men, and thought she had been taken safely to one of the
huts. All through that wet and stormy night he heard a baby crying.
At dawn he found the woman lying in a pool of mud, apparently dead,
while men passed and repassed her, and took no notice. Her baby, not
quite a year old, sat and wailed in some long grass near her. The
woman was actually not dead, but she died a few days later. The baby
boy was none the worse for his night out, and drank off a gourd of milk
"like a man." Gordon gave him to a family to look after, paying for
him daily with some maize.

Mosquitoes and other insects were a pest wherever he went, but at
Saubat he had the extra pest of rats. They ran over his mosquito nets,
ate his soap, his books, his boots, and his shaving-brush, and screamed
and fought all night, until he invented a clever trap and stopped their
thefts.

When Gordon returned to Gondokoro, he found nearly all his own staff
ill with fever and ague. Out of ten only two were well,--one of these
having newly recovered from a severe fever. Two were dead, and six
seriously ill. Gordon himself was worn to a mere shadow, but he had to
act as doctor and as sick-nurse. The weather was cold and wet, and the
rain came into the tents. To his sister, Gordon wrote: "Imagine your
brother paddling about a swamped tent without boots, attending to a
sick man at night, with more than a chance of the tent coming down
bodily." Of course he got chilled, and ill too, and at last gave an
order that "all illness is to take place away from me."

Nor was it only sickness amongst his friends that he had to sadden him.
He found that his Egyptian officials--some of them those he had most
trusted--were leaguing with the slavers, taking bribes, helping to undo
the good work he had already done, and trying to rouse his troops into
mutiny. The troops themselves were a great trial. They were lazy,
treacherous, chicken-hearted fellows, with no pluck. "I never had less
confidence in any troops in my life," Gordon said, and he declared that
three natives would put a whole company to flight. The native
Soudanese were as brave as lions. A native has been known to kill
himself because his wife called him a coward. The Arab soldiers when
on sentry duty would all go to sleep at their posts, and think no harm
of it.

The climate of the Soudan did not suit them, and they died like flies.
Of one detachment of 250, half were dead in three months, 100
invali