His headquarters were fixed in the palace at
Khartoum; but there were various interludes in his government.
Once,
when the Khedive's finances had become peculiarly embroiled, he
summoned Gordon to Cairo to preside over a commission which
should set matters to rights.
Gordon accepted the post, but soon found that his situation was
untenable. He was between the devil and the deep sea-- between
the
unscrupulous cunning of the Egyptian Pashas, and the immeasurable
immensity of the Khedive's debts to his European creditors. The
Pashas
were anxious to use him as a respectable mask for their own
nefarious
dealings; and the representatives of the European creditors, who
looked
upon him as an irresponsible intruder, were anxious simply to get
rid
of him as soon as they could. One of these representatives was
Sir Evelyn Baring, whom Gordon now met for the first time. An
immediate antagonism flashed out between the two men. But their
hostility had no time to mature; for Gordon, baffled on all
sides, and deserted even by the Khedive, precipitately returned
to his Governor-Generalship. Whatever else Providence might have
decreed, it had certainly not decided that he should be a
financier.
His tastes and his talents were indeed of a very different kind.
In his absence, a rebellion had broken out in Darfur-- one of the
vast outlying provinces of his government-- where a native
chieftain, Zobeir, had erected, on a basis of slave-traffic, a
dangerous military power.
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