midable as that of the Turkish
Empire on whose frontiers it hovered, and in spreading a reign of
terror such as can seldom be organised except by civilisation. With
Napoleonic suddenness and success the Mahdist hordes had fallen on the
army of Hicks Pasha, when it left its camp at Omdurman, on the Nile
opposite Khartoum, and had cut it to pieces in a fashion incredible.
They had established at Omdurman their Holy City, the Rome of their
nomadic Roman Empire. Towards that terrible place many adventurous
men, like poor Hicks, had gone and were destined to go. The sands that
encircled it were like that entrance to the lion's cavern in the
fable, towards which many footprints pointed, and from which none
returned.

The last of these was Gordon, that romantic and even eccentric figure
of whom so much might be said. Perhaps the most essential thing to say
of him here is that fortune once again played the artist in sending
such a man, at once as the leader and the herald of a man like
Kitchener; to show the way and to make the occasion; to be a sacrifice
and a signal for vengeance. Whatever else there was about Gordon,
there was about him the air not only of a hero, but of the hero of a
tragedy. Something Oriental in his own mysticism, something most of
his countrymen would have called moonshine, something perverse in his
courage, something childish and beautiful in that perversity, marked
him out as the man who walks to doom--the man who in a hundred poems
or fables goes up to a city to be crucified. He had gone to Khartoum
to arrange the withdrawal of the troops from the Soudan, the
Government having decided, if possible, to live at peace with the new
Mahdist dictatorship; and he went through the deserts almost as
solitary as a bird, on a journey as lonely as his end. He was cut off
and besieged in Khartoum by the Mahdist armies, and fell with the
falling city. Long before his end he had been in touch with Kitchener,
now of the Egyptian Intelligence Department, and weaving very
carefully a vast net of diplomacy and strategy in which the slayers of
Gordon were to be taken at last.

A well-known English journalist, Bennet Burleigh, wandering near
Dongola, fell into conversation with an Arab who spoke excellent
English, and who, with a hospitality highly improper in a Moslem,
produced two bottles of claret for his entertainment. The name of this
Arab was Kitchener; and the two bottles were all he had. The
journalist obtained