"I wonder what Nuneham wanted with Gordon! Something about those
graceless tarbooshes, I suppose. He'll make them smart for what they've
done to-day. Wonderful man, Nuneham! Wonderful!"
*CHAPTER III*
John Nuneham was the elder son of a financier of whose earlier life
little or nothing was ever learned. What was known of his later life was
that he had amassed a fortune by colonial speculation, bought a London
newspaper, and been made a baronet for services to his political party.
Having no inclination towards journalism the son became a soldier, rose
quickly to the rank of Brevet-Major, served several years with his
regiment abroad, and at six-and-twenty went to India as Private
Secretary to the Viceroy, who, quickly recognising his natural tendency,
transferred him to the administrative side and put him on the financial
staff. There he spent five years with conspicuous success, obtaining
rapid promotion, and being frequently mentioned in the Viceroy's reports
to the Foreign Minister.
Then his father died, without leaving a will, as the cable of the
solicitors informed him, and he returned to administer the estate. Here
a thunderbolt fell on him, for he found a younger brother, with whom he
had nothing in common and had never lived at peace, preparing to dispute
his right to his father's title and fortune on the assumption that he
was illegitimate, that is to say, was born before the date of the
marriage of his parents.
The allegation proved to be only too well founded, and as soon as the
elder brother had recovered from the shock of the truth, he appealed to
the younger one to leave things as they found them.
"After all, a man's eldest son is his eldest son--let matters rest," he
urged; but his brother was obdurate. "Nobody knows what the
circumstances may have been--is there no ground of agreement?" but his
brother could see none.
"You can take the inheritance, if that's what you want, but let me find
a way to keep the title so as to save the family and avoid scandal"; but
his brother was unyielding.
"For our father's sake--it is not for a man's sons to rake up the dead
past of his forgotten life"; but the younger brother could not be
stirred.
"For our mother's sake--nobody wants his mother's good name to be
smirched, least of all when she's in her grave"; but the younger brother
remained unmoved.
"I promise never to marry. The title shall end with me. It shall
return to you or to your children"; but the younger brother would not
listen.
"England is the only Christian country in the world in which a man's son
is not always his son--for God's sake let me keep my father's name?"
"It is mine, and mine alone," said the younger brother, and then a heavy
and solitary tear, the last he was to shed for forty years, dropped
slowly down John Nuneham's hard-drawn face, for at that instant the well
of his heart ran dry.
"As you will," he said. "But if it is your pride that is doing this I
shall humble it, and if it is your greed I shall live long enough to
make it ashamed."
From that day forward he dedicated his life to one object only, the
founding of a family that should far eclipse the family of his brother,
and his first step towards that end was to drop his father's surname in
the register of his regiment and assume his mother's name of Lord.
At that moment England with two other European Powers had, like
Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, entered the fiery furnace of Egyptian
affairs, though not so much to withstand as to protect the worship of
the golden image. A line of Khedives, each seeking his own advantage,
had culminated in one more unscrupulous and tyrannical than the rest,
who had seized the lands of the people, borrowed money upon them in
Europe, wasted it in wicked personal extravagance, as well as in
reckless imperial expenditure that had not yet had time to yield a
return, and thus brought the country to the brink of ruin, with the
result that England was left alone at last to occupy Egypt, much as Rome
occupied Palestine, and to find a man to administer her affairs in a
position analogous to that of Pontius Pilate. It found him in John
Lord, the young Financial Secretary who had distinguished himself in
India.
His task was one of immense difficulty, for though nominally no more
than the British Consul-General, he was really the ruler of the country,
being representative of the sovereign whose soldiers held Egypt in their
grip. Realising at once that he was the official receiver to a bankrupt
nation, he saw that his first duty was to make it solvent. He did make
it solvent. In less than five years Egypt was able to pay her debt to
Europe. Therefore Europe was satisfied, England was pleased, and John
Lord was made Knight of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.
Then he married a New England girl whom he had met in Cairo, daughter of
a Federal General in the Civil War, a gentle creature, rather delicate,
a little sentimental, and very religious.
During the first years their marriage was childless, and the wife,
seeing with a woman's sure eyes that her husband's hope had been for a
child, began to live within herself, and to weep when no one could see.
But at last a child came, and it was a son, and she was overjoyed and
the Consul-General was content. He allowed her to christen the child by
what name she pleased, so she gave him the name of her great Christian
hero, Charles George Gordon. They called the boy Gordon, and the little
mother was very happy.
