During the year 1883 a solitary English gentleman was to be seen,

wandering, with a thick book under his arm, in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem.  His unassuming figure, short and slight, with its half-gliding, half-tripping motion, gave him a boyish aspect, which contrasted, oddly, but not unpleasantly, with the touch of grey on his hair and whiskers.  There was the same contrast—­ enigmatic and attractive—­between the sunburnt brick-red complexion—­the hue of the seasoned traveller—­and the large blue

eyes, with their look of almost childish sincerity.  To the friendly inquirer, he would explain, in a row, soft, and very distinct voice, that he was engaged in elucidating four questions—­the site of the Crucifixion, the line of division between the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, the identification of Gideon, and the position of the Garden of Eden.  He was also, he would add, most anxious to discover the spot where the Ark first touched ground, after the subsidence of the Flood:  he believed, indeed, that he had solved that problem, as a reference to some passages in the book which he was carrying would show.

This singular person was General Gordon, and his book was the Holy Bible.

In such complete retirement from the world and the ways of men, it might have seemed that a life of inordinate activity had found

at last a longed-for, final peacefulness.  For month after month, for an entire year, the General lingered by the banks of the Jordan.  But then the enchantment was suddenly broken.  Once more adventure claimed him; he plunged into the whirl of high affairs; his fate was mingled with the frenzies of Empire and the

doom of peoples.  And it was not in peace and rest, but in ruin and horror, that he reached his end.

The circumstances of that tragic history, so famous, so bitterly debated, so often and so controversially described, remain full of suggestion for the curious examiner of the past.  There emerges

from those obscure, unhappy records an interest, not merely political and historical, but human and dramatic.  One catches a vision of strange characters, moved by mysterious impulses, interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last—­so it almost seems—­like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined catastrophe.  The characters, too, have a charm of their own:  they

are curiously English.  What other nation on the face of the earth

could have produced Mr. Gladstone and Sir Evelyn Baring and Lord Hartington and General Gordon?  Alike in their emphasis and their lack of emphasis, in their eccentricity and their conventionality, in their matter-of-factness and their romance, these four figures

seem to embody the mingling contradictions of the English spirit.

As for the mise-en-scene, it is perfectly appropriate.  But first,

let us glance at the earlier adventures of the hero of the piece.

Charles George Gordon was born in 1833.  His father, of Highland and military descent, was himself a Lieutenant-General; his mother came of a family of merchants, distinguished for their sea

voyages into remote regions of the Globe.  As a boy, Charlie was remarkable for his high spirits, pluck, and love of mischief.  Destined for the Artillery, he was sent to the Academy at Woolwich, where some other characteristics made their appearance.

On one occasion, when the cadets had been forbidden to leave the dining-room and the senior corporal stood with outstretched arms in the doorway to prevent their exit, Charlie Gordon put his head

down, and, butting the officer in the pit of the stomach, projected him down a flight of stairs and through a glass door at

the bottom.  For this act of insubordination he was nearly dismissed—­ while the captain of his company predicted that he would never make an officer.  A little later, when he was eighteen, it came to the knowledge of the authorities that bullying was rife at the Academy.  The new-comers were questioned,

and one of them said that Charlie Gordon had hit him over the head with a clothes-brush.  He had worked well, and his record was

on the whole a good one; but the authorities took a serious view of the case, and held back his commission for six months.  It was owing to this delay that he went into the Royal Engineers, instead of the Royal Artillery.

He was sent to Pembroke, to work at the erection of fortifications; and at Pembroke those religious convictions, which never afterwards left him, first gained a hold upon his mind.  Under the influence of his sister Augusta and of a ’very religious captain of the name of Drew’, he began to reflect upon his sins, look up texts, and hope for salvation.  Though he had never been confirmed—­ he never was confirmed—­ he took the sacrament every Sunday; and he eagerly perused the Priceless Diamond, Scott’s Commentaries, and The Remains of the Rev. R. McCheyne.  ‘No novels or worldly books,’ he wrote to his sister, ’come up to the Commentaries of Scott….  I, remember well when you used to get them in numbers, and I used to laugh at them; but, thank God, it is different with me now.  I feel much happier and more contented than I used to do.  I did not like Pembroke, but now I would not wish for any prettier place.  I have got a horse and gig, and Drew and myself drive all about the country.  I

hope my dear father and mother think of eternal things…  Dearest Augusta, pray for me, I beg of you.’

He was twenty-one; the Crimean War broke out; and before the year

was over, he had managed to get himself transferred to Balaclava.

During the siege of Sebastopol he behaved with conspicuous gallantry.  Upon the declaration of peace, he was sent to Bessarabia to assist in determining the frontier between Russia and Turkey, in accordance with the Treaty of Paris; and upon this

duty he was occupied for nearly two years.  Not long after his return home, in 1860, war was declared upon China.  Captain Gordon

was dispatched to the scene of operations, but the fighting was over before he arrived.  Nevertheless, he was to remain for the next four years in China, where he was to lay the foundations of extraordinary renown.

Though he was too late to take part in the capture of the Taku Forts, he was in time to witness the destruction of the Summer Palace at Peking—­the act by which Lord Elgin, in the name of European civilisation, took vengeance upon the barbarism of the East.

The war was over; but the British Army remained in the country, until the payment of an indemnity by the Chinese Government was completed.  A camp was formed at Tientsin, and Gordon was occupied

in setting up huts for the troops.  While he was thus engaged, he had a slight attack of smallpox.  ‘I am glad to say,’ he told his sister, ’that this disease has brought me back to my Saviour, and

I trust in future to be a better Christian than I have been hitherto.’

Curiously enough a similar circumstance had, more than twenty years earlier, brought about a singular succession of events which were now upon the point of opening the way to Gordon’s first great adventure.  In 1837, a village schoolmaster near Canton had been attacked by illness; and, as in the case of Gordon, illness had been followed by a religious revulsion.  Hong-Siu-Tsuen—­ for such was his name—­ saw visions, went into ecstasies, and entered into relations with the Deity.  Shortly afterwards, he fell in with a Methodist missionary from America, who instructed him in the Christian religion.  The new doctrine, working upon the mystical ferment already in Hong’s mind, produced a remarkable result.  He was, he declared, the prophet of

God; he was more—­ he was the Son of God; he was Tien Wang, the Celestial King; he was the younger brother of Jesus.

The times were propitious, and proselytes soon gathered around him.  Having conceived a grudge against the Government, owing to his failure in an examination, Hong gave a political turn to his teaching, which soon developed into a propaganda of rebellion against the rule of the Manchus and the Mandarins.  The authorities took fright, attempted to suppress Hong by force, and failed.  The movement spread.  By 1850 the rebels were overrunning the populous

and flourishing delta of the Yangtse Kiang, and had become a formidable force.  In 1853 they captured Nankin, which was henceforth their capital.  The Tien Wang, established himself in a

splendid palace, and proclaimed his new evangel.  His theogony included the wife of God, or the celestial Mother, the wife of Jesus, or the celestial daughter-in-law, and a sister of Jesus, whom he married to one of his lieutenants, who thus became the celestial son-in-law; the Holy Ghost, however, was eliminated.

His mission was to root out Demons and Manchus from the face of the earth, and to establish Taiping, the reign of eternal peace.  In the meantime, retiring into the depths of his palace, he left the further conduct of earthly operations to his lieutenants, upon whom he bestowed the title of ‘Wangs’ (kings), while he himself, surrounded by thirty wives and one hundred concubines, devoted his energies to the spiritual side of his mission.  The Taiping Rebellion, as it came to be called, had now reached its furthest extent.  The rebels were even able to occupy, for more than a year, the semi-European city of Shanghai.

But then the tide turned.  The latent forces of theEmpire gradually asserted themselves.  The rebels lost ground, their armies were defeated, and in 1859 Nankin itself was besieged, and the Celestial King trembled in his palace.  The end seemed to be at hand, when there was a sudden twist of Fortune’s wheel.  The war of 860, the invasion of China by European armies, their march into the interior, and their occupation of Peking, not only saved the rebels from destruction, but allowed them to recover the greater part of what they had lost.  Once more they seized upon the provinces of the delta, once more they menaced Shanghai.  It was clear that the Imperial army was incompetent, and the Shanghai merchants determined to provide for their own safety as best they could.  They accordingly got together a body of troops, partly Chinese and partly European, and under European

officers, to which they entrusted the defence of the town.  This small force, which, after a few preliminary successes, received from the Chinese Government the title of the ’Ever Victorious Army’, was able to hold the rebels at bay, but it could do no more.

For two years Shanghai was in constant danger.  The Taipings, steadily growing in power, were spreading destruction far and wide.  The Ever Victorious Army was the only force capable of opposing them, and the Ever Victorious Army was defeated more often than not.  Its first European leader had been killed; his successor quarrelled with the Chinese

Governor, Li Hung Chang, and was dismissed.  At last it was determined to ask the General at the head of the British Army of Occupation for the loan of an officer to command the force.  The English, who had been at first inclined to favour the Taipings, on religious grounds, were now convinced, on practical grounds, of the necessity of suppressing them.  It was in these circumstances that, early in 1863, the command of the Ever Victorious Army was offered to Gordon.  He accepted it, received the title of General from the Chinese authorities, and entered forthwith upon his new task.  He was just

thirty.

In eighteen months, he told Li Hung Chang, the business would be finished; and he was as good as his word.  The difficulties before

him were very great.  A vast tract of country was in the possession of the rebels—­ an area, at the lowest estimate, of 14,000 square miles with a population of 20,000,000.  For centuries this low-lying plain of the Yangtse delta, rich in silk

and tea, fertilised by elaborate irrigation, and covered with great walled cities, had been one of the most flourishing districts in China.  Though it was now being rapidly ruined by the

depredations of the Taipings, its strategic strength was obviously enormous.  Gordon, however, with the eye of a born general, perceived that he could convert the very feature of the country which, on the face of it, most favoured an army on the defence—­ its complicated geographical system of interlacing roads and waterways, canals, lakes and rivers—­ into a means of offensive warfare.  The force at his disposal was small, but it was mobile.  He had a passion for map-making, and had already, in his leisure hours, made a careful survey of the country round Shanghai; he was thus able to execute a series of manoeuvres which proved fatal to the enemy.  By swift marches and counter-marches, by sudden attacks and surprises, above all by the dispatch of armed steamboats up the circuitous waterways into positions from which they could fall upon the enemy in reverse, he was able gradually to force back the rebels, to cut them off piecemeal in the field, and to seize upon their cities.

But, brilliant as these operations were, Gordon’s military genius

showed itself no less unmistakably in other directions.  The Ever Victorious Army, recruited from the riff-raff of Shanghai, was an

ill-disciplined, ill-organised body of about three thousand men, constantly on the verge of mutiny, supporting itself on plunder, and, at the slightest provocation, melting into thin air.  Gordon,

by sheer force of character, established over this incoherent mass of ruffians an extraordinary ascendancy.  He drilled them with rigid severity; he put them into a uniform, armed them systematically, substituted pay for loot, and was even able, at last, to introduce regulations of a sanitary kind.  There were some terrible scenes, in which the General, alone, faced the whole furious army, and quelled scenes of rage, desperation, towering courage, and summary execution.  Eventually he attained an almost magical prestige.  Walking at the head of his troops with nothing but a light cane in his hand, he seemed to pass through every danger with the scatheless equanimity of a demi-god.  The Taipings themselves were awed into a strange reverence.  More than once their leaders, in a frenzy of fear and admiration,

ordered the sharp-shooters not to take aim at the advancing figure of the faintly smiling Englishman.

