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On the 16th April, Baring received the following telegram from Gordon, and it was in the hands of the Ministry when they equivocated with Parliament on 21st and 22nd April, "As far as I can understand, the situation is this : you state your intention of not sending any relief up here to Berber, and you refuse me Zebehr. I consider myself free to act according to circumstances. I shall hold on here as long as I can, and if I can repress the rebellion I shall do so. If I cannot I shall retire to the Equator, and leave you the indelible disgrace of abandoning the garrisons of Sennaar, Kassala, Berber, and Dongola, with the certainty that you will eventually be forced to smash up the Mahdi under great difficulties if you would retain peace in Egypt." (Blue-Book, No. 15, 1884.)

He offered to send Colonel Stewart and Mr. Power to Berber if possible; but Stewart telegraphed, "I shall follow the fortunes of General Gordon," and Power did the same; adding, "we are quite blocked on the north, east, and west." What Mr. Power would have thought of Mr. Gladstone's asseveration in Parliament that Khartoum was not surrounded, must remain unknown, but may be surmised.

The south was the region in which the Mahdi's friends abounded, and all other directions were "quite blocked"! "Imprisonment" had begun in the middle of March. "Scarcely a day" passed without assaults and skirmishes; and Gordon, reporting the fact on the 8th April, said, "The losses of the rebels are quite unnecessary if we are eventually to succumb."

He telegraphed to Sir Samuel Baker to appeal to moneyed men to advance the means of engaging 3,000 Turkish troops with whom
to put an end to the Mahdi, which at that time was not difficult ; and he told Sir E. Baring, "It would be the climax of meanness – after I had borrowed money from the people here, had called on them to sell their grain at a low price, &c.– to go and abandon them without using every effort to relieve them whether those efforts are diplomatically correct or not ; and I feel sure, whatever you may feel diplomatically, I have your support – and that of every man professing himself a gentleman–in private." (Blue-Book. No. 15)

[continuation of footnote† from previous page]
of the Government to recoup the King of the Belgians the expense of Gordon's journey
from Palestine to Brussels. Gordon, always generous, had no money about him when
he started from Jaffa. He drew on Belgium. When the Gladstone Government sum-
moned Gordon to London, and sent him to Egypt, Gordon left his brother, Sir Henry,
to arrange for repayment to the King of the Belgians. Sir Henry applied to the
Government in the hope that they would enable him to recoup the King, as they had
withdrawn Gordon from his service. They declined, and pleaded that they could not
make themselves responsible for an indefinite sum. Sir Henry guaranteed that it
should not exceed £50. Still they declined, and Sir Henry recouped the King out of
General Gordon's army pay, which Sir Henry drew for him.