When Gordon left Cairo for Khartoum he thought that the best plan for the Soudan, when the Egyptian Government withdrew, would be to replace it by the heirs of the petty Sultans, who had been deprived of their power when the Soudan was annexed by Mehemet Ali. But when he saw the real state of affairs, he felt that these disunited kinglets would not be strong enough to resist the power of the Mahdi. As for the Mahdi, he was too much of a religious fanatic to have the government of the Soudan put into his hands. He was ambitious as well as fanatical; his object was to overrun the whole world. Directly he ceased to be a conqueror, his people would cease to believe in his Divine mission, and he would lose his power. At that time he possessed great power, and Gordon felt that there must be a still more powerful man set up. There was only one such man alive, and he was a prisoner at Cairo. The argument against Zebehr was that he had been an inveterate slave-hunter, and that to put him into supreme power would be to give him unlimited means of gratifying his vices. Against this it must be urged that under the Mahdi's rule the kidnapping of slaves would be just as cruelly carried on as under that of Zebehr. Also that with Zebehr, being a prisoner, it would be possible to make certain stipulations on the subject of slave-hunting. Moreover, it was Gordon's intention eventually to annex, for the Congo State, the great slave-hunting district, and to rule that himself, so that Zebehr could not interfere. Apart from these arguments, Gordon did not believe that Zebehr loved slave-hunting for its own sake, but rather for the wealth and position it gave him. He believed that if Zebehr were made Sultan of the Soudan, his ambitious nature would be satisfied, and he would cease to hunt slaves, the _raison d'etre_ for such an occupation being gone. There can be no question that Zebehr was a most able man, a born ruler and leader of men. He was an inveterate enemy of Gordon's, and at the meeting which took place between Gordon and Zebehr at Cairo, when the former was _en route_ to Khartoum, lookers-on considered that on no account ought these two men ever to be in the Soudan together.