e here yesterday to speak to Ali Bey, the Moudir of
Keneh, who was visiting me (a splendid handsome Turk he is); so little
Michail crept in to mention his business under my protection, and a few
more followed, till Ali Bey got tired of holding a durbar in my divan and
went away to his boat. You see the people think the _courbash_ is not
quite so handy with an English spectator. The other day Mustapha A'gha
got Ali Bey to do a little job for him--to let the people in the Gezeereh
(the island), which is Mustapha's property, work at a canal there instead
of at the canal higher up for the Pasha. Very well, but down comes the
Nazir (the Moudir's _sub_.), and courbashes the whole Gezeereh, not
Mustapha, of course, but the poor _fellaheen_ who were doing his corvee
instead of the Pasha's by the Moudir's order. I went to the Gezeereh and
thought that Moses was at work again and had killed a firstborn in every
house by the crying and wailing, when up came two fellows and showed me
their bloody feet, which their wives were crying over like for a death,
_Shorghl el Mizr_--things of Egypt--like _Cosas de Espana_.

_Wednesday_.--Last night I bored Sheykh Yussuf with Antara and Abou-Zeyd,
maintaining the greater valour of Antara who slew 10,000 for the love of
Ibla; you know Antara. Yussuf looks down on such profanities, and
replied, 'What are Antara and Abou-Zeyd compared to the combats of our
Lord Moses with Og and other infidels of might, and what is the love of
Antara for Ibla compared to that of our Lord Solomon for Balkees (Queen
of Sheba), or their beauty and attractiveness to that of our Lord
Joseph?' And then he related the combat of _Seyyidna Mousa_ with Og; and
I thought, 'hear O ye Puritans, and give ear O ye Methodists, and learn
how religion and romance are one to those whose manners and ideas are the
manners and ideas of the Bible, and how Moses was not at all a crop-eared
Puritan, but a gallant warrior!' There is the Homeric element in the
religion here, the Prophet is a hero like Achilles, and like him directed
by God--Allah instead of Athene. He fights, prays, teaches, makes love,
and is truly a _man_, not an abstraction; and as to wonderful events,
instead of telling one to 'gulp them down without looking' (as children
are told with a nasty dose, and as we are told about Genesis, etc.) they
believe them and delight in them, and tell them to amuse people. Such a
piece of deep-disguised scepticism as _Credo qu