SHADOW_OF_THE_PYRAMID_OF_CHEOPSShadow of Pyramid
SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS(From a Photograph taken on the top of the Pyramid just before sunset)
Besides these, much passes that is intended for your especial entertainment. Sellers of turquoises, which they dig out from various creases in their robes; venders of stuffed crocodiles andlive monkeys; strange men from the desert with a jackal, which they throw, bound by all four legs, and snarling and snapping, on the marble at your feet; little girls who sing songs, and play accompaniments to them on their throats with the tips of their fingers; women conjurers, who draw strings of needles and burning flax from their mouths, and who swallow nasty little wriggling snakes, and hatch pretty fluffy little chickens out of the slabs of the terrace. Or else there is a troop of blue and white Egyptian soldiers marching by, or gorgeous young officers on polo ponies, or red-coated Tommies on donkeys, with their toes trailing in the dust and the ribbons of their Scotch caps floating out behind; and consuls-general with gorgeous guards in gold lace, and with wicked-looking curved silverswords; or the young Khedive himself, who comes with a great clatter of hoofs and bellowing sais before, and another galloping troop of cavalry in the rear, at the sound of which the people run to the curb and touch the fez, as he raises his hand to his, and rolls by in a cloud of dust.
There are very good things to see, and with a companion on one side to explain them, and another on the other side to whom you can impart this information as though you had been born knowing it, you cannot spend a more entertaining afternoon. There is only one drawback, and that is a lurking doubt that you should be up and about seeing the show-places. Friday, in consequence, is the best day in Cairo, as all the things you ought to see are then closed, and you can sit still on the terrace with a clear conscience. Among the mosques and the tombs and the palaces and museums to which all good tourists go, and of which there are excellent descriptions, giving their various dimensions and other particulars, in the guide-books, there are the Citadel and the Mosque of Mehemet Ali. The Citadel is the fortress built on the hill above the city, but which, with the Oriental incompleteness of that time, was reared upon high but not upon the highest ground. The sequel to this naturally was that when Mehemet Ali wanted the city of Cairo he sought out the highest ground, and dropped cannon-balls into the fortress until it capitulated. He afterwards asked all the Mamelukes to dinnerat the Citadel, and then had them treacherously killed—all but one, who rode his horse down the side of the Citadel and escaped. If you can imagine the reservoir at Forty-second Street placed upon the top of Madison Square Garden, and a man riding down the side of it, you can understand what a very difficult and dangerous thing this was to do. There is no doubt that he did it, for I saw a picture of him in the very act in a book of history when I was at school, and I also have seen the marks of his horse's hoofs in the stone parapet of the Citadel, and they are just as fresh as they were three years ago, when they were on the other side.
The Mosque of Mehemet Ali surmounts the Citadel, and its twin minarets are the distinguishing mark of Cairo; they are as conspicuous for miles above the city as is the dome of St. Paul's over London, and they are as light and graceful as it is impressive and heavy. The men on guard tie big yellow shoes on your feet before they allow you to enter this mosque, the outer court-yard of which is floored with alabaster, over which you slide as though you were on a mirror or a sheet of ice. It is very beautiful, and one is as unwilling to walk on it as to tramp in muddy boots over a satin train. The floor of the mosque is covered with the most magnificent rugs, as wide-spreading as a sheet and as heavy as so much gold; alabaster pillars reach to the top of the square, empty building, and from these rise five domes, coloredblue and red, and lightened with gilded letters. It is very rich-looking, gloomy, silent, and impressive. It is the best of the mosques. From the outside, on the ramparts, you can see Cairo stretching out below for miles in a level gray jumble of flat roofs and rounded domes and slender minarets, with the high walls of a palace here and the thick green of a park there to break the monotony; beyond it lies the Nile, a twisting ribbon of silver; and beyond that rich green fields and canals and bunches of palm-trees; and seven miles away, where the green ceases and the desert begins, are three monuments of gray stone, looking, at that distance, disappointingly small and familiarly commonplace. It is not, I think, until you have seen them several times, and have climbed to their top and gazed up at them from below, that you appreciate the pyramids as you had expected to appreciate them; but after they have laid their charm upon you, you will find yourself twisting your neck to take another look, or going out of your way to see them again before the sun has said good-night to them, as it has done ever since it first climbed over the edge of the world and found them waiting there.
