The Artist, the General and the Hajjah

David Roberts was an artist whose lithographs of Egypt were hugely popular and are, even today, instantly recognisable. Charles Gordon was a Victorian military hero and one of the earliest examples of a media sensation. Gordon’s luck ran out in Sudan when, while he was Governor General, Khartoum was put under siege by the Mahdist rebels, and he was assassinated. Lady Evelyn Cobbold was an aristocrat and a traveller. She converted to Islam and was the first European woman, on record, to undertake the Hajj.

Lady Evelyn was the only one of the three whose connection to the Scottish Highlands was clear in my mind. I had studied about Gordon in school in Sudan but thought of him as English. This was because the Sudanese refer to the British, who ruled Sudan from 1898 to 1956, as the Ingeleez. They did so not out of ignorance but because, officially, the British Empire was ‘English’, and all the Scots engaged in empire-building and administration presented themselves as English. When it came to international affairs, even the Scottish press of the time used ‘England’ in reference to the state.  Similarly, I had known David Roberts’ paintings but did not know that he was born in Edinburgh. I am always seeking connections between Sudan and Scotland – the country I came from and the one I am living in now. Through fiction, I bring them closer to give meaning to my own personal trajectory.

In my novel Bird Summons (2019), three Muslim women embark on a road trip to the Highlands to visit the grave of Zainab/ Lady Evelyn Cobbold. Their leader, Salma, says, ‘We might never understand what it’s like to be the eldest daughter of the seventh Earl of Dunmore or to have a townhouse in Mayfair and a 15,000-acre estate in the Highlands, but Lady Evelyn was a woman like us, a wife and a grandmother. She worshipped as we worshipped though she kept her own culture, wore Edwardian fashion, shot deer and left instructions for bagpipes to be played at her funeral. She is the mother of Scottish Islam and we need her as our role model.’

During the drive across Scotland, the women bicker and banter, field phone calls from family and ex-suitors from ‘back home’, and navigate the obstacles to getting to that grave on the Glencarron estate. Outsiders in Britain, hesitant in their interactions and feeling unsettled, the women seek in Lady Evelyn a connection that would make them more comfortable and grounded in the Scottish landscape. Transcending race, they seize on Lady Evelyn as someone ‘like us’, someone who had prayed as they pray, who had read the Qur’an and believed as they believe. Despite the huge gulf between her and them, the women’s journey is an insistence on the sisterhood of Islam. 

Salma, Moni and Iman are united in that they are Muslim, Arab, and they moved to live in Scotland at some point in their lives. They see themselves as good, observant Muslims, but even within their conventional lives there is a danger of wandering astray. Salma has no intention of having an affair with Amir and feels safe flirting with him long-distance but, still, she is cheating on her husband and taking the first steps in ruining her marriage, and by extension her successful life.  Moni believes she is a wonderful mother, sacrificing all for her disabled son, but in doing so she is neglecting everything else, and ultimately being unfair to herself. Iman feels justified in rebelling against the constraints of her femininity, but it is maturity that she needs more than freedom. 

On the shores of Loch Ness, the women stay at a monastery which has been converted into a resort. Can they connect to the Christian monks who once worshipped here? ‘They would have understood each other, asked forgiveness from the same God, followed the ten commandments, experienced the trajectory of weakness, sin, regret, then redemption.’

Many impulses and observations go into making a novel. I had been struck once and truly dismayed by a television programme in which inner-city Muslim youth were taken to visit a cathedral in the English countryside. The programme was made during the years of the War on Terror, when it was deemed necessary for the media to wring its hands over the ‘Muslim problem’.  In that climate, the youngsters were filmed saying that they felt no connection whatsoever to either the cathedral or the countryside, that neither meant anything to them, though they were born and grew up nearby. I was dismayed because I often felt the exact opposite. In ruined Scottish castles and other remnants of the past, I felt connected to the believing Christians who had spent their days in worship and accepted Fate. They were more like me than modern Britons.  

