1890], Winter in Egypt 43 



President, an anomalous one seeing that I was a teetotaller, but which 

 yet worked well. 



The latter half of the summer of 1890 was darkened for me by the 

 final illness and death of my cousin, Francis Currie. He had been 

 my Mentor, not always in the ways of wisdom, during my youth at 

 Paris, and had remained there a constant and very dear friend for 

 close on thirty years. On my visit to Paris in the Spring I had found 

 him ill with an ominous cough, and other symptoms of a decline, but 

 his French doctor, whom I consulted about him, persisted in declaring 

 that it was nothing more than the legacy of a fever he had long before 

 contracted in India while serving in the campaign of the Mutiny, and 

 encouraged him to go for change of air to the Alps, though to my eye, 

 and to that of his faithful bonne Julienne he was already " un homme 

 jrappe." Now, however, soon after my return to the Paris Embassy 

 in July, I learned that he was at Aix les Bains, and, as it seemed, in an 

 almost hopeless state. This broke short my stay at Paris, and took 

 me first to Aix, and then moving him away from the great heat there 

 to Glyon in Switzerland, where, a month later, in spite of our care, he 

 died. The history of those few weeks, as of the rest of the summer 

 of 1890, belongs, if ever I write it, to my most private memoirs. 



On the 18th of October we again left England for Egypt, spending 

 three more weeks on our way with the Lyttons at Paris, and then on by 

 Marseilles to Alexandria and Sheykh Obeyd, where we once more spent 

 the winter. The political position in Egypt at this time was as follows : 

 Riaz Pasha was still in office under the Khedive Tewfik, and the 

 provinces of Lower Egypt, laxly ruled, were much disturbed with 

 brigandage, especially in our immediate neighbourhood. Riaz, who at 

 that time was working with the Khedive in secret opposition to Baring 

 and the British Occupation, allowed the brigandage to continue, with 

 the idea that it would serve as a proof of the unpopularity of the Eng- 

 lish regime and its powerlessness to preserve order. Baring was oc- 

 cupied now almost exclusively with the struggle to make both ends of 

 Egyptian finance meet, being convinced on his side that a prosperous 

 balance sheet was the best argument he could use with the British 

 public in favour of retaining Egypt as a permanent British dependency. 

 In this he was supported by Lord Salisbury at the Foreign Office, who 

 had made up his mind, now that the Wolff Convention for a withdrawal 

 of the British garrison had failed, to stay on in military occupation 

 without any legal settlement of England's position on the Nile. It was 

 argued that the legal road to such a settlement had been barred by the 

 Sultan, who, when the Convention had been agreed to, had withheld his 

 signature of ratification. Though I did not know it at the time, our 

 Queen (Victoria) had taken the Sultan's action as a personal slight, 

 seeing that she had affixed her own royal signature in ratification 