It is significant that Gordon found it easier to win battles and to crush mutineers than to keep on good terms with the Chinese authorities.  He had to act in cooperation with a large native force; and it was only natural that the general at the head of it

should grow more and more jealous and angry as the Englishman’s successes revealed more and more clearly his own incompetence.  At

first, indeed, Gordon could rely upon the support of the Governor.  Li Flung Chang’s experience of Europeans had been hitherto limited to low-class adventurers, and Gordon came as a revelation.  ‘It is a direct blessing from Heaven,’ he noted in his diary, ’the coming of this British Gordon. ...  He is superior

in manner and bearing to any of the foreigners whom I have come into contact with, and does not show outwardly that conceit which

makes most of them repugnant in my sight.’  A few months later, after he had accompanied Gordon on a victorious expedition, the Mandarin’s enthusiasm burst forth.  ‘What a sight for tired eyes,’

he wrote, ’what an elixir for a heavy heart—­ to see this splendid Englishman fight! ...  If there is anything that I admire

nearly as much as the superb scholarship of Tseng Kuofan, it is the military qualities of this fine officer.  He is a glorious fellow!’ In his emotion, Li Hung Chang addressed Gordon as his brother, declaring that he ’considered him worthy to fill the place of the brother who is departed.  Could I have said more in all the words of the world?’

Then something happened which impressed and mystified the sensitive Chinaman.  ’The Englishman’s face was first filled with a deep pleasure, and then he seemed to be thinking), of something depressing and sad; for the smile went from his mouth and there were tears in his eyes when he thanked me for what I had said.  Can it be that he has, or has had, some great trouble in his life, and that he fights recklessly to forget it, or that Death has no terrors for him?’ But, as time went on, Li Hung Chang’s attitude began to change.  ’General Gordon,’ he notes in July, ’must control his tongue, even if he lets his mind run loose.’  The Englishman had accused him of intriguing with the Chinese general, and of withholding money due

to the Ever Victorious Army.  ’Why does he not accord me the honours that are due to me, as head of the military and civil authority in these parts?’ By September, the Governor’s earlier transports have been replaced by a more judicial frame of mind.  ’With his many faults, his pride, his temper, and his never-ending demand for money, (for one is a noble man, and in spite of all I have said to him or about him) I will ever think most highly of

him. ...  He is an honest man, but difficult to get on with.’

Disagreements of this kind might perhaps have been tided over until the end of the campaign; but an unfortunate incident suddenly led to a more serious quarrel.  Gordon’s advance had been

fiercely contested, but it had been constant; he had captured several important towns; and in October lice laid siege to the city of Soo-chow, once one of the most famous and splendid in China.  In December, its fall being obviously imminent, the Taiping leaders agreed to surrender it on condition that their lives were spared.  Gordon was a party to the agreement, and laid special stress upon his presence with the Imperial forces as a pledge of its fulfilment.  No sooner, however, was the city surrendered than the rebel ‘Wangs’ were assassinated.  In his fury, it is said that Gordon searched everywhere for Li Hung Chang with a loaded pistol in his hand.  He was convinced of the complicity of the Governor, who, on his side, denied that he was responsible for what had happened.  ’I asked him why I should plot, and go around a mountain, when a mere order, written with five strokes of the quill, would have accomplished the same thing.  He did not answer, but he insulted me, and said he would report my treachery, as he called it, to Shanghai and England.  Let him do so; he cannot bring the crazy Wangs back.’  The agitated Mandarin hoped to placate Gordon by a large gratuity and

an Imperial medal; but the plan was not successful.  ’General Gordon,’ he writes, ’called upon me in his angriest mood.  He repeated his former speeches about the Wangs.  I did not attempt to argue with him…  He refused the 10,000 taels, which I had ready for him, and, with an oath, said that he did not want the Throne’s medal.  This is showing the greatest disrespect.’

Gordon resigned his command; and it was only with the utmost reluctance that he agreed at last to resume it.  An arduous and terrible series of operations followed; but they were successful,

and by June, 1864, the Ever Victorious Army, having accomplished its task, was disbanded.  The Imperial forces now closed round Nankin; the last hopes of the Tien Wang had vanished.  In the recesses of his seraglio, the Celestial King, judging that the time had come for the conclusion of his mission, swallowed gold leaf until he ascended to Heaven.  In July, Nankin was taken, the remaining chiefs were executed, and the rebellion was at an end.  The Chinese Government gave Gordon the highest rank in its military hierarchy, and invested him with the yellow jacket and the peacock’s feather.  He rejected an enormous offer of money; but he could not refuse a great gold medal, specially struck in his honour by order of the Emperor.  At the end of the year he returned to England, where the conqueror of the Taipings was made

a Companion of the Bath.

That the English authorities should have seen fit to recognise Gordon’s services by the reward usually reserved for industrious clerks was typical of their attitude towards him until the very end of his career.  Perhaps if he had been ready to make the most of the wave of popularity which greeted him on his return—­if he had advertised his fame and, amid high circles, played the part of Chinese Gordon in a becoming manner—­ the results would have been different.  But he was by nature farouche; his soul revolted against dinner parties and stiff shirts; and the presence of ladies—­ especially of fashionable ladies—­ filled him with uneasiness.  He had, besides, a deeper dread of the world’s contaminations.  And so, when he was appointed to Gravesend to supervise the erection of a system of forts at the mouth of the Thames, he remained there quietly for six years, and at last was almost forgotten.  The forts, which were extremely expensive and quite useless, occupied his working hours; his leisure he devoted

to acts of charity and to religious contemplation.  The neighbourhood was a poverty-stricken one, and the kind Colonel, with his tripping step and simple manner, was soon a familiar figure in it, chatting with the seamen, taking provisions to starving families, or visiting some bedridden old woman to light her fire.  He was particularly fond of boys.  Ragged street arabs and rough sailor-lads crowded about him.  They were made free of his house and garden; they visited him in the evenings for lessons and advice; he helped them, found them employment, corresponded with them when they went out into the world.  They were, he said, his Wangs.  It was only by a singular austerity of living that he was able to afford such a variety of charitable expenses.  The easy luxuries of his class and station were unknown

to him:  his clothes verged upon the shabby; and his frugal meals were eaten at a table with a drawer, into which the loaf and plate were quickly swept at the approach of his poor visitors.  Special occasions demanded special sacrifices.  When, during the Lancashire famine, a public subscription was opened, finding that he had no ready money, he remembered his Chinese medal, and, after effacing the inscription, dispatched it as an anonymous gift.

Except for his boys and his paupers, he lived alone.  In his solitude, he ruminated upon the mysteries of the universe; and those religious tendencies, which had already shown themselves, now became a fixed and dominating factor in his life.  His reading

was confined almost entirely to the Bible; but the Bible he read and re-read with an untiring, unending assiduity.  There, he was convinced, all truth was to be found; and he was equally convinced that he could find it.  The doubts of philosophers, the investigations of commentators, the smiles of men of the world, the dogmas of Churches—­ such things meant nothing to the Colonel.  Two facts alone were evident:  there was the Bible, and there was himself; and all that remained to be done was for him to discover

what were the Bible’s instructions, and to act accordingly.  In order to make this discovery it was only necessary for him to read the Bible over and over again; and therefore, for the rest of his life, he did so.

The faith that he evolved was mystical and fatalistic; it was also highly unconventional.  His creed, based upon the narrow foundations of Jewish Scripture, eked out occasionally by some English evangelical manual, was yet wide enough to ignore every doctrinal difference, and even, at moments, to transcend the bounds of Christianity itself.  The just man was he who submitted to the Will of God, and the Will of God, inscrutable and absolute, could be served aright only by those who turned away from earthly desires and temporal temptations, to rest themselves

whole-heartedly upon the in-dwelling Spirit.  Human beings were the transitory embodiments of souls who had existed through an infinite past, and would continue to exist through an infinite future.

The world was vanity; the flesh was dust and ashes.  ‘A man,’ Gordon wrote to his sister, ’who knows not the secret, who has not the in-dwelling of God revealed to him, is like this—­[picture of a circle with Body and Soul written within it].  He takes the promises and curses as addressed to him as one man, and will not hear of there being any birth before his natural birth, in any existence except with the body he is in.  The man to whom the secret (the indwelling of God) is revealed is like this:  [picture of a circle with soul and body enclosed in two separate circles].

He applies the promises to one and the curses to the other, if disobedient, which he must be, except the soul is enabled by God to rule.  He then sees he is not of this world; for when he speaks

of himself he quite disregards the body his soul lives in, which is earthly.’  Such conceptions are familiar enough in the history of religious thought:  they are those of the hermit and the fakir;

and it might have been expected that, when once they had taken hold upon his mind, Gordon would have been content to lay aside the activities of his profession, and would have relapsed at last

into the complete retirement of holy meditation.  But there were other elements in his nature which urged him towards a very different course.  He was no simple quietist.  He was an English gentleman, an officer, a man of energy and action, a lover of danger and the audacities that defeat danger; a passionate creature, flowing over with the self-assertiveness of independent

judgment and the arbitrary temper of command.

Whatever he might find in his pocket-Bible, it was not for such as he to dream out his days in devout obscurity.  But, conveniently enough, he found nothing in his pocket-Bible indicating that he should.  What he did find was that the Will of God was inscrutable and absolute; that it was man’s duty to follow where God’s hand led; and, if God’s hand led towards violent excitements and extraordinary vicissitudes, that it was not only futile, it was impious to turn another way.  Fatalism is always apt to be a double-edged philosophy; for while, on the one hand, it reveals the minutest occurrences as the immutable result of a rigid chain of infinitely predestined causes, on the other, it invests the wildest incoherences of conduct or of circumstance with the sanctity of eternal law.  And Gordon’s fatalism was no exception.  The same doctrine that led him to dally with omens, to search for

prophetic texts, and to append, in brackets, the apotropaic initials D.V. after every statement in his letters implying futurity, led him also to envisage his moods and his desires, his

passing reckless whims and his deep unconscious instincts, as the

mysterious manifestations of the indwelling God.  That there was danger lurking in such a creed he was very well aware.  The grosser temptations of the world—­ money and the vulgar attributes of power—­ had, indeed, no charms for him; but there were subtler

and more insinuating allurements which it was not so easy to resist.  More than one observer declared that ambition was, in reality, the essential motive in his life:  ambition, neither for wealth nor titles, but for fame and influence, for the swaying of

multitudes, and for that kind of enlarged and intensified existence ‘where breath breathes most even in the mouths of men’.

Was it so?  In the depths of Gordon’s soul there were intertwining

contradictions—­ intricate recesses where egoism and renunciation

melted into one another, where the flesh lost itself in the spirit, and the spirit in the flesh.  What was the Will of God?  The question, which first became insistent during his retirement at Gravesend, never afterwards left him; it might almost be said that he spent the remainder of his life in searching for the answer to it.  In all his Odysseys, in all his strange and agitated adventures, a day never passed on which he neglected the

voice of eternal wisdom as it spoke through the words of Paul or Solomon, of Jonah or Habakkuk.  He opened his Bible, he read, and then he noted down his reflections upon scraps of paper, which, periodically pinned together, he dispatched to one or other of his religious friends, and particularly his sister Augusta.  The published extracts from these voluminous outpourings lay bare the

inner history of Gordon’s spirit, and reveal the pious visionary of Gravesend in the restless hero of three continents.

His seclusion came to an end in a distinctly providential manner.

