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 supplied the shortcomings of all the rest. When it was a matter of pulling the boats up the river, he was the first at the ropes, and the last to leave them, wading through the water with his trousers up. If it was his steamer that had run aground, all the active labour, as well as the organisation, fell on him. Sooner than add to the work of those in attendance on him, he would be seen preparing and cooking his own food; and because he could do it better than his native servant, he would clean his duck-gun, with the whole camp agape, until his ways were realised, at an Excellency doing his own work. Nor did he spare himself physically. His average day's walk, which satisfied him that he was in good health, was fourteen miles; but he often exceeded twenty miles, and on one occasion he even walked thirty-five miles under a tropical sun. Of the conduct of his soldiers against an enemy, or in coping with the difficulties of river navigation, he was always nervous, and whether for work or for fighting he used, he said, "to pray them up as he did his men in China"; but without his knowledge, one of his own soldiers was vigilantly observant of his conduct, and has recorded, through the instrumentality of Slatin Pasha, his recollections of Gordon as a fighter and leader of soldiers:--