Parting at once from the sailors and our servants, the
General and I were conducted into the audience hall; and there at
least I suppose the Pasha hoped that he would confound us by his
greatness. The hall was nothing more than a large whitewashed
room. Oriental potentates have a pride in that sort of simplicity,
when they can contrast it with the exhibition of power, and this
the Pasha was able to do, for the lower end of the hall was filled
with his officers. These men, of whom I thought there were about
fifty or sixty, were all handsomely, though plainly, dressed in the
military frockcoats of Europe; they stood in mass and so as to
present a hollow semicircular front towards the upper end of the
hall at which the Pasha sat; they opened a narrow lane for us when
we entered, and as soon as we had passed they again closed up their
ranks. An attempt was made to induce us to remain at a respectful
distance from his mightiness. To have yielded in this point would
have have been fatal to our success, perhaps to our lives; but the
General and I had already determined upon the place which we should
take, and we rudely pushed on towards the upper end of the hall.
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