The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Last Frontier, by E. Alexander (Edward Alexander) Powell

THE LAST FRONTIER

BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL
THE LAST FRONTIER
GENTLEMEN ROVERS
THE END OF THE TRAIL
FIGHTING IN FLANDERS
THE ROAD TO GLORY
VIVE LA FRANCE!
ITALY AT WAR
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

A SANDSTORM PASSING OVER KHARTOUM.
“It approached at the speed of a galloping horse—a great fleecy, yellowish-brown cloud which looked for all the world like the smoke of some gigantic conflagration.”

THE LAST FRONTIER

THE WHITE MAN'S WAR
FOR CIVILISATION IN AFRICA

BY

E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S.
LATE OF THE AMERICAN CONSULAR SERVICE IN EGYPT

WITH SIXTEEN FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
AND MAP

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1919

Copyright, 1912, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

To
MY CHEERFUL, UNCOMPLAINING
AND COURAGEOUS COMRADE ON THE
LONG AFRICAN TRAIL
MY WIFE

FOREWORD

The unknown lands are almost all discovered. The work of the explorer and the pioneer is nearly finished, and ere long their stern and hardy figures will have passed from the world's stage, never to return. In the Argentine, in Mexico, and in Alaska store clothes and stiff hats are replacing corduroys and sombreros; the pack-mule is giving way to the motor-car. The earth has but one more great prize with which to lure the avaricious and the adventurous: Africa—mysterious, opulent, alluring—beckons and calls.

The conditions which exist in Africa to-day closely parallel those which were to be found, within the memory of many of us, beyond the Mississippi. In North Africa the French are pushing their railways across the desert in the face of Arab opposition, just as we pushed our railways across the desert in the face of Indian opposition forty years ago. As an El Dorado the Transvaal has taken the place held by Australia, and California, and the Yukon, in their turn. The grazing lands of Morocco and the grain lands of Rhodesia will prove formidable rivals to those of our own West in a much-nearer future than most of us suppose. French and British well-drillers are giving modern versions of the miracle of Moses in the Sahara and the Sudan and converting worthless deserts into rich domains thereby.

The story of the conquest of a continent by these men with levels and transits, drills and dynamite, ploughs and spades, forms a chronicle of courage, daring, resource, and tenacity unsurpassed in history. They are no idlers, these pioneers of the desert, the jungle, and the veldt; they live with danger and hardship for their daily mates; they die with their boots on from snake-bite or sleeping-sickness or Somali spear; and remember, please, they are making new markets and new playgrounds for you and me. Morocco, Algeria, Tripolitania, Equatoria, Rhodesia, the Sahara, the Sudan, the Congo, the Rand, and the Zambezi ... with your permission I will take you to them all, and you shall see, as though with your own eyes, those strange and far-off places which mark the line of the Last Frontier, where the white-helmeted pioneers are fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation.

E. Alexander Powell.

AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT

For assistance in the preparation of this book I am grateful to many people. To the editors of Collier's, The Outlook, The Review of Reviews, The Independent, The Metropolitan, Travel, and Scribner's my thanks are due for their permission to use such portions of this volume as originally appeared in their magazines in the form of articles. I also desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Right Hon. James Bryce, O.M., for permission to avail myself of certain data contained in his admirable work on South Africa; to Charles K. Field, Esq., editor of The Sunset Magazine, for the title and introductory lines to Chapter V; to the Hon. F. C. Penfield, former American Diplomatic Agent in Egypt, from whose clear and comprehensive “Present-Day Egypt” I have drawn portions of my account of the complex administration of the Nile country; to J. Scott Keltie, LL.D., F.R.G.S., author of “The Partition of Africa” and editor of “The Statesman's Year-Book,” for much valuable information obtained from those volumes; and to Miss Isabel Savory, A. Sylva White, Esq., S. H. Leeder, Esq., C. W. Furlong, Esq., and Francis Miltoun, Esq., for suggestions derived from their writings on African subjects. To the American diplomatic and consular officials in Africa, and to missionaries of many creeds and denominations, I am indebted for innumerable kindnesses and much valuable information. At consulate and mission station alike, from Cape Bon to Table Bay, I found the latch-string always out and an extra chair at the table. I likewise take this opportunity of expressing my appreciation of the courtesies shown me by H. H. Abbas Hilmi II, Khedive of Egypt; H. R. H. Prince George of Greece, former High Commissioner in Crete; H. H. Ali bin Hamoud bin Mohammed, ex-Sultan of Zanzibar; H. E. the French Minister of the Colonies; H. E. the Belgian Minister of the Colonies; Sir Thomas Cullinan of the Premier Diamond Mine, Pretoria; and to the officers of the Imperial German East Africa Railways; the Beira, Mashonaland and Rhodesian Railways; and the British South Africa Company.

E. A. P.

[CONTENTS]

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LAST FRONTIER

[CHAPTER I]

THE THIRD EMPIRE

WE have witnessed one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of the world. In less than a generation we have seen the French dream of an African empire stretching without interruption from the Mediterranean to the Congo literally fulfilled. French imperialism did not end, as the historians would have you believe, on that September day in 1870 when the third Napoleon lost his liberty and his throne at Sedan. The echoes of the Commune had scarcely died away before the French empire-builders were again at work, in Africa, in Asia, in Oceanica, founding on every seaboard of the world a new and greater France. In the two-score years that have elapsed since France's année terrible her neglected and scattered colonies have been expanded into a third empire—an empire oversea. She has had her revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine by forestalling Teutonic colonial ambition in every quarter of the globe: in China, in Australasia, in Equatoria, and in Morocco the advance of the German vorlopers has been halted by the harsh “Qui vive?” of the French videttes.

Though thirty centuries have elapsed since Phœnicia first began to nibble at the continent, it was not until 1884 that the mad rush began which ended in Africa's being apportioned among themselves by half a dozen European nations with as little scruple as a gang of boys would divide a stolen pie. This stealing of a continent, lock, stock, and barrel, is one of the most astounding performances in history. France emerged from the scramble with a larger slice of territory than any other power, a territory which she has so steadily and systematically expanded and consolidated that to-day her sphere of influence extends over forty-five per cent of the land area and twenty-four per cent of the population of Africa.

So silently, swiftly, and unobtrusively have the French empire-builders worked that even those of us who pride ourselves on keeping abreast of the march of civilisation are fairly amazed when we trace on the map the distances to which they have pushed the Republic's African frontiers. Did you happen to know that the fugitive from justice who turns the nose of his camel southward from Algiers must ride as far as from Milwaukee to the City of Mexico before he can pass beyond the shadow of the tricolour and the arm of the French law? Were you aware that if you start from the easternmost boundary of the French Sudan you will have to cover a distance equal to that from Buffalo to San Francisco before you can hear the Atlantic rollers booming against the break-water at Dakar? It is, indeed, not the slightest exaggeration to say that French influence is to-day predominant over all that expanse of the Dark Continent lying west of the Nile basin and north of the Congo—a territory one and a half times the size of the United States—thus forming the only continuous empire in Africa, with ports on every seaboard of the continent.

With the exception of the negro republic of Liberia (on whose frontiers, by the way, France is steadily and systematically encroaching), the little patches of British and Spanish possessions on the West Coast, and the German colonies of Kamerun and Togoland, France has unostentatiously brought under her control that enormous tract of African soil which stretches from the banks of the Congo to the shores of the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic seaboard to the Valley of the Nile. Algeria has been French for three-quarters of a century, being regarded, indeed, as a part of France and not a colony at all. Though the Bey of Tunis still holds perfunctory audiences in his Palace of the Bardo, it is from the French Residency that the protectorate is really ruled. Though Tripolitania has passed under Italian dominion, it is French and not Italian influence which is recognised by the unsubjugated tribesmen of the hinterland. And now, after years of intrigue and machinations, which twice have brought her to the brink of war, France, by one of the most remarkable diplomatic victories of our time, has won the last of the world's great territorial prizes and has set the capstone on her colonial edifice by adding the empire of Morocco—under the guise of a protectorate—to her oversea domain.

On the West Coast the tricolour floats over the colonies of Senegal, French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Upper Senegal-Niger, and Mauritania (the last named a newly organised colony formed from portions of the Moroccan hinterland), the combined area of these possessions alone being about equal to that of European Russia.

From the Congo northward to the confines of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan stretches the great colony of French Equatorial Africa—formerly known as the French Congo—the acquirement of which by Savorgnan de Brazza, counterchecked the ambitious plans of Stanley and his patron, King Leopold, thus forming one of the most dramatic incidents in the scramble for Africa. Though potentially the most valuable of the French West African possessions, being enormously rich in both jungle and mineral products, notably rubber, ivory, and copper, France has taken surprisingly little interest in this colony's development, and, as a result, it has been permitted to fall into a state of almost pitiful neglect. There are two causes for the backwardness of French Equatorial Africa: first, its atrocious climate, the whole territory being a breeding-ground for small-pox, blood diseases, tropical fevers in their most virulent forms, and, worst of all, the terrible sleeping-sickness; second, the almost total lack of easy means of communication, the back door through the Belgian Congo being the only direct means of access to the greater part of the colony, which was virtually cut in half by the broad area lying between the southern boundary of Kamerun and the equator and extending eastward from the coast to the Ubangi River, which France ceded to Germany in 1911 as a quid pro quo for being permitted a free hand in Morocco, and which has been renamed “New Kamerun.” Though the economic development of this region must prove, under any circumstances, a difficult, dangerous, and discouraging task, it can be accomplished if the government will divert its attention from its projects in North Africa long enough to make Libreville a decent port, to provide adequate steamer services on the great rivers that intersect the colony, and to link up those rivers with each other and with the coast by a system of railways.

Lying on the northern frontier of French Equatorial Africa, and separating it from the Sahara, is the great Central African state of Kanem, with its organised native government, its important commerce, and its considerably developed civilisation, which was completely subjugated by France in 1903, Wadai, its powerful neighbour to the east, accepting a French protectorate in the same year. In the centre of this ring of colonies lie the million and a half square miles of the French Sahara, which the experiments of the French engineers have proved to be as capable of irrigation and cultivation as the one-time deserts of our own Southwest. Off the other side of the continent is the great colony of Madagascar, the second largest island in the world, in itself considerably larger than the mother country; while the French Somali Coast forms the sole gateway to Abyssinia and divides with the British colony of Aden the control of the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Everything considered, history can show few parallels to this marvellous colonial expansion, begun while France was still suffering from the effects of the disastrous Prussian War, and quietly carried on under the very eyes of greedy and jealous neighbours.

The territorial ambitions of most countries have been blazoned to the world by many wars. It took England two disastrous campaigns to win South Africa and two more to conquer the Sudan; Russia learned the same lesson in Manchuria at even a more terrible cost; while Italy's insecure foothold on the Red Sea shore was purchased by the annihilation of an army. Where other nations have won their colonial possessions by arms, France has won hers by adroitness. Always her policy has been one of pacific penetration. Trace the history of her African expansion and you will find no Majuba Hill, no Omdurman, no Adowa, no Modder River. Time and time again the accomplishments of her small and unheralded expeditions have proved that more territory can be won by beads and brass wire than by rifles and machine-guns.

Not long ago I asked the governor-general of Algeria what he considered the most important factors in the remarkable spread of French influence and civilisation in North Africa, and he answered, “Public schools, the American phonograph, and the American sewing-machine.” The most casual traveller cannot but be impressed by the thoroughness with which France has gone into the schoolmaster business in her African dominions. She believes that the best way to civilise native races is by training their minds, and she does not leave so important a work to the missionaries, either. In Algiers there is a government university with nearly two thousand students and a faculty of one hundred professors, while in more than eighteen hundred secondary, primary, and infant schools the youth of Algeria, irrespective of whether they believe in Christ, in Abraham, or in Mohammed, are being taught how to become decent and patriotic citizens of France. In Tunisia alone there are something over fifteen hundred educational institutions; all down the fever-stricken West Coast, under the palm-thatched roofs of Madagascar and the crackling tin ones of Equatoria, millions of dusky youngsters are being taught by Gallic schoolmasters that p-a-t-r-i-e spells “France,” and the meaning of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” To these patient, plodding, persevering men, whether they wear the white linen of the civil service or the sombre cassocks of the religious orders, I lift my hat in respect and admiration, for they are the real pioneers of progress. If I had my way, the scarlet ribbon of the Legion would be in the button-hole of every one of them. We too may claim a share in this work of civilisation, for I have seen a band of savage Arab raiders, their fierce hawk-faces lighted up by the dung-fed camp-fire, held spellbound by the strains of a Yankee phonograph; and I have seen the garments of a tribal chieftain of Central Africa being fashioned on an American sewing-machine.

“When the English occupy a country,” runs a saying which they have in Africa, “the first thing they build is a custom-house; the first thing the Germans build is a barracks; but the first thing the French build is a railway.” Nothing, indeed, is more significant of the civilising work done by the French in these almost unknown lands than the means of communication, there being in operation to-day in French Africa six thousand miles of railway, twenty-five thousand miles of telegraph, and ten thousand miles of telephone. Think of being able to buy a return ticket from Paris to Timbuktu; of telegraphing Christmas greetings to your family in Tarrytown or Back Bay or Bryn Mawr from the shores of Lake Tchad; or of sitting in the American consulate at Tamatave and chatting with a friend in Antanarivo, three hundred miles away. Why, only the other day the Sultan of Morocco, at Fez, sent birthday congratulations to the President of France, at Paris, by wireless.

To-day one can travel on an admirably ballasted road-bed, in an electric-lighted sleeping-car, with hot and cold running water in your compartment, and with a dining-car ahead, along that entire stretch of the Barbary Coast lying between the Moroccan and Tripolitanian frontiers, which, within the memory of our fathers, was the most notorious pirate stronghold in the world. A strategic line has been built six hundred miles southward from the coast city of Oran to Colomb-Bechar, in the Sahara, with Timbuktu as its eventual destination, and, now that the long-standing Moroccan controversy has been settled for good and all, another railway is already being pushed forward from Ujda, on the Algerian-Moroccan border, and in another year or two the shriek of the locomotive will be heard under the walls of Fez the Forbidden. From Constantine, in Algeria, another line of rails is crawling southward via Biskra into the Sahara, with Lake Tchad as its objective, thus opening up to European commerce the great protected states of Kanem and Wadai. From Dakar, on the coast of Senegal, a combined rail and river service is in operation to the Great Bend of the Niger, so that one can now go to the mysterious city of Timbuktu by train and river steamer, in considerable comfort and under the protection of the French flag all the way. In Dahomey, within the memory of all of us a notorious cannibal kingdom, a railway is under construction to Nikki, four hundred miles into the steaming jungle; from Konakry, the capital of French Guinea, a line has just been opened to Kourassa, three hundred and fifty miles from anywhere; while even the fever-stricken, voodoo-worshipping Ivory Coast boasts two hundred miles or so of well-built line with its rail-head already half-way from the coast to Jimini. From Tamatave, the chief seaport of Madagascar, you can go by rail to the capital, Antanarivo, three hundred miles up into the mountains, and, if you wish to continue across the island, government motor-cars will run you down, over roads that would make the Glidden tourists envious, to Majunga, on the other side. From Djibouti, the capital of the French Somali Coast, another railway has been pushed as far up-country as Diré-Dawah, in Menelik's dominions (fare sixty dollars for the round trip of two hundred and fifty miles), thus diverting the lucrative trade of Abyssinia from the British Sudan to the French marts in Somaliland.

France has more good harbours on the coasts of Africa than all the other nations put together. Algiers, with one of the finest roadsteads in the world, is now the most important coaling-station in the Mediterranean and a port of call for nearly all of the lines plying between America and the Near East; by the construction of a great ship-canal the French engineers have made Tunis directly accessible to ocean-going vessels, thus restoring the maritime importance of Carthage to her successor; with Tangier under French control, a naval base will doubtless eventually be constructed there which will rival Toulon and will divide with Gibraltar the control of the entrance to the Mediterranean. With its entire western portion dominated by the great French ports of Villefranche, Toulon, Ajaccio, Marseilles, Oran, Algiers, and Bizerta, the Mediterranean is well on the road to becoming, as Napoleon once prophesied, a French lake.

But, though good harbours are taken rather as a matter of course in the Mediterranean, one hardly expects to find them on the reef-bordered West Coast, which is pounded by a ceaseless and merciless surf. At all of the British, German, Spanish, and Portuguese ports in West Africa, save one, you are lowered from the steamer's heaving deck into a dancing surf-boat by means of a contrivance called the “mammy chair,” and are taken ashore by a score of ebony giants who ply their trident-shaped paddles madly in their desperate efforts to prevent your being capsized. Alternately scorched by the sun and soaked by the waves, you are landed, about three times out of four, on a beach as hot as though of molten brass. The fourth time, however, your Kroo boys are not quite quick enough to escape the crest of one of those mighty combers—and you can thank your lucky stars if you get ashore at all. This is the method by which every passenger and every bale of merchandise is landed on the West Coast and it is very dangerous and unpleasant and costly. But when you come to the French port of Dakar, instead of being dangled between sea and sky in a bo's'n's chair and dropped sprawling into the bottom of a pitching surf-boat, and being paddled frantically ashore by a crew of perspiring negroes, you lounge in a cane chair on an awning-covered deck while your vessel steams grandly in, straight alongside a concrete wharf which would do credit to the Hudson River, and a steam crane dips down into the hold and lifts the cargo out, a dozen tons at a time, and loads it on a waiting train to be transported into the heart of Africa, and as you lean over the rail, marvelling at the modernity and efficiency which characterise everything in sight, you wonder if you are really in the Dark Continent, or if you are back in America again.

But if the French harbours are amazingly good, the French vessels which drop anchor in them are, for the most part, amazingly bad. The Messageries Maritimes, a highly subsidised line which has a virtual monopoly of the French colonial passenger trade, and which is notorious for its we-don't-care-whether-you-like-it-or-not attitude, has the worst vessels that I know, bar none, and charges the most exorbitant fares. If you wish to visit the Somali Coast, or Madagascar, or Réunion, you will have to take this line, because there is no other, but elsewhere along the coasts of Africa you will do well to follow my advice and travel under the British or the German flag.

The struggle of the French colonial army to maintain law and order along the vast reaches of France's African frontiers forms one of the most thrilling and romantic chapters in the history of colonial expansion. Theirs has been a work of tact, rather than of force, for, where England, Germany, Italy, and Belgium have used the iron hand in dealing with the natives, France, more farsighted, has seen the wisdom of hiding it within the velvet glove. Always she has conciliated the Moslem. She has safeguarded the privacy of his mosques and harems; she has encouraged by government subsidies his schools and universities; instead of desecrating the tombs of his holy men, she has whitewashed them; the burnooses of the great tribal and religious chieftains are brilliant with French decorations; the native mollahs and cadis are utilised as local magistrates in all except the gravest cases or those involving a European. To attempt to govern a country without those, or against those, to whom it belonged, is a blunder of which France has never been guilty. It has been the consistent policy of other European nations, on the contrary, neither to trust the natives nor to treat them with any degree of consideration. Hence the ominous unrest in India; hence the ever louder murmur of “Egypt for the Egyptians”! hence the refusal of the natives of German East Africa to work on German-owned plantations and their wholesale emigration from that colony; hence the fact that no Italian official in Eritrea or Benadir dares venture outside the town walls unarmed and unescorted, nor will in Tripolitania for many years to come. I have been assured repeatedly by North African sheikhs that, should France become involved in a European war, her native soldiery would volunteer almost to a man. That England is far from certain how her Egyptian and Sudanese troops would behave in such a contingency is best proved by the formidable British garrisons which she deems it wise to maintain in the land of the Valley of the Nile.

I am but reflecting the opinions of many highly placed and intimately informed European officials in North Africa when I assert that Germany's repeated interference with the French programme in Morocco was due as much to military as to political reasons, the Germans using this means to hinder the expansion of that mysterious force noire which has long been a bugaboo to the War Office authorities in Berlin. Whether this was the true reason or not for Germany's attitude in the Moroccan business, no one knows better than the German general staff that, in the event of war, the Republic would be able to advance a great black army to the banks of the Rhine in thirty days—and that she would not be deterred by the scruples which prevented her utilising her African soldiery in 1870. It has been repeatedly urged, indeed, that the numerical inferiority of the annual French conscription, as compared with that of Germany, be made up for by drafting a corps of black troops drawn from French West Africa into the continental army. France has already recruited very close to twenty thousand native troops—which is the strength of an army corps—in her West African possessions alone, and as any scheme for drafting it into Algeria, so as to enable the French troops stationed there to be available elsewhere, would instantly arouse the Arab population to revolt, it is highly probable that this African army corps would, in case of war, be employed on the European continent. Though France's African army does not at present number much over fifty thousand men—all well drilled, highly disciplined, and modernly armed—the French drill-sergeants in Africa are not idle and have limitless resources to draw from. The population of the negro states under French protection runs into many millions, and would easily yield twenty per cent of fighting men, while the acquisition of Morocco has added the Berbers, that strange, warlike, Caucasian race, to the Republic's fighting line. Nothing pleases the African as an occupation more than soldiering, his native physique, courage, and endurance making him, with amazingly little training, a first-class fighting man. It is no great wonder, then, that Germany looks askance at the formidable army which her rival is building up so quietly but so steadily on the other side of the Middle Sea.

