saw in the East. Not as one sees it by day, with tourists and
photographers and donkey-boys making it cheap and familiar, but at
night, when the tourists had gone to bed, and the donkey-boys had been
paid to keep out of sight, and the moonlight threw the great negro face
and the pyramids back of it into shadows of black and lines of silver,
and the yellow desert stretched away on either side so empty and silent
that I thought I was alone and back two thousand years in the past,
discovering the great monuments for myself, and for the first time.
Before you ascend the Pyramid of Cheops you must deal with a middle-man
in the person of the sheik of the pyramids, who selects guides for you,
and who acts as though the pyramids were his private show, and he was
both sole proprietor and ticket-taker at the door. He lives in a village
near by, and he and his forefathers have always been allowed a monopoly
of the pyramids, and distribute their patronage to those guides who will
pay them the highest percentage of what they receive from the visitors.
You have three men to help you, two to pull, and one to push and to
dilate on the view. It takes over ten minutes to climb to the top, with
the men jerking at your wrists, and the third man shoving you from
below. It is not a difficult feat, and women accomplish it every day,
but it leaves you in a breathless state when you reach the summit, and
you are stiff above the knees for a day or two after you have come down.
When you have reached the summit the guides cheer feebly to give you the
idea that you have accomplished something which has often been
attempted before, but never so successfully; but you are not deceived,
and you do not feel like cheering yourself. The view is worth the climb,
however, and the sight of the shadow of the pyramid, spreading out over
the villages and canals below like a black cloud, impresses you more
with its immensity than the fact that it is a hundred feet higher than
the top of the Diana on the Madison Square Garden tower. I am sure of
this fact, because the man who built the Madison Square Garden assured
me of it between breaths on the summit of the pyramid. While you are
resting, the thing to do is to pay one of the guides to attempt to run
down the pyramid you are on, cross the heavy sand to the pyramid beyond,
and reach its top in eight minutes. When you give the word he disappears
with a bound and drops into space, skipping and jumping and growing
smaller and smaller as he goes, until he looks like a fluttering
handkerchief; and when he reaches the sand he is as small as a child of
three, and his ascent of the other pyramid suggests a white pigeon
shuffling up the steep roof of a barn. It is distinctly on his part a
sporting thing to do. The descent of the pyramid is very much worse than
going up, and you need to go very slowly, and not to look too often at
the people crawling about like ants below. Only four men, however, in
six years have slipped and fallen during this descent, and one of them
had been drinking. They were all killed. The more you see of the
pyramids the more you want to see of them, although I think one
ascent is all perhaps you will care about taking; but their dignity and
the wonder of their being where they are, and for so long, increases
with every look at them. You cannot grow too familiar with the pyramids.
They will not have it.
[Illustration: DAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO]
On the road back from the Pyramids of Gizeh there are other pyramids
within sight of Cairo, but these are those with which the Sphinx is
associated. You will see here one of the most beautiful sights of Cairo,
the dahabeeyahs on the Nile. They and their white sails, especially when
they come wing and wing before the wind, are the most beautiful of
floating objects, and when there are hundreds of them coming towards you
in lessening perspective, with the sun shining on the sails, and the
banks on either side alive and moving with the palms, the river Nile
becomes the best part of Cairo.
There is another place on the Nile which you should visit, and to which
tourists seldom go. This is the isle of Rodda, on the bank of which
Moses was found, and where you may see the Nilometer. This is a well
about sixteen feet in diameter, connected by a channel with the Nile. It
is made of masonry, and down one side there runs a column on which are
inscribed ancient Arabian and Cufic numerals, or what answer for
numerals. It was dug many centuries ago, and it marks the rising and
falling of the river, and at the same time the prosperity or dismay of
Egypt. When the tide begins to rise, this rude instrument is watched
hourly, and the hopes of the people rise and fall as the muddy water
moves up or down the narrow well. When it reaches a certain height the
sheik in charge declares that the time has come for cutting the banks
and irrigating the land. In ancient days the rate of taxation was
determined by the height of the inundation, and it is said that the
sheik in charge of the Nilometer is still under the influence of the
government, to whose advantage it is to make the fellahin believe that
the inundation is favorable. It was the engineers under Napoleon who
discovered that the Nilometer was being tampered with, but there is no
likelihood of its being abused to-day under the English, whose
improvement of the irrigation of Egypt has been their best work, and for
the fellahin's best good. But it is interesting, nevertheless, to look
down into the old well, overgrown with vines and surrounded by ruin and
crumbling walls and broken lattices, and to think that for centuries it
brought news of famine or of plenty, and that it was, primitive as its
construction is, the pulse of Egypt.
