THROUGH OLD EGYPT TO CAIRO
On my way to Cairo I have taken a run through the delta, crossing Lower
Egypt to the Suez Canal and returning through the Land of Goshen.
The soil is as rich and the grass is as green now as it was when Joseph
picked out this land as the best in Egypt for his famine-stricken father
Jacob. Fat cattle by the hundreds grazed upon the fields, camels with
loads of hay weighing about a ton upon their backs staggered along the
black roads. Turbaned Egyptians rode donkeys through the fields, and the
veiled women of this Moslem land crowded about the train at the villages.
On one side a great waste of dazzling yellow sand came close to the edge
of the green fields, and we passed grove after grove of date-palm trees
holding their heads proudly in the air, and shaking their fan-like leaves
to every passing breeze. They seemed to whisper a requiem over the dead
past of this oldest of the old lands of the world.
[Illustration: The _sakka_, or water carrier, fills his pigskin bag at
the river, and then peddles it out, with the cry: “O! may God recompense
me,” announcing his passage through the streets of village or town.]
[Illustration: Up and down the slippery banks of the Nile goes
the centuries-long procession of _fellah_ women bearing head
burdens—water-jars or baskets of earth from excavations.]
As we neared Cairo and skirted the edge of the desert, away off to the
right against the hazy horizon rose three ghost-like cones of gray out
of the golden sand. These were the Pyramids, and the steam engine of the
twentieth century whistled out a terrible shriek as we came in sight of
them. To the left were the Mokattam Hills, with the citadel which Saladin
built upon them, while to the right flowed the great broad-bosomed Nile,
the mother of the land of Egypt, whose earth-laden waters have been
creating soil throughout the ages, and which to-day are still its source
of life.
Egypt, in the words of Herodotus, is the gift of the Nile. This whole
rainless country was once a bed of sterile sand so bleak and bare that
not a blade of grass nor a shrub of cactus would grow upon it. This
mighty river, rising in the heights of Africa and cutting its way through
rocks and hills, has brought down enough sediment to form the tillable
area of Egypt. South of Cairo, for nearly a thousand miles along its
banks, there extends a strip of rich black earth which is only from three
to nine miles wide. Below the city the land spreads out in a delta shaped
somewhat like the segment of a circle, the radii of which jut out from
Cairo, while the blue waters of the Mediterranean edge its arc. This
narrow strip and fan form the arable land of Egypt. The soil is nowhere
more than thirty-five feet deep. It rests on a bed of sand. On each side
of it are vast wastes of sand and rock, with not a spot of green to
relieve the ceaseless glare of the sun. The green goes close to the edge
of the desert, where it stops as abruptly as though it were cut off by a
gardener. Nearly everywhere up the Nile from Cairo the strip is so narrow
that you can stand at one side of the valley and see clear across it.
Thus, in one sense, Egypt is the leanest country in the world, but it is
the fattest in the quality of the food that nature gives it. Through the
ages it has had one big meal every year. At the inundation of the Nile,
for several months the waters spread over the land and were allowed to
stand there until they dropped the rich, black fertilizing sediment
brought down from the African mountains. This sediment has produced from
two to three crops a year for Egypt through the centuries and for a long
time was the sole manure that the land had. The hundreds of thousands of
cattle, donkeys, camels, and sheep that feed off the soil give nothing
back to it, for their droppings are gathered up by the peasant women and
girls, patted into shape, and dried for use as fuel. Until late years
the only manure that was used in any part of the country was that of
pigeons and chickens, or the crumbled ruins of ancient towns, which,
lying through thousands of years, have become rubbish full of fertilizing
properties. Recently, as I have said, the use of artificial fertilizers
has been encouraged with excellent results.
The irrigation of Egypt is now conducted on scientific lines. The water
is not allowed to spread over the country as it was years ago, but the
arable area is cut up by canals, and there are immense irrigating works
in the delta, to manage which during the inundation hundreds of thousands
of men are required. Just at the point of the delta, about twelve miles
above Cairo, is a great dam, or barrage, that raises the waters of the
Nile into a vast canal from which they flow over the fan-like territory
of Lower Egypt. All through Egypt one sees men scooping the water up in
baskets from one level to another, and everywhere he finds the buffalo,
the camel, or donkey turning the wheels that operate the crude apparatus
for getting the water out of the river and onto the land.
