that could
remain. The effect of this growing road, one might almost say this
living road, began to be felt. Mahmoud, the Mahdist military leader,
fell back from Berber, and gathered his hosts more closely round the
sacred city on the Nile. Kitchener, making another night march up the
Atbara river, stormed the Arab camp and took Mahmoud prisoner. Then at
last he moved finally up the western bank of the Nile and came in
sight of Omdurman. It is somewhat of a disproportion to dwell on the
fight that followed and the fall of the great city. The fighting had
been done already, and more than half of it was working; fighting a
long fight against the centuries, against ages of sloth and the great
sleep of the desert, where there had been nothing but visions, and
against a racial decline that men had accepted as a doom. On the
following Sunday a memorial service for Charles Gordon was held in the
place where he was slain.

The fact that Kitchener fought with rails as much as with guns rather
fixed from this time forward the fashionable view of his character. He
was talked of as if he were himself made of metal, with a head filled
not only with calculations but with clockwork. This is symbolically
true, in so far as it means that he was by temper what he was by
trade, an engineer. He had conquered the Mahdi, where many had failed
to do so. But what he had chiefly conquered was the desert--a great
and greedy giant. He brought Cairo to Khartoum; we might say that he
brought London or Liverpool with him to the gates of the strange city
of Omdurman. Some parts of his action supported, even regrettably, the
reputation of rigidity. But if any admirer had, in this hour of
triumph, been staring at him as at a stone sphinx of inflexible fate,
that admirer would have been very much puzzled by the next passage of
his life. Kitchener was something much more than a machine; for in the
mind, as much as in the body, flexibility is far more masculine than
inflexibility.

A situation developed almost instantly after his victory in which he
was to show that he was a diplomatist as well as a soldier. At
Fashoda, a little farther up the Nile, he found something more
surprising, and perhaps more romantic, than the wildest dervish of the
desert solitudes. A French officer, and one of the most valiant and
distinguished of French officers, Major Marchand, had penetrated to
the place with the pertinacity of a great explorer, and seemed
prepared to ho