CARPENTER’S
WORLD TRAVELS

Familiar Talks About Countries
and Peoples

WITH THE AUTHOR ON THE SPOT AND
THE READER IN HIS HOME, BASED
ON THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND
MILES OF TRAVEL
OVER THE GLOBE

CAIRO TO KISUMU
EGYPT—THE SUDAN—KENYA COLONY

ON THE GREAT ASWAN DAM

“The dam serves also as a bridge over the Nile. I crossed on a car, my motive power being two Arab boys who trotted behind.”

CARPENTER’S WORLD TRAVELS

CAIRO TO KISUMU
Egypt—The Sudan—Kenya
Colony

BY
FRANK G. CARPENTER
LITT.D., F.R.G.S.

WITH 115 ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS
AND TWO MAPS IN COLOUR

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1923

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
FRANK G. CARPENTER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

First Edition

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the publication of this book on Egypt, the Sudan, and Kenya Colony, I wish to thank the Secretary of State for letters which have given me the assistance of the official representatives of our government in the countries visited. I thank also our Secretary of Agriculture and our Secretary of Labour for appointing me an Honorary Commissioner of their Departments in foreign lands. Their credentials have been of the greatest value, making available sources of information seldom open to the ordinary traveller. To the British authorities in the regions covered by these travels I desire to express my thanks for exceptional courtesies which have greatly aided my investigations.

I would also thank Mr. Dudley Harmon, my editor, and Miss Ellen McBryde Brown and Miss Josephine Lehmann for their assistance and coöperation in the revision of the notes dictated or penned by me on the ground.

While most of the illustrations are from my own negatives, these have been supplemented by photographs from the Publishers’ Photo Service and the American Geographic Society.

F. G. C.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CAIRO TO KISUMU
EGYPT—THE SUDAN—KENYA COLONY

CHAPTER I
JUST A WORD BEFORE WE START

This volume on Egypt, Nubia, the Sudan, and Kenya Colony is based upon notes made during my several trips to this part of the world. At times the notes are published just as they came hot from my pen, taking you back, as it were, to the occasion on which they were written. Again they are modified somewhat to accord with present conditions.

For instance, I made my first visit to Egypt as a boy, when Arabi Pasha was fomenting the rebellion that resulted in that country’s being taken over by the British. I narrowly escaped being in the bombardment of Alexandria and having a part in the wars of the Mahdi, which came a short time thereafter. Again, I was in Egypt when the British had brought order out of chaos, and put Tewfik Pasha on the throne as Khedive. I had then the talk with Tewfik, which I give from the notes I made when I returned from the palace, and I follow it with a description of my audience with his son and successor, Abbas Hilmi, sixteen years later. Now the British have given Egypt a nominal independence, and the Khedive has the title of King.

In the Sudan I learned much of the Mahdi through my interview with Sir Francis Reginald Wingate, then the Governor General of the Sudan and Sirdar of the British army at Khartum, and later gained an insight into the relations of the British and the natives from Earl Cromer, whom I met at Cairo. These talks enable one to understand the Nationalist problems of the present and to appreciate some of the changes now going on.

In Kenya Colony, which was known as British East Africa until after the World War, I was given especial favours by the English officials, and many of the plans that have since come to pass were spread out before me. I then tramped over the ground where Theodore Roosevelt made his hunting trips through the wilds, and went on into Uganda and to the source of the Nile.

These travels have been made under all sorts of conditions, but with pen and camera hourly in hand. The talks about the Pyramids were written on the top and at the foot of old Cheops, those about the Nile in harness on the great Aswan Dam, and those on the Suez Canal either on that great waterway or on the Red Sea immediately thereafter. The matter thus partakes of the old and the new, and of the new based upon what I have seen of the old. If it be too personal in character and at times seems egotistic, I can only beg pardon by saying—the story is mine, and as such the speaker must hold his place in the front of the stage.

Beggars and street sellers alike believe that every foreigner visiting Egypt is not only as rich as Crœsus but also a little touched in the head where spending is concerned, and therefore fair game for their extravagant demands.

Among the upper classes an ever-lighter face covering is being adopted. This is indicative of the advance of the Egyptian woman toward greater freedom.

CHAPTER II
THE GATEWAY TO EGYPT

I am again in Alexandria, the great sea-port of the valley of the Nile. My first visit to it was just before Arabi Pasha started the rebellion which threw Egypt into the hands of the British. I saw it again seven years later on my way around the world. I find now a new city, which has risen up and swallowed the Alexandria of the past.

The Alexandria of to-day stands upon the site of the greatest of the commercial centres of antiquity, but its present buildings are as young as those of New York, Chicago, or Boston. It is one of the boom towns of the Old World, and has all grown up within a century. When George Washington was president it was little more than a village; it has now approximately a half million inhabitants.

This is a city with all modern improvements. It has wide streets as well paved as those of Washington, public squares that compare favourably with many in Europe, and buildings that would be an ornament to any metropolis on our continent. It is now a city of street cars and automobiles. Its citizens walk or ride to its theatres by the light of electricity, and its rich men gamble by reading the ticker in its stock exchange. It is a town of big hotels, gay cafés, and palaces galore. In addition to its several hundred thousand Mohammedans, it has a large population of Greeks, Italians, and other Europeans, among them some of the sharpest business men of the Mediterranean lands. Alexandria has become commercial, money making, and fortune hunting. The rise and fall of stocks, the boom in real estate, and the modern methods of getting something for nothing are its chief subjects of conversation, and the whole population is after the elusive piastre and the Egyptian pound as earnestly as the American is chasing the nickel and the dollar.

The city grows because it is at the sea-gate to Egypt and the Sudan. It waxes fat on the trade of the Nile valley and takes toll of every cent’s worth of goods that comes in and goes out. More than four thousand vessels enter the port every year and in the harbour there are steamers from every part of the world. I came to Egypt from Tripoli via Malta, where I took passage on a steamer bound for India and Australia, and any week I can get a ship which within fifteen days will carry me back to New York.

One of the things to which Alexandria owes its greatness is the canal that Mehemet Ali, founder of the present ruling dynasty of Egypt, had dug from this place to the Nile. This remarkable man was born the son of a poor Albanian farmer and lived for a number of years in his little native port as a petty official and tobacco trader. He first came into prominence when he led a band of volunteers against Napoleon in Egypt. Later still he joined the Sultan of Turkey in fighting the Mamelukes for the control of the country. The massacre of the Mamelukes in 1811 left the shrewd Albanian supreme in the land, and, after stirring up an Egyptian question that set the Powers of Europe more or less by the ears with each other and with the Sultan of Turkey, he was made Viceroy of Egypt, with nominal allegiance to the Turkish ruler. When he selected Alexandria as his capital, it was a village having no connection with the Nile. He dug a canal fifty miles long to that great waterway, through which a stream of vessels is now ever passing, carrying goods to the towns of the valley and bringing out cotton, sugar, grain, and other products, for export to Europe. The canal was constructed by forced labour. The peasants, or fellaheen, to the number of a quarter of a million, scooped the sand out with their hands and carried it away in baskets on their backs. It took them a year to dig that fifty-mile ditch, and they were so overworked that thirty thousand of them died on the job.

Ismail Pasha, grandson of Mehemet Ali, made other improvements on the canal and harbour, and after the British took control of Egypt they bettered Alexandria in every possible way.

It has now one of the best of modern harbours. The port is protected by a breakwater two miles in length, and the biggest ocean steamers come to the quays. There are twenty-five hundred acres of safe anchorage inside its haven, while the arrangements for coaling and for handling goods are unsurpassed.

These conditions are typical of the New Egypt. Old Mother Nile, with her great dams and new irrigation works, has renewed her youth and is growing in wealth like a jimson weed in an asparagus bed. When I first saw the Nile, its valley was a country of the dead, with obelisks and pyramids as its chief landmarks. Then its most interesting characters were the mummified kings of more than twenty centuries ago and the principal visitors were antiquity hunters and one-lunged tourists seeking a warm winter climate. These same characters are here to-day, but in addition have come the ardent dollar chaser, the capitalist, and the syndicate. Egypt is now a land of banks and stock exchanges. It is thronged with civil engineers, irrigation experts, and men interested in the development of the country by electricity and steam. The delta, or the great fan of land which begins at Cairo and stretches out to the Mediterranean, is gridironed with steel tracks and railroad trains, continuing almost to the heart of central Africa.

I find Egypt changing in character. The Mohammedans are being corrupted by the Christians, and the simple living taught by the Koran, which commands the believer to abstain from strong drink and other vices, has become infected with the gay and giddy pleasures of the French. In many cases the system of the harem is being exchanged for something worse. The average Moslem now has but one wife, but in many cases he has a sweetheart in a house around the corner, “and the last state of that man is worse than the first.”

The ghouls of modern science are robbing the graves of those who made the Pyramids. A telephone line has been stretched out of Cairo almost to the ear of the Sphinx, and there is a hotel at the base of the Pyramid of Cheops where English men and women drink brandy and soda between games of tennis and golf.

Cotton warehouses and docks extend for a mile along the Mahmudiyeh Canal connecting the port of Alexandria with the Nile River, and the prosperity of the city rises and falls with the price of cotton in the world’s markets.

Nubian women sell fruit and flowers on the streets of Alexandria to-day, but once their kings ruled all Egypt and defeated the armies of Rome. They became early converts to Christianity but later adopted Mohammedanism.

The Egypt of to-day is a land of mighty hotels and multitudinous tourists. For years it has been estimated that Americans alone spend several million dollars here every winter, and the English, French, and other tourists almost as much. It is said that in the average season ten thousand Americans visit the Nile valley and that it costs each one of them at least ten dollars for every day of his stay.

When I first visited this country the donkey was the chief means of transport, and men, women, and children went about on long-eared beasts, with Arab boys in blue gowns following behind and urging the animals along by poking sharp sticks into patches of bare flesh, as big as a dollar, which had been denuded of skin for the purpose. The donkey and the donkey boy are here still, but I can get a street car in Alexandria that will take me to any part of the town, and I frequently have to jump to get out of the way of an automobile. There are cabs everywhere, both Alexandria and Cairo having them by thousands.

The new hotels are extravagant beyond description. In the one where I am now writing the rates are from eighty to one hundred piastres per day. Inside its walls I am as far from Old Egypt as I would be in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The servants are French-speaking Swiss in “swallow-tails”, with palms itching for fees just as do those of their class in any modern city. In my bedroom there is an electric bell, and I can talk over the telephone to our Consul General at Cairo. On the register of the hotel, which is packed with guests, I see names of counts by the score and lords by the dozen. The men come to dinner in steel-pen coats and the women in low-cut evening frocks of silk and satin. There is a babel of English, French, and German in the lounge while the guests drink coffee after dinner, and the only evidences one perceives of a land of North Africa and the Moslems are the tall minarets which here and there reach above the other buildings of the city, and the voices of the muezzins as they stand beneath them and call the Mohammedans to prayer.

The financial changes that I have mentioned are by no means confined to the Christians. The natives have been growing rich, and the Mohammedans for the first time in the history of Egypt have been piling up money. Since banking and money lending are contrary to the Koran, the Moslems invest their surplus in real estate, a practice which has done much to swell all land values.

Egypt is still a country of the Egyptians, notwithstanding the overlordship of the British and the influx of foreigners. It has now more than ten million people. Of these, three out of every four are either Arabs or Copts. Most of them are Mohammedans, although there are, all told, something like eight hundred and sixty thousand Copts, descendants of the ancient Egyptians, who have a rude kind of Christianity, and are, as a body, better educated and wealthier than the Mussulmans.

The greater part of the foreign population of Egypt is to be found in Alexandria and Cairo, and in the other towns of the Nile valley, as well as in Suez and Port Said. There are more of the Greeks than of any other nation. For more than two thousand years they have been exploiting the Egyptians and the Nile valley and are to-day the sharpest, shrewdest, and most unscrupulous business men in it. They do much of the banking and money lending and until the government established banks of its own and brought down the interest rate they demanded enormous usury from the Egyptian peasants. It is said that they loaned money on lands and crops at an average charge of one hundred and fifty per cent. per annum.

This was changed, however, by the establishment of the Agricultural Bank. The government, which controls that bank, lends money to the farmers at eight per cent. to within half of the value of their farms. To-day, since the peasants all over Egypt can get money at this rate, the Greeks have had to reduce theirs.

The Italians number about forty thousand and the French twenty thousand. There are many Italian shops here in Alexandria, while there are hundreds of Italians doing business in Cairo. They also furnish some of the best mechanics. Many of them are masons and the greater part of the Aswan Dam and similar works were constructed by them.

