It would have been a most unwarrantable and, for Gordon, quite an impossible thing to do, and yet, so far is fact stranger than fiction, that the whole history of about a quarter of a continent would have been changed for the better, and the march of civilisation and humanity in Northern Africa would have been incalculably accelerated if the Governor-General of the Equator had stopped his boat just at that point, landed his men on the island, routed the holy man out of his cave, and either put a bullet through his head or drowned him in the Nile; for this recluse, then unknown beyond the confines of his native desert, was destined seven years later to be hailed by the Soudan tribesmen as the Mahdi--a word which to us means so much disgrace and disaster as well as hard and tardily won triumph that there is no need here to further elaborate the coincidence. It was not a pleasant land, this scene of Gordon’s first government. As he himself says of the wilderness: “No one can conceive the utter misery of these lands. Heat and mosquitoes day and night all the year round.” These are few words, but I am able to say from personal experience that to those who know what African heat and African mosquitoes _are_ they speak very eloquently. Here, until October, 1876, Gordon lived and worked and suffered, making maps, building forts, enticing traders to come to him, teaching his soldiers to work and to till the ground and raise crops instead of plundering the natives. One by one his staff died about him, but still somehow the work went on. When he first arrived he wrote: “the only possessions Egypt has in my province are two forts, one here at Gondokoro and the other at Fatiko. There are three hundred men in one and two hundred in the other. You can’t go out in safety half a mile.” But towards the end of ’76 the line of posts had been pushed to Duffli, a place on the Nile only three degrees north of the Equator itself. Lake Albert Nyanza had been circumnavigated for the first time by a steamboat and mapped out--not by Gordon himself, who declined the honour of first steaming on its waters, but by an Italian lieutenant of his, named Gessi, and his reason for doing this was “to give a practical proof of what I think regarding the inordinate praise which is given to an explorer.” His idea was that those who did the hard work, the getting up of stores and boats and other impedimenta over rapids and across deserts, were the real men who deserved the honour. “But all this would go for nothing in comparison with the fact of going on the lake, which you may say is a small affair when you have the boats ready for you”--from which certain much-boomed and belauded explorers known to latter-day fame might well learn wisdom as well as a little becoming modesty.