In Bird Summons, magic realism made it possible for me to link the present to the past and convey a sense of the unseen aspects of the religious experience. In their attempt to visit Lady Evelyn’s grave, the women experience surreal manifestations of the spiritual dangers they are facing. The consequences of their life choices take tangible shapes that pose a threat and issue a warning.  Away from the city (which represents restrictions, formality and rituals both religious and secular), the spiritual freedom that the women encounter is vast and beyond control.  As Lady Evelyn was able to transform her life, undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca as a lone European woman to become the first British hajjah, so do the Arab women in Scotland traverse a spiritual expanse and gain a better understanding of their roles and the truths of their existence. Outdoors, the women feel that their worship is witnessed by nature. ‘In the back of her mind [Moni] wondered if she was making history. Perhaps for the first time ever, the words of the Qur’an were reaching this particular part of the earth. Perhaps one day, to her credit, coastline, machair and sandstone would bear witness to what they had heard her recite.’ And in another chapter, ‘The grass was [Salma’s] prayer mat, the wind a protector, her knees felt grounded to this particular piece of earth. She spoke to it and said, “Bear witness for me on the day I will need you to. On the day you will be able to speak and I will not.’’’

I first encountered Lady Evelyn Cobbald in Michael Wolfe’s wonderful classic anthology One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage (1997). Only a handful of the entries were written by women and so hers made an impact. It was taken from her book Pilgrimage to Mecca, which was first published in 1934. The book was reissued in 2009 by Arabian Publishing with an excellent and long introduction by William Facey. The introduction serves as a biography as well as a critical assessment of Lady Evelyn Cobbald as a worldly writer who moved in circles that included T.E Lawrence and Marmaduke Pickthall. She had spent her childhood in Algiers and Cairo and, as was typical of the Victorian aristocracy, spent most of her time with the household staff. These nannies were Muslim, and with them she visited mosques, where the call of the azan made a deep impression on her. As an adult, visiting the Vatican with friends, she was asked by the Pope if she were a Catholic. In the introduction to Pilgrimage to Mecca she writes, ‘I was taken aback for a moment and then I replied that I was a Moslem. What possessed me I don’t pretend to know as I had not given a thought to Islam for many years. A match was lit and I then and there determined to read up and study the Faith. The more I read and the more I studied, the more convinced I became that Islam was the most practical religion’.

My admiration for Lady Evelyn, which verged on awe, killed my ability to fictionalize her. I rendered her as she was and not as an imaginary character. I could not put words in her mouth nor place her in situations that I contrived. As a result, in Bird Summons she is a figure revered by the women who are visiting her grave. The novel is about them and not about her. She is an inspiration to them; her book accompanies them on the journey and they are impressed by her story of conversion. I personally found myself moved by the account of her burial. Reading about it brought tears to my eyes; writing about it in the last chapter of the novel felt like reaching a destination. ‘In January 1963, when Lady Evelyn died in a nursing home in Inverness, a telephone call was made to the mosque in Woking. The story the imam heard was strange. An aristocratic Scottish woman, over ninety years old, had laid down the terms of her funeral in a will. She wished to be interned according to the rules of her faith, a faith that was not that of her family or the people around her. She wanted an imam to read the prayers in Arabic. She wanted bagpipes to be played and no Christian minister must be present. She wanted to lie facing Mecca in a place where the red stags could run over her grave. The imam took the overnight train to Inverness, far away, he later said, like the distance between Lahore and Karachi…’

I found it easier to fictionalize Charles Gordon in my novel River Spirit (2023). The novel charts Sudan’s pivotal move from Ottoman rule to becoming forcibly part of the British empire. The novel is narrated from the viewpoints of several characters, most of them Sudanese and women. Each character passes on the baton of the story to the next. One of the characters is Gordon himself, Governor General of Sudan, who was killed in Khartoum in 1895 by revolutionary forces. These had put Khartoum under a tough siege for several months while Gordon held out, standing on the roof of his palace, looking out with his telescope over the Blue Nile, desperately waiting for the British relief expedition. When it did arrive, it was too late. 

Gordon was the archetypical Victorian hero. He had supressed the Taiping rebellion in China and was dubbed by the adoring British press as ‘Chinese Gordon’. His death at the hands of a rogue assassin, and the hacking of his head, just two days before the relief expedition arrived, was a national trauma for Britain. Queen Victoria wept, his journals were published widely, and countless books were written about him. In the 1960s, Hollywood glamourized him with the epic war film Khartoum, in which his character was played by Charlton Heston, and Laurence Olivier, in blackface, played his Sudanese enemy!