There is a mosque on the outside of the city which people visit on certain days to see the howling dervishes go through their peculiar form of worship. This mosque consists of four square walls with a dome. It is whitewashed within, and bare and rude and old. The sunlight entersit through square holes cut in the dome, and beats upon thirty or forty men who stand in a semicircle facing the East. They are of all sorts, from Arabs of the desert with long hair and wild eyes, to fat, pleased-looking merchants from the bazars, and the beggars and water-carriers of the streets. Around them on chairs are the tourists and the residents, like the spectators at a play rather than the guests of a religious sect watching a religious ceremony. Most of the men wear their hats, and some of the women take careful notes and make sketches. They reminded me of medical students at a clinic when a man is being cut up. An archdeacon from one of our Western cities wore his hat, to show, probably, that he disapproved of the whole thing; but as he used to eat with his knife while on board theFulda, his conduct in any place was not to be considered. The priest recites something from the Koran, and the men repeat it, moving their bodies back and forward as they do so with gradually increasing rapidity. What they may be saying is quite unintelligible, and the chorus they make resembles that of no human sound, but rather the gasping or panting of an animal. It is to the visitor absolutely without any religious significance; all that is impressive about it is its horrible earnestness and its at times repulsive results. As the voice of the priest grows more accentuated the bodies of the men swing farther and lower, until their hair sweeps the floor, and their eyes, when they throw their bodies back,are on a level with those of the spectators. A drum beats in quickening time to the voice of the priest and to the gasps of the dervishes, and a flute playing a weird accompaniment seems to mock at their fierce grunts and breathings. It was one of the most unpleasant exhibitions I ever witnessed, and affected one's nerves to such a degree that several of the women had to leave. The eyes of the men rolled in their sockets, and their lips parted, and through their clinched teeth came fiercer and louder gasps, until the chorus of sound reached you like the quick panting of an engine as it draws out of a station. The sweat ran from them like water from a sponge, and the veins stood out on their faces, showing in congested knots beneath the skin. Some of them groaned, and others shrieked and cried out, "Allah! Allah!" This acted like the strokes of a whip on the others, who rocked more and more violently, and swung themselves almost off their feet. Then, as the music grew fainter the motion of the bending bodies grew less vigorous and finally ceased, and the men stood rigid, some apparently unmoved and unconcerned, and others turning and reeling in a fit.
While this was going forward, and you felt as though you were assisting at a heathen rite in which self-punishment was being inflicted as a bid for God's indulgence, two interesting things happened. An officer in the English Army of Occupation turned to his dragoman and cried atthe top of his voice, angrily: "Do you call this worth ten piasters? Well, I don't. Now if you've got anything to show me, take me to see it. This isn't worth coming to see. You're a rank impostor."
A SECTION OF THE PYRAMIDA SECTION OF THE PYRAMID
The other thing was the act of a native woman, who brought her child to the door and handed it to a priest, who took it in his arms and passed with it in front of the swinging, gasping, crazy semicircle of men. The child was about three years old, and was dying, and the mother had brought it there to be cured by the breath of the dervishes. As it passed before them, the hair of some of the men swept itsarm, and it turned its frightened eyes up to those of the priest, who smiled gravely down upon the baby and bore him outstretched in his arms three times in front of the swinging crescent. The faith of the child's mother appealed to some of us more than did the Englishman's desire to get his money's worth. The incident is only of interest here as showing perhaps why the Army of Occupation is not as popular as it might be. This officer was no doubt an excellent soldier—the ribbons on his tunic showed that—and no one would have thought of questioning his ability to handle raw recruits or his knowledge of tactics. But in handling the Egyptian tactics do not count for so much as tact.
There are several ways of reaching the pyramids, and it is eminently in keeping with the other incongruities of the place and time that the most popular way of visiting them is on a four-in-hand coach, with a guard in a red coat and a bell-shaped white beaver tooting on his horn, and a young gentleman with a boutonnière and an unhappy smile holding the reins and working his way in and out between long strings of camels. There is a very smart hotel about two hundred yards from the foot of the pyramids, and you take a donkey there or a camel and ride up a sandy road to the base of the Pyramid of Cheops. There are then several things that you may do. You can either climb to the top of this first pyramid, or crawl into its interior, or walk over to see the Sphinx, or make a tour of subterranean tombsand passageways of alabaster and polished stones, which are lighted for you by magnesium wire or stumps of candles.
