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Mahmoud soon broke down and rejoiced greatly thereafter, but Saleh reached the end of the day and his evening meal in safety, but his fast came to an abrupt termination early in the morning. We started at half-past five and reached Makalla at sunrise the following morning, Easter Sunday, March 25.
I leave you to conjecture, friend Mahmoud, what I suffered in that voyage, so contrary to my expectation, and more when we arrived the following day at the south-west of the isle of Pantanalea. There the Turks landed, and the two captains began to divide all the prizes they had made. All this was for me a lingering death.
The strong, the broad-shouldered Aka, Mahmoud, Raschid, Selim, they with the bodies of Seti and the faces of Rameses, in their blue yeleks and unsandalled feet would go into the desert as their forefathers did for the Shepherd Kings.
He was a pleasant man, but decidedly eccentric. His great mania was the study of genealogy, and he never failed to explain when we met that he was my cousin, and that we were both related to the late Sultan Mahmoud on the female side! When all was ready the exhumation took place, and very imposing it was.
"After Seti's death," said Mahmoud, as we stood in the chamber of the tomb, brilliantly lighted by the electric bulbs, "his body was embalmed and with great pomp and ceremony the mummy was carried from the palace in the great city of Thebes through the dismal gorge and deposited in a magnificent alabaster sarcophagus that had been prepared for its reception in this chamber in the limestone rock ninety feet below the surface of the ground.
One of the Ministers, Mehemet Ali Pasha, the brother-in-law of the Sultan, was formerly a cooper's apprentice, but taken, when a boy, by the late Sultan Mahmoud, to be a playmate for his son, on account of his extraordinary beauty. Rescind Pasha, the Grand Vizier, is a man of about sixty years of age.
Major Swinburne and Captain Walker arrived in the morning, and we had a grand tiffin at twelve, and Mahmoud was allowed to sit on the table, and he ate sausages, pommeloe, bananas, pine-apple, chicken and curry, and then seizing a long glass of champagne, drank a good deal before it was taken from him.
Not far away was the Sphinx looking east in the sand! He pottered about his room. He did things very slowly. Eastern life, as it had flowed from the lips of Starnworth, went before his imagination like a great and strange procession. And in this procession Mahmoud Baroudi drove Russian horses, and walked, almost like a mendicant, in a discoloured gibbeh.
I tell you, sir, I have been forced to drink out of quassia-cups until my whole being has imbibed the bitter; and I am like that tree to which Firdousi compared Mahmoud, 'Whose nature is so bitter, that were you to plant it in the garden of Eden, and water it with the ambrosial stream of Paradise, and were you to enrich its roots with virgin honey, it would, after all, discover its innate disposition, and only yield the acrid fruit it had ever borne."
There, too, we partook of the tea and cakes that were handed around at four o'clock, and when we returned from excursions on shore, tired and warm, we found refreshing lemonade ready to quench our thirst. Our dragoman, Mahmoud Achmed, the Egyptian conductor of all our sight-seeing excursions on land, was an interesting character and became a great favorite.
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