Shortly before the General's term expired, he invited Mr.
Cook to dinner. The Nile share of the Gordon Relief
Expedition had been handed over to Cook. The boats, the
provisioning of them, and the river transport service up to
Wady Halfa, were contracted for and undertaken by Cook.
A most entertaining account he gave of the whole affair. He
told us how the Mudir of Dongola, who was by way of rendering
every possible assistance, had offered him an enormous bribe
to wreck the most valuable cargoes on their passage through
the Cataracts.
Before Mr. Cook took leave of the General, he expressed the
regret felt by the British residents in Cairo at the
termination of Sir Frederick's command; and wound up a pretty
little speech by a sincere request that he might be allowed
to furnish Sir Frederick GRATIS with all the means at his
disposal for a tour through the Holy Land. The liberal and
highly complimentary offer was gratefully acknowledged, but
at once emphatically declined. The old soldier, (at least,
this was my guess,) brave in all else, had not the courage to
face the tourists' profanation of such sacred scenes.
Dr. Bird told me a nice story, a pendant to this, of Mr.
Thomas Cook's liberality. One day, before the Gordon
Expedition, which was then in the air, Dr. Bird was smoking
his cigarette on the terrace in front of Shepherd's Hotel, in
company with four or five other men, strangers to him and to
one another. A discussion arose as to the best means of
relieving Gordon. Each had his own favourite general.
Presently the doctor exclaimed: 'Why don't they put the
thing into the hands of Cook? I'll be bound to say he would
undertake it, and do the job better than anyone else.'
'Do you know Cook, sir?' asked one of the smokers who had
hitherto been silent.
'No, I never saw him, but everybody knows he has a genius for
organisation; and I don't believe there is a general in the
British Army to match him.'
When the company broke up, the silent stranger asked the
doctor his name and address, and introduced himself as Thomas
Cook. The following winter Dr. Bird received a letter
enclosing tickets for himself and Miss Bird for a trip to
Egypt and back, free of expense, 'in return for his good
opinion and good wishes.'
After my General's departure, and a month up the Nile, I -
already disillusioned, alas! - rode through Syria, following
the beaten track from Jerusalem to Damascus. On my way from
Alexandria to Jaffa I had the good fortune to make the
acquaintance of an agreeable fellow-traveller, Mr. Henry
Lopes, afterwards member for Northampton, also bound for
Palestine. We went to Constantinople and to the Crimea
together, then through Greece, and only parted at Charing
Cross.
It was easy to understand Sir Frederick Stephenson's
(supposed) unwillingness to visit Jerusalem. It was probably
far from being what it is now, or even what it was when
Pierre Loti saw it, for there was no railway from Jaffa in
our time. Still, what Loti pathetically describes as 'une
banalite de banlieue parisienne,' was even then too painfully
casting its vulgar shadows before it. And it was rather with
the forlorn eyes of the sentimental Frenchman than with the
veneration of Dean Stanley, that we wandered about the ever-
sacred Aceldama of mortally wounded and dying Christianity.
One dares not, one could never, speak irreverently of
Jerusalem. One cannot think heartlessly of a disappointed
love. One cannot tear out creeds interwoven with the
tenderest fibres of one's heart. It is better to be silent.
Yet is it a place for unwept tears, for the deep sadness and
hard resignation borne in upon us by the eternal loss of
something dearer once than life. All we who are weary and
heavy laden, in whom now shall we seek the rest which is not
nothingness?
My story is told, but I fain would take my leave with words
less sorrowful. If a man has no better legacy to bequeath
than bid his fellow-beings despair, he had better take it
with him to his grave.
We know all this, we know!
But it is in what we do not know that our hope and our
religion lies. Thrice blessed are we in the certainty that
here our range is infinite. This infinite that makes our
brains reel, that begets the feeling that makes us 'shrink,'
is perhaps the most portentous argument in the logic of the
sceptic. Since the days of Laplace, we have been haunted in
some form or other with the ghost of the MECANIQUE CELESTE.
Take one or two commonplaces from the text-books of
astronomy:
Every half-hour we are about ten thousand miles nearer to the
constellation of Lyra. 'The sun and his system must travel
at his present rate for far more than a million years (divide
this into half-hours) before we have crossed the abyss
between our present position and the frontiers of Lyra'
(Ball's 'Story of the Heavens').
'Sirius is about one million times as far from us as the sun.
If we take the distance of Sirius from the earth and
subdivide it into one million equal parts, each of these
parts would be long enough to span the great distance of
92,700,000 miles from the earth to the sun,' yet Sirius is
one of the NEAREST of the stars to us.
The velocity with which light traverses space is 186,300
miles a second, at which rate it has taken the rays from
Sirius which we may see to-night, nine years to reach us.