It seems absurd to say that the Sphinx is disappointing, but so many who have seen it say so that I feel I am one of many, and not individually lacking in reverence or imagination. In the first place, the approach to it is bad; you come at the Sphinx not from the front, but from the rear, where all you can see of it is a round ball of crumbling stone spreading out from a neck of broken outline, much smaller and meaner than you had imagined it would be. In the second place, instead of looking up at it, or having it look down at you, you view it first from a semicircular ridge of sand, at the bottom of which it reposes, and at such a near view that whatever outline or character of countenance it once possessed is lost. I have seen photographs of the Sphinx, taken while I was in Cairo, much more impressive than the Sphinx itself. Lying in a hollow of the sand hills as it does, the farther you move away from it in order to get a better focus, the less you see of it, and as you draw nearer to it it loses its meaning, as does the scenery of a theatre when you are on the wrong side of the foot-lights. I know that that is an unpopular thing to say, and that there are many who feel thrills when they first look upon the face of the Sphinx, and who describe their emotions to you at length, and who write down their impressions in their diaries when they get back to the hotel.But they have come a long way expecting to be thrilled, and they do not intend to be disappointed. Some of the sphinxes in the museum of Gizeh, which you pass on your way to the pyramids, impressed me more than did the one great Sphinx, though they were indoors and surrounded by attendants and the cheap decoration of the museum, once a palace for the harem. They were of green stone and of huge proportions, and with "the curling lip and sneer of cold command"; and if you look at them long enough you feel uncomfortable shivers down your back, and a perfectly irrational impulse to rush at them and beat them in the face and force them to tell you what they know and what they have kept back and have been keeping back for centuries and centuries. Their faces show that they know all that we know and much besides that we shall never know, and when the world at last comes to an end they will stretch themselves and smile at one another and say: "Nowtheyknow it, but we knew it all the while. We could have told had we liked, but we have enjoyed watching them fretting and fuming and prying about and tinkering at our faces with their little hammers, and blowing us up with saltpetre only to try and put us back again with steam. We who have kept our secret from Herodotus and Cæsar, are we likely to give it up to Ebers and Mark Twain?"
But this same Sphinx by moonlight impressed me more than did anything I saw in the East. Not as one sees it by day, with tourists and photographersand donkey-boys making it cheap and familiar, but at night, when the tourists had gone to bed, and the donkey-boys had been paid to keep out of sight, and the moonlight threw the great negro face and the pyramids back of it into shadows of black and lines of silver, and the yellow desert stretched away on either side so empty and silent that I thought I was alone and back two thousand years in the past, discovering the great monuments for myself, and for the first time.
Before you ascend the Pyramid of Cheops you must deal with a middle-man in the person of the sheik of the pyramids, who selects guides for you, and who acts as though the pyramids were his private show, and he was both sole proprietor and ticket-taker at the door. He lives in a village near by, and he and his forefathers have always been allowed a monopoly of the pyramids, and distribute their patronage to those guides who will pay them the highest percentage of what they receive from the visitors. You have three men to help you, two to pull, and one to push and to dilate on the view. It takes over ten minutes to climb to the top, with the men jerking at your wrists, and the third man shoving you from below. It is not a difficult feat, and women accomplish it every day, but it leaves you in a breathless state when you reach the summit, and you are stiff above the knees for a day or two after you have come down. When you have reached the summit the guides cheer feebly to give you the idea that you have accomplishedsomething which has often been attempted before, but never so successfully; but you are not deceived, and you do not feel like cheering yourself. The view is worth the climb, however, and the sight of the shadow of the pyramid, spreading out over the villages and canals below like a black cloud, impresses you more with its immensity than the fact that it is a hundred feet higher than the top of the Diana on the Madison Square Garden tower. I am sure of this fact, because the man who built the Madison Square Garden assured me of it between breaths on the summit of the pyramid. While you are resting, the thing to do is to pay one of the guides to attempt to run down the pyramid you are on, cross the heavy sand to the pyramid beyond, and reach its top in eight minutes. When you give the word he disappears with a bound and drops into space, skipping and jumping and growing smaller and smaller as he goes, until he looks like a fluttering handkerchief; and when he reaches the sand he is as small as a child of three, and his ascent of the other pyramid suggests a white pigeon shuffling up the steep roof of a barn. It is distinctly on his part a sporting thing to do. The descent of the pyramid is very much worse than going up, and you need to go very slowly, and not to look too often at the people crawling about like ants below. Only four men, however, in six years have slipped and fallen during this descent, and one of them had been drinking. They were all killed. The more you see of the pyramids themore you want to see of them, although I think one ascent is all perhaps you will care about taking; but their dignity and the wonder of their being where they are, and for so long, increases with every look at them. You cannot grow too familiar with the pyramids. They will not have it.
DAHABEEYAHSDAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO
On the road back from the Pyramids of Gizeh there are other pyramids within sight of Cairo, but these are those with which the Sphinx is associated. You will see here one of the most beautiful sights of Cairo, the dahabeeyahs on the Nile. They and their white sails, especially when they come wing and wing before the wind, are the most beautiful of floating objects, and when there are hundreds of them coming towards you in lessening perspective, with the sun shining on the sails, and the banks on either side alive and moving with the palms, the river Nile becomes the best part of Cairo.
