Chapter II: Egypt Under Tewfik, 1889

The summer of 1889 saw me occupied almost exclusively with literary work. It was then that I wrote my poem, “A New Pilgrimage,” which with many other pieces of more or less the same date I published in the early autumn. This brought me once more into pleasant relations with my friends, even those who had been most angry with me for my doings in Ireland. Chief among these was my cousin, George Wyndham, who already the year before had sent me a pleasant word. “We have so many grounds,” he wrote, “for friendship, our common love of sport and of poetry, and especially our common blood, that I think it would be very foolish to allow differences of politics and opinion to interfere with it in any way. I sincerely hope that you think so too.” Now, on my return to England in 1889, I found him full of affectionate endeavour to make things pleasant for me on my re-emergence into social life. In this he showed himself no idle friend. I had hardly arrived in London when he arranged occasions of meeting for me at his house in Park Lane with our mutual friends, and eventually one with Arthur Balfour, at which we buried our political hatchet in mutual amiabilities, an attitude we have ever since preserved as often as we have met. Another friend, equally dear to me with George, whom I recovered at this time, was Lytton. He, too, had written me an affectionate letter, regretting that he had missed seeing me on my passage through Paris. As to my women friends, my prison adventures, I soon found, had done me no real discredit with them. The only one of them that had been seriously shocked at it was Princess Wagram, who, not being English, had made herself more English in the matter than were my own countrywomen, and now she, too, was reconciled. With the rest the episode was a title to romantic interest, which made it easy for me to resume my place and more than my place in society. Their kindness did me full amends, and for the next few years strewed my path with flowers to the extent that politics lost their hold over my mind, more than perhaps they should have done. My daughter Judith, too, now growing up, was a new interest of a very absorbing kind, and my diary, when it is resumed, I find dealing mainly with home occupations and the details of my private life.

Nor must I omit another influence which was an important one with me that summer in the direction of weaning me from home politics, that of an intimacy which I then for the first time enjoyed with William Morris. I had already for some years known the Morrises, my first acquaintance with them having been begun in 1883, when I met Mrs. Morris at Naworth, having been invited specially for the purpose by Mrs. Howard (Lady Carlisle), and had spent a week there in her company, and we had made friends, but of Morris himself I had as yet seen little except occasionally when I called on them in Hammersmith. This summer, however, of 1889 saw me for the first time at Kelmscott Manor, where I had an opportunity of intimate intercourse with him during the many pleasant days of gudgeon fishing we enjoyed together on the Upper Thames and the evenings when we argued the questions, artistic and political, which occupied his mind.

Morris was at that time in a mood of reaction from his socialistic fervour. He had quarrelled with Hyndman, and was disgusted at the personal jealousies of his fellow-workers in the cause and at their cowardice in action. He never got over the pusillanimity they had shown at the Trafalgar Square meeting two years before, when a few hundred policemen had dealt with thousands of them as though they had been schoolboys. Morris was too loyal and too obstinate to abjure his creed, but the heart of his devotion to the cause of the proletariat had gone. In some ways our two positions were the same. We had both of us sacrificed much socially to our principles, and our principles had failed to justify themselves by results, and we were both driven back on earlier loves, art, poetry, romance. Morris, with one who understood him and dared to argue with him boldly, was a delightful companion. He was intolerant of the conventional talk of society, and had little sympathy with ideas foreign to his own. He had little patience with fools, and the prettiest woman in the world could not seduce him into listening to nonsense if there was nothing of fact behind it. His time was too precious to waste on them; and the fine ladies who affected artistic tastes in his company without real knowledge put him straightway to flight. To such he was rude and repellent, but to anyone who could increase his stock of knowledge on any subject he lent a willing ear, whether artist or artisan, with absolute indifference as to his social position. In his domestic life Morris was too busy to be unhappy, and of too sanguine a temperament to worry himself much over past disappointments; yet disappointments cannot but have been his. He had a strong and affectionate heart, and had centred his home affections on his two children, and the younger, May, had just made an engagement he disapproved, while the elder, Jenny, who had been his pride as a child for her intellectual faculties, had overworked her brain and was now subject to epileptic fits. It was touching now at Kelmscott to watch Morris’s solicitude for this poor girl on whom his chief home love was bestowed.

Kelmscott Manor was a romantic house, and the life there extremely primitive. There were few of the conveniences of modern life. The rooms below and also on the upper floor were all passage rooms opening one into another, and in order to reach the tapestried chamber in which we sat in the evenings, it was necessary to pass to and fro through Morris’s own bedroom, in which he lay at night in a great square Elizabethan four-post bed, an arrangement which would have been of extreme discomfort to anyone less tolerant of such things than he, and less indifferent to his personal convenience. It was the same thing in the day time. He worked at the designs he was making for his carpets, and at his drawings, and the corrections of his proofs in a room where he was liable every minute to disturbance. Such discomforts had been submitted to by our forefathers, and why not, he thought, by us. It was this insensitiveness to his surroundings that enabled him to deal with the prodigious volume of work which he daily assigned himself, both manual and intellectual.