In accordance with a stipulation in the Treaty of Paris, an international commission had been appointed to improve the navigation of the Danube; and Gordon, who had acted on a similar body fifteen years earlier, was sent out to represent Great Britain.  At Constantinople, he chanced to meet the Egyptian minister, Nubar Pasha.  The Governorship of the Equatorial Provinces of the Sudan was about to fall vacant; and Nubar offered the post to Gordon, who accepted it.  ’For some wise design,’ he wrote to his sister, ’God turns events one way or another, whether man likes it or not, as a man driving a horse turns it to right or left without consideration as to whether the

horse likes that way or not.  To be happy, a man must be like a well-broken, willing horse, ready for anything.  Events will go as

God likes.’

And then followed six years of extraordinary, desperate, unceasing, and ungrateful labour.  The unexplored and pestilential

region of Equatoria, stretching southwards to the Great Lakes and

the sources of the Nile, had been annexed to Egypt by the Khedive

Ismail, who, while he squandered his millions on Parisian ballet-dancers, dreamt strange dreams of glory and empire.  Those dim tracts of swamp and forest in Central Africa were—­ so he declared—­ to be ‘opened up’; they were to receive the blessings of civilisation, they were to become a source of eternal honour to himself and Egypt.  The slave-trade, which flourished there, was to be put down; the savage inhabitants were to become acquainted with freedom, justice, and prosperity.  Incidentally, a

government monopoly in ivory was to be established, and the place

was to be made a paying concern.  Ismail, hopelessly in debt to a horde of European creditors, looked to Europe to support him in his schemes.  Europe, and, in particular, England, with her passion for extraneous philanthropy, was not averse.

Sir Samuel Baker became the first Governor of Equatoria, and now Gordon was to carry on the good work.  In such circumstances it was only natural that Gordon should consider himself a special instrument in God’s band.  To put his disinterestedness beyond doubt, he reduced his salary, which had been fixed at £10,000, to £2,000.  He took over his new duties early in 1874, and it was not long before he had a first hint of disillusionment.  On his way up the Nile, he was received in state at Khartoum by the Egyptian Governor—­ General of the Sudan, his immediate official superior.

The function ended in a prolonged banquet, followed by a mixed ballet of soldiers and completely naked young women, who danced in a circle, beat time with their feet, and accompanied their gestures with a curious sound of clucking.  At last the Austrian Consul, overcome by the exhilaration of the scene, flung himself in a frenzy among the dancers; the Governor-General, shouting with delight, seemed about to follow suit, when Gordon abruptly left the room, and the party broke up in confusion.

When, 1,500 miles to the southward, Gordon reached the seat of his government, and the desolation of the Tropics closed over him, the agonising nature of his task stood fully revealed.  For the next three years he struggled with enormous difficulties—­ with the confused and horrible country, the appalling climate, the maddening insects and the loathsome diseases, the indifference of subordinates and superiors, the savagery of the slave-traders, and the hatred of the inhabitants.  One by one the small company of his European staff succumbed.  With a few hundred

Egyptian soldiers he had to suppress insurrections, make roads, establish fortified posts, and enforce the government monopoly of

ivory.  All this he accomplished; he even succeeded in sending enough money to Cairo to pay for the expenses of the expedition.

But a deep gloom had fallen upon his spirit.  When, after a series

of incredible obstacles had been overcome, a steamer was launched

upon the unexplored Albert Nyanza, he turned his back upon the lake, leaving the glory of its navigation to his Italian lieutenant, Gessi.  ‘I wish,’ he wrote, ’to give a practical proof

of what I think regarding the inordinate praise which is given to

an explorer.’  Among his distresses and self-mortifications, he loathed the thought of all such honours, and remembered the attentions of English society with a snarl.  ’When, D.V., I get home, I do not dine out.  My reminiscences of these lands will not be more pleasant to me than the China ones.  What I shall have

done, will be what I have done.  Men think giving dinners is conferring a favour on you…  Why not give dinners to those who need them?’ No!  His heart was set upon a very different object.  ’To each is allotted a distinct work, to each a destined goal; to

some the seat at the right hand or left hand of the Saviour. (It was not His to give; it was already given—­ Matthew xx, 23.  Again, Judas went to “His own place”—­Acts i, 25.) It is difficult for the flesh to accept:  “Ye are dead, ye have naught to do with the world”.  How difficult for anyone to be circumcised from the world, to be as indifferent to its pleasures, its sorrows, and its comforts as a corpse is!  That is to know the resurrection.’

But the Holy Bible was not his only solace.  For now, under the parching African sun, we catch glimpses, for the first time, of Gordon’s hand stretching out towards stimulants of a more material quality.  For months together, we are told, he would drink nothing but pure water; and then … water that was not so pure.  In his fits of melancholy, he would shut himself up in his tent for days at a time, with a hatchet and a flag placed at the door to indicate that he was not to be disturbed for any reason whatever; until at last the cloud would lift, the signals would be removed, and the Governor would reappear, brisk and cheerful.

During, one of these retirements, there was grave danger of a native attack upon the camp.  Colonel Long, the Chief of Staff, ventured, after some hesitation, to ignore the flag and hatchet, and to enter the forbidden tent.  He found Gordon seated at a table, upon which were an open Bible and an open bottle of brandy.  Long explained the circumstances, but could obtain no answer beyond the abrupt words—­’You are commander of the camp’—­ and was obliged to retire, nonplussed, to deal with the situation

as best he could.  On the following morning, Gordon, cleanly shaven, and in the full-dress uniform of the Royal Engineers, entered Long’s hut with his usual tripping step, exclaiming ’Old fellow, now don’t be angry with me.  I was very low last night.  Let’s have a good breakfast—­a little b. and s.  Do you feel up to

it?’ And, with these veering moods and dangerous restoratives, there came an intensification of the queer and violent elements in the temper of the man.

His eccentricities grew upon him.  He found it more and more uncomfortable to follow the ordinary course.  Official routine was an agony to him.  His caustic and satirical humour expressed itself in a style that astounded government departments.  While he jibed at his superiors, his subordinates learned to dread the explosions of his wrath.  There were moments when his passion became utterly ungovernable; and the gentle soldier of God, who had spent the day in quoting texts for the edification of his sister, would slap the face of his Arab aide-de-camp in a sudden access of fury, or set upon his Alsatian servant and kick him until he screamed.

At the end of three years, Gordon resigned his post in Equatoria,

and prepared to return home.  But again Providence intervened:  the

Khedive offered him, as an inducement to remain in the Egyptian service, a position of still higher consequence—­ the Governor-Generalship of the whole Sudan; and Gordon once more took up his task.  Another three years were passed in grappling with vast revolting provinces, with the ineradicable iniquities of the slave-trade, and with all the complications of weakness and corruption incident to an oriental administration extending over almost boundless tracts of savage territory which had never been effectively subdued.  His headquarters were fixed in the palace at

Khartoum; but there were various interludes in his government.  Once, when the Khedive’s finances had become peculiarly embroiled, he summoned Gordon to Cairo to preside over a commission which should set matters to rights.

Gordon accepted the post, but soon found that his situation was untenable.  He was between the devil and the deep sea—­ between the unscrupulous cunning of the Egyptian Pashas, and the immeasurable

immensity of the Khedive’s debts to his European creditors.  The Pashas were anxious to use him as a respectable mask for their own nefarious dealings; and the representatives of the European creditors, who looked upon him as an irresponsible intruder, were anxious simply to get rid of him as soon as they could.  One of these representatives was Sir Evelyn Baring, whom Gordon now met for the first time.  An immediate antagonism flashed out between the two men.  But their hostility had no time to mature; for Gordon, baffled on all sides, and deserted even by the Khedive, precipitately returned to his Governor-Generalship.  Whatever else Providence might have decreed, it had certainly not decided that he should be a financier.

His tastes and his talents were indeed of a very different kind.  In his absence, a rebellion had broken out in Darfur—­ one of the

vast outlying provinces of his government—­ where a native chieftain, Zobeir, had erected, on a basis of slave-traffic, a dangerous military power.  Zobeir himself had been lured to Cairo,

where he was detained in a state of semi-captivity; but his son, Suleiman, ruled in his stead, and was now defying the Governor-General.  Gordon determined upon a hazardous stroke.  He mounted a camel, and rode, alone, in the blazing heat, across eighty-five miles of desert, to Suleiman’s camp.  His sudden apparition dumbfounded the rebels; his imperious bearing overawed them; he signified to them that in two days they must disarm and disperse;

and the whole host obeyed.  Gordon returned to Khartoum in triumph.  But he had not heard the last of Suleiman.  Flying southwards from

Darfur to the neighbouring province of Bahr-el-Ghazal, the young man was soon once more at the head of a formidable force.  A prolonged campaign of extreme difficulty and danger followed.  Eventually, Gordon, summoned again to Cairo, was obliged to leave

to Gessi the task of finally crushing the revolt.  After a brilliant campaign, Gessi forced Suleiman to surrender, and then shot him as a rebel.  The deed was to exercise a curious influence

upon Gordon’s fate.

Though Suleiman had been killed and his power broken, the slave-trade still flourished in the Sudan.  Gordon’s efforts to suppress

it resembled the palliatives of an empiric treating the superficial symptoms of some profound constitutional disease.  The

root of the malady lay in the slave-markets of Cairo and Constantinople:  the supply followed the demand.  Gordon, after years of labour, might here and there stop up a spring or divert a tributary, but, somehow or other the waters would reach the river-bed.  In the end, he himself came to recognise this.  ’When you have got the ink that has soaked into blotting-paper out of it,’ he said, ‘then slavery will cease in these lands.’  And yet he struggled desperately on; it was not for him to murmur.  ’I feel my own weakness, and look to Him who is Almighty, and I leave the issue without inordinate care to Him.’

Relief came at last.  The Khedive Ismail was deposed; and Gordon felt at liberty to send in his resignation.  Before he left Egypt, however, he was to experience yet one more remarkable adventure.  At his own request, he set out on a diplomatic mission to the Negus of Abyssinia.  The mission was a complete failure.  The Negus was intractable, and, when his bribes were refused, furious.  Gordon was ignominiously dismissed; every insult was heaped on him; he was arrested, and obliged to traverse the Abyssinian Mountains in the depth of winter under the escort of a savage troop of horse.  When, after great hardships and dangers, he reached Cairo, he found the whole official world up in arms against him.  The Pashas had determined at last that they had no further use for this honest and peculiar

Englishman.  It was arranged that one of his confidential dispatches should be published in the newspapers; naturally, it contained indiscretions; there was a universal outcry—­ the man was insubordinate, and mad.  He departed under a storm of obloquy.

It seemed impossible that he should ever return to Egypt.

On his way home he stopped in Paris, saw the English Ambassador, Lord Lyons, and speedily came into conflict with him over Egyptian affairs.  There ensued a heated correspondence, which was finally closed by a letter from Gordon, ending as follows:  ’I have some comfort in thinking that in ten or fifteen years’ time it will matter little to either of us.  A black box, six feet six by three feet wide, will then contain all that is left of Ambassador, or Cabinet Minister, or of your humble and obedient servant.’

