“The Emir Beshýr, on arriving in Egypt, was coldly received at first, as it was said, by Mahomet Ali; but afterwards, having induced the Viceroy to believe that he could put him in possession of Acre and all Syria, he was, by Mahomet Ali’s money and mediation, restored to his principality. It was then that the plan for the conquest of Syria was concocted in secret between them. The Emir, on his return, contrived to recover his ascendency over the Sheykh Beshýr; and, picking a quarrel with him, he succeeded in taking him prisoner, and sent him in chains to Acre, where Abdallah Pasha finally cut his head off. At the same time, the Emir, to complete the ruin of the Sheykh’s party, mutilated the young Princes, who had shown themselves the Sheykh’s partisans. The Sheykh’s wife fled; and Aâlm-ed-dyn, a Druze, whom he employed in the execution of his bloody barbarities, was sent after her, and told to bring her son, a little boy, cost what it would. ‘Let me see him cut in pieces before my eyes,’ said the sanguinary wretch. The tyrant! he never sleeps without a number of guards round his person. His wife died soon after, and he sent a confidential agent to Constantinople, and bought two young Georgian slaves, he then being past eighty; and, after having both with him to see which he liked best, he took one of them as his favourite. It was for them that the mâalem[36] you saw at Cyprus, looking after canary-birds, was sent.”
FOOTNOTES:
[27] A finjàn is a small hemispherical coffee-cup, a little bigger than an egg-cup.
[28] The Arabic word is جون Gún with the soft G, or Gwn. The pronunciation is Jôon.
[29] Prince Pückler Muskau, who saw the garden seven years afterwards, and who is perhaps as good a judge of gardens, grounds, and parks, as any man, did not seem so much delighted with it as I had expected. He bestowed excessive praise on that of the Pasha of Egypt at Shôobra, one of the finest, he said, that he had ever seen, and better kept than the best English ones.
[30] In 1837 she said to me, “I have never been out of the doors of my house since my brother’s death. For five years I have not been farther than the outer door, once with M. Lamartine, and once to the bench at the first door with the Americans. Since that time, I have not seen the strangers’ garden, nor your little room; for, if I should put my head outside of my own court, I should certainly fall into such a passion with some of the people, that it would make me ill.”
[31] Probably from the French, besicles.
[32] This chieftain, after having lingered in prison for a year in Acre, lost his head in 1828, or near that time, by the order of Abdallah Pasha.
[33] A government edict.
[34] Hamâady, the executioner.