Korea has 13 million inhabitants, and in area is just about as large as Great Britain. It is now subject to Japan, and is administered by a Japanese Resident-General, whose headquarters are at Seoul.

MANCHURIA

From Seoul we travelled northwards by rail to Wi-ju, a small place on the left bank of the Yalu River, which forms the boundary between Korea and Manchuria. Opposite, on the right or north bank of the Yalu, stands An-tung, a town with 5000 Japanese and 40,000 Chinese inhabitants. The river had just begun to freeze over, and the ice was still so thin that it could be seen bending in great waves under the weight of our sledge, which a Chinaman pushed along at a great speed with a long iron-shod pole. However, we reached the other side in safety.

From An-tung to Mukden is only 200 miles, but the journey takes two whole days. The little narrow-gauge railway was laid down during the Russo-Japanese War to enable the Japanese to transport provisions and material to the front. The small track goes up and down over the mountains in the most capricious curves and loops, and the train seldom accomplishes the whole journey without a mishap. The Japanese Consul at An-tung, who had made the journey eight times, had been in four railway accidents, and two days previously the train had rolled down a declivity with a general and his staff.

The view through the carriage windows is magnificent. This part of Manchuria is mountainous, but in the depths of the valleys lie farms and fields. Manchus in long blue coats and black vests wind along the road tracks, some on foot, others mounted, while others again drive two-wheeled carts drawn by a horse and a pair of mules. All the watercourses are frozen, but there is no snow. It is sunny, clear, and calm in these valleys, where the thunder of battle has long died away among the mountains.

Half-way to Mukden we halt for the night, and start next morning before daybreak in biting cold. Some Chinese merchants join the train, attended by servants bearing paper lanterns. A small party of Japanese soldiers also is here. They are in thick yellow coats with high collars, bashliks, red shoulder knots, caps with a red border, leather-covered felt boots, and are armed with cutlasses and rifles. They are sinewy and sturdy fellows, neat and clean, and always seem cheerful.

At length the Christmas sun rises glowing red, and the ice flowers vanish from the windows. Here, where the winter cold is so piercing, it is oppressively hot in summer. Our little toy train crosses a river several times on fragile bridges of beams, which seem as though they might at any moment collapse like a house of cards. Small strips of tilled land, creaking ox-carts on the deeply rutted roads, tiny Buddhist oratories, primitive stations with long rows of trucks of fuel, a country house or two—that is all that is to be seen the whole day, until late in the evening we arrive at Mukden.

Manchuria is one of the dependencies of China. The Russians constructed a railway through the country to the fortress of Port Arthur, but, as is well known, the Japanese succeeded in capturing the fortress during the war. By the peace of Portsmouth,[19] concluded in September 1905, the Japanese acquired Port Arthur, the adjacent commercial port of Dalny, with the surrounding district, the southern half of the large island Sakhalin, the supremacy over Korea, together with the South Manchurian Railway—so that the Russians had unknowingly built this railway for the benefit of their enemies.

Round Mukden was fought the greatest battle of the whole Russo-Japanese War. The contest lasted twenty days; more than 850,000 men and 2500 guns were engaged, and 120,000 were left dead on the field. On March 1, 1905, the whole Japanese army began to move, and formed at last a ring round the Russians and Mukden. Thus the Japanese became for the time being the masters of Manchuria, but on the conclusion of peace the country was handed back to China.

The life in the singular streets of Mukden is varied and attractive. The Manchus seem a vigorous and self-confident people; they are taller than the Chinese, but wear Chinese dress with fur caps on their heads. The women seldom appear out of doors; they wear their hair gathered up in a high knot on the crown, and, in contrast to the Chinese women, do not deform their feet. Among the swarming crowds one sees Chinamen, merchants, officers, and soldiers in semi-European fur-lined uniforms, policemen in smart costumes with bright buttons, Japanese, Mongols, and sometimes a European. Tramcars drawn by horses jingle through the broader streets. The houses are fine and solidly built, with carved dragons and painted sculpture, paper lanterns and advertisements, and a confusion of black Chinese characters on vertically hanging signs. At the four points of the compass there are great town gates in the noble Chinese architecture, but outside stretches a bare and dreary plain full of grave mounds.

In Pe-ling, or "Northern Tomb," rests the first Chinese Emperor of the Manchu dynasty, and his son, the great Kang Hi, who reigned over the Middle Kingdom for sixty-one years. Pe-ling consists of several temple-like buildings. The visitor first enters a hall containing an enormous tortoise of stone, which supports a stone tablet inscribed with an epitaph extolling the deceased Emperor. At the farthest extremity of the walled park is the tomb itself, a huge mass of stone with a curved roof. In a pavilion just in front of this building the Emperor of China is wont to perform his devotions when he visits the graves of his fathers. Solemn peace reigns in the park, and under the pine-trees stone elephants, horses, and camels gaze solemnly at one another.

From Mukden Port Arthur is an easy eight hours' railway journey south-westwards; and it is only an hour and a half more to Dalny, which in Japanese hands has grown to a large and important commercial town.

THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY

On December 28, 1908, we stepped into the train in Dalny, and commenced a railway journey which lasted without a break for eleven days.

First we have to go back to Mukden, and then a somewhat shorter journey to the last Japanese station. At the next the stationmaster is a Russian, and Russian guards replace the Japanese. In the afternoon the train draws up at Kharbin on the Sungari River, a tributary of the great Amur. It was towards Kharbin that the Russians slowly retired after their defeat, and on this very platform Prince Ito, the first Japanese Resident-General of Korea, was murdered barely a year later.

At Kharbin we have to wait two hours for the international express, which runs twice a week from Vladivostock to Moscow.

Next morning we stay for two hours at a station in Manchuria, on the boundary between Manchuria and Siberia, between China and Russia, and here our luggage is examined by the Russian customs officers. We put our watches back one and a half hours—that is the difference of time between Kharbin and Irkutsk. We are now travelling from east to west, in the same direction as the sun. If the train went as fast as the sun we should enjoy perpetual day; but the train lags behind, and we only gain an hour in the twenty-four.

The Trans-Siberian railway is the longest in the world, the distance from Dalny to Moscow being 5400 miles. The railway was completed just in time for the war, but as it had only one track, it taxed all the energy of the Russians to transport troops and war material to the battlefields in Manchuria. A second track is now being laid.

By using this railway a traveller can go from London to Shanghai in fourteen days, the route being to Dover, across the Channel to Calais, by rail to Moscow, from Moscow to Vladivostock by the Trans-Siberian railway, and from Vladivostock to Shanghai by sea. The sea voyage from London by the P. and O.—calling at Gibraltar, Marseilles, Port Said, Aden, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong—takes about six weeks, which can be reduced to a month by travelling by train across Europe to Brindisi (at the south-eastern corner of Italy), and thence by steamer to Port Said, where the liner is joined. There is still a third route, across the Atlantic to the United States or Canada, by rail to San Francisco or Vancouver, and then by steamer to Shanghai via Japan. This journey can also be accomplished in a month.



On the last day of the year we pass through the Yablonoi Mountains and enter the region called Transbaikalia, because it lies on the farther, that is, the eastern, side of Lake Baikal. Here dwell Buriats, a Mongolian people—in winter in wooden huts surrounded by enclosures for domestic animals, in summer in tents. When we awoke on the morning of New Year's Day the train was passing along the southern shore of Lake Baikal, and one of the most enchanting scenes in the world was displayed to the eyes of the passengers. On the eastern shore the mountains stood clearly defined in the pure morning air, while the ranges to the west were lit up by the clear sunshine. Here and there the slopes were covered with northern pine and fir-trees. The line runs all the way along the lake shore, sometimes only a couple of yards from the water. This part of the Trans-Siberian railway was the most difficult and costly to make, and the last to be completed. During its construction traffic between the extremities of the line was provided for by great ferry-boats across the lake. The line winds in and out, following all the promontories and bays of the lake, and the train rolls on through narrow galleries where columns of rock are left to support a whole roof of mountain. Sometimes we run along a ledge blasted out of the side of the mountain, above a precipitous slope which falls headlong to the lake. We rush through an endless succession of tunnels, and on emerging from each are surprised by a new view of the mountainous shore.

Baikal, or the "Rich Lake," is the third inland sea of Asia, only the Caspian and the Sea of Aral being larger. Its height above sea-level is 1560 feet; the water is light-green in colour, sweet, and crystal clear, and abounds in fish, among them five species of salmon. There is also a kind of seal, and in general many of the animal forms of Baikal are allied to those of the salt sea. Baikal is the deepest lake in the world, soundings having been taken down to 5618 feet. Steamers cross the lake in various directions, and in winter sleighs are driven over the ice from shore to shore. At the beginning of January the whole of the deep lake is so cooled down that ice begins to form, and the lake is usually frozen over to the middle of April.

We stop an hour at Irkutsk to change trains. Irkutsk is the largest town in Siberia, and has 100,000 inhabitants; it stands on the bank of the river Angara, which flows out of Lake Baikal, and thus forms the outlet of all the rivers and streams which empty themselves into the lake, the largest of which is the Selenga. Although the Angara is five times as large as the Yenisei, it is called a tributary of the latter. The Yenisei rises in Chinese territory, and, running northwards right through Siberia, falls into the Arctic Ocean. It receives a large number of affluents, most of them from the east. Its banks are clothed with forest, and from Minusinsk downwards the river is navigable.

The Lena, the great river which passes through eastern Siberia north-east of Baikal, is not much smaller than the Yenisei. There stands the town of Yakutsk, where the temperature falls in winter down to-80 deg., and rises in summer to 95 deg. North of Yakutsk, on the river Yana, lies Verkhoiansk, the coldest place in the world, the centre of low temperature or pole of cold.