Attending school in Sudan, I had studied a different version of history, the Sudanese version, in which Gordon was himself his own worst enemy. Gordon believed himself to be exceptional. Delusional, stressed, he defied authority and forced the British government to send in an army to rescue him. His stance resulted in the death of many Sudanese. If he had surrendered Khartoum instead of holding out at all costs, its inhabitants would have been spared much bloodshed. 

In my novel, Gordon does not speak until the start of the last quarter. He comes late into the story because from the Sudanese perspective, the story had started long before his arrival. In the nineteenth century, Sudan was part of the Ottoman Empire, and was ruled through Egypt. The Sudanese lived on the frayed edge of an empire that was in decline. Years of harsh rule, excessive taxation and cruel exploitation had taken their toll. People started anticipating the prophecy that the Mahdi – the Guided One – would surely appear to rescue them from the awfulness of their lives. When a man named Muhammed Ahmed claimed that the Prophet Muhammed had told him in a dream that he was the Mahdi, the Sudanese took heed. Muhammed Ahmed announced that people didn’t need to pay taxes and that they should revolt against what he pronounced as the ‘infidel’ government. 

In my research I found it fascinating that the ulema of Khartoum, themselves government employees and loyal to the Ottoman Caliphate, did not immediately reject Muhammad Ahmed’s claim to being the Mahdi. Educated in the prestigious Azhar University, well versed in the characteristics of the Expected Madhi as described in the Hadith, the ulema’s initial response was to hear him out and give him the benefit of the doubt. When they found that he did not fulfil the characteristics of the Mahdi, they (and later the Azhar) issued fatwas and proclamations against him. The northern Sudanese tribes adhered to these fatwas and supported the government. So did the Sufi tariqas which Muhammad Ahmed had abolished along with the four schools of Islamic law!

The Mahdist rebellion started as a religious movement that denounced a world which was coming to an end. Its adherents wore patches on their clothes and lived frugally. Armed only with spears and farming utensils, they were able to defeat, against the odds, the government soldiers that were sent against them. The news spread throughout Sudan of these miraculous victories as proof of Muhammed Ahmed’s authentic Mahdism. When one success led to the other and more tribes joined in, the movement became a nationwide revolution against foreign rule. Worldly gains and political power became part of the impetus. The Mahdi also began to fight the Sudanese tribes who refused to join him. Every Sudanese was compelled to pay allegiance to his cause. If they did not, they were regarded as a kaffir. At one point, even marriages were annulled between women living in territories under the Mahdi’s rule and their husbands who fought on the side of the government.   

In the meantime, Britain had invaded Egypt, and was ruling Sudan as a subsidiary territory. This was when Gordon stepped into the picture. He was appointed by the Khedive of Egypt, but he was getting his orders from London. When he arrived in Khartoum, the Mahdi had already taken over the west of the country. Gordon’s orders were to evacuate the Egyptian garrisons in Khartoum; the roused British press wanted their hero to ‘smash’ the Mahdi. Instead, the Mahdi put Khartoum under siege and Gordon started calling out for a rescue expedition. This again was supported by British public opinion and, after pressure, an expedition was gathered and sent out. It arrived too late, exactly two days after the Mahdists had taken over Khartoum and assassinated Gordon.  

The Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, was blamed for delaying the relief expedition, and the Liberal government fell as a consequence. Gordon had certainly captured the public imagination. For the next fourteen years, as Sudan remained an independent state under Mahdist rule (a rule comparable to those of ISIS or Boko Haram), the desire to avenge Gordon bubbled. His death was used to extend British influence in Africa. He was lauded as a hero, and many young men were inspired to fight to ‘regain’ the Sudan.  It was conveniently forgotten that Gordon had disobeyed orders. Instead of evacuating as he was instructed to, he had dug in. Many Sudanese lives would have been saved if he had surrendered Khartoum to the Mahdi. 

