Full text of "Egypt in transition"

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THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

GIFT OF

Gene Fowler

EGYPT IN TRANSITION

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS
ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO

I'fioto 6j/ O. C licrf-tfarii.

THK RK;HT HONORABLK THK EARL OF CKOMKK, G.C.B., O.M.

EGYPT IN TRANSITION

SIDNEY LOW

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

THE EARL OF CROMER

G.C.B., ETC.

WITH PORTRAITS

Wefa gorfe
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1914

All rights restrvtd

Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1914.

NortoooU

J. 8. Cushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

Collage
Library

EDMUND GOSSE, C.B., LL.D.

POET AND CRITIC

WHO HAS VINDICATED THE LITERATURE OF THE SMALLER

NATIONS AND ILLUMINATED THAT OF

THE GREATER

INTRODUCTION

I HAVE been informed on good authority that a few
years ago an English gentleman paid a visit to a high
official of the Sudanese Government resident at Khar-
tum, and, as a preliminary to a searching interrogatory
on a number of points of great public interest, stated
that he had just arrived and that his intention was
'to get at the very heart and soul of the people of the
Sudan.' The official in question was naturally rather
staggered at the declaration of a programme of such
far-reaching ambition, all the more so because he had
himself passed many toilsome years in the country,
in the course of which he had made strenuous efforts
to understand the habits and aspirations of its inhabit-
ants, but did not feel at all confident of the degree
of success which he had attained. He therefore
anxiously inquired of the newcomer how long a time
he intended to devote to the accomplishment of his
self-imposed task. The reply given by this ardent
seeker after Sudanese truth was that he proposed to
leave Khartum by the train on the following Friday
morning.

It may be, albeit I was told the anecdote as an
authentic fact, that this is a caricature, but in any case
it departs from the reality less than many might, as a

viii INTRODUCTION

first impression, be inclined to think. In truth, the
rapidity with which casual visitors to the East occa-
sionally form their opinions, the dogmatism with which
they assert those opinions, which are often in reality
formed before they cross the British Channel, and the
hasty and sweeping generalisations which they at
times base on very imperfect data, is a never-ending
source of wonderment to those who have passed their
lives in endeavouring to unravel the tangled skein of
Eastern thought and have had actual experience of
the difficulties attendant on Eastern government and
administration. The scorn and derision excited by
these mental processes have found expression in the
creation of an idealised type, under the name of 'Pad-
gett, M.P.,' who is supposed to embody all the special
and somewhat displeasing characteristics of his class.
There is, however, another side to the question.
My personal experience rather leads me to the con-
clusion that what Pericles said of women holds good
about British officials in the East, that is to say, that
the less they are talked about the better. I have
noticed that on many occasions the really good work
done has varied in the inverse proportion of the degree
of public attention which it has attracted whether in
the sense of praise or blame. Nevertheless, it is cer-
tainly desirable, if for no other reason than to serve
as an antidote to current fables, that the British public
should have accurate information furnished to them
as regards the proceedings of their agents abroad.

INTRODUCTION ix

It is equally desirable, even from the point of view of
the agents themselves, that those proceedings should
be from time to time scrutinised by intelligent and
independent witnesses who are not bound by any
official ties. Moreover, it sometimes happens that a
newcomer, bringing a fresh mind to bear upon the
facts with which he has to deal, may notice points
which, owing to custom and familiarity, have escaped
the attention of residents, and may thus make sugges-
tions of real practical utility. The value of the in-
formation thus afforded to the public necessarily de-
pends on the intelligence, the powers of observation,
the absence from prejudice, and the care displayed in
the collection of data exercised by the informant. In
the present instance all who are interested in the affairs
of Egypt and the Sudan have been singularly fortunate.
Mr. Sidney Low entered on his task already equipped
with a wide experience gained in other countries. He
evidently spared no pains to ensure accuracy in the
statements of his facts. His letters testify to the acute-
ness of his powers of observation. His pleasing liter-
ary style is calculated to attract many who would be
repelled by more ponderous official or semi-official
utterances. The result is that he has produced a
lively and, so far as I can judge, a very trustworthy
account of the present conditions of affairs in the
Valley of the Nile. I have no hesitation in commending
what he has written to the favourable consideration
of all who are interested in the subject.

x INTRODUCTION

The abundant literature which exists on modern
Egypt, coupled with the fact that a steady stream of
winter visitors now passes annually through Cairo,
have contributed to render the public tolerably familiar
with the present condition of Egyptian affairs. On
these, therefore, I need not dwell at any length. I wish,
however, to repeat an opinion which I have frequently
expressed on former occasions, namely, that by far
the most important question connected with Egyptian
internal administration at present is the abolition, or
at all events the modification, of the Capitulations.
The evils of the system, on which Mr. Low dwells
in one of his letters, are universally recognised. The
difficulty is to find a remedy, which shall at the same
time be both effective and practicable. I have in my
official reports, and more recently in an article published
in the Nineteenth Century and After, made certain sug-
gestions for solving the legislative dilemma which at
present exists. I do not attach any exaggerated im-
portance to the particular scheme which I have recom-
mended, but, without attempting to go fully into the
subject on the present occasion, I may say that no
plan of reform can, I am convinced, be successfully
carried into execution unless it steers between two
extremes. In the first place, it would be in the highest
degree unjust and also impolitic to deprive the Euro-
peans resident in Egypt of their present privileges
without providing adequate guarantees against the
recurrence of those abuses to guard against which the

INTRODUCTION xi

privileges were originally created. The best guarantee
would probably be the creation of machinery which
would in some form or another enable European resi-
dents in Egypt to make their voices heard before any
legislation affecting their special interests was under-
taken. There are many ways in which this object
may be accomplished, neither have I any sort of wish
to dogmatise as to which method is the best ; but
whatever plan be adopted it will certainly prove a
failure unless the general principle is recognised that
personal rule, which must for a long time to come be
the predominating feature in Egyptian administration,
must in this instance be tempered to such an extent
as to enable local European opinion to be brought into
council. Equally objectionable would be any attempt
to treat all the inhabitants of the Nile Valley as a single
or homogeneous political unit, and to amalgamate
the machinery for purely Egyptian and for European
legislation.

Between the extreme of personal government and
that of parliamentary institutions of the conventional
type there lies a tolerably wide field for action. The
statesmanship of those responsible for the government
of Egypt will be shown by the extent to which they
will be able to devise a plan not open to the charge of
excess in either direction. In the meanwhile, there is
a distinct risk that in view of the great difficulty of
finding a practicable and unobjectionable solution to
this question ; of the fact that the subject, which is

xii INTRODUCTION

very complicated, is but little understood in this
country ; and of the further fact that public attention
is at present directed to other and admittedly more
important topics, matters will be allowed to drift on
as they are, and that the present regime will continue
without any very substantial change. Such a con-
clusion would be unsatisfactory and disappointing to
those who are interested in the well-being of Egypt
and its inhabitants. But, on the other hand, it will
be better to drift on as at present rather than to take
a step in a false direction.

The public are, however, generally speaking, less fully
acquainted with Sudanese than with Egyptian affairs.
Mr. Low's letters from the Sudan are, therefore, to be
welcomed. They constitute, as I venture to think,
the most instructive and interesting portion of his
book. It is with very special pleasure that I note that
so competent an observer as Mr. Low is able to give
a very satisfactory account of Sudanese progress. I trust
it will not be thought presumptuous if I supplement
his account by stating the main causes which, in my
opinion, have contributed towards rendering that
progress possible.

Unquestionably, amongst such elements in the situa-
tion as are under human control, the first place must
be given to the fact that the form of government in
the Sudan is singularly adapted to the special condition
and requirements of the country. It is probable that,
with the exception of a few experts who might be num-

INTRODUCTION xiii

bered on the fingers of one hand, there are not a dozen
people in England who could give even an approxi-
mately accurate account of what that form of govern-
ment is. Neither can the general ignorance which
prevails on this subject cause any surprise, for the
political status of the Sudan is different to that of any
other country in the world. It was little short of
providential that at the time this question had to be
settled a Minister presided at the Foreign Office who
did not allow himself to be unduly bound by precedent
and convention. The problem which had to be solved
was how the Sudan, without being designated as
British territory, could be spared all the grave incon-
veniences which would have resulted if it had continued
to be classed as Ottoman territory. When the cannon
at Omdurman had once cleared the ground for political
action, it appeared at first sight that politicians were
impaled on the horns of an insoluble dilemma. Lord
Salisbury, however, whose memory I shall never cease
to revere, said to- me on one occasion that when once
one gets to the foot of apparently impassable moun-
tains it is generally possible by diligent search to find
some way of getting through them.

So it proved in the present instance. It occurred to
me that the Sudan might be made neither English nor
Egyptian, but Anglo-Egyptian. Sir Malcolm Mcll-
wraith clothed this extremely illogical political conception
in suitable legal phraseology. I must confess that I made
the proposal with no very sanguine hopes that it would

xiv INTRODUCTION

be accepted. Lord Salisbury, however, never thought
twice on the matter. He joyfully agreed to the creation
of a hybrid State of a nature eminently calculated
to shock the susceptibilities of international jurists.
The possible objections of foreign governments were
conjured away by the formal declaration that no pref-
erence would be accorded to British trade. The
British and Egyptian flags were hoisted with pomp
on the palace of Khartum, and from that time forth
Sir Reginald Wingate and his very capable subordinates
have been given a free hand.

The second cause, to which the success of the Sudanese
administration may, in my opinion, be attributed is
that, broadly speaking, the Sudanese officials have
been left to themselves. There has been absolutely
no interference from London. Nothing has, for-
tunately, as yet occurred to awaken marked parlia-
mentary interest in the affairs of the Sudan.
Supervision from Cairo has been limited to guidance
on a few important points of principle, to a very limited
amount of financial control, and occasionally, but
very rarely, to advice on matters of detail which has
invariably been communicated in private and unofficial
form. A system of this sort cannot, of course, be made
to work satisfactorily unless thorough confidence is
entertained in the agents who are responsible for its
working. The agents employed in the Sudan have
always been very carefully chosen, and they have fully
justified the confidence which has been shown in them.

INTRODUCTION xv

They have been mainly, though by no means exclu-
sively, soldiers. The civilian element is, however,
being gradually increased.

I may perhaps conveniently take this opportunity
of explaining the genesis of the Sudanese Civil Service.
In the first instance, the civil work of the Sudan was
carried on almost exclusively by officers of the army.
This system continued practically unchanged until
the commencement of the war in South Africa. It was
not modified by reason of its having worked badly,
nor because any special predilection was entertained
for civilian in preference to military agency. Speaking
with a somewhat lengthy experience of administrative
work done by both soldiers and civilians, I may say
that I find it quite impossible to generalise on the sub-
ject of their respective merits I mean, of course,
in respect to ordinary administrative work, and not
as regards posts where special legal, educational or
other technical qualifications have to be considered.
In the present case my feeling was that a certain number
of active young men endowed with good health, high
character, and fair abilities were required to assist in
governing the country, and that it was a matter of
complete indifference whether they had received their
early training at Sandhurst, or at Oxford or Cambridge.

But the South African war brought out one great
disadvantage which is an inevitable accompaniment to
the employment of army officers in civil capacities.
It is that they are liable to be suddenly removed. The

xvi INTRODUCTION

officers themselves naturally wish to join their regi-
ments when there is a prospect of seeing active service.
The War Office, although I think it at times allows itself
to be rather too much hide-bound by regulations, nat-
urally looks, on an occasion of this sort, solely to the
efficiency of the troops which it sends into the field.
The result is that the head of a Government such as
that of the Sudan may suddenly find himself deprived
of some of his most valuable agents, and is thus ex-
posed to the risk of having his administration seri-
ously dislocated at a critical moment.

Frequent changes in any administration are at all
times to be deprecated. One of the reasons of what-
ever successes have been achieved in the Nile Valley
has been that all such changes have, so far as was
possible, been avoided. They are especially to be
deprecated at a time when events of importance, such
as those which occurred in South Africa, send an electric
shock through the whole British Empire, and more or
less affect indirectly all its component parts. To any
one sitting in a London office the removal of half a
dozen young officers and the substitution of others
in their place may not seem a matter of vital impor-
tance. But the question will be regarded in a very
different light by the head of an administration such
as the Sudan, who will very fully realise how impossible
it is, whether in respect to civil or military appoint-
ments, to fill at once the vacuum caused by the abrupt
departure of even a very few trained men. As a matter

INTRODUCTION xvii

of fact the withdrawal of a certain number of officers
from the Sudan to go to South Africa led to conse-
quences which were serious, and might well have been
much more so. It was manifestly desirable to do all
that was possible to obviate any such risks in the
future. Hence the embryo of a Sudanese Civil Ser-
vice was brought into being.

I should add that another very potent cause which
has contributed to the successful administration of the
Sudan is that the officials, both civil and military, have
been well paid and that the leave rules have been
generous. These are points to which I attach the
utmost importance. In those outlying dominions of
the Crown where coloured races have to be ruled
through European agency, everything depends on the
character and ability of a very small number of indi-
viduals. Probably none but those who have them-
selves been responsible for the general direction of an
administration in these regions can fully realise the
enormous amount of harm sometimes irremediable
harm which can be done by the misconduct or indis-
cretion of a single individual. Misconduct on the part
of British officials is, to their credit be it said, extremely
rare. Indiscretion or want of judgment constitutes
greater danger, and, considering the very great diffi-
culties which the officials in question have at times to
encounter, it cannot be expected that they should not
occasionally commit some venial errors.

The best safeguard against the committal of any such

xviii INTRODUCTION

errors is to discard absolutely the practice of selecting
for employment abroad any who for whatsoever reason
have been whole or partial failures in other capacities
at home. Personally, I regard anything in the nature
of jobbing these appointments as little short of criminal ;
and although my confidence in the benefits to be de-
rived from parliamentary interference in the affairs
of our Eastern dominions is limited, there is, in my
opinion, one point as to which such interference, if
properly exercised, may be most salutary. A very
careful watch may and should be kept on any tendency
to job, whether that tendency be displayed by the
executive Government or, as is quite as probable,
by Members of Parliament or others connected with
the working of party machinery. Imperialist England
requires, not the mediocre by-products of the race,
but the flower of those who are turned out from our
schools and colleges to carry out successfully an Im-
perial policy.

Their services cannot be secured unless they are
adequately paid. Of all the mistakes that can be
committed in the execution of an Imperialist policy
the greatest, in my opinion, is to attempt to run a big
undertaking 'on the cheap.' I am, of course, very
fully aware of the financial difficulties to be encountered
in granting a high scale of salaries. I can speak with
some experience on this point, inasmuch as for a
long period, during the early days of our Egyptian
troubles, I had to deal with a semi-bankrupt Exchequer.

INTRODUCTION xix

But my reply to the financial argument is that if
money is not forthcoming to pay the price necessary
to secure the services of a really competent man, it is
far preferable to wait and not to make any appointment
at all. Apart from the consideration that high ability
can or ought to be able to secure its own price, it is not
just to expose any European to the temptations which,
in the East, are almost the invariable accompaniment
of very low salaries ; and, although to the honour of
British officials it may be said that the cases in which
they have succumbed to those temptations are so
rare as to be almost negligible, the State is none the
less under a moral obligation to place its employes in
such positions as to prevent personal feelings of honour
and probity being the sole guarantee for integrity.

Scarcely less important is the question of leave.
A period of nine consecutive months is quite long
enough for any European to remain in such a climate
as the Sudan. After the expiration of that time, his
physical health and mental vigour become impaired.
Moreover, he is liable to get into a groove, and to attach
an undue importance to local circumstances, which
loom large on the spot, but which are capable of being
reduced to more just proportions by change of climate,
scenery and society.

There is one further point to which attention may
be drawn. I have already alluded to the desirability
of avoiding frequent changes in the personnel of the
subordinate staff. The same holds good even to a

xx INTRODUCTION

greater extent in respect to the highest appointments.
It almost invariably happens that sound and durable
reforms take time in their conception and execution,
and that they are slow in their operation. It is an im-
mense advantage if the same individual or individuals
who are responsible for initiating the reform can also
for a certain period watch over its execution and opera-
tion. The continuity of policy gained by the long
tenure of office which has been enjoyed by Sir Reginald
Wingate has been of incalculable value to the Sudan.

I have now, I think, indicated the principal reasons
which have enabled the Sudan to progress in the man-
ner recorded by Mr. Low. Under one condition
and it is a condition of the utmost importance that
progress will, I hope and believe, be steady and con-
tinuous. It is that the pace should not be forced.

CROMER.

36 WIMPOLE STREET, LONDON,
December 8, 1913.

NOTE BY THE AUTHOR

THE chapters that follow were written after visits
to Egypt and the Sudan, in which I endeavoured to
gain some insight into the political, social, and adminis-
trative conditions of those countries. They are in-
tended to convey some account, slight, but I hope
faithful, of my impressions of the territory in that
stage of transition which ensued after the conclusion
of Lord Cromer's great period of reconstruction and
financial readjustment the stage which lay between
the reconquest of the Sudan by Lord Kitchener, and
his return to Cairo as British Agent and Consul-General.
It was thus the Nile lands, in certain of their aspects,
presented themselves to an observer, with some knowl-
edge of political and social developments at other
epochs, and in other countries of the East and the West.

Most descriptions of Egypt begin with the Nile
mouths or the capital, and work upwards towards the
tropical provinces. I have preferred to start with the
Sudan, which was the part of the area first examined
at close quarters, and thence to follow the course of the
great river downwards to the Delta and the sea.

S. L.

ZXl

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

AUTHOR'S NOTE

CHAPTER

I. THE DESERT TRAIN

II. A CITY OF ROMANCE ......

III. THE GROWING OF KHARTUM .

IV. OMDURMAN

V. ANGLO-SUDANESE SOCIETY

VI. CONCERNING POLITICS AND PERSONS .

VII. SOME SUDANESE PROBLEMS .

VIII. SIMPKINSON BEY

IX. CONCERNING WOMEN, SOLDIERS, AND CIVILIANS

X. THE NEW GATE OF AFRICA .

XI. STATE SOCIALISM IN THE SUDAN

XII. A NOCTURNE

XIII. A SUDAN PLANTATION

XIV. LAND AND WATER ......

XV. THE BRIDLE OF THE FLOOD .

XVI. THE CLIENTS OF COOK .

XVII. THE HILLS OF THE DEAD

XVIII. CAIRO IMPRESSIONS

XIX. IN THE DELTA

XX. MR. VAPOROPOULOS

XXI. THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHET

XXII. THE OCCUPATION

PAGE

vii

9
'9
3i

Si
62

1 20

132

141

'53
162
169
179
192
202

212

xxiv CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

XXIII. GOVERNING ELEMENTS, OLD AND NEW . . . 223

XXIV. GOVERNMENT BY INSPECTION 233

XXV. HALTING JUSTICE 242

XXVI. SOME RECENT REFORMS 253

XXVII. THE DRAG ON THE WHEEL 270

XXVIII. CONCLUSIONS 286

INDEX 311

PORTRAITS

THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF CROMER, G.C.B., O.M., ETC.

Frontispiece

FACING PACK

FIELD-MARSHAL VISCOUNT KITCHENER OF KHARTUM, G.C.B.,

O.M., ETC 60

LIEUT. -GENERAL SIR FRANCIS REGINALD WINGATE, G.C.V.O.,

ETC. 122

SLATIN PASHA, G.C.V.O., ETC 182

THE KHEDIVE 244

SIR WILLIAM WILLCOCK.S, K.C.M.G 300

EGYPT IN TRANSITION

CHAPTER I

THE DESERT TRAIN

THE Egypt of history paused at that gorge among the
Nubian rocks where the Nile spouts its way over the
Second Cataract. Often it could not get so far, and the
frontier fell back to the First Cataract, where now the
great dam blocks the stream by the island temples of
Philae ; sometimes an ambitious ruler pushed his armies
to the south and levied tribute from the tribes and
nations towards the Equator ; once or twice in the age-
long process the movement was reversed, and the lower
valley of the river has been subject to the masters of
the upper plains. But nearly always, be it under
Usertsen or Ramses, under the Ptolemies, the Romans,
the Arabs, or the Turks, a line was drawn at some
border fortress below the Cataract, by the site of what
in modern times is called Wady Haifa. Egypt, with
one hand clasped to Asia, ended here ; all beyond was
Africa vast, confused, mysterious, incomprehensible,
at once a menace and a temptation ; a land perhaps to
prey upon, perhaps to fear, but one that seemed to
have little kinship or community with the kindly,
habitable earth men knew. There, at Wady Haifa,

2 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

where to-day you first touch the Sudan soil and leave the
Nile boat for the train that bears you across the desert, at
Haifa, or at Syene, which now is Assuan, was the last
outpost of Europe and Asia, the final vedette of civilisa-
tion. The level sun flamed across the waste of sand upon
the spearheads of Pharaoh's mercenaries and the hel-
mets of Roman soldiers as it did upon the bayonets of
Kitchener's sentries. Beyond the frontier camp the Nile
wound its way slowly upwards towards the Unknown,
the region of many names Cush, Ethiopia, Meroe,
Napata, where only vague rumour and doubtful travel-
lers' tales told of dim kingdoms, rising and falling, and
restless tribes of untamable savages.

But now this vast realm lies open. For the first
time in its history it is in full touch with the outer
world. When British generals overthrew the Khalifa's
hordes they did more than merely reconquer the Sudan
for Egypt : they conquered it in a sense in which
conquest had never been effectual here before. It is
true that previous to the Mahdist revolt the 'Turks'
ruled all through the Sudan, even to the Equator on
the south and to the farthest borders of Darfur on the
west. But, though Egyptian officials took heavy toll
from the natives, and though Egyptian and Turkish
soldiers lived (and plundered) all over the provinces,
the country remained inaccessible, remote, and inhos-
pitable. For those who were not officials or emissaries
of the Government, the journey into it was difficult,
and even dangerous ; for all it was long and slow.

THE DESERT TRAIN 3

Now the neat and well-appointed express boats of the
Sudan Government service float you smoothly up to
Haifa in the extreme of comfort. And at Haifa you
transfer yourself and your baggage to the train, which
is also run by the Sudan authorities, with no greater
trouble than you would experience at Clapham Junc-
tion. You will make your first acquaintance with the
realms of Queen Candace through the windows of a
fine dining-room car. You enter the barrier desert
to the whistle of a locomotive that will roll you up to
the capital of North Central Africa in a night and a
day of luxurious travel. It is a very simple business
to get to Khartum nowadays. You can book through
from Charing-Cross if you please, and the worst ad-
venture that need befall you on the way will be a bad
Channel crossing or an inadequate luncheon at a rail-
way buffet. Measured by time of transit, which is the
only practical method of calculating distances, Om-
durman is nearer Piccadilly than Inverness when
George III was King, or Venice when Charles Dickens
discovered Italy. Eight days and a half from door to
door from the Thames to the Blue Nile. 'Good
going !' said an officer who went up with Kitchener in
'98. 'It took us three years to do the same journey
the first time we tried it. But we didn't happen to have
a railway ready for us then. We had to build it as we
went along and fight a battle every few months
while we were doing that.'

Yet, despite the tourist agents and the steamship

4 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

companies and the railways, there is still some vague-
ness, outside the ranks of the regular Egyptian holiday
crowd, as to where and what the Sudan is. A lady,
the wife of a high official in Khartum, tells me that her
friends at home seem divided in opinion as to whether
the town is a sort of suburb of Cairo or a section of
Wildest Africa. 'How awful for you to have to live
in a place like that, my dear!' says one sympathiser.
'I suppose you hardly see a civilised human being
from one year's end to another.' And another will
write in this strain: 'Young Blank, you know, my
husband's second cousin, has gone to Cairo. Such a
nice boy do, please, ask rfim to come out and have
tea with you one afternoon.'

Let us hope these intelligent geographical conceptions
are not widely diffused ; though we Britons, unless
we have business or social relations with any particular
part even of our own dominions, are apt to be curiously
ignorant of it. I doubt, at any rate, whether many of
us have grasped the real and astonishing truth about
the last great Empire over which the flag of Britain
flies. Do we all know, for instance, that here, alone on
the earth, that ensign floats alongside another ? The
Sudan is under Two Flags : on all the public buildings,
on the barracks, the Government steamers, the police
stations, the palaces, the post offices, at a review of
troops, you look aloft and see two flagstaffs the White
Crescent of Egypt waves from the one, the Union Jack
crackles jauntily from the other. Through all the

THE DESERT TRAIN 5

length of the Nile, from Uganda to the Mediterranean,
England is in partnership with the Khedivial Govern-
ment. -In Egypt it is a relation somewhat veiled and
not formally admitted, though real enough ; in the
Sudan, though Britain is, beyond question, the pre-
dominant partner, the joint rights of Egypt itself
nominally still a Turkish province are carefully
asserted. It is a curious situation, of which more
anon. Meanwhile, let us not forget that we are deal-
ing with a condominium of a very remarkable and
novel kind. The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan is a political
entity such as does not exist anywhere else on earth,
such as never has existed in this precise shape so far as
we know. We have here something exceptional and
unique, whereof the two flags that greet us before we
enter the train at Haifa are the striking symbol. There
is the record of many stirring chapters of history, of
the epitaph of many brave men's lives black, brown,
and white in those two tall masts and those squares
of bunting flapping in the dusty desert breeze.

That is one of the things that perhaps everybody
does not grasp touching the Sudan. There are some
others. Is it commonly understood that this territory,
which has been added to the sphere of British interest
during the past fifteen years, is enormous in extent and
immense in its potential, if not its actual, resources ?
It is twelve hundred miles long and a thousand miles
wide, and it has an area of a million square miles
two-thirds the size of India, larger than Great Britain,

6 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

France, Germany, and Austria together. One prov-
ince alone would hold Spain comfortably and have room
to spare. Nor are these vast spaces mere waste tracts,
empty squares, such as used to be left blank on those
old maps of Africa which are still too often reproduced
in our modern atlases. There is plenty of swamp,
scrub, and desert in the Sudan. But there is also a
large amount which is actually rich and fertile, and a
still larger amount which, under certain conditions,
such as we are now beginning to apply, might be made
so. The population of the whole territory is esti-
mated at little more than three millions. But this
is due to temporary causes which we have now elim-
inated. That is to say, to the ruin and havoc wrought
by Mahdism. The Sudan has in former times sup-
ported a large number of inhabitants, it was even the
seat of populous civilised communities, and it may
become so again. It is no Sahara into which we are
bringing the light, but a country of great, though
unequal, possibilities worth developing and cultivating.
Different views are taken of the Sudan by those who
may be called Sudan experts ; there are few who do
not hold that, in parts at least, it will be more than
worth the pains that are being taken by a small knot of
Englishmen, assisted by a competent body of Egyp-
tians and natives, to bring it into prosperity. The
task will be long and difficult : none more worthy and
arduous has been undertaken by Englishmen of our
generation.

THE DESERT TRAIN 7

You get some glimmering of it as you travel in the
desert train, which bridges the stretch of utter barren-
ness that fends Egypt from the south. This railway
was, indeed, the beginning of the work which rendered
the rest possible. At Haifa the Nile bends in a mighty
loop to the west, and then turns north again before
it resumes its proper southward course at Abu Hamed.
Wolseley, in 1884, took the long and tedious way round
the bend and over the two cataracts it passes. Kitch-
ener, in 1898, determined to take the short cut across
the 230 miles of desert. And such desert ! Africa,
the world, has scarcely its equal. Treeless, waterless,
lifeless, it glistens on either side a sea of dead sand
that washes to the base of scarred hills, without a leaf,
a patch of green, the twinkle of a mountain torrent.
Through this ruined wilderness, in the heat of a tropical
summer, Girouard's men made the track, laid the
sleepers, and spiked down the rails at racing pace, one
gang ahead preparing the way for the next as it came
along. Between that fiery May and that fierce Decem-
ber the young Canadian lieutenant of engineers got
the road begun and finished never less than a mile of
rails laid in a day, sometimes three miles. Often as
you have read of that wonderful achievement, it is not
till you are looking from the windows of the desert
train that you comprehend its full meaning. Even in
December, with all the comforts of the train de luxe,
wicker chairs, iced drinks, smoked glass panes, and
lattice shutters you gasp at the heat and cough with

8 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

the dust. The glare of the level yellow plain makes
your eyes ache ; you are glad when a mirage comes to
rest them, so that the jagged rocks on the horizon seem
floating in sheets of cool white water and the fronds
of delusive palms wave mockingly on the horizon line.
And you may think of the men working against time
there in the open, not in the winter, but in July
think what the dust, and the furious sun, and the
burning sand, and even the cruel irony of the mirage,
must have been to them. At Abu Hamed, where the
Nile is touched again and there are groves and fields,
you slip comfortably into a well-kept bath they
have ready for you at the railway station, and with
soap and hot water wash off the desert dust and go
back to your car, refreshed and clean, for breakfast.
And then you glide past Berber, where roofless mud
houses still tell of the ruin wrought by the dervishes
before we came to stay the devastation, over the
great iron bridge across the Atbara, and the branch
line to the Red Sea coast which Girouard's successors
have built ; along the river, past Shendy and Metem-
meh and in sight of that other desert of the Nile bend
which our men trod wearily in the fruitless advance
that came too late to save Gordon. The sun has set,
and the pall of the tropical evening rests darkly on the
land, as your journey ends at the railway station of
Khartum.

CHAPTER II

A CITY OF ROMANCE

KHARTUM !

It is a name which many Englishmen cannot hear,
even when it is prosaically called at a railway station,
without a certain thrill. To some, indeed, of my fellow-
travellers who arrived with me by the desert train that
dark, warm evening in December, it may have meant
little. 'Also sind wir zuletzt am Ende !' says the stout
German, who has been grumbling and perspiring for
many hours. For him, coming into the Sudan with
strictly commercial aims, Khartum is only a town like
any other. So it is to the American lady tourist, under
the disc of a vast white felt helmet and a blue veil like
a mosquito-curtain ; to the good-looking young Briton,
bound for Gondokoro and the pursuit of big game, it
is merely the starting-point of a sporting expedition ;
to the bimbashi of a Sudanese battalion going back
to duty after his three months' leave it means another
spell of hard, hot, dusty toil before the moist greenness
of 'home' can be felt again. The aliens have no part
in the associations that gather round the spot where
the two Niles join. The youngsters were not old
enough to share in the long tension of that unavailing
march which ended in futility and retreat; they were

io EGYPT IN TRANSITION

only schoolboys during the progress of the later vic-
torious expedition which avenged the failure. So many
things have happened since Stewart fell at Abu Klea
and Wilson took the Bordein under a rain of bullets
past the swarming walls of Omdurman : many things
since Wauchope's Highlanders and Hector Macdpnald's
Sudanese mowed down the Khalifa's dervishes at
Kerreri. Nations have risen and fallen since then :
great armies have fought greater battles. No wonder
the story of Khartum has waxed dim.

But to those who lived through it, who followed at a
distance the whole strange dramatic series which began
with the massacre of Hicks Pasha's hapless regiments
and ended with the death of Abdullah the Khalifa,
it must be a romance merely to breathe the air of
Khartum. The very names of things and places recall
events which once stirred us to the marrow with hope,
or fear, or anger, or suspense. As I traced our route
on the railway by the guide-book the long-forgotten
geography of the Sudan came back to me. How well
all England knew it once. How they used to pore
over the maps behind windows lurid with the London
fog, till Dongola and Berber, and Korti and Metem-
meh, the Atbara, and Abu Hamed, were burned into
our memory. I saw Safiyeh herself in that brisk little
dockyard a Portsmouth in miniature where a
captain of the British Navy builds boats and repairs
engines and keeps the Sudan Government's flotilla in
order. A battered, empty, mastless, and unfunnelled

A CITY OF ROMANCE 11

hulk was the famous Thames penny steamer which
went through such vicissitudes in her heroic day. A
mere shell of shabby planking; but to set foot on the
poor old lighter is to recall the breathless nights spent
when the tale was being told in England of the gallant
dash to save Gordon at the last, of the rush up the
Nile, of the mending of the boiler under the dervish
fire, of all the desperate efforts that came too late.
After Lord Charles Beresford had used the little steamer
to rescue Sir Charles Wilson's party from a very per-
ilous position she fell into the Khalifa's hands again ;
thirteen years later Lord Kitchener's gunboats re-
captured her, in the course of that hurried expedition
up the White Nile to settle matters with Captain Mar-
chand at Fashoda. What things she has seen, that
dishevelled Safiyeh \ If her mouldering timbers could
speak, they could tell some tales worth hearing.

It is one of the romances of Khartum ; but all
Khartum is a romance. Its wide streets, its forts and
barracks and palaces, its groves and gardens, its mud-
walled suburb villages, its two great confluent rivers,
the dusty plain that stretches round it to the hard blue
sky, bear witness to a chapter of history none the less
marvellous because it is recent. A generation ago the
whole vast Sudan was a sort of outlying Turkey. The
'Turk' misruled in calm insouciance; Egyptian pasha-
dom buttoned its frock coat round its pockets at
Khartum, and shared its gains grudgingly with official-
ism at Cairo ; Egyptian conscripts kept guard sulkily

12 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

in the provinces, dreaming of the wheatfields and water-
meadows they would never see again ; the slave trade
went on briskly under the eyes of plundering ruffianism
which took toll of the grain and ivory, the gum and
the women, in the name of the Khedive. The empire
which Mehemet Ali founded seemed no more evanes-
cent than many others in the East : it was abominable
barbarism at bottom, but it had the externals of civili-
sation. The telegraph wire went striding down to the
Equator ; military bands were playing Austrian dance
music outside the officers' messes at Wadelai and Lado.
Who could imagine that raiding Arabs and tribes of
African blacks could overturn all this elaborate edifice ?
But it collapsed, so to speak, in a night. A strange
magnetic impulse brought these scattered, helpless,
peoples together about Mohammed Ahmed, the Mahdi,
and Egyptian rule shrivelled up in a blast of flame.
Few things are more remarkable in their way than this
swift linking up of an oppressed heterogeneous popula-
tion by the bond of a common Islamism ; few more
deplorable than the ruin and desolation that followed
the coming of the Dongola Messiah.

It was a reproduction of those convulsions and cata-
clysms, of those displacements and migrations and
colossal butcheries, we see moving dimly through the
darkness of past centuries in the pages of Gibbon.
We had it under our eyes ; we have the results, the
survivals, before us in Khartum to-day, and in Omdur-
man. The towns are full of memorials of that brief

A CITY OF ROiMANCE 13

crusading fury of Moslem puritanism, of the long carni-
val of blood and rapine that followed, of the heroic
struggles to stem the tide, of the final, disciplined, de-
liberate effort to beat it back, of the steady, successful
labour to repair the ravages. We have forgotten much
of the story. We live too fast in these days to keep
our memories green. But in the Sudan capital it is
not easy to forget : the associations of that stirring
recent past are before you everywhere. Even the
tourist cannot miss all of them.

You may go out to the battlefield of Omdurman
which here they call Kerreri with one of Mr. Cook's
dragomans, or, as I did, with a native officer who had
been through the fight, and hear over again the details
of Kitchener's great victory. Not long ago the ground
was all white with unburied skeletons, and dervish
skulls, and even dervish jibbahs and spears were to be
had at will. Now most of these relics have gone, and,
though there are a few dry bones lying conspicuously
in the sunshine, there is some doubt whether they are
not the mortal remains of camels and oxen, thoughtfully
placed in situ by the donkey-boys for the benefit
of inquisitive and acquisitive visitors. Perhaps there
is no more reliance to be placed on the testimony of
the donkey-boy himself, who, on being questioned, will
tell you that he was himself in the battle. He was a
Sudanese slave of the Baggara, he says, who was given
a gun and taken into the fight, and crawled away
wounded (he shows you a conspicuous scar) to Omdur-

I 4 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

man when it was over. You supply him with piastres
and receive his story with due scepticism. Yet it may
be true. Khartum and Omdurman are full of the
living remnants of Mahdist triumph and Mahdist
oppression, now engaged in quite peaceful avocations.

In that Government dockyard I have mentioned I
noticed a little old man with a shrewd, bronzed, semi-
European face and an iron-grey moustache, working
assiduously at a drilling machine. He was a Cypriote,
and was a mechanic in the Government arsenal when the
Mahdists came. Skilled artisans being wanted, his
life was spared ; after a disciplinary interval of chains
and prison, they set him to labour in the Khalifa's
workshops, and there we found him when we took over
the plant and business. Now he drills and hammers
for the Sudan Government, and gets his wages regu-
larly, which was an advantage he did not enjoy when
he was drilling and hammering either for the Khedive
or the Khalifa. He had to become a Mohammedan,
and they gave him a forlorn captive negress (nominally
a Mohammedan too) as a wife. I did not ascertain
what had become of the lady ; but the man himself
has reverted to the faith of his fathers.

People had strange religious as well as matrimonial
experiences in the Sudan while the Khalifa ruled and
since. There is, for example, Signora X, who now
presides over the household of an Italian tailor in
Khartum. I became acquainted with this artist in the
course of an attempt to get certain ink stains, pro-

A CITY OF ROMANCE 15

duced by an erring stylographic pen, removed from
my trousers. In the temporary absence of her hus-
band the Signora confided to me portions of her bi-
ography. She was born in Marseilles, and came to
Egypt in the flower of her youth as a governess in a
family of position, where her charms captivated an
officer of rank in the Khedive's forces, who married
her. Here I think she must have embroidered a little ;
I suspect she was only a lady's maid and her husband
no more than a corporal. She followed this warrior
to the Sudan, and was herded into the compound at
Omdurman, in which they placed all the women young
enough to be worth keeping, the day after the taking of
Khartum. One of the Mahdi's fighting Emirs claimed
her as the prize of war, and proposed to add her to his
harem ; but she contrived to appeal to the Mahdi,
who had decreed that European women with resident
husbands should not be made over to Moslems. Un-
happily the Signora's Egyptian spouse had disappeared,
having been no doubt killed ; but one of the brothers
of the Austrian mission kindly allowed her to become
his wife pro forma, and this situation subsisted during
the Khalifate. After 1898 the proper ecclesiastical
steps were taken to annul the nominal union, and she
joined her fortunes with those of the Italian tailor,
whom death had relieved of a Sudanese wife imposed
upon him (deeply against his will, the Signora averred)
during his days of servitude and Mohammedanism.
Or, again, you ask a question concerning the pleasant-

16 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

faced native 'boy' who ministers to you when you
are lunching at a friend's table. Your host requests
Abdullah to tell his story. He does so, and you learn
that his father was a Baggara Arab, that he was taken
young to be water-bearer to the Khalifa himself, that
he was captured by Sir Reginald Wingate's men not
far from his master in the last fight of all, when the
Pretender and his chosen lieutenants perished. They
took the boy and sent him to school in Khartum ; and
now he deftly pours soda-water for the unbeliever, as
though no weapon more lethal than a corkscrew had
ever swum into his ken.

There are other and sadder memorials. In the
beautiful new palace of the Sirdar, which has risen from
the ruins of the old one, they take you into a ground
floor corridor, on the walls of which is the tablet :
'Here Gordon died.' The palace is built on the site
of its predecessor, though its plan and arrangement are
different, and the actual staircase on which the hero
fell has disappeared. But a little above the spot is a
new staircase, sweeping up in a handsome curve from
the gardens to the broad verandah on the first floor,
on which the principal rooms of the present residence
open. As we stand on the second step we must be
very near the actual space in which the tragedy occurred
on that night in February 1885, when the dervish horde,
fifty thousand strong, made its final swoop upon Gor-
don's disheartened, decimated, famished garrison cower-
ing behind its ineffective walls. With one rush the

A CITY OF ROMANCE 17

feeble ramparts were carried and the Mahdists were
slaughtering the Egyptians like sheep. Gordon had
gone up to the roof of the palace, where day after day
he had watched for some sign of that belated, slow-
moving army, whose advance guard, after its boggling
with the sands and the cataracts, was even then so
close. Seeing that all was over he put on his Pasha's
uniform, girded on his sword, and calmly stood at the
head of the staircase awaiting what should befall.
Through the palace grounds, trampling over his own
flower-beds and rose-bushes, came the shrieking fa-
natics, brandishing their great spears.

The Mahdi, it is said, had given orders to spare him ;
alive Gordon was worth more than dead. But the
howling mob, maddened by their orgy of blood, did
not stop to answer the hero's disdainful challenge.
They threw themselves upon him ; pike and two-
handed sword stabbed and hewed ; the head was cut
off and the body was hacked to pieces, there, on the
blood-stained steps, close by where we stand. Some-
body tells the story again in quiet tones ; before us lie
the lawns and rustling sycamores of the gardens, sleep-
ing under the silver rain of the southern stars ; behind
us the broad, lamp-lit terrace, where gay little after-
dinner groups of men and women are chatting and
laughing. It is one of those contrasts between the
present and a past so little remote that we seem to
touch it with our hands, which make your first few
days in Khartum so like a dream.

i8 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

Indeed, as I look back upon those days my mind
retains a mingled impression of scenes and memories
almost equally vivid : of a beautiful city, green and
white in the midst of the grey desert dust ; of sunset
in a superb pageant of rose and lemon, yellow and
violet, glowing upon great lake-like reaches of gleaming
water ; of pleasant villas set back behind trees and
flowers ; of date palms bending their gracious heads
above the golden bells of the tocoma and the crim-
son clusters of the poinsettias ; of a busy bazaar and
market full of cheerful, laughing negroes and lithe
brown Arabs, keen-eyed and straight ; of stalwart
Sudanese soldiers in white uniforms and Egyptians in
khaki, disciplined and respectful ; of many Englishmen
and a few Englishwomen, all young, all well-dressed,
apparently all good-looking ; of a whole world of active,
vigorous life, moving upon a background of shadows.
Such was my vision of Khartum, as I came to it at first,
haunted by those memories from which Khartum itself
has emerged. For it is only the sentimental traveller
who has time to indulge in retrospective meditation
here. Khartum does not meditate over the past.
It is far too well occupied with the present and the
future.

CHAPTER III
THE GROWING OF KHARTUM

YOUR first emotion over Khartum yields to a senti-
ment of surprise as you begin to look around you, a
surprise abundantly justified when you recall the recent
history of the place. Fifteen years ago, when it fell
into the hands of the victors of Kerreri, Khartum was
a heap of ruin and rubbish. Founded by Mehemet
All in 1834, it had been a town of some importance and
pretension as the centre of Egyptian rule in the Sudan.
For that reason, as soon as Mohammed Ahmed, the
Mahdi, got possession of the town he set about to
destroy it utterly. The public buildings were burned,
the private dwellings, mostly of mud, were dismantled,
the inhabitants, or such of them as had escaped
massacre, were commanded to transfer themselves to
Omdurman, some three miles away on the opposite
bank of the Nile. This village became an immense
human warren, and, under the Khalifa, it was pretty
nearly the largest town, measured by population, in
all Africa. Within sight of its festering alleys Khartum
crumbled to dust in the sun. When Kitchener entered
it, on September 3, 1898, to hold the funeral service
over Gordon and hoist the Two Flags on a wrecked
battlement of Gordon's Palace, it was lifeless and
vacant. An entirely new city had to be created.

