Hassan saluted them all in turn, and Demetri and Foyster insisted on shaking hands with him in English fashion. After exchanging a few words he turned towards the Kiahia’s horsemen, and was pleased to recognise in their leader the same good-looking young Georgian whom he had seen at the head of the Kiahia’s Mamelukes at the jereed play. Calling him on one side, Hassan inquired whether he had any precise instructions as to the course to be pursued for the discovery and seizure of the Sammalous Arabs.
“Yes,” he replied; “I have a letter to the Governor of this district ordering him to provide one or two villagers well acquainted with the road to guide the English party to the Pyramids,[[69]] and also to place under our charge two Arabs now waiting here who belong to the villages robbed by the Sammalous, and who are supposed to have some knowledge of the direction in which they have retreated.”
It was deemed advisable that the whole party should proceed towards the divan of the Governor of Ghizeh, which was at no great distance from the spot where they were now assembled. They moved onward accordingly, and as they approached the Governor’s house the Georgian and Hassan rode forward to demand an interview with that personage, while the remainder of the party halted at a short distance from the house. They had not been there long before their ears were saluted by sounds too familiar to all who have passed any time in the neighbourhood of a Government divan in Egypt—namely, the heavy and swiftly-descending blows of a stick, accompanied by shrieks and cries of the victim, “Amân! amân! [mercy! mercy!] I am dead. Mercy! mercy! You may kill me, but I have not a farthing.”
The Europeans stopped their ears to shut out these painful sounds, while Demetri, more accustomed to such sights, went forward to witness the punishment, and ascertain what might be its cause and issue. The cries died away into moans and groans, which soon became altogether inaudible, leaving the Europeans to imagine that the sufferer was dead or had fainted; and Mr Thorpe was virtuously and indignantly inveighing against the barbarous cruelty of the Turkish governors when Demetri arrived.
As he approached they saw that he was convulsed with laughter, which only redoubled Mr Thorpe’s indignation; and he asked the dragoman, in an angry voice, how he could be so brutal as to jest over the agony and torture of a fellow-creature.
“You shall hear, you shall hear, O my master,” said Demetri, still unable to compose his features to a serious expression. “The man whom they were beating is a fellah who occupies some land in the neighbourhood, and though he sells his beans and his wheat like others, he never has any money to pay the taxes on the day that they are collected: either he has been robbed, or the crop failed, or the rats devoured half of it, or he lost his purse on the road as he was coming to pay in the money due to the Government—always some excuse; and though for two successive seasons he has been severely beaten, they never could find a piastre about his person nor extract one from him. This morning, just as your Excellencies came, the same scene had been repeated: he had vowed his inability to pay, and the Governor ordered him two hundred and fifty blows on the feet. The fellow took them all, bawling and screaming and groaning as you heard; and a stranger might well suppose that he was almost, if not quite, murdered. As soon as he had received the number of blows ordered, he was released, and began to stagger out of the Governor’s presence as if he could scarcely stand on his feet. In doing so he nearly ran up against one of the kawàsses standing by, a strong, rough fellow, who struck him a smart blow on the cheek with his open hand. The suddenness of the blow took him so by surprise that it opened his mouth unawares, and there dropped from it to the ground something enveloped in a piece of rag. The kawàss darted forward and seized it. On opening it they found within four gold sequins, being the exact amount of the sum which he owed to the Government. The rascal had come with a full determination not to pay if he could help it, and rather to take any amount of punishment he could conveniently bear: if he found the beating carried to a length that his patience could not endure, he could at any time stop it by producing the money. It seems that the two hundred and fifty which he had received had produced little or no effect on his leathern feet, and he was going off, chuckling at having cheated the Government once more, when that accidental blow on the cheek made him spit out the money.”[[70]]
It may be believed that this version of the story changed the compassion of the Thorpe party into an inclination to laugh, and shortly afterwards the fellah who had received the beating, and had unintentionally paid his taxes, was pointed out to them by Demetri walking homeward to his village, apparently with as little suffering in his feet as if he had been beaten by children with straws.
While Mr Thorpe was discussing with the Missionary Müller the peculiar features of character exhibited by the Egyptian fellah in the scene which had just occurred, Hassan and the Georgian returned, accompanied by the guides required, so the whole party set off merrily towards the Pyramids.
Mr Thorpe had now reached the goal of wishes long entertained, for although Thebes, Memphis, and other places of antiquarian interest had mingled in his dreams, there was something in the grand and antique simplicity of the Pyramids which had assigned to them a pre-eminence in his imagination. Immediately on arriving he commenced his tour and survey of the Great Pyramid with his daughter and Müller. Hassan went with them also, rightly judging that his services might be necessary not only to interpret for them, but to protect them against the importunity of the Arabs, who had flocked in considerable numbers to see the strangers, and to devise various projects for extracting money from them. There were not then, as now, crowds of Arabs, half Bedouins, half villagers, who make a living at the Pyramids by running up and down them for prizes and assisting the numerous travellers to reach the top; but there was even then a remnant of some tribe located there in tents, who enjoyed a kind of prescriptive right to the custody of the place, and Hassan and the Georgian had agreed to pay a score of these to act as guards or watchmen while the party remained.
Mr Thorpe and Müller were already engaged in a discussion concerning the history of the Pyramids; Emily had fallen a little behind, and was turning to ask some question of Hassan, who had spoken to her a moment before, when she observed him standing on a large stone at the base of the Pyramid, his eyes cast down to the ground in a fit of profound abstraction. There was an air of melancholy in his countenance, so different from its usual expression, that she could not resist the impulse which led her to ask him the subject of his meditations, which she imagined to be something connected with the story of the Pyramids.