I hesitated to write about Gordon, let alone from his point of view. He was an imperialist and a racist, opining in his journals that all black women were sluts. Researching his life was wading into propaganda. There was so much material that I did not want to be influenced by! So, I began my novel with the Sudanese characters, telling the Sudanese perspective before allowing Gordon to speak in chapter nineteen. As I had used first names with the other characters, I also entitled his chapter ‘Charles’ rather than Gordon. This was a simple change but it freed something within me. The name ‘Gordon’ was so loaded, so much talked about. ‘Charles’ was more humble; I could write about a Charles.  Also, for the first time in my writing life, I used the second person. I began the chapter with, ‘You like how they say your name, changing the ‘g’ to the guttural ‘gh’, elongating the second syllable so that it sounds Scots. Ghur-doun. Ghur-doun Basha, they say. The title ‘Pasha’ is Ottoman as are the decorations of the Order of the Osmanieh and the Order of the Medjidie. You do not mind honours, they sit well with your nature, they do justice to your achievements. Major-General, Companion of the Order of the Bath, Companion of the Order of the Dragon, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the Imperial Yellow Jacket. It is monetary prizes that you shun. You detest the acquisition of wealth, the constant wrangling over salaries and benefits. It is pedantic and you do admire spirit. You admire your enemies, the fanatics led by the Mahdi, the dervishes who throw themselves into battle as if death will not touch them. You wish you were leading them.’

The conquest of the Sudan took place in 1898. The decisive Battle of Umdurman (in which a young Winston Churchill served) was particularly brutal, with thousands of Sudanese killed. Using the latest, most powerful artillery, the British destroyed the Mahdi’s tomb. To avenge Gordon, the Mahdi’s body was dug out and dismembered. To copy Gordon’s death, his skull was detached and preserved while his bones were thrown in the Nile. And Gordon continued to be a symbol of what was right about imperialism. He inspired soldiers and school children, missionaries and colonial settlers. There are statues of him in London at the Embankment, in Chatham, in Gravesham, and a memorial in Southampton. 

If I get up from my desk now and drive for ten minutes, I will find a huge bronze statue of Gordon right in the middle of Aberdeen city centre. My own local Gordon statue!  It was a shock when I first came across it, soon after I first arrived in the 1990s. The word ‘Khartoum’ chiselled in the inscription. I could not help but be thrilled by the connection to the city where I spent the first twenty-three years of my life. Here, somehow, was an assertion of my identify, proof of a shared history. Gordon had been there, and I was now here. The university I had graduated from, the University of Khartoum, was once Gordon Memorial College. The palace where he died was only a few miles from where I had grown up. The Blue Nile he gazed at every day was what had watered my ancestors for generations. I knew his history, I knew his story, and this knowledge, despite all the obstacles, enabled me to write about him. ‘Every single day, you look north through your telescope, waiting for the sight of the red uniforms, the flutter of the Union Jack. End of November was your calculation. Food wise and ammunition, Khartoum could only hold out until the end of November otherwise ‘the game is up and Rule Britannia.’ Yet here you are weeks later, just about. Soldiers reduced to skin and bones, snoozing on their feet, people dying of malnutrition, so many corpses in the streets that you pay twenty piastres to anyone who would bury one. The city is shelled day and night. Shells fall in the Nile, scar buildings, kill children and horses. Shells shatter the windows of the palace which you insist on lighting up through the night. Lanterns and candles, lots of candles, to ward off the beat of the war drums. Ghur-doun. Doun. Doom. They are beating for you and no one else. Every night, murdering your sleep, raiding your nerves, turning your hair white. 

It is white now – all of it. You notice it when you shave. You notice too that your hand does not tremble. You are not afraid. It is others who are afraid of you. The Mahdi now encamped across the river, hesitating to attack, even though he knows the appalling condition of the city. Your officers who in your presence cannot hold their hands steady to light a cigarette. Grown men reduced to stammering because they face Ghur-doun. Ghur-doun who is not afraid of death.’

Gordon was not the only Scottish character in River Spirit. A disproportionate number of Scots played a part in Britain’s colonial administration. I therefore had no reservation in including another man, Robert, the engineer whose true vocation is art. My initial idea for the novel was of a young man from Edinburgh who becomes fascinated by the vernacular architecture of colonial Sudan. He paints the Nile and starts to dress like a native. When he sketches the wife of a tribal chief and the drawing is discovered, his career and safety are in jeopardy. But I ended up deviating quite far from this original idea. The Sudanese woman in the drawing took centre stage, and the artist was no longer the main character. 

