Product Code Database
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text
Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ...under a promise that they would not deal in slaves. They had been placed under the control of the Governor of the Soudan. His authority, however, had scarcely been able to make itself felt in these remote countries. The Khedive therefore had resolved to form them into a separate government, and to claim as a monopoly of the State the whole of the trade with the outside world. There was no other way of putting an cud to the slave-trade, which at present was carried on in defiance of law. Once the brigandage had been stamped out, trade might become free to all. Gordon was to establish a line of posts through his province, attempt to win the confidence of the tribes, and persuade them to stop the wars made in the hope of carrying off slaves. Gordon''s career in Africa is recorded in those supremely interesting and intensely characteristic letters to members of his family which Mr. Birkbeck Hill Invs had the privilege of publishing, and which really make his book--Colonel Gordon in Central Africa. I own to shuddering at the sacrilege of condensing into a few score pages the outlines of that extraordinary narrative which those letters--Gordon''s own journal in effect--tell with so unstudied a vividness. That the path of the condenser is a thankless one--this does not distress me. My grief is that in boiling down this thick volume of letters, the beauty, the strength, the sacred fervor, and the tender play of humor which irradiate them must clean evaporate, and there he left but a matter-of-fact record of acts and facts. I have the selfconsciousness of being a vandal; yet there comes to me some consolation in the probability that its very succinctness, which distresses me, will induce many people to read this little...
|
