EGYPT has excellent railways. There is no reason why it should not have.
They are made without difficulty and easily maintained in a land of
no frosts; only where they touch the desert an occasional fence is
necessary against the drifting sand. The rails are laid, without wooden
sleepers, on iron saucers, with connecting bands, and the track is firm
and sufficiently elastic. The express train travels the 131 miles to
Cairo in about four and a half hours, running with a punctuality, and
with Egyptian drivers and conductors too, that is unique in Egypt. The
opening scene at the station did not promise expedition or system.
We reach the station three quarters of an hour before the departure
of the train, for it requires a longtime—in Egypt, as everywhere in
Europe—to buy tickets and get baggage weighed. The officials are slower
workers than our treasury-clerks. There is a great crowd of foreigners,
and the baggage-room is piled with trunks of Americans, 'boxes' of
Englishmen, and chests and bundles of all sorts. Behind a high counter
in a smaller room stand the scales, the weigher, and the clerks. Piles
of trunks are brought in and dumped by the porters, and thrust forward
by the servants and dragomans upon the counter, to gain them preference
at the scales. No sooner does a dragoman get in his trunk than another
is thrust ahead of it, and others are hurled on top, till the whole pile
comes down with a crash. There is no system, there are neither officials
nor police, and the excited travelers are free to fight it out among
themselves. To venture into the mêlée is to risk broken bones, and it
is wiser to leave the battle to luck and the dragomans. The noise is
something astonishing. A score or two of men are yelling at the top
of their voices, screaming, scolding, damning each other in polyglot,
gesticulating, jumping up and down, quivering with excitement. This is
your Oriental repose! If there were any rule by which passengers could
take their turns, all the trunks could be quickly weighed and passed on;
but now in the scrimmage not a trunk gets to the scales, and a half hour
goes by in which no progress is made and the uproar mounts higher.
Finally, Ahmed, slight and agile, handing me his cane, kuffia and watch,
leaps over the heap of trunks on the counter and comes to close quarters
with the difficulty. He succeeds in getting two trunks upon the platform
of the scales, but a traveler, whose clothes were made in London, tips
them off and substitutes his own. The weighers stand patiently waiting
the result of the struggle. Ahmed hurls off the stranger's trunk, gives
its owner a turn that sends him spinning over the baggage, and at last
succeeds in getting our luggage weighed. He emerges from the scrimmage
an exhausted man, and we get our seats in the carriage just in time.
However, it does not start for half an hour.
The reader would like to ride from Alexandria to Cairo, but he won't
care to read much about the route. It is our first experience of a
country living solely by irrigation—the occasional winter showers being
practically of no importance. We pass along and over the vast shallows
of Lake Mareotis, a lake in winter and a marsh in summer, ride between
marshes and cotton-fields, and soon strike firmer ground. We are
traveling, in short, through a Jersey flat, a land black, fat, and rich,
without an elevation, broken only by canals and divided into fields by
ditches. Every rod is cultivated, and there are no detached habitations.
The prospect cannot be called lively, but it is not without interest;
there are ugly buffaloes in the coarse grass, there is the elegant
white heron, which travelers insist is the sacred ibis, there are some
doleful-looking fellaheen, with donkeys, on the bank of the canal,
there is a file of camels, and there are shadoofs. The shadoof is the
primitive method of irrigation, and thousands of years have not changed
it. Two posts are driven into the bank of the canal, with a cross-piece
on top. On this swings a pole with a bucket of leather suspended at
one end, which is outweighed by a ball of clay at the other. The fellah
stands on the slope of the bank and, dipping the bucket into the water,
raises it and pours the fluid into a sluice-way above. If the bank is
high, two and sometimes three shadoofs are needed to raise the water to
the required level. The labor is prodigiously hard and back-straining,
continued as it must be constantly. All the fellaheen we saw were clad
in black, though some had a cloth about their loins. The workman usually
stands in a sort of a recess in the bank, and his color harmonizes with
the dark soil. Any occupation more wearisome and less beneficial to the
mind I cannot conceive. To the credit of the Egyptians, the men alone
work the shadoof. Women here tug water, grind the corn, and carry about
babies, always; but I never saw one pulling at a shadoof pole.
There is an Arab village! We need to be twice assured that it is a
village. Raised on a slight elevation, so as to escape high water, it is
still hardly distinguishable from the land, certainly not in color.
All Arab villages look like ruins; this is a compacted collection of
shapeless mud-huts, flat-topped and irregularly thrown together. It is
an aggregation of dog-kennels, baked in the sun and cracked. However,
a clump of palm-trees near it gives it an air of repose, and if it
possesses a mosque and a minaret it has a picturesque appearance, if the
observer does not go too near. And such are the habitations of nearly
all the Egyptians.
Sixty-five miles from Alexandria, we cross the Rosetta branch of the
Nile, on a fine iron bridge—even this portion of the Nile is a broad,
sprawling river; and we pass through several respectable towns which
have an appearance of thrift—Tanta especially, with its handsome station
and a palace of the Khedive. At Tanta is held three times a year a great
religious festival and fair, not unlike the old fair of the ancient
Egyptians at Bubastis in honor of Diana, with quite as many excesses,
and like that, with a gramme of religion to a pound of pleasure. “Now,”
says Herodotus, “when they are being conveyed to the city Bubastis, they
act as follows:—for men and women embark together, and great numbers
of both sexes in every barge: some of the women have castanets on which
they play, and the men play on the flute during the whole voyage; and
the rest of the women and men sing and clap their hands together at the
same time.” And he goes on to say that when they came to any town they
moored the barge, and the women chaffed those on shore, and danced with
indecent gestures; and that at the festival more wine was consumed than
all the rest of the year. The festival at Tanta is in honor of a famous
Moslem saint whose tomb is there; but the tomb is scarcely so attractive
as the field of the fête, with the story-tellers and the jugglers and
booths of dancing girls.
We pass decayed Benha with its groves of Yoosef-Effendi oranges—the
small fruit called Mandarin by foreigners, and preferred by those who
like a slight medicinal smell and taste in the orange; and when we are
yet twenty miles from Cairo, there in the south-west, visible for a
moment and then hidden by the trees, and again in sight, faintly and yet
clearly outlined against the blue sky, are two forms, the sight of which
gives us a thrill. They stand still in that purple distance in which we
have seen them all our lives. Beyond these level fields and these trees
of sycamore and date-palm, beyond the Nile, on the desert's edge, with
the low Libyan hills falling off behind them, as delicate in form and
color as clouds, as enduring as the sky they pierce, the Pyramids of
Geezeh! I try to shake off the impression of their solemn antiquity, and
imagine how they would strike one if all their mystery were removed. But
that is impossible. The imagination always prompts the eye. And yet I
believe that standing where they do stand, and in this atmosphere, they
are the most impressive of human structures. But the pyramids would be
effective, as the obelisk is not, out of Egypt.
Trees increase in number; we have villas and gardens; the grey ledges of
the Mokattam hills come into view, then the twin slender spires of the
Mosque of Mohammed Ali on the citadel promontory, and we are in the
modern station of Cairo; and before we take in the situation are
ignominiously driven away in a hotel-omnibus. This might happen in
Europe. Yes; but then, who are these in white and blue and red, these
squatters by the wayside, these smokers in the sun, these turbaned
riders on braying donkeys and grumbling dromedaries; what is all this
fantastic masquerade in open day? Do people live in these houses? Do
women peep from these lattices? Isn't that gowned Arab conscious that he
is kneeling and praying out doors? Have we come to a land where all our
standards fail and people are not ashamed of their religion?
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