The farther south the bounds of Equatoria were pushed the more dismal the country seems to have become. He calls it “a dead, mournful spot, with a heavy, damp dew penetrating everywhere. It is as if the angel Azrael had spread his wings over this land. You have little idea of the silence and solitude. I am sure no one whom God did not support could bear up. It is simply killing.” At length the three years of his miserable service came to an end. In October he set his face northward from Khartoum and ate his Christmas dinner in London. It was in those days that Britain woke up to some sense of her opportunities and responsibilities. She had begun what was then called the “forward” policy, and which to-day with wider vision and sounder wisdom we call the Imperial policy. Unhappily the fickle breath of popular favour soon blew the other way for a space; a halt was called, then a retreat was sounded, and of course with the inevitable result. The arms of Britain were sullied by defeat, and her ancient honour was stained by the breach of her plighted word and the desertion of those who had trusted to her faith. This was the dark and disgraceful period which lasted from the end of 1880 to the beginning of 1885. It began with the desertion of the heroic British garrisons in the Transvaal and the everlasting shame of Majuba Hill, and it ended with the political betrayal and the constructive murder of Charles George Gordon. It was on January 31, 1877, that Gordon went back to Africa as Governor-General of the Soudan. On May 5th he was installed at Khartoum; on the 19th he left to strike his first blow against slavery; by June 7th he had crossed four hundred miles of wilderness and passed the frontier of Dafour. His movements during this time, amazing as they are now to us, were absolutely paralysing to the chiefs and officials of the country. To them a Pasha of Egypt was a portly gentleman, never in a hurry, never inclined to leniency or mercy, a staunch upholder of the slave trade in its worst as well as its best aspects, and possessing a very keen eye indeed to the main chance. But the quite phenomenal Pasha who now flits across their astonished vision is a lean, yellow-faced little man, clad in the gorgeous but dusty and travel-stained uniform of a Marshal of Turkey, mounted on a swift dromedary which out-distances every other animal of the desert save the beast ridden by the Arab sheikh who accompanies him. The two fly from point to point with incredible rapidity; the words of the Pasha are sometimes stern and sometimes mild, but always just and always dead against slavery. There is no talk of what he wants for himself, but only of what he wants done or left undone, because this or that is right or wrong--and what he wants he gets.