FILTH AND LUST AND BLOOD.

309

railings round a gaudy pall. The Khalifa's house was the house of a well-to-do-fellah, and a dead donkey putrified under its window-holes. The arsenal was the reduplication of all the loot that has gone for half a dollar apiece these three years. The great mosque was a wall round a biggish square with a few stickand-thatch booths at one end of it.

The iron mosque was a galvanised shed, and would have repulsed the customers of a third-rate country photographer. Everything was wretched.

And foul. They dropped their dung where they listed; they drew their water from beside green sewers; they had filled the streets and khors with dead donkeys; they left their brothers to rot and puff up hideously in the sun. The stench of the place was in your nostrils, in your throat, in your stomach. You could not eat; you dared not drink. Well you could believe that this was the city where they crucified a man to steal a handful of base dollars, and sold mother and daughter together to be divided five hundred miles apart, to live and die in the same bestial concubinage.

The army moved out to Khor Shamba during the 3rd. The accursed place was left to fester and fry in

its own filth and lust and blood.

The reek of its

abominations steamed up to heaven to justify us of

our vengeance.

310

XXXV.

THE FUNERAL OF GORDON.

THE steamers-screws, paddles, stern-wheelers—plugplugged their steady way up the full Nile. Past the northern fringe of Omdurman where the sheikh came out with the white flag, past the breach where we went in to the Khalifa's stronghold, past the choked embrasures and the lacerated Mahdi's tomb, past the swamp-rooted palms of Tuti Island. We looked at it all with a dispassionate, impersonal curiosity. It was Sunday morning, and that furious Friday seemed already half a lifetime behind us. The volleys had dwindled out of our ears, and the smoke out of our nostrils; and to-day we were going to the funeral of Gordon. After nearly fourteen years the Christian soldier was to have Christian burial.

On the steamers there was a detachment of every corps, white or black or yellow, that had taken part in the vengeance. Every white officer that could be spared from duty was there, fifty men picked from each British battalion, one or two from each unit of

the Egyptian army. That we were going up to Khartum at all was evidence of our triumph; yet, if you looked about you, triumph was not the note. The most reckless subaltern, the most barbarous black, was touched with gravity. We were going to perform a necessary duty, which had been put off far, far too long.

Fourteen years next January-yet even through that humiliating thought there ran a whisper of triumph. We may be slow; but in that very slowness we show that we do not forget. Soon or late, we give our own their due. Here were men that fought for Gordon's life while he lived,-Kitchener, who went disguised and alone among furious enemies to get news of him; Wauchope, who poured out his blood like water at Tamai and Kirbekan; StuartWortley, who missed by but two days the chance of dying at Gordon's side. And here, too, were boys who could hardly lisp when their mothers told them that Gordon was dead, grown up now and appearing in the fulness of time to exact eleven thousand lives

for one. Gordon may die-other Gordons may die in the future-but the same clean-limbed brood will grow up and avenge them.

The boats stopped plugging and there was silence. We were tying up opposite a grove of tall palms; on the bank was a crowd of natives curiously like the backsheesh - hunters who gather to greet the Nile steamers. They stared at us; but we looked beyond

them to a large building rising from a crumbling quay. You could see that it had once been a handsome edifice of the type you know in Cairo or Alexandria—all stone and stucco, two-storied, faced with tall regular windows. Now the upper storey was clean gone; the blind windows were filled up with bricks; the stucco was all scars, and you could walk up to the roof on rubble. In front was an acacia, such as grow in Ismailia or the Gezireh at Cairo, only unpruneddeep luscious green, only drooping like a weeping willow. At that most ordinary sight everybody grew very solemn. For it was a piece of a new world, or rather of an old world, utterly different from the squalid mud, the baking barrenness of Omdurman. A façade with tall windows, a tree with green leavesthe façade battered and blind, the tree drooping to earth-there was no need to tell us we were at a grave. In that forlorn ruin, and that disconsolate acacia, the bones of murdered civilisation lay before us.

The troops formed up before the palace in three sides of a rectangle-Egyptians to our left as we looked from the river, British to the right. The Sirdar, the generals of division and brigade, and the staff stood in the open space facing the palace. Then on the roof -almost on the very spot where Gordon fell, though the steps by which the butchers mounted have long since vanished-we were aware of two flagstaves. By the right hand halliards stood Lieutenant Staveley, R.N., and Captain Watson, K.R.R.; by the left hand

THE SEAL ON KHARTUM.

313

Bimbashi Mitford and his Excellency's Egyptian A.D.C.

The Sirdar raised his hand. A pull on the halliards: up ran, out flew, the Union Jack, tugging eagerly at his reins, dazzling gloriously in the sun, rejoicing in his strength and his freedom. "Bang!" went the "Melik's" 12-pounder, and the boat quivered to her backbone. "God Save our Gracious Queen " hymned the Guards' band-" bang!" from the "Melik "—and Sirdar and private stood stiff-" bang!"-to attention, every hand at the helmet peak in-" bang!"-salute. The Egyptian flag had gone up at the same instant; and now, the same ear-smashing, soul-uplifting bangs marking time, the band of the 11th Sudanese was playing the Khedivial hymn. "Three cheers for the Queen!" cried the Sirdar: helmets leaped in the air, and the melancholy ruins woke to the first wholesome shout of all these years. Then the same for the Khedive. The comrade flags stretched themselves. lustily, enjoying their own again; the bands pealed forth the pride of country; the twenty-one guns banged forth the strength of war. Thus, white men and black, Christian and Moslem, Anglo-Egypt set her seal once more, for ever, on Khartum.

Before we had time to think such thoughts over to ourselves, the Guards were playing the Dead March in "Saul." Then the black band was playing the march from Handel's "Scipio," which in England generally goes with "Toll for the Brave"; this was in memory