Chapter III: Cromer Begins to Make Mistakes (1)

My visit to Gros Bois that autumn on my way Eastwards was a sad one, Princesse Berthe having died in the course of the summer, and there were no visitors and none of the bright talk I had so long enjoyed there.

“We arrived at Sheykh Obeyd on the 12th of November. That same evening Sheykh Mohammed Abdu called and gave us a full history of his adventures after leaving Newbuildings. At Oxford he had found a number of Arabic manuscripts known by name only at the Azhar, and among them the correspondence of a certain Arab philosopher, El Sebaïn, with Frederick the Great. He is going to have a number of them copied with funds supplied by the Awkaf (the Ministry of Endowments). He then went to Switzerland and on to Algeria and Tunis. He drew a black picture of the state of things in French North Africa, compared to which he said the sufferings of native Egypt at the hands of the English were as light to darkness. In Algeria the whole administration is directed in the interests of the European Colonists at the expense of the natives. For these there is hardly any legal protection, and absolutely no liberty. There is neither freedom of the press nor even of speech, espionage is worse than at Constantinople, nor is the state of things better in Tunis than in Algeria. It had been proposed to him at Tunis to ask an audience of the Bey, but he had been informed by the Austrian Consul General that permission would have to be first asked of the French Resident, who would have sent a Frenchman to be present at it. The Mohammedans of Tunis had said to him, ‘Your journals in Egypt complain of their lot under the English, but all we ask of Providence is to be given five years of your _régime_ as a respite from the hell of our own.’ The Mufti told me these details because I had seen it published in the ‘Figaro’ that he had expressed himself as entirely pleased with the condition of things for his fellow-Moslems under French rule. His account accords with all I have heard from other quarters about Tunis, and with what I remember of Algeria in 1873. There is no doubt that the English _régime_ in Egypt is exceptional in the history of such _régimes_, which are in their essence tyrannies and oppressions, and I think I may take some credit to myself for having made it exceptional by forcing Egyptian rights upon English public attention in 1882, and by keeping up the publicity whenever these rights have been freshly attacked. In France and Tunis no single voice is raised by any Frenchman against his countrymen’s iniquities in North Africa, and crime is heaped upon crime, and so it would be here in Egypt if the European colony were allowed to have its way. Fortunately for Egypt there is practically no English colony, and our officials live under fear of criticism in the London press and parliament, otherwise we should have a purely military government at Cairo. Already, in answer to what I published in the ‘Manchester Guardian’ last summer about the abuses prevalent in the Ministry of Justice at Cairo, a move is being made by Cromer to get the Kourbash reintroduced, but I think we shall be able to prevent this, or at least to make it impossible for Cromer to do it on the sly.

“Finally the Mufti told us the latest doings of the Khedive. He has now gone in wholly for money making and speculation. He has got Cassel (the King’s friend) to lend him half a million sterling for various schemes without interest, and he is projecting a building venture at Ghizeh, for which purpose an exchange of land is being proposed with the Awkaf, all to the Khedive’s advantage. Abdu, however, as Mufti, has a veto on such transactions, and he will not allow any swindling of the public purse. He has seen the Khedive lately, who is ostentatiously friendly, but Mohammed Abdu knows he is intriguing to get him deprived of his Muftiship. The Khedive will not tolerate anyone who does not fear him. The unfortunate Minshawi was, it seems, basely sacrificed by Abbas, who had commissioned him to find the stealers of his cattle, but who denied it when questioned by Cromer.[4] There is also a quarrel, in which the Khedive is concerned, about some emerald mines on the Red Sea coast. Cromer, to his credit, stoutly discountenances all speculative mining.

“_22nd Nov._—Rowton, poor fellow, is dead at his house in Berkeley Square.

“_23rd Nov._—Yesterday I sent the French edition of our ‘Pilgrimage to Nejd’ to Mohammed Abdu to amuse him during Ramadan, and later he came to see me. Speaking of Midhat Pasha, of whom an account is given in the book, he told me Midhat was a man he had never liked in spite of his sympathy with the constitutional cause at Constantinople which Midhat had championed. Midhat, he said, was a hot head, and very imprudent, especially in his cups, for he had a habit of drinking, and this was the cause of his ruin. While Wali at Damascus Midhat had attended a large dinner given at Tarablus, and had made a speech, in which he had described himself as the destroyer of two Kings (alluding to Abd el Aziz and Murad). This was reported to the Sultan, and was the cause of Midhat’s disgrace. As a reformer he was shallow and Europeanized in the worst sense, nevertheless his fall had been a real misfortune, and his end a real tragedy.

“Mohammed Abdu has had another talk with the Khedive, who told him the whole history of his not having kept his appointment with us at Crabbet in the summer. The reason was precisely what I suspected. When the visit was first proposed no objection had been made by the Englishmen appointed to dry nurse the Khedive during his stay in England, but the very morning of the Sunday when he was getting ready to start for Crabbet, Cassel, whose guest he was, on behalf of the King in London, spoke to him about it, and told him that his going to see me would offend the King, that it would be interpreted at Court as meaning that he had not been satisfied with the King’s reception of him. Cassel’s words had been, ‘I do not say that you ought not to go, but if you do it will be understood in this sense.’ The Khedive sent the explanation as a message to me through the Mufti, but not for publication; he wishes me to see him as usual, but I shall not go, and have told Abdu to say that since the King has commanded the Khedive not to see me, and the Khedive has thought fit to obey, I, as the King’s subject, am still more bound to obedience.