In area Siberia is larger than the whole of Europe, but the population in this immense country is no greater than that of Greater London, i.e. about seven millions. Of these 60 per cent are Russians, 20 per cent Kirghizes, and the remainder is made up of Buriats, Yakuts, Tunguses, Manchus, Samoyeds, Ostiaks, Tatars, Chukchis, etc. No small part of the Russian population consists of convicts transported to Siberia, whose hard lot is to work under strict supervision in the gold mines. Their number is estimated at 150,000. Before the railway was made they had to travel tremendous distances on foot. They marched ten miles a day in rain and sunshine, storm and snow, through the terribly cold and gloomy Siberia. Before and behind them rode Cossacks, who would not let them rest as they dragged their chains through the mud and mire of the road. Frequently women and children followed of their own free will to share their husbands' and fathers' fate during their forced labour in the mines. Now there is a great improvement. The labour, indeed, is just as hard, but the journey out is less trying. The unfortunate people are now forwarded in special prison vans with gratings for windows. They are like travelling cells, and can often be seen on side tracks at a station.

In the neighbourhood of the Lena River dwell Yakuts of the Turkish-Tatar race. They number only 230,000 men, are nominally Christians, and pursue agriculture and trade. East of the Yenisei are the Tunguses, a small people divided into "settled," "horse," "reindeer," and "dog" Tunguses, according to the domestic animal of most importance to their mode of life. In western Siberia, the governments of Tobolsk and Tomsk, live Ostiaks, a small Finnish tribe of 26,000 persons, who are poor fisher folk, hunters and nomads with reindeer. This tribe is rapidly dying out. North of them, in the northern parts of western Siberia and in north-eastern Europe, live the Samoyeds, of Ural-Altai origin, who are still fewer in number than the preceding tribe, and live by reindeer-breeding and fishing.

All these Siberian tribes and many others are Shamanists, and are so called after their priests, Shamans. They believe in an intimate connection between living men and their long-deceased forefathers. They entertain a great dread of the dead, and do everything they can to exorcise and appease their souls, bringing them offerings. All this business is attended to with much black magic and witchcraft by the Shamans, who are also doctors. When any one dies the spirit of the dead must be driven out of the tent, so the Shaman is summoned. He comes decked out in a costly and curious dress, and with religious enthusiasm performs a dance which soon degenerates into a kind of ecstasy. He throws himself about, reels and groans, and is beside himself. And when he has carried on long enough he catches hold of a magic drum, whose soothing sounds calm him and bring him back to his senses. When he has finished his performance the soul is gone!

Over white plains, over hills, and through valleys, the train bears us on farther north-westwards through the government of Irkutsk. At Krasnoiarsk we cross the Yenisei by a fine bridge nearly two-thirds of a mile long. In summer vessels can ascend as far as Minusinsk, in a district of southern Siberia, rich in gold and iron and productive soil. In general Siberia is a rich country. Gold, silver, and copper, lead, graphite, and coal occur, besides many other valuable minerals and stones in the mountains. The country has also good prospects of future development owing to its remarkably excellent agricultural land. Most of this is situated near the railway, and all Siberia is intersected by a net of waterways. From one of the tributaries of the Obi steamers can pass by canal to the Yenisei, and thence on to the Lena. Omsk, the third town of Siberia, with 89,000 inhabitants, is the centre of this water system. More than 6000 miles of river can be navigated by large steamers, and nearly 30,000 by smaller boats. In western Siberia, around Tomsk and Omsk, the agricultural produce increases year by year, and the time will certainly come when these regions will support a population many times as large as at present, and export large quantities of corn in addition. This is the only thing which will make this enormously long railway pay, for it cost somewhere about L11,000,000 to build.

We have passed Tomsk and crossed the Obi by a fine massive bridge of stone and iron. The Obi is the largest river of Asia. In length it is equal to the Yenisei and Blue River, but its drainage basin is larger than that of either of the others. Where the great affluent, the Irtish, runs in from the west, the Obi has a breadth of nearly two miles, and at its mouth, in the Gulf of Obi on the Arctic Ocean, the breadth has increased to twelve miles. The Irtish also receives from the west a large tributary, the Tobol, and at the confluence stands the town of Tobolsk.

One day passes after another, and one night after another rises up blue and cold from the east. We have left every mountain and hill behind us, and the boundless plains, like a frozen sea, lie buried under deep snow. Sometimes we travel for a whole hour without seeing a farm or village. Only occasionally do we see to the north a small patch of taiga, or the Siberian coniferous forest, silent and dark. A clump of birch-trees is a rare sight. The country is open, flat, monotonous, and dead-white as far as the horizon.

Thus we travel on by degrees through Siberia, this immense country bounded on the south by the Altai, Sayan, the Yablonoi and Stanovoi Mountains, and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. Huge areas of northern Siberia are occupied by tundras—moss-grown, marshy steppes, with little animal life, frozen hard as stone in winter and thawed during the short summer into dangerous swamps.

In the frozen ground of northern Siberia, and particularly in old flood plains, have been found complete specimens of the mammoth. This animal is an extinct species of elephant, which, during the diluvial period, was distributed over all northern Asia, Europe, and North America. The mammoth was larger than the elephant of the present day, had tusks as much as 13 feet long, a thick fur suitable for a cold climate, and quite a luxuriant mane on the back of the head and neck. That prehistoric man was a contemporary of the mammoth is proved by ancient rude drawings of this animal.

Larches, pine and spruce, birch and willow, compose the forests of Siberia. The larch manages to exist even round the pole of cold. The Polar bear, the Arctic fox, the glutton, the lemming, the snow-hare, and the reindeer are the animals in the cold north. In the central parts of the country are to be found red deer, roedeer, wild swine, beaver, wolf, and lynx. Far away to the east, on the great Amur River, which is the boundary between the Amur province and Manchuria, as well as in the coast province of Ussuri, on the coast of the Sea of Japan, occur tigers and panthers. The most valuable animals, the furs of which constitute one of the resources of Siberia, are the sable, the ermine, and the grey squirrel. The south-eastern parts of this great country are a transitional region to the steppes of central Asia, and there are to be found antelopes, gazelles, and wild asses.

At length, on January 5, we are up in the Ural Mountains, and the line winds among hills and valleys. Near the station of Zlatoust stands a granite column to mark the boundary between Asia and Europe.

THE VOLGA AND MOSCOW

From the boundary between Europe and Asia the train takes us onwards past Ufa to Samara. The hills of the Urals become lower and the country flattens out again. Snow lies everywhere in a continuous sheet, and peasants are seen on the roads with sledges laden with hay, fuel, or provisions. At Batraki we pass over the Volga by a bridge nearly a mile long. The Volga is the largest river in Europe; it is 2300 miles long, and has its source in the Valdai hills (between St. Petersburg and Moscow) at a height of only 750 feet above sea-level. It flows, therefore, through most of Russia in Europe, traversing twenty governments. The right bank is high and steep, the left flat; and at its mouth in the Caspian Sea it forms a very extensive delta. The Volga is navigable almost throughout its length, and has also forty navigable tributaries. The river is frozen over for about five months in the year, and when the ice breaks up in spring with thundering cracks it often causes great damage along the banks. Crowds of vessels, boats, and rafts pass up and down the sluggish stream, as well as passenger steamers built after the pattern of the American river boats. By the Volga and its canals one can travel by steamer from the Baltic to the Caspian Sea, and from the Caspian Sea by the Volga into the Dwina and out to the White Sea. The Volga is not only an important highway for goods and passengers, but also an inexhaustible fish preserve; indeed the sturgeon and sterlet fisheries constitute its greatest wealth.

When the train has rattled heavily and slowly over the Volga, it proceeds west-north-west into the very heart of holy Russia, and late on January 7, 1909, we roll into the station of Moscow, the old capital of Russia.

Moscow is a type of the old unadulterated Russia, a home of the simple, honest manners and customs of olden days, of faith and honour, of a child-like, pure-hearted belief in the religion of the country, the Catholic Greek Church. In its crooked, winding, badly-paved streets swarm Tatars, Persians, and Caucasians, among Slav citizens and countrymen, those inexterminable Russian peasants who suffer and toil like slaves, look too deep into the vodka[20] cup on Saturday, yet are always contented, good-tempered, and jovial.

The town stands on both sides of the small Moskva River, which falls into the Oka, a tributary of the Volga, and is inhabited by more than a million souls. The Kremlin is the oldest part, and the heart of Moscow (Plate XXIII.). Its walls were erected at the end of the fifteenth century; they are 60 feet high, crenellated, and provided with eighteen towers and five gates. Within this irregular pentagon, a mile and a quarter in circumference, are churches, palaces, museums, and other public buildings. There stands the bell tower of Ivan Veliki, 270 feet high, with five storeys. From the uppermost you can command the whole horizon, with Moscow beneath your feet, the streets diverging in every direction from the Kremlin like the spokes of a wheel, and crossed again by circular roads. Between the streets lie conglomerations of heavy stone houses, and from this sea of buildings emerge bulb-shaped cupolas with green roofs surmounted by golden Greek crosses. Large barracks, hospitals, palaces, and public buildings crop up here and there. Right through the town winds the Moskva in the figure of an S, and the walls of the Kremlin with their towers are reflected in the water.



In the tower of Ivan Veliki hang thirty-three bells of various sizes. At its foot stands the fallen "Tsar" bell, which weighs 197 tons and is 65 feet in circumference. In its fall a piece was broken out of the side, and it is therefore useless as a bell, but it is set up on a platform as an ornament.

Within the walls of the Kremlin is also the Church of the Ascension of the Virgin, which is crowned by a dome 138 feet high, with smaller cupolas at the four corners. Standing in the centre of the Kremlin, this church is the heart not only of Moscow but of all Russia, for here the Tsars are crowned, while the bells of Ivan Veliki peal over the city. The interior of the cathedral presents an indescribable effect. The light from the narrow windows high up is very dim, and is further dulled by gilded banners with pictures of saints and crosses. The temple nave is crammed with religious objects, iconostases and icons, sacred portraits of solid gold with only the hands and faces coloured. Wax candles burn before them, from which the smoke rises up to the vaulted roof, floating about the banners in a greyish-blue mist.