There are also Germans, Austrians, and Russians, together with a few Americans and Belgians. The British community numbers a little over twenty thousand. Among the other foreigners are some Maltese and a few hundred British East Indians.

Sitting here at Alexandria in a modern hotel surrounded by the luxuries of Paris or New York, I find it hard to realize that I am in one of the very oldest cities of history. Yesterday I started out to look up relics of the past, going by mile after mile of modern buildings, though I was travelling over the site of the metropolis that flourished here long before Christ was born. From the antiquarian’s point of view, the only object of note still left is Pompey’s Pillar and that is new in comparison with the earliest history of Old Egypt, as it was put up only sixteen hundred years ago, when Alexandria was already one of the greatest cities of the world. The monument was supposed to stand over the grave of Pompey, but it was really erected by an Egyptian prefect in honour of the Roman emperor, Diocletian. It was at one time a landmark for sailors, for there was always upon its top a burning fire which was visible for miles over the Mediterranean Sea. The pillar is a massive Corinthian column of beautifully polished red granite as big around as the boiler of a railroad locomotive and as high as a ten-story apartment house. It consists of one solid block of stone, standing straight up on a pedestal. It was dug out of the quarries far up the Nile valley, brought down the river on rafts and in some way lifted to its present position. In their excavations about the pedestal, the archæologists learned of its comparatively modern origin and, digging down into the earth far below its foundation, discovered several massive stone sphinxes. These date back to old Alexandria and were chiselled several hundreds of years before Joseph and Mary brought the baby Jesus on an ass, across the desert, into the valley of the Nile that he might not be killed by Herod the King.

This city was founded by Alexander the Great three hundred and thirty-two years before Christ was born. It probably had then more people than it has to-day, for it was not only a great commercial port, but also a centre of learning, religion, and art. It is said to have had the grandest library of antiquity. The manuscripts numbered nine hundred thousand and artists and students came from all parts to study here. At the time of the Cæsars it was as big as Boston, and when it was taken by the Arabs, along about 641 A.D., it had four thousand palaces, four hundred public baths, four hundred places of amusement, and twelve thousand gardens. When Alexander the Great founded it he brought in a colony of Jews, and at the time the Mohammedans came the Jewish quarter numbered forty thousand.

At Alexandria St. Mark first preached Christianity to the Egyptians, and subsequently the city became one of the Christian centres of the world. Here Hypatia lived, and here, as she was about to enter a heathen temple to worship, the Christian monks, led by Peter the Reader, tore her from her chariot and massacred her. They scraped her live flesh from her bones with oyster shells, and then tore her body limb from limb.

Here, too, Cleopatra corrupted Cæsar and later brought Marc Antony to a suicidal grave. There are carvings of the enchantress of the Nile still to be seen on some of the Egyptian temples far up the river valley. I have a photograph of one which is in good preservation in the Temple of Denderah. Its features are Greek rather than Egyptian, for she was more of a Greek than a Simon-pure daughter of the Nile. She was not noted for beauty, but she had such wonderful charm of manner, sweetness of voice, and brilliancy of intellect, that she was able to allure and captivate the greatest men of her time.

Cleopatra’s first Roman lover was Julius Cæsar, who came to Alexandria to settle the claims of herself and her brother to the throne of Egypt. Her father, who was one of the Ptolemies, had at his death left his throne to her younger brother and herself, and according to the custom the two were to marry and reign together. One of the brother’s guardians, however, had dethroned and banished Cleopatra. She was not in Egypt when Cæsar came. It is not known whether it was at Cæsar’s request or not, but the story goes that she secretly made her way back to Alexandria, and was carried inside a roll of rich Syrian rugs on the back of a servant to Cæsar’s apartments. Thus she was presented to the mighty Roman and so delighted him that he restored her to the throne. When he left for Rome some time later he took her with him and kept her there for a year or two. After the murder of Cæsar, Cleopatra, who had returned to Egypt, made a conquest of Marc Antony and remained his sweetheart to the day when he committed suicide upon the report that she had killed herself. Antony had then been conquered by Octavianus, his brother-in-law, and it is said that Cleopatra tried to capture the heart of Octavianus before she took her own life by putting the poisonous asp to her breast.

CHAPTER III
KING COTTON ON THE NILE

The whole of to-day has been spent wandering about the cotton wharves of Alexandria. They extend for a mile or so up and down the Mahmudiyeh Canal, which joins the city to the Nile, and are flanked on the other side by railroads filled with cotton trains from every part of Egypt. These wharves lie under the shadow of Pompey’s Pillar and line the canal almost to the harbour. Upon them are great warehouses filled with bales and bags. Near by are cotton presses, while in the city itself is a great cotton exchange where the people buy and sell, as they do at Liverpool, from the samples of lint which show the quality of the bales brought in from the plantations.

Indeed, cotton is as big a factor here as it is in New Orleans, and the banks of this canal make one think of that city’s great cotton market. The warehouses are of vast extent, and the road between them and the waterway is covered with bales of lint and great bags of cotton seed. Skullcapped blue-gowned Egyptians sit high up on the bales on long-bedded wagons hauled by mules. Other Egyptians unload the bales from the cars and the boats and others carry them to the warehouses. They bear the bales and the bags on their backs, while now and then a man may be seen carrying upon his head a bag of loose cotton weighing a couple of hundred pounds. The cotton seed is taken from the boats in the same way, seed to the amount of three hundred pounds often making one man’s load.

Late in the afternoon I went down to the harbour to see the cotton steamers. They were taking on cargoes for Great Britain, Russia, France, Germany, and the United States. This staple forms three fourths of the exports of Egypt. Millions of pounds of it are annually shipped to the United States, notwithstanding the fact that we raise more than two thirds of all the cotton of the world. Because of its long fibre, there is always a great demand for Egyptian cotton, which is worth more on the average than that of any other country.

For hundreds of years before the reign of that wily old tyrant, Mehemet Ali, whose rule ended with the middle of the nineteenth century, Egypt had gone along with the vast majority of her people poor, working for a wage of ten cents or so a day, and barely out of reach of starvation all the time. Mehemet Ali saw that what she needed to become truly prosperous and raise the standard of living was some crop in which she might be the leader. It was he who introduced long-staple cotton, a product worth three times as much as the common sort, and showed what it could do for his country. Since then King Cotton has been the money maker of the Nile valley, the great White Pharaoh whom the modern Egyptians worship. He has the majority of the Nile farmers in his employ and pays them royally. He has rolled up a wave of prosperity that has engulfed the Nile valley from the Mediterranean to the cataracts and the prospects are that he will continue to make the country richer from year to year. The yield is steadily increasing and with the improved irrigation methods it will soon be greater than ever. From 1895 to 1900 its average annual value was only forty-five million dollars; but after the Aswan Dam was completed it jumped to double that sum.

Though cotton is the big cash crop of Egypt, small flocks of sheep are kept on many of the farms and the women spin the wool for the use of the family.

Sugar is Egypt’s crop of second importance. Heavy investments of French and British capital in the Egyptian industry were first made when political troubles curtailed Cuba’s production.

The greater part of Upper and Lower Egypt can be made to grow cotton, and cotton plantations may eventually cover over five million five hundred thousand acres. If only fifty per cent. of this area is annually put into cotton it will produce upward of two million bales per annum, or more than one sixth as much as the present cotton crop of the world. In addition to this, there might be a further increase by putting water into some of the oases that lie in the valley of the Nile outside the river bottom, and also by draining the great lakes about Alexandria and in other parts of the lower delta.

Egypt has already risen to a high place among the world’s cotton countries. The United States stands first, British India second, and Egypt third. Yet Egypt grows more of this staple for its size and the area planted than any other country on the globe. Its average yield is around four hundred and fifty pounds per acre, which is far in excess of ours. Our Department of Agriculture says that our average is only one hundred and ninety pounds per acre, although we have, of course, many acres which produce five hundred pounds and more.

It is, however, because of its quality rather than its quantity that Egyptian cotton holds such a commanding position in the world’s markets. Cotton-manufacturing countries must depend on Egypt for their chief supply of long-staple fibre. There are some kinds that sell for double the amount our product brings. It is, in fact, the best cotton grown with the exception of the Sea Island raised on the islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. The Sea Island cotton has a rather longer fibre than the Egyptian. The latter is usually brown in colour and is noted for its silkiness, which makes it valuable for manufacturing mercerized goods. We import an enormous quantity of it to mix with our cotton, and we have used the Egyptian seed to develop a species known as American-Egyptian, which possesses the virtues of both kinds.

There is a great difference in the varieties raised, according to the part of the Nile valley from which each kind comes. The best cotton grows in the delta, which produces more than four fifths of the output.

A trip through the Nile cotton fields is an interesting one. The scenes there are not in the least like those of our Southern states. Much of the crop is raised on small farms and every field is marked out with little canals into which the water is introduced from time to time. There are no great farm houses in the landscape and no barns. The people live in mud villages from which they go out to work in the fields. They use odd animals for ploughing and harrowing and the crop is handled in a different way from ours.

Let me give you a few of the pictures I have seen while travelling through the country. Take a look over the delta. It is a wide expanse of green, spotted here and there with white patches. The green consists of alfalfa, Indian corn, or beans. The white is cotton, stretching out before me as far as my eye can follow it.

Here is a field where the lint has been gathered. The earth is black, with windrows of dry stalks running across it. Every stalk has been pulled out by the roots and piled up. Farther on we see another field in which the stalks have been tied into bundles. They will be sold as fuel and will produce a full ton of dry wood to the acre. There are no forests in Egypt, where all sorts of fuel are scarce. The stalks from one acre will sell for two dollars or more. They are used for cooking, for the farm engines on the larger plantations, and even for running the machinery of the ginning establishments. In that village over there one may see great bundles of them stored away on the flat roofs of the houses. Corn fodder is piled up beside them, the leaves having been torn off for stock feed. A queer country this, where the people keep their wood piles on their roofs!

In that field over there they are picking cotton. There are scores of little Egyptian boys and girls bending their dark brown faces above the white bolls. The boys for the most part wear blue gowns and dirty white skullcaps, though some are almost naked. The little girls have cloths over their heads. All are barefooted. They are picking the fibre in baskets and are paid so much per hundred pounds. A boy will gather thirty or forty pounds in a day and does well if he earns as much as ten cents.

The first picking begins in September. After that the land is watered, and a second picking takes place in October. There is a third in November, the soil being irrigated between times. The first and second pickings, which yield the best fibre, are kept apart from the third and sold separately.

After the cotton is picked it is put into great bags and loaded upon camels. They are loading four in that field at the side of the road. The camels lie flat on the ground, with their long necks stretched out. Two bags, which together weigh about six hundred pounds, make a load for each beast. Every bag is as long and wide as the mattress of a single bed and about four feet thick. Listen to the groans of the camels as the freight is piled on. There is one actually weeping. We can see the tears run down his cheeks.

Now watch the awkward beasts get up. Each rises back end first, the bags swaying to and fro as he does so. How angry he is! He goes off with his lower lip hanging down, grumbling and groaning like a spoiled child. The camels make queer figures as they travel. The bags on each side their backs reach almost to the ground, so that the lumbering creatures seem to be walking on six legs apiece.

Looking down the road, we see long caravans of camels loaded with bales, while on the other side of that little canal is a small drove of donkeys bringing in cotton. Each donkey is hidden by a bag that completely covers its back and hides all but its little legs.

In these ways the crop is brought to the railroad stations and to the boats on the canals. The boats go from one little waterway to another until they come into the Mahmudiyeh Canal, and thence to Alexandria. During the harvesting season the railroads are filled with cotton trains. Some of the cotton has been ginned and baled upon the plantations, and the rest is in the seed to be ginned at Alexandria. There are ginning establishments also at the larger cotton markets of the interior. Many of them are run by steam and have as up-to-date machinery as we have. At these gins the seed is carefully saved and shipped to Alexandria by rail or by boat.

The Nile bridge swings back to let through the native boats sailing down to Alexandria with cargoes of cotton and sugar grown on the irrigated lands farther upstream.

A rainless country, Egypt must dip up most of its water from the Nile, usually by the crude methods of thousands of years ago. Here an ox is turning the creaking sakieh, a wheel with jars fastened to its rim.

Egypt is a land that resists change, where even the native ox, despite the frequent importation of foreign breeds, has the same features as are found in the picture writings of ancient times. He is a cousin of the zebu.

