172 TEE SOUDAN. My husband went to see Sheikh Magranee at 10 a.m., as the poor little man was too ill to receive him yesterday. He went accompanied by all his staff, in order to receive the Sheikh with all possible honour and ceremony, and thus counteract the reports persistently set going by the rebels, to the effect that the Egyptians, or Turks, as they call them, having called Christians to their help, are all Kaffirs, and that they do not attend to their religion. The Sheikh is quartered in a musjid close to the sea. He came to the door to meet my husband and staff, and seemed really glad to see the English officers. The room insid'e was the ground floor of the mosque ; half of it was carpeted and raised about a couple of feet, and round this part were divans. One of the officers who was there told me about it, and he says it was a curious thing to see the third highest representative of the Mussulman religion sitting down in his own musjid, surrounded by English officers, who were come to help him in keeping up the power of his faith. In front and on the carpet knelt or sat, crossed-legged and shoeless, some forty or fifty Egyptian officers, amongst a lot of thick-lipped Soudanese, hairy Arab Sheikhs, and three or four exceedingly dirty, nasty-smelling, half-witted men dicant fools of that class that are so much reverenced by the Mussulmans, owing to the latter’s idea that Allah especially protects half-witted people. Just as the Sheikh had begun to talk to my husband, a poor old man pressed in, and rushed up to the former to touch his clothes, nobody thinking