To the orthodox Russians the Kremlin is almost a holy place. They make pilgrimages to its temples and cloisters with the same reverence as Tibetans to the sanctuaries of Buddha. "Moscow is surpassed only by the Kremlin, and the Kremlin only by heaven," they say.

Perhaps no year in the history of Moscow is so famous as the year 1812. Then the city was taken by Napoleon and the Grande Armee. The Russian army abandoned the city, and the citizens left their homes. Napoleon entered on September 14, and next day the city began to burn. The Russians had set fire to it themselves in several places. Three-fourths of the city lay in ashes when the French evacuated Moscow after an occupation of five weeks and the loss of 30,000 men. The remembrance of this dreadful time still survives among the populace.

ST. PETERSBURG AND HOME

From Moscow an express train takes us in eleven hours to the capital of Peter the Great, St. Petersburg, at the mouth of the Neva, in the Gulf of Finland. Here we are in the midst of very different scenes from those in Moscow. Here is no longer genuine uncontaminated Russia, but Western civilisation, which has come and washed away the Slavonic. The churches and monasteries indeed are built in the same style as in Moscow, and the eyes meet with the same types and costumes, and the same heavily laden waggons and carts rumble over the Neva bridges; but one feels and sees only too plainly that one is in Europe.

The Neva is forty miles long and a third of a mile broad, and comes from Lake Ladoga. It is spanned by four fine bridges, always crowded with carriages and foot passengers, and in summer numerous small steamboats ply up and down. In winter thick ice lies on the river during four months.

St. Petersburg has nearly two million inhabitants, which is rather more than a hundredth part of the population of the whole Russian empire. The appearance of the town shows that it is new, for the streets are straight and broad. The climate is very raw, damp, and disagreeable, and it rains or snows on 200 days in the year.

A walk through the streets of St. Petersburg shows the traveller much that is strange. Tiny chapels are found everywhere—in the middle of a bridge or at a street corner. They contain only a picture of a saint with candles burning before it. Many persons stop as they pass by, uncover their heads, fall on their knees, cross themselves and murmur a prayer, and then vanish among the crowd in the streets. It is also noticeable that this city is full of uniforms. Not only do the soldiers of the large garrison wear uniforms, but civil officials, schoolboys, students, and many others are dressed in special costumes with bright buttons of brass or silver. But what especially attracts the stranger's attention are the vehicles. Persons of the upper classes drive in open sleighs and cover themselves with bearskins lined with blue, and are drawn by tall, dark, handsome trotters. Sometimes also a troika, or team of three horses abreast, is seen, one of the horses in the middle under the arch which keeps the shafts apart, while the other two, on either side, go at a gallop. The hackney sleighs are also common, so small that two persons can hardly find room to sit, and as there is no support or guard of any kind, they must cling to each other's waists in order not to be thrown off at sharp corners. These small sledges have no fixed stands, but they are drawn up in long rows outside hotels, banks, theatres, railway stations, and other much-frequented places, and may be found singly almost anywhere in the streets. The drivers are always merry and cheerful, and keep up a running conversation with their passenger or their horse, which they call "my little dove." All drive at the same reckless pace, as if they were running races through the streets.

St. Petersburg is rich in art collections and museums, picture-galleries, churches, and fine palaces. The finest building in the city, however, is the Isaac Cathedral, with its high gilded dome, surrounded by four similar but smaller gilded cupolas. The cross at the top is 330 feet above the ground, and the great dome is the first thing in St. Petersburg to be seen on coming by steamer from the Gulf of Finland. When the Cathedral was built, it cost more than two and three-quarter million pounds. It was finished fifty years ago, but has never been in really sound condition, and is always undergoing extensive repairs.

* * * * *

The last stage of our journey is now at hand. One evening we drive in a troika, with much ringing of sleigh bells, to the station of the Finland Railway, whence the train takes us through Viborg to Abo, the old capital of Finland. Here a steamer is waiting to take us over to Stockholm, which was the starting-point of our long journey.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] A seaport of New Hampshire, U.S.A.

[20] A Russian alcoholic liquor usually made from rye.



PART II



I

STOCKHOLM TO EGYPT

TO LONDON AND PARIS

Again we set out from Stockholm in the evening by train, and the next morning we reach Malmoe, a port on the west coast of Sweden, not many miles north of Trelleborg, from which we started on our journey eastwards across Asia. From Malmoe a steamer soon takes us across the narrow sound to Copenhagen, the beautiful capital of Denmark, and then we take the train across the large, rich, and fertile island of Zealand. There farms are crowded close together among the tilled fields; there thriving cattle graze on the meadows, yielding Denmark a superfluity of milk and butter; there the productive soil spreads everywhere, leaving no room for unprofitable sandy downs and heaths, as on the west coast of Jutland. The Danes are a small people, but they make a brave struggle for existence. Their country is one of the smallest in Europe, but the first in utilising all its possibilities of opening profitable commerce with foreign lands. Much larger are its possessions in the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, and Iceland, but there the population is very scanty and the real masters of the islands are cold and ice.

At Korsoer, on the Great Belt, we again go on board a steamer which in a few hours takes us between Langeland and Laaland to Kiel, the principal naval port of Germany. Here we are on soil which was formerly Danish, for it was only during her last unfortunate war that Denmark lost the two duchies of Schleswig and Holstein.

We travel by train from Kiel through fertile Holstein southwards to the free Hansa town of Hamburg on the Elbe, the greatest commercial emporium on the mainland of Europe, and, after London and New York, the third in the world.

From Hamburg the train goes on through Hanover and Westphalia, across the majestic Rhine, through South Holland, not far north of the Belgian frontier, to the port of Flushing, which is situated on one of the islands in the delta of the Scheldt. Here another steamer is ready for us, and after a passage of a few hours we glide into the broad trumpet-shaped mouth of the Thames and land at Queenborough. There again we take a train which carries us through the thickly-peopled, well-cultivated country of Kent into the heart of London, the greatest city of the world.



After a few days' stay in London we go on to Paris—by train to Dover, across the Channel at its narrowest part in a swift turbine steamer, and again by rail from Calais to Paris, through one of the most fruitful districts of France, vying with the valleys of the Rhone and Garonne in fertility. In a little over seven hours after leaving London we arrive at the great city (Plate XXIV.) where the Seine, crossed by thirty bridges, describes a bend, afterwards continuing in the most capricious meanderings to Rouen and Havre.



The first thing the stranger notices in Paris is the boulevards—broad, handsome streets, with alleys of leafy trees between rows of large palatial houses, theatres, cafes, and shops. The oldest, the boulevards proper, were formerly the fortifications of the town with towers and walls; "boulevard" is, then, the same word as the English "bulwark." Louis XIII., who enlarged and beautified Paris, had these bulwarks pulled down, and the first boulevards laid out on their site. They are situated on the north side of the Seine, and form a continuous line under different names, Madeleine, des Capuchines, des Italiens, and Montmartre. This line of boulevards is one of the sights of Paris. In later times boulevards were also laid out where there had been no fortifications before. Under Louis XIV. and his successors Paris grew and increased in splendour and greatness; then it was the scene of the great Revolution and its horrors; then under Napoleon it became the heart of the mightiest empire of that time. With the fall of Napoleon Paris was twice entered by the forces of the Allies, and in 1871 it was besieged and captured by the Prussians. Since then Paris has been spared from disastrous misfortunes, and is, as it has been for many centuries, the gayest and most animated city in Europe.

Let us take a rapid walk through the town, starting at the Place de la Bastille, on the north bank of the Seine, where formerly stood the fortress and prison of the Bastille. This prison was stormed and destroyed at the commencement of the Great Revolution, on July 14, 1789, and since that year July 14 has been the chief national festival-day. In the middle of the square stands the July Column, and from its summit a wonderful view of Paris can be obtained. We now follow the Rue de Rivoli, the largest and handsomest street in Paris. On the left hand is the Hotel de Ville, a fine public building, where the city authorities meet, where brilliant entertainments are given, and where the galleries are adorned with canvases of famous masters.

Farther along, on the same side, is the largest public building of the city, the palace of the Louvre. Like the British Museum, it would require months and years to see properly. Here are stored colossal collections, not only of objects of art and relics from great ancient kingdoms in Asia and Europe, but also of the finest works of European sculptors and painters of all periods.

We walk on north-westwards through the luxuriant gardens of the Tuileries, and stop a moment in the Place de la Concorde to enjoy the charming views presented on all sides—the river with its quays and bridges, the parks and avenues, the huge buildings decorated with exquisite taste, the wide, open spaces adorned with glorious monuments, and the never-ending coming and going of pleasure-loving Parisians and Parisian ladies in costumes of the latest fashion.

From the Place de la Concorde we direct our steps to the Champs Elysees, a magnificent park with a broad carriageway along which the fashionable world rides, walks, or drives in smart carriages and motor cars. At the northern side of the park lives the President of the Republic in the palace of the Elysees.

If we now follow the double row of broad avenues northwards we come to the Place de l'Etoile, a "circus" where twelve avenues of large streets meet. One of them, a prolongation of the Champs Elysees, is named after the grand army of Napoleon and leads to the extensive Bois de Boulogne. In the middle of the Place de l'Etoile is erected a stately triumphal arch, 160 feet high, in memory of Napoleon's victories.

From here we follow a busy street as far as the bridge of Jena, and on the opposite bank of the Seine rises the Eiffel Tower, dominating Paris with its immense pillar 1000 feet high. The Eiffel Tower is the highest structure ever reared by human hands, twice as high as the cathedral of Cologne and the tallest of the Egyptian pyramids. At the first platform we are more than 330 feet above the vast city, but the hills outside Paris close in the horizon. When the cage rises up to the third platform we are at a height of 864 feet above the ground, and see below us the Seine with its many bridges and the city with its innumerable streets and its 140 squares. A staircase leads up to the highest balcony, and at the very top a beacon is lighted at night visible 50 miles away. From the parapet we hardly dare allow our eyes to look down the perpendicular tower to the four sloping iron piers at its base, especially when it blows hard and the whole tower perceptibly swings. There is no need to go up in a balloon to obtain a bird's-eye view of Paris; from the top of the Eiffel Tower we have the town spread out before us like a map.