He arrived in England early in 1880 ill and exhausted; and it might have been supposed that after the terrible activities of his African exile he would have been ready to rest.  But the very opposite was the case; the next three years were the most momentous of his life.  He hurried from post to post, from enterprise to enterprise, from continent to continent, with a vertiginous rapidity.  He accepted the Private Secretaryship to Lord Ripon, the new Viceroy of India, and, three days after his arrival at Bombay, he resigned.  He had suddenly realised that he was not cut out for a Private Secretary, when, on an address being sent in from some deputation, he was asked to say that the Viceroy had read it with interest.  ‘You know perfectly,’ he said to Lord William Beresford, ’that Lord Ripon has never read it, and I can’t say that sort of thing; so I will resign, and you take in my resignation.’  He confessed to Lord William that the world was not big enough for him, that there was ’no king or country big enough’; and then he added, hitting him on the shoulder, ’Yes, that is flesh, that is what I hate, and what makes me wish to die.’

Two days later, he was off for Pekin.  ’Every one will say I am mad,’ were his last words to Lord William Beresford; ’but you say

I am not.’  The position in China was critical; war with Russia appeared to be imminent; and Gordon had been appealed to in order to use his influence on the side of peace.  He was welcomed by many old friends of former days, among them Li Hung Chang, whose diplomatic views coincided with his own.  Li’s diplomatic language, however, was less unconventional.  In an interview with the Ministers, Gordon’s expressions were such that the interpreter shook with terror, upset a cup of tea, and finally refused to translate the dreadful words; upon which Gordon snatched up a dictionary, and, with his finger on the word ‘idiocy’, showed it to the startled Mandarins.  A few weeks later, Li Hung Chang was in power, and peace was assured.  Gordon had spent two and a half days in Pekin, and was whirling through China, when a telegram arrived from the home authorities, who viewed his movements with uneasiness, ordering him to return at once to England.  ‘It did not produce a twitter in me,’ he wrote to his sister; ’I died long ago, and it will not make any difference to me; I am prepared to follow the unrolling of the scroll.’  The world, perhaps, was not big enough for him; and yet how clearly he recognised that he was ‘a poor insect!’ ’My heart tells me that, and I am glad of it.’

On his return to England, he telegraphed to the Government of the

Cape of Good Hope, which had become involved in a war with the Basutos, offering his services; but his telegram received no reply.  Just then, Sir Howard Elphinstone was appointed to the command of the Royal Engineers in Mauritius. it was a thankless and insignificant post; and, rather than accept it, Elphinstone was prepared to retire from the Army—­ unless some other officer could be induced, in return for £800, to act as his substitute.  Gordon, who was an old friend, agreed to undertake the work upon one condition:  that he should receive nothing from Elphinstone; and accordingly, he spent the next year in that remote and unhealthy island, looking after the barrack repairs and testing the drains.

While he was thus engaged, the Cape Government, whose difficulties had been increasing, changed its mind, and early in 1882, begged for Gordon’s help.  Once more he was involved in great affairs:  a new field of action opened before him; and then, in a moment, there was another shift of the kaleidoscope, and again he was thrown upon the world.  Within a few weeks, after a violent quarrel with the Cape authorities, his mission had come to an end.  What should he do next?  To what remote corner or what enormous stage, to what self-sacrificing drudgeries or what resounding exploits, would the hand of God lead him now?  He waited, in an odd hesitation.  He opened the Bible, but neither the prophecies of Hosea nor the epistles to Timothy gave him any advice.  The King of the Belgians asked if he would be willing to go to the Congo.  He was perfectly willing; he would go whenever the King of the Belgians sent for him; his services, however, were not required yet.  It was at this juncture that he betook himself to Palestine.  His studies there were embodied in a correspondence with the Rev. Mr. Barnes, filling over 2,000 pages of manuscript—­ a correspondence which was only put an end to when, at last, the summons from the King of the Belgians came.  He

hurried back to England; but it was not to the Congo that he was being led by the hand of God.

Gordon’s last great adventure, like his first, was occasioned by a religious revolt.  At the very moment when, apparently forever, he was shaking the dust of Egypt from his feet, Mahommed Ahmed was starting upon his extraordinary career in the Sudan.  The time

was propitious for revolutions.  The effete Egyptian Empire was hovering upon the verge of collapse.  The enormous territories of the Sudan were seething with discontent.  Gordon’s administration had, by its very vigour, only helped to precipitate the inevitable disaster.  His attacks upon the slave-trade, his establishment of a government monopoly in ivory, his hostility to

the Egyptian officials, had been so many shocks, shaking to its foundations the whole rickety machine.  The result of all his efforts had been, on the one hand, to fill the most powerful classes in the community—­ the dealers in slaves and, ivory—­ with a hatred of the government, and on the other to awaken among the mass of the inhabitants a new perception of the dishonesty and incompetence of their Egyptian masters.

When, after Gordon’s removal, the rule of the Pashas once more asserted itself over the Sudan, a general combustion became inevitable:  the first spark would set off the blaze.  Just then it happened that Mahommed Ahmed, the son of an insignificant priest in Dongola, having quarrelled with the Sheikh from whom he was receiving religious instruction, set up as an independent preacher, with his headquarters at Abba Island, on the Nile, 150 miles above Khartoum.  Like Hong-siu-tsuen, he began as a religious reformer, and ended as a rebel king.  It was his mission, he declared, to purge the true Faith of its worldliness and corruptions, to lead the followers of the prophet into the paths of chastity, simplicity, and holiness; with the puritanical zeal of a Calvin, be denounced junketings and merrymakings, songs and dances, lewd living and all the delights of the flesh.  He fell into trances, he saw visions, he saw the prophet and Jesus, and the Angel Izrail accompanying him and watching over him forever.  He prophesied and performed miracles, and his fame spread through the land.

There is an ancient tradition in the Mohammedan world, telling of

a mysterious being, the last in succession of the twelve holy Imams, who, untouched by death and withdrawn into the recesses of

a mountain, was destined, at the appointted hour, to come forth again among men.  His title was the Mahdi, the guide; some believed that he would be the forerunner of the Messiah; others believed that he would be Christ himself.  Already various Mahdis

had made their appearance; several had been highly successful, and two, in medieval times, had founded dynasties in Egypt.  But who could tell whether ail these were not impostors?  Might not the twelfth Imam be still waiting, in mystical concealment, ready to emerge, at any moment, at the bidding of God?  There were signs by which the true Mahdi might be recognised—­ unmistakable signs, if one could but read them aright.  He must be of the family of the prophet; he must possess miraculous powers of no common kind; and

his person must be overflowing with a peculiar sanctity.  The pious dwellers beside those distant waters, where holy men by dint of a constant repetition of one of the ninety-nine names of God, secured the protection of guardian angels, and where groups of devotees, shaking their heads with a violence which would unseat the reason of less athletic worshippers, attained to an extraordinary beatitude, heard with awe of the young preacher whose saintliness was almost more than mortal and whose miracles brought amazement to the mind.  Was he not also of the family of the prophet?  He himself had said so, and who would disbelieve the

holy man?  When he appeared in person, every doubt was swept away.

There was a strange splendour in his presence, an overpowering passion in the torrent of his speech.  Great was the wickedness of

There was a strange splendour in his presence, an overpowering passion in the torrent of his speech.  Great was the wickedness of

the people, and great was their punishment!  Surely their miseries

were a visible sign of the wrath of the Lord.  They had sinned, and the cruel tax gatherers had come among them, and the corrupt governors, and all the oppressions of the Egyptians.  Yet these things, ’Too, should have an end.  The Lord would raise up his chosen deliverer; the hearts of the people would be purified, and

their enemies would be laid low.  The accursed Egyptian would be driven from the land.  Let the faithful take heart and make ready.

How soon might not the long-predestined hour strike, when the twelfth Imam, the guide, the Mahdi, would reveal himself to the world?’ In that hour, the righteous ’Would triumph and the guilty

be laid low forever.’  Such was the teaching of Mohammed Ahmed.  A band of enthusiastic disciples gathered round him, eagerly waiting for the revelation which would crown their hopes.  At last, the moment came.  One evening, at Abba Island, taking aside the foremost of his followers, the Master whispered the portentous news.  He was the Mahdi.

The Egyptian Governor-General at Khartoum, hearing that a religious movement was afoot, grew disquieted, and dispatched an emissary to Abba Island to summon the impostor to his presence.  The emissary was courteously received.  Mohammed Ahmed, he said, must come at once to Khartoum.  ‘Must!’ exclaimed the Mahdi, starting to his feet, with a strange look in his eyes.  The

look was so strange that the emissary thought it advisable to cut

short the interview and to return to Khartoum empty-handed.  Thereupon, the Governor-General sent 200 soldiers to seize the audacious rebel by force.  With his handful of friends, the Mahdi fell upon the soldiers and cut them to pieces.  The news spread like wild-fire through the country:  the Mahdi had arisen, the Egyptians were destroyed.  But it was clear to the little band of enthusiasts at Abba Island that their position on the river was no longer tenable.  The Mahdi, deciding upon a second Hegira, retreated south-westward, into the depths of Kordofan.

The retreat was a triumphal progress.  The country, groaning under

alien misgovernment and vibrating with religious excitement, suddenly found in this rebellious prophet a rallying-point, a hero, a deliverer.  And now another element was added to the forces of insurrection.  The Baggara tribes of Kordofan, cattle-owners and slave-traders, the most warlike and vigorous of the inhabitants of the Sudan, threw in their lot with the Mahdi.  Their powerful Emirs, still smarting from the blows of Gordon, saw that the opportunity for revenge had come.  A holy war was proclaimed against the Egyptian misbelievers.  The followers of the Mahdi, dressed, in token of a new austerity of living, in the

‘jibbeh’, or white smock of coarse cloth, patched with variously shaped and coloured patches, were rapidly organised into a formidable army.  Several attacks from Khartoum were repulsed; and

at last, the Mahdi felt strong enough to advance against the enemy.  While his lieutenants led detachments into the vast provinces lying to the west and the south—­Darfur and Bahr-el-Ghazal—­he himself marched upon El Obeid, the capital of Kordofan.  It was in vain that reinforcements were hurried from Khartoum to the assistance of the garrison:  there was some severe

fighting; the town was completely cut off; and, after a six months’ siege, it surrendered.  A great quantity of guns and ammunition and £100,000 in spices fell into the hands of the Mahdi.  He was master of Kordofan:  he was at the head of a great army; he was rich; he was worshipped.  A dazzling future opened before him.  No possibility seemed too remote, no fortune too magnificent.  A vision of universal empire hovered before his eyes.  Allah, whose servant he was, who had led him thus far, would lead him onward still, to the glorious end.

For some months he remained at El Obeid, consolidating his dominion.  In a series of circular letters, he described his colloquies with the Almighty and laid down the rule of living which his followers were to pursue.  The faithful, under pain of severe punishment, were to return to the ascetic simplicity of ancient times.  A criminal code was drawn up, meting out executions, mutilations, and floggings with a barbaric zeal.  The blasphemer was to be instantly hanged, the adulterer was to be scourged with whips of rhinoceros hide, the thief was to have his

right hand and his left foot hacked off in the marketplace.  No more were marriages to be celebrated with pomp and feasting, no more was the youthful warrior to swagger with flowing hair; henceforth, the believer must banquet on dates and milk, and his head must be kept shaved.  Minor transgressions were punished by confiscation of property or by imprisonment and chains.  But the rhinoceros whip was the favourite instrument of chastisement.  Men

were flogged for drinking a glass of wine, they were flogged for smoking; if they swore, they received eighty lashes for every expletive; and after eighty lashes it was a common thing to die.  Before long, flogging grew to be so everyday an incident that the

young men made a game of it, as a test of their endurance of pain.

