i3<$ Egypt
Sudan, and his most practical plan seems to have been
that Zobeir should succeed him and hold Khartum until
the garrisons had been withdrawn. This Cromer sup-
ported, but the British Government, still suffering from
their anti-slavery complex, could not swallow Zobeir.
Which was, indeed, unfortunate. For the one chance
of getting Gordon away was to let him name a successor
who would relieve him of what he considered his moral
responsibility : " I declare, once for all, I will not leave
the Sudan until every one who wants to go down is given
the chance, unless a Government is established that re-
lieves me of the charge/' was what he wrote in his
journal He quite underrated the danger he was in, and
overlooked the difficulty in which he was involving the
Government. He believed that the Mahdi could be
<£ smashed" as easily as Arabi, even by a Turco-
Egyptian force. But it is difficult to detect any
permanent policy in the telegrams, of which he sent
as many as thirty a day. Thus Cromer reports
(February 29, 1884) : "I have received a fresh batch
of telegrams from Gordon. His statements and pro-
posals are hopelessly bewildering and contradictory/'
Meantime the tribes between Berber and Khartum
rose for the Mahdi. Khartum was cut off, and the
question now became, how to get Gordon himself out;
for the remoter garrisons, and even that of Khartum,
were clearly lost. Possibly the best chance now would
have been to let him go as he suggested to see the
Mahdi, which would have solved the situation one way
or the other. It might even have succeeded, as he had a
genius in dealing with Orientals, But the Liberal Solo-
mons, who had let the genius out of the bottle, were in-
capable of getting it back again.
By April Cromer had realised that a British expedition