A Desert Drama: Conan Doyle's Sudan Adventure
A Desert Drama: Conan Doyle's Sudan Adventure is an article written by Thomas R. Tietze published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995).
This historical and literary study situates A Desert Drama (The Tragedy of the Korosko) within the context of the Mahdist revolt and British imperial policy in the Sudan, analysing Arthur Conan Doyle's portrayal of empire, religion, and international rivalry. Drawing on historical sources and close textual reading, it argues that the novel sought to educate contemporary readers about the political and moral stakes of British intervention.
A Desert Drama: Conan Doyle's Sudan Adventure
STAND UP!' CRIED MANSOOR. 'STAND UP!
A little over a hundred years ago, a figure emerged from the wastes of the Sudan that would capture the imagination of the world and add another fascinating episode to the history of Britain's imperialist adventure. In 1881, a certain Muhammad Ahmed, called the Mahdi, rallied thousands of oppressed Sudanese behind the banner of messianic fundamentalist Islam. Torn between the corruptions of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and the inefficiency of the British-backed Egyptian government, the Mahdist patriots wanted not only to expel the Turks and defeat the Egyptians but also to take a leading role in re-establishing the values of early Islam. In fact, the Mahdi's ambition was nothing less than the conversion of the world.
So effective was he in preaching his divinely ordained message, and so harsh was the environment in which his influence spread, that in 1883 a horde of warriors using only primitive weapons was able to massacre some 7,000 Egyptian infantrymen under the command of British Colonel William Hicks, who had been charged with the responsibility of quelling the Mahdi's revolt. With this success and others behind him the Mahdi commanded 40,000 men armed with more than 20,000 rifles and even artillery. When the British received news of Hicks's humiliating defeat and became aware of the threat to Khartoum itself. the government ordered an enigmatic, religious, and courageous man — General Charles George 'Chinese' Gordon — to go up the Nile to Khartoum early in 1884 in order to see what might be done about the Mahdi's revolt. England's Prime Minister Gladstone, who was keen to get the British out of Egypt as soon as possible, hoped Gordon's appointment as Governor of the Sudan would be a powerful symbol of British concern at the same time that it would avoid another military disaster.
Of course, Khartoum fell to the Mahdi in 1885 after a siege of 317 days, and Gordon's death immediately placed his name at the top of the list of martyrs to the idea of Empire. A spirited but late British reprisal resulted in almost a year's worth of terrible battles, as wave after wave of Mahdist fanatics, many of them Hadendoa — Kipling's 'Fuzzy Wuzzies' — armed with great hacking swords and carrying rhinoceros-hide shields, flung themselves up against the famous British square. Disciplined and well-armed with Martini-Henry rifles that fired .45 bullets, the British punished the Mahdi's armies until the end of December 1885, when the government completed a withdrawal of all troops from the Sudan. In June of that year, Gladstone lost office and the Mahdi died. In both cases, the power vacuum was quickly filled, in England by a new conservative government and in the Sudan by a clever, ambitious, and fanatical man named Abdullah al-Taaishi. Identified by scholarly and popular acclaim as the Khalifa al-Mahdi, or the Mahdi's successor, he sought to continue the dead leader's plan to purify the world after conquering it. For a dozen years the Khalifa ruled from his desert palace, hanging and beheading those who opposed him. The first human head to be placed on a pole prominently before his dwelling was what was left of Gordon's. The British would not be able to reclaim the Sudan, avenge the death of Gordon, or execute the Khalifa until 1898-9. Two years before Kitchener would lead the British to a decisive victory at Omdurman. Arthur Conan DoyleDr A. Conan Doyle took a Cook's Tour up the Nile.
I
Conan Doyle was aware of the danger from the Dervishes-a term the Mahdi at first introduced to describe his followers, then later forbade. (The word reminded Muslims of the selfless and unworldly disciples of the great mediaeval Sufi mystic Jalaladdin ar-Rumi. These original Dervishes developed a dramatic method of attaining a meditative altered state of consciousness by doing a whirling dance; apparently the Mahdi wished to change the emphasis from meditation to action and so began to call his followers the Ansar, signifying an absolute belief in the paradise inevitably awaiting those who would die in God's cause.) For the British, the term Dervish would stick, signifying all of the Mahdi's followers. According to Pierre Nordon, Conan Doyle recognised that it would be a simple matter for Dervishes to capture a group of passengers from a Cook's vessel and hold them for ransom. (1) As there was no official British military presence south of Wadi Halfa, such an event was frighteningly possible.
