Across the desert spread the telegraph message: "_General Gordon is coming to Khartoum_."
"_You are men, not women. Be not afraid; I am coming,_" followed Gordon's own message to the terrified garrison.
More swiftly than ever before, he crossed the lonely desert. Many skeletons of men and of camels, of oxen and of horses, now lay bleaching in the scorching sun on that dreary waste of treeless desolation.
On 18th February he reached Khartoum, and was greeted as their deliverer by the people, who flocked around him in hundreds, trying to kiss his hands and feet.
"I come without soldiers," he said to them, "but with God on my side, to redress the evils of the land."
At once he was ready, as in past days, to listen to tales of wrong from the poorest, and to try to set them right. He had all the whips and instruments of torture that Egyptian rulers had used piled up outside the Palace and burned. In the gaol he found two hundred men, women, and children lying in chains and in the most dismal plight. Some were innocent, many were prisoners of war. Of many their gaolers could give no reason for their being there. One woman had been imprisoned for fifteen years for a crime committed when she was a child.
Gordon had their chains struck off, and set them free. At nightfall he had a bonfire made of the prison, and men, women, and children danced round it in the red light of the flames, laughing and clapping their hands.
All the sick in the city he sent by the river down to Egypt.
In Khartoum itself, by the mercy of its Governor, peace soon reigned.
"Gordon is working wonders," was the message Mr. Power sent to England.
But the Mahdi's power was daily growing, and he feared no one. When Gordon sent him messages of peace he sent back insolent answers, calling upon Gordon to become a Mussulman, and to come and serve the Mahdi.
"If Egypt is to be quiet, the Mahdi must be smashed up," Gordon telegraphed to the English Government.
By means of his steamers he laid in stores. The defences of Khartoum he strengthened by mines and wire entanglements. He made some steamers bullet-proof, and on 24th August was able to write that they were doing "splendid work." His poor "sheep," as he called his troops, were being turned into tried soldiers. "You see," he wrote, "when you have steam on, the men can't run away, and must go into action."