“_24th Nov._—The papers give an account of Dora Labouchere’s marriage at Florence to a son of the Minister Rudini. I am glad she has made a good alliance, it will please her old father who deserves to be pleased.

“_2nd Dec._—The Mufti called to-day and gave me an account of what is going on at headquarters in the matter of judicial reform. He had an interview with Cromer yesterday, having been sent for to talk the various projects over. Cromer asked him his opinion of the plan of perambulating judges, and the Mufti said its value would all depend upon whether these were appointed by the Government or by the Court of Appeal. If the latter good men would be chosen, if the former not. McIlwraith was then sent for, and in the Mufti’s presence received a lecture from Cromer on the necessity of consulting the best native opinion, and especially the Mufti’s. He is satisfied now that they will adopt a reasonable scheme. He expostulated also against additional power being put into the hands of the police in its present corrupt condition. He tells me the Khedive is very angry with him for having insisted on his paying the full price, £20,000, in his deal with the Awkaf, and that he is doing what he can to get him deprived of his position of Mufti. Abdu, however, is so firmly established now that it is of little importance what the Khedive intrigues against him, and it seems really as if at last his influence would become what it ought to have been from the first, the supreme one in Egypt. He is in high spirits, and I congratulated him on becoming Grand Vizier. Cromer supports the Mufti now. The Khedive is very foolish, for he allows real evils to go on unchecked and intervenes only in trifles.

“_7th to 9th Dec._—A short outing in the desert, in the hills behind Cairo, exploring the cleft of Wadi Dijleh, where vultures still have their roosting place, both the great vulture and the Egyptian. They are getting rare now in Egypt, owing to our sanitary arrangement which forbids the leaving of carcases, which were their food. The black and white Egyptian vultures used to be as plentiful as domestic fowls; ‘Pharaoh’s chickens’ Frank travellers called them. When the French in 1801 had Suliman el Halabi impaled for the assassination of General Kléber, the sentence passed on him by their Court Martial was that he was to remain impaled until the vultures had devoured him. I have been reading Jabarti’s Chronicle, which is intensely interesting. It shows the French invasion of Egypt to have been a wanton and most criminal proceeding, absolutely ruinous to the still prosperous country. Cairo was almost completely destroyed by them, and when they evacuated, it was left as a prey to the Bedouins to its complete destruction. Yet the French are at this moment raising a monument at Cairo to Kléber and the rest of them, inscribed: ‘To the heroic Martyrs of Civilization who died during the campaigns of Egypt and Syria.’

“On our way back to Sheykh Obeyd we followed the Mokattam range to its extreme edge overlooking Cairo. The view of the vast city, half Oriental, half European, approached thus as we approached it suddenly from the desert, is, I think, the most astonishing in the world. We arrived after several days’ wandering in an absolute waste, the last mile of the way being waster than all the rest, and difficult for camels to cross, for the heights have been blasted with dynamite, and all is a labyrinth of holes and heaps, I suppose to prevent a surprise by artillery, the whole plateau being uninhabited and unvisited, except by kites and vultures, a sheer naked wilderness of stones, nor could one possibly guess the existence of life anywhere within miles of it, until gradually one began to hear the roar of the city below. It is not until one is actually within twenty yards of the cliff’s edge that one gets the slightest hint of the living world spread out close beneath one’s feet, the immense city of Cairo, with its citadels and towers, and walls, and minarets stretching away for miles, the splendid ancient city, and beyond it modern Cairo, with its turmoil of tramways, railroads, and other modernities, and yet further still the Nile and the Nile Valley, seven miles across and green as a spinach bowl, with the yellow desert, far away in Africa with its Pyramids. The immediate foreground is dazzlingly white, a huge stone quarry, where men in gangs are at work like ants, quarrying the white limestone of which modern Cairo is being built. The sudden contrast brought tears into my eyes as sudden wonders are apt to do.

“_11th Dec._—More interesting talk with Abdu. The Khedive is still very angry with him about the £20,000 of Wakf property, and is revenging himself upon the Mufti by trying to get up a new quarrel with him on religious grounds connected with the proposed savings’ bank, which gives offence to old-fashioned Moslems, as allowing depositors to receive interest on their money, a thing forbidden by their religious law. Abdu, as Mufti, has issued a _fetwa_ on the subject, recommending a change in the wording of the decree which institutes the Bank, but the Khedive has taken up a high religious line against him, condemning the thing altogether, this, although the Khedive puts his own money unscrupulously out at interest everywhere, and makes no secret of it. Cromer, however, supports Abdu, so that he is in no actual danger from the intrigue. In all this, as in much else, the Khedive acts absurdly, allowing real evils to go on without protest, and intervening only in trifles.

