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.
[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: 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.