A novel began to grow in the author's imagination which would in the end provide useful insights into his mind, concerning a situation very much in the news, but not generally or vividly appreciated by the public. I hope,' he wrote to his editor, Greenhough Smith of The Strand Magazine, 'it will make the man in the bus realise what a Dervish means, as he never did before.' (2)
First published in The Strand Magazine in the spring and summer of 1897 as The Tragedy of the Korosko, Conan Doyle revised and added to the text for its first American edition from Lippincott in January 1898 as A Desert Drama, and, in February, ten days later, by its original title from British publishers, Smith, Elder. He even lingered over the material to the extent that he later adapted it into a stage play. The Fires of Fate (1909). In fact, H. R. F. Keating theorizes that Conan Doyle's admiration of Gordon, whose portrait adorns the rooms at 221B Baker
Street, was an influence on the creation of Sherlock Holmes (3) The novel appeared on the eve of Kitchener's exploit in the Sudan, an event that Charles Higham suggests Conan Doyle could have anticipated. In Egypt, Conan Doyle dined with Kitchener. This inside knowledge doubtlessly led to the story's success with the public. (4)
II
The structure of the novel builds upon an introduction to the action in which the author involves the leading characters-named in a passenger list as a cast in a play. Verisimilitude is added as the author suggests that his readers have heard or read of the incident of the Korosko's capture, and the passenger list is provided with the country of origin noted. There are stock characters, to be sure-a Bostonian old maid, a young virgin who resembles a Gibson girl, an Irishman, a Non-conformist minister, a solicitor with a dried-up life who looks at his experiences only so that he might tick off another item on his Badeker guide, a typical British Colonel, and a Frenchman who imagines the Mahdist revolt to be a British fiction that excuses extended British involvement in Egypt. An American named Headingly provides an objective voice as he asks about the political situation. Each of these characters allows Conan Doyle to present a different perception of the late nineteenth century Arab world.
Miss Adams, the Bostonian old maid, represents the unquestioned assumption of superiority: 'She had never been from home before, and she was now busy upon the self-imposed task of bringing the East up to the standard of Massachusetts. She had hardly landed in Egypt before she realised that the country needed putting to rights, and since the conviction struck her she had been very fully occupied. The saddle-galled donkeys, the starved pariah dogs, the flies around the eyes of the babies, the naked children, the importunate beggars, the ragged, untidy women they were all challenges to her conscience, and she plunged in bravely at her work of reformation. For her, looking at a veiled female is a challenge to womanhood: they 'turn a woman into a bale of cotton goods with a pair of eyes looking out of it'.
She goes on:
- '... Why, good land, it was only yesterday at Abou-Simbel, Mr Stephens, I was passing one of their houses-if you can call a mud-pie like that a house-and I saw two of the children at the door with the usual crust of flies round their eyes, and great holes in their poor little blue gowns! So I got off my donkey, and I turned up my sleeves, and I washed their faces well with my handkerchief, and sewed up the rents--for in this country I would as soon think of going ashore without my needle-case as without my white umbrella, Mr. Stephens. Then as I warmed on the job I got into the room-such a room!-and I packed the folks out of it, and I fairly did the chores as if I had been the hired help.... my sakes, I saw more dust and mess than you would think they could crowd into a house the size of a Newport bathing-hut. From the time I pinned up my skirt until I came out with my face the colour of that smoke-stack, wasn't more than an hour, or maybe an hour and a half, but I had that house as clean and fresh as a new pine-wood box. I had a New York Herald with me, and I lined their shelf with paper for them. Well, Mr Stephens, when I had done washing my hands outside, I came past the door again, and there were those two children sitting on the stoop with their eyes full of flies, and all just the same as ever, except that each had a little paper cap made out of the New York Herald upon his head.'