With this Spartan ferocity there was mingled the glamour and the mystery of the East.  The Mahdi himself, his four Khalifas, and the principal Emirs, masters of sudden riches, surrounded themselves with slaves and women, with trains of horses and asses, with body guards and glittering arms.  There were rumours of debaucheries in high places—­ of the Mahdi, forgetful of his own ordinances, revelling in the recesses of his

harem, and quaffing date syrup mixed with ginger out of the silver cups looted from the church of the Christians.  But that imposing figure had only to show itself for the tongue of scandal

to be stilled.  The tall, broad-shouldered, majestic man, with the

dark face and black beard and great eyes—­who could doubt that he

was the embodiment of a superhuman power?  Fascination dwelt in every movement, every glance.  The eyes, painted with antimony, flashed extraordinary fires; the exquisite smile revealed, beneath the vigorous lips, white upper teeth with a V-shaped space between them—­ the certain sign of fortune.  His turban was folded with faultless art, his jibbeh, speckless, was perfumed with sandal-wood, musk, and attar of roses.  He was at once all courtesy and all command.  Thousands followed him, thousands prostrated themselves before him; thousands, when he lifted up his voice in solemn worship, knew that the heavens were opened and that they had come near to God.  Then all at once the onbeia—­

the elephant’s-tusk trumpet—­would give out its enormous sound.  The nahas—­the brazen wardrums—­ would summon, with their weird rolling, the whole host to arms.  The green flag and the red flag and the black flag would rise over the multitude.  The great army would move forward, coloured, glistening, dark, violent, proud, beautiful.  The drunkenness, the madness of religion would blaze on every face; and the Mahdi, immovable on his charger, would let

the scene grow under his eyes in silence.

El Obeid fell in January, 1883.  Meanwhile, events of the deepest importance had occurred in Egypt.  The rise of Arabi had synchronised with that of the Mahdi.  Both movements were nationalist; both were directed against alien rulers who had shown themselves unfit to rule.  While the Sudanese were shaking off the yoke of Egypt, the Egyptians themselves grew impatient of

their own masters—­ the Turkish and Circassian Pashas who filled with their incompetence all the high offices of state.  The army led by Ahmed Arabi, a Colonel of fellah origin, mutinied, the Khedive gave way, and it seemed as if a new order were about to be established.  A new order was indeed upon the point of appearing:  but it was of a kind undreamt of in Arabi’s philosophy.  At the critical moment, the English Government intervened.  An English fleet bombarded Alexandria, an English army landed under Lord Wolseley, and defeated Arabi and his supporters at Tel-el-kebir.  The rule of the Pashas was nominally restored; but henceforth, in effect, the English were masters of Egypt.

Nevertheless, the English themselves were slow to recognise this fact:  their Government had intervened unwillingly; the occupation

of the country was a merely temporary measure; their army was to be withdrawn as soon as a tolerable administration had been set up.  But a tolerable administration, presided over by the Pashas, seemed long in coming, and the English army remained.  In the meantime, the Mahdi had entered El Obeid, and his dominion was rapidly spreading over the greater part of the Sudan.

Then a terrible catastrophe took place.  The Pashas, happy once more in Cairo, pulling the old strings and growing fat over the old flesh-pots, decided to give the world an unmistakable proof of their renewed vigour.  They would tolerate the insurrection in the Sudan no longer; they would destroy the Mahdi, reduce his followers to submission, and re-establish their own beneficent rule over the whole country.  To this end they collected together an army of 10,000 men, and placed it under the command of Colonel

Hicks, a retired English officer.  He was ordered to advance and suppress the rebellion.  In these proceedings the English Government refused to take any part.  Unable, or unwilling, to realise that, so long as there was an English army in Egypt they could not avoid the responsibilities of supreme power, they declared that the domestic policy of the Egyptian administration was no concern of theirs.  It was a fatal error—­an error which they themselves, before many weeks were over, were to be forced by the hard logic of events to admit.  The Pashas, left to their own devices, mismanaged the Hicks expedition to their hearts’ content.  The miserable troops, swept together from the relics of Arabi’s disbanded army, were dispatched to Khartoum in chains.

After a month’s drilling, they were pronounced to be fit to attack the fanatics of the Sudan.  Colonel Hicks was a brave man; urged on by the authorities in Cairo, he shut his eyes to the danger ahead of him, and marched out from Khartoum in the direction of El Obeid at the beginning of September, 1883.  Abandoning his communications, he was soon deep in the desolate wastes of Kordofan.  As he advanced, his difficulties increased; the guides were treacherous, the troops grew exhausted, the supply of water gave out.  He pressed on, and at last, on November 5th, not far from El Obeid, the harassed, fainting, almost desperate army plunged into a vast forest of gumtrees and mimosa scrub.  There was a sudden, appalling yell; the Mahdi, with 40,000 of his finest men, sprang from their ambush.  The Egyptians were surrounded, and immediately overpowered.  It was not a defeat, but an annihilation.  Hicks and his European staff were slaughtered; the whole army was slaughtered; 300 wounded wretches

crept away into the forest.

The consequences of this event were felt in every part of the Sudan.  To the westward, in Darfur, the Governor, Slatin Pasha, after a prolonged and valiant resistance, was forced to surrender, and the whole province fell into the hands of the rebels.  Southwards, in the Bahr-el-Ghazal, Lupton Bey was shut up

in a remote stronghold, while the country was overrun.  The Mahdi’s triumphs were beginning to penetrate even into the tropical regions of Equatoria; the tribes were rising, and Emir Pasha was preparing to retreat towards the Great Lakes.  On the cast, Osman Digna pushed the insurrection right up to the shores of the Red Sea and laid siege to Suakin.  Before the year was over, with the exception of a few isolated and surrounded garrisons, the Mahdi was absolute lord of a territory equal to the combined area of Spain, France, and Germany; and his victorious armies were rapidly closing round Khartoum.

When the news of the Hicks disaster reached Cairo, the Pashas calmly announced that they would collect another army of 10,000 men, and again attack the Mahdi; but the English Government understood at last the gravity of the case.  They saw that a crisis was upon them, and that they could no longer escape the implications of their position in Egypt.  What were they to do?  Were they to allow the Egyptians to become more and more deeply involved in a ruinous, perhaps ultimately a fatal, war with the Mahdi?  And, if not, what steps were they to take?

A small minority of the party then in power in England—­ the Liberal Party—­ were anxious to withdraw from Egypt altogether and at once.  On the other hand, another and a more influential minority, with representatives in the Cabinet, were in favour of a more active intervention in Egyptian affairs—­ of the deliberate use of the power of England to give to Egypt internal stability and external

security; they were ready, if necessary, to take the field against the Mahdi with English troops.  But the great bulk of the party, and the Cabinet, with Mr. Gladstone at their head, preferred a middle course.  Realising the impracticality of an immediate withdrawal, they were nevertheless determined to remain

in Egypt not a moment longer than was necessary, and, in the meantime, to interfere as little as possible in Egyptian affairs.

From a campaign in the Sudan conducted by an English army they were altogether averse.  If, therefore, the English army was not to be used, and the Egyptian army was not fit to be used against the Mahdi, it followed that any attempt to reconquer the Sudan must be abandoned; the remaining Egyptian troops must be withdrawn, and in future military operations must be limited to those of a strictly defensive kind.  Such was the decision of the English Government.  Their determination was strengthened by two considerations:  in the first place, they saw that the Mahdi’s rebellion was largely a nationalist movement, directed against an

alien power, and, in the second place, the policy of withdrawal from the Sudan was the policy of their own representative in Egypt, Sir Evelyn Baring, who had lately been appointed Consul-General at Cairo.  There was only one serious obstacle in the way—­ the attitude of the Pashas at the head of the Egyptian Government.  The infatuated old men were convinced that they would

have better luck next time, that another army and another Hicks would certainly destroy the Mahdi, and that, even if the Mahdi were again victorious, yet another army and yet another Hicks would no doubt be forthcoming, and that they would do the trick, or, failing that … but they refused to consider eventualities any further.  In the face of such opposition, the English Government, unwilling as they were to interfere, saw that there was no choice open to them but to exercise pressure.  They therefore instructed Sir Evelyn Baring, in the event of the Egyptian Government refusing to withdraw from the Sudan, to insist upon the Khedive’s appointing other Ministers who would be

willing to do so.

Meanwhile, not only the Government, but the public in England were beginning to realise the alarming nature of the Egyptian situation.  It was some time before the details of the Hicks expedition were fully known, but when they were, andwhen the appalling character of the disaster was understood, a thrill of horror ran through the country.  The newspapers became full of articles on the Sudan, of personal descriptions of the Mahdi, of agitated letters from colonels and clergymen demanding vengeance, and of serious discussions of future policy in Egypt.  Then, at the beginning of the new year, alarming messages began to arrive from Khartoum.  Colonel Coetlogon, who was in command of the Egyptian troops, reported a menacing concentration of the enemy.  Day by day, hour by hour, affairs grew worse.  The Egyptians were obviously outnumbered:  they could not maintain themselves in the field; Khartoum was in danger; at any moment, its investment might be complete.  And, with Khartoum once cut off from communication with Egypt, what might not happen?

Colonel Coetlogon began to calculate how long the city would hold

out.  Perhaps it could not resist the Mahdi for a month, perhaps for more than a month; but he began to talk of the necessity of a

speedy retreat.  It was clear that a climax was approaching, and that measures must be taken to forestall it at once.  Accordingly,

Sir Evelyn Baring, on receipt of final orders from England, presented an ultimatum to the Egyptian Government:  the Ministry must either sanction the evacuation of the Sudan, or it must resign.  The Ministry was obstinate, and, on January 7th, 1884, it resigned, to be replaced by a more pliable body of Pashas.  On the same day, General Gordon arrived at Southampton.  He was over fifty, and he was still, by the world’s measurements, an unimportant man.  In spite of his achievements, in spite of a certain celebrity—­ for ‘Chinese Gordon’ was still occasionally spoken of—­ he was unrecognised and almost unemployed.

He had spent a lifetime in the dubious services of foreign governments, punctuated by futile drudgeries at home; and now, after a long idleness, he had been sent for—­to do what?—­to look after the Congo for the King of the Belgians.  At his age, even if he survived the work and the climate, he could hardly look forward to any subsequent appointment; he would return from the Congo, old and worn out, to a red-brick villa and

extinction.  Such were General Gordon’s prospects on January 7th, 1884.  By January 18th, his name was on every tongue, he was the favourite of the nation, he had been declared to be the one living man capable of coping with the perils of the hour; he had been chosen, with unanimous approval, to perform a great task; and he had left England on a mission which was to bring him not only a boundless popularity, but an immortal fame.  The circumstances which led to a change so sudden and so remarkable are less easily

explained than might have been wished.  An ambiguity hangs over them—­ an ambiguity which the discretion of eminent persons has certainly not diminished.  But some of the facts are clear enough.

The decision to withdraw from the Sudan had no sooner been taken than it had become evident that the operation would be a difficult and hazardous one, and that it would be necessary to send to Khartoum an emissary armed with special powers and possessed of special ability, to carry it out.  Towards the end of

November, somebody at the War Office—­it is not clear who—­had suggested that this emissary should be General Gordon.  Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary, had thereupon telegraphed to Sir Evelyn Baring asking whether, in his opinion, the presence of

General Gordon would be useful in Egypt; Sir Evelyn Baring had replied that the Egyptian Government was averse to this proposal, and the matter had dropped.