“_20th Dec._—The Ramadan fast is over to-day, a thing for which I am always thankful. How much more comfortable the world would be without its feasts and fasts. As I lie here on the roof watching the birds, who care for none of these things, I realize what a long way humanity has wandered out of the region of common sense. Three quarters of our man’s miseries come from pretending to be what we are not, a separate creation superior to that of the beasts and birds, while in reality these are wiser than we are, and infinitely happier.

“_20th Dec._—Herbert Spencer is dead, poor old man, at the age of eighty-three, and another death announced is that of Henry Stanley (Lord Stanley of Alderley) at seventy-six. About Stanley, Blanche Hozier sends me an excellent account of his character, written by her mother, who was his sister. ‘I do not think,’ she writes, ‘that he has been a sad man, for he has had joys of his own, being at one with his God, from whom he takes all willingly without repining, and in this submission there is great content, and he loved nature and real sport, and Oriental learning, and order and obedience, and he had a fair estate to rule over, and he enjoyed improving it in his own way. No, I think he had been a happy man. He is dying in his small, frugal room he had from a boy, when I was so much with him before I married. Alderley has been a beloved place for many generations. God bless those who go out and those who come in.’ I consider that a most touching account and most true. He was one of the best and least selfish of men, a sincere Moslem without parade. The last time I saw him I remember he was rather hurt with me because I said something implying a disbelief in the divine ordering of things in the world. In his domestic life he was unfortunate, his Spanish wife, Fabia, being socially impossible and mad. Yet he was kind to her, though she weighed like a mill-stone round his neck, and he spent half of his time with her at Alderley. He told me once that he had consulted the Grand Mufti at Constantinople as to whether he might avail himself of his Moslem right and put Fabia away, but he never had the heart to do so, nor would he do anything which might cause a scandal to his religious profession. He did an enormous deal of good to those about him whatever their beliefs, and helped to the best of his power in Parliament all Orientals who were suffering wrong. For this he got scant thanks and no credit. His deafness made public life almost an impossibility, and his many eccentricities and strange manner and appearance caused him to be more laughed at in the House of Lords than listened to. Yet he achieved from time to time success by his insistence for the causes he took up. Personally I had a great regard for him, indeed affection, and we remained for forty-three years firm allies.

“_23rd Dec._—I have finished Jabarti, whose Chronicle is as good as Stowe’s, and written much in the same style, and with certain characters of men he had known as good as Plutarch’s.”

Jabarti was by birth a Somali and by position an Alem of the Azhar at Cairo, who, finding himself there from the middle of the eighteenth century till well into the nineteenth, in a position of knowledge, though he took no part in public affairs, kept an accurate Chronicle of Egyptian events, relating all with strict impartiality. His history includes the episode of Bonaparte’s invasion, as seen through Egyptian eyes, and is of the utmost value. He continued keeping it till the year 1820, when he was waylaid as he was riding home one evening on his ass from Shubra and murdered—it has been asserted—by Mohammed Ali’s order.

“_25th Dec._—I am glad to see that Stanley was buried according to the Mussulman rite, in his Park at Alderley, in presence of the Imam of the Turkish Embassy and one of the Secretaries, as well as of members of his own family.

“The Mufti came in the afternoon with Minshawi Pasha, the same who played an honourable part at the time of the bombardment of Alexandria, saving many Christian lives at Tantah, near which he lives. The English Government gave him a decoration after the war for his humanity, but Cromer has since persecuted him as a partisan of the Khedive. He is very rich, and has recently given a large sum of money, £14,000, to the Mufti for various Mohammedan purposes. The Mufti is still being worried by the Khedive, who has been putting pressure on a number of the Sheykhs of the Azhar to denounce him on grounds of impiety in the form of an _ardahal_ (petition) precisely as Mohammed Ali did against the Sheykh El Saadat of Jabarti’s time. He tells me that in spite of all he has gone through in his life, he has never lost but two friends, having made it a principle always to forgive.

“_8th Jan._, 1904.—Greville, manager of the Bank of Egypt, came to luncheon and brought news that war between Japan and Russia is nearly certain. I have not myself seen how it could be avoided. The occupation of Manchuria by Russia with her seizure of Port Arthur makes the position of Japan in those waters too dangerous for her to acquiesce without fighting, and it became a question between trying conclusions now, and waiting to be swallowed up at leisure. The present moment is favourable to Japan because the English Government has promised to help Japan if a third power intervenes to help Russia. Of course, it is a great risk but of the two Japan seems to be choosing the lesser, if not the less imminent danger. I wish her all possible success, she being the representative of Oriental independence against the European Powers. If she succeeds in beating the Russians at sea, she may be able to get the hegemony of China and so frustrate altogether the Western invasion. Neither China nor Korea has the least chance of being able to stand alone against Russia and would be gradually absorbed, as would Japan too if she fails in the war.”

