128 The French at Timbuctoo [1894 



Kitchener went after the Khedive, and no one knows exactly what 

 took place between them as they were alone. ' It is all the more 

 curious,' said Broadwood, ' because just before the Khedive left for 

 the south, he received us at Abbassieh and spoke in quite a friendly 

 tone.' I have no doubt Kitchener made a quarrel of it purposely to 

 get the Khedive back from the frontier, and that Cromer still further 

 exaggerated it for political reasons. The ' Daily News ' has an article 

 anything but unfavourable to my article, though in common with all the 

 English papers it has been full of violent words lately against the 

 Khedive. 



" Gerald Portal is dead in England. I am sorry for this on Lady 

 Edmund Talbot's account, as she and her sister had reckoned on his 

 succeeding Cromer here. I see the newspapers make great count of 

 him, but he was a man of very ordinary abilities, pushed on by Cromer, 

 whose faithful pupil and understudy he was. I don't know that he is 

 any loss to us politically here. 



" yth Feb. — Spent the day wading through nearly a hundred news- 

 papers from England, the arrears of the last fortnight. It is quite 

 astonishing the lies and false arguments they contain about everything 

 Egyptian, only another proof of the fact that the Press is in reality an 

 engine for the concealment of historic truth, the most complete ever 

 invented. There is not a single English paper that treats the recent 

 incident here with even a semblance of fair dealing. Lying hypocrisy 

 and violence are everywhere the order of the day. The French have 

 pushed a military column forward and have occupied Timbuctoo! I 

 am curious to know the exact position here of the Egyptian Govern- 

 ment towards the French, and have written to Tigrane proposing a 

 visit. 



" 8th Feb. — Lunched with Tigrane and discussed the ' Frontier in- 

 cident ' with him at length. It would seem that the Khedive did sev- 

 eral things while on his journey that were irregular. Maher Pasha, 

 who travelled with him, was formerly Governor of the Frontier Prov- 

 ince, and put him into communication with everybody Kitchener least 

 wished him to see. At Luxor he found Minshatti, the Sheykh of the 

 Abdabdeh, who was condemned to death five years ago, but whose 

 sentence had been commuted, and who was made to reside at Luxor. 

 Him Abbas made much of, took on board his dahabiyah with him and 

 released. This is the same Minshatti who appealed on one occasion 

 to me. and about whom I wrote to Grenfell. He was at that time 

 specially obnoxious to Kitchener, then head of the Intelligence depart- 

 ment on the Upper Nile. 



" Again, it is true that His Highness insisted upon making a desert 

 expedition farther than Kitchener approved ; and again, that Kitchener 

 had had some Soudanese soldiers, five of them, shot on the plea ot 