20 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

So far this was an advantage. The builders had
no hampering vestiges of the past to deal with. They
were not encumbered by the hopeless ground-plan
of an Eastern town, nor were their efforts after light
and sanitation thwarted by the existence of a nest of
twisting lanes and interlocking courts. They could
start fair and lay out their streets and open spaces
with a mathematical symmetry for which municipal
reformers at home sigh in vain. This is typical of
much else in the Sudan. Its administrators are more
fortunate than those who are concerned with countries
thickly grown over with the tradition and inheritance
of the past, such, for instance, as India and Egypt.
War and revolution had cleared the ground for them,
and they could lay their own foundations and work
from them. Khartum reveals the results of a bold and
far-sighted ambition. Its second founders were con-
vinced from the outset that they were the holders of
no mean city. Though it is so new and young, it
bears the aspect of a capital ; it seems to be preparing
itself for a great future. I confess that when I con-
sidered the situation of Khartum, and the swiftness
with which it had sprung up out of the dust of its own
decay, I expected to find it makeshift and provisional.
I figured it to myself as a sort of frontier camp, or,
at the best, like some of the civil stations in India
where everything has a hasty appearance, as if prepared
for people who are not life-long residents, but only
temporary sojourners under alien stars. But there is

THE GROWING OF KHARTUM 21

nothing of that transient feeling about Khartum ; it
has no rawness, despite its youth, and, though still
unfinished, it has a settled air, as if it were the work of
men who realised that they were planning for the future.
It lies in the midst of a brown and yellow wilderness,
which we do wrong to call desert, since it needs but
water to reclothe it with a garment of verdure. The
water is there in the two mighty rivers the Blue
Nile, blue with the scour from the Abyssinian hills,
and the White Nile, whitened by the flood from the
lakes of the Equator that mingle their streams at
this point. The water is there, but it is not easy, for
political and other reasons, to filter it over this thirsty
land. The city of Khartum, however, is allowed to
take its toll, and it shows the result in a wealth of
greenery, of bloom and foliage, and rustling branch,
which delight the tired senses after the glare and
barrenness of the long, hot journey from the north.
All along the river front and in the gardens behind it,
and especially in those of the Palace, the slender, wil-
lowy date palms bow their stately heads like tall young
princesses, as if in acknowledgment of the nosegays
of red and yellow blossoms, which the parkinsonia,
the poinsettia, the mustard tree, the sisiban, the flower-
ing thorn of the Sudan, and other lesser shrubs toss to
their knees. The streets have been planned, as I have
said, with a generous amplitude, and, though there are
many vacant spaces in them still, they give promise
of becoming handsome boulevards with time. En-

22 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

terprising Greeks and venturous Italians have estab-
lished thriving shops, which give to the main thorough-
fares a busy and mercantile appearance.

Behind these streets is the quarter of the natives, and
it is a native quarter cleaned, regulated, and deodorised.
The houses are of mud or mud bricks, like those of
Egypt, but they are spaced out with a vigilant regard
to sanitation and a conscientious neglect of their
owners' feelings on the accumulation and disposition
of superfluous dirt. In this part the Government,
mindful of the spiritual needs of its subjects, has built
a handsome mosque, and, careful of their material
wants, it has provided a great market, where are rows
of booths and shanties, and where camels and donkeys,
tinpots and native damur cottons, and many other
vendable things, are bought and sold under the strict
supervision of certain Coptic and Egyptian clerks
accountable to the mudiryeh, which is the provincial
and municipal administration combined. Trade is
brisk and varied. I saw a stall largely devoted to
the sale of braces, though I cannot conjecture the use
of those articles to people who do not wear trousers.
To the tourist who visits Khartum this market is a
place of joyous resort. Here to his heart's content he
can snapshot such subjects as he will not find during
his holidays in Egypt negroes lavishly displaying
limbs of polished ebony, fierce Arab tribesmen hung
round with cutting weapons who have driven their
gaunt, striding, desert camels from far up the country ;

THE GROWING OF KHARTUM 23

giant Shilluks from the Upper Nile ; savages of all
sorts from the dark recesses of Africa towards the West
Coast and the Congo. Women are numerous, some
in veil or yashmak, others in various stages of semi-
nudity : in the Northern Sudan there are still more
women than men, thanks to the activity of the Khalifa
in killing off the adult male population. These may
be the reliquice Danaum, but they show no trace of
gloom. They are a cheerful, good-tempered, chatter-
ing folk, especially the Sudanese. The Arabs are
more dignified and reserved, and in their brown keen
faces and the easy grace of their walk you seem to
detect something of the manner of a conquering, direct-
ing, race. They do not forget that they used to be
the masters and the negroes their servants. 'Who are
these ?' I say to my Arab dragoman, indicating a
group of negresses squatting round open trays of Indian
corn and millet. 'Those slave women, sah,' replies
Abdul, with scorn. As a matter of fact, they are not
slave women now ; but a few years ago they were.
Many thousands such were found, husbandless and
ownerless, when we marched into Omdurman. Many
of them live in a couple of native villages in a sort of
enclosure or reserve just outside the town of Khartum.
Black or brown, Semitic or negroid in blood, these
people seem to have an excellent understanding with the
latest rulers whom the chances of history have imposed
upon them. Furious fighters as some of them have
been, they give one the impression of a docile, easily-

24 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

governed folk. Unless all appearances belie them
they both like and respect the men from the distant
North who are set in authority over them. They
are 'casual' towards the Greeks, familiar rather than
friendly with the Egyptians ; but towards the English
their demeanour is reverential. When a native
mounted on a donkey passes an English gentleman even
in the streets of Khartum, it is etiquette for him to
dismount from his beast and salute ; it is also correct
for the Briton to acknowledge the salutation with
punctilious courtesy. So it used to be in India when
there were only sahibs in that land, and in Egypt, too,
I believe, in the pre-Cookian days. In the Sudan even
now they are beginning to distinguish between the
mere tourist and the important official resident who
wears the gilt crescent on the front of his pith helmet ;
presently the European may find himself treated as
brusquely by brown elbows and toes as he is in the
streets of Cairo and Bombay. Meanwhile, the ma-
jority of the Sudan natives are still in the unsophisti-
cated stage ; and the travelling Briton, who is less
than nobody in his own and most other countries, can
taste for a moment the unwonted sensation of belonging
to a superior order of beings.

The good manners of the Sudanese cannot, I think,
be set down to our credit ; they are naturally polite, as,
indeed, are most of the Oriental and primitive peoples.
But there are other things we have been teaching them
during the past twelve years, and they have been learn-

THE GROWING OF KHARTUM 25

ing their lesson with gratifying rapidity. The con-
dominium of England and Egypt has been exhibited
in an administrative partnership. The official hier-
archy is mixed ; in every department there are English
chiefs, with native subordinates, from somewhere
down the Nile. So far, work requiring some intelli-
gence, as well as elementary education, has had to be
entrusted to the Misraim, the Copts and Mohammedans
from the north, with some little assistance from the
handy Greek, the useful Syrian, and the adaptive
Armenian. But the new rulers of the Sudan hold that
its own population should be enabled to provide the
requisite skill and brains, as well as muscle, without
drawing upon an alien element, which is not altogether
happy in these tropical regions, and often stands
the climate badly. You will remember Mr. Kipling
has endeavoured to impress it upon the public mind
in some oft-quoted verses that even before Lord
Kitchener had completed the work of conquest he set
about the task of education. He thought that as we
were proposing to extinguish the staple trade of the
country, which was fighting, we ought to create a few
others. So his lieutenants and coadjutors set to work
to turn the Sudanese into efficient members of a pacific
society. The children of the Arab warriors and their
black dependants are being sent to school, and are
taught not only reading and writing but also various
industrial arts, with the result that the Sudan will
soon be able to find itself in mechanics, blacksmiths,

26 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

carpenters, and artisans of all kinds, without assistance
from outside ; and presently also in architects, sur-
veyors, engineers, doctors, schoolmasters, officials,
and clerks. The muscle and physique of the negro,
combined with the alert intelligence of the Arab, should
contribute all that is needed. Already there is abun-
dant work, at wages which would not sound wholly
contemptible in the East End of London, for both
kinds. The Government railways, shops, and dock-
yards, employ thousands of men, and an industrial
city, still newer than Khartum, has sprung up on the
opposite side of the Blue Nile. Passing through these
workshops, filled with whirring machinery, one saw
Sudanese fitters and enginemen and boat-builders
and riveters toiling briskly, under the direction of a
few skilled foremen from the Clyde, the Tees, or the
Don. All honour, by the way, to these canny Scots
and quiet, clean-faced young fellows from the North
and the Midlands. The Sudan owes much to them.

At the far end of the long river-front of Khartum,
beyond the Palace, and the club, and the houses of the
European residents, and just within the enceinte of
barracks and defensive works for Khartum, remem-
ber, is a fortress and place of arms stands the Gordon
College. It is an imposing building, in solid brick and
stone, with wide corridors and cool, academic cloisters.
This is the seminary of the higher education for the
Sudan, and here the young Sudanese, who has learnt
the elements in the primary schools, may carry his

THE GROWING OF KHARTUM 27

studies further by the aid of Arabic-speaking teachers,
under the general superintendence of certain young or
youngish gentlemen who have acquired proficiency in
cricket and other ingenuous arts at the universities of
Oxford and Cambridge. The boys are a mixed lot.
One was pointed out to me as the son of an Egyptian
clerk in the War Department ; another was the child
of a former bitter and formidable enemy of ours
a great and prosperous slave trader; a third was the
son of one of the Khalifa's famous Emirs, a foeman who
proved himself worthy of our steel ; two more were
closely related to the false Prophet himself. Some of
the boys had marched across from the Cadets' College,
a few yards away a sort of Sudanese Sandhurst -
where the sons of officers in the black battalions and
some others, mostly belonging to the first fighting
families of the country, are qualifying for the military
career. The Commandant takes an especial pride in
his cadets, and has brought them to a high state of
efficiency. He was kind enough to parade them for
my inspection, and a smarter lot of young soldiers
I have not often seen. The boys take a passionate
delight in their studies ; when they are not in the class-
rooms or on the parade ground they sometimes play
football ; but their favourite amusement is to drill
one another, or practise their gymnastic exercises, or
read military text-books. Thus is the inherited war-
like instinct turned to good account. Before long the
Sudanese contingent will be able to find its subalterns

28 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

and non-commissioned officers without drawing upon
Egypt.

Throughout the Gordon College there is a similar
practical aim. The Director of Education has very
wisely determined that a high literary culture is a
luxury with which for the immediate future the Sudan
can dispense. The young Sudanese is not encouraged
to read Burke and Mill, and Herbert Spencer and Berg-
son, nor is he induced to browse vaguely over English
literature and modern politics. That peculiar intel-
lectual stimulus so liberally purveyed to the youthful
Bengali is denied him. I did not hear the boys recite
any English poetry, for they do not learn English poetry,
which would certainly confuse and probably upset
them. But I went through the drawing office and the
surveyor's class, and saw young students, working out
plans with metre-rule and T-square, and calculating
quantities with a neatness and precision which would
do no discredit to Great George Street. The students
learn sufficient English for all such purposes ; not
enough to denationalise them or cause them to forget
that they are the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of a
Mohammedan country. Instead of qualifying his
pupils to become disappointed office-seekers or active
political agitators, the Director endeavours to produce
a steady stream of young fellows, with the elements
of a sound technical training. It seemed to me that
he had chosen the better way ; and I even thought
that some more highly developed communities might

THE GROWING OF KHARTUM 29

learn something from the educational experiment which
is being conducted in the heart of Africa.

Khartum, however, is doing more for science and
learning, and education in the highest sense, than this.
The most notable building in the place in some re-
spects the most notable building in the Sudan or in
all North Africa is the Wellcome Institute. Here,
thanks to the enterprise and liberality of Mr. Henry
S. Wellcome, the head of the famous firm of manu-
facturing druggists, there are well-equipped labora-
tories and consulting rooms in which a staff of bacteri-
ologists and medical experts is engaged in examining the
problems of tropical vegetation, germ-life, and disease.
Results of the utmost value may be expected from their
researches, which may end in extirpating or bringing
under control the worst of the maladies which have
hung like a blight over the vitality and the progress
of the sun-lands. It is the beginning of a work com-
parable in importance to that of the great Portuguese
travellers and explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. Prince Henry the Navigator, Vasco da
Gama, and Bartolomeo Diaz laid open the coasts of
Africa to the exploitation and commerce of Europe;
but through all the intervening centuries the interior
of the Dark Continent has remained inhospitable and
deadly. It seems as if modern science and hygiene
may once more restore it to civilisation and render it
habitable and wholesome for the northern races. And
in this great peaceful reconquest of the South the

30 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

Wellcome Laboratories of Khartum will be in the van-
ward files. If Britain had done no more in the Sudan
than to provide a secure centre for this scientific work,
we should have justified our efforts to get back to the
Upper Nile.

CHAPTER IV
OMDURMAN

THE transmutation of Omdurman is as strange in its
way as that of the sister city across the Nile. Omdur-
man has had a curious history. Some thirty years ago
it was an unimportant native village. When Moham-
med Ahmed, the Mahdi, had swept up all the Sudan,
save only Khartum, he made Omdurman his camp,
where he assembled his armies for the siege of the last
stronghold of Egyptian rule. After the fall and destruc-
tion of Khartum he turned the camp into his capital,
and brought together a vast concourse of his friends
and subjects. The policy was continued by his suc-
cessor, Abdullah, the Khalifa. That sensual and
suspicious tyrant would have liked if he could to collect
the entire population of his dominions about the walls
of his own residence. No one knows how many people
there were in Omdurman fifteen years ago. I have
heard the number put at half a million or even eight
hundred thousand. It is an immense place still,
straggling some five or six miles along the river bank;
but two-thirds is empty space, though its population
now is well over sixty thousand. Under the Khalifa's
regime of blood and famine the inhabitants of the

32 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

Sudan had decreased by at least seventy per cent.
The figure seems incredible ; but the best authority on
the subject, the Sirdar, who knows everything about
the Sudan that is worth knowing, regards it as an
unduly moderate estimate. When we came into posses-
sion the eight or nine millions of the Sudanese peoples
had been reduced to less than two ; and perhaps a
quarter of them or more were gathered under the
Khalifa's eye, in the nest of reeking lanes round the
barracks where he kept his servants and his women,
and the great enclosure in which he held his prayer
meetings.

There were willing and unwilling tenants in the
houses and huts of Omdurman. Many thousands were
the Khalifa's janissaries, the dervishes of the Baggara
and other fighting Arab tribes, on whose spears his
power rested. These men lived at free quarters,
plundering the negroes, and making booty of the
cattle and corn and women of those who were suspected
of disloyalty to the Prophet. Others were the warriors
of rival Arab clans who had been brought into Omdur-
man so that they could be watched and guarded.
Here, too, were all the European and Egyptian prisoners
whose lives it had been deemed desirable to spare.
In a little house adjacent to the Khalifa's lived Slatin
during the ten precarious years of his captivity, some-
times petted by the capricious tyrant, sometimes in-
sulted and bullied, but always, in spite of his forced
conversion to Mohammedanism, treated as a slave

OMDURMAN 33

and aware that his life hung by a thread. Now he is
Sir Rudolf von Slatin Pasha, K.C.M.G., C.V.O., C.B.,
Inspector-General of the Sudan, the second greatest
man in the country, next only to the Sirdar. You
may meet the gallant Austrian officer riding his pony
through the streets of Khartum, looking not at all as if
sixteen years of his life had been passed in exile and
captivity, amid trials and dangers enough to shake
the nerve of any man. And in Omdurman, or, perhaps,
at a pleasant afternoon party under the trees of the
Palace Gardens at Khartum, you could till lately have
seen a very tall old man in a rough brown cassock,
girdled with cord, a man with a long beard, a face all
lined and seared that was a history in itself, and deep
earnest eyes with a glint of humour in them. This was
Father Ohrwalder, who likewise was one of the Mahdi's
captives, and suffered many things in the prison-houses
of Omdurman, before he escaped through the skilful
contrivance of Sir Reginald Wingate. When the end
of the dervish rule came, Father Ohrwalder went back
again, not to a palace or to high office, but to live
simply in Omdurman and to work among his 'people,'
some of them Christians, who had shared his own cap-
tivity. Everybody liked the good priest. Moslems
made way for his tall figure as he passed through the
bazaars ; he was friendly with the Greek priests and
the Coptic ecclesiastics ; with the chief of his own
Austrian mission, as well as with Bishop Gwynne, the
genial and popular head of the Protestant community

34 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

in the Sudan, himself the friend of men of all religions
and of none.

Omdurman was like Peking in that it was a town
within a town. There was a kind of ' Sacred Forbidden
City,' a walled enclosure in the core of the huge un-
regulated mass of mean buildings, which was appro-
priated by the Khalifa, his dependants, his personal
followers, and his Baggara praetorians. In this stood
his own house, a somewhat pretentious edifice, fitted
with a bath-room, mosquito curtains, carpets, brass
bedsteads, doors of inlaid wood and other luxuries ;
the houses of his sons, his arsenal and armoury (where
you may still see an odd collection of miscellaneous
armour and weapons, from mailed helmets of crusad-
ing pattern to Tower muskets and Remington rifles
taken from Hicks Pasha), his treasury, and his harem;
here, too, was the Mahdi's tomb, which Kitchener
deemed it politic to destroy ; and the great Mosque ;
and the gallows. One part of the Khalifa's house has
been converted to the use of the present administra-
tion of the town. On the ground floor I saw a couple
of rooms very simply furnished with a writing table,
a deck chair, a shelf with a few books, a camp bedstead
and metal tub, and the other modest articles of an
Englishman's toilet. These were the quarters of the
junior civilian, fresh from Oxford, who was assisting
the Mudir of Omdurman and learning from him how
to govern natives. It made one reflect a moment on
the odd revenges and juxtapositions of history to hear

OMDURMAN 35

the young gentleman's name. For this youthful Sudan
civilian was a son of Mr. Asquith, the liberal Prime
Minister who owed his rapid advancement in official
life to the favour and high regard of Mr. Gladstone,
that other great liberal statesman whose action in send-
ing Gordon to Khartum was the indirect cause of the
founding of Omdurman.

Another portion of the Khalifa's abode has been con-
verted into the residence of the Mudir, the governor.
The position, at the time of my visit, was rilled by
Captain Young, a very able officer lent to the Sudan
service by the British Army; and Mrs. Young was
then the only English lady in Omdurman except the
wife of the officer commanding one of the Sudanese
battalions. English ladies are rare in the Sudan ;
the officers stationed up the country are, I believe, not
expected to enter the matrimonial state without the
permission of the Sirdar, and even in Khartum itself
ladies are few. They make up for the paucity of their
numbers by being exceedingly charming and more
hospitable, even to the passing globe-trotter, than
that peccant person usually deserves. After a morning
in Omdurman I lunched with great satisfaction in
Mrs. Young's shady dining-room ; and my enjoyment
of this agreeable repast was increased by an ever-
present sense of incongruity. I could not dismiss
the thought that these pleasant, English-seeming
apartments, with their quiet, home-like air of comfort,
were, in fact, those in which Abdullah had carried on

36 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

his orgies and taken counsel with his trembling satel-
lites. As I sat on the broad verandah, with its rugs
and tea tables, I had before me the dusty plain where
the Khalifa assembled his fanatics and worked them
up to the right pitch of more or less genuine enthu-
siasm. My eyes could scan the spot where he held
his daily revivalist meetings, his daily floggings, his
not infrequent hangings. The civil gaffir, or watch-
man, who held my pony at the gate, might have been
one of Abdullah's victims, or one of his executioners,
a few years ago.

The Mudir devoted more hours of a busy day than I
had any title to expect to showing me round Omdurman.
Shrunk as it is from its former proportions, it is a large
place, and takes a long time to see. We rode through
street after street, and lane after lane, mostly occupied
by small bazaar shops doing a brisk business. Om-
durman is the mart and entrepot for a wide tract of
north Central Africa, and natives come from great
distances to sell and buy here. You can find good
opportunity for studying the different types and nations,
from the Levantine, in black trousers and pith helmet,
who was born, perhaps, by the shores of the Bosphorus,
to the Bahr-el-Gazal negro, in a loin cloth, who first
saw the light not far from the Equator. I was intro-
duced to certain of the local manufacturers. We went
to the quarter of the silversmiths, where grave-looking
Arabs sell heavy bracelets and anklets of hammered
metal, and little trays and ornaments neatly woven in

OMDURMAN 37

silver wire. They are good handicraftsmen, with
their primitive tools, but they have no originality or
sense of design. On the other hand, they can copy
a model with exact fidelity; and Captain Young
showed me various articles accurately imitated from
the European patterns which he had supplied. In a
small back yard, we found the establishment of a
local miller, a man of substance, though his plant con-
sisted of a couple of grindstones turned by a patient
camel, which walked round and round all day in a
little covered shed. At Omdurman they weave an
excellent cotton cloth called damur, which is very light
and strong, and more porous than duck or crash ; it is
much liked by European residents in the Sudan for
suits of summer clothing. We visited one of the local
cotton mills where this cloth is woven. The owner
was a woman, and she had half a dozen female assistants
and one old man in her employ. This man sat on the
ground with his legs tucked into a hole under him and
drove the shuttle through the sticks and strings of a
flimsy loom, such as you may see anywhere in an Indian
village. The proprietress herself twisted the yarn
with a spindle, which she operated with a marvellous
and baffling dexterity. She took the thing between
her two brown, skinny little palms, and rubbed it up
and down for a moment, and it became alive and went
on spinning and spinning and spinning with a perfectly
uniform motion ; and the hank of yarn came out and
grew longer and longer, and was spun into a thin fine

38 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

thread and never broke. How it was done you could
not tell, for if you took the bobbin yourself and tried
to spin it you could not keep it going for half a dozen
turns, and the thread snapped off almost at once. The
craftswoman smiled, and took the machine from you,
and did the trick again as easily as before. It is a
queer tool, the Asiatic or the African hand. Its
possessor, as a rule, has so few others that he has
learnt how to do all he wants with this one.

We went round the quarter of the grain-sellers, the
bazaar of those who sell potter's wares and earthenware
of all sorts ; we inspected the vegetable market, and
the booths of the butchers. Everybody, of course,
knew the Mudir and his Egyptian assistant the Mamur
or sub-magistrate, and everybody was polite, attentive,
good-humoured, without obsequiousness or servility.
The Sudanese does not cringe or crouch even to the
man he gladly recognises as his superior ; he stands
up and looks him in the face. It was the day appointed
for the trial of a steam fire-engine which Captain
Young had imported : a necessary apparatus in these
clustering rows of huts of dried brick and sun-baked
wood and straw. The furnace was lighted, and long
jets of water were spouted into the air, to the keen
delight of a great crowd of men and women and bright-
eyed youngsters who watched the performance. It
was all very interesting ; but as I went the round I was
haunted by a vague sense that there was something
missing, something I was unconsciously expecting and

OMDURMAN 39

did not find. I discovered what it was when we came
to the quarter of the butchers. Therein I saw meat
weighed out and sold on cleanly slabs of zinc, which
slabs, by the edict of the Mudir, are flushed and scraped
daily with as much care and nicety as if they adorned
the shop-front of a Westend poulterer. Then I per-
ceived what was lacking to the sukh, which is the
market-place, of Omdurman. The familiar odour of
the Orient, unforgetable when once it has assailed your
nostrils, was absent. Here was an Eastern bazaar,
without the Eastern smell, that pungent, racy flavour
compounded of sun-dried filth and close-packed hu-
manity and the miscellaneous products of many
animals. The life and colour of the sun-lands were
there ; but not the dirt-heaps before the open doors,
the prowling dogs rooting in garbage, the mired and
feculent ways. Omdurman is genuine Africa ; but
it is Africa deodorised, cleansed, regulated, made safe
and wholesome by firm and patient hands. When
you recall George Steevens's appalling description of
that place as it was when we took possession mounds
of festering rottenness, stenches that turned the soldiers
sick, dead bodies of men and buffaloes putrefying in
the lanes you feel that its inhabitants have some
reason for gratitude towards their present rulers.

CHAPTER V
ANGLO-SUDANESE SOCIETY

THE winter visitor to Khartum comes away with a
somewhat exaggerated belief in the amenities of Anglo-
Sudanese life. He must be hard to please if he has
not enjoyed his trip. The railway journey may have
been a trifle long and dusty, even though mitigated by
first-rate sleeping cars, a restaurant wagon de luxe, and
excellent baths at the half-way station of Abu Hamed
to wash the desert dust off the voyager. But the
tourist, especially if provided with a few introductions,
finds everything delightful. The climate fills him with
enthusiasm, as well it may, for in December and Janu-
ary it would be perfect, save for an occasional sand-
storm. The sun shines hotly all day from a cloudless
sky, but a far greater heat could be endured in this
dry, exhilarating atmosphere ; there is always some
breeze stirring, and the mornings and nights are fresh
and cool, without the nipping chill that is apt to try
the liver and lungs after sundown in the winter of some
other tropical countries. It seems good to be alive
in these bracing mornings, as you ride along the river
bank, under the palms, with the red and yellow blos-
soms glowing on one side of you, and the great white

ANGLO-SUDANESE SOCIETY 41

river gleaming on the other ; or at night, after a pleas-
ant dinner party, as you stroll back under the golden
southern moon floating through the purple velvet of
the sky.

Then there is so much that is novel and still unhack-
neyed. Even the small discomforts of existence are
enjoyable. There are few carnages in Khartum, ex-
cept those belonging to the Palace and a governess-cart
or two. The tourist must go about on the back of a
donkey, or in a rickshaw, drawn by the same useful
beast. The donkeys are not always up to the best
Egyptian standard, and they are often provided only
with the stirrupless native saddle, which is a wooden
framework, with a sheepskin thrown over it. Conse-
quently, locomotion is sometimes slow, and the hotel
rickshaws would be outpaced easily by the average
seaside perambulator. The residents keep their own
donkeys, which are a much superior breed, or ride
sleek Arab ponies, and in the plenitude of their hos-
pitality they will often let the visitor have the loan of
one of these animals. They make him welcome to their
houses, and lend him steam-launches, guides, sailing-
boats, and other luxuries, and show him all the things
worth seeing, and generally put themselves out for this
passing sojourner to a quite unwarrantable and un-
expected extent. Presently the miscellaneous trippers
- the Briton doing the Nile in a hurry, the American,
the German will pour in. Then there will be cabs
and motor-cars and many hotels, and donkey boys,

42 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

unsophisticated no longer, and a horde of the pestering
touts who make Cairo hideous ; and then, I suppose,
Khartum society will grow reserved and inaccessible.
Meanwhile, it is still new enough to retain the pioneering
tradition ; it still feels itself a settlement of the English
in a distant land ; and it is still pleased to see the
stranger from 'home.' It is particularly pleased if
that voyager happens to be feminine, and young, and
good-looking; but even to the middle-aged male visi-
tant with some credentials, it is ready to open its heart
and its doors.

All these things naturally predispose one to a favour-
able estimate of Anglo-Sudanese society. It is indeed
a very pleasant and attractive body of people who
assemble in the Sudan capital in the winter months,
whom it would be difficult not to like. Something of
the brightness of the clear oxygenated air has commu-
nicated itself to the residents, who have tempered the
national stiffness with a certain Southern vivacity.
Then it is a society of people in the prime of life and
health. Everybody in the Sudan is young or youngish.
There are very few Englishmen in the whole territory
over fifty ; most are well under forty, many below
thirty. Officers in this service do not have to wait
till they are grey and bald before obtaining positions
of responsibility and power. They are commanding
regiments or governing provinces at an age when in
England they would be helping to drill a company or
sealing documents in Downing Street. The English-

ANGLO-SUDANESE SOCIETY 43

man who wears the Khedivial badge is too scarce and
costly an article to be wasted over mere routine. He
joins the service at five-and-twenty or so, and after
a very short apprenticeship he is placed in some post
of importance, where he has to exercise his own initia-
tive and direct many native subordinates. The Sudan
may not have more than ten years of him altogether,
and it cannot afford to let him spend too much time in
learning his business. It takes him young and it
means to make the best of him before his youth has
gone ; it is no country or climate for the old.

To the advantage of youth it seemed to me that
Sudan society added a quite exceptional allowance of
good looks. This may be an accident ; I do not sup-
pose that the qualifying examination for admission
includes a beauty competition. But it is not alto-
gether fortuitous. The Government insists on a high
standard of health and physical fitness in the soldiers
and civilians it employs ; and nearly all of them are
tall and strong and cleanly built and have a wholesome
and athletic appearance. As for the ladies, I do not
know why they should have more than the common
share of personal attractiveness, unless it is a case of
natural (very natural) selection. I have, indeed, a
suspicion that when the young officer communicates
his desire to commit matrimony to the Sirdar that
shrewd and kindly autocrat expects to have the portrait
of the lady submitted to him as well as her dossier.
But I hasten to add that I have no official warrant for

44 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

this suggestion. It is no more than a theory of my own,
formed when I surveyed the very becoming feminine
'gallery' at the Sirdar's review of the Egyptian and
Sudanese troops of his garrison.

Well, sunshine, open air, good health, abundant
exercise, and plenty of hard, but thoroughly interesting
work ought to make people good-humoured. Nobody
has time to loaf or mope in Khartum ; and nobody is
idle. Everybody, on the contrary, is extremely busy,
for the field is large and the labourers few ; and if
the harvest is to be gathered in season and the due
amount of 'leave' obtained in the year, the business
must be put through with energy. There is no room
for 'slackers' in the Sudan, and no tenderness for them.
Public feeling is altogether against this class of offender,
who soon learns to amend his ways, or if incorrigible
is quietly sent elsewhere. What strikes one most is
the extraordinary alertness of these young officers and
officials, the keenness with which they pursue their
work, the absorbing interest they take in it. They
find time to play, too ; there is polo or tennis going
most afternoons, some cricket, football for the British
battalion, a little shooting of sand-grouse and gazelle
and bigger game, bridge at the club, tea parties and
dinner parties in the winter months, which is the
Khartum 'season.' But all these are incidentals.
Nobody is sportsman enough to live for sport in the
Sudan ; the social amusements are a mere passing
episode of the cool weather. The real interest is the

ANGLO-SUDANESE SOCIETY 45

work. Nobody minds talking 'shop' in the Sudan,
for often there is nothing else to talk about. Besides,
they like it.

'It is a new toy for them, this Sudan,' said a clever
lady to me in Khartum. These young fellows have
thrown themselves into the task of ruling, administer-
ing, educating, drilling, policing, civilising their miscel-
laneous millions, black and brown, scattered over a
sub-continent, with the same light-hearted earnestness
which you find in the subalterns of a native Indian
regiment or in the ward-room of one of his Majesty's
cruisers. They do not assume any excessive air of
seriousness, but, on the contrary, take everything with
a kind of schoolboy, gaiety ; but every man's heart is
in the job, and particularly in his own share of it. One
tall, smooth-cheeked youth kept me up half a night to
discuss the special qualities and peculiar merits of
certain machinery entrusted by the Public Works
Department to his charge. Another, a bimbashi of
the Camel Corps, occupied many hours of a long railway
journey in impressing upon me the value of camelry,
properly drilled, in the scheme of things. His heart
was with the camel ; I never heard so much good said
for the ungainly creature before. But the Camel Corps,
you see, was this young officer's affair, and he took a
deep professional pride in it. I remembered how I went
on board a two-funnelled steam-launch at a naval
review, and remarked to the infant in command :
'This is one of the fastest boats in the fleet, isn't she ?*

46 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

'She's the fastest of them all,' said the boy. 'I
thought,' I replied, 'that the Tetrahedron's pinnace
was faster.' The boy bounced with indignation, and
turned to the bearded quartermaster at his side. 'We
can go half a knot better than they, can't we, Wilkins ?'
'I should think we could, sir, and a knot too if we
liked.' That is the spirit of the Navy ; it is the spirit
that also prevails under the Two Flags.

I have a respect for the British regimental officer,
especially when I see him outside the Metropolitan
police district, where he is usually at his worst ; but
I should not like to assume that his average quality
could be correctly gauged by the examples one meets
in the Sudan. As a fact, these are all picked men,
and they are not unconscious of the circumstance.
The Government insists on mind as well as muscle.
It will have its young men healthy and strong ; but
it wants them to possess a fair allowance of brains and
the ability to use them. No officer can be seconded
for service with the Egyptian army who cannot produce
the highest testimonials from his military superiors,
and he must pass a rather severe qualifying examina-
tion in addition. The same rule applies to the young
civilian nominated from the universities. The novice is
given a reasonable time to master Arabic, which is not
an easy language, and if he fails to attain the requisite
standard he is returned whence he came.

Many other things he has to learn, and he contrives
to learn them. The tradition in the Sudan is in favour

ANGLO-SUDANESE SOCIETY 47

of the exercise of the intelligence. The two men who
have had most to do with the destinies of the country
so far Lord Kitchener and the present Sirdar have
shown that high intellectual interests are not incon-
sistent with hard fighting and the winning of battles.
Sir Reginald Wingate, like his former chief, but perhaps
in a greater degree, is a scholar, a linguist, a student of
antiquities and history. But he had to do his share of
rough and perilous soldiering work, though the public
knew little about it at the time, being just then other-
wise occupied. After the great battle of Omdurman in
September 1898, George Steevens, who told its story in
his vivacious prose, went home, the other able corre-
spondents went home, most of the 1 1,000 British troops
went home, even Lord Kitchener went home. There
came the friction with France, and then in a little while
the growing quarrel with the Boers, and we all forgot
the Khalifa. But that inconvenient person had got
away after his Baggara had been mown down in heaps
by the maxim and rifle fire at Kerreri. He assembled
another army, 7000 strong, and a year after the great
victory Sir Reginald Wingate was in hot pursuit of him.
There were no British soldiers at Ghedit, where the
final battle was fought : only a few British officers and
some 2000 native troops. It was not very far from the
scene of Hicks Pasha's defeat; and at one moment it
looked as if there might be a repetition of that disaster.
For Sir Reginald Wingate was greatly outnumbered, and
his troops in their final dash had to march nearly two

48 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

days without water, with the risk of finding the wells
occupied in force by the enemy. Yet the hazard had
to be run ; for if the Khalifa had been allowed to get
away then the tribes would assuredly have assembled
round him again, and the conquest of the Sudan would
have had to begin de novo. Fortunately the Khalifa
had not seized the wells, but the peril was not over.
The dervishes, wiser than at Omdurman, made a night
attack on the British zariba, and it was awkward work to
repel the rush of the spearmen in the dark. But the
Sudanese and Egyptian soldiers stood their ground,
the attack gradually died away, and Wingate's men
advancing drove the dervishes before them. In the
centre of the field they found the body of the Khalifa.
Before him lay a line of his chosen guard of riflemen,
swept away by a blast of fire which converged by some
lucky chance upon this spot in the darkness. Every
man died where he stood, with his musket at his shoul-
der. Behind his escort Abdullah had seated himself on
his carpet, with his Emirs about him ; and here they met
their death with the calm and silent dignity of the
children of Islam when it is the will of Allah that the
end shall come. Many evil deeds were done by Ab-
dullah the Khalifa ; but he died better than he lived.
And his Africans were faithful to him to the last, as
African troops have so often been faithful in defeat
to the Chief who has led them to victory. As the tale
of Ghedit was told me, I thought of Hannibal's Old
Guard of Numidians, dying grimly under the swords

ANGLO-SUDANESE SOCIETY 49

of the legionaries, in that battle at Zama which sealed
the fate of Carthage two thousand years ago.

But the final blow at the Khalifa was struck, as I
have said, by one who was not only a soldier but also a
student, a man of books and ideas as well as a man of
action. There is enough of this spirit in the Sudan to
keep it from that deadness to all intellectual interests
which does unhappily sometimes oppress a British
community, predominantly official and military, in
the outlying parts of the globe. But then, also, you
must recollect that the British bey or bimbashi in the
Sudan is much more in touch with 'home' than most of
those who serve the Empire in distant regions. He gets
his three months' clear 'leave' every year so far as the
exigencies of his duty permit ; which is enough to
enable him to reach England and freshen himself for
eight weeks or so under a Northern sky. In India,
even now, people still talk of 'Europe' and 'Europeans,'
not of England and English ; they feel themselves so
far away from the continent of their nativity that minor
distinctions are merged. In the Sudan there is no such
suggestive nomenclature ; they would stare at you
if you spoke of a European policeman or a European
soldier. They are at home too often to talk the
language of exile. This ample allowance of holidays is
one of the attractions of the service ; it is also one of
the things that lead the winter visitor to exaggerate
those attractions. He does not see Khartum in the hot
weather, when all the ladies have left, when the ther-

50 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

mometer is at 120 degrees in the shade, when a piece
of metal in the daytime cannot be touched without
burning the fingers, when storms of redhot dust are
driving over everything. Still less does he realise that
Khartum, with its nice houses and gardens, is merely
the administrative and military centre. The hardest
work of the country is done away in the provinces, in
Kordofan, in the Bahr-el-Ghazal, almost to the Equator,
or far up the Blue Nile towards the Abyssinian frontier,
where men are toiling under a vertical sun, sometimes
amid swamps, deserts, or fever-haunted bush. No
club for them, no tea parties, no Palace, with its informal
little court, sometimes no white companion to speak to
for months at a time ; and that in a climate which,
pleasant enough as it may seem in December, with a
good roof above you and an ice-machine handy, is
uncommonly trying without such amenities in the
month of August. I have heard it hinted that in
Khartum and in Cairo the officials are rather too
generously served in the matter of leave ; but nobody
denies that the men up the country need all they get
and deserve all they can take.

CHAPTER VI
CONCERNING POLITICS AND PERSONS

THE Government of the Sudan is an anomaly within
an anomaly, as I was forcibly reminded one bright
morning in Omdurman when I watched a battalion
of the Egyptian army on parade. The sun glanced on
a long line of swarthy Arabs and absolute negroes,
arrayed in uniforms which only the genius of Anglo-
Indian military tailoring could have devised ; three
or four young Englishmen in brown helmets and khaki
rode along the ranks ; the band was drumming and
trumpeting vigorously to the tune of 'Men of Harlech' ;
the colour party bore a green and gold flag with the
Khedivial crescent. Suddenly the colonel rapped out
half a dozen sharp orders in --Turkish. Not in Eng-
lish, you perceive, which is the language of the officers,
not in the colloquial Arabic, which is the language of
the men ; but in Turkish, which is as much a foreign
tongue to all grades as Chinese. And it was brought
home to me by this curious linguistic performance that
I was under the shadow of the Sultan, in a land which
is still, according to vague political fiction, linked on
to that queer conglomerate, the Ottoman Empire.

Egypt is not an independent country, still less, I need
hardly say, does it 'belong' to England ; it is a province

52 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

of Turkey, and its ruler is theoretically the Viceroy of
the Sultan, who has kindly permitted some British
troops to 'occupy' the country temporarily to assist in
maintaining order, with some British officials to help the
Egyptians in the business of government. In this con-
dition of dependence, formally on Turkey, practically
on Great Britain, Egypt has a half-share in the Sudan,
England having the other half. It is a condominium
regulated by the agreement of 1899, which declares
that the English and Egyptian flags shall be used to-
gether throughout the territory ; that the military
and civil control shall be vested in the Governor-
General of the Sudan, who must also be the Sirdar of
the Egyptian army, and cannot be removed by the Khe-
dive without the consent of the British Government ;
that the 'capitulations' and consular jurisdictions are
not in force as in Egypt ; and that the import and
export of slaves are absolutely prohibited. The
Sudan is divided into fourteen provinces, each presided
over by an English Mudir, or Governor, responsible
to the Governor-General, who is nominally responsible
to the Khedive and the King; actually responsible to
nobody, unless it be the British Agent in Cairo, who is,
in theory, one of the foreign Consuls-General, and in
reality the representative of the British Government,
which controls the Government of Egypt.

It is a situation distinctly mixed when one tries to
put it upon paper. In effect it is simpler than it looks.
The truth is that the Sudan is a vast territory, inhabited

CONCERNING POLITICS AND PERSONS 53

by African natives, administered by English officials,
with the assistance of Egyptian subordinates, and de-
fended by a force of Egyptian and Sudanese troops
under English command. A single battalion of the
British 'Army of Occupation' is garrisoned in Khartum.
But in this town and in Omdurman and elsewhere in
the Sudan are stationed four-fifths of the Egyptian
army. There are some cavalry in Cairo, chiefly to do
escort duty for the Khedive, three infantry battalions
in Upper and Lower Egypt, a few guns, and military
police. The rest of the Egyptian army infantry,
mounted men, and artillery are beyond the frontier.
There is an Egyptian War Office in Cairo, but it has not
much to do. Most of the business is conducted in
Khartum. The Commander-in-Chief is there, the
Headquarters Staff, the military secretary, and adju-
tant-general. It is in the Sudan that the Egyptian
army is trained, for it is in the Sudan that it is most
likely to have to fight, if any fighting comes to be done.
The duty of looking after Egypt devolves mainly upon
the small British force which is called the Army of
Occupation so called because we are only 'occupying'
Egypt, just to see that things go right, in a quite casual
and temporary way, meanwhile obligingly assisting
the Egyptians to govern themselves in a decent and
tolerable fashion.

In the Sudan, however, we have no need to keep up
the fiction of being 'advisers' to native administrators.
Englishmen are running the territory without disguise,

54 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

to the great advantage of its inhabitants. To all intents
and purposes, these provinces are under British rule.
The military and civil hierarchy is entirely English in
its higher grades ; the subordinates are mostly Egyp-
tian, but their nationality is only, so to speak, inci-
dental ; many, in fact, are Syrians, Greeks, and Levan-
tines, and some are Sudanese natives. Egypt at pres-
ent furnishes the best available supply of intelligent
Arabic-speaking persons with education enough to
become company officers, minor magistrates, railway
officials, post-office employes, and the like. But they
do not stand the Sudan climate very well, and they are
not particularly happy in the country. They are
being supplemented, and, perhaps in time will be
supplanted, by the young Arabs and young negroes
whom we are training at the Gordon College, in
the military school, and in the technical workshops.
There will be Sudanese captains and subalterns, Sudan-
ese schoolmasters, kadis, and clerks, Sudanese sur-
veyors, irrigation officials, and tax collectors, and they
will gradually replace the Egyptian functionaries, who
are in reality almost as much foreigners in the country
as we are ourselves. In time, also, it may be possible
to dispense with the conscripted fellahin of the Lower
Nile valley, who fill the cadres of the Egyptian regi-
ments, leaving the defence of the Southern territory
entirely to the black battalions made up of voluntarily
enlisted natives of the Sudan. The majority of their
company officers and non-commissioned officers are

CONCERNING POLITICS AND PERSONS 55

now Egyptians ; but the sons of the fighting chiefs and
other scions of the 'first families' of the Sudan are being
made ready to take these positions. Then we shall
have a Sudan army exactly analogous to that of India -
commanded by English generals and colonels and
majors, with natives of the soil in the ranks and in
the intermediate grades.

