Since the death of Sultan Sayid the power of Oman has most lamentably gone down, partly owing to the very success of his attempts to put down piracy; this, followed by the introduction of steam, has diminished the importance of Maskat as a safe port for the merchants to deposit their wares. It is also partly due to the jealousies which prevail between the descendants of Sayid who rule in Zanzibar and in Maskat. Palgrave in 1863 describes Maskat as having 40,000 inhabitants; there are probably half that number now.
The Sultan of Zanzibar has to pay an annual tribute of 40,000 crowns to his relative of Maskat in order to equalise the inheritance, and this tribute being a constant source of trouble, of late years he has taken to urging the wild Bedouin tribes in Oman to revolt against the present, rather weak-minded sultan who reigns there. He supplies them with the sinews of war, namely money and ammunition, and the insurrection which occurred in February 1895 was chiefly due to this motive power.
One of his sisters married a German, the English conniving at her escape from Zanzibar in a gunboat. On her husband's death, her elder brother having in the meantime also died, she returned to Zanzibar thinking her next brother, the present sultan, to be of a milder disposition, but he refused to take any notice of her and her children.
The present ruler of Maskat, Sultan Feysul, is a grandson of Sultan Sayid and son of Sultan Tourki by an Abyssinian mother. Since his accession, in 1889, he has been vacillating in his policy; he has practically had but little authority outside the walls of Maskat, and were it not for the support of the British Government and the proximity of a gunboat, he would long ago have ceased to rule. When we first saw him, in 1889, he was but a beardless boy, timid and shy, and now he has reached man's estate he still retains the nervous manner of his youth. He lives in perpetual dread of his elder brother Mahmoud, who, being the son of a negress, was not considered a suitable person to inherit the throne. The two brothers, though living in adjacent houses, never meet without their own escorts to protect them from each other.
The way in which Feysul obtained possession of the Sultan's palace on his father's death, to the exclusion of his brother, is curious.
Feysul said his grief for his father was so great that his feelings would not admit of his attending the funeral, so he stayed at home while Mahmoud went, who on his return found the door locked in his face.
The palace is entered by a formidable-looking door, decorated with large spiked bosses of brass. This opens into a small court which contained at the time of our first visit the most imposing sight of the place, namely the lion in his cage to the left, into which Feysul was in the habit of introducing criminals of the deepest dye, to be devoured by this lordly executioner. Opposite to this cage of death is another, a low probationary cage, which, when we were there, contained a prisoner stretched out at full length, for the cage is too low to admit of a sitting posture. From this point he could view the horrors of the lion's cage, so that during his incarceration he might contemplate what might happen to him if he continued, on liberation, to pursue his evil ways. Another door leads into a vaulted passage full of guards, through which we passed and entered into an inner court with a pool in the centre and a wide cloister around it supporting a gallery.
Sultan Feysul was then a very young man, not much over twenty. He was greatly interested in seeing us, for we were the first English travellers who had visited him since his accession. We caught sight of him peeping at us over the balcony as we passed through the courtyard below, and we had to clamber up a ladder to the gallery, where we found him ready to welcome us. He seized our hands and shook them warmly, and then led us with much effusiveness to his khawah, a long room just overhanging the sea, which is his reception and throne-room. Here were high, cane-bottomed chairs around the walls, and at one end a red chair, which is the throne; just over it were hung two grotesque pictures of our Queen and the Prince Consort, such as one could buy for a penny at a fair. They are looked upon as objects of great value here, and act as befitting symbols of our protectorate.
The imam fed us with sweets and coffee, asked us innumerable questions, and seemed full of boyish fun. Certainly with his turban of blue and red checked cotton (which would have been a housemaid's duster at home), his faded, greenish yellow cloak, fastened round his slender frame by a red girdle, he looked anything but a king. As we were preparing to depart the young monarch grew apparently very uneasy, and impatiently shouted something to his attendants, and when the servant came in, Feysul hurried to him, seized four little gilt bottles of attar of roses, thrust two of them into each of our pockets, and with some compliments as to our Queen having eyes everywhere, and Feysul's certainty that she would look after him, the audience was at an end.
Sultan Feysul was a complete autocrat as far as his jurisdiction extended. At his command a criminal could be executed either in the lion's cage or in a little square by the sea, and his body cut up and thrown into the waves. The only check upon him was the British Resident. His father, Tourki, not long before sewed up a woman in a sack and drowned her, whereupon a polite message came from the Residency requesting him not to do such things again. Hence young Feysul dared not be very cruel—to offend the English would have been to lose his position.