It had been part of our plan for the winter that Auberon Herbert should spend it with us at Sheykh Obeyd, but for one reason and another though he came to Egypt he had established himself the other side of Cairo, at Helouan, and it had been a matter of much correspondence between us how we were to meet, as neither of us liked going through the town, and it was at last decided that we were to have a rendezvous in the Mokattam Hills behind Cairo some ten miles away, at a certain hour on a certain day, a plan which was attended with an almost certain risk of our not meeting at all, for, though we knew the hills well, he had no knowledge of them, nor was there any definite landmark. The result was as follows:

“_9th Jan._—To Wady Abensur, which Europeans call Wady Hof, and encamped just above the great Sudd at noon, having left Sheykh Obeyd at 6.30. I then sent Mutlak down in the direction of Helouan to meet Auberon and Salem Aweymer on my _delûl_ to look for him in the valleys, as he had proposed to walk from Helouan and the valleys are so intricate here that I was sure he would not find us. At half past two I also went in search of him on my mare and rode almost to Helouan and then back up the main valley and I was just on the point of giving it up when I heard a shout behind me. Auberon had been found, having wandered away up another valley, Wady Melag, and presently he appeared with Salem, as extraordinary a figure as one well could see. He was clad in grey flannels, without a coat, and was carrying a lantern in one hand and a staff in the other, with a wallet full of stones strapped to his back, like the pictures of Christian with his bundle of sins in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ I had the greatest difficulty in getting him to mount the camel, though it was already late and the road along the edge of the valley is a dangerous one to be in after dark and I was anxious to be back at the tent. However, at last he mounted and we arrived just at nightfall, and he stopped to dine with us and set to like a famished man, which he was, for he had been wandering in the valleys since eleven and had brought nothing with him but some coffee and milk in a bottle. He stayed on with us talking afterwards, interestingly on many subjects, including that of Herbert Spencer, whose influence over him as a young man he described as immense. Spencer had given him for the first time solid ground on which to stand, though he had since gone further than Spencer in certain directions. On one subject, however, he talked as it seemed to me not quite sanely, namely the stones he was carrying in his wallet. He turned these out for us to examine. They were quite common bits of limestone, flakes from the cliffs with which all the valleys about here are strewn, but he insisted in seeing in them carved faces of grotesque personages, with big noses and helmets, and declared them to be the work of primitive men who had formerly inhabited the valleys. He chose me out a few of the smaller ones and made them over to me with much earnestness to examine at my leisure, handing me also the small sum of five piastres as a present to those who had found him in the valley. Then taking up his wallet and his stick and lighting his lantern he set out, in spite of all remonstrances, in the direction he had come. I sent Suliman with him as far as the Sudd, but he would not allow him to go a yard further, saying it would spoil his night’s walk. It appears to be his habit to spend his nights in the neighbourhood of Helouan with his lantern looking for these stones, and he told me he had been accosted in the dark on one occasion and nearly attacked by a man with a _nabut_. I think he runs great risks, for the hills are frequented by convicts escaped from the prison at Toura, and I told him so, and as he nevertheless persisted in his midnight tramp, I made him write on a scrap of paper that he absolved me from all responsibility in case of accidents.”

This proved to be the last time we met. Two days later I heard from him, that having wandered all night he had found himself at daybreak in an unknown country but had made his way down to the Nile and so got back to his hotel. He died the following year.

“_17th Jan. (Sunday)._—The Mufti has been to Alexandria where he has seen the Khedive, who received him, as his way is, with smiles and jokes, though he had been doing his best to get Cromer’s consent to depose him. The Khedive has a new grief against him, his having issued fetwas to certain Mohammedans from the Transvaal in answer to these three questions:

“1. May a Moslem in a foreign country eat meat not killed according to rule?

“2. May a Moslem in a foreign country wear a hat?

“3. May a Shafeite at prayer range himself in the same line with a Hanafite?

To all these three questions Mohammed Abdu had answered in the affirmative, and the Khedive, though he himself eats and wears a hat and says no prayers when in Europe, affects to regard the decision as atheism. Cromer, however, supports the Mufti; it is a queer position.

“_22nd Jan._—The Mufti was here to-day for his usual Friday’s luncheon in the garden under the bamboos. He has a new worry in the death of one of the chief Azhar Sheykhs, which will be the cause of fresh trouble with the Khedive as to his successor. Fortunately, His Highness, ‘our young man,’ the Mufti calls him, is to start on a journey in the direction of the Tripoli frontier, which will give everybody about him a little holiday and the Mufti hopes himself to be off then to Khartoum, where he promises me to find out what the real state of feeling in the Soudan is towards the present _régime_. We had a long and interesting talk about the Mameluke days in Egypt, as also about the condition of the Jews in Arabia before the coming of Mohammed, and other matters of Eastern history in which he is very learned. I know no society so pleasant as his or so improving, it is all the society we have here as we see nothing of Europeans. We are in a kind of Coventry now with the English officials, but no matter, as long as Egypt is not annexed to the British Crown I shall go on with my opposition.

“He talked, too, about the Khedive’s commercial propensities which he indulges without regard for his political position. He has taken to hiring and reletting the ferries over the canals, and he has been trying to get a concession of the fishing rights in various places at the expense of poorer people. Cromer has taken him to task for this and has told him that he must choose between being a Khedive and being a tradesman, in which Cromer is in the right. All the family of Mohammed Ali have been keen traders and Abbas cares for nothing now, Abdu says, but money making.