The pulse of Egypt to-day is not shown in the mere rising or falling of
a body of water. It is less primitive in its construction, and no one
knows which way it is going to jump. In the next chapter I shall try to
tell something of the men who have their fingers on Egypt's pulse, and
who are agreed in only one thing--that there are too many fingers for
Egypt's good.
V
THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT
When the visitor to Cairo first grasps the extent of his own ignorance
of Egypt, and appreciates that if he is to understand its monuments and
the signs of past times about him he must study the history of the whole
world for forty centuries, he is apt to retreat precipitately. Later, as
a compromise, he proposes skipping thirty-nine centuries and limiting
his researches to the study of the political and social conditions of
Egypt during the last ten years. And when he begins jauntily on this he
finds that all that has gone before, from Rameses II. to Mehemet Ali, is
as simple as the line of Popes in comparison with the anomalies and
intricacies of government that have arisen within the last decade. Yet
the very intricacies of the subject give to this study a fascination
entirely apart from its rare picturesqueness, and no matter what manner
of man he may be, he cannot but find some side of the situation which
appeals to him. If his mind be constituted like that of a ready reckoner
he can revel in unravelling the intricacies of the Caisse and the Laws
of Liquidation; if it is judicial, he can perhaps elucidate the powers
of the Mixed Tribunal; if romantic, he has the career of Ismail, the
most magnificent of patriots and profligate of monarchs; and if it turns
towards adventure and the clash of arms, he can read of the heroic
fanaticism of Fuzzy Wuzzy, the son of the Mahdi, of the futile mission
of Gordon, of Stewart's march across the desert, and of the desperate
valor of the fight at Aboo-Klea.
But it is the paradoxical nature of Egypt's present situation which
gives it its chief interest, and lends to it the peculiar fascination of
a puzzle, or one of Whistler's witticisms. For, while Egypt is not free,
as is Morocco, nor under a protectorate, as is Tunis, she is still free
and still protected. She is free to coin money, to maintain an army, and
to make treaties; and yet she pays six million dollars a year tribute to
Turkey as a part of the Ottoman Empire, and her army that she is allowed
to maintain is officered by English soldiers, whom she is also allowed
to maintain. She may not pay out the money she is allowed to coin
without the consent of foreigners; she cannot punish the man who steals
this money, be he Greek, English, or American, without the approval of
these foreigners; and her official language is that of one foreign
power, her ostensible protector is another, and her real protector is
still another, whose commands are given under the irritating disguise of
"advice."
[Illustration: EGYPTIAN INFANTRY IN THEIR DIFFERENT UNIFORMS]
Alfred Milner, the late under-secretary for finance in Egypt, whose
_England in Egypt_ is the best book on the subject, though it reads like
a novel, has put it in this way: "It is not given to mortal intelligence
to understand at one blow the complexities of Turkish suzerainty and
foreign treaty rights; to realize the various powers of interference and
obstruction possessed by consuls and consuls-general, by commissioners
of the public debt, and other mixed administrations; to distinguish
English officers who are English from English officers who are Egyptian,
foreign judges of the international courts from foreign judges of the
native courts; to follow the writhings of the Egyptian government in its
struggle to escape from the fine meshes of the capitulations; to
appreciate precisely what laws that government can make with the consent
of only six powers, and for what laws it requires the consent of no less
than fourteen."
