Upon Henty's return from the Abyssinian campaign in 1868 his active busy
mind incited him to take a calm home rest from his warlike labours by
writing one of his first books, based upon his correspondent letters,
and entitled, _The March to Magdala_. This, published towards the end
of the year, was full of vigorous description, and as an epitome of the
war it achieved a very fair success. In addition it served to make the
reading public better acquainted with a name already familiar to the
newspaper world.
Very shortly after this essay now, he wrote and sent out through the
same publishers, Messrs. Tinsley Brothers, his second three-volume
novel, _All but Lost_. This was in 1869, and long before the days when
he devoted himself to the young readers of his works of adventure.
At the end of the year he undertook another expedition. This, however,
was of a peaceful nature, to wit, the task of describing the
epoch-marking inauguration of M. Ferdinand de Lesseps's _magnum opus_,
the Suez Canal. It was a pleasant duty, for the correspondent was
practically a privileged visitor, and one of the representatives of
civilisation who had come to partake of Ismail Pasha's munificent
hospitality, in company with other guests who may fairly be classed as
representing "the world."
He wrote a series of letters full of vivid word-painting, descriptive of
Cairo _en fete_, of ball and banquet, of the illuminations, and of the
state of the ancient city--of the Egypt where of old the children of
Israel were enslaved, and helped to build the monuments which still
remain. He also touched on the homes which were raised and built with
the straw-mingled clay that ages ago crumbled into dust, and is now
being excavated and basket-borne to spread upon the agricultural land as
an extra fertiliser of the almost too fertile earth.
Henty had a great opportunity here for his descriptive pen, and his
letters abound with pictures of the Aladdin-like state of the place, of
the way in which money was lavished to provide a grand reception for
empress and emperor, viceroy and prince, and the rest of the
distinguished guests whom the Khedive delighted to honour. Cairo
presented such a scene, that the writer felt that he could readily
imagine himself transported into the times of the _Arabian Nights_ as it
might have been on the occasion of the marriage of Aladdin to the
princess of his heart, one Badroulboudour. The illuminations in the
soft transparency of an Egyptian atmosphere presented a fairy-like
aspect. Flags of all nations hung perfectly still in the soft air, side
by side with lanterns and decorations of a more national kind. There
were fireworks everywhere; rockets ascended with a hiss and roar in
rapid succession, while dazzling fires of every hue that chemistry has
won from earth's minerals threw broad floods of colour like nocturnal
rainbows, only more iridescent in their mingling, along the street and
across the square. Noise was not wanting, for petards exploded with
unpleasant frequency; and as the salvoes died out there was constantly
arising the peculiar dull subdued roar of the thronging multitude in
ecstasy at the unwonted sight.
In the side streets the crowd was strangely novel to the eyes of the
foreign visitor, and as carriages crowded with spectators made their way
slowly through the throng of the ordinary Egyptian city dwellers,
strongly reinforced by the inhabitants from all the country round, the
eyes of the stranger were constantly attracted by the silent,
solemn-looking, white-turbaned Mussulman, and the dark, blue-robed,
muffled, and yashmak-wearing women--all eyes for the looker-on. It was
a strange and constant change from light to darkness in the generally
ill-lit city. One minute the spectator would be traversing a street
that presented the appearance of a long ball-room, with lines of
chandeliers running down the centre only a few paces apart. From these
hung festoons and garlands of coloured lamps, while several lines of
lanterns ran along the houses on either side. Then a few steps and the
visitor plunged into a narrow way, sombre, suggestive, and gloomy,
possibly illumined only by the glowworm-like rays of a single lamp, with
a few slippered people hurrying softly, almost shadow-like, as they made
their way towards the line of illuminations.
In the brightly lighted streets the looker-on from any elevation gazed
down upon a perfect sea of turbans and also at a long line of carriages,
each preceded by its wand-bearing runners shouting boisterously to the
crowd to clear the way. It was one long festival for rich and poor
alike, and the variety of the scene was wondrous. The occupants of the
carriages, whose drivers forced their way through the good-tempered
crowd, were often the closely-veiled inhabitants of the harems of the
rich, not as a rule the harem of the Eastern story, the word harem now
more truly meaning simply the ordinary home. But in many cases these
were guarded jealously by attendant eunuchs, and preceded by runners
bearing braziers or cressets of flaming wood.
