CHAPTER XIII 



OMDURMAN AND FASHODA 



From this point my more violent activities in life may be said to 

 have ended. My health had suffered seriously from the extreme hard- 

 ships of my journeys, hardships which hitherto I had borne with easily, 

 but which now at my age of fifty-six had taken their revenge on me. 

 The next two years were for this reason an unhappy period of my 

 life, and this, though I do not often make mention in it of my suffer- 

 ings, is reflected in my diary. 



We left Sheykh Obeyd on the 19th April. Four days before, on 

 15th April, I had gone to wish the Khedive good-bye. He received 

 me pleasantly, as always, with pretty speeches about my friendship for 

 him, and the good report of me he heard from everyone. He asked 

 about my journey to Siwah and the attack made on me. I made 

 rather light of it with him as a ghasu (an accident of travel), but he 

 said he had heard it was the doing of the Senussia. About the state 

 of affairs between Greece and Turkey he said things could not be 

 going worse. The Sultan was ruining the Empire, the end could not 

 be far distant. " But where can we look," he asked, " for another 

 chief? In Arabia there is only your friend Ibn Rashid, and he is 

 little more than a Bedouin." With Sheykh Mohammed Abdu too I 

 had a farewell talk. 



" Vjih April. — Abdu brought me news that war was declared be- 

 tween Greece and Turkey. We agreed that it was better things had 

 come to actual war. Personally I think that it would be no loss for the 

 Ottoman Empire if the Greeks should be able to hold their own in 

 Macedonia, though I do not expect it, for a defeat of the Turkish army 

 would bring about a revolution at Constantinople, and even a European 

 war would do no harm. ' When thieves fall out, honest men come 

 by their own.' The Ottoman Empire cannot be made to last in 

 Europe, and as soon as the remnant of the provinces there are lost the 

 better it will be. I expect, however, to see the Turks advance on 

 Athens, when the Powers would doubtless intervene to stop the fight- 

 ing, which they could do by pressure at Constantinople. Then there 

 may be a second chance for the establishment of a better order of 

 things on the Bosphorous, for it would be too great a scandal to allow 

 the Sultan and his palace clique to go on for another twenty years on 



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