3-074-773 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Exultation, drawn by S. Berkley, 1883. 'Whether in Asia or in Africa, there is a strong community of feeling, and a similarity of habit and expression, among the half-barbarous nations of the Desert professing the religion of Mohammed. This picture of the chief of a Bedouin tribe, out for a raid of irregular and predatory warfare, galloping in front of the party, and in the wild excitement of their triumph, with an exulting cry, tossing his scimetar into the air, might perhaps truly represent the gesture of some commander in the vast and motley horde led by the Mahdi, composed of different tribes of Nubian Arabs mixed with the n*groes of Kordofan and Darfur, whose overwhelming multitude has destroyed the Egyptian army in one terrible conflict. There has been little apparent change, of character or of costume, in the uncivilised populations of the East, and those of Northern Africa, since the era of the first Mussulman conquests; but their possession, in some measure, of the weapons of modern war...renders them more formidable when they rise, over an immense extent of ungoverned territory, and swoop down upon the widely separated forts and stations of the Khedive's feeble administration'. From "Illustrated London News", 1883.