When Gordon left Egypt, at the end of the year 1879, he was able to truthfully declare in the words of his favourite book: "No man could lift his hand or his foot in the land of the Soudan without me." Yet he was fully alive to the dangers of the future, although then they were no more than a little cloud on the horizon, for he wrote in 1878: "Our English Government lives on a hand-to-mouth policy. They are very ignorant of these lands, yet some day or other, they or some other Government, will have to know them, for things at Cairo cannot stay as they are. The Khedive will be curbed in, and will no longer be absolute Sovereign. Then will come the question of these countries.... There is no doubt that if the Governments of France and England do not pay more attention to the Soudan--if they do not establish at Khartoum a branch of the mixed tribunals, and see that justice is done--the disruption of the Soudan from Cairo is only a question of time. This disruption, moreover, will not end the troubles, for the Soudanese through their allies in Lower Egypt--the black soldiers I mean--will carry on their efforts in Cairo itself. Now these black soldiers are the only troops in the Egyptian service that are worth anything." The gift of prophecy could scarcely have been demonstrated in a more remarkable degree, yet the Egyptian Government and everybody else went on acting as if there was no danger in the Soudan, and treated it like a thoroughly conquered province inhabited by a satisfied, or at least a thoroughly subjected population. From this dream there was to be a rude and startling awakening. It is impossible to say whether there was any connection direct or indirect between the revolt of Arabi Pasha and the military leaders at Cairo and the rebellion in the Soudan, which began under the auspices of the so-called Mahdi. At the very least it may be asserted that the spectacle of successful insubordination in the Delta--for it was completely successful, and would have continued so but for the intervention of British arms--was calculated to encourage those who entertained a desire to upset the Khedive's authority in the upper regions of the Nile. That Gordon held that the authors of the Arabi rising and of the Mahdist movement were the same in sympathy, if not in person, cannot be doubted, and in February 1882, when the Mahdi had scarcely begun his career, he wrote: "If they send the Black regiment to the Soudan to quell the revolt, they will inoculate all the troops up there, and the Soudan will revolt against Cairo, whom they all hate." It will be noted that that letter was written more than twenty months before the destruction of the Hicks Expedition made the Mahdi master of the Soudan.