refused to send any such message; and he perceived, as he tells us, that "it was evidently useless to continue the correspondence any further." After all, what could he do? He was still only a secondary figure; his resignation would be accepted; he would be given a colonial governorship, and Gordon would be no nearer safety. But then, could he sit by, and witness a horrible catastrophe, without lifting a hand? Of all the odious dilemmas which that man had put him into, this, he reflected, was the most odious. He slightly shrugged his shoulders. No; he might have "power to hurt," but he would "do none." He wrote a despatch—a long, balanced, guarded, grey despatch, informing the Government that he "ventured to think" that it was "a question worthy of consideration, whether the naval and military authorities should not take some preliminary steps in the way of preparing boats, etc., so as to be able to move, should the necessity arise." Then, within a week, before the receipt of the Government's answer, he left Egypt. From the end of April till the beginning of September—during the most momentous period of the whole crisis—he was engaged in London upon a financial conference, while his place was taken in Cairo by a substitute. With a characteristically convenient unobtrusiveness, Sir Evelyn Baring had vanished from the scene.
Meanwhile, far to the southward, over the wide-spreading lands watered by the Upper Nile and its tributaries, the power and the glory of him who had once been Mahommed Ahmed were growing still. In the Bahr-el-Ghazal, the last embers of resistance were stamped out with the capture of Lupton Bey, and through the whole of that vast province—three times the size of England—every trace of the Egyptian government was obliterated. Still further south the same fate was rapidly overtaking Equatoria, where Emin Pasha, withdrawing into the unexplored depths of central Africa, carried with him the last vestiges of the