Egypt, meanwhile, had to foot the bill, and some
Egyptians, especially those who contributed to the
Nationalist newspapers, complained bitterly of the
burden. In practice it was not very onerous. When
the Sudan was reconquered it was recognised that for
several years this devastated and depopulated tract
could not be expected to pay its way, and that the defi-
cit must be made good from the Egyptian revenues.
This was a mistake, due to the customary tenderness
of all British Governments for the British tax-payer.
We should have put ourselves in a stronger position
if we had become responsible, jointly with Egypt, for the
deficiency ; and the liability, as it turns out, would have
been light and transient. The Sudan now is paying its
way and requires no external assistance. Its Financial
Secretary, Colonel Bernard, a military officer whom
Lord Kitchener 'discovered' and turned into a highly
competent Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been
reducing the deficit year by year. In 1898 the annual
revenue was 35,000; by 1906 it has risen to 804,-
ooo; in 1912 it was 1,710,000. The contribution
by the Egyptian Government in the last-named year

56 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

was 335,000; but against this was to be set off a
return payment of 172,000 for maintenance of the
army in the Sudan, so that the net cost to Lower
Egypt of the Upper Provinces is only 163,000. But
in the current year (1913) this charge disappears alto-
gether, under a new settlement of the financial rela-
tions between the Cairo and Khartum Governments.
By this settlement, the contribution of Egypt to the
Sudan Exchequer and the payment for the maintenance
of the army are abolished, on condition that the Egyp-
tian Government hands over to the Sudan the customs
duties on goods destined for the territory collected in
Egypt. Thus the Sudan is now self-supporting. Its
revenue and expenditure, if all goes well, will balance
without external subventions. But even if Egyptwere
still called upon to contribute a hundred thousand or so
per annum it would not be an excessive amount to pay
for the maintenance of a settled government along the
whole course of the Nile, right up to its sources, and
for the removal of the menace which hung over Egypt
so long as the southern territories were in a turmoil of
warlike barbarism. For the present Egypt secures re-
pose and immunity ; and in the future she will double
her irrigation supply, and add many millions to the value
of her lands, by those great engineering works which
can only be undertaken by a Government having full
control of the upper waters of the two great rivers which
mingle at Khartum to pour their life-giving fluid
through the lower valley. For the first time in history

CONCERNING POLITICS AND PERSONS 57

a civilised Power can deal with the Niles and their
tributary streams, as a whole. Egypt, which thirty
years hence, thanks to the engineers and administra-
tors of the Sudan, may be twice as rich as she is at
present, need not grudge her contribution towards the
cost of the process in its initial stages.

The present task of the English rulers is to maintain
order, heal the wounds caused by the Mahdist fury, and
restore civilised conditions of life. Create, perhaps,
would be a better word than restore ; but it must be
remembered that we have some vestiges of an old civili-
sation to work upon. Modern scholars and historians
dismiss the idea that these Central African regions
were never anything but a mere welter of savagery.
We know now that Ethiopia shared in the culture and
in the social development of ancient Egypt, as its monu-
ments show ; and we know, too, that this old Nilotic
civilisation lasted on in the upper regions long after it
had succumbed in Egypt to the attacks from the north
and west. Christianity assimilated, but did not de-
stroy it ; for centuries after the Arabs had overwhelmed
Egypt there was a Christian empire in Africa, cut off
from the north by the Moslem wave, with its churches,
its schools, its monasteries, its walled towns, its industries,
and its well-organised society. As late as the four-
teenth century these Ethiopian States maintained their
individuality, nor were they finally engulfed in the
Mohammedan tide till the seventeenth. Up till that
time and even later there were the relics of an

58 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

indigenous civilisation, which had in it, perhaps, the
germs of something higher than the Asiatic Orientalism
with its bad European veneer, introduced by the Turks
and Arabs. The conquests of Mehemet Ali did more to
demoralise than to raise the Ethiopian races. There
were military stations, barracks, forts, steamers, the
telegraph ; but the people were plundered and preyed
upon by ruffianly soldiers and corrupt officials, the
flourishing caravan trade was broken up, and whole-
sale slave-hunting was encouraged. The 'Turks' had
rendered their own tenure precarious by their oppres-
sion, even before the pseudo-Messiah united all the
elements antagonistic to them by the bond of a common
fanaticism.

In that period of disruption and unrest which even-
tually brought us upon the Nile strange things happened
and strange figures appeared. I had been lunching
at Khartum with a high official of the Government in
one of those charming villas on the river bank. 'Don't
go,' said the host, as we were rising to take our leave ;
'Zubeir Pasha is here, and I dare say you would like
to see him.' Certainly we would like to see him. What
would you say if Godfrey de Bouillon or Bertrand du
Guesclin strolled in for a chat over the teacups ? To
see Zubeir Pasha face to face was as if some long dead
and buried adventurer had come to life out of the pages
of the history books. His name was well enough
known to the British public through the newspapers
and the parliamentary debates of the Gordon period ;

CONCERNING POLITICS AND PERSONS 59

for this old man, who lived right down into the second
decade of the twentieth century, 1 had played a
great part in Sudan affairs long before the Mahdi
rose, and might have played a greater part still
had Gordon been allowed to have his way at the
last. He was an Arab of the Berber region, who
plunged into the wilder parts of the Sudan many years
before the 'Turk' had been shaken out of the tropical
provinces, while Ismail Pasha's regiments were still
patrolling the country, bullying the tribes, levying
contributions, pretending to suppress the slave dealers,
and meanwhile taking toll of their illicit gains. In
this welter Zubeir was at home. He was energetic,
capable, ambitious, with abundant courage, and no
scruples to spare ; a keen trader, an excellent organiser,
with some talent for soldiering and leadership. He
built up a great personal and commercial influence
in the Sudan provinces. He traded, he fought, he
brought the tribes together, he made a sort of confedera-
tion which included Darfur, Kordofan, and the Bahr-el-
Ghazal and the Khartum district; he was the most
powerful man in those provinces. Then Gordon, in
his crusade against the slave trade, came into conflict
with him ; his son was killed by Gessi, one of Gordon's
lieutenants ; Zubeir himself was seized, exiled to Cairo,
and forbidden to set foot again in the Sudan. But his
influence had not left him ; and when Gordon went out
on his fatal mission he urged that his old enemy should

1 He died at Berber in 1913.

60 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

be brought back to aid him in the work of pacification.
' Send me troops or Zubeir.' The Imperial Government
refused. Zubeir was kept in Cairo, and afterwards
enjoyed the hospitality of England in Gibraltar.
Eventually Lord Cromer caused him to be released,
pensioned, and returned to the Sudan. He lived patri-
archally amid a whole tribe of his kinsfolk and descend-
ants, near Khartum, drew his pension, managed his
great estates, and was on excellent terms with the
authorities, albeit he had a still unsatisfied claim for, I
think, a matter of four millions on account of the dam-
age done to his property in the time of the sequestra-
tion.

He was, when I saw him, a brisk, hale, vivacious old
gentleman, with a twinkling brown eye, a short grey
beard, and a kindly manner. Four score and one were
the years of his life, but he was alert and vigorous. He
scrambled upon his donkey unaided, and scrambled
off again like a schoolboy when somebody expressed a
desire to take a snapshot of him. He was very com-
municative, and did not in the least mind being ques-
tioned about his past career and his private affairs.
'Gordoun Pasha,' he said, was the best Englishman he
ever knew ; he never believed that Gessi had Gordon's
authority for killing his son Suleiman. He denied
that he was a slave trader ; he found the trade going
on when he took to organising the provinces. Topics
even more delicate he was willing to discuss. He was
asked how many children he had had in the course of

FiKLD-M.AK.snAi.

From the ml //>u

VisoorsT KrrrnKNKK OK
O.M.

Hig hy i/,, Hon. John Cottier .

, (J.C.B.,

CONCERNING POLITICS AND PERSONS 61

a much married life. He could not say ; there were
some twenty-six alive. And wives ? One does not
usually put that question to a Mussulman, but Zubeir
was a man of the world. He had had sixteen wives
altogether, he believed, but it had pleased Allah to
take several of the ladies from him. He was still
engaged in supplementing the deficiency; only last
year he had taken to wife a girl of his own tribe, the
good-looking and intelligent Jaalins. Wasn't he a
little old for matrimony ? some one mildly hinted.
Not at all, responded the gay veteran ; on the contrary,
he thought that the marrying of wives tends to keep
an elderly person young. Certainly he tested his own
prescription faithfully, and it seems to have agreed
with him. Thus did this fierce old fighter end his
peaceful days, seeking the delights of domesticity,
cultivating his gardens, making friends with the new
rulers who were bringing peace and order into the
wide sun-baked lands through which he had ploughed
his stormful, man-hunting, filibustering way. Com-
fortably enough he reposed under the shadow of the
Pax Britannica, this lean, brown, lively veteran, who
might, one reflected, if things had fallen but a little
differently, have founded an Empire, or have died in a
dungeon, like many an Eastern adventurer before him.

CHAPTER VII
SOME SUDANESE PROBLEMS

* WELL,' I said to the courteous official who was trying
to get some business done for me in Khartum, 'I
suppose, since this is Saturday night, I must let the
matter stand over till Monday.' 'Not at all. Come
to my office to-morrow morning and I will arrange it
for you.' 'To-morrow ! But you forget that to-
morrow is Sunday. Surely you do not go to your office
on that day ?'

'Certainly I do. My office is open on Sunday
mornings. We take our holiday on Friday. This is a
Mohammedan country, you know.'

And that was another new light to me. As a rule, it
may be said of the Englishman in the remote parts of
the earth, cesium non animum mutat : he changes his
climate, but not his habits. So to hear that he
went to work on the Sabbath and rested on the
Friday was as startling as if one had learnt that he
was prepared to sit down to dinner without a dress
coat or, at the worst, a dinner jacket.

The task of the Sudan administrators, as I have said,
is that of creating, or reviving, a civilisation out of
chaos. They have many difficulties, and one great
advantage. The ruin wrought by the Mahdist move-

SOME SUDANESE PROBLEMS 63

ment was so complete that they can start with some-
thing like a tabula rasa. A society and a civil polity
had been totally wrecked ; only the foundations were
left, and the new rulers had a fairly free hand to rebuild
the structure as they pleased, within reason. There
is a large field for experiment and for bold innovations,
which could not be attempted in older and more com-
plex communities with a highly organised structure
and an unbroken tradition.

Some fundamental considerations had, however, to
be taken into account. One of these is the existence
and prevalence of the Mohammedan religion. The
Sudanese profess the faith of Islam. Many of them,
especially the negroes, are very bad Moslem ; but they
are not on that account the less fanatical, and we
cannot forget that our presence in the country is due
to the most striking Islamic revival of the nineteenth
century. In the Sudan, as well as in Egypt, the
Mussulman religion is still living, and its hold is as
strong as ever. Its votaries believe not only that there
is one God, but also that there is only one faith ; those
who do not accept the teaching of the Prophet may have
many virtues, but they cannot stand on the same foot-
ing as the true believers. We have to contend against
an undoubted prejudice. As Englishmen, we may be
respected or even liked ; as Christians, there is a feeling
against us which is very difficult to overcome. The
Egyptian of the old regime, the hated and oppressing
'Turk,' was at least a Mussulman ; we are 'Nazarenes,'

64 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

and it is not a point in our favour. 'Ah ! if you could
only be Moslem,' said an old Arab Sheikh to a British
officer, with whom he had been spending a long day of
travel and sport, 'how glad we should all be.'

Such a sentiment demands tender handling. Lord
Kitchener determined that his new Sudan should not
be troubled by religious dissension. He impressed it
upon his lieutenants and coadjutors that they were
dealing with a Mohammedan community, which,
having a quite respectable religion of its own, was not
to be regarded as a fair subject for proselytism. Noth-
ing, he believed, would do more to set Moslem parents
against education than the notion that it was to be
employed as a means of turning the children from the
faith of their fathers. Consequently, the instruction
imparted is strictly secular. Conscientious Mohamme-
dans can send their boys to the Gordon College, the
primary schools, and the technical classes, with a com-
plete conviction that no attempt will be made to
undermine the foundations of their faith. The obliga-
tion rests alike upon the Protestant and the Catholic
clergy, who are both enjoined against giving religious
teaching, except, of course, to the members of their own
communions. One of the most useful institutions in
Khartum is the school for girls, which is much appre-
ciated by an increasing number of Mohammedan
mothers. But the pupils are taught nothing which
would shake their belief in the doctrines and customs
of Islam; and no Mohammedan husband, who in due

SOME SUDANESE PROBLEMS 65

course marries one of these young ladies, will find that
he has unwittingly acquired a convert to Christianity.
On the same ground missionary effort is not en-
couraged ; indeed, over a great part of the territory
it is absolutely prohibited. After the reconquest some
of the missionary societies, British and foreign, thought
that a great door and effectual was opened in the Sudan,
and were anxious to send in their agents. But Lord
Kitchener put his foot down at once. An able and
zealous young clergyman came out from home to
establish an Anglican mission in Khartum. 'No,'
said the Sirdar, 'this is no field for missionary enter-
prise. But I should think there would be abundant
scope for your energies among your own countrymen
here. You can stay and convert them, if you like.
But there must be no attempt at proselytism among
the Mohammedans.' The embargo extends to all the
northern and more civilised provinces of the Sudan, and
includes all those in which the Arab population is most
numerous, from the Egyptian frontier to Fashoda. It
is only in the Equatorial provinces of the Far South that
the missionaries may teach their religion, and make
converts if they can. In these districts we are con-
cerned mainly with true African negroes, who are
practically heathens, and have hardly been touched by
Mohammedanism. With them the ulema and the
minister have an equal chance ; and if the latter can
teach them the Bible before the former gets at them
with the Koran, the Government at Khartum makes

66 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

no objection. And with them, it may be added, the
missionaries do make some progress ; with the Moham-
medans, even without the administrative veto, they can
do little or nothing. The Mussulman world is rather
less likely to become Christian to-day, than it was 300
years ago.

Another matter in which it is necessary to move with
a good deal of caution is that of slavery. Legalised
slavery ceased to exist with the annexation. No man
is entitled to make any human being his property in
the Sudan any more than in England, or to constrain
him to labour against his will ; and any person held as a
slave can, if he pleases, claim immediate manumission.
The buying and selling of slaves is prohibited and
severely punished ; there is a special slave trade de-
partment, with its own police, engaged in the repression
of the practice, which, however, is far from extinct
in the remoter districts. Domestic and agrarian
slavery is dying, but not dead. Many thousands of
slaves have asserted their right of emancipation, and
converted themselves into free labourers, much stimu-
lated thereto by the excellent wages which any able-
bodied person can obtain in the Government workshops,
on the railways, and in private employment. The
Khalifa left us a legacy of a horde of female slaves when
he bolted from Omdurman, and these were all manu-
mitted, not in every case to their own advantage, for,
after all, it was somebody's business to feed them as
long as they had owners. That illustrates one of the

SOME SUDANESE PROBLEMS 67

difficulties that beset the process of abolishing slavery
in a community long accustomed to this 'peculiar
institution.' Peculiar or not, it has existed in Africa
and in Asia from time immemorial, and society has been
built up round it. To overthrow it in haste necessarily
produces grave economical disturbance. The land-
owner finds himself deprived of the means of cultivating
the soil, and the labourer sometimes discovers that he
has exchanged a stable and secure existence for one
that is uncertain and precarious. He may even learn
in some cases that the 'cash nexus' by which he is bound
to an employer, only anxious to make the most of his
labour, is a harsher tie than that which linked him to a
master who had some interest in keeping him contented
and healthy. Slaves in Africa, as in Asia, were, as a
rule, treated with kindness, though no doubt the most
fiendish cruelties were perpetrated in the process of
obtaining them for the market.

With the slave trade we can have no compromise.
But with the emancipation of the slaves actually held
as servants or dependants we need not hurry matters
unduly. A good deal of social disorganisation has al-
ready been caused, and it will take some time to settle
itself. It is most felt by the powerful land-owning and
cattle-owning Arab tribes, who have been accustomed
to rely on their negro serfs for the cultivation of their
fields and the care of their flocks and herds. The chiefs
of these clans are still highly important and influential
persons, and we do not want to rouse their opposition

68 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

unnecessarily. This history of the past conveys a
warning. There is no doubt, I think, that Gordon's
impetuous crusade against slavery had much to do with
the final rising against Egyptian rule. If there had
been no Gordon there might have been no Mahdi.
To the general resentment which the Khedivial officials
excited, Gordon added the opposition of all the vested
interests. His furious onslaught upon slavery was
regarded as an attack upon private property in one
of its most respectable forms. And these property
owners, great chiefs with a bevy of spearmen at their
backs, were powerful then, and are not powerless now.
So it may be hoped that no impatient pressure from
home will induce the Sudan Government to move other-
wise than gently and cautiously in this delicate business.
Three things the Sudan needs above all others if it
is to become rich and prosperous : Better communica-
tions, more water, and abundant labour. Given these
things, and with its fertile and varied soil, its fine climate,
and its vitalising sunshine, it will export great quanti-
ties of grain and cotton. Under the old Turco-Egyp-
tian regime it was lamentably deficient in all the three
essentials. Roads it had none, beyond the few made
about the towns of the north and the camel tracks
through the deserts. For centuries it has done without
wheeled transport of any sort ; such commerce as it had
was carried on the backs of camels and donkeys, and the
shoulders of men. By this means the caravans tra-
versed the roadless deserts, and somehow contrived

SOME SUDANESE PROBLEMS 69

to keep up communication right across the fiery con-
tinent from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and from
Morocco to the Equator. Where time is no object,
marvellous distances can be covered by the legs of men
and of animals. The African is a tremendous walker, if
you give him time for his journeys. At Suakin I met a
man who had walked all the way from the West Coast.
He was going to Mecca, and had, so far, been seven
years on the route. At a plantation on the Nile near
Berber, my attention was directed to certain of these
fellatah, as they are called, natives of Nigeria, who
were working their way, in a similar leisurely fashion,
towards the Holy City, and would no doubt get there
in time, if they did not happen to die first. But this
pedestrian method is unsuited to modern trade. The
caravan is out of date.

It is being superseded by the railways, which the
Sudan Government is building. In these enterprises it
has exhibited a most creditable energy, and a lofty con-
fidence in the future of the country. Of the line from
Wady Haifa to Khartum I have already spoken. From
Khartum the Sudan Government railway has now been
carried to Sennar, two hundred miles up the Blue
Nile, a town which had once a great trade till it was
captured and destroyed by the Mahdists. On the way
it passes Wad Mcdani, a large native town with streets
of straw-roofed African huts, and a 'Palace,' with fine
gardens for the Governor of the Blue Nile province.
At Sennar the line turns westward and crosses the White

70 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

Nile by a great steel swing bridge, wrought by skilful
hands in the English north country. Thence it runs on
to El Obeid, in the heart of the Kordofan province, a
place as remote and inaccessible a few years ago as
any spot on earth. Wild tribesmen, spear-armed and
riding bullocks, come in from the wastes, but they are
on business bent. They have discovered that there are
merchants in the old capital of the Emirs who will give
them good prices for their gum, and grain, and hides,
and sell them coloured calico and other products of
civilisation. They understand the railway and are
beginning to travel by it to Rahad and Kosti, the Nile
port, and other local centres to which their occasions call
them. Before long, I dare say, we shall find them
suitably arrayed in tweed trousers and bowler hats
running down for a week-end at Khartum to do the
cinema-theatres. At present they are still primitive
and picturesque, and keenly appreciative of improved
possibilities for trade.

From El Obeid the railway will in due course pene-
trate still deeper into Central Africa and perhaps
eventually join hands with a French railway from
Timbuctoo and the West Coast, or with an English
railway from Northern Nigeria. Long before this
connection is achieved the direct north and south line
will have got on to Gondokoro, where in due course it
will meet the Cape-to-Cairo line and the Uganda rail-
way, and so carry us, if we please, to the Indian Ocean
or the goldfields of the Transvaal.

SOME SUDANESE PROBLEMS 71

Another extension is projected from Sennar to the
Abyssinian frontier, through the fertile district between
the Blue Nile and the Atbara. Already there is a
westward extension, much lower down than Khartum,
branching off from the main line to Egypt near Abu
Hamed into the Dongola province as far as Kereima.
Here are the pyramids and temples of Merowi, impor-
tant and interesting, but not to be compared with those
other temples and pyramids at Meroe higher up on the
railway, which are being unearthed by Professor
Garstang. This was the ancient capital of Queen
Candace, with the Temple of the Sun, and the great
Temple of Amon, and other monuments of the flowering
period of Ethiopic civilisation. At the junction of the
Atbara with the Nile begins the railway to Port Sudan,
of which more will be said later. The railways and the
river steamers will put most parts of the territory in
direct communication with the sea, and so with the
great trade routes and markets of the globe.

But if the Sudan is to load the trucks and freight
steamers with sacks of wheat and maize and gum and
bales of cotton, it must have water. It is nowhere a
quite rainless country; but, until the Equatorial prov-
ince is reached, it does not get enough moisture from
the heavens to produce crops. Most of the northern
part looks to the eye like arid desert, bare and brown or
staring yellow ; but it is desert which needs only water
to bloom with verdure. And the water is there, flow-
ing from end to end of the country along the broad

72 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

channel of the Niles and their tributary streams.
But Egypt has first claim upon the perennial waters of
the Nile, and until her thirsting fields and gardens are
sated the Sudan must touch nothing. Outside the
flood season the entire Sudan is limited to as much Nile
water as will irrigate a few thousand acres a mere
speck in her available millions. Not till the works
have been completed which will increase the supply for
Egypt will the Sudan be able to add largely to her
cultivable area. Thus the fate of the two countries
is linked together, and the fortune of the one depends
upon the other.

Even for such crops and tillage grounds as she
owns, the Sudan has too few hands. Labour is scarce
and dear ; for what are two millions of people in a
territory more than half as large as India ? And,
albeit the Arab is earnestly devoted to matrimony and
the Sudanese are prolific, it will be long before the
depopulation of recent decades can be made good.
The Sudan, in fact, wants men badly, and it does not at
present see where they are to come from. There is
talk of increased migration from Egypt ; but the
Egyptian, except as trader or official, is not fond of the
southern territory. The fellah would prefer to till
land nearer his own home, and there will be plenty of
scope for him there when the increased water supply
reclaims fresh sections of desert in the Delta and on the
middle Nile. But if not the Egyptian, who then ?
Possibly some negro tribes from the interior of Africa

SOME SUDANESE PROBLEMS 73

may move northward, but not much dependence can
be placed on them. Sooner or later, I cannot but
think, our fellow-subjects in British India will come
in to fill the gap. From her teeming bosom India
could spare a few million cultivators, and never miss
them ; indeed, they are straining to get away, and
moving towards all sorts of places where they are not
wanted or will do no good. In the Sudan they would
find a climate to suit them ; a (virtually) British Gov-
ernment to protect them, with no white British colonists
to object to their presence ; and a fair opening for their
industry and their skill as husbandmen. For Indian
Mohammedans the country seems specially suitable;
and it might be worth while for the Indian and Sudan
Governments to consider whether concerted measures
might not be devised, in order to promote a moderate
migration from a region where agricultural humanity
is rather too thick on the ground to one where it is too
sparse and scattered.

CHAPTER VIII
SIMPKINSON BEY

'I AM afraid you are not interested, Captain Simpkin-
son,' remarked the vicar's wife, with a certain asperity.

'I beg your pardon,' said the captain hastily; 'I -- I
was thinking of something else for the moment.'

The 2nd Battalion of the Royalshire Regiment was
At Home to its friends at its depot in the highly re-
spectable British garrison town of Cokechester. The
'County' was there, and the fringe of the county -
florid local magnates, sporting solicitors, and land
agents, anxious matrons keeping a careful eye on
marriageable daughters, stout rectors, slim curates.
The regimental band was beating out the famous
regimental tune of the Royalshires on one square of
enamelled sward ; flannelled youths and short-skirted
maidens were playing tennis on another; the servants
were preparing tea and ices in the buffet under the long
marquee. The vicar's wife had chosen this occasion to
impart to the young officer he was still young, though
there were lines and wrinkles on his lean, brown cheeks
her ideas on the proper management of soup kitchens.
But the captain's thoughts were far away.

As the good lady prosed on, under the mild sunshine
of an English June, his mind wandered drowsily to a

SIMPKINSON BEY 75

different scene and a hotter sky. The green turf and
the red roofs of the quaint old town faded away. Before
him a great space of dusty plain, baked and parched
under the merciless glare, stretched away to where, in
the dim distance, jagged spurs of rock stood black
above the shimmering waters of the mirage. On the
edge of the visionary lake a long string of camels stalked
slowly across the horizon line. In the foreground the
dreamer saw rows of mud huts, roofed with corrugated
iron ; in front was drawn up a company of soldiers, not
the trim little red-coats of the Royalshires, but tall,
lathy black men, in white uniforms, with Martini rifles
and long, triangular bayonets. A couple of young
Englishmen, in khaki, rode up and down. Presently
the company sprang to attention, and rigidly pre-
sented arms ; the while another Englishman, who was,
in fact, himself, emerged from the largest of the huts,
mounted a white Arab pony, and, with the adjutant at
his side, and native officers and orderlies in attendance,
rode towards a group of stalwart barbarians, with
spears and turbans and flowing garments, waiting
humbly on his pleasure. For Captain Simpkinson was
Simpkinson Bey then, Mudir of a province, with a
Sudanese battalion at his orders ; and the Sheikh of a
great tribe of the Baggara was craving audience, to
learn his pleasure concerning a certain matter of cattle
raiding, whereof some of the clansmen had been guilty.
The captain's errant thoughts went back to other
scenes : to long marches through the desert when he

76 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

was bringing up a convoy of camels from the coast, and,
night after night, for many weeks, he camped, with his
beasts and his Bisharin drivers, under the stars ; to the
time when a sudden rising occurred at an isolated post
far up in the province, and he pressed on breathlessly
with a handful of his Sudanese on mules and donkeys,
wondering if he should be, after all, too late to save the
beleaguered Englishmen and Egyptians ; to awful days,
all alone in his tin-roofed shanty, with the thermometer
at 1 20 deg. in the shade (if there had been, any shade),
and the khamsin wind blowing up clouds of red-hot
sand ; to brief, delightful holidays, when he was able to
get down to Khartum, and enjoy a week of polo, and
wear evening clothes, and sit long on the cool verandahs
of charming villas after dinner ; to busy mornings in his
mudiryeh, where he worked in regal fashion, receiving
reports, issuing commands, giving directions to a whole
staff of assistants, subordinates, clerks, officials, the
unquestioned autocrat of a vast district, with none
greater than he, save the Governor-General 300 miles
away. Now he was drilling his company of languid
Tommies, and trying to satisfy the major and earn the
approval of the colonel, and discussing soup-kitchens
with the vicar's wife.

' You must be glad to have got away from that terrible
country and be back in England,' said the lady.

'M yes; awfl'y glad. No place like home, you
know,' answered ex-Bey Simpkinson.

But he said it without conviction, and the vicar's

SIMPKINSON BEY 77

wife was confirmed in the opinion that he was a dull
young man.

In fact, it had been a good life while it lasted, if often
a hard one. At five-and-twenty, a subaltern in the
Royalshires, of no particular importance in the scheme
of things, he had managed to get seconded for service
in the Egyptian Army. Here he was at once a bim-
bashi, which is a major, one of the four European
officers in a Sudanese regiment, with mature native
captains and lieutenants, be-medalled veterans some of
them, who had served at the Atbara and Toski, obeying
his orders. Being a smart young fellow, with a certain
organising faculty, he was presently transferred to the
administrative side ; and thus it came about that he
found himself, at little more than thirty, a colonel (in
the Egyptian army list), a Bey, and the Governor of a
province twice as large as Wales. He had all sorts of
duties and responsibilities ; he was commandant of the
troops, head of the police, home secretary in his own
cabinet, inspector of education (so far as there was any
education), chief collector of taxes, and guardian of
public order, law, and morals. Sometimes he pushed
out with a party of his troops on a miniature campaign
against slave runners or raiding tribes from the hills ;
sometimes he went down to the frontier and engaged in
delicate diplomacy with the officers of the Sovereign
State of the Congo. Captain Simpkinson chuckled
when he recalled the mingled game of bluff and finesse
they had played against one another out there on the

78 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

remote border of the Lado Enclave, very far away from
the Foreign Offices and the newspapers. But they were
good fellows, that young Verhaeeren and young Flan-
drin ; and the English and the Belgians had had some
genial nights at bridge together after the day's wran-
gling was done.

But the full and busy years, punctuated with wel-
come intervals of leave at home, rolled out swiftly.
Simpkinson Bey was only let on lease to the Sudan
service. The British army, which graciously lends its
officers to Egypt, requires repayment of the loan ; in
seven years, or ten at the outside, the seconded soldier
is reclaimed. He may, if he chooses, and if a place can
be found for him, pass permanently into the Egyptian
Civil Service, in which case he retires from the British
army, and abandons his pay and claim to further pro-
motion. Otherwise he returns with the rank which
would have been his, in the normal course of things, if
he had spent his years of absence with his own corps.
The result is occasionally a rather emphatic step down-
ward in outward dignity and actual importance. A
man may have been the ruler of a province ; he may
have been a Bey or a Pasha ; he may have been the
head of a department in the Khartum Government,
virtually a kind of Chancellor of the Exchequer or
Secretary of State; or he may have been Kaimakam
(which is Colonel), with a full battalion of 900 men
under him; perhaps even El Lewa, or Major-General.
And after all this, he may come back to his regiment as

SIMPKINSON BEY 79

a major, or even a mere captain, with other men to
order him about, and only the dull routine of garrison
duty to occupy him. Simpkinson Bey might have
stayed in the Sudan Administration if he had wished ;
he had done good work, and they would have made
room for him. But after ten years of dust and sun he
was growing a little tired of the tropics ; he found him-
self thinking rather frequently of wet English lanes and
tangled hedgerows ; with certain blue English eyes and
rose-leaf English cheeks also a good deal in his thoughts.
So he 'chucked' the Khedivial uniform, and returned
to the regiment, and the company, and respectable
Cokechester ; and another young man harries the
raiders in his stead and keeps the Dinkas in order.

If Simpkinson Bey never got on to the Staff or ob-
tained an administrative appointment while he bore the
Crescent badge, but remained with his battalion, he
would still have found plenty to occupy and interest
him. The Egyptian army is like the Indian army, in
that its European officers are in close and constant
contact with their men. There are no English non-
commissioned officers. 'Sergeant What's-his-name
has disappeared. The European drill instructor has
gone, and the European subaltern ; it rests with the
colonel and the bimbashis, or majors (the English
officer is a major, whatever his rank in the home ser-
vice), to drill, train, and discipline the men with the
help of the native captains, lieutenants, and non-coms.
There is some difference in the nature of his task, ac-

8o EGYPT IN TRANSITION

cording as the Englishman finds himself posted to one
of the battalions composed of Egyptian conscripts or
one of those recruited in the Sudan by voluntary enlist-
ment. The work is easier and duller in the former case.
The fellah of the Nile Valley has no martial tastes ;
he is so little inclined to be a soldier that he tries various
devices to escape service when the lot falls upon him in
the annual balloting. Sometimes he borrows 20 from
the Agricultural Bank or the Greek moneylender, on the
security of his fields, to buy himself off ; sometimes he
has been known to snip off the top joint of his trigger
finger. But in the ranks he does very well. He is
patient, obedient, and teachable, a good marcher, and
really fond of his drill, which he learns with a machine-
like precision. He is very amenable to discipline, and
gives comparatively little trouble in camp and barracks ;
so that it is deemed requisite to have no more than three
European officers in some of the Egyptian battalions,
while four of them have only native officers, from the
colonel downwards.

In the 'black' regiments there is always an English
commandant and three or four English bimbashis.
The Sudanese are more difficult to handle than the
conscript troops. They are more excitable and rest-
less, more impatient of routine, a little too fond of
native beer, and the stronger liquors of the West, if
they can get them, and altogether they demand more
constant supervision, both iathe field and on the parade-
ground. Yet I believe that the English bimbashi gets

SIMPKINSON BEY 81

on better with his negroes and Arab tribesmen than
with the Egyptians. There is a fine manliness and
simplicity about these blacks ; they are soldiers be-
cause they like soldiering (some of them have had no
other trade), and they often develop a real affection for
their officers. I noticed the difference between the
two contingents at a review of the Khartum garrison,
held before the Sirdar one morning. The 'Gyppies
made a fine show, for they marched past like a moving
wall, every bayonet in its right alignment. For phy-
sique you would find some'of the companies hard to beat.
There is scarcely a stronger man on earth than the
Egyptian fellah, with his wide, square chest, his long,
sinewy back, and his wiry muscles, developed by forty
centuries of Sandow exercises, performed with the
spade, the hand-pick, and the shadufor lever with which
he swings the water up from the Nile. Compared
with him the Sudanese often seems leggy and weedy,
with shoulders too narrow for his height ; and he does
not march with the same accuracy. But the dash and
spirit of the Sudanese companies were unmistakable ;
they had the martial bearing of men descended from
generations of warriors, as many of them are.

And then their music ! By dint of infinite pains the
Egyptian regimental bands have been taught the notes
of the scale, albeit the Egyptian has no 'ear' or, at any
rate, an ear of a quite different character from our own.
He drums and trumpets in the same fashion as he
marches mechanically, though with a stubborn

82 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

precision. But with the black it is otherwise. He has
an ear attuned to our melodies and harmonies ; the
soul of music is in this savage, and you have but to
teach him the use of brass and wood to bring it out.
There is one specially selected Sudanese band at Khar-
tum which plays with such expression and instinctive
feeling as would give it a reputation, I believe, in any
European capital. They perform anything well -
Viennese dance music, comic opera tunes, the old Scot-
tish melodies with the breath of the heather in them
that make the Briton's heart beat a little when he hears
them under an alien sky. And they have not forgotten
the indigenous music. At the close of the review the
massed bands of the Sudanese regiments played the
columns past to their own tunes. It was a wild riot of
barbaric sound, savage and confused, yet blended into
a kind of unity. You heard the voices of the African
forest, the wail of the desert, the shout of the battle, the
laughter of the village : above all, the notes of the native
drum with their suggestion of menace and mystery.
The African can make the stretched skin speak, and its
weird, monotonous voice excites him strangely. There-
fore did Mohammed Ahmed Ibn Sayid, the Mahdi,
warn his followers against this indulgence. 'Abstain,'
said the Puritan prophet, 'from all amusements, for
through prayers alone can this world be kept in peace.
Abstain also from the pleasures of music, do not beat the
big and small drums.' The Mahdi knew his people.
He knew that the African tribesman, smiling, good-

SIMPKINSON BEY 83

humoured, indolently sensual in the ordinary way, can
be stirred to paroxysms of animal fury when the right
stimulus is applied. That is what makes him a 'first-
class fighting man,' on occasion, formidable but uncer-
tain, and needing above all things sure leadership and
careful handling.

CHAPTER IX
CONCERNING WOMEN, SOLDIERS, AND CIVILIANS

OUR friend Bimbashi Simpkinson Bey has varied du-
ties to perform in the Sudan, such as will not assuredly
fall to his lot while he is with his regiment at home.
In the Sudanese battalion these functions are more
diverse and complex than in those composed of Egyp-
tians. The fellah soldier, a conscript, and practically
unpaid, lives in barracks as a bachelor; his wife, if he
has one, stays behind in the village with her husband's
family. But the blacks, who have enlisted as pro-
fessional soldiers for long service, bring their women
with them. There would be no reliance on them at all
if they were separated from them : they would be use-
less for duty, and would probably desert. So the
authorities make a virtue of necessity, and regard
every married man as 'on the strength' of the regiment,
so long as he is married in moderation. That is to say,
each soldier may have a wife in the lines ; if he avails
himself of his privilege as a Mohammedan to have more
than one, he must keep the supernumerary consorts at
his own expense somewhere else. But the official part-
ner is officially recognised ; the soldier is granted
quarters for her and an allowance towards her main-
tenance and that of her children.

WOMEN, SOLDIERS, AND CIVILIANS 85

The ladies, in fact, form part of the regiment, and
may be said to be under military discipline. Neat
rows of huts are built for them within the lines, which
they are expected to keep clean and in good order under
penalty. The colonel inspects the haremat, or women's
quarter, from time to time, and comments unkindly on
any exhibition of negligence or dirt. The women, how-
ever, may be said to have their own commandant, in the
person of the sheikha, a female of discretion and mature
years appointed to control their conduct, manners, and
morals. If any tenant of the haremat is disorderly or
disobedient, if she quarrels too frequently with her
husband or her neighbours, if she neglects her children,
or if her behaviour falls below the regimental standard
of propriety, the sheikha, having reproved her with
more or less effect, brings her to the orderly room and
makes formal complaint of her delinquencies. The
officer of the day makes grave note of the case, listens
with attention to the accusation of the sheikha and the
defendant's explanation, and takes such steps as the
occasion seems to demand. As a rule the authority of
the sheikha is vindicated, since this military duenna
bears, so to speak, the King's commission. Some-
times a woman will be brought to the orderly room on
the complaint of a neighbour, or a rival, or of her own
husband ; sometimes, also, a husband at the instance
of his wife.

Delicate connubial questions may fall to be adjudi-
cated upon by a youthful bachelor bimbashi, who in

86 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

England might not be deemed an expert in causes
matrimonial. But in the Sudan he is a man of the
world, and his decisions are accepted with reverence.

'Oh, thou woman,' says Sergeant Mohammed Yehya,
as he leads the erring Zeinab home, having obtained a
judgment of the court in his favour, 'did I not tell thee
the Bey would have no regard for the word of a light
minded female pig like thyself ? Great is the wisdom
of the Ingliiz !'

Nothing that I did in Omdurman interested me more
than the visit I paid to the barracks of one of the black
battalions at that town. It was the loth Sudanese,
which, under the command of its late able and popular
kaimakam, Lempriere Bey, had reached a high state of
efficiency; indeed, the 9th and the loth Sudanese, I
believe, are regarded as the two crack regiments of the
Egyptian army. The barrack-rooms are long sheds,
with a raised platform, on which the soldiers spread their
straw mattresses. As we went round, each man, in full
kit (for the regiment was preparing for parade), stood,
like a black statue, in his place. The rooms were not
quite so well furnished as if they had been in the Marine
lines at Portsmouth, but as clean and tidy; and in this
dusty land, these men, brought up on dung floors in
mud hovels, had been taught to keep themselves and
their dwelling-places in excellent order. Fine, soldierly
men were the Sudanese non-commissioned officers and
the Egyptian captains and the lieutenants who accom-
panied us on our tour of inspection : one of these, a

WOMEN, SOLDIERS, AND CIVILIANS 87

bronzed veteran whose broad breast was covered with
medals, for he had faced the dervish spears in all the
battles of Hunter's and Kitchener's campaigns. Some
of the troops were to be conveyed across by steamer to
Khartum ; I watched them march down to the river
and embark, which they did with no more fuss and
noise than a similar number of European soldiers would
have made.

After we went round the haremat, and I had the
honour of a presentation to the head sheikha, and like-
wise to the subordinate sheikhas, each of whom is
responsible for the discipline of a company. Some of
these latter were a little shy ; each of them, however,
protested that her own company was one of exceptional
virtue and decorum, and as much above the level of all
the other companies as the loth Sudanese were, speaking
generally, superior to the rest of the army. The rank
and file women, dressed in their parade robes of (mostly)
clean white cotton, stood at the doors of their huts ;
and as we passed by the end of each row, the whole
company emitted shrill cries in honour of the command-
ing officer. It is a curious sound, something between a
scream and a whistle: the English officers call it 'lou-
louing,' because of the syllable which is most distinguish-
able through the prolonged piercing howl. It has a
rather mournful effect, but I believe expresses great
exultation when given with energy, as it certainly was
by these daughters of the regiment.

The first Government of the Sudan was a government

88 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

of soldiers. It began with a conquest, the suppression
of armed rebellion, and the occupation of the conquered
territory by an invading army, which had to organise an
administration from its own resources. The officers of
the victorious force supplied a contingent of officials,
who transformed themselves promptly into provincial
governors, tax-collectors, district magistrates, and
inspectors. One was turned into financial secretary,
another became Minister of the Interior, a third Minis-
ter of Railways. The civil administration was neces-
sarily subordinate to the military : in an Indian dis-
trict the commissioner, a civilian, takes precedence of
the officer commanding the troops ; in the Sudan the
Mudir of the province, himself a soldier, is the com-
mandant of the troops. For in some parts of the Sudan,
it must be remembered, we are still a garrison rather
than a Government, and are by no means in a position
to lay down our arms. That is one of the reasons why
we must go cautiously and slowly, and why impatient
persons at home must not insist on too many social
and domestic reforms in a hurry, thereby repeating
Gordon's mistake and playing into the hands of another
not wholly impossible Mahdi.

The transition from military to civil rule was brought
about gradually. As the soldier officials retired at the
end of the term of service, their place was taken by
civilians. There is now an Egyptian and a Sudan Civil
Service, recruited from young university men nominated,
on the recommendation of their academic authorities,

WOMEN, SOLDIERS, AND CIVILIANS 89

by a Board of Selection. The selected candidate goes
back to his college to study the Arabic language for the
year ; then he comes out and gets to work. There are
many attractions in this service, including good pay,
abundant leave, and a pension; and the Board of
Selection has a legion of the prize young men of Oxford
and Cambridge offering themselves for the few posts it
offers annually. No doubt it succeeds in getting excel-
lent specimens of our academic and athletic culture.
As to how far these graduates are doing much better
than the picked young soldiers they are intended to
supersede, it is as yet too early to say. Military opinion
in the Sudan itself was, I fancy, inclined at first to be a
little sceptical as to the merits of the young civilians.
That, perhaps, is not unnatural ; besides, Jones, of
Balliol, and Smith, of Trinity, who attained the supreme
distinction of a university Blue, and possibly also the
minor honour of a First Class, may be disposed to give
themselves airs at the outset. It does not last. They
speedily discover that these unpolished products of the
orderly room and the barrack square have learnt a good
many things which are not, as yet, imparted beside the
Isis and the Cam. The soldier training, for instance,
teaches those humble but necessary virtues of order,
punctuality, and discipline, which are, perhaps, as use-
ful for practical purposes as the best public school or
university 'tone.' If Jones, B.A., strolls into his office
with a casual excuse half an hour after the appointed
time he is apt to meet with small mercy from a military

90 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

superior, who has learnt in the regiment that it is an
uncommonly serious matter to be late for parade.