No small part in the winning of North Africa has been played by the Foreign Legion—how the name smacks of romance!—that picturesque company of adventurers, soldiers of fortune, and ne'er-do-weels, ten thousand strong, most of whom serve under the French flag in preference to serving in their own prisons. In this notorious corps the French Government enlists without question any physically fit man who applies. It asks no questions and expects to be told any number of lies. It trains them until they are as hard as nails and as tough as rawhide; it works them as a negro teamster works a Kentucky mule; it pays them wages which would cause a strike among Chinese coolies; and, when the necessity arises, it sends them into action with the assurance that there will be no French widows to be pensioned. So unenviable is the reputation of the Legionnaires that even the Algerian desert towns balk at their being stationed in the vicinity, for nothing from hen-roost to harem is safe from their depredations; so they are utilised on the most remote frontiers in time of peace and invariably form the advance guard in time of war. It is commonly said that when the Legion goes into action its officers take the precaution of marching in the rear, so as not to be shot in the back, but that is probably a libel which the regiment does not deserve. Wherever the musketry is crackling along France's colonial frontiers, there this Legion of the Damned is to be found, those who wear its uniform being, for the most part, bearers of notorious or illustrious names who have chosen to fight under an alien flag because they are either afraid or ashamed to show themselves under their own.

Several times each year it is customary for the commandants of the French posts along the edge of the Sahara to organise fantasias in honour of the Arab sheikhs of the region, who come in to attend them, followed by great retinues of burnoosed, turbaned, and splendidly mounted retainers, with the same enthusiasm with which an American countryside turns out to see the circus. At one of these affairs, held in southern Algeria, I could not but contrast the marked attentions paid by the French officials to the native chieftains with the cavalier and frequently insolent attitude invariably assumed by British officials toward Egyptians of all ranks, not even excepting the Khedive. Were a French official to affront one of the great Arab sheikhs as Lord Kitchener did the Khedive, when he exacted an apology from his Highness for presuming to criticise the discipline of the Sudanese troops, he would be fortunate indeed if he escaped summary dismissal.

At the fantasia in question luxuriously furnished tents had been erected for the comfort of the native guests; a champagne luncheon provided the excuse for innumerable protestations of friendship; a series of races with money prizes was arranged for the visitors' horses; and, before leaving, the sheikhs were presented with ornate saddles, gold-mounted rifles, and, in the cases of the more important chieftains, with crosses of the Legion of Honour. In return for this they willingly agreed to capture and surrender certain fugitives from justice who had fled into the desert; to warn the more lawless of their tribesmen that the plundering of caravans must cease; to furnish specified quotas of recruits for the native cavalry; and to send in for sale to the Remount Department a large number of desert-bred horses. And, which is the most important of all, they go back to their tented homes in the desert immensely impressed with the power, the wealth, and the generosity of France.

“THROUGH DIM BAZAARS WHERE TURBANED SHOPKEEPERS SQUAT PATIENTLY IN THEIR DOORWAYS.”
Here, in the native quarters of the remote towns of the Algerian hinterland, the disciples of Pan-Islam find eager listeners to their creed of Africa for the Africans.
Photograph by Em. Frechon, Biskra.

Not content with these periodic manifestations of friendship, the French Government makes it a point occasionally to invite the native rulers of the lands under its control to visit France as the guests of the nation. Escorted by French officers who can talk with them in their own tongue, these colonial visitors in their outlandish costumes are shown the delights of Montmartre by night, they are dined by the President of the Republic at the Élysée, they are given the freedom of Paris at the Hôtel de Ville, and they finally return to their own lands the friends and allies of France for the rest of their lives. “It doesn't cost the government much,” an official of the French Colonial Office once remarked to me, à propos of a visit then being paid to Paris by the King of Cambodia, “and it tickles the niggers.”

Straggling down here and there into the desert from some of the North African coast towns go the trade routes of the caravans, and it is the protection of these trade routes, traversing, as they do, a territory half again as large as that of the United States, that is entrusted to the twelve hundred méharistes composing France's Saharan forces. By a network of small oasis garrisons and desert patrols, recruited from the desert tribes and mounted on the tall, swift-trotting camels known as méhari, France has made the Saharan trade-routes, if not as safe as Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, certainly very much safer for the lone traveller than lower Clark Street, in Chicago, or the neighbourhood of the Paris Halles. It has long been the fashion to hold up the Northwest Mounted Police as the model for all constabulary forces, just as it has been the fashion to extol the English as the model colonisers, but, taking into consideration the fewness of their numbers, the vastness of the region which they control, and the character of its climate and its inhabitants, I give the blue ribbon to these lean, brown-faced, hard-riding camel-men who have carried law and order into the furthermost corners of the Great Sahara.

Though comparatively unfertile, the Sahara vastly influences the surrounding regions, just as the Atlantic Ocean influences the countries which border on it. Were commerce to be seriously interrupted upon the Atlantic, financial hardships would inevitably result in the countries on either side. So it is, then, with the Sahara, which is, to all intents and purposes, an inland ocean. Ever since the caravan of the Queen of Sheba brought gifts to King Solomon, ever since Abraham came riding down from Ur, it has been customary for the nomad Arab rulers through whose territories the desert trade routes pass to exact heavy tribute from the caravan sheikhs, the Bilma trans-Saharan route alone being plundered annually to the tune of ten million francs until the coming of the French camel police. Many of these great trade caravans, you will understand, are literally moving cities, sometimes consisting of as many as twelve thousand camels, to say nothing of the accompanying horses, donkeys, sheep, and goats. To outfit such a caravan often takes a year or more, frequently at a cost of more than one million dollars, the money being subscribed in varying sums by thousands of merchants and petty traders dwelling in the region whence it starts. It is obvious, therefore, that the looting of such a caravan might well spell ruin for the people of a whole district; and it is by her successful protection of the caravan routes that France has earned the gratitude of the peoples of all those regions bordering on the Great Sahara. But the days of the caravan trade are numbered, for the telegraph wires which already stretch across the desert from the Mediterranean coast towns to the French outposts in the Congo, the Senegal, and the Sudan, are but forerunners to herald the coming of the iron horse.

France's path of colonial expansion in Africa has been remarkably free from obstructions, for, barring the Algerian campaign of 1830, and the German-created incidents in Morocco, she has acquired her vast domain—close on half the total area of the continent—at a surprisingly low cost in money and lives. The only time, indeed, when her African ambitions received a serious setback was in 1898, at Fashoda (now known as Kodok), on the White Nile, when the French explorer, Major Marchand, yielded to the peremptory demand of Lord Kitchener and hauled down the tricolour which he had raised at that remote spot, thus losing to France the whole of the Western Sudan and the control of the head-waters of the Nile.

There is an interesting bit of secret diplomatic history in this connection. The story has been told me by both French and British officials—and there is good reason to believe that it is true—that the French Government had planned, in case Marchand was able to hold his position until reinforcements arrived, to divert the waters of the White Nile, at a point near its junction with the Sobat River, into the Sahara, an undertaking which, owing to the physical characteristics of that region, would, so the French engineers claimed, have been entirely feasible. France would thus have accomplished the twofold purpose of irrigating her desert territory and of turning Egypt into a desert by diverting her only supply of water; for this, remember, was in those bitter, jealous days before the Anglo-French entente. It was, indeed, the intelligence that the Khalifa proposed, by doing this very thing, to bring Egypt to her knees that caused the second Sudanese expedition to be pushed forward so rapidly. (I should add that the idea, once so popular in France, of turning the Sahara into an inland sea, has been proven impracticable, if not impossible.) It is safe to say that England's prime reason for clinging so tenaciously, and at such heavy cost, to the arid tract known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, is to safeguard Egyptian prosperity by keeping control of the head-waters of the Nile. To illustrate how completely the Nile is the barometer of Egyptian prosperity, I might add that the last time I was in Khartoum the officials of the Sudanese Irrigation Service complained to me most bitterly that they were being seriously hampered in their work of desert reclamation by the restrictions placed upon the quantity of water which they were permitted to divert from the Nile, a comparatively small diversion from the upper reaches of the river causing wide-spread distress among the Egyptian agriculturists a thousand miles down-stream.

Because the map-makers from time beyond reckoning have seen fit to paint the northern half of the African continent a speckled yellow, most of us have been accustomed to look upon this region as an arid, sun-baked, worthless desert. But French explorers, French engineers, and French scientists have proved that it is very far from being worthless or past reclamation. M. Henri Schirmer, the latest and most careful student of its problems, says: “The sterility of the Sahara is due neither to the form of the land nor to its nature. The alluvium of sand, chalk, and gypsum which covers the Algerian Sahara constitutes equally the soil of the most fertile plains in the world. What causes the misery of one and the wealth of the other is the absence or the presence of water.” Now, an extensive series of experiments has proven that the Sahara, like the Great American Desert, has an ample supply of underground water, which in many cases has been reached at a depth of only forty feet. There is, incidentally, hardly a desert where the experiment has been tried, whether in Asia, Africa, or America, where water has not been found within two thousand feet of the surface. Though usually not sufficient for agriculture, enough has generally been found to afford a supply for cattle, railroads, and mines. Three striking examples of what can be accomplished by scientific well-drilling in arid lands are the great wells of the Salton Desert, the flowing wells at Benson, Arizona, and a supply of seven hundred thousand gallons of water a day from the deep wells on the mesa at El Paso, each of these supplies of water being obtained from localities which were superficially hopelessly dry.

It should be borne in mind, in any discussion of North Africa, that until the early '80's the Great American Desert was as primitive, waterless, and sparsely settled a region as the Sahara. Its scattered inhabitants practised irrigation and agriculture very much as the people of southern Algeria and Tunisia do to-day, and, like them, they constructed buildings of unburnt brick and stone. Though the Indian was able to find a meagre sustenance upon the American desert, just as the Arab does upon the African, it was of a kind upon which the white man could not well exist. The unconquered Apaches plundered wagon-trains and mail-coaches just as the Tuareg occasionally plunders the Saharan trade caravans to-day, and the only white men were the soldiers at scattered and lonely posts or desperadoes flying from the law. There is, indeed, a striking similarity between the conditions which prevail to-day along France's African borders and those which existed within the memories of most of us upon our own frontier.

Then the railways came to the American West, just as they are coming to North Africa to-day, and the desert was awakened from its lethargy of centuries by the shriek of the locomotive. The first railroads to be constructed were designed primarily as highways between the Atlantic and the Pacific seaboards, with hardly a thought of revenue from the desert itself. But hard on the heels of the railway-builders followed the miners and the cattlemen, so that to-day the iron highway across the desert is bordered by prosperous cities and villages, by mines and oil-derricks and ranches and white farm-houses with green blinds, this one-time arid region, which the wiseheads of thirty years ago pronounced worthless, now yielding a wealth twice as much per capita as that of any other portion of the United States.

What has already been accomplished in the American desert, French brains, French energy, and French machinery are fast accomplishing in the Sahara. Thanks to the recent invention, by a non-commissioned officer of France's African forces, of a six-wheeled motor-sledge driven by a light but powerful aeroplane engine, the problem of rapid communication in these desert regions, which have hitherto been impassable to any kind of animal or mechanical traction, has been solved. As the new vehicle has proved itself capable of maintaining a speed over sand dunes of twenty miles an hour, it promises to be of invaluable assistance to the French in their work of opening up the waste places. Not only have French expeditions explored and charted the whole of the unknown regions, but they have thoroughly investigated the commercial possibilities of the immense territories which have recently come under their control. These investigations have shown that the Sahara is very far from being the sandy plain, flat as a billiard-table, which the pictures and descriptions in our school geographies led us to believe, and which the reports of those superficial travellers who had only journeyed into the desert as far as Biskra, in Algeria, or Ghadames, in Tripolitania, confirmed, but is, on the contrary, of a remarkably varied surface, here rising into plateaus like those of Tibesti and Ahaggar, there crossed by chains of large and fertile oases, and again broken into mountain ranges, with peaks eight thousand feet high, greater than the Alleghanies and very nearly as great as the Sierra Nevadas.

An oasis, by the way, does not necessarily consist, as the reading public seems to believe, of a clump of palm-trees beside a brackish well, many of them being great stretches of well-watered and cultivated soil, sometimes many square miles in extent, and rich in fig, pomegranate, orange, apricot, and olive trees. The oasis of Kaouer, for example, with its one hundred thousand date-palms, furnishes subsistence for the inhabitants of a score of straggling villages, with their camels, flocks, and herds. There are said to be four million date-palms in the oases of the Algerian Sahara alone, and to cut down one of them is considered as much of a crime as arson is in a great city, for its fruit is a sufficient food, from its leaves a shelter can be made which will keep out sun and wind and rain, and its shade protects life and cultivation. Many date plantations and even vineyards have flourished for several years past in southernmost Algeria by means of water from below the surface, while the chief of the French geodetic survey recently announced that a tract in the very heart of the Sahara, nine degrees in longitude by twelve degrees in latitude, is already sufficiently watered for the raising of grain. The reports of these expeditions and commissions bear with painstaking thoroughness on the productivity of the soil, the suitability of the climate, the existence and accessibility of forest wealth, the presence and probable extent of mineral veins, and on transportation by road, rail, and river over all that huge territory which comprises France's African empire.

The story of French success in the exploration, the civilisation, the administration, and the exploitation of Africa is one of the wonder-tales of history. That she has relied on the resources of science rather than on those of militarism makes her achievement the more remarkable, for where England's possessions have largely been gained by punitive expeditions, France has won hers by pacific penetration. Look at Senegambia as it is now under French rule, and compare its condition with what it was as Mungo Park describes it at the end of the eighteenth century; contrast the modernised Dahomey of to-day, with its railways, schools, and hospitals, with the blood-soaked, cannibal country of the early '60's; remember that Algeria has doubled in population since the last Dey, by striking the French consul with his fan, turned his country into a French department—and you will have a bird's-eye view, as it were, of what the French have accomplished in the colonising field.

If French Africa becomes in time a rich and prosperous dominion—and I firmly believe that it will—it is to her patient and intrepid pioneers of civilisation—-desert patrols, railway-builders, well-drillers, school-teachers, commercial investigators—that the thanks of the nation will be due; for they are pointing the way to millions of natives, on whose activities and necessities the commercial development of Africa must eventually depend. So I trust that those at home in France will give all honour to the men at work in the Sahara, the Senegal, and the Sudan or rotting in the weed-grown, snake-infested cemeteries of the Congo and Somaliland; men whose battles have been fought out in steaming jungles or on lonely oases, far away from home and friends and often from another white man's help and sympathy; sometimes with savage desert raiders, or in action against Hausa, Berber, or Moor; but oftenest of all with an unseen and deadlier foe—the dread African fever.

THE TROGLODYTE TOWN OF MEDENINE, SOUTHERN TUNISIA.
Perhaps the strangest city in the world. The dwellings, known as rhorfas, are built in the form of horseshoes to keep out thieves.
Photograph by Soler, Tunis.

CHAPTER II

THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL

AN unaccustomed silence hung over the labyrinth of court-yards, corridors, gardens, mosques, and kiosks which compose the imperial palace in Fez. The chatter of the harem women was hushed; the white-robed officials of the household slipped through the mosaic-paved passages like melancholy ghosts; even the slovenly sentries at the gates, their red tunics over their heads to protect them from the sun, seemed to tread more softly, as though some great one lay dying. Within the palace, in a room whose furnishings were a strange jumble of Oriental taste and European tawdriness, a group of men stood about a table. Certain of them were tall and sinewy and swarthy, their white burnooses, which enveloped them from their snowy turbans to their yellow slippers, marking them unmistakably as Moors. Of the others, whose clearer skins showed them to be Europeans, some wore the sky-blue tunics and scarlet breeches of the chasseurs d'Afrique, some the braided jackets and baggy trousers of the tirailleur regiments, some the simple white linen of the civil administration, while across the chest of one, a grizzled man with the épaulettes of a general of division, slanted a broad scarlet ribbon. At the table sat an old-young man, a man with an aquiline, high-bred nose, a wonderfully clear, olive skin, and a fringe of scraggy beard along the line of his chin, a man with a weak mouth and sensual lips and heavy-lidded, melancholy eyes. The man with the scarlet ribbon unrolled a parchment and, bowing, spread it upon the table. One of the native dignitaries, with a gesture of reverence which included heart and lips and head, dipped a quill pen into an ink-well and tendered it to the silent figure at the table. “Your Majesty will have the goodness to sign here?” said the soldier, half-questioningly, half-commandingly, as he indicated the place with his finger. The man at the table gravely inclined his head, reached for the pen, hesitated for a moment, then slowly began to trace, from right to left, the strange Arabic signature. “Inshallah! It is done!” he said, and throwing down the pen he sunk his face into his hands. “Vive la France!” said the general solemnly, and “Vive la France!” echoed the officers around him. Well might the one lament and the others rejoice, for, with the final flourish of the Sultan's pen, Morocco had ceased to exist as an independent nation and France had added an empire to her dominions.

“The world is a peacock,” says a Moorish proverb, “and Morocco is the tail of it.” Now, however, it has become the tail of the Gallic cock, for when, on March the thirtieth, 1912, Sultan Mulai-abd-el-Hafid signed the treaty establishing a French protectorate over his country, Morocco entered upon a new phase of its existence. With that act there ended, let us hope for all time, a situation which on more than one occasion has threatened the peace of the world. Not since the English landed in Egypt a third of a century ago has an event occurred which so vitally concerns the future welfare of Africa; not since the Treaty of Tilsit has France won so decisive a diplomatic victory or added so materially to her territorial possessions. By the signing of that treaty France laid the final stone in the mighty colonial structure which she has built up in Africa, and opened to Christianity, civilisation, and commerce the door of a region which has hitherto been a synonym for mystery, cruelty, intolerance, and fanaticism.

Though scarcely forty hours of travel by train and boat separate the departure platform at the Quai d'Orsay station in Paris from the landing-beach at Tangier, though its coast is skirted by the tens of thousands of American tourists who visit the Mediterranean each year, less is known of Morocco than of many regions in central Asia or inner Africa. Though a few daring travellers have made scattering crow's-feet upon its map, there are regions as large as all our New England States put together which are wholly unexplored. It is almost the last of the unknown countries. As its women draw their veils to hide their faces from the men, so the Moors have attempted to draw a veil of mystery and intolerance over the face of their country to hide it from the stranger. What strange tribes, what ruins of an earlier civilisation, what wealth in forests or minerals lie behind its ranges can only be conjectured. Its maps are still without the names of rivers and mountains and towns—though the rivers and mountains and towns are there; the sole means of travel are on camels, mules, or donkeys along the wild, worn paths, it being the only country of any size in the world which cannot boast so much as a mile of railway; its ports and the two highways leading from the coast to its capitals, Fez and Morocco City, were, until the coming of the French, alone open to the traveller—and none too safe at that; the foreigner who has the hardihood to stray from the frequented paths is taking his life in his hands. Few of the maps of Morocco are, so far as accuracy is concerned, worth the paper they are printed on, being largely based on unscientific material eked out by probabilities and conjectures, there being less accurate information, in fact, about a country larger than France, and only two days' journey from Trafalgar Square, than there is about Abyssinia or Borneo or Uganda. Even the names which we have given to the country and its inhabitants are purely European terms and are neither used nor recognised by the people themselves, who call their country El Moghreb el Aska, which means literally “Sunset Land,” the term Morocco being a European corruption of the name of one of its capitals, Marrakesh, or, as it is known to foreigners, Morocco City. A land almost as large as the State of Texas, with snow-capped mountain ranges, navigable rivers, vast forests, a fertile soil, an abundant water supply, and an ideal climate; a land of walled cities and white villages, of domed mosques and slender minarets, of veiled women and savage, turbaned men; a land of strange peoples and still stranger customs; a land of mystery and fatalism, of suspicion and fanaticism, of cruelty and corruption, of confusion and contradiction—that is Morocco, where, as an Arabic writer has put it, a wise man is surprised at nothing that he sees and believes nothing that he hears.

