THE REIGNS OF ABBAS AND SAID. 23 sudden and perhaps opportune attack of illness, did not avail himself of the invitation. The train, containing some four-score members of the Vice-regal family, set out in due course, travelling at express speed. At Kafr el Zahat the Nile is crossed by an iron bridge, constructed, I believe, by Messrs. Brassey, Peto and Betts. In order to enable sailing-vessels to pass under the viaduct, it is provided with a swing-bridge in its centre, which can be swung backward and forward. By some inexplicable oversight, this swing-bridge had been opened shortly before the arrival of the Vice-regal train in order to allow a dahabeah to pass, and had not been closed before the train reached the bridge. The result was that the train fell headlong into the Nile, and that the majority of its passengers were drowned.

In a country such as Egypt, a catastrophe of this kind was certain, with or without reason, to be attributed to design rather than accident. I doubt whether anybody now alive knows, or is ever likely to know, what the truth was about this catastrophe. All I can say is that many years later, I saw a great deal of the official who had been station-master at Kafr el Zahat at the time the catastrophe occurred, and who had subsequently become a minister under Ismail Pasha. He was one of the best educated, most enlightened and liberal-minded Turks it has been my fortune to meet, and, I should say, the last person to be an accomplice in a crime. But in the East, even more than elsewhere, one never knows.