THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER
This is the story of how a handful of white men jerked a nation out of
the desert and the depths of despair, as though by its collar, set it
on its feet, and taught it to play the game. It is the story of how
northeast Africa—a region which God had seemingly forgotten—has been
transformed into a prosperous and self-respecting country by giving
it two things which it had always needed and had never known—justice
and water. It is the chronicle of a thirty years' struggle, under
disheartening conditions, against overwhelming odds, and when you
have finished it you will agree with me, I think, that it is one of
the wonder-tales of history. It is a drama in which English officials
and Egyptian pashas and Arab sheikhs all have their greater or their
lesser parts, and it is as full of romance and intrigue and treachery
and fighting as any moving-picture play that was ever thrown upon a
screen.
To my way of thinking, the rescue and rehabilitation of the Nile
country is the most convincing proof of England's genius as a
colonising nation. That you may be able to judge, by comparison, what
she has accomplished, you must go back a third of a century or so, to
the days when Ismail Pasha—he with the brow of a statesman and the
chin of a libertine—still sat on the throne of the Pharaohs, wielding
an extravagant, vacillating, and ineffectual rule over a region which
stretched from the Mediterranean seaboard southward to Uganda and the
sleeping-sickness, and from the Red Sea shore westward until it lost
itself in the sand wastes of the Great Sahara. Of the one million
three hundred and fifty thousand square miles at that time included
within the Egyptian borders, less than five thousand were cultivated
land; the rest was yellow desert and nothing more. The seven millions
of blacks and browns who composed the population were so poor that the
dwellers in the slums of Whitechapel were affluent when compared to
them; they lived, for the most part, in wretched hovels of sun-dried
mud scattered along the banks of the Nile, maintaining a hand-to-mouth
existence by raising a low grade of cotton on a few feddans of land
which they irrigated by hand, at an appalling cost of time and
labour, with water drawn up in buckets from the river. As a result
of the _corvée_, or system of forced labour on public works which
prevailed, a large part of the population was virtually in a state
of slavery; the taxes, which were unjustly assessed and incredibly
exorbitant, could only be collected with the aid of the _kourbash_,
as the terrible whip of rhino hide used by the slave-dealers was
known. Barring the single line of ramshackle railway which connected
Cairo with Alexandria and with the Suez Canal, the only means of
transportation were the puffing river-boats and the plodding caravans.
The unpaid and ill-disciplined army was a synonym for cowardice,
as proved by its defeats by the tribesmen of Abyssinia and the
Sudan. The Khedive was a profligate and a spendthrift; his ministers
and governors were cruel, dishonest, and tyrannical; the national
resources had been dissipated in a veritable debauch of extravagance
and corruption. I doubt, indeed, if the sun ever shone on a more
decadent, demoralised, and discouraged nation than was Egypt on that
June day in 1879, when a cablegram from Constantinople, addressed,
significantly enough, to “Ismail Pasha, ex-Khedive of Egypt,” brought
the Sultan's demand for his immediate abdication in favour of his
son Tewfik. Called to a heritage of bankruptcy and wide-spread
discontent, the new ruler, anxious though he undoubtedly was to use
his prerogatives for his people's good, found himself forced to decide
between European intervention and native rebellion. The question was
decided for him, however, for, in the spring of 1882, Arabi and his
lawless soldiery broke loose and overran the land.
[Illustration: Dance of Nuba women, Kordofan.
Illustration: Shilluk warriors, Blue Nile.
Illustration: Bread-making in the Lado Enclave, Sudan.
WORK AND PLAY IN BLACK MAN'S AFRICA.]
Whether this Arabi Pasha was at heart a patriot or a plunderer is a
question which has never been satisfactorily decided, nor is it one
which particularly concerns us, although, if you ever happen to find
yourself at Kandy, in the hills of Ceylon, where he still lives in
exile, I would recommend you to call upon him, for he will receive you
with marked hospitality and will talk to you quite frankly about those
stirring events in which he played so prominent a part. As this is a
story of the present, rather than of the past, suffice it to say that
Arabi, then an officer in the Egyptian army, instigated a military
revolt which had as its object the ending of European influence in the
affairs of Egypt. So rapidly did this propaganda of “Egypt for the
Egyptians!” spread among the lower classes of the population, and so
perilous became the position of foreigners resident in the country,
that, upon Alexandria being captured and looted by the revolutionists,
a British squadron bombarded and partially destroyed that city, while
a British army, hurried from Malta for the protection of the Canal, in
which England held the dominating interest, dispersed Arabi's forces
at Tel-el-Kebir, pushed on across the desert to Cairo, stamped out
the remaining embers of the revolt, and restored in a measure the
authority of the Khedive, though not without taking the precaution of
surrounding him with British “advisers” and garrisoning his cities
with British troops. Such, in tabloid form, is the story of the
beginnings of British domination in the land of the Valley of the Nile.
In view of the chaotic condition of the country, England naturally
decided that the only way to insure the safety of her subjects, as
well as of her great financial and political interests in that region,
was to continue the military occupation of Egypt, for the time being
at least, and boldly to begin the task of its financial, judicial,
political, and military reconstruction. The form of government which
has resulted is, I suppose, the most extraordinary in the history of
nations.
Nominally a province of the Turkish Empire, and administered by
a viceroy who theoretically derives his power from the Turkish
sovereign, Egypt is autonomous (so far as Turkey is concerned),
though it still pays annual tribute of about three million five
hundred thousand dollars to the Sultan. Though the title “khedive”
means sovereign or king, without qualification or limitation, the real
ruler of Egypt is not his Highness Abbas Hilmi II, but his Britannic
Majesty's Agent and Consul-General—at present Lord Kitchener of
Khartoum—who, though officially Britain's diplomatic representative
in Egypt and nothing more, in reality exercises almost unlimited
authority and power. In other words, England has assumed the position
of a receiver for Egypt's foreign creditors and has apparently made
the receivership—which has never been agreeable to the khedivial
government—a permanent one. Egypt's situation might, indeed, be
quite aptly compared to a railway system which has been forced into
bankruptcy by the extravagant methods of its directors, and one
of whose largest creditors has become receiver with full power to
reorganise the system for its stockholders' and its creditors' best
good.