There was no further reference to Gordon in the official dispatches until after his return to England.  Nor, before that date, was any

allusion made to him as a possible unraveller of the Sudan difficulty, in the Press.  In all the discussions which followed the news of the Hicks disaster, his name is only to be found in occasional and incidental references to his work “In the Sudan”.  The “Pall Mall Gazette”, which, more than any other newspaper, interested itself

in Egyptian affairs, alluded to Gordon once or twice as a geographical expert; but, in an enumeration of the leading authorities on the Sudan, left him out of account altogether.  Yet

it was from the “Pall Mall Gazette” that the impulsion which projected him into a blaze of publicity finally came.  Mr. Stead, its enterprising editor, went down to Southampton the day after Gordon’s arrival there, and obtained an interview.  Now when he was in the mood—­ after a little b. and s., especially—­ no one was more capable than Gordon, with his facile speech and his free-and-easy manners, of furnishing good copy for a journalist; and Mr. Stead made the most of his opportunity.  The interview, copious and pointed, was published next day in the most prominent part of

the paper, together with a leading article, demanding that the General should be immediately dispatched to Khartoum with the widest powers.  The rest of the Press, both in London and in the provinces, at once took up the cry:  General Gordon was a capable and energetic officer, he was a noble and God-fearing man, he was

a national asset, he was a statesman in the highest sense of the word; the occasion was pressing and perilous; General Gordon had been for years Governor-General of the Sudan; General Gordon alone had the knowledge, the courage, the virtue, which would save the situation; General Gordon must go to Khartoum.  So, for a

week, the papers sang in chorus.  But already those in high places

had taken a step.  Mr. Stead’s interview appeared on the afternoon

of January 9th, and on the morning of January 10th Lord Granville

telegraphed to Sir Evelyn Baring, proposing, for a second time, that Gordon’s services should be utilised in Egypt.  But Sir Evelyn Baring, for the second time, rejected the proposal.

While these messages were flashing to and fro, Gordon himself was

paying a visit to the Rev. Mr. Barnes at the Vicarage of Heavitree, near Exeter.  The conversation ran chiefly on Biblical and spiritual matters—­ on the light thrown by the Old Testament upon the geography of Palestine, and on the relations between man

and his Maker; but, there were moments when topics of a more worldly interest arose.  It happened that Sir Samuel Baker, Gordon’s predecessor in Equatoria, lived in the neighbourhood.  A meeting was arranged, and the two ex-Governors, with Mr. Barnes in attendance, went for a drive together.  In the carriage, Sir Samuel Baker, taking up the tale of the “Pall Mall Gazette”, dilated upon the necessity of his friend’s returning to the Sudan

as Governor-General.  Gordon was silent; but Mr. Barnes noticed that his blue eyes flashed, while an eager expression passed over

his face.  Late that night, after the Vicar had retired to bed, he

was surprised by the door suddenly opening, and by the appearance

of his guest swiftly tripping into the room.  ‘You saw me today?’ the low voice abruptly questioned.  ‘You mean in the carriage?’ replied the startled Mr. Barnes.  ‘Yes,’ came the reply; ’you saw me—­that was myself—­the self I want to get rid of.’  There was a sliding movement, the door swung to, and the Vicar found himself alone again.

It was clear that a disturbing influence had found its way into Gordon’s mind.  His thoughts, wandering through Africa, flitted to

the Sudan; they did not linger at the Congo.  During the same visit, he took the opportunity of calling upon Dr. Temple, the Bishop of Exeter, and asking him, merely as a hypothetical question, whether, in his opinion, Sudanese converts to Christianity might be permitted to keep three wives.  His Lordship

answered that this would be uncanonical.

A few days later, it appeared that the conversation in the carriage at Heavitree had borne fruit.  Gordon wrote a letter to Sir Samuel Baker, further elaborating the opinions on the Sudan which he had already expressed in his interview with Mr. Stead; the letter was clearly intended for publication, and published it

was in “The Times” of January 14th.  On the same day, Gordon’s name began once more to buzz along the wires in secret questions and answers to and from the highest quarters.

‘Might it not be advisable,’ telegraphed Lord Granville to Mr. Gladstone, to put a little pressure on Baring, to induce him to accept the assistance of General Gordon?’ Mr. Gladstone replied, also by a telegram, in the affirmative; and on the 15th, Lord Wolseley telegraphed to Gordon begging him to come to London immediately.  Lord Wolseley, who was one of Gordon’s oldest friends, was at that time Adjutant-General of the Forces; there was a long interview; and, though the details of the conversation

have never transpired, it is known that, in the course of it, Lord Wolseley asked Gordon if he would be willing to go to the Sudan, to which Gordon replied that there was only one objection—­ his prior engagement to the King of the Belgians.  Before nightfall, Lord Granville, by private telegram, had ’put a little

pressure on Baring’.  ‘He had,’ he said, ’heard indirectly that Gordon was ready to go at once to the Sudan on the following rather vague terms:  His mission to be to report to Her Majesty’s Government on the military situation, and to return without any further engagement.  He would be under you for instructions and will send letters through you under flying seal…  He might be of use,’ Lord Granville added, in informing you and us of the situation.  It would be popular at home, but there may be countervailing objections.  Tell me,’ such was Lord Granville’s concluding injunction, ’your real opinion.’

It was the third time of asking, and Sir Evelyn Baring resisted no longer.  ‘Gordon,’ he telegraphed on the 16th, ’would be the best man if he will pledge himself to carry out the policy of withdrawing from the Sudan as quickly as is possible, consistently with saving life.  He must also understand that he must take his instructions from the British representative in Egypt…  I would rather have him than anyone else, provided there is a perfectly clear understanding with him as to what his position is to be and what line of policy he is to carry out.  Otherwise, not…  Whoever goes should be distinctly warned that he will undertake a service of great difficulty and danger.’

In the meantime, Gordon, with the Sudan upon his lips, with the Sudan in his imagination, had hurried to Brussels, to obtain from the King of the Belgians a reluctant consent to the postponement of his Congo mission.  On the 17th he was recalled to London by a telegram from Lord Wolseley.  On the 18th the final decision was made.  ‘At noon,’ Gordon told the Rev.

Mr. Barnes, Wolseley came to me and took me to the Ministers.  He went in and talked to the Ministers, and came back and said:  “Her

Majesty’s Government wants you to undertake this.  Government is determined to evacuate the Sudan, for they will not guarantee future government.  Will you go and do it?” I said:  “Yes.”  He said:  “Go in.”  I went in and saw them.  They said:  “Did Wolseley tell you your orders?” I said:  “Yes.”  I said:  “You will not guarantee future government of the Sudan, and you wish me to go up and evacuate now.”  They said:  “Yes”, and it was over.’

Such was the sequence of events which ended in General Gordon’s last appointment.  The precise motives of those responsible for these transactions are less easy to discern.  It is difficult to understand what the reasons could have been which induced the Government, not only to override the hesitations of Sir Evelyn Baring, but to overlook the grave and obvious dangers involved in

sending such a man as Gordon to the Sudan.  The whole history of his life, the whole bent of his character, seemed to disqualify him for the task for which he had been chosen.  He was before all things a fighter, an enthusiast, a bold adventurer; and he was now to be entrusted with the conduct of an inglorious retreat.  He

was alien to the subtleties of civilised statesmanship, he was unamenable to official control, he was incapable of the skilful management of delicate situations; and he was now to be placed in

a position of great complexity, requiring at once a cool judgment, a clear perception of fact, and a fixed determination to carry out a line of policy laid down from above.  He had, it is

true, been Governor-General of the Sudan; but he was now to return to the scene of his greatness as the emissary of a defeated and humbled power; he was to be a fugitive where he had once been a ruler; the very success of his mission was to consist

in establishing the triumph of those forces which he had spent years in trampling underfoot.  All this should have been clear to those in authority, after a very little reflection.  It was clear enough to Sir Evelyn Baring, though, with characteristic reticence, he had abstained from giving expression to his thoughts.  But, even if a general acquaintance with Gordon’s life and character were not sufficient to lead to these conclusions, he himself had taken care to put their validity beyond reasonable doubt.

Both in his interview with Mr. Stead and in his letter to Sir Samuel Baker, he had indicated unmistakably his own attitude towards the Sudan situation.  The policy which he advocated, the state of feeling in which he showed himself to be, was diametrically opposed to the declared intentions of the Government.  He was by no means in favour of withdrawing from the Sudan; he was in favour, as might have been supposed, of vigorous

military action.  It might be necessary to abandon, for the time being, the more remote garrisons in Darfur and Equatoria; but Khartoum must be held at all costs.  To allow the Mahdi to enter Khartoum would not merely mean the return of the whole of the Sudan to barbarism; it would be a menace to the safety of Egypt herself.  To attempt to protect Egypt against the Mahdi by fortifying her southern frontier was preposterous.  ’You might as well fortify against a fever.’  Arabia, Syria, the whole Mohammedan world, would be shaken by the Mahdi’s advance.  ’In self-defence,’ Gordon declared to Mr. Stead, the policy of evacuation cannot possibly be justified.’

The true policy was obvious.  A strong man—­Sir Samuel Baker, perhaps—­ must be sent to Khartoum, with a large contingent of Indian and Turkish troops and with two millions of money.  He would very soon overpower the Mahdi, whose forces would ‘fall to pieces of themselves’.  For in Gordon’s opinion it was ’an entire mistake to regard the Mahdi as

in any sense a religious leader’; he would collapse as soon as he

was face to face with an English general.  Then the distant regions of Darfur and Equatoria could once more be occupied; their original Sultans could be reinstated; the whole country would be placed under civilised rule; and the slave-trade would be finally abolished.  These were the views which Gordon publicly expressed on January 9th and on January 14th; and it certainly seems strange that on January 10th and on January 14th, Lord Granville should have proposed, without a word of consultation with Gordon himself, to send him on a mission which involved, not

the reconquest, but the abandonment of the Sudan; Gordon, indeed,

when he was actually approached by Lord Wolseley, had apparently agreed to become the agent of a policy which was exactly the reverse of his own.  No doubt, too, it is possible for a subordinate to suppress his private convictions and to carry out loyally, in spite of them, the orders of his superiors.  But how rare are the qualities of self-control and wisdom which such a subordinate must possess!  And how little reason there was to think that General Gordon possessed them!

In fact, the conduct of the Government wears so singular an appearance that it has seemed necessary to account for it by some

ulterior explanation.  It has often been asserted that the true cause of Gordon’s appointment was the clamour in the Press.  It is

said—­ among others, by Sir Evelyn Baring himself, who has given something like an official sanction to this view of the case—­ that the Government could not resist the pressure of the newspapers and the feeling in the country which it indicated; that Ministers, carried off their feet by a wave of ‘Gordon cultus’, were obliged to give way to the inevitable.  But this suggestion is hardly supported by an examination of the facts.  Already, early in December, and many weeks before Gordon’s name had begun to figure in the newspapers, Lord Granville had made his first effort to induce Sir Evelyn Baring to accept Gordon’s services.  The first newspaper demand for a Gordon mission appeared in the “Pall Mall Gazette” on the afternoon of January 9th; and the very

next morning, Lord Granville was making his second telegraphic attack upon Sir Evelyn Baring.  The feeling in the Press did not become general until the 11th, and on the 14th Lord Granville, in

his telegram to Mr. Gladstone, for the third time proposed the appointment of Gordon.  Clearly, on the part of Lord Granville at any rate, there was no extreme desire to resist the wishes of the

Press.  Nor was the Government as a whole by any means incapable of ignoring public opinion; a few months were to show that, plainly enough.  It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if Ministers had been opposed to the appointment of Gordon, he would

never have been appointed.  As it was, the newspapers were in fact

forestalled, rather than followed, by the Government.