Such was the house. Out of doors the river—an upper branch of the Thames—was a constant attraction, and there Morris each afternoon took complete holiday. He loved boating, as it reminded him of his Oxford days, and he loved sitting hour after hour in a punt with rod and line, capturing the local gudgeon, a sport requiring skill, on which he prided himself, not without modest reason. In all matters concerning the river he took a passionate and proprietary interest, cherishing a special grudge against the Thames Conservancy, a body which interfered with individual rights, and whose legitimate authority he denied. Against these he constantly inveighed. He loved, too, in memory of Oxford, to engage in wordy warfare with the bargees, and had a strong vocabulary of abuse for them which he did not spare. When on the river he affected a rough manner even with his fellows in the boat, and scorned to apologize if accidents through his fault occurred, all which was in keeping with his appearance, which was that of a Norwegian sea captain rather than a poet, and of this he was proud. He was very dogmatic, with violent likes and dislikes. He used to say that St. Peter’s was the ugliest building in the world after St. Paul’s, and of these things he would discourse when the fish were off their feed, for when they were biting he was too absorbed in his catch to have a thought for anything else.

Of poetry he affected to have little knowledge, and of the work of those he was averse to, he would pretend never to have read a word. I remember that on one boating excursion in which we all took part, we were compelled to take refuge from heavy rain in a little inn by the river side, and that we found in it a book of poetical extracts which we amused ourselves by reading, and that among the rest were those lines of Byron, perhaps his best and quite his best known:

There was a sound of revelry by night.

This he declared to be rubbish, and that he had not a notion whom they were by. Morris in these playful moods was very attractive, and of all the great men I have been in close relations with, I reckon him intellectually the strongest. He had an astonishingly firm grasp of things, and an immensely wide range of knowledge. I never knew him deceived by a false argument, and he was difficult to overcome in discussion even on subjects his adversary knew the best. One thing only, I think, he did not know, much as he had written about it, the love of women, and that he never cared to discuss. My talks with him that summer confirmed me in my resolution politically to retire into my shell, and I think my resolution had a corresponding influence on him.

“_13th Oct._, 1889. _Paris._—I have left home once more for the winter, and with a lighter heart than I have lately had. My last act before leaving England was to write two letters severing the last links which bound me to political life. One was to the Kidderminster electors telling them that they must not depend on me to stand again for Parliament, the other to T. P. O’Connor resigning my directorship of the ‘Star.’ I have intended this for more than a year, but have taken time to reflect, and am sure now that the step is a wise one. As a matter of principle I cannot go on pretending to believe in the Liberal Party, with which I have not an idea in common, beyond Irish Home Rule. As a matter of personal ambition, politics have nothing more to give me. I will not be a parliamentary drudge, and I cannot aspire to lead a party.

“Of doing good in the world in any public way I also despair. I do not see clearly in what direction good lies. I do not love civilised humanity; and poor savage human nature seems a lost cause. I have done what I could for it. I have, I think, saved Egypt from absorption by Europe, and I have certainly, by stopping the Soudan war in 1885, put back the clock of African conquest for a generation, perhaps for a century. But the march of ‘Progress’ is irresistible in the end; and every year the old-fashioned idea of the rights of uncivilised man dies more completely out. Even in Ireland, the National cause is putting itself in line with nineteenth century thought. The moonlighters and cattle-houghers and rebels of all kinds are disappearing; and, instead, we see Parnell manœuvring and deceiving in Parliament neither more nor less than Gladstone himself, and declaring with Rosebery for Imperial Federation! In all this I have no real lot or part. Ireland will doubtless get something of what she wants, and she has all my good wishes still. But Imperial Federation is not worth going to prison for a second time nor even standing another contested election. I have done enough—possibly too much—and am sick and weary of the machinery of English public life.

“On the other hand stands the world of art and poetry. In this I can still hope to accomplish something, and with an advantage of experience not every poet has. I have a great deal to accomplish before old age takes me and little time. My poems, my memoirs, my book of maxims (the ‘Wisdom of Merlyn),’ my book of the Arab horse. These are work enough for all my remaining strength. Then, how delightful life is in perfect liberty! Never have I felt more capable of enjoyment, of the pleasures of friendship, of the casual incidents of romance, of the continuous happiness of life at home. These harmonize with a literary, not with a political ambition, and so it is best it should be. Am I not right?”

The three weeks that I spent at Paris on this occasion were delightful ones passed all in this mood. I found Lytton at the Embassy, and our old intimate intercourse was renewed. He, older than me by nine years, was already entering that valley of the shadow of old age from which he was never to emerge, and which ended in his death two years later. It was that in which his last volume of verse was written, and he made me the confidant of his sorrows, but this is not the place in which to give them more publicity than the volume itself gave them when it was published after his death. They served to accentuate my own mood of aversion from public affairs, and I spent most of my time with him at the Embassy, the same well-known house and garden where I had spent so much of my early youth officially as a member of it in the days of Lord Cowley and the Second Empire. I paid a visit, too, to the Wagrams at Gros Bois, where I mixed again in French society. The château was at that time undergoing repair of a substantial kind, an experience it had not had since 1830, and my hosts were living in the _dépendance_, an interesting suite of little rooms once the abode of Marshal Berthier’s aides-de-camp, and possessed of a certain historic charm, with their Empire furniture and decorations. We shot each day in the great woods.