Another feature of Egypt's complex form of government is the
International Debt Commission, which consists of delegates from
England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Italy, who are
stationed at Cairo for the purpose of keeping an eye on the national
revenues and periodically collecting a share of them, over and above
the actual running expenses of the government, to pay the interest on
the Egyptian bonds held in those countries.
To this administrative medley must be added the complications caused
by the Ottoman Capitulations—by which fourteen foreign governments,
including our own, exercise almost sovereign rights in Egypt, the
International Tribunals, or “Mixed Courts,” in the control of which
Egypt has almost nothing to say, giving them complete jurisdiction in
all civil cases in which aliens may be involved with each other or
with Egyptians, while the foreign consuls possess absolute authority
in criminal cases where their nationals are concerned.
The Capitulations, many of which date back to the early days of
Turkish power, are nothing less than guarantees to foreigners within
the Ottoman dominions of full and complete immunity from the laws
governing Turkish subjects. No reciprocal obligation was constituted
by a Capitulation (which, by the way, means the instrument containing
the terms of an agreement), as it was intended to be a purely
gratuitous concession granted to Christians, by virtue of which they
were tolerated upon the soil of Islam. Though the Capitulations
were never regarded by the Turks as treaties—it being obvious that
the Commander of the Faithful, who is likewise the Successor of
the Prophet and the Shadow of Allah, could never treat a Christian
ruler as an equal—they have all the character and force of treaties
nevertheless, inviolability of domicile, freedom from taxation of
every sort, and immunity from arrest for any offence whatsoever being
but items in the comprehensive promise not to molest the foreigner.
In short, the Capitulations give to the nations possessing them as
complete jurisdiction over their citizens as they exercise at home,
the Egyptian Government being powerless to lay so much as a finger on
a foreigner who breaks its laws.
Should an American sailor, for example, become involved in a drunken
affray, as sometimes happens, and wound or kill an Egyptian, the
Egyptian police would no more arrest him than they would the Khedive.
They would merely keep him under surveillance, meanwhile notifying
the American consul, who would despatch his _kavasses_, as the armed
guards which are attached—also by virtue of the Capitulations—to the
various consulates are called, to effect the man's arrest. He would
then be tried by the consul, who possesses magisterial powers, before
a jury drawn from American residents or tourists, and, if found
guilty, would be confined in one of the several consular prisons which
the United States maintains in the Turkish Empire, although, if the
sentence were a long one, he would probably be sent to a prison in
this country to serve it out.
Though the Egyptian police may be perfectly aware that Georgios
Miltiades runs a roulette game in the back room of his café, and keeps
a disorderly house up-stairs, he can lounge in his doorway and jeer
at them with perfect safety for the simple reason that he is a Greek
subject, and therefore his café is as much on Greek soil as though it
were in the Odos Ammonia in Athens, his consul alone possessing the
right to enter it, to cause his arrest, and to inflict imprisonment or
fine.
Notwithstanding the fact that the importation of hasheesh into Egypt
is strictly prohibited, the government making every effort to stamp
out its use by the natives, the Italian smuggler who drops anchor in
Alexandria harbour with a cargo of it aboard knows perfectly well
that the arm of the Egyptian law is not long enough to reach him. If,
however, he is caught by the local police in the act of taking the
contraband ashore, it will be confiscated, though he himself can be
arrested and punished only by the Italian consular official resident
at that port.
As a result of the privileges granted to foreigners by the
Capitulations, the consuls stationed in Egypt, as well as in other
parts of the Turkish Empire, are virtually the governors of their
respective colonies, possessing powers which cause their wishes to
be respected and their orders obeyed. They are expected to keep a
watchful eye on the doings of their nationals, especially those who
keep saloons, dance-halls, or cafés; to settle, either in or out of
court, their quarrels and even their domestic disputes; to inspect the
sanitary condition of their houses; to perform the marriage service
for those who prefer a civil to a religious ceremony; and to attend to
their burial and the administration of their estates when they die.
It is scarcely necessary to add that, as a result of this anomalous
state of affairs, there is constant friction and frequent conflicts
of authority between the foreign consuls and the local authorities.
So jealously, indeed, do the foreign powers guard the privileges
conferred upon them by the Capitulations, that Cairo can have no
modern drainage system because certain of the European governments
refuse to give the Egyptian sanitary inspectors permission to enter
the houses of their subjects.
In matters of personal law, such as marriage, divorce, guardianship,
succession, and the like, foreigners are, in general, subject to their
own patriarchs or other religious heads, while similar questions are
decided for the natives by the native courts known as _Mehkemmehs_,
which are presided over by the Cadis. In other matters Egyptians are
justiciable before the ordinary native tribunals, which now consist of
forty-six summary courts having civil jurisdiction in matters up to
two thousand five hundred dollars in value and criminal jurisdiction
in offences punishable by a fine or by imprisonment up to three years;
seven central tribunals, each of the chambers of which consists of
three judges; and a court of appeals at Cairo, about half of whose
members are European. Since its reorganisation, the native Egyptian
bench has won an enviable record for honesty, energy, and efficiency,
and would, if granted complete jurisdictional powers, prove a great
influence for good in the land.
