That for which Gordon had paved the way; that which Kitchener and Macdonald had gallantly achieved, in these latter days political sentimentalists, Englishmen of parochial mind, had gradually undone. Egypt, brought to a pitch of high prosperity under the civil administration of Lord Cromer, had been gradually allowed to lapse back into native hands. There had been no absolute evacuation at the date of Renshaw's arrival in the country, but the British garrison had been reduced to insignificant proportions. But Renshaw did not come back! He had vanished from the ken of civilization--swallowed up as effectually in the Nubian desert as when the earth had opened and swallowed up Dathan and covered the congregation of Abiram. The history of Egypt and the Soudan, written in blood at the period in question, only accorded with that written in ink, in advance of the event, by those who in the first decade of the twentieth century foresaw the outcome of Little Englandism all the world over. The native movement--the strength of which the dominant party in Parliament had chosen to ignore--manifested itself in scenes of sudden and overwhelming violence, while at the same time the Holy War, preached by a Mahdi in whose existence great numbers of people had refused to believe, claimed as sacrificial victims nearly every white-skinned man throughout the length and breadth of the Soudan. The caravan with which Renshaw was travelling fell into the hands of the Mahdi's adherents, betrayed by a treacherous guide, who then spread the news--anticipating what he had every reason to believe would really happen--of the death of The White Kaffir, as a consequence of the resistance he had offered to a band of "True Believers." The news was received in England with grief and lamentation by those who esteemed Renshaw, appreciated his talents, and knew how essential were his services if the aims of the Socialist-Labour Leader, Nicholas Jardine, and his party were to be defeated. But the public in general saw in the disappearance of the rising statesman the almost inevitable result of a rash enterprise. It came to be regarded only as an incidental episode in the wholesale upheaval of which India, Egypt, and other lands once dominated by the British sceptre soon became the scene.