Conan Doyle's sense of the rhythm of language is delightful, but it is the unspoken self-satisfaction of Miss Adams that reminds us that she would probably be completely ignorant of the terrible poverty not far from her home in Boston, or New York, or contemporary London. So that, instead of charity at home, Miss Adams extends herself in the cause of the Egyptian fellahin. Conan Doyle clearly offers a satire of the so-called 'bleeding heart' syndrome. It seems significant that, after all her efforts, the best that the tidied home reminds her of is a 'pine-wood box'. Is she thinking of a New England coffin?
Another significant Western response to the Arab world is mutual suspicion among rival powers-particularly France and Britain. One of the passengers tries to explain an alternative perception to the American Headingly; M. Fardet says, 'There are no Dervishes. They do not exist.' He goes on to explain the suspicions of the average Frenchman:
- 'Pah, my friend, you do not know the English. You look at them as you see them with their pipes and their contented faces, and you say, 'Now, these are good, simple folk, who will never hurt any one.' But all the time they are thinking and watching and planning. 'Here is Egypt weak,' they cry. 'Allons!' and down they swoop like a gull upon a crust. 'You have no right there,' says the world. 'Come out of it!' But England has already begun to tidy everything, just like the good Miss Adams when she forces her way into the house of an Arab. 'Come out,' says the world. 'Certainly,' says England; 'just wait one little minute until I have made everything nice and proper.' So the world waits for a year or so, and then it says once again, 'Come out.' 'Just wait a little,' says England; 'there is trouble at Khartoum, and when I have set that all right I shall be very glad to come out.' So they wait until it is all over, and then again they say, 'Come out.' 'How can I come out,' says England, 'when there are still raids and battles going on? If we were to leave, Egypt would be run over.' 'But there are no raids,' says the world. 'Oh, are there not?' says England, and then within a weck sure enough the papers are full of some new raid of Dervishes. We are not all blind, Mister Headingly.'
Reading M. Fardet's words in the present era, after the Warren Commission, the Watergate scandal, and the Iran-Contra debacle, the notion of a government spreading 'disinformation' seems to an American far from implausible. But of course British patriot Conan Doyle meant M. Fardet's suspicions to be laughably paranoid, and Fardet himself will soon realise his folly.
In the next chapter, Headingly discusses the situation with a British Colonel, named Cochrane Cochrane, suggesting perhaps a family so old that it had run out of christening alternatives. It is in this conversation that Conan Doyle confronts the most obvious question about the British colonial impulse. Why is Britain involved at all? First, argues Cochrane, there is a responsibility of modern Englishmen to preserve the treasures of ancient Egypt; after all, in England Cromwell's followers destroyed statues of the Saints-what's to prevent the followers of the Khalifa from levelling the Sphinx? Considering that the debate about the preservation of ancient artifacts actually constituting idolatry remains lively in today's Egypt, Colonel Cochrane's concerns remain valid.
The American asks a lingering question: '... Suppose I grant you that the Dervishes could overrun Egypt, and suppose also that you English are holding them out, what I'm never done asking is, what reason have you for spending all these millions of dollars and the lives of so many of your men? What do you get out of it, more than France gets, or Germany, or any other country, that runs no risk and never lays out a cent?' Cochrane's response is illuminating: '... A man or a nation is not placed upon this earth to do merely what is pleasant and profitable. It is often called upon to carry out what is both unpleasant and unprofitable, but if it is obviously right it is mere shirking not to undertake it. In our cynical modern age, it is particularly intriguing to see the world as it was once seen; Conan Doyle shows us a Britain involved in the Middle East that regards its job as a moral responsibility. If they hadn't been there to quell the Mahdi and, soon after, the Khalifa, it would have been wrong. Whether this perspective is in fact true of not, it must be seen as the way in which the British public came to understand their country's military involvement in the Sudan.