So far as the Khedive is concerned, he has about as much to say in
the direction of the government as the child Emperor of China had
before the revolution put a president in his stead. Not only is Abbas
Hilmi surrounded by English secretaries and advisers, without whose
permission he may scarcely change his mind, but he is compelled to
yield to England even in choosing the members of his ministry, the one
or two attempts which he has made to assert his right to independence
of action in this respect having been met by England with a military
demonstration in the streets of his capital which was not abated until
the office was filled by an Egyptian satisfactory to the British
Consul-General.
Some years ago, when that grim old statesman, Lord Cromer, was still
_deus ex machina_ in Egypt, the Khedive, emboldened by the rapid
spread of the Nationalist movement, which has for its slogan “Egypt
for the Egyptians!” flatly declined to give a cabinet portfolio to a
certain Egyptian politician whose appointment had been urged by the
British Consul-General and who was notoriously a British tool. The
following morning Lord Cromer drove to the Abdin Palace and demanded
an audience with the Khedive. There were no euphemisms employed in the
interview which ensued.
“I have come to obtain your Highness's signature to this decree,”
announced Lord Cromer, in the blunt and aggressive manner so
characteristic of him.
“Suppose, my lord,” the Khedive asked quietly, “that I decline to make
an appointment which is not for the good of Egypt—what then?”
“Then, your Highness,” said Cromer menacingly, “Ceylon.”
“But suppose, my lord,” Abbas Hilmi again inquired, his face pale with
anger, “that I disregard your threat to exile me to Ceylon and still
refuse to sign this commission?”
Lord Cromer strode across the room to a window which commanded a view
of Abdin Square and threw back the curtain. “Will your Highness look
out of this window before you give me a final answer?” he asked.
The Khedive stepped to the window and looked down. There, drawn up in
motionless ranks which stretched from end to end of the great square,
was a brigade of British infantry, the Egyptian sun blazing down on
the rows of brown helmets, on the business-like uniforms of khaki,
and on the slanting lines of steel. For five full minutes Abbas Hilmi
stood in silence, looking down on that grim display of power. Then he
turned slowly to Lord Cromer. “Give me the pen,” he said.
[Illustration:
The real ruler of Egypt, His Excellency Field Marshal Lord Kitchener
of Khartoum, British Agent and Consul-General in Egypt, inspecting a
guard of honour upon his recent visit to the battle-field of Omdurman.
Illustration: “Riflemen made from mud.” A march past of Sudanese
infantry.
THE SAVIOUR OF THE SUDAN AND SOME OF THOSE HE SAVED.]
Here is another example of the harshness of the attitude which England
has seen fit to adopt in her dealings with the Egyptian sovereign. In
the days when Lord Kitchener, fresh from his triumphs in the Sudan,
was still Sirdar of the Egyptian army, the Khedive announced that he
would utilise the occasion of his approaching visit to Khartoum to
review the troops of the garrison. For hours the sinewy, brown-faced
soldiery marched and countermarched before the Khedive on the field
of Omdurman. The infantry in their sand-coloured uniforms swept by
with the swing of veterans; the field batteries—the same that had
mown down the Mahdi's fanatic tribesmen—rumbled by at a gallop; the
camel corps, the riders swaying on their strange mounts like vessels
in a gale, paced past; then the cavalry came, as fast as the horses
could lay foot to ground, lances levelled, the troopers cheering
like madmen, thundering past the reviewing party in a whirlwind of
colour and dust and noise. It was a fine exhibition and one of which
any commanding officer might well have been proud, but the Khedive had
received his military education in Austria, where faultless alignment
and the ability to execute intricate parade movements are reckoned
among the first requisites of a soldier; so when Lord Kitchener, the
conqueror of the Sudan and the maker of the Egyptian army, reined up
his charger before him, saluted, and perfunctorily asked, “I trust
that your Highness is satisfied with the discipline and appearance of
your forces?” Abbas Hilmi, probably as much from a spirit of hostility
to the English as for any other reason, answered in a voice loud
enough to be heard by all around him, “They are a fine body of men,
Lord Kitchener, but I am far from satisfied with their discipline.”
Officers who witnessed this incident have told me that Lord Kitchener
was as amazed as though he had received a slap in the face. Within
an hour his resignation as Sirdar was in the hands of the Khedive,
who as promptly accepted it. But England could never permit her
foremost soldier to be so wantonly and so publicly affronted, for to
do so would be dangerously to impair her prestige among all classes
of Egyptians. So the cable flashed a message from Downing Street to
the British Agency in Cairo and a few hours later the Khedive was
peremptorily informed that he could choose between apologising to
Lord Kitchener and requesting him to withdraw his resignation or of
abdicating in favour of his brother. Appreciating that it was wiser
to apologise and keep his throne than to remain stubborn and lose it,
Abbas Hilmi requested Kitchener to remain on as Sirdar—and he himself
remained on as Khedive.
The men who really transact the business of the Egyptian Government
are not the holders of cabinet portfolios, but the departmental
under-secretaries, all of whom are English, their plans being
perfunctorily submitted to their Egyptian chiefs for their
approval, though they would be used whether they received it or
not. The national revenues and expenditures are controlled by an
English financial adviser, without whose permission the Khedive
and his ministers cannot spend so much as a piastre of government
funds. Similarly, the ministries of the interior, of justice, of
communications, and of agriculture are dictated by English “advisers.”
For upward of thirty years, in fact, the Nile country has been
more absolutely governed from London than has India, or Canada, or
Australia, or South Africa, or any of the Crown colonies, and this
despite the fact that between England and Egypt there is no tie that
is officially recognised by any foreign power. Now, thirty years is
a considerable lapse of time anywhere, particularly in the East,
where men mature rapidly, so that those who were children when the
British came are in the prime of life now. The fact that in that
interim England has had ample time to train them for the duties of
governmental administration, as witness what we have accomplished
among the Filipinos in less than half that time, but that she has
made little, if any, effort to do so, is quite naturally taken by
all thinking Egyptians as a proof that there is no sincerity back of
her repeated assertions that she intends to turn Egypt over to them
as soon as they are fitted to administer it. In fact, I have heard
responsible British officials assert that, to their way of thinking,
the natives were getting altogether too much education as it was, and
that the less they were taught to think the easier it would be for
England to hold the country. Frankly stated, England's attitude toward
the Egyptians has been “You cannot go near the water until you know
how to swim.”
