The Inspector-General laughed. "Pepper in his finger-nails—the hoary old trick, sir! Good-night, Sirdar!"
"Good-night, Colonel!" And the Inspector-General descended the steps.
Being left alone, the Sirdar walked for a long hour to and fro on the terrace, trying to see what course he ought to take in dealing with a religious leader who differed so dangerously from the holy men that were more troublesome, but hardly more deadly, than the sand-flies of the desert.
At midnight he found himself standing on the very spot on which General Gordon met his death, and in an instant, as by a flash of mental lightning, he saw the scene that had been enacted there only a few years before—the grey dawn, the mad rush of the howling dervishes in their lust of blood, up from the dim garden to the top of these steps, on which stood, calmly waiting for them, the fearless soul that had waited for his own countrymen in vain. "Where is your Master, the Mahdi?" he cried. Then a barbarous shriek, the flash of a score of lances, and the martyr of the Soudan fell.
Was this to be another such revolt, more subtle if not more bloody, turning England out of the valley of the Nile by making it impossible for her to meet the expense of governing the country, and thereby destroying the seeds of civilisation that had been sown in the Soudan through so many toilsome years?
On the other hand, was it the beginning of a great spiritual revolution that was intended by God to pass over the whole face of the world? It might even be that, though the Soudan was only a brown and barren wilderness, for had not all great faiths and all great prophets sprung out of the desert—Moses, Mohammed, Christ!
This brought the Sirdar back to a memory that had troubled him deeply for many weeks—the memory of the disgrace that had fallen in Cairo on his comrade of long ago, the son of his old friend Nuneham, young Gordon Lord.
Then it dawned upon him for the first time that, however serious his offence as a soldier, the son of his friend had done no more and no less than his great namesake did before him when he resisted authority because authority was in the wrong!
Good God! could it be possible that young Gordon was in the right after all, and that this movement of the man Ishmael was the beginning of a world-wide revolt against the materialism, the selfishness, the venality, and the oppression of a corrupt civilisation that mocked religion by taking the name of Him who came to earth to destroy such evils?
If that were so, could any Christian country in these days dare to repeat the appalling error of the Roman Empire in Palestine two thousand years ago—the error of trying to put down moral forces by physical ones?