bille_, or thought they did, and declined to keep
them on their pedestals. The result is, familiarity without intimacy and
detachment without dignity, while the pre-War official habit of going
Home every year for some months has prevented even subordinates from
studying their district or department consecutively.

Hence it is that a widespread Nationalist movement gathered force and
perfected its plans for a detailed campaign which blended peaceful
demonstration with sabotage, murder and violence, and took the
Anglo-Egyptian Government completely by surprise, paralysing
communications and intimidating the general public until the weight of
Imperial troops, luckily still quartered in the country, was allowed to
make itself felt and restored order.

This is not the time or the place to discuss these affairs, which are
still _sub judice_, but one salient feature of the movement is pertinent
to our subject, and that is the marked _rapprochement_ between Moslems
and Copts, who fraternised in each other's mosques and churches, carried
flags bearing the device of Cross and Crescent and used American mission
buildings to further their new-found brotherhood. These relations were
somewhat marred by the wholesale devastation of Coptic property
up-country, but the Copts took it very well and paraded the streets with
their Moslem friends, if they could not hide away from them. The local
Jew came in too, and the climax of this religious _entente_ was reached
when an Egyptian Jewess preached in the mosque of al-Azhar on the
ancient relations between Jews and Arabs.

But we must not merely consider Egypt as a sort of religious and racial
clearing house; it is also the main gate of Africa.

Southward, up the Nile valley and across grim deserts, lies Khartoum,
the capital of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, only four days from Cairo by
rail. This is a very tempting theatre for missionary enterprise, which
is, however, held in check by the authorities, who decline to have their
Sudan spiritually exploited and materially disturbed by futile efforts
to evangelise the country. Missionaries say that this part of the Sudan,
as well as Egypt, was once Christian; that discrimination is being shown
in favour of Islam even to the extent of making pagans become Moslem on
joining the Egyptian Army; that Gordon College is being run on
non-Christian lines and that Islam is getting ahead of them in the race
to convert pagans in this part of the world.

T