“Gros Bois, Wagram tells me, has been an oak wood ever since the time of the Druids. It was a royal domain, and had been given over and over again to different favourites of the kings of France. The last instance was when it was bestowed by Napoleon on the Prince’s grandfather, as the inscription over the door records, his ‘companion in arms.’ The estate is of about 4,000 hectares, of which fully half are woodlands, 1,200 being inside the park wall, an ancient enclosure dating from 1650. I never saw so completely isolated a place, nor one quite so enjoyable. The woods are laid out formally (as French woods are) with straight rides or rather drives of grass cut through them, and though there is no old timber, all having been levelled with the ground in 1814, the oak trees grown up again from the stub are very beautiful, and the place is full of woodpeckers, jays, and magpies, besides game. There is a stone recording the death of the late Prince’s first roebuck: _Ici mon fils a tué son premier chevreuil_, with the date 1826. This was Wagram’s father, who went on till 1888, killing something every day in season and out of season, partridges on their nests if he could find no other, dogs, and sometimes beaters. All is recorded in a book; and he might have been the original of Carlyle’s Baron: _qui centum mille perdices plumbo confecit et statim in stercore convertit_. (I am not sure of the Latinity.) He died at the beginning of last year, being about eighty years old, but shooting on to the last week of his life.

“I have received a nice letter from Kidderminster in answer to mine, and the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ announces my retirement publicly from political life. The Princess is triumphant at this retirement, as she was always opposed to my politics.”

All this was very demoralizing from a public point of view. On the 25th I was joined by my family at Paris, and on the 2nd November we moved on to Rome and Egypt. At Rome, where we spent a month, I found myself once more within the sphere of the serious life of two years before, having many friends among the Irish clergy, who formed so strong an element at the Vatican, and I find many entries in my diary connected with Irish politics, some of which are worth transcribing here.

“_4th Nov._—To see Monsignore Stonor, who has inherited much of Cardinal Howard’s position, being a sort of diplomatic go-between with the Papal court as well as having been made an archbishop. He tells me that Lintorn Simmons is coming here on an official mission to the Vatican. When he, Stonor, saw Lord Salisbury in London this summer, Lord Salisbury told him that diplomatic relations would have to be established with the Pope, but that there was such fear of opposition from the Nonconformists that it would have to be done cautiously. Rosebery had told him much the same thing. Now the pretext is a settlement of ecclesiastical disputes at Malta. This, Stonor says, is a pretext only, as the disputes were settled some time ago through himself. He also told me what happened between the Pope and the German Emperor. There was no rudeness intended by the Emperor nor offence taken by the Pope. An arrangement had been come to between the Emperor and Prince Henry, that Prince Henry and Herbert Bismarck should come to the Vatican half an hour after the Emperor, but owing to the slow pace of the Emperor’s carriages Prince Henry arrived too soon by ten minutes. Herbert Bismarck thereupon made a scene, declaring that he and Prince Henry would leave the Vatican if not at once announced. They were consequently announced, although the Pope had given orders that he and the Emperor should be undisturbed for half an hour, ten minutes before the time, but the Emperor told them to wait. Stonor assures me that this was all. It has, however, I fancy been agreed to hush up whatever happened, and the Emperor has made whatever amends was required.

“_5th Nov._—Made a round of visits with Stonor, among others to the Embassy. The Dufferins arrived last night, but we did not see them. With Dering [the first Secretary], however, we had some talk. Simmons is to arrive next week and with him as secretary, Ross of Bladensburg. This will make a storm in Ireland, where Ross is known to have had much to do with the Papal Rescript against the Plan of Campaign. [See my ‘Land War in Ireland.’]

“_6th Nov._—We breakfasted at the Palazzo Caetani, and went on in the afternoon in a storm of thunder and lightning with the Duke and Duchess [of Sermoneta] and their daughter Giovanella to Fogliano. Fogliano, however, we were not destined to reach, for the rain was quite equatorial, and we stopped for the night at Cisterna, where the Duke has a half-deserted palace, and there we are camped. The floods on the Campagna were beyond belief, torrents of red water pouring over the edges of the railway cuttings, and in some places the train having to drive its way against a strong and deep current. Every water course was a raging flood and broad streams were forming themselves rapidly in the fields and still broader lakes. At Villetri we left the train and took carriage, but stopped here as it was thought dangerous to go farther. I never in Europe saw such continuous lightning or such rain over so long a space of time. It has been like the breaking of the monsoon in India. The torrent in one of the valleys gave one an idea of what the world may have been in the tropic age when the great valleys were first formed.