Such attainments as he does possess may also inspire
rather less respect than they did at home ; and they do
not always impress his older military mentors. One of
them, a veteran of thirty-seven, who held high office
under the Sudan Government, had no esteem for the
New Civilian, and imparted to me unfavourable opin-
ions of this young gentleman.

'I am not a university man,' said this unbeliever,
'so perhaps you can tell me what they do learn at
Oxford and Cambridge that can be of the smallest use
to anybody ? When we get them out here we have to
begin teaching them the simplest things, which we
stupid British officers learnt before we left Sandhurst.
We have to teach them manners ; I didn't mind saying
"Sir" to the Colonel when I was a subaltern, but these
youngsters don't know how to behave to men from
whom they have to take orders. We have to teach
them book-keeping, office accounts, map measuring,
how to docket papers and draw up reports, the elements
of land surveying; surely these are things that their
schoolmasters might have taught them before they sent
them out to us. Of course, they know all there is to
know about Latin and Greek -

'Of course,' I murmured.

'Yes, of course. But what on earth is the use of that
here ? The only foreign language we want, besides
Arabic, is French ; and apparently these accomplished

WOMEN, SOLDIERS, AND CIVILIANS 91

students have not found time to learn French. They
can play cricket, I believe ; but that isn't much use in a
country where there's no turf. They had much better
teach them to ride decently, and to shoot, and give
them some military drill, [which, you know, we have
to put them through when they have come out. It
seems to me that their real education only begins when
we take them in hand.'

It was perhaps unduly harsh criticism, and some of
the grievances of which my friend complained have
since been remedied. The educational deficiencies
of the first batch of civilians are now supplemented to
some extent during their probationary period by the
authorities of Oxford and Cambridge. But since those
seats of learning are laying themselves out to train the
servants of the Empire they might do more to fit them
for their task. It is rather absurd that at four-and-
twenty, after some fifteen years of elaborate and expen-
sive education, Jones, B.A., and Smith, B.A., have to
be put to school again in the Sudan. In fact the youth-
ful British civilian everywhere not merely in the
Sudan is apt to be more schoolboyish than befits his
years. At twenty-five the young soldier, if he is not a
mere 'waster,' has had his eyes opened to the respon-
sibilities and serious duties of life. But the graduate
is still redolent of the classrooms and the playing-fields,
of boyish studies and boyish pastimes. The Sudan, by
the way, is pretty well supplied with university Blues,
but they are not always appreciated as they deserve.

92 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

Not long ago the most ccerulean of all Blues came out
to the country. He had captained the eleven at Lord's ;
he had played for England ; he had made a great innings
somewhere which caused the cricket reporters to grow
breathless with rapture ; his bowling had been analysed
with mathematical exactitude, and the sporting papers
kept libellous stereotype portraits of him ready for use.
This hero was at his first afternoon party in Khartum ;
and a lady, a very young and pretty and sporting lady,
was giving him tea. By way of making conversation,
she asked him if he liked polo ; but he had to confess
that he was an indifferent performer on a horse. Did
he care for shooting ? No ; he was not a shot. Then,
in the faint hope of finding some topic to interest him,
she said sweetly: 'Do you play cricket at all, Mr.
Blenkinsopp ?' I do not know how Blenkinsopp took
it; but if he was a young man of sense it should have
done him a great deal of good. As a matter of fact
these officials soon adapt themselves to the ways of
the country, and on the whole, I believe, are doing well ;
and they are providing the Sudan with a capable and
competent civil bureaucracy. The natives will have no
reason to regret the supersession of the military adminis-
trators. But these latter deserve their gratitude and
the gratitude of their countrymen and the civilised
world generally for the manner in which they piloted
the Sudan ship of state into smooth water during the
years when it was rolling in the trough of the storm.

CHAPTER X
THE NEW GATE OF AFRICA

RATHER more than seven years ago an event occurred
which was hardly noticed in the English newspapers,
though few happenings of the time were of more impor-
tance with respect to the future.

In January 1906, Lord Cromer, accompanied by the
Governor-General of the Sudan, by a bevy of officials,
and by guards of honour of bluejackets, marines, and
British and Egyptian infantry, opened the Nile-Red-
Sea Railway at Port Sudan.

In January 1907, Lord Cromer's successor, Sir Eldon
Gorst, visited the same locality to note what had been
done in the interval. He declared himself amazed at
the substantial and rapid progress which had been made
under the direction of the British officers and officials
who control the affairs of the Red Sea province.

The progress went on steadily and swiftly for the next
five years; and in January 1912, the King and Queen,
on their way home from India, landed at Port Sudan,
were received with due ceremony at that thriving town,
travelled some distance up the country as far as Sinkat
once a place of unhappy memories in the days of the
Mahdist fury and there held a review of native

94 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

troops and tribesmen, in which representatives of all
the local clans and peoples, Arab and negro, black and
brown, Mussulman and pagan, were present. Then
perhaps for the first time some consciousness of the
work that is being done at this point on the Red Sea
coast came upon those Britons at home who before
that scarcely knew where Port Sudan was.

Not many people, unless they have actually passed
through it, have any conception of the activity dis-
played in this remote corner of the territory. Until I
went to Port Sudan myself, though I had heard a good
deal about it in Khartum, I had no idea that the develop-
ment of a great commercial emporium and port of call
was being carried out on this remarkable scale. I
expected to find a railway station, a few shanties, an
improvised quay or two. I found, instead, imposing
wharves and bridges of stone and iron, a range of mas-
sive warehouses, cranes and loading machinery, some
fine buildings already erected, others in progress ;
streets, squares, and public gardens planned and partly
laid out ; a busy population of Greeks, Italians, Levan-
tines, and other Europeans or quasi-Europeans, doing
a lively trade ; an excellent modern hotel, small but
comfortable and well managed ; and many other signs
of activity and enterprise.

Eight years ago Port Sudan was not marked on the
map. There was only a miserable native hamlet and
the tomb of a local saint, which latter is now carefully
conserved in the precincts of the new coal-tipping

THE NEW GATE OF AFRICA 95

installation, just as the holy rood and pulpit of the old
abbey may be found in the railway goods-yard at
Shrewsbury. There were no Europeans and no trade
and no ships nearer than the ancient Red Sea port of
Suakin, crouching behind its rocks and coral reefs,
thirty-six miles farther down the coast.

Port Sudan is a creation of the railway, which
branches from the main line to Khartum, a little above
Berber, just where the Atbara, the first great tributary
of the Nile, flows into that river. It is a railway that
had been talked of for many years before it was actually
put in hand. If the rulers of Britain had been rightly
advised it should have been built nearly a quarter of a
century earlier. There was much discussion as to the
Suakin-Berber Railway and the Suakin-Berber route
in 1884, when the relief of Gordon was being considered,
and those who knew the country best held that the
expedition should have gone that way. Lord Wolseley,
for some reason, took a different view, and the Govern-
ment, at his instance, committed itself to the gigantic
boating trip up the Nile. Nobody, I suppose, now
doubts that this was a grave error, for which we paid
dearly. The mistake was partly acknowledged by its
author, who, after the abandonment of Khartum,
formed a half-hearted project to carry the railway from
the coast to Berber. A highly expensive equipment of
plant, rolling stock, permanent way, and locomotives
was ordered at Woolwich and shipped out to Suakin.
Vestiges of it may still be seen forlornly rusting in the

96 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

scrub and desert ; for England presently found herself
in difficulties with Russia on the Afghan frontier, and in
the war-scare the Suakin-Berber Railway was dropped
and forgotten for many years. At length, in the fulness
of time, it was taken up by the engineers of the Sudan
Government and brought to completion.

Its terminus was changed. Suakin, the outlet for
centuries of the pilgrim route from Inner Africa to
Mecca, the last remnant of the old Egyptian dominion
in the Sudan, on which the Crescent banner was kept
flying all through the Mahdist insurrection, is a pictu-
resque town with respectable traditions. But it has a
hopelessly bad roadstead, encumbered by rocks and
shoals ; and it has no fresh water save such as is brought
in by skins and metal casks on the humps of camels.
Instead of spending vast sums upon the attempt, which
could never have been completely successful, to convert
Suakin into a port more or less fit for modern shipping,
the Government engineers preferred to deal with one
that lay ready to hand. By the tomb of Sheikh Bar-
ghut they found a deep inlet from the sea, a splendid
natural harbour, which ships can enter at all hours of
the day and night, and in which steamers drawing
thirty feet of water can be moored in safety. They
christened it Port Sudan, brought the railway there
with a junction and branch line to Suakin and de-
liberately set about to prepare the new entrepot for
the destinies that await it.

The work had to be done from the very foundation ;

THE NEW GATE OF AFRICA 97

there was nothing to go upon. Port Sudan is the
artificial creation of man's hands and brains, as Port
Harcourt will be, the new harbour of Southern Nigeria,
which will presently come into being on the other side of
Africa. Even as the Nigerian fiord is to-day, so was the
Red Sea inlet, when the pioneers came down upon it
from the Nile : a place left through the centuries to
unheeding Nature, which even savagedom had passed
by. It was planted, staked out, settled, populated, as
rapidly as any mushroom mining or transport town in
the Western States of America, and it has sprung up
more quickly. But it is not the accidental result of a
sudden rush, or the haphazard agglomeration of pioneers
and prospectors. It is all the outcome of conscious
design. Everything belonged to the Government,
and everything has been done by the Government.
The place has not grown, it has been made. It started,
as towns do not usually start, with a regular plan and
a definite scheme of construction and location. The
engineers and surveyors and land agents of the adminis-
tration took pencil and compasses and tracing paper in
hand, and said : 'Here we will have our wharves ; here
our docks, quays, cranes, warehouses ; here our public
buildings ; here our shops and offices ; here our residen-
tial quarter; here our main thoroughfares; here our
side streets ; here our gardens and recreation grounds.'
Some of those who are concerned with municipal affairs
in other places may deem them fortunate in their
opportunity. I served for several arduous years of my

98 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

life on the committees of the London County Council,
and at times, when we were puzzling over tramway
routes and street improvements, I caught myself
impiously wishing that another Great Fire of London
might make a clean sweep of everything, and allow us
to start fresh and fair.

I made my journey to Port Sudan by the Atbara
route. You can go comfortably by sea it is but two
days from Suez, and there are regular services by the
excellent boats of the Khedivial Mail Steamship Com-
pany and those of the Austrian Lloyd and the North
German Lloyd but I wanted to see what the Suakin-
Berber Railway, that vision of the Gladstonian years,
had become in practice. And in practice I found it a
wonderfully satisfactory thing, doing great credit to its
constructors and to the officers of the Sudan Govern-
ment Railway Department, by whom it is operated.
The line is well laid, the engines are powerful and rea-
sonably fast, and the train, with its sleeping cars and
restaurant wagon, is up to the very highest standard
of modern locomotive luxury. Indeed, I do not remem-
ber ever finding myself in more comfortable quarters on
any railway, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, or North
America. The Sudan Express can quite safely chal-
lenge comparison with the best trains of the Continent,
the United States, and India. The whole enterprise
has been planned with a large ambition : the work of
men who believe in the future.

You feel this very much in the town itself. The

THE NEW GATE OF AFRICA 99

present bureaucracy and autocracy of military and
civilian officers is lodged very simply by the waterside ;
but from their modest mess-house they can look across
the harbour to the long and lofty stone warehouses, and
the solid sea-wall of coral blocks on which the new
wharves are built, and the gaunt skeleton framework of
iron ribs and girders by which the colliers will unload ;
they can glance up the estuary to the point where the
great bridge crosses it, a steel hinged bridge that can
be lifted out of the way by the mere pulling of a lever
so as to allow ten-thousand-ton steamers to pass up to
the docks that will lie above it ; or, again, they may let
their eyes travel a little way seaward, and there, just
at the root of the new mole and breakwater, they can
see the new Mudiryeh, the residence of the Governor,
and the offices and law courts of the province, a hand-
some building with an imposing air of solidity and
permanence. Port Sudan is waiting waiting for the
argosies of the world to discharge their cargoes on her
quays, and meanwhile making ready to receive them
with a fine display of all the most modern appliances for
dealing with sea-borne commerce. It has cost nearly a
million sterling, one way and another; and one cannot
but admire the courage of a young and far from wealthy
Government, which has poured out this vast sum in the
wilderness to bring its territories into touch with the
great highways and thoroughfares of maritime trade.
Will this audacious confidence be justified ? Port
Sudan has always had its hostile critics, especially in the

ioo EGYPT IN TRANSITION

Egyptian Press, who maintained that too much money
had been spent in haste on a speculative enterprise.
Whether the speculation would prove successful or not
depended on the future productiveness of the Sudan.
At first, though a good deal was coming in, very little
was going out. During the first ten months of 1906 the
imports were valued at 312,000, largely Government
material, railway plant, and machinery, while the
exports only amounted to 40,000. But as the Sudan
develops, the wheat and cotton, gum, maize, hides,
coffee, and timber will be railed down to the Red Sea,
and coal and European manufactured goods will come
up in exchange. And that the Sudan, with its perennial
sunshine and its vast area, will become one of the great
agricultural-producing regions those who know it best
do not doubt : when the engineers have settled the
irrigation question, and enabled it to take a larger
supply of the fertilising water which flows by its swamps
and forests and thirsting levels on the way to Egypt and
the sea. That consummation achieved there will be
millions of acres under wheat and cotton and dhura,
and the storehouses at Port Sudan will bulge with bags
and bales, and every shilling spent on them will be
repaid many times over. So hold the official optimists,
perhaps not unduly optimistic. And they point out
that without its seaport the Government could neither
push on with the irrigation works nor construct railways
in the interior. The cost would be prohibitive if every
ton of heavy material had to be carried two thousand

THE NEW GATE OF AFRICA 101

miles from the Mediterranean, conveyed by railway to
the First Cataract, breaking bulk there to be shipped
on the river steamer to Haifa, and transferred to the
railway again at that place. As it is, a cargo can be
taken from Liverpool or Antwerp to Khartum (and
presently to the Abyssinian border and the Equator)
with only one transfer at Port Sudan. In the future
the Nile route will be used for passenger traffic and for
the lighter and more costly articles. The heavy and
bulky goods will come round by sea and the Atbara
railway. 'Who knows,' said one young enthusiast,
who had laboured in that moist and fiery air over the
creation of Port Sudan- 'who knows but that this
place in twenty years' time may not be one of the great
mercantile towns of the world, a second Buenos Ayres
perhaps ?' 'Buenos Ayres ?' I said. 'Yes; why not ?
The Argentine trade, I understand, can keep a city of
over a million inhabitants in prosperity. But the
Sudan is a bigger country than Argentina, and surely
its agricultural prospects are as good.'

It is a sweltering little place, Port Sudan : with a
trying climate, damp heat in the winter, the glare of a
sevenfold furnace in summer. It lies on flats of salt
white sand and powdered coral, through which the
estuary draws a broad ribbon of blue ; and it has its
difficulties about water supply. But it gets its com-
pensations, for it is on the edge of the mountain land.
Northward and westward the plain is closed in by the
olivine walls and dimly purpled ramparts of a mass of

102 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

rugged hills, that rise in peaked ridges and broken
sierras into the hard metallic dome of the African sky.
The lower slopes are only a few miles distant, and on
these, I take it, in the years to come the merchants and
magnates of Port Sudan will have their villas and gar-
dens, travelling down to their offices by motor-cars and
fast electric tramways. Farther inland the mountains
rise higher, and here the Sudan Government is establish-
ing its Simla in the hill-station of Erkoweit. Up there,
in his Alpine chalet, amid the tinkle of running waters,
and the sight of rock and fell and green turf, the tired
toiler will be able to leave the tropics behind him for a
space, and return to his labours, braced and invigorated,
without the expense and the delay of the long journey
'home.' We are making the sun-lands habitable in
these days ; and thanks to modern science, modern
transport, and modern medicine, Port Sudan will not
be, even for migrants from Northern Europe, the place
of intolerable exile and perpetual suffering such as its
situation between the Red Sea and the desert would
have made it in the past.

CHAPTER XI
STATE SOCIALISM IN THE SUDAN

WHEN I left England that fortunate country was in the
whirl of a furious discussion over socialism and anti-
socialism. Bound for the Sudan, I assumed that I was
going 'to where beyond these voices there is peace';
and it is true I did not hear the topic mentioned in the
territory. Yet, in some of its aspects, it was rather
frequently brought before me, and I often found myself
in contact with certain phases of the question which is
agitating our domestic politics.

The original Government of the Sudan is, as I have
said, a Government of soldiers. These gallant officers
are not, I take it, political philosophers. Most of them
I imagine to be Conservatives by tradition and instinct,
disliking Radicals and Little-Englanders and Labour
politicians. If they had any opinions on these subjects
at home they were probably against 'nationalising'
anything, against interfering with private enterprise,
and against municipal trading. But in the Sudan they
are not swayed by theories ; and dealing with practical
necessities as they arise, they have quietly adopted
several large items of a system which some people wildly
advocate and others angrily denounce in older and more
advanced communities.

103

104 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

State Socialism is in a condition of vigorous activity
in the Sudan. Some of its developments were inevit-
able. The Government, set up in 1898 in the wake of
the invading army, found itself planted upon a ruin.
Political institutions there were none ; society was a
chaos. The new Government had to be everything and
to do everything. The most ardent individualist could
not have wished to confine its functions to the main-
tenance of public order and the raising of revenue.
There was no room for laissezfaire among a people just
released from an armed tyranny and theocracy, who
looked to the new Administration for the first requisites
of existence. The Government, before it had time to
turn round, found itself embarked in business of the
most varied kind. It was landowner, housebuilder,
purveyor of food and clothing, storekeeper, railway
manager, importer, retail trader, agriculturist, and
tourist agent. If it wanted steamers to ply on the rivers
it had to build and man them ; if it desired to foster
trade in the country it was obliged to supply the means
of transport, if not actually to buy and sell the goods
itself. And these things it could do with a free hand ;
for there were few vested interests which it need be
afraid to traverse, and no prickly hedges of prejudice of
public opinion to bar the way against bold experiments.
Some of these it tried with the confidence born, perhaps
of youth, perhaps of a serene unconsciousness of their
full import. For example, it instituted a Central
Economic Board, intended to study the commercial

STATE SOCIALISM IN THE SUDAN 105

situation, to assist traders in their transactions, to
advise importers what to bring in, and generally to act
as an Intelligence Department for industrial affairs.
The members are high officials in the administrative
service, and the secretary is Mr. H. P. Hewins, the
brother of the secretary of the Tariff Commission.
One cannot help reflecting that in a somewhat more
important industrial community than the Sudan we
rather badly need a Central Economic Board and are
not in the least likely to get one.

The Sudan Government believes I suppose it has
had to believe in the public ownership of public
services and of various other commodities. It builds
and runs all the railways for the excellent reason that if
it did not there would be no railways at all. It found
itself in possession of a fleet of gunboats and dispatch
vessels, and it uses them not only to carry mails and
officials, but also to transport passengers and the goods
of the general trader. It lets out steamers for hire, and
competes with Messrs. Cook in providing for pleasure
parties on the Upper Nile. If you want to 'do' the
equatorial region comfortably and combine a little
shooting with a glimpse of primitive Africa, you can
apply to the Commander-in-Chief of the Sudan navy,
who will be willing to lend you, at a moderate price, one
of the Government steamers, with a crew complete.
The Government owns the ferries, which are the only
means of communication between the three sister towns
on the Blue and White Niles. It refused the offer of a

106 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

company to build the tramways between Khartum and
Omdurman in Egypt the tramways and the light
railways are in private hands and built the line itself
and operates it. Another company would have liked
to supply the town with water, but the Government
would not have that either, and preferred to be its own
Water Board. It also provides electric lighting, though
whether private enterprise would have been willing to
take up this business I do not know.

But it is in its dealing with the land that the State
Socialistic policy is most marked. A great deal of the
extra-urban soil of the Sudan belongs to the Government
in default of other ownership. There was a tendency to
assume that this amount was larger than it is ; but, as
the country quieted down, numerous owners who had
disappeared during the troubles of the Mahdist period
put in their claims, and many complications ensued.
Thereupon an elaborate settlement investigation was
instituted, and is now proceeding. When it is complete,
it is supposed that good legal titles will be established to
most of the land actually occupied or under some sort
of cultivation. In any case the Government will be a
very large landowner, and it holds all the so-called
desert areas which will not always be desert much
of Khartum and North Khartum and Omdurman and
the whole of Port Sudan. In dealing with these lands,
the Government has set its face against complete
alienation. It objects to sell freeholds, and prefers to
grant leases for a comparatively short term of years.

STATE SOCIALISM IN THE SUDAN 107

The idea is partly to discourage speculation and partly
to secure for the State the 'unearned increment' of
urban properties. Not long ago a wealthy syndicate in
Cairo made an offer to develop some large blocks of va-
cant land in Khartum. The Government declined to sell,
though it was willing to grant leases, which were refused.
The Sudan was threatened with a minor land boom
like that which was followed by so disastrous a collapse
in Egypt. Much speculative energy was ready to be
directed to the new territory, and in one or two cases
some lucky persons did contrive to bring off highly
profitable deals. There is a certain site in Khartum
which changed hands at 20,000, having been bought
two years earlier for 1200; a few years before that, so
I was ruefully assured by the individual who refused the
bargain, it was offered for 40. But the Sudan author-
ities have failed to discern any particular advantage in
such transactions, and they discourage them. They
profess themselves anxious to admit the genuine settler
who wants the land for agricultural purposes and
intends to develop it himself; but the financier, who
merely 'sits on' an estate in order to sell it when its
price has gone up with the general rise in values, they
would like to keep away as long as possible. In the
towns they think the fee simple of the land should be
held by the State for posterity. There are to be no
millionaire landlords, drawing steadily increasing rents
for ever from the Park Lane of Khartum and the
Regent Street, when it gets one, of Port Sudan.

io8 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

It is a bold policy which, to me, at any rate, seems the
right one, particularly in its urban aspects. But I have
heard it a good deal criticised, not always favourably.
Some of its own subjects, and some of those who are
rather anxious to become its subjects, complain that the
Sudan Government keeps too much in its own hands,
and allows too little scope for private enterprise and
initiative. There is the charge commonly, and often
justly, levelled against every manifestation of state
socialism : which is that it tends to give undue power
to officialism, with the result of checking progress and
deadening commercial activity. One very able busi-
ness' man, who has himself a large pecuniary interest
in the Sudan, condemned the system unsparingly. A
young and poor country, he maintained, could only be
brought forward by introducing capital from outside ;
and the administrative policy, he insisted, was obstruct-
ing this fertilising inflow. He assured me that plenty
of money was available for investment in the Sudan
some years ago ; but the attitude of the Government
was so unfavourable to investors that very little was
done. He held that the refusal to sell freeholds was an
error, for nobody would risk his money, when the future
was still so beset with uncertainty, on a mere leasehold
title. Nor would companies embark on trading ven-
tures, with a Government always ready to enter into
competition with them, and able, moreover, to compete
at a great advantage owing to its possession of the
means of transport and communication.

STATE SOCIALISM IN THE SUDAN 109

He pointed to the condition of Port Sudan, which I
had not long quitted. That town, as I have said, has
fine public buildings and Government warehouses.
The works have attracted to the spot a considerable
number of traders and shopkeepers of diverse nation-
alities. There are Greeks, Italians, Egyptians, Arabs,
Abyssinians, Syrians, and others. The place looks
lively enough when you walk through it at evening,
with its bazaar, its brisk cafes, its pushing little shops.
But the straight roads, wider than Northumberland
Avenue, the cross streets intersecting them at right
angles, according to the excellent Government building
plan, were fronted by one-storey shanties of wood or
cheap plaster. Hardly anybody thought it worth while
to put up a substantial edifice of brick and stone.
Why ? My friend insisted that it was because the
Government would not sell the sites. The Greek and
other immigrants, he said, wanted a security which they
could mortgage before they would sink their money in
expensive buildings. A short lease was valueless to
them for this purpose, and they would not hazard
capital over it. I have heard the same explanation
given by others, and I believe that, in part at least, it is
correct; indeed, I understand that the uncompromis-
ing refusal to sell freehold sites will probably not be
persisted in.

One cannot but sympathise with the Sudan Govern-
ment in its dilemma : on the one hand it is anxious not
to deprive the State of the property it holds in trust for

no EGYPT IN TRANSITION

future generations ; on the other, it is confronted by the
risk that the future generations may not come into being
at all, unless a few people can see a chance of themselves
growing rich rapidly or laying up treasure for their
descendants. Thus do the old questions reappear in the
newest societies ; and thus are administrators in tropical
Africa finding themselves perplexed to find a practical
solution for problems over which we are still theorising
in Europe. After all, I suppose the Norman barons
were only land speculators of a sort in the conquered
and disordered Anglo-Saxon shires ; and the adven-
turous Hellenes and Syrians of the Sudan may become
the founders of the great landowning aristocratic
families of the coming centuries. History has a way of
working itself out on extremely threadbare lines.

CHAPTER XII
A NOCTURNE

WHEN I left Port Sudan I came back over the railway
to the Atbara, and then some way up the Khartum line
as far as the small wayside station of Zeidab : having
been invited to visit a cotton plantation, which was at
that time about the most important example of agricul-
tural development on a large scale visible in the Sudan.
The railway is on the east bank of the Nile ; the estate
on the west, some miles higher up. I was to alight at
Zeidab station, where I was to be met by my hosts and
provided with a boat to cross the river and conveyance
on the other side.

The south-bound express bustled alongside the little
platform, and left me standing there with my luggage
piled in a neat mound : nobody seemed to be expecting
me. The stationmaster had only a few words of Eng-
lish and I only a few words of Arabic ; but with the
help of this limited vocabulary I was enabled to under-
stand that a hitch had occurred in the programme.
Owing to some mistake in transmitting or reading tele-
grams, my friends at the plantation had been led to
believe that my train would not arrive before midnight,
whereas here it was in the afternoon. What was to be
done ? The stationmaster, the post-office clerk, an

ii2 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

intelligent young Egyptian, the two Arab porters, were
sympathetic ; but it did not appear that they could
give effectual aid. If I had been at a Scottish railway
station somebody would have said to me within the first
five minutes : ' Ye'll maybe no' get away from here the
night.' As it was, the unwelcome truth was broken to
me in the Oriental manner by stages. I told the
stationmaster to send a man across to the plantation.
He salaamed, and gave voluble directions to an inter-
ested negro, who departed with every appearance of
alacrity. Then he brought me a wooden kitchen chair,
from the whitewashed room in which he slept and issued
tickets, and I sat down on the platform and waited.

After half an hour or so I asked the stationmaster to
expedite the proceedings. He gave instructions to
another native, who sprinted off at a very fair hundred
yards pace. Another half-hour elapsed, and I called
upon the official to report progress. He shouted,
'Achmet ! Mahmud ! Osman !' and various natives
emerged from nowhere in particular and dashed away
into space. I inquired how long it would take these
athletes to reach the plantation, and how they proposed
to get there ; whereupon it was gently hinted to me that
there was not the slightest chance that they would get
there at all, because there were no boats on that side of
the Nile. In effect, the whole company had gone no
farther than the river bank, about a quarter of a mile
distant, where I presently found them standing in a
group to watch for the arrival of the boat from the

A NOCTURNE 113

opposite bank. I demanded, angrily, if they saw any
signs of this vessel : for it was growing dark by this
time, and my unaccustomed eyes could distinguish
nothing. They peered intently into the shining levels
and long trails of shadow, and reported that the felucca
had put off, and was, in fact, in sight. When would it
make the landing ? After a spirited debate it was
decided though, I think, only by a narrow majority
that the relieving expedition might reasonably be
expected in forty minutes. Thus encouraged, I went
back to the platform and my kitchen chair and dozed
uncomfortably.

Forty minutes passed, fifty, an hour. There was no
sign of rescue. I roused myself and looked round.
The stationmaster's room was closed, and the post-
office ; the entire place was empty save for myself, and
dark except for an oil lamp burning dimly on the plat-
form. I made noisy researches and uplifted my voice.
At last I stumbled upon one of the Arab porters, rolled
up asleep in the dust behind the station. Him I shook
into consciousness, and sent wrathfully for the station-
master. That officer was as polite and benignant as
ever. I inquired whether the boat had arrived. He
referred the question to Achmet, who transmitted it to
Mahmud, who passed it on to Osman and to another
man who emerged suddenly from the unknown. They
all with one accord declared that no boat had come, or
was likely to come. Then I asked desperately : Why
on earth did they tell me they had seen it on the way an

114 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

hour ago ? More debate, turning, I believe, on the
point whether the previous resolution had genuinely
expressed the sense of the meeting, or whether it had
not been illegally carried by the casting vote of the
chairman. Eventually I had to come to the conclusion
that there was no possibility of getting away till the
plantation boat should appear about midnight or later,
and that I might as well reconcile myself to spending
the next six hours of my life at Zeidab station. There
was nowhere else to spend the time ; there was no vil-
lage, not even a house, visible ; the nearest hotel, as I
was aware, was about 200 miles distant.

I went into the stationmaster's room, made him put
a lamp on his rough deal table, got out a book, and pro-
ceeded to make the best of things. My hosts were
genuinely concerned at the position, and so guiltily
apologetic that my ill temper was mollified. The
stationmaster and the post-office clerk walked in every
few minutes to say: 'You all right, my mister, boat
coming n P.M.' Achmet and Mahmud and Osman
stole softly in and out on their bare feet, and leaned
against the wall, gazing at me, and smiling soothingly
when they caught my eye. I got on very well with
these good fellows, especially with Achmet. We con-
versed chiefly by means of dumb show, and I discovered
that he was an Arab of the Jaalin tribe, twenty-two years
of age, married, and the father of two sons. He was
tall and lithe, with well-cut features, and his smooth
walnut-coloured cheeks were scored with cross cuts like

A NOCTURNE 115

those honourable scars which a duelling German student
bears. In Achmet's case they were tribal marks, and
they were set off by the pleasantest of smiles and the
shiniest of white teeth. He was a notable contrast to
his colleague, a soot-black negro, as well as to the pale
Coptic clerk, and the little, scrubby, fussy, well-inten-
tioned Egyptian stationmaster.

Presently I was conscious of hunger. I remembered
that it was many hours since I had breakfasted in the
train beyond the Atbara, and that the comfortable
dinner for which I had reserved myself at the plantation
house was clearly not for my taking. I made pressing
inquiries after food, and was told there was none to be
had. But I pointed out to my entertainers that obvi-
ously they must eat something, and that a little of that,
whatever it was, would do for me. At this the deputa-
tion retired and conferred earnestly in the darkness.
Presently the Coptic clerk returned and said they were
going to kill a hen for me. I remembered now that I
had seen some skinny, consumptive fowls scratching
feebly about the station yard, and I could not reconcile
myself to assimilating one of these martyrs, red from
the slaughter. I therefore declined the carnivorous
banquet, and suggested that, since there were hens,
there were, perhaps, eggs. The proposal was accepted,
and my soul leaped within me when the stationmaster
proffered tea and bread and butter. Presently those
viands appeared. The eggs were the size of marbles,
and as hard ; the bread was a leathery brown substance

n6 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

composed of dhura ; the butter, made of buffalo milk,
betrayed its origin ; but the tea was grateful to a tired
and thirsty drinker, and I have enjoyed some meals
less in Pall Mall. Achmet and his friends gazed on me
solemnly as I ate, and, I believe, congratulated them-
selves with the thought that a violent, and possibly
dangerous, lunatic was being fed into comparative calm.

But their manners were perfect. I was, I felt, much
de trop, for I was keeping them awake for hours after the
stationmaster would have been asleep on his angarieb of
string, with his staff snoring in some corner rolled up in
their cotton wrappers. Nobody, however, gave a sign
of boredom or hinted at retirement. On the contrary,
they remained awake and attentive, and gave me to
understand that the presence of a wearied, impatient,
bad-tempered Briton was really a distinguished honour,
for which they could not be too grateful. Every now
and then somebody went down to the waterside to
obtain tidings of the felucca, and came back with the
entirely apocryphal information that the missing vessel
might be sighted at any moment. I had got long past
believing them by this time ; but I appreciated the
chivalrous courtesy which induced them to keep my
spirits up by artistically contrived falsehoods.

In the end the felucca did arrive, and they put me
and my luggage aboard with care, plunging bare legs
manfully in the cold, moonlit waters. Zeidab is far
beyond the tourist sphere, so nobody asked me for
bakshish or seemed even to expect it. The station-

A NOCTURNE 117

master was with difficulty prevailed upon to accept pay-
ment for the tea and marmoreal eggs, and Achmet and
his friends received their douceurs with the gentlemanly
unconsciousness of a well-bred English butler after a
country-house party. We shook hands warmly all
round, and they stood long and looked after me as we
floated slowly into the darkness.

My relations with Zeidab station were not quite
finished. After two interesting days on the estate I
had to catch the train for my return journey from the
same place. Now the express from Khartum for Egypt
passes Zeidab at 5 A.M. To start at three in the morn-
ing is uncomfortable anywhere ; and my hosts told me
that the better way was to leave the previous night,
cross the river, set up a camp-bed on the east bank near
the station, and sleep there till the train came. Even so
was it done. After dinner I was put into the felucca
again, with my belongings and my friend's Indian ser-
vant to look after me ; the lateen sail was hoisted, and
we glided down the silent river. Those who know the
Nile only from the decks of the admirable steamers of
the Sudan Government and Messrs. Cook, or even from
the roof of a fine tourist dahabiyeh, do not drink in the
full spirit of voyaging on that immemorial stream.
For that you must travel by night, in the high-prowed
sailing boat with the bending bamboo mast and the
great three-cornered sail, with no electric light and no
noisy fellow-passengers. I lay under the boom half
asleep, while the Arab boatmen moved softly on bare

ii8 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

feet and spoke together in whispers. There was hardly
a sound save the faint sigh of the sail, as it shook in the
fluttering wind, and the muffled moan of mast and
spars. Like the ship of a dream our bark drifted down
the strange river that looks as no other river of this
earth looks at night, with its flood of silver bordered by
banks of ink and funereal trees. By day the date-
palm of the Nile waves a graceful head above a slender
stem, tall and stately as a young princess ; at night it is
a grim, dark skeleton, with all its tossing fronds frozen
into stiff black arms and gaunt pointing fingers.

Our keel slid softly into the mud, and I was carried by
strong brown shoulders ashore. I chose a convenient
spot, under a big sycamore tree, and here they spread
my camp bedstead and laid on it a fur-lined sleeping
bag. It is one of the pleasures of a warm climate that
you can enjoy sleeping in the open with only the sky and
stars above you. But for those who commonly lie
beneath a roof of whitewash, that blue-black ceiling
of the tropic night, hung with lamps of gold and silver,
may be too splendid for sleep. For myself, I lay long
awake and watched the constellations till long past
midnight ; and awakened again early, and gazed
through my light screen of branches, until the false
dawn stole timidly in, robed in pearly grey, and then
flushed rose-red, like a bride, to meet the fierce caresses
of the sun. Whereupon I looked at my watch, and
called loudly to my Indian attendant slumbering under
a contiguous bush, bidding him rouse the station people

A NOCTURNE 119

and make ready to depart. It was well I did so; for,
albeit my railway friends had promised to ring a bell
when the train left the previous station, half an hour
distant, they did as a fact delay that signal until the
express was all but upon us. On time, and its divisions,
the African intellect is still, for the most part, vague.

CHAPTER XIII
A SUDAN PLANTATION

THE estate of Zeidab, to which I was inducted after
and between the incidents described in the last chapter,
proved very well worth visiting. It was here that I
made my bow to King Cotton in his North African
domains ; a great potentate whose sway extends from
this point down the Nile to the Mediterranean, though
his seats of power at present are mainly by the lower
reaches of the river. But the time may come when he
will wax mighty in the Sudan also, and when tens of
thousands of black labourers will be pulling the woolly
pods from millions of acres of cotton bushes to feed
the spindles whirling hungrily under the tall chimneys
of Oldham. The British Cotton Growing Association
has paid commendable attention to the Sudan : though
its first overtures were not very warmly received, and
some of its principal promoters were more inclined to
throw their weight and influence upon the western,
rather than the eastern, side of the African Continent.
But there is room for the Sudan as well as Nigeria ;
and if the former can produce cotton in large quantities
it will not want for markets. Sir William Garstin
thinks that at present wheat must be the staple crop,

1 20

A SUDAN PLANTATION 121

and that cultivators for some time should devote their
main attention to this. But cotton is so much more
valuable that if there is water available one cannot
doubt that it will be produced in conjunction with,
though not to the exclusion of, bread-stuffs.

There is fine cotton and wheat land all about the
Atbara region from Berber upwards, and that part of it
near the Nile has a welcome air of fertility and verdure
as you come to it after passing through the desert
country, whether your approach is made by the north
from Wady Haifa or from the east by Port Sudan.
Palms and acacias and cactus hedges and fields of that
emerald-green clover, which is the Egyptian substitute
for grass, greet you as you approach the Nile. The
district was well cultivated before the Great Depopula-
tion, as the ruined villages and the acres of roofless
huts in Berber attested. The capacity of the soil and
the scarcity of hands to till it suggested the idea out
of which the Zeidab estate has developed. Some nine
years ago Mr. Leigh Hunt, an American, came into
the Sudan with the ingenious project of taking up a
concession of cotton-growing land from the Govern-
ment, and importing negroes from the Southern States
to work it : conceiving, I suppose, that it would be
equally beneficial to the one country to acquire these
coloured gentlemen and for the other to get quit of
them. We were all on the crest of the Americanisation
craze in those years ; the Government jumped at the
notion, and the New York millionaire I do not know

122 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

whether Mr. Leigh Hunt came under that description,
but at that time all American financiers were millionaires
to the excited British imagination obtained his con-
cession and set to work. The scheme, however, was
not very successful in its original shape. Those who
know the American 'buck nigger' best would hardly,
I think, desire to see him planted down among a
primitive people like that of the Berber province.
Very few American citizens came, and those who did
were of small use as agriculturists, and were soon sent
back again.

The Zeidab estate changed hands. Mr. Leigh Hunt
made over his concession to an association called the
Sudan Plantations Syndicate, which has a good deal of
London and South African capital invested in it, and
an uncommonly shrewd managing director in the
person of Mr. D. P. McGillivray, an energetic Scot,
with a successful business record behind him in Egypt.
The property has succeeded in paying excellent divi-
dends already, and it will continue to do so if proper
management and hard work can avail. It is, at any
rate, a striking object-lesson in the agricultural possi-
bilities of this part of the Sudan. The original conces-
sion was for an area of no less than 30,000 feddans
(Egyptian acres), but the Syndicate when I visited it
was only dealing with about 13,000. They have to
pay the land tax on all the land they are bringing into
cultivation, and they do not see their way to work all
their property until their water supply can be increased.

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL Sin FKANCIS REGINALD WINGATK, (5.C.Y.O.

A SUDAN PLANTATION 123

Here, of course, we are in a rainless district ; the grower
is absolutely dependent upon the Nile irrigation.

Now the Nile rolls past the lands of Zeidab, turbidly
rushing up the banks and over them in flood time, and
flowing in ample volume during the remainder of the
year. But that great store must be tapped sparingly
and under due restriction by the riparian tenants.
Egypt has the first claim upon the liquid treasure, and
will not allow the supply to be attenuated before it
reaches her own fields. During the flood there is more
water than is wanted, and anybody is free to take as
much as he requires. This open time has lasted from
the middle of July to the end of January, and in those
months, technically of flood, though the flood has gone
by well before the end, the Sudan as well as Egypt has
unlimited access to the fertilising fluid. Since my visit
to Zeidab, the open time has been extended for one
month, so that the water may now be drawn from the
Nile in unlimited quantities for irrigation purposes
till the end of February. This is a very welcome
indulgence and greatly appreciated by the cultivators
of the dry lands of Upper Egypt, Nubia, and the
Sudan.

After the 'flood' season is over at the end of January
(or now February), the farmer is left to the 'perennial'
water of the Nile, white water which by this time has
lost most of the rich mud brought down from the Abys-
sinian hills. This perennial water is carefully guarded
lest the amount should run short before the next flood ;

124 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

and for the whole of the immense Sudan there was
allotted no more than the quantity sufficient to water a
bagatelle of 10,000 feddans. How little this is will be
seen from the fact that the Zeidab estate alone was
taking 40 per cent, of the total, having 4000 acres under
cotton, for which its tenants need, or at least prefer
to get, the perennial water. The remainder of their
land they must keep under crops which do not require
irrigation before the middle of July, and can, therefore,
be left to the flood water when it comes down.

There are other smaller estates in the Berber province,
in English or native hands. The patriarch Zubeir
Pasha, of whom I have already spoken, was a large
landowner here and elsewhere, farming extensively, with
a whole staff of agents, sons, sons-in-law, and nephews
to help him. But I preferred to visit Zeidab, as being,
I believe, the largest concern of the kind in the Sudan,
and managed according to all the latest scientific and
economical ideas. There was at any rate plenty to see
and much to wonder at. Considering that the estate
had been taken in hand barely three years before, and
had not been in full working order for much more than
twelve months, the results attained were remarkable.
The place had an air of settled and established pros-
perity; one might have supposed oneself in some old
plantation in India, or even in Louisiana, rather than in
a district which five years earlier was running to waste,
and five years before that was a ravaged wilderness.
The house in which the managing director lives is a sub-

A SUDAN PLANTATION 125

stantially built, whitewashed, brick edifice, rather
reminding one, with its thick walls, two-storeyed
verandahs, and lofty rooms, of those solid bungalows
which the old-time merchants used to build in Southern
India ; and there was almost a Madras compound of
blossoming trees and flower gardens round it. Leading
up to the mansion is a whole street of stables, store-
houses, residences for the engineer, manager, doctor,
surveyor, and other officials, and a nice wide white
street, with young trees planted along it. The fellahin
and cultivating tenants live all over the estate and
about it : some in mud-walled villages built by the
Syndicate itself, with as much attention to regularity
and sanitation as the conditions allow; some in the
half deserted hamlets dotted over this country ; some
in tents and thatched huts or tukuls, which they put up
themselves in a corner of their field. I went into one
of these residences. It was the merest shanty, of
sticks and dried palm leaves, with absolutely nothing
in it but a few cooking pots ; yet outside were some
full bags of the owner's cotton which I was assured were
worth not less than 20 as they lay.

