led to a beyship or a bow-string, receive fourfold punishment by
deportation to Fayzoghlu, the local Cayenne. If you order your peasant
to be flogged, his friends gather in threatening hundreds at your
gates; when you curse your boatman, he complains to your consul; the
dragomans afflict you with strange wild notions about honesty; a
Government order prevents you from using vituperative language to the
"natives" in general; and the very donkey boys are becoming cognisant
of the right of man to remain unbastinadoed. Still the old leaven
remains behind: here, as elsewhere in the "Morning-land," you cannot
hold your own without employing the voie de fait. The passport system,
now dying out of Europe, has sprung up, or rather has revived, in
Egypt, with peculiar vigour.[FN#4] Its good effects claim for it our
respect; still we cannot but lament its inconvenience. By we, I mean
real Easterns. As strangers-even those whose beards have whitened in
the land-know absolutely nothing of what unfortunate natives must
endure, I am tempted to subjoin a short

[p.19]sketch of my adventures in search of a Tazkirah, or passport, at
Alexandria.

Through ignorance which might have cost me dear but for friend
Larking's weight with the local authorities, I had neglected to provide
myself with a passport in England, and it was not without difficulty,
involving much unclean dressing and an unlimited expenditure of broken
English, that I obtained from H.B.M's Consul at Alexandria a
certificate, declaring me to be an Indo-British subject named Abdullah,
by profession a doctor, aged thirty, and not distinguished-at least so
the frequent blanks seemed to denote-by any remarkable conformation of
eyes, nose, or cheek. For this I disbursed a dollar. And here let me
record the indignation with which I did it. That mighty Britain-the