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But food grew scarcer than money. Biscuits were the officers' chief food; dhoora that of the men. Again and again news was sent to him: "The English are coming." Again and again he found that the English army that was to relieve Khartoum had not yet started. "The English are coming!" mocked the dervishes.
He sent some dhoora to her by one of his men, and thought she had been taken safely to one of the huts. All through that wet and stormy night he heard a baby crying. At dawn he found the woman lying in a pool of mud, apparently dead, while men passed and repassed her, and took no notice. Her baby, not quite a year old, sat and wailed in some long grass near her.
The chief culprit, to whom much of this misgovernment was due, was Raouf Bey, whom Gordon found at Gondokoro. This man had been in office for six years, and proved a miserable failure. "Raouf had never conciliated the tribes, never had planted dhoora; and, in fact, only possessed the land he camped upon."
Squatting among the rocks, or lying thickly in the shadow, they peered out at the slow-moving square beneath them, while women with water-skins and bags of dhoora fluttered from group to group, calling out to each other those fighting texts from the Koran which in the hour of battle are maddening as wine to the true believer.
"I took a poor old bag of bones into my camp a month ago, and have been feeding her up, but yesterday she was quietly taken off, and now knows all things. I have sent her some dhoora, which will produce a spark of joy in her black and withered carcass. I told my man to see her into one of the huts, and thought he had done so.
"We have in hand 1,796,000 rounds Remington ammunition; 540 rounds Krupp; 6000 rounds mountain gun ammunition; £140 in specie; £18,000 in paper in treasury! £60,000 in town in paper; 110,000 okes of biscuits; 700 ard ebs of dhoora.... "We are going to send down the Bordeen the day after to-morrow, and with her I shall send this Journal.
Let us drive them away!" But Gordon's mode was widely different. It was based on justice and reason, and in the long-run constituted sound policy. He paid for what he took, and when he used the natives to drag his boats, or to clear tracks through the grassy zone fringing the Nile, he always carefully handed over to them cows, dhoora, or money, as an equivalent for their work.
"Oh, but, all the same, we would sooner have the cow!" Two little boys came smiling up to Gordon one day, and pressed him to buy one of them for a little basketful of dhoora. Gordon bought one, and both boys were delighted. "Do buy me for a little piece of cloth. I should like to be your slave," said one little fellow that Gordon rescued from a gang of slavers.
"I am a fool, I dare say, but I cannot see the sufferings of these people without tears in my eyes.... It is a sad sight to see the poor starved creatures looking so wistfully at one. What can I do? Poor souls! I cannot feed or look after them. I must leave it to God, who will arrange all in kindness. Some of them were so miserably thin. I have sent them some dhoora.
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