This empire which has come under the shadow of the tricolour is, above all else, a white man's country. Unlike India and Tripolitania and Rhodesia and the Sudan, Morocco is a country which is admirably adapted for European colonisation, being blessed with every natural advantage that creation has to offer. Its only objectionable feature is its people. Lying at the western gateway of the Mediterranean, where the narrowed sea has so often proved a temptation to invasion, its Atlantic ports within striking distance of the great lanes of commerce between Europe and South America and South Africa, Morocco occupies a position of enormous strategic, political, and commercial importance. The backbone of the country is the Great Atlas, which, taken as a whole, has a higher mean elevation than that of any other range of equal length in Europe, Africa, or western Asia, attaining in places an elevation of nearly fifteen thousand feet. Snow-clad, this mighty and isolated wall rises so abruptly from the plain that it needs but little stretch of the imagination to understand how the ancients believed that on it rested the heavens—whence, indeed, its name. Personally, the thing that surprised me most in Morocco was the total absence of desert. Either because of its proximity to the Sahara, or because of its camels, or the two combined, I went to Morocco expecting that I should find vast stretches of sun-baked, yellow sand. As a matter of fact, I found nothing of the kind. Traversed from east to west, as I have already said, by the strongly defined range of the Atlas, the greater part of its surface is really occupied by rolling prairies, diversified by low hills, and not at all unlike Ohio and Indiana. Though admirably adapted to the growing of cereals, the strict prohibition against the exportation of grain has naturally resulted in discouraging the native farmers, so that immense tracts of fertile land remain uncultivated. The alluvial soil, which is remarkable for its richness, frequently reaches a depth of fifteen feet and could be brought to an almost incredible degree of productiveness by the application of modern agricultural methods. What greater praise can be given to any soil than to say that it will bear three crops of potatoes in a single year and that corn is commonly sown and reaped all within the space of forty days?

Unlike its neighbouring countries, Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripolitania, Morocco does not lack for navigable waterways, for it possesses several large rivers which could be navigated for hundreds of miles inland, though at present, owing to the apathy of the inhabitants, and the unsettled condition of the regions along their banks, they are used for neither traffic nor irrigation. The chief of these is the Muluya, which, with its tributary the Sharef, provides northeastern Morocco with a valuable commercial waterway for a distance of more than four hundred miles. The most important river of northwest Morocco is the Sebu, which empties into the Atlantic, while in the central and western districts the Kus, the Bu-Regreg, the Sus, and the Assaka will, under the new régime, prove invaluable as means of opening up the country.

A very large number of people seem to be under the impression that Morocco is unhealthy and suffers from a sweltering heat. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The climate is, as a matter of fact, extremely healthful, malaria, the scourge of the other countries of North Africa, being unknown. In the regions lying between the central range of the Atlas and the sea the thermometer seldom rises above ninety degrees or falls below forty degrees, the mountain wall serving as a protection from the scorching winds of the Sahara. During the winter months the rains are so heavy and frequent along the Atlantic coast that good pasturage is found as far south as Cape Juby, while in the interior the rivers frequently become so swollen that travel is both difficult and dangerous. The unpleasantness of the rains (and you don't know what discomfort is, my friends, until you have journeyed in Morocco during the rainy season) is more than compensated for by the beauties of the spring landscape. For mile after mile I have ridden across meadows literally carpeted with wild flowers, whose varied and brilliant colours, combined with the peculiar fashion in which each species confined itself to its own area, gave the countryside the appearance of a vast floral mosaic. After seeing these gorgeous natural combinations of colour—dark blue, yellow, white, and scarlet, iris, marigolds, lilies, and poppies—I no longer wondered where the Moors draw the inspiration for that chromatic art of which they left such marvellous examples in the cities of southern Spain.

Though the country has, unfortunately, become largely deforested—for what Moor would ever think of planting trees, which could only be of value to another generation?—a wealth of timber still remains in the more remote valleys of the Atlas, the pines and oaks often attaining enormous size. Though Spanish concessionaires are profitably working gold mines in the Riff country, and the great German firm of Mannesmann Brothers has acquired extensive iron-ore-bearing properties in the Sus, and though large deposits of silver, copper, lead, and antimony have been discovered at various points in the interior, the mineral wealth of Morocco is still a matter for speculation. It is not likely to remain so long, however, for history has shown that it is the miners who form the real advance-guard of civilisation.

To the stranger who confines his investigations to the highways which connect the capitals with the coast, Morocco gives the impression of being very sparsely settled. This is due to the fact that the natives take pains to avoid the highroads as they would the plague, the continual passage of troops and of travellers, all of whom practise the time-honoured custom of living on the country and never paying for what they take, having had the natural result of driving the inhabitants into less travelled regions, though traders and others whose business takes them into the back country find that it is far more densely populated than most foreigners suspect. Heretofore it has been possible for almost any foreigner, by the judicious use of bakshish, to obtain from the authorities an official order which required the people living along the roads to supply food both for him and his escort and fodder for their horses. Now, this was a very serious tax, especially among a people as poverty-stricken as the Moorish peasantry, and as a result of it the heedless traveller often caused much misery and suffering. But if the occasional traveller proved so serious a burden, imagine what it meant to these poor people when the Sultan himself passed, for, able to move only with an army, without any commissariat or transport, and feeding itself as it went, he devastated the land of food and fodder as though he was an invader instead of a ruler, sweeping as ruthlessly across his empire as the Huns did across southern Europe, and leaving his subjects to starve. Is it any wonder, then, that the desperation of the wretched, half-starved peasantry has vented itself in repeated revolutions? The coming of the French is bound to change this deplorable and demoralising state of affairs, however, for, once assured of protection for their crops and justice for themselves, the fugitive country folk will quickly flock back and resume the cultivation of their abandoned lands.

One of the facts about Morocco that will probably surprise most people—I know that it surprised me—is that the Berbers, who form fully two thirds of the population, are a purely white race, as white indeed, barring the tan which results from life under an African sun, as we ourselves. Though the generic term Moor is applied by Europeans to all the inhabitants of Morocco, there are really four distinct racial divisions of the population: the Berbers, who, being the earliest-known possessors of the land, are the genuine Moroccans, and are, when of unmixed blood, a very energetic and vigorous people, indeed; the Arabs, who are the descendants of the Mohammedan conquerors of the country and possess to the full the Arab characteristics of arrogance, indolence, and cruelty; the negroes, brought into the country as slaves from Central Africa in an influx extending over centuries, this admixture having resulted in deteriorating both the Berbers and the Arabs, the infusion of black blood showing itself in dark skins, thickened lips, low foreheads, sensual tastes, and a marked stupidity; and lastly, but by no means the least important, the ubiquitous, persecuted, and persecuting Jews. The Berbers dwell for the most part in the mountains, while the Arabs, on the contrary, are to be found only on the plains, it being the weak, sensual, and intolerant amalgam produced by the fusion of these two races, and tinctured with negro blood, which forms the population of the Moorish cities and to which the name “Moor” most properly belongs.

Between the Moor of the mountains and the Moor of the towns there is as wide a gulf as there is between the natives of Vermont and the natives of Venezuela. The town Moor is sullen, suspicious of all strangers, vacillating; the pride, but none of the energy, of his ancestors remains. In his youth he is licentious in his acts; in his old age he is licentious in his thoughts. He is abominably lazy. He never runs if he can walk; he never walks if he can stand still; he never stands if he can sit; he never sits if he can lie down. The only thing he puts any energy into is his talking; he believes that nothing can be done really well without a hullabaloo. The men of the mountains are cast in a wholly different mould, however, from that of the men of the towns. Fierce enemies and stanch friends, they like fighting for fighting's sake. They are intelligent and industrious; though fonder of the sword and the pistol than of the plough and the hoe, their fertile mountain valleys are nevertheless fairly well cultivated. They are a hardy, warlike, and indomitable race and have never yet been conquered. It is well to remember in any discussion of these people that, through all the vicissitudes of their history, they have never before had the flag of another nation flying over them. All the successive invaders of North Africa have been confronted with the problem of subduing them, but always they have failed and have gone back. Not only that, but once the Moors went invading on their own account, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, conquering all southern Spain, holding it for five hundred years, and leaving behind them the architectural glories of Seville, of Cordova, and of Granada to tell the story. Unless I am very much mistaken, therefore, it will cost France many lives and much money to make them amenable to her rule.

The decadence of the Moors is primarily due to two things: immorality and racial jealousies. They are probably the most licentious race, in both thought and act, in the world. Compared to them the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were positively prudish. This extreme moral degeneracy is in itself enough to ruin the sturdiest people, but, as though it was not sufficient, the two principal races, Arab and Berber, hate each other as the Armenian hates the Turk, this racial antagonism in itself making impossible the upbuilding of a strong and united nation. In fact, the only thing they have in common is their religion, which is the air they breathe, and which, though incapable of producing internal harmony, unites them in hostility to the unbeliever.

There is less public spirit in Morocco than in any place I know. No Moor takes the slightest interest in anything outside his personal affairs, and no one ever plans for the future—other than to hope that he will get a comfortable divan and his share of houris in Paradise. The last thing that would occur to a Moor would be to spend money on anything which will not bring him in an immediate profit, so that, as a consequence, trees are never planted, mines never worked, roads never made, bridges never built. He does not want civilisation. He does not believe in modern inventions or improvements. What was good enough for his father is good enough for him. Why lug in railways and telegraphs, and similar contrivances of the devil, then, when things are good enough as they are?

There is no cause for the other European nations to envy France the obligations she assumed when she declared a protectorate over Morocco. She has a long and hilly road to travel before she can convert her latest acquisition into a national asset. Before Morocco can be thrown open to French settlers its savage and hostile population will have to be as effectually subdued as were the Indians of our own West. The tribes of southern Morocco are especially hostile to the French occupation, and many military experts believe that the protectorate will never be enforced in those regions without a long campaign and much shedding of blood, while one eminent French general has openly asserted that it will take at least a dozen years fully to subdue the country.

Personally, I am a firm believer in the future of Morocco and the Moors under the guidance and protection of France. I have seen too much of what France has accomplished in far less favoured regions, and under far more discouraging conditions, to think otherwise. Nothing illustrates the latent possibilities of the Moorish character better than an experiment which was made some years ago. At the request of the Sultan, the British minister to Morocco asked his government for permission to send a body of Moors to Gibraltar for the purpose of being instructed in British drill and discipline. The War Office acceding to the request, two hundred Moors, selected at random from various tribes throughout the empire, were sent to Gibraltar and remained there for three years, the men being occasionally changed as they acquired a knowledge of drill. They had good clothing given them, slept in tents, and were allowed by the Sultan a shilling a day, receiving precisely the same treatment as British soldiers. During the three years they were stationed on the Rock, there were only two cases in the police court against them for dissolute conduct or disorder. The soldiers of what civilised nation could have made such a record? Colonel Cameron, under whose superintendence they were placed, reported that they learned the drill as quickly and as well as any Englishmen, and that they were sober, steady, and attentive to their duties. (The Moors, it should be remarked, are noted for their abstemiousness, the precepts of the Koran which forbid the use of spirits and tobacco being rigidly observed.) This tends to show that Moors, living under a just and humane government, and having, as these men had, proper provision made for their livelihood, are not a lawless or even a disorderly people, and that they are capable of being transformed, under such a form of government as France has established in Algeria and Tunisia, into the splendid warriors which their ancestors were in Spain. It was, as I think I have remarked in the preceding chapter, the knowledge that France, in acquiring Morocco, would obtain the material for a formidable addition to her military forces which was, it is generally believed, one of the motives that inspired Germany's persistent opposition to a French protectorate.

Though the reins of Moorish power are already firmly in the hands of the French Resident-General at Fez, there is no reason to believe that the French expect, for the present at least, to depose the Sultan, it being to their interests, for obvious reasons, to maintain the pleasant fiction that Morocco is still an independent empire to which they have disinterestedly lent their protection, In August, 1912, Sultan Mulai-abd-el-Hafid, appreciating the emptiness of his title under the French régime, abdicated in favour of his brother, Mulai Youssef, who is known to be friendly to France. The new Sultan, who is the seventeenth of the dynasty of the Alides and the thirty-seventh lineal descendant of Ali, uncle and son-in-law of the Prophet, is known to his subjects as Emir-el-Mumenin, or Prince of True Believers, and as such he exercises a spiritual influence over his subjects which the French are far too shrewd to disregard. The position of the Sultan of Morocco has, indeed, become strikingly similar to that of his fellow-ruler in the other corner of Africa, the Khedive of Egypt, for, like him, he must needs content himself henceforth with the shadow of power. Even if the imperial form of government is permanently maintained (and this I very much doubt, for it is characteristic of the Latin races—as Taine puts it—that they always want to occupy a “sharply defined and terminologically defensible position”), its real ruler will be the Resident-General of France, whose policies will be carried out by French advisers in every department of the government and whose orders will be backed up by French bayonets. So long as Mulai Youssef is content meekly to play the part of a puppet, with French officials pulling the strings, he will be permitted to enjoy all the honours and comforts of royalty, but let him once give ear to sedition, let him make the slightest attempt to undermine the authority of the French régime, and he will find himself occupying a sentry-guarded villa in Algiers near the residences of the ex-Queen of Madagascar and the ex-King of Annam, those other Oriental rulers who thought to match themselves against the power of France.

The Sherifian umbrella, which is the Moorish equivalent of a crown, is hereditary in the family of the Filali Sherifs of Tafilelt. Each Sultan is supposed, prior to his death, to indicate the member of the imperial family who, according to his conscientious belief, will best replace him. This succession is, however, elective, and all members of the Sherifian family are eligible. It has generally happened that the late Sultan's nominee has been elected by public acclamation at noonday prayers the Friday after the Sultan's death, as the nominee generally has obtained possession of the imperial treasure and is supported by the body-guard, from whose ranks most of the court officials are appointed. I might add that all of the Moorish Sultans in recent years have been so extremely bad that no successor whom they could appoint, or who could appoint himself, could by any possibility be worse. The present Sultan knows scarcely half a dozen places in his whole empire, and has spent most of his life in two of them—Marrakesh and Fez—having held, up to the time of his accession to the throne, the important post of Khalif of the latter city. The Moors never pray for their sovereign to journey among them, for, so disturbed has been the condition of the country for many years past, and so numerous have been the pretenders to the Sherifian throne, that recent Sultans have rarely ventured outside the walls of their capitals with less than thirty thousand followers behind them, so that when they had occasion to pass through the territory of a hostile tribe, as not infrequently happened, they fought their way through, leaving ruin and desolation behind them. Though both Mulai Youssef and his predecessors have always resided at one or the other of the two official capitals, the coast city of Tangier has heretofore been the real capital of Morocco. Here lived the diplomatic and consular representatives of the foreign powers and, with a cynical disregard for the Moorish Government and people, ran things between them. Though considerations of safety doubtless entered into the matter, the chief reason for making Tangier the diplomatic capital was the extreme inconvenience to the foreign legations of being obliged to follow the court in its periodical migrations from one capital to the other. Therefore the diplomatic folk remained comfortably in Tangier—which, incidentally, can readily be overawed by a war-ship's guns—and the Sultan appointed ministers to treat with them there and thus carry on the foreign business of the state. When questions of great importance had to be negotiated special missions were sent to the capital at which the Sultan happened to be residing, the departure of these ambassadorial caravans, with their secretaries, attachés, kavasses, servants, and body-guards, not to mention the immense train of pack-mules and baggage camels, providing a spectacle quite as picturesque and entertaining as any circus procession. That feature of Moorish life disappeared with the coming of the French, however, for the foreign ministers will doubtless shortly be withdrawn; and hereafter, when any negotiations are to be conducted anent Morocco, instead of a diplomatic mission having to make a two-hundred-mile journey on horses or camels, the ambassador at Paris of the power in question will step into his motor-car and whirl over to the Ministry of the Colonies in the Rue Oudinot.

I know of nothing which gives so graphic an idea of the amazing conditions which have heretofore prevailed in Morocco, and to which the French are, thank Heaven, putting an end, as the speech which a former British minister, Sir John Drummond Hay, made some years ago to the reigning Sultan, and which was, probably, the most extraordinary address ever made by a diplomatic representative to a foreign ruler.

“Your Majesty has been so gracious as to ask me,” said Sir John, looking the despot squarely in the eye, “to express frankly my opinion of affairs in Morocco. The administration of the government in Morocco is the worst in the world. The government is like a community of fishes; the giant fish feed upon those that are small, the smaller upon the least, and these again feed upon the worms. In like manner the vizier and other dignitaries of the court, who receive no salaries, depend for their livelihood upon peculation, trickery, corruption, and the money they extract from the governors of provinces. The governors are likewise enriched through peculation from tithes and taxes, and extortion from sheikhs, wealthy farmers, and traders. A Moor who becomes rich is treated as a criminal. Neither life nor property is secure. Sheikhs and other subordinate officials subsist on what they can extort from the farmers and the peasantry. Then again, even the jailers are not paid; they gain their livelihood by taking money from prisoners, who, when they are paupers, are taught to make baskets, which are sold by the jailers for their own benefit. How can a country, how can a people, prosper under such a government? The tribes are in a constant state of rebellion against their governors. When the Sultan resides in his northern capital of Fez, the southern tribes rebel, and when he marches south to the city of Morocco, eating up the rebels and confiscating their property, the northern tribes rebel. The armies of the Sultan, like locusts, are constantly on the move, ravaging the country to quell the revolts. Agriculture is destroyed, the farmers and peasantry only grow sufficient grain for their own requirements, and rich lands are allowed to lie fallow because the farmers know the crops would be plundered by the governors and sheikhs. Thus it happens with cattle and horses. Breeding is checked, since the man who may become rich through his industry is treated as a criminal and all his possessions are taken from him, as in the fable the goose is killed to get the golden eggs.”

France, in pursuing her Moroccan adventure, will do well to bear in mind two danger-spots: the Riff and the Sus. Unless she treads carefully in the first she is likely to become embroiled in a quarrel with Spain; with the natives of the Sus she will probably have trouble whether she treads lightly or not. Sooner or later France is bound to come into collision with Spain, for, with Morocco avowedly a French protectorate, I fail to see how she can tolerate Spanish soldiers on its soil. Spain, basing her pretensions on her expulsion of the Moors from Granada in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, has always considered herself one of the heirs of Morocco. In fact, a secret treaty was signed between France and Spain in 1905 which distinctly defined the respective spheres of influence of the two powers in that country. By the terms of this treaty Spain was acknowledged to have predominating interests in those regions adjacent to the ports of Ceuta, Melilla, and El Araish, as well as in the Riff, a little-known and exceedingly mountainous district, believed to be rich in minerals, which lies in the northwestern corner of the empire, two days' journey eastward from Tetuan. Spain distinctly engaged not to take any action in the zone thus allotted to her other than to proceed with its commercial exploitation, but it was stipulated that, should the weakness of the Sherifian government make the maintenance of the status quo impossible, she should have a free hand in her sphere.

France, meanwhile, steadily continued her “pacific penetration” of Morocco, pushing her Algerian railways closer and closer to Morocco's eastern frontier, mobilising troops at strategic points, and overrunning the Sultan's dominions with “scientific” expeditions and secret agents. Spain soon began to regard with envy and impatience the subtle game which the French were so successfully playing, but it was not until 1910 that she found the opportunity and the excuse for which she had been eagerly waiting. Some Spanish labourers, who were working on a railway which was being laid from Melilla to some mines a few miles distant, were attacked by Riffian tribesmen and a number of the Spaniards were killed. Spain jumped at the opportunity which this incident afforded as a hungry trout jumps at a fly, and a few days later a Spanish army was being disembarked on Moroccan soil. A sharp campaign ensued which ended in the temporary subjugation of the Riffians and the occupation by Spain of a considerable tract of territory extending from Ceuta eastward to Cabo del Agua and southward as far as Seluan, thus comprising practically all of Morocco's Mediterranean seaboard. A Moorish envoy was sent to Madrid and, after protracted negotiations, a convention was signed which permitted Spain to establish a force of Moorish gendarmerie, under Spanish officers, at Melilla, Aljucemas, and Ceuta, for the maintenance of order in the districts near those places. Until this force has shown itself capable of maintaining order, the Spaniards assert that they will remain in occupation of the territory they now hold. Emboldened by her success in this adventure, and greedy for further expansion, Spain, in June, 1911, sent a vessel to El Araish (Laraiche) on the Atlantic coast, and a column was despatched from there to Alcázar, which lies some twenty miles inland. The region was apparently perfectly calm at the time, and the reasons given by Spain for her action—that mysterious horsemen had been seen upon the walls of Alcázar—appeared, in France at least, to be mere pretensions and raised a storm of indignation. As things now stand, France has proclaimed a definite protectorate over the whole of Morocco, an arrangement to which the Sultan has consented. Despite that proclamation, however, Spain continues to occupy a rich and extensive district of the country with an army of forty thousand men. By what means France will attempt to oust her—for oust her she certainly will—is an interesting subject for speculation and one which is giving both French and Spanish diplomats many sleepless nights.