Let it be perfectly clear, however, that nothing is farther from my
intention than to intimate that British rule has not been beneficial
to Egypt. No fair-minded person who was familiar with the appalling
condition of the country and its people before the English came, and
with their present state of prosperity, would cast so much as the
shadow of a doubt on the wonderful improvement which has been brought
about. The story of Egypt's rise from practical bankruptcy until its
securities are now quoted nearly as high as English consols reads
like a romance of the gold fields. During the last few years the
country has been experiencing a land boom equal to that of southern
California, property in Alexandria having sold at the rate of one
hundred dollars a square yard; scientific irrigation, combined with
the completion of the great dam at Assuan, has enormously enlarged
the area of cultivation and has made Egypt the second greatest
cotton-producing country in the world; the national debt has been
materially reduced; and, most significant of all, Egypt's European
bondholders have consented to have the interest on their bonds reduced
from seven to three and a half per cent. Life and property have been
made as safe in Port Said and Zagazig and the Fayoum as they are
in Yonkers or Salem or New Rochelle; slavery has been abolished;
official corruption has been rooted out; forced labour for public
works is no longer permitted; an admirable system of railways brings
the entire cultivated area within reach of the coast; hospitals have
been established in all of the larger towns; while every phase of the
public health has been so closely watched that the population of the
country has actually doubled in the thirty years since the English
came.
To my way of thinking, the most interesting chapter in the history of
present-day Egypt is that which records the development of scientific
irrigation. Northeast Africa being practically rainless, its sole
source of water supply is the Nile, this mighty river created by
torrential rains in the mountains of Abyssinia and by the overflow of
equatorial lakes, and which is without tributaries in Egypt proper,
having an overflow which varies with the seasons. For four months
the flood rushing seaward, which is known as “high Nile,” enriches
hundreds of square miles of what would otherwise be arid and worthless
land. Then come eight months of low Nile, which, were it not for the
genius of an English engineer, would mean unwatered fields, scanty
crops, and probably famine. The British administrators, appreciating
from the very outset that Egypt's entire future depended upon its
agricultural prosperity, and that this, in turn, depended upon the
_fellaheen_ having an ample and steady supply of water for their
farms, set their engineers at the task of devising some scheme for
compelling the great river to pay tribute to the land through which it
passed instead of wasting its fertilising waters in the Mediterranean.
Hence the great barrage at Assuan, suggested by Sir William Willcocks,
designed by Sir Benjamin Baker, built by Sir John Aird, and financed
by Sir Ernest Cassel. A mile and a quarter long, containing a million
tons of stone and creating a reservoir three times the area of the
Lake of Geneva, this titanic barrier permits the additional irrigation
of one million six hundred thousand acres of land. Though its cost was
twelve million five hundred thousand dollars, it has already increased
the earning power of Egypt fully thirteen million dollars annually, so
it will be seen that it more than pays for itself to the country every
twelvemonth. The systematic liberation, during the burning summer
months, of the water thus conserved, means unfailing prosperity for
Egypt, for it is almost unbelievable, to one who has not seen it with
his own eyes, what agricultural magic water can work in this naturally
fertile soil. As the regions capable of responding to irrigation are
almost boundless, and as the water supply is almost inexhaustible, and
as the engineers—and, what is far more important, the financiers—have
come to appreciate that the pregnant soil can be made to pay for
the cost of any reservoir, or series of reservoirs, which they may
construct, it is only reasonable to assume that the great dam at
Assuan is but the forerunner of many others, so that eventually the
Valley of the Nile will be white with cotton and yellow with grain
from the Delta to the Sudd.
But if Upper Egypt suffers from being too dry, Lower Egypt suffers
from being too wet. The prosperity of the country, remember, depends
almost entirely upon its cotton crop, which has an approximate value
of one hundred million dollars annually, the cotton fields covering
some one million six hundred thousand acres, most of which are in the
Delta. That this source of revenue may be increased, the Egyptian
Government has recently undertaken a huge drainage project, which
will, it is estimated, when completed in 1915, redeem a great tract
of flooded and hitherto worthless land, bringing a million additional
acres under cultivation, almost doubling the production of cotton,
and, incidentally, draining Lake Mariout, that historic body of water
disappearing forever.
Agriculture and its attendant problems of irrigation and fertilisation
constitute the sole hobby and amusement of the present Khedive, Abbas
Hilmi II, and, consequently, he is keenly interested in anything that
pertains to it, being a ready and liberal purchaser of all improved
types of agricultural machinery, which he puts to practical use on
the great estates which he owns near Alexandria, in the Delta, and in
the Western Desert. It so happened that, while I was the consular
representative of the United States at Alexandria, I received a
call one morning from the president of an American concern engaged
in the manufacture of agricultural and well-drilling machinery who
explained that he was passing through Egypt and asked if it would
be possible for me to obtain him an audience with the Khedive. The
request was duly transmitted to the Grand Master of Ceremonies, and
shortly thereafter a reply reached me naming the day and hour when
his Highness would receive my compatriot and myself at the palace of
Ras-el-Tin. Frock-coated and top-hatted, we drove to the palace on
the day appointed, were received by the officials of the khedivial
household, and shown into the _salle de réception_, where Abbas Hilmi
stood awaiting us. After a cordial greeting—for the Khedive makes no
secret of his liking for Americans—he drew me down beside him on a
small sofa, motioning my companion to take a chair opposite us.