It seems rather unfair to saddle the responsibility for all of these
burdens and for this remarkable condition of affairs, which is
unequalled in history, upon the shoulders of one man, but one man is
responsible for it directly and indirectly. He is still alive, a hanger
on at the court of the Sultan of Turkey, he who was at one time the most
picturesque monarch of the world. Ismail Pasha became Khedive a little
before the time of the close of our Civil War. Egypt had never been more
prosperous than then--owing but fifteen million dollars. In 1876, when
Ismail was deposed and his son Tewfik Pasha put in his place, he had
increased the debt of Egypt to four hundred and forty-five million
dollars. Ismail was a typical Oriental ruler; he had the typical
Oriental ruler's French veneer and education, a combination which has
been found to produce most serious results. When an Oriental is left
alone he is a barbarian, or he used to be; now, after he has been made
the talk of Paris for nine days, and has been given a state dinner at
Marlborough House, and a few stars for his coat, and called "cousin," he
goes home with no particular disgust for his former eccentricities of
mis-government, but with a quiver full of new tastes, desires, and
ambitions, and thereafter plays his role of monarch with one eye on the
grand stands of Europe. He wants their good opinion, but he wants to get
it in his own way--the old way. He begins to build railroads and
hospitals, but he continues, after his past custom, to draw the money
for such improvements from licensed gambling-houses or from the sale of
opium. He has a French cook, but he retains the kurbash; he puts up
telephones, but he does not give up the bowstring.
[Illustration: RIAZ PASHA,
Prime-minister of Egypt]
Ismail was the first Khedive who discovered that the easiest way to get
money is to borrow it. He found that all one has to do is to sign a
paper, and you get the money. It was very easy for Ismail to borrow
money, because the credit of Egypt was good and sound in itself, and
because foreigners, who even at that time swarmed in Egypt, knew that
the repudiation of debts, while possible in a powerful or free
government, was not to be feared from that country. So there began a
reign of extravagance for which history has no parallel. If "money
breeds money," it is also true that those who spend money freely are
given more chances to do so than any one else. Adventurers, charlatans,
rascals of every climate and every nationality, swarmed down upon Cairo,
and fought with one another for a chance to glut themselves at the
repast which this reckless profligate spread for all comers. No man
probably was ever so basely cheated as was Ismail, or on so magnificent
a scale. And nothing remains but ruins to show where the money spent on
his own personal pleasure was bestowed. That other magnificent
reprobate, William M. Tweed, left monuments like the Court House to
commemorate his thefts of public money; but Ismail's palaces are falling
in pieces, the rain has washed the paint off the boards, the tips of the
crescents are broken, and great gardens filled with fountains and
mosaic paths are choked with weeds and covered with fallen leaves and
the dirt and dust of neglect and decay. You can walk over long marble
floors which have sunk by their own weight through the rotten
foundations, and see yourself at full length in bleared mirrors
surrounded by the gilt borders and blue silken curtains of the Second
Empire. Ismail ordered these palaces as men order hats, and threw them
away as you toss an empty cartridge from a gun-barrel. And that was all
the most of them ever were, empty cartridges, mere shells of wood
painted to look like marble, and gilding and mirrors, as tasteless as
the buildings at the Centennial Exposition, and lasting as long.
And yet they pleased him, and he ordered more and more, so that wherever
his eye might rest it would fall upon a palace which would serve as a
fitting covering for his royal person, and as a testimony to his
magnificence. He wanted many, and he wanted them at once. He had them
built at night by the light of candles. The Palace of Gizeh, which is
now a museum, was reared in this way while Cairo slept, and at a cost of
twenty-four million dollars. The curtains ordered for its windows cost
one thousand dollars each, and when it was found that they did not fit
the windows, the entire front of the building was torn down, and a new
front with windows to match the curtains was put in its place. He built
an opera-house as fine as that of Covent Garden in six months, and a
grotto as dark and cool as the Mammoth Cave, with stalactites of painted
rope and rocks of papier-mache and mud, with its sides lined with
aquariums, in which swam strange fish. The wind and the dust play
through this grotto to-day; for he no sooner reared a palace in air than
he turned from it to some new toy. These are the things you can see. You
can hear stories--some of them true, some of them possible--of things
that are past, such as his swimming-tanks where a hundred of the slaves
of the harem bathed together for his edification; the pie out of which,
when it was opened, there stepped a ballet-dancer; and the story of the
disappearance of the Pasha who grew too rich. This is, unfortunately, a
true story, and not one out of the _Arabian Nights_. This Pasha was
invited by Ismail to see a new dahabeeyah, and never returned. But one
of the attendants on the Khedive came back some weeks later with his
finger bitten off at the joint. He and Ismail alone know where the Pasha
who was too rich has gone.