There is another place on the Nile which you should visit, and to which tourists seldom go. This is the isle of Rodda, on the bank of which Moses was found, and where you may see the Nilometer. This is a well about sixteen feet in diameter, connected by a channel with the Nile. It is made of masonry, and down one side there runs a column on which are inscribed ancient Arabian and Cufic numerals, or what answer for numerals. It was dug many centuries ago, and it marks the rising and falling of the river, and at the same time the prosperity or dismay of Egypt. When the tide begins to rise, this rude instrumentis watched hourly, and the hopes of the people rise and fall as the muddy water moves up or down the narrow well. When it reaches a certain height the sheik in charge declares that the time has come for cutting the banks and irrigating the land. In ancient days the rate of taxation was determined by the height of the inundation, and it is said that the sheik in charge of the Nilometer is still under the influence of the government, to whose advantage it is to make the fellahin believe that the inundation is favorable. It was the engineers under Napoleon who discovered that the Nilometer was being tampered with, but there is no likelihood of its being abused to-day under the English, whose improvement of the irrigation of Egypt has been their best work, and for the fellahin's best good. But it is interesting, nevertheless, to look down into the old well, overgrown with vines and surrounded by ruin and crumbling walls and broken lattices, and to think that for centuries it brought news of famine or of plenty, and that it was, primitive as its construction is, the pulse of Egypt.
The pulse of Egypt to-day is not shown in the mere rising or falling of a body of water. It is less primitive in its construction, and no one knows which way it is going to jump. In the next chapter I shall try to tell something of the men who have their fingers on Egypt's pulse, and who are agreed in only one thing—that there are too many fingers for Egypt's good.
When the visitor to Cairo first grasps the extent of his own ignorance of Egypt, and appreciates that if he is to understand its monuments and the signs of past times about him he must study the history of the whole world for forty centuries, he is apt to retreat precipitately. Later, as a compromise, he proposes skipping thirty-nine centuries and limiting his researches to the study of the political and social conditions of Egypt during the last ten years. And when he begins jauntily on this he finds that all that has gone before, from Rameses II. to Mehemet Ali, is as simple as the line of Popes in comparison with the anomalies and intricacies of government that have arisen within the last decade. Yet the very intricacies of the subject give to this study a fascination entirely apart from its rare picturesqueness, and no matter what manner of man he may be, he cannot but find some side of the situation which appeals to him. If his mind be constituted like that of a ready reckoner hecan revel in unravelling the intricacies of the Caisse and the Laws of Liquidation; if it is judicial, he can perhaps elucidate the powers of the Mixed Tribunal; if romantic, he has the career of Ismail, the most magnificent of patriots and profligate of monarchs; and if it turns towards adventure and the clash of arms, he can read of the heroic fanaticism of Fuzzy Wuzzy, the son of the Mahdi, of the futile mission of Gordon, of Stewart's march across the desert, and of the desperate valor of the fight at Aboo-Klea.
But it is the paradoxical nature of Egypt's present situation which gives it its chief interest, and lends to it the peculiar fascination of a puzzle, or one of Whistler's witticisms. For, while Egypt is not free, as is Morocco, nor under a protectorate, as is Tunis, she is still free and still protected. She is free to coin money, to maintain an army, and to make treaties; and yet she pays six million dollars a year tribute to Turkey as a part of the Ottoman Empire, and her army that she is allowed to maintain is officered by English soldiers, whom she is also allowed to maintain. She may not pay out the money she is allowed to coin without the consent of foreigners; she cannot punish the man who steals this money, be he Greek, English, or American, without the approval of these foreigners; and her official language is that of one foreign power, her ostensible protector is another, and her real protector is still another, whose commands are given under the irritating disguise of "advice."
EGYPTIAN INFANTRYEGYPTIAN INFANTRY IN THEIR DIFFERENT UNIFORMS
Alfred Milner, the late under-secretary for finance in Egypt, whoseEngland in Egyptis the best book on the subject, though it reads like a novel, has put it in this way: "It is not given to mortal intelligence to understand at one blow the complexities of Turkish suzerainty and foreign treaty rights; to realize the various powers of interference and obstruction possessed by consuls and consuls-general, by commissioners of the public debt, and other mixed administrations; to distinguish English officers who are English from English officers who are Egyptian, foreign judges of the international courts from foreign judges of the native courts; to follow the writhings of the Egyptian government in its struggle to escape from the fine meshes of the capitulations; to appreciate precisely what laws that government can make with the consent of only six powers, and for what laws it requires the consent of no less than fourteen."