“This palace here at Cisterna has many remains of grandeur, fresco paintings by Zucchero, and fine marble chimney-pieces. The weather, too, in spite of the rain is warm, and we are lodged comfortably enough. We play dominoes in the evening on an old fire screen propped on two chairs to serve as table.”

We went on next morning with the first light to Fogliano, just in time to get across the Pontine Marshes, for the floods were rising and in one place had already covered the road. Here we spent four days in this the most delightful country place in Italy. I have already described Fogliano in one of my previous volumes and need not repeat it here. We occupied our time pleasantly enough duck shooting on the lagoons, which lie between the great oak forest and the sea, in the early mornings, and riding in the afternoons to visit the Duchess’s stud, which she has established very successfully here, and for which she had bought a couple of Arab stallions a year or two ago. The Duke much busied with public affairs, and the municipal elections now going on at Rome. He was on the committee of selection, and after much telephoning to and from headquarters ended by sending in his resignation. This was an early stage of his public career which led him later to the mayoralty of Rome, and later still to office in the Government. “The Duke,” I write, 9th November, after much talk on these subjects, “is certainly a most distinguished man, not a man of genius but of very superior talents. He has read enormously, philosophy, science, history, and can talk well on most subjects. He is president of the Italian Geographical Society and the Italian Alpine Club, an honest man in public affairs, but disenchanted with knowledge and doubtful of the ends of life like all the rest of us. ‘Neither the moral law nor the law of beauty,’ he says, ‘can be found in nature, and without these the world must be lacking in interest.’ He is not religious, but supports religion as being the reason of these two ideas, at least so I gather from what he has told me.”

It was in accordance with this view of religion, and out of politeness to us, that on Sunday the 10th it was arranged that mass should be said in a little movable hut on wheels like a bathing machine, evidently a new experiment, a talked-of chapel not being finished or apparently likely to be. “The Duke is clearly a latitudinarian though he attended mass, and the Duchess enjoys life too much to be very _dévote_. There were some thirty servants and peasant neighbours brought in and a sprinkling of dogs to make up the congregation, which was all out of doors in front of the house, the celebrant a mass priest brought in from a distance. Altogether a quaint admixture of mediæval simplicity with a nineteenth century lack of faith, but it is not for me to criticize.” On our return to Rome the same afternoon, 10th November, I found letters and newspapers with news from Egypt. “The Stanley expedition has come to grief in Africa, and Wadelai was really captured by the Mahadists just as Osman Digna declared it to be more than a year ago. Stanley and Emin are now reported to be together endeavouring to get to the coast, but an end will have been put to their filibustering projects of re-conquest on the Upper Nile. The German, Peters, too, has been knocked on the head by the Somalis, and Islam triumphs all along the equatorial line. The German Emperor, meanwhile, is at Constantinople being fêted with all honour by Abdul Hamid.”

The news inspired me with a fresh longing for the East, where my true heart lay, and hastened our departure for Egypt, the rest of our time at Rome being spent partly, as I have said, with my old friends the Irish priests in the various colleges and monasteries, partly with new artistic acquaintances, of whom there are so many resident in the ancient city. But I must not linger over these personal recollections, interesting as they are to me, for they would take up too much space. All I need notice is that, calling again at the Embassy, I found Lord Dufferin, to my pleasure, favourable to the pleading I made that he should help if possible in any decision there might be in the direction of re-establishing that free government at Cairo he had promised the Egyptians in 1883, and recalling Arabi. On my last day at Rome I attended a dinner at the Irish college, where I met the Maronite Archbishop of Damascus, and where good old Dr. Kirby, rector of the College, proposed my unworthy health, and where I was constrained to speak at length to the students on the prospects of Home Rule. It was my last public utterance about Ireland. On the morning of the 4th we left for Naples, and there took ship for Alexandria, and by the 12th found ourselves once more at Sheykh Obeyd, where we spent the rest of the winter in the purely Oriental surroundings I have more than once described.

On the occasion of this second visit to Egypt of 1889-90 I adopted a new attitude towards the British occupation and Baring, who represented it at Cairo as Consul-General and British Resident. When I had been there the previous year I had avoided all intercourse with the Anglo-official world, but now, on my return, influenced by the conversation I had had with Dufferin at Rome and thinking that I might perhaps thus help on the re-establishment of a more liberal _régime_ at Cairo, I took occasion of an informal message sent me that he would be glad to see me to call on Baring, and from that time remained in friendly relations with the Residency, which were not without their advantage in a public way. In business matters I found Sir Evelyn a pleasant man to deal with. He was quick to understand a case, and straightforward in his replies, willing always to listen to arguments, however opposed to his own opinions, and with nothing of the conventional insincerities of diplomacy. It is to this, no doubt, that he owed his success in converting to his view the many English Radical M.P.’s who, arriving at Cairo with the idea of hastening on the evacuation, left it persuaded that the proposal was impossible or at least premature, and that the Occupation must be maintained.

