with these duties. The Soudan and the Equatorial Province
were so frightfully mismanaged and cruelly governed that, Gordon says,
"when Said Pasha, the Viceroy before Ismail, went up to the Soudan with
Count F. Lesseps, he was so discouraged and horrified at the misery of
the people that at Berber the Count saw him throw his guns into the
river, declaring that he would be no party to such oppression. It was
only after the urgent solicitations of European consuls and others that
he reconsidered his decision."

It is quite amusing to see the efforts that were made at Cairo to break
in the new governor, and to fit him for his post, in accordance with
the traditions of the country. As soon as everything was settled,
Gordon, with his usual promptness, and absence of all love of display,
was anxious to be off to his post of duty, and for that purpose to
utilise the ordinary passenger steamer from Suez. But about states such
as Egypt was before the British occupation, there is a strange mixture
of reckless expenditure combined with paltry meanness. Although the
Egyptian authorities once refused to pay the travelling expenses of an
official travelling on duty from Alexandria to Cairo in connection with
Colonel Gordon, yet they insisted on this occasion that it would be
unbecoming to the dignity of a governor to travel by an ordinary
steamer, so a special one was set apart for this purpose. Gordon
afterwards calculated that had he been allowed his own way, he would at
the outset have saved at least L400! For the sake of peace he yielded
the point, and went from Cairo in a special train, and from Suez in a
special steamer, accompanied by a large number of useless servants. He
had his revenge, however, for owing to an engine getting off the line,
there was a long halt, and finally he had to proceed by the ordinary
train. Gordon was a remarkable instance of the general rule, that the
greater the ability of a man the less affection has he for display, and
for all the official trappings of office. The only display that Gordon
ever cared for was that of intrinsic merit and hard work, and these
qualities he always looked for in his subordinates.

Colonel Gordon reached Suakim on February 25th, 1874, and writing home,
he records his impressions of Cairo and its officials. "I think the
Khedive likes me, but no one else does; and I don't like them, I mean
the swells, whose corns I tread on in all manner of ways. Duke of This
wants steame