war.  The conduct of the ruler was imitated by his subjects.  The presence of women increased the vanity of the warriors:  and it was not very long before the patched smock which had vaunted the holy poverty of the rebels developed into the gaudy jibba of the conquerors.  Since the unhealthy situation of Khartoum amid swamps and marshes did not commend itself to the now luxurious Arabs, the Mahdi began to build on the western bank of the White Nile a new capital, which, from the detached fort which had stood there in Egyptian days, was called Omdurman.  Among the first buildings which he set his subjects to construct were a mosque for the services of religion, an arsenal for the storage of military material, and a house for himself.  But while he was thus entering at once upon the enjoyments of supreme power and unbridled lust, the God whom he had served, not unfaithfully, and who had given him whatever he had asked, required of Mohammed Ahmed his soul; and so all that he had won by his brains and bravery became of no more account to him.

In the middle of the month of June, scarcely five months after the completion of his victorious campaigns, the Mahdi fell sick.  For a few days he did not appear at the mosque.  The people were filled with alarm.  They were reassured by remembering the prophecy that their liberator should not perish till he had conquered the earth.  Mohammed, however, grew worse.  Presently those who attended him could doubt no longer that he was attacked by typhus fever.  The Khalifa Abdullah watched by his couch continually.  On the sixth day the inhabitants and the soldiers were informed of the serious nature of their ruler’s illness, and public prayers were offered by all classes for his recovery.  On the seventh day it was evident that he was dying.  All those who had shared his fortunes—­ the Khalifas he had appointed, the chief priests of the religion he had reformed, the leaders of the armies who had followed him to victory, and his own family whom he had hallowed—­crowded the small room.  For some hours he lay unconscious or in delirium, but as the end approached he rallied a little, and, collecting his faculties by a great effort, declared his faithful follower and friend the Khalifa Abdullah his successor, and adjured the rest to show him honour.  ’He is of me, and I am of him; as you have obeyed me, so you should deal with him.  May God have mercy upon me!’ [Slatin, fire and sword.] Then he immediately expired.

Grief and dismay filled the city.  In spite of the emphatic prohibition by law of all loud lamentations, the sound of ’weeping and wailing arose from almost every house.’  The whole people, deprived at once of their acknowledged sovereign and spiritual guide, were shocked and affrighted.  Only the Mahdi’s wives, if we may credit Slatin, ’rejoiced secretly in their hearts at the death of their husband and master,’ and, since they were henceforth to be doomed to an enforced and inviolable chastity, the cause of their satisfaction is as obscure as its manifestation was unnatural.  The body of the Mahdi, wrapped in linen, was reverently interred in a deep grave dug in the floor of the room in which he had died, nor was it disturbed until after the capture of Omdurman by the British forces in 1898, when by the orders of Sir H. Kitchener the sepulchre was opened and the corpse exhumed.