One of the conditions on which the Plantations
Syndicate holds the land from the Government is that of
providing 3O-inch pumps to draw up the perennial water
from the Nile and distribute it over the land by means of
a system of canals. On this estate they work at an
advantage over some others farther down the river; for
their level is low, and it is seldom necessary to lift the

126 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

water more than two or three metres. Lower down, in
Upper Egypt, at the great estate of Kom Ombo, near
Assuan, I saw a magnificent pumping apparatus, which
is raising water nearly sixty feet, and pouring it into
a huge network of watercourses, including one great
artificial stream some thirty miles long. It is a wonder-
ful piece of engineering and agricultural science, but it
involves, of course, a vast expenditure, and it could
only be undertaken by great capitalists, able to sink
their money and wait for the return. At Zeidab,
however, it seems they did not have so long to wait.
They have got their irrigation system complete, one
main channel intersecting the property at the highest
level, and dropping its waters into a series of secondary
and third-rate canals, which again are drawn off into
the numerous minor runlets and rills that pass the
vivifying fluid into every farm and through every field.
The cotton crop was mostly over at the time of my
visit ; the barns were full of the cotton wool, ready to
be carried across to the railway, and sent down to Port
Sudan. The young wheat was well forward, and very
beautiful it looked, rippling into waves of green over the
level meadows. I am not an agricultural expert, but
I was assured by a visitor who is, that for its stage and
growth this wheat was as good in quality as any he
had seen anywhere. The cotton is not, I believe,
quite up to the standard of the best grown in Lower
Egypt no cotton in the world is equal to that ; but
it does not fall so very far behind, and enables the

A SUDAN PLANTATION 127

Syndicate and its tenants to sell at a price which gives
a very fair return on their outlay.

The Syndicate farms some of the land itself and sells
or lets the rest; and maintains the pumping-station
and keeps the irrigation system in order and under
proper control both for its own farms and those of the
tenants. It is a hard, healthy, energetic out-of-door
life for the handful of young Englishmen and young
Scotsmen who run this little colony, where already
there are some thousands of people living. Tenants
are coming in to take up the land ; Arabs and Sudanese
from the Berber district and Dongola, fellahin from
Nubia, a few shrewd Greeks and others from Lower
Egypt, even an Englishman or two, who see the possi-
bility of making money in the new country.

Adult male labour was scarce in the locality; as you
went through the villages you saw many women and
children and few men. For the people here are of the
same race as my friend Achmet of Zeidab station ; they
are Jaalin Arabs, and the Jaalins were the victims of the
Mahdist fury at its worst and bloodiest, when it was just
tottering to its fall. The Jaalins were a high-spirited
and rather haughty tribe, who thought much of their
pure Arab descent, of the prowess of their men in old
frontier wars, and the honour of their women. They
despised the swarthy semi-negro dervishes from the
South, and submitted to the Mahdist rule with much
impatience. In June 1897, when the tramp of the
Anglo-Egyptian battalions was heard beyond Dongola,

128 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

and the desert railway was pushing on, the Jaalins re-
volted against the Omdurman tyranny. Mahmud, the
Khalifa's fighting Emir, swept down upon them with a
horde of dervish spears and rifles. The Jaalins, com-
pletely outnumbered, retired into Metemmeh, fortified
the place, and held it till all their ammunition was ex-
hausted. Then the Mahdists broke in, and an orgie of
brutal massacre and mutilation ensued. Two thou-
sand of the fighting men were butchered as they stood ;
others had their feet or hands cut off. The chief,
Abdullah, was taken to Omdurman, and left, walled
up to the chin, till he died of hunger. The dervishes
devastated the whole Jaalin country, killing, plundering,
and maiming. You met few middle-aged men in the
Jaalin villages ; only young men, who were boys eleven
years before, veterans who were old even then, and
women and children. When you remember how the
brave Jaalins were treated by the Khalifa's savages,
you have a certain satisfaction in the thought that if
we were just too late to save them, we were able to
avenge them ; and you feel that among the swaths of
dead lying on the field of Kerreri a year later there must
have been a good many who deserved their fate.

These Jaalins are among the most attractive of all
the Sudan peoples good-looking, good-natured, digni-
fied, humorous, and thoroughly likeable. On the first
evening of my stay at Zeidab we went for a drive along
the wide, sandy, road which runs through the estate
northward to Khartum. It was made by Kitchener's

A SUDAN PLANTATION 129

army in '98, and the bones of the oxen killed for the
bivouac fires were still whitening by the wayside. As
we scuttled along behind two fiery little Abyssinian
mules, through meadows dotted with clumps of trees,
which in the gathering gloom looked park-like and
English, we met an upstanding Jaalin driving a fine
young bull. I asked my companion to question this
native for my instruction. The Arab, with a broad
grin and a roar of hilarious recognition, explained that
he was the man who very nearly, but not quite, beat my
friend at putting the stone in some sports which had
been got up on the estate in the summer. The Jaalin
children are as delightful as they are numerous. When
I went into one of the villages with my camera a whole
covey of them tumbled out of one of the huts, clamoured
about me, grouped themselves to be photographed, and
chattered and pushed at one another like young
sparrows. The boys were naked, brown, shiny, laugh-
ing little fellows, as impudent and knowing as London
gutter-children ; there were one or two small maidens,
with bead necklaces and rudimentary skirts, much more
demure and composed than the lads, whom they
ordered about rather haughtily, even as Gwendoline
commands Billy in Hoxton. There was also a baby,
who put his fingers into his eyes and wept aloud when
he saw me directing a strange implement upon him ;
and was comforted by his elder sister and admonished
into silence, and, I have no doubt, informed that if
he failed to be good directly the ugly man would have

130 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

him. The young Arabs and I made so much noise
that the mother of some of them (she was surely too
young to own the whole brood) came to the door of
her hut. This daughter of the Jaalins sustained the
tribal reputation for good looks. She was tall and
straight, with large eyes that shone like black gems
in the clear brown oval of her face. In drapery of dark
blue, with one shapely, silver-ringed, arm thrown up
above her head to shield her from the smiting sun, she
stood framed in the doorway regarding our doings with
grave and gracious indulgence. Before this noble
type of antique, primitive, womanhood one felt some-
how ultra-modern, crude, vulgar.

'You had better not photograph herj said one of my
companions. 'These Jaalin women are particular.' I
had no such intention. I should as soon have thought
of taking a snapshot at the Duchess when she stands at
the head of the staircase to receive her guests in her own
house. No 'great lady' of our West could have been
more calmly dignified than this Arab woman of the
people. Will her children and her children's children
be like her, when they have been sent to our schools,
and acquired a taste for cheap finery, and learnt to
'hustle,' and grown fidgety and self-conscious ? Shall
we end by turning them into bad imitations of the
neurotic town-bred boys and girls who crowd our picture
shows ? We have saved them from the spears of the
savages and the stripes of the pashas ; but to what ul-
timate destiny are all these Eastern folks tending whom

A SUDAN PLANTATION 131

Europe has snatched into its swirl of 'progress' and
unseeing change ? Who shall say ? Well, at least it
is something to have redeemed them from slavery
and slaughter, to have given them a breathing-space
before the New Era sweeps them along its tumultu-
ous ways.

CHAPTER XIV
LAND AND WATER

IN my visit to the Zeidab plantation something of the
importance of the irrigation question, which is the
question of questions for Egypt at all times, was borne
in upon me. As you descend the course of the Nile you
see this more and more at each stage, until the Delta
itself is reached. And if you have come from the Sudan,
you are also in a position to grasp the great cardinal
truth that the key to the water-gates of Egypt is in this
territory. Whoso controls the Sudan has the power to
affect intimately the vital destinies of Egypt, to make it
rich and prosperous, or to reduce it to scarcity and,
under certain conditions, to starvation. All this on
account of the geography and the hydrography of the
Nile, which is the most wonderful river in the world,
regulated by a natural mechanism unequalled in its
delicacy and grandeur. And the power-sources and
main working stations of this magnificent machinery are
in the Sudan. Egypt lives on and by the results.

Four hundred and fifty years B.C. Herodotus said that
Egypt was the Nile and the Nile was Egypt. Twenty-
three centuries later a great English engineer put the
same thought into different words. 'Egypt,' says Sir

132

LAND AND WATER 133

William Willcocks, 'is nothing more than the deposit
left by the Nile in flood.' The wider part of the
country where it spreads out into the fan-like Delta
has been made by the river itself as it disgorged the
silt from its two mouths and pushed back the sea.
The remainder is a ribbon of cultivation between the
deserts, a ribbon kept green by the mud and waters of
the Nile. Cut off this supply for a single season and
the entire population of Egypt would be in the grip of
famine; curtail it to any serious extent for a very few
years, and the strip of cultivation would disappear, and
the Arabian desert and the Sahara would come down
everywhere, as they do even now in places, to both
banks of the river. For the most fertile agricultural
region of the earth is only redeemed from being itself
barren desert by the gifts of the Nile, and the skill,
more or less in different ages, by which the bounty of
the great stream is used.

The phenomena connected with the Nile inundation
have been known and utilised in Egypt since the
beginning of recorded history. For seven thousand
years at least men have been watching and noting the
flow and fall of the water and ripening their crops by
its fertilising deposit. King Mcnes is said by tradition
to have begun the system of basin irrigation, and he is
supposed to have lived about B.C. 440x3. Ever since
(and probably before) Egypt has not only lived on the
Nile flood, but has endeavoured, with more or less
success, to regulate, economise, and direct it. No river

134 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

has been so closely studied as the Nile, or handled with
such consummate mastery and resourcefulness. The
greater Pharaohs of the middle dynasties, the Ptolemies,
the Romans, brought to bear upon its problems an
engineering capacity which we can envy. Of the
behaviour of the Nile, when it emerged below the Second
Cataract and through all its course downwards to the
sea, they knew as much as could be learned by the
most careful observation. But the remoter causes
were still hidden from them. It is only since a civilised
government has been in power along the whole of the
upper waters, and since the entire length of the river
has been traced to its source, that we can in part
account for that majestic periodicity, and those occa-
sional variations, which have amazed and bewildered
so many generations. Only since Britain has been at
work in the Sudan have these age-long problems come
near solution : thanks to the efforts of men like Sir
Colin Scott-Moncrieff, Sir William Garstin, Sir William
Willcocks, Mr. Webb, and the other great engineers
and administrators of the Egyptian Public Works
Department.

The Nile, as we now know, has its true source in the
Victoria Nyanza, that vast natural reservoir kept full
by drenching equatorial rains and the rivers of the
Central African highlands. It plunges over the Ripon
Falls into its second reservoir, Lake Albert, and there-
after, as the White Nile, flows steadily northward,
leaving Uganda to pass into the Sudan. In these days

LAND AND WATER 135

we may almost claim the Nile as a British waterway.
In no part of its course of 3700 miles does it touch
territory which is not British or under British influence.
Seventy miles after leaving Lado, the Gazell river runs,
or rather crawls, into the main stream, which here
breaks up into many channels, niters wide over the
country in spongy swamps, and winds and creeps
deviously through beds of tangled vegetation, the fa-
mous Sudd barrier. A little farther north the White
Nile spreads into Lake No, a shallow lagoon ; then the
Sobat river joins it, and it runs in a broad, equable
stream, with little fall, to Khartum, where its turbulent
partner, the Blue Nile, flings itself into its placid bosom
after a downward rush from the alpine heights of
Abyssinia. It is from this impetuous marriage that
the land of Egypt is born. For the Blue Nile, scouring
the volcanic detritus from the mountains, brings the
rich red water that leaves the fertilising deposit. It
is helped by its younger brother, the Atbara, also of
Abyssinian descent, which joins the family two hundred
miles farther north. About 65 per cent, of the flood
water that passes the great dam at Assuan comes from
the Blue Nile.

This Blue Nile, fed by the rains and melting snows,
begins to rise early in June; and is in full tide, together
with the Atbara, in the latter part of August. The
river continues to rise through Egypt till the middle of
September, when it remains stationary for a fortnight or
three weeks. Then a fresh rise occurs in October, and

136 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

the Nile is at its height, and then it gradually sinks
back. The flood season is technically over at the end
of January, by which time most of the 'red' water has
gone by. Through the spring the river continues to
fall, and is at its lowest in the early summer, when the
flood comes down again to replenish it. And so,
century after century, the stately movement has gone
on ; and century after century the Egyptian peasant
has waited for the spreading of the waters to bring life
to his arid fields.

But the process, though perpetual, is not constant.
The rise and fall vary from year to year; and this
variation is all-important for Egypt, and has been, and
always must be, the subject of the most anxious solici-
tude and calculation. Shakespeare, who knew every-
thing, knew this :

They take the flow o' the Nile
By certain scales i' the Pyramids ; they know
By the height, the lowness, or the mean, if dearth
Or foison follow. The higher Nilus swells
The more it promises : as it ebbs, the seedsman
Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,
And shortly comes to harvest.

There is an almost technical accuracy in this language.
If the Nile rises twenty feet or less there will be famine
in Egypt, and great scarcity if the rise is no more than
twenty-three feet. A twenty-five feet rise is still in-
sufficient for the higher levels, whereas anything be-
tween that figure and about twenty-six and a half feet

LAND AND WATER 137

will give satisfactory irrigation everywhere. A rise
much beyond this level is a dire misfortune. It means
the bursting of dykes and dams, the flooding of the
whole country and many villages, the destruction of
houses and cattle, and often much loss of life. No
wonder the water gauges have been anxiously watched.
There are no objects in Egypt to my thinking much
more interesting than the Nilometers, the graduated
scales cut on stones or natural rocks on the river banks,
by which, for thousands of years, the rise of the water
has been measured and by which it is still measured
to-day.

For seventy centuries, more or less, they have been
watching the Nile flow ; it is only in our own times that
it has become possible to control it, and the control will
grow more stringent year by year as we lay hands more
firmly on the Sudan. For seven thousand years Egypt
lived and was born anew each season by the system of
basin irrigation. When the flood came down in the
late summer and autumn it was allowed to flow over or
through the banks into basins, enclosed by dykes, and
communicating with each other and the Nile by a sys-
tem of canals. The water, highly charged with the
fertilising deposit, stood on the land for a month or
six weeks ; then it was allowed to drain back into its
parent stream, leaving behind it the rich brown mud
on which the fellah cast his seed. No ploughing was
needed ; no manuring, for the deposit itself was suffi-
cient. Under the old native dynasties, and the Greeks,

138 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

and the Romans, and the Caliphs, the whole country
was cultivated by this system, and it supported ten or
twelve, or, as some hold, twenty millions of people.
Only one crop a year could be grown ; but it was that
bounteous crop of wheat, varied by lentils, clover, and
maize, which made Egypt the granary of the ancient
world.

But the basin system required good government to
police the dykes and watercourses, and keep the river
banks in repair. Under the Turks and Mamluks it
gradually fell into disorder. By the beginning of the
nineteenth century large areas had been abandoned,
and had gone back to salt and sand ; and the population
of Egypt had dwindled down to a couple of millions.
Then came Mehemet Ali, the Albanian soldier of fortune,
who was the true founder of modern Egypt. That
ruthless but highly capable despot conceived the idea
of supplementing the immemorial cereal harvests of
Egypt by the more profitable cotton plant. For cotton
the annual inundation is not sufficient ; the crop re-
quires water at other seasons than that of the flood.
Mehemet Ali's engineers began constructing broad and
deep canals, which would hold the Nile water through
the year, and allow it to be poured over the land when
wanted. This is the system of perennial irrigation,
inchoate and rudimentary till the British occupation,
brought to full development and perfection during the
past twenty years. It is the greatest of all the tasks
which Englishmen have accomplished in Egypt. The

LAND AND WATER 139

engineers of the Public Works Department have been
busy converting the basin areas into those of perennial
irrigation, cleaning out and deepening the old canals,
and threading new ones through tracts which have
gone back to desert or have never yet been reclaimed.
The basins exist no longer in Lower Egypt, and they are
fast being superseded in the upper part of the country.
One result is that the land of Egypt has been enlarged
by tens of thousands of acres ; and the extension will
continue. The new Egypt is, to a great extent, the
creation of the hydraulic engineer; and if that useful
person can only be provided with sufficient water
he can go on adding fresh accessions of territory. It is
a question not of land, but of water. The land is there
in practically unlimited quantities. The water is not
unlimited ; and the problem is so to deal with it that
the largest possible proportion shall be spread over the
soil when the soil needs it, instead of draining away
wastefully into the sea. The perennial canals, com-
bined with the great dams and weirs, which store up
the fluid when the Nile is high and allow it to run down
gradually when the stream is low, have gone far to
furnish the solution. They have enabled the winter
crops of wheat, barley, beans, lentils, and vetches to be
followed by summer crops of the far more valuable
sugar-cane and cotton.

Thus not only has the area of cultivable Egypt been
extended, but its value has been increased. Rents have
more than doubled in the last dozen years, and in some

I 4 o EGYPT IN TRANSITION

cases they have trebled and quadrupled. Many acres
of land, which fifteen years ago was barely worth 5
an acre, changed hands in the boom that preceded the
collapse of 1907 at 30, 40, 50, and upwards. If the
gold-mines of the Rand had been discovered under the
soil of Egypt they would scarcely have added more to
her wealth than the labours of a handful of British
engineers and officials since the great schemes of Sir
William Garstin, Sir William Willcocks, and Sir
Benjamin Baker were developed. The capital value
of the country has been raised by tens of millions, and
once more it is able to support a population not far be-
low that which inhabited it in the palmiest days of the
Pharaohs. The dream of Mehemet Ali has been ful-
filled : Egypt is helping to feed the cotton mills of the
world.

CHAPTER XV
THE BRIDLE OF THE FLOOD

THE irrigation of Egypt is a vast and complicated
business. In some respects it is the largest enterprise
undertaken by man upon the surface of the globe ; for
when it is completed, as it will be sometime by the
head-works at Lake Victoria and Lake Albert, it will
mean that over a length of 4000 miles human agency is
at work, adapting and modifying the forces of Nature
to serve its own ends and minister to its needs.

The problem of the Nile has become more complex
in recent years since the old basin irrigation has been
superseded. When Egypt was mainly a corn producer
this system answered its purpose admirably. For the
country then lived on the Nile flood, and the energies of
its people were mainly devoted to utilising the flow to
the utmost and restraining it within bounds when it ran
to excess. Beyond that it could not go. If the rise was
insufficient in any year, Egypt for that year suffered and
starved ; if the rise was too great the corvee of the
peasants was embodied, and all hands went to the dykes
to raise and strengthen them. The superfluous tide,
doing much or little mischief, as the case might be,
coursed away eventually to the sea. It could not be

HI!

142 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

stored for the next year, which might, perhaps, turn
out to be one of scarcity.

With Mehemet Ali the system of perennial irrigation
came in. Deep canals were dug to hold the water
through the summer, in order that the cotton and sugar-
cane plantations might be kept moist when the flood
had gone by. It became eminently desirable to regu-
late the stream of the river, so as to have a supply
available at all times, and so that the deficiency of one
period might be made good out of the superfluity of
another. Hence the project of holding up the Nile
water by means of dams and barrages, and letting it
down gradually upon the land when needed. Seventy
years ago Mougel Bey, a French engineer in the service
of the great Viceroy, designed the barrage fifteen miles
north of Cairo, with the object of controlling the
Nile at the Delta bifurcation, and diverting the flow of
the Rosetta and Damietta branches into canals by
which all Lower Egypt could be irrigated. Mougel
suffered the fate of those who serve Oriental despots :
he fell out of favour, he was not allowed to complete his
great work, and he himself, after the British occupation,
was found living in extreme old age and dire poverty at
Alexandria. The barrage was nominally finished,
after Mougel's fall, by corvee and military labour ; but
its workmanship was hopelessly bad, its plan was
defective, and it was quite incapable of being used. It
lay rotting and rusting, till the English came and
brought into Egypt skilled engineers, trained in the

THE BRIDLE OF THE FLOOD 143

Indian school of irrigation. Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff
and his assistants took the weir in hand, repaired and
enlarged it, fortified it with solid masonry and concrete,
and made it capable of holding up thirteen feet of Nile
flood. Three main canals were constructed to draw off
the water and spread it over the Delta provinces. The
works have been paid for many times over already by
the increased value they have given to the lands of
Lower Egypt and the rise in the tax which the Govern-
ment is able to levy upon them.

Before this restoration was completed it had become
clear that the Nile water must be impounded and stored
much higher up, if the whole of Upper as well as Lower
Egypt was to be treated under the perennial canal
system, and made suitable for the cultivation of sugar-
cane and cotton as well as cereal crops. In 1890 Sir
Colin Scott-Moncrieff appointed a commission, with Sir
William Willcocks as its president, to study the ques-
tion of establishing a great reservoir on the Nile. The
commissioners reported in favour of damming the
river at the First Cataract, just above Assuan ; and a
later international commission, composed of Sir Benja-
min Baker and a French and Italian colleague, sent in a
recommendation to the same effect. It was accordingly
decided to build barrages at Assiut and Esneh to regu-
late the flow, and to create an enormous reservoir or lake
by a gigantic dam of masonry above the Assuan Cata-
ract. The firm of Aird & Co. agreed to construct this for
about two millions sterling. Egypt was too poor, or

144 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

rather too much tied up by financial obligations, to
find this large amount of capital at once ; but Sir
Ernest Cassel paid the contractors as the work went on,
and received bonds from the Egyptian Government
which have to be redeemed by sixty half-yearly pay-
ments of 78,613. The Assuan dam and the Assiut
barrage and their subsidiary works had cost about 6|
millions up to the end of 1908 ; and Sir William Garstin
estimated that as a result the annual rental value of
lands in Middle Egypt had increased by 2,637,000
and their sale value by 26,570,000. So this great
engineering triumph may be said to have repaid its
cost already.

But the original designs of Garstin, Willcocks, and
Baker had to be modified by a curious outbreak of
aesthetic sentimentalism. The dam, as projected,
would have held up water enough to cause the complete
submersion of the beautiful temples at Philse, with their
pylons and courts and colonnades. The archaeological
and antiquarian societies of Europe were inflamed at the
thought of this sacrifice ; and there was a loud outcry
set up by some who knew and valued these monuments,
and re-echoed by many who till that time had never
heard of them. Some of the engineers proposed that
the difficulty should be met by raising the temples on
piles clear above the highest level of the reservoir,
while others suggested that they should be removed
bodily and rebuilt elsewhere. Finally, a compromise
was adopted. The dam, originally planned to be 100

THE B.RIDLE OF THE FLOOD 145

feet high and to keep back 85 milliards of cubic feet of
water, was lowered by 26 feet, and it was nominally
capable of holding up only 35 milliards of cubic feet,
though, as Sir William Willcocks contends, it was able
to resist the pressure of double that quantity. The
temples were not drowned out ; but every year at high
Nile they were converted into islands, with their base-
ments and the lower parts of their columns flooded.
The engineers maintain that the process has done them
more good than harm ; for the buildings, which were
fast falling into decay, have been propped and under-
pinned, and their annual washing is even said to bind
and consolidate their foundations. The sentimental
agitation seems to me to have been honoured with much
more attention than it deserved. I yield to nobody in
regard for the monuments of the past, and would not
needlessly disturb a single stone that has been hewn
by the hands of the dead ; but, after all, we are con-
cerned with the present, and we cannot sacrifice the
interests of the millions of Egyptians, living and to
come, in order that a few genuine students and a con-
siderable number of idle tourists may gaze unimpeded
at some interesting, though not supremely important,
examples of Ptolemaic art.

In any case the lover of the aesthetic has his compen-
sation in the charm of an imposing and significant con-
trast. The temples rise like islands out of the broad
sheet of water, the huge artificial lake into which this
reach of the Nile has been converted by the dam.

146 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

The stone colonnades, looking more Greek than Egyp-
tian in their lightness and grace, are beautiful in their
way ; but there is a beauty of another kind, the beauty
of stern majesty and purposeful strength, in the mighty
bar of granite that lies athwart the river and curbs its
pace or holds the tremendous energy of its impact in
suspense. When I visited it some of the sluice gates
were open, and from the vast white face of the wall of
stone there roared a dozen cataracts of sparkling green,
which seethed into foamy billows, and danced into
snowflakes of spray among the rocks below the fall. It
is a thundering head of water, when they let it go, that
will rattle ton-weight boulders round like pebbles of
the sea-beach. But with the pull of a few levers in
the power-house they can close all the gates ; and then
the three-thousand-mile flow of the river is arrested,
and it laps peacefully against the barrier, a wide and
tranquil pool. If the dam gave, there is water enough
in that huge reservoir to drown all Egypt, and whirl
its cities and villages away like straws. But Sir
Benjamin Baker's massive rampart, ribbed upon the
solid rock of the river bottom, will hold for ages ; so,
at least, the engineers contend, despite the fact that
some eminent Cambridge mathematicians have worked
out calculations intended to prove that this dam, and
all other dams and weirs and similar works, have been
constructed on faulty data. But one is inclined to
think that the engineers know their business better
than the professors.

THE BRIDLE OF THE FLOOD 147

The Assuan Dam was begun in the summer of 1898
and finished in June 1902. As then left it was a mile
and a quarter long, 125 feet high at its deepest part, 81
feet wide at the bottom, and 23 feet at the top wide
enough for a good roadway and a line of rails for trolleys.
Between the water level above and below the dam there
was a difference of 67 feet. There are 180 sluice gates,
and when they are all open they will let the flood through
at the rate of half a million cubic feet per second. The
reservoir above, or rather the Nile lake a hundred miles
long, would store 1300 million cubic yards of water,
which sounds a perfectly appalling quantity. While
the dam was being made it was of course necessary to
keep the Nile navigation open, and a canal, sufficient
for the passage of large boats, was cut through the rocky
hill on the west bank of the Nile, the hill of living granite
from which the great shafts and monoliths were hewn for
the temples of Karnak and Thebes. One such may be
seen only half torn from its bed, defined by the double
tier of square holes mortised in the face of the cliff.
Wooden wedges were to be driven into these slots, and
water poured upon them till they swelled and the
rock cracked under the strain. Our engineers, who cut
and squared and lifted their own masonry with hardened
steel chisels and steam machinery, were amazed at this
evidence of laborious, persistent, indomitable effort.
In this wise were the mammoth temples builded, the
mighty columns and pylons quarried, carried, shaped,
set up, by master-workmen who had perhaps only tools

148 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

of bronze at their command, and ropes, and beams,
and wooden levers, and thousands of straining oxen,
and tens of thousands of patient human hands. But
at Assuan the busy hands were suddenly stilled, per-
haps by war, or dynastic revolution, or a barbarian
raid, or it may be the bankruptcy of the contractors ;
the tools were thrown down, the workers fled, the
work was left unfinished as we see it, with the cuts
and borings in the rock as clean and sharp as though
they were made yesterday instead of forty centuries ago.
Egypt, to revert to a former statement, is the creation
of the irrigationist, whether he works with the immemo-
rial bucket and lever, unchanged on the Nile bank
to-day since that of the earliest dynasties, or whether
he uses the scarcely less ancient water-wheel, the
hand pump, or the perennial canal. By the completion
of the Delta barrage, the construction of the new water-
courses and the storage of the waters in the Assuan
reservoir, British engineers since the Occupation began
have added new territory to the country. But the
entire cultivable area is not yet provided for. All the
available water is at present used profitably, and in
the summer time, when the Nile is low, hardly a drop
trickles away to the sea without having done its duty
first upon the fields. It was found that the milliards
of cubic feet of water, held up in the great reservoir,
were still insufficient to moisten all the land which
might be brought into cultivation. For some years
to come it will be the task of our engineers to devise

THE BRIDLE OF THE FLOOD 149

measures for increasing the supply. Since 1907 they
have been engaged in repairing, in part, the mistake
made in modifying Sir William Willcocks' original
design in deference to the sentimental outcry about
Philae. The dam has been raised by five metres, and
if this involves a further submersion of the temples
it has more than doubled the capacity of the reservoir.
The additions were completed in December 1912.
When I visited the dam the extension was in course
of construction, and the resident engineer showed me
round the works, and explained the ingenious devices
by which a mass of new masonry had to be riveted
to the existing structure so as to render it capable of
supporting the additional strain. The increase of
storage capacity will supply the perennial canals for
some years ; but eventually even that addition will be
inadequate and more water will be wanted.

Where is it to come from ? The engineers answer
that question by turning to the 'Anglo-Egyptian
Sudan,' and then the full value of that dominion be-
comes apparent. For Sir William Garstin and his
coadjutors have been considering several audacious
schemes for increasing the quantity of water brought
down to the cataracts by the Nile, and it is only on its
upper courses through the Sudan that the river can be
dealt with in this fashion. The volume of the great
stream has already been frittered away and diminished
long before it touches the Egyptian border. More
than half the amount brought down from the equatorial

150 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

lakes is wasted in the swamps and marshes of the Sudd
region. Since the collapse of the Mahdist rule British
officers have been actively at work here. In the dock-
yard at Khartum I saw the gunboats, equipped with
big steel saws, which are used for shearing through
the tangle of floating weed and reed and papyrus that
obstructed, and almost blocked, the flow of the White
Nile. The Sudd itself is not wasted : a German in-
ventor has discovered a method of converting the
dried blocks of vegetable debris into fuel, and a com-
pany is at work in the Sudan for carrying out the pro-
cess. The Sudd had grown so dense, during the years
of neglect under the Mahdist and the later Egyptian
rule, that all communication with the upper waters
of the Nile was cut off. To the immeasurable benefit of
Egypt, the British occupation restored it. The true
bed of the river had in fact disappeared; but in 1900
Colonel Peake forced a passage through a series of
shallow lakes for 172 miles. Next year another 147
miles of fairway were reclaimed, and in 1903-4 the
whole length of the Nile was laid open. Now, though
still with incessant labour and vigilance, a passage
is kept clear, so that the river is navigable as far as
Gondokoro, and the volume of water brought down
has largely increased. The sportsmen and pleasure
parties, who get glimpses of Equatorial Africa from
the decks of the Government steamers, should give a
thought to the resourceful energy which has enabled
them to enjoy this comfortable journey.

THE BRIDLE OF THE FLOOD 151

But, though the Sudd is kept down, the White Nile
still soaks its way through swamp and lagoon for
nearly 400 miles, and the waste by absorption and
evaporation is enormous. By closing all the outlets
into the marshes, and widening and deepening the
channel, much of this loss will be prevented. Sir
William Garstin has even suggested a bolder project
nothing less than that of diverting the course of the
river, so as to make it avoid the swamp region alto-
gether, and turning it into a new straight channel
200 miles long. Long before that ambitious enterprise
is attempted it is probable that another Assuan dam
will be erected south of Khartum for the irrigation of
the whole great tract of country above the First Cata-
ract. Even more fascinating is the proposal, which
will be carried into effect some day, for building a
dam to regulate the discharge from the outlet of Albert
Nyanza, and so to convert that lake and Victoria
Nyanza into colossal storage reservoirs. At the great
lakes, says Sir William Willcocks, 'with the sweep of a
giant's hand,' the whole Nile system can be handled
and controlled. Lake Victoria, adds the same author-
ity, is the true key of the Nile, and whoever holds it
has the destinies of Egypt in the hollow of his hand.
'Modern Egypt, with its cotton and sugar-cane crops,
depending on the summer supply of the river, and its
new perennial canals, is absolutely dependent on the
equatorial lakes over whose outlets flies the flag of
Great Britain.' That is a conclusive answer, if there

152 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

were no other, to the people who talk lightly of ter-
minating the connection between England and the
Nile Valley. England cannot withdraw from the
scene, if only because the immense potential resources
of the North African river basin cannot be developed
to their highest capacity without her direction and
control.

CHAPTER XVI
THE CLIENTS OF COOK

AT Assuan one finds oneself whirled tumultuously into
the full stream of Egyptian pleasure-seekers. Some
go by the Nile boat up to the temples of Abu Simbel
and the Second Cataract at Wady Haifa ; a few take
the train onwards as far as Khartum. But the ma-
jority are content to bring their southward journey
to a close at Assuan. They sentimentalise over the
submerged temples at Philae and stare at the great
dam ; the most of them spend a few days, or it may be
weeks, sunning themselves on donkey-back or camel-
back in the desert, boating on the Nile, wandering over
Elephantine Island, or surveying that place of many
memories from the terraces of the hotels.

One has many temptations to linger and 'fleet the
time pleasantly.' From my window at the Cataract I
enjoyed a prospect which was a never-ending delight
and interest. To watch the changing colours of the
great river at my feet might of itself have been an occu-
pation for an idle man's day. In the morning, before
the sun had warmed it into translucency, it lay before
one a sheet of oily brown ; it turned to a clear green-
grey at midday, and settled into steely white under

154 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

the cold luminosity of the moon. Before evening the
tourists, thirsty for tea after the jaunts of the day,
would assemble on the terrace to watch the tremendous
pageant of the sunset. It is a thing distinctive and
unique, that dying of the daylight in Upper Egypt,
because all the colours of the changing sky are trans-
mitted by the broad refracting mirror of the Nile.
Fantastic and amazing are the variations of the setherial
tints as they quiver upon the face of the waters and
drown in their depths. Like an army with banners
the long columns of carmine and orange march across
the firmament, and wane above the rugged hills of the
western bank into the mauve and violet of the matchless
Egyptian afterglow ; and the Nile is mottled in squares
and patches of diverse hue. Immediately before us
it is a dull purple, in which the shadows of the rocks
and the reflection of a passing dahabiyeh hang black;
farther to the south lies a space of glowing rose, then
one of lemon-yellow slowly burnishing itself to gold.
Mighty boulders edge into the stream, or fling them-
selves as rocky islets into its course, and force it to
cream and splutter over the cataracts.

Opposite we see the island of Elephantine, with its
Nubian villages nestling among the palm-groves :
Elephantine, where once Juvenal, an unwilling exile,
pointed wrathful hexameters against Egyptian super-
stition and Roman officialdom. But Juvenal, groaning
for the club life and fashionable society of the metrop-
olis, was a mere upstart, modern like ourselves. Aus-

THE CLIENTS OF COOK 155

terer and more ancient memories face us at Elephantine.
Those laughing American boys and girls in the sailing
boat yonder are putting across for the Nilometer,
which was old when Strabo saw it. Presently their
dragoman will bid them notice the inscribed rocks
by the waterside, where they will see the cartouches
and texts of Thothmes II and Rameses II, sharp cut
into the imperishable granite three thousand years ago.
Egypt is the classic land of the tourist. Here, at
any rate, he need not blush for himself as a parvenu.
The late Mr. Thomas Cook, wood-turner, printer,
Baptist missionary, and man of genius, did, it is true,
re-open the Nile lands for Western and Northern holi-
day-makers in the nineteenth century. But his clients
were only following a very ancient tradition. The
Egyptian winter excursionist is of a venerable an-
tiquity. He was perambulating the Nile banks long
before the country that gave birth to Cook had emerged
from barbarism. Even the globe-trotter, observing
the curious details with an eye to publication, may be
comforted by the thought that personages of the
highest literary respectability were doing the same
thing before Greece had grown old and while Rome was
still young. The Father of History is his great exem-
plar. Herodotus, the first Special Correspondent, was
filling his journalistic notebooks with points about
Egypt even as his humbler successors are doing to-day.
Strabo, another useful member of the craft, was occu-
pied in similar fashion four hundred years later. He

156 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

had an introduction to the officer in command at
Assuan, who took him out for a drive in the desert,
and showed him the sights of the locality, and brought
him back to dinner, and, I dare say, spent the evening
with him discussing the detestable condition of home
politics and explaining to his civilian visitor that the
gross incompetency of the Roman war office was simply
ruining the Service. Plus qa change plus c'est la meme
chose, at least in Egypt, where one counts by centuries
as elsewhere by years. And my own belief is that
centuries hence, when the Turks have gone from the
Mediterranean, and when the English occupation is no
more than a scratch on the historic record, the tourist
from lands afar will still come to spend joyous winters
in Egypt, will still loaf pleasantly up and down the
Nile, will still grope his way into the tombs of the kings,
will still stand awestruck before the mammoth ruin
of Karnak, and will still be hauled by rapacious raga-
muffins over the ledges of the Pyramid.

He was indeed very like ourselves, that ancient
tourist, even in his vulgarities ; and he went and
scratched his name and his banal observations on the
monuments, like any cheap tripper. Excursionists
of the Greek and Roman times have left their mark
all over the feet and legs of the majestic northern
Colossus of Memnon at Thebes ; and some Ionian
mercenaries - - a company of Greek 'Tommies,'
homeward-bound from the Sudan placed a notice
of their journey on the polished granite of the great

THE CLIENTS OF COOK 157

statues at Abu Simbel. But that which is common
and ill-bred in the present is gilded by a ray of romance
when it has been perpetrated long ago. For this
antique cockneyism we can only be grateful. Those
Greek and Latin inscriptions at the base of the Colossus
are too trivial to disfigure the monster. They do but
add to its impression of permanence and power. Calm,
immovable, enormous, gazing for ever in passionless
meditation on the grey immensities of the desert,
above the palm trees and the villages and the
transient towns, the great twin brethren sat as
they sit to-day ; and at their feet the little human
insects from the ^gean and the Adriatic crawled and
chattered, as our great-great-grandchildren may crawl
and chatter in the short to-morrow of eternity.

I do not think that the modern tourist, as a general
rule, takes the antiquities too seriously. 'I am getting
fed up with temples,' observed one gay youth, as we
bucketed on our donkeys over this same monumental
plain of Thebes. Most of the visitors, it is true, provide
themselves with the volumes of Baedeker, Murray,
or Flinders Petrie, and begin with an honest endeavour
to assimilate those improving works ; but after a time
they get mixed up among the dynasties and the car-
touches, and can hardly distinguish Queen Candace
from Queen Hatshepu, or Amenhotep from Psam-
metichus. They are rather a jolly lot, who have come
from the smoke of London, the chills of Berlin, and the
wintry rigours of Chicago, in holiday mood, entirely

158 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

resolved to enjoy themselves. Of modern Egypt, the
real, living Egypt, they know even less than they do
of that ancient Egypt which still lies half buried under
the dust ; but the Egypt of Messrs. Cook, the Egypt
of the hotels and the palace steamers, the Egypt of
the dragoman and the donkey-boy, the Egypt which
dines and dances and holds gymkhanas, the Egypt
which enables the Northern sojourner to bask and
play in the sun that they most keenly appreciate.
They visit the monuments in parties and in the highest
spirits. There are middle-aged ladies, who have never
ridden donkeys since their childhood and are proud of
their success with these fiery animals ; middle-aged
gentlemen, exchanging jocularities with the guides ;
young folks of both sexes, much occupied with one
another. Five out of six carry kodaks, and photograph
with indiscriminating assiduity.

For idle people who want to while away a month or
two agreeably there is no pleasanter region than the
Upper Nile, though most visitors, I believe, come away
convinced that the climate hardly deserves its reputa-
tion. It can be bitterly cold in the mornings even at
Assuan and Luxor; and Cairo in January is sometimes
as uncomfortable as London in November. But the
tourist need not get up till the day is fairly warmed,
and he is indoors long before the evening chill sets in.
The temples and tombs at least furnish an excellent
excuse for long rides and hilarious afternoons. The
hardships of travel are unfelt, since the best Egyptian

THE CLIENTS OF COOK 159

hotels are not easily to be beaten in any country for
comfort and luxury. An admirable table d'hote, the
ministrations of a competent chef and maitre d'hotel, a
good orchestra, a commodious lounge, a cosmopolitan
society in the best of tempers, perhaps a dance, send
the visitor happily to bed. Cookian Egypt is run on
the probably correct assumption that most visitors are
well provided with money to spend and all bent on
amusing themselves. The severe voyager who comes
abroad to economise has scarcely as yet found his way
to the Nile ; though, towards the end of the season,
strange cohorts of the personally-conducted, doing
the country at a moderate inclusive charge, descend
upon the land. But to enjoy the winter Nile trip it is
better not to be too earnest or too thrifty. If you
want to study the people or the monuments seriously,
come earlier or later in the season, before the holiday
horde has arrived or after it has gone away.

Egypt, then, for a certain number of weeks in the
winter is a tourist land, and such, under all political
and social vicissitudes, it is likely to remain. Whether
this is wholly an advantage to the country may be
doubted. The visitors bring in some money, but
only a small portion is left to 'fructify in the pockets
of the people.' Perhaps some two millions sterling
are spent in Egypt each year between December and
March. But of this sum the greater part goes to the
tourist agencies, the steamship companies, and the
great hotels, and returns to Europe as dividends and

160 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

interest on the international capital by which these
concerns are run. The salaries and wages paid to
Swiss managers and German waiters scarcely add to
the wealth of Egypt ; nor the money expended in the
fashionable shops in Cairo, largely owned by Greeks,
Italians and Frenchmen. There remains the harvest
reaped by carriage proprietors, guides, dragomans,
donkey drivers, bazaar vendors, and miscellaneous
appropriators of baksheesh. Many of these persons
do pretty well. A young dragoman at Luxor told me
that he devoted the entire summer to study and medi-
tation and yet was able to make enough in the winter
to maintain his wife and family in comfort. He had
been drawn for the conscription, and had promptly
bought himself off out of his savings : no ten years'
servitude in the ranks for this capitalist. But the
men and boys who cultivate the tourist field are not
the most estimable members of Egyptian society, nor
are they improved by their contact with Western civ-
ilisation. Too many of the peasantry are tempted
away from their villages by this easy method of earning
money. The thrifty, laborious peasant is converted
into a tout and hanger-on ; he becomes extortionate
and insolent, and has grown too lazy by the end of the
season to return to the monotonous toil of his hamlet.
He idles about all the summer, reserving himself for
the excitement of baksheesh-hunting and hotel-haunt-
ing in the winter.

