Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/92

 of an English gentlewoman, was the only spot throughout all Syria and Palestine in which the will of Mehemet Ali and his fierce Lieutenant was not the law. More than once had the Pasha of Egypt commanded that Ibrahim should have the Albanians delivered up to him, but this white woman of the mountain (grown classical, not by books, but by very pride) answered only with a disdainful invitation to "come and take them."

Whether it was that Ibrahim was acted upon by any superstitious dread of interfering with the Prophetess (a notion not at all incompatible with his character as an able Oriental commander), or that he feared the ridicule of putting himself in collision with a gentlewoman, he certainly never ventured to attack the sanctuary, and so long as the Chatham's grand-daughter breathed a breath of life, there was always this one hillock, and that, too, in the midst of a most populous district, which stood out and kept its freedom. Mehemet Ali used to say, I am told, that the English woman had given him more trouble than all the insurgent people of Syria and Palestine.

The Prophetess announced to me that we were upon the eve of a stupendous convulsion, which would destroy the then recognized value of all property upon earth, and declaring that those only who should be in the East at the time of the great change could hope for greatness in the new life that was now close at hand, she advised me, whilst there was yet time, to dispose of my property in fragile England, and gain a station in Asia; she told me that, after leaving her, I should go into Egypt, but that in a little while I should return into Syria. I secretly smiled at this last prophecy as a "bad-shot," for I had fully determined, after visiting the pyramids, to take ship from Alexandria for Greece. But men struggle vainly in the meshes of their destiny; the unbelieved Cassandra was right after all; the Plague came, and the necessity of avoiding the Quarantine to which I should have been subjected, if I had sailed from Alexandria, forced me to alter my route: I went down into Egypt, and stayed there for a time, and then crossed the Desert once more, and came back to the mountains of the Lebanon exactly as the Prophetess had foretold.

Lady Hester talked to me long and earnestly on the subject of