1904] Sheyk Ali Yusuf's Folly in 



Bekri, who had married an elder sister, the Khedive had made her 

 acquaintance, and seems to have wished to establish her with Ali 

 Yusuf. Ali Yusuf was therefore put forward as a suitor, his suit 

 being supported by Abbas, but the old game of preliminary presents and 

 then delays was the only result, and Ali Yusuf getting tired of this, 

 arranged with El Bekri and the young lady that she should elope with 

 him. Now elopement is a quite unheard of thing in Islam, and bears 

 the character of a theft, inasmuch as it is stealing a man's daughter 

 without paying the customary dower, and the scandal caused in Ali 

 Yusuf's case has been everywhere immense, nor has it been made less 

 by Lord Cromer's having ultimately settled the dispute by advising 

 the young person to return to her parents. Mohammed Abdu tells me 

 that the Khedive's position at Constantinople is that of being made use 

 of by the Sultan as a spy for him on what goes on in Egypt, and 

 for this he has lost his popularity. 



" ijth Dec. — I have been a week in bed with a strong fever, a 

 soul-crushing evil, and now feel twenty years older than when I 

 left England hardly a month ago. The things of this life seem very 

 far away, or seemed so till this morning, not merely the things of youth, 

 love, ambition, vanity, but equally so the things of the spirit, all hope, 

 all fear, all wish to live or die. In these depths, the problem of a 

 future life seems foolishness ; God, heaven and hell, good and evil, duty 

 of anv kind, responsibility, words without meaning. Above all the 

 heart is dead. Who is there that can help or heal? The good to us 

 are as one with the wicked. There is no voice in all the world that 

 can reach us or console. Only with the dead, those who have passed 

 through the shadow where we stand, are we able to converse as equal 

 to ourselves in sorrow. I seemed to grope in blind impotent search for 

 a dead hand, Cowie's, as she used to be here sixteen years ago, when 

 we lived like mendicants in the little garden house, and as she had 

 nursed me in Ceylon. Then I could have howled like a wild beast 

 in my desolation. Such were the last few days. 



" Now I am better, the fever almost gone." 



This was the beginning of a long illness which eventually declared 

 itself as Mediterranean fever, and from which for two years it seemed 

 unlikely I should recover. 



It is with reluctance that I waste space in recording these ups and 

 downs of health which would be better passed over in entire silence, for 

 I am sufficiently old-fashioned to be of the opinion of our forefathers, 

 that bodily infirmities should be hidden as far as possible from public 

 view, and that self-respect should require us as men to follow the 

 dignified course of the wild creatures of the forest, who retire out of 

 sight when suffering, and end by dying of old age in some remote 



