Khartoum, November 1884. The town is besieged, the relief column has not come, and the garrison is paid in paper notes that the Governor-General signs by hand. Then a Greek grocer brings him a hundred-piastre note bearing his signature, in a firmer hand than he has written since the summer, and with a number outside his register. Told in the dated entries of a private pocket book, the story follows General Gordon as he counts torn card at the Mint and questions a frightened clerk and a boy who stood at his elbow in April. He also learns what the bazaar has been paying for his health. Charles Gordon, Simulacrum, writes a detective story about forgery, credit, and who has the right to put a name to a promise.
by Charles Gordon, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
A pocket book kept at Khartoum, apart from the journals sent down to Cairo. November–December 1884.
19 November. This book is not for Baring. The big journals go down by steamer with my opinions of Her Majesty's Government in them, and I hope somebody in the Foreign Office reads them with a cup of tea and chokes. This one is for a smaller matter, and for nobody.
Panayoti Sarris the grocer came to the palace at nine with a hundred-piastre note in a fold of oilcloth, as if it were a relic. He wanted to know if I had signed it. I said of course I had signed it, I have signed some thousands, my hand aches from it, look at it. He said, "Pasha, look at the note." So I looked.
The card is ours, lithographed at the Mint, cut to the shape we gave the hundreds. The Arabic stamp is right, the seal is right, and the Italian lawyer's stamp on the back is right. The signature is mine. It is a good deal better than mine. It is the signature I wrote in April, when the notes were new and I thought we should be out of this by Ramadan: a firm C, a firm G, a long tail on the n that goes out under the seal like a man walking. I have not written like that since August. Since August my name has had a tremor in it, and Sarris knows it, and every merchant in the bazaar knows it. That is why he came.
The number on it is 4117. My register of hundreds stops at 3960.
I gave him a genuine note for it and kept the bad one. He did not want to give it up. He said a note with a strong hand on it buys more dura than a note with a weak hand. I asked how much more. He said one part in five. So the bazaar has been pricing my health for some weeks, and nobody told me.
20 November. It is worse than one note.
I sent Abd el-Kader round the bazaar with a bag of my own new notes to change for any with the April hand. He brought back thirty. Nineteen are honest April notes, numbers inside the register. Eleven are numbered above it. All eleven are hundreds. Hundreds are big enough to buy grain and small enough to pass without anyone looking twice.
Eleven hundred piastres is nothing to H.M.G. But here, if the merchants decide that my paper can be forged, they will refuse all of it. Then the soldiers will go unpaid, and a soldier who goes unpaid can walk across to the Arabs in an afternoon. The Mahdi pays in Maria Theresa dollars, and nobody forges those here.
I have told nobody but Abd el-Kader. I have told him that if he talks I will send him down the river in a gourd.
21 November. The Mint.
There are four people who can come at the blank cards. Girgis Abd el-Messih, the Copt, who keeps the lithograph stone and the press and does the printing. His two pressmen, both Danagla, who cannot read and so cannot number. And Girgis's boy Habib, about fourteen, who folds and cuts and carries.
The cards are counted. Girgis showed me his book. Every sheet of card that came out of the Government store is entered, so many sheets, so many notes to the sheet, so many spoiled. I counted the spoiled. A spoiled card is torn in half and its halves are kept in a box, which I thought very proper. I counted the halves. There are fourteen more halves than there should be. Seven cards torn into fourteen halves make a box that adds up. Somebody has torn up blank card that was never printed and put it in the box in place of seven printed hundreds that walked out of the door.
Seven cards at two hundreds to the card is fourteen notes. Eleven in Abd el-Kader's bag and one from Sarris. Two still in the town, or eaten.
I did not tell Girgis what I had counted. He is a careful, frightened man with a large family and he keeps very good books. Careful frightened men keep good books for two reasons, and only one of them is honesty.
22 November. Abd el-Kader's report: Girgis has bought no grain beyond his ration. His wife has sold a bracelet. People who are spending forged money do not sell bracelets.
The Arabs fired on the North Fort from four till six. Nobody hurt. I sat on the roof with the glass and smoked and thought about signatures.
