It was on March 12, 1874, that Gordon came in sight of Khartoum, where eleven years later he was to find his grave. He was received on the banks by the Egyptian governor-general, who ordered salutes to be fired and the brass band to play. If Gordon did not appreciate the honours paid to him, he was delighted at the news that a growth of grass and stones that had hitherto rendered the White Nile impassable had been at last cut away by the soldiers. Now the river was free, and instead of the journey to Gondokoro—his own capital, eleven hundred miles south of Khartoum—taking fourteen months, as in the days of Sir Samuel Baker, he would be able to perform it in four weeks.
Every moment of the ten days that Gordon stayed at Khartoum was busily employed in discovering all he could as to the condition of the people and the state of the government. It did not take him more than a few hours to learn that the Egyptian government had no authority whatever over the people, and that the money matters of the Soudan were hopelessly mixed with those of Cairo. But at present he could only note what was wrong, and wait to set it right. His work just now lay at Gondokoro, and thither he must go.
On the 22nd he started up the river, and at each mile, as they drew nearer and nearer to the equator, he found the climate more trying. It was, as he says, nothing but 'heat and mosquitoes day and night, all the year round.' But, exhausting though the climate was, he could not help being deeply interested in the many things that were new to him. There were great hippopotamuses plunging about in their clumsy way; the crocodiles, looking more like stone beasts than living things, basking motionless on the mud where the river had fallen; the monkeys that had their homes with the storks among the trees that covered the banks in places; the storks that sounded as if they were laughing, and 'seemed highly amused at anybody thinking of going up to Gondokoro with the hope of doing anything.' In a forest higher up they found a tribe, the Dinkas, dressed in necklaces. Their idea of greeting a white 'chief' was to lick his hands, and they would have kissed his feet also had not Gordon jumped up hastily and, snatching up some strings of gay beads he had brought with him for the purpose, hung them over their heads.
The people of Gondokoro were filled with astonishment when Gordon's steamer anchored under the river banks. It was a wretched place, worse even than Khartoum, and inhabited by wretched people, whom ill-treatment had made at once revengeful and timid. But Gordon did not care how miserable the place was, he felt sure he could do something to help the people; and first he began by trying to make friends. For a time it was uphill work; they had given up planting their little plots of ground—what was the use when their harvest was always taken from them? Their only possession of value was their children, and these they often begged Gordon to buy, to save them from starvation. It seemed too good to be true when the white man gave them maize, which they baked in cakes, and fed them while they sowed their patches once more. 'He would see that no one hurt them,' he said, and little by little, under his protection, the poor people plucked up heart again and forgot their troubles, as nobody but negroes can.
Up and down the river he went, establishing some of the forts which he knew to be necessary if the slave-trade was to be put down. One day Abou Saoud brought him some letters written by a party of slave-dealers to the Egyptian governor of Fashoda, on the White Nile, half-way to Khartoum, saying that they would shortly arrive with a gang of negroes whom they had captured, and with two thousand cows, which they had also kidnapped, as was their custom. Gordon was ready for them; the cattle he kept, not being able to return them to their black owners, and the negroes he set free. If possible they were sent home, but if that could not be done he bought them himself, so that no one else should have a claim to them. The gratitude shown by the blacks was boundless, and one, a chief of the Dinkas, proved useful to him in many ways. The others, tall, strong men, gladly served him as hewers of wood and drawers of water.
So the weeks went on, and in the intervals of capturing more convoys of slaves Gordon still found time to attend to an old dying woman, whom he often visited himself, besides daily sending her food, and, what she loved better still, tobacco. The heat grew worse and worse, and no doubt the mosquitoes also; and Gordon's only pleasure was wading in the Nile morning and evening—a very dangerous amusement, as the river swarmed with crocodiles. But he had heard that crocodiles never attacked anything that was moving, and certainly he took no harm, and his health was good. All his white men, however, fell ill, and as there was no one to nurse them but himself, he would not replace them.
