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Updated: June 29, 2025
"In addition to what I have already stated," Signor Farkhi writes, "I have already mentioned to Sir Moses, in a former letter, that as soon as the Pashas of His Majesty the Sultan arrived at Damascus, they reinstated me in my former office, the duties of which are to assist in the magistrates' department in managing the affairs of the city; this honour was conferred on me in accordance with a direction in the Sultan's firman.
When I was sailing down the Nile, I could not help remarking to all the pashas I visited how strange it appeared that men so civilised as they were should be living in such a barren, hot, and glaring land as Egypt, when the negroes on the equator were absolutely living in the richest and pleasantest garden in the world, so far as nature has made the two countries.
Two days before the approach of the fleet was known at Cairo, the French and English consuls proposed that the Khedive should issue a decree, declaring a general amnesty, and that the president of the council, the minister of war, and the three military pashas should quit the country for a year. This request was complied with.
And then the savage struggle for life with all the gain to the pashas and the beys, and those who ruled over them; while their own wounds grew foul, and, in the torturing noon-day heat of the white waste, Death reached out and dragged them from the drooping lines to die. Fighting because they must fight not patriot love, nor understanding, nor sacrifice in their hearts. War! War! War! War!
But Indshe-Bairaktar did not fancy an expedition which was expensive and promised little booty. When finally definite orders came from the Bagdad-Valesi, the other pashas had already scared away the enemy, who had disappeared into unknown regions. After a brief and interesting sojourn, therefore, we decided to return through the desert with a caravan which was on the point of starting.
"The people of Ghadames," said the Pashas of Tripoli, "are rebels they sympathized with the Arabs they did not come forward to help us to exterminate the Arabs they must now pay for their disaffection."
Taxes, the corvee, undue influence in favour of pashas who could put his water on their land without compensation, or unearthed old unpaid mortgages on his land, or absorbed his special salt concession in the Government monopoly, or suddenly put a tax on all horses and cattle not of native breed; all these and various other imposts, exactions, or interferences engineered by the wily Mamour, the agent of the mouffetish, or the intriguing Pasha, killed his efforts, in spite of labours unbelievable.
When we spoke of Hafiz Pasha, of Belgrade, he said, "I know him well, but he does not know me; I recollect him at Carpout and Diarbecr before the battle of Nisib, when he had thirty or forty pashas under him. He could shoot at a mark, or ride, with the youngest man in the army."
It is only by chance, or by profiting by their intestine divisions, that the authority of the Porte is recognised. The Pashas are mostly hereditary, and live in a state of perpetual insurrection. Thus from the shores of the Archipelago to the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris, civilisation and vegetation appear to obey the same law of decrease.
And then the savage struggle for life with all the gain to the pashas and the beys, and those who ruled over them; while their own wounds grew foul, and, in the torturing noon-day heat of the white waste, Death reached out and dragged them from the drooping lines to die. Fighting because they must fight not patriot love, nor understanding, nor sacrifice in their hearts. War! War! War! War!
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