It was not long before Risk’s curiosity gave him a fair opportunity. He inquired of Bertran as to my knowledge of the stars; and my friend, who then saw perfectly the drift of all his conduct, so prepossessed him in favour of my superior science, that he communicated to him in the instant the great expectations he had formed, to be enabled by me, to foresee the destiny of the Bey; the success of the war; and, in particular, whether or not he should make himself master of Mecca; to conquer which place, he was about to dispatch his slave and son-in-law, Mahomet Bey Abou Dahab, at the head of an army conducting the pilgrims. Bertran communicated this to me with great tokens of joy: for my own part, I did not greatly like the profession of fortune-telling, where bastinado or impaling might be the reward of being mistaken. But I was told I had most credulous people to deal with, and that there was nothing for it but escaping as long as possible, before the issue of any of my prophecies arrived, and as soon as I had done my own business. This was my own idea likewise; I never saw a place I liked worse, or which afforded less pleasure or instruction than Cairo, or antiquities which less answered their descriptions. In a few days I received a letter from Risk, desiring me to go out to the Convent of St George, about three miles from Cairo, where the Greek patriarch had ordered an apartment for me; that I should pretend to the French merchants that it was for the sake of health, and that there I should receive the Bey’s orders. Providence seemed to teach me the way I was to go. I went accordingly to St George, a very solitary mansion, but large and quiet, very proper for study, and still more for executing a plan which I thought most necessary for my undertaking. During my stay at Algiers, the Rev. Mr Tonyn, the king’s chaplain to that factory, was absent upon leave. The bigotted catholic priests there neither marry, baptize, nor bury the dead of those that are Protestants. There was a Greek priest,[74]Father Christopher, who constantly had offered gratuitously to perform these functions. The civility, humanity, and good character of the man, led me to take him to reside at my country house, where I lived the greatest part of the year; besides that he was of a chearful disposition, I had practised much with him both in speaking and reading Greek with the accent, not in use in our schools, but without which that language, in the mouth of a stranger, is perfectly unintelligible all over the Archipelago.