already been torn up by Russia under the cover of the great Franco-Prussian war, and it was now clear to the world that a few years more would bring about a renewal of the old strife between Muscovite and Turk. During 1872 and 1873 Gordon travelled much through Bulgaria, sketching the military positions which he thought might soon become the scenes of fighting. In these travels in Bulgaria he gathered an intimate knowledge of the ways and means of Turkish government. "Have nothing to do with the Turk. I know him well, he is hopeless," he once said to the writer of these pages, when, early in 1877, the long-foreseen struggle between Russia and Turkey was about to open.

At Constantinople, in November 1872, Gordon met Nubar Pacha at the British Embassy. That far-seeing Egyptian Minister soon noted the vast difference that lay between the officer of engineers and any other English official with whom he had ever come in contact.1 Clearly this rich treasure in soldier-shape, now floating waif-like about Europe, was something worth securing. Here was the "Captain" whose "good leading" the best thinker of our time had been vainly asking for England, in England, a few years before, speaking wonderful words at the very place where this captain of engineers had been born, and in the hearing of many men who had been his associates.

"How many yet of you are there knights-errant now beyond all former fields of danger-knights-patient now beyond all former endurance-who still retain the ancient

1 'England owes little to her officials; she owes her greatness to men of a different stamp," Nubar Pacha once said to the writer.

and eternal purpose of knighthood, to subdue the wicked and to aid the weak? To them, be they few or many, we English people call for help to the wretchedness, and for rule over the baseness of multitudes desolate and deceived, shrieking to themselves this new gospel of their new religion, ‘Let the weak do as they can, and the wicked as they will.'

You think they (the people) don't want to be commanded; try them, determine what is needful for them, honourable for them, show it them, promise to bring it them, and they will follow you through fire. 'Govern us,' they cry with one heart, through many minds. They can be governed still, these English, they are men still, not gnats or serpents. They love their old ways yet, and their old masters, and their old land. They would fain live in it as many as may stay there, if you will show them how, there, to live, or show them even how, there, like Englishmen to die."1

As we read these words, spoken at Woolwich in 1869, and think that only a few miles away from the place where this prayer for a leader of men, for a knight who would sustain "the ancient and eternal purpose of knighthood," for one who would even teach us "how to die," went forth like a cry into the wilderness, there was living at Gravesend in absolute neglect, unnoticed and unknown, the one man whose heart, brain, soul, and hand were able to fill the void of that night which the speaker saw beyond all the gaslight glare of a false and rotten prosperity-"the pity of it all" is the first thought that comes to us-the pity of the fate that let this " Captain of good leading" waste his life in the deserts of Africa. And yet who would now have it otherwise? It was on the night of December 14th,

1 See Mr. Ruskin's Lectures on "War" and on the "Future of England," delivered at Woolwich in 1865 and 1869.

1869, this prayer, that a knight might arise who would teach us how to die, was uttered at Woolwich. Fifteen years later to a day, on December 14th, 1884, Gordon was writing the last words that ever came to us from Khartoum: "P.S.-I am quite happy, thank God; and, like Lawrence, I have tried to do my duty." Surely the prayer had been answered.

CHAPTER V

THE SOUDAN

GORDON, having accepted Nubar Pacha's offer, reached Egypt in February 1874. He spent a fortnight in Cairo, had many interviews with Khedive Ismail and the Ministers, and then started, by way of Suez and Suakim, for his new command. We must pause a moment to sketch the dim and distant region and the work that lay before him.

Any person standing in the centre of the long bridge across the Nile at the Kasr-el-Nil in Cairo, and looking up stream towards the south, will see on his left hand gray sandstone hills which, beginning near the citadel of the city, stree southwards out of sight. Below his standpoint flows the Nile, coming out of the south, a broad and rapid river. If the time of year be the month of August, the current is full-flooded, thick with mud, and swirling with the force of an immense volume pent between banks too narrow to hold it; if the time be February, the stream is shrunken to a tenth of its flooded volume, the colour is ashen or milky gray, and there is a wide margin of sand or dried mud between water and bank. All these changes of volume and colour are caused by conditions of climate and earth surface which can be explained from this point as well as from any other.

First let us take the mountain. From the sandstone ridge at the citadel a line of hills, gradually growing in altitude and broadening in width of base, runs south into enormous distance-runs, in fact, to the other end of Africa. Fourteen hundred miles south of where you stand this line of hills rises to a very lofty altitude, and spreads out into many ranges and groups of mountains, which are continued in snowy summits nearly to the equator; from thence it descends abruptly to moderate elevations, becoming merged into a rolling table-land.

It is this range of mountains which, in its culminating masses of Abyssinia and the mountains to the south of that country, forms the barrier that acts the twofold part of rendering Nubia and Egypt practically rainless regions, and at the same time sends the summer inundations to fertilise the long line of river and the far distant delta of Lower Egypt.

All across the vast breadth of the Indian Ocean from Australia to Zanzibar a never-ceasing south-east wind carries the millions of tons of water which the sun has drawn up from the tropical ocean, in vapour-saturated clouds to the east shores of Africa. The portion of this vapour which is carried by the monsoon against the Abyssinian highlands falls in a three months' continuous downpour, beginning in May: the portion of it which is borne on the wings of the never-ceasing south-east tradewind is carried up the long slope of land that runs from Zanzibar to the centre of Africa, and is there precipitated in rain that lasts some eight months out of the twelve.

Thus Abyssinia sends out from the heart of its great hills a rush of water which, carried by many tributaries into the Blue Nile and the Athbara, begins to inundate