“_23rd Jan._—The reason of Gorst’s return to Europe is explained. He went to try and get the French Government to agree to an abolition of the Caisse de la Dette, and has been at Paris seeing M. Delcassé with that object. I have written to the Editor of the ‘Manchester Guardian’ about it, explaining how very necessary it is to preserve the Caisse de la Dette as a check upon financial extravagance here. What our people specially want just now is liberty to spend all the Egyptian money they can get on the Soudan, which is an English, not an Egyptian interest. There is a scheme of railway making between Souakim and Berber, and also between Khartoum and Abyssinia, the Cape to Cairo line, and there is an ultimate plan of great irrigation reservoirs to supply Manchester with Soudanese cotton. It is only the Caisse de la Dette which stands in the way of Egypt’s being made the milch cow of our African Empire. I hear, however, that the French Government has refused to consent to the abolition.”

[N.B. These were the first negotiations with the French Government, which resulted some months later in the Agreement known as the _Entente Cordiale_, whereby France gave England a completely free hand in Egypt in return for a free hand given her in Morocco.]

“_4th Feb._—My letter to the ‘Manchester Guardian’ is published, and comes in pretty opportunely, though I understand the French Government has definitely refused to waive its rights on the Caisse de la Dette. It appears that there was really a proposal into which Gorst entered of some gigantic operation in the Soudan, a concession of Government lands on a vast scale for twenty millions to Cassel, with irrigation works, and a Government guarantee which required the consent of the Caisse; also it was said an attempt was made to abolish the Caisse altogether, a huge scheme of developing the Soudan at the expense of Egypt. Fortunately this has been put a stop to by the French Government, and the whole thing has fallen into the water. The Khedive was certainly mixed up in it, and from what I can understand Cromer did not altogether approve. Mohammed Abdu says that Gorst has been playing into the Khedive’s hands of late financially, and there is talk of his leaving the Egyptian service.

“_11th Feb._—The Russo-Japanese War has begun, and some Russian ironclads have been sunk in Port Arthur.

“There is a split between George Wyndham and Redmond over the Catholic University. As far as my politics are concerned I should be sorry to see entire harmony between Ireland and England, for then we should have the Irish as Imperialist as the worst of us.

“_14th Feb. (Sunday)._—The Mufti lunched with us and talked about Egyptian history. He said that the Circassian Mameluke system in its later development had an immoral foundation, but such had not been the case with the earlier Mamelukes, who were principally those slaves brought into Egypt by Salah ed Din (Saladin). Nothing had ever exceeded the crimes of the later Mamelukes, Ottoman and French alike. It was common with these to try the sharpness of their swords at the armourers’ shops on the passers by, by cutting off their heads or cutting them in two at the waist. Good Mohammed Abdu sitting here on my sofa in his turban telling these tales looked for a moment like a very terrible Turk making passes as he spoke with an imaginary sword. He also cited a good saying of Seyyid Jemal ed Din, ‘Justice is found where equal forces meet,’ meaning thereby that unless the strength of the ruler is opposed by the resisting strength of the ruled, there will always be tyranny. This in allusion to the passivity of the Egyptians under wrong.

“There has been a new scandal at Cairo, the Khedive having invited his Hungarian mistress to a Court Ball. The wives of the Consuls were offended at this, and would have made a public matter of it, but Cromer appeased them.

“_24th Feb._—Cockerell has arrived from England to spend some weeks with us.

“_26th Feb._—Everything is going splendidly in Manchuria, and there really seems to be a chance of the Russians being driven finally back into Siberia. Their sea power seems broken, and there is a good chance of the Japanese being able to cut their railway line, and so starve them out at Port Arthur. It is not likely there will be much sympathy with the Russian Government, though they are trying to get up a cry of ‘Christian civilization in danger.’ Apart from all special knowledge of the rights and wrongs of an international quarrel between nations, I think it a wise rule to give one’s good wishes to the power which is fighting nearest home, that is to say, nearest its own capital and seat of Government. It is preposterous that a Government should claim rights of any kind a thousand miles away from home.

“_29th Feb._—Took Cockerell to call on the Mufti, whom we found in bed with influenza, but he conversed with his usual wisdom. Talking about a proposal made by Ali Yusuf at the General Assembly to create Parliamentary Government in Egypt, I objected to the word creation, seeing that parliamentary Government had been won in Egypt twenty-two years ago, but Abdu says its revival now is only an intrigue, and that he had opposed it, though ineffectually, for it was put to the vote and carried by a majority. In this I think he was wrong, for, intrigue or not, a parliament is the best chance there is in Egypt of getting rid of English dictation. Cromer has declared such a proposal to be beyond the competence of the Assembly. Abdu tells me that Gorst has been certainly helping the Khedive in his commercial speculations, and there has been a quarrel between him and Cromer on the subject. It is not expected that he will retain his post here of Financial Adviser.

