volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

Gift of a Parthian Sarcophagus. 289
Director of Indo-European Telegraphs, who asked me
to come to his house and take over a stone sarcophagus,
which Colonel Ross wished to give to the British Museum.
I went and breakfasted with him at the Karachi Club,
where I met a great friend of Rawlinson's, Sir Robert
Sandeman, Agent to the Governor-General of Baluchist&n
and then Mr. Finch took me to his stores and handed
over to me the stone sarcophagus, which is now in the
Babylonian Room of the British Museum. I left Karachi
on the morning of March 12th, and embarked on the
P. & O. s.s. " Peshawar "^ at Bombay on March 14th,
^ Among the passengers on board were Sir Samuel and Lady
Baker, whose acquaintance I made three years earUer in Egypt. I saw
a great deal of Sir Samuel during the voyage, and he was never tired
of talking about Egypt and the Sudan, and the importance of crushing
the rebellion of the Darawish (Dervishes), and taking possession of
Khartum without delay. His knowledge of every part of the Egyptian
Sudan was very great, and his remarks on its tribes and their
religious customs most valuable and instructive. He talked much
about General Gordon and the virtues and weaknesses of that remarkable
man, and greatly blamed the authorities for sending him to
Khartum or, as Sir Samuel said, to his death. He was firmly convinced
that the only man capable of reconquering the Sudan was
Kitchener. Sir Samuel and his wife managed to obtain a table for
themselves and their personal friends from Ceylon, and in spite of
my dilapidated apparel, insisted on my joining them. As he loved
to talk of the time when he was Governor-General of the Sudan and
of his discovery of Albert N'yanza in 1864, and was always ready to
answer questions, we aU enjoyed our meal times thoroughly. One
night he told us the story of how he and his bearers lost their way
in some awful swamp on the White Nile, and of how a lot of his
" boys " deserted and carried away all the food and the medicine
chest, leaving himself and his wife practically alone to die, for
they both were suffering severely from fever. As he told the story,
passengers seated at the neighbouring tables stopped their conversation,
and craned their necks to hear what he was saying, and the waiters, both
black and white, stood still and listened. When he had told us how
he divided the last dose of quinine between himself and his wife, and
how they both collapsed and laid themselves down to die in a foetid
mass of mud and vegetable slime, an enthusiastic psychical lady at
our table, who had been listening with bated breath to every word
Sir Samuel spoke, addressed herself to Lady Baker and said, " dear
Lady Baker, do tell us what you felt and thought at the moment
when you had swallowed the last grain of quinine and laid yourself