These extravagances and these eccentricities were all in keeping with
our idea of what an Oriental despot should be, but it would be most
unfair and ungenerous to give only this side of Ismail's character. He
was a man of much mind and of large ideas, as well as a man with the
tastes of a voluptuary, and the means, for a time, of a Count of Monte
Cristo. It was he who built the harbor of Alexandria; and the railways
and canals that others have completed were started under his regime. All
of these things--railroads, palaces, canals, and grottos made of
mud--cost money; and there were other expenses. Knights of industry and
rascals of all degrees extorted vast fortunes from him in indemnities
for supposed failures on his part to keep up with his agreements, and to
stick to the letter of concessions. Some of these, like the payment of
fifteen million dollars to the Suez Canal Company, were just enough; but
there was also an enormous sum given in backsheesh to Turkey to gain the
consent of the Porte to a proposed change in the line of succession and
the establishment of the rule of primogeniture. Up to that time the
eldest male member of the ruling family had always succeeded to power,
but Ismail obtained a firman from the Sultan allowing his son to follow
him. The gratification of this natural vanity or love of family was not
obtained for the asking, and cost his people dear. They were already
groaning under a multitude of taxes; the army was unpaid; the
bureaucracy was rotten throughout; bribery and extortion, unfair
taxation, and open seizure of the property of others had reduced the
country almost to bankruptcy. Ismail in sixteen years had brought about
a state of things that threatened utter ruin, to not only the native,
but to the strangers within and without the gates. The strangers made
the move for reform. I have told this much of Ismail not because it is
new or unfamiliar, but because it shows how, through his misrule, the
foreign element was able to obtain a footing upon the shore of Egypt,
which footing has now grown to a trampling under foot of what is native
and properly Egyptian. This entering wedge was called the Dual Control,
and France and England were appointed receivers for Egypt, just as we
appoint receivers for a badly managed railroad, and Ismail was deposed,
his son Tewfik taking his place.
[Illustration: AN EGYPTIAN LANCER]
But although this was the first important and most official recognition
of the right of the stranger to dictate to Egypt, he had already
obtained peculiar rights in Egypt through capitulations, or those
privileges granted in the past to foreign residents in Turkey and its
dependent state of Egypt. In the sixteenth century the foreigners who
traded in these Oriental countries stood in actual need of protection
from the natives. Because they were foreigners they were regarded with
such lack of consideration that, in order to balance the disadvantages
of having their shops destroyed and their throats cut, the Sultan gave
them certain privileges--such as immunity from taxation, immunity from
arrest, the inviolability of domicile, and the exemption from the
jurisdiction of the local courts.
These privileges were unimportant when the foreign element in
Constantinople was so little and so weak that the position of the
Chinamen in San Francisco in '49 was that of a powerful aristocracy in
comparison; but the snake warmed at the hearth-stone grew, and the
Sultan's empire dwindled, and the privileges which were given to bribe
the foreigner to come and to remain became a bane to Turkey and a curse
to the weaker state of Egypt. The inviolability of domicile, for
instance, is at this very day made use of by foreigners who are carrying
on some wickedness or who have committed a crime for which they cannot
be arrested by an Egyptian policeman unless he is accompanied by an
official representative of the country to which the foreigner belongs.
Let us suppose, for example, that the police of New York wished to raid
a gambling-house. This, I know, is asking a good deal of the reader's
intelligence, but we will suppose it to be a gambling-house which has
not paid its assessment to the police regularly, and which should be
given a lesson. All that the proprietor of the house would have to do,
did capitulations extend in New York, would be to lease the house to an
Italian, or to take out papers of naturalization from the British
government. You can imagine the chagrin of an officer of the law who,
when he goes to make an arrest, is confronted with a German who says he
is an Englishman, and whose domicile is accordingly sacred. This, as you
can imagine, would impede the wheels of justice.
