Egyptian troops
poured in from all directions and relieved the besieged city. More
than a thousand of the mutineers were killed near the gates of the
town; nearly a thousand more were tried and executed; and those who
attempted to escape the vengeance of the merciless pasha and fled
for safety to the wilderness, were hunted down like beasts by the
roving Bedouins. Though order was now restored, it was no easy
matter to obtain camels. It required all the power and persuasion
of the authorities to induce the Shukrie-Arabs to enter the town
and convey us to Kedaref.
We heard at Kassala the miserable end of Le Comte de Bisson's mad
enterprise. It appears that the Comte, formerly an officer in the
Neapolitan army, had married at an advanced age a beautiful,
accomplished and rich heiress, the daughter of some contractor; it
was "a mariage de convenance," a title bought by wealth and beauty.
In the autumn of 1864, De Bisson reached Kassala accompanied by
some fifty adventurers, the scum of the outcasts of all nations,
who had enrolled themselves under the standard of the ambitions
Comte, "on the promised assurance that power and wealth would be,
before long, their envied portion." De Bisson's idea seems to have
been to personify a second Moses: he came not only to colonize, but
also to convert. The wild roving Bedouin of the Barka plains would,
he believed, not only at once and with gratitude acknowledge his
rule, but would soon, abandoning his false creed, fall prostrate
before the altar he intended to erect in the wilderness.
Pages:
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118