As my writing progressed, Robert became more ruthlessly ambitious, enslaving a young woman in order to paint her. ‘He saw her again. The girl he had seen six months ago, the one he had almost purchased and then at the end didn’t, feeling it was beneath him to do so. He had often looked at the sketches he made of her that day. Her special beauty, only oil could do justice to her blue-black skin, the contrast of the white cloth against it, not only white, but any colour would sing. Her brooding eyes – the longing in them when she turned away to look at the river. On returning home that day, he was struck by a brilliant idea – he could free her once he was done with her. This would assuage his troubled conscience.’

In constructing Robert’s character, I researched Scottish artists and settled on David Roberts, the renowned Orientalist painter. So, from the inception, I was not fictionizing David Roberts but using his life to build a character that was already part of my imagination. I had known David Roberts’ work for years. When my husband was a university student in 1980s Cairo, he bought a calendar of Ancient Egypt lithographs by David Roberts. He kept the calendar long afterwards and I was enthralled by the images. Bulky temples in the desert with a few tiny people next to them. The sunny, sandy pyramids of Giza. Romantic visions of boats sailing on the Nile at sunset. When my mother-in-law passed away, we found among her belongings a coffee table book entitled Egypt-Yesterday and Today by David Roberts. In it were page after page of gorgeous paintings of the Nile Valley, all in his distinctive, unmistakable style inspired by his travels in Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century. I also learnt that Roberts had been born in Edinburgh. One of the most famous Scottish artists of his time had painted my part of the world. I was excited by the connection. 

David Roberts not only painted archaeological sites, among his best works were also lavish crowded street scenes, majestic mosques, souqs and slave girls. This of course was the exotic East – the Temple of Karnak, obelisk and Sphinx – and though I knew that it was idealised and not altogether ‘real’, I succumbed to the charms of his Orientalist vision. Now, in my hallway in Aberdeen, there are four framed lithographs by David Roberts. Minarets and the facades of mosques are rendered in extraordinary architectural detail. Women wear veils like the ones my great-grandmother wore. In The Silk Merchants’ Bazaar, piles of merchandise and shoppers mingle under intricate woodwork and lattice windows.  

In his biography by Katharine Sim, Roberts’s childhood is described in Dickensian terms. Born in 1796 in West Kirk, his family lived in the cramped, downstairs rooms of a tenement. Two of his siblings died at a young age. Robert’s father was a shoemaker, and his mother took in washing to supplement the family’s income. They could not afford to keep their son at school, and at the age of ten, David was apprenticed to a housepainter. In his teens he worked for a circus as a scene-painter, and then joined a company of strolling players. He continued to design and paint stage scenery in the Edinburgh Theatre Royal, the Glasgow Theatre Royal and, in his late twenties, in the Drury Lane Theatre London. Painting full-scale scenery and stage sets had a big influence on his later paintings of the Middle East.

David Roberts, though, never did travel as far south as Sudan. Instead, after Egypt, he went to Syria and Palestine, and accomplished his most popular work The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia. During his long tours, he produced vast amounts of drawings and watercolours. On his return to Scotland, he used these as a basis for paintings and lithographs. These lithographic prints were produced in mass quantities and sold to the public through a system of subscription. Appearing before the advent of widespread photography, and at a time when there was huge interest in the lands of the Bible, Roberts quickly garnered subscribers, among them the young Queen Victoria. The Royal Collection today includes her complete set.

In David Roberts’s work I was often struck by how disproportionally small people were in relation to the buildings. That he was more fascinated by landscapes and monuments was also evident in his journals. The sun setting over the hills, the white sails of the boats on the Nile, fascinated him more than the people with whom he did not have the language skills to communicate. An exception to this were the Nubian woman, graceful dancing girls and those filling their water jugs at the river. After his death, such enthusiastic passages were censored by his ‘prudish’ daughter Christine and regarded as too ‘licentious’ to be made public.    

Christine’s mother, Margaret, had been an alcoholic. His wife’s behaviour was a constant source of distress for David as she quarrelled with his parents and pressured him with requests for more money. Keeping Margaret at a distance and his beloved, Christine, close, was a life-long struggle. Even after being separated for years, he was constantly dodging his wife by travelling, and calling her ‘the brazen faced monster’ as time and again he had to settle her debts. 