NAPOLEON'S TOMB

When we have safely descended from the giddy height, we make our way across the Champ de Mars to the Hotel des Invalides. Formerly several thousand pensioners from the great French armies found a refuge in this huge building, but now it is used as a museum for military historic relics.



We pass in under the glittering gilded dome, visible all over the city, and find ourselves in a round hall, the centre of which is occupied by a crypt, likewise round and several feet deep and open above. On the floor in mosaic letters are glorious names, Rivoli, Pyramids, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Wagram, and Moscow. Twelve marble statues, representing as many victories, and sixty captured colours keep guard round the great sarcophagus of red porphyry from Finland which contains the remains of Napoleon (Plate XXV.).

No one speaks in here. The deepest silence surrounds the ashes of the man who in his lifetime filled the world with the roar of his cannon and the thunder of his legions, and who within the space of a few years completely changed the map of Europe. Pale and subdued, the light falls over the crypt where the red porphyry speaks of irresistible power, and the white goddesses of victory are illumined as it were with a reflection of the years of glory.

Unconsciously we listen for an echo of the clash of arms and the words of command. We seem to see a blue-eyed boy playing at his mother's knee at Ajaccio in Corsica; we seem to hear a youthful revolutionist, burning with enthusiasm, making fiery speeches at secret clubs in Paris. Pale and solemn, the shade of the twenty-six-year-old general floats before our mind's eye as he returns from a series of victories in northern Italy, where he rushed like a storm over the plains of Lombardy, made a triumphal entry into Milan, and for ever removed the ancient republic of Venice from the list of independent States.

We recall the campaign of the French army against Egypt and the Holy Land. Napoleon takes his fleet out from the harbour of Toulon, escapes Nelson's ships of the line and frigates, seizes Malta, sails to the north of Crete and west of Cyprus, and lands 40,000 men at Alexandria. The soldiers languish in the desert sands on the way to Cairo, they approach the Nile to give battle to the Egyptian army, and at the foot of the pyramids the East is defeated by the West. The march is continued eastwards to Syria. Five centuries have passed since the crusaders attempted to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of unbelievers. Now again the weapons of Western lands clash in the valley of the Jordan and at the foot of Mount Tabor, and now the French General obtains a victory over the Turks outside Nazareth. In the meantime, however, Nelson has annihilated his fleet. The flower of the republican army is doomed to perish, and Napoleon's dream of an oriental dominion has vanished with the smoke of the last camp fire. He leaves Egypt with two frigates, sails along the coasts of Tripoli and Tunis, and passes at night with extinguished lights through the channel between Africa and Sicily.

Again our eyes turn to the dim light under the cupola of the Invalides, and the marble columns and statues look white as snow. Then our thoughts wander off to the Alps, the Great St. Bernard, the St. Gotthard, Mont Cenis, and the Simplon, where the First Consul, like Hannibal before him, with four army corps bids defiance to the loftiest mountains of Europe. We seem to see the soldiers dragging the cannon through the frozen drifts and collecting together again on the Italian side. At Marengo, south of the Po, a new victory is added to the French laurels, and the most powerful man in France has the fate of Europe in his hands.

Then various episodes of his marvellous career pass before us. Our eyes fall on the name Austerlitz down in the mosaic of the crypt. The Emperor of France has marched into Moravia and drawn up his legions under the golden eagles. A distant echo seems to sound round the crypt—it is Napoleon's cavalry riding down the Russian guards, it is the "grand army" annihilating the Austrian and Russian forces, it is the French artillery pounding the ice on the lake and drowning the fugitives, their guns and horses.

A murmur passes through the crypt, an echo from the battle of Jena, where Prussia was crushed, its territory devastated from the Elbe to the Oder, and its fortresses surrendered, Erfurt, Magdeburg, Stettin, Luebeck, while the victor made his entry into Frederick the Great's capital, Berlin. We hear the tread of the columns and the tramp of horses through the mud on the roads in Poland, and we see the bloody battlefields of Pultusk, east of the Vistula, and Eylau in West Prussia, where heaps of bodies lie scattered over the deep snow. We see Napoleon on his white horse after the battle of Friedland in East Prussia, where the Russians were defeated. The guards and hussars rode through them with drawn swords. Their enthusiastic cry of "Long live the Emperor" still vibrates under the standards round the sarcophagus; and above the shouts of victory the beat of horse hoofs is heard on the roads of Europe; it is the courier between the headquarters of the army and Paris.

The conqueror marches to Vienna, and threatens to crush Austria. He gains the bloody battle of Wagram, north-east of Vienna, he wipes out states and makes them dependencies of France and their rulers his obedient vassals, and he gives away royal crowns to his relations and generals. His dominion extends from Danzig to Cadiz, from the mouth of the Elbe to the Tiber; he has risen to a height of power and glory never attained since the golden age of Rome.

Bayonets and sabres, cuirasses and helmets flash in the sunlight as the invincible army camps with band and music and song above the Niemen. Half a million of soldiers are on their way to the old capital of Russia, Moscow. The Russian roads from Vilna to Vitebsk are full of endless lines of troops, squadrons of cavalry in close formation, and enormous baggage trains. The Russians know that their freedom is in danger; they burn their own towns and villages, devastate their own provinces, and retire little by little, as they did a hundred years earlier when Charles XII. invaded Russia. At length there is a battle at Moscow, and the French army enters the town. We see in imagination the September nights lighted up far and wide by a blazing flame. Moscow is on fire. On the terrace of the Kremlin stands a little man in a grey military coat and a black cocked hat, watching the flame. Within a week the old holy city of the Muscovites lies in ashes.

The early twilight of winter falls over Paris, and we see the shadows deepen round Napoleon's tomb. We fancy we see among them human figures fighting against hunger, cold, and weariness. The time of misfortune is come. The great army is retreating, the roads are lined with corpses and fragments. The cannon are left in the snow. The soldiers fall in regiments like a ripe crop. Packs of wolves follow in their tracks: they are contented with the dead, but the Cossack squadrons cut down the living. At the bridge over the Beresina, a tributary of the Dnieper, 30,000 men are drowned and perish. All discipline is relaxed. The soldiers throw away their guns and knapsacks. Clothed in furs and with a birchen staff in his hand, the defeated emperor marches like a simple soldier in the front. Thanks to the severe climate of their country and its great extent, and thanks also to their own cautious conduct of the war, the Russians practically annihilated Napoleon's army.

The darkness deepens. At Leipzig Russians, Austrians, Prussians, and Swedes oppose Napoleon. There his proud empire falls to pieces, even Paris is captured, and he loses his crown. He is carried a prisoner down the Rhone valley through Lyons, and shipped off to the island of Elba.

Once more he fills the world with tumult. With a brig and seven small vessels he sails back to the coast of France. He has a force of only 1100 men, but in his hands it is sufficient to reconquer France. He marches over the western offshoots of the Alps. At Grenoble his force has increased to 7000 men. In Lyons he is saluted as Emperor, and Paris opens its gates. He is ready to stake everything on a single throw. In Belgium is to be the decisive battle. Hostile armies gather round the frontiers of France, for Europe is tired of continual war. At Waterloo Napoleon fights his last battle, and his fate is sealed for ever.

He leaves Paris for the last time. At the port of Rochefort, between the mouths of the Loire and the Garonne, he goes on board an English frigate. After seventy days' sail he is landed on the small basaltic island of St. Helena in the southern Atlantic, where he is doomed to pass the last six years of his eventful life. Here also his grave is digged under the willows in the valley.

Nineteen years after Napoleon's death the simple grave under the willows was uncovered, the coffins of wood, lead, and sheet-iron were opened in the presence of several who had shared his long imprisonment, the remains were taken on board a French frigate amid the roar of guns and flags waving half-mast high, the coffin was landed at Cherbourg in Normandy, and the conqueror of Europe once more made his entry into Paris with military pomp and ceremony, in which all France took part. Drawn by sixteen horses in funereal trappings and followed by veterans of Napoleon's campaigns, the hearse, adorned with imperial splendour, was escorted by soldiers under the triumphal arch of the Place de l'Etoile and through the Champs Elysees to the Hotel des Invalides, where the coffin was deposited in the Finnish sarcophagus. Thus was fulfilled the last wish of the conqueror of the world: "I desire that my remains may rest on the banks of the Seine."

PARIS TO ROME

The stranger leaves Paris with regret, and is consoled only by the thought that he is on his way to sunny Italy. The train carries him eastwards, and he looks through the window at the hills and plains of Champagne, the home of sparkling wine. Around him spread tilled fields, villages, and farmhouses. Where the soil is not suitable for vines, wheat, or beet, it provides pasture for large flocks. Men are seen at work everywhere, and the traveller realises that France is so prosperous because all its small proprietors, peasants, and townspeople are so industrious and so thrifty. Now the frontier is reached. The great fortress of Belfort is the last French town passed, and a little later we are in Alsace.

Another frontier is crossed, that between Germany and Switzerland, and the train halts at the fine town of Bale, traversed by the mighty Rhine. Coming from the Lake of Constance, the clear waters of the river glide under the bridges of Bale, and turn at right angles northwards between the Vosges and the Black Forest.

From Bale we go on south-westwards to Geneva. Along a narrow valley the railway follows the river Birs, which falls into the Rhine, and winds in curves along the mountain flanks, sometimes high above the foot of the valley, and sometimes by the river's bank. It is towards the end of January, and snow has been falling for several days on end. All the country is quite white, and the small villages in the valley are almost hidden.

Now we come to three lakes in a row, the Lake of Bienne, the Lake of Neuchatel, and the great Lake of Geneva, which we reach at the town of Lausanne. Here the snow has ceased to fall, and the beautiful Alps of Savoy are visible to the south. The sun is hidden behind clouds, but its rays are reflected by the clear mirror of the lake. This view is one of the finest in the world, and our eyes are glued to the carriage window as the train follows the shore of Geneva.