“It gives me particular pleasure,” I began, “to present Mr. K—— to
your Highness, particularly as he is an authority on agricultural
machinery—a subject in which your Highness is, I know, considerably
interested.”
“Say, Khedive,” exclaimed my fellow-countryman, suddenly leaning
forward and emphasising every sentence by waggling his finger under
Abbas Hilmi's august nose, “I've got the niftiest little proposition
in well-drilling machinery that ever struck this burg, and if you
don't jump at a chance to get in on the ground floor, then all I've
got to say is that you're throwing away the chance of your lifetime.”
The Khedive, being, naturally, quite unaccustomed to this form of
verbal assault and still more unaccustomed to having any one waggle a
finger under his nose, at first drew back haughtily; then the humour
of the situation dawned upon him, and, as the river of talk which
is one of the chief assets of the trained American salesman flowed
steadily on, he became interested in spite of himself, now and then
interjecting a pertinent question, and terminating the audience by
giving the American an order for several thousand dollars' worth
of American machinery, which, the last I heard of it, was giving
excellent satisfaction on the royal farms.
* * * * *
If it is difficult to fix the exact legal status of Egypt, it is still
more difficult to explain that of the Sudan, which is described in the
official blue-books as “an Anglo-Egyptian condominium.” Until 1882
the Sudan was as much a part of Egypt proper as Florida is a part of
the United States, but in that year Egyptian rule was interrupted by
the revolt of the Mahdi, who, with his successor the Khalifa, held
the country for sixteen years under a bloody and desolating tyranny.
In 1896 an Anglo-Egyptian army under Sir Herbert Kitchener began
operations for the recovery of the lost provinces, and, on September
2, 1898, the overthrow of the Dervish power was completed on the
battle-field of Omdurman. In the following year the pleasing farce was
presented of a convention being signed by the British and Egyptian
Governments (or, in other words, by Lord Cromer as the representative
of England in Egypt and by Lord Cromer as the virtual dictator of
Egypt) which provides for the administration of the territory south of
the twenty-second parallel of latitude by a governor-general appointed
by Egypt with the assent of England; and which declares that the
British and Egyptian flags shall be used together; that laws shall be
made by proclamation; that no duties shall be levied on imports from
Egypt; and that slavery is prohibited. In view of England's absolute
domination of Egypt, it is obvious that the term “condominium,” as
applied to the Sudan, is a euphemism for “British possession,” and
that England controls this great region as completely as though her
flag alone flew over it and King George's picture ornamented its
stamps.
The name Sudan is short for Beled-es-Sudan, which means the Land of
the Blacks. Extending from the southern frontier of Egypt to Uganda,
a distance equal to that from Saint Paul to New Orleans, and from the
shores of the Red Sea to the confines of the great central African
kingdom of Wadai, or as far as from Chicago to Denver, the Sudan
boasts an area three times that of Texas. This area, prior to the
Dervish oppression, had a population estimated at eight and a half
millions, but, as a result of the wholesale massacres perpetrated by
the Mahdi and his followers, it has to-day less than two and a half
millions. Since the return of peace, however, the Sudan is gradually
recovering from the effects of the Dervishes' barbaric rule, during
which the whole country was depopulated, wide tracts of land went out
of cultivation, and trade was largely abandoned.
At present the poverty, the scanty population, and the lack of
irrigation in the Sudan form a striking contrast to the wealth, the
density of population, and the high state of cultivation found in
Egypt. But, though it has been, until very recently, little better
than an abandoned estate, with practically no market value, the money
and labour which its British proprietors are expending upon it are
already beginning to produce highly promising results. As a matter
of fact, the agricultural resources of this inland empire are hardly
guessed at, for the fact is too apt to be overlooked that, beyond
the sandy deserts which guard its northern frontier, there exist
extensive and fertile regions which, in the provinces of Gezire and
Sennar alone, are estimated at fifteen millions of acres. Added to
this, the Sudan is particularly fortunate in possessing, in the Blue
and the White Nile, two great waterways which are destined to prove
invaluable as mediums of fertilisation and transportation. There is,
indeed, no room for doubt that the Sudan is destined to be in time
a great agricultural centre, for cotton, wheat, and sugar-cane are
staple and give every promise of prolific crops—many English experts
prophesying that, when provided with facilities for irrigation, it
will supplant the United States as the chief cotton-growing country
of the world—while, farther afield, there are excellent cattle ranges
and untold wealth in forest lands. But although much money has
already been spent upon the Sudan, much more will have to be spent
before it can have more than a speaking acquaintance with prosperity,
for none of its three great needs—population, irrigation, and
transportation—can be provided for nothing or in a hurry.
[Illustration:
Fighting-men of the Emir of Wadai. (“They are wearing helmets and
chain mail captured by their Saracenic ancestors from the Crusaders.
The quilted armour on the horses will turn anything short of a
bullet.”)
Illustration: A gift from Ali Dinar, Sultan of Darfur, to the Sirdar
of the Sudan. (The Sultan of Darfur is a semi-independent and powerful
native ruler of the Southwestern Sudan.)
STRANGE PEOPLE FROM INNERMOST AFRICA.]
I was told so repeatedly by people in other and more favoured parts
of Africa that the Sudan was nothing but a waste of sun-scorched
sand, that I went there as much to see if the description were a true
one as for any other reason. You don't have to search for romance in
the Sudan; it's there waiting for you when you arrive. It met me on
the station platform at Wady Halfa, which is the first town across
the Sudanese frontier, in the form of a fair-haired, moon-faced,
khaki-clad guard on the Khartoum express, who spurned the tip I
proffered him to secure a compartment to myself as insolently as the
poor but virtuous heroine of the melodrama spurns the villain's gold.
