i68 Convent of St. Anthony [ x 895 



discredit Ali Pasha and frighten the Legislative Council. He com- 

 plained of the timidity and lack of fibre in the native Egyptian members 

 of the Council. ' Look,' he said, ' at Heshmet Pasha, we all looked 

 upon him as a Nationalist and a Riazist, yet directly the trouble came 

 last year he went round at once.' It now being twelve o'clock, after 

 a little talk about Tunis, the Khedive got up and, taking my hand with 

 both his, thanked me and said he knew I was one he could depend on, 

 and who had the welfare of Islam at heart. I am more struck 

 than ever at the frankness of his character and the clearness of his 

 ideas." 



The first three months of the New Year, 1895, were devoted by us 

 almost entirely to desert travelling, when we explored the hill country 

 that lies between the Nile and the Red Sea, a piece of desert land almost 

 entirely unknown to Europeans, or indeed to the townspeople of Cairo 

 and the fellahin of the Delta, and as yet unmapped, to me a great addi- 

 tional charm, and except for a few scattered Bedouins quite unin- 

 habited. We had on this occasion my cousin Mary Elcho with us, who 

 was spending the winter in Egypt, and we pushed our explorations as 

 far as the Red Sea, and followed the coast line down it between the 

 high mountain range of Kalala and the Gulf of Suez, a narrow strip 

 of sandy shore seldom or never visited, there being barely room in 

 places for camels to pass, a rugged shore, where the only sign of hu- 

 manity is the occasional apparition of a distant ocean steamer far away 

 on its road to India or Japan, and at the water's edge a continuous 

 jetsam of empty brandy and rum bottles cast up by the waves, and 

 marking the unholy track of Western civilization. The whole of the 

 precipitous Kalala chain, which runs in places to a height of four and 

 five thousand feet, was in the ancient days before Islam the scattered 

 abode of those early Christian hermits who were so picturesque a fea- 

 ture of the fourth and fifth centuries, and may still, some of them, be 

 identified as former hermitages by the possession of a trickle of water 

 and a palm or two still growing wild, and one monastery, still inhabited, 

 the convent of St. Anthony. It lies in one of the ruggedest and most 

 desolate places in the world, difficult of access for camels, and parted 

 from the Nile Valley by eighty miles of inhospitable desert, and 

 twenty from the seashore on the other side. In all that journey we 

 had met with no inhabitant after our first day's march, and it was with 

 some difficulty that we made out our road to it, for the Bedouins with us 

 had never been there, and we only had knowledge of it by the vaguest 

 hearsay. The convent is hardly ever visited by Europeans, and ours 

 was absolutely the first occasion on which women had been admitted 

 within the Monastery walls since its foundation some 1,500 years ago. 

 All this was intensely interesting, but descriptions of desert journeys 

 lie outside the scope of my present memoirs. It is only here and there 



