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telegraph forms. As ever, this impossible character was greatly aware of the impression he made – a merchant who visited Gordon later recalled begging him not to light candles in the windows, for fear of giving his presence away to the enemy. At this, the general became furious, lit candles all over the room, put a lantern on a table by one of the windows and sat at it. He turned to the merchant and said, ‘When God was portioning out fear to all the people in the world, at last it came to my turn, and there was no fear left to give me. Go and tell all the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear.’ In his journal, which he decorated with cartoon sketches, he notes that he shares his meals with a mouse, despises the indolence and slovenliness of his Egyptian soldiers and dreams of never having to return to Britain: he would rather live like a tribesman with the Mahdi than be obliged to go out to dinner in London every night. On 14 December 1884 he sent a message reading:

NOW MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of my country. Good-bye

C. G. Gordon

You send me no information, though you have lots of money.

C.G.G.

Characteristically, this was followed, two weeks later, by a message which said the precise opposite: ‘Khartoum is all right. Could hold out for years. CG Gordon. 29.12.84’.

This was nonsense. As even the Mahdi knew from the deserters who crossed to his lines, by now almost every living thing that could be eaten – even rats – had been devoured. The waters of the Nile, which had provided a natural defence, were falling all the time. At around three in the morning of 26 January 1885 Khartoum was woken by the sound of tens of thousands of jihadists swarming into the town. It was all over very quickly and very savagely. Gordon’s contempt for his Egyptian troops had been justified, and in their emaciated state they were unable to put up much of a fight anyway. The Mahdi’s men were aflame with what they conceived to be holy passion and stormed on towards the palace. Gordon had positioned himself on the roof, picking off invaders as they approached. Finally, they swarmed so close that he could no longer point the gun down at them over the edge of the roof. If he had had any hope of saving his life earlier in the fight, by this stage he must have known that the end for which he had professed such enthusiasm was at hand. He returned to his room and put on his white uniform. Then, taking his revolver and sword, he went and stood at the top of the stairs to await the inevitable. It was shortly before sunrise.

There are several different versions of what happened next. Some accounts have Gordon going down fighting, but the preferred story was that he stood at the head of the steps and faced down his attackers for some seconds, until, with a cry of ‘O cursed one, your time has come,’ one of them gathered his wits, lunged forward and drove his spear into Gordon’s body. Apart from having him in the wrong uniform, this was the scene depicted in George William Joy’s picture of a stiff-upper-lipped Englishman glaring down contemptuously at the dozen attackers about to stab him to death. For once, the word ‘iconic’ is appropriate, for the image of the lone, outnumbered white man about to fall to a mass of alien weapons, one hand hanging by his side, the other across his breast, really became an icon of empire. It fitted the imperial belief of a lonely mission to an ungrateful world. The popularity of the painting was nothing to do with Sudan, which much of the British population would have been hard put to identify on a map. The place did not matter. What they cared about was an idea of what the empire was about, not money or power, but moral purpose, perfectly expressed through a half-cracked general.

The Mahdi had wanted to take Gordon alive, for his plan was to keep him in chains until he abandoned his faith and became a Muslim. But in the frenzy Gordon