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 if he were stone." Those were the men whom, if the choice had lain with him, he would have wished to command. And yet, strangely enough, he persistently underrated the strength of the forces against him. A handful of Englishmen—a handful of Turks—would, he believed, be enough to defeat the Mahdi's hosts and destroy his dominion. He knew very little Arabic, and he depended for his information upon a few ignorant English-speaking subordinates. The Mahdi himself he viewed with ambiguous feelings. He jibed at him as a vulgar impostor; but it is easy to perceive, under his scornful jocularities, the traces of an uneasy respect.

He spent long hours upon the palace roof, gazing northwards; but the veil of mystery and silence was unbroken. In spite of the efforts of Major Kitchener, the officer in command of the Egyptian Intelligence service, hardly any messengers ever reached Khartomn; and when they did, the information they brought was tormentingly scanty. Major Kitchener did not escape the attentions of Gordon's pen. When news came at last, it was terrible: Colonel Stewart and his companions had been killed. The Abbas, after having passed uninjured through the part of the river commanded by the Mahdi's troops, had struck upon a rock; Colonel Stewart had disembarked in safety; and, while he was waiting for camels to convey the detachment across the desert into Egypt, had accepted the hospitality of a local sheikh. Hardly had the Europeans entered the sheikh's hut when they were set upon and murdered; their native followers shared their fate. The treacherous sheikh was an adherent of the Mahdi, and to the Mahdi all Colonel Stewart's papers, filled with information as to the condition of Khartoum, were immediately sent. When the first rumours of the disaster reached Gordon, he pictured, in a flash of intuition, the actual details of the catastrophe. "I feel somehow convinced," he wrote, "they were captured by treachery. &hellip; Stewart was not a bit suspicious (I am made up of it). I can see in imagination the whole scene, the sheikh inviting