1893] Sir Clare Ford Ambassador 99 



med's father, now a Pasha by favour of the Sultan, and in high favour 

 at the Imperial court, who put me in the way of seeing various digni- 

 taries, including Munir Pasha, the Sultan's chief intermediary between 

 Yildiz Palace and strangers of distinction, who promised me an early 

 audience of His Majesty, but I soon found there were obstacles in the 

 way of an actual private audience of the kind usual at that time among 

 the Court officials. Mukhtar Pasha, from whom I had brought a letter 

 of introduction to Munir, had described me in it as " a rich Englishman 

 who had for many years defended the cause of the Arabs against the 

 English Government." The word " rich " was an unfortunate one as 

 suggesting ideas of bakshish to the official mind, and I soon discovered 

 that the doors of Yildiz would need more than one golden key to open 

 for me, a form of blackmail I was not prepared to submit to, for I 

 have made it a rule in my dealings with Orientals neither to give, nor 

 to receive, presents. Neither was I disposed to waste more time than 

 a few days waiting for this and that arrangement to mature. Never- 

 theless I had opportunities given me of seeing a good deal of the 

 inside machinery of that singular abode, the Sultan's residence and 

 its surroundings. I might of course have obtained a formal audience 

 in the orthodox way by getting the British Ambassador to present me, 

 but that would not have served my purpose as the conversation of 

 strangers under such circumstances of introduction was never more with 

 Abdul Hamid than a polite interchange of compliments. 



Our Ambassador at the time was Sir Clare Ford, on whom we all 

 called, and who received me very cordially as a former member of the 

 Diplomatic service, and who had for a while worked there in Bulwer's 

 time as an attache, but we did not talk politics except with Nelidoff, the 

 Russian Ambassador, who was announced while we were there, and 

 who had at one time been my intimate friend when he and I were 

 attaches together at Athens. Nelidoff always remembered our days 

 there with pleasure when we met, and so it was on this occasion. We 

 talked of old times at Athens when he and I were still almost boys, 

 he three or four years older than me, and of the paper chases we had 

 ridden together in the olive woods with Dufferin, he, too, still a young 

 man, travelling with his mother in the East, and who had spent the 

 winter with us there. I found him much intrigued about the Sultan 

 of Johore, who to his immense surprise found himself an object of 

 vast curiosity at Constantinople, and who, thanks to Sheykh el Bekri's 

 introduction, had been received with all ceremonious honour by Abdul 

 Hamid, though the Court had refused from the first to acknowledge him 

 as having any claim to calling himself a Sultan. Nevertheless he was 

 credited by everyone with a very high position as a Mohammedan 

 Prince in the Malay States. Nelidoff told the story of what the Sultan's 

 chamberlain had said of him when Nelidoff had asked who and what 