But her health became still more delicate, so a nurse had to be looked
for, and they found one in an Egyptian woman--with a child of her
own--who, by power of a pernicious law of Mohammedan countries, had been
divorced through no fault of hers, at the whim of a husband who wished
to marry another wife. Thus Hagar, with her little Ishmael, became
foster-mother to the Consul-General's son, and the two children were
suckled together and slept in the same cot.
Years passed, during which the boy grew up like a little Arab in the
Englishman's house, while his mother devoted herself more and more to
the exercises of her religion, and his father, without failing in
affectionate attention to either of them, seemed to bury his love for
both too deep in his heart and to seal it with a seal, although the
Egyptian nurse was sometimes startled late at night by seeing the
Consul-General coming noiselessly into her room before going to his own,
to see if it was well with his child.
Meantime as ruler of Egypt the Consul-General was going from strength to
strength, and seeing that the Nile is the most wonderful river in the
world and the father of the country through which it flows, he
determined that it should do more than moisten the lips of the Egyptian
desert while the vast body lay parched with thirst. Therefore he took
engineers up to the fork of the stream where the clear and crystal Blue
Nile of Khartoum, tumbling down in mighty torrents from the volcanic
gorges of the Abyssinian hills, crosses the slow and sluggish White Nile
of Omdurman, and told them to build dams, so that the water should not
be wasted into the sea, but spread over the arid land, leaving the
glorious sun of Egypt to do the rest.
The effect was miraculous. Nature, the great wonder-worker, had come to
his aid, and never since the Spirit of God first moved upon the face of
the waters had anything so marvellous been seen. The barren earth
brought forth grass and the desert blossomed like a rose. Land values
increased; revenues were enlarged; poor men became rich; rich men became
millionaires; Egypt became a part of Europe; Cairo became a European
city; the record of the progress of the country began to sound like a
story from the "Arabian Nights," and the Consul-General's annual reports
read like fresh chapters out of the Book of Genesis, telling of the
creation of a new heaven and a new earth. The remaking of Egypt was the
wonder of the world; the faces of the Egyptians were whitened; England
was happy, and Sir John Lord was made a baronet. His son had gone to
school in England by this time, and from Eton he was to go on to
Sandhurst and to take up the career of a soldier.
Then, thinking the Englishman's mission on foreign soil was something
more than to make money, the Consul-General attempted to regenerate the
country. He had been sent out to re-establish the authority of the
Khedive, yet he proceeded to curtail it; to suppress the insurrection of
the people, yet he proceeded to enlarge their liberties. Setting up a
high standard of morals, both in public and private life, he tolerated
no trickery. Finding himself in a cockpit of corruption, he put down
bribery, slavery, perjury, and a hundred kinds of venality and intrigue.
Having views about individual justice and equal rights before the law,
he cleansed the law courts, established a Christian code of morals
between man and man, and let the light of Western civilisation into the
mud hut of the Egyptian fellah.
Mentally, morally, and physically his massive personality became the
visible soul of Egypt. If a poor man was wronged in the remotest
village he said, "I'll write to Lord," and the threat was enough. He
became the visible conscience of Egypt, too, and if a rich man was
tempted to do a doubtful deed he thought of "the Englishman" and the
doubtful deed was not done.
The people at the top of the ladder trusted him, and the people at the
bottom, a simple, credulous, kindly race, who were such as sixty
centuries of mis-government had made them, touched their breasts, their
lips, and their foreheads at the mention of his name, and called him
"The Father of Egypt." England was proud, and Sir John Lord was made a
peer.
When the King's letter reached him he took it to his wife, who now lay
for long hours every day on the couch in the drawing-room, and then
wrote to his son, who had left Sandhurst and was serving with his
regiment in the Soudan, but he said nothing to anybody else, and left
even his secretary to learn the great news through the newspapers.
He was less reserved when he came to select his title, and remembering
his brother he found a fierce joy in calling himself by his father's
name, thinking he had earned the right to it. Twenty-five years had
passed since he had dedicated his life to the founding of a family that
should eclipse and even humiliate the family of his brother, and now his
secret aim was realised. He saw a long line succeeding him, his son,
and his son's son, and his son's son's son, all peers of the realm, and
all Nunehams. His revenge was sweet; he was very happy.
