While Mohammed was thus occupied he received the support of a man, less virtuous than but nearly as famous as himself.  Abdullah was one of four brothers, the sons of an obscure priest; but he inherited no great love of religion or devotion to its observances.  He was a man of determination and capacity.  He set before himself two distinct ambitions, both of which he accomplished:  to free the Soudan of foreigners, and to rule it himself.  He seems to have had a queer presentiment of his career.  This much he knew:  there would be a great religious leader, and he would be his lieutenant and his successor.  When Zubehr conquered Darfur, Abdullah presented himself before him and hailed him as ‘the expected Mahdi.’  Zubehr, however, protested with superfluous energy that he was no saint, and the impulsive patriot was compelled to accept his assurances.  So soon as he saw Mohammed Ahmed rising to fame and displaying qualities of courage and energy, he hastened to throw himself at his feet and assure him of his devotion.

No part of Slatin Pasha’s fascinating account of his perils and sufferings is so entertaining as that in which Abdullah, then become Khalifa of the whole Soudan, describes his early struggles and adversity: 

’Indeed it was a very troublesome journey.  At that time my entire property consisted of one donkey, and he had a gall on his back, so that I could not ride him.  But I made him carry my water-skin and bag of corn, over which I spread my rough cotton garment, and drove him along in front of me.  At that time I wore the white cotton shirt, like the rest of my tribe.  My clothes and my dialect at once marked me out as a stranger wherever I went; and when I crossed the Nile I was frequently greeted with “What do you want?  Go back to your own country.  There is nothing to steal here."’

What a life of ups and downs!  It was a long stride from the ownership of one saddle-galled donkey to the undisputed rule of an empire.  The weary wayfarer may have dreamed of this, for ambition stirs imagination nearly as much as imagination excites ambition.  But further he could not expect or wish to see.  Nor could he anticipate as, in the complacency of a man who had done with evil days, he told the story of his rise to the submissive Slatin, that the day would come when he would lead an army of more than fifty thousand men to destruction, and that the night would follow when, almost alone, his empire shrunk again to the saddle-galled donkey, he would seek his home in distant Kordofan, while this same Slatin who knelt so humbly before him would lay the fierce pursuing squadrons on the trail.