“_12th Jan._—Yesterday I called by appointment on Sir Evelyn Baring. I had not done so since our meeting in 1883, but it came about in this wise. When Prince Wagram (he had followed us to Egypt at the end of the year) was here a fortnight ago he gave me a kind of informal message from Baring to the effect that he would be pleased if I came to see him. At the time I was not quite sure how to respond to this, and I delayed taking any action, but last Sunday I received a visit from Mohammed el Moelhi, who gave me news of how things were going politically. He assured me that people were becoming more reconciled to the state of affairs, that Riaz was allowing rather more personal liberty, and that Tewfik had retired altogether from political action. Nearly all the exiles had been allowed to return, and Mohammed Abdu had been appointed judge at Benha. Under the circumstances he strongly advised me in Arabi’s interest to respond to Baring’s advance. He said it would increase my opportunities of influence, for now people were afraid to come to me for fear of Baring’s displeasure. He did not think that Riaz was hostile, though the Khedive doubtless was. The Khedive, however, was malleable, and if he saw that Baring was friends with me he would think it safest to follow suit. I believed this to be sound advice, and I consequently wrote a note to Baring saying that I had received this informal message from Wagram and asking when I could see him. He replied very politely and so my visit was arranged.

“I found Baring at two in his study, and stayed with him for about half an hour. People say that he is stiff and ill-mannered. I did not find him so. On the contrary he was courteous and kindly. We spoke pretty frankly about things. I said I had not called before because I was not sure whether he would wish to see me. He replied that the only thing he had thought unfair in our political quarrel was Randolph Churchill’s having accused him in the House of Commons of having attacked me through my property in Egypt; he had not been there to answer him, and he thought it unfair; as a fact he had entirely forgotten the existence of my property, and he certainly had had nothing to do with the proceedings taken against me concerning it. I answered that to the best of my recollection I had never supposed him to have intervened personally in the affair, and that it was doubtless the Khedive’s doing. Randolph had, moreover, exceeded my instructions in pushing the case as far as he had done. We did not discuss this long. I told him the Khedive had had me spied upon, and he said it was natural his Highness should not be very friendly to me, and should want to know what I was doing in Egypt, but the Khedive had not spoken to him about me for a long while.

“We then went on to the state of the country, and I told him I thought things were going better now he had got rid of Nubar and was working with a Mohammedan Ministry. He said the Nubar Ministry was a mistake, but the difficulty is to get Mohammedans who are capable of the work. They are either of the old-fashioned sort who will hear of no improvement, or else young fellows who take some modern European plan, and wish to pitchfork it into Egypt whether it is suitable or not. I said that as to that it was just Arabi’s merit that he stood between these two extremes. Arabi knew nothing of Europe, but wanted to improve on Oriental lines. I mentioned that I had heard Mohammed Abdu had returned and received an appointment, and he gave the Sheykh a high character, and said that nearly all the exiles were now recalled. I told him that I hoped the amnesty would be general and would include Arabi and the other exiles who are in Ceylon. To this he demurred, and said that Arabi, having made an unsuccessful revolution had to pay the penalty, ‘not, however,’ he added, ‘that I have ever accepted the theory that his was a _military_ revolt, but it was unsuccessful.’ ‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘it was altogether successful, except for the British Army.’ ‘That,’ he said, ‘was one of the elements he should have reckoned with’; and I ‘a British army of 20,000 men is too strong an element for any Oriental calculation.’

“He then went on to talk of practical improvements and said he was pleased that I had recognized these, but it would be necessary for many years to come to have some European guidance, and he believed English guidance to be better than French or any other. Lastly, we discussed agricultural methods and a school of agriculture which was being founded, and agreed that schools of this sort were a doubtful benefit. [_N.B._—The school in question which had been started under a Scotchman proved a comical failure, the professors after several years of experiments having had to call in their fellah neighbours to show them how crops could be grown successfully.] We parted on cordial terms, and he invited Anne and me to luncheon for to-day. I declined as I do not wish to go into town again, but I accepted for Anne, and so she and Judith are to go in there this morning. I trust this may all be for the best.

“I have been reading Gordon’s ‘Letters to his Sister,’ and find them very consoling in their resignation to Providence; his doctrine is entirely Mohammedan.”

This extract has its importance as showing in connection with other extracts of a later date that the difficulty about recalling Arabi, which was the essential condition of any true intention of restoring the National Party in Egypt, resided not in the Khedive only but in Lord Cromer. The following, too, will have its interest as indicating perhaps the point of departure taken by him so markedly at a later date in Arabian affairs.

