The land of the Pharaohs is becoming civilised, and unpleasantly so: nothing can be more uncomfortable than its present middle state, between barbarism and the reverse. The prohibition against carrying arms is rigid as in Italy; all "violence" is violently denounced; and beheading [p.18]being deemed cruel, the most atrocious crimes, as well as those small political offences, which in the days of the Mamluks would have 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 mistress of the seas-the ruler of one-sixth of mankind-should charge five shillings to pay for the shadow of her protecting wing! That I cannot speak my modernised "civis sum Romanus" without putting my hand into my pocket, in order that these officers of the Great Queen may not take too ruinously from a revenue of seventy millions! O the meanness of our magnificence! the littleness of our greatness!