I went to call on Lord Lloyd just before the close of the academic year, which was at the end of May. Soon after I was invited to dine at the Residency. I won twenty piastres off him at bridge and was told to collect it from his A.D.C. He asked me how I found Egypt and I said: ‘All right,’ with an intonation that made him catch me up quickly. ‘Only all right?’ That was all that passed between us. He believed in his job more than I did in mine. He used to drive through Cairo in a powerful car, with a Union Jack flying from it, at about sixty miles an hour. He had motor-cyclist outriders to clear the way—Sir Lee Stack, the Sirdar, had been killed the year before while driving through Cairo and a traffic jam had materially helped his assassins. One day I was shown the spot near the Ministry of Education where it happened; there was a crowd at the spot which I at first took for a party of sightseers, but the attraction proved to be a naked woman lying on the pavement, laughing wildly and waving her arms. She was one of the _hashish_ dope-cases that were very common in Egypt. The crowd was jeering at her; the policeman a few yards off paid no attention. I attended a levee at the Abdin Palace, King Fuad’s Cairo residence. It began early, at nine o’clock in the morning. The King gave honourable precedence to the staff of the University; it came in soon after the diplomatic corps and the Ministers of the Crown and some time before the army. While still in England I had been warned to buy suitable clothes—a morning coat and trousers—for this occasion. To be really correct my coat should have had green facings, green being the national colour of Egypt, but I was told that this would not be insisted upon. Opinions differed greatly as to what was suitable Court-dress; most of the French professors arrived in full evening dress with swallowtail coats and white waistcoats, others wore ordinary dinner jackets. Most of them had opera-hats; they all had decorations round their necks. They looked like stragglers from an all-night fancy-dress ball. After signing my name in the two large hotel registers, one belonging to the King and the other to the Queen, I was given a refreshing rice-drink, a courtesy of the Queen’s. I then went up the noble marble staircase. On every other step stood an enormous black soldier, royally uniformed, with a lance in his hand. My soldier’s eye commented on their somewhat listless attitudes; but, no doubt, they pulled themselves smartly to attention when the Egyptian army general staff went past. I had been warned that when I met King Fuad I must not be surprised at anything extraordinary I heard; a curious wheezing cry was apt to burst from his throat occasionally when he was nervous. When he was a child his family had been shot up by an assassin employed by interested relatives; and Fuad had taken cover under a table and, though wounded, had survived. We were moved from room to room. At last