“_4th March._—There has been a good debate about the Somaliland war, more or less in accordance with my programme, published on the 10th February in the ‘Daily Chronicle.’ Ritchie reproduced some of my arguments, and Willy Redmond rubbed them in. The campaign will now be allowed to drop.

“_10th March._—The following is a story current about Gorst’s quarrel with Cromer. It appears that last winter, or rather the winter before, a lady, a friend of the King’s, came to Egypt and received what she considered scanty attention at Lady Cromer’s hands, whereas Gorst made himself agreeable to her, and an intrigue was started between them favoured by the King, to whom the lady had complained, according to which Cromer at the end of the year was to be retired, and Gorst to have his place at the Cairo Agency. It was supposed that Cromer would be willing either to join the Government at home, or perhaps take the Paris Embassy. The King was dissatisfied at the time with Monson the actual Ambassador at Paris, because, being poor, Monson did not, in the King’s opinion, represent him with sufficient dignity. At any rate Gorst was promised Cromer’s succession, and counted on it (an arrangement which I had already heard of) as also that eventually Cromer’s son Errington was to have the place in reversion. Cromer, however, himself does not seem to have been told about it, and when the time came for the change refused all offers inducing him to budge, and was very angry when he learned what had been going on. Matters, moreover, have been further complicated by money transactions with Cassel. Cassel had lent His Highness half a million at 2½ per cent. to speculate with, while Gorst as Financial Adviser granted Cassel concessions. All this made up an elaborate intrigue, but it has been upset by Cromer who has put his foot down, and now declares he means to stay on indefinitely in Egypt. The Khedive, so Mohammed Abdu says, has been lectured, and told to choose between being a Khedive and being a tradesman. Gorst has had to leave Egypt, and is now through the King’s influence being provided with a post at the Foreign Office, as Assistant Under-Secretary, with the promise of an Embassy some day. Errington has been packed off to the Legation at Teheran, and the lady is to come no more to Cairo. I must say that I think old Cromer is to be sympathized with, and I am glad the intrigue failed, though Gorst has been personally friendly with us here, but these money speculations at the Finance Office are intolerable, and Gorst deserves his disappointment. Yesterday Dormer (who is in the Finance Office), came to luncheon, and added his share of information. Gigantic financial operations are in progress. A concession of all the Egyptian State railways is being given to a company of which Rivers Wilson is head. For this the Company is to pay forty-two millions sterling down. The present income from the railroads is sixteen hundred millions, so that the company at actual rates will get three per cent. for its capital, with prospect of indefinite extension. Cassel, too, has been in treaty for a concession of all the Government lands in Upper Egypt for some other prodigious sum. We suppose the idea is to convert and pay off the whole public debt, and so get the Caisse de la Dette and all other restrictions abolished. For the present, however, the French Government holds out against all changes.

“In the evening I looked in on the Mufti and recounted to him the whole story of the Gorst-Cromer quarrel. I always tell him everything, and he tells me everything, and so between us we know everything. He said that the account fitted in with all that he had himself heard and noticed during the past year. The Khedive, when he was in London, had attempted to open the question of Cromer’s retirement at the Foreign Office, but had been stopped, and Cromer this winter had spoken to him (the Mufti) impatiently of Gorst, so that he was quite prepared for what I had to tell him, and he knew all about the financial intrigues which Gorst had encouraged the Khedive in. Gorst had allowed the Khedive, for instance, to purchase the large Mariout property of the Government for a very trifling sum, and had helped him in other ways to make money, more or less at the Government’s expense. He was much amused at the lady’s part in the intrigue. It had come round to him through a friend who happened to be on board the ship that took the Khedive last summer to Constantinople, that His Highness had boasted to his fellow travellers that a certain high English personage had promised to get rid of Sheykh Mohammed Abdu for him. Abdu had talked the incident over with his friend, Mustapha Pasha Fehmy.

“_15th March._—It is now decided we are all to go to Damascus on Thursday. Anne and I, Cockerell and Miss Lawrence and Mutlak, to look for horses. To-day the Mufti called. He had talked of going with us to Damascus, but has reflected that it would not do. ‘If you and I,’ he said, ‘were to go together to Damascus the Sultan would go mad. He would think that we had come to proclaim the Arabian Caliphate.’

“_17th March._—I have written to George Wyndham to get him to stop the Somali campaign, and to provide for the safety of the ‘friendly tribes,’ on the Arab principle of paying blood money so as to end the feud between them and the Mullah. ‘The British forces should then retire to the seaports and leave the interior strictly alone. If there are any friendly chiefs who feel themselves too much compromised they should be given handsome pensions and invited to live at Berbera under English protection. The rest of the tribes will very soon come to terms with the others, _only don’t leave British garrisons anywhere in the interior_, and forbid all travelling and sporting expeditions by our officers for some years to come. You should consult Zoheir’s Ode in the Moallakat as to peacemaking by payment.’”

We left the same day for Damascus and arrived at Beyrout on the 20th by sea from Port Said.

