Once more Wauchope found himself on the way to the front for active service, this time back to the scene of his former exploits in the Soudan. Matters there, ever since the withdrawal of the British and Egyptian troops in 1885, when the then all-conquering Mahdi took Khartoum and slew the gallant General Gordon, had gone on from bad to worse. Over-running the whole valley of the Nile, the Egyptian boundary-line had been much circumscribed, and was now fixed as far north as Wady Halfa, the prophet holding almost undisputed sway over the whole Soudan, except that part of it contiguous to the Red Sea in the neighbourhood of Suakim. On the death of the Mahdi in 1885, his tomb at Omdurman became a sanctuary, round which the faithful gathered themselves. Under the sway of his successor, Khalifa Abdullahi of the Baggara tribe, cruelty and oppression ground down with iron hand every neighbouring tribe. Military despotism stamped out commerce, and trade and agriculture; the people were ruined, and slaughter and devastation ruled where formerly there had been prosperity and peace. {147} Even Egypt was not safe from the inroads of the Dervish host, attempts being made several times to invade its borders; but Tokar was their utmost limit. In 1892, Colonel Horatio Herbert Kitchener recaptured that town, but no further attempt was made to regain lost ground till 1896, when that officer, now Major-General and Sirdar, or Commander of the Egyptian army, received orders to advance up the Nile for the reconquest of the Soudan. The days of Egypt's weakness were past, for during the interval between this and Tel-el-Kebir, when the then wretched Egyptian army was smashed to pieces, English officers had been actively licking into shape a new native force. Drill and discipline, combined with growing confidence in their officers, had in those years built up an army able and willing to dare anything. The Sirdar was ready to fight the Khalifa, but he realised that in an invasion of the Soudan the real enemy to be faced was the Soudan itself--'its barrenness which refuses food, and its vastness which paralyses transport.' These were the problems to be overcome by the general who would conquer the Soudan and plant his flag on the walls of Khartoum.