Despite these difficulties, Roberts rose to become one of the most prominent Orientalist painters of his time, counting the artist Turner and the novelist Thackeray among his admirers. He was talented, hardworking and ambitious – and these qualities I borrowed for my fictional Robert labouring on his art in Sudan. I also dropped the name of David Roberts into this paragraph. ‘He was satisfied with his work, intoxicated by what he could further achieve. A body of work that would possess more than charm. As good as anything by the Glasgow Boys – those children of shipping magnates who could afford to study in Paris, enrol in ateliers; sons of the manse propped up by financial support. All the formal education Robert ever had was from the School of Art, especially set up for working men unable to study full-time. Every day except Sunday, he would rise before dawn to attend lessons before putting in a full day at the shipbrokers. An oil portrait of the girl …  could end up as masterful as Jean-Leon Gerome’s Bashi-Bazouk. Not as lavish, certainly starker but still in its own way gorgeous. His conception of it was so strong it was palpable; he was confident that he could pull it off once he got back home and had the space and materials for a large oil canvas. In the meantime, his technique and subject matter were on a par with David Roberts’s, his watercolours comparable to Arthur Melville’s, dare he say, work that Owen Jones, had he still been alive, would have approved of. In a year, he could make his mark in the world of Scottish Art. His name listed among the artists in a catalogue. His name linked to the painters who depicted the Orient. His own atelier. Each painting selling for thirty pounds, fourty, sixty. He would never have to work with ships again.’

David Roberts achieved the dream of the outsider joining the inner circle. In 1841, he was elected as a Royal Academician, was awarded a prize at the Paris International Exposition, and later received the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh. The child with little prospects had become one of Scotland’s establishment figures. And history will count him as one of the first British professional artists to interpret the Middle East. His vision of the Middle East became the quintessential one.

The regions David Roberts travelled through and sketched were part of an ageing Ottoman Empire. In only a few decades, these places would fall into Britain’s hands. The explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and administrators who came to play a role in the British Empire very likely travelled there with expectations built around the images portrayed in his art. Among these travellers were Gordon, and among them was Lady Evelyn Cobbald. They would most likely have been familiar with Roberts’s work. 

David Roberts (1786-1864), Charles Gordon (1833-1885) and Lady Evelyn Cobbold (1867-1963). Three Scottish figures who spent considerable time in the Muslim world, took and gave in varying portions. Roberts and Lady Evelynn were secure in their Scottish identity but completely divergent in class. Gordon, descended from generations of British military men, was born in England and hardly ever lived in Scotland. His public image was that of an English army officer. As men, Gordon and Roberts enjoyed more freedom and agency than Lady Evelyn who, despite being adventurous, was held back by social conventions and motherhood. It was through conversion that she penetrated deeper into the Muslim world and saw what they never did – the Ka’ba and the Prophet Muhammad’s mosque in Medina. Lady Evelyn and Gordon were closer in social grouping but, as a writer, she might have connected more intellectually with the artist, David Roberts. The lives of the three overlapped but, as far as I know, they never met. Roberts in the last years of his life would have read in the newspapers about the young Gordon’s outstanding success in China. Gordon as a practicing Christian would have been interested in Roberts’s lithographs of the Holy Lands. Lady Evelyn was eighteen when Gordon was assassinated. In Cairo with her father, moving in British colonial circles, entranced by the azan, she would have been following the dramatic news of the Khartoum siege and Gordon’s last days. Visiting the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx for the first time, I imagine her comparing the reality with David Roberts’ lithograph of the same scene.  

I believe that Scotland, the nation which produced these three exceptional individuals, endowed them with gravitas and awareness of the marginal perspective, the desire to understand (if not always fully) and the will to see (if not always clearly). Roberts, Gordon and Cobbold were not simple opportunists. They shared a sense of integrity and depth; the desire to excel in their chosen field and the urge to engage fully with their surroundings.

Scotland is a nation that is familiar with resistance and opposition. Its political culture has always been one of enlightenment and anti-imperialism. This, however, did not prevent it from playing an active role in the British Empire. Roberts, Gordon and Cobbold arrived in North Africa as privileged, white members of a colonial class, shaped by Victorian values and prejudices. Lady Evelyn was steeped in aristocracy. David Roberts’ orientalist paintings paved the way for European dominance and hegemony. Gordon, in his diaries, railed bitterly against the Liberal Prime Minister, Gladstone, when the latter stood up in parliament and declared that the Sudanese had a right to freedom. The extent of the legacy of the three travellers illustrates the involvement of Scotland in the British Empire, a complicit relationship that cannot be denied.