Not only strange birds and beasts were to be seen on the way to Gondokoro. The wild black people came down to the banks to stare. Some had their faces smeared with ashes, others wore gourds for headdresses. Some wore neither gourds nor anything else. One chieftain's full dress was a string of beads. At first he was afraid to come near Gordon, but when he had been given a present of beads and other things he grew very friendly.
"He came up to me," says Gordon, "took up each hand, and gave a good soft lick to the backs of them; and then he held my face and made the motion of spitting in it."
This was a mark of great politeness and respect. A chief of this tribe once welcomed an English traveller by spitting into each of his hands, and then into his face. The traveller, in a rage, spat back as hard as ever he could, and the chief was overcome with joy at the traveller's friendliness.
Near Gondokoro, at St. Croix, Gordon came to the ruins of an Austrian missionary settlement. Only a few banana trees, planted by the missionaries, and some graves, marked where the Christian settlement had been. Out of twenty missionaries who had gone there during thirteen years, thirteen had died of fever, two of dysentery, and two, broken in health, had had to go home. And yet they had not been able to claim as a Christian even one of the blacks amongst whom they worked. No wonder that the Austrian Government lost heart and gave up the mission.
When Gordon reached Gondokoro he saw that it was absurd to pretend that the Khedive ruled any of the country outside its walls. No one dared go half a mile outside without being in danger of his life from the tribes whose wives and children and cattle the slavers had taken.
Gordon felt that to make friends with those people, to show them that he was sorry for them, and that he wished to help them, was the first thing to be done if he was to be in reality their Governor. And so, as he travelled on from point to point--back to Khartoum from Gondokoro, to Berber, to Fashoda, to Soubat--he made friends wherever he went. Quickly the black people came to love the man who punished or slew their enemies, who took them from the slavers, and gave them back their wives and children and cattle. He gave grain to some, set others to plant maize, fed the starving ones, and always paid them for each piece of work that they did for him.