He drew back as though the silver I offered him were a rattlesnake
in working order and his face flushed a dull brick-red; then,
bowing stiffly from the waist, as a Prussian officer does when he
is introduced, he turned on his heel and strode away. “I say, you
got the wrong one that time, old chap,” remarked an Englishman who
had witnessed the little incident and who, judging from his pith
helmet and riding-breeches, was of the country. “You probably didn't
know that you were offering a tip to a former captain in his German
Majesty's _garde du corps_?” I remarked that a month before a former
general of division of the Bey of Tunis had accepted with marked
gratitude a tip not half so large for showing me through the Palace of
the Bardo.
“Well, this Johnnie won't,” was the reply. “He may not have much
money, but he's loaded to the gunwales with pride. The story of his
career sounds as if it had served as a model for one of Ouida's
novels. Refused to marry the girl his parents had picked out for
him, so his father cut off his allowance and left him to shift for
himself. He sent in his papers, went to Algeria, and enlisted—of all
fool things!—in that regiment of earth's hard cases called the Foreign
Legion. It didn't take him long to get all he wanted of that kind of
soldiering, so one day, when he was sent down to Oran in charge of
a prisoner, he swam out to a British steamer lying in the harbour,
worked his passage to Alexandria, enlisted in a British cavalry
regiment, took part in Kitchener's campaign against the Khalifa, was
wounded in the shindy at Omdurman, and retired on a pension. Now he
wears a guard's uniform and carries a green flag and walks up and
down the platform shouting 'All aboard for Khartoum!' And at home he
would have a coronet on his visiting-cards and spend his afternoons
swaggering along Unter den Linden. Extraordinary what a man will do
if he has to, isn't it? But you'll find lots more of the same kind in
the Sudan. It's no place for idlers down here; every one works or gets
out.”
That struck me as a pretty promising introduction to a country which,
so I had been assured elsewhere, had nothing more interesting to
recommend it than sun and sand, and it was with a marked rise in my
anticipations that I saw my luggage stowed away in a compartment of
one of the long railway carriages, which are painted white for the
same reason that a man wears a white suit in the tropics, which have
windows of blue glass to prevent the sun-glare from injuring the
passengers' eyes, and which are provided with both outside and inside
blinds in an attempt to keep out a little of the heat. Looked at from
any stand-point that you please, the thirty hours' railway journey
from Wady Halfa to Khartoum is far from being an enjoyable experience,
for a light in your compartment means a plague of flies, while any
attempt to get air, other than that kicked up by the electric fan,
means suffocating dust. It being too dark to read and too hot to
sleep, the only alternative is to sit in your pajamas, swelter, and
smoke.
Considering the obstacles it has had to overcome, the Sudan government
deserves great credit for the railways it has built and the trains it
operates. The construction of the railway to Khartoum was undertaken
by General Kitchener in 1896, in order to support the advance of
his army, and, in spite of the difficulty of laying a railway line
across the sandy and stony surface of the desert, the work was so
energetically carried on that the line advanced at the rate of a mile
a day. The most serious obstacle was, of course, the provision of an
adequate supply of water for the engines and workmen, so a series of
watering-stations was established, at which wells, sunk to a depth of
eighty feet or more, tap the subterranean water. These stations are
so far apart, however, that to supply the engines it is necessary to
attach two or more tank-cars to each train. Still another difficulty
is the shifting sand, which, during the period of the _khamsin_, or
desert wind, proves as disastrous to railroading in the Sudan as snow
does to the railroads of our own Northwest, an inch of sand throwing
an engine from the rails far more effectually than a yard of snow.
It was my fortune, by the way, to encounter one of the _huboubs_,
or sand-storms, for which the Sudan is famous. To give an adequate
idea of it, however, is as impossible as it is to describe any other
overwhelming phenomenon of nature. Far off across the desert we saw
it approaching at the speed of a galloping horse—a great fleecy,
yellowish-brown cloud which looked for all the world like the smoke of
some gigantic conflagration. A distant humming, which sounded at first
like the drone of a million sewing-machines, gradually rose into such
a roar as might be made by a million motor-cars, and then the storm
was upon us. The sand poured down as though shaken through a sieve;
the landscape was blotted out; the sun was obscured and there came
a yellow darkness, like that of a London fog; men and animals threw
themselves, or were hurled, to the ground before the fury of the wind,
while a mantle of sand, inches thick, settled upon every animate and
inanimate thing. Then it was gone, as suddenly as it had come, and we
were left dizzy, bewildered, blinded, half-strangled, and gasping for
breath, amid a landscape which was as completely shrouded in yellow
sand as an American countryside in winter is covered with snow. Under
any circumstances a sand-storm is a disagreeable experience, but out
on the desert, where the traveller's life frequently depends upon the
plainness of the caravan trails, it ofttimes brings death in its train.
It is a gratifying compliment to American mechanical skill that the
running-time between Wady Halfa and Khartoum has been shortened four
hours by the recent adoption of American locomotives, which run,
fittingly enough, over American-made rails. In the construction of
its trains the Sudan government has avoided the irksome privacy of
the European compartment car and the unremitting publicity of the
American Pullman by designing a car which combines the best features
of both. The first-class cars on the Sudanese express trains contain
a series of coupés, each somewhat roomier than the drawing-room in
a Pullman sleeper and each opening into a spacious corridor which
runs the length of the car. For day use there is one long cushioned
seat running crosswise of each compartment, which at night forms the
lower berth, the back of the seat swinging up on hinges to form the
upper. Each coupé is provided with running water, a folding table,
two arm-chairs of wicker, and an electric fan, without which last,
owing to the almost incredible dust which a train sets in motion,
one would all but suffocate. At several stations along the line are
well-equipped baths, at which the trains stop long enough for the
passengers hurriedly to refresh themselves.
