Below, to the north-
Clear of cloud or

Here he halted his little caravan. west, lay a wonderful panorama. speck of mist, the great plains of the Soudan, the vast level region through which the Blue Nile winds on its way to Khartoum, lay outspread to a horizon which sight could not reach. As Gordon sat looking at this splendid vision of the land over which he had so long ruled, a wild troop of mountain horsemen swooped down upon his camp. Their leader carried a letter bearing the king's seal. No personal violence was offered, but Gordon and his party were prisoners; they must return, and take the road to Massowah instead of the one they were following direct to Kassala. There was nothing to be done but to obey. From a village on the backward road Gordon managed to despatch telegrams to the Khedive by way of Galabat. In these he urged that a war-steamer with troops and two guns should be sent to Massowah. Then turning to the east at Gondar he began the long route to Massowah. From November 18th to December 8th the march was carried out under great difficulties. Although nominally free after the second day from Gondar, the party was subjected to a great deal of rough usage. The winter season had now begun,

66

A second

'Sleeping

and the mountains were covered with snow. time Gordon was arrested near the frontier. with an Abyssinian at the foot and one on each side of you is not comfortable," he writes; "and so I passed my last night in Abyssinia." The next day he reached Massowah. So ended a strange experience of this mountain land and its wild people.

Notwithstanding all he had suffered at their hands Gordon read them with an unbiassed judgment. "You

VI

TIME CURES ALL

159

have far abler men to deal with than I had anticipated," he wrote; "men of stern, simple habits, and utter freedom from bombast, or ordinary uncivilised tinsel and show. It is a race of warriors, hardy, and though utterly undisciplined, religious fanatics." Something like that old Highland stock from which this man had himself derived his own grand qualities. With that extraordinary elasticity of mind which brought Gordon quickly up from whatever depth of trouble or disaster fortune sent him, he sums up his impressions and experiences of Abyssinia as soon as he arrives at Massowah with still the same deep insight into human nature, the same quaint comparisons. "He (the king) is of the strictest sect of the Pharisees. He talks like the Old Testament; drunk overnight, he is up at dawn reading the Psalms. If he were in England he would never miss a prayer-meeting, and would have a Bible as big as a portmanteau."

And here the curtain falls upon the last chapter but one in the career of Charles Gordon in the Soudan. From Massowah he went to Cairo. Despite all his toil and suffering in the service of Egypt, his reception at the capital was worse than the mere negative coldness of official displeasure. It is only true to say that every man's hand was against him, the hardest blows coming from his own countrymen. His cipher telegrams to the Khedive he was soon to read in the London papers, with his proposals clipped and changed to suit the objects of the men who were now in power in Cairo. Quick as steam and electricity could carry the warped messages, they were sent to demonstrate to England that this great son of hers was not only inconsistent, disobedient,

and insubordinate, but that he was also mad! Well, it is all past now, and Time, the great avenger, has set everything in its place. Khedives and Pachas, consuls and commissioners, Ministers and journalists, big and little, have sunk away into oblivion; and, looking across the dead level of the world which has taken them to their rest, or in which they still await the great effacement, we see, beyond and above all, a mountain-top lying in lustrous afterglow, the light that comes when the sun has set, to carry the memory of a very noble life far into the night of Time.

CHAPTER VII

INDIA-CHINA-IRELAND-MAURITIUS-THE CAPE OF

GOOD HOPE-PALESTINE

HOME and rest. How often in far-off scenes of strife and misery, worn with prolonged exertion under a terrible sun, and spent with the weariness that comes from physical and mental suffering endured upon a road that seemed endless in its length, had Gordon pictured to himself a day when he would go home and rest! Well, now he had come home; but the rest, where was it? The time was the midwinter of 1880. A strange fit of hero-worship was still passing across the English people. A campaign against the South African tribe known as Zulus had just been brought to a successful termination. Some two regiments of British cavalry, fourteen battalions of regular infantry, four batteries of artillery, and a strong auxiliary force of irregular troops had marched from our frontier across sixty or seventy miles of well-watered, open, grass country, and the larger division of this force having repulsed in square the attack of a body of natives chiefly armed with spears, had burned the kraal or grass village of the Zulu king, and then retired within our frontiers. It is difficult now to realise the extraordinary enthu

M

siasm which this very facile feat of arms called forth from an admiring nation. There were presentations of swords of honour, subscriptions, civic banquets and illuminated addresses from mayors and corporate bodies. Old veterans, who still remembered the traditions of the great French war, could not help indulging sarcastic comment as they contrasted the landing of the regiments that had won Waterloo with these effusive demonstrations.

Meanwhile the real African hero, the man who for six years had by his great genius maintained the authority of a weak State over a region as large as Europe and among races whose bravery and power in war we were soon to test to our cost; the man who, sweeping like a whirlwind across immense deserts, had seemingly multiplied his individuality into legions of soldiers; this man whom, it is possible, the future will look upon as the hero of our time and race, was now an unnoticed stranger, dwelling as a bird of passage on our shores. "I like Nelson's signal," he had once written while in the Soudan. "C England expects duty; now the race is for honours, not honour, and for newspaper praise." It is probable that as time goes on there will arise an entirely false conception, not of the man himself, because he has left in his writings a vast mass of thought through which it will not be easy for the world to lose its way, but it is more than possible that the contemporary view of Gordon and the treatment which he was accorded by the governing powers of his time will altogether change its aspect. There is a picture of Shakespeare painted in our day which represents him seated in the centre of an admiring circle of the great ones of his