“_20th Feb._—Sháhir Ibn Nassár, son of the chief Sheykh of the Dhaheri Harb tribe of Hedjaz came to Sheykh Obeyd on the 25th of January with his cousin Seyid and a friend, Ali, from Mecca. Sháhir is a pleasing young man and we invited him to stay with us, and he has been ever since at Sheykh Obeyd. He came to Cairo to claim a debt of £350 due to his tribe for the hire of camels supplied to the Haj last year, and was very angry because Riaz and the Khedive had refused to see him notwithstanding his having brought letters, also the money had been refused him, and the Khedive had refused his gift of a delul. After waiting in ante-rooms all this month he made up his mind to go back to his people, who have it in their power to block the pilgrim road, or at least to make things very uncomfortable for the pilgrims, but I proposed to him as a last resource to see Baring. This he did on Tuesday, I having spoken about him the day before to Baring when I lunched at the Residency. Baring received him, by Zeyd’s account who went with him, with all honour and sent at once for Riaz and told him Sháhir was under his protection, and he must see justice done. Riaz then went to the Khedive, who already knew of Sháhir’s being with me, and they sent Thábit Pasha to Sháhir and another Pasha Abderrahman, and all together went to the Emir el Haj and gave him a wigging and made him acknowledge the debt. Sháhir is to have his money in a few days, and is, of course, highly delighted. He has given me the delul, which is rather a white elephant as I shall have to give him a present in exchange.”

This Sháhir was a most interesting man, being a quite wild Bedouin, and his father, the chief Sheykh of the most important tribe between Mecca and Medina, the hereditary occupants of the mountain passes through which the pilgrimage yearly has to pass. From very early times they have been subsidized by the Caliphs and Sultans who have been responsible for the safe conduct of the pilgrims to grant a free passage, but of late years the subsidy had remained unpaid through the dishonesty of the agents entrusted with its delivery, a neglect which brought about much trouble, and occasionally loss of life, through the hostility of the tribe. Sháhir had had little dealing with civilization, even that of Mecca, and found himself more at home with us than at Cairo, sharing Zeyd’s tent on the desert edge outside our garden wall. He was a wonderful camel-rider, performing strange feats of agility with his delul, but was unable to ride a horse, for the Harb are not horse owners, at least not that section of the tribe which inhabits the Hedjaz. When he left us to return to his home by sea from Suez, his delul, an Udeyhah, remained with me, I giving him in exchange £50, a very full price, for the expense of his journey.

Another matter which I took up that winter with Lord Cromer was one that lay at the root of all sound progress in Egypt, as it does wherever a Mohammedan population finds itself subjected to a Christian government, that of its demoralization by drink. I am no fanatic on the question of drink in Europe, where the use of wine and strong drinks stands in no direct opposition, except by its abuse, to morals. But in Mohammedan lands the case is entirely different. There the abstention from wine is a fundamental principle of the moral code, and those who transgress on this point become reprobate in their own eyes, and lose all sense of decency and decorum. This was beginning to show itself markedly in Egypt as a consequence of the establishment of English rule. It had been against the spread of drink as much as anything that the revolution of 1881 had acquired its moral strength in public opinion and, with the suppression of the Nationalists after Tel-el-Kebir, and the reinstatement of European control, the evil had returned in double force. It is hardly too much to say that we had intervened in Egypt to reinstate the Greek drink sellers, who combined it with moneylending in the villages of the Delta. The country district where I had my home was a good instance of how the evil worked. The villages in our immediate neighbourhood at Sheykh Obeyd were inhabited entirely by Mohammedans; in the whole of them there were not half-a-dozen Copts or Christians of any sect and there was no demand whatever for drink in any of them. On my return there, however, in this year I found that a small local railway had been opened, joining these with Cairo, and that at each station on the line as the first sign of the coming civilization a drink shop had been established, kept by a Greek moneylender in the interest of his financial business. It was calculated that if the fellahin could be tempted inside his doors to taste the forbidden liquor the rest of his morality would soon give way, and with it his independence of borrowing. Against this coming evil the respectable heads of the villages were doing their best to make opposition, and one morning they called on me to advise what they should do. I advised them to make formal protest to the Government, and offered if they should fail in obtaining a favourable answer, to plead their cause with Baring, who alone had it in his power to put pressure not so much on the Khedivial officials as on the Greek Consulate. The Greek drink-sellers were most of them Hellenic subjects, and as such protected by the international agreements known as the Capitulations against interference in their trade by the Khedivial police, and the privileges thus enjoyed by them had been re-established in full force with the overthrow of the National Government, and it rested with Baring, who exercised all real power, to decide to what extent the privileges should be permitted to go. The whole question of the drink shops might, if he was willing, be treated as a police matter to be dealt with as a common nuisance, and it would not have been possible for the Greek Consul-General to make a serious question of it if Baring should insist. The secret reason, however, of the protection extended to them at the Consulate was, that they bought their immunity there in part with cash paid down, in part with threats of complaints laid against the Consul-General at Athens, a form of black-mailing much in vogue amongst the Greeks.

“_25th March._—Saw Sir Evelyn Baring on the drink question, especially with regard to our being threatened here at Sheykh Obeyd. I told him of the deputation which had come to me from Merj and Kafr el Shórafa (in protest against the drink shops being open in those villages in connection with the new railway), and he expressed his general sympathy and desire to help in stopping the spread of drink in Egypt, but said it was a large question, and a question of law; he would see Riaz (the Prime Minister), and find out how the law was; Riaz was very hostile to the Greeks, and so would be likely to do what he could. He would let me know the result, and then, if there was a possibility, the inhabitants of Merj and the other villages should protest, and he would do all in his power to help them.