The mention of these railway baths recalls an incident which seems
amusing enough to relate. I once had as a fellow-passenger on the
journey from Khartoum northward a red-faced, white-moustached,
choleric-tempered English globe-trotter, who was constitutionally
opposed to the practice of tipping, which he took occasion to
characterise on every possible occasion as “An outrage—a damnable
outrage, sir!” Now, at these wayside bath stations it has long been
the accepted custom to give the equivalent of five cents to the
silent-footed native who fills the tub, brings you your soap and
towels, and brushes your garments. But this the irascible Englishman,
true to his principles, refused to do, still further unpopularising
himself by loudly cursing the cleanliness of the tub, the warmth of
the water, the size of the towels, and the slowness of the Sudanese
attendant. Five minutes before the time for the train to leave the
whistle gave due warning and the passengers scrambled from the bath
into their clothes, which the native attendants were accustomed to
brush and leave outside the bath-room doors. Every one hurried into
his clothes, as I have remarked, except the anti-tipping Englishman,
who almost choked with blasphemy when he found that his garments
had mysteriously disappeared. Though a hasty search was instituted,
not a trace of them could be found, the impassive Sudanese stolidly
declaring that they had seen nothing of the effendi's missing
apparel. The engine shrieked its final warning and the laughing
travellers piled aboard—all, that is, but the Englishman, who rushed
onto the platform clad in a bath towel, only to retreat before the
shocked glances of the women passengers. My last impression of that
God-forsaken, sun-blistered bath station in the desert was the rapidly
diminishing sound of his imprecations as he continued his fruitless
search for his garments. There was no other train, I should add, for
three days. Weeks later I heard that his clothes were eventually
returned to him by a native, who said that he had found them, neatly
folded, underneath a near-by culvert.
Nowhere is the overpowering romance of the land brought more vividly
before you than in the dining-cars or on the decks of the river
steamers. The tall young Englishman in flannels who sits opposite
you at table remarks casually that he is using a four months'
leave of absence to go up Gondokoro-way after elephant, and a
French marquis who is sitting near by, happening to overhear the
conversation, leans across to inquire about the chances for sport
on the Abyssinian frontier. “You can't go across there, you know,”
interrupts a bimbashi, whose freckled Irish face looks strangely
out of place beneath the tarboosh which denotes an officer in the
Egyptian service. “The Hadendowas are on the rampage again and the
Sirdar has issued orders that no one is to be permitted to cross into
Menelik's territory until things have quieted down. There's no use
your trying it, for the camel police are jolly well certain to turn
you back.” The bearded man in the ill-fitting clothes, who would be
taken almost anywhere for a commercial traveller, is, you are told,
one of the most celebrated big-game shots in the world, and just
now is on his way to the Lado Enclave in search of a certain rare
species of antelope for the Berlin museum. The grizzled Egyptian
officer sitting by himself—for the British no more mingle socially
with the Egyptians than Americans do with negroes—once served under
Gordon, as the bit of faded blue ribbon on the breast of his tunic
denotes; the brown-faced Englishman in riding-clothes, with the
wrinkles about his eyes which come from staring out across the sands
under a tropic sun, is a pasha and the governor of a province as
large as many a European kingdom, and farther up the line he will get
off the train and disappear into the desert on one of his periodical
tours of inspection, perhaps not seeing another white face for three
months or more. It struck me that there was something particularly
fine and manly and self-reliant about these young Englishmen who are
acting as policemen and judges and administrators and agricultural
experts rolled into one, out there at the Back of Beyond. “It's only
the hard work that makes it bearable,” said one of them in answer to
my question. “What with the heat and the flies and the never-ending
vista of yellow sand and the lack of companionship, we should die from
sheer loneliness if we didn't work from dawn until bedtime. Besides,
every two years we get long enough leave to go home.” (And oh, the
caress in that word home.) Then he asked me with pathetic eagerness
about the latest song-hits at the London music-halls, and was this
new Russian dancer at Covent Garden as wonderful as the illustrated
weeklies made her out, and honestly, now, did I think the government
was going to be such a bally ass as to give the Irish home rule? That
young man—he was twenty-four on his last birthday, he told me—has
charge of a province four times as large as New York State, and in it
he wields a power which is a strange cross between the patriarchal
and the despotic. With a score or so of camel police he maintains law
and order among a population which, until very recent years, were as
savage and intractable as the Sioux; he holds the high justice, the
middle, and the low; and he is, incidentally, a practical authority on
such varied subjects as wheat-growing, cotton-raising, camel-breeding,
fertilising, and irrigation. Nor would I fail to call attention to
the little-known but wonderful work of a handful of British officers,
who, working continuously since 1898, in those fever-ridden swamps
near Lake No, have finally succeeded in removing the last block
of Sudd,[2] twenty-four miles long, thus making the Nile a free,
navigable waterway from Khartoum to Rejaf, in Uganda, a distance of
twelve hundred miles. And these young men, remember, are but isolated
examples of the thousands, in Africa, in Asia, in America, and in
Oceanica, who are binding together Britain's colonial empire.
[2] The name given to the dense masses of water plants which have long
obstructed the upper reaches of the Nile.
Its discomforts notwithstanding, the railway journey from Wady Halfa
to Khartoum is filled with interest, comparing not at all unfavourably
with that other remarkable desert journey by the Trans-Caspian railway
from Krasnovodsk to Samarkand. For two hundred miles or more after
leaving Wady Halfa we see through the blue glass of the windows
nothing but endless wastes of black rocks and orange sand. Then
the desert gives place to undulating sand-hills, and these in turn
to clusters of dom-palms, to fields of barley, to conical acacias,
and finally a fringe of palms announces the proximity of the river.
