Egyptian colleagues, and treated with indifference by the Cairene
Government. He also discovered that his troops were worthless, and
that not one of his officers, civil and military, cared a fig for the
task in hand. Their one thought was how to do nothing at all, and
Gordon's patience and energy were monopolised, and in the end
exhausted, by attempts to extract work from his unwilling
subordinates. Even the effort to educate them up to the simple
recognition that a certain amount of work had to be done, and that
unless it were well done, it had to be done over again, resulted in
failure. To the plain instructions he gave, they would give an
interpretation of their own; and while fully admitting on explanation
that this was not the proper way of executing any task, they would
invariably repeat it after their own fashion, until at length Gordon
could see no alternative to performing the task himself. Thus were his
labours indefinitely multiplied, and only his exceptional health and
energy enabled him to cope with them at all. How much they affected
him in his own despite may be judged from the exclamation which
escaped him, after he had obtained a considerable success that would
have elated any other leader--"But the worry and trouble have taken
all the syrup out of the affair!"

The personal glimpses obtainable of Gordon during these depressing
years, while engaged on a task he foresaw would be undone by the
weakness and indifference of the Egyptian authorities as soon as he
gave it up, are very illustrative of his energy and inherent capacity
for command. The world at large was quite indifferent to the heroism
and the self-denial, amounting to self-sacrifice, which alone enabled
him to carry on his own shoulders, like a modern Atlas, the whole
administration of a scarcely conquered region, which covered ten
degrees of latitude. But we who have to consider his career in all its
bearings, and to discover, as it were, behind his public and private
acts, the true man, cannot afford to pass over so lightly passages
that are in a very special degree indicative of the man's character
and temperament. In no other period of his career did he devote
himself more strenuously to the details, in themselves monotonous and
uninteresting, of a task that brought him neither present nor
prospective satisfaction. When the tools with which he was supplied
failed him, as they did at every turn, he threw himself into the
struggle, and supp