“_6th April._—Called again on Baring to show him the petition against the drink shops. It had been signed by seventy-three of the principal Sheykhs and notables of Merj, Kafr el Jamus, Kafr el Shórafa, and Birket el Haj, also by Salaam Abu Shedid and Hassan Abu Tawil, Sheykhs from the Howeytat and Aiaidéh tribes. He seemed pleased with it, and I left him a translation, and we discussed the question together and with Tigrane Pasha, who had come in and whom Baring sent off at once with the original to Riaz. Tigrane [he was the Armenian Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs] declared that the case could be dealt with without infringing upon National rights. I argued strongly against its being treated fiscally, but rather as a matter of police and public morals. In this Tigrane agreed with me, and Baring said he would do all in his power to stop the spread of the drink shops, if according to the ruling of the International Courts, and if not, he would submit a modification of the law to the Powers. We discussed also several other cases, especially that of the Government salt tax, an imposition which pressed hardly upon the people, and that of certain Bedouins imprisoned at Ghizeh. He showed himself anxious to intervene in all these matters, sent for the persons responsible, and promised to see into the cases. A good morning’s work.”

The above will give some idea of the practical way in which Lord Cromer did the work of administration at Cairo, and of the kind of questions I was able to bring before him. That he had the reformation of abuses at that date, 1890, the period of his first and best practical energies, much at heart, is certain, nor did I then suspect him of working, as he did so flagrantly later, less for the good of Egypt than in English political and financial interests. It is, however, necessary to remark that, in spite of his promises of assistance and the undoubted good faith of Riaz Pasha on the drink question, nothing at all was ever done to protect these villages from the Greek intruders, who ply their trade in them unchecked to the present day. Their case was as strong a one as could well have been brought forward, for it was one where the demand for alcohol needed to be created in the midst of a totally abstaining population, and it worked the ill results we foresaw. The drink shops were put under regulations good enough in their way, but the sale was not suppressed, and like many another regulation in Egypt where no advantage of revenue was concerned, they were not insisted on; energy in introducing them, however sincere at the outset, soon slackened, and the regulations became a dead letter.

I will add to this, because they are amusing, a couple of extracts from my diary, conversations I put down in it, with Zeyd, my Bedouin horse master, of the Muteyr tribe in Nejd, as I was riding with him on two occasions on the desert edge in the evening that winter. They have an interest worth preserving, as they show the way the Arabs of Arabia think in contrast to the Egyptian fellahin whom they come in contact with during their visits to Cairo, a contrast which has a significance in view of the political developments we have witnessed in these last years.

“_Zeyd._ The fellahin are a timid folk, if they see a cat cross their path after dark they think it an _afrit_, they believe in all manner of foolish things.

“_I._ What then? Are there no _afrits_ in Nejd?

“_Zeyd._ Wallah! The belief in _afrits_ is foolishness. There are no _afrits_, neither in Nejd nor here. But the fellahin have no heart. They are without blood. They are afraid.

“_I._ You are a philosopher. Do all in Nejd think like you?

“_Zeyd._ The men of Nejd have brave hearts. They are used to being alone. They journey alone through the desert, ten days, twenty days, forty days perhaps. They know nothing of _afrits_. There is none other but God.

“_I._ Truly none. But do they see nothing?

“_Zeyd._ They fear nothing. There is of course Shaitan, who sometimes appears to them in the likeness of a goat or a cow. But they are not afraid. He does not harm them.

“_I._ And do they speak to him?

“_Zeyd._ Shaitan will sometimes journey with them in disguise. There was once a man of Bereydah who was riding his delul alone in a storm. There was lightning amid the darkness. He heard a voice in front of him asking what he was doing there in such tempestuous weather, and if he was not afraid. A flash revealed to him the figure of a sheep set on the neck of his camel. It was Shaitan, who was speaking to frighten the man. The man, however, put out his hand and caught the sheep by the fleece, saying, ‘I know you are a sheep by your wool.’ But Shaitan answered, ‘And you. I know you are a sheep by your wits!’ and he slid down the camel’s neck to the ground and disappeared.

“_I._ Yet you do not believe in _afrits_.

“_Zeyd._ No. That is a vulgar superstition.

* * * *

“_I._ What is this to the right of us? A tomb?

“_Zeyd._ Ay, verily. The tomb of a saint. The fellahin have a hundred thousand saints. They are a credulous people. They kill sheep for Abu Seriyeh still, though he has been dead a thousand years.

“_I._ And we, too, killed a sheep when we went on the pilgrimage to Abu Seriyeh three years ago.

“_Zeyd._ Yes, to bring a blessing on your camels. And one of your camels died within the year. How can a Sheykh, a holy man who has been dead so long, help any one, beast or man?

“_I._ This, too, is philosophy.

“_Zeyd._ No. It is truth. An uncle or a grandfather, I can understand that one should give them a sheep, but not to Abu Seriyeh. This land is full of the tombs of holy men. The fellahin are a credulous people.

