Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/251

 From this city he proceeded by land to Rosetta, and thence up the Nile to Cairo. Here he was hospitably received by the house of Julian and Bertran, to whom he had been recommended; and he likewise received from the principal bey and his officers, men of infamous and odious characters, very extraordinary marks of consideration, his cases of instruments being allowed to pass unexamined and free of duty through the custom-house, while presents were given instead of being exacted from him by the bey. These polite attentions he owed to the opinion created by the sight of his astronomical apparatus that he was a great astrologer,—a character universally esteemed in the East, and held in peculiar reverence by the secretary of the bey then in office, from his having himself some pretensions to its honours.

This man, whose name was Risk, in whom credulity and wickedness kept an equal pace, desired to discover, through Bruce's intimate knowledge of the language of the stars, the issue of the war then pending between the Ottoman empire and Russia, together with the general fortunes and ultimate destiny of the bey. Our traveller had no predilection for the art of fortune-telling, particularly among a people where the bastinado or impaling-stake might be the consequence of a mistaken prediction; but the eulogies which his kind host bestowed upon the laudable credulity of the people, and perhaps the vanity of pretending to superior science, overcame his reluctance, and he consented to reveal to the anxious inquirer the fate of empires. In the mean while he was directed to fix his residence at the convent of St. George, about three miles from Cairo. Here he was visited by his old friend Father Christopher, with whom he had studied modern Greek at Algiers, and who informed him that he was now established at Cairo, where he had risen to the second dignity in his church. Understanding Bruce's intention of proceeding to Abyssinia, he observed that there were