Old residents deplore the demoralisation produced by

THE CLIENTS OF COOK 161

this annual gamble for piastres and complain that it is
aggravated by the careless bounty of the visitors, who
treat the natives with a familiarity which they often
abuse. One hears lurid stories in Cairo of the rela-
tions of some European lady visitors towards certain
of the picturesque Arab ruffians who swagger about
in the capacity of dragoman. No doubt these tales
are greatly exaggerated ; but the lower class native,
accustomed for generations to be treated with utter
contempt by his 'betters,' easily misunderstands a
slight display of courtesy and interest. The donkey-
boys, while they remain boys, are often brisk, ready-
witted, and amusingly cheeky young rascals ; but,
grown to man's estate, they become greedy and im-
pertinent, and contrast disagreeably with the unspoilt
fellahin, who are respectful, reserved, and not without
a certain humble dignity. The visitor usually comes
away rather unfavourably impressed by the Egyptian
native ; but that is because he sees only the worst
specimens of the population in their worst aspects.
If he had any opportunity of making acquaintance
with Mohammedan gentlemen of the old-fashioned
kind, and not merely the smart young men in tar-
booshes who read French novels and patronise the
hotels, or if he took occasion to see the villagers in their
homes and at their work, his estimate might be more
indulgent.

CHAPTER XVII
THE HILLS OF THE DEAD

THESE winter visitors to Egypt are, as I have endeav-
oured to explain, for the most part in a buoyant frame
of mind. The gloomy grandeur of the ancient monu-
ments does not greatly impress, and is far indeed from
depressing, them. They have come to the Nile only
incidentally to inspect temples and tombs ; their
main quest is for a good climate and a good time. As
to the former they sometimes have to pretend pretty
hard in order to persuade themselves that they are
thoroughly satisfied, for Egypt in December and
January is not all warmth and sunny sky. They get
their best time as a rule in Upper Egypt, when they
have exchanged the relaxing air of Cairo for the bracing
dryness of Assuan and Luxor. In the latter place,
that centre of colossal ruins and amazing monuments,
they can enjoy themselves very much ; and, if they do
full justice to the excellent cuisine and other highly
modern amenities of the hotels, they do not fail to pay
their respects to the stupendous remains of Karnak,
and make frequent pilgrimages across the river to the
plain and necropolis of Thebes.

One might well come from the ends of the earth to
Egypt, if Egypt had nothing else to show but these

162

THE HILLS OF THE DEAD 163

overpowering vestiges of a vanished civilisation. There
are people who find something barbaric in mere size.
By this criterion the ancient Egyptians were bar-
barians ; for in actual bigness most modern buildings
are bandboxes by comparison with some of theirs.
But I cannot agree that the temple of Karnak is im-
posing only by its magnitude, like an English railway
terminus or an American skyscraper. When you
stand inside the great Hippostyle Hall, and let your
eye travel about that wilderness of mighty columns
and crushing beams, you are conscious of elemental
power like that of Nature herself in her more prodigal
moods of achievement. So does one survey the mam-
moth wedge of the Matterhorn and the splintered
peaks of the Rockies. Carry the mind for a moment
away to the works of classic or Gothic art : the Parthe-
non, in its white beauty, Chartres and Canterbury,
with all their wealth of flying arch and fretted buttress
and petrified embroidery, seem toy-like before the
superb simplicity of those colossal lotus capitals that
blossom above the swelling vastness of the columns.
But Karnak, as we see it to-day, has the majesty of
strength in desolation ; conceive what it must once
have been when every smoothed beam and polished
shaft glowed with the colours of the desert and the
sunset, with blazing red and vivid green and burning
yellow ; and when from every wall and roof there
waved tapestries of blue and crimson and gold. In the
masonry of the pylons at Luxor there are deep slots

164 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

to hold the triple masts from which the long streamers
floated masts and streamers, I doubt not, as much
greater than the poles and pennants before St. Mark's
as the Karnak temple, with its mile-long avenue of
sphinxes, was greater than the Venetian casket of
jewellery work. It was worth while to be a tourist
in Egypt in those days.

Karnak and Luxor, the cities of the living, lie on
the east bank of the Nile. On the west bank opposite
is the City of the Dead. In the wide level plain by
the river was Thebes, with its temples and streets,
and its colonies of priests, embalmers, and mortuary
workers, and attendants of all kinds. Some three
miles back the desert plateau of the Sahara drops down
in rugged slopes and banks, where 'the kings and
counsellors of the earth' sleep in the 'desolate places'
they hollowed for themselves among the rocks. No
tourist omits to visit the Tombs of the Kings. It is
one of the show spots of Egypt ; and here more than
anywhere else, I think, the traveller loses by the condi-
tions under which he usually undertakes the journey.
For this pilgrimage to the last habitations of the buried
Pharaohs the holiday mood is distinctly inappropriate.
The effect lies almost as much in the approach as in
the funeral chambers themselves, and it is apt to be
missed in the company of garrulous guides and noisy
excursionists.

For myself, I went alone and walked. Nobody ever
walks in Egypt; and the hotel porter, when informed

THE HILLS OF THE DEAD 165

that I proposed to adopt that method of locomotion,
regarded me with horror and contempt. I so far
agree with him that I should generally prefer to be
transported by a railway train, a motor-car, a horse, a
camel, a mule, or a bicycle, rather than by that clumsy
appliance the human leg, which has always seemed to
me singularly ill adapted for rapid and convenient
progression. But on this occasion I did well to go
afoot. My solitary morning tramp across the Theban
plain and up into the Hills of the Dead repaid the
fatigue it involved. For a couple of miles or so the
road passes through the villages, beside irrigation canals,
and over the cultivated ground. Then the fields are
left, and you wind your way up among the barren hills.
I do not know any place that gives a more absolute
impression of forlorn and lifeless solitude. It is desert,
not here lying before you in a vast expanse of air and
radiance, but desert channelled into narrow gorges or
tossed into rifted crags and cliffs of sand ; not a tree
or a blade of grass or a rill of water to break the blank
numbness of the dry and withered ridges. The path,
threading upward through these desolate glens, leads
at length to the foot of a bold mountain mass that
throws its broad front and heavy sloping shoulders
up to the skyline, and looks as if the world ended with
its crest. For the ancient Egyptians it did, and, in a
sense, it does so still. The mountain has only one
side ; it is the stairway to the upland plateau of the
North African desert. You can climb to the summit,

166 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

and then you find yourself on level ground again, the
infinite level of the Sahara, that stretches for two thou-
sand miles straight in front of you. You might ride,
if you could carry food and sustenance for yourself
and your beasts, for weeks and months, due west
across that waste till you came almost down to the
shores of the Atlantic. The ancients thought that
the other world lay beyond this pathless plain, and
they buried their kings and princes and nobles at
its edge, that they might find the way from it to their
last abiding place.

In the heart of the mountain are the courts, the
palaces, the mansions of the dead. The funeral pro-
cession wound up from the populous plains below by
that same road I had traversed. Long corridors and
passages were hewn in the everlasting stone ; at their
inmost end a deep, square chamber where they placed
the sarcophagus of the king, and his mummy, perhaps
also the mummies of his queens, his sons, and his
daughters. Then they walled up the entrance with
great stones, and left Pharaoh to reign in his silent
kingdom alone. The centuries came and went ; Egypt,
Persia, Greece, and Rome passed away; 'the drums
and tramplings of a thousand conquests' echoed along
the banks of the Nile; and still Pharaoh slept in his
palace of the underworld. In the tomb of Amenophes
II., opened in 1899, you may watch his slumbers even
now. The mummy is there in the stone coffin where
they placed it when the king died. It is easily visible,

THE HILLS OF THE DEAD 167

for the tombs are wired and lighted by electricity to
prevent the discolouration of the walls and ceilings by
the torches of the guides. Blackened and shrivelled,
the corpse is recognisably human, perhaps even in
some degree regal, with its stiff legs, its thin hands,
the narrow, high forehead, the haughty firmness of
the tight-closed lips and eyes. In the massive stone
chest the king lies as they left him. All about him the
figured walls of his maze of cells and galleries glow with
the records of his triumphs and his deeds, glaring and
staring at you, as when they stained and chiselled
them 3,000 years ago: Pharaoh, magnificent and
vindictive, binding his enemies in ropes, dragging
captive kings behind his chariot-wheels, building,
smiting, sacrificing, destroying ; there are the servants
of his pleasures, the ministers of his power, above all
the dreadful gods, his guardians, dog-headed fiends
and vulture-headed monsters, who have taken Pharaoh
unto themselves. A strange and terrible world this,
that the explorers laid bare for us when they violated
the hiding-places of the City of the Dead !

And yet it was not all gloom and wrath and savage
magnificence. In the Museum at Cairo you can see
the objects taken from the graves, notably the treasures
found by Mr. Theodore Davis in the tomb of Queen
Thya's parents. Mr. Davis is a wealthy and enthu-
siastic American excavator, who has laboured with
tireless zeal to rob the hiding-places of Thebes of their
secrets. The cases filled by his industry and liberality

168 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

at Cairo are of extraordinary interest. There are
beautiful inlaid coffers of sandal-wood and ivory, deli-
cate alabaster vases, painted and gilded chariots,
chairs and couches plated with gold, elegant and sym-
metrical as the best Louis Quinze work ; there, or in
other apartments of the Museum, are exquisite rings
and bracelets and brooches, gold rosettes to fasten
my lady's dress, and gemmed tiaras for the coils of her
dusky hair. The men who piled up the Pyramids,
and forced myriads of straining slaves to drag immense
stone coffins into the cavities of the hills, had a taste
for art and beauty and luxury, too. They worked in
miniature as well as on the grandest scale, and carved
a jade scarab no bigger than a plum-stone, or fashioned
a necklace of amber beads to lie lightly on some soft
bosom, a jewel to hang from a little brown ear, with
the same sure workmanship and unfaltering skill with
which they wrought at the great monoliths that stand
solemnly among the lamp-posts of the Thames Em-
bankment and the statuettes of the Place de la Con-
corde. Truly a wonderful people, with more mysteries
to them than the antiquarians have revealed.

CHAPTER XVIII
CAIRO IMPRESSIONS

To many visitors I think the first impression of Cairo
must be one of disappointment. The untravelled
tourist, trained to believe that he is here in the heart
of the genuine, unadulterated East, is no doubt easily
pleased. He is looking for local colour, and he gets it,
mistaking the hotel 'Arabs' for genuine children of the
desert, and photographing Coptic clerks and Levan-
tine hawkers under the belief that they are representa-
tive specimens of the Moslem population. He has
come to Egypt with a stock of preconceived ideas,
and he takes some time to dispose of them. One of
these notions is that it is always blazing hot in this
quarter of the globe, a delusion from which he is some-
times roughly awakened by a severe cold or an attack
of influenza. I went to a garden-party at Ghezireh
one afternoon in January. It was dull and cloudy,
with a fresh wind blowing, and most of the male guests
were attired in dark tweeds or serge coats, with bowler
hats or similar head coverings. My sympathy was
aroused for a new-comer from Europe, who had arrayed
himself for the occasion in light flannels, knickerbockers,
putties, and a huge sun helmet. In this respect the
Teuton is a worse offender than the Briton. The

169

i;o EGYPT IN TRANSITION

latter has a natural dislike for the unconventional and
the outre in dress ; but the voyager from the Father-
land clings shiveringly to his tropical garb and his
helmet on days which suggest thick overcoats and the
comforts of the fireside.

To the stranger, however, who knows something of
the East, who has seen it in Persia, or India, or even
Turkey, Cairo at the first view must seem a rather
cockneyfied place. And to him who comes down, as
I did, from the Sudan, it will appear that he has left
Africa some way behind, and has stepped back into
Europe. As I drove from the railway station on a
dark evening, in a drizzle of rain, I thought to myself
that if I had dropped down here from the clouds I
might well have believed myself in almost any great
city on the other side of the Mediterranean. The tall,
stucco-fronted houses with iron balconies, the wine
shops, the cafes, the tramways, the granite-paved
roads, the frequent lettering in French and Italian,
were full of Western suggestion. In Cairo the visitor
lives and spends most of his time in a quarter which
is entirely modern and occidentalised ; a quarter of
wide, new boulevards, high blocks of offices and flats,
plate-glass shop windows, and huge, staring hotels.

New Cairo, like most of the Continental capitals from
Christiania to Belgrade, aims at a bad imitation of
Paris, and succeeds as well as the others. It is a little
humiliating for nous autres, we English, to reflect that,
in spite of all we have done in the world, in spite of our

CAIRO IMPRESSIONS 171

success, our energy, our material power, it is not our
particular type of civilisation and society that our
rivals, our clients, even our dependants, are anxious to
copy. It is a case of Grcecia capta over again. Here,
in Egypt, we are the victors and the rulers; we 'run
the show' politically and economically; we dominate
administrative and military matters ; we are the most
efficient and potent influence in the country; we are
obeyed, and, on the whole, I think we are respected.
But we have not insinuated our way into the Egyptian
heart. We are not loved ; our habits, our customs,
our ideals do not appeal to their sympathies. When
Young Egypt casts its eyes outwards it looks to France.
It reads French books, it likes to speak the French
language, it sees French plays, it relaxes itself in what
it supposes to be the French manner; it cultivates,
so far as it can, French society, masculine and feminine
especially feminine. When it takes a European holi-
day it does not seek the coasts of Britain : it finds
our manners, as well as our climate, too chilly, and it
does not care for our recreations. It prefers Rome
and Vienna, and the Riviera, and, above all, Paris,
and returns with ultra-Parisian tastes, which it en-
deavours, so far as possible, to gratify at home. The
tragic shade of the captive of Sedan sometimes seems
to me to haunt the Haussmannised avenues of modern
Cairo. The Paris of Napoleon III. was the Paradise
which Ismail Pasha tried to reproduce on the banks
of the Nile ; and he did not wholly fail, though he

172 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

wrecked himself, and nearly wrecked his country, in
the effort.

Of its kind, and for those who like that sort of thing,
it is a fine town, this new Cairo, with its palaces, its
legations, its handsome public buildings, its hotels,
its theatres and cafes-chantants, its pleasant resi-
dential suburbs, and its general air of brisk activity.
When I saw the city first it was supposed to be a little
despondent financially. The Egyptian land boom
had collapsed and many people who were very rich
on paper a few months before were economising and
retrenching ; and, moreover, Egypt had been ad-
versely affected by the misfortunes of the European,
and particularly the American, stock markets, and the
hotel keepers were sadly deploring the paucity of
wealthy visitors during the present season. But to
the outward eye there seemed no particular sign of
depression. The great hotels gave their weekly dances,
and the scene was gay with brilliant uniforms and
jewelled shoulders ; visitors and residents dined luxuri-
ously in the restaurants and took tea on the terraces ;
the streets were thronged with lively crowds on foot ;
and in the roadways landaus and motor-cars jostled
the broughams of Egyptian ladies, their faces visible
under the thin gauze veil which Mussulman conven-
tion still demands from the one sex, even as it rigor-
ously prescribes the invariable red tarboosh above the
frock-coat or tweed suit of the most Europeanised
members of the other.

CAIRO IMPRESSIONS 173

The most attractive spot in modern Cairo is the out-
let of the great iron bridge which crosses the Nile
near the Museum of Antiquities and the Kasr-en-Nil
barracks of the Army of Occupation, where you may
see T. Atkins, Esquire, leaning out of the windows in
his shirt-sleeves, or punting a football about on the
parade-ground. Not far off is the British Agency,
which every cabdriver knew as 'Lordy Cromer's
house,' long after Sir Eldon Gorst had come to sit in
the seat of power. In the morning the bridge is crossed
by long trains of Arabs and fellahin from the outlying
villages, with loaded camels and donkeys ; in the
afternoon by strings of polo ponies, and by fashion-
able carriages taking out ladies to pay calls upon their
friends in the Ghezireh. This Ghezireh is the large
island in the Nile where the English live when they
can afford it. Here the more prosperous officials and
professional men abide in spacious villas with pretty
gardens, and here is the Khedivial Sports Club, where
the British colony plays polo and golf and tennis in
the afternoons, and holds its race meetings. It is a
patch of well-to-do middle-class Britain with which
Egyptian society has small part or lot.

This is new Cairo. The old Cairo exists, the Cairo
of the bazaars, the mosques, the swarming Moham-
medan population, the narrow lanes, and tall, over-
hanging houses, with barred and trcllised windows.
Some of it is a little cockneyfied too. The main high-
way, the famous Musky, is not what it was ; its shops

174 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

are about as Oriental as those in the Tottenham Court
Road, and many of the wares displayed might equally
well be purchased in London, or New York, or Vienna.
But it is still picturesque with its cosmopolitan and
diversified throng : Greeks, Syrians, Copts, Arabs,
Italians, Jews, Mohammedan peasants, Cairo trades-
folk and workpeople, fakirs, beggars, English officers
in khaki, American girls, native women, black-robed
and (more or less) veiled. Penetrate into the narrow
streets leading to the right and left, and you may
breathe a somewhat less diluted atmosphere ; but,
even here, the Greek and Italian names over the bazaar
booths are numerous, and in the very middle of one
dark and malodorous lane I saw a bold inscription to
the effect that Dr. Somebody, graduate of the Uni-
versity of Philadelphia, was prepared to supply patients
with advice and medicine. Compared with the bazaar
quarter of Indian cities, that of Cairo strikes one as a
little dull and neutral tinted ; for the monotonous fez,
and the dirty blue and black and white robes of the la-
bouring people, are poor substitutes for the brightly-
dyed cottons and variegated turbans of Bombay, Delhi,
or Jaipur. In one respect old Cairo is Eastern enough.
For filth and darkness it need fear no comparison.
Its uncleansed lanes are slippery with mud or smothered
in dust, and they are lighted ineffectively, or not at all,
save by the faint gleam of lanterns from the open stalls.
If you chance to get into one of these lanes on the night
of a Mohammedan wedding you may see the whole

CAIRO IMPRESSIONS 175

place lit by a line of waving torches, dancing in the
hands of a crowd of friends of the family, and the dark
fronts of the houses illuminated by festooned red
lamps, and then the scene is one of Salvator Rosa-like
picturesqueness. But native Cairo did not strike me
as a favourable example of municipal regulation, and
for a town which has lived for thirty years under the
progressive hand of British officialism it is not quite
what one could wish.

To the judicious visitor the attraction of this city is
neither its Western veneer nor its Eastern squalor, but
its specimens of Oriental art in some of its most fas-
cinating phases. The Museum of Arabian Antiquities
is almost as interesting as the Egyptian Museum, where
are gathered the mummies and sarcophagi and other
treasures from the rifled tombs and temples of the
ancient dynasties. Moslem art, in its flowering day,
was never so ambitious or imposing; but it produced
delicious mosaics, marvellously carved and fretted
woodwork, splendid doors and lamps and caskets of
chased bronze, and lovely glass, in white as pure as the
summer cloud and in blue as deep as the autumn sea.
In among the narrow lanes and huddled houses you
will come suddenly upon an old mosque, sometimes
dark and dirty, but perhaps with a noble recessed door-
way, or a beautiful cupola, resting lightly and grace-
fully on its throne, with its tall guardian minarets
beside it. Those who think that Mohammedanism
means necessarily stagnation and barbarism will alter

176 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

their opinion, when they have studied the mosques
of Cairo, and considered what Islam produced in its
great periods of culture. The mosque of Sultan Hasan
was completed in the year of the Prophet 762, which is
A.D. 1360, and it is not unworthy to rank beside some of
the noblest of contemporaneous Christian cathedrals.
When you look on the sumptuous decoration of its
lofty and superb porch, on the splendid poise of its
minaret, and the majestic arches which crown the
recesses of its inner court, you may think that the
architects of the Califate were fit compeers of the
master-builders of the Western churches. The Egyp-
tians have always regarded this mosque as the finest
in the world, and they say that Sultan Hasan ordered
the right hand of the designer to be cut off that he
might not build another to vie with it.

The mosque of Hasan lies at the foot of the mass of
rock called the Citadel. On the Citadel itself, in front
of the walls and battlements of the mediaeval fortress,
there is a great modern mosque, the mosque of Mehemet
Ali, visible all over the city, with its huge dome and
two conspicuous towers no bad memorial of the
bold adventurer who would have tumbled the Turk
out of Asia Minor, and restored the Eastern Califate,
but for the interference of the Western Powers. The
Citadel is the last crag of the mountain ridge called
the Mokattam Hills, which strides across the desert,
and ends abruptly at the river plain whereon Cairo
rests. A great city, seen from an adjacent height, is

CAIRO IMPRESSIONS 177

always impressive ; the view of Cairo from the Citadel
at evening is of unique magnificence, if only because
of the pageant of strange colour that commonly follows
the Egyptian sunset. The sea of flat, grey roofs,
broken by domes and cupolas and turrets, lies under
a veil of purple, shading away to smoky blackness on
one horizon, and glowing in astonishing banks of orange
and amber and crimson on the other. Across the
gleaming streak of the Nile the plain stretches in a
band of green and then of level drab.

Suddenly the eye as it travels westwards is caught
by the two mighty wedges of the Pyramids, looming
in dim immensity through the evening haze. Seen
at close quarters and by day, the Pyramids look disap-
pointingly insignificant. There are no buildings about
them to give the scale, and with their rough surfaces
of dusty yellow they are only two more big sandhills
among the adjacent mounds and dunes of the desert.
One thinks that their builders would have done better
to plant them in the midst of a city whose edifices
would have served to give the measure of the stupen-
dous tumuli. We are constantly told that the greatest
Pyramid covers exactly the area of Lincoln's Inn Fields.
I sometimes wish it were in Lincoln's Inn Fields,
thrusting its blunt point into the clouded sky far above
the tumultuous roofs and climbing spires of London.
As it is, you must be miles away to gain the full effect
of the great barrows. You see them best in the stretch
of desert on the opposite side of the Nile, between

178 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

Heluan and Cairo, or from the ridge of the Mokattam
Hills. Then you perceive that the monument of
'Cheops' and its fellow are only the culminating peaks
of a chain, the Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa of a range
of pyramids strung out for miles along the plain.
Veritable mountains they seem as they rise boldly from
the level ground. It is hard to believe that they are
only some three or four hundred feet high, instead of
as many thousands ; or that these, among the greatest
works of men's hands, are also the oldest that are
left to us.

CHAPTER XIX
IN THE DELTA

To the tourist Egypt is a land of tombs, temples,
touts, and hotels, a land of desert and sun-baked sand.
But there is another Egypt which the tourist does
not know : the Egypt of the alluvial plain between
Cairo and the sea, the Egypt of the agricultural villages
where they grow the cotton crop, and of the busy pro-
vincial towns where they store and sell it. Tantah
and Damanhur are certainly not so interesting as
Luxor ; but to those whose concern is with the present
and future rather than with the remote past they are
perhaps as instructive.

An excursion into the Delta is not easily carried out
unless the visitor has relations with Englishmen or in-
fluential natives who have official or business interests
in that part of the country. There are few hotels or
pensions, no guides or donkey-boys, and no facilities
for the pleasure traveller; therefore, for board and
lodging and the means of locomotion away from the
railway, the inquirer must be indebted to the good
offices of friends. Properly introduced, he will find
no difficulty in this respect; for hospitality is a tradi-
tion with the Englishman in the East as it is with the

179

i8o EGYPT IN TRANSITION

Oriental himself. The British element in the Delta
is select rather than numerous ; it consists of a few
officials, inspectors, irrigation engineers, and the su-
perior staff of the banks and the great land companies
which have bought agricultural estates, and are super-
vising and developing them. All these are in pretty
close contact with the people, and they can tell you
more about them, if they choose, than you will learn
in the Cairo Government offices.

It was with one of these gentlemen, the manager of
an Anglo-Egyptian land syndicate, an accomplished
Arabic scholar, and a man who knows the fellah and
the fields through and through, that I stayed in the
heart of the Delta, and made some acquaintance with
the people of Egypt who are, and always have been,
the peasantry. The real Egypt is not the Egypt
of the towns : these are largely alien settlements, with
the European, Greek, Syrian, Armenian, and other
extraneous elements disproportionately represented.
The genuine native, the autochthon, born of the Nile
silt, is a delver of the soil, as he was before the Moslem
or the Romans came. His aspect when you come upon
him at work in his dykes and ditches is startlingly
reminiscent of the ancient monuments. In appear-
ance, colouring, physical conformation, he is like the
serfs of Pharaoh ; he has the same high shoulders, he
wears the same close-fitting skull-cap, he uses the same
tool, the small curved adze, and scratches the soil with
the same primitive plough drawn by bullocks. And

IN THE DELTA 181

no doubt his mud-walled huts and his tastes and habits
and ideas have suffered no greater change.

An hour's journey by the main line that links Cairo
with Alexandria, a short run on the excellent light
railway system that spreads its useful network over
the Delta, and a drive of some five miles, and we had
reached the large, square, whitewashed building where
I was to stay. As we went along I saw fresh samples
of the real Egypt, and wondered more and more to
find it so little like the Egypt of tradition and the pic-
ture books. It had been raining heavily, and the
primitive, unmetalled roads were sodden with mire.
Those people who still believe the pleasing old myth
of the geography books, that Egypt is a 'rainless'
country, should have been with us on that drive to see
the horses smoking and straining in the effort to drag
the clumsy arabiyah through a muddy compost that
clogged the wheels and caked on the axles till at length
the machine stuck fast and had to be extricated by a
gang of toiling peasants with ropes and planks. They
should have accompanied us the next day when we
rode into Damanhur, with the ponies splashing to
the stirrup-leathers in pools of viscous water. I have
never seen a much muddier town than Damanhur
was that day, and its conditions made one reflect alike
on the Egyptian winter and the benefits of municipal
self-government ; for the place enjoys the advantage of
a native municipality. But, in justice to the climate,
let me add, I was earnestly assured that I had fallen

182 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

upon an exceptionally bad spell of weather, and that
the locality is not often visited by showers of such
volume. Indeed, on my second day the sun came
out, and it was bright and clear and even warm in the
afternoon, though at night I shivered under my rugs
and overcoats. I was in a flat and fertile land : a
great level of bright green everywhere, intersected by
raised dykes and straight canals crossing and re-crossing
one another, so that wherever you looked there was the
gleam of water. All over the fields, just raised above
them on small mounds so as to be clear of the flood in
the days of basin irrigation, were dotted small villages
with low brown houses, and here and there the white or
yellow or faint blue cupola and minaret of a mosque.
This Egypt ! It might almost have been Holland,
with the scattered palm trees for windmills, and the
gaunt buffaloes and rusty camels for sleek bullocks
and heifers.

The estate I visited was typical in many ways of
the changes that have passed over Egypt. It had
belonged that is to say, it had been forcibly seized
- by the Khedive, Said Pasha, the father of Ismail,
and by him handed over to a Turkish officer about the
Court. This landlord built the great white house on
the demesne, and removed the villagers from a neigh-
bouring hamlet, so as to have them near at hand. Their
huts, with the barns and byres of the proprietor, were
clustered untidily round the manor house, which was
raised, as usual, on its small patch of ground elevated

SLATIN PASHA, G.C.V.O.

IN THE DELTA 183

above flood-mark. It had once been a place of some
pretension, with an avenue of acacia trees leading up
to the doorway; but the Osmanli owners, busy in
Cairo, neglected the estate which gradually fell into
confusion, and was being cut up among numerous
struggling tenants, none of them doing too well, owing
to the poor condition of the irrigation works.

Then came the English occupation and the new
Public Works Department. The old canals were
cleaned and repaired, new ones were made, and the
property swiftly revived. The land became valuable,
changed hands at higher prices, and attracted the notice
of various speculators, who bought parcels of it and
sold again at a profit. Greek tradesmen and others
from the towns were considerable holders or buyers.
We passed a large farm on the road belonging to a
merchant in Alexandria which I was assured could not
have been worth less, at the current valuation of land,
than a hundred thousand pounds. It was a safe and
lucrative proceeding to buy land in the Delta a few
years ago. The astute operator waited till he was told
by his agents that certain Englishmen, in shabby
jackets, had been seen in the neighbourhood with meas-
uring chains and spirit levels. That meant that the
Irrigation Department was going to work on the
canals. Then was the time to get credit from the bank
and tempt the fellahin to sell at something above the
market rate ; and after that it was only necessary to
sit on the land till the works were finished, and the

i84 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

value had trebled or quadrupled, and sell if you
could. It was a good game ; but not a few people
in Egypt are regretting that they ever took a hand in
it. They committed the common error of holding
on too long, writing up their assets gaily as nominal
prices rose, but declining to realise. Then the crash
came, and everybody wanted to sell at once, but there
were no buyers, and the banks refused to give further
credit ; and thus it happens that there are still a good
many persons in Cairo and Alexandria who were
almost millionaires on paper a little while ago,
and are very badly in want of ready cash at the present
moment.

Non raggionam di lor; at least not just now. The
peasants, who bought land to farm, not to sell, were
not much affected by the collapse, and the irrigation
works are all to their advantage. As I went round with
my friend the expert he pointed out to me how much
had been done in the last few years to restore value to
the soil. In the evil days when the basin system had
been allowed to fall into disorder, and before the new
perennial canals had been developed, a large part of
this fertile Delta tract had gone back to desert. For
the land is good only on condition that it is looked to
with close and constant attention. There are other
countries where Nature repairs her own ravages with-
out the aid of man. It is not so in Egypt, where the
natural forces must always be diligently watched and
controlled or they will do more evil than good. The

IN THE DELTA 185

Delta soil is impregnated with salt, which always tends
to come up to the surface if the land is left fallow too
long, or if it is insufficiently drained. Drainage is
as important as irrigation, and so is the rotation of
crops, and the use of artificial manures, especially
under the perennial system. When only the flood
water of the Nile was poured over the fields the rich
mud provided much of the sustenance that was needed.
But now that the thin white water is used as well more
artificial nutriment is requisite. The cotton culture,
which adds so largely to the annual income of Egypt,
involves some danger of reducing the capital of the
country. Cotton is a very exhausting crop, and may
impoverish the soil if it is not planted in due rotation
with cereals and pulses, which put back some of the
elements that the greedy little bush has withdrawn.
This is of course understood by the great land com-
panies, which farm scientifically, and pay much atten-
tion to rotation and drainage. Even to my amateurish
eyes, the difference between the progressive, and the
stagnating, holdings was apparent. There would be
two blocks, practically identical in site and situation,
lying side by side along the course of a canal, one occu-
pied by the company and the other by native pro-
prietors : the former was worth perhaps 100 an acre,
while the latter was unsaleable at half that price.

The fellah, however, if not very eager to adopt
modern methods, is, within his limits, a good farmer.
A knowledge of the soil, of the seasons, of the habits

1 86 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

of grains and roots and vegetables, of the efficiency of
water applied to land, had been bred into him for
generations. Indeed, one of my informants went so
far as to say that what he does not know about these
things, on the purely empirical side, is not worth know-
ing. He is not scientific, but he is a highly practical
man, and he has been quick to seize the advantages
conferred upon him by the Public Works Department.
The irrigation officers are the only English officials
with whom he comes in actual contact, and their ac-
tivity he understands and appreciates. He knows well
enough that they are the persons by whom the choked
ditches have been cleansed and straightened and the
new waterways dug, that they will see that he gets the
supply of water to which he is entitled, and that they
perform this service without being incited thereto by
means of bribes. They know, too, that when the
department requires a draft of labour, men will not be
impressed by force, and compelled to work without
payment or reward. The duty of keeping the Nile
banks and the irrigation dykes in order has been per-
formed by forced labour from time immemorial. One
of Lord Cromer's great reforms was the abolition of
the corvee. Now the State, as an employer, pays its
servants for their work. The labour, however, is
still not entirely free. When there is danger of a flood
or the breach of an embankment a sort of levee en masse
of the neighbouring villagers takes place. The men,
with their spades and mattocks, hurry to the point of

IN THE DELTA 187

peril, and work as desperately as if they were throwing
up entrenchments round a beleaguered city, while the
women and children bring up faggots and earth in
baskets. In such a case no compulsion is necessary ;
for all the peasants know well enough the results that
will follow if the water overcomes the defences, and
all are anxious to avert the calamity.

It is a poor little place to look at, the Egyptian vil-
lage a mere cluster of mud-huts thrown together
promiscuously. Some of the houses are flat-roofed ;
but that kind of construction needs to be supported
by timber, which costs money, and a great many of
the huts have domed roofs and look like rather large
beehives. The villagers own huge flocks of pigeons,
and keep them in squat, square towers, with battle-
ment tops, which have quite a mediaeval and fortified
aspect. In front of the village there may be a small
group of date palms ; there will, in any case, be a pond
in which the inhabitants wash their clothes, their
beasts, and themselves, and from which, unless they
are near the Nile, they also draw their supply of
drinking water. To induce the people to refrain from
emptying their refuse into this receptacle is one of the
tasks of the sanitary inspectors. It is not an easy
one : the fellah has been living for a few thousand years
without paying any particular regard to sanitation,
and does not see the necessity of it. Yet there is
progress. I have heard that, in some of the villages
threatened by plague, the headmen, or onidehs, with-

i88 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

out any official pressure, have themselves insisted on
the water being boiled before being used for drinking
purposes.

But the fellah does not take to new ideas easily ; he
has all the peasant's ingrained distrust of innovation,
and a natural suspicion, due to many centuries of
oppression, of administrative activity. Indeed, he is
typical of the peasant type slow, obstinate, suspi-
cious, extremely shrewd in all matters that come within
his comprehension, a bundle of prejudices and fanatical
superstitions ; withal, an excellent fellow in many
ways, temperate, sober, thrifty, and laborious, kindly in
his domestic relations, and easily attached to those who
treat him well. He has a sense of humour, and his sun-
burnt, anxious countenance, wrinkled by much thought
about crops and floods and pennyworths of clover, will
easily relax into a hearty grin at a good broad joke.

Squalid as his hamlet looks, and scanty as is the
furniture of his hut, he is well off as things go in East-
ern countries ; he has enough to eat and drink and to
buy himself the simple clothes he needs and his few
luxuries, such as bad coffee and cigarettes. He can
get a living, though he works hard for it, and if he can
repress the land-hunger which impels him to take more
acres than he can work profitably, and so brings him
into the clutches of the moneylender or the Greek,
who makes usurious advances on the cotton crop,
he may do well. Like peasant proprietors everywhere
he is too apt to borrow too freely and recklessly and

IN THE DELTA 189

to mortgage his holding or his crops ; and it is to
repress this tendency that Lord Kitchener's new Five
Feddans Law has been enacted, whereby the holder
of less than five acres is prohibited from pledging his
land as security for a loan and cannot be sold up by his
creditor. This legislation, imitated from the Punjab,
has done well in India, and may be useful in prevent-
ing the Egyptian small holder from delivering himself
into bondage to the local usurer or land shark. But
the Delta farmer is not always a small holder, nor is he
always as poor and humble a cultivator as the Indian
ryot. He makes no outward show, but he is often a
man of substance. Many a fellah who lives in a shanty
with no more visible wealth than a couple of bullocks,
a donkey, and some pots and pans, could dig up from
somewhere a hoard of sovereigns and piastres. On
one estate I visited I was present at an interview be-
tween the overseer and a man who held a lease of 1000
acres at 5 an acre. A farmer who could pay 5,000
a year by way of rent would be a person of some pre-
tension in most countries. But this man was work-
ing like a peasant on his own land, and he was dressed
in the same shabby dark blue cotton gown as the fel-
lahin. I heard another case of a land company
selling an estate to a fellah for 40,000. When the
documents were executed, and the time came for pay-
ing the money, the purchaser went back to his house
and brought the whole amount in bags of gold loaded
upon donkeys.

190 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

No one knows how many millions are hoarded and
buried under the soil of Egypt. Slowly, very slowly,
the fellah is beginning to learn that it is safe to be rich,
that a man may save money without having his taxes
raised upon him in defiance of the assessment, or with-
out being compelled to disgorge to the local officials
under the kourbash. He still likes to keep his invest-
ments under his own hand, where he can find them
when wanted ; but this is perhaps rather from habit
than reason ; for he has discovered by this time that
the era of arbitrary exaction is over, and that he has
his 'rights' which do not depend upon the caprices of
the Pasha or the relative venality of the nearest tax-
gatherer.

He leads a dullish life in the village, with few amuse-
ments, save the Mohammedan holidays, an occasional
wedding or funeral, and the long talks at evening,
sitting on the ground with his fellows when the day's
work is done. Physically, in spite of those insanitary
customs which have been mentioned, he is finely devel-
oped, thin-flanked, broad-shouldered, straight-backed,
with a wide, flat chest, and sinewy arms ; and the
women, too, when you see them coming from the well
at evening, with the great pitchers poised on their
heads, moving lightfully and gracefully,

'With foot so firm
To crush the serpent and spare the worm,'

you think they might well be the mothers of strong

IN THE DELTA 191

men. Forty centuries of exercise in swinging up the
water-lever and wielding the pickaxe have given the
fellah a notable physique. In due course, the shaduf
will be superseded by the steam-pump, and the spade
by a mechanical digger, and the peasant will crouch
all day long inside a close cabin turning taps and filling
oil-cans. The water will be laid on in pipes, and the
women, instead of walking like caryatids under their
urns, will be bending over a stocking frame in a fac-
tory. Industrial civilisation, like other luxuries, is
not bought without a price.

CHAPTER XX
MR. VAPOROPOULOS

SOMETHING has been said in previous chapters of that
speculative fever which possessed Egypt for several
years, and the collapse that followed. How these things
operated in certain individual cases may be learnt by
considering the history of that enterprising Greek, Mr.
Aristides Vaporopoulos, whom a classically-minded
friend of mine calls Aristides the Moderately Just.

His father was an innkeeper in Corfu during that
queer forgotten episode when the Ionian Islands were
a British Protectorate, and, of all people in the world,
Mr. Gladstone was the Lord High Commissioner
thereof. Vaporopoulos the elder migrated to Malta
and set up a tavern in Valetta. Here his son was
born ; and that is why he was baptised William Albert,
as well as Aristides, and why he always calls himself
'Mr.,' and has been known to refer to the British
Islands as 'home.'

In doing odd jobs about the inn the youth early
acquired a useful miscellaneous education and consid-
erable knowledge of the world. He served thin wine
to Italian sailors, coffee and lemonade to his own
countrymen and the island aborigines, occasionally

192

MR. VAPOROPOULOS 193

bad spirits to adventurous British bluejackets. He
picked up English, Italian, French, and gained much
experience of mankind in various aspects, mostly shady.
This instructive course of studies was continued in
divers towns and cities of the Mediterranean. Dis-
agreeing with his father about a little matter of
accounts, he took service as a waiter in Palermo ;
subsequently he migrated to one of the big hotels in
Naples, where the wider world was opened to him ; he
saw something of fashionable travellers from the North,
and added some German to his budget of languages.
Thus equipped, after a brief dalliance with Athens and
Constantinople and Alexandria, where he learnt Arabic,
he settled in Cairo, and his linguistic attainments
secured him an appointment as dragoman.

Then arrived the autumn of 1884, when Lord Wolse-
ley's unwieldy Gordon Relief Expedition was toiling
up the Nile in whaleboats, with the assistance of the
great tourist agents. There was a keen demand for
interpreters with this force. Aristides, an intelligent
young fellow of two-and-twenty at this time, obtained
an appointment, and went to the front, officially at-
tached to an Egyptian brigade. He escaped the perils
of the campaign unscathed, and drifted down, after
it was over, to Assuan, where he invested the savings
from his not illiberal pay in purchasing the good-will
of a small bazaar stall. He sold sham jewellery to
the natives in summer, and sham Sudan relics to tour-
ists in the winter, and, being reasonably honest and

194 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

extremely shrewd, he did well, and speedily enlarged
his operations. In three years he was able to exchange
his booth in the bazaar for a shop on the river front,
with a proper European plate-glass window, and a
scrubby compatriot of his own as assistant behind the
counter; in five years he had a branch establishment
in Luxor ; and not long afterwards he was in a position
to set up his headquarters in Cairo.

His great opportunity came with Kitchener's cam-
paigns in 1897-8, and he seized it promptly. He went
with the army, but not this time in any capacity so
humble as that of interpreter. Grown older and
bolder, he cherished higher aims. He turned most of
his available assets into cash, and started for the
Sudan with a large miscellaneous consignment of goods
and stores, such as men in need of many things would
be likely to require. He knew the natives better than
the Intelligence Department; his 'mobile transport'
moved faster than Girouard's railway corps. And so
when, after a toilsome march under the tropic blaze,
the army arrived at its camping ground, it found Mr.
Vaporopoulos already installed in a shanty of biscuit
tins and sackcloth, his wares neatly set out on the
earth ; himself, his Syrian clerk, his Hellenic assist-
ants, unclean to look upon, but unwearyingly assidu-
ous, prepared to supply perspiring and exhausted war-
riors with a variety of very welcome commodities -
at a price.

Such enterprise could not fail to be rewarded. The

MR. VAPOROPOULOS 195

tins of sardines, bottled peas, mixed pickles, jam, In-
dian cigars, went off on the top of the market. What
young officer who had lost his last pocket-handkerchief
could hesitate to pay Vaporopoulos half-a-crown for
a small square of cheap Manchester print ? Five
shillings did not seem too much for a bottle of Bass
to a man half dead with thirst, who had not seen beer
for many a day. But Aristides did not limit himself
to retail trade. He could get camels and donkeys
somehow while the military authorities were looking
for them, and was always prepared to take a contract
for such articles as wire rope, army biscuit, forage, and
railway stores. The prices paid gave a splendid profit
in spite of the cost of transport, and before Omdurman
was entered Aristides had become a man of means.
When the new Khartum was being constructed he
was one of the first to get a block of land, and set up
a general store', which prospered rapidly. His business
grew by leaps and bounds, he was soon able to open
branches all over the Sudan, and presently he was not
merely a shopkeeper, but a merchant dealing in ivory,
timber, gum, and rubber, with his agents at Kassala,
Rumbeck, Gondokoro, and even in the Congo State
and British East Africa. Then he came back to Cairo,
engaged larger premises and more clerks, and devoted
himself to consolidating what had now become a highly
important and lucrative trading concern.

He was a big man by this time. He had relations
with all sorts of people in high official stations ; the

196 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

banks knew and honoured him, and his draft would
have been cashed at sight over half Africa. He found
no difficulty in extending his activities in various
profitable directions. He bought building land in
Cairo and the suburbs, financed transactions in the
agricultural districts, and took a hand in the great
cotton and sugar speculations. Vaporopoulos was
beginning to be known as an individual to reckon with,
and cosmopolitan financiers, Armenian, Belgian, Eng-
lish, sought his acquaintance. Then, for the first
time in his busy life, he turned to spend money as well
as make it, and began to develop social ambitions.
Hitherto he had associated mostly with his own com-
patriots, shaved once a week, and changed his collar
every other day ; when he wanted recreation, which
was seldom, he went to an Italian cafe, drank coffee
and a little absinthe, played a game of billiards, and
sometimes visited a reeking native music-hall, where
half-naked dancing women contorted themselves for
his edification. His European friends gave him ampler
ideas. He dealt with a competent tailor, frequented
the bars and restaurants of the fashionable hotels,
and discovered that a good many of the patrons of
those establishments were eager to make the acquaint-
ance of a person with his reputation for riches and
business enterprise.

