One mob of assailants made their way to the palace.  Gordon came out to meet them.  The whole courtyard was filled with wild, harlequin figures and sharp, glittering blades.  He attempted a parley.  ’Where is your master, the Mahdi?’ He knew his influence over native races.  Perhaps he hoped to save the lives of some of the inhabitants.  Perhaps in that supreme moment imagination flashed another picture before his eyes; and he saw himself confronted with the false prophet of a false religion, confronted with the European prisoners who had ‘denied their Lord,’ offered the choice of death or the Koran; saw himself facing that savage circle with a fanaticism equal to, and a courage greater than, their own; marching in all the pride of faith ‘and with retorted scorn’ to a martyr’s death.

It was not to be.  Mad with the joy of victory and religious frenzy, they rushed upon him and, while he disdained even to fire his revolver, stabbed him in many places.  The body fell down the steps and lay—­ a twisted heap—­at the foot.  There it was decapitated.  The head was carried to the Mahdi.  The trunk was stabbed again and again by the infuriated creatures, till nothing but a shapeless bundle of torn flesh and bloody rags remained of what had been a great and famous man and the envoy of her Britannic Majesty.  The blood soaked into the ground, and left a dark stain which was not immediately effaced.  Slatin mentions that the Arabs used often to visit the place.  Ohrwalder went himself, and more than six weeks after the capture of the town, saw ‘black spots’ upon the steps.  But they have all since been obliterated.

Such, briefly, is the story of the fall of Khartoum and of the death of Gordon.  The fact that the two steamers arrived only two days after the capture of the town has given colour to the belief that, but for the three days’ delay at Metemma, the catastrophe might have been averted.  This view appears incorrect.  The Arabs had long held Khartoum at their mercy.  They hoped, indeed, to compel its surrender by famine and to avoid an assault, which after their experience at El Obeid they knew must cost them dear.  Gordon has stated in his Journals that the town became defenceless by the middle of December.  The arrival of twenty British soldiers and a few officers could not have materially affected the situation—­could only, in fact, have increased the loss.  Yet nearly everyone who reads the tale will wish—­in spite of reason—­that some help, however little, had reached the lonely man; that before the darkness fell he had grasped an English hand, and learned that his countrymen had not abandoned him, had not forgotten—­would never forget.