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By Root 1158 0

was what he ended up doing, taking Britain to war with the bizarre – if not quite articulated – aim of maintaining the authority of the Ottoman Empire. There was a noisy group of angry businessmen with money at stake, while the great majority of ships passing through the Suez Canal flew the British flag. When a bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 failed to cow the revolt, the British parliament voted money to send an army, under the command of General Sir Garnet Wolseley. Landing forces at either end of the canal, Wolseley made an audacious advance, culminating in an attack before dawn on the Egyptian forces at Tel el Kebir. In half an hour he had destroyed a force of more than 20,000, with the Highland Brigade, which led one wing of the attack, in no mood to take many prisoners. Two days later, the British flag was flying over Cairo and a feverishly grateful Gladstone was soon offering Wolseley a barony.

Egypt never formally became part of the empire. Indeed, the British kept insisting that they’d be leaving shortly: they repeated the claim no fewer than sixty-six times between 1882 and 1922. The problem was that it was never entirely clear when their conditions for withdrawal would be met, and if these conditions included a properly functioning democracy and educational system the British did not seem to be doing a great deal to bring them about. In theory, the country was still under an Ottoman viceroy with an Egyptian cabinet. But Evelyn Baring, the believer in ‘manifest destiny’, was transferred from India, with the very modest title of consul general. In reality no Egyptian minister could stay in office if he opposed Baring’s proposals, earning the Consul General the inevitable nickname ‘Over’ Baring. He was soon ennobled as Lord Cromer and was known in Egypt simply as ‘The Lord’, the enormous residence built for him on the banks of the Nile being the ‘bayt al lurd’ or ‘house of the lord’.* The British flag flew above the citadel Saladin had built against the Crusaders and colonial officials ran the public finances. The Egyptian army was disbanded and reconstituted under a British commander in chief. The Veiled Protectorate, as this system of government was known, functioned by having (not so) shadow British officials in all important government departments. British soldiers watched over the Nile. British brokers struck deals for Egyptian-grown cotton. British vessels crowded the harbour in Alexandria. And on the most famous river in civilization, Thomas Cook ran steamers carrying visiting Europeans to see the ruins of another Egypt, of 5,000 years earlier.

As so often in the history of the empire, one thing led to another. For by taking control of Egypt the British had also assumed responsibility for Sudan, upstream on the Nile, and the biggest country in Africa, much of which had been under Egyptian authority for sixty years. Gladstone was about to learn that seizing Egypt was like putting your hand in a hole and discovering you’ve stuck your fingers inside a primed mousetrap.

There was nothing particularly enticing about this enormous expanse of not very much. Sudan’s most important city was – and remains – Khartoum, at the point where the White Nile meets the Blue Nile, both of which are today spanned by bridges of varying degrees of ugly functionality. Both rivers are a dirty brown. The rutted streets are jammed with smoky, hooting vehicles, the government offices with dozy and decision-averse civil servants. In summer the temperature climbs to over 50 degrees Celsius. Alcohol is illegal and in 2009 the country’s President earned the distinction of becoming the first serving head of state to have an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court.

Here, in early January 1885, a guttering lantern in the window of what is now the Republican Palace revealed a European sitting at a table, writing. Closer inspection would have discovered a thin, restless man in his early fifties, of average height, with the reddened skin of years of military service in the sun. When he fixed you with his grey-blue