Agents from Sir Sidney had hastened up to interpose between the French and the Turks, and to make fresh proposals of accommodation.  Letters, they said, had just been written to London, and, when the convention of El Arish was known there, it would be ratified to a certainty; in this situation, it would not be right to suspend hostilities, and wait.  To this the grand vizier and Kleber consented, but on conditions that were irreconcilable.  The grand vizier insisted that Cairo should be given up to him; Kleber, on the contrary, that the vizier should fall back to the frontier.  Under these conditions, fighting was the only resource.

On the 20th of March, 1800, in the plain of Heliopolis, ten thousand soldiers, by superiority in discipline and courage, dispersed seventy or eighty thousand foes.  Kleber gave orders for the pursuit on the following day.  When he had ascertained with his own eyes that the Turkish army had disappeared, he resolved to return and reduce the towns of Lower Egypt, and Cairo in particular, to their duty.

He arrived at Cairo on the 27th of March.  Important events had occurred there since his departure.  The population of that great city, which numbered nearly three hundred thousand inhabitants, fickle, inflammable, inclined to change, had followed the suggestions of Turkish emissaries, and fallen upon the French the moment they heard the cannon at Heliopolis.  Pouring forth outside the walls during the battle, and seeing Nassif-Pasha and Ibrahim Bey, with some thousand horse and janizaries, they supposed them to be the conquerors.  Taking good care not to undeceive the inhabitants, the Turks affirmed that the grand vizier had gained a complete victory, and that the French were exterminated.  At these tidings, fifty thousand men had risen in Cairo, at Bulak, and at Gizeh, and Cairo became a scene of plunder, rapine, and murder.

[Illustration:  137.jpg CITADEL OF CAIRO]

During these transactions, General Friant arrived, detached from Belbeys, and lastly Kleber himself.  Though conqueror of the grand vizier’s army, Kleber had a serious difficulty to surmount to subdue an immense city, peopled by three hundred thousand inhabitants, partly in a state of revolt, occupied by twenty thousand Turks, and built in the Oriental style; that is to say, having narrow streets, divided into piles of masonry, which were real fortresses.  These edifices, receiving light from within, and exhibiting without nothing but lofty walls, had terraces instead of roofs, from which the insurgents poured a downward and destructive fire.  Add to this that the Turks were masters of the whole city, excepting the citadel and the square of Ezbekieh, which, in a manner, they had blockaded by closing the streets that ran into it with embattled walls.

In this situation, Kleber showed as much prudence as he had just shown energy in the field.  He resolved to gain time, and to let the insurrection wear itself out.  The insurgents could not fail at length to be undeceived respecting the general state of things in Egypt, and to learn that the French were everywhere victorious, and the vizier’s army dispersed.  Nassif-Pasha’s Turks, Ibrahim Bey’s Mamluks, and the Arab population of Cairo could not agree together long.  For all these reasons, Kleber thought it advisable to temporise and to negotiate.