In outline the lake is like a dolphin just about to dive. At the dolphin's snout lies Geneva, and here the river Rhone flows out of the lake to run to Lyons and debouch into the Mediterranean immediately to the west of the great port of Marseilles.

Geneva is one of the finest, cleanest, and most charming towns in the world. Between its northern and southern halves the water of the lake, deep blue and clear as crystal, is drawn off into the Rhone as into a funnel. There the current is strong, and the river is divided into two by a long island.

The finest sight, however, is the view south-eastwards when the weather is clear. There stand the mighty summits and crests of the Alps of Savoy, now covered with snow, and glittering in white, light blue, and steely grey tints. There also Mont Blanc is enthroned above the other mountains, nay, above all Europe, awesome and grand, the crown of the Alps, the frontier pillar between Switzerland, France, and Italy.

From Geneva we go eastwards along the northern shore of the lake. The air is hazy, and the Alps of Savoy look like a light veil beneath the sun. In this light the water is of a bright green like malachite. Beyond Lausanne the mist disappears, and the Alps again appear dazzling white and steep as pyramids and towers. Towns, villages, and villas cast reflections of their white or coloured house-fronts and their light balconies on the lake. The shore is lined by a row of hotels surrounded by gardens and promenades. Travellers come hither from all countries in summer to feast their eyes on the Alps and strengthen their lungs by inhaling the fresh air.

We leave the lake and mount gently up the Rhone valley between wild rocks. It becomes narrower as we ascend. The Rhone, a tumultuous stream, roars in its bed, now quite insignificant compared to the majestic river at Geneva. In the valley tilled fields are laid out, dark green spruces peep out of the snow on the slopes, while above all the snow-white summits of the Alps are enthroned.

A few minutes beyond Brieg the train rushes at full speed straight into the mountain. The electric lamps are lighted and all the windows closed. The tunnel is filled with smoke, and a continuous reverberation dins our ears. The Simplon tunnel is the longest in the world, being 12-1/2 miles long. It is only a few years since it was completed. Work was begun from both sides of the mountain at the same time, and when the excavations met in the middle and a blasting charge burst the last sheet of rock, it was found that the calculations had not been an inch out. After fully twenty minutes it begins to grow light, and when the train rolls out of the tunnel we are on Italian ground.

The train now descends a lovely valley to the shore of Lago Maggiore. Framed in steep mountains, the dark blue lake contains a small group of islands, full of white houses, palaces, and gardens. One of these is well known by the name of Isola Bella, or the Beautiful Island.

Night hides from our eyes the plains of Lombardy, Milan with its famous cathedral, the bridge over the Po, and then a number of famous old towns, including Bologna with its university about fifteen hundred years old.

Next morning, however, we see to the south-west something like a flaming beacon. It is the gilded dome of St. Peter's Church, which, caught by the rays of the rising sun, shines like a fire above the eternal city.

THE ETERNAL CITY

The King of Italy has 35 million subjects, but in Rome lives another mighty prince, the Pope, though his kingdom is not of this world. His throne is the chair of St. Peter, his arms the triple tiara and the crossed keys which open and close the gates of the kingdom of heaven. He has 270 million subjects, the Roman Catholics. For political reasons he is a voluntary prisoner in the Vatican, a collection of great palaces containing more than 10,000 halls and apartments. There also are installed museums, libraries, and collections of manuscripts of vast extent and value. The Vatican museum of sculpture is the richest in the world. In the Sistine Chapel, a sanctuary 450 years old, Michael Angelo adorned the roof with great pictures of the creation of the world and man, of the Fall and the Flood, and at the end wall an immense picture of the Last Judgment. To the west of the palace stands the Pope's gardens and park, and to the south the Church of St. Peter, the largest temple in Christendom. The whole forms a small town of itself; and this town is one of the greatest in the world, a seat of art and learning, and, above all, the focus of a great religion. For from here the Pope sends forth his bulls of excommunication against heretics and sinners, and here he watches over his flock, the Catholics, in accordance with the Saviour's thrice repeated injunction to Peter: "Feed my sheep."

A drive through Rome is intensely interesting. The streets are mostly narrow and crooked, and we are always turning corners, driving across small triangular open places and in lanes where it is ticklish work to pass a vehicle coming in the opposite direction. Yet no boulevards, no great streets in the world, can rival in beauty the streets of Rome. They are skirted by old grey palaces built thousands of years ago rather than centuries, decorated with the most splendid window frames, friezes, and colonnades. Every portal is a work of art; round every corner comes a new surprise, a fountain with sea-horses and deities, a mediaeval well, a moss-grown ruin of Imperial times, or a church with a tower whence bells have rung for centuries over Rome.

And what a commotion there is in all these narrow streets! Here comes a peasant driving his asses weighed down with baskets of melons and grapes. There a boy draws a handcart piled up with apricots, oranges, and nuts. Here we see men and women from the Campagna outside Rome, clad in their national costume, in which dirty white and red predominate, the men with black slouched hats, the women with white kerchiefs over their hair. They are of dark complexion, but on the cheeks of the younger ones the roses appear through the bronze. The patricians, the noble Romans who roll by lazily in fine carriages, are much fairer, and indeed the ladies are often as pale as if they had just left the cloister or were ready for the bier. Boys run begging after the carriage, and poor mothers with small infants in their arms beseech only a small coin. There are many in Rome who live from hand to mouth. But all are cheerful, all are comely.

Now we reach the bridge of St. Angelo over the muddy Tiber, and before us stands the massive round tower of the castle of St. Angelo, which the Emperor Hadrian built 1800 years ago as a mausoleum for himself. On the left is the piazza of St. Peter, which, with its surrounding buildings, its curved arcades, St. Peter's Church and the Vatican, is one of the grandest in the world. Between its constantly playing fountains has stood for 300 years an obelisk which the Emperor Caligula brought from Egypt to adorn Rome. It witnessed wonderful events long before the time of Moses. At its foot the children of Israel sang the melodies of their country during their servitude. It was a decoration of Nero's circus, and saw thousands of Christian martyrs torn to pieces by Gallic hounds and African lions; and still it lifts itself 80 feet into the air in a single block, untouched by time and the strife of men.

At the north side of the piazza is the gate of the Vatican, where the Swiss Guards keep watch in antique red and yellow uniforms. Before us are the great steps of St. Peter's Church. We enter the grand portico and pass through one of the bronze doors into the church. All the dimensions are so immensely great that we stop in astonishment. Now our eyes lose themselves in sky-high vaulting, glittering with colour, and now we admire the columns and their capitals, pictures in mosaic or monuments in marble. Rome was not built in a day, says the proverb, and St. Peter's Church alone was the work of 120 years and twenty Popes. Italy's foremost artists, including Raphael and Michael Angelo, put the best of their energies into the building of this temple, where is the tomb of the Apostle Peter. The great church contains a bronze statue of the Apostle Peter in a sitting position, and the right foot is worn and polished by the kisses of the faithful. High above in the vaulting over his head is to be seen the following inscription in Latin:—"Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven."

Paul has also a worthy memorial church in Rome, St. Paul's, which stands outside the walls. On the way thither we pass a small chapel where, it is said, Peter and Paul took leave of each other before they went to suffer martyrdom. On the facade the final words are inscribed. Paul said: "Peace be with you, thou foundation of the church and shepherd of Christ's lambs." And Peter: "Go forth in peace, thou preacher of the gospel, righteous guide to salvation." Paul's tomb is under the high altar of St. Paul's Church. In the interior of the church we notice portraits in mosaic of all the Popes from St. Peter to Leo XIII.

Rome is inexhaustible. It has grown up during 2600 years, and each age has built on the ruins of the preceding. The city is piled up in strata like a geological deposit. What lies hidden at the bottom is scarcely known at all; that is from the time of the early kings of Rome. Then follows the city of the Republic, and upon it the Rome of the Emperors, the cosmopolitan city, where the Caesars from their palace on the Palatine stretched their sceptre over all the known world from foggy Britain and the dark forests of Germany to the burning deserts of Africa, from the mountains of Spain to Galilee and Judaea. Many stately remains of this time of greatness are still preserved among the modern streets and houses. Vandals, Goths, and other barbarians have sacked Rome, monsters of the Imperial house have devastated the city to wipe out the remembrance of their predecessors and glorify themselves; but if Rome was not built in a day, so two thousand years have not sufficed to blot out its magnificence.

Then follow new strata, the Christian age, the Middle Ages, and modern times, with their innumerable churches, monasteries, and massive solemn palaces. Christianity built on the ruins of paganism. Ancient and modern times are inextricably mixed. Up there on the Capitoline hill rides a Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, in bronze. Look round, and there on the farther bank of the Tiber another horseman looks over the eternal city, the brave champion of young Italy's liberty, Garibaldi. You ride through a street lined with grand shops in new buildings, and in a couple of minutes you are at the Forum Romanum, the Roman market-place, the heart of the world empire, the square for markets, popular assemblies, and judicial courts, a marble hall in the open air. Over its flags, victors, accompanied by their comrades in arms and their prisoners, marched up to the Capitol to sacrifice in the temple of Jupiter, where now only a few pillars and ruins remain of all the splendour Julius Caesar and Augustus lavished upon it.

At one time we are like pilgrims in the fine Church of St. Peter; at another we are strolling under the triumphal arch of Titus, erected in remembrance of the destruction of Jerusalem in the year A.D. 70.