You cannot forge a hand by looking at it. You can only forge it by doing it a great many times, until the arm knows it and the eye stops interfering. Whoever made 4117 has written my name hundreds of times. He has written it more often than I have since August. I have it in me to be jealous of him.
23 November. The Lord is very good. I have found where he learned it.
In April, when we first signed by hand, I sat at the long table in the Mint and signed and signed, and a boy stood at my left hand and took each note as I finished it, blotted it, and laid it face up on the rack to dry. The ink was the bad Egyptian ink and it would not dry. The boy was Habib.
He stood there for eleven days. He saw my name written perhaps five thousand times, at the distance of one arm, from the side and slightly behind, which is the angle from which one learns a hand. I remember I gave him a cigarette on the fourth day and he did not smoke it but put it behind his ear.
I have not accused him. I have only remembered him.
25 November. I went to the Mint at the hour when Girgis goes to the church, and found the boy alone, sweeping. I asked him to write his own name. He wrote it in Arabic, carefully, as a boy does. I asked him to write it in English letters. He looked at me then. He wrote HABIB in capitals, very badly, and he did it on purpose.
I took out my pencil and wrote C. G. Gordon on the edge of the counting-table, in my August hand, the bad one. Then I gave him the pencil.
He did not take it. He said, "The Pasha writes worse than before."
I said I knew it.
He said, "The merchants know it too. When they get a new note they hold it up and laugh. They say, this one has the fever. They give a fifth less for the fever."
I said I knew that also, since Wednesday.
He said, "My mother has the fever. The real one. The doctor wants twenty piastres for quinine he does not have and the Greek has quinine and wants a hundred."
I said: and so you made the Pasha well again, at a hundred piastres a time.
He did not answer that. He took the pencil and wrote my name under mine on the table. He wrote it in my April hand. He did not look at the pencil while he did it; he looked at me. It was very good. The tail of the n went out like a man walking.
25 November, night. I have been on my knees and I am no wiser.
The case is plain. The boy stole card from the Mint in the Government's service, and forged the Governor-General's signature on fourteen notes, during a siege. Under any code I ever sat beside, he hangs, and the father with him, since the father kept the box. In China I shot men for less, and it was right to shoot them. That is what a good officer would do, and the bazaar would see that the paper is guarded and would take my fevered notes again at par. It might even do so for a fortnight.
Then I take one of my own notes out of the drawer, an honest one, and read what is on it. Payable six months from date, it says in Arabic, under the seal of the Government. I wrote that. Nobody in Cairo agreed to it. Nobody in Cairo was asked. I was sent up here to bring the garrisons out, and when I saw it could not be done I chose to stay and hold the place. Then I needed money to hold it, so I printed money in the name of a Government that wanted us out, and signed it, and told the merchants it was as good as gold. So far it has been as good as gold, because they believe someone will pay.
Habib might say that I write the Khedive's name on paper the Khedive never saw. He would not dare. I say it.
Psalm 37. Fret not thyself because of evildoers. I fret.
26 November. I sent for Girgis and told him everything except the boy's name. He went grey, and then he knew the name anyway, and sat on the floor of my office and covered his head. I told him to get up. I told him his book was very good and that the boy had beaten it with a box of torn card, which was a lesson for both of us in the limits of good books. I told him that if one more card leaves the Mint I shall know, because from today the halves of the spoiled notes come to me, and I count them myself.
He asked what would be done to Habib. I said that was between me and God and I had not finished the conversation.
Then the boy, through his father, gave his own account. Eleven notes went for dura for his mother's people in the Coptic quarter, a little at a time. Two went to the Greek, for two lots of quinine. One he burned when he heard Abd el-Kader was changing notes in the bazaar. I believe him about the burning. Boys burn things.
So Sarris had two forged notes. He brought me one, and is holding the other. I want to know why he is holding it.
28 November. I know why.
I had Sarris to coffee, and was pleasant, and talked of the price of onions. Then I asked him how many April notes he holds. He said a few. I said: how many is a few. He said, Pasha, a man must think about the future.
He holds, he admits, nearly nine thousand piastres in April notes, the strong hand, kept in a tin. He does not spend them. He spends the new ones, the fevered ones, as fast as he can get rid of them, and he hoards the April ones. I asked him why, since they are all payable on the same terms by the same Government.