How, then, are we to explain the Government’s action?  Are we to suppose that its members, like the members of the public at large, were themselves carried away by a sudden enthusiasm, a sudden conviction that they had found their saviour; that General

Gordon was the man—­they did not quite know why, but that was of no consequence—­the one man to get them out of the whole Sudan difficulty—­they did not quite know how, but that was of no consequence either if only he were sent to Khartoum?  Doubtless even Cabinet Ministers are liable to such impulses; doubtless it is possible that the Cabinet of that day allowed itself to drift,

out of mere lack of consideration, and judgment, and foresight, along the rapid stream of popular feeling towards the inevitable cataract.  That may be so; yet there are indications that a more definite influence was at work.  There was a section of the Government which had never become quite reconciled to the policy of withdrawing from the Sudan.  To this section—­we may call it the imperialist section—­which was led, inside the Cabinet, by Lord Hartington, and outside by Lord Wolseley, the policy which really commended itself was the very policy which had been outlined by General Gordon in his interview with Mr. Stead and his letter to Sir Samuel Baker.  They saw that it might be necessary to abandon some of the outlying parts of the Sudan to the Mahdi; but the prospect of leaving the whole province in his hands was highly distasteful to them; above all, they dreaded the loss of Khartoum.  Now, supposing that General Gordon, in response to a popular agitation in the Press, were sent to Khartoum, what would

follow?  Was it not at least possible that, once there, with his views and his character, he would, for some reason or other, refrain from carrying out a policy of pacific retreat?  Was it not

possible that in that case he might so involve the English Government that it would find itself obliged, almost imperceptibly perhaps, to substitute for its policy of withdrawal

a policy of advance?  Was it not possible that General Gordon might get into difficulties, that he might be surrounded and cut off from Egypt’?  If that were to happen, how could the English Government avoid the necessity of sending an expedition to rescue

him?  And, if an English expedition went to the Sudan, was it conceivable that it would leave the Mahdi as it found him?  In short, would not the dispatch of General Gordon to Khartoum involve, almost inevitably, the conquest of the Sudan by British troops, followed by a British occupation?  And, behind all these questions, a still larger question loomed.  The position of the English in Egypt itself was still ambiguous; the future was obscure; how long, in reality, would an English army remain in Egypt?  Was not one thing, at least, obvious—­ that if the English

were to conquer and occupy the Sudan, their evacuation of Egypt would become impossible?

With our present information, it would be rash to affirm that all, or any, of these considerations were present to the minds of

the imperialist section of the Government.  Yet it is difficult to

believe that a man such as Lord Wolseley, for instance, with his knowledge of affairs and his knowledge of Gordon, could have altogether overlooked them.  Lord Hartington, indeed, may well have failed to realise at once the implications of General Gordon’s appointment—­ for it took Lord Hartington some time to realise the implications of anything; but Lord Hartington was very far from being a fool; and we may well suppose that he instinctively, perhaps subconsciously, apprehended the elements of a situation which he never formulated to himself.  However that

may be, certain circumstances are significant.  It is significant that the go-between who acted as the Government’s agent in its negotiations with Gordon was an imperialist—­ Lord Wolseley.  It is significant that the ‘Ministers’ whom Gordon finally interviewed, and who actually determined his appointment were by no means the whole of the Cabinet, but a small section of it, presided over by Lord Hartington.  It is significant, too, that Gordon’s mission was represented both to Sir Evelyn Baring, who was opposed to his appointment, and to Mr. Gladstone, who was opposed to an active policy in the Sudan, as a mission merely ’to report’; while, no sooner was the mission actually decided upon, than it began to assume a very different complexion.  In his final

interview with the ‘Ministers’, Gordon we know (though he said nothing about it to the Rev. Mr Barnes) threw out the suggestion that it might be as well to make him the Governor-General of the Sudan.  The suggestion, for the moment, was not taken up; but it is obvious that a man does not propose to become a Governor-General in order to make a report.

We are in the region of speculations; one other presents itself.  Was the movement in the Press during that second week of January a genuine movement, expressing a spontaneous wave of popular feeling?  Or was it a cause of that feeling, rather than an effect?  The engineering of a newspaper agitation may not have been an impossibility—­ even so long ago as 1884.  One would like to know more than one is ever likely to know of the relations of the imperialist section of the Government with Mr. Stead.

But it is time to return to the solidity of fact.  Within a few hours of his interview with the Ministers, Gordon had left England forever.  At eight o’clock in the evening, there was a little gathering of elderly gentlemen at Victoria Station.  Gordon, accompanied by Colonel Stewart, who was to act as his second-in-command, tripped on to the platform.  Lord Granville bought the necessary tickets; the Duke of Cambridge opened the railway-carriage door.  The General jumped into the train; and then Lord Wolseley appeared, carrying a leather bag, in which was

£200 in gold, collected from friends at the last moment for the contingencies of the journey.  The bag was handed through the window.  The train started.  As it did so, Gordon leaned out and addressed a last whispered question to Lord Wolseley.  Yes, it had

been done.  Lord Wolseley had seen to it himself; next morning, every member of the Cabinet would receive a copy of Dr. Samuel Clarke’s Scripture Promises.  That was all.  The train rolled out of the station.

Before the travellers reached Cairo, steps had been taken which finally put an end to the theory—­ if it had ever been seriously held—­ that the purpose of the mission was simply the making of a

report.  On the very day of Gordon’s departure, Lord Granville telegraphed to Sir Evelyn Baring as follows:  ’Gordon suggests that it may be announced in Egypt that he is on his way to Khartoum to arrange for the future settlement of the Sudan for the best advantage of the people.’  Nothing was said of reporting.  A few days later, Gordon himself telegraphed to Lord Granville suggesting that he should be made Governor-General of the Sudan, in order to ‘accomplish the evacuation’, and to ‘restore to the various Sultans of the Sudan their independence’.

Lord Granville at once authorised Sir Evelyn Baring to issue, if he thought fit, a proclamation to this effect in the name of the Khedive.  Thus the mission ‘to report’ had already swollen into a Governor-Generalship, with the object, not merely of effecting the evacuation of the Sudan, but also of setting up ’various Sultans’ to take the place of the Egyptian Government.

In Cairo, in spite of the hostilities of the past, Gordon was received with every politeness.  He was at once proclaimed Governor-General of the Sudan, with the widest powers.  He was on the point of starting off again on his journey southwards, when a

singular and important incident occurred.  Zobeir, the rebel chieftain of Darfur, against whose forces Gordon had struggled for years, and whose son, Suleiman, had been captured and executed by Gessi, Gordon’s lieutenant, was still detained at Cairo.  It so fell out that he went to pay a visit to one of the Ministers at the same time as the new Governor-General.  The two men met face to face, and, as he looked into the savage countenance of his old enemy, an extraordinary shock of inspiration ran through Gordon’s brain.  He was seized, as he explained in a State paper, which he drew up immediately after the meeting, with a ‘mystic feeling’ that he could trust Zobeir.  It was true that Zobeir was ’the greatest slave-hunter who ever existed’; it was true that he had a personal hatred of Gordon, owing to the execution of Suleiman—­’and one cannot wonder at it,

if one is a father’; it was true that, only a few days previously, on his way to Egypt, Gordon himself had been so convinced of the dangerous character of Zobeir that he had recommended by telegram his removal to Cyprus.  But such considerations were utterly obliterated by that one moment of electric impact of personal vision; henceforward ,there was a rooted conviction in Gordon’s mind that Zobeir was to be trusted,

that Zobeir must join him at Khartoum, that Zobeir’s presence would paralyse the Mahdi, that Zobeir must succeed him in the government of the country after the evacuation.  Did not Sir Evelyn Baring, too, have the mystic feeling?  Sir Evelyn Baring confessed that he had not.  He distrusted mystic feelings.  Zobeir,

no doubt, might possibly be useful; but, before deciding upon so important a matter, it was necessary to reflect and to consult.

In the meantime, failing Zobeir, something might perhaps be done with the Emir Abdul Shakur, the heir of the Darfur Sultans.  The Emir, who had been living in domestic retirement in Cairo, was with some difficulty discovered, given £2,000, an embroidered uniform, together with the largest decoration that could be found, and informed that he was to start at once with General Gordon for the Sudan, where it would be his duty to occupy the province of Darfur, after driving out the forces of the Mahdi.  The poor man begged for a little delay; but no delay could be granted.  He hurried to the railway station in his frockcoat and fez, and rather the worse for liquor.  Several extra carriages for

his twenty-three wives and a large quantity of luggage had then to be hitched on to the Governor-General’s train; and at the last

moment some commotion was caused by the unaccountable disappearance of his embroidered uniform.  It was found, but his troubles were not over.  On the steamer, General Gordon was very rude to him, and he

drowned his chagrin in hot rum and water.  At Assuan he disembarked, declaring that he would go no farther.  Eventually, however, he got as far as Dongola, whence, after a stay of a few months, he returned with his family to Cairo.

In spite of this little contretemps, Gordon was in the highest spirits.  At last his capacities had been recognised by his countrymen; at last he had been entrusted with a task great enough to satisfy even his desires.  He was already famous; he would soon be glorious.  Looking out once more over the familiar desert, he felt the searchings of his conscience stilled by the manifest certainty that it was for this that Providence had been reserving him through all these years of labour and of sorrow for this!  What was the Mahdi to stand up against him!  A thousand schemes, a thousand possibilities sprang to life in his pullulating brain.  A new intoxication carried him away.  ’Il faut etre toujours ivre.  Tout est la:  c’est l’unique question.’  Little though he knew it, Gordon was a disciple of Baudelaire.  ’Pour ne pas sentir l’horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos epaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans treve.’  Yes—but how feeble were those gross resources of the miserable Abdul-Shakur!  Rum?  Brandy?  Oh, he knew all about them; they were nothing.  He tossed off a glass.  They were nothing at all.  The true drunkenness lay elsewhere.  He seized a paper and pencil, and dashed down a telegram to Sir Evelyn Baring.  Another thought struck him, and another telegram followed.  And another, and yet another.  He had made up his mind; he would visit the Mahdi in person, and alone.  He might do that; or he might retire to the Equator.  He would decidedly retire to the Equator, and hand over the Bahr-el-Ghazal province to the King of the Belgians.  A whole flock of telegrams flew to Cairo from every stopping-place.  Sir Evelyn Baring was patient and discrete; he could be trusted with such confidences; but unfortunately Gordon’s strange exhilaration found other outlets.  At Berber, in the course of a speech to the assembled chiefs, he revealed the intention of the Egyptian Government to withdraw from the Sudan.  The news was everywhere in a moment, and the results were disastrous.  The tribesmen, whom fear and interest had still kept loyal, perceived that they need look no more for help or punishment from Egypt, and began to turn their eyes towards the rising sun.

Nevertheless, for the moment, the prospect wore a favourable appearance.  The Governor-General was welcomed at every stage of his journey, and on February 18th he made a triumphal entry into Khartoum.  The feeble garrison, the panic-stricken inhabitants, hailed him as a deliverer.  Surely they need fear no more, now that the great English Pasha had come among them.  His first acts seemed to show that a new and happy era had begun.  Taxes were remitted, the bonds of the usurers were destroyed, the victims of Egyptian injustice were set free from the prisons; the immemorial instruments of torture the stocks and the whips and the branding-irons were broken to pieces in the public square.  A bolder measure had been already taken.  A proclamation had been issued sanctioning slavery in the Sudan.  Gordon, arguing that he was powerless to do away with the odious institution, which, as soon as the withdrawal was carried out, would inevitably become universal, had decided to reap what benefit he could from the public abandonment of an unpopular policy.  At Khartoum the announcement was received with enthusiasm, but it caused considerable perturbation in England.  The Christian hero, who had spent so many years of his life in suppressing slavery, was now suddenly found to be using his high powers to set it up again.  The Anti-Slavery Society made a menacing movement, but the Government showed a bold front, and the popular belief in Gordon’s infallibility carried the day.