The largest and grandest ruin in Rome is the Colosseum (Plate XXVI.), an amphitheatre which was built by the two Emperors, Vespasian and Titus, and which was finished eighty years after the birth of Christ. The outside walls are nearly 160 feet high. The tiers of benches, which could accommodate 85,000 spectators, were divided into four blocks, of which the outermost and highest was set apart for freedmen and slaves with their women. The tickets were of ivory, and indicated the different places so clearly that every one could easily find his way in the huge passages, colonnades, and staircases. The benches were covered with marble, and many statues of the same material adorned the upper walls of the amphitheatre. The spectacles were usually held in the daytime, and to abate the heat of the sun immense silken awnings were stretched over the arena and the auditorium. When the theatre was full, it presented a scene of dazzling splendour. In the best places sat senators in purple-bordered togas, the priests of the various temples, the Vestal virgins in black veils, warriors in gold-embroidered uniforms. There sat Roman citizens in white or coloured togas, bareheaded, beardless, and closely cropped, eagerly talking in a language as euphonious as French and Italian. All strangers who were staying in Rome were there, ambassadors from all the known countries of the world, statesmen, merchants, and travellers from Germany and Gaul, from Syria, Greece, and Egypt.

A circus or theatre of our day is a toy compared to the Colosseum. The old Romans were masters in the arrangement of spectacles to satisfy the rude cravings of the masses. Woods and rocks were set up, in which bloody contests were fought, and where gladiators hunted lions and tigers with spears. The immense show-ground could be quickly filled with water, and on the artificial lake deadly sea battles were fought; and the bodies of the slain and drowned lying on the bottom were invisible when the water was dyed red with blood. The arena could be drained at once by ingenious channels, slaves dragged out the corpses through the gate of the Goddess of Death, and the theatre was made ready for the night performance. Then the arena was lighted up with huge torches and fires, and troops of Christians were crucified in long rows or thrown to the lions and bears. When a Roman emperor celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome, two thousand gladiators appeared in the Colosseum, thirty-two elephants, and numbers of wild animals.



Not far from the Colosseum begins one of the oldest and most famous roads ever trodden by the foot of man—the Appian Way. Here emperors and generals marched into Rome after successful wars; here their remains were carried out to be burned on pyres and deposited in urns in mausoleums and tombs. Here the Christians came out at night in silent ranks to consign the remains of their co-religionists, torn to pieces in the arena, to the catacombs of underground Rome. Here also St. Paul made his entry into Rome, escorted by troops of Christians, as recorded in the last chapter of the Acts of the Apostles; and to-day we find on this road a small chapel which is called "Whither goest thou?" (Quo vadis?) at the point in the road where Peter saw his vision.

POMPEII

From Rome we go on to Naples, where to the east the regular volcanic cone of Vesuvius rears itself like a fire-breathing dragon over the bay, and where towns, villages, and white villas stand as thick on the shore as beads on a rosary. Our time is short; we drive rapidly through the lava-paved streets of Naples, and cannot feast our eyes long enough with the sight of these fine dark men in their motley dirty garments, and cannot hear enough of their melodious songs in honour of delightful Naples. Their warm affection for the famous city is quite natural, and one of their sayings, "See Naples and die," implies that life is worthless to any one who has not been there.

During our wanderings we come to the National Museum, and there we are lost to everything outside. There we forget the bustling life of the streets, the blue bay and the green gardens; for here we are in the presence of antiquity—an immense collection of artistic objects, statues, and paintings from Pompeii.



In the sixth century B.C. Pompeii was founded at the southern foot of Vesuvius, not far from the shore of the bay. About eighty years before our era Pompeii came under the rule of Rome, and during the succeeding 150 years it was changed into a genuine Roman town in all respects—in style of building, language, trade, and manner of life. A wall with towers enclosed this collection of streets and houses, and at night the eight town gates were closed and shut in 20,000 inhabitants. In its principal square, a place of popular assemblies and festivals, stood the Temple of Jupiter among porticoes, arcades, and rows of marble statues. In another square theatres were erected, and there also stood an old Greek temple.

Many rich and eminent Romans loved Pompeii, and built costly villas in the town or its beautiful environs. One of these was the famous orator and author, Cicero, whose villa was situated near the north-eastern town gate. Again and again he went to Pompeii to rest after the noise and tumult of Rome, and the last time he is certainly known to have sojourned there was in the year 44 B.C., shortly after the murder of the great Caesar.

From the vicinity of Cicero's villa ran north-west the Street of Tombs, bordered with innumerable monuments like the Appian Way outside Rome. Some were quite simple, others resembled costly altars and temples, and all contained urns with the bones and ashes of the dead.

Some streets were lined entirely with shops and stores. Most of the streets were straight and regular, some broad, others quite small; they were paved with flags of lava and had raised footpaths. Here and there stones were laid in a row across the street, whereon foot passengers could cross over dryshod after the heavy torrential rains, which then, as now, repeatedly converted these lanes into rivers and canals.

Pompeii had several bath-houses, luxuriously and comfortably furnished, built of stone, dark and cool, and very attractive during the warm, sultry summer. In the apodyterium the visitor took off his clothes, and then repaired to the various rooms for warm air, warm baths, and cold baths. The walls in the frigidarium were decorated with paintings representing shady groves and dark forests; the vaulted roof was painted blue and strewn with stars, and through a small round opening the sunlight poured in. The basin itself was therefore like a small forest pool under the open sky. The bather was thoroughly scraped and shampooed by the attendants, and last of all smeared with odorous oils.

The houses of wealthy citizens were decorated with exquisite taste and artistic skill. Towards the streets the houses showed little besides bare plain walls, for the old Romans did not like the private sanctity of their homes to be disturbed at all by the noise of the streets and the inquisitiveness of people on the public roads. So it is still, if not in Italy and Greece, at any rate over all the Asiatic East. Pomp and state were only displayed in the interior. There were seen statues and busts, flourishing flower-beds under open colonnades, and in the midst of the principal apartment, called the atrium, was a marble basin sunk in the mosaic pavement, and through a quadrangular opening in the roof above the sun and moon looked in and the rain often mingled its drops with the jets of the constantly playing fountain. When the master of the house gave an entertainment, tables were carried in by slaves, and the guests took their luxurious meal lying on long couches. They ate, and drank, and jested, listening from time to time to the tones of flutes, harps, and cymbals, and watched the lithe movements of dancers with eyes dull and heavy with wine.

Happy days were spent in Pompeii in undisturbed peacefulness. People enjoyed the treasures of the forests, gardens, and sea, transacted their business or the duties of their posts, and assembled for discussion in the Forum, where the columns cast cool shadows over the stone flags. No one thought of Vesuvius. The volcano was supposed to have become for ever extinct ages ago. On the ancient lava-streams old trees grew, the most luscious grapes ripened on the flanks of the mountain, and from their descendants is pressed out at the present day a wine called Lachryma Christi. A legend relates that when the Saviour once went up Vesuvius and stood in mute astonishment at the beautiful landscape surrounding the Bay of Naples, He also wept from grief over this home of sin and vanity; and where His tears moistened the ground there grew up a tendril which has not its like on earth.

The year before the burning of Rome, Pompeii was devastated by a fearful earthquake. The inhabitants soon took heart again, however, and built up their town better and more beautiful than ever. Sixteen years passed, and then the blow came, the most crushing and annihilating blow that ever befell any town since Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by fire from heaven.

The elder Pliny, who left to the world an immortal work, was then in command of a Roman fleet anchored in the Bay of Naples, and lived with his family in a place not far from Pompeii. His adopted son, the younger Pliny, a youth of eighteen, spirited, quick, and talented, was also with him. Vesuvius broke into eruption on August 24 in the year 79, and in a few hours Pompeii and two other towns were buried under a downpour of pumice and ashes, and streams of lava and mud. Among the victims was the elder Pliny.



Several years afterwards, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote to the younger Pliny and asked him for information about the manner of his uncle's death. The two letters containing answers to this question are still extant. Pliny describes how his uncle was suffocated by ashes and sulphurous vapour on the shore. He had himself seen flames of fire shoot up out of the crater, which also vomited forth a black cloud spreading out above like the crown of a pine-tree. He went out with his mother to the forecourt of the house, but when the ground trembled and the air became full of ashes they hurried off, followed by a crowd of people. His mother, who was old, begged him to save himself by rapid flight, but he would not desert her. And he writes: "I looked round; a thick smoky darkness rolled threateningly over us from behind; it spread over the earth like an advancing flood and followed us. 'Let us move to one side while we can see,' I said,' so that we may not fall down on the road and be trampled down in the darkness by those behind.' We had scarcely got out of the crowd when we were involved in darkness, not such as when there is no moon or the sky is overcast, but such as prevails in a closed room when the lights are out." And he tells how the fugitives tied cushions over their heads so as not to be bruised by falling stones, and how they had repeatedly to shake off the ashes lest they should be weighed down by them. He was quite composed himself, and thought that the whole world was passing away.

By this eruption Pompeii was buried under a layer of pumice and ashes 20 feet thick. For a long period of years the inhabitants of the neighbourhood came hither and digged up with their spades one thing or another, but then Pompeii sank into the night of oblivion and slumbered under the earth for fifteen hundred years. At last the town was discovered again, and excavations were commenced. Country houses, fields, and clumps of mulberry trees had sprung up on the deep bed of ashes. Not till fifty years ago did modern investigation take Pompeii seriously in hand, and now more than half the town is laid bare. Strangers can ride unhindered through the streets, look into the shops and baths, and admire the fine wall-paintings in the palaces of the great. The columns of Jupiter's temple, so long buried in complete darkness, are again lighted by the sun, and cast their shadows as of old over the stone flags of the Forum (Plate XXVII.). The Street of Tombs is exposed, and young cypresses grow up among the monuments. The dead, which were already buried when Vesuvius scattered its ashes over them, listen now to strange footsteps on the road. But the unfortunates who were buried alive under the shower of ashes have decayed and turned to dust. And yet they may still be seen in the museums, with distorted limbs and their faces to the ground. We see them in the position they assumed when they fell and the ashes were bedded close to their sides. Thus they remained lying for eighteen hundred years, imbedded as in a mould. Their bodies returned to the earth, but the empty space remained. By pouring plaster into these forms, life-like figures of persons have been reproduced just as they were when death overtook them. Here lies a woman who fell outside her house and grasped with convulsive fingers a bag full of gold and silver. Here is a man resting his heavy head on his elbow, and here a dog which has curled itself up before it was at last suffocated.