* * * *

“_Zeyd._ This road from Kafr el Shórafa to the bridge, how often I used to think of it when I was journeying from Syria with the Seglawi horse, the grey Seglawi, and the Jilfa mare. I used to ask of God that he would grant me this, that I might ride along the sand just here with them in safety. And see, I arrived with them and rode along this very road.

“_I._ Thank God.

“_Zeyd._ Yes, thank God. There is no word it does one more good to say than this, ‘thank God,’ when a danger is past. _El hamdu l’Illah; el hamdul l’Illah!_”

* * * *

Another conversation of nearly the same date has the additional interest that it concerns a mission I had sent him on the year before, to purchase a stallion for me from the Anazeh in Northern Arabia.

“_Zeyd._ I will tell you how I bought the Seglawi [this was the stallion ‘Azrek,’ see General Stud Book]. I did not, of course, tell them the truth, that I was the servant of the Bey (meaning me). There is no shame in this. It is policy (_siasa_). I am a master of policy. I made a deceit. I said to them that I was of the Agheylat, looking for horses for India, horses from the north and tall ones, for those are the horses that bring most price in India. What did I want with the pure bred? I wanted to make money. And so I went to the Sebáa. I alighted at Ibn ed Derri’s tent, as it were by accident. But I made a mistake. It was not the tent of Mishlab Ibn ed Derri, but of his brother Fulan (the name _Fulan_ is used as we say So-and-So). There are four brothers. Fulan and Fulan and Fulan and Mishlab. Mishlab was the owner of the Seglawi. I stayed there for three days, without speaking of the Seglawi. The horse was at pasture and I did not see him. On the fourth day came Mishlab to breakfast with his brother, and they killed a lamb—and behold the Seglawi was with him—he did not bring him to sell, but, as the custom is with strangers, that I might see him. He stood tethered outside the tent, but I did not even turn his way. Only lifting up my eyes stealthily, I saw him, and the sight of his forehead and of his eyes gave me joy. For you know the Seglawi’s face is of those which, if a man, a sorrowful man, sees, he needs must rejoice. Only it made my heart beat terribly, and I said to myself, ‘Zeyd must never more return to the Bey—he must die—if he do not obtain that horse.’ Then, after we had eaten, I arose as one who wishes to go outside for a private purpose; and I walked past the Seglawi with my face to the ground as though I did not see him, and hardly putting one foot before the other, like a thief. And when I returned Mishlab was alone with his son Sakr in the tent, and we talked of the buying of horses. And I told them of my desire of tall horses for the Indian market.

“And after a while I said to the father that I had something that I should wish to speak to him of in private—for I knew that his son would not consent to the sale, seeing that it was he who received the money of the Arabs when their mares were served, and I knew, too, that the father was displeased at this. All that is customary is that those who bring mares should also bring flour for the stallion, and it may be a _kiswah_ (a complimentary robe), but not money. But Sakr had taken money, to his father’s displeasure. So I said to the young man, when we had gone outside, ‘O Salameh, stay you here on one side, for I have something to speak of with your father. And you may watch us, and, if you see me strike your father, then come to his assistance, but if I do not raise my hand to him, then wait till we have finished, for it is not necessary you should hear.’ And to my friend who was with me, I told him to take his spear, and sent him on another errand to fetch my dromedary.

“Then when we were alone, I said to Mishlab: ‘O Mishlab, it is time I went on my business, for I am engaged in the purchase of horses. But before I go I would see your horse. I cannot buy him, for I am looking only for horses from the North at a low price, but yours, the Seglawi, would I see. For I am of the Muteyr and you are of the Sebáa, and I am a master of fortune (_sáhib el bukht_), and you are a master of fortune, and it would be a shame that I did not name a price or put a value on him, for otherwise, you might think that I did not know his worth.’ And Mishlab said, ‘So be it.’ And I named £100, as if it were a great price. And when I had named it, I saw that Mishlab put his hand under his kefiyeh to scratch his head and stroke his beard. And at last he spoke: ‘Nay, it would be a sin.’ And I pressed him, for I saw by his manner that he was in doubt, and I could hardly believe in my fortune that there should be a hope of his consenting. And again my heart beat so that you might hear it. And at last I said, as if rising to go, ‘There shall be another ten added to the hundred.’ And I gave him my hand, and he gave me his hand. And I said, ‘O Mishlab, listen. The Seglawi is the Seglawi, and the men of the tribe send their mares to you on his account. But he is but flesh and blood, and a shot might destroy him, and then where would be the £110?’ And he said, ‘If it were not for my son’s ill doing, I would not do it. And I do not want money, for God has blessed me with many camels and I have all I need. But I fear that Sakr will bring disgrace on me, for he takes money for the mares, which thing is forbidden; and I fear lest my good fortune should fail me.’

“And so it was settled in that one talking, and immediately I called for my delul, and having given him the advance money (_arbun_), I begged him to send his son with me to Aleppo to receive the full price. And I mounted in haste, fearing that the rest would return and would make him change his mind.”