204 Nubar Pasha Resigns [J895 



'the object has been obtained. The difficulty of being certain was that 

 only some fifteen per cent, of cases of bi'tes from a certainly mad dog 

 led to hydrophobia. He talked of Pasteur as the one great man of 

 Science France had produced. He described him as a most simple- 

 minded man, entirely destitute of humour, and incapable of thinking 

 about more than one thing at a 'time. If you started him on a conversa- 

 tion he could not change the subject till he had exhausted it. This 

 was the secret of his success. His mind was not a French one. 



" Dr. Ruffer is at the head of the Pasteur Institute of London. He 

 tells me he is only thirty-six, though he has grey hair and looks fifty. 

 But he was junior to George Curzon when at Oxford, so I suppose he 

 is of the age he says. More thunder and lightning in 'the evening, 

 away to the north-west. There must have been heavy rain in Jendali 

 and probably on all the hills between the Nile and the Red Sea. It is 

 cold and damp and raw. I am getting weary of the Nile and cannot 

 understand the patience of travellers not invalids who travel on it in 

 dahabiyalis. We stopped at Beni Hassan, but I did not go ashore, as 

 I draw the line at tombs. Beni Hassan, however, might, I think, be 

 a good point of departure f)r our winter's journey. Farther down 

 the river there are impassable places where rocks come down to the 

 wa'ter's edge. 



" 16th Nov. — Arrived at Cairo in the afternoon, and glad to get 

 home. The Lower River seems to me vastly superior to the Upper, 

 and has a familiar and pleasant aspect. I had the rare pleasure of 

 seeing a real scyl come down into the Nile some forty yards across, 

 and strong and deep enough to carry away a camel — a great turbid 

 flood which had broken through the Nile bank and was rushing some 

 two hundred yards out into the river. It must have come from Wady 

 Senhur, a few miles south of Wasta. 



" There has been an earthquake at Rome and a change of Ministry 

 at Cairo. Nubar, the old rogue, has retired, and Mustafa Fehmy is put 

 into his place. 



" It was dark before I got to Sheykh Obeyd, and I had some difficulty 

 in making myself heard at the gate, but all is well. El hamdul Mali." 



The disappearance of Nubar here recorded marks the beginning of 

 the new regime in Egypt which was to last for nearly ten years, during 

 which Cromer was to be supreme in every branch of the Egyptian ad- 

 ministration, governing through merely dummy native Ministers, with 

 Mustafa Fehmy at their head. Lord Salisbury, now at the head of 

 a strong Unionist Government in England, had made up his mind at 

 all hazards to continue the military Occupation and retain Egypt per- 

 manently as a dependency of the British Empire. He also, 'though we 

 did not know it at the time, had a settled design of avenging the death 