So the sleeping town has wakened to life again, and the dead have returned from the kingdom of shadows. The excavated pictures, sculptures, and art treasures of Pompeii, together with the whole arrangement of the town, the style of building and the inscriptions, have thrown an unexpected light on the life of antiquity. We can even read the passing conceits scribbled on the walls. At one corner a house is offered for hire from July I—"intending tenants should apply to the slave Primus." On another a jester advises an acquaintance: "Go and hang thyself." A citizen writes of a friend: "I have heard with sorrow that thou art dead—so adieu!" Another wall bears the following warning: "This is no place for idlers; go away, good-for-nothing." It is curious to read the names Sodom and Gomorrah, evidently scribbled by a Jew. Low down on the walls small schoolboys have practised writing the Greek alphabet, showing that Greek was included in their curriculum. And once were found written in charcoal, and only partly legible, the words, "Enjoy the fire, Christian," a scoff at the martyrs who, soaked in tar, were burned as torches in Nero's gardens.

From Naples we take a steamer for Egypt. After crossing the Bay of Naples we have to starboard the charming island of Capri. On its northern side you may swim or row in a shallow boat, under an arch of rock three feet high, into the Blue Grotto. Inside is a quiet crystal-clear sheet of water which extends more than 50 yards into the hill. The roof over its mirror is more than 160 feet high. The only light comes in through the small entrance. Owing to the reflections of the sky and water, everything in the grotto is blue, and stalactites hang like icicles from the roof and walls. If you dip an oar or your hand into the water it shines white as silver, owing to the reflection from the sandy bottom. It is possible to enter only in calm weather, or the boat would be stoved in against the rocky archway.

On a promontory to larboard appear the white houses and olive gardens of beautiful Sorrento, and then we steer out into the turquoise blue waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea. To the south the rocky island of Stromboli rises from the waves with its ever-burning volcano, like a beacon. In the Straits of Messina we skirt the shores of Sicily and Calabria, which have so frequently suffered from terrible earthquakes. At last we are out in the wide, open Mediterranean. Italy sinks below the horizon behind us, and we steam eastward to Alexandria, the port of the land of the Pharaohs.



II

AFRICA

GENERAL GORDON

Seldom has the whole civilised world been so convulsed, so overwhelmed with sorrow, at the death of one man as it was when in January, 1885, the news flashed along the telegraph wires that Khartum had fallen, and that Gordon was dead.

Gordon was of Scottish extraction, but was born in one of the suburbs of London in the year 1833, and as a young lieutenant of engineers heard the thunders of war below the walls of Sebastopol. As a major of thirty years of age he commanded the Imperial army in China, and suppressed the furious insurrection which raged in the provinces around the Blue River. "The Ever-Victorious Army" would have come to grief without a strong and practical leader, but in Gordon's hands it soon deserved its name. He made his plans quickly and clearly, brought his troops with wonderful rapidity to the most vulnerable points in the enemy's position, and dealt his blows with crushing force. In a year and a half he had cleared China of insurgents and restored peace.

After several years of service at home and other wanderings in Eastern lands, Gordon accepted in 1874 an invitation to enter into the service of the Khedive of Egypt. The Khedive Ismail was a strong man with far-reaching projects. He wished to extend his dominion as far as the great lakes where the Nile takes its rise, and Gordon was to rule over a province named after the equator.



Immediately to the south of Cairo begins a plateau which stretches from north to south through almost the whole continent. In Abyssinia it attains to a considerable height, and near the equator rises into the loftiest summits of Africa. These mountains screen off the rain from Egypt and large areas of the Sudan. The masses of vapour which are carried over Abyssinia in summer by the monsoon are precipitated as rain in these mountain tracts, and consequently the wind is dry when it reaches Nubia and Egypt; while the moisture which rises from the warm ocean on the east, and is borne north-westwards by the constant trade-wind, is converted into water during eight months of the year among the mountains on the equator.

The rain which falls on the mountains of Abyssinia gives rise to the Atbara and Blue Nile, which produce abundant floods in the Nile during autumn; and during the rest of the year the White Nile, which comes from the great lakes on the equator, provides for the irrigation of Egypt. Thus the country is able to dispense with rain, and innumerable canals convey water to all parts of the Nile valley. Many kinds of grain are cultivated—wheat, maize, barley, rice, and durra (a kind of millet); vegetables, beans, and peas thrive, numerous date palms suck up their sap from the heavy, sodden silt on the river's banks, and sugar-cane and cotton are spreading more and more. Seen at a height from a balloon, the fields, palms, and fruit-trees would appear as a green belt along the river, while the rest of the country would look yellow and grey, for it is nothing but a dry, sandy desert.

The Nile, then, is everything to Egypt, the condition of its existence, its father and mother, the source of the wealth by which the country has subsisted since the most remote antiquity. Now that we are about to follow Gordon along the Nile to the equator, we must not forget that we are passing through an ancient land. The first king of which there are records lived 3200 years before the Christian era, and the largest of the Great Pyramids at Ghizeh is 4600 years old (Plate XXVIII.). Its funeral crypt is cut out of the solid rock, and in it still stands the red granite sarcophagus of Cheops. Two million three hundred thousand dressed blocks, each measuring 40 cubic feet, were used in the construction of this memorial over a perishable king, and the pyramid is reckoned to be the largest edifice ever built by human hands. The buildings and works of the present time are nothing compared to it. Only the Great Wall of China can vie with it, and this is ruined and to a large extent obliterated, while the pyramid of Cheops still stands, scorched by the sun, or sharply defined in the moonlight, or dimly visible as a mysterious apparition in the dark, warm night.

Twelve hundred miles south of the capital of modern Egypt the desert comes to an end, and the surface is covered by vast marshes and beds of waving reeds. This is the Sudan, "the Land of the Blacks." At the point where the White and Blue Niles mingle their waters lay the only town in the Sudan, Khartum, whither trade-routes converged from all directions, and where goods changed hands. Here were brought wares which never failed to find purchasers. The valuable feathers plucked from the swift-footed ostrich were needed to decorate the hats of European ladies; the wild elephants, larger and more powerful than their Indian congeners, were shot or caught in pitfalls in the woods for the sake of their precious ivory. But the most esteemed of all the wares that passed through Khartum were slaves—"black ivory," as they were called by their heartless Arab torturers. Elephants' tusks are heavy, and cannot be transported on horses or oxen from the depths of the forest, for draught animals are killed by the sting of the poisonous tsetse fly. Therefore the tusks had to be carried by men, and when these had finished their task they were themselves sold into Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. The forests and deserts were not inexhaustible; ivory and ostrich feathers might be worked out, but there would always be negroes.



When the Khedive Ismail invited Gordon to enter his service as governor of the new province not far from the sources of the Nile, Gordon accepted the post in the hope that he would be able to suppress slave-trading, or at least to check the hunting of black men and women. He left Cairo and travelled by the Red Sea to Suakin, rode to Berber on the Nile, and was received with much pomp and ceremony by the Governor-General at Khartum. Here he heard that the Nile was navigable for 900 miles southwards, and therefore he could continue his journey without delay.

The Nile afforded an excellent passage for Gordon's small steamboat. But the Nile can also place an insurmountable obstacle in the traveller's way. After the rainy season the White Nile overflows its banks, forming an inextricable labyrinth of side branches, lakes, and marshes. The country lies under water for miles around. The waterway between impenetrable beds of reeds and papyrus is often as narrow as a lane. The roots of large plants are loosened from the mud at the bottom, and are compacted with stems and mud into large sheets which are driven northwards by the rushing water. They are caught fast in small openings and sudden bends, and other islets of vegetation are piled up against them. Thus the river course is blocked, and above these natural dams the water forms lakes. Such banks of drifting or arrested and decaying vegetation are called sudd, and the more it rains the greater are the quantities that come down. At length the sudd becomes soft and yields to the pressure of the water, and then the Nile is navigable again.

Gordon's small steamer glides gently up the river. He advances deeper and deeper into a world unknown to him, and around him seethes tropical Africa. On the banks papyrus stems wave their plumes above the reeds. It was from the pith of papyrus stems that the old Egyptians made a kind of paper on which they wrote their chronicles. Here and there swarthy natives are seen between the reed beds, and sometimes noisy troops of wandering monkeys gaze at the boat. The hippopotami look like floating islands, but show themselves only at night, wallowing in the shallow water. A little beyond the luxuriant vegetation of the banks extends the boundless grassland with its abundant animal life and thin scattered clumps of trees.

After a journey of four days the steamer glided past an island. There dwelt in a grotto a dervish or mendicant monk named Mohamed Ahmed, who ten years later was to be Gordon's murderer.

In the middle of April Gordon and his companions were in Gondokoro, a small place which now stands on the boundary between the Sudan and British East Africa, and here he took charge of his Equatorial Province. He forced the Egyptian soldiers, who garrisoned this and one or two other posts on the Nile and robbed on their own account, to plough and plant; he arrested all slave-hunters within reach and freed the slaves; he succoured the poor, protected the helpless, and sent durra to the hungry.

The heat was excessive, and Gordon and his staff were pestered by crowds of gnats. It was still worse in September when the rain poured down and large tracts were converted into swamp, from which dangerous miasma was exhaled. In a month seven of Gordon's eight officers had died of fever, but he himself continued his work undismayed, and wrote in his diary: "God willing, I shall do much in this country."

He soon perceived that the best districts of his province lay around the large lakes in the south. But the Equatorial Province was too far away from Egypt. It hung as it were on a long string, the Nile, and from the largest lake, the Victoria Nyanza, the distance to Cairo in a straight line was nearly 2200 miles. Much shorter was the route to Mombasa on the east coast, so Gordon advised the Khedive to occupy Mombasa and open a road to the Victoria Nyanza. Then it would be easier to contend against the slave-trade. He described the condition of the Sudan in forcible letters, and into the Khedive's ears were dinned truths such as he never heard from his servile pashas. He would first establish steam communication with the lakes, and a number of boats which could be taken to pieces were on the way to his province.

