So far as General Gordon was concerned, the Uganda question was then, both for this period and for his subsequent and more important command, definitely closed. But one personal incident remains to be chronicled. When Gordon received Mtesa's request to garrison Dubaga, and had actually planted a station on the Victoria Lake, he telegraphed the facts to the Khedive, who promptly replied by conferring on him the Medjidieh Order. At the moment that Gordon received this intimation he had decided that it would not be politic to comply with Mtesa's request to garrison Dubaga, and he had only just succeeded in rescuing an Egyptian force from a position of danger in the manner described. He felt that he had obtained this decoration "under false pretences," but the recollection of the hard and honourable work he had performed must have soon salved his conscience. At an early stage of his work Gordon felt disposed to throw it up, and during the whole three years a constant struggle went on within himself as to whether he should stay or return to England. Many causes produced this feeling. There was, in the first place, disillusionment on discovering that the whole thing, from the Egyptian Government point of view, was a sham, and that his name was being made use of to impose on Europe. But then he thought he saw an opportunity of doing some useful and beneficial work, and, stifling his disappointment, he went on. Arrived on the scene, he found himself thwarted by his 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!"