But the houses on either side were not occupied merely by flaming lamps,
for from the latticed windows over the shops the female inhabitants of
the city, eagerly throwing off the customary reserve, peered down upon
the passing throng. Colour in the lighted streets and diversity were
everywhere in company with rampant irregularity, for each decorator had
worked according to his own sweet will. No two streets were alike
either in occupants or in decoration. Sombre and sordid buildings
crowded close upon palaces, and while one street was dark and empty,
with its sporadic lamps, the next was crowded with a dense mass
listening to the plaintive music of the native bands discoursing wild
and, possibly to the hearers, delicious strains, but strains containing
too much bagpipe and cymbal for the foreign ear. In another, as if it
were some gigantic old-world fair, the merry-featured, strangely robed
throng was clustering round a knot of dancing girls, Egyptian
Terpsichoreans. These displayed their ideas of the poetry of motion in
a singularly wild and picturesque manner, and were evidently frantically
admired by the holiday-keeping lookers-on.
By way of change, after hours of wandering through the crowded and
illuminated streets, Henty describes one of the palaces where the
principal guests were accommodated by the Khedive. This was reached
after a quiet drive to its site, a short distance from the town. Here
in the soft darkness of the Egyptian night the illuminations were
superb, and the description exemplifies the lavish recklessness of the
host on behalf of his guests. In front of the palace was a space
forming a parallelogram of considerably over a quarter of a mile long by
some three hundred yards wide. This was surrounded by an arched
trellis-work, resembling somewhat in its detail the delicate tracery of
a cathedral cloister. The wooden structure was literally covered upon
both sides with illumination lanterns, and looked like some gnome or
fairy fabric of fire. Round it was a carriage drive which passed
between it and the palace, and against the walls of the palace itself
glittering lights were fixed in the same order as upon the wooden
framework, so that to the spectator it was as if he gazed down a vista
of two interminable walls of fire connected by arches of coloured lamps.
The effect was exquisite, heightened as it was by the ascending rockets
which burst and showered down coloured stars in constant succession.
Pyrotechnic fires burned here and there, and threading as it were the
falling stars, the strains of band after band of music blended their
enchantment with the beauty of the scene.
This is but a slight description of one of the many sights embraced by
the enormous fete provided for the Khedive Ismail's world-invited
guests, and picture after picture Henty painted of these scenes by night
and by day. He also visited the various points of interest in the
neighbourhood, notably the Pyramids, going by the road to these ancient
monuments which had been slave-constructed by order of the Khedive, as
if in a fit of lavish recklessness he had determined to emulate the
doings of some Pharaoh of old, so that his French empress visitor should
have a special way made smooth across the desert to the old world-famous
pyramidal tombs. Visitor and special correspondent Henty was, but he
spoke out as the quiet, thoughtful Englishman in translating the words
of the wise old Orientals who thoughtfully shook their heads and added
their quiet _Cui bono_? over the thriftless wanton expense. There was
banqueting and feasting, and all at a time when the treasury was
depleted, when the civil and military forces had their payments in
arrear, and when national debt heaped upon national debt. All this
could only end in the bankruptcy which too surely came.
Most of this renowned spectacle was preliminary to the long-expected
opening of the canal, and, ignoring the head-shaking of the thoughtful,
the great mass of the light-hearted Egyptians, rich and poor alike, went
to see and share in the festivity, and took no thought of the future.
The world had come to see the opening of the canal, the finish of a
stupendous undertaking, the inception of a clever western, but
thoroughly Egyptian and Pharaoh-like in its audacity. At last the
shovel and basket of the drudging slaves as well as workers for hire,
were cast aside, and the waters flowed through what American visitors
sardonically styled "the ditch", opening nearly a hundred miles of
waterway extending from Suez to Timsah, now re-christened, or
Mahommedanised into Ismailia. Along this "ditch" there was a grand
procession of state barges, steam launches, and visitor-bearing craft,
all made the more imposing by the presence of a squadron of British
battleships, whose approach to the entrance with the saluting thunder of
their great guns Henty dwells upon, though, apparently with a grim
chuckle of British irony, he relates how two of the marine monsters got
aground.
