The State Of Society That Arose Out Of This May Be Easily Imagined.
The Warlike Arab Tribes Fought And Brawled Among Themselves In Ceaseless
Feud And Strife.
The negroes trembled in apprehension of capture, or rose
locally against their oppressors.
Occasionally an important Sheikh would
effect the combination of many tribes, and a kingdom came into existence
- a community consisting of a military class armed with guns and of
multitudes of slaves, at once their servants and their merchandise,
and sometimes trained as soldiers. The dominion might prosper viciously
till it was overthrown by some more powerful league.
All this was unheeded by the outer world, from which the Soudan is
separated by the deserts, and it seemed that the slow, painful course of
development would be unaided and uninterrupted. But at last the
populations of Europe changed. Another civilisation reared itself above
the ruins of Roman triumph and Mohammedan aspiration - a civilisation
more powerful, more glorious, but no less aggressive. The impulse of
conquest which hurried the French and English to Canada and the Indies,
which sent the Dutch to the Cape and the Spaniards to Peru, spread to
Africa and led the Egyptians to the Soudan. In the year 1819 Mohammed
Ali, availing himself of the disorders alike as an excuse and an
opportunity, sent his son Ismail up the Nile with a great army. The Arab
tribes, torn by dissension, exhausted by thirty years of general war,
and no longer inspired by their neglected religion, offered a weak
resistance.
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