*CHAPTER IV*
If Lord Nuneham had died then, or if he had passed away from Egypt, he
would have left an enduring fame as one of the great Englishmen who
twice or thrice in a hundred years carve their names on the granite page
of the world's history; but he went on and on, until it sometimes looked
as if in the end it might be said of him, in the phrase of the Arab
proverb, that he had written his name in water.
Having achieved one object of ambition, he set himself another, and
having tasted power he became possessed by the lust of it. Great men
had been in England when he first came to Egypt, and he had submitted to
their instructions without demur, but now, wincing under the orders of
inferior successors, he told himself, not idly boasting, that nobody in
London knew his work as well as he did, and he must be liberated from
the domination of Downing Street. The work of emancipation was delicate
but not difficult. There was one power stronger than any Government,
whereby public opinion might be guided and controlled--the press.
The British Consul-General in Cairo was in a position of peculiar
advantage for guiding and controlling the press. He did guide and
control it. What he thought it well that Europe should know about Egypt
that it knew, and that only. The generally ill-informed public opinion
in England was corrected; the faulty praise and blame of the British
press was set right; within five years London had ceased to send
instructions to Cairo; and when a diplomatic question created a fuss in
Parliament the Consul-General was heard to say--
"I don't care a rush what the Government think, and I don't care a straw
what the Foreign Minister says; I have a power stronger than either at
my back--the public."
It was true, but it was also the beginning of the end. Having attained
to absolute power, he began to break up from the seeds of dissolution
which always hide in the heart of it. Hitherto he had governed Egypt by
guiding a group of gifted Englishmen who as Secretaries and Advisers had
governed the Egyptian Governors; but now he desired to govern everything
himself. As a consequence the gifted men had to go, and their places
were taken by subordinates whose best qualification was their
subservience to his strong and masterful spirit.
Even that did not matter as long as his own strength served him. He
knew and determined everything, from the terms of treaties with foreign
Powers to the wages of the Khedive's English coachman. With five
thousand British bayonets to enforce his will, he said to a man, "Do
that," and the man did it, or left Egypt without delay. No Emperor or
Czar or King was ever more powerful, no Pope more infallible; but if his
rule was hard, it was also just, and for some years yet Egypt was well
governed.
"When a fish goes bad," the Arabs say, "is it first at the head or at
the tail?" As Lord Nuneham grew old, his health began to fail, and he
had to fall back on the weaklings who were only fit to carry out his
will. Then an undertone of murmuring was heard in Egypt. The Government
was the same, yet it was altogether different. The hand was Esau's, but
the voice was Jacob's. "The millstones are grinding," said the
Egyptians, "but we see no flour."
The glowing fire of the great Englishman's fame began to turn to ashes,
and a cloud no bigger than a man's hand appeared in the sky. His
Advisers complained to him of friction with their Ministers; his
Inspectors, returning from tours in the country, gave him reports of
scant courtesy at the hands of natives, and to account for their
failures they worked up in his mind the idea of a vast racial and
religious conspiracy. The East was the East; the West was the West;
Moslem was Moslem; Christian was Christian; Egyptians cared more about
Islam than they did about good government, and Europeans in the valley
of the Nile, especially British soldiers and officials, were living on
the top of a volcano.
The Consul-General listened to them with a sour smile, but he believed
them and blundered. He was a sick man now, and he was not really living
in Egypt any longer--he was only sleeping at the Agency; and he thought
he saw the work of his lifetime in danger of being undone. So, thinking
to end fanaticism by one crushing example, he gave his subordinates an
order like that which the ancient King of Egypt gave to the midwives,
with the result that five men were hanged and a score were flogged
before their screaming wives and children for an offence that had not a
particle of religious or political significance.
A cry of horror went up through Egypt; the Consul-General had lost it;
his forty years of great labour had been undone in a day.
As every knife is out when the bull is down, so the place-hunting
Pashas, the greedy Sheikhs, and the cruel Governors whose corruptions he
had suppressed found instruments to stab him, and the people who had
kissed the hand they dared not bite thought it safe to bite the hand
they need not kiss. He had opened the mouths of his enemies, and in
Eastern manner they assailed him first by parables. Once there had been
a great English eagle; its eyes were clear and piercing; its talons were
firm and relentless in their grip; yet it was a proud and noble bird; it
held its own against East and West, and protected all who took refuge
under its wing; but now the eagle had grown old and weak; other birds,
smaller and meaner, had deprived it of its feathers and picked out its
eyes, and it had become blind and cruel and cowardly and sly--would
nobody shoot it or shut it up in a cage?