The procession, however, seems to have been petty in comparison with the
innate grandeur of M. de Lesseps's enterprise and what it meant to the
future of the civilised world. Later, as if to make up for his words
respecting the grounding of the huge iron-clads, which were doomed to
flounder like whales in a rivulet before they got off, Henty hastens to
paint vividly and evidently with a feeling of pride the aspect of the
ships of war of every European nation, the dark line of sailors who
manned the yards, cheering vociferously, the clouds of powder smoke
mingling with the volumes from the funnels drifting slowly across the
water, the lofty lighthouse, and the populous town which had sprung up
as if under the wand of a magician. And that magician was M. de
Lesseps, the sun of whose greatness sank in sadness years after, when,
as if vaulting ambition had overleaped itself, he died half-forgotten
and broken-hearted at the temporary failure of his other great venture,
the canal to join Pacific and Atlantic, which, these many years after
the great man's death, promises to be the accomplished fact of the
twentieth century.
George Henty was always a sailor at heart, and never happier than when,
hatless in a brisk breeze, he was watching the easing off or the
tightening of a sheet, while his hands played with the spokes of the
wheel which governed a vessel's course. So it is not surprising that in
his description of the grand fetes and rejoicings over the opening of
the canal he should find a businesslike corner at the bottom of one of
his letters to talk about the chances of a vessel passing easily through
the sand-bordered ribbon of water which joined the Mediterranean and Red
Seas. He says: "I have been favoured with a log of the soundings taken
on board the _Cambria_ during her passage through the canal,"--he speaks
like the man in his element--"and I am bound to say that they are far
more favourable than from all other accounts I could have believed
possible. The total number of soundings were seventy-six. They were
taken, with the exception of the passage of the Bitter Lakes, during the
whole passage at intervals of a nautical mile, and of the seventy-six
soundings no fewer than fifty-six gave a depth of twenty-seven feet and
over, while of the remaining twenty only four were below twenty-two
feet, one only giving as little as nineteen feet of water. This table
of soundings shows that the canal is upon the average of a depth of
twenty-six feet; and although it is unquestionable that the vessels
drawing only eighteen feet did scrape the ground in several places
during their passage, the soundings taken by Mr Ashbury showed that
these must have been, with the exception of the lump of rock at
Serapium, mere accidental mounds and banks which had been left in the
process of dredging."
And here, too, it will not be out of place to add a few words written
after the inauguration, and _finis coronat opus_ had been added to
Henty's descriptions of the great event. Just overleaf it was the
sailor speaking upon the achievement and the canal's possibilities of
carrying out the objects for which it was designed. He is now speaking
as the thoughtful leader-writer, and somewhat in these words he begins
to count the cost of the entertainment provided by the Khedive.
"Admitting," he says, "that the cost of all this enterprise has been
enormous, amounting as they say here to two millions sterling, to what
good has this sum been spent? For it is not the viceroy's private
money, but the national revenue, and one feels in the position of the
guests of the directors of some public company, One says, `Yes, it is a
splendid banquet; but what will the unfortunate shareholders say?' I
can reply that the shareholders do not like it at all. Why should
French journalists, German professors, and English heads of chambers of
commerce be taken up the Nile at the expense of the people of Egypt?"
But it is only fair to say that this was not written in a grudging
spirit, for Henty had found time to praise warmly the admirable
management and kindly welcome given to the Khedive's guests, and his
final remarks were veined with a feeling of sorrow that the hospitality
should have been so profuse.
At the dispersal of the crowd of visitors it seems as if it occurred to
Henty that this would be a most favourable opportunity, after making
himself acquainted with the land of the captivity and the ancient works
in Egypt, to take in reverse the journey made of old in the days of
famine, and visit the Holy Land. This happy thought he put into
execution, and making a tour through the Holy Land, he ended by visiting
Jerusalem before his return to England.