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 constitution; 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 acr