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FOETS—IBRAHIM PASHA 313
of people from the hot Cilician plain. Hither they
come two days' journey by araha, and live for six
weeks or two months in flimsy dwellings among the
pines and rocks and mountain air, finding that length
of change from the plain necessary each year. Now,
also, I could make out the fortifications erected along
One was a castle,
this historic pass at various times.
standing on the eastern skyline, a structure designated
now by Ighsan and others as merely ''Kale"
or Castle, sufficient name amongst an incurious race.
And next appeared various Egyptian fortifications,
very much out of latitude according to one's general
conception of Egypt and the Egyptians.
They were evidence of the Egyptian Occupation, a
queer topsy-turvy period of Turko-Egyptian history
which ended so recently as eighty years ago. It
makes a chapter of almost medieval adventure and
adventurers : of Egypt, an Ottoman province, invading
and conquering Syria and the south-eastern part of
Asia Minor; of Ibrahim Pasha as chief and highly
capable adventurer on the Egyptian side ; and of the
Ottoman Empire more helpless than at any time of
its existence. Now and then, too, crops up, on the
Turkish side, the name of Helmuth von Moltke ;
and now occurs the incident of this officer, destined
to future greatness, riding in desperate flight before
Egyptian cavalry after the battle of Nisib, on the
Euphrates, east of Aintab. Moltke, it would seem,
has had something to do with German aspirations
in Asia Minor.
Ibrahim Pasha was served by French engineers,
who fortified the Cilician Gates according to the
best military art of the time. The forts remain,
guns and all, much as when the Egyptians withdrew
in 1841. There is a story that the guns are
British, and show the British broad arrow, which
sounds curious when it is recalled that England and
France intervened to save the Ottoman Empire from
the victorious Egyptians, and bombarded Beirut to
that end. I had promised myself to examine these