It seems rather unfair to saddle the responsibility for all of these burdens and for this remarkable condition of affairs, which is unequalled in history, upon the shoulders of one man, but one man is responsible for it directly and indirectly. He is still alive, a hanger on at the court of the Sultan of Turkey, he who was at one time the most picturesque monarch of the world. Ismail Pasha became Khedive a little before the time of the close of our Civil War. Egypt had never been more prosperous than then—owing but fifteen million dollars. In 1876, whenIsmail was deposed and his son Tewfik Pasha put in his place, he had increased the debt of Egypt to four hundred and forty-five million dollars. Ismail was a typical Oriental ruler; he had the typical Oriental ruler's French veneer and education, a combination which has been found to produce most serious results. When an Oriental is left alone he is a barbarian, or he used to be; now, after he has been made the talk of Paris for nine days, and has been given a state dinner at Marlborough House, and a few stars for his coat, and called "cousin," he goes home with no particular disgust for his former eccentricities of mis-government, but with a quiver full of new tastes, desires, and ambitions, and thereafter plays his rôle of monarch with one eye on the grand stands of Europe. He wants their good opinion, but he wants to get it in his own way—the old way. He begins to build railroads and hospitals, but he continues, after his past custom, to draw the money for such improvements from licensed gambling-houses or from the sale of opium. He has a French cook, but he retains the kurbash; he puts up telephones, but he does not give up the bowstring.
RIAZ PASHARIAZ PASHA,Prime-minister of Egypt
Ismail was the first Khedive who discovered that the easiest way to get money is to borrow it. He found that all one has to do is to sign a paper, and you get the money. It was very easy for Ismail to borrow money, because the credit of Egypt was good and sound in itself, and because foreigners, who even at that time swarmedin Egypt, knew that the repudiation of debts, while possible in a powerful or free government, was not to be feared from that country. So there began a reign of extravagance for which history has no parallel. If "money breeds money," it is also true that those who spend money freely are given more chances to do so than any one else. Adventurers, charlatans, rascals of every climate and every nationality, swarmed down upon Cairo, and fought with one another for a chance to glut themselves at the repast which this reckless profligate spread for all comers. No man probably was ever so basely cheated as was Ismail, or on so magnificent a scale. And nothing remains but ruins to show where the money spent on his own personal pleasure was bestowed. That other magnificent reprobate, William M. Tweed, left monuments like the Court House to commemorate his thefts of public money; but Ismail's palaces are falling in pieces, the rain has washed the paint off the boards, the tips of the crescentsare broken, and great gardens filled with fountains and mosaic paths are choked with weeds and covered with fallen leaves and the dirt and dust of neglect and decay. You can walk over long marble floors which have sunk by their own weight through the rotten foundations, and see yourself at full length in bleared mirrors surrounded by the gilt borders and blue silken curtains of the Second Empire. Ismail ordered these palaces as men order hats, and threw them away as you toss an empty cartridge from a gun-barrel. And that was all the most of them ever were, empty cartridges, mere shells of wood painted to look like marble, and gilding and mirrors, as tasteless as the buildings at the Centennial Exposition, and lasting as long.
And yet they pleased him, and he ordered more and more, so that wherever his eye might rest it would fall upon a palace which would serve as a fitting covering for his royal person, and as a testimony to his magnificence. He wanted many, and he wanted them at once. He had them built at night by the light of candles. The Palace of Gizeh, which is now a museum, was reared in this way while Cairo slept, and at a cost of twenty-four million dollars. The curtains ordered for its windows cost one thousand dollars each, and when it was found that they did not fit the windows, the entire front of the building was torn down, and a new front with windows to match the curtains was put in its place. He built an opera-house as fine asthat of Covent Garden in six months, and a grotto as dark and cool as the Mammoth Cave, with stalactites of painted rope and rocks of papier-maché and mud, with its sides lined with aquariums, in which swam strange fish. The wind and the dust play through this grotto to-day; for he no sooner reared a palace in air than he turned from it to some new toy. These are the things you can see. You can hear stories—some of them true, some of them possible—of things that are past, such as his swimming-tanks where a hundred of the slaves of the harem bathed together for his edification; the pie out of which, when it was opened, there stepped a ballet-dancer; and the story of the disappearance of the Pasha who grew too rich. This is, unfortunately, a true story, and not one out of theArabian Nights. This Pasha was invited by Ismail to see a new dahabeeyah, and never returned. But one of the attendants on the Khedive came back some weeks later with his finger bitten off at the joint. He and Ismail alone know where the Pasha who was too rich has gone.