His friends were not of one sex only. Some ladies,
both of the visiting and resident colony, were quite
willing to cultivate his society. Aristides was still

MR. VAPOROPOULOS 197

a bachelor, a dapper little middle-aged gentleman,
supposed to be even wealthier than he really was.
He had always been too much occupied with money-
making to think of love-making, though he had vaguely
intended to marry a good-looking girl of his own race
when he could find time to attend to the matter. Now,
under the genial rays of popularity and success, his
ideas took a wider sweep. His big, new motor-car
was often to be seen outside the Ghezireh Palace
Hotel, or the Mena House, or the Grand at Heluan,
with Aristides himself taking tea on the terrace, in
intimate converse with goddesses in Paris chiffons,
and lively young maidens from England and America,
who treated him with a free-and-easy Anglo-Saxon
familiarity which he found extremely agreeable.

It was in this phase that he became acquainted with
those distinguished members of the British aristocracy,
the Hon. Augustus Cashless, and, his sister Ella, both
of whom were rudely described by too candid friends
as being in Egypt 'on the make.' The Hon. Augustus,
after a variegated career in politics and the City, had
scented the Egyptian land boom from afar. To his
ingenious brain, and the fertile suggestion of a well-
known promoter, a little off colour at the moment,
was due the conception of the Great Sesostris Land
Company, to which the attention of the British invest-
ing public was being earnestly besought. London
society, thanks to Mr. Cashless's connections, was a
good deal interested, and various influential persons

i 9 8 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

had accepted allotments of shares. The market, how-
ever, was a little shy, and wanted to see some solid
money, especially Egyptian money, in the venture
before it would bite freely.

Aristides was brought into the concern through the
agency of the Hon. Ella, whose acquaintance he had
made at a Ghezireh tea party. Miss Cashless was not
exactly in her first youth, and the stress of a dozen
London seasons had made her look a little anxious.
But her figure, aided by the efforts of a too confiding
Grafton Street dressmaker, was still agreeable ; and
she had red-gold hair, which made the heart of Aris-
tides jump each time he looked at it. The lady was
extremely gracious to the little Greek, whose thoughts
began to take a vague, alluring turn. Could it be -
after all, he was rich and not quite a fool ? 'You are
so clever, dear Mr. Vaporopoulos,' said Ella to him,
as he drove her back to the Semiramis Hotel in his
motor-car ; and Aristides pondered over the words
through a night of sleepless happiness. Privately,
Miss Cashless referred to him in conversation with her
intimates as 'a little Greek bounder who is goin' to
put Gus and me up to all sorts of good things.' She
introduced him to her brother who, to oblige his sister,
was quite willing to allow him to participate in the
advantages of the Great Sesostris Company. A year
before Aristides would have hesitated to touch that
promising concern with the end of a bamboo pole.
But love blinded his keen black eyes, and ambition

MR. VAPOROPOULOS 199

clouded his habitual shrewdness. Before he quite
knew it, he was deep in the scheme ; a few more drives
and tea parties with Ella and most of his available
capital, and a little more, was locked up in the Great
Sesostris, of whose shares a hundred thousand or so
stood in his name.

His holding, paid for in hard cash, gave the neces-
sary fillip to the company. The Hon. Augustus went
back to London and worked the affair vigorously,
in society, in the financial press, and on the stock
Exchange. Paris and Brussels and the advertising
outside brokers became interested, and the quotations
began to rise. The i shares went up to 50^., and
those in the know were commonly supposed to be
waiting till they were worth a five pound note. As a
fact, they were cautiously unloading, and only deterred
from clearing out altogether by the consciousness that
the market was more buoyant than stable, and that
any serious selling would bring it down. They agreed
to hold on a few months longer.

Those were months for Aristides of pleasant musing.
Miss Ella had gone home at the end of the winter sea-
son, but she wrote him little notes occasionally, and
she had given him her portrait of a few years'
earlier date to look at. Aristides left his mercantile
business mainly to his subordinates, not to its advan-
tage ; and dreamed of becoming a millionaire when the
time came for selling his Sesostris shares. He never
meant to keep them, of course; he knew too much

200 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

about the property in Egypt for that : but of the pro-
ceedings of his kind friends in London he knew very
little, and he did not understand how fragile was the
foundation on which they had builded their boom.

It was slighter than they themselves believed. One
morning, they awoke to find the slump upon them,
and the castle tumbling about their ears. Everything
Egyptian went down with a run, and the huge inflated
Sesostris speculation was the first to go. In a panic,
Mr. Cashless's West-end friends hurried off to their
brokers, and threw their shares on the market, only
to render the situation hopeless. In three days
' Great Caesars,' as the dealers called them, had fallen
to par ; in a fortnight they were at rubbish prices,
and nobody would touch them. 'What about Egypt,
Gus ?' said the Hon. Ella to her brother. 'Egypt, my
dear girl,' said Mr. Augustus, 'is U.P., so far as you and
I are concerned, and I don't think you need give your-
self the trouble to write any more letters to that little
Greek microbe.'

It was a severe blow to Mr. Vaporopoulos. For some
time his position was decidedly shaky. He had plunged
rather beyond his resources, and the banks were calling
in their loans, and insisting on immediate repayment.
There was a moment when the ugly word liquidation
loomed rather insistently before him. But he pulled
himself together and came through. His mercantile
business was still sound, and though he had crippled
it a good deal by his financial adventures, and found it

MR. VAPOROPOULOS 201

necessary to dispose of several of his stores and branches
to the astutest of his Syrian assistants, there was
enough to live on. He abandoned his dreams, alike of
love and ambition, and entered upon a severe course
of retrenchment and hard work. The motor-car was
sold, the expensive flat given up, and the fashionable
hotels saw him no more. He resumed his old habits,
took to working thirteen hours a day again, and when
I last saw him he was behind the counter of one of
his own shops earnestly endeavouring to sell a box of
extremely bad Hamburg cigars at the price of the best
Havanas. Aristides will be all right.

The shares of the Great Sesostris Land Company
stand at a nominal quotation of $s. 6d. to-day ; and
if you would care to have some you need only apply
to the Hon. Augustus Cashless, who will be happy to
furnish you, at that very moderate figure, with quite
as many as you are likely to require.

CHAPTER XXI
THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHET

IT may not occur to many visitors that Cairo is a
university town. Such, however, it is, and as such it
is known and regarded with respect all over the king-
doms and principalities of Islam.

And here I am not alluding to the New University
College which has been recently instituted, to give
instruction in Western science and literature, under
the patronage of the Khedive and the encouragement
of the British adviser to the Ministry of Education.
Millions of Moslem, who know nothing of the Khedive,
and very little of the English, are interested in Cairo,
not because it is a great and wealthy city, the capital
of Egypt, but because it is the seat of the university of
El-Azhar. For that establishment is the chief seminary
of the whole Mohammedan world, the gathering-
ground for all who would make themselves proficient
in the learning of Islam, the training school for the
priests and doctors of the Faith.

In the mere number of its students and its professors
it surpasses all academies and colleges, not merely of
the East, but of the West also. There are over 10,000
boys and men, of all ages from twelve to sixty, at El-

202

THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHET 203

Azhar, and the teachers, the sheikhs, ulemas, and
tutors, are counted by hundreds. Its constituency,
like those of the European universities in the Middle
Ages, is cosmopolitan rather than national : it draws
its pupils from every part of the three continents in
which orthodox Mussulmans dwell. Even as students
used to come from Scandinavia and Sicily to Paris
and Gottingen, so they now flock to El-Azhar from all
the lands of the Prophet. There are Syrians, Moors,
Algerians, Turks, Tunisians, Bosnians from the Adri-
atic, and Mongols from near the Pacific, Afghans,
Punjabis, Abyssinians and Somalis, blue-eyed Cir-
cassians, and ebon-hued negroes. It is a microcosm
of Mohammedanism, a museum of those various popu-
lations white, brown, yellow, and black who are
the children of Islam. There is no place like it any-
where, and nothing in Cairo better worth seeing.

I waited outside in the mud of the squalid lane,
while the guardians of the gate inspected the letter of
introduction I had brought with me from the Sheikh
Ahmed El-Azhary, the head of the Wakfs bureau, a
learned doctor in Moslemism and likewise an en-
lightened administrator who knows and admires the
ways of the English. My credentials being found
sufficient, I was invited to put felt slippers over my
boots, and thereupon conducted through the maze of
vast courts and wide corridors. The place is confusing
owing to its size and the mass of humanity which
crowds every inch of the enormous floor space. It is

204 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

like knocking off the top of an ant-hill and looking
down upon the myriads of black insects that swarm
about the galleries.

Men and boys were in heaps and knots and circles
all over the ground. After passing through the outer
quadrangles you come upon the Liwan, or great hall
of lectures. It is an immense covered shed, with a low
roof supported by a forest of columns of every shape
and size. There are nearly four hundred of them, all
robbed from old churches and temples. The classes
and the teachers are scattered over the floor, packed
so close together that often it is difficult to make your
way between two of the groups. Here and there the
professor has a wooden chair and a table ; but as a rule
teachers and pupils are alike sitting or squatting on the
ground, with their robes gathered under their bare
feet and their shoes laid out in front of them. The
walls and pillars and planking are fairly clean, but not
all the students are ; some are even filthy and ragged,
and a reek of promiscuous humanity fills the air. The
din, too, is bewildering ; for all the teachers are talk-
ing to their classes at the same time, and half the
classes are repeating or reciting something, or droning
verses from the Koran or the service books, bending
their bodies up and down in unison with the monotonous
cadence.

The black-bearded sheikhs put a good deal of energy
into their work, shouting, expostulating, and explain-
ing vigorously, but their efforts did not always meet

THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHET 205

with much response. According to the rules, no pupils
are admitted below the age of sixteen ; but this regula-
tion is not strictly observed, for many of the students
were mere children. These boys were alert and inter-
ested, and when there was a class mainly composed of
them the drone rose into a shrill chorus, and the bodies
were swung up and down like those of a crew in a
racing eight. The elder students were of all ages and
conditions some, quite grey and old ; some, intelli-
gent young Syrians and Egyptians, with clear-cut,
good features ; some, wild Arabs from Yemen ; some,
mere grinning savages from Somaliland and the Upper
Nile. Some, too, were evidently taking in the words
of the teacher with attention, while others lolled about
half asleep, listless, and stupid, perhaps from hunger,
for many of these learners are in the lowest depths of
poverty. No fees are paid by the students, the whole
expenses of the establishment, including the salaries
of the teachers, being met by the Administration des
Wakfs, a sort of Egyptian Ecclesiastical Commission,
which disposes of the vast revenues belonging to the
mosques and religious and charitable foundations. A
considerable number of the students are in the position
of the sizars and poor scholars in our own mediaeval
universities ; they not only obtain their education free
of charge, but they also receive a daily allowance of
food and a small stipend.

About a thousand are lodged and boarded at El-
Azhar itself; others find quarters in some of the neigh-

206 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

bouring mosques. Many are married, and live with
their wives and children somehow and somewhere in
the purlieus of the native city. After the student is
admitted to El-Azhar he stays practically as long as he
pleases. Some do remain half a lifetime, dawdling
over the sacred texts, droning over their lessons day
after day, hanging about the Liwan long after they
have lost any interest they ever had in learning, and
any real desire to enter the priesthood, simply because
they have cut themselves adrift from the active world,
and would not know where to turn for food and shelter
and companionship if they were to leave the great
swarming caravanserai.

On the upper floors are the cubicles in which the
in-college students live. They are bare little oblong
apartments, scantily furnished (but one does not have
much furniture in the East), watertight and white-
washed, and kept in fair order by the university ser-
vants. Some of the inmates are ragged, dirty, and
churlish ; others clean and courteous. In one room
I found four intelligent and polite Syrians, with whom,
by the aid of my guide, an English-speaking young clerk
in the Wakfs office, I entered into conversation. One
of the four was a middle-aged man, who had been for
ten years at El-Azhar. The full course lasts twelve
years, and those who aspire, so to speak, to a degree
in honours, may stay two or three years longer or more.
This Syrian seemed to think that his ambition to be-
come a really learned doctor in Islam would hardly

THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHET 207

be satisfied until he had spent at least fifteen years at
the university. His companions were, by this standard,
almost freshmen, youths of two or three-and-twenty in
their second or third years, and they regarded their
senior with fitting respect. None of these men belonged
to the class of poor students. They had good clothes,
and comfortable rugs and coverlets to their angariebs,
and they showed me, behind the doors of a glass-fronted
bookcase, quite a respectable little library of Moham-
medan theological literature, the gem of the collection
being a volume setting forth in intricate detail the
genealogies of the descendants and collaterals of the
Prophet for several centuries. One of the four was
a young man of means, who owned a silver-handled
cane and perambulated Cairo in a tarboosh and an
overcoat. He evidently belonged to the smart set
of the university, and had, indeed, as he explained,
only been sent there by his father in order that he might
return to his native village with a reputation for general
culture and polish. The others proposed to become
ulema and seemed to be sedulous and even enthusiastic
students.

These Syrians were pleasant, intelligent fellows, all
of them very different from the unkempt, semi-civilised,
creatures I saw in other dormitories ; and one felt sorry
that their alert brains were being wasted and fuddled
over the antiquated futility that passes for learning at
El-Azhar.

For this seminary has been the workshop and arsenal

208 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

of Moslem obscurantism. Modern science, modern
literature, modern history, modern philosophy were,
until quite lately, almost unknown. A little algebra
was taught, and, I believe, some astronomy, though I
fancy that in the latter branch of study the system is
that which was accepted before the age of Copernicus.
Lord Cromer tells an instructive story in this connec-
tion. He once, he says, asked the head of the univer-
sity whether his profession taught that the sun went
round the earth or the earth round the sun. The
learned person replied that he was not sure, that one
nation taught one way, and another a different way,
that his own general impression was that the sun went
round the earth, but that he had never paid much
attention to the subject, which in any case was too
unimportant to merit serious discussion.

The anecdote is characteristic of the whole spirit of
El-Azhar. It lives in the past ; it is hedged in by a
narrow formalism, and its main interest is in the
dogmas, the theology, and the traditions of Moham-
medanism. Some literary culture its pupils obtain,
and some ethical training; they may learn to write
that rich and varied language, the classical Arabic,
with elegance and precision ; and they are taught
respect for the moral virtues which Islam enjoins
temperance, justice, mercy, and patient endurance.
But the years which the 'Alim' spend in its crowded
cloisters are for the most part devoted to theological
formulae and religious studies. They learn by heart

THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHET 209

long passages, not so much from the Koran itself as
from the annotators and expositors of that book in the
second and third degree ; they pore over the commen-
tators on the commentaries. Or they read the lives
of Mohammed, and the lives of his wives, and com-
panions, and relatives, elaborate explanations of the
ritual of the mosques, intricate genealogical tables of
the descendants of the Prophet.

It is this kind of knowledge, laboriously acquired
and committed to memory, which, in the fulness of
time, qualifies a man to become an ulema, to leave the
courts of El-Azhar, and to go back to be a priest or
teacher or doctor of the law among his own people.
One class, when I visited the Liwan, was reciting in
monotonous recitative from the Koran ; another was
hearing a lecture on the different ceremonials to be
observed in fasting; another on the benefits, practices,
and effects of prayer ; another on the history of the
Prophet. I only noticed one which occupied itself
with anything approaching scientific studies, and this
was where an elderly sheikh was teaching a few youths
some elementary arithmetic.

The Principal of the El-Azhar University receives
a salary of about 1200 per annum, and is a highly
important personage, dividing with the Grand Mufti
and the Grand Kadi at Constantinople a sort of spirit-
ual headship of Islam, with the duty of safeguarding
the religious law and observances. With him and his
university the English in Egypt have little to do; it

210 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

stands outside our sphere of direct influence, nor does
the adviser to the Minister of Education, who keeps so
vigilant an eye on the other schools of the country,
control the curriculum of this huge theological seminary.
So long as they do not interfere with civil order and
justice, the 'Alim' of El-Azhar are free to prescribe
their own canons to their co-religionists in Egypt and
elsewhere.

The graduates of El-Azhar carry a great influence
all over the Moslem world, and are the missionaries
of the strictest orthodoxy and conservatism. Many
enlightened Mohammedans wish El-Azhar to be trans-
formed into a genuine modern university, with its
vast resources employed for more useful objects. They
would like to see the fanatical sheikhs supplemented,
if not replaced, by teachers properly trained in learn-
ing and science. But El-Azhar is immensely powerful,
it has a hold upon the whole body of priests and ulemas,
and it has a papal contempt for the temporal authority.
The present Khedive, a devout but progressive Mussul-
man, fully alive to the value of rational education, has
tried hard to reform El-Azhar, and has even threatened
to divert a part of the revenue it draws from the
Administration des Wakfs to the purpose of founding
a modern university. A serious quarrel arose on this
ground between his Highness and the Chief Sheikh,
and the latter dignitary was refused admittance at the
Khedive's levee, an event which caused a prodigious
stir in the native circles of Cairo. El-Azhar has

THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHET 211

remained too long a strange survival from the 'Ages
of Faith,' a picturesque embodiment of much that is
most characteristic of old-world Islamism, a bulwark
against the advance of that spirit of intellectual unrest
and inquiry which is invading Egypt and all the other
Eastern lands. But the energy and determination of
Abbas II have at length prevailed even in this strong-
hold of medievalism. In 1911 a new Law was pro-
mulgated by which a professional council of teachers
and educational experts was appointed to assist the
Principal, and the syllabus was enlarged by the addi-
tion of such subjects as geometry, hygiene, drawing,
and natural history; and 'the difference,' writes Lord
Kitchener in his Report of 1912, 'between the former
and the actual state of things in El-Azhar is already
very marked.' Twenty years hence, perhaps, the
professors of the ancient university of Islam may be
more interested in Mendel than in Mohammed, and its
students may be discussing the problems of sociology
more earnestly than the Lives of the Saints. But the
struggle for supremacy between the Progressives and
the Priests is not yet ended and it is likely to be severe.

CHAPTER XXII
THE OCCUPATION

EGYPT, according to Lord Milner, is xthe land of
paradox. You appreciate the force of that remark
at many points, but, perhaps, most of all when you
endeavour to come to close quarters with the political
system, which is full of the strangest contradictions,
the oddest contrasts between form and fact, the reality
and the conventional.

Here, for instance, is a curious illustration which was
brought before one, at the state receptions held by the
Khedive at the Mohammedan festival of Bairam and
a few other occasions, after Lord Cromer had left the
British Agency and before Lord Kitchener had taken
it up. These Khedivial levees are rather grand affairs ;
for his Highness is wealthy, and his court is carried on
with as much display of the ceremonial side of royalty
as that of most European sovereigns except one or
two of the greatest. The Diplomatic Corps is present
in its customary array of decorative man-millinery.
One could observe that ornamental company as it
filed past the Khedivial throne and made its bow to
his Highness. The envoys go in order of seniority of
appointment, according to established etiquette ; an
elderly Dutch gentleman, the representative of the

THE OCCUPATION 213

Queen of the Netherlands, first, then the others in
due order Spaniard, Austrian, Russian, German, and
the rest down to the smaller states of both Conti-
nents. Very nearly last of all you will notice a slightly-
built young Englishman, looking as unobtrusive as it
is possible for anybody to look in a laced coat and gold-
braided trousers ; he takes his place far down the line,
with Swiss and Belgians in front of him, and only a
Swede, of still more junior standing than himself,
behind. A stranger who did not know might think
him a person of no particular importance. But this
happened to be Sir Eldon Gorst, the representative
of Great Britain, the virtual ruler of Egypt, the head
of the whole administration, with far more authority
and much greater power than all the Khedive's minis-
ters put together. Technically he is only the British
Consul-General, accredited to the Court of the Khedive,
just as the others are. He can offer the Khedive
friendly advice ; so also can the Belgian or the Portu-
guese Consul. Only it is by no means certain that
their advice would be followed, whereas it is in the
highest degree improbable that the British Agent's
recommendation would be rejected.

This brings us face to face with the strange anomaly
of the whole political position in Egypt. There are
many people who imagine that the lower Nile Valley
is a dependency of Great Britain. It may be so -
more or less in fact ; in theory it is nothing of the
kind. Egypt in form is neither a dependency of

214 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

England nor is it an independent state. It is still
nominally a province of the Ottoman Empire. When
an Egyptian regiment is at drill you will hear its
English officers give the word of command to the fellah
conscripts and the negro soldiers in Turkish ; for this
army is theoretically a part of the armed force of the
Sultan of Turkey. The officers wear the Turkish
badge on their helmets ; the colour party carries a
Turkish ensign ; the generals actually receive their
commissions countersigned from Constantinople. The
theory does not bear much relation to the facts, nor is
the administrative or political life of Egypt affected
to any substantial degree by this fiction of Turkish
suzerainty. In practice, Ottoman control is limited
to the appointment of a resident Turkish High Com-
missioner in Cairo, a very dignified personage, who is
treated with much respect by everybody, and does
nothing at all except draw his pay rumour hints
that it does not always come quite regularly and
engage in a little vague intriguing. If Yildiz Kiosk
attempted seriously to interfere in Egyptian internal
affairs it would be peremptorily warned off. Still the
legal and diplomatic convention which regards the
country as a technically dependent province of Tur-
key is one of the factors in the international situation ;
and those responsible for its destinies have to take it
into account.

Except in so far as he is subject to the shadowy con-
trol of his suzerain, the Khedive is the sovereign ruler

THE OCCUPATION 215

of an autonomous state. Nothing that we have done
since 1882 is supposed to derogate from that position.
We have never established even a Protectorate over
Egypt. When we first blundered into the country,
it was not with the smallest intention of conquering
or annexing. We bombarded Alexandria merely to
save the lives of Europeans threatened by a military
rabble ; we sent Lord Wolseley with an army to
'restore the authority of the Khedive,' weakened as
it had been by the revolt of his mutinous colonels.
We have been restoring or maintaining the authority
of the Khedive ever since. Our few thousand troops
are not a British garrison ; they are merely the remains
of the 'Army of Occupation' left behind by Wolseley
to complete the work done at Tel-el-Kebir, and enable
the Khedive to preserve the public order. Our officers
in the Egyptian regiments and at the Egyptian War
Office are not in the British service : they are tempo-
rarily 'lent' to the Khedive to assist him in the drill
and discipline of his own army. Similarly, a number
of British civilian officials have been permitted to take
service under the Khedive so as to give his Highness
their aid in the conduct of his administration and the
management of his finances ; they are paid and em-
ployed by him, not by England. The Khedive remains
nominally the head of the executive and the supreme
power in the state. Every administrative decree,
edict, or act of legislation is supposed to emanate from
him. The actual Egyptian system is unique. We

216 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

have no record of anything quite resembling it in the
catalogue of modern constitutions and constitutional
experiments. There is one set of persons who carry
on the government; and another set of persons
who tell them how to do it. That, perhaps, may find
its parallels elsewhere. But the peculiarity here is
that the informal advisory Government has the mate-
rial and moral force behind it, so that if it withdrew
its support the other, the nominal Government, would
collapse. Thus the advice, when requisite, can always
take the substance, if not the form, of a command.

The anomalous situation would not have arisen if
we had chosen to make full use of the right which we
had acquired by the mailed fist in the beginning.
When Wolseley marched into Cairo, after the battle
of September 1882, he represented the only effective
force in the country. The Khedive had been virtually
deposed by Arabi's fifty thousand rebel troops ; and
Arabi's disorderly horde had been beaten and dispersed
by the invading army. The country was in our hands,
and we could have done what we pleased with it. The
obvious course seemed to be to hoist the British flag
on the citadel at Cairo, appoint an English Governor,
or declare the Khedive the Viceroy of the English
Sovereign, and quietly proceed to administer the whole
territory, under a hierarchy of British officials, on the
Indian model, to the great advantage of its inhabitants.
The proceeding would have involved a quarrel with
Turkey and probably with France. Still, in 1882,

THE OCCUPATION 217

with Germany encouraging us and Russia quiescent,
we might have faced the risk.

The other alternative was to rescue and retire.
Having smashed up Arabi, we might have stayed just
long enough to organise a new army for the Khedive,
and then left Egypt to 'stew in its own juice.' But
that would have led to further outbreaks, rebellions,
revolutions, another European intervention of some
kind. Egypt could not stand by herself.

We fell back on a compromise. We did not annex
and we did not retire. The Anglo-Saxon, says Lord
Cromer, asserted his native genius 'by working a
system which, according to every canon of political
thought, was unworkable.' And the line he took was
that he would do all that was necessary for Egypt
without accepting the responsibility of incorporating
it with his own dominions. 'He would not interfere
with the liberty of action of the Khedivial Govern-
ment, but in practice he would insist on the Khedive
and the Egyptian Ministers conforming to his views.
He would in theory be one of the many powers exer-
cising equal rights, but in practice he would wield a
paramount influence. He would occupy a portion of
the Ottoman dominions with British troops, and at
the same time he would do nothing to infringe the
legitimate rights of the Sultan. He would not break
his promise to the Frenchmen, but he would wrap it
in a napkin to be produced on some more convenient
occasion. In a word, he would act with all the practi-

2i8 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

cal common sense, the scorn for theory, and the total
absence of any fixed plan based on logical reasoning,
which are the distinguishing features of his race.'

The unworkable system worked mainly because it
was put in the hands of a body of exceptionally able
men. England had the good luck, or the good sense,
to entrust the destinies of Egypt at this critical stage
to a group of administrators of high ability and unusual
force of character. There were accomplished finan-
ciers, such as Sir Edgar Vincent, Sir Auckland Colvin,
and afterwards Sir Edwin Palmer and Lord Milner;
military organisers of the stamp of Lord Kitchener and
Lord Grenfell ; irrigation engineers like Sir Colin Scott-
Moncrieff, Sir William Garstin, and Sir William Will-
cocks ; above all, Lord Cromer himself, the great pro-
Consul, resolute, tactful, far-seeing, and inexhaustibly
patient, who never lost his temper or his nerve through
all the trials of a most trying time. Fortune helped
in another way. The situation, difficult for every-
body, was particularly difficult for the titular ruler of
Egypt. Perhaps, if he had been very strong, or self-
assertive, or impatient, it would have become quite
impossible. Luckily the Khedive, Tewfik Pasha, was
none of these things. He was in many ways an esti-
mable prince, exemplary in his private life, courteous,
kindly, intelligent, and humane. But his was an ami-
able, rather than a powerful, personality ; and the
weakness he had shown at the decisive moment, when
Arabi's mutinous regiments assembled before his

THE OCCUPATION 219

palace, was characteristic. His self-effacing and self-
distrustful modesty rendered it easier for him. to accept
the position forced upon him by events, and enabled
him to work, as a more vigorous sovereign might not
have done, for the common benefit of his shaken realm,
in concert with his able and rather masterful English
'adviser.'

His successor, the present Khedive, who came to
the throne young, capable, high-spirited, and ambitious,
naturally found it more difficult to accommodate him-
self to tutelage, and for some years there was much
friction between himself and his English counsellors.
But Abbas II. gradually reconciled himself to the sit-
uation, and found an outlet for his energies and his un-
doubted ability in schemes for promoting the material
and social welfare of his country and the development
of his extensive estates. So the system gradually
crystallised, and it has long since settled into the
established order of things, and operates smoothly
enough as a rule. But it still depends upon securing
a high level of personal capacity in the Anglo-Egyp-
tian hierarchy, and maintaining the tradition of the
famous bureaucracy of the 'eighties and 'nineties.

The compromise involves the keeping in being of a
full-blown native ministry. Each public department
has an Egyptian minister as its chief; there is the
Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, the
Minister of War, the Minister of Education, and so
on. To this functionary belong not only the emolu-

220 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

ments, but also the outward honours, of the office.
If you walk into the ministerial building in Cairo you
will find his Excellency treated with extreme respect,
seated in a handsome apartment, attended by a staff
of secretaries, guards, and ushers. When you leave
the Pasha's presence you may be conducted to a much
more modest room, where a care-worn Englishman
sits at a desk loaded with documents, and gives hurried
commands to clerks and messengers. He wears the
red fez on his head, but there is no sign of high official
rank about his person or his surroundings ; the Minis-
ter's portly native under-secretary looks more imposing.
This busy Briton is the adviser, nominally the subordi-
nate, of the high-placed chief of the department,
engaged, at a moderate salary, to assist him in his
work, and to supply such good counsel as he may be
required to offer. In fact, he is one of the links of
that chain of British influence which the Occupation
has drawn about the Egyptian Government. It is his
duty to see that the business of the office is properly
conducted, to suppress laxity and maladministration,
to insist on the right thing being done and the wrong
thing being avoided. He does not command. He
only says: 'I think it advisable that your Excellency
should issue such and such an order,' or 'I hear that
so-and-so has been grossly negligent, and I hope your
Excellency will think proper to reprimand him.' His
Excellency does not always comply with this admoni-
tion ; but if he refuses too frequently, or on sufficiently

THE OCCUPATION 221

serious occasions, the 'adviser' reports the matter to
his own real chief, the Prime Adviser, the British Agent,
who, if necessary, would carry it to the Khedive ; and
in that case the Minister might be faced by the alter-
native, se soumettre ou se demettre.

It is obviously a relation in which much depends on
the personality of the parties in it. The ideal position,
according to the views of some of the earlier Anglo-
Egyptian officials, was that the minister should have all
the dignity and leisure, and the adviser all the hard
work and the power. They would have been well con-
tent to allow his Excellency to sit in his room, smoking
cigarettes and reading a French novel, only occasionally
rousing himself to sign, without examining them, the
documents prepared for him by his English mentor.
Things do not invariably take that course; nor if
Egypt is to have any real training in self-government is
it advisable that they should. It may happen that the
Egyptian is the stronger member of the partnership.
There are departments of state in Cairo where this has
been the case. The minister has more initiative and
energy than the adviser, and the latter has yielded to his
influence. Tact, however, is required as much as
strength, if this arrangement is to be rendered tolerable.
An under-secretary, who was constantly quarrelling
with his nominal chief and putting pressure upon him,
would be so troublesome, not only in the office, but to
the Consul-General and the Home Government, that
some other sphere of usefulness would probably be
found for him.

222 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

It speaks well for the adaptability of Englishmen in
difficult circumstances that such cases have been rare.
The 'unworkable system' has been made a success by
good temper, knowledge of the world, and a single-
minded desire to promote the interests of the public
service. Due credit should also be given to the mem-
bers of the successive Egyptian Cabinets who have done
their best in a position which must have often imposed a
strain upon them. The strain proved too -severe for the
greatest native statesman of modern Egypt, the tal-
ented and intellectual Nubar, and it must always be a
little trying for any ambitious man of capacity and per-
sonal force. But of late years the Khedive's ministers
have usually found no difficulty in reconciling them-
selves to the arrangement ; and the best of them, though
they may sometimes chafe a little under the advisory
hand, acknowledge and appreciate the character of the
foreigners with whom they are compulsorily associated,
and on the whole get on very well with them.

CHAPTER XXIII
GOVERNING ELEMENTS, OLD AND NEW

FROM what has been said about the character of the
Occupation, it will be seen that to talk about England
'governing' Egypt is a misuse of language. We do not
govern Egypt ; we only govern the governors of Egypt.
From the beginning our idea has been that the actual
administration of the country should be left in native
hands, with a certain number of Englishmen to see that
things are properly done. Impatient critics have some-
times complained of this complicated system. Why,
they say, do we not obtain simplicity and efficiency at
once by abolishing it, and establishing a complete
British civil service, like that which accomplishes the
far more difficult task of managing the affairs of the
peoples of India ?

The reason is that we pledged ourselves not to annex
or incorporate Egypt ourselves, but simply to prepare
the Egyptians for self-government. It was a promise
given in haste and with an inadequate knowledge of the
facts. If we had known in 1882 all that we have learnt
since, it would assuredly not have been given at all.
But given it was ; and the policy it suggests has been
steadily kept in view. Honestly and laboriously we

223

224 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

have been trying to pave the way for complete internal
autonomy under native direction. When this will be
established it is impossible to predict. But it could
not be established at all if the bureaucracy were British,
even in its higher grades, any more than there is any
reasonable chance of instituting it in India. Therefore,
the provincial government of Egypt is entirely native.
The mudirs, or governors, are all Egyptians, and so are
their subordinates down to the omdehs, or headmen, of
the villages, and from them to the village policemen.
The English advise, and they inspect. The mudir
takes his orders from the Ministry of the Interior and
the Ministry of Finance. Both these departments have
a number of British inspectors, who travel round the
provinces, find out what the mudirs and police authori-
ties and revenue officials are doing, and report to Cairo
the result of their observations. Their reports come
before the English advisers at the various Ministries,
who go into them, and are supposed to see that action
is taken where necessary, and peccant provincial ad-
ministrators admonished, fined, or dismissed.

Thus, in the last resort, there is British control and
supervision ; but it is not direct British management.
Except in the Irrigation service a highly important
exception the Englishmen merely superintend and
report. The mudirs, the mamurs, or sub-governors,
and the hierarchy under them in every province, are
natives. Here we have a radical difference between the
condition of things in Egypt and the Sudan. In the

GOVERNING ELEMENTS 225

latter territory there are no native mudirs. At the
head of every province there is an Englishman as gover-
nor, who is directly responsible to the Governor-General
for the entire administration of his district. But then,
the Sudan is virtually a British dominion. Egypt is
not, and is not intended to be.

The arrangement, all things considered, is perhaps
the best that was possible under the circumstances, and
it works rather better than might have been anticipated,
though not without a certain amount of friction. One
of the great difficulties at the outset was that of person-
nel, for in the East everything depends on the man
rather than his office. When we came into the country
we found it badly in want of a satisfactory native gov-
erning class. The mass of the population, the genuine
Egyptian aborigines, are peasants, who have always
been ruled from above and usually from outside.
There was no middle class, except the mercantile and
professional community of the towns, largely foreigners
of one kind or another Syrians, Greeks, Armenians,
Italians. Then there are the Copts, who are sometimes
represented to be the genuine descendants of the ancient
Egyptians. In reality they are of the same race and
origin as the fellahin ; but having resisted the Mussul-
man conversion they did not intermarry with the Arab
immigrants, they were driven off the land, and, like the
Jews of the Middle Ages, they took to trade, and de-
veloped more intellectual interests than their agricul-
tural neighbours. They make excellent clerks, scrive-

226 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

ners, bookkeepers, surveyors, and minor officials of all
kinds. They are intelligent and industrious ; but they
are no more capable of assuming serious responsibility
or power than the peasantry, and being Christians they
are not suitable persons to exercise authority over a
Mohammedan community.

There are a certain number of well-to-do landowners,
scattered over Egypt, who constitute something in the
nature of a squirearchy. Some of them are the descend-
ants of prosperous fellahs, who did well, laid by money,
added more and more feddans to their holdings, un-
til they became rich men with large estates. Such a
landowner would sometimes leave the untidy village
street, build himself a good house on his own land, with
his barns and stables and servants' quarters about it,
and live the life of a country gentleman in a moderate
fashion. It is that life to which the Egyptian really
aspires when he follows his own instincts ; and even
the townsman wants to get land if he can. Merchants,
tradesmen, officials, like to invest their savings in real
property. I met a young clerk in one of the public
offices in Cairo who had been educated at an American
mission school and spoke English well. He was three-
and-twenty, and, of course, married and a parent. He
told me that he had saved enough out of his salary to
buy a small estate in the Delta. His wife and children
and his mother-in-law and an uncle managed the farm,
and he went down there himself during the long summer
vacation when most of the Cairo offices go to sleep.

GOVERNING ELEMENTS 227

Everybody, indeed, in an Egyptian town seems to
have an interest in the land. The Berberine servant
who acts as chambermaid in your hotel is probably the
tenant of a tiny patch of earth, with a date palm and a
mud hut; and there he labours during the summer and
autumn, leaving his family to look after it when he
comes down to Cairo in the cool season to gather the
piastres of the stranger. And the trader who has made
money will often own an estate worth thousands of
p.ounds, left in charge of an azar or bailiff,whose accounts
he will check from time to time. Such a man, when he
retires from business, may himself set up as a country
gentleman, even as prosperous shopkeepers do else-
where. This class has increased since the Occupation.
Land is a better investment than it ever was, and it is
more secure. Trade has been extraordinarily prosper-
ous, the banking system has developed, and, above all,
it is now safe to be rich. A man can have a good house,
and exhibit the outward signs of wealth, without the
risk that his superfluity will be squeezed out of him by
tax collectors, or extorted from him as bribes by the
retainers of the Pasha. It is no longer necessary to
conceal all evidence of means, live in ostentatious
penury, and bury your money, if you have any, in a hole
in the earth. That is one of the reasons why land is
more sought after than ever, and why the boom in real
estate attained such gigantic proportions.

Some of the old-fashioned Egyptian squires, who have
been settled on their estates for a generation or two, and

228 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

farm their own land, are much looked up to by their
poorer neighbours, and exercise a good deal of influence.
They seem to have many of the characteristic qualities
which belong to their condition. I became acquainted
with a patriarch of this kind who was an estimable old
gentleman. He lived in a great, whitewashed, untidy
old house, with large, bare rooms on the ground floor,
and latticed apartments above in which his women-folk
abode. He told me, by the way, that his wife had
never been downstairs or set foot outside the house, had
never, in fact, moved beyond the confines of her second-
storey prison, for twenty-five years. This proprietor
was a rigorous Mohammedan of the old school, very
particular in the performance of his religious observ-
ances, and in the habit of getting up at an unearthly
hour of the morning to say his prayers. But lie was
alive to modern progress in agricultural affairs, and
farmed with a certain amount of science, attending
carefully to the rotation of crops and paying much
attention to drainage. There was nothing of the
aristocrat about him ; he spoke to the peasants on terms
of absolute equality, and treated even a minor native
official of the Public Works Department with ceremoni-
ous deference. He was a mine of information about all
agricultural matters, and though he could barely read
he managed the complicated accounts of his estate by
an efficient rule-of-thumb method of his own. He com-
plained bitterly of the depredations of his nazar, but I
do not think that this functionary could often have got

GOVERNING ELEMENTS 229

the better of him. He had a shrewd and humorous
judgment of things in general, and much enjoyed a joke.
Towards the English he was, on the whole, friendly,
acknowledging freely the benefits the Irrigation Depart-
ment had conferred upon the country, and the improve-
ment in the revenue administration.

But the sturdy old Moslem could not get over the fact
that we were Christians ; he had been brought up to
regard Christianity as a religion fit only for Coptic clerks
and Greek moneylenders and other low persons. I
asked him what would happen if we were to abandon
Egypt, and he admitted frankly that it would be a great
misfortune for people like himself. 'We should have
the Turks back again,' he said ; and he did not like the
Turks, and gave me a catalogue of their iniquities.
'But they were Moslems,' he added.

It was these Turks, or Turco-Egyptians, who formed
the real governing element in Egypt before our inter-
vention, and, to some extent, they do so still. They
constituted the military caste, the higher official hier-
archy, and the greater landowners, having possession
of the large estates which the Khedives had granted to
their favourites and successful ministers. Egypt, even
under the dynasty of Mehemet AH, was a subject
province, ruled by Turkish conquerors. Political power
and social importance belonged to the Osmanli, includ-
ing in that term Circassians and Albanians ; and the
Egyptians were regarded as a subjugated, inferior,
population.

230 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

Nothing could exceed the contempt with which the
natives of all ranks were treated by those who were, or
supposed themselves to be, of the Ottoman race ; and
even now, though they have lost their power, they retain
their insolence. Before 1882 most of the pashas and
provincial governors were Turks, and the administra-
tive oppression was accentuated by the fact that it was
carried on by a class who considered themselves the
masters of the country. This was the case even with
the Turco-Egyptians, whose ancestors had been in the
country for a century or more, and who had long lost
all touch with Constantinople. But they still looked
upon the Calif as their political, as well as their spiritual,
head, and still regarded themselves to some extent as a
foreign garrison.

We have cut the claws of this class ; but they are still
influential. The blood of the masterful, fighting race
tells ; and the Turk, even with a good strain of Arab or
Egyptian in him, retains a certain energy and vigour
of character which give him the ability to command.
Twice in the course of my visits to great estates belong-
ing to European land companies I was introduced to
native intendants or managers, who seemed to be men of
much administrative capacity one of them even had
English subordinates, to whom he gave orders ; and in
each instance I learned that they were of Turkish origin.
It is these Turco-Egyptians who still hold a good many
of the places in which initiative and willingness to accept
responsibility are required. From this stock sprang

GOVERNING ELEMENTS 231

Riaz Pasha, probably the ablest statesman of modern
Egypt, except Nubar, that subtle and versatile Arme-
nian. The mudirs and mamurs of the provinces, and the
police commandants, are largely Turco-Egyptians, some
of them the sons or grandsons of the men who filled
similar offices in a different fashion before the
Occupation. They are better so engaged, under British
inspection, than in leading the life of pleasure in Cairo
and Alexandria, with much more doubtful Western
assistance, or sulking on their estates, dreaming venge-
fully of the bad old days.

The Egyptian Turk is not too fond of us. With the
individual Englishman he can sometimes get on pretty
well, for between the Englishman and the Turk there
are points in common, both coming of a vigorous stock,
that has Imperial instincts and traditions. But for the
English rule the Turk has small liking, even though he
may himself be doing well under it. I heard the Occupa-
tion bitterly condemned by an Albanian officer in the
Egyptian army, who had fought bravely under Kitche-
ner and Grenfell, and bore on his breast a whole row of
medals as proofs of his exploits. Yet this man, who had
served faithfully under the English, and had been re-
warded and honoured for doing so, wished us away, and
talked of Egypt for the Egyptians : meaning Egypt for
himself and his kindred. The feeling of the 'Turk' is
intelligible. He knows that he has more ruling capacity
than anybody in the country except ourselves. If we
left, he believes he would have the upper hand once

232 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

more, get all the good places and the dignified offices,
and make himself comfortable in the ancient high-
handed fashion. He cannot be expected to cherish any
affection for an administrative system which puts him
on the same political level as his former serfs and sub-
jects, and makes no more of a pasha than if he were an
Armenian storekeeper. So he grumbles at the English,
and looks vaguely towards Constantinople, ignoring
the fact that the little finger of the Sultan and the
Young Turks, if once they really got hold of the country,
would be thicker than the loins of the 'Ingleezi,' with
no particular regard shown for Osmanli blood. He
probably would not be allowed to 'boss' the country
again ; but he thinks he would and could, and naturally
resents his supersession.

