A visitor of kindly disposition is not debarred from encouraging effort by the gift of a few cigarettes to the convicts. Tobacco is not forbidden in the prisons of Egypt. It is issued to convicts in the works prisons in small rations as a reward, according to the governor’s judgment. The unconvicted and civil prisoners undergoing merely detention are at liberty to purchase it. I was the witness, the cause indeed, of a curious and unwonted scene in the small prison at Assiut when I inspected it in 1898. The sale of tobacco was in progress in the prison yard, where all of the prisoners, a hundred and more, were at exercise. An official stood behind a small table on which lay the little screws of tobacco for disposal, each for a few _milliems_, the smallest of Egyptian coins, the fractional part of a farthing. The eagerness with which the poor prisoners eyed the precious weed excited my generosity, and I bought up the whole table load, then and there, for a couple of shillings. The prisoners crowding around saw the deal and understood it. Hardly had I put down the ten piastres when the whole body “rushed” the table, overset it, threw the screws of tobacco upon the ground, and all hands pounced down on the scattered weed in one great struggling, scrambling, combatant medley. The tobacco was quite wasted, of course, and I have no idea who got the money. The mêlée was so unmanageable that it was necessary to call out the guard to drive the prisoners back to their wards. I was aghast at my indiscretion and ready to admit that I should have known better. The daily unremitting toil of Tourah must be preferable to all but the incurably idle. Yet the terror of “Tourah” is now universal up and down Egypt. It is the great “bogey” of the daily life among the lower classes, the threat held over the fractious child or the misconducted donkey boy who claims an exorbitant “bakshish.” To accuse any decent fellah of having been in Tourah is the worst sort of insult and at once indignantly denied. When my own connection with the English prisons became known, I was generally called the pasha of the English Tourah, and my official position gained me very marked respect among classes spoiled by many thousands of annual tourists,--the greedy guides and donkey boys, the shameless vendors of sham curiosities, the importunate beggars that infest hotel entrances, swarm in the villages and make hideous the landing stages up the Nile. An old hand will best silence a persistent cry for alms or the wail of _miski_ (poverty stricken), of “Halas! finish father, finish mother” (the ornate expression for an orphan), by talking of the _caracol_, “police station,” and a promise of “Tourah” to follow.