1902], Butler's History of Egypt 35 



false snipe, and fifty-two little white herons, a thing to note in view 

 of the rapid extermination of birds in Egypt. We arrived at home 

 a full hour before sunset, having found Hamouda Abdu, now made a 

 Bey. expecting us at the Cairo station. His brother the Mufti had 

 just left for Assouan for the opening of the great Nile dam. 



" The building scheme at Kafr el Jamus has been going on apace, 

 the whole area north of the village has been laid out in streets 

 and squares, though these have not yet been built over, indicating the 

 rise of the tide which will one day join us in continuous houses with 

 Cairo. Our neighbour Selim Bey Faraj, the Christian judge of Benha, 

 is dead, a poor unmanly creature who had managed to get on bad 

 terms with all the Moslems round. He had got possession of forty 

 acres of land to which he clung pertinaciously in spite of some per- 

 secution by the Arabs provoked by his own covetousness. He had a 

 passion for litigation and was memorable for a record series of ac- 

 tions at law brought against his wife which he carried before every 

 tribunal in Egypt, native and foreign, and then on appeal before the 

 Sultan at Constantinople, and as a last resort before the Pope at 

 Rome, and lost them all. 



" igth Dec. — The Grand Mufti (Sheykh Mohammed Abdu) came 

 and sat with me this morning for a couple of hours talking. He 

 had sent me Butler's ' Conquest of Egypt by the Arabs ' of which he 

 had received a presentation copy and I explained its contents to him, for 

 he does not read English. He treats Butler's theory of the Makawkas 

 being identical with Cyrus the Melchite Patriarch of Alexandria as 

 rubbish. He says that it is certain the Makawkas was a Copt, the 

 Governor of Memphis, and that he and the mass of the Copts favoured 

 the Arab invasion which relieved them of the Roman tyranny. If 

 it had not been so, how could the Copts have obtained such very 

 favourable terms from Amru and enjoyed the liberty and self gov- 

 ernment they did for so many centuries after? It was only the 

 crusades and especially the attack made on Egypt by St. Louis that 

 caused the Copts to begin to be persecuted, they having declared for 

 the invaders. We talked also about contemporary affairs at Constanti- 

 nople. The Khedive is now on bad terms with the Sultan, having 

 been ill-received by him this summer. Abdul Hamid refused to receive 

 him at all until he had promised not to mention the affair of Thasos. 

 The affair of Thasos is this : the Khedive, who is owner of the island 

 though it forms no part of Egypt, has managed matters there so badly, 

 raising the taxes and imposing import duties that the people of the 

 island complained of it to the Sultan who made it a pretext for send- 

 ing his own troops there as garrison. The Khedive wanted these re- 

 moved, but could not get a hearing at the Palace. 



" Abbas is now much under the influence of a Hungarian lady 



