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You think me very bad, and a great rogue, and so I am; but, I tell you, if you had had any other Arab you would have found him a thousand times a bigger rogue than myself, for all the Arabs are dogs. This I could not object to do, in order that he might show it to the Pasha and the English Consul. Some of his remarks were full of sel, but mostly touched with selfishness.
You would think that this conduct on the part of the Pasha might not procure for his “friend” a very gracious reception amongst the people whom he had thus despoiled and decimated; but the Asiatic seems to be animated with a feeling of profound respect, almost bordering upon affection, for all who have done him any bold and violent wrong, and there is always, too, so much of vague and undefined apprehension mixed up with his really well-founded alarms, that I can see no limit to the yielding and bending of his mind when it is wrought upon by the idea of power.
The voice of the tale-teller was that of Ibrahim, and the story was this: that the citadel at Cairo was to be seized, that the streets of Alexandria were to be swept free of Europeans, that every English official between Cairo and Kordofan was to be slain. Mahommed Ibrahim, the spy, who knew English as well as Donovan Pasha knew Arabic, was this very night to kill Fielding Bey with his own hand!
For his visit to-day he had invented a reason a matter of finance; but his real reason was concealed behind the malevolent merriment by which he was now seized. So absorbed was he that he did not heed the approach of another visitor down an angle of the court-yard. He was roused by a voice. "Well, what's tickling you so, pasha?"
After a settlement was effected in 1883, Hicks Pasha, an officer of courage and ability, who had retired from the Indian army, gathered 11,000 men at Omdurman to quell the Mahdist insurrection.
The Moors tried to put down disorder with a high hand, drove out and murdered the distinguished men of Timbuktu, and as a result let loose a riot of robbery and decadence throughout the Sudan. Pasha now succeeded pasha with revolt and misrule until in 1612 the soldiers elected their own pasha and deliberately shut themselves up in the Sudan by cutting off approach from the north.
I asked one driver how long he had been on the road; he told me three weeks. He was carrying food down to the front. The way the ox-wagons were used for transport was a marvel of organisation to me. The transport officer at Mustapha Pasha, with whom I became very friendly, was lyrical in his praise of the ox-wagon. It was, he said, the only thing that stuck to him during the war.
"Then who the devil is it? By Jupiter! I believe it is Osman." "I dare not tell you his name; he has been reconnoitring, and has had narrow escapes." "That's not what I want to know. Tell me straight away is it Osman Pasha, or is it not?" "Captain," said the wily interpreter, "this is a secret mission.
They have slain my wife, my children, my slaves; there is a blood feud between the Mahdi and me. Then I remembered that the Turks led by Englishmen were at Khartoum, preparing for an attack upon my enemy, and I said, I will seek the English Turk, the Hicks Pasha, and I will say, `I would be avenged upon my enemy, but I am alone, and what can one arm do?
Eastern hospitality forbids all resentment for such behaviour; I was, besides, a great man, and on a visit to the Pasha. In my conversations with Bosari, I assured him that I felt myself most comfortably situated at Tayf, and that its climate agreed perfectly with my health; and I betrayed no desire of quitting the place for the present.
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