These extravagances and these eccentricities were all in keeping with our idea of what an Oriental despot should be, but it would be most unfair and ungenerous to give only this side of Ismail's character. He was a man of much mind and of large ideas, as well as a man with the tastes of a voluptuary, and the means, for a time, of a Count of Monte Cristo. It was he who built the harbor of Alexandria; and the railwaysand canals that others have completed were started under his régime. All of these things—railroads, palaces, canals, and grottos made of mud—cost money; and there were other expenses. Knights of industry and rascals of all degrees extorted vast fortunes from him in indemnities for supposed failures on his part to keep up with his agreements, and to stick to the letter of concessions. Some of these, like the payment of fifteen million dollars to the Suez Canal Company, were just enough; but there was also an enormous sum given in backsheesh to Turkey to gain the consent of the Porte to a proposed change in the line of succession and the establishment of the rule of primogeniture. Up to that time the eldest male member of the ruling family had always succeeded to power, but Ismail obtained a firman from the Sultan allowing his son to follow him. The gratification of this natural vanity or love of family was not obtained for the asking, and cost his people dear. They were already groaning under a multitude of taxes; the army was unpaid; the bureaucracy was rotten throughout; bribery and extortion, unfair taxation, and open seizure of the property of others had reduced the country almost to bankruptcy. Ismail in sixteen years had brought about a state of things that threatened utter ruin, to not only the native, but to the strangers within and without the gates. The strangers made the move for reform. I have told this much of Ismail not because it is new or unfamiliar, but becauseit shows how, through his misrule, the foreign element was able to obtain a footing upon the shore of Egypt, which footing has now grown to a trampling under foot of what is native and properly Egyptian. This entering wedge was called the Dual Control, and France and England were appointed receivers for Egypt, just as we appoint receivers for a badly managed railroad, and Ismail was deposed, his son Tewfik taking his place.
AN EGYPTIAN LANCERAN EGYPTIAN LANCER
But although this was the first important and most official recognition of the right of the stranger to dictate to Egypt, he had already obtained peculiar rights in Egypt through capitulations, or those privileges granted in the past to foreign residents in Turkey and its dependent state of Egypt. In the sixteenth century the foreigners who traded in these Oriental countries stood in actual need of protection from the natives. Because they were foreigners they were regarded with such lack of consideration that, in order to balance the disadvantages of having their shops destroyed and their throats cut, the Sultan gave them certain privileges—such as immunity from taxation, immunity from arrest, the inviolability of domicile, and the exemption from the jurisdiction of the local courts.
These privileges were unimportant when the foreign element in Constantinople was so little and so weak that the position of the Chinamen in San Francisco in '49 was that of a powerful aristocracy in comparison; but the snake warmed atthe hearth-stone grew, and the Sultan's empire dwindled, and the privileges which were given to bribe the foreigner to come and to remain became a bane to Turkey and a curse to the weaker state of Egypt. The inviolability of domicile, for instance, is at this very day made use of by foreigners who are carrying on some wickedness or who have committed a crime for which they cannot be arrested by an Egyptian policeman unless he is accompanied by an official representative of the country to which the foreigner belongs. Let us suppose, for example, that the police of New York wished to raid a gambling-house. This, I know, is asking a good deal of the reader's intelligence, but we will suppose it to be a gambling-house which has not paid its assessment to the police regularly, and which should be given a lesson. All that the proprietor of the house would have to do, did capitulations extend in New York, would be to lease the house to an Italian, or to take out papers of naturalization from the British government. You can imagine the chagrin of an officer of the law who, when he goes to make an arrest, is confronted with a German who says he is an Englishman, and whose domicile is accordingly sacred. This, as you can imagine, would impede the wheels of justice.
When I was in Cairo a Greek, who had taken out papers as an American citizen, flaunted this fact in the faces of the native police whenever they came to arrest him for keeping a gambling-house. They applied to our consul-general,Mr. E. C. Little, of Abilene, Kansas, who so far differed from the etiquette observed by some other consuls-general in Cairo as not to delay and not to warn the criminal. He sent his soldiers to be present at the arrest. The offender met this by bringing forth another American citizen of Greek parentage, to whom he claimed to have leased the house, and whose family were inside. Mr. Little, feeling that the American flag did not look well as a cloak for gambling-houses, and being a young man who has assisted at county-seat fights and who can pitch three curves, said that if the roulette tables were not out of the house in twenty-four hours he would himself break them into kindling-wood with an axe. This incident shows how the capitulations of the sixteenth century are acting as stumbling-blocks to the Egyptian of to-day, even when the consuls-general are willing to assist the native government, which is seldom.
TIGRANE PASHATIGRANE PASHA,Minister of Foreign Affairs
This is not all. The immunity from full taxation,now that the foreigners are among the richest inhabitants of Cairo, is most manifestly unjust; and though the mixed courts of an international judiciary have done away with trial of the foreign resident, or lack of trial, in civil cases, by the several consuls-general, the abuses of the capitulations are still a grievous and most unjust imposition by the great powers, ourselves included, upon a weaker one. To return to the Dual Control and to the story of the growth of the foreigners' hold on Egypt. The Dual Control was unpopular; so was the foreigner and his capitulations, who, waxing fat on the weaknesses of the country after Ismail's debauchery of its strength, grew insolent—so insolent that the cry raised by a general in the Khedive's army of "Egypt for the Egyptians" was taken up, and found expression in the Arabist movement or rebellion. Its leader was Arabi Pasha. He wanted what the Know-Nothing party of America wanted—his country for his countrymen. What else he wanted for himself does not matter here. He was, in the eyes of the Khedive, a rebel. In the eyes of some of the people he was the would-be preserver of his country against the plague of the foreign invasion.