Rightly or wrongly, the Consul-General became convinced that the Khedive
was intriguing against him, and one day he drove to the royal palace and
demanded an audience. The interview that followed was not the first of
many stormy scenes between the real governor of Egypt and its nominal
ruler, and when Lord Nuneham strode out with his face aflame, through
the line of the quaking bodyguard, he left the Khedive protesting
plaintively to the people of his court that he would sell up all and
leave the country. At that the officials put their heads together in
private, concluded that the present condition could not last, and asked
themselves how, since it was useless to expect England to withdraw the
Consul-General, it was possible for Egypt to get rid of him.
By this time Lord Nuneham, in the manner of all strong men growing weak,
had begun to employ spies, and one day a Syrian Christian told him a
secret story. He was to be assassinated. The crime was to be committed
in the Opera House, under the cover of a general riot, on the night of
the Khedive's State visit, when the Consul-General was always present.
As usual the Khedive was to rise at the end of the first act and retire
to the saloon overlooking the square; as usual he was to send for Lord
Nuneham to follow him, and the moment of the Khedive's return to his box
was to be the signal for a rival demonstration of English and Egyptians
that was to end in the Consul-General's death. There was no reason to
believe the Khedive himself was party to the plot, or that he knew
anything about it, yet none the less it was necessary to stay away, to
find an excuse--illness at the last moment--anything.
Lord Nuneham was not afraid, but he sent up to the Citadel for General
Graves, and arranged that a battalion of infantry and a battery of
artillery were to be marched down to the Opera Square at a message over
the telephone from him.
"If anything happens, you know what to do," he said; and the General
knew perfectly.
Then the night came, and the moment the Khedive left his palace the
Consul-General heard of it. A moment later a message was received at
the Citadel, and a quarter of an hour afterwards Lord Nuneham was taking
his place at the Opera. The air of the house tingled with excitement,
and everything seemed to justify the Syrian's story.
Sure enough, at the end of the first act the Khedive rose and retired to
the saloon, and sure enough at the next moment the Consul-General was
summoned to follow him. His Highness was very gracious, very agreeable,
all trace of their last stormy interview being gone; and gradually Lord
Nuneham drew him up to the windows overlooking the public square.
There, under the sparkling light of a dozen electric lamps, in a solid
line surrounding the Opera House, stood a battalion of infantry, with
the guns of the artillery facing outward at every corner; and at sight
of them the Khedive caught his breath and said--
"What is the meaning of this, my lord?"
"Only a little attention to your Highness," said the Consul-General in a
voice that was intended to be heard all over the room.
At that instant somebody came up hurriedly and whispered to the Khedive,
who turned ashen white, ordered his carriage, and went home immediately.
Next morning at eleven, Lord Nuneham, with the same force drawn up in
front of Abdeen Palace, went in to see the Khedive again.
"There's a train for Alexandria at twelve," he said, "and a steamer for
Constantinople at five--your Highness will feel better for a little
holiday in Europe!" and half-an-hour afterwards the Khedive, accompanied
by several of his Court officials, was on his way to the railway
station, with the escort, in addition to his own bodyguard, of a British
regiment whose band was playing the Khedivial hymn.
He had got rid of the Khedive at a critical juncture, but he had still
to deal with a sovereign that would not easily be chloroformed into
silence. The Arabic press, to which he had been the first to give
liberty, began to attack him openly, to vilify him, and systematically
to misrepresent his actions, so that he who had been the great
torch-bearer of light in a dark country saw himself called the Great
Adventurer, the Tyrant, the Assassin, the worst Pharaoh Egypt had ever
known--a Pharaoh surrounded by a kindergarten of false prophets,
obsessed by preposterous fears of assassination and deluded by phantoms
of fanaticism.
His subordinates told him that these hysterical tirades were inflaming
the whole of Egypt; that their influence was in proportion to their
violence; that the huge, untaught mass of the Egyptian people were
listening to them; that there was not an ignorant fellah possessed of
one ragged garment who did not go to the coffee-house at night to hear
them read; that the lives of British officials were in peril; and that
the promulgation of sedition must be stopped, or the British governance
of the country could not go on.
A sombre fire shone in the Consul-General's eyes while he heard their
prophecy, but he believed it all the same, and when he spoke
contemptuously of incendiary articles as froth, and they answered that
froth could be stained with blood, he told himself that if fools and
ingrates spouting nonsense in Arabic could destroy whatever germs of
civilisation he had implanted in Egypt, the doctrine of the liberty of
the press was all moonshine.
