e used in the
construction of this memorial over a perishable king, and the pyramid is
reckoned to be the largest edifice ever built by human hands. The
buildings and works of the present time are nothing compared to it. Only
the Great Wall of China can vie with it, and this is ruined and to a
large extent obliterated, while the pyramid of Cheops still stands,
scorched by the sun, or sharply defined in the moonlight, or dimly
visible as a mysterious apparition in the dark, warm night.

Twelve hundred miles south of the capital of modern Egypt the desert
comes to an end, and the surface is covered by vast marshes and beds of
waving reeds. This is the Sudan, "the Land of the Blacks." At the point
where the White and Blue Niles mingle their waters lay the only town in
the Sudan, Khartum, whither trade-routes converged from all directions,
and where goods changed hands. Here were brought wares which never
failed to find purchasers. The valuable feathers plucked from the
swift-footed ostrich were needed to decorate the hats of European
ladies; the wild elephants, larger and more powerful than their Indian
congeners, were shot or caught in pitfalls in the woods for the sake of
their precious ivory. But the most esteemed of all the wares that passed
through Khartum were slaves--"black ivory," as they were called by their
heartless Arab torturers. Elephants' tusks are heavy, and cannot be
transported on horses or oxen from the depths of the forest, for draught
animals are killed by the sting of the poisonous tsetse fly. Therefore
the tusks had to be carried by men, and when these had finished their
task they were themselves sold into Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. The
forests and deserts were not inexhaustible; ivory and ostrich feathers
might be worked out, but there would always be negroes.

[Illustration: PLATE XXVIII. THE GREAT PYRAMIDS AT GHIZEH.]

When the Khedive Ismail invited Gordon to enter his service as governor
of the new province not far from the sources of the Nile, Gordon
accepted the post in the hope that he would be able to suppress
slave-trading, or at least to check the hunting of black men and women.
He left Cairo and travelled by the Red Sea to Suakin, rode to Berber on
the Nile, and was received with much pomp and ceremony by the
Governor-General at Khartum. Here he heard that the Nile was navigable
for 900 miles southwards, and therefore he could continue his journey
without delay.

The Nile afforded an e