Bankrupts and Brokers 65
allowed, by securing the concession for a railway from
Alexandria to Cairo. Moreover, Abbas, though he cut
himself off from all Europeans as much as possible,
accepted the advice of the British rather than that of the
French. And the British party in Egypt was that of the
Turkish " ruling class" and of the landed Beys, who
took advantage of the reaction to revive all their old
oppressions of the peasantry. So that when Abbas died
of "a stroke'1—the stroke being administered by his
own bodyguard—the Egyptians endured with fortitude a
coincident heat-wave in the belief that it was the opening
of Hell's Gates for the reception of their ruler.
Said (1854-1863), the youngest son of Mehemet
AH, and uncle of Abbas, was, in all respects, the anti-
thesis of Abbas, and as modern as Abbas had been
medieval. And his easy-going Europeanisation of Egypt
was a welcome relief from the reactionary and irrational
Abbas. Said was French in culture, and a great patron
of distinguished foreigners. His friend, Edmond About,
leaves us a pen-picture of Said: " Un de ces colosses
debonnaires, bons vivants, gros plaisants, grands man-
gems; et buveurs mirifiques. Sa main etait de taille a
souffleter des elephants; sa face large, haute en coulewr,
h£rissee d'une barbe a tons crins, exprime la bonte la
franchise, le courage, et le cynisme." There was a
Rabelaisian humour about this Gargantua of twenty-five
stone, who incorporated all that is most comic to the
West in the East, or to the East in the West. For he
was a Khalif of the Arabian Nights, doubled with a
cabotin of the Quartier Latin. He jovially decapitated
misbehaving sheikhs and made a jolly bonfire of
claims for eighty million piastres of village tax arrears.
He entertained foreign sovereigns with funny French
stories, and made his Pashas wade with him through
5