III
Another issue raised by A Desert Drama is that of religion. When the Europeans become captives of the Khalifa's troops, they are offered the opportunity of becoming Muslims. The alternative is, of course, death. The captives, whatever their beliefs in more casual circumstances, reflect on their options. Several decide on cultural criteria alone to reject conversion, particularly M. Fardet, an agnostic. Placed under direct threat of death, Fardet declares himself a Westerner. All the Western captives agree to die rather than succumb to Islamic pressure. None of the American/Europeans consent to the 'easy' survival alternative. But, in order to stall for time-which they believe will increase their chances of rescue by the Camel Corps-the party agrees to receive religious instruction from the Moolah. The scene reveals a petty quarrel between the British Colonel and the Frenchman. Significantly, the Colonel, fearful of his advancing years robbing him of his erect military carriage, wears a corset to prop him up. Also, Fardet is a modern, freethinking agnostic, which makes him the ideal member of the group to deal with the Moolah, since he has no religious convictions that might be affronted by contact with Islamic ideas. In perhaps not so subtle satire. Conan Doyle points up the artifice that props up British pretence in the Sudan and the empty cynicism behind the French rivalry in Egypt.
In the presentation of the Moolah's introduction of Islam, Conan Doyle seems acquainted with the basic tenets and values, yet the Moolah is depicted as both kindly and suspicious, deeply faithful and narrow-minded. Islam is described in the narrator's voice as a 'newer, cruder, and more earnest faith'. The Moolah refers to the Qur'an as 'the law of Allah as written by His prophet', when of course it is a central tenet that Muhammad was illiterate and that the book is uncreated, but rather revealed. Conan Doyle appears to have read the Qur'an, though when the Moolah quotes from it for support, the narrative voice-reflecting Conan Doyle's own disenchantment with his Roman Catholic schooling-says: 'He broke into one of those dogmatic texts which pass in every creed as an argument'.
Finally, yet improbably, the Moolah tests their willingness to receive the Truth by demanding that the Western captives make a demonstration of their openness to Islam:
- 'Now,' said the Moolah, and his voice had lost its conciliatory and persuasive tone, there is no more time for you. Here upon the ground I have made out of two sticks the foolish and supertitious symbol of your former creed. You will trample upon it, as a sign that you renounce it, and you will kiss the Koran, as a sign that you accept it, and what more you need in the way of instruction shall be given to you as you go.
The captives have most of them never had the challenge of putting their religious position on the life-or-death line:
- ... All of them were children of this world, and some of them disagreed with everything which that symbol upon the carth represented. But there was the European pride, the pride of the white race which swelled within them, and held them to the faith of their countrymen. It was a sinful, human, un-Christian motive, and yet it was about to make them public martyrs to the Christian creed. [p.208]
Instead of agreeing to the renunciation of the Cross, the agnostic Fardet proposes a contest of miracles. In light of Conan Doyle's later espousal of Spiritualism, the scene is fascinating. Fardet, in a moment captured by illustrator Sidney Paget, actually impresses the Dervishes by making a date appear from the Moolah's beard-a 'piece of obvious palming'.
Unfortunately for the captives, Fardet goes too far and the illusion is exposed. Finally the captives fall to their knees, some of them making the sign of the cross.
IV
A Desert Drama is reminiscent of Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, in that it details episodic crises, though it lacks a confident hero in whom all the characters can have faith. Like Cooper's tale, it is all run and hide for Westerners caught up in a frighteningly alien environment. But beyond the simplicity of its plot, the book affords Conan Doyle with an opportunity, as he saw it, to educate 'the man on the bus' about the urgency of British involvement in the Sudan. He knew Kitchener was on the brink of his 1898 assault against the Khalifa, and this successful serial in The Strand Magazine, and the hardcover that soon followed, must have helped the British public to see some of the issues that made intervention worthwhile. In the process of telling his tale, Conan Doyle was also able to shed light on international relations, religious differences, and the responsibilities of the idea of Empire.
References:
1. Nordon, Pierre: Conan Doyle, pp.41-2.
2. Green & Gibson: A Bibliography of A Conan Doyle, p. 106.
3. Keating, H. R. F.: Sherlock Holmes: The Man and his World, pp.52-4.
4. Higham, Charles: The Adventures of Conan Doyle, pp. 145-7.
Page references relate to Conan Doyle, A: A Desert Drama: Being The Tragedy of the Korosko; Philadelphia, Lippincott; 1898.
Other works consulted:
Barthorp, Michael: War on the Nile: Britain, Egypt and the Sudan, 1881-1898; Poole, Dorset, Blandford Press; 1986.
Pearson, Hesketh: Conan Doyle: His Life and Art.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