But let me put into a nutshell the kernel of information we need to
understand this wonderful country. We all know how Egypt lies on the map
of northeastern Africa, extending a thousand miles or more southward from
the Mediterranean Sea. The total area, including the Nubian Desert, the
region between the Nile and the Red Sea, and the Sinai Peninsula, is more
than seven times as large as the State of New York, but the real Egypt,
that is, the cultivated and settled portion comprising the Nile valley
and delta, lacks just four square miles of being as large as our State of
Maryland. Of this portion, fully one third is taken up in swamps, lakes,
and the surface of the Nile, as well as in canals, roads, and plantations
of dates, so that the Egypt of farms that actually supports the people is
only about as big as Massachusetts. Though this contains little more than
eight thousand square miles, nevertheless its population is nearly one
eighth of ours. Crowd every man, woman, and child who lives in the United
States into four states the size of Maryland, and you have some idea of
the density of the population here. Belgium, that hive of industry, with
its mines of iron and coal and its myriad factories, has only about six
hundred people per square mile; and China, the leviathan of Asia, has
less than two hundred and fifty. Little Egypt is supporting something
like one thousand per square mile of its arable area; and nearly all of
them are crowded down near the Mediterranean.
Of these people, about nine tenths are Mohammedans, one twelfth
Christians, Copts, and others; and less than one half of one per cent.
Jews. Among the Christians are many Greeks of the Orthodox Church and
Italian Roman Catholics from the countries on the Mediterranean Sea.
Nature has much to do with forming the character and physique of the men
who live close to her, and in Egypt the unvarying soil, desert, sky,
and river, make the people who have settled in the country become, in
the course of a few generations, just like the Egyptians themselves.
Scientists say that the Egyptian peasantry of to-day is the same as in
the past, and that this is true even of the cattle. Different breeds have
been imported from time to time only to change into the Egyptian type,
and the cow to-day is the same as that pictured in the hieroglyphics
of the tombs made thousands of years ago. The Egyptian cow is like the
Jersey in shape and form save that its neck is not quite so delicate
and its horns are a trifle shorter. Its colour is a rich red. Its milk
is full of oil, and its butter is yellow. It has been asserted that the
Jersey cow originally came from Egypt, and was taken to the Island of
Jersey by the Phœnicians in some of their voyages ages ago.
But to return to the Nile, the source of existence of this great
population. Next to the Mississippi, with the Missouri, it is the longest
river of the world. The geographers put its length at from thirty-seven
hundred to four thousand miles. It is a hundred miles or so longer than
the Amazon, and during the last seventeen hundred miles of its course
not a single branch comes in to add to its volume. For most of the way
it flows through a desert of rock and sand as dry as the Sahara. In the
summer many of the winds that sweep over Cairo are like the blast from a
furnace, and in Upper Egypt a dead dog thrown into the fields will turn
to dust without an offensive odour. The dry air sucks the moisture out of
the carcass so that there is no corruption.
Nearly all of the cultivated lands lie along the Nile banks and depend
for their supply of water on the rise of the river, caused by the rains
in the region around its sources. When the Nile is in flood the waters
are coloured dark brown by the silt brought down from the high lands of
Abyssinia. When it is low, as in June, they are green, because of the
growth of water plants in the upper parts of the river. At flood time the
water is higher than the land and the fields are protected by banks or
dikes along the river. If these banks break, the fields are flooded and
the crops destroyed.
We are accustomed to look upon Egypt as a very hot country. This is not
so. The greater part of it lies just outside the tropics, so that it has
a warm climate and a sub-tropical plant life. The hottest month is June
and the coldest is January. Ice sometimes forms on shallow pools in the
delta, but there is no snow, although hail storms occur occasionally,
with very large stones. There is no rain except near the coast and a
little near Cairo. Fogs are common in January and February and it is
frequently damp in the cultivated tracts.
For centuries Egypt has been in the hands of other nations. The
Mohammedan Arabs and the Ottoman Turks have been bleeding her since their
conquest. Greece once fed off her. Rome ate up her substance in the
days of the Cæsars and she has had to stake the wildest extravagancies
of the khedives of the past. It must be remembered that Egypt is almost
altogether agricultural, and that all of the money spent in and by it
must come from what the people can raise on the land. The khedives and
officials have piped, and Egypt’s farmers have had to pay.
It was not long before my second visit to Egypt that the wastefulness
and misrule of her officials had practically put her in the hands of a
receiver. She had gone into debt for half a billion dollars to European
creditors—English, French, German, and Spanish—and England and France had
arranged between them to pull her out. Later France withdrew from the
agreement and Great Britain undertook the job alone.
At that time the people were ground down to the earth and had barely
enough for mere existence. Taxes were frightfully high and wages
pitifully low. The proceeds from the crops went mostly to Turkey and to
the bankers of Europe who had obtained the bonds given by the government
to foreigners living in Egypt. In fact, they had as hard lives as in the
days of the most tyrannical of the Pharaohs.
But since that time the British have had a chance to show what they could
do, irrigation projects and railroad schemes have been put through,
cotton has come into its own, and I see to-day a far more prosperous land
and people than I did at the end of the last century.