Two years earlier, in 1881, a religious teacher named Muhammad Ahmad had proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the promised redeemer of Islamic eschatology. He withdrew to Kordofan and Darfur and began to build an army. The Egyptian government, ruling Sudan with increasing difficulty, sent a force of 4,000 to capture him. It was ambushed near El Obeid, destroyed, and its equipment captured. By 1883 the Mahdi's followers were estimated, perhaps with British exaggeration, at 200,000. The Egyptian governor Rauf Pasha decided that only a larger fight would do, against the advice of his British advisors. He raised the Hicks expedition. By the time Hicks actually set out for El Obeid, the town had already fallen to the Mahdi. The mission was maintained anyway, now with the additional goal of relieving Slatin Bey, the Austrian-born governor of Darfur.

From Duem on the Nile to El Obeid was about 200 miles of mostly featureless Kordofan scrub. The expedition set out in the summer of 1883. Their guides, either through genuine mistake or, as later writers suggested, through design, led them into increasingly difficult country. Morale collapsed. Egyptian regulars began deserting en masse. The baggage train slowed. Water ran short. By the time they reached the woods at Shaykan, near Kashgil and El Obeid, they were surrounded. The Mahdist army, perhaps 40,000 strong, closed in on 3 November 1883. The Egyptian forces, despite Churchill's assessment, did what they had been trained to do: they formed a defensive square. For two days, according to reports that reached Britain soon after, the square held.

On the third day, 5 November, the square collapsed. The Mahdist army poured in. Nearly all the Egyptian officers, including Hicks himself and his chief of staff Colonel Farquhar, were killed. About one-third of the Egyptian soldiers surrendered and were freed later; most had only been conscripts. All the senior British officers died. Only about 500 soldiers escaped back to Khartoum. Also among the dead were two Western journalists: Edmund O'Donovan of The Daily News and Frank Vizetelly of The Graphic, both of whom had accompanied the expedition expecting to report on victory. Their bodies were never recovered. Their newspapers covered their deaths. The names of the Sudanese fighters who triumphed here are largely absent from those accounts, which is one of the many ways the writing of nineteenth-century African military history still has work to do.

Shaykan was one of the most significant battles of the Mahdist War. With the Egyptian army in Kordofan destroyed, the Mahdi could consolidate his hold on the western Sudan and prepare for the larger campaigns to come. Osman Digna, whose Hadendoa tribesmen on the Red Sea coast had been called the "fuzzy-wuzzies" in British accounts, was emboldened by Shaykan and joined the rising. El Obeid became a major Mahdist administrative center for several years. Slatin Bey in Darfur eventually surrendered, converting to Islam under duress, and remained a prisoner of the Mahdist state for eleven years before escaping in 1895. The disaster at Shaykan also prompted the British government to send General Charles Gordon to Khartoum with an ill-defined evacuation mission. Gordon would die there on 26 January 1885 when the Mahdi's army took the city.

Churchill's contempt for the Hicks expedition, in The River War, was blunt: an army that was unpaid, untrained, undisciplined, with soldiers who had more in common with the Mahdist fighters than with their officers. He may have been right. But the framing obscures the other side. The Mahdist army at Shaykan was not a rabble. It was a well-led, well-organized force led by commanders who knew their terrain, coordinated their movements, and understood exactly how to envelop a defensive square in the woods. The fighters were mostly Sudanese villagers, farmers, and nomads who had answered a religious call; they fought with a motivation that the conscript Egyptian regulars entirely lacked. In the terms of November 1883, the better army won. For Britain and Egypt it would take another fifteen years, and the bigger machine guns at Omdurman, to reverse the judgment.

The battlefield near Kashgil and the woods of Shaykan sits in what is now North Kordofan state, Sudan, southeast of El-Obeid. It is not a memorialized site. The exact location of the defensive square that held for two days is debated. No cenotaph marks the spot where Hicks Pasha fell. The two war correspondents have no graves. What remains is the event itself: a moment in November 1883 when the balance of power in Sudan tilted briefly back toward an independent Sudanese state, before the British Empire, in a later decade and with more modern weapons, took it all away again. Shaykan is the battle that a story about the Battle of Omdurman must pass through to make sense. Without Shaykan, no Mahdist state; without the Mahdist state, no Omdurman. The woods are quieter now. The story is not.