The boats came up at the time when the Nile began to rise after rain, and then his plan was to advance farther southwards. The natives were opposed to this progress and feared the supremacy of Egypt, and therefore they tried to prevent the advance of the "White Pasha," who was loath to employ arms against them. All they wanted was to be left in peace in their grasslands and forests; and when now an intruder, whose aims they did not understand, penetrated into their country, they endeavoured whenever they could to bar his way, so that he was obliged, much against his will, to resort to force.

After all kinds of troubles and difficulties he reached at last the northernmost of the Nile lakes, the Albert Nyanza, and it was a great feat to have brought a steamer even thus far. He did not succeed in reaching the Victoria Nyanza, for the ruler of the country between the lakes had resolved to oppose with all his power any intruder, were he white man or Arab.

For three years Gordon was at work on the Upper Nile in the neighbourhood of the equator. During the next three years we find him in the deserts of the Sudan farther north. He was Governor-General of the whole of the Egyptian Sudan, and Khartum was his capital. His province was 1200 miles broad, from the Red Sea to the Sahara, and as long from north to south. The whole country was in a state of unrest. The Khedive had carried on an unsuccessful war against the Christian King of Abyssinia, and the Mohammedan states of Kordofan and Darfur were in revolt against Egypt. There half-savage Beduin tribes were scattered about over the deserts, and there some of the worst slave-dealers had their haunts.

In May, 1877, Gordon mounted his swift dromedary to set out on a journey of 2000 miles. He wished to visit the villages and camps of the slave-dealers in distant Darfur. The hot season had set in. When the sun stood at its meridian altitude the shadow of the dromedary disappeared beneath the animal. A dreary desert extended on all sides, greyish-yellow, dusty, and dry.

The White Pasha skims over the desert mile after mile. He has the finest dromedary in all the land, an animal that became famous throughout the Sudan. Some hundreds of Egyptian troopers follow him, but he leaves them all far behind and only a guide keeps up with him. He rushes over the desert like the wind, and suddenly and unexpectedly draws rein at the gates of an oasis before the guard can shoulder their arms. After giving his orders in the name of the Khedive, he disappears as mysteriously, no one knows whither. At another oasis, perhaps 300 miles away, the chief has been warned of his coming and has therefore posted watchmen to look out for him. Round about lies the desert, sandy and yellow, with a surface as level as a sea, where the approach of the White Pasha can be seen from a long distance. The watchman announces that two black specks are visible in the distance, which, it is supposed, are the Pasha's outriders, and some hours must pass before he arrives with his troops. The two specks grow larger and come rapidly nearer. The dromedaries swing their long legs over the ground, seeming to fly on invisible wings. Now the men have come to the margin of the oasis. The watchers can hardly believe their eyes. One of the riders wears the gold-embroidered uniform of an Egyptian pasha. Never had the Sudan seen a Governor-General travelling in this way—without flags and noisy music, and stripped of all the display appropriate to his rank.

And as he came so he flew away again, mysteriously and incomprehensibly. Again and again he lost his armed force. In some districts he closed the paths leading to wells in order to bring the refractory tribes to submission. With inflexible severity he broke the power of the chiefs who still carried on trade in slaves. He freed numbers of black captives and drilled them as soldiers, for his own fighting men were the scum of Egypt and Syria. With a handful of men he dealt his blows at the weakest points of the enemy's defence and thus always gained the victory. In four months he suppressed the revolt and checked the power of the slave-dealers.

Gordon had now cleared all the west of the Sudan, and only Dara in southern Darfur remained to be dealt with. There the most powerful slave-dealers had collected to offer resistance. He came down one day like lightning into their camp. They might easily have killed him—it was he who had ruined their trade in black ivory. He went unconcernedly among the tents, and they did not dare to touch him. And when his own troops arrived, he summoned all the chiefs to his tent and laid his conditions before them. They were to lay down their arms and be off each to his own home; and one by one they obeyed and went away without a word.

But the slave-trade was a weed too deeply rooted in the soil to be eradicated in a single day, and the revolt and troubles which constantly arose out of this horrible traffic gave Gordon no peace. He left the Sudan at the end of 1879, and the next two years were occupied with work in India, China, Mauritius, and South Africa. Meanwhile remarkable events had occurred in Egypt. Great Britain had sent vessels and troops to the land of the Khedive, and had taken over the command and the responsibility. The chief of the dervishes, Mohamed Ahmed, whom we remember on the small island in the Nile, proclaimed that he was chosen by God to relieve the oppressed, that he was the Mahdi or Messiah of Islam. Discontent prevailed among the Mohammedans throughout the Sudan, for Egypt had at length prohibited the slave-trade, and the Mahdi collected all the discontented people and tribes under his banner. His aim was to throw off the yoke of Egypt. Proud and arrogant, he sent despatches through the whole of the Sudan, and his summons to a holy war flew like a prairie fire over North Africa.

The British Government, which was now responsible for Egypt, was in a difficulty. The Sudan must either be conquered or evacuated, for the Egyptian garrisons were still at Khartum and at several places even down to the equator. The Government decided on evacuation, and Gordon was sent to perform the task of withdrawing all the garrisons. He accepted the mission and set out immediately for Cairo.

Thus Gordon began his last journey up the Nile. At Korosko, just at the northern end of the great S-shaped bend of the Nile, he mounted his dromedary and followed the narrow winding path which has been worn out during thousands of years through the dry hollows of the Nubian desert, over scorched and weathered volcanic knolls and through dunes of suffocating sand.

On February 18, 1884, Gordon, for the second time Governor-General of the Sudan, made his entry into Khartum, where he took up his quarters in his old palace. Cruelty and injustice had again sprung up during the years he had been absent. He opened the gates of the overcrowded gaols, and the prisoners were released and their fetters removed. All accounts of unpaid taxes were burned in front of the palace. All implements of punishment and torture were broken to pieces and thrown into the Nile.

Then began the evacuation of the town. As many as 3000 women and children were sent to Abu Hamed and through the desert to Korosko. They got through without danger and were saved. Where women and children could travel, it would have been easy to lead troops from Egypt. Instead of this, however, England despatched an expedition to Suakin to secure an outlet on the Red Sea, whereupon the rebellious tribes of the Sudan were roused to fury, believing that the white men intended to come and take their country. Consequently they rallied all the more resolutely round the Mahdi, and their hatred extended to the dreaded Gordon and the few Europeans with him in Khartum.

As long as the telegraph line was still available to Cairo, Gordon kept the authorities informed of the state of affairs and pointed out what should be done to ensure success. He asked especially that the road from Berber to Suakin should be held, for from this line also the Sudan could be controlled, but his advice was not attended to and Berber was eventually surrounded by the Mahdi's troops and captured. Several chiefs north and north-east of Khartum, who had previously been friendly disposed, now joined the Mahdi. News of fresh desertions came constantly to Khartum, and even in the town itself Gordon was surrounded by traitors. On March 10 the telegraph line was cut and then followed six months of silence, during which the world learned little or nothing of the brave soldier in the heart of Africa. On March 11 Arab war parties appeared on the bank of the Blue Nile, for the Mahdi was drawing his net ever closer round the unfortunate town.

During the preceding years the Egyptian Government had caused Khartum to be fortified after a fashion, and during the earlier months of the siege Gordon worked day and night to strengthen the defences. His soldiers threw up earthern ramparts round the town, a network of wire entanglements was set up, and mines were laid at places where an assault might be expected. At the end of April the town was entirely blockaded, and only the river route to the north was still open. At the beginning of May the Arabs crossed the Blue Nile, suffering great losses from exploding mines and the guns of the town. In the early part of September there were still provisions for three months, and the Arabs, perceiving that they could not take the town by storm from the White Pasha, resolved to starve it out.

The Nile was now at its highest, and huge grey turbid volumes of water hurried northwards. Now was the only chance for a small steamer to try to get to Dongola, where it would be in safety. On the night of September 9 a small steamer was made ready for starting, and Gordon's only English comrades, Colonel Stewart and Mr. Power, went on board, together with the French Consul, a number of Greeks, and fifty soldiers. They took with them accounts of the siege, correspondence, lists and details about provisions, ammunition, arms, men, and plans of defence, and everything else of particular value. Silently the steamer moved off from the bank, and when day dawned Gordon was alone. Alas, the little steamer never reached Dongola, for it was wrecked immediately below Abu Hamed. Every soul on board was murdered, and all papers of value fell into the hands of the Mahdi. On the other hand, Gordon's diary from September 10 to December 14, 1884, is still extant, and is wonderful reading.

By this time the British Government had at last decided to send an expedition to relieve Khartum. River boats were built in great numbers, troops were equipped for the field, the famous general, Lord Wolseley, was in command, and by the middle of September the first infantry battalion was up at Dongola on the northern half of the great S of the Nile. But then the steamers had only just arrived at Alexandria, and had to be taken up the Nile and tediously dragged through the cataracts, while the desert column which was to make the final advance on Khartum had not yet left England. A long time would be required to get everything ready.

In Khartum comparative quiet as yet prevailed. The dervishes bided their time patiently, encamping barely six miles from the outworks. Shots were exchanged only at a distance. On September 21 Gordon learned by a messenger that the relief expedition was on the way, and ten days later he sent his steamboats northwards to meet it and to hasten the forwarding of troops. But thereby he lost half of his own power of resistance.

On October 21 the Mahdi himself arrived in the camp outside Khartum, and on the following day sent Gordon convincing proofs that Stewart's steamboat had sunk and that all on board had been slain. He added a list of all the journals and documents found on board. From these the Mahdi had learned almost to a day how long Khartum could hold out, the strength of the garrison, the scheme of defence, where the batteries stood and how long the ammunition would last. This was a terrible blow to the lonely soldier, but it did not break down his courage. The death of Stewart and his companions grieved him inexpressibly, but he sent an answer to the Mahdi that if 20,000 boats had been taken it would be all the same to him—"I am here like iron."