All you so interestingly describe recalls my long connection with the doings of the Confraternity when Sayed Mohammed el Mahdi, the son of Sayed Ben Ali, the virtual founder of the order, was its titular head. To him, in 1883, the Sudan Mahdi wrote, offering the position of third Khalifa in his new hierarchy. Had Sayed Mohammed accepted, it is possible that, in addition to the Sudan revolt, the whole of North Africa might have been ablaze; but the Senussi Mahdi aimed at peaceful penetration rather than military occupation: his zawias (religious rest-houses) had gradually been extended to Central and West Africa, they “were neutral meeting-places where difficulties, tribal, commercial, legal or religious, could be settled by an unbiassed authority. His akhwan were judges as well as missionaries. They defined tribal areas, settled water and grazing rights as well as meting out the justice of the Koran to those who infringed the code of Islam.” The interest of the Turkish Government in this great movement dates back many years, and I well remember when the late Ghazi Mukhtar Pasha (then Turkish High Commissioner in Egypt) procured the original manuscript Senussi prayer-book, had one thousand copies lithographed in a private printing press in Cairo, and dispatched them as a present to the Senussi with a request in the title-page for the great religious leader’s “help in prayer.” Sayed Mohammed died on the 1st June, 1902. I had full knowledge of the dispatch to Kufara—the then headquarters of the Order—of his tombstone which had been secretly cut and engraved in Cairo by an expert native stonemason; but if I digress in this manner I shall soon exceed the limits of a “Foreword,” and so must rapidly pass over these early experiences which, nevertheless, proved useful when the Great War let loose all the hidden forces of hostility and revealed the immense influence of Islamic teaching for good or ill as applied in the interests of the various opponents. That, on the one hand, Sayed Ahmed, the uncle and successor of Sayed Mohammed, should have espoused the Turco-German cause and harboured Enver Pasha and other notable Turkish officers who had crossed to the north coast of Africa in submarines, to organize the Senussi campaigns against Egypt and the Sudan; whilst, on the other hand, British influence and British officers were enabled to assist the Sherif of Mecca—the Guardian of the Holy Places of Islam—in his successful revolt against Turkish rule in Arabia, are interesting and little-understood features in the history of the great world upheaval from which we have but recently emerged, and no doubt they will be chronicled in due course by those concerned in these “side-shows,” as they are somewhat inadequately described. It must not, however, be forgotten that—insignificant as they may appear in comparison with the terrific clash of arms in Western Europe—they have resulted in giving Egypt tranquillity on its western frontier,