Time or trouble were not to be wasted upon an
infidel. Orders were given that he should be immediately buried;
the orders were carried out; and in a few moments the cavalcade
had left the little hillock far behind. But some of those who
were present believed that Olivier Pain had been still breathing
when his body was covered with the sand.
Gordon, on hearing that a Frenchman had been captured by the
Mahdi, became extremely interested. The idea occurred to him that
this mysterious individual was none other than Ernest Renan,
'who,' he wrote, in his last publication 'takes leave of the
world, and is said to have gone into Africa, not to reappear
again'. He had met Renan at the rooms of the Royal Geographical
Society, had noticed that he looked bored--the result, no doubt,
of too much admiration--and had felt an instinct that he would
meet him again. The instinct now seemed to be justified. There
could hardly be any doubt that it WAS Renan; who else could it
be? 'If he comes to the lines,' he decided, 'and it is Renan, I
shall go and see him, for whatever one may think of his unbelief
in our Lord, he certainly dared to say what he thought, and he
has not changed his creed to save his life.' That the mellifluous
author of the Vie de Jesus should have determined to end his days
in the depths of Africa, and have come, in accordance with an
intuition, to renew his acquaintance with General Gordon in the
lines of Khartoum, would indeed have been a strange occurrence;
but who shall limit the strangeness of the possibilities that lie
in wait for the sons of men? At that very moment, in the south-
eastern corner of the Sudan, another Frenchman, of a peculiar
eminence, was fulfilling a destiny more extraordinary than the
wildest romance.
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