And now I must tell you how it came to happen, as it did
continually, that people thought it worth while to claim the
assistance of a mere traveller, who was totally devoid of all just
pretensions to authority or influence of even the humblest
description, and especially I must explain to you how it was that
the power thus attributed did really belong to me, or rather to my
dragoman. Successive political convulsions had at length fairly
loosed the people of Syria from their former rules of conduct, and
from all their old habits of reliance. The violence and success
with which Mehemet Ali crushed the insurrection of the Mahometan
population had utterly beaten down the head of Islam, and
extinguished, for the time at least, those virtues and vices which
had sprung from the Mahometan faith. Success so complete as
Mehemet Ali's, if it had been attained by an ordinary Asiatic
potentate, would have induced a notion of stability. The readily
bowing mind of the Oriental would have bowed low and long under the
feet of a conqueror whom God had thus strengthened. But Syria was
no field for contests strictly Asiatic. Europe was involved, and
though the heavy masses of Egyptian troops, clinging with strong
grip to the land, might seem to hold it fast, yet every peasant
practically felt, and knew, that in Vienna or Petersburg or London
there were four or five pale-looking men who could pull down the
star of the Pasha with shreds of paper and ink.
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