A word, in passing, upon the region known as the Riff. It is more discussed and less known than any other quarter of Morocco. Nothing has been written upon it except from hearsay and no European has penetrated across its length and breadth, and this although it is but two days' ride on horseback from Tetuan. Situated in the very heart of the Great Atlas range, and accessible only through narrow passes and over rough mountain trails, this region has, from time beyond reckoning, been the home and the refuge of that savage and mysterious clan known as the Riffs. Their feudal chieftains live in great castles built of stone and lead much the same lives as did the European nobles of the Middle Ages. The passes giving access to the Riff are commanded by hilltop forts impregnable to anything short of modern artillery—and to get within range of them the artillery would need to have wings. They are a people rich in possibilities, are these Riffs, and one whom it is wiser to conciliate than to fight, as France will doubtless sooner or later learn. Brigands by nature, farmers in a small way by occupation, disciples of the vendetta, scorners of the law, suspicious of strangers, their only courts the gun and dagger, the Riffs have more in common with the mountaineers of the Blue Ridge than any people that I know. They have nothing in common with the other inhabitants of Morocco except their dress, wearing the universal brown hooded jellab and over it the toga-like white woollen haik, a skull-cap of red or brown, a belt with pouches of gaily coloured leather, and in it, always, a muzzle-loading pistol and the vicious curved knife, while over the shoulder slants the ten-foot-long Riff rifle, coral-studded, brass-bound, ivory-butted, and almost as dangerous to the man behind it as to the one in front. The Riffs are fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and quite frequently red-haired, and claim to be descended from the Romans, which is no unreasonable assumption on their part, as the Romans were adventuring in Morocco—they called it Mauritania—long before Cæsar's day.

The other danger-point in Morocco is the Sus, a “forbidden” and unknown country through which only a handful of European travellers have ever passed, all in disguise and all in peril of their lives. The Sus is the rich and fertile valley lying between the Great Atlas and the Anti Atlas, and touching the Atlantic coast at Agadir. It is said to be thickly populated; it is believed to contain rich mines; it is fanatical to the last degree. Its Berber inhabitants, who are separated from the Arabs of the surrounding regions by a totally distinct language known as the Tamazight, or Tongue of the Free, though acknowledging the religious supremacy of the reigning Sultan, have always maintained a semi-independence, having never submitted to Moorish rule nor paid tax nor tribute to the government of Morocco. Twice within the last three or four decades Moorish Sultans have invaded and attempted to conquer the Sus, but each time they have been driven back across the Atlas. The origin of the people of this region is lost in the mists of antiquity. According to the Koran its original inhabitants were natives of Syria, where they proved themselves such undesirable citizens that King David ordered them to be tied up in sacks and carried out of the country on camels, since he wished to see their faces no more. Arrived in the vicinity of the Atlas Mountains, the leader of the caravan called out in the Berber tongue “Sus!” which means “Let down! Empty out!” So the exiled undesirables were dumped unceremoniously out of their sacks, and the country in which they found themselves, and where they settled, is called the Sus to this day. The people of the Sus have never liked the French, and there is little doubt that they will oppose any attempt to treat them as a province of Morocco, and consequently subject to French control. It is obvious that France will sooner or later be obliged to send an expedition into the Sus for the purpose of asserting her power as well as to counteract the German influence which is rapidly gaining ground there, for the Sus, remember, is the region where Germany's interests in Morocco are centred and provided the excuse for sending her gun-boat to Agadir and almost provoking a European war thereby. Germany still retains her commercial interests in the Sus Valley, and France will be obliged to step gingerly indeed if she wishes to avoid stirring up still another affaire Marocaine.

If France accomplishes nothing more in Morocco than the extermination of the slave trade she will have performed a genuine service to humanity. Though slavery has been abolished in every other quarter of Africa, no attempt has ever been made by the European powers to put a check upon the practice in Morocco. Something over three thousand slaves, it is estimated, are imported into Morocco every year, most of them being brought by the terrible desert routes from Equatoria and the Sudan, the trails of the slave caravans being marked by the bleaching bones of the thousands who have died on the way from heat, hunger, or exhaustion. Many smug-faced people will assure you that slavery has been wiped out in Africa—praise be to the Lord!—but I can take you into half a dozen Moroccan cities and show you slaves being auctioned to the highest bidder as openly as they were in our own South fifty years ago. There is a large and profitable demand for slaves, particularly girls and boys, in all of the Moroccan cities, a young negress having a market value of anywhere from eighty dollars to one hundred and twenty dollars. Although, as I have already remarked, the bulk of the slaves are driven across the Sahara by the time-honoured method, exceptionally pretty girls are often brought from West African ports in French vessels as passengers and disposed of to wealthy Moors by private sale. So great is the demand for young and attractive women that girls are occasionally stolen from Moorish villages, the slave-dealer laying a trail of sweets, of which the native women are inordinately fond, from the outskirts of the villages up to neighbouring clumps of trees, behind which he conceals himself, pouncing out upon his unsuspecting victims as they approach. If France succeeds in stamping out the slave trade in Morocco as effectually as she has in her other African possessions, she will prove herself, as our missionary friends would put it, the flail of the Lord.

Of all France's ambitious projects for the exploitation of North Africa in general, and the opening up of Morocco in particular, the one which most appeals to the imagination, and which, when executed, is likely to be of the greatest benefit to the world, is her astounding scheme for bringing South America a week nearer to Europe by means of a railway from Tangier, in Morocco, to Dakar, in Senegal. The route, as at present planned, would run from Tangier, via Fez, to Tuat. From Tuat the Sahara would be crossed and the Niger gained at Timbuktu. Though about three hundred miles of this section would lie through the most hopeless desert country, it presents no great obstacle to engineers, the Sudanese line from Wady Halfa to Khartoum proving how easily the difficulties of desert construction and lack of water can be overcome. The third section would be from Timbuktu to Dakar, where the French within the last few years have created a magnificent naval port and commercial harbour. Already Timbuktu and Dakar are in regular communication by a mixed steamer and railway service, the journey taking, when the Senegal is in flood, but five days. As such a system would have, of necessity, to be independent of the Niger and Senegal river services, which are not always reliable, a line is now under construction which will bring Timbuktu into direct rail communication with Dakar, thus eliminating the difficulties and uncertainties of river navigation. From Dakar to Pernambuco, in Brazil, is less than fifteen hundred miles, which could be covered by a fast steamer in three days. There are already regular sailings between these ports, but with the completion of this trans-African system (and, believe me, it is far from being as chimerical as it sounds, for the French do not let the grass grow under their feet when they once get a clear right of way for railway-building) ocean greyhounds will be placed in service between Dakar and the South American ports, it being estimated that the traveller who purchases his ticket via Madrid, Gibraltar, and then over the Moroccan-Saharan system, can journey from Paris to Rio de Janeiro in twelve days. It is obvious that in some such scheme as this lies the future of the French Sahara, as well as the enormously increased prosperity of the Moroccan hinterland and of the Niger-Senegal possessions, for it was just such a transcontinental line, remember, which brought population and prosperity to the desert regions of our own West.

It is no light task to which France has pledged herself in agreeing to effect the regeneration of an empire so decrepit and decadent as Morocco, but that she will accomplish it is as certain as that the leaves come with the spring. The changes which the coming of the French will effect in Morocco stretch the imagination almost to the breaking-point. Already the wireless crackles and splutters from a mast erected over the French Residency in Fez. With the proclamation of the protectorate the waiting railway-builders jumped their rail-heads across the Moroccan border as homesteaders, hearing the signal gun, jump their horses over the border of newly opened lands. Two or three years more and the traveller will be able to purchase through tickets to Fez and Marrakesh as easily as he can now to San Francisco or Milan. At Tangier, Rabat, El Araish, Mogador, and Agadir harbours will be dredged, break-waters built, and wharves constructed, while the filthy, foul-smelling cities will be made as clean and sanitary as Tunis and Algiers. Under French control Tangier, with its ideal climate, its picturesque features, and its splendid situation, will rival Cairo and the Riviera as a fashionable winter resort. The Moorish peasantry will be permitted to till their farms in peace, undisturbed by devastating armies, while the warlike Riffs can have their fill of fighting in French uniforms and under the French flag. This is no empty vision, remember. Peace, progress, and prosperity are bound to come to Morocco, just as they have come to those other African regions upon which the Frenchman has set his hand. Just how soon they come depends largely upon the Moors themselves.

CHAPTER III

SIRENS OF THE SANDS

ZORAH-BEN-ABDALLAH was a perilously pretty girl, judged by any standard that you please. She was unveiled—a strange thing for an Eastern woman—and the clearness of her café-au-lait complexion was emphasised by carmine lips and by blue-black hair, bewilderingly becoiffed and bewitchingly bejewelled; her eyes Scherazade would have envied. She was leaning from the window of a second-class compartment in the ramshackle train which plies between Constantine and Biskra and was quite openly admiring the very tight light-blue tunic and the very loose scarlet riding-breeches of my companion, a young officer of chasseurs d'Afrique who was rejoining his regiment at El-Kantara.

“She's a handsome girl,” said I.

“Not for an Ouled-Naïl,” said he, adjusting his monocle and staring at her critically, very much as though he were appraising a horse. “An Ouled-Naïl's face is her fortune, you know, and in the Ziban, where they come from, she wouldn't get a second look.”

“She would get several second looks on Broadway,” said I, taking another one myself. “I once travelled twelve thousand miles to see some women not half as pretty.”

That is why I went to the Ziban, that strange and almost unknown zone of oasis-dotted steppes in southernmost Algeria. Hemmed in between the Atlas Mountains and the Great Sahara, it forms the real Algerian hinterland, a region vastly different in people, manners, and customs from either the desert or the littoral. Here, in this fertile borderland, where the red tarbooshes and baggy trousers of the French outposts are the sole signs of civilisation, is the home of the Ouled-Naïls, that curious race, neither Arab, Berber, nor Moor, the beauty of whose dusky, daring daughters is a staple topic of conversation in every harem and native coffee-house between the Pyramids and the Pillars of Hercules.

Rather than that you should be scandalised later on, it would be well for you to understand in the beginning that the women of the Ouled-Naïl are, so far as morality is concerned, as easy as an old shoe. It comes as something of a shock, after seeing these petite and pretty and indescribably picturesque women on their native heath, or rather on their native sands, to learn that from earliest childhood they are trained for a life of indifferent virtue very much as a horse is trained for the show-ring. But it is one of those conditions of African life which must be accepted by the traveller, just as he accepts as a matter of course the heat and the insects and the dirt.

Breaking home ties almost before they have entered their teens, they make their way to Biskra, to Constantine, and to Algiers, yes, and to Tripoli on the east and to Tangier on the west, dancing in the native coffee-houses or in the harems of the rich and not infrequently earning considerable sums thereby. The Ouled-Naïl promptly converts all of her earnings that she can spare into gold, linking these gold pieces together into a sort of breastplate, not at all unlike that jingling, glittering affair which Mary Garden wears in her portrayal of Salome. When this golden garment becomes long enough to reach from her slender, supple neck to her still more supple waist, the Ouled-Naïl retires from business, returns to the tents of her people in the edge of the Great Sands, hides her pretty face behind the veil common to all respectable Moslem women, and, setting her daintily slippered feet on the straight and narrow path of virtue, leads a strictly moral life ever after.

Ouled-Naïl dancing-girls. “Petite, piquant, and indescribably picturesque.”

Women of the “Great Tents.” The wife and daughter of a nomad sheikh of the Algerian Sahara.

SOME SIRENS OF THE SANDS.

The peculiar dances of the Ouled-Naïls demand many years of arduous and constant practice. A girl is scarcely out of her cradle before, under the tutelage of her mother, who has herself been a danseuse in her time, she begins the inconceivably severe course of gymnastics and muscle training which is the foundation of their strange and suggestive dances. From infancy until, scarcely in her teens, she bids farewell to the tent life of the desert and sets out to make her fortune in the cities along the African littoral, she is as carefully groomed and trained as a colt entered at the county fair. Morning, noon, and night, day after day, year after year, the muscles of her chest, her back, her hips, and her abdomen are developed and trained and suppled until they will respond to her wishes as readily as her slender, henna-stained fingers. Her lustrous, blue-black hair is brushed and combed and oiled and brushed again; she is taught to play the hautboy, the zither, and the flute and to sing the weird and plaintive songs the Arab loves; to make the thick, black native coffee and with inimitable dexterity to roll a cigarette. By the time she is thirteen she is ready to make her début in the dance-hall of some Algerian town, whence, after three or four or possibly five years of a life of indifferent virtue, she returns, a-clank with gold pieces, to the tented village from which she came, to marry some sheikh or camel-dealer and to bear him children, who, if they are boys, will don the white turban and scarlet burnoose of the Spahis and serve in the armies of France, or, if they are girls, will live the life of their mother all over again. It will be seen, therefore, that the profession is an hereditary one, which all the women of the tribe pursue without incurring, so far as I could learn, a hint of scandal or a trace of shame. It is a queer business, and one to which no other country, so far as I am aware, offers a parallel, for whereas the geishas of Japan, the nautches of India, and the odalisques of Turkey are but classes, the Ouled-Naïls are a race, as distinct in features, language, and customs as the Bedouin, the Nubian, or the Jew.

That the men of the Ouled-Naïl (which, by the way, is pronounced as though the last syllable were spelled “Nile”) look upon the lives led by their sisters, daughters, and sweethearts with much the same toleration and approval that an up-State farmer shows for the village maid who goes to the city to earn a living as a waitress, a stenographer, or a shop-girl, is proved by a little incident which Mr. S. H. Leeder, the English author-traveller, tells of having once witnessed on the station-platform at Biskra. A tall young tribesman of the Ouled-Naïl, the son of a sheikh of some importance, was leaving Biskra, to which town he had been paying a short visit with his mother. He was taking back with him one of his countrywomen, a dancing-girl named Kadra, who had been a resident in the Rue Sainte, as Biskra's Tenderloin is known, for two or three years, and was quite celebrated for her beauty, with the intention of marrying her. Here was this girl, after such an amazing episode in her career, quietly dressed, veiled to the eyes, and carefully chaperoned by the prospective bridegroom's mother, returning to assume a position of rank and consideration among her own people, while several of her late companions, tears of sorrow at the parting pouring down their unveiled and painted faces, clung to and caressed her with every sign of childlike affection. And such marriages, I have been assured by French officials, are not the exception but the rule in the Ziban. Never was the truth brought home to me more sharply that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” than in the land of the Ouled-Naïls, where, unlike our own, it is never too late to mend; not even for a woman.

Barring the two who appeared in the production of “The Garden of Allah,” the only genuine Ouled-Naïls ever seen in the United States were those who, owing to the enterprise of some far-seeing showman, were responsible for introducing that orgy of suggestiveness known as the danse du ventre to the American public at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, a dance which, thanks to numerous but unskilled imitators, French, Egyptian, and Syrian, spread from ocean to ocean under the vulgar but descriptive nickname of “the houchee-kouchee.” As a matter of fact, the danse du ventre, as seen in the questionable resorts of our own country, has about as much in common with the real dance of the desert people, as performed on a silken carpet spread before the tent of some nomad sheikh, as the so-called “Spanish fandango” of the vaudeville stage has with the inimitably beautiful and difficult dances to be seen at Señor Otero's dancing-academy in Seville. The dance of the Ouled-Naïls is the very essence of Oriental depravity. It is the dance of the pasha's harem; it is the dance of those native cafés which the European tourists are always so eager to visit; it is the dance which every little girl of the tribe is taught—long years before she knows its meaning.

Depraved though they are, the Ouled-Naïls never depart in their dress from that which would be considered perfectly proper and respectable even by Mr. Anthony Comstock. The painters of every country seem to have taken a peculiar delight in depicting Arab dancing-girls as conspicuously shy of clothing, but, picturesqueness aside, the décolleté gown of an American woman would embarrass and shock these daughters of the sands as much as it would all Moslems, for though they may be somewhat lacking in morals they are never lacking in clothes. The women of the Ouled-Naïl are considerably below the medium height and, owing to the peculiar fashion in which their gaudy-hued tarlatan skirts are bunched out around the waist and are shortened to display their trim ankles and massive silver anklets, they appear even smaller than they really are. Their hands and feet are small and wonderfully perfect—if one is able to overlook the nails stained crimson with henna; arched eyebrows meet over eyes as big and lustrous and melting as those of a gazelle; while their wonderful blue-black hair, plaited into ropes and heavily bejewelled—whether the “jewels” are genuine or not is no great matter—is brought down over the ears in the fashion which made Cléo de Mérode famous.

But the really distinguishing feature of the Ouled-Naïl's costume is her jewelry. She has so much of it, in fact, that there is no gold to be had in Algeria. Ask for napoleons instead of paper money at your bank in Algiers and you will meet with a prompt

“Impossible, m'sieur.”

“But why is it impossible?” you ask.

“Because we have no gold, m'sieur,” is the polite response.

“Where is it, then?” you inquire, scenting a robbery or an anticipated run on the bank.

“On the Ouled-Naïls, m'sieur,” the cashier courteously replies.

And he speaks the literal truth. Every centime that a dancing-girl can beg, borrow, or earn goes toward the purchase of massive silver jewelry, anklets, bracelets, and the like, and these in turn are exchanged for gold pieces—whether French napoleons, English sovereigns, or Turkish liras she is not at all particular—which, linked together in that golden armour of which I have already spoken, envelops her lithe young body from neck to hips. When her portable wealth has attained to such dimensions it is usually the sign for the Ouled-Naïl to retire from business, going to her desert husband with her dowry about her neck.

When it is remembered that the native quarters of these towns in the edge of the Sahara are frequented by savage desert tribesmen who know little and care less about civilisation and the law, is it to be wondered at that time and time again these unprotected girls are done to death in the little rooms up the steep, dark stairs for the sake of the gold which they display so lavishly as part of their allurements? During my stay in one of these Algerian towns an Arab, stealthily coming up behind an Ouled-Naïl as she was returning one night from the dance-hall through the narrow, deserted streets, drove a knife between her shoulders and, snatching the little fortune which hung about her neck, fled with it into the desert. But the arm of the French law is very long, reaching even across the sand wastes of the Great Sahara, and months later, when he thought all search for him had been abandoned, the fugitive felt its grasp as he sat, cross-legged, in the distant bazaars of Wadai. After that came the trial and the guillotine, for in Algeria, as in the other lands which they have conquered, the French have taught the natives by such grim object-lessons that punishment follows swift on the heels of crime.

Now, if that same crime had been committed fifty miles to the eastward, across the Tunisian frontier, the murderer would, in all likelihood, have gotten off with thirteen months in jail—that is, if he was caught at all. For, though the regency of Tunisia is French in pretty much everything but name, it has been deemed wise to maintain the fiction of Tunisian independence by permitting the Bey a good deal of latitude so far as the punishment of his own subjects is concerned, his ideas of justice (la justice du Bey it is called, in contra-distinction to la justice française, which is a very different sort of justice indeed) usually working out in a fashion truly Oriental. In Tunisia all death sentences must be confirmed by the Bey in person, the condemned man being brought before him as he sits on his gilt-and-velvet throne in the great white palace of the Bardo. In the presence of the sovereign the murderer is suddenly brought face to face with the members of his victim's family, for such things are always done dramatically in the East. The Bey then inquires of the family if they insist on the execution of the murderer, or if they are willing to accept the blood-money, as it is called, a sum equivalent to one hundred and forty dollars, which in theory is paid by the murderer to the relatives of his victims as a sort of indemnity if he is allowed to escape with his life. If, however, he does not possess so large a sum, as is frequently the case, the Bey makes it up out of his private purse. Nine times out of ten, if the victim was a woman, the blood-money is promptly accepted—and praise be to Allah for getting it!—for in Africa women are plenty but gold is scarce. In case the blood-money is accepted the murderer's sentence is commuted to imprisonment for twelve months and twenty-seven days, though just why the odd twenty-seven I have never been able to learn. But it may have been that it was an only son, or a husband, or a chieftain of importance who was murdered, and in such cases the relatives invariably demand the extreme penalty of the law.

“Do you insist on his blood?” inquires the Bey, a portly and easy-going Oriental who has a marked aversion to taking life, even in the case of murderers.

“We do, your Highness,” replies the spokesman of the family, salaaming until his tarboosh-tassel sweeps the floor.

“Be it so,” says the Bey, shrugging his shoulders. “I call upon you to bear witness that I am innocent of his death. May Allah the Compassionate have mercy upon him! Turn him toward the gate of the Bardo,” which last is the local euphemism for “Take him out and hang him.” Five minutes later the wretch is adorning a gallows which has been set up in the palace gardens.

Due north from the land of the Ouled-Naïls, and hemmed in by the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas, is the Grand Kabylia, a wild, strange region, peopled by many but known to few. Whence the Kabyles came nobody knows, though their fair complexions, red hair, and blue eyes lead the ethnologists to suppose that they are a branch of that equally white and equally mysterious Berber race who occupy the Moroccan ranges of the Atlas. Thirteen hundred years ago they came to North Africa from out of the East, bringing with them a civilisation and a culture and institutions distinctively their own. Retreating into their mountain fastnesses before that Arab invasion which spread the faith of the Prophet over all North Africa, they have dwelt there ever since, the French, who conquered them in the middle of the last century only after heavy losses, having wisely refrained from interference in their tribal laws or customs, which remain, therefore, almost unmodified.