The Egyptians put more work on their crop than our Southern farmers do. In the first place, the land has to be ploughed with camels or buffaloes and prepared for the planting. It must be divided into basins, each walled around so that it will hold water, and inside each basin little canals are so arranged that the water will run in and out through every row. The whole field is cut up into these beds, ranging in size from twenty-four to seventy-five feet square.

The cotton plants are from fourteen to twenty inches apart and set in rows thirty-five inches from each other. It takes a little more than a bushel of seed to the acre. The seeds are soaked in water before planting, any which rise to the surface being thrown away. The planting is done by men and boys at a cost of something like a dollar an acre. The seeds soon sprout and the plants appear in ten or twelve days. They are thinned by hand and water is let in upon them, the farmers taking care not to give them too much. The plants are frequently hoed and have water every week or so, almost to the time of picking. The planting is usually done in the month of March, and, as I have said, the first picking begins along in September.

I have been told that cotton, as it is grown here, exhausts the soil and that the people injure the staple and reduce the yield by overcropping. It was formerly planted on the same ground only every third year, the ground being used in the interval for other crops or allowed to lie fallow. At present some of the cotton fields are worked every year and others two years out of three. On most of the farms cotton is planted every other year, whereas the authorities say that in order to have a good yield not more than forty per cent. of a man’s farm should be kept to this crop from year to year. Just as in our Southern states, a year of high cotton prices is likely to lead to overcropping and reduced profits, and vice versa. Another trouble in Egypt, and one which it would seem impossible to get around, is the fact that cotton is practically the only farm crop. This puts the fellaheen more or less at the mercy of fluctuating prices and changing business conditions; so that, like our cotton farmers of the South, they have their lean years and their fat years.

Egypt also has had a lot of trouble with the pink boll weevil. This pestiferous cotton worm, which is to be found all along the valley of the Nile, has also done great damage on the plantations of the Sudan, a thousand miles south of Alexandria. It is said that in one year it destroyed more than ten million dollars’ worth of cotton and that hundreds of the smaller farmers were ruined. The government has been doing all it can to wipe out the plague, but is working under great disadvantages. The Egyptian Mohammedans are fatalists, looking upon such things as the boll weevil as a judgment of God and believing they can do nothing to avert the evil. Consequently, the government had to inaugurate a system of forced labour. It made the boys and men of the cotton region turn out by the thousands to kill the worms under the superintendence of officials. The results were excellent, and as those who were forced into the work were well paid the farmers are beginning to appreciate what has been done for them.

The government helps the cotton planters in other ways. Its agricultural department sends out selected seed for planting a few thousand acres to cotton, contracting with each man who takes it that the government will buy his seed at a price above that of the market. The seed coming in from that venture is enough to plant many more thousands of acres, and this is distributed at cost to such of the farmers as want it. More than one quarter of all seed used has latterly been supplied in this way.

The government has also induced the planters to use artificial fertilizers. It began this some years ago, when it was able to distribute thirty thousand dollars’ worth of chemical fertilizer, and the demand so increased that within a few years more than ten times as much was distributed annually.

CHAPTER IV
THROUGH OLD EGYPT TO CAIRO

On my way to Cairo I have taken a run through the delta, crossing Lower Egypt to the Suez Canal and returning through the Land of Goshen.

The soil is as rich and the grass is as green now as it was when Joseph picked out this land as the best in Egypt for his famine-stricken father Jacob. Fat cattle by the hundreds grazed upon the fields, camels with loads of hay weighing about a ton upon their backs staggered along the black roads. Turbaned Egyptians rode donkeys through the fields, and the veiled women of this Moslem land crowded about the train at the villages. On one side a great waste of dazzling yellow sand came close to the edge of the green fields, and we passed grove after grove of date-palm trees holding their heads proudly in the air, and shaking their fan-like leaves to every passing breeze. They seemed to whisper a requiem over the dead past of this oldest of the old lands of the world.

The sakka, or water carrier, fills his pigskin bag at the river, and then peddles it out, with the cry: “O! may God recompense me,” announcing his passage through the streets of village or town.

Up and down the slippery banks of the Nile goes the centuries-long procession of fellah women bearing head burdens—water-jars or baskets of earth from excavations.

As we neared Cairo and skirted the edge of the desert, away off to the right against the hazy horizon rose three ghost-like cones of gray out of the golden sand. These were the Pyramids, and the steam engine of the twentieth century whistled out a terrible shriek as we came in sight of them. To the left were the Mokattam Hills, with the citadel which Saladin built upon them, while to the right flowed the great broad-bosomed Nile, the mother of the land of Egypt, whose earth-laden waters have been creating soil throughout the ages, and which to-day are still its source of life.

Egypt, in the words of Herodotus, is the gift of the Nile. This whole rainless country was once a bed of sterile sand so bleak and bare that not a blade of grass nor a shrub of cactus would grow upon it. This mighty river, rising in the heights of Africa and cutting its way through rocks and hills, has brought down enough sediment to form the tillable area of Egypt. South of Cairo, for nearly a thousand miles along its banks, there extends a strip of rich black earth which is only from three to nine miles wide. Below the city the land spreads out in a delta shaped somewhat like the segment of a circle, the radii of which jut out from Cairo, while the blue waters of the Mediterranean edge its arc. This narrow strip and fan form the arable land of Egypt. The soil is nowhere more than thirty-five feet deep. It rests on a bed of sand. On each side of it are vast wastes of sand and rock, with not a spot of green to relieve the ceaseless glare of the sun. The green goes close to the edge of the desert, where it stops as abruptly as though it were cut off by a gardener. Nearly everywhere up the Nile from Cairo the strip is so narrow that you can stand at one side of the valley and see clear across it.

Thus, in one sense, Egypt is the leanest country in the world, but it is the fattest in the quality of the food that nature gives it. Through the ages it has had one big meal every year. At the inundation of the Nile, for several months the waters spread over the land and were allowed to stand there until they dropped the rich, black fertilizing sediment brought down from the African mountains. This sediment has produced from two to three crops a year for Egypt through the centuries and for a long time was the sole manure that the land had. The hundreds of thousands of cattle, donkeys, camels, and sheep that feed off the soil give nothing back to it, for their droppings are gathered up by the peasant women and girls, patted into shape, and dried for use as fuel. Until late years the only manure that was used in any part of the country was that of pigeons and chickens, or the crumbled ruins of ancient towns, which, lying through thousands of years, have become rubbish full of fertilizing properties. Recently, as I have said, the use of artificial fertilizers has been encouraged with excellent results.

The irrigation of Egypt is now conducted on scientific lines. The water is not allowed to spread over the country as it was years ago, but the arable area is cut up by canals, and there are immense irrigating works in the delta, to manage which during the inundation hundreds of thousands of men are required. Just at the point of the delta, about twelve miles above Cairo, is a great dam, or barrage, that raises the waters of the Nile into a vast canal from which they flow over the fan-like territory of Lower Egypt. All through Egypt one sees men scooping the water up in baskets from one level to another, and everywhere he finds the buffalo, the camel, or donkey turning the wheels that operate the crude apparatus for getting the water out of the river and onto the land.

But let me put into a nutshell the kernel of information we need to understand this wonderful country. We all know how Egypt lies on the map of northeastern Africa, extending a thousand miles or more southward from the Mediterranean Sea. The total area, including the Nubian Desert, the region between the Nile and the Red Sea, and the Sinai Peninsula, is more than seven times as large as the State of New York, but the real Egypt, that is, the cultivated and settled portion comprising the Nile valley and delta, lacks just four square miles of being as large as our State of Maryland. Of this portion, fully one third is taken up in swamps, lakes, and the surface of the Nile, as well as in canals, roads, and plantations of dates, so that the Egypt of farms that actually supports the people is only about as big as Massachusetts. Though this contains little more than eight thousand square miles, nevertheless its population is nearly one eighth of ours. Crowd every man, woman, and child who lives in the United States into four states the size of Maryland, and you have some idea of the density of the population here. Belgium, that hive of industry, with its mines of iron and coal and its myriad factories, has only about six hundred people per square mile; and China, the leviathan of Asia, has less than two hundred and fifty. Little Egypt is supporting something like one thousand per square mile of its arable area; and nearly all of them are crowded down near the Mediterranean.

Of these people, about nine tenths are Mohammedans, one twelfth Christians, Copts, and others; and less than one half of one per cent. Jews. Among the Christians are many Greeks of the Orthodox Church and Italian Roman Catholics from the countries on the Mediterranean Sea.

Nature has much to do with forming the character and physique of the men who live close to her, and in Egypt the unvarying soil, desert, sky, and river, make the people who have settled in the country become, in the course of a few generations, just like the Egyptians themselves. Scientists say that the Egyptian peasantry of to-day is the same as in the past, and that this is true even of the cattle. Different breeds have been imported from time to time only to change into the Egyptian type, and the cow to-day is the same as that pictured in the hieroglyphics of the tombs made thousands of years ago. The Egyptian cow is like the Jersey in shape and form save that its neck is not quite so delicate and its horns are a trifle shorter. Its colour is a rich red. Its milk is full of oil, and its butter is yellow. It has been asserted that the Jersey cow originally came from Egypt, and was taken to the Island of Jersey by the Phœnicians in some of their voyages ages ago.

But to return to the Nile, the source of existence of this great population. Next to the Mississippi, with the Missouri, it is the longest river of the world. The geographers put its length at from thirty-seven hundred to four thousand miles. It is a hundred miles or so longer than the Amazon, and during the last seventeen hundred miles of its course not a single branch comes in to add to its volume. For most of the way it flows through a desert of rock and sand as dry as the Sahara. In the summer many of the winds that sweep over Cairo are like the blast from a furnace, and in Upper Egypt a dead dog thrown into the fields will turn to dust without an offensive odour. The dry air sucks the moisture out of the carcass so that there is no corruption.

Nearly all of the cultivated lands lie along the Nile banks and depend for their supply of water on the rise of the river, caused by the rains in the region around its sources. When the Nile is in flood the waters are coloured dark brown by the silt brought down from the high lands of Abyssinia. When it is low, as in June, they are green, because of the growth of water plants in the upper parts of the river. At flood time the water is higher than the land and the fields are protected by banks or dikes along the river. If these banks break, the fields are flooded and the crops destroyed.

We are accustomed to look upon Egypt as a very hot country. This is not so. The greater part of it lies just outside the tropics, so that it has a warm climate and a sub-tropical plant life. The hottest month is June and the coldest is January. Ice sometimes forms on shallow pools in the delta, but there is no snow, although hail storms occur occasionally, with very large stones. There is no rain except near the coast and a little near Cairo. Fogs are common in January and February and it is frequently damp in the cultivated tracts.

For centuries Egypt has been in the hands of other nations. The Mohammedan Arabs and the Ottoman Turks have been bleeding her since their conquest. Greece once fed off her. Rome ate up her substance in the days of the Cæsars and she has had to stake the wildest extravagancies of the khedives of the past. It must be remembered that Egypt is almost altogether agricultural, and that all of the money spent in and by it must come from what the people can raise on the land. The khedives and officials have piped, and Egypt’s farmers have had to pay.

It was not long before my second visit to Egypt that the wastefulness and misrule of her officials had practically put her in the hands of a receiver. She had gone into debt for half a billion dollars to European creditors—English, French, German, and Spanish—and England and France had arranged between them to pull her out. Later France withdrew from the agreement and Great Britain undertook the job alone.

At that time the people were ground down to the earth and had barely enough for mere existence. Taxes were frightfully high and wages pitifully low. The proceeds from the crops went mostly to Turkey and to the bankers of Europe who had obtained the bonds given by the government to foreigners living in Egypt. In fact, they had as hard lives as in the days of the most tyrannical of the Pharaohs.

But since that time the British have had a chance to show what they could do, irrigation projects and railroad schemes have been put through, cotton has come into its own, and I see to-day a far more prosperous land and people than I did at the end of the last century.

CHAPTER V
FELLAHEEN ON THEIR FARMS

For the last month I have been travelling through the farms of the Nile valley. I have visited many parts of the delta, a region where the tourist seldom stops, and have followed the narrow strip that borders the river for several hundred miles above Cairo.

The delta is the heart of Egypt. It has the bulk of the population, most of the arable land, the richest soil, and the biggest crops. While it is one of the most thickly settled parts of the world, it yields more to the acre than any other region on earth, and its farm lands are the most valuable. I am told that the average agricultural yield for all Europe nets a profit of thirty-five dollars per acre, but that of Lower Egypt amounts to a great deal more. Some lands produce so much that they are renting for fifty dollars an acre, and there are instances where one hundred dollars is paid.

