The Story of General Gordon Part 8

The slaves that he had set free used to try to kiss his feet and the hem of his garment. To this day there is a name known in Egypt and in the Soudan as that of a man who scorned money, who had no fear of any man, who did not even fear death, whose mercy was as perfect as his uprightness. And the name of that man is Gordon Pasha.

"Give us another Governor like Gordon Pasha," was the cry of the Soudanese when the Mahdi uprose to be a scourge to the Soudan.

CHAPTER VI

KHARTOUM

Gordon left Egypt in December 1879, "not a day too soon," the doctor said, for he was ill, not only from hard work, but from overwork.

The burden he had carried on his shoulders through those years was the burden of the whole of the Soudan.

He was ordered several months of complete rest. But those days of rest were only castles that Gordon had built in his day-dreams, when burning days and bitter nights had made him long for ease.

Early in 1880 he became Secretary to Lord Ripon, Viceroy of India. He remained only a few months in India, and then went to China, in answer to an urgent message from his old friend, Li Hung Chang.

China and Russia were on the brink of a great war. The Chinese courtiers wished to fight, but Li Hung Chang longed for peace.

"Come and help me to keep peace," he said to Gordon. And "Chinese Gordon" did not fail him.

"I cannot desert China in her present crisis," he wrote.

His stay in China was not long, but when he returned to England he had made peace between two empires.

He had only been home for a short time when again he was on the wing.

One day at the War Office he met a brother officer, who complained of his bad luck at having to go and command the Engineers at such a dull place as the Island of Mauritius.

"Oh, don't worry yourself," said Gordon, "I will go for you: Mauritius is as good for me as anywhere else."

For a year he remained there--a peaceful, if dull year, but in March 1882 he was made a Major-General, and relieved from his post.

For a short time he was in South Africa, trying to put to rights affairs between the Basutos--a black race--and the Government at the Cape. The Government, who had asked him to come, treated him badly, and even put his life in danger. He made them very angry by telling them that they were wholly in the wrong, and that he would not fight the Basutos, who had right and justice on their side; and, having failed in his mission, he returned to England.

To find the rest and peace he so much needed, Gordon now went to the Holy Land.

Long ago, the day before a brave warrior was made a knight, he spent the hours from sunset till dawn alone in a chapel beside his armour, watching and praying. This was called "watching his armour."

Gordon was "watching his armour" now. Often he saw no one for weeks at a time. He prayed much, and the books he read were his Bible, his Prayer Book, Thomas a Kempis, and Marcus Aurelius. He wandered over the ground where the feet of the Master he served so well had trod before him. He was much in Jerusalem. He went to where the grey olives grow in the Garden of Gethsemane. His own Gethsemane was still to come.

In those quiet days he planned great work that he meant to do in the East End of London.

But there was other work for him to do. "We have nothing to do when the scroll of events is unrolled but to accept them as being for the best," he once wrote.

In December 1883 he suddenly returned to London, and soon it was known that he was going, at the request of the King of the Belgians, to the Congo, to help to fight the slavers there. "We will kill them in their haunts," said Gordon.

Meantime, fresh things had been happening in the Soudan.

When Gordon left Egypt in 1879, he said to an English official there: "I shall go, and you must get a man to succeed me--if you can. But I do not deny that he will want three qualifications which are seldom found together. First, he must have my iron const.i.tution; for Khartoum is too much for any one who has not. Then, he must have my contempt for money; otherwise the people will never believe in his sincerity.

Lastly, he must have my contempt for death."

Such a man was not found, and well might the black people long for the return of Gordon Pasha, the only Christian for whom they offered prayers at Mecca.

When he went away, under the rule of the greedy Egyptian pashas the slave trade began again. Once more packed caravans of wretched slaves dragged across the desert, and the land was full of misery and of rebellion.

In 1881 the discontented Soudanese found a leader.

From the island of Abbas on the Nile, Mahommed Ahmed, a dervish or holy man, from Dongola, proclaimed to the people of Egypt and of the Soudan that he was a prophet sent from heaven to save them from the cruelty of their rulers.

_El Mahdi el Muntazer_, or The Expected One, he called himself, and said he was immortal and would never die.

Soon he had many followers. He was attended by soldiers, who stood in his presence with drawn swords, and he had all the power of a king.

Because he was Mahdi, his followers all had to obey him. And as he was Mahdi, he himself did exactly as he pleased, and what he liked to do was all that was wicked and cruel.

The Governor-General at Khartoum, seeing that the Mahdi was growing much too powerful, sent two companies of soldiers to take him prisoner.

The Mahdists made a trap for them, fell on them with their swords and short stabbing spears, and destroyed them. More troops were sent, and also destroyed. Then came a small army, and of that army almost no man escaped.

"This is in truth our Deliverer, sent from Heaven," said the wild people of the Soudan, and they flocked in tribes to join the Mahdi.

It was not long before he owned a great army, and there have never been any soldiers who fought more fiercely and with more magnificent courage, and who feared death less, than those followers of a savage dervish.

The Mahdi laid siege to one of the chief cities of the Soudan. It fell before him, and sack and ma.s.sacre followed.

An army of 11,000, under the command of a brave English officer, was then sent to attack the Mahdi. Like all the troops that had gone before them, they were led into a trap, and, out of 11,000 men, only eleven returned to Egypt.

From one victory to another went the Mahdi. His troops, armed with weapons taken from those they had slain, were rich with plunder.

Only two Englishmen were now left in the Soudan. At Khartoum were Colonel Coetlogan and Mr. Frank Power, correspondent of the _Times_.

Colonel Coetlogan telegraphed that it was hopeless for the Egyptian troops in the Soudan to hold out against the Mahdi. Soldiers were deserting daily, and people on every hand were joining the victorious army of the ruffian who claimed to have been sent from Heaven. Colonel Coetlogan begged for orders for the loyal troops to leave the Soudan and seek safety in Egypt.

Gordon believed that if the Soudan were given up to the Mahdi, there would presently be no limit to the tyrant's power. All the slavery and misery from which Gordon had tried to free the land would be worse than ever before. Egypt and Arabia might also, before long, take as their king the Mahdi who ruled the Soudan.

He held that at all costs Khartoum must be defended, and not handed over to the Mahdi, as Colonel Coetlogan and many others advised.

In England this belief of General Gordon, who knew more about the Soudan than any other living man, soon became known.

All his plans for going to the Congo were made, and he had gone to Brussels to take leave of the King of the Belgians when a telegram came to him from the English Government.

"Come back to London by evening train," it said. And, leaving all his luggage behind him, Gordon went.

Next morning he interviewed Lord Wolseley and some members of the Cabinet. He was asked if he would undertake a mission to the Soudan, to try to resettle affairs there, to bring away the Egyptian garrisons, and to divide, if possible, the country amongst the petty sultans whom he thought strong and wise enough to keep order.

Gordon was ready to go, and, to go at once. "I would give my life for these poor people of the Soudan," he said.

Late that afternoon he started.