And so, after sinister efforts to punish the whole people for the
excesses of their journalists by enlarging the British army and making
the country pay the expense, he found a means to pass a new press law,
to promulgate it by help of the Prime Minister, now Regent in the
Khedive's place, and to suppress every native newspaper in Egypt in one
day. By that blow the Egyptians were staggered into silence, the
British officials went about with stand-off manners and airs of
conscious triumph, and Lord Nuneham himself, mistaking violence for
power, thought he was master of Egypt once more.
But low, very low on the horizon a new planet now rose in the firmament.
It was not the star of a Khedive jealous of Nuneham's power, nor of an
Egyptian Minister chafing under the orders of his Under-Secretary, nor
yet of a journalist vilifying England and flirting with France, but that
of a simple Arab in turban and caftan, a swarthy son of the desert whose
name no man had heard before, and it was rising over the dome of the
mosque within whose sacred precincts neither the Consul-General nor his
officials could intrude, and where the march of British soldiers could
not be made. There a reverberation was being heard, a now voice was
going forth, and it was echoing and re-echoing through the hushed
chambers that were the heart of Islam.
When Lord Nuneham first asked about the Arab he was told that the man
was one Ishmael Ameer, out of the Libyan Desert, a carpenter's son, and
a fanatical, backward, unenlightened person of no consequence whatever;
but with his sure eye for the political heavens, the Consul-General
perceived that a planet of no common magnitude had appeared in the
Egyptian firmament, and that it would avail him nothing to have
suppressed the open sedition of the newspapers if he had only driven it
underground, into the mosques, where it would be a hundredfold more
dangerous..
If a political agitation was not to be turned into religious unrest, if
fanaticism was not to conquer civilisation and a holy war to carry the
country back to its old rotten condition of bankruptcy and barbarity,
that man out of the Libyan Desert must be put down. But how and by whom?
He himself was old--more than seventy years old--his best days were
behind him, the road in front of him must be all downhill now; and when
he looked around among the sycophants who said, "Yes, my lord,"
"Excellent, my lord," "The very thing, my lord," for some one to fight
the powers of darkness that were arrayed against him, he saw none.
It was in this mood that he had gone to the sham fight, merely because
he had to show himself in public; and there, sitting immediately in
front of the fine girl who was to be his daughter soon, and feeling at
one moment her quick breathing on his neck, he had been suddenly caught
up by the spirit of her enthusiasm and had seen his son as he had never
seen him before. Putting his glasses to his eyes he had watched him--he
and (as it seemed) the girl together. Such courage, such fire, such
resource, such insight, such foresight! It must be the finest brain and
firmest character in Egypt, and it was his own flesh and blood, his own
son Gordon!
Hitherto his attitude towards Gordon had been one of placid affection,
compounded partly of selfishness, being proud that he was no fool and
could forge along in his profession, and pleased to think of him as the
next link in the chain of the family he was founding; but now everything
was changed. The right man to put down sedition was the man at his
right hand. He would save England against Egyptian aggression; he would
save his father too, who was old and whose strength was spent, and
perhaps--why not?--he would succeed him some day and carry on the
traditions of his work in the conquests of civilisation and its triumph
in the dark countries of the world.
For the first time for forty years a heavy and solitary tear dropped
slowly down the Consul-General's cheek, now deeply scored with lines;
but no one saw it, because few dared look into his face. The man who
had never unburdened himself to a living soul wished to unburden himself
at last, so he scribbled his note to Gordon and then stepped into the
carriage that was to take him home.
Meantime he was aware that some fool had provoked a demonstration, but
that troubled him hardly at all; and while the crackling cries of "Long
live Egypt!" were following him down the arena he was being borne along
as by invisible wings.
Thus the two aims in the great Proconsul's life had become one, and that
one aim centred in his son.
*CHAPTER V*
As Gordon went into the British Agency a small, wizened man with a
pock-marked face, wearing Oriental dress, came out. He was the Grand
Cadi (Chief Judge) of the Mohammedan courts and representative of the
Sultan of Turkey in Egypt, one who had secretly hated the Consul-General
and raved against the English rule for years; and as he saluted
obsequiously with his honeyed voice and smiled with his crafty eyes, it
flashed upon Gordon--he did not know why--that just so must Caiaphas,
the high priest, have looked when he came out of Pilate's judgment hall
after saying, "If thou let this man go thou art not Caesar's friend."