“_21st March (Sunday)._—By train to Baalbek, a slow business, the pace being but little, if at all faster than formerly by diligence, which used to run between Beyrout and Damascus, and was so capitally horsed. We travelled from Zahleh with a respectable man and his wife, Christians of the place who, finding we talked Arabic, gave us a good deal of information. The country of the Lebanon is very prosperous now, entirely, so he told us, through the emigration there has been to America, the emigrants coming back with money made there in trade. Every cultivable acre of land is taken up and prices have gone up prodigiously. He pointed out to me a property in the Bekaa which had been bought as derelict forty years ago by Dervish Pasha for £6,000 and which is now worth £60,000 or £70,000. The taxation is not excessive, certainly not as compared with Egypt. There is a yearly tax of 4 per mil. on the capital value of all land, and 12½ per cent. is taken on the gross produce besides being paid in kind. Certainly, the people look prosperous, new houses and new plantations of mulberry trees everywhere, children with rosy cheeks, and men and women well dressed. He puts the population of the Lebanon at 150,000 Christians, 100,000 Moslems, and 40,000 Druses, with as many more Druses in the Hauran. I had no idea of such prosperity.

“At Baalbek we went to the ruins which I had never seen. They are, I think, the most splendid in the world. They have been to a certain extent _remis à neuf_ for the Emperor William when he was here, and there is an absurd tablet commemorating the event of his visit, evidently of Constantinople origin, with the names of the Emperor and the Sultan side by side. Otherwise the repairs have been sensibly done. There are the usual American tourists here, fortunately not more than half-a-dozen, the most senseless type of human nature, being quite insensible to beauty or decorum and with the manners of shopboys, who ramble through the gardens of the ancient world with as little knowledge of their value as beasts have, defiling all and trampling all. Yet I noticed that one of them, a thick-set porker with pendant chaps, little cunning eyes, and a bullet head, after discussing the East in the language of Wall Street, and with comparisons drawn from the gutter of his financial mind, was able to give a sensible account to a neighbour who questioned him on the subject of the licensing laws of his own New England State. A proof that in its own environment there is no race entirely without value. They should be kept at home, for they have no business in these ancient lands.

“_22nd March._—On to Damascus by the new railway which is carried down the wooded valley of the Baradah, very beautiful and very unlike any other. The railway twists and twirls dangerously in and out among the villages, and rounds sharp corners with no outlook 50 yards ahead; there have been many accidents, a single line, and the trains rock prodigiously. Here we are at a hotel, the Hotel d’Orient, a quiet place where few tourists go, but hotels are novelties still at Damascus.

“_23rd March._—To the Consulate. Richards, who is in charge of it, confirms the prosperity of the Lebanon and says that most of the emigrants return with money from America, some few are Mohammedans, the greater number Christian. The country is quite undisturbed and safe. He sent a _kavás_ with us to visit our house in the Kassab quarter, which we bought in 1881, and certainly never should have found without help. (I had forgotten even the name of the street where it was.) When we came to the door I recognized it so little that I was sure the _kavás_ was mistaken. The little low door into the street had a chink opened when we knocked, but there were only women inside, the man, our tenant, having gone to market to sell his wheat. The _kavás_, however, got hold of a watchman and so we were admitted. A funny little place it was, but nice inside with an inclosure of about an acre walled round and planted with lucerne, and a fine old stone wall, shutting us in from surrounding gardens. Lady Ellenborough used to live next door, and the house belongs now to her stepson, a son of her husband Mijwel, who lets it, and on the other two sides lies the great garden, called Bostan el Basha, belonging to Sheykh Hassan el Attar, a chief of the Damascus Ulema. Ours is almost the last house at the extreme north-eastern end of Damascus on the road to Palmyra. The name of the street is Shariah Musjid el Kassab. In the afternoon we went there again and this time found the whole family of our tenant assembled. Sheykh Saleh Tillo and his three sons. They are well-off people and the rooms are richly furnished with good carpets and pillows, and one or two really handsome inlaid chests, besides china and glass, some old, some new. We are pleased with our little house and feel inclined to make a part of it habitable for ourselves and spend six weeks in it every year, but there would be a difficulty about getting possession. The rent they pay is only eleven pounds a year.

“From there we went to the Maidan quarter and drank coffee with Ahmed Ibn Jamil, a horse dealer, whom we had known in Egypt, but he showed us no good horses.

“I find very little change in the town since I was here last except on the north-western side, where the railroad has caused some building, and a big barracks has been put up. The rest of the city is much what I remember it in 1880, not at all Europeanized. The bazaars which were burnt down in Midhat Pasha’s time have been rebuilt and are as busy as ever. There are no modern shops or Frank innovations, or by-laws, or other Christian tomfooleries; things are made too uncomfortable for Europeans for there to be any resident foreign merchants. Newspapers of all kinds are forbidden, the post is unsafe and irregular, and at the Central telegraph office there are no printed forms. We were given with difficulty a sheet of notepaper to write a message on.

“_24th March._—Visited the Ottoman Bank and reopened my account there, finding £12 still to my name, which had been lying there for 23 years. The house has been all these years in the care of the British Consul, who has been changed many times in the interval, the consular dragoman having been put in charge of it who, through lapse of time, had come to consider the property his own. There has been a wonderful flight of storks over the city, travelling in front of a storm from the south- west, many hundreds of them on their annual migration.