CHAPTER XXIV
GOVERNMENT BY INSPECTION

THIS is the correct description of the system which
prevails in Egypt under the British occupation. It is
government by inspection and authoritative advice.
We leave the administration so far as may be in native
hands ; but we tell the native administrators what they
ought to do, and we provide European supervisors to
see that they do it.

At headquarters in Cairo this control is fairly close
and constant, because there we have the European
adviser in daily and hourly contact with the chiefs of
the departments and their subordinates. But outside
the central administration there is no such division or
delegation of powers. The mudirs are supposed to be
the responsible governors of the provinces, with the
entire local civil and police hierarchy under their com-
mand. They have no English advisers, but there are a
number of English inspectors, who travel about the
country, visit the mudiryehs, the revenue offices, the
police stations, the prisons, and have the right to 'call
for papers,' to inquire into alleged abuses or miscarriages
of justice or failures to comply with the requisition of
the ministries, and generally to overhaul the proceedings

233

234 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

of the provincial and municipal administration. It is
the inspectorate which prevents the local machinery
from slipping back into the old grooves, and enables the
British Agent and his staff to keep in touch with it -
more or less.

The more or less depends to a considerable extent on
the character and capacity of the inspectors. In the
early days of the Occupation they had to be drawn from
such sources of supply as were available on the spot.
Some were military men ; some officials who had served,
in one capacity or another, under Ismail or the Dual
Control ; some private individuals who had been long
in Egypt and had become acquainted with the country
and the natives. The Egyptian civil service, it must be
remembered, had been a good deal leavened by Euro-
peans French, Italians, English even before the
Intervention. Ismail, though he preferred the French,
had some liking for Englishmen in positions of respon-
sibility. A story was told me of one of those English
employes of the Khedive by his son, himself in the ser-
vice of the present Egyptian Government. The Eng-
lishman, a retired naval officer, had an important ad-
ministrative department under his charge, and was
liked and trusted by Ismail, who treated him with
familiarity. After serving for some years, much to the
advantage of the public interest, he thought he was en-
titled to an increase of his moderate salary, and made
the request to the Khedive by word of mouth. 'How
much do you think you ought to have ?' asked Ismail.

GOVERNMENT BY INSPECTION 235

The Englishman suggested an addition of four hundred
a year to his emoluments. 'And what is the entire
budget of your department ?' inquired the Khedive.
'Over 80,000,' was the reply. 'My dear Captain,'
said his Highness, 'you have 80,000 a year passing
through your hands, and you cannot get four hundred
for yourself without coming to me about it ? What
strange people you English are, to be sure.'

Some of the rather miscellaneous collection of persons
who formed the official hierarchy at the outset turned
out magnificently and did admirable work. But it was
largely a matter of chance, and there were some failures.
The Anglo-Egyptian Civil Service is now recruited in
the regular fashion I have already described in dealing
with the Sudan. Likely candidates are nominated by
the authorities of the English universities, their quali-
fications are considered by a Board of Selection com-
posed of high officials, and the best of them are chosen
to fill the annual vacancies. There is a large field to
choose from, for the Egyptian service offers sufficient
pay, a career, a pension, a fair climate, and abundant
holidays, all which things are naturally attractive to the
youth at Oxford and Cambridge, balancing perhaps
between a clerkship in Whitehall and the teaching of
cricket and the Latin grammar to schoolboys. Plenty
of candidates present themselves ; and it is the fault of
the Board of Selection if they do not get young men of
the right stamp, or as near it as our ancient universities
can supply.

236 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

I have said something about these young gentlemen
as they develop in the Sudan under military tutelage.
In Egypt their functions are at once easier and more
difficult. They are freed from the strain of dealing,
often unsupported and alone, with tribes of savages
in a country, conquered but hardly as yet subjugated.
On the other hand they have to grapple with the prob-
lems of an older and more complex society, and to
maintain their authority with civilised Orientals,
sometimes of exceeding astuteness. For a young man
of five- or six-and-twenty, who a year or two before
was a sort of grown-up schoolboy, to tackle a wily
old mamur or sheikh, learned in all the learning of the
Egyptians, is no easy task. And in Egypt there is
scant opportunity of giving the young civilian the
prolonged preliminary training which is imparted to
the neophyte in India. The service is a small one, and
there are practically no subordinate posts to be filled by
Europeans. The junior sub-inspector, after a very
few months' apprenticeship under a senior man, has
to be sent on his rounds, and he at once assumes the
responsibility of supervising dignified and high-placed
native functionaries double his own age. He has to
conduct his correspondence and his verbal intercourse
with them in a difficult foreign language, and under
conditions with which it takes years of close observa-
tion for most Europeans to grow familiar. His duties
are delicate as well as responsible, and much tact,
temper, judgment, and firmness are needed to perform

GOVERNMENT BY INSPECTION 237

them properly. For the inspector is not the direct
official chief of the governors and district magistrates,
who carry on the local administration, and have the
police and subordinate officers under their command,
and the people under their thumb.

The system is a makeshift, and I have heard it criti-
cised unfavourably by some experienced Europeans
in Egypt. One able man, who knows the country
thoroughly, condemned it because it hampered the
mudirs too much in minor matters, derogated from
their dignity, and made it difficult to get the right
kind of native gentleman to accept the office. The
mudir, as the representative of the Khedive, and the
local head of the administration, is a big man in his
province, entitled to a great deal of the consideration
and outward respect which the Oriental loves. But
it is not easy for him to conserve his status when a
young English civilian may come in at any moment to
'sit upon' his Excellency, overhaul his accounts, inves-
tigate his proceedings, and hear complaints against
him from his own subordinates.

My friend told me that one mudir complained to
him especially of the interference of the inspectors in
trivial matters ; he could not, he said, dock a clerk of
two days' pay for unpunctuality without being taken
to task for it by the inspector. How, he asked, could
he maintain his authority and enforce discipline in
these circumstances ?

Nor is this minute inspection always effective, for

238 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

the local officials can usually baffle the inspector, if
they choose, and render his inquiries to a large extent
nugatory. What, indeed, can the latter do, especially
if he is young, not altogether familiar with the col-
loquial Arabic, and unversed in the ways of the people ?
Let us say that an alleged case of police corruption,
or an unpunished crime, has been brought to the notice
of the Ministry of the Interior. An inspector is ordered
from Cairo to investigate and report, and he informs
the mudir that on such and such a day he will visit
that potentate's seat of government and go into the
matter. 'O, Hamed Mustapha,' says the mudir to
his confidential assistant, 'behold the Ingleez Bey,
Jon-ess mister, cometh to make a report. Let us see
to it, my brother, that he learneth those things which
it is fitting for him to know.'

In due course Jones, B.A., appears, and is received
with all suitable respect. The mudir is delighted to
see him ; very glad indeed that the Effendim at Cairo
are inquiring into that matter which has been the cause
of so much anxious thought to himself and his vigilant
staff; most desirous to assist the inspector in his la-
bours in fact, has had all the papers prepared to
save him trouble. The inspector glances through a
formidable bundle of documents, and makes what he
can of them with the assistance of his translator. He
questions the mudir, who deeply deplores the unfortu-
nate incident which has occurred. He himself has
spent sedulous days and nights over it, and after much

GOVERNMENT BY INSPECTION 239

cogitation has framed, with the assistance of Allah, a
theory on the subject. Would the inspector deign to
hear it ? The inspector listens to the explanation,
which may perhaps strike him as rather thin. But
when he comes to examine the other witnesses, the
mamurs, the secretaries, the magistrates, the police,
and the village headmen, he finds that they all support
the mudir's version of the case with singular uni-
formity. He may have his doubts ; but what can he
do ? The officials are in daily contact with the local
chief, they are dependent upon him for all sorts of
small favours, and they have good cause for not wish-
ing to incur his displeasure. The inspector is a
stranger ; he is not in touch with them, and they have
no reason to offend their magnate for the sake of a
person who will presently go away and forget them.
Jones must be a man of unusual penetration if he is
able to get behind the story which has been prepared
for him, or to compile a report which tells more of the
truth than it is considered desirable for him to ascer-
tain.

Another Anglo-Egyptian of great experience, with
whom I conversed on this subject, was so much im-
pressed by the difficulties of government by inspec-
tion that he advocated its abolition and the substitu-
tion of direct British responsibility. He thought
that an English mudir should be appointed in every
Egyptian province, as is the case in the Sudan ; or,
if that is not done, that at least the native mudir

240 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

should be provided with an English adviser, according
to the precedent adopted at the central ministries.
His view is that the tradition of corruption and mal-
administration has not yet been eradicated, and will
not be for generations to come ; and, that being so,
it is hopeless to expect good government in Egyptian
hands. But then he is one of those Englishmen who
have the profoundest distrust of all 'native' honesty
and competence ; and he gave me lurid tales of the
manner in which bribery is still attempted, even of
European officials, and of the rooted disbelief in ad-
ministrative integrity.

For my part, I do not agree with him. I know that
jobbery and mismanagement are not confined to the
East, and examples of it have been met with as far
removed from the Nile as Poplar and St. Louis. If
minor officials in the Egyptian irrigation service some-
times accept douceurs and connive at evasions of the
law, so also do minor officials in English and American
municipalities. The old Egyptian bureaucracy was a
bad one, not because the men in it were Orientals,
but because they were Orientals inadequately con-
trolled, irregularly paid, and employed by a venal and
capricious despotism. Pay the Oriental properly,
keep him under strict supervision, and make it his
interest to be honest, and I dare say he will be about as
upright as most other imperfectly educated men with
no exalted ideal of public duty, which, after all, in most
countries is only the possession of the few.

GOVERNMENT BY INSPECTION 241

At any rate the expedient of enlarging direct British
action is not likely to be adopted. The tendency is
the other way. Instead of still further reducing the
powers and responsibilities of the mudirs and their
councils, it is probable that they will be extended. Lord
Cromer was on the whole satisfied with the progress
made by these officials during the closing years of his
tenure of office. Some of them still exhibit too much
of the slackness and laxity of the old regime ; but they
are assimilating the new methods, and some of the
younger governors are far more capable and efficient
than their predecessors. The time has not yet come
for withdrawing such check as is enforced by the exist-
ence of the inspectorate ; but I think that in the
future the numbers of the inspectors will be diminished
and their activity curtailed, and every effort made to
render the mudir really responsible for the adminis-
tration of his province and to judge him by the results.
If he needs assistance it may be given by providing
him with a strong provincial council, formed of the
leading men of his district. Lord Cromer's later
policy was to place in native hands all the functions
which natives could be trusted to perform, and the
policy is likely to be carried farther under Lord
Kitchener. That indeed is the only means by which
Egypt can be prepared for the self-government which
it is the ultimate object of the Occupation to confer
upon her.

CHAPTER XXV
HALTING JUSTICE

THE most unsatisfactory feature in the condition of
modern Egypt is the administration of criminal justice.
The opponents of the British Occupation point exult-
ingly to the fact that in a prosperous and improving
country, with a population, on the whole, docile, sub-
missive, and peaceable, life and property are less
secure than they used to be in some provinces of Euro-
pean Turkey. This insecurity is most noticeable in
the Delta, which ought to be, one would think, a region
very easily policed, for it is made up of flat fields and
little open villages, with no mountains, swamps, or
forests in which evil-doers can take refuge ; and,
though there are a certain number of predatory Bed-
ouins about, the great majority of the villagers are
quiet, hardworking peasants. Yet in the Behera
province, and other parts of the Delta, crimes of vio-
lence are far too numerous. Arson, robbery, and
murder decrease very little, and assaults upon women,
homicidal attacks, house-breaking, forgery, cattle-
poisoning, and other offences tend to increase ; and
some old residents have assured me that in this respect
the state of the country is no better than it was under
Ismail and Said.

242

HALTING JUSTICE 243

Englishmen are not often the victims of personal
violence, partly because there are very few of them in
the small towns and villages, partly because those who
are there know how to protect themselves, and it is
not deemed safe to meddle with them. Europeans of
some other nationalities do not share this immunity ;
Greeks and Italians have been murdered or robbed,
even in the suburbs of Alexandria.

A great proportion of the crimes reported (consider-
ably more than half) go unpunished, and everybody
knows that many serious offences are committed in
the villages which are never reported at all ; and
again many notorious criminals when brought to trial
before the native courts are acquitted. In the last six
months of 1911, out of eighty convictions in cases sent
up to the Courts of Assize by the committing magis-
trates, for wilful murder with premeditation, only three
sentences of death were pronounced. Human life is
held strangely cheap, and homicide is often the result
of incidents of the most trivial character. 'A man
who expostulated with his neighbour for crossing the
end of his garden was murdered the same afternoon
for no other or better reason.' 1 'Comparatively few
murders are committed or attempted for purposes of
robbery, and the majority may be ascribed to revenge,
feuds, questions of women, or sudden quarrels arising
from motives of which it would be difficult to exag-

1 Lord Kitchener, Reports on Egypt and the Sudan, 1911 and 1912, pp. 31
and 35.

244 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

gerate the futility. Thus in Assiut a woman is murdered
for refusing to give a glass of water, a man for taking
a handful of flour. In Behera a man is killed for
allowing his sheep to eat in a neighbour's clover ; in
Gharbia another for fishing in a drain ; in Girga a
third because his son stole a date, and a girl is mur-
dered for purloining a head of maize.' l In the great
cities there has been a steady growth of crime, and in
Cairo, with its large sprinkling of cosmopolitan rascal-
dom, there were 454 murders and other grave offences
in 1912 as compared with 344 in 1910. Society in
Egypt, in town and country alike, is still somewhat
imperfectly protected against evil-doers.

This is partly due to the inadequate numbers of the
police force. There are only 8290 policemen with 434
officers for the whole of Egypt; and of the officers
only 62 are English. These sixty-two Englishmen
have to keep order and suppress crime among twelve
millions of people, scattered in thousands of villages
about the Delta, and stringed out along the course of
the Nile, with the desert handy on either side for fugi-
tives and marauders, or packed into the bazaars and
swarming alleys of the cities. No wonder they find
they have rather too much on their hands. Lord
Kitchener is endeavouring to improve matters in the
rural districts by organizing the ghaffirs or village
watchmen into a sort of local gendarmerie, giving them

1 Lord Kitchener, Reports on Egypt and the Sudan, 1911 and 1912, pp. 31
and 35.

Photo by l>iitncti. ( airo.

THE KHEDIVE.

HALTING JUSTICE 245

regular police training, and some military drill and
instruction in the use of arms. There are over forty
thousand of these ghaffirs, under their own special
officers and the general authority of the omdehs, or
village headmen, and a good deal is expected from
their efforts under the new system.

To the ordinary Nile tourist nothing of all this is
visible. But some hints of it will speedily be brought
before any visitor who spends a short time in the
Delta towns and villages. I went into the living-room
of an English bank manager, and observed that he
had a small armoury of firearms, rifles, and Mauser
pistols, as well as sporting guns. I said I did not know
there was any big game in that part of the country.
He smiled, and said that one might possibly need a
weapon, in certain eventualities, for other purposes
than that of sport. He added that in the town in
which his branch was situated there was a good deal
of floating ruffianism and loose rowdyism, imperfectly
controlled by the police, who were regarded with con-
tempt and inspired no terror. One could never tell,
he observed, whether some incident might not pro-
duce an outbreak of this disorderly element, and in
that case it would be as well to be able to defend
oneself.

It is a sure sign of insufficient police protection when
private individuals take to carrying arms, as they do
in the city of Paris and certain portions of the United
States of America. My friend the bank manager told

246 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

me that many officials and other residents in the rural
districts thought it advisable to have a weapon handy.
He said that he had met the omdeh of the neighbour-
ing village and found him going his rounds girt with a
belt that supported a business-like looking revolver.
Asked why this defensive apparatus was necessary,
the headman replied that he often had to carry con-
siderable sums of money with him, and was always
liable to be attacked by Arab footpads or village
ruffians. This was in the heart of one of the richest
and most populous agricultural districts in the world.
It is not increasing poverty which has led to increasing
crime here.

The causes are of another kind. The police, be-
sides being weak in numbers, work under many dis-
advantages. They were organised as a quasi-military
force, and in the early years of the Occupation they
did good service under direct English command. There
was much open defiance of authority, the dregs of the
Arabist rebellion were still simmering, and there was
soldiers' work to do. Everybody in Egypt knows
how one iron-handed Briton dealt with disaffection
and disorder in a perturbed district. 'Will you under-
take this job ?' said his superior. 'Yes, if you will
give me a free hand.' 'You can have as many men,'
said the Chief, 'and, within reason, as much money
as you want; and I shall ask no questions. But you
have got to keep this province quiet. If you succeed
- well. If you fail, there is an end to your career.'

HALTING JUSTICE 247

There was no failure ; and in a couple of years that
province showed as clean a crime-sheet as Bedfordshire.
To-day brigandage and robbery are again rife there.
The gendarmerie has been turned to civil police duties
under chiefs who are not, as a rule, police experts.
The mudir, nominally responsible for the security of
the province, has no control over the parquet ; and
his authority is liable to be weakened by the inter-
ference of the English inspector, who may know noth-
ing whatever about police work, and sometimes knows
very little about the people and the district. The
police, too, are largely independent of the civil adminis-
tration. Neither the Ministry of the Interior nor the
local authorities have the right to see a proces verbal
after it has come into the hands of the parquet. This
separation of powers sounds rather well theoretically ;
but in practice, where the police are often timid and
sometimes corrupt, it works badly and allows many
criminals to be at large who ought to be in gaol.

Another difficulty is that the Egyptian habitual
criminal does not mind going to prison, now that he
is no longer flogged when he gets there. On the
contrary, he is well fed, well lodged, properly clothed,
and generally provided, with more creature comforts,
with more food, warmth, light, ventilation, than he is
accustomed to enjoy when at large. 'It certainly
looks,' says the Judicial Adviser to the Khedivial
Government in a recent Report, 'as if our very hygienic
and up-to-date Egyptian prisons hold few terrors for

248 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

the criminal classes of this country. The problem is
even more difficult here than in Europe, where a
certain moral stigma attaches to imprisonment which
is practically non-existent here. We can only hope
that, with the advance of education and other civilis-
ing influences, the disgrace in question may, in time,
be more keenly felt and imprisonment become more
deterrent than it evidently is at present.' It is cer-
tainly not easy to make prison strongly 'deterrent'
to a person who regards a short sojourn in gaol as an
agreeable and inexpensive rest-cure.

More than all this is the fact that the Egyptian peas-
antry do not understand the modern method of ad-
ministering criminal justice, and do not co-operate
with it. We have introduced the principle of English
law which requires that a person, even if known to be
guilty, shall not be punished unless his guilt can be
proved in open court by the evidence of witnesses.
This is alien to the Eastern temperament, and so is
that tenderness for abstract justice which would rather
see six criminals escape than condemn one innocent
man. When a crime is committed in an Egyptian
village the circumstances are, as a rule, matter of public
notoriety. Everybody knows who the offender was ;
there is probably not a human being in the entire pre-
cincts who could not denounce the author, account for
his motives, and describe his crime off-hand. But be-
fore that criminal can be convicted he must be tried
in open court, and his guilt proved by the testimony

HALTING JUSTICE 249

of witnesses. Now the witnesses will not appear if
they can help it, and if they are summoned they are
not anxious to give evidence against the prisoner;
for there is no certainty in their minds that he will be
condemned, and if he is acquitted they know very
well that he will have a score to settle with those who
have endeavoured ineffectually to get him punished.
The reluctant witness may be a peaceable farmer, the
accused a more or less violent ruffian who will not
scruple to take his revenge. The villager does not see
why he should incur these risks and inconvenience to
oblige the State, which will not trouble to protect him
when the trial is over. Besides, it is no affair of his
to bring criminals to justice. The Effendim should
perform that duty without the assistance of private
individuals. Thus it is that witnesses cannot be
procured, even in flagrant and notorious cases of
murder, and that offenders, caught almost red-handed,
escape punishment.

The Ministry of the Interior makes some attempt to
deal with this state of things by imposing an extra
police tax, according to the Indian precedent, on a
village in which there is much unpunished crime. This,
it is assumed, will give the whole population an interest
in waging war against malefactors and overcome the
reluctance to give evidence. It does not always work
that way. In an Arab village, near, a house where I
was staying in the Delta, two travelling hawkers had
recently been robbed and murdered. The omdeh,

250 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

himself one of the Arab villagers, was called upon to
produce the murderers, whose identity was known to
every man, woman, and child in the place. He pro-
fessed his inability to do so, and thereupon was ordered
to enrol half a dozen extra watchmen, and pay them
the regulation number of piastres out of the village
funds. The omdeh induced six of his own friends and
associates to accept these offices, with an understand-
ing that on receiving their salaries they should give
them back to him to be redistributed among the en-
lightened ratepayers. Thus the administrative pres-
sure was not felt, and the penalty inflicted on the
peasant population was rendered nugatory.

A rather curious appendix to the story was the
attitude of the inhabitants of a small outlying hamlet
attached to the village. These people were not Arabs,
but Egyptian fellahin. They protested that they had
nothing to do with the murder, which had been ar-
ranged by the Arabs, possibly with the connivance of
their omdeh and the sheikhs, who, at any rate,
had made themselves accessories after the fact. The
hamlet dwellers did not feel called upon to denounce
these wrongdoers to the authorities, but they did not
see why they should suffer for their misdeeds, and they
stoutly refused to recognize the increased police-tax
or contribute to it in any way.

In these matters Egypt is suffering, like other Orien-
tal countries just now, through the transition from the
old ways to the new. We have endeavoured to adapt

HALTING JUSTICE 251

the procedure and the principles of Western law among
a people who have not yet assimilated its spirit. Under
the ancient dispensation criminal justice was rough
and ferocious. Still, it did manage to keep down
violent crime by the effectual method of striking terror.
The law might not be loved, but it could make itself
felt in a forcible fashion when the occasion arose.

If a murder was reported to the Pasha, and he con-
sidered it advisable, or was requested from Cairo,
to make an example, he acted without undue formality.
He came down to the village, and called upon the omdeh
to produce the murderer forthwith. The headman,
probably knowing all about the crime, delivered up
the criminal if he could, and the Pasha promptly hanged
him ; or, if the right man was not available, the omdeh
surrendered somebody else to the gallows. If the
omdeh could not find anybody within a reasonable
time, the Pasha very likely hanged him, caused several
of the principal residents to 'eat stick,' ordered his
zaptiehs to seize some portable property or cattle as
a fine on the community at large, and went away.

This very arbitrary conduct had at any rate the
effect of reminding the villagers, with dramatic em-
phasis, that murder was a proceeding which might
involve unpleasant consequences for somebody, or
perhaps everybody; and that the commission of mur-
der was, therefore, an indulgence which, in the general
interest, should be kept within due limits. It was
not ideal justice, and no trouble was taken to obtain

252 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

conclusive evidence of guilt. The innocent often
suffered, but the guilty did not always escape ; and
it was not left to the private individual to assist the
law as a witness at his own personal inconvenience and
risk.

The old system cannot be commended ; but it was
probably not a whit more distasteful to the people
than the one we have put in its place. We cannot, of
course, go back to the traditional Oriental method.
We can only hope that the blessings of the Western
procedure will gradually gain comprehension and
sympathy. And in the meanwhile we must take pains
to render the administration of criminal justice as
effective as it can be made under the conditions, and
a great deal more effective than it is at present.

CHAPTER XXVI
SOME RECENT REFORMS

IN the preceding chapters I have said something of
the defects which mar our administrative record, some-
thing of the difficulties which still remain to be sur-
mounted. Yet, taken as a whole, the record is one to
which we are entitled to turn with satisfaction. In the
recent history of our race there is no chapter more
creditable than this of our relations with the peoples of
the Nile basin during the past thirty years. That
space of time, brief enough in the life of nations, al-
most covers our occupation of Egypt and our control
of its affairs. And within it a small number of British
statesmen, soldiers, civil officials, engineers, and edu-
cationalists have performed a work of organization
and reconstruction which cannot easily be overpraised.
Nothing that England has done in Asia, and Germany
or France in Africa, has been so swift, so certain, so
unquestionably beneficial to the world at large and to
the populations immediately concerned.

At' the opening of the eighties of the last century
Egypt lay, as it were, waterlogged and half-derelict,
rolling heavily across the track of international politics.
In the later years of Ismail it had become a bad example

253

254 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

of Oriental misgovernment, rendered worse by a veneer
of Western extravagance and vulgarity. Ismail's
palaces and railways and boulevards and theatres
and steam-yachts, his caravanserai of wives and concu-
bines, and the brigades and batteries he quartered on
the Sudan, or threw away in Abyssinia all these had
to be paid for by millions of ill-fed, overworked, and
ruthlessly plundered peasants. It was the fellah,
grubbing in the Nile mud, and dabbling in the wasted
and unbridled Nile flood, who in the last resort bore
the burden alike of Turkish pashadom and cosmopoli-
tan usury. These kept their fangs buried fast in the
luckless country, even when Ismail was cleared out,
not because he had spoiled the Egyptians, but because
the bondholders were afraid he might begin to spoil
them. The rich lands of the Delta and the river banks,
which once fed the populace of Rome with corn, and
are now feeding the mills of Lancashire with cotton,
could barely find a living for their own inhabitants.
The concessionnaire, and the foreign middleman,
waxed fat, under the shelter of the international con-
ventions and jurisdictions which the Powers had ex-
torted from the weakness of the Sultanate and the
insolvency of the Khediviate. Military insubordina-
tion had followed social disruption, and three very ordi-
nary colonels might have overthrown the government,
and restored the regime of the Mamelukes, if England,
as usual in 'a fit of absence of mind,' had not muddled
into armed intervention at the critical moment.

SOME RECENT REFORMS 255

It was one of our lucky blunders. It saved Egypt
from France, from the Turks, to some extent even
from the bourses ; it placed us securely astride the
short route to India ; it eventually created for us a new
empire in the Sudan, and rescued that great area from
anarchy and barbarism ; it initiated the regeneration
of the Nile valley, financial, economic, political, so
that now, while those who were young when the process
began are not yet old, the country is more prosperous,
more stable, more progressive, more honestly governed
than it has been for many centuries. In the last few
years, lit by the fires that have flared from continent to
continent, throbbing to the march of armies and the
movement of world-diplomacy, we have left our men
to do their work on the Nile almost unnoticed. But
the work has gone on, quietly and steadily, though with
many checks and set-backs ; and if we take stock of it
to-day we see that the process of reform is maintained,
and that with every year that passes we are doing
something to redeem the promise with which we
entered upon military occupation of the Khedivial
dominions. We are preparing the Egyptian people
for self-government and self-realisation ; though not
in our time, or for, long afterwards, will the goal be
reached.

Not long ago, among the papers 'presented to both
Houses of Parliament by command of His Majesty,'
was one headed 'Egypt, No. 3 (1913),' which I have no
doubt was consigned, for the most part unread, to

256 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

numerous legislative and editorial waste-paper baskets.
Such is the fate of the greater part of that invaluable
material for the writing of history which His Majesty's
Stationery Office discharges with wasteful profusion
upon an unregarding world. But 'Egypt, No. 3
(1913),' was worth a glance if only for its authorship.
It was a 'Despatch from His Majesty's Agent and
Consul-General at Cairo' --that is to say, from the
leader and administrator who has written his name so
deeply, not only upon the sands of North-East Africa,
but also upon the soil of Europe and Asia. Fourteen
years ago Lord Kitchener was called away from the
Nile to play his part on the greater stage of affairs,
to break down the Boer resistance in South Africa, and
then to command the armies of India. But now,
after a long absence, he is back in Egypt, not as the
strategist and war-lord, but as the supervisor of eco-
nomic and political reforms ; and in the two concise
Annual Reports, in which he gives an account of his
stewardship, we can discover how far Egypt has gone
on the road to stable nationhood since Major Kitchener,
R.E., was commanding the Egyptian cavalry when
Wolseley dragged his slow column up the Nile nine-
and-twenty years ago.

Egypt, when Lord Kitchener took over the British
Agency at Cairo in July 1911, was under a political
cloud. The three previous years had been marked by a
good deal of economic depression, the natural and in-
evitable result of the excessive inflation of the preceding

SOME RECENT REFORMS 257

period which culminated in the collapse of the great
speculative boom of 1907. The public revenue was
increasing and the general resources of the country
were untouched ; but the banking and business com-
munity was in disorder, and there were numerous
failures. This disturbance of the financial atmosphere
may have helped to render Egypt more easily respon-
sive to that wave of unrest which passed over the
Mohammedan world after 1908. The operations of
the Young Turk Committee affected all Islamic coun-
tries more or less, and in Cairo the Committee had its
agents in close touch with the groups of semi-educated
young native agitators who were equally opposed to the
Khediviate, as the representative of Turkish autocracy,
and the British control, as the embodiment of alien
and Christian domination. Sir Eldon Gorst's liberal
and conciliatory attitude, and his well-meant efforts
to extend the sphere of local self-government, had been
misinterpreted, as he himself mournfully acknowledged,
into 'an attempt to pacify the Nationalist agitation
by ill-timed concessions and an intentional diminu-
tion of British authority.' In February 1910, Boutros
Pasha, the Coptic Prime Minister, was murdered by
Wardani, a young Nationalist, and the trial of the
murderer gave occasion for many demonstrations of
Mussulman fanaticism and anti-English feeling. It
was discovered that a seditious society, in intimate
relations with the Young Turk Committee, was in
existence in Cairo. The connection of these agitators

258 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

with the abortive plot to murder the Khedive, the
Premier, and Lord Kitchener himself, in July 1912,
was not open to much doubt.

The appointment of Lord Kitchener at this juncture
was an exceedingly wise step. Sir Eldon Gorst was an
accomplished and high-minded administrator and an
able financier. But his amiable temperament, his
unobtrusive manner, his rooted objection to all methods
that bore even the appearance of harshness, his dislike
for the assertion, or even the show, of autocratic au-
thority, had created a somewhat unfortunate im-
pression. He had seemed a little wanting in that
energy of character which Orientals expect in their
rulers. The imputation would clearly not lie against
the resolute soldier who had overthrown the Khalifa
and humbled the Boers. Everybody in Egypt knew
that Kitchener was a strong man, the sort of man who
would 'stand no nonsense' if it came to the point; and
nothing could have been more salutary for the Farid
Beys, the Shawishes, and the fluent young persons of
the Cairo and Constantinople press and the Swiss
congresses, than to find themselves confronted by one
who had been the master of many legions, and had
wielded the sword as well as the pen. Lord Kitchener's
presence at the Cairo Agency was the most practical
commentary on Sir Edward Grey's statement in the
House of Commons that no attempts to weaken the
British control would be of the slightest effect. It
showed the agitators that England still meant business,

SOME RECENT REFORMS 259

and that 'Committee' methods would not work in
Egypt.

Lord Kitchener, however, took a sedate view of the
matter. He knew that the activity of the cosmo-
politan, and more or less denationalised, agitators did
not really express the sentiments of the great mass of
the population. Egypt was not 'seething with dis-
affection,' though there was more yeasty fermentation
among the articulate minority of the large towns than
is good for an Eastern people. On this subject he spoke
a few plain words in his first Report. The excitement,
he wrote, caused by the 'totally unexpected action of
Italy, in declaring war against the Turkish Empire
and proceeding to invade Tripoli and Cyrenaica,' was
widespread and deep; but 'notwithstanding the
mischievous efforts of some of the more irresponsible
native newspapers, the people of Egypt have displayed
the most praiseworthy self-restraint .... Egypt was
declared neutral, and that neutrality has been strictly
maintained by Egyptians, who have thus shown an
admirable devotion to duty, law, and order, in spite of
the intensely sympathetic and religious feelings raised
by the long struggle which has been going on so close
to their own frontier.'

The same conditions prevailed the following year
under circumstances of still greater provocation. The
past year had been one of considerable anxiety owing to
the war in the Near East. On the war itself Lord
Kitchener does not offer any comment beyond one

260 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

significant sentence : 'Defective military arrangements
appear to be responsible for the breakdown of one of the
finest fighting armies that existed in the world.' But as
to the internal agitation in Egypt we read :

I am glad to be able to report that political feeling in other
respects has lately been much calmer, and that the considera-
tion of practical reforms for the good of the country has
apparently become more interesting to the majority of the
people than discussions on abstruse political questions
which are unlikely to lead to any useful result. On returning
to Egypt after a long absence I have been forcibly struck by
the fact that the formerly homogeneous body of intelligent
Mohammedan inhabitants, who constituted a collective
community based on fixed social laws, is now split up and
divided into parties and factions of a political character.
Whatever the value of a party system may be in Western
political life it is evident that its application to an intensely
democratic community, the essential basis of whose social
system is the brotherhood of man, combined with respect for
learning and the experience of age, is an unnatural proceeding,
fraught with inevitable division and weakness. The develop-
ment and elevation of the character of a people depends
mainly on the growth of self-control and the power to domi-
nate natural impulses, as well as on the practice of unobtru-
sive self-reliance and perseverance, combined with reasoned
determination. None of these elements of advance are as-
sisted in any way by party strife. Calm and well-considered
interest in political affairs is good for both the governed
and those who rule; but factitious interest, generally based
on misrepresentation and maintained by party funds and
party tactics, does nothing to elevate or develop the intelli-
gent character of an Oriental race. 1

1 Egypt, No. I (1912), p. 2.

SOME RECENT REFORMS 261

It is not through politics that salvation will come.
'The future development of the vast mass of the in-
habitants of Egypt depends upon improved condi-
tions of agriculture, which, with educational progress,
are the most essential steps towards the material and
moral advance of the people.' Lord Kitchener, having
restored confidence in the existing system and the
authority of the law by making it plain that all attempts
at disorder would be met by stern repression, has
devoted himself to agrarian and educational reforms.
He has been the friend of the fellah, of that ignorant,
enduring, invincibly laborious cultivator, who has
wrung a subsistence from the dry soil and wet brown
mud of the Nile land through all the changes of the
ages. 'The fellah,' says Lord Kitchener, 'remains
the same as he has always been, one of the best and
most hard-working types of humanity, somewhat
conservative, like most cultivators, and hardly real-
ising the changes that have taken place around him.'

He has been slow to understand that it is possible
for him to get not merely too little water, which has
always been his standing anxiety, but too much.
We have so improved the irrigation machinery that
the farmer has become careless and extravagant in his
use of the fertilising flood. Much of the land has
become waterlogged, especially the newly-reclaimed
Delta areas where there is no natural drainage, and
the crops have been injured. Cotton pests have arisen,
and the cattle decreased through want of sufficient

262 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

nutriment; so that in 1911, though more land was
under cultivation, the harvest was a poor one. Lord
Kitchener set to work to remedy these defects. The
peasants were taught to husband the water supply,
drainage operations were extended in the Delta, and
measures taken to extirpate the cotton parasites and
destructive insects. More careful selection of the
plant was found to be requisite ; and as the poorer
cultivators often found it difficult to obtain good seed
from the merchants, who sold them inferior varieties
at high prices, the Government now supplies the fellah
with the article he requires at a reasonable price.

Another great reform is the establishment of halakas,
or official markets, in which the cultivators can sell
their cotton. During the past year halakas have been
established throughout the cotton-growing areas of
Egypt, with a view to protecting the small cultivator
from fraudulent practices, and in order to bring into
closer contact buyers and local sellers, who are thus
enabled to carry out their transactions at fixed centres,
under circumstances tending to a more regular and
orderly conduct of business. These halakas are paid
for by, and are under the direct control of, the various
local Councils, provincial or municipal, inspection of
their general working being carried out by the Ministry
of the Interior through the medium of a British inspec-
tor. The official weighing machines placed in them
are periodically inspected and tested by inspectors
attached to the Department of Weights and Measures.

SOME RECENT REFORMS 263

The general working of the halakas is thus described :
An enclosed space about an acre in extent is taken in a
suitable position, in the centre of which the official
weighing machine is erected, and, in a prominent posi-
tion, a notice-board is placed, on which is daily marked
up in large figures the opening price of ginned cotton,
received by telegram from an agent in the Bourse in
Alexandria ; should there be a rise or fall of more thin
five piastres during the morning a further telegram is
received and posted up notifying the change. In
addition to this a circular is dispatched every afternoon
by the National Bank of Egypt at Alexandria giving
the latest prices of all the various kinds of cotton and
of seed. This notice is displayed at the markets in a
conspicuous position. The small farmer throughout
the country is thus informed of all the latest prices of
cotton in Alexandria, and is no longer obliged to rely
on information gathered from interested parties. A
fee of five milliemes a kantar is charged on cotton en-
tering the halaka, and this amount goes to meet the
expenses incurred by the Councils ; the owner can
then have all his cotton weighed free on the official
weighing machine, or he can, if he wishes, have a few
bags weighed, for verification purposes only, before
or after they are weighed by the purchaser. Next
to the manager's office is placed a branch of the Savings
Bank, in which the seller can deposit any money he
receives, should he wish to do so, and there are also
store-rooms to be rented.

264 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

The scheme, as might be expected, has met with
considerable opposition from the small merchants.
In some places they have combined in refusing either
to enter the halakas or to purchase cotton that has
passed through them. But the enterprise is welcomed
by the honest buyers as giving them a fairer chance of
competing in the market with their less scrupulous
rivals, and several of the representatives of the largest
cotton-dealing firms in the country have given practical
and substantial support to the halakas.

A more important reform is that which is called the
Five Feddan Law. It is intended to protect the small
cultivator, the man who farms five Egyptian acres or
less, from having his land, house, or farming utensils
seized for debt. The principle is that of the Homestead
Law in the United States, and of that which makes
the 'bien de famille insaisissable' in France; it is also
that of the Punjab Land Alienation Act in India. The
protection of the poorer peasants in this manner was
rendered necessary by the action of the small foreign
usurers who, scattered throughout the country in the
villages, and financed by various banks, were able,
with the support of the Capitulations, to lend money
on mortgage to the fellaheen at exorbitant rates of
interest. Not even a country as agriculturally pros-
perous as Egypt can stand such a burden indefinitely,
and the inducements held out to the fellah to take the
first step into debt were temptations few could resist,
with the inevitable consequence that, once in the

SOME RECENT REFORMS 265

clutches of the moneylender, there was no escape for
the victim until the whole of his property became so
involved as to bring about his expropriation. It is
the standing evil which attends on peasant proprietor-
ship everywhere, in Ireland, in Hungary, in Roumania,
in Bengal, and all wise governments do their best to
guard against it by making it difficult or impossible
for the peasant to expropriate the holding without
which he cannot exist. But with five acres free of
debt it is considered that the fellah can live in comfort
and bring up his children properly; and gradually
he may learn to do without the local usurer, put his
money into the savings banks, and raise funds when
he needs them by getting advances on his crops from
the Agricultural Bank of Egypt, which lends under
government restrictions, and is not allowed to exact
extravagant interest.

These social reforms are probably of more value to
the people at large, at the moment, than the remodelling
of the legislature and electorate which is provided by
the new Organic Law promulgated in July 1913. The
importance of this belongs to the future rather than
the present ; it is an extension of the principle, always
kept before us since the beginning of the Occupation,
that the Egyptians ought to be allowed as large a
share in the general and local administration of the
country as they seem able to exercise with advantage.
Lord Dufferin's famous Report, which initiated the
new system, recommended that certain representative

266 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

'Institutions' should be established, though for the
purpose of criticism, discussion, and suggestion rather
than to legislate, or to control the executive. The
Legislative Council, constituted under the Organic
Law of 1883, was a consultative body of thirty members,
of whom fourteen were nominated by the Government.
It examined the budget and new laws, and communi-
cated its opinion on these matters to the Government,
which, however, is not bound to accept its advice.
The General Assembly included the members of the
Legislative Council, the six Ministers, and forty-six
elective members. It had nothing to do with legis-
lation, but no new direct personal or land tax could
be imposed without its consent, and no public loan
contracted. The General Assembly has never shown
itself a very practical or judicious body, and one of its
recent exhibitions of bad temper and bad policy was
the rejection of the very necessary and beneficial pro-
posal to extend the concession of the Suez Canal Com-
pany after the existing concession expires.

Under the new Organic Law the General Assembly
disappears, or, rather, it is merged in the Legislative
Council, which is reconstituted with enlarged powers
and membership as the Legislative Assembly. This
body will have eighty-nine members, of whom sixty-six
are elected. The country is divided into a number of
approximately equal circumscriptions, each sending
one representative to the Assembly, chosen by second-
ary election, through 'electors delegate,' one for every

SOME RECENT REFORMS 267

fifty inhabitants. The six Cabinet Ministers are
ex-officio members of the Assembly; and in addition
the Government nominates seventeen members, under
a proviso which obliges it to make its selection in such
a manner as to secure that certain classes and races
have a minimum representation in the Assembly.
Thus the Copts will always have four representatives,
the Bedouins three, the merchants two, the doctors
two, and the engineers one. This is a judicious pro-
vision which might be introduced into some other
constitutions. Why should whole orders and pro-
fessions be virtually deprived of political power, as
they must be under purely local representation ?
Moreover, the members of the Legislative Assembly
must be elected by an absolute majority of votes, so
that a second ballot is taken if no candidate obtains
the requisite number at the first poll. 'This system,'
says Lord Kitchener, 'is clearly preferable to that of
the relative majority under which, by reason of the
scattering of votes among a number of candidates, the
election often results in a very imperfect representation
of the electorate.' To which we may say to Lord
Kitchener's countrymen, De te fabula. As a con-
stitutional reformer there might be scope for the energies
of the British Agent in Westminster as well as Cairo.

The new Legislative Assembly, like its predecessors,
has restricted powers. It is still held that legislation
and administration are the functions of the Executive
Government ; the Ministers are responsible to the

-268 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

Khedive, not to the Assembly ; the laws will still be
enacted by Khedivial decrees, drafted and issued with
the concurrence of the British Agent. But the As-
sembly has now enlarged opportunities for influencing
legislation. It may initiate a project of law, l sauf en
ce qui concerne les lois constitutionnelles,' and may send
it up to the Council of Ministers. If the Council
approves, it returns the draft Bill, with or without
amendment, to the Assembly for public discussion ;
it can reject the proposal if it thinks fit, but it must
notify the Assembly of the reasons for its decision.
In the ordinary way laws will be laid before the
Assembly by Ministers ; if the Assembly disapproves
the proposal, a conference must be held ; and if no
agreement can be reached at this meeting the question
is adjourned for fifteen days, at the expiration of which
period the draft, in its original form or amended, must
again be submitted to the Legislature. If there is
still a difference of opinion, the Government, on the
initiative of the Cabinet, may dissolve the Assembly
and call for another general election ; or it can, if it
pleases, promulgate the proposed law without further
discussion, though