The trouble began at Alexandria, where the excited people attacked the foreign residents, killing some, and destroying valuable property. Men-of-war of the two powers represented in the Dual Control had already arrived to put down the rebellion. When the riot on shore was at its height, the English war-vessels bombarded the city. Thebombarding of Alexandria was war, but it was not magnificent. There are certain things made to be bombarded—forts and ships of war—but cities are not built for that purpose or with that ultimate end in view. The English people, as a people, however, regret the bombardment of Alexandria as much as any one. The French war-vessels, for their part, refused to join the bombardment, and so were requested by the English admiral to sail away and give the other half of the Dual Control a clear field. Different people give you different reasons for the departure of the French fleet at this crisis. Some say that M. Clemenceau, who hated M. Freycinet and his policy, possibly raised the cry of the German wolf on the frontier, and pointed out the danger at home if the army and navy were engaged otherwise than in protecting the border. Others say that, like the good one of the two robbers in theBabes in the Wood, one of the Dual Control drew the line at murder or at the bombardment of a country she was supposed to protect. Plundering the Egyptians was possible, but not bombarding their city. They stopped at that. The English followed up the bombardment of Alexandria by the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, which ended the rebellion. The Citadel of Cairo surrendered at their approach, and the Khedive's rule was again undisturbed. The English remained, however, to "restore order," and to see to the "organization of proper means for the maintenance of the Khedive's authority." They have beendoing that now for ten years, and it is interesting to note that they have made so little progress that the last "disorder" in Cairo was due to the action of the British consul-general himself in allowing the young Khedive just twenty-four hours in which to dismiss one of his cabinet. This can hardly be described as "maintaining the authority of the Khedive," which the English had promised to do.
CAMEL CORPS PATROLA CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA
After the battle of Tel-el-Kebir Great Britain stood undoubtedly in the position of the savior of the Khedive if not of Egypt. Her soldiers had crushed the rebellion, and as she had sent her Only General and one of the royal family and many thousands of good men to do it, and as she had lost not only men, but money, she thought she deserved something in return. The something she has taken in return has been taken gradually, and is the control of Egypt at the present day. It is possible that had the English not lost many more men and much more money in the campaign in the Soudan, which followed immediately after the suppression of Arabi, they might not have gone so far as they have gone in settling themselves in Egypt. But there was a not unnatural feeling that the Soudan campaign, which had cost so much, and which was a failure in all but in showing the bravery of the British troops, ought to be paid for, or made up to the English in some way. I should like to go into the story of this most picturesque and heroic of campaigns, but it would require a book by itself.Its history is briefly this: The religious and military chieftain known as "the Mahdi," shortly after the defeat of Arabi, threatened all Egypt from the Soudan, which rose under his leadership. General Hicks, an Englishman, with ten thousand men, in the service of the Khedive, was sent against him. He was killed, and most of the troops with him. The English, who were at that time the only power in Egypt with authority of any sort back of it, and who were virtually in control, felt that they should take the responsibilities of their position as well as its benefits, and avenge the massacre, drive back the Mahdi's forces, and, if possible, crush him and them for all time. The campaign was later further complicated by the presence at Khartoom of Major-General C. G. Gordon, who had gone there to lead back in safety the Egyptian troops still remaining in the Soudan. He was, after his arrival at Khartoom, virtually a prisoner at that place, which is a mud city on the banks of the Nile far above the fifth cataract. The attempts to rescue him and to suppress the Mahdi were equally unsuccessful.
This is, in a few words, the story of a campaign which has been unequalled within the last twenty years in picturesqueness, heroism, and dramatic surprises. It had been said that the old days of personal bravery, of hand-to-hand slaughter, and of the attack and defence of man against man, were at an end; that owing to the new weapons of war, by which an enemy can be attackedwhen several miles distant from the attacking party, when the pressing of an electric button destroys an army corps, and when turning a handle will send three hundred bullets a minute into a mass of infantry, the necessity for personal courage was over. But seldom in history has there been as fierce personal encounters as in the Soudan, or as unusual methods of warfare. On the one hand were the naked supporters of the Mahdi, armed with their spears and knives, and protected only by bull-hide shields, but actuated by a religious fanaticism that drove them exulting at their enemies, and with no fear of death, but with the belief that through it they would gain joyous and proud immortality. Against them were the British troops, outnumbered ten to one, with hundreds of miles of sandy desert before, behind, and on every side of them, cut off from communication with the outside world, in a country barren and unfamiliar, and attacked by tens of thousands, who came when they pleased and where they pleased, rising as swiftly as a sand-storm rises, and disappearing again as suddenly into the desert.