I saw in to-day’s newspapers an advertisement of an Egyptian land company, announcing an issue of two and one half million dollars’ worth of stock. The syndicate says in its prospectus that it expects to buy five thousand acres of land at “the low rate of two hundred dollars per acre,” and that by spending one hundred and fifty thousand dollars it can make that land worth four hundred dollars per acre within three years. Some of this land would now bring from two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars per acre, and is renting for twenty dollars per acre per annum. The tract lies fifty miles north of Cairo and is planted in cotton, wheat, and barley.

Such estates as the above do not often come into the market, however. Most of Egypt is in small farms, and little of it is owned by foreigners. Six sevenths of the farms belong to the Egyptians, and there are more than a million native land owners. Over one million acres are in tracts of from five to twenty acres each. Many are even less than an acre in size. The number of proprietors is increasing every year and the fellaheen, or fellahs, are eager to possess land of their own. It used to be that the Khedive had enormous estates, but when the British Government took possession some of the khedivial acres came to it. These large holdings have been divided and have been sold to the fellaheen on long-time and easy payments. Many who then bought these lands have paid for them out of their crops and are now rich. As it is to-day there are but a few thousand foreigners who own real estate in the valley of the Nile.

The farmers who live here in the delta have one of the garden spots of the globe to cultivate. The Nile is building up more rich soil every year, and the land, if carefully handled, needs but little fertilization. It is yielding two or three crops every twelve months and is seldom idle. Under the old system of basin irrigation the fields lay fallow during the hot months of the summer, but the canals and dams that have now been constructed enable much of the country to have water all the year round, so that as soon as one crop is harvested another is planted.

The primitive norag is still seen in Egypt threshing the grain and cutting up the straw for fodder. It moves on small iron wheels or thin circular plates and is drawn in a circle over the wheat or barley.

The Egyptian agricultural year has three seasons. Cereal crops are sown in November and harvested in May; the summer crops are cotton, sugar, and rice; the fall crops, sown in July, are corn, millet, and vegetables.

The mud of the annual inundations is no longer sufficient fertilizer for the Nile farm. The fellaheen often use pigeon manure on their lands and there are hundreds of pigeon towers above the peasants’ mud huts.

The whole of the delta is one big farm dotted with farm villages and little farm cities. There are mud towns everywhere, and there are half-a-dozen big agricultural centres outside the cities of Alexandria and Cairo. Take, for instance, Tanta, where I am at this writing. It is a good-sized city and is supported by the farmers. It is a cotton market and it has a great fair, now and then, to which the people come from all over Egypt to buy and sell. A little to the east of it is Zagazig, which is nearly as large, while farther north, upon the east branch of the Nile, is Mansura, another cotton market, with a rich farming district about it. Damietta and Rosetta, at the two mouths of the Nile, and Damanhur, which lies west of the Rosetta branch of the Nile, not far from Lake Edku, are also big places. There are a number of towns ranging in population from five to ten thousand.

The farms are nothing like those of the United States. We should have to change the look of our landscape to imitate them. There are no fences, no barns, and no haystacks. The country is as bare of such things as an undeveloped prairie. The only boundaries of the estates are little mud walls; and the fields are divided into patches some of which are no bigger than a tablecloth. Each patch has furrows so made that the water from the canals can irrigate every inch.

The whole country is cut up by canals. There are large waterways running along the branches of the Nile, and smaller ones connecting with them, to such an extent that the face of the land is covered with a lacework veil of little streams from which the water can be let in and out. The draining of the farms is quite as important as watering, and the system of irrigation is perfect, inasmuch as it brings the Nile to every part of the country without letting it flood and swamp the lands.

Few people have any idea of the work the Egyptians have to do in irrigating and taking care of their farms. The task of keeping these basins in order is herculean. As the Nile rushes in, the embankments are watched as the Dutch watch the dikes of Holland. They are patrolled by the village headmen and the least break is filled with stalks of millet and earth. The town officials have the right to call out the people to help, and no one refuses. If the Nile gets too high it sometimes overflows into the settlements and the mud huts crumble. During the flood the people go out in boats from village to village. The donkeys, buffaloes, and bullocks live on the dikes, as do also the goats, sheep, and camels.

The people sow their crops as soon as the floods subside. Harvest comes on within a few months, and unless they have some means of irrigation, in addition to the Nile floods, they must wait until the following year before they can plant again. With a dam like the one at Aswan, the water supply can be so regulated that they can grow crops all the year round. This is already the condition in a great part of the delta, and it is planned to make the same true of the farms of Upper Egypt.

As for methods of raising the water from the river and canals and from one level to another, they vary from the most modern of steam pumps and windmills to the clumsy sakieh and shadoof, which are as old as Egypt itself. All the large land owners are now using steam pumps. There are many estates, owned by syndicates, which are irrigated by this means, and there are men who are buying portable engines and pumps and hiring them out to the smaller farmers in much the same way that threshing machines are rented in the United States and Canada. Quite a number of American windmills are already installed. Indeed, it seems to me almost the whole pumping of the Nile valley might be done by the wind. The breezes from the desert as strong as those from the sea sweep across the valley with such regularity that wind pumps could be relied upon to do efficient work.

At present, however, water is raised in Egypt mostly by its cheap man power or by animals. Millions of gallons are lifted by the shadoof. This is a long pole balanced on a support. From one end of the pole hangs a bucket, and from the other a heavy weight of clay or stone, about equal to the weight of the bucket when it is full of water. A man pulls the bucket down into the water, and by the help of the weight on the other end, raises it and empties it into a canal higher up. He does this all day long for a few cents, and it is estimated that he can in ten days lift enough water to irrigate an acre of corn or cotton. At this rate there is no doubt it could be done much cheaper by pumps.

Another rude irrigation machine found throughout the Nile valley from Alexandria to Khartum is the sakieh, which is operated by a blindfolded bullock, buffalo, donkey, or camel. It consists of a vertical wheel with a string of buckets attached to its rim. As the wheel turns round in the water the buckets dip and fill, and as it comes up they discharge their contents into a canal. This vertical wheel is moved by another wheel set horizontally, the two running in cogs, and the latter being turned by some beast of burden. There is usually a boy, a girl, or an old man, who sits on the shaft and drives the animal round.

The screech of these sakiehs is loud in the land and almost breaks the ear drums of the tourists who come near them. I remember a remark that one of the Justices of our Supreme Court made while we were stopping together at a hotel at Aswan with one of these water-wheels in plain sight and hearing. He declared he should like to give an appropriation to Egypt large enough to enable the people to oil every sakieh up and down the Nile valley. I doubt, however, whether the fellaheen would use the oil, if they had it, for they say that the blindfolded cattle will not turn the wheel when the noise stops.

I also saw half-naked men scooping up the water in baskets and pouring it into the little ditches, into which the fields are cut up. Sometimes men will spend not only days, but months on end in this most primitive method of irrigation.

The American farmer would sneer at the old-fashioned way in which these Egyptians cultivate the soil. He would tell them that they were two thousand years behind the time, and, still, if he were allowed to take their places he would probably ruin the country and himself. Most of the Egyptian farming methods are the result of long experience. In ploughing, the land is only scratched. This is because the Nile mud is full of salts, and the silt from Abyssinia is of such a nature that the people have to be careful not to plough so deep that the salts are raised from below and the crop thereby ruined. In many cases there is no ploughing at all. The seed is sown on the soft mud after the water is taken off, and pressed into it with a wooden roller or trodden in by oxen or buffaloes.

AFRICA

Last of the continents to be conquered by the explorers, and last to be divided up among the land-hungry powers, is now slowly yielding to the white man’s civilization.

Where ploughs are used they are just the same as those of five thousand years ago. I have seen carvings on the tombs of the ancient Egyptians representing the farm tools used then, and they are about the same as those I see in use to-day. The average plough consists of a pole about six feet long fastened to a piece of wood bent inward at an acute angle. The end piece, which is shod with iron, does the ploughing. The pole is hitched to a buffalo or ox by means of a yoke, and the farmer walks along behind the plough holding its single handle, which is merely a stick set almost upright into the pole. The harrow of Egypt is a roller provided with iron spikes. Much of the land is dug over with a mattock-like hoe.

Most of the grain here is cut with sickles or pulled out by the roots. Wheat and barley are threshed by laying them inside a ring of well-pounded ground and driving over them a sledge that rests on a roller with sharp semicircular pieces of iron set into it. It is drawn by oxen, buffaloes, or camels. Sometimes the grain is trodden out by the feet of the animals without the use of the rollers, and sometimes there are wheels of stone between the sled-runners which aid in hulling the grain. Peas and beans are also threshed in this way. The grain is winnowed by the wind. The ears are spread out on the threshing floor and the grains pounded off with clubs or shelled by hand. Much of the corn is cut and laid on the banks of the canal until the people have time to husk and shell it.

The chief means of carrying farm produce from one place to another is on bullocks and camels. The camel is taken out into the corn field while the harvesting is going on. As the men cut the corn they tie it up into great bundles and hang one bundle on each side of his hump. The average camel can carry about one fifth as much as one horse hitched to a wagon or one tenth as much as a two-horse team. Hay, straw, and green clover are often taken from the fields to the markets on camels. Such crops are put up in a baglike network that fits over the beast’s hump and makes him look like a hay or straw-stack walking off upon legs. Some of the poorer farmers use donkeys for such purposes, and these little animals may often be seen going along the narrow roads with bags of grain balanced upon their backs.

I have always looked upon Egypt as devoted mostly to sugar and cotton. I find it a land of wheat and barley as well. It has also a big yield of clover and corn. The delta raises almost all of the cotton and some of the sugar. Central and Upper Egypt are grain countries, and in the central part Indian and Kaffir corn are the chief summer crops. Kaffir corn is, to a large extent, the food of the poorer fellaheen, and is also eaten by the Bedouins who live in the desert along the edges of the Nile valley. Besides a great deal of hay, Egypt produces some of the very best clover, which is known as bersine. It has such rich feeding qualities that a small bundle of it is enough to satisfy a camel.

This is also a great stock country. The Nile valley is peppered with camels, donkeys, buffaloes, and sheep, either watched by herders or tied to stakes, grazing on clover and other grasses. No animal is allowed to run at large, for there are no fences and the cattle thief is everywhere in evidence. The fellaheen are as shrewd as any people the world over, so a strayed animal would be difficult to recover. Much of the stock is watched by children. I have seen buffaloes feeding in the green fields with naked brown boys sitting on their backs and whipping them this way and that if they attempt to get into the crops adjoining. The sheep and the goats are often watched by the children or by men who are too old to do hard work. The donkeys, camels, and cows are usually tied to stakes and can feed only as far as their ropes will reach.

The sheep of Egypt are fine. Many of them are of the fat-tailed variety, some brown and some white. The goats and sheep feed together, there being some goats in almost every flock of sheep.

The donkey is the chief riding animal. It is used by men, women, and children, and a common sight is the veiled wife of one of these Mohammedan farmers seated astride one of the little fellows with her feet high up on its sides in the short stirrups. But few camels are used for riding except by the Bedouins out in the desert, and it is only in the cities that many wheeled vehicles are to be seen.

Suppose we go into one of the villages and see how these Egyptian farmers live. The towns are collections of mud huts with holes in the walls for windows. They are scattered along narrow roadways at the mercy of thick clouds of dust. The average hut is so low that one can look over its roof when seated on a camel. It seldom contains more than one or two rooms, and usually has a little yard outside where the children and the chickens roll about in the dust and where the donkey is sometimes tied.

Above some of the houses are towers of mud with holes around their sides. These towers are devoted to pigeons, which are kept by the hundreds and which are sold in the markets as we sell chickens. The pigeons furnish a large part of the manure of Egypt both for gardens and fields. The manure is mixed with earth and scattered over the soil.

Almost every village has its mosque, or church, and often, in addition, the tomb of some saint or holy man who lived there in the past. The people worship at such tombs, believing that prayers made there avail more than those made out in the fields or in their own huts.

There are no water works in the ordinary country village. If the locality is close to the Nile the drinking and washing water is brought from there to the huts by the women, and if not it comes from the village well. It is not difficult to get water by digging down a few feet anywhere in the Nile valley; and every town has its well, which is usually shaded by palm trees. It is there that the men gather about and gossip at night, and there the women come to draw water and carry it home upon their heads.

