!9°3] Jabarti's Egyptian Chronicle yg 



him deprived of his position of Mufti. Abdu, however, is so firmly 

 established now that it is of little importance what the Khedive 

 intrigues against him, and it seems really as if at last his influence 

 would become what it ought to have been from the first, the supreme 

 one in Egypt. He is in high spirits, and I congratulated him on be- 

 coming Grand Vizier. Cromer supports the Mufti now. The Khe- 

 dive is very foolish, for he allows real evils to go on unchecked and 

 intervenes only in trifles. 



" Jth to gth Dec. — A short outing in the desert, in the hills be- 

 hind Cairo, exploring the cleft of Wadi Dijleh, where vultures still 

 have their roosting place, both the great vulture and the Egyptian. 

 They are getting rare now in Egypt, owing to our sanitary arrange- 

 ment which forbids the leaving of carcases, which were their food. 

 The black and white Egyptian vultures used to be as plentiful as 

 domestic fowls ; ' Pharaoh's chickens ' Frank travellers called them. 

 When the French in 1801 had Suliman el Halabi impaled for the 

 assassination of General Kleber, the sentence passed on him by their 

 Court Martial was that he was to remain impaled until the vul- 

 tures had devoured him. I have been reading Jabarti's Chronicle, 

 which is intensely interesting. It shows the French invasion of Egypt 

 to have been a wanton and most criminal proceeding, absolutely 

 ruinous to the still prosperous country. Cairo was almost completely 

 destroyed by them, and when they evacuated, it was left as a prey 

 to the Bedouins to its complete destruction. Yet the French are at 

 this moment raising a monument at Cairo to Kleber and the rest 

 of them, inscribed : ' To the heroic Martyrs of Civilization who died 

 during the campaigns of Egypt and Syria.' 



" On our way back to Sheykh Obeyd we followed the Mokattam 

 range to its extreme edge overlooking Cairo. The view of the vast 

 city, half Oriental, half European, approached thus as we approached 

 it suddenly from the desert, is, I think, the most astonishing in the 

 world. We arrived after several days' wandering in an absolute 

 waste, the last mile of the way being waster than all the rest, and 

 difficult for camels to cross, for the heights have been blasted with 

 dynamite, and all is a labyrinth of holes and heaps, I suppose to 

 prevent a surprise by artillery, the whole plateau being uninhabited 

 and unvisited, except by kites and vultures, a sheer naked wilder- 

 ness of stones, nor could one possibly guess the existence of life 

 anywhere within miles of it, until gradually one began to hear the 

 roar of the city below. It is not until one is actually within twenty 

 yards of the cliff's edge that one gets the slightest hint of the living 

 world spread out close beneath one's feet, the immense city of Cairo, 

 with its citadels and towers, and walls, and minarets stretching away 

 for miles, the splendid ancient city, and beyond it modern Cairo, 



