Only in August, 1884, a relief expedition was decided on, and at the end of December two columns started from Korti, one along the Nile towards Abu Hamed, the other across the desert by Gakdul Wells to Metemmeh and Khartoum. But the effort that might have succeeded six months earlier was too late. Two days before the relieving steamers arrived the weak defences of Khartoum had been stormed, and Gordon had fallen. For the moment it seemed that Gordon’s death would do what he himself could not do when alive. Great preparations were made for a new campaign in the autumn. The columns, which had drawn back to Merowe after much severe fighting, were quartered for the summer along the river. General Graham was again despatched to Suakin with orders to crush Osman Digna, and a railway from that place to Berber was begun. For two months there was hard fighting at Hashin, at McNeill’s Zeriba, and at Tamai. But the hot fit passed. The railway, which had been begun without any survey, quite in the familiar Egyptian fashion, was given up. The whole Nile Valley was left unoccupied as far as Kosheh. The dervishes pushed on, and occupied Dongola, and, though decisively beaten at Ginnis at the end of the year, they continued to maintain a harassing border warfare. The Mahdi died in June, 1885, carried off by a malignant fever, or, as some say, poisoned by a woman, whilst in the middle of his preparations for the invasion of Egypt. His successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi, a Baggara of the Taaisha tribe from Darfur, took up his plans. To the children of the desert Egypt might well seem an easy and attractive field for plunder. They had had a rough experience of the quality of British troops in action, but these new antagonists had always followed up their victories by retreat and evacuation. They had no reason to doubt the continuation of the same nerveless policy. The British Government talked loudly of abandoning Egypt itself. Any resistance by Egyptian troops unsupported seemed an absurdity. But unexpected obstacles arose. A revolt in Darfur, war with Abyssinia, and the opposition of the great Kabbabish tribe, combined to delay the Khalifa’s advance. Not until 1889 did he send his best general, Wad el Nejumi, forward. Nejumi pressed on without misgivings. Only Egyptian troops were guarding the frontier. But the Egyptian battalions, trained and led by British officers, were no longer mere droves of frightened sheep. Under Wodehouse at Argin, and under Grenfell at Toski, they first checked, and then annihilated, Nejumi’s army. Thenceforward the dervish power steadily declined. The recapture in 1891 of Tokar, Osman Digna’s chief base of supplies, put an end to his influence in the Suakin district. Raiding and frontier warfare continued till 1896, but there was no serious fighting, until the Dongola Expedition in 1896 marked the opening of the well-prepared campaign which ended in the complete overthrow of the Khalifa’s power.