The Rais had told him our adventure with the saint, at which he laughed very heartily, saying, I was a wise man and a man of conduct. To me he only said, “they are bad people at Dendera;” to which I answered, “there were very few places in the world in which there were not some bad.” He replied, “Your observation is true, but there they are all bad; rest yourselves however here, it is a quiet place; though there are still some even in this place not quite so good as they ought to be.”
The Shekh was a man of immense riches, and, little by little, had united in his own person, all the separate districts of Upper Egypt, each of which formerly had its particular prince. But his interest was great at Constantinople, where he applied directly for what he wanted, insomuch as to give a jealousy to the Beys of Cairo. He had in farm from the Grand Signior almost the whole country, between Siout and Syene, or Assouan. I believe this is the Shekh of Upper Egypt, whom Mr Irvine speaks of so gratefully. He was betrayed, and murdered some time after, by one of the Beys whom he had protected in his own country.
While we were at Furshout, there happened a very extraordinary phænomenon. It rained the whole night, and till about nine o’clock next morning; and the people began to be very apprehensive least the whole town should be destroyed. It is a perfect prodigy to see rain here; and the prophets said it portended a dissolution of government, which was justly verified soon afterwards, and at that time indeed was extremely probable.
Furshout is in lat 26° 3´30´´; above that, to the southward, on the same plain, is another large village, belonging to Shekh Ismael, a nephew of Shekh Hamam. It is a large town, built with clay like Furshout, and surrounded with groves of palm trees, and very large plantations of sugar canes. Here they make sugar.
Shekh Ismael was a very pleasant and agreeable man, but in bad health, having a violent asthma, and sometimes pleuretic complaints, to be removed by bleeding only. He had given these friars a house for a convent in Badjoura; but as they had not yet taken possession of it, he desired me to come and stay there.
Friar Christopher, whom I understood to have been a Milanese barber, was his physician, but he had not the science of an English barber in surgery. He could not bleed, but with a sort of instrument resembling that which is used in cupping, only that it had but a single lancet; with this he had been lucky enough as yet to escape laming his patients. This bleeding instrument they call the Tabange, or the Pistol, as they do the cupping instrument likewise. I never could help shuddering at seeing the confidence with which this man placed a small brass box upon all sorts of arms, and drew the trigger for the point to go where fortune pleased.
Shekh Ismael was very fond of this surgeon, and the surgeon of his patron; all would have gone well, had not friar Christopher aimed likewise at being an Astronomer. Above all he gloried in being a violent enemy to the Copernican system, which unluckily he had mistaken for a heresy in the church; and partly from his own slight ideas and stock of knowledge, partly from some Milanese almanacs he had got, he attempted, the weather being cloudy, to foretel the time when the moon was to change, it being that of the month Ramadan, when the Mahometans’ lent, or fasting, was to begin.
It happened that the Badjoura people, and their Shekh Ismael, were upon indifferent terms with Hamam, and his men of Furshout, and being desirous to get a triumph over their neighbours by the help of their friar Christopher, they continued to eat, drink, and smoke, two days after the conjunction.
The moon had been seen the second night, by a Fakir[115], in the desert, who had sent word to Shekh Hamam, and he had begun his fast. But Ismael, assured by friar Christopher that it was impossible, had continued eating.
The people of Furshout, meeting their neighbours singing and dancing, and with pipes of tobacco in their mouths, all cried out with astonishment, and asked, “Whether they had abjured their religion or not?”—From words they came to blows; seven or eight were wounded on each side, luckily none of them mortally.—Hamam next day came to inquire at his nephew Shekh Ismael, what had been the occasion of all this, and to consult what was to be done, for the two villages had declared one another infidels.