On the Continent, however, the opposite was the case. The very journals which only a week before had declared that, in undertaking to subdue Arabi, England had assumed a task the difficulties of which she had scarcely calculated, now went to the other extreme, and described Tel-el-Kebir as a mere military promenade. In the "Débats," M. Gabriel Channes wrote that the fears that an Egyptian campaign would prove hazardous were groundless. The only difficulties which the English army had to encounter were due to the vast amount of baggage it had to transport, owing to the men carrying nothing but their arms. According to the same article an army less burdened would have beaten Arabi and reached Cairo in a few days; and if the campaign had lasted some weeks, this was only due to the slowness of the attack. The "Avenir Militaire" maintained that Sir Garnet Wolseley did not shorten the campaign by transferring his base to Ismailia, and that the qualities of the English troops were not exposed to a very severe ordeal. "The attack on Tel-el-Kebir," it added, "against troops ill on the watch, succeeded with a promptitude which rendered a portion of those qualities useless." Many of the Continental journals went further, and unable in any other way to explain the dashing fight which in twenty minutes placed all Egypt at England's feet, boldly asserted that the victory was bought and paid for by English gold. They even named the exact sum, viz., £E32,000. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that the late Professor Palmer's ill-fated expedition into the Sinaitic Desert to secure the neutrality of the Bedouins, at a price of £5,000, should have given an apparent colour to these reports.[78] One author,[79] whose writings, however, are not always to be accepted as accurate, states that Sultan Pasha (already referred to as the President of the Chamber of Notables) was attached to Wolseley's force with the object of securing by large bribes the fidelity of the Bedouins in the district between Ismailia and Zag-a-zig. According to the same authority, the Bedouins received from £3 to £2 a head, and much of the money found its way into the pockets of officers of the Egyptian army from the rank of Lieutenant to that of Colonel. The events of Tel-el-Kebir are thus referred to by the same writer:--