"We do not want your beads; we do not want your cloth; we only want you to go away," one tribe said to him. Gordon's heart was full of pity for them. It was for them that he was spending his life, had they only known it. The never-ending work and worry tried him badly. "Poor sheath, it is much worn," he wrote of himself from the dreary land of marsh and forest into which he had come while laying down a chain of posts between Gondokoro and the Lakes. The dampness of the marshes was poison to white men, and earwigs, ants, mosquitoes, sandflies, beetles, scorpions, snakes, and every imaginable insect and reptile seemed to do their best to make things unpleasant for him. The turf was full of prickly grass seeds; the long grass cut the fingers to the bone if people tried to pick it. The very fruit was bitter and poisonous. Rain sometimes fell in unexpected torrents, so heavy that he was flooded out of his tent. When he was dead tired, body and soul, Gordon would sometimes build castles of what he would do when he got back to England. He would lie in bed till eleven, and always wear his best fur coat, and travel first class, and have oysters every day for lunch! In 1876 there seemed a chance of his really building his castles. He felt it was impossible to rid the land of slavery, with the Egyptian officials, who did not wish to have it stopped, working hard against him, and so, after three years of hard work, he threw up his post and went home. No sooner was he gone than the Khedive realised how great a loss it would be to him and to his country if Gordon were not to return. He begged him to come back, and he would make him Governor-General of the Soudan, and help him in every possible way to carry out the work he wished to do. So Gordon returned, and in February 1877 he started for the Soudan, absolute ruler now of 1640 miles of desert, marsh, and forest. "So there is an end of slavery," he wrote to his sister, "if God wills, for the whole secret of the matter is in that Government (the Soudan), and if the man who holds the Soudan is against it, it must cease." . . . "I go up alone with an infinite Almighty God to direct and guide me, and am glad to so trust Him as to fear nothing, and, indeed, to feel sure of success." From this time on, in every direction, the slavers were hunted and harried and driven out of the land, as one drives rats from a farmyard. On every side he came on caravans packed with starving slaves, dying of hunger and thirst, and set them free. The desert was strewn not only with the bodies of camels, that the dry air had turned into mummies, but with the bones and whitened skulls of the slave-dealers' victims. Everywhere he had to look out for treachery and for lying, and be ready to pounce on slaves cunningly concealed by the kidnappers. A hundred or more would sometimes be found being smuggled past, down the Nile, hidden under a boatload of wood.