250 Abdallah Minjowar [i§97 



Abdallah is by position a grea't man. He has an immense territory and 

 lives in a castle, which if not mediaeval belongs to the age of Moham- 

 med Ali, and has a really beautiful stone gateway worthy of any cen- 

 tury. He tells me his father and his tribe came into Egypt first in 

 Mohammed Ali's time, having been invited here from Jebel Akhdar 

 in Tripoli. He was once there wi'th his father, Minjowar, as a boy. 

 In appearance he reminds me of the Emir Abd el Kader, and is in 

 truth a man of high and generous character, a great personage here 

 on the desert edge. The Government has recently made a high road 

 for him to Medinet el Fayoum, of which he is proud. I rode in to see 

 him after breakfast, and we are camped now inside his wall. Many 

 poor people, particularly boys and women, have run up to kiss my hand 

 yesterday and to-day. Expenses besides bersim, 10 pias'tres. Yester- 

 day we passed an immense swarm of bees covering the rocks in a 

 ravine by the river. 



" All is satisfactorily arranged. Abdallah will send Minshawi with 

 us, and a second man with two camels, and a head man, Beseys, on a 

 delul. He is to carry letters of credence for us to the chief persons 

 at Siwah and Jerabub, and to the two principal Harabi Sheykhs of the 

 Jebel Akhdar, a't whose tents I am promised to alight within twenty, 

 say thirty days. I shall not be able to see Senussi as he has left Jerabub, 

 but I shall see the head of the Zaghwiyeh, the Monastery there, and 

 be well received. We are to start on Thursday, nth, with four ardebs 

 of beans for the camels and barley for the mare. Salem is to go in'to 

 Medinet el Fayoum to-morrow, to get what things are still required, 

 as nothing will be procurable anywhere beyond. I have spent the day 

 slugging in my tent — very hot, with many flies, an object of atten- 

 tion for the villagers, and of attentions from Abdallah, his relations and 

 friends. Beseys, who is to go with me, is an oldish man, with a 

 rugged, ugly face, but I think that he will do. Minshawi we know 

 already. Abd-el-Salaam has left us. He was too old for the journey, 

 and required too much in the way of comfort, and did too little in 

 the way of work. Also Abdallah objected to him, and he himself 

 was inclined to leave, so I paid him his five days, and he is gone. 



" We spent the evening talking, principally with a very intelligent man 

 of fellah origin, and of good education, who had been an Arabist, and 

 now is living here, cultivating a few feddans, which Abdallah has let 

 him have more or less as a charity. He gave us his views of Egyptian 

 politics, which are exactly Arabi's old ones. It is refreshing to hear 

 them in these days. Old Beseys listened with an occasional word of 

 approval, but Abdallah was sent to sleep by it and retired. 



" Kasr-el-Jibali is a place of religion, and it being Ramadan, prayer 

 goes on nearly all day long, from an hour before sunrise, when a kind 

 of matins is chanted by a select few, till sunset, when there is a general 



