It has been stated that when he had taken his passage
for England he was without any money in his pocket, and that he
quaintly said to a friend: "Do you think it is right for a
Major-General of the British Army to set out on a journey like this
without sixpence in his pocket?" There is nothing improbable in such
an occurrence, and it was matched only sixteen months later, when he
was on the point of starting for Khartoum in the same impecunious
condition.

Gordon arrived in England on 8th November, and after some
correspondence with the King of the Belgians, which will be referred
to later in connection with the Congo mission, he again left England
on 26th December. On this occasion he was going to carry out a
long-cherished desire to visit and reside in the Holy Land, so that he
might study on the spot the scenes with which his perfect knowledge of
the Bible--his inseparable companion--had made him in an extraordinary
degree familiar. In the best sense of the word, he was going to take a
holiday. There was to be absolute quiet and rest, and at the same time
a congenial occupation. He sailed for Jaffa as a guest on one of Sir
William Mackinnon's steamers, but he at once proceeded to Jerusalem,
where he lived alone, refusing to see any one, with his books as
companions, and "mystifying people as to what he was doing." During
his stay at Jerusalem he entered with much zest and at great length
into the questions of the various sites in the old Jewish capital. I
do not propose to follow the course of his labours in that pursuit, as
several works contain between them, I should say, every line he wrote
on the subject, and the general reader cannot be expected to take any
interest in abstruse and much-debated theological and topographical
questions. But even in the midst of these pursuits he did not lose his
quickness of military perception. After a brief inspection he at once
declared that the Russian Convent commanded the whole city, and was in
itself a strong fortress, capable of holding a formidable garrison,
which Russia could despatch in the guise of priests without any one
being the wiser. From Jerusalem, when the heat became great, he
returned to Jaffa, and his interest aroused in worldly matters by the
progress of events in Egypt, and the development of the Soudan danger,
which he had all along seen coming, was evoked by a project that was
brought under his notice for the construction across Palestine of a
canal to