months). August! why he ought to have given in! What is to be done? They'll be howling for an expedition. … It is no laughing matter; that abominable Mahdi! Why on earth does he not guard his roads better? What is to be done?" Several times in his bitterness he repeats the suggestion that the authorities at home were secretly hoping that the fall of Khartoum would relieve them of their difficulties. "What that Mahdi is about," Lord Granville is made to exclaim in another deleted paragraph, "I cannot make out. Why does he not put all his guns on the river and stop the route? Eh what? 'We will have to go to Khartoum!' Why, it will cost millions, what a wretched business! What! Send Zobeir? Our conscience recoils from that, it is elastic, but not equal to that, it is a pact with the Devil. … Do you not think there is any way of getting hold of HIM, in a quiet way?" If a boy at Eton or Harrow, he declared, had acted as the Government had acted, "I think he would be kicked, and I am sure he would deserve it." He was the victim of hypocrites and humbugs. There was "no sort of parallel to all this in history—except it be David with Uriah the Hittite"; but then "there was an Eve in the case," and he was not aware that the Government had even that excuse.
From the past, he turned to the future, and surveyed, with a disturbed and piercing vision, the possibilities before him. Supposing that the relief expedition arrived, what would be his position? Upon one thing he was determined: whatever happened, he would not play the part of "the rescued lamb." He vehemently asserted that the purpose of the expedition could only be the relief of the Sudan garrisons; it was monstrous to imagine that it had been undertaken merely to ensure his personal safety. He refused to believe it. In any case, "I declare positively," he wrote, with passionate underlinings, "and once for all, that I will not leave the Sudan until every one who wants to go down is given the chance to do so, unless a government is established, which relieves me of the charge; therefore if