When I was in Cairo a Greek, who had taken out papers as an American
citizen, flaunted this fact in the faces of the native police whenever
they came to arrest him for keeping a gambling-house. They applied to
our consul-general, Mr. E. C. Little, of Abilene, Kansas, who so far
differed from the etiquette observed by some other consuls-general in
Cairo as not to delay and not to warn the criminal. He sent his soldiers
to be present at the arrest. The offender met this by bringing forth
another American citizen of Greek parentage, to whom he claimed to have
leased the house, and whose family were inside. Mr. Little, feeling that
the American flag did not look well as a cloak for gambling-houses, and
being a young man who has assisted at county-seat fights and who can
pitch three curves, said that if the roulette tables were not out of the
house in twenty-four hours he would himself break them into
kindling-wood with an axe. This incident shows how the capitulations of
the sixteenth century are acting as stumbling-blocks to the Egyptian of
to-day, even when the consuls-general are willing to assist the native
government, which is seldom.
[Illustration: TIGRANE PASHA,
Minister of Foreign Affairs]
This is not all. The immunity from full taxation, now that the
foreigners are among the richest inhabitants of Cairo, is most
manifestly unjust; and though the mixed courts of an international
judiciary have done away with trial of the foreign resident, or lack of
trial, in civil cases, by the several consuls-general, the abuses of the
capitulations are still a grievous and most unjust imposition by the
great powers, ourselves included, upon a weaker one. To return to the
Dual Control and to the story of the growth of the foreigners' hold on
Egypt. The Dual Control was unpopular; so was the foreigner and his
capitulations, who, waxing fat on the weaknesses of the country after
Ismail's debauchery of its strength, grew insolent--so insolent that the
cry raised by a general in the Khedive's army of "Egypt for the
Egyptians" was taken up, and found expression in the Arabist movement or
rebellion. Its leader was Arabi Pasha. He wanted what the Know-Nothing
party of America wanted--his country for his countrymen. What else he
wanted for himself does not matter here. He was, in the eyes of the
Khedive, a rebel. In the eyes of some of the people he was the would-be
preserver of his country against the plague of the foreign invasion.
The trouble began at Alexandria, where the excited people attacked the
foreign residents, killing some, and destroying valuable property.
Men-of-war of the two powers represented in the Dual Control had already
arrived to put down the rebellion. When the riot on shore was at its
height, the English war-vessels bombarded the city. The bombarding of
Alexandria was war, but it was not magnificent. There are certain things
made to be bombarded--forts and ships of war--but cities are not built
for that purpose or with that ultimate end in view. The English people,
as a people, however, regret the bombardment of Alexandria as much as
any one. The French war-vessels, for their part, refused to join the
bombardment, and so were requested by the English admiral to sail away
and give the other half of the Dual Control a clear field. Different
people give you different reasons for the departure of the French fleet
at this crisis. Some say that M. Clemenceau, who hated M. Freycinet and
his policy, possibly raised the cry of the German wolf on the frontier,
and pointed out the danger at home if the army and navy were engaged
otherwise than in protecting the border. Others say that, like the good
one of the two robbers in the _Babes in the Wood_, one of the Dual
Control drew the line at murder or at the bombardment of a country she
was supposed to protect. Plundering the Egyptians was possible, but not
bombarding their city. They stopped at that. The English followed up the
bombardment of Alexandria by the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, which ended the
rebellion. The Citadel of Cairo surrendered at their approach, and the
Khedive's rule was again undisturbed. The English remained, however, to
"restore order," and to see to the "organization of proper means for the
maintenance of the Khedive's authority." They have been doing that now
for ten years, and it is interesting to note that they have made so
little progress that the last "disorder" in Cairo was due to the action
of the British consul-general himself in allowing the young Khedive just
twenty-four hours in which to dismiss one of his cabinet. This can
hardly be described as "maintaining the authority of the Khedive," which
the English had promised to do.
[Illustration: A CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA]