"fanaticism," a convenient word which began now to be freely used in describing the National movement. What, however, I think more than anything else was condemned just then by the little group of English officials was the "monstrous" determination which the Egyptian Chamber was said to have come to, if it could secure the right of voting the Budget, to cut down the subvention of £1,000 a year paid to Reuter's Agency. Without this it was felt that it would be impossible any longer to know at Cairo the odds on the Oxford and Cambridge boat race or even on the Derby or Grand Prix. There was a dark hint, too, thrown out that the charge of £9,000 a year then figuring in the Budget as a grant in aid to the European Opera House might be reduced, and on this astounding proof of "fanaticism," Fitzgerald, as a patron of the ballet, was especially insistent. These things, with others almost as trifling, were made a serious crime to the Notables and to the new Ministry, who were countenancing the reductions. I used to hear the tale of their complaints from Gregory, who was now in much closer touch with them than I any longer was. It was in answer to their threats of intervention, which were beginning to have an effect on the Stock Exchange in the lowered price of Egyptian Bonds and of property generally in Egypt, that I at this time resolved to give proof of my confidence in the national fortunes by buying a small estate for my future residence in the neighbourhood of Cairo, and the result was my purchase of Eheykh Obeyd Garden, a property of some forty acres, between Merj and Materieh.
It will be interesting to Egyptian readers to know what the prices of land in that neighbourhood then were. There was, as I have said, at that time not a single house built on the desert strip between Abbassiyeh and Kafr el Jamus, and the Government was willing to sell it to anybody who would buy it at the rate of a few piastres an acre. I thought at one moment of establishing myself on the land where my camp of the moment stood, and I made inquiry of my friend Rogers Bey, who was in the Land Department of the Ministry of Finance, and I find among my papers the draft of an application I sent in for a hundred acres, where