Treasure Hunt Tales: The Star of the South & Captain Antifer. Жюль Верн

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      CHAPTER II.

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      The reader will hardly be astonished at Mehemet Ali entering on the scene at the beginning of this chapter. Whatever may have been the importance of the illustrious Pasha in the history of the Levant, he must inevitably have appeared in this story on account of the unpleasant experiences the owner of the brigantine had had with the founder of modern Egypt.

      At this epoch Mehemet Ali had not begun, with the army of his son Ibrahim, the conquest of Palestine and Syria, which belonged to Sultan Mahmoud, the sovereign of Turkey in Europe and Turkey in Asia. On the contrary, the Sultan and the Pasha were good friends, the Pasha having helped the Sultan successfully to reduce the Morea and overcome the attempt at independence of the little kingdom of Greece.

      For some years Mehemet Ali and Ibrahim remained quietly in their pachalik. But undoubtedly this state of vassalage, which made them mere subjects of the Porte, lay heavy on their ambition, and they were only waiting an opportunity for breaking the bonds which had existed for centuries.

      There then lived in Egypt a personage whose fortune, accumulated for many generations, made him one of the most important men in the country. He lived at Cairo, his name was Kamylk Pasha, and he it was whom the captain of the brigantine addressed as Excellency.

      He was an educated man, well versed in the mathematical sciences, and in their practical or even fanciful application. But above all things, he was steeped deep in Orientalism, and an Ottoman at heart although an Egyptian by birth. Having persuaded himself that the resistance to the attempts of Western Europe to reduce the people of the Levant to subjection would be more stubborn under Sultan Mahmoud than under Mehemet Ali, he had thrown himself heart and soul into the contest. Born in 1780 of a family of soldiers, he was scarcely twenty years of age when he had joined the army of Djezzar, where he soon attained by his courage the title and rank of Pasha. In 1799 he many times risked his liberty, his fortune, and his life in fighting against the French under Bonaparte. At the battle of El-Arish he was made prisoner with the Turks, and would have been set at liberty if he had signed an undertaking not to bear arms again against the French. But resolved to struggle to the end, and reckoning on an unlikely change of fortune, obstinate in his deeds as he was in his ideas, he refused to give his parole. He succeeded in escaping, and became more energetic than ever in the various encounters which distinguished the conflict of the two races.

      At the surrender of Jaffa on the 6th of March, he was among those given up under the capitulation on condition that their lives were saved. When these prisoners—to the number of four thousand, for the most part Albanians or Arnauts—were brought before Bonaparte, the conqueror was much disturbed at the capture, fearing that these redoubtable soldiers would go to reinforce the Pasha’s garrison at Acre. And even in those days showing that he was one of those conquerors who stick at nothing, he gave orders that the prisoners should be shot.

      This time there was no offer as to the prisoners of El-Arish, to set them at liberty on condition of their not serving again. No, they were condemned to die. They fell on the beach, and those whom the bullets had not struck, believing that mercy had been shown them, were shot down as they ran along the shore.