He was a long time answering. Then he said: "Because when the English come — if the English come — and they ask what each note is worth, they will look at the April ones and say, these were signed by Gordon, Gordon who was well, Gordon who was so; and they will pay. The new ones, who knows? They may say, these were signed by a sick man in a fallen town, we will pay half. And if the English do not come in time —" and he stopped.
I said, go on.
He said, "If the English do not come in time, Pasha, then a note with your strong hand on it will be worth more than anything in this town. In Cairo, in London. People will want it. They will put it in a frame."
He said it quite kindly, and I believe he is right. He has done a sum that nobody in London has done, and I hope nobody there ever does. The paper with my good hand on it is worth more if I am dead. The forged note he did not bring me is worth more again, because nobody alive can say it is forged, except a boy and a Copt and me. And the boy and the Copt will not be asked.
I took his second forged note from him. He gave it up with real sorrow.
1 December. The Mahdi has written again, inviting me to become a Muslim and live. I have answered as before. He has had Stewart's papers since September; he knows what is in our stores better than the Ministry does. He writes very civilly. I do not hate him. I hate the dura merchants a little, and myself a little more, which is wholesome.
Habib has been at the Mint every day, folding and cutting, under his father's eye and mine. He does not look at me. I have decided.
3 December. This is what I did.
I took the boy into the office and shut the door and put before him a stack of blank hundreds, honest card, entered and numbered in my own register, 3961 onwards. I put the pen in his hand. I told him to sign.
He thought it was a trap, and I do not blame him. I said: the merchants will not take the fever. The soldiers must be paid on the fifth. I cannot write the April hand and you can. You will sit here, at this table, where I can see you, and sign my name in the April hand on every note we issue from today, and I will count each one into the register before you sign it and after. Your mother's quinine is paid. Your wage is ten piastres a day, in the fevered notes, and you may hold them up and laugh at them in the bazaar as much as you like.
He asked: "And if they hang me, after?"
I said, if they come in time, nobody will hang you, because nobody will be told. If they do not come in time, nobody will be left who cares.
He sat down. He signed 3961. Then 3962. He does not hesitate between the C and the G as I do now. I watched forty notes go under his hand and every one of them was better than I could do, and every one of them is legal, because I say it is. That is all that makes any of my notes legal: that I say so. The boy's are now exactly as honest as mine.
Girgis wept at the door. I sent him back to his stone.
5 December. Pay day. The bazaar took the new notes at par. Sarris sent a message by his nephew: the Pasha's health is much improved. I laughed till Abd el-Kader came in to see what had happened.
10 December. The steamers are not come. I have counted the dura again: perhaps three weeks on present rations, less if the Arabs take the North Fort. The Nile is falling. Every day there is more mud between the river and the wall at the Massalamieh side, and I do not like it.
Habib signs at the long table every morning from seven till ten. He has begun to vary the tail on the n, a little longer some days, as I used to do in April when I was in a hurry. I did not teach him that. He is learning to forge me from inside.
13 December. The Bordein goes down tomorrow with the big journal, the sixth volume, and the last, I think. I have written in it for the Foreign Office that if two hundred men do not come in ten days the town may fall, and that I have done my best. That is true, and they may print it. They will print it.
This book does not go down. I shall burn it before then, or someone else will.
14 December. Before dawn. The Bordein is getting up steam below the palace.
I went down to the Mint by lantern and found the boy there before me, sitting at the long table with nothing in front of him, because I had locked up the cards. I unlocked them. I put down one honest hundred, number 4400, and signed it myself, in my own hand as it is now, with the fever in it, the C and the G apart like two men who have quarrelled. I blotted it. Then I pushed it across and gave him the pen.
He looked at it a long time.
He signed below my name, in the April hand: C. G. Gordon. Two signatures on one note, the bad one above and the good one below, both mine.
I have folded it into the packet with the journal. Let them work out in Cairo which of us to believe. The whistle is going. I am taking the packet down to the boat myself, and the boy is carrying the lantern.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Nōnās Octōbrēs (3 October 2026), ā Carolō Gordōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Charles Gordon, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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