Once more the day of punishment for the guilty had dawned. In the disasters and defeats inflicted by the Mahdi, in the horrors of the sack of Khartoum and many another town, Egypt had paid the penalty for her sins against the Soudan. In blood and shame she had reaped a full harvest. But the unhappy Soudanese had only thrown off the yoke of one master to find themselves under that of one much more terrible. Even before the Mahdi’s death plunder and success had corrupted the new faith, and dimmed the first glow of religious fervour. The Khalifa, under the guise of religion, had developed into a cruel and bloodthirsty tyrant. He and his principal supporters, Arabs from Western Darfur, regarded themselves as conquerors in a foreign land. Especially since he had brought his own tribe, the Taaisha, to settle in Omdurman, he had made it his policy to depress the power of the Nile Valley tribes like the Jaalin and the Danagla. On them fell the brunt of his military expeditions. Executions, massacre, and confiscations, were the order of the day. The inhabitants of whole districts, especially in the once-populous country along the Blue Nile, were forced to come and live at Omdurman, which grew into a city of 400,000 inhabitants. This concentration, by at once creating a great demand and withdrawing the agricultural population from their proper occupation, produced the most terrible famines. Everything was sacrificed to the supremacy of the western Arabs. In ten years more damage was inflicted upon the country by this pack of human wolves than in all the sixty years of Egyptian dominion, bad as it was. Slatin Pasha estimates that 75 per cent. of the population perished. Great as the abominations of the slave-trade had been before, they were never greater than under the Khalifa’s rule. The export of slaves was forbidden, but from all parts of the country they were brought in droves to the market at Omdurman.