Though the Kabyles, of all the Moslem races, treat their women with the greatest respect, neither imprisoning them in harems nor hiding them beneath veils and swaddling-clothes, they share with the mountaineers of the Caucasus the somewhat dubious distinction of selling their daughters to the highest bidder. Between the Circassians and the Kabyles there is, however, a distinction with a difference, for, whereas the former sell their daughters in cold blood and take not the slightest interest in what becomes of them thereafter, the Kabyle parent expects, even if he does not always insist, that the man who purchases his daughter shall marry her. A fine, upstanding Kabyle maiden of fifteen or thereabouts, with the lines of a thoroughbred, the profile of a cameo, and a skin the colour of a bronze statue, will fetch her parents anywhere from eighty to three hundred dollars, at least so I was told at Tizi-Ouzou, the chef-lieu of the district, and the man who told me assured me very earnestly that, the crops having been bad, a girl could be bought very cheaply, and begged me to think it over.

Though the Mauresques of Algeria, the Jewesses of Tunisia, and the fair-skinned beauties of Circassia combine a voluptuous figure with an altogether exceptional beauty of complexion and features, the women of Kabylia, with their flashing teeth, their sparkling eyes, their full red lips, their lithe, slender bodies, and their haughty, insolent manners, suggest a civilisation older and more sensuous, and entirely alien to our own. The humblest peasant girl, grinding the family flour between the upper and the nether stones in the doorway of a mud hovel, possesses so marked a distinction of feature and figure and bearing that it is not difficult to believe that Cleopatra or Helen of Troy might well have come from this same race.

The approach of a Kabyle woman is heralded in two ways: first, by a strong-scented perfume, which, like the celebrated parfum du Bey of Tunis, is composed of the blended scents of a score or more different kinds of blossoms, the odour changing from carnation to rose, to heliotrope, to violet, and so on every few minutes (no, I didn't believe it either, until I tried it); and, secondly, by the clink and jingle of the bracelets, anklets, necklaces, and bijoux of gold, silver, turquoise, and coral with which they are loaded down, and which sound, when they move, like an approaching four-in-hand. Good specimens of this Kabyle jewelry are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, by the way, and bring high prices in the shops of Tunis and Algiers, being eagerly sought after by collectors.

Personally, I am quite unable to picture an admirer making love to one of these insolent-eyed beauties, for they are headstrong and hot of temper, and if the gentleman happened to say the wrong thing he would very probably find the yataghan, which every Kabyle maiden carries, planted neatly between his shoulders. They seem to be fond of cold steel, do these Kabyles, for at the conclusion of a wedding ceremony the bridegroom, walking backward, holds before him an unsheathed dagger and the bride, following him, keeps the point of it between her teeth. Another wedding custom of Kabylia, no less strange, consists of the partial martyrdom of the bride, who, clad in her marriage finery, stands for an entire morning with her back to a stone pillar in the village square, her eyes closed, her arms close at her sides, and her only foothold the column's narrow base, the cynosure of hundreds of curious eyes. Despite the stern stuff of which the Kabyle women are made, it is small wonder that the bride usually faints before this peculiarly harrowing ordeal is over.

As far removed from these half-savage women of Ouled-Naïl and of Kabylia as a Philadelphia Quakeress is from a Cheyenne squaw are those poor prisoner women of whose pale, half-hidden faces the visitor to the North African coast towns sometimes gets a glimpse at the barred window of a harem, or meets at nightfall hastening home from their sole diversion, the weekly excursion to the cemetery. You can see them for yourself any Friday afternoon if you will loiter without the whitewashed gateway to the cemetery of Bou-Kabrin, on the hill above Algiers, for they believe that on that day—the Moslem Sabbath—the spirits of the dead re-visit the earth, and hence their weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery to keep them company. When the sun begins to sink behind the Atlas these white-veiled pyramids of femininity reluctantly begin to make their way back through the narrow, winding lanes of the native city, disappearing one by one through doors which will not open for them until another Friday has rolled around. Picture such a life, my friends: six days a week encloistered behind jealously guarded doors and on the seventh taking an outing in the cemetery!

That many of these Mauresque women of the coast towns are very beautiful—just as many others are exceedingly ugly—there is but little doubt, though they are so sheeted, shrouded, veiled, and draped from prying masculine eyes that a man may know of their beauty only by hearsay. I imagine that the dress of the Mauresque woman was specially designed to baffle masculine curiosity, for if Aphrodite herself were enveloped in a white linen sheet from head to waist, and in enormous and ridiculous pantaloons from waist to ankle, she could go where she pleased without being troubled by admirers. Not only is a Mauresque woman never permitted to see a man—or rather, the man is not permitted to see her, for despite all precautions she sometimes manages to catch glimpses of people through the lattices of her harem windows—but she may not receive a visit from her father or brother without her husband's permission. When she is ill enough to require the services of a physician—and she has to be very ill indeed before one is summoned—incredibly elaborate are the preparations. All the women of her household are ranged about the bed, while her servants hide her under the bedclothes almost to the point of suffocation. If her pulse has to be felt a servant covers her hand and arm so carefully that only an inch or so of her wrist is visible. If she has hurt her shoulder, or back, or leg, a hole is made in the bedclothes so that the doctor may just be able to see the injured place, and nothing more. Should he have the hardihood to insist on looking at her tongue, the precautions are still more elaborate, the attendants covering the patient's face with their hands and just leaving room between their fingers so that her tongue may be stuck out. I know a French physician in Tunis who told me that he was once called to attend the favourite wife of a wealthy Arab merchant, and that while he was conducting the examination the lady's husband stood behind him with the muzzle of a revolver pressed into the small of his back.

JEWISH WOMEN IN THE CEMETERY OF TUNIS.
“They believe that the spirits of the dead revisit the earth, and hence the weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery to keep them company.”

Always over the head of the Arab woman hangs the shadow of divorce. Nowhere in the world does the law so facilitate the separation of man and wife. If a man grows weary of his wife's looks, of her temper, or of her dress; if he wishes to replace her with another; or if he is tired of married life and does not wish a wife at all, he has but scant difficulty in getting rid of her, for in North Africa a divorce can be had in fifteen minutes at a total cost of a dollar and twenty cents. In theory, either husband or wife may divorce the other by a simple formality, without assigning any reason whatever. As a matter of fact, however, actual divorce by the man is rare, the Moslem husband usually preferring to get rid of his wife by a process called repudiation, which bears with great injustice and cruelty on the woman. If he tires of her for any reason, or merely wishes to replace her, he drives her away with the words “Woman, get thee hence; take thy goods and go.” In this case, although the husband is free to remarry, the woman is not and can only obtain a legal release by returning to the man the money which he paid for her. The woman may apply to the courts for divorce without her husband's consent only if she is able to prove that he ill-treats or beats her without sufficient reason, if he refuses her food, clothes, or lodging, or if she discovers a previous wooing on her husband's part, all previous betrothals, or even offers of marriage, whether the other lady refused or accepted him, being considered ground for divorce.

The next time you happen to be in Tunis don't fail to pay a visit to the divorce court. It is the most Haroun-al-Raschidic institution this side of Samarkand. A great hall of justice, vaulted and floored with marble and strewn with Eastern carpets, forms the setting, while husbands in turbans and lawyers in tarbooshes, white-veiled women and green-robed, gray-bearded judges complete a scene which might have been taken straight from the Arabian Nights. The women, closely veiled and hooded, and herded like so many cattle within an iron grill, take no part in the proceedings which so intimately affect their futures, their interests being left in the hands of a voluble and gesticulative avocat. On either side of the hall is a series of alcoves, and in each alcove, seated cross-legged on a many-cushioned divan, is a gold-turbaned and green-robed cadi. To him the husband states his case, the wife putting in her defence—if she has any—through her lawyer and rarely appearing in person. The judge considers the facts in silence, gravely stroking his long, gray beard, and then delivers his decision—in nine cases out of ten, so I was told, in favour of the husband. Should either party be dissatisfied, he or she can take an appeal by the simple process of walking across the room and laying the case before one of the judges sitting on the other side, whose decision is final. A case, even if appealed, is generally disposed of in less than an hour and at a total cost of six francs, which goes to show that the record for quick-and-easy divorces is not held by Reno.

It is characteristic of the Moslem view-point that infidelity on the part of the husband is no cause for divorce whatsoever, while infidelity on the part of the wife, owing to the strict surveillance under which Moslem women are kept and the prison-like houses in which they are confined, occurs so rarely as to be scarcely worth mentioning. Should a Moslem woman so far succeed in evading the vigilance of her jailers as to enter into a liaison with a man, instead of a divorce trial there would be two funerals. To put his wife and her paramour out of the way without detection is a matter of no great difficulty for an Arab husband, for if any one disappears in a Mohammedan country the harem system renders a search extremely difficult, if not, indeed, wholly out of the question. In fact, it has happened very frequently, especially in such populous centres as Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, that a man has enticed his rival into his house, either keeping him a prisoner for life or slowly killing him by torture. Though the French authorities are perfectly well aware of such occurrences, neither they in Algeria and Tunisia nor the English in Egypt feel themselves strongly enough intrenched to risk the outburst of fanaticism which would inevitably ensue should they violate the privacy of a harem.

I am perfectly aware of the fact that it has become the fashion among those travellers who confine their investigations of African life to the lanes about Mustapha Supérieur, to the souks of Tunis, and to the alleys back of the Mousky, to pooh-pooh the idea that slavery still exists in North Africa. As a matter of fact, however—though this the European officials will, for reasons of policy, stoutly deny—slavery not only exists sub rosa in Algeria and Tunisia and in Egypt, but slave markets are still openly maintained in the inland towns of Morocco and Tripolitania, the French and Italian occupations notwithstanding. When a wealthy Moslem wants slaves nowadays he does not send traders to Circassia or raiders to Uganda, but he applies to one of the well-known dealers in Tetuan, or Tripoli, or Trebizond, a marriage contract is drawn up, and all the ceremonies of legal wedlock are gone through by proxy. By resorting to these fictitious marriages and similar subterfuges, the owner of a harem may procure as many slaves, white, brown, or black, as he wishes, and once they are within the walls of his house, no one can possibly interfere to release them, for, the police being under no conditions permitted to violate the privacy of a harem, there is obviously no safeguard for the liberty, or even the lives, of its inmates. As a result of this system, a constant stream of female slaves—fair-haired beauties from Georgia and Circassia, brown-skinned Arab girls from the borders of the Sahara, and negresses from Equatoria—trickles into the North African coast towns by various roundabout channels, and, though the European officials are perfectly well aware of this condition of things, they are powerless to end it. The women thus obtained, though nominally wives, are in reality slaves, for they are bought for money, they are not consulted about their sale, they cannot go away if they are discontented, and their very lives are at the disposal of their masters. If that is not slavery, I don't know what is.

In those cases where the European authorities have ventured to meddle with native customs, particularly those concerning a husband's treatment of his wife, the interference frequently has had curious results. A wealthy Arab from the interior of Oran, starting on a journey to the capital of that province, bade the wife whom he adored an affectionate good-bye. Returning several days before he was expected, he seized the smiling woman, who rushed to greet him, tied her hands, and dragging her into the street gave her a furious beating in the presence of the astounded neighbours. No, she had not been unfaithful to him, he said, between the blows, nor had she been unkind. He not only was not tired of her, so he assured the onlookers, but she was a veritable jewel of a wife. Finally, when his arm grew tired and he stopped to take breath, he explained that, passing through a street in Oran, he had seen a crowd following a man who was being dragged along by two gendarmes. Upon inquiry he learned that he was being taken to prison for having beaten his wife. Therefore he had ridden home at top speed, without even waiting to complete his business, so that he might prove to himself, to his wife, and to his neighbours that he, at least, was still master in his own house and could beat his wife when he chose.

And here is another incident which illustrates the fashion in which the French administrators in Algeria deal with those ticklish questions which involve Arab domestic relations. A farmer and his wife were travelling through the interior; he was on a donkey and she, of course, on foot. Along came an Arab sheikh on horseback and offered the woman a lift. She accepted, and presently, growing confidential, admitted that she was unhappily married and detested her husband. Her companion proposing an elopement, she readily agreed. Accordingly, when they came to a by-road, this Lochinvar of the desert put spurs to his horse and galloped off with the lady across his saddle-bow, paying no heed to the shouts and protestations of the husband toiling along in the dust behind. Though he succeeded in tracing the runaway couple to the sheikh's village, the husband quickly found that plans had been made against his coming, for the villagers asserted to a man that they had known the eloping pair for years as man and wife and that the real husband was nothing but an impudent impostor. Unable to regain his wife, he then appealed to the French authorities of the district, who were at first at somewhat of a loss how to act in the circumstances, for the Europeans in North Africa are always sitting on top of a powder barrel and a hasty or ill-considered action may result in blowing them higher than Gilderoy's kite. Finally, an inspiration came to the juge d'instruction before whom the matter had been brought. Placing the dogs of the real husband in one room, and those of the pretended husband in another, he confronted the woman with them both. Now, Arab dogs are notoriously faithful to the members of their own households and equally unfriendly toward all strangers, so that though her own dogs fawned upon her and attempted to lick her hand, those of the sheikh snarled at sight of her and showed every sign of distrust. The judge promptly ordered her to be returned to her lawful husband—who, I fancy, punished her in true Arab fashion—and had the village placarded with a notice in Arabic which read: “The testimony of one dog is more to be believed than that of a townful of Arabs.” To appreciate how much more effective than any amount of fines or imprisonment this notice proved, one must remember that the deadliest insult an Arab can give another is to call him a dog.

Perhaps it is because they live so far from the contaminating influence of civilisation, or what stands for civilisation in North Africa, that the lives of those women who dwell beneath the black camel's-hair tents of the Sahara are far freer and happier than those led by their urban cousins. Which reminds me of a little procession that I once met while riding through southern Algeria. It consisted of an Arab, his wife, and a donkey. The man strode in front, his rifle over his shoulder. Then came the donkey, bearing nothing heavier than its harness. In the rear trudged the wife, carrying the plough. Though the Arab women may, and probably do, till the fields yoked beside a camel, a donkey, or an ox, their faces are unveiled and they are permitted free intercourse with the men of their tribe. Even among the nomad desert folk, however, women are regarded with indifference and contempt, the Arabs saying of a boy “It is a benediction,” but of a girl “It is a malediction.” With the Arabs a woman is primarily regarded as a servant, and long before a daughter of the “Great Tents” has entered her teens she has been taught how to cut and fit a burnoose, to sew a tent cover, and to make a couscous, that peculiar dish of half-ground barley, raisins, honey, hard-boiled eggs, and mangled fowl, stewed with a gravy in a sealed vessel, of which the Arabs are so fond. By the time she is ten her parents have probably received and accepted an offer for her hand—and praise Allah for ridding them of her!—and by the time she is twelve she is married and a mother. When a match has been decided upon—and it is by no means an uncommon thing for an unborn child to become conditionally engaged—several days of haggling as to the price which is to be paid for her ensue, the bridegroom eventually getting her at a cost of several camels, cattle, or goats, her value being based upon her looks and the position of her parents. On the day of the wedding the bride—on whose unveiled face, remember, the bridegroom has never laid eyes—concealed within a swaying camel-litter which looks for all the world like a young balloon, preceded by a band and accompanied by all her relatives, is taken with much ceremony to her new home. When the long-drawn-out marriage feast is over, the hideous racket of the flutes and tom-toms ceases and the wedding guests depart. Alone in her tent, the bride awaits her husband, who will see her face for the first time. Seating himself by her side, her husband makes her take off, one by one, her necklaces, her rings, and her anklets, so that, unadorned, she may be estimated at her true worth. If, thus stripped of her finery, she is not up to his expectations, the man may even at this late hour declare the marriage off and send the girl back to her parents. Should he be satisfied with his latest acquisition—for it is more than likely that he already has three or four other wives—he produces a club, which he places on the floor beside her, a custom whose significance requires no explanation. An Arab husband does not confine himself to a stick in regulating his domestic affairs, however, for only a few months ago the French authorities of Oran divested a desert sheikh of the burnoose of authority because, in a fit of jealous rage, he had cut off his wife's nose.

AN ARAB BRIDE GOING TO HER HUSBAND.
“Followed by rejoicing relatives, the bride is taken to her husband's home in a swaying camel litter which looks like a young balloon.”
Photograph by Em. Frechon, Biskra.

CHAPTER IV

THE ITALIAN “WHITE MAN'S BURDEN”

SINCE the world began the arm of Italy has reached out into the Mediterranean toward Africa, its finger pointing straight at Tripoli. Phœnicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards, and Turks followed the suggestion of that finger in their turn, but of them all only the Arab and the Turk remain. In every case a colonial empire was the mirage which beckoned to those land-hungry peoples from behind the golden haze which hangs over the African coast-line, and in every case their African adventures ended in disappointment and disaster. After an interim of centuries, in which the roads and ramparts and reservoirs built along that shore by those primeval pioneers have crumbled into dust, the troop-laden transports of a regenerated Italy have followed in the wake of those Greek galleys, those Roman triremes, and those Spanish caravels. Undeterred by the recollection of her disastrous Abyssinian adventure, Italy is imbued with the idea, just as were her powerful predecessors, that her commercial and political interests demand the extension of her dominion across the Middle Sea.

Ever since the purple sails of Phœnicia first flaunted along its coasts the history of Tripolitania has been one of invasion and conquest. In the very dawn of history the galleys of Greece dropped anchor off this shore, in the belief that it was the Garden of the Hesperides, and the vestiges of their colony of Cyrenaica lure the archæologists to-day. The Greeks, who, because of its three leagued cities of Oëa, Sabrata, and Leptis, named their new possession Tripolis, just as Decapolis signified the region of ten cities and Pentapolis of five, retreated before Carthage's colonial expansion, and the Carthaginians gave way in turn to the conquering Romans, who included the captured territory within their province of Africa and called it Regio Tripolitana—whence the name it bears to-day. Christianity was scarcely four centuries old when the hordes of fierce-faced, skin-clad Vandals, sweeping down from their Germanic forests, burst into Gaul, poured through the passes of the Pyrenees, overran Spain, and, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, carried fire and sword and torture from end to end of the Mediterranean. Before another century had rolled around, however, Belisarius, the great captain of Byzantium, had broken the Vandal power forever, and the troubled land of Tripolitania once again came under the shadow of the cross. Then the wave of Arab conquest came, rolling across North Africa, breaking upon the coasts of Spain, and not subsiding until it reached the marches of France, supplanting the feeble Christianity of the natives of all this region with the vigorous and fanatical faith of Islam. Though Ferdinand the Catholic, not content with expelling the Moors from Spain, continued his crusade against the infidel by capturing the Tripolitan capital, the Knights of Saint John, to whom he turned the city over, surrendered to the beleaguering Turks just as the sixteenth century had reached its turning-point, and Turkish it has remained, at least in name, ever since.

We of the West can never be wholly indifferent to the fate and fortunes of this much-harassed land, for our flag has fluttered from its ramparts and the bayonets of our soldiers and the cutlasses of our sailors have served to write some of the most stirring chapters of its history. So feeble and nominal did the Turkish rule become that the beginning of the last century found Tripolitania little more than a pirate stronghold, ruled by a pasha who had not only successfully defied, but had actually levied systematic tribute upon, every sea-faring nation in the world. It was not, however, until the Pasha of Tripoli overstepped the bounds of our national complaisance by demanding an increase in the annual tribute of eighty-odd thousand dollars which the United States had been paying as the price of its maritime exemption that the American consul handed him an ultimatum and an American war-ship backed it up with the menace of its guns. Standing forth in picturesque and striking relief from the tedium of the four years' war which ensued was the capture by the Tripolitans in 1803 of the frigate Philadelphia, which had run aground in the harbour of Tripoli, and the enslavement of her crew; her subsequent recapture and destruction by a handful of blue-jackets under the intrepid Decatur; and the heroic march across the desert to Derna of General William Eaton and his motley army.

Eaton's exploit, like that of Reid and the General Armstrong at Fayal, seems to have been all but lost in the mazes of our national history. With the object of placing upon the Tripolitan throne the reigning Pasha's exiled elder brother, who had agreed to satisfy all the demands of the United States, William Eaton, soldier of fortune, frontiersman, and former American consul at Tunis, recruited at Alexandria what was thought to be a ridiculously insufficient expeditionary force for the taking of Derna, a strongly fortified coast town six hundred miles due west across the Libyan desert. With a handful of adventurous Americans, some two-score Greeks, who fought the Turk whenever opportunity offered, and a few squadrons of Arab mercenaries—less than five hundred men in all—he set out under the blazing sun of an African spring. Though his Arabs mutinied, his food and water gave out, and his animals died from starvation and exhaustion, Eaton pushed indomitably on, covering the six hundred miles of burning sand in fifty days, carrying the city by storm, and raising the American flag over its citadel—the first and only time it has ever floated over a fortification on that side of the Atlantic.

