2,6 A Fantastic Biography [1902 



who has become his mistress. She was with him at the time of 

 his motor car mishap, some weeks ago, when he missed his way 

 coming back at night from Dar el Beyda and stuck fast in the sand. 

 The ghaffirs who refused to help him he put to forced labour for 

 a week, a thing reported to the British agency and made a cause 

 of quarrel there against him. We talked also of Midhat Pasha and 

 the death of the Sultan Abdul Aziz. Abdu confirms the account 

 of this given me by Dr. Dickson in 1884 as one certainly of suicide. 1 

 He tells me also how Midhat was starved to death at Taif. They 

 gave him bread so hard that the old man broke his teeth over it 

 and they allowed him no convenience of any kind in his cell for 

 his natural wants till he died of ill treatment, and his head was 

 then cut off and sent to Constantinople. Of Abdul Hamid, Abdu 

 spoke as the greatest scoundrel living, a strong word for a Grand 

 Mufti to use of his Caliph. 



" 22nd Dec. — An Arabic newspaper has published a fantastic ac- 

 count of my life and doings, I am by birth, it says, an Irishman, 

 born with an hereditary hatred of England, originally without fortune 

 of my own, I espoused the daughter of a great English lord under 

 the following condition. The lord, many years before, while travel- 

 ling in the Ottoman dominions, had been assassinated and died leav- 

 ing £4,000,000 sterling to his daughter, with an injunction that she 

 should avenge him. She consequently imposed upon her suitors that 

 they should take oath of vengeance, and as I was the only one with 

 sufficient courage, I had been accepted, and had since devoted my life 

 to an attempt to ruin the Ottoman Empire. This I had sought to 

 accomplish by stirring up the Arabs to proclaim an Arabian Caliphate. 

 It attributes the present coolness between the Khedive and the Sultan 

 to my machinations, as also the war now going on in Arabia between 

 Ibn Rashid and Mubarrak of Koweit, whom I had supplied with arms, 

 and a great deal more nonsense of the same kind. I talked the thing 

 over with Mohammed Abdu, who suggested that I might make use of 

 this as an opportunity for publishing in Arabic a full account of my 

 connection with the affairs in Egypt of 1881-82." [Out of this grew 

 the work which occupied me all that winter in conjunction with the 

 Mufti, and which was published five years afterwards as my " Secret 

 History of the English Occupation of Egypt."] 



" 1st Jan. 1903. — We celebrated the New Year (the second day 

 of Shaban), by dining with the Mufti, and talked over the old 

 political days of 1882." 



5th January to 14th January were occupied in a desert journey 

 by Tel el Kebir, Salahieh, Ismailia and back by Kassassin and Om 

 Kamr home. Our party consisted of Anne and me and Miss Law- 



1 See my " Secret History." 