When I was in Cairo I was told of one of the Mahdi's men who continually rushed at a British square during an engagement holding his shield clear of his body as he advanced to throw a spear, and then retreated again. This looked like the worst form of foolhardiness to the English, until they saw that he was protecting with his shield his little boy, who was hiding behind it, and thatwhen the chance offered, this child, who could not have been more than seven, and who was as naked of protection as his father, would throw a spear of his own. The father was wounded four times, but each time the bullet struck him he only shook himself, as a dog shakes off water, and once more rushed forward. When he fell for the last time the boy tumbled across him, unconscious from a wound in his thigh. The surgeons dressed this wound and bandaged it; but when the child came to and saw what they had done, he leaped up and tore the clothes from around him, and then, as the blood from the reopened wound ran out, fell over backwards dead. The English officer who told this story asked if fighting such men could be considered agreeable work from any point of view.
H. H. ABBAS II.H. H. ABBAS II.Khedive of Egypt
But the Soudan is only of interest here as showing how, having lost so much through it, the British did not feel more inclined than before to evacuate Egypt, although there were many who thought, as a few still think, that Egypt has cost them too much already, and more than they can ever get back. The loss of Gordon was perhapsthe disaster of all the most keenly felt. How keenly is shown partly by the statue the English have placed to him in Trafalgar Square, surrounded by their kings and greatest generals. It shows him with one foot placed on the battlement of Khartoom, with his arms folded, and with the head thrown slightly forward, looking out, as he had done for so many weary months, for the relief that came too late. This monument is a reproach to those whose uncertainty of mind and purpose cost Gordon his life. It was doing a brave thing to put it up in a public place, being, as it is, a standing reminder of the neglect and half-heartedness that lost a valuable life, and one that had been risked again and again for his country. It is not only a monument to General Gordon, but to the English people, who have had the courage to admit in bronze and stone that they were wrong.
For the last ten years the English have been as tardy in getting out of Egypt as they were in going after Gordon into the Soudan. They have repeatedly declared their intention of evacuating the country, not only in answer to questions in the House, but in answer to the inquiries of foreign powers. But they are still there. They have not been idle while there, and they have accomplished much good, and have brought benefits innumerable to Egypt. They have improved her systems of irrigation, upon which the prosperity of the land depends, have strengthened her army, have done away with the corvee, or taxpaid on labor, and with the kurbash, or whip used in punishment, and, what is much the most wonderful, they have brought her out of ruin into such a condition of prosperity that she not only pays the interest on her enormous debt, but has a little left over for internal improvements. There has also been a marked change for the better in the condition of the courts of justice, and there has been an extension of a railroad up the Nile as far as Sirgeh.
But the English to-day not only want credit for having done all this, but they want credit for having done it unselfishly and without hope or thought of reward, and solely for the good of mankind and of Egypt in particular. They remind me of those of the G. A. R. who not only want pensions and medals, but to be considered unselfish saviors of their country in her hour of need. There is no reason why a man should not be held in honor for risking his life for his country's sake, and honors, if he wants them, should be heaped upon him, but not money too. He either served his country because he was loyal and brave, or because he wanted money in return for taking certain risks. Let him have either the honors or the money, but he should not be so greedy as to want both. England has made a very good thing out of Egypt, and she has not yet got all she will get, but she wants the world to forget that and look upon her as an unselfish and enlightened nation that is helping a less prosperous and less powerful people to get upon theirfeet again. Of course it is none of our business (at least it is our policy to say so) when England stalks forth like a roaring lion seeking what she may devour all over the world. Americans travel chiefly upon the Continent, and unless they go into out-of-the-way corners of the world they have no idea how little there is left of it that has not been seized by the people of Great Britain. For my own part I find one grows a little tired of getting down and sailing forth and landing again always under the shadow of the British flag. If the United States should begin with Hawaii and continue to annex other people's property, we should find that almost all of the best corner lots and post-office sites of the world have been already pre-empted. Senator Wolcott once said to Senator Quay: "I understand, Quay, you want the chairmanship of the Library Committee. You seem to want the earth; if you don't look out you will interfere with my plans."
If the United States had taken away the little princess's island from her and continued to plunder weaker nations, she would have found that England wants the earth too, and that she is in a fair way of getting it if some one does not stop her very soon. There are a number of good people in England who believe that for the last ten years their countrymen have spent their time and money in redeeming Egypt as a form of missionary work, and there are others quite as naïve who put the whole thing in a word by saying, "What would we do with our younger sons if it was not for Egypt?"