cluded in the general Soudan Budget,
which always showed an alarming deficit. These arrangements imparted a
special difficulty into the situation with which Gordon had to deal,
and his manner of coping with it will reveal how shrewd he was in
detecting the root-cause of any trouble, and how prompt were his
measures to eradicate the mischief. From the first he fully realised
why he was appointed, viz. "to catch the attention of the English
people"; but he also appreciated the Khedive's "terrible anxiety to
put down the slave-trade, which threatens his supremacy." With these
introductory remarks, the main thread of Gordon's career may be
resumed.

After the brief hesitation referred to in the last chapter, and the
reduction of his salary to what he deemed reasonable dimensions,
Gordon proceeded to Cairo, where he arrived early in the year 1874. As
in everything else he undertook, Gordon was in earnest about the work
he had to attempt, and no doubt he had already formed in his mind a
general plan of action, which would enable him to suppress the
slave-trade. Here it will suffice to say that his project was based on
the holding of the White Nile by a line of fortified posts, and with
the river steamers, which would result in cutting off the slave
hunters from their best source of supply. The expression of his plans
in his earnest manner showed up by contrast the hollowness of the
views and policy of those who had obtained his services. In his own
graphic and emphatic way he wrote: "I thought the thing real and found
it a sham, and felt like a Gordon who has been humbugged." He found
Cairo "a regular hot-bed of intrigues," and among not only the
Egyptian, but also the European officials. With a prophetic grasp of
the situation he wrote, "Things cannot last long like this." Had
Gordon been long detained at Cairo, where the etiquette and the advice
offered him by every one in an official position exasperated him
beyond endurance, there is no doubt that he would have thrown up his
task in disgust. He was animated by the desire to make the sham a
reality, and to convert the project with which he had been intrusted
into a beneficial scheme for the suffering population of the Soudan.
There, at least, he would be removed from the intrigues of the
capital, and at liberty to speak his own thoughts without giving
umbrage to one person and receiving worldly counsel from another.

One of the chief bones of contention during the few we