t merely that they were such poor
fighters that Gordon declared that three natives would put a company
to flight, but they were so disinclined for any work, and so
encumbered by their women and children, that their ability to make any
military show might be as safely challenged as their combative spirit.
Well might Gordon write: "I never had less confidence in any troops in
my life." But even these shortcomings were not the worst. The Arab
soldiers provided by the Egyptian Government, and sent up over and
over again, in spite of Gordon's protests and entreaties, could not
stand the climate. They died like flies. Of one detachment of 250,
half were dead in three months, 100 of the others were invalided, and
only 25 remained fit for duty. From a further body of 150 men sent as
a reinforcement, half were reported on the sick list the day after
their arrival. The main buttress of the Khedive's authority in this
region was therefore hollow and erected on an insecure foundation. The
Egyptian soldiers possessed firearms, and the natives, in their
ignorance that they could not shoot straight, were afraid of them; but
the natural progress of knowledge would inevitably prove fatal to that
unreal supremacy, and eventually entail the collapse of the Cairo
administration in the Soudan and the remoter districts on the
Equator.

Realising the inefficiency of the Egyptian force, General Gordon set
himself to the task of providing a better; and mindful of the
contingent danger of creating a corps that might in the end prove a
peril to the system it was meant to protect, he resolved that, if
individually brave and efficient, it should be exceedingly limited in
numbers, and incapable of casting aside its allegiance to the Khedive.
He began in a small way by engaging the services of any stalwart
Soudanese native whom chance placed in his path, and thus he organised
in the first year of his rule a corps of about forty men as a sort of
bodyguard. An accident brought him into contact with a party of the
Niam Niam, a tribe of cannibals from the interior of Africa, but
possessing a martial spirit and athletic frames. Gordon looked at them
with the eye of a soldier, and on the spot enrolled fifty of them into
the small force he was organising. He armed them with spears as well
as guns, and as these spears were cutting ones, with a blade two feet
long, they were the more formidable weapon of the two. Gordon
describes the Niam Niam warriors as lo