He himself was still radiant.  Nor, amid the jubilation and the devotion which surrounded him, did he forget higher things.  In all this turmoil, he told his sister, he was ‘supported’.  He gave injunctions that his Egyptian troops should have regular morning and evening prayers; ‘they worship one God,’ he said, ‘Jehovah.’  And he ordered an Arabic text, ‘God rules the hearts of all men’, to be put up over the chair of state in his audience chamber.  As the days went by, he began to feel at home again in the huge palace which he knew so well.  The glare and the heat of that southern atmosphere, the movement of the crowded city, the dark-faced populace, the soldiers and the suppliants, the reawakened consciousness of power, the glamour and the mystery of the whole strange scene—­these things seized upon him, engulfed him, and worked a new transformation on his intoxicated heart.  England, with its complications and its policies, became an empty vision to him; Sir Evelyn Baring, with his cautions and sagacities, hardly more than a tiresome name.  He was Gordon Pasha, he was the Governor-General, he was the ruler of the Sudan.  He was among his people—­his own people, and it was to them only that he was responsible—­to them, and to God.  Was he to let them fall without a blow into the clutches of a sanguinary impostor?  Never!  He was there to prevent that.  The distant governments might mutter something about ‘evacuation’; his thoughts were elsewhere.  He poured them into his telegrams, and Sir Evelyn Baring sat aghast.  The man who had left London a month before, with instructions to ’report upon the best means of effecting the evacuation of the Sudan’, was now openly talking of ‘smashing up the Mahdi’ with the aid of British and Indian troops.  Sir Evelyn Baring counted upon his fingers the various stages of this extraordinary development in General Gordon’s opinions.  But he might have saved himself the trouble, for, in fact, it was less a development than a reversion.  Under the stress of the excitements and the realities of his situation at Khartoum, the policy which Gordon was now proposing to carry out had come to tally, in every particular, with the policy which he had originally advocated with such vigorous conviction in the pages of the Pall Mall Gazette.

Nor was the adoption of that policy by the English Government by any means out of the question.  For, in the meantime, events had been taking place in the Eastern Sudan, in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea port of Suakin, which were to have a decisive effect upon the prospects of Khartoum.  General Baker, the brother of Sir Samuel Baker, attempting to relieve the beleaguered garrisons of Sinkat and Tokar, had rashly attacked the forces of Osman Digna, had been defeated, and obliged to retire.  Sinkat and Tokar had then fallen into the hands of the Mahdi’s general.  There was a great outcry in England, and a wave of warlike feeling passed over the country.  Lord Wolseley at once drew up a memorandum advocating the annexation of the Sudan.  In the House of Commons even Liberals began to demand vengeance and military action, whereupon the Government dispatched Sir Gerald Graham with a considerable British force to Suakin.  Sir Gerald Graham advanced, and in the battles of El Teb and Tamai inflicted two bloody defeats upon the Mahdi’s forces.  It almost seemed as if the Government was now committed to a policy of interference and conquest; as if the imperialist section of the Cabinet were at last to have their way.  The dispatch of Sir Gerald Graham coincided with Gordon’s sudden demand for British and Indian troops with which to ‘smash up the Mahdi’.  The business, he assured Sir Evelyn Baring, in a stream of telegrams, could very easily be done.  It made him sick, he said, to see himself held in check and the people of the Sudan tyrannised over by ’a feeble lot of stinking Dervishes’.  Let Zobeir at once be sent down to him, and all would be well.

The original Sultans of the country had unfortunately proved disap-pointing.  Their place should be taken by Zobeir.  After the Mahdi had been smashed up, Zobeir should rule the Sudan as a subsidised vassal of England, on a similar footing to that of the Amir of Afghanistan.  The plan was perhaps feasible; but it was clearly incompatible with the policy of evacuation, as it had been hitherto laid down by the English Government.  Should they reverse that policy?  Should they appoint Zobeir, reinforce Sir Gerald Graham, and smash up the Mahdi?  They could not make up their minds.  So far as Zobeir was concerned, there were two counterbalancing considerations; on the one hand, Evelyn Baring now declared that he was in favour of the appointment; but, on the other hand, would English public opinion consent to a man, described by Gordon himself as ’the greatest slave-hunter who ever existed’, being given an English subsidy and the control of the Sudan?  While the Cabinet was wavering, Gordon took a fatal step.  The delay was intolerable, and one evening, in a rage, he revealed his desire for Zobeir—­ which had hitherto been kept a profound official secret—­ to Mr Power, the English Consul at Khartoum, and the special correspondent of “The Times.”  Perhaps he calculated that the public announcement of his wishes would oblige the Government to yield to them; if so, he was completely mistaken, for the result was the very reverse.  The country, already startled by the proclamation in favour of slavery, could not swallow Zobeir.  The Anti-Slavery Society set on foot a violent agitation, opinion in the House of Commons suddenly stiffened, and the Cabinet, by a substantial majority, decided that Zobeir should remain in Cairo.  The imperialist wave had risen high, but it had not risen high enough; and now it was rapidly subsiding.  The Government’s next action was decisive.  Sir Gerald Graham and his British Army were withdrawn from the Sudan.

The critical fortnight during which these events took place was the first fortnight of March.  By the close of it, Gordon’s position had undergone a rapid and terrible change.  Not only did he find himself deprived, by the decision of the Government, both of the hope of Zobeir’s assistance and of the prospect of smashing up the Mahdi with the aid of British troops; the military movements in the Eastern Sudan produced, at the very same moment, a yet more fatal consequence.  The adherents of the Mahdi had been maddened, they had not been crushed, by Sir Gerald Graham’s victories.  When, immediately afterwards, the English withdrew to Suakin, from which they never again emerged, the inference seemed obvious; they had been defeated, and their power was at an end.  The warlike tribes to the north and the northeast of Khartoum had long been wavering.  They now hesitated no longer, and joined the Mahdi.  From that moment—­ it was less than a month from Gordon’s arrival at Khartoum—­ the situation of the town was desperate.  The line of communications was cut.  Though it still might be possible for occasional native messengers, or for a few individuals on an armed steamer, to win their way down the river into Egypt, the removal of a large number of persons—­the loyal inhabitants or the Egyptian garrison—­ was henceforward an impossibility.  The whole scheme of the Gordon mission had irremediably collapsed; worse still, Gordon himself, so far from having effected the evacuation of the Sudan, was surrounded by the enemy.  ‘The question now is,’ Sir Evelyn Baring told Lord Granville, on March 24th, ’how to get General Gordon and Colonel Stewart away from Khartoum.’

The actual condition of the town, however, was not, from a military point of view, so serious as Colonel Coetlogon, in the first moments of panic after the Hicks disaster, had supposed.  Gordon was of opinion that it was capable of sustaining a siege of many months.  With his usual vigour, he had already begun to prepare an elaborate system of earthworks, mines, and wire entanglements.  There was a five or six months’ supply of food, there was a great quantity of ammunition, the garrison numbered about 8,000 men.  There were, besides, nine small paddle-wheel steamers, hitherto used for purposes of communication along the Nile, which, fitted with guns and protected by metal plates, were of considerable military value.  ‘We are all right,’ Gordon told his sister on March 15th.  ‘We shall, D. V., go on for months.’  So far, at any rate, there was no cause for despair.  But the effervescent happiness of three weeks since had vanished.  Gloom, doubt, disillusionment, self-questioning, had swooped down again upon their victim.  ’Either I must believe He does all things in mercy and love, or else I disbelieve His existence; there is no half way in the matter.  What holes do I not put myself into!  And for what?  So mixed are my ideas.  I believe ambition put me here in this ruin.’  Was not that the explanation of it all?  ’Our Lord’s promise is not for the fulfilment of earthly wishes; therefore, if things come to ruin here He is still faithful, and is carrying out His great work of divine wisdom.’  How could he have forgotten that?  But he would not transgress again.  ’I owe all to God, and nothing to myself, for, humanly speaking, I have done very foolish things.  However, if I am humbled, the better for me.’

News of the changed circumstances at Khartoum was not slow in reaching England, and a feeling of anxiety began to spread.  Among the first to realise the gravity of the situation was Queen Victoria.  ‘It is alarming,’ she telegraphed to Lord Hartington on March 25th.  ’General Gordon is in danger; you are bound to try to save him…  You have incurred a fearful responsibility.’  With an unerring instinct, Her Majesty forestalled and expressed the popular sentiment.  During April, when it had become clear that the wire between Khartoum and Cairo had been severed; when, as time passed, no word came northward, save vague rumours of disaster; when at last a curtain of impenetrable mystery closed over Khartoum, the growing uneasiness manifested itself in letters to the newspapers, in leading articles, and in a flood of subscriptions towards a relief fund.  At the beginning of May, the public alarm reached a climax.  It now appeared to be certain, not only that General Gordon was in imminent danger, but that no steps had yet been taken by the Government to save him.

On the 5th, there was a meeting of protest and indignation at St. James’s Hall; on the 9th there was a mass meeting in Hyde Park; on the 11th there was a meeting at Manchester.  The Baroness Burdett-Coutts wrote an agitated letter to “The Times” begging for further subscriptions.  Somebody else proposed that a special fund should be started with which ’to bribe the tribes to secure the General’s personal safety’.  A country vicar made another suggestion.  Why should not public prayers be offered up for General Gordon in every church in the kingdom?  He himself had adopted that course last Sunday.  ‘Is not this,’ he concluded, ’what the godly man, the true hero, himself would wish to be done?’ It was all of no avail.  General Gordon remained in peril; the Government remained inactive.  Finally, a vote of censure was moved in the House of Commons; but that too proved useless.  It was strange; the same executive which, two months before, had trimmed its sails so eagerly to the shifting gusts of popular opinion, now, in spite of a rising hurricane, held on its course.  A new spirit, it was clear—­ a determined, an intractable spirit—had taken control of the Sudan situation.  What was it?  The explanation was simple, and it was ominous.  Mr. Gladstone had intervened.

The old statesman was now entering upon the penultimate period of his enormous career.  He who had once been the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories, had at length emerged, after a lifetime of transmutations, as the champion of militant democracy.  He was at the apex of his power.  His great rival was dead; he stood pre-eminent in the eye of the nation; he enjoyed the applause, the confidence, the admiration, the adoration, even, of multitudes.  Yet—­ such was the peculiar character of the man, and such was the intensity of the feelings which he called forth—­ at this very moment, at the height of his popularity, he was distrusted and loathed; already an unparalleled animosity was gathering its forces against him.  For, indeed, there was something in his nature which invited —­which demanded—­ the clashing reactions of passionate extremes.  It was easy to worship Mr. Gladstone; to see in him the perfect model of the upright man—­the man of virtue and of religion—­ the man whose whole life had been devoted to the application of high principles to affairs of State; the man, too, whose sense of right and justice was invigorated and ennobled by an enthusiastic heart.  It was also easy to detest him as a hypocrite, to despise him as a demagogue, and to dread him as a crafty manipulator of men and things for th