Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/15

 

EGYPT IN THE SPRING OF 1882.

The war had not yet come. For months there had been rumors of trouble in Egypt; the English papers were full of accounts of tumult and disorder; there had been a military revolution; troops had surrounded the Palace of the Khedive, and compelled a change of Ministry; all power was in the hands of the army; constitutional authority was destroyed, and the country was drifting into anarchy. Such reports created a feeling of alarm in Europe, and many travellers who had proposed to spend a Winter on the Nile, remained in the South of France, or in Italy. I left Naples with some apprehension, but as we approached Alexandria on the morning of the 16th of February, the sun rose on the same scene as when we had landed there from Constantinople six years before. There was no sign of warlike preparation. Everything had the look of peace and of commercial prosperity. The ships that crowded the harbor showed that we were entering the great maritime city of the East, while there was a faint revival of the ancient splendor in the palaces on the shore. In all this there was nothing to give token of a city that in four short months was to be the scene of a fearful