We pass in turn Gebel Barka, the sacred mountain of the ancient
Egyptians, and, at its base, the ruins of Napata, once the capital
of an Ethiopian kingdom. A few miles south of Atbara, which is the
junction of the railway to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, we pass the
so-called Island of Meroe, with its score of pyramids, beside which
the majestic monuments of Egypt are but the creations of yesterday,
for this region, remember, was the cradle of the Egyptian arts and
sciences. In the settlements along the banks we now begin to see the
typical round straw huts of Central Africa, with their pointed roofs
and airy _recubas_, or porches. The peoples change with the scenery,
the slender, tarbooshed Nubian giving way to the fierce-faced,
shock-headed Hadendowas, that savage fighting-clan who hold the
country between the Nile and the Red Sea, and they, in turn, to the
Kabbabish Bedouins, those freebooters of the desert, who, perched high
on their lean white racing camels, were the terror of every caravan
in the days before the British came. The cultivated patches become
thicker, the signs of civilisation grow increasingly frequent, the
train rumbles across a long iron bridge which spans the river, and
slowing, comes to a halt before a long, low station building on which
is the word “Khartoum.”
Like another Phœnix, Khartoum has risen from its ashes on the site
of that city which formed the funeral pyre of the heroic Gordon. The
name—“elephant's trunk”—refers to the shape of the long peninsula on
which the city stands and which forms the point of separation of the
Nile into its Blue and White branches. It is a brand-new city which
the British engineers have constructed; a city with a ground plan
as mathematically laid out and with streets as broad as Washington;
a city with pavements and sidewalks and gutters and sewers and
lighting facilities on the most modern lines. As all the buildings
are of a dust-coloured brick, the business portion of the city has
a certain air of substantial permanence, but so uncompromising is
the architecture and so destitute of shade are the streets that it
looks more like a Russian penal settlement than like an African
capital. In the residential quarter, however, the picturesque has
not been sacrificed to the utilitarian, for along the bank of the
Blue Nile a splendid boulevard—a sort of African Riverside Drive—has
been constructed, and here no business or commercial trespass will
be permitted, for from the Grand Hotel to the Palace, a distance
of a mile or more, it is lined with the residences of the British
officials, low-roofed, broad-verandaed bungalows nestling in luxuriant
gardens. The thing that impresses one most about Khartoum is the
extraordinary width of its streets and diagonal avenues and the
frequency of its open circles, but the British will tell you quite
frankly that military considerations, rather than beauty, guided them
in planning it and that a few field-guns, properly placed, can sweep
the entire city. There are two buildings in Khartoum which seem to me
to be more significant of the new era which has begun for the Sudan
than all the other features of the city combined. One is the Gordon
Memorial College, built with the object of training the sons of the
Sudanese sheikhs and chieftains along those lines which are best
calculated to make for the future peace, progress, and prosperity of
the country. With his laurels as the victor of Omdurman still fresh
upon him, Lord Kitchener appealed to his countrymen for one hundred
thousand pounds for the establishment of this institution, which he
felt that England owed to the memory of Gordon, and, so prompt and
general was the response, the entire sum was subscribed within a few
days. The other building to which I referred is the recently completed
Anglican Cathedral, which stands as a recognition of Gordon's great
work as a missionary and as an impressive exhibition of the advance
of the Christian faith. Could Gordon have returned to life on the
occasion of the consecration of this cathedral, and have seen
harmoniously gathered beneath its lofty roof religious dignitaries of
such different minds and faiths as the Bishop of London, the Coptic
Archbishop of Alexandria, the Greek Patriarch of Abyssinia, and the
Grand Cadi and the Grand Mufti, the heads of the Mohammedan community
in the Sudan, he might well have exclaimed, “I did not die in vain.”
* * * * *
I have now sketched for you the conditions which prevailed in the
Valley of the Nile before the English came and those which obtain
there to-day. What its future is to be depends wholly upon the action
of England. Were she to leave the country now, or within the near
future, she would leave it under conditions which would soon result
in chaos, and the good that she has done would be largely lost. The
extensive schemes of irrigation upon which she has entered, and upon
which the prosperity of this whole region so largely depends, could
never be financed by an independent Egypt, and the same is true of the
question of transportation, which is at the bottom of all the problems
of economic development in the Sudan.
That England's position in the Nile country is illegal and illogical
her stanchest supporters do not attempt to deny, but those who are
really familiar with Egyptian conditions and character will agree
with me, I think, that Egypt could suffer no greater calamity than
to have the English go. Not that I think that there is the slightest
probability of their doing so, for Italy's aggression in Tripolitania,
combined with the attitude of the other members of the Triple
Alliance, has resulted in Britain strengthening, rather than relaxing,
her grip on Egypt and the Suez Canal. The canal provides, indeed,
the key to the entire Egyptian situation, for upon her control of it
depends England's entire scheme of administration in India and the
Farther East. To withdraw her forces from Egypt would be tantamount
to leaving the gateway to her Eastern possessions unguarded, and
that, I am convinced, she will never do. Two lesser, though in
themselves important, reasons militate against her surrendering the
control of the Valley of the Nile. One is her hope of eventually
realising, in spite of German opposition, Cecil Rhodes's dream of
an “All Red” route from the Cape to Cairo, of which Egypt and the
Sudan would be the northern links. The other is the belief that in
the scientific irrigation and cultivation of the fertile Nile lands
lie the means of freeing British manufacturers from their dependence
on American cotton. I am inclined to believe, therefore, that in the
not far-distant future England will become convinced that candour
is a better policy than hypocrisy, and will frankly add to her
globe-girdling chain of colonial possessions the whole of that vast
region lying between the mouths of the Nile and the swamps of the
Sudd.