A territory larger than all the Atlantic States, from Florida to Maine, put together; a dry climate as hot in summer and as cold in winter as that of New Mexico; a surface which varies between the aridity of the Staked Plains and the fertility of the San Joaquin Valley of California; so sparsely populated that its fanatic, turbulent, poverty-stricken population averages but two inhabitants to the square mile—that is Tripolitania. Bounded on the west by Tunisia and the French and on the east by Egypt and the English, the hinterland of the regency stretches into the Sahara as far as the Tropic of Cancer. Its eleven hundred miles of coast-line set squarely in the middle of the north African littoral; its capital almost equidistant from the Straits, the Dardanelles, and the Suez Canal; and half the great ports of the Mediterranean not twelve hours' steam away, the strategical, political, and commercial position of Tripolitania is one of great importance.

Tripolitania, as the regency should properly be called, or Libya, as the Italians have classically renamed it, consists of four more or less distinctly defined divisions: Tripoli, Fezzan, Benghazi, and the Saharan oases. Under the Turkish régime the districts of Tripoli and Fezzan have formed a vilayet under a vali, or governor-general; Benghazi has been a separately administered province under a mutes-sarif directly responsible to Constantinople, while the oases have not been governed at all. The district of Tripoli, which occupies the entire northwestern portion of the regency, is for the most part an interminable stony table-land, riverless, waterless, and uninhabited save along the fertile coast. The stretches of yellow sand which the traveller sees from the deck of his ship are not, as he fondly imagines, the edge of the Sahara, but merely sand dunes blown in by the sea, such as may be seen elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast.

Sloping from these coastal sand dunes up to the barren interior plateau is a zone, averaging perhaps five miles in width, of an altogether remarkable fertility, for its deep ravines, filled with considerable streams during the winter rains, continue to send down a supply of subterranean water even during the dry season. By means of countless wells, round and round which blindfolded donkeys and oxen plod ceaselessly, the water is drawn up into reservoirs and conducted thence to the fields. In this coast oasis it is harvest-time all the year round, for, notwithstanding the primitive agricultural implements of the natives and their crude system of irrigation, the soil is amazingly productive. From April to June almonds, apricots, and corn are gathered in; in July and August come the peaches; from July to September is the vintage season, and the Tripolitan grapes vie with those of Sicily; from July to September the black tents of the nomad date and olive pickers dot the fields, though the yellow date of the coast is not to be spoken of in the same breath with the luscious, mahogany-coloured fruit of the interior oases; from November to April the orange groves are ablaze with a fruit which rivals that of Jaffa; the early spring sees the shipment of those “Malta potatoes” which are quoted on the menus of every fashionable hostelry and restaurant in Europe; while lemons are to be had for the picking at almost any season of the year.

Southward into the Sahara from the southern borders of Tripoli stretches the province of Fezzan, its inaccessibility, its prevalent malaria, and its deadly heat having popularised it with Abdul-Hamid, of unsavoury memory, as a place of exile for disgraced courtiers and overpopular officials, presumably because of the exceeding improbability of any of them ever coming back. Artesian wells and scientific farming have proved in other and equally discouraging quarters of Africa, however, that the words “desert” and “worthless” are no longer synonymous, so there is no reason to believe that the agricultural miracles which France has performed in Algeria and Tunisia on the one hand, and England in Egypt and the Sudan on the other, could not be successfully attempted by the Italians in Fezzan. Arid and inhospitable as this region appears to-day, it should be remembered that its Greek and Roman colonists boasted of it as “the granary of Europe.” What has been done once may well be done again. All that this soil needs, after its centuries of impoverishment and neglect, is decent treatment, and any one who has seen those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads clinging to the rocky hill-sides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic care, will predict a promising agricultural future for an Italian Tripolitania. In its physical aspects, northern Tripolitania resembles Europe much more than it does Africa; its climate is no warmer than southern Italy in summer and not nearly as unhealthy as the Campagna Romana; while its soil, as I have already remarked, holds great possibilities for patient, hardy, frugal, industrious agriculturists of the type of those twenty thousand Sicilians who are forced by poverty to emigrate each year to America or the Argentine. Keeping these facts in mind, one does not have to seek far for the causes which underlay Italy's sudden aggression.

SUNRISE ON THE GREAT SANDS.
For sheer majesty and grandeur, the only thing that is at all comparable with a Saharan sunrise is daybreak in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.

Reaching Egyptward in the form of a mighty fist is the peninsula of Barka, the Cyrenaica of the ancients, officially known as the Mutessariflik of Benghazi, its many natural advantages of climate, soil, and vegetation making it the most favoured region in the regency, if not, indeed, in all North Africa. While the climate and vegetation of southern Tripoli and of Fezzan are distinctly Saharan, the date-palm being the characteristic tree, Benghazi is just as decidedly Mediterranean, its fertile, verdure-clad uplands being covered with groves of oak, cypress, olive, fig, and pine. Though well supplied with rain and, as I have said, extremely fertile, the Benghazi province, once the richest of the Greek colonies, is now but scantily populated. Scattered along its coasts are Benghazi, the capital, with an inextricably mixed population and one of the worst harbours in the world; Tobruk, which, because of its excellent roadstead and its proximity to the Egyptian frontier and the Canal, Germany has long had a covetous eye on; and the insignificant ports of Derna and Khoms, the lawless highlands of the interior being occupied by hordes of warlike and nomadic Arabs who acknowledge no authority other than their tribal sheikhs.

South by east into the Libyan Desert straggle the Aujila and Kufra chains of oases, marking the course of the historic caravan route to Upper Egypt and presenting the aspect of a long, winding valley, extending from the Benghazi plateau almost to the banks of the Nile. Underground reservoirs lie so near the surface of the desert that all of these sand-surrounded islands have water in abundance, that of Jof, for example, supporting over a million date-palms and several thousand people, together with their camels, horses, and goats.

Such, in brief, bold outline, are the more salient characteristics—climatic, agricultural, and geographical—of the region which Italy has seized. Everything considered, it was not such a long look ahead that the Italian statesmen took when they decided to play their cards for such a stake. Though neither soil nor climate has changed since the days of Tripolitania's ancient prosperity, centuries of wretched and corrupt Turkish rule, with its system of absentee landlords and irresponsible officials, has reduced the peasantry to the same state of dull and despairing apathy in which the Egyptian fellaheen were before the English came. If Tripolitania is to be redeemed, and I firmly believe that it will be, the work of regeneration cannot be done by government railways and subsidised steam-ship lines and regiments of brass-bound officials, but by patient, painstaking, plodding men with artesian-well drilling machines and steam-ploughs and barrels of fertiliser. It may well be, as the Italian expansionists enthusiastically declare, that Tripolitania constitutes a “New Italy” lying at the very ports of old Italy, but it is going to take many, many millions of lire and much hard work to make it worth the having.

To those unaccustomed to the sights and sounds and smells of the East, a visit to the town of Tripoli is more interesting than enjoyable. Both its harbour and its hostelry are so incredibly bad that no one ever visits them a second time if he can possibly help it. The harbour of Jaffa, in Palestine, is a trifle worse, if anything, than that of Tripoli; but the only hotel I know of which deserves to be classed with the Albergo Minerva in Tripoli is the one next door to the native jail in Aden. Picture a cluster of square, squat, stuccoed houses, their tedious sky-lines broken by the minarets of mosques and the flagstaffs of foreign consulates, facing on a crescent-shaped bay. Under the sun of an African summer the white buildings of the town blaze like the whitewashed base of a railway-station stove at white heat; the stretch of yellow beach which separates the harbour from the town glows fiery as brass; while the waters of the bay look exactly as though they had been blued in readiness for the family washing. Within the crumbling ramparts of the town is a network of dim alleys and byways, along which the yashmaked Moslem women flit like ghosts, and vaulted, trellis-roofed bazaars where traders of two-score nationalities haggle and gesticulate and doze and pray and chatter the while they and their wares and the passing camels smell to heaven. Scattered here and there among the shops are native bakeries, in the reeking interiors of which, after your eyes become accustomed to the darkness, you can discern patient camels plodding round and round and round, grinding the grain in true Eastern fashion between the upper and the nether millstones.

Follow the narrow Strada della Marina past the custom-house, where the Italian sentry peers at you suspiciously from beneath the bunch of cock's feathers which adorns his helmet; past the odorous fish-market and so into the unpaved, unlighted, foul-smelling quarter of the Jews, and your path will be blocked eventually by the sole remaining relic of Tripoli's one-time greatness, the marble arch of triumph erected by the Romans in the reign of Antoninus Pius, now half-buried in débris, its chiselled boasts of victory mutilated, and its arches ruthlessly plastered up, the shop of a dealer in dried fish. In that defaced and degraded memorial is typified the latter-day history of Tripolitania. Before the Italian occupation disrupted the commerce of the country and isolated Tripoli from the interior, by long odds the most interesting of the city's sights were the markets, which were held upon the beach on the arrival of the trans-Saharan caravans, for they afforded the foreigner fleeting but characteristic glimpses, as though on a moving-picture screen, of those strange and savage peoples—Berbers, Hausas, Tuaregs, Tubbas, and Wadaians—who are retreating farther and farther into the recesses of the continent before the white man's implacable advance.

All down the ages Tripoli has been the gateway through which weapons, cutlery, and cotton have entered, and slaves, ostrich feathers, and ivory have come out of inner Africa by plodding caravan. Since the sons of Ham first found their way across the wilderness of Shur, this region has been the terminus of three historic trade routes. The first of these runs due south across the desert to Lake Tchad and the great native states of Kanem, Sokoto, Bagirmi, and Wadai; the second follows a southwesterly course across the Sahara to the Great Bend of the Niger and the storied city of Timbuktu; while the third, going south by east, long carried British cottons and German jack-knives to the natives of Darfur and the Sudan. Is it any wonder, then, that, fired by the speeches of the expansionists in the Roman senate, all Italy should dream of a day when the red-white-and-green banner should float over this gateway to Africa and endless lines of dust-coloured camels, laden with glass beads from Venice and cotton goods from Milan, should go rolling southward to those countries which lie beyond the great sands? But, lost in the fascination of their dream, the Italians forgot one thing: modern commerce cannot go on the back of a camel. No longer may Tripolitania be reckoned the front door, or even the side door, to central Africa. As the result of French and British encroachment and enterprise, not only has nearly all of the Tripolitanian hinterland been absorbed by one or the other of these powers, but, what is of far more commercial importance, they have succeeded in diverting the large and important caravan trade of which the Italians dreamed, and which for centuries has found its way to the sea through Tripoli, to their own ports on the Nile, the Senegal, and the Niger, leaving to Tripolitania Italiana nothing but its possibilities as an agricultural land.

The statesmen who planned, and the soldiers and sailors who executed, the seizure of Tripolitania, were obeying a voice from the grave. Though the overwhelming disaster to the Italians at Adowa in 1896, when their army of invasion was wiped out by Menelik's Abyssinian tribesmen, caused the political downfall of Crispi, the greatest Italian of his time, his dream of Italian colonial expansion, like John Brown's soul, went marching on. With the vision of a prophet that great statesman saw that the day was not far distant when the steady increase in Italy's population and production would compel her to acquire a colonial market oversea. Crispi lies mouldering in his grave, but the Italian Government, in pursuance of the policy which he inaugurated, has been surreptitiously at work in Tripolitania these dozen years or more.

Never has that forerunner to annexation known as “pacific penetration” been more subtly or more systematically conducted. Even the Pope lent the government's policy of African aggrandisement his sanction, for is not the Moslem the hereditary foe of the church, and does not the cross follow close in the wake of Christian bayonets? Italian convents and monasteries dot the Tripolitanian littoral, while cowled and sandalled missionaries from the innumerable Italian orders have carried the gospel, and the propaganda of Italian annexation, to the oppressed and poverty-stricken peasantry of the far interior. Under the guise of scientists, Italian political and commercial agents have been quietly investigating the problems and possibilities of the regency from end to end, while the powerful Banco di Roma, an institution backed with the funds of the Holy See, through its branches in Tripoli and Benghazi, has been systematically buying up arable farm-lands from the impoverished peasantry at a few lire the hectare, which quadrupled in value with the landing of the first Italian soldier.

Though prior to the war there were probably not two thousand native-born Italians in the whole of Tripolitania, the numerous Jews, in whose hands was practically the entire trade of the country, were offered inducements of one kind and another to become Italian subjects, Italy thus laying a foundation for her claims to predominating interests in that region. On the pretext that the Turkish authorities had tampered with the foreign mail-bags, Italy demanded and obtained permission to establish her own post-offices at the principal ports, so that for many years past the anomalous spectacle has been presented, just as in other portions of the Turkish Empire, of letters from a Turkish colony being franked with surcharged Italian stamps. The most ingenious stroke, however, was the establishment of numerous Italian schools—and very good schools they are—where the young idea, whether Arab, Maltese, or Jew, has been taught to shoot—along Italian lines.

To those really conversant with the situation, Italy's pretexts that the activities of her subjects resident in Tripolitania had been interfered with and their lives and interests seriously endangered sound somewhat hollow. To tell the truth, Italians have had a freer rein in the regency—and, incidentally, have caused more trouble—than any other people. Italy's real reasons for the seizure of Tripolitania were two, and only two: first, she wanted it; and second, she could get it.

Now that she has Tripolitania in her grasp, however, her task is but begun, for setting forward the hands of progress by occupation of Moslem territory has ever been a perilous proceeding. Though France shouldered the white man's burden in Algeria with alacrity, she paid for the privilege with just forty years of fighting; it took England, with all the resources of her colonial experience and her colonial army, sixteen years to conquer the ill-armed Arabs of the Sudan, while the desperate resistance of the Mad Mullah and his fanatic tribesmen has compelled her practically to evacuate Somaliland; overthrown ministries, depleted war-chests, and thousands of unmarked graves in the hinterland bear witness to the deep solicitude displayed for the cause of civilisation in Morocco by both France and Spain; Russia spent a quarter of a century and the lives of ten thousand soldiers in forcing her beneficent rule on the Moslems of Turkestan. Italy will be more fortunate than her colonising neighbours, therefore, if she emerges unscathed from her present Tripolitanian adventure, for every page of the history of latter-day colonisation proves that seizure of Moslem territory never ends with a naval demonstration, a landing party, a staff with a descending and an ascending flag, and the flash and thunder of a national salute.

When Italy pointed the noses of her transports Tripoliward she committed the incredible blunder of underestimating for a second time the resistance that she would encounter. She made just such a mistake some years ago in Abyssinia, and the plain of Adowa is still sprinkled with the bleaching bones of her annihilated army. The Italian agents in Tripolitania had assured their government that, as a result of Turkish oppression, corruption, and overtaxation, the Turks were heartily disliked by the Tripolitanians—all of which was perfectly true. But when they went on to say that the Tripolitanians would welcome the expulsion of the Turks and the substitution of an Italian régime, they overshot the mark. In other words, the Tripolitanians much preferred to be ill-treated by the Turks, who are their coreligionists, than to be well-treated by the Italians, who are despised unbelievers. The Italians, having had no previous experience with Moslem peoples, landed at Tripoli with every expectation of being welcomed as saviours by the native population. It is quite true that the natives gave the Italians an exceedingly warm reception—with rifles and machine guns. Here, then, were some sixty thousand Italian soldiers, who had anticipated about as much trouble in taking Tripolitania as we should in taking Hayti, instead of being permitted to play the jaunty and picturesque rôles of deliverers from oppression, being forced to battle desperately for their lives against the very people whom they had come to save and civilise. It was a graphic instance of the workings of Mohammedanism. How Kitchener and Cromer, those two grim men who have had more experience than any other Europeans in fighting and governing Mohammedans, must have smiled to themselves when they read the Italian statements that the taking of Tripolitania meant only a campaign of a fortnight.

To comprehend thoroughly the peculiar situation in which Italy finds herself, you should understand that the portly, sleepy-eyed, good-natured old gentleman who theoretically rules Turkey under the title of Mohammed V is, politically speaking, as much a dual personality as Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde. As Sultan of Turkey, or, to give him his proper title, Emperor of the Ottomans, he is the nominal ruler of some twenty-four millions of divided, discontented, and disgruntled Turkish subjects—Osmanlis, Arabs, Syrians, Armenians, Circassians, Bulgars, Greeks, Jews—and in that capacity plays no great part in ordering the affairs of the world. But Mohammed V is more than Sultan of Turkey: he is likewise Successor of the Prophet, Commander of the Faithful, and Caliph of all Islam, and as such is the spiritual and temporal leader of the two hundred and twenty millions who compose the Moslem world. Nor is there any way of disassociating the two offices. In making war on the Sultan of Turkey, therefore, Italy automatically made war on the chief of all Mohammedans, thus shaking her fist in the face not alone of a nation but of a religion—and the most militant and fanatical of all religions at that. There is not a wearer of turban or tarboosh between the Gold Coast and the China coast, be he Hausa, Tuareg, Berber, Moor, Algerian, Tunisian, Tripolitanian, Egyptian, Sudanese, Somali, Arab, Kurd, Turk, Circassian, Persian, Turkoman, Afghan, Sikh, Indian, Malay, or Moro, who does not regard Italy's aggression in Tripolitania as an affront to himself and to his faith.

Among all Moslems there is growing an ominous unrest, a fierce consciousness that the lands which they have for centuries regarded as their own are gradually slipping from them, and a decision that they must fight or disappear. On the Barbary coast, the Nile, the Congo, the Niger, and the Zambezi they see the turbans and the tarbooshes retreating before the white helmets' implacable advance, and now they see even the Ottoman throne, to them a great throne, shaking under the pressure. Hence there is not a Moslem in the world to-day who will remain indifferent to any action which hints at the dismemberment of Turkey, for he knows full well that the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the political fortunes of Islam are inextricably interwoven.

That Italy can hold the Tripolitanian coast towns as long as her ammunition, her patience, and her public purse hold out, no one acquainted with the conditions of modern warfare will attempt to deny. Unless, however, the militant section of Islam, of which this region is the very focus, can be induced to acquiesce in an Italian occupation, the life of an Italian soldier who ventures out of range of his war-ships' guns will not be worth an hour's purchase. Hordes of fanatical, desert-bred Arabs, inured to hardship, deadly sun, scanty food, and dearth of water, mounted on swift camels and as familiar with the trackless desert as the woodsman is with the forest in which he works, ablaze with a religion which assures them that the one sure way to paradise is to die in battle with the unbelievers, can harass the Italian army of occupation for years to come by a guerilla warfare. Even though Turkey agrees to surrender Tripolitania and to withdraw her garrisons from that province, Italy will still have far from smooth sailing, for the simple reason that she is not fighting Turks alone, but Moslems, and, as a result of her ill-advised slaughter of the Arabs, she has made the Moslem population of Tripolitania permanently hostile. Most significant of all, the Arab resistance to an Italian advance into the interior of the country will be directed, controlled, and financed by that sinister and mysterious power known as the Brotherhood of the Senussiyeh.

To American ears the word “Senussiyeh” doubtless conveys but little meaning, but to the French administrateurs in Algeria and Tunisia, and to the officers of the Military Intelligence Department in Egypt and the Sudan, it is a word of ominous import. Though the Brotherhood of the Senussiyeh is, without much doubt, the most powerful organisation of its kind in the world, so complete is the veil of secrecy behind which it works that comparatively little is definitely known as to its designs, ramifications, and resources. Briefly, it is a secret Moslem society, organised about a century ago by an Algerian dervish, Mohammed ben Ali ben Es Senussi, from whom it takes its name; its object is the restoration of the Mohammedan religion to its original purity, austerity, and political power, the first step toward which is the expulsion of the Christian from Moslem lands; its initiated members, scattered throughout the Mohammedan world, have been variously estimated at from five to fifteen millions; the present grand master of the order, Senussi Ahmed-el-Sherif, the third of the succession, is admittedly a man of exceptional intelligence, resource, and sagacity; his monastic court at Jof, in the oasis of Kufra, five hundred miles, as the camel goes, south of Benghazi and about the same distance from the Nile, is the capital of a power whose boundaries are the boundaries of Islam.

It is no secret that the growing power of the Senussiyeh is causing considerable concern to the military and political officials of those European nations that have possessions in North Africa, for, in addition to the three-hundred-odd zawias, or monasteries, scattered along the African littoral from Egypt to Morocco, the long arm of the order reaches down to the mysterious oases which dot the Great Sahara, it embraces the strange tribes of the Tibesti highlands, it controls the robber Tuaregs and the warlike natives who occupy the regions adjacent to Lake Tchad, and is, as the French and British have discovered, a power to be reckoned with in the protected states of Kanem, Sokoto, Bagirmi, Bornu, and Wadai.

The organisation of the order is both strong and simple. The khuan, or brothers, whose names are carefully recorded in the books of the mother lodge at Jof, owe unquestioning obedience to the mokaddem, or prefect, in charge of the district to which they belong. Each mokaddem has under his orders a corps of secret agents, known as wekils, whose duty is to keep him constantly in touch with all that is going on in his district and to communicate his instructions to the brothers. On Grand Bairam—the Mohammedan Easter—the mokaddems meet in conclave at Jof, on which occasion the spiritual and political condition of the order is discussed and its course of action decided on for the ensuing year. Above the mokaddems, and acting as an intermediary between them and the veiled and sacred person of the Senussi himself, is a cabinet of viziers, who, by means of a remarkable system of camel couriers, are enabled to keep constantly in touch with all the districts of the order.

At Jof, from which no European investigator has ever returned, are centred all the threads of this vast organism. There is kept the war-chest of the order, constantly increased by large and small contributions from true believers all over the world, for every member of the Senussiyeh who has a total income of more than twenty dollars a year must contribute two and one half per cent of it to the order annually; there the Senussi has established depots of stores and war material and factories for the manufacture, or rather the assembling, of modern fire-arms; thither come to him from the obscure harbours of the Tripolitanian coast cargoes of arms and ammunition; thither flock pilgrims from North and West Africa, from the Niger and from the Nile, to receive his orders and to seek his blessing; there is centred one of the most remarkable secret-service systems in the world, its agents not alone in every corner of the Mohammedan world, but likewise keeping their fingers ever on the political pulse of Europe.

A place better fitted for its purpose than Jof it would be hard to imagine. Here, surrounded by inhospitable desert, with wells a long day's camel-ride apart, and the route known only to experienced and loyal guides, the Senussi has been free to educate, drill, and arm his disciples, to accumulate great stores of arms and ammunition, and to push forward his propaganda of a regenerated and reinvigorated Islam, without any possibility of interference from the Christian nations. There seems to be but little doubt that factories have been erected at Jof for the assembling of weapons of precision, the materials for which have been systematically smuggled across the Mediterranean from Greece and Turkey for years past. Strange as it may sound, these factories are under the direction of skilled engineers and mechanics, for so well laid are the plans of the order that it annually sends a number of Moslem youths to be educated in the best technical schools of Europe. Upon completing their courses of instruction they return to Jof, or other centres of Senussiyeh activity, to place their trained services at the disposal of the order, others being sent Europeward to be educated in their turn. The Senussiyeh's military affairs are equally well organised, the Arabs, than whom there is admittedly no finer fighting material in the world, being instructed along European lines, modified for desert warfare, by veteran drill-masters who have learned their trade in the native armies of England and France. The nucleus of this mobile and highly effective force is, so I am told by French officials in Africa, an admirably mounted and equipped camel corps of five thousand men which the Senussi keeps always on a war footing in the Kufra oases. These facts in themselves prove definitely that it would be no sporadic resistance, but a vast, organised movement, armed with improved weapons, trained by men who learned their business under European drill-masters, and directed by a high intelligence, with which Italy would have to reckon should she attempt the hazardous experiment of an advance in the real hinterland of Tripolitania.

Let me make it perfectly clear that the grand master of the Senussiyeh is a man of altogether exceptional ability. Under his direction the order has advanced with amazing strides, for he is a remarkable organiser and administrator, two qualities rarely found among the Arabs. The destruction of the Mahdi and of the Khalifa, and the more recent dethronement of Abdul-Hamid, resulted in bringing a large accession of force to his standard by the extinction of all religious authority in Africa except his own. Though the Sultan of Turkey is, as I have said, the titular head of the Moslem religion, and is venerated as such wherever praying-rugs are spread, the chief of this militant order is undoubtedly regarded by the average Mohammedan as the most actively powerful figure, if not as the saviour, of Islam. The first Senussi was powerful enough to excommunicate the Sultan Abdul-Medjid from the order because of his intimacy with the European powers; the father of the present Khedive of Egypt was accustomed to address the second Senussi in such terms as a disciple would use to a prophet, while Abbas Hilmi II, the reigning Khedive, a few years ago journeyed across the Libyan desert to pay his respects to the present head of the order.

Those who are in a position to know whereof they speak believe that the Senussiyeh would actively oppose any attempt on the part of the Italians to occupy the hinterland of Tripolitania, for it is obvious that such an occupation would not alone bring the Christian in dangerous proximity to the chief stronghold of the order, but it would effectually cut off the supplies of arms and ammunition which caravans in the pay of the Senussiyeh have regularly been transporting to Jof from obscure ports on the Tripolitanian coast. It has been the policy of the Senussiyeh, supported by the Turkish administration in Tripolitania, to close the regions under its control to Christians, so it is scarcely likely that it would do other than resist an Italian penetration of the country, even in the face of a Turkish evacuation. Though the order encouraged resistance to the French advance in the Sudan, considering that the extension of the French sphere of influence threatened its own prestige in those regions, it has, as a rule, refrained from displaying antagonism toward the rulers of the adjoining regions. Aside from proselytism, the Senussiyeh has performed a great work in the Sahara in the colonisation and cultivation of the oases, the encouragement of trade, the building of rest-houses, the sinking of wells, and the protection of trans-Saharan caravans.

Stripped of the glamour and exaggeration with which sensational writers and superficial travellers have invested the subject, it is apparent that the Senussi controls a very wide-spread and powerful organisation—an organisation probably unique in the world. As a fighting element his followers are undoubtedly far superior to the wild and wretchedly armed tribesmen who charged the British squares so valorously at Abu Klea and Omdurman and who wiped out an Italian army in the Abyssinian hills. Their remarkable mobility, their wonderful powers of endurance, their large supplies of the swift and hardy racing-camel known as hegin, and their marvellous knowledge of this great, inhospitable region, coupled with the fact that they can always retreat to their bases in the desert, where civilised troops cannot follow them, are all advantages of which the Senussi and his followers are thoroughly aware.

Although the Senussi is, as I have shown, amply capable of causing the Italians serious trouble, it is very unlikely that he will prove actively hostile if they refrain from encroaching upon those remote regions which he looks upon as his own. Italy will have her hands full with the development of the coastal regions for many years to come, so, if she is wise, she will leave the interior of the country severely alone, recognise the religious authority of the Senussi, and, if possible, effect some such working agreement with him as England has done with an equally dangerous neighbour, the Amir of Afghanistan.

From the glimpses which I have given you of the inhospitable character of Tripolitania and the still more inhospitable people who inhabit it, it will be seen that Italy's task does not end with the ousting of the Turk. She has set her hand to the plough, however, and started it upon a long and arduous and very costly furrow, the end of which no man can see. For a nation to have a colony, or colonies, wherein she can turn loose the overflow of her population and still keep them under her own flag, is an undeniable asset, particularly when the colony is as accessible from the mother country as Libya [1] (for we must accustom ourselves to the new name sooner or later) is from Italy. But if Italy is to be a success as a colonising nation she must school herself to do things differently in Tripolitania from what she has in her other African dependencies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.

[1] The Italians have given their new possession the historic name of Libya.

First and foremost, she must pick the men who are to settle her new colony as carefully as she picks the men for her carabinieri, choosing them with a view to their intelligence, industry, energy, and sobriety, for to flood Tripolitania with such a class of emigrants as every vessel from Italy dumps on our hospitable shores is but to invite disaster.

Secondly, she must impress on these colonists the imperative necessity of keeping on friendly terms with the natives, who are, after all, the real owners of the soil, and of obtaining their co-operation in the development of the country. The Arab, remember, unlike the negro, cannot be bullied and domineered with impunity, Germany's African colonies providing significant examples of the failures which invariably result from ill-treatment of the native population.

Thirdly, there must be no “absentee landlordism,” the future of the colony largely depending, to my way of thinking, upon frugal, hard-working peasant farmers, owning their own farms, whose prosperity will thus be indissolubly linked with that of the colony.

Lastly, all local questions of administration should be taken entirely out of the hands of Rome and left to “the man on the spot,” for history is filled with the chronicles of promising colonies which have been ship-wrecked on the rocks of a highly centralised form of government.

If the Italians will take these things to heart, I believe that their conquest of Tripolitania will prove, in the end, for the country's own best good, contributing to its peace and to the welfare of its inhabitants, native as well as foreign, and that it will promote the opening up of the dark places to civilisation, if not to Christianity—for the Moslem does not change his faith. When, therefore, all is said and done, I cannot but feel that the cross of the House of Savoy portends more good to Africa in general, and to Tripolitania in particular, than would ever the star and crescent.

CHAPTER V

THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER

THIS is the story of how a handful of white men jerked a nation out of the desert and the depths of despair, as though by its collar, set it on its feet, and taught it to play the game. It is the story of how northeast Africa—a region which God had seemingly forgotten—has been transformed into a prosperous and self-respecting country by giving it two things which it had always needed and had never known—justice and water. It is the chronicle of a thirty years' struggle, under disheartening conditions, against overwhelming odds, and when you have finished it you will agree with me, I think, that it is one of the wonder-tales of history. It is a drama in which English officials and Egyptian pashas and Arab sheikhs all have their greater or their lesser parts, and it is as full of romance and intrigue and treachery and fighting as any moving-picture play that was ever thrown upon a screen.

To my way of thinking, the rescue and rehabilitation of the Nile country is the most convincing proof of England's genius as a colonising nation. That you may be able to judge, by comparison, what she has accomplished, you must go back a third of a century or so, to the days when Ismail Pasha—he with the brow of a statesman and the chin of a libertine—still sat on the throne of the Pharaohs, wielding an extravagant, vacillating, and ineffectual rule over a region which stretched from the Mediterranean seaboard southward to Uganda and the sleeping-sickness, and from the Red Sea shore westward until it lost itself in the sand wastes of the Great Sahara. Of the one million three hundred and fifty thousand square miles at that time included within the Egyptian borders, less than five thousand were cultivated land; the rest was yellow desert and nothing more. The seven millions of blacks and browns who composed the population were so poor that the dwellers in the slums of Whitechapel were affluent when compared to them; they lived, for the most part, in wretched hovels of sun-dried mud scattered along the banks of the Nile, maintaining a hand-to-mouth existence by raising a low grade of cotton on a few feddans of land which they irrigated by hand, at an appalling cost of time and labour, with water drawn up in buckets from the river. As a result of the corvée, or system of forced labour on public works which prevailed, a large part of the population was virtually in a state of slavery; the taxes, which were unjustly assessed and incredibly exorbitant, could only be collected with the aid of the kourbash, as the terrible whip of rhino hide used by the slave-dealers was known. Barring the single line of ramshackle railway which connected Cairo with Alexandria and with the Suez Canal, the only means of transportation were the puffing river-boats and the plodding caravans. The unpaid and ill-disciplined army was a synonym for cowardice, as proved by its defeats by the tribesmen of Abyssinia and the Sudan. The Khedive was a profligate and a spendthrift; his ministers and governors were cruel, dishonest, and tyrannical; the national resources had been dissipated in a veritable debauch of extravagance and corruption. I doubt, indeed, if the sun ever shone on a more decadent, demoralised, and discouraged nation than was Egypt on that June day in 1879, when a cablegram from Constantinople, addressed, significantly enough, to “Ismail Pasha, ex-Khedive of Egypt,” brought the Sultan's demand for his immediate abdication in favour of his son Tewfik. Called to a heritage of bankruptcy and wide-spread discontent, the new ruler, anxious though he undoubtedly was to use his prerogatives for his people's good, found himself forced to decide between European intervention and native rebellion. The question was decided for him, however, for, in the spring of 1882, Arabi and his lawless soldiery broke loose and overran the land.

Dance of Nuba women, Kordofan.

Shilluk warriors, Blue Nile.

Bread-making in the Lado Enclave, Sudan.

WORK AND PLAY IN BLACK MAN'S AFRICA.

Whether this Arabi Pasha was at heart a patriot or a plunderer is a question which has never been satisfactorily decided, nor is it one which particularly concerns us, although, if you ever happen to find yourself at Kandy, in the hills of Ceylon, where he still lives in exile, I would recommend you to call upon him, for he will receive you with marked hospitality and will talk to you quite frankly about those stirring events in which he played so prominent a part. As this is a story of the present, rather than of the past, suffice it to say that Arabi, then an officer in the Egyptian army, instigated a military revolt which had as its object the ending of European influence in the affairs of Egypt. So rapidly did this propaganda of “Egypt for the Egyptians!” spread among the lower classes of the population, and so perilous became the position of foreigners resident in the country, that, upon Alexandria being captured and looted by the revolutionists, a British squadron bombarded and partially destroyed that city, while a British army, hurried from Malta for the protection of the Canal, in which England held the dominating interest, dispersed Arabi's forces at Tel-el-Kebir, pushed on across the desert to Cairo, stamped out the remaining embers of the revolt, and restored in a measure the authority of the Khedive, though not without taking the precaution of surrounding him with British “advisers” and garrisoning his cities with British troops. Such, in tabloid form, is the story of the beginnings of British domination in the land of the Valley of the Nile.

In view of the chaotic condition of the country, England naturally decided that the only way to insure the safety of her subjects, as well as of her great financial and political interests in that region, was to continue the military occupation of Egypt, for the time being at least, and boldly to begin the task of its financial, judicial, political, and military reconstruction. The form of government which has resulted is, I suppose, the most extraordinary in the history of nations.

Nominally a province of the Turkish Empire, and administered by a viceroy who theoretically derives his power from the Turkish sovereign, Egypt is autonomous (so far as Turkey is concerned), though it still pays annual tribute of about three million five hundred thousand dollars to the Sultan. Though the title “khedive” means sovereign or king, without qualification or limitation, the real ruler of Egypt is not his Highness Abbas Hilmi II, but his Britannic Majesty's Agent and Consul-General—at present Lord Kitchener of Khartoum—who, though officially Britain's diplomatic representative in Egypt and nothing more, in reality exercises almost unlimited authority and power. In other words, England has assumed the position of a receiver for Egypt's foreign creditors and has apparently made the receivership—which has never been agreeable to the khedivial government—a permanent one. Egypt's situation might, indeed, be quite aptly compared to a railway system which has been forced into bankruptcy by the extravagant methods of its directors, and one of whose largest creditors has become receiver with full power to reorganise the system for its stockholders' and its creditors' best good.

Another feature of Egypt's complex form of government is the International Debt Commission, which consists of delegates from England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Italy, who are stationed at Cairo for the purpose of keeping an eye on the national revenues and periodically collecting a share of them, over and above the actual running expenses of the government, to pay the interest on the Egyptian bonds held in those countries.

To this administrative medley must be added the complications caused by the Ottoman Capitulations—by which fourteen foreign governments, including our own, exercise almost sovereign rights in Egypt, the International Tribunals, or “Mixed Courts,” in the control of which Egypt has almost nothing to say, giving them complete jurisdiction in all civil cases in which aliens may be involved with each other or with Egyptians, while the foreign consuls possess absolute authority in criminal cases where their nationals are concerned.

The Capitulations, many of which date back to the early days of Turkish power, are nothing less than guarantees to foreigners within the Ottoman dominions of full and complete immunity from the laws governing Turkish subjects. No reciprocal obligation was constituted by a Capitulation (which, by the way, means the instrument containing the terms of an agreement), as it was intended to be a purely gratuitous concession granted to Christians, by virtue of which they were tolerated upon the soil of Islam. Though the Capitulations were never regarded by the Turks as treaties—it being obvious that the Commander of the Faithful, who is likewise the Successor of the Prophet and the Shadow of Allah, could never treat a Christian ruler as an equal—they have all the character and force of treaties nevertheless, inviolability of domicile, freedom from taxation of every sort, and immunity from arrest for any offence whatsoever being but items in the comprehensive promise not to molest the foreigner. In short, the Capitulations give to the nations possessing them as complete jurisdiction over their citizens as they exercise at home, the Egyptian Government being powerless to lay so much as a finger on a foreigner who breaks its laws.

Should an American sailor, for example, become involved in a drunken affray, as sometimes happens, and wound or kill an Egyptian, the Egyptian police would no more arrest him than they would the Khedive. They would merely keep him under surveillance, meanwhile notifying the American consul, who would despatch his kavasses, as the armed guards which are attached—also by virtue of the Capitulations—to the various consulates are called, to effect the man's arrest. He would then be tried by the consul, who possesses magisterial powers, before a jury drawn from American residents or tourists, and, if found guilty, would be confined in one of the several consular prisons which the United States maintains in the Turkish Empire, although, if the sentence were a long one, he would probably be sent to a prison in this country to serve it out.

Though the Egyptian police may be perfectly aware that Georgios Miltiades runs a roulette game in the back room of his café, and keeps a disorderly house up-stairs, he can lounge in his doorway and jeer at them with perfect safety for the simple reason that he is a Greek subject, and therefore his café is as much on Greek soil as though it were in the Odos Ammonia in Athens, his consul alone possessing the right to enter it, to cause his arrest, and to inflict imprisonment or fine.

Notwithstanding the fact that the importation of hasheesh into Egypt is strictly prohibited, the government making every effort to stamp out its use by the natives, the Italian smuggler who drops anchor in Alexandria harbour with a cargo of it aboard knows perfectly well that the arm of the Egyptian law is not long enough to reach him. If, however, he is caught by the local police in the act of taking the contraband ashore, it will be confiscated, though he himself can be arrested and punished only by the Italian consular official resident at that port.

As a result of the privileges granted to foreigners by the Capitulations, the consuls stationed in Egypt, as well as in other parts of the Turkish Empire, are virtually the governors of their respective colonies, possessing powers which cause their wishes to be respected and their orders obeyed. They are expected to keep a watchful eye on the doings of their nationals, especially those who keep saloons, dance-halls, or cafés; to settle, either in or out of court, their quarrels and even their domestic disputes; to inspect the sanitary condition of their houses; to perform the marriage service for those who prefer a civil to a religious ceremony; and to attend to their burial and the administration of their estates when they die. It is scarcely necessary to add that, as a result of this anomalous state of affairs, there is constant friction and frequent conflicts of authority between the foreign consuls and the local authorities. So jealously, indeed, do the foreign powers guard the privileges conferred upon them by the Capitulations, that Cairo can have no modern drainage system because certain of the European governments refuse to give the Egyptian sanitary inspectors permission to enter the houses of their subjects.

In matters of personal law, such as marriage, divorce, guardianship, succession, and the like, foreigners are, in general, subject to their own patriarchs or other religious heads, while similar questions are decided for the natives by the native courts known as Mehkemmehs, which are presided over by the Cadis. In other matters Egyptians are justiciable before the ordinary native tribunals, which now consist of forty-six summary courts having civil jurisdiction in matters up to two thousand five hundred dollars in value and criminal jurisdiction in offences punishable by a fine or by imprisonment up to three years; seven central tribunals, each of the chambers of which consists of three judges; and a court of appeals at Cairo, about half of whose members are European. Since its reorganisation, the native Egyptian bench has won an enviable record for honesty, energy, and efficiency, and would, if granted complete jurisdictional powers, prove a great influence for good in the land.

So far as the Khedive is concerned, he has about as much to say in the direction of the government as the child Emperor of China had before the revolution put a president in his stead. Not only is Abbas Hilmi surrounded by English secretaries and advisers, without whose permission he may scarcely change his mind, but he is compelled to yield to England even in choosing the members of his ministry, the one or two attempts which he has made to assert his right to independence of action in this respect having been met by England with a military demonstration in the streets of his capital which was not abated until the office was filled by an Egyptian satisfactory to the British Consul-General.

Some years ago, when that grim old statesman, Lord Cromer, was still deus ex machina in Egypt, the Khedive, emboldened by the rapid spread of the Nationalist movement, which has for its slogan “Egypt for the Egyptians!” flatly declined to give a cabinet portfolio to a certain Egyptian politician whose appointment had been urged by the British Consul-General and who was notoriously a British tool. The following morning Lord Cromer drove to the Abdin Palace and demanded an audience with the Khedive. There were no euphemisms employed in the interview which ensued.

“I have come to obtain your Highness's signature to this decree,” announced Lord Cromer, in the blunt and aggressive manner so characteristic of him.

“Suppose, my lord,” the Khedive asked quietly, “that I decline to make an appointment which is not for the good of Egypt—what then?”

“Then, your Highness,” said Cromer menacingly, “Ceylon.”

“But suppose, my lord,” Abbas Hilmi again inquired, his face pale with anger, “that I disregard your threat to exile me to Ceylon and still refuse to sign this commission?”

Lord Cromer strode across the room to a window which commanded a view of Abdin Square and threw back the curtain. “Will your Highness look out of this window before you give me a final answer?” he asked.

The Khedive stepped to the window and looked down. There, drawn up in motionless ranks which stretched from end to end of the great square, was a brigade of British infantry, the Egyptian sun blazing down on the rows of brown helmets, on the business-like uniforms of khaki, and on the slanting lines of steel. For five full minutes Abbas Hilmi stood in silence, looking down on that grim display of power. Then he turned slowly to Lord Cromer. “Give me the pen,” he said.

The real ruler of Egypt, His Excellency Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, British Agent and Consul-General in Egypt, inspecting a guard of honour upon his recent visit to the battle-field of Omdurman.

“Riflemen made from mud.” A march past of Sudanese infantry.

THE SAVIOUR OF THE SUDAN AND SOME OF THOSE HE SAVED.

Here is another example of the harshness of the attitude which England has seen fit to adopt in her dealings with the Egyptian sovereign. In the days when Lord Kitchener, fresh from his triumphs in the Sudan, was still Sirdar of the Egyptian army, the Khedive announced that he would utilise the occasion of his approaching visit to Khartoum to review the troops of the garrison. For hours the sinewy, brown-faced soldiery marched and countermarched before the Khedive on the field of Omdurman. The infantry in their sand-coloured uniforms swept by with the swing of veterans; the field batteries—the same that had mown down the Mahdi's fanatic tribesmen—rumbled by at a gallop; the camel corps, the riders swaying on their strange mounts like vessels in a gale, paced past; then the cavalry came, as fast as the horses could lay foot to ground, lances levelled, the troopers cheering like madmen, thundering past the reviewing party in a whirlwind of colour and dust and noise. It was a fine exhibition and one of which any commanding officer might well have been proud, but the Khedive had received his military education in Austria, where faultless alignment and the ability to execute intricate parade movements are reckoned among the first requisites of a soldier; so when Lord Kitchener, the conqueror of the Sudan and the maker of the Egyptian army, reined up his charger before him, saluted, and perfunctorily asked, “I trust that your Highness is satisfied with the discipline and appearance of your forces?” Abbas Hilmi, probably as much from a spirit of hostility to the English as for any other reason, answered in a voice loud enough to be heard by all around him, “They are a fine body of men, Lord Kitchener, but I am far from satisfied with their discipline.” Officers who witnessed this incident have told me that Lord Kitchener was as amazed as though he had received a slap in the face. Within an hour his resignation as Sirdar was in the hands of the Khedive, who as promptly accepted it. But England could never permit her foremost soldier to be so wantonly and so publicly affronted, for to do so would be dangerously to impair her prestige among all classes of Egyptians. So the cable flashed a message from Downing Street to the British Agency in Cairo and a few hours later the Khedive was peremptorily informed that he could choose between apologising to Lord Kitchener and requesting him to withdraw his resignation or of abdicating in favour of his brother. Appreciating that it was wiser to apologise and keep his throne than to remain stubborn and lose it, Abbas Hilmi requested Kitchener to remain on as Sirdar—and he himself remained on as Khedive.

The men who really transact the business of the Egyptian Government are not the holders of cabinet portfolios, but the departmental under-secretaries, all of whom are English, their plans being perfunctorily submitted to their Egyptian chiefs for their approval, though they would be used whether they received it or not. The national revenues and expenditures are controlled by an English financial adviser, without whose permission the Khedive and his ministers cannot spend so much as a piastre of government funds. Similarly, the ministries of the interior, of justice, of communications, and of agriculture are dictated by English “advisers.” For upward of thirty years, in fact, the Nile country has been more absolutely governed from London than has India, or Canada, or Australia, or South Africa, or any of the Crown colonies, and this despite the fact that between England and Egypt there is no tie that is officially recognised by any foreign power. Now, thirty years is a considerable lapse of time anywhere, particularly in the East, where men mature rapidly, so that those who were children when the British came are in the prime of life now. The fact that in that interim England has had ample time to train them for the duties of governmental administration, as witness what we have accomplished among the Filipinos in less than half that time, but that she has made little, if any, effort to do so, is quite naturally taken by all thinking Egyptians as a proof that there is no sincerity back of her repeated assertions that she intends to turn Egypt over to them as soon as they are fitted to administer it. In fact, I have heard responsible British officials assert that, to their way of thinking, the natives were getting altogether too much education as it was, and that the less they were taught to think the easier it would be for England to hold the country. Frankly stated, England's attitude toward the Egyptians has been “You cannot go near the water until you know how to swim.”

Let it be perfectly clear, however, that nothing is farther from my intention than to intimate that British rule has not been beneficial to Egypt. No fair-minded person who was familiar with the appalling condition of the country and its people before the English came, and with their present state of prosperity, would cast so much as the shadow of a doubt on the wonderful improvement which has been brought about. The story of Egypt's rise from practical bankruptcy until its securities are now quoted nearly as high as English consols reads like a romance of the gold fields. During the last few years the country has been experiencing a land boom equal to that of southern California, property in Alexandria having sold at the rate of one hundred dollars a square yard; scientific irrigation, combined with the completion of the great dam at Assuan, has enormously enlarged the area of cultivation and has made Egypt the second greatest cotton-producing country in the world; the national debt has been materially reduced; and, most significant of all, Egypt's European bondholders have consented to have the interest on their bonds reduced from seven to three and a half per cent. Life and property have been made as safe in Port Said and Zagazig and the Fayoum as they are in Yonkers or Salem or New Rochelle; slavery has been abolished; official corruption has been rooted out; forced labour for public works is no longer permitted; an admirable system of railways brings the entire cultivated area within reach of the coast; hospitals have been established in all of the larger towns; while every phase of the public health has been so closely watched that the population of the country has actually doubled in the thirty years since the English came.

To my way of thinking, the most interesting chapter in the history of present-day Egypt is that which records the development of scientific irrigation. Northeast Africa being practically rainless, its sole source of water supply is the Nile, this mighty river created by torrential rains in the mountains of Abyssinia and by the overflow of equatorial lakes, and which is without tributaries in Egypt proper, having an overflow which varies with the seasons. For four months the flood rushing seaward, which is known as “high Nile,” enriches hundreds of square miles of what would otherwise be arid and worthless land. Then come eight months of low Nile, which, were it not for the genius of an English engineer, would mean unwatered fields, scanty crops, and probably famine. The British administrators, appreciating from the very outset that Egypt's entire future depended upon its agricultural prosperity, and that this, in turn, depended upon the fellaheen having an ample and steady supply of water for their farms, set their engineers at the task of devising some scheme for compelling the great river to pay tribute to the land through which it passed instead of wasting its fertilising waters in the Mediterranean. Hence the great barrage at Assuan, suggested by Sir William Willcocks, designed by Sir Benjamin Baker, built by Sir John Aird, and financed by Sir Ernest Cassel. A mile and a quarter long, containing a million tons of stone and creating a reservoir three times the area of the Lake of Geneva, this titanic barrier permits the additional irrigation of one million six hundred thousand acres of land. Though its cost was twelve million five hundred thousand dollars, it has already increased the earning power of Egypt fully thirteen million dollars annually, so it will be seen that it more than pays for itself to the country every twelvemonth. The systematic liberation, during the burning summer months, of the water thus conserved, means unfailing prosperity for Egypt, for it is almost unbelievable, to one who has not seen it with his own eyes, what agricultural magic water can work in this naturally fertile soil. As the regions capable of responding to irrigation are almost boundless, and as the water supply is almost inexhaustible, and as the engineers—and, what is far more important, the financiers—have come to appreciate that the pregnant soil can be made to pay for the cost of any reservoir, or series of reservoirs, which they may construct, it is only reasonable to assume that the great dam at Assuan is but the forerunner of many others, so that eventually the Valley of the Nile will be white with cotton and yellow with grain from the Delta to the Sudd.

But if Upper Egypt suffers from being too dry, Lower Egypt suffers from being too wet. The prosperity of the country, remember, depends almost entirely upon its cotton crop, which has an approximate value of one hundred million dollars annually, the cotton fields covering some one million six hundred thousand acres, most of which are in the Delta. That this source of revenue may be increased, the Egyptian Government has recently undertaken a huge drainage project, which will, it is estimated, when completed in 1915, redeem a great tract of flooded and hitherto worthless land, bringing a million additional acres under cultivation, almost doubling the production of cotton, and, incidentally, draining Lake Mariout, that historic body of water disappearing forever.

Agriculture and its attendant problems of irrigation and fertilisation constitute the sole hobby and amusement of the present Khedive, Abbas Hilmi II, and, consequently, he is keenly interested in anything that pertains to it, being a ready and liberal purchaser of all improved types of agricultural machinery, which he puts to practical use on the great estates which he owns near Alexandria, in the Delta, and in the Western Desert. It so happened that, while I was the consular representative of the United States at Alexandria, I received a call one morning from the president of an American concern engaged in the manufacture of agricultural and well-drilling machinery who explained that he was passing through Egypt and asked if it would be possible for me to obtain him an audience with the Khedive. The request was duly transmitted to the Grand Master of Ceremonies, and shortly thereafter a reply reached me naming the day and hour when his Highness would receive my compatriot and myself at the palace of Ras-el-Tin. Frock-coated and top-hatted, we drove to the palace on the day appointed, were received by the officials of the khedivial household, and shown into the salle de réception, where Abbas Hilmi stood awaiting us. After a cordial greeting—for the Khedive makes no secret of his liking for Americans—he drew me down beside him on a small sofa, motioning my companion to take a chair opposite us.

“It gives me particular pleasure,” I began, “to present Mr. K—— to your Highness, particularly as he is an authority on agricultural machinery—a subject in which your Highness is, I know, considerably interested.”

“Say, Khedive,” exclaimed my fellow-countryman, suddenly leaning forward and emphasising every sentence by waggling his finger under Abbas Hilmi's august nose, “I've got the niftiest little proposition in well-drilling machinery that ever struck this burg, and if you don't jump at a chance to get in on the ground floor, then all I've got to say is that you're throwing away the chance of your lifetime.”

The Khedive, being, naturally, quite unaccustomed to this form of verbal assault and still more unaccustomed to having any one waggle a finger under his nose, at first drew back haughtily; then the humour of the situation dawned upon him, and, as the river of talk which is one of the chief assets of the trained American salesman flowed steadily on, he became interested in spite of himself, now and then interjecting a pertinent question, and terminating the audience by giving the American an order for several thousand dollars' worth of American machinery, which, the last I heard of it, was giving excellent satisfaction on the royal farms.

If it is difficult to fix the exact legal status of Egypt, it is still more difficult to explain that of the Sudan, which is described in the official blue-books as “an Anglo-Egyptian condominium.” Until 1882 the Sudan was as much a part of Egypt proper as Florida is a part of the United States, but in that year Egyptian rule was interrupted by the revolt of the Mahdi, who, with his successor the Khalifa, held the country for sixteen years under a bloody and desolating tyranny. In 1896 an Anglo-Egyptian army under Sir Herbert Kitchener began operations for the recovery of the lost provinces, and, on September 2, 1898, the overthrow of the Dervish power was completed on the battle-field of Omdurman. In the following year the pleasing farce was presented of a convention being signed by the British and Egyptian Governments (or, in other words, by Lord Cromer as the representative of England in Egypt and by Lord Cromer as the virtual dictator of Egypt) which provides for the administration of the territory south of the twenty-second parallel of latitude by a governor-general appointed by Egypt with the assent of England; and which declares that the British and Egyptian flags shall be used together; that laws shall be made by proclamation; that no duties shall be levied on imports from Egypt; and that slavery is prohibited. In view of England's absolute domination of Egypt, it is obvious that the term “condominium,” as applied to the Sudan, is a euphemism for “British possession,” and that England controls this great region as completely as though her flag alone flew over it and King George's picture ornamented its stamps.

The name Sudan is short for Beled-es-Sudan, which means the Land of the Blacks. Extending from the southern frontier of Egypt to Uganda, a distance equal to that from Saint Paul to New Orleans, and from the shores of the Red Sea to the confines of the great central African kingdom of Wadai, or as far as from Chicago to Denver, the Sudan boasts an area three times that of Texas. This area, prior to the Dervish oppression, had a population estimated at eight and a half millions, but, as a result of the wholesale massacres perpetrated by the Mahdi and his followers, it has to-day less than two and a half millions. Since the return of peace, however, the Sudan is gradually recovering from the effects of the Dervishes' barbaric rule, during which the whole country was depopulated, wide tracts of land went out of cultivation, and trade was largely abandoned.

At present the poverty, the scanty population, and the lack of irrigation in the Sudan form a striking contrast to the wealth, the density of population, and the high state of cultivation found in Egypt. But, though it has been, until very recently, little better than an abandoned estate, with practically no market value, the money and labour which its British proprietors are expending upon it are already beginning to produce highly promising results. As a matter of fact, the agricultural resources of this inland empire are hardly guessed at, for the fact is too apt to be overlooked that, beyond the sandy deserts which guard its northern frontier, there exist extensive and fertile regions which, in the provinces of Gezire and Sennar alone, are estimated at fifteen millions of acres. Added to this, the Sudan is particularly fortunate in possessing, in the Blue and the White Nile, two great waterways which are destined to prove invaluable as mediums of fertilisation and transportation. There is, indeed, no room for doubt that the Sudan is destined to be in time a great agricultural centre, for cotton, wheat, and sugar-cane are staple and give every promise of prolific crops—many English experts prophesying that, when provided with facilities for irrigation, it will supplant the United States as the chief cotton-growing country of the world—while, farther afield, there are excellent cattle ranges and untold wealth in forest lands. But although much money has already been spent upon the Sudan, much more will have to be spent before it can have more than a speaking acquaintance with prosperity, for none of its three great needs—population, irrigation, and transportation—can be provided for nothing or in a hurry.

Fighting-men of the Emir of Wadai. (“They are wearing helmets and chain mail captured by their Saracenic ancestors from the Crusaders. The quilted armour on the horses will turn anything short of a bullet.”)

A gift from Ali Dinar, Sultan of Darfur, to the Sirdar of the Sudan. (The Sultan of Darfur is a semi-independent and powerful native ruler of the Southwestern Sudan.)

STRANGE PEOPLE FROM INNERMOST AFRICA.

I was told so repeatedly by people in other and more favoured parts of Africa that the Sudan was nothing but a waste of sun-scorched sand, that I went there as much to see if the description were a true one as for any other reason. You don't have to search for romance in the Sudan; it's there waiting for you when you arrive. It met me on the station platform at Wady Halfa, which is the first town across the Sudanese frontier, in the form of a fair-haired, moon-faced, khaki-clad guard on the Khartoum express, who spurned the tip I proffered him to secure a compartment to myself as insolently as the poor but virtuous heroine of the melodrama spurns the villain's gold. He drew back as though the silver I offered him were a rattlesnake in working order and his face flushed a dull brick-red; then, bowing stiffly from the waist, as a Prussian officer does when he is introduced, he turned on his heel and strode away. “I say, you got the wrong one that time, old chap,” remarked an Englishman who had witnessed the little incident and who, judging from his pith helmet and riding-breeches, was of the country. “You probably didn't know that you were offering a tip to a former captain in his German Majesty's garde du corps?” I remarked that a month before a former general of division of the Bey of Tunis had accepted with marked gratitude a tip not half so large for showing me through the Palace of the Bardo.

“Well, this Johnnie won't,” was the reply. “He may not have much money, but he's loaded to the gunwales with pride. The story of his career sounds as if it had served as a model for one of Ouida's novels. Refused to marry the girl his parents had picked out for him, so his father cut off his allowance and left him to shift for himself. He sent in his papers, went to Algeria, and enlisted—of all fool things!—in that regiment of earth's hard cases called the Foreign Legion. It didn't take him long to get all he wanted of that kind of soldiering, so one day, when he was sent down to Oran in charge of a prisoner, he swam out to a British steamer lying in the harbour, worked his passage to Alexandria, enlisted in a British cavalry regiment, took part in Kitchener's campaign against the Khalifa, was wounded in the shindy at Omdurman, and retired on a pension. Now he wears a guard's uniform and carries a green flag and walks up and down the platform shouting 'All aboard for Khartoum!' And at home he would have a coronet on his visiting-cards and spend his afternoons swaggering along Unter den Linden. Extraordinary what a man will do if he has to, isn't it? But you'll find lots more of the same kind in the Sudan. It's no place for idlers down here; every one works or gets out.”

That struck me as a pretty promising introduction to a country which, so I had been assured elsewhere, had nothing more interesting to recommend it than sun and sand, and it was with a marked rise in my anticipations that I saw my luggage stowed away in a compartment of one of the long railway carriages, which are painted white for the same reason that a man wears a white suit in the tropics, which have windows of blue glass to prevent the sun-glare from injuring the passengers' eyes, and which are provided with both outside and inside blinds in an attempt to keep out a little of the heat. Looked at from any stand-point that you please, the thirty hours' railway journey from Wady Halfa to Khartoum is far from being an enjoyable experience, for a light in your compartment means a plague of flies, while any attempt to get air, other than that kicked up by the electric fan, means suffocating dust. It being too dark to read and too hot to sleep, the only alternative is to sit in your pajamas, swelter, and smoke.

Considering the obstacles it has had to overcome, the Sudan government deserves great credit for the railways it has built and the trains it operates. The construction of the railway to Khartoum was undertaken by General Kitchener in 1896, in order to support the advance of his army, and, in spite of the difficulty of laying a railway line across the sandy and stony surface of the desert, the work was so energetically carried on that the line advanced at the rate of a mile a day. The most serious obstacle was, of course, the provision of an adequate supply of water for the engines and workmen, so a series of watering-stations was established, at which wells, sunk to a depth of eighty feet or more, tap the subterranean water. These stations are so far apart, however, that to supply the engines it is necessary to attach two or more tank-cars to each train. Still another difficulty is the shifting sand, which, during the period of the khamsin, or desert wind, proves as disastrous to railroading in the Sudan as snow does to the railroads of our own Northwest, an inch of sand throwing an engine from the rails far more effectually than a yard of snow.

It was my fortune, by the way, to encounter one of the huboubs, or sand-storms, for which the Sudan is famous. To give an adequate idea of it, however, is as impossible as it is to describe any other overwhelming phenomenon of nature. Far off across the desert we saw it approaching at the speed of a galloping horse—a great fleecy, yellowish-brown cloud which looked for all the world like the smoke of some gigantic conflagration. A distant humming, which sounded at first like the drone of a million sewing-machines, gradually rose into such a roar as might be made by a million motor-cars, and then the storm was upon us. The sand poured down as though shaken through a sieve; the landscape was blotted out; the sun was obscured and there came a yellow darkness, like that of a London fog; men and animals threw themselves, or were hurled, to the ground before the fury of the wind, while a mantle of sand, inches thick, settled upon every animate and inanimate thing. Then it was gone, as suddenly as it had come, and we were left dizzy, bewildered, blinded, half-strangled, and gasping for breath, amid a landscape which was as completely shrouded in yellow sand as an American countryside in winter is covered with snow. Under any circumstances a sand-storm is a disagreeable experience, but out on the desert, where the traveller's life frequently depends upon the plainness of the caravan trails, it ofttimes brings death in its train.

It is a gratifying compliment to American mechanical skill that the running-time between Wady Halfa and Khartoum has been shortened four hours by the recent adoption of American locomotives, which run, fittingly enough, over American-made rails. In the construction of its trains the Sudan government has avoided the irksome privacy of the European compartment car and the unremitting publicity of the American Pullman by designing a car which combines the best features of both. The first-class cars on the Sudanese express trains contain a series of coupés, each somewhat roomier than the drawing-room in a Pullman sleeper and each opening into a spacious corridor which runs the length of the car. For day use there is one long cushioned seat running crosswise of each compartment, which at night forms the lower berth, the back of the seat swinging up on hinges to form the upper. Each coupé is provided with running water, a folding table, two arm-chairs of wicker, and an electric fan, without which last, owing to the almost incredible dust which a train sets in motion, one would all but suffocate. At several stations along the line are well-equipped baths, at which the trains stop long enough for the passengers hurriedly to refresh themselves.

The mention of these railway baths recalls an incident which seems amusing enough to relate. I once had as a fellow-passenger on the journey from Khartoum northward a red-faced, white-moustached, choleric-tempered English globe-trotter, who was constitutionally opposed to the practice of tipping, which he took occasion to characterise on every possible occasion as “An outrage—a damnable outrage, sir!” Now, at these wayside bath stations it has long been the accepted custom to give the equivalent of five cents to the silent-footed native who fills the tub, brings you your soap and towels, and brushes your garments. But this the irascible Englishman, true to his principles, refused to do, still further unpopularising himself by loudly cursing the cleanliness of the tub, the warmth of the water, the size of the towels, and the slowness of the Sudanese attendant. Five minutes before the time for the train to leave the whistle gave due warning and the passengers scrambled from the bath into their clothes, which the native attendants were accustomed to brush and leave outside the bath-room doors. Every one hurried into his clothes, as I have remarked, except the anti-tipping Englishman, who almost choked with blasphemy when he found that his garments had mysteriously disappeared. Though a hasty search was instituted, not a trace of them could be found, the impassive Sudanese stolidly declaring that they had seen nothing of the effendi's missing apparel. The engine shrieked its final warning and the laughing travellers piled aboard—all, that is, but the Englishman, who rushed onto the platform clad in a bath towel, only to retreat before the shocked glances of the women passengers. My last impression of that God-forsaken, sun-blistered bath station in the desert was the rapidly diminishing sound of his imprecations as he continued his fruitless search for his garments. There was no other train, I should add, for three days. Weeks later I heard that his clothes were eventually returned to him by a native, who said that he had found them, neatly folded, underneath a near-by culvert.