The white prophet; a novel
Excerpt
It was perhaps the first act of open hostility, and there was really nothing in the scene or circumstance to provoke an unfriendly demonstration. On the broad racing ground of the Khedivial Club, a number of the officers and men of the British Army quartered in Cairo, assisted by a detachment of the soldiers of the army of Egypt, had been giving a sham fight in imitation of the Battle of Omdurman, which is understood to have been the death-struggle and the end of Mahdism.
The Khedive himself had not been there — he was away at Constantinople — and his box had stood empty the whole afternoon; but a kinsman of the Khedive's, with a company of friends, had occupied the box adjoining, and Lord Nuneham, the British Consul-General, had sat in the centre of the grand pavilion, surrounded by all the great ones of the earth, in a sea of muslin, flowers, and feathers. There had been European ladies in bright spring costumes. Sheikhs in flowing robes of flowered silk,
Egyptian Ministers of State in Western dress and British Advisers and Under-Secretaries in Eastern tarbooshes, officers in go-braided uniforms, foreign Ambassadors, and an infinite number of pashas, beys, and effendis. Besides these, too, there had been a great crowd of what is called the common people, chiefly Cairenes — the volatile, pleasure-loving people of Cairo, who care for nothing so little as the atmosphere of political trouble.
They had stood in a thick line around the arena, all capped in crimson, thus giving to the vast ellipse the effect of an immense picture framed in red.
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