“_26th March._—A night of tempest and a day of rain, but in the evening, the weather having cleared, I walked with Cockerell to Salahieh, the new quarter of the town where houses are being built, we were glad to see on good Turkish models with overhanging stories made of wooden frames filled in with plaster, cheap, practical, and pretty. Richards gives an excellent character of the present Turkish Waly Nazim Pasha as honest, sensible, and pacific, but he is building a huge Government house in European taste which must disfigure that quarter of the town. The view from Salahieh is among the first half-dozen great views of the world, the others being perhaps the view over Cairo from the top of Mokattam, (2) the harbour of Rio Janeiro seen from Corcovado, (3) the Lake of Geneva from the hills above Lausanne (4) Constantinople, from the Tower of Galata and (5) the Red Sea with Mount Sinai from the summit of Kalala. All these will stop one’s breath for wonder and bring tears to one’s eyes.

“_27th March._—We spent the day in the bazaars, which are the best and cheapest in the world. It is a pleasure buying in them because the sellers are so amiable and do not worry travellers to buy. Everything is astonishingly cheap and one might live comfortably with one’s family in Damascus on £100 a year. A man can dress himself well for £1 from head to foot, a woman for 10_s._, a child for 2_s._ 6_d._, house rent is one tenth what it is at Cairo.

“I am becoming converted to the Sultan’s mode of government; though it is a wearisome tyranny for the rich, the poor are happy under it and are more fortunate in the circumstances of their lives than any population in Europe, and there is less discontent. The people in the streets here are all well dressed and fat and healthy, many of them have beasts to ride and there are very few beggars, food is plentiful, and all the small industries flourish. Our European factory system is unknown. Except for military conscription, an evil which they share with all the peasantries of Europe, they have nothing to complain of, and do not complain. I find an immense practical advance since twenty-five years ago. On the other hand the educated and wealthy classes are treated like children. No man may travel as far as Beyrout without a passport, or to Europe without special leave or leaving a deposit behind him of £100, or if he takes his wife with him, £200 more. No newspapers are allowed to enter the country, or any to be published of more value than a childish sheet of local news. What is extraordinary is that nearly all the Government offices in Syria are filled with political exiles from Constantinople. Nazim Pasha, the Governor, is the same person I remember head of the police at Constantinople during the Armenian massacres, and who was made a scapegoat of to save the Sultan’s face. The military commandant is a Young Turk, and so are nearly all the functionaries, that is to say, they were Young Turks, but now dare not express any opinions. Constantinople has been emptied of late years of its political notabilities, and as the Sultan will not allow them to go to Europe they are sent in exile to the various provinces, the more dangerous of them being provided with Government appointments to keep them quiet. The wonder is that they do not combine and rebel, but in fact the population is not with them, and except sporadically, there is no discontent. Such is the impression I have formed of the present _régime_ at Damascus. Peace has been made with the Druses and with all disaffected communities.” [This state of things helps to explain the rapidity with which the revolution, four years later, of 1908, spread through the Ottoman provinces, when it had once declared itself at Constantinople. Nazim was Commander-in-Chief against the Bulgarians later and was assassinated in 1913 at Constantinople.]

“After luncheon I went with Cockerell to see the great Mosque, which is being rebuilt, and in better taste than any rebuilding on a large scale we have seen in Europe. It is a splendid piece of architecture, and the view from its minaret is superb; only the tomb of Saladin has been badly restored, it is said by a Russian Prince in Constantinopolitan taste, the ancient wooden sarcophagus having been removed by him; also it is still adorned with ribbons placed there by the irrepressible Emperor William. We are to leave for Egypt again to-morrow morning.

“_28th March._—By train to Beyrout. We had for travelling companion, Ali Pasha Abd el Kader, the old Algerian Emir’s second son, with whom we had much talk. He is more of a Circassian in appearance than an Arab, and is not unlike the late Sultan Abdul Aziz. He is a great personage in Syria, and at all the stations where we stopped he was greeted by acquaintances, who kissed his hand, for he holds a semi-religious position here. He would not agree to my proposition that the people of Damascus were prosperous or contented, but did not give his reasons. He is a fat and heavy man, without great intelligence, but possessed of a certain dignity. His elder brother, Mohammed, whom we knew in 1880, lives now in Constantinople; another brother, he told me, was in Morocco, taking part in the war there, but none of them are allowed to go to Algeria. He has had news, he said, of an arrangement which had been come to between France and England for the partition of Morocco. He had travelled in France and England, but speaks no European language.” [This news, casually given me by Ali Pasha Abd el Kader, was the first I received of the Anglo-French Convention, afterwards known as the Entente, whereby the two Governments agreed to divide Egypt and Morocco between them, the first step of the coalition between England, France, and Russia against Germany, the initial cause of the Great War of 1914.]

“_31st March._—Returned to Sheykh Obeyd yesterday. The Somali War has been stopped, but whether through my letter to George Wyndham or otherwise, I do not know.