Gordon leapt up the steps and into the house as one who was at home, and
going first into the shaded drawing-room he found his mother on the
couch looking to the sunset and the Nile--a sweet old lady in the
twilight of life, with white hair, a thin face almost as white, and the
pale smile of a patient soul who had suffered pain. With her, attending
upon her, and at that moment handing a cup of chicken broth to her, was
a stout Egyptian woman with a good homely countenance--Gordon's old
nurse, Fatimah.
His mother turned at the sound of his voice, roused herself on the
couch, and with that startled cry of joy which has only one note in all
nature, that of a mother meeting her beloved son, she cried, "Gordon!
Gordon!" and clasped her delicate hands about his neck. Before he could
prevent it, his foster-mother, too, muttering in Eastern manner, "O my
eye! O my soul!" had snatched one of his hands and was smothering it
with kisses.
"And how is Helena?" his mother asked, in her low, sweet voice.
"Beautiful!" said Gordon.
"She couldn't help being that. But why doesn't she come to see me?"
"I think she's anxious about her father's health, and is afraid to leave
him," said Gordon; and then Fatimah, with blushes showing through her
Arab skin, said--
"Take care! a house may hold a hundred men, but the heart of a woman has
only room for one of them."
"Ah, but Helena's heart is as wide as a well, mammy," said Gordon;
whereupon Fatimah said--
"That's the way, you see! When a young man is in love there are only
two sort of girls in the world--ordinary girls and his girl."
At that moment, while the women laughed, Gordon heard his father's deep
voice in the hall saying, "Bid good-bye to my wife before you go, Reg,"
and then the Consul-General, with "Here's Gordon also," came into the
drawing-room, followed by Sir Reginald Mannering, Sirdar of the Egyptian
army and Governor of the Soudan, who said--
"Splendid, my boy! Not forgotten your first fight, I see! Heavens, I
felt as if I was back at Omdurman and wanted to get at the demons
again."
"Gordon," said the Consul-General, "see His Excellency to the door and
come to me in the library;" and when the Sirdar was going out at the
porch he whispered--
"Go easy with the Governor, my boy. Don't let anything cross him.
Wonderful man, but I see a difference since I was down last year.
Bye-bye!"
Gordon found his father writing a letter, with his _kawas_ Ibrahim, in
green caftan and red waistband, waiting by the side of the desk, in the
library, a plain room, formal as an office, being walled with bookcases
full of Blue Books, and relieved by two pictures only--a portrait of his
mother when she was younger than he could remember to have seen her, and
one of himself when he was a child and wore an Arab fez and slippers.
"The General--the Citadel," said the Consul-General, giving his letter
to Ibrahim; and as soon as the valet was gone he wheeled his chair round
to Gordon and began--
"I've been writing to your General for his formal consent, having
something I wish you to do for me."
"With pleasure, sir," said Gordon.
"You know all about the riots at Alexandria?"
"Only what I've learned from the London papers, sir.
"Well, for some time past the people there have been showing signs of
effervescence. First, strikes of cabmen, carters, God knows what--all
concealing political issues. Then, open disorder. Europeans hustled
and spat upon in the streets. A sheikh crying aloud in the public
thoroughfares, 'O Moslems, come and help me to drive out the
Christians.' Then a Greek merchant warned to take care, as the Arabs
were going to kill the Christians that day or the day following. Then
low-class Moslems shouting in the square of Mohammed Ali, 'The last day
of the Christians is drawing nigh.' As a consequence there have been
conflicts. The first of them was trivial, and the police scattered the
rioters with a water-hose. The second was more serious, and some
Europeans were wounded. The third was alarming, and several natives had
to be arrested. Well, when I look for the cause I find the usual one."
"What is it, sir?" asked Gordon.
"Egypt has at all times been subject to local insurrections. They are
generally of a religious character, and are set on foot by madmen who
give themselves out as divinely-inspired leaders. But shall I tell you
what it all means?"
"Tell me, sir," said Gordon.
The Consul-General rose from his chair and began to walk up and down the
room with long strides and heavy tread.
"It means," he said, "that the Egyptians, like all other Mohammedans,
are cut off by their religion from the spirit and energy of the great
civilised nations--that, swathed in the bands of the Koran, the Moslem
faith is like a mummy, dead to all uses of the modern world."