The farmers’ houses have no gardens about them, and no flowers or other ornamental decoration. The surroundings of the towns are squalid and mean, for the peasants have no comforts in our sense of the word. They have but little furniture inside their houses. Many of them sleep on the ground or on mats, and many wear the same clothing at night that they wear in the daytime. Out in the country shoes, stockings, and underclothes are comparatively unknown. Only upon dress-up occasions does a man or woman put on slippers.

The cooking and housekeeping are done entirely by the women. The chief food is a coarse bread made of corn or millet baked in thick cakes. This is broken up and dipped into a kind of a bean stew seasoned with salt, pepper, and onions. The ordinary peasant seldom has meat, for it is only the rich who can afford mutton or beef. At a big feast on the occasion of a wedding, a farming nabob sometimes brings in a sheep which has been cooked whole. It is eaten without forks, and is torn limb from limb, pieces being cut out by the guests with their knives.

Next to the market where sugar cane is sold is the “Superb Mosque,” built by Sultan Hassan nearly 600 years ago. Besides being a centre for religious activities, it is also a gathering place for popular demonstrations and political agitation.

Cairo is the largest city on the African continent, and one of the capitals of the Mohammedan world. Its flat-roofed buildings are a yellowish-white, with the towers and domes of hundreds of mosques rising above them.

Of late Egypt has begun to raise vegetables for Europe. The fast boats from Alexandria to Italy carry green stuff, especially onions, of which the Nile valley is now exporting several million dollars’ worth per annum. Some of these are sent to England, and others to Austria and Germany.

As for tobacco, Egypt is both an exporter and importer. “Egyptian” cigarettes are sold all over the world, but Egypt does not raise the tobacco of which they are made. Its cultivation has been forbidden for many years, and all that is used is imported from Turkey, Greece, and Bosnia. About four fifths of it comes from Turkey.

Everyone in Egypt who can afford it smokes. The men have pipes of various kinds, and of late many cigarettes have been coming into use. A favourite smoke is with a water pipe, the vapour from the burning tobacco being drawn by means of a long tube through a bowl of water upon which the pipe sits, so that it comes cool into the mouth.

The chicken industry of Egypt is worth investigation by our Department of Agriculture. Since the youth of the Pyramids, these people have been famous egg merchants and the helpful hen is still an important part of their stock. She brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, for her eggs form one of the items of national export. During the last twelve months enough Egyptian eggs have been shipped across the Mediterranean to England and other parts of Europe to have given one to every man, woman, and child in the United States. Most of them went to Great Britain.

The Egyptians, moreover, had incubators long before artificial egg hatching was known to the rest of the world. There is a hatchery near the Pyramids where the farmers trade fresh eggs for young chicks at two eggs per chick, and there is another, farther down the Nile valley, which produces a half million little chickens every season. It is estimated that the oven crop of chickens amounts to thirty or forty millions a year, that number of little fowls being sold by the incubator owners when the baby chicks are about able to walk.

Most of our incubators are of metal and many are kept warm by oil lamps. Those used here are one-story buildings made of sun-dried bricks. They contain ovens which are fired during the hatching seasons. The eggs are laid upon cut straw in racks near the oven, and the firing is so carefully done that the temperature is kept just right from week to week. The heat is not gauged by the thermometer, but by the judgment and experience of the man who runs the establishment. A fire is started eight or ten days before the eggs are put in, and from that time on it is not allowed to go out until the hatching season is over. The eggs are turned four times a day while hatching. Such establishments are cheaply built, and so arranged that it costs almost nothing to run them. One that will hatch two hundred thousand chickens a year can be built for less than fifty dollars, while for about a dollar and a half per day an experienced man can be hired to tend the fires, turn the eggs, and sell the chickens.

CHAPTER VI
THE PROPHET’S BIRTHDAY

Stand with me on the Hill of the Citadel and take a look over Cairo. We are away up over the river Nile, and far above the minarets of the mosques that rise out of the vast plain of houses below. We are at a height as great as the tops of the Pyramids, which stand out upon the yellow desert off to the left. The sun is blazing and there is a smoky haze over the Nile valley, but it is not dense enough to hide Cairo. The city lying beneath us is the largest on the African continent and one of the mightiest of the world. It now contains about eight hundred thousand inhabitants; and in size is rapidly approximating Heliopolis and Memphis in the height of their ancient glory.

Of all the Mohammedan cities of the globe, Cairo is growing the fastest. It is more than three times as big as Damascus and twenty times the size of Medina, where the Prophet Mohammed died. The town covers an area equal to fifty quarter-section farms; and its buildings are so close together that they form an almost continuous structure. The only trees to be seen are those in the French quarter, which lies on the outskirts.

The larger part of the city is of Arabian architecture. It is made up of flat-roofed, yellowish-white buildings so crowded along narrow streets that they can hardly be seen at this distance. Here and there, out of the field of white, rise tall, round stone towers with galleries about them. They dominate the whole city, and under each is a mosque, or Mohammedan church. There are hundreds of them in Cairo. Every one has its worshippers, and from every tower, five times a day, a shrill-voiced priest calls the people to prayers. There is a man now calling from the Mosque of Sultan Hasan, just under us. The mosque itself covers more than two acres, and the minaret is about half as high as the Washington Monument. So delighted was Hasan with the loveliness of this structure that when it was finished he cut off the right hand of the architect so that it would be impossible for him to design another and perhaps more beautiful building. Next it is another mosque, and all about us we can see evidences that Mohammedanism is by no means dead, and that these people worship God with their pockets as well as with their tongues.

In the Alabaster Mosque, which stands at my back, fifty men are now praying, while in the courtyard a score of others are washing themselves before they go in to make their vows of repentance to God and the Prophet. Not far below me I can see the Mosque El-Azhar, which has been a Moslem university for more than a thousand years, and where something like ten thousand students are now learning the Koran and Koranic law.

Here at Cairo I have seen the people preparing to take their pilgrimage to Mecca, rich and poor starting out on that long journey into the Arabian desert. Many go part of the way by water. The ships leaving Alexandria and Suez are crowded with pilgrims and there is a regular exodus from Port Sudan and other places on this side of the Red Sea. They go across to Jidda and there lay off their costly clothing before they make their way inland, each clad only in an apron with a piece of cloth over the left shoulder. Rich and poor dress alike. Many of the former carry gifts and other offerings for the sacred city. Such presents cost the Egyptian government alone a quarter of a million dollars a year; for not only the Khedive but the Mohammedan rulers of the Sudan send donations. The railroad running from far up the Nile to the Red Sea makes special rates to pilgrimage parties.

Yet I wonder whether this Mohammedanism is not a religion of the lips rather than of the heart. These people are so accustomed to uttering prayers that they forget the sense. The word God is heard everywhere in the bazaars. The water carrier, who goes about with a pigskin upon his back, jingling his brass cups to announce his business, cries out: “May God recompense me!” and his customer replies, as he drinks, by giving him a copper in the name of the Lord. The lemonade peddler, who carries a glass bottle as big as a four-gallon crock, does the same, and I venture to say that the name of the Deity is uttered here more frequently than in any other part of the world. It is through this custom of empty religious formulas that I am able to free myself of the beggars of the city. I have learned two Arab words: “Allah yatik,” which mean: “May God give thee enough and to spare.” When a beggar pesters me I say these words gently. He looks upon me in astonishment, then touches his forehead in a polite Mohammedan salute and goes away.

On my second visit to Egypt I was fortunate in being in Cairo on the birthday of the Prophet. It was a feast day among the Mohammedans, and at night there was a grand religious celebration at the Alabaster Mosque which Mehemet Ali, that Napoleon of Egypt, built on the Citadel above Cairo. Its minarets, overlooking the Nile valley, the great deserts and the vast city of Cairo, blazed with light, and from them the cry of the muezzins sounded shrill on the dusky air: “Allah is great! There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah! Come to worship! Allah is great! There is no God but Allah!”

As this call reverberated through the city, Mohammedans of all classes started for the Citadel. Some came in magnificent turnouts, bare-legged, gaudily dressed syces with wands in their hands running in front of them to clear the way. Some came upon donkeys. Some moved along in groups of three or four on foot. The Khedive came with the rest, soldiers with drawn swords going in front of his carriage and a retinue of cavalry following behind.

The Alabaster Mosque covers many acres. It has a paved marble court, as big as a good-sized field, around which are cloisters. This is roofed with the sky, and in the midst of it is a great marble fountain where the worshippers bathe their feet and hands before they go in to pray. The mosque is at the back of this court, facing Mecca. Its many domes rise to a great height and its minarets seem to pierce the sky. It is built of alabaster, but its exterior has become worn and pitted by the sands of the desert, which have been blown against its walls until it has nothing of the grandeur which it must have shown when its founder worshipped within it.

The interior, however, was wonderfully beautiful that night, when its gorgeous decorations were shown off by the thousands of lights of this great service. Under the gaslight and lamplight the tinsel which during the day shocks the taste was softened and beautified. The alabaster of the walls became as pure as Mexican onyx, and the rare Persian rugs that lay upon the floor took on a more velvety tint.

See it all again with me. In the eye of your mind cover an acre field with the richest of oriental rugs; erect about it walls of pure white alabaster with veins as delicate as those of the moss agate; let these walls run up for hundreds of feet; build galleries around them and roof the whole with great domes in which are windows of stained glass; hang lamps by the thousands from the ceiling, place here and there an alabaster column. Now you have some idea of this mosque as it looked on the night of Mohammed’s birthday.

You must, however, add the worshippers to the picture. Thousands of oriental costumes; turbans of white, black, and green; rich gowns and sober, long-bearded, dark faces, shine out under the lights in every part of the building. Add likewise the mass of Egyptian soldiers in gold lace and modern uniforms, with red fezzes on their heads, and the hundreds of noble Egyptians in European clothes. There are no shoes in the assemblage, and the crowd moves about on the rugs in bare feet or stockings.

What a babel of sounds goes up from the different parts of the building, and how strange are the sights! Here a dozen old men squat on their haunches, facing each other, and rock back and forth as they recite passages of the Koran. Here is a man worshipping all alone; there is a crowd of long-haired, wild-eyed ascetics with faces of all shades of black, yellow, and white. They are so dirty and emaciated they make one think of the hermits of fiction. They stand in a ring and go through the queerest of antics to the weird music of three great tambourines and two drums played by worshippers quite as wild looking as themselves. It is a religious gymnastic show, the horrible nature of which cannot be described upon paper.

When I first entered the mosque, these Howling Dervishes were squatted on the floor, moving their bodies up and down in unison, and grunting and gasping as though the whole band had been attacked with the colic. A moment later they arose and began to bob their heads from one side to the other until I thought their necks would be dislocated by the jerks they gave them. They swung their ears nearly down to their shoulders. The leader stood in the centre, setting the time to the music. Now he bent over so that his head was almost level with his knees, then snapped his body back to an erect position. The whole band did likewise, keeping up this back-breaking motion for fifteen minutes. All the time they howled out “Allah, Allah!” Their motions increased in wildness. With every stoop the music grew louder and faster. They threw off their turbans, and their long hair, half matted, now brushed the floor as they bent down in front, now cut the air like whips as they threw themselves back. Their eyes began to protrude, one man frothed at the mouth. At last they reached such a state of fanatical ecstasy that not for several minutes after the leader ordered them to stop, were they able to do so. The Howling Dervishes used to cut themselves in their rites and often they fall down in fits in their frenzy. They believe that such actions are passports to heaven.

A great occasion in Cairo is the sending of a new gold-embroidered carpet to the sanctuary in Mecca, there to absorb holiness at the shrine of the Prophet. The old carpet is brought back each year, and its shreds are distributed among the Faithful.

The mosque of the Citadel in Cairo was built of alabaster by Mehemet Ali, the “Napoleon of Egypt.” When Mohammed’s birthday is celebrated, its halls and courts are choked with thousands of Moslem worshippers and are the scene of fanatical religious exercises.

In another part of the room was a band of Whirling Dervishes, who, dressed in high sugar-loaf hats and long white gowns, whirled about in a ring, with their arms outstretched, going faster and faster, until their skirts stood out from their waists like those of a circus performer mounted on a bareback steed, as she dances over the banners and through the hoops.

There were Mohammedans of all sects in the mosque, each going through his own pious performances without paying any attention to the crowds that surrounded him. In his religious life the Mussulman is a much braver man than the Christian. At the hours for prayer he will flop down on his knees and touch his head on the ground in the direction of Mecca, no matter who are his companions or what his surroundings. He must take off his shoes before praying, and I saw yesterday in the bazaars of Cairo a man clad in European clothes who was praying in his little box-like shop with his stocking feet turned out toward the street, which was just then full of people. In the heel of each stocking there was a hole as big as a dollar, and the bare skin looked out at the crowds.

The Moslems of Egypt, like those elsewhere, have their fast days, during which, from sunrise to sunset, they do not allow a bit of food nor a drop of water to touch their lips. Some of them carry the fast to such an extent that they will not even swallow their saliva, and in this dry climate their thirst must be terrible. The moment the cannon booms out the hour of sunset, however, they dash for water and food, and often gorge themselves half the night. You may see a man with a cigarette in his hand waiting until the sun goes down in order that he may light it, or another holding a cup of water ready while he listens for the sound of the cannon. This fasting is very severe upon the poor people of Egypt, who have to work all day without eating. The rich often stay up for the whole night preceding a fast day, and by going to bed toward morning they are able to sleep the day through and get up in time for a big meal after sunset.

The poor are the best Mohammedans, and many of the more faithful are much alarmed at the laxity in religious duty that comes through contact with Europeans. A missionary friend told me of a Moslem sheik who was offered a glass of cognac by a brother believer on a fast day. Shortly after this he met my friend and spoke of the incident, saying: “I don’t know what we are coming to. Good Mohammedans think they can drink without sinning, and this man laughed when I told him it was fast day and said that fasts were for common people, and that religion was not of much account, anyhow. We have many infidels among us, and it seems to me that the world is in a very bad way.”

The Moslems have many doctrines worthy of admiration and the morals of the towns of Egypt which have not been affected by European civilization are, I am told, far better than those of Cairo or Alexandria. A traveller to a town on the Red Sea, which is purely Mohammedan, says that the place has had no litigation for years, and there is no drunkenness or disorder. The people move on in a quiet, simple way, with their sheik settling all their troubles. Mohammedan Cairo is quite as orderly as the part in which the nobility and the Europeans live. It contains the bazaars and the old buildings of the Arabian part of the city, and is by all odds the most interesting section.

CHAPTER VII
IN THE BAZAARS OF CAIRO

Cairo is the biggest city in Africa. It is larger than St. Louis and one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Orient. The Christians and the Mohammedans here come together, and the civilizations of the East and the West touch each other. The modern part of Cairo has put on the airs of European capitals. It has as wide streets as Paris, and a park, full of beautiful flowers and all varieties of shrubs and trees, lies in its very centre. Here every night the military bands play European and American airs, and veiled Mohammedan women walk about with white-faced French or Italian babies, of which they are the nurses. People from every part of the world listen to the music. The American jostles the Englishman while the German and the Frenchman scowl at each other; the Greek and the Italian move along side by side, as they did in the days when this country was ruled by Rome, and now and then you see an old Turk in his turban and gown, or a Bedouin Arab, or a white-robed, fair-faced heathen from Tunis.

The European section of Cairo now has magnificent hotels. It is many a year since the foreign traveller in Egypt has had to eat with his fingers, or has seen a whole sheep served up to him by his Egyptian host as used to be the case. To-day the food is the same as that you get in Paris, and is served in the same way. One can buy anything he wants in European Cairo, from a gas-range to a glove-buttoner, and from a set of diamond earrings to a pair of shoestrings. Yesterday I had a suit of clothes made by an English tailor, and I drive about every day in an American motor car. There are, perhaps, fifty thousand Europeans living in the city, and many American visitors have learned the way to this great winter resort. The bulk of the Europeans are French and Italian, and the Mouski, one of the main business streets, is lined for a mile with French and Italian shops. There are thousands of Greeks, and hundreds of Jews from Palestine, the states of southern Europe, and Asia Minor. One sees every type of Caucasian moving about under dark red fezzes and dressed in black clothes with coats buttoned to the chin.

The foreign part of Cairo is one of great wealth. There are mansions and palaces here that would be called handsome in the suburbs of New York, and property has greatly risen in value. Many of the finest houses are owned by Greeks, whose shrewd brains are working now as in the classic days. The Greeks look not unlike us and most of them talk both English and French. They constitute the money aristocracy of Alexandria, and many of the rich Greek merchants of that city have palatial winter homes here. As I have said, they are famed as bankers and are the note-shavers of Egypt. They lend money at high rates of interest, and I am told that perhaps one fifth of the lands of the country belong to them. They have bought them in under mortgages to save their notes. The lower classes of the Greeks are the most turbulent of Egypt’s population.

FROM CAIRO TO KISUMU

Embraces the right shoulder of Africa which for centuries withstood the attempts of rulers and traders to establish their dominion over the continent

The tourist who passes through Cairo and stays at one of the big hotels is apt to think that the city is rapidly becoming a Christian one. As he drives over asphalt streets lined with the fine buildings of the European quarter, it seems altogether English and French. If he is acquainted with many foreigners he finds them living in beautiful villas, or in apartment houses like those of our own cities. He does his shopping in modern stores and comes to the conclusion that the Arab element is passing away.

This is not so. Cairo is a city of the Egyptians. Not one tenth of its inhabitants are Christians and it is the hundreds of thousands of natives who make up the life blood of this metropolis. They are people of a different world from ours, as we can see if we go down for a stroll through their quarters. They do business in different ways and trade much as they have been trading for generations. Their stores are crowded along narrow streets that wind this way and that until one may lose himself in them. Nearly every store is a factory, and most of the goods offered are made in the shop where they are sold.

Although the foreigner and his innovations are in evidence, native Cairo is much the same now in characters, customs, and dress as it was in the days of Haroun Al Raschid. Here the visionary Alnaschar squats in his narrow, cell-like store, with his basket of glass before him. He holds the tube of a long water pipe in his mouth and is musing on the profits he will make from peddling his glass, growing richer and richer, until his sovereign will be glad to offer him his daughter in marriage and he will spurn her as she kneels before him. We almost expect to see the glass turned over as it is in the story, and his castles in the air shattered with his kick. Next to him is a turbaned Mohammedan who reminds us of Sinbad the Sailor, and a little farther on is a Barmecide washing his hands with invisible soap in invisible water, and apparently inviting his friends to come and have a great feast with him. Here two long-gowned, gray-bearded men are sitting on a bench drinking coffee together; and there a straight, tall maiden, robed in a gown which falls from her head to her feet, with a long black veil covering all of her face but her eyes, looks over the wares of a handsome young Syrian, reminding us of how the houris shopped in the days of the “Thousand and One Nights.”

Oriental Cairo is a city of donkeys and camels. In the French quarter you may have a ride on an electric street car for a few cents, or you may hire an automobile to carry you over the asphalt. The streets of the native city are too narrow for such things, and again and again we are crowded to the wall for fear that the spongy feet of the great camels may tread upon us. We are grazed by loaded donkeys, carrying grain, bricks, or bags on their backs, and the donkey boy trotting behind an animal ridden by some rich Egyptian or his wife calls upon us to get out of the way.

The donkeys of Egypt are small, rugged animals. One sees them everywhere with all sorts of odd figures mounted on them. Here is an Egyptian woman sitting astride of one, her legs bent up like a spring and her black feet sticking out in the stirrups. She is dressed in black, in a gown which makes her look like a balloon. There is a long veil over her face with a slit at the eyes, where a brass spool separates it from the head-dress and you see nothing but strips of bare skin an inch wide above and below. Here is a sheik with a great turban and a long gown; his legs, ending in big yellow slippers, reach almost to the ground on each side of his donkey. He has no bridle, but guides the beast with a stick. A donkey-boy in bare feet, whose sole clothing consists of a blue cotton nightgown and a brown skullcap, runs behind poking up the donkey with a stick. Now he gives it a cut, and the donkey jerks its hinder part from one side to the other as it scallops the road in attempting to get out of the way of the rod. Here is a drove of donkeys laden with bags for the market. They are not harnessed, and the bags are balanced upon their backs without ropes or saddles.

The ordinary donkey of Egypt is very cheap indeed, but the country has some of the finest asses and mules I have ever seen, and there are royal white jackasses ridden by wealthy Mohammedans which are worth from five hundred to a thousand dollars per beast. The best of these come from Mecca. They are pacers, fourteen hands high, and very swift. The pedigrees of some of them are nearly as long as those of Arabian horses. It is said that the Arabs who raise them will never sell a female of this breed.

But to return to the characters of the bazaar. They are of the oddest, and one must have an educated eye to know who they are. Take that man in a green turban, who is looked up to by his fellows. The dragoman tells us that he has a sure passport to Heaven, and that the green turban is a sign that he has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and thus earned the right to the colours of the Prophet. Behind him comes a fine-featured, yellow-faced man in a blue gown wearing a turban of blue. We ask our guide who he may be and are told, with a sneer, that he is a Copt. He is one of the Christians of modern Egypt, descended from the fanatical band described by Charles Kingsley in his novel “Hypatia.” Like all his class he is intelligent, and like most of them well dressed. The Copts are among the shrewdest of the business Egyptians, and with prosperity they have grown in wealth. They are money lenders and land speculators. Many of them have offices under the government, and not a few have amassed fortunes. Some of them are very religious and some can recite the Bible by heart. They differ from their neighbours in that they believe in having only one wife.

The crowd in these streets is by no means all men, however. There are women scattered through it, and such women! We look at them, and as their large soulful eyes, fringed with dark lashes, smile back at us, we wish that the veils would drop from their faces. The complexions which can be seen in the slit in the veils are of all colours from black to brunette, and from brown to the creamy white of the fairest Circassian. We are not particularly pleased with their costume, but our dragoman tells us that they dress better at home. The better classes wear black bombazine garments made so full that they hide every outline of the figure. Some of them have their cloaks tied in at the waist so that they look like black bed ticks on legs. Here, as one raises her skirt, we see that she wears bloomers falling to her ankles, which make us think of the fourteen-yard breeches worn by the girls of Algiers. The poorer women wear gowns of blue cotton, a single garment and the veil making up a whole costume. Astride their shoulders or their hips some of them carry babies, many of whom are as naked as when they were born.

The streets of old Cairo resound with the cries of vendors of sweetmeats and drinks. Lemonade is dispensed from a great brass bottle on the back of the seller, while around his waist is a tin tray of glasses or cups.

Over many warehouses, shops, and even stables of old Cairo are homes of the well-to-do with marble floors covered with fine rugs. The supporting arch is much used because long timbers are not available.

Here is a lady with a eunuch, who, as black as your hat and as sombre as the Sphinx, guards the high-born dame lest she should flirt with that handsome young man from Tunis sitting cross-legged in the midst of his bottles of attar of roses. He offers a bottle to the lady while he talks of its merits in the most flowery terms. Here is a barefooted girl, who, strange to say, has no veil over her face, but whose comely features might be considered by a jealous lover to warrant such protection. Her chin is tattooed and the nails of her fingers and toes are stained deep orange with henna. She has a great tray on her head and is calling out her wares in the strangest language: “Buy my oranges! They are sweet as honey, and I know that God will make my basket light.”

This is in Arabic, and one hears the same extravagant sort of talk all about him. Here two Turks meet and salute each other. They almost fight in their struggle each to humble himself first by kissing the hand of the other. After they have done so a third passes and they all say: “Naharak sayed”—“May thy day be happy and blessed.” There are no more polite people on earth than these Mohammedans, whose everyday talk is poetry.

I can always amuse myself for days in watching the trading in the bazaars. I saw an Egyptian woman buying some meat to-day. The butcher’s whole stock consisted of a couple of sheep, one of which hung from a nail on the wall. The woman drew her finger nail along the piece she wished to take home, and the butcher sawed it off with a clasp knife. He weighed it on a pair of rude scales, and the woman objected, saying that he had given her too much. He then took one end of the strip of meat in his hand, and putting the other end in his mouth, severed it by drawing the knife quickly across it. He handed the piece he had held in his mouth to the woman, who took it and paid for it, evidently seeing nothing out of the way in his methods.

In the bazaars the merchants sit in little booths no bigger than the packing-box of a piano. A ledge about two feet high, and of about the same width, runs along the front of the store, on which the customers sit. A purchaser is usually offered coffee, and asked to take a smoke out of the long-stemmed water pipe of the proprietor. It takes a great time to make a deal, for the Mohammedan always asks three times what he expects to get, and never comes down without bargaining. The better merchants all keep book accounts, which they foot up in Arabic characters, taking the ink out of a brass inkstand with a handle a foot long which is so made that it will contain the pen as well as the ink. This inkwell is thrust into the belt of the gown when the proprietor leaves his shop.

If one is not satisfied at one place he can go to another. In the Cinnamon Bazaar there are dozens of stores that sell nothing but spices, and in the Shoemakers’ Bazaar are the gorgeously embroidered slippers and red-leather shoes, turned up at the toes, worn by all good Mohammedans. In the Silver Bazaar the jewellers are at work. They use no tools of modern invention. Their bellows is a bag of goatskin with a piece of gun-barrel for the mouth and two sticks like those used for the ordinary fire bellows at the end. One’s only guarantee of getting a good article is to buy the silver, have it tested by the government assayer, and let the jeweller make it up under his own eyes. Poor jewellery is often sold, and I remember buying a silver bracelet for a friend during a visit to Cairo which looked very pretty and very barbaric, but six months after its presentation it began to change colour, and proved to be brass washed with silver.

I see many watches displayed, for there is now a craze among the peasants of Egypt to own watches. They want a cheap article, and in many cases buy a fresh watch every year. As a result the Swiss and Germans have been flooding the country with poor movements, put up in fancy German silver, nickel, and gun-metal cases, and are selling them at two dollars and upward apiece. They are not equal to our timepieces which sell at one dollar. Some of these watches are advertised as of American make, and sell the quicker on that account. I doubt not that a good American watch would sell well and displace the poor stuff now sent in by the Swiss. In one bazaar only brass articles are shown, while in another nothing but rugs are sold. The Persian Bazaar and the Turkish Bazaar are managed by men of these nations. In fact, wandering through the business parts of Cairo, one can see types of every oriental people on the globe.

CHAPTER VIII
INTIMATE TALKS WITH TWO KHEDIVES

To-day Egypt is governed by a king. Her last sovereign had the title of sultan, and for fifty years before that she was ruled by khedives. There were four khedives in that time, and with two of them I had face-to-face chats. The first was with Tewfik Pasha, whom I met in the Abdin Palace during my second visit to Cairo. The other was with Abbas Hilmi, the son and successor of Tewfik, with whom I talked sixteen years later. Abbas Hilmi’s pro-German intrigues finally led to his being deposed by the British and to the establishment of the Protectorate, which ended in the nationalization of Egypt under a ruler with the title of king.

I give you here the stories of the two interviews, reproducing the notes I made at the time.

I have just returned from a long audience with the Khedive of Egypt. Khedive is a Persian-Arabic word, meaning “king,” and Mohammed Tewfik occupies much the same position now as the Pharaohs did in the days of Moses. It is true that he is in a measure the vassal of the Sultan of Turkey to whom he pays a tribute of about three and three quarter million dollars a year, and that he has also several European advisers who keep sharp watch over the revenues of his kingdom to see that a great part of them go to the interest on the debts that he and his predecessors have contracted with the bankers of Europe. But he is, nevertheless, the king of Egypt, and as kings go to-day, he has more power than many other monarchs. His residence in Cairo is a grand palace with hundreds of rooms filled with magnificent furniture. He drives about the city with soldiers carrying swords, riding prancing horses in front of his carriage, and with a score of cavalry following behind. He has five hundred thousand dollars a year for his personal expenses, and he has several palaces besides the one he occupies in Cairo.

It was at the Abdin Palace that I met His Highness to-day. The interview had been arranged by the American consul general. We left his office together in the consular carriage. The dragoman of the legation, a bright-eyed Syrian in the most gorgeous of Turkish clothes of brown covered with gold embroidery and with a great sword shaped like a scimitar clanking at his side, opened the carriage door for us and took his seat by the coachman. The Arabian Jehu cracked his whip and away we went through the narrow streets. We drove by the modern European mansions of the rich Greeks, past the palaces of Egyptian princes from which came the sweet smell of orange flowers and over which whispered broad spreading palms. We then went through a business street amid droves of donkeys, through a caravan of camels, by veiled women clad in black, past the palace in which Ismail Pasha had his harem when he was khedive, and on into a great square of many acres. On the right of this square were vast barracks filled with Arab troops in blue uniforms and fezzes. A regiment of Egyptian troops was going through a gymnastic drill, performing the motions as well to-day as they did at the time when our American General Stone was their commander and when General Grant reviewed them and said that they seemed to be good soldiers for everything except fighting.

The Abdin Palace, built in the form of a great horseshoe, is at the end of this square. It is a vast building of two stories, of brown stucco, with many windows and a grand entrance way in the centre. At the left there is a door leading to the harem, and as our carriage drove up we were passed by a closed coach drawn by two magnificent Arabian horses. On the box beside the liveried coachman sat a scowling eunuch whose black skin and dark clothes were all the more sombre by contrast with his bright red skullcap. In front of the carriage ran two fleet syces with wands or staffs held up in the air in front of them, warning plebeians to get out of the way. I was told that the carriage was that of a princess who was about to make a call upon the Khedivieh, or queen. These runners, who are a part of every nobleman’s turnout, are among the most picturesque sights of Egypt.

At the door of the palace stood two pompous soldiers with great swords in their hands. They were in Turkish costumes with embroidered jackets of blue and gold and full zouave trousers of blue broadcloth. Upon their heads were turbans, and their faces made me think of the fierce troops that conquered this land in the days of the Prophet. Passing up the massive steps we came to the palace door which was opened by an Arab clad in European clothes and wearing the red fez, which the Egyptian never takes off in the house or out of it. We were ushered into a grand entrance hall, floored with marble mosaic, the walls of which were finished in cream and gold. In front of us a staircase so wide that two wagonloads of hay could be drawn up it without touching led by easy flights to the second floor, while at the right and the left were the reception rooms for visitors and halls leading to the apartments reserved for the chamberlains, masters of ceremonies, and other officers of the royal household. After chatting a moment with one or two of the cabinet ministers, who were just passing out after a council with His Highness, we moved on up the stairs. In one of the drawing rooms on the second floor we were met by another Egyptian official in black clothes and red fez who conducted us to a reception room, the door of which stood open, and motioned us to enter.

In the centre of this room, which was not larger than a good-sized American parlour, there stood all alone a man of about thirty-six years of age. He was dressed in a black broadcloth coat buttoning close up at the neck like that of a preacher. Lavender pantaloons showed below this, fitting well down over a pair of gaiter-like pumps. On the top of his rather handsome head was a fez of dark red with a black silk tassel. This man was the Khedive of Egypt. He is, I judge, about five feet six inches in height and while rather thick-set, does not weigh more than one hundred and fifty pounds. His frame is well rounded, his head is large, and his features are clean cut. He has a nose slightly inclined to the Roman. His forehead is high, and the dark brown eyes that shine from under it change from the grave to the smiling during his conversation. The Khedive extended his hand and said he was glad to see me and that he liked to have Americans come to Cairo. Seating himself on a divan, with one leg doubled up under him, he motioned me to join him. There was an absence of pomp or snobbishness in his manner, and though dignified he did not put on half the airs of the average backwoods member of our House of Representatives. As he seated himself, his black coat opened so that I had a chance to note the contrast between his costume and that of the gorgeous rajahs whom I have met in India. His only jewellery consisted of a set of pearl studs the size of the smallest of peas and a watch chain of thin links of gold. He wore a cheap black bow tie in his white turnover collar, and his cuffs, though scrupulously clean, had not the polish of the American laundry.

Besides being a good French scholar, Tewfik Pasha speaks English, and that was the language used in our conversation. In speaking of his life as Khedive, he said:

“I am told that many people envy me my position. They say that I am a young man whose lot must be a pleasant one. They do not understand the troubles that surround me. Many a time I would have been glad to lay down all the honours I have for rest and peace. The ten years of my reign have been equal to forty years of work and of worry. If life were a matter of pleasure I would be a fool to remain on the throne. I believe, however, that God put man on the world for a purpose. Duty, not pleasure, is the chief end of man. I do the best I can for my country and my people, and I feel happiest when I do the most work and when my work is the hardest.”

“In the famous Abdin Palace I interviewed Tewfik Pasha, when he was Khedive of Egypt, and later, in the same audience room, talked with Abbas Hilmi, his son and successor.”

The gorgeous kavass is essential to the official dignity of the representative of foreign governments in Cairo. Besides attending on the person of minister or consul general on state occasions, he also serves as major domo and general “fixer.”

As the Khedive said these words I thought of the thorns which have filled the pillow of his reign. I thought of how, upon his entering manhood, his father Ismail was deposed and he was put upon the throne. I thought of how he boxed the ears of the messenger who came to tell him he had succeeded to that uncomfortable seat. I thought of his trouble under foreign dictation. I thought of the plots and nearly successful rebellion of Arabi Pasha, of the revolution of the Mahdi, of the creditors who to-day are grinding Egypt between their upper and nether millstones, of the danger of assassination, and of the other perils that are ever present about the throne of an oriental monarch. Recalling all these things, I could appreciate why his mouth hardened and his eyes grew sad when he spoke thus to me.

The talk then turned upon the condition of Egypt and its future, but as to these matters Tewfik was reticent. He spoke proudly of the reforms which he had inaugurated in government and of the fact that now, though the taxes were heavy, every peasant knew just what he would have to pay and that the taxes were honestly collected. He spoke of the improvement of the courts and said that the pasha and the fellah were equal before the law. “When I came to the throne,” said he, “the people were surprised that I put the prince on the same footing as other people. Now, there is no difference in justice. The prince and the peasant are the same in our courts, and the former may be punished like the latter.”

At this point, coffee and cigarettes were brought in by the servants of the palace. The coffee was à la Turque. It was served in little china cups shaped like egg cups, in holders of gold filigree, each holding about three tablespoonfuls of rich black coffee as thick as chocolate and as sweet as molasses. There were neither saucers nor spoons. Trying to follow the Khedive’s example I gulped down half the contents of the cup at a swallow. It was as hot as liquid fire. I could feel the top of my mouth rising in a blister, the tears came into my eyes, and my stomach felt as though it had taken an internal Turkish bath. Tewfik Pasha took the boiling mixture without winking and went on talking as though his throat were used to scalding fluids. Surprised to see him refuse a cigarette, I asked him if he did not smoke. He replied:

“No! I neither smoke nor drink. I do not drink for two reasons. I believe a man is better off without it, and, what is of more moment to me, it is against the laws of life as laid down in the Koran. We do not believe it right to drink anything intoxicating and good Moslems drink neither wine nor liquor. I believe that every man should be faithful to the religion which he professes. My faith is that of Islam and I try to follow it as well as I can. I am not illiberal in it, however, for I tolerate all religions and all sects in my kingdom. We have Copts, Jews, and Christians, and your missionaries are at work in the land. They make very few converts, if any, among the people of my faith, but they have schools in Upper Egypt that are doing much in the way of education.”

The consul general here spoke of the Khedive’s knowledge of the Koran, mentioning the fact that His Majesty knows the whole book by heart. There is no doubt that Tewfik has as much faith in his religion as we have in ours. He spoke with some pride of the Mohammedan conversions in Africa and the fact that there are more than one hundred millions of people in the world who believe the same as he does. We talked of the band of one hundred American Catholics, who are stopping in Egypt on their way to the Holy Land, and the Khedive said he was interested in these pilgrims who are following the footsteps of Joseph and Mary. He spoke of the immense sums brought into Egypt by tourists and said that it bettered the business of his country.

Throughout our whole conversation the talk was of the most cordial and unceremonious character and I left the palace with the impression that the Khedive of Egypt is a man of great sense and of more than ordinary ability. He stands well with his people. Indeed, the leading men in Cairo tell me he would do much for Egypt if he were not hampered by foreign intervention. He gave up a number of his palaces a year or so ago and he is, for a king, most economical. Had other rulers of the past been equally careful, Egypt would be a rich country to-day instead of being ridden with debts. He is a man of domestic tastes, and though a Mohammedan and an oriental king, he is the husband of but one wife to whom he is as true as the most chaste American. A friend of Tewfik Pasha reported to me a talk he recently had with him upon this subject in which the Khedive expressed himself strongly in favour of monogamy: “I saw,” said he, “in my father’s harem the disadvantages of a plurality of wives and of having children by different wives, so I decided before I came to manhood that I would marry but one woman and would be true to her. I have done so, and I have had no reason to regret it.”

From what I can learn the ruler’s family life is a happy one. He is much in love with his wife, who is said to be one of the cleverest women of Egypt. A woman friend of hers, who visits often at the royal harem, tells me that this queen of Egypt is both beautiful and accomplished. She keeps up a big establishment separate from that of the Khedive, and when she sits down to dinner or breakfast it is not with her husband, but with her own ladies. The Khedive eats with his officers, according to Mohammedan etiquette, and his apartments, or the salumlik, are separate from hers. Both she and her husband have done much to break down the rigidity of Mohammedan social customs. Tewfik Pasha takes the Khedivieh with him wherever he goes, though she usually travels in a separate train or car. She has stuck to the Khedive through the stormiest days of his reign. During the last war she refused to take refuge on the English gunboats when invited to do so.

Both the Khedive and the Khedivieh are wrapped up in their four children. They have two boys and two girls. The boys are Abbas Hilmi, who will be fifteen years old in July, and Mehemet Ali, who is two years younger. These boys are now at school in Berlin. They speak French, English, German, and Arabic, and they are, I am told, very clever. The girls are rather pretty, cream-complexioned maidens of eight and ten, who are as much like American girls as they can be considering their surroundings. They wear European clothes and may be seen along the sea shore at Alexandria, walking together and swinging their hats in their hands like other little girls at our summer resorts. They have European governesses and talk French quite well.

In Cairo sixteen years later I found on the throne Abbas Hilmi who was a boy at school when I had my interview with his father. Again through the courtesy of our consul general an audience with the Khedive was arranged for me, and together we went to the palace to pay our respects. Here is the story of my visit:

In the very room where I met Tewfik Pasha I was received in the same cordial and informal manner by his son, the present Khedive. He does not look much like his father. He is a trifle taller and seems to have more dignity, perhaps because in place of his father’s simple garb Abbas Hilmi wears the more formal frock coat and striped trousers of modern officialdom.

Though stripped of most of their political powers, the khedives surrounded themselves with all the trappings of rulership, and made the most of the magnificence of the Abdin Palace in Cairo, where they granted audiences and gave grand balls.

One of the most famous hotels in the world is Shepheard’s, at Cairo, through which for many years leading characters of all nations have passed on their way to the East or to the West. Its site was once part of the garden of Princess Kiamil, daughter of Mehemet Ali.

A school among the Moslems is a simple matter, consisting usually of young men sitting at the feet of a teacher whose sole textbook and equipment are the Koran, lengthy passages of which are learned by rote.

My conversation with His Highness covered a wide range. It dealt with the present prosperity of Egypt, and I could see that he understands both his country and its people. He thinks that the Nile valley has by no means reached the maximum of its development, and says that by increasing the dams and drainage facilities Egypt might yield much greater crops than she does now. I spoke to him about having met his father, mentioning the great interest that Tewfik Pasha showed in Egypt and its future. The Khedive expressed a similar desire to do all he could for the Egyptians, but practically the only matters in which he has full sway are those regarding his own estates, his management of which shows great business capacity. He has an allowance of five hundred thousand dollars a year out of the public treasury, but in addition he owns thousands of acres of valuable lands, so his private property must be worth many millions of dollars. He handles this in such a way that it pays well, his experiments and improvements being the talk of farmers and business men throughout the Nile valley.

I have heard a great deal of these khedivial farms since I have been in Egypt. Abbas Hilmi inherited much land from his father, but he has other large tracts, which he himself has redeemed from the desert, and yet others which he has made good by draining. Not far from Cairo he owns twenty-five hundred acres which a few years ago were covered with swamps, quagmires, and hillocks. He bought this cheap and then began to improve it. He cut down the hills, drained the swamps, and put water on the land. At present that estate is paying over sixty thousand dollars a year, bringing His Highness thirty per cent. and upward on his investment.

He has another great farm not far from Alexandria which was all desert not long ago. The Khedive has irrigated it and thus turned four thousand waste acres into cultivated fields. Farm villages have grown up about them and His Highness has so laid out the estate with trees and flowers that it is said to be like an earthly paradise. In one place he has a plantation of fifteen thousand mulberry bushes, the leaves of which furnish food for his silkworms. This estate is at Montzah, a few miles out of Alexandria, on a beautiful bay of the Mediterranean Sea. Abbas Hilmi has built a palace there, or rather two palaces, a little one for himself and a larger one for his family. In other parts of the estate he is carrying on all sorts of breeding experiments. He has chicken houses and rabbit hutches as well as a tower containing thousands of pigeons.

The Khedive is interested in fine stock and is doing much to improve that of Egypt. On his various farms he has high-bred horses, cattle, and sheep. He has a large number of Arabian thoroughbred horses, and some Jersey, Swiss, and other fine breeds of cows. His water buffaloes, known here as gamoushes, are far better than any others of the Nile valley. He is also breeding cattle for oxen and mules for draft animals. He has a school on his estate near Cairo where two hundred boys are being educated to take places on his various properties. This school is run at his own expense, the boys being taught farming and surveying as well as reading, writing, and arithmetic. The course of study lasts for five years, at the end of which the graduate is pretty sure of a good position as a steward or overseer on one of the khedivial farms.

Abbas Hilmi has made a great deal of money within the last three or four years. He is investing largely in Cairo and is building apartment houses with elevators, telephones, electric lights, bathrooms, and all other modern improvements. He has a brick factory on one of his estates near here, and his profits from cotton and other crops must be very large.

Abbas Hilmi’s wife is the Princess Ikbal Hanem, whom he married when he was about twenty. She is said to be both accomplished and beautiful, but like all Mohammedan ladies, she leads a secluded life, and does not appear at the great functions at the palace. She is not seen at the Khedive’s grand ball, given to his officials and the foreigners about once a year, to which something like fifteen hundred guests are invited. She is present, all the same, however, for she has a screened chamber looking down upon the ballroom, with the curtains so arranged that she can watch the dancing and flirting while she herself is unseen. Her Majesty has gorgeous apartments in each of the palaces and a little court of her own of which the noble ladies of Egypt are a part.

CHAPTER IX
EL-AZHAR AND ITS TEN THOUSAND MOSLEM STUDENTS

The biggest university of the Mohammedan world is situated in Cairo. It has, all told, over ten thousand students, and its professors number more than four hundred. Its students come from every country where Mohammedanism flourishes. There are hundreds here from India, and some from Malaya and Java. There are large numbers from Morocco, as well as from Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli. There are black Nubians, yellow-skinned Syrians and Turks, and boys from southeastern Europe with faces as fair as our own. There are long-gowned, turbaned Persians, fierce-eyed Afghans, and brown-skinned men from the Sudan and from about Kuka, Bornu, and Timbuktu. The students are of all ages from fifteen to seventy-five, and some have spent their lives in the college.

This university has been in existence for almost a thousand years. It was founded A.D. 972, and from that time to this it has been educating the followers of the Prophet. It is to-day perhaps the strongest force among these people in Egypt. Ninety-two per cent. of the inhabitants of the Nile valley are Mohammedans and most of the native officials have been educated here. There are at least thirty thousand men in the public service among its graduates, while the judges of the villages, the teachers in the mosque schools, and the imams, or priests, who serve throughout Egypt are connected with it. They hold the university in such high regard that an order from its professors would be as much respected as one from the government, if not more.

A fifteen-minutes drive from the hotel quarter through the bazaars of the Mouski and the narrow “Street of the Booksellers” brings one to the university of El-Azhar, for 900 years the educational centre of the Moslem world.

The various nationalities are segregated in the courtyard porticos of El-Azhar. Instruction is free and almost entirely in the Koran. If a student doesn’t like one professor, he moves on to another.

The university education is almost altogether Mohammedan. Its curriculum is about the same as it was a thousand years ago, the chief studies being the Koran and the Koranic law, together with the sacred traditions of the religion and perhaps a little grammar, prosody, and rhetoric. A number of the professors also teach in the schools connected with the mosques of the Egyptian villages, which are inspected, but not managed, by the government. Even there the Koran takes up half the time, and religion is considered far more important than science.

Indeed, it is wonderful how much time these Egyptians spend on their bible. The Koran is their primer, their first and second reader, and their college text book. As soon as a baby is born, the call to prayer is shouted in its ear, and when it begins to speak, its father first teaches it to say the creed of Islam, which runs somewhat as follows:

“There is no God but God; Mohammed is the Apostle of God,” and also “Wherefore exalted be God, the King, the Truth! There is no God but Him! The Lord of the glorious Throne.”

When the boy reaches five or six he goes to the mosque school, where he squats down, cross-legged, and sways to and fro as he yells aloud passages from the Koran. He studies the alphabet by writing texts with a black brush on a slate of wood or tin. Year after year he pounds away, committing the Koran to memory. There are more than two hundred and fifty thousand pupils in the Egyptian schools, of whom a majority are under thirteen years of age. It was brought out by a school census some years ago that over fifty thousand of these boys could recite a good part of the Mohammedan bible, and that forty-five hundred had memorized the whole from beginning to end. Another forty-five hundred were able to recite one half of it from memory, while thirty-eight hundred could correctly give three fourths of it. When it is remembered that the Koran contains one hundred and fourteen divisions and in the neighbourhood of eighty thousand words, it will be seen what this means. I’m willing to bet that there are not four thousand children in the United States who can reel off the New Testament without looking at the book, and that with our vast population we have not fifty thousand boys who can recite even one book of our Bible from memory and not mispronounce a word.

The Mohammedans reverence their bible quite as much as we do ours. While it is being read they will not allow it to lie upon the floor, and no one may read or touch it without first washing himself. It is written in Arabic and the Moslems consider its style a model. They believe that it was revealed by God to Mohammed, and that it is eternal. It was not written at first, but was entirely committed to memory, and it is to a large extent in that way that it is still taught. The better classes of Mohammedans have beautiful copies of this book. They have some bound in gold with the texts illuminated, and the university has a collection of fine editions which is looked upon as one of its greatest treasures.

This famous Mohammedan university is situated in the heart of business Cairo. When I rode to it to-day (on my donkey) I passed through a mile or more of covered bazaars, thronged with turbaned men and veiled women and walled with shops in which Egyptians were selling goods and plying their trades. Known as the Mosque of El-Azhar, or “The Resplendent,” it is one of the oldest mosques of Cairo. It covers several acres, and the streets about it are taken up largely with industries connected with the college. One of the bazaars is devoted to bookselling and bookbinding and another to head dressing. Since every Mohammedan has his head shaved several times a week, there are in this institution ten thousand bald-headed students. The men wear turbans of white, black, or green, and there is not a hair under them except on the top of the crown, where a little tuft may be left that the owner may be the more easily pulled into heaven.

My way was through this street of the barbers, where I saw students kneeling down while being shaved. One or two were lying with their heads in the laps of the barbers at work on their faces. The barbers used no paper, wiping the shavings on the faces of their victims instead. At the end they gave the head, face, and ears a good washing.

As I approached the entrance of the university I saw many young men standing about, with their books under their arms, and some carrying manuscripts in and out. Each student has his shoes in his hand when he enters the gates, and before I went in I was made to put on a pair of slippers over my boots. The slippers were of yellow sheepskin and a turbaned servant tied them on with red strings.

Entering the gate, I came into a great stone-flagged court upon which the study halls face. The court was surrounded by arcades upheld by marble pillars, and in the arcades and in the immense rooms beyond were thousands upon thousands of seekers after Koranic learning. They sat in groups on the floor, listening to the professors, who were lecturing on various subjects, swaying back and forth as they chanted their words of wisdom. Some of the groups were studying aloud, until the confusion was as great as that at the Tower of Babel when the tongues of the builders were multiplied. There were at least five thousand men all talking at once, and all, as it seemed to me, were shouting at the tops of their voices. As I made my way through the mass, I had many unfriendly looks and narrowly escaped being mobbed when I took snapshots of the professors and students at work under the bright sun which beat down upon the court. The inmates of this school are among the most fanatical of the Mohammedans, and I have since learned that the Christian who ventures among them may be in danger of personal violence.

I spent some time going from hall to hall and making notes. In one section I found a class of blind boys who were learning the Koran, and I am told that they are more fanatical than any of the others. In another place I saw forty Persians listening to a professor. They were sitting on the ground, and the professor himself sat flat on the floor with his bare feet doubled up under him. I could see his yellow toes sticking out of his black gown. He was lecturing on theology and the students were attentive.

Another class near by was taking down the notes of a lecture. Each had a sheet of tin, which looked as though it might have been cut from an oil can, and he wrote upon this in ink with a reed stylus. The letters were in Arabic so I could not tell what they meant.

I looked about in vain for school furniture such as we have at home. There was not a chair or a table in the halls; there were no maps or diagrams and no scientific instruments. There were no libraries visible; the books used were mostly pamphlets.