On the 15th of January 1885 he heard vigorous firing from Khartoum. Gordon and his garrison were preventing the Mahdists from keeping in their possession a fort which they had just taken. In the days that followed, the firing went on, but Gordon's ammunition was nearly done, and he and his men were weak and spent with hunger. On the night of the 25th Slatin heard "the deafening discharge of thousands of rifles and guns; this lasted for a few minutes, then only occasional shots were heard, and now all was quiet again." He lay wide awake, wondering if this was the great attack on Khartoum that the Mahdi had always planned. A few hours later, three black soldiers entered the prison bearing something in a bloody cloth. They threw it at the prisoner's feet, and he saw that it was the head of General Gordon. When the relieving army reached Khartoum, they found the Mahdi's banners of black and green flaunting from its walls, and the guns that had so bravely defended it turned against them. They had come too late. A traitor in the camp had hastened the end, and Gordon had fallen, hacked to pieces, while trying to rally his troops. For hours after he fell, massacre and destruction went on in the city. Fourteen years later, Lord Kitchener and his soldiers avenged that massacre, and marched into Khartoum. The Mahdi was dead. He who boasted that he was immortal had died from poison given him by a woman whom he had cruelly used. The Mahdi's successors had fallen before a conquering English army. When the Mahdists sacked and burned the Governor's Palace, they forgot to destroy the trees and the rose bushes that Gordon with his own hands had planted. And in a new and lovely garden, beside a new Palace from which a brave Scottish soldier rules the Soudan, the roses grow still, fragrant and beautiful. Khartoum is a great town now, peaceful and prosperous. The Gordon College, where the boys of the Soudan are taught all that English schoolboys learn, is the monument that England gave to a hero. A statue of him stands in one of the squares, and to it came a poor old black woman to whom Gordon had been very kind. "God be praised!" she cried, "Gordon Pasha has come again!" For a whole day she sat beside the statue, longing for a look from him who had never before passed her without a friendly nod. "Is he tired? or what is it?" she asked. After many visits, she came home one evening quite happy. "The Pasha has nodded his head to me!" she said. And so, in the hearts of the people of the Soudan, Gordon Pasha still lives. Winds carry across the desert the scent of the roses that he planted, and that drop their fragrant leaves near where his blood was shed. And to the Eastern country for whose sake he died, and to our own land for whose honour his life was given, he has left a memory that must be like the roses--for ever fragrant, and for ever sweet. [1] _Strand Magazine_, May 1892. By kind permission of Messrs. Newnes.