In September, 1883, Hicks, acting under the orders of the Egyptian government, led an expedition into the depths of Kordofan, where the Mahdi had retired to organise the tribesmen, from thirty to sixty thousand strong, whom his recent victories had attracted to his standard. Hicks commanded about 11,000 weakly and ill-fed men, of whom many were so unwilling to be soldiers that to prevent desertion they had to be sent up the Nile in chains. His artillery consisted of thirty-six Krupp, Nordenfelt, and mountain guns, and his transport was supplied by six thousand horses and camels. The whole of the Egyptian troops were thoroughly out of heart; they were aware that they were about to march into a country of which little was known except that it was almost waterless, and that they would encounter hordes of desperate and ruthless fanatics. As the men filed out of Khartoum they were in floods of tears. The fate of such an army may easily be imagined: on the 5th of November it was surprised by the Mahdi with 40,000 of his followers, and cut to pieces, near El Obeid in Kordofan.[253] Hicks and the other Europeans died fighting dauntlessly to the last; the Egyptians allowed themselves to be butchered almost without resistance: three hundred were given quarter, only to become the slaves of the victors, into whose hands passed the guns, much ammunition, thousands of rifles, and all the transport animals. One man alone escaped to bring the news to Khartoum. Yet so little was the importance of the Mahdist movement appreciated by the English government that at the very time Hicks’s column was being destroyed in Kordofan, Mr Gladstone was urging the reduction of the British army of occupation in Egypt. When Hicks’s fate became known in Cairo the situation grew very complicated. The Cabinet in London, afraid of being drawn into armed intervention in the Soudan, had persistently assumed an attitude of aloofness on the subject of Hicks’s operations, and, affecting to ignore the fact that Britain was virtually, though not officially, mistress in Egypt, and that a word from her representative at Cairo, Lord Cromer (then Sir Evelyn Baring), would have stopped the expedition, declined all responsibility on the ground that it had been undertaken solely on the authority of the Egyptian government. The annihilation of Hicks’s army had placed Khartoum in a position of great danger: only two thousand troops were left to man the four miles of earthworks by which the town was ringed, and its communications with Cairo and Suakim were seriously threatened. The generals in command of the British army at Cairo admitted that, if the Mahdi advanced on Khartoum, it would be impossible to hold it in its existing condition, and that in all probability the whole valley of the Nile, as far south as Wadi Halfa, would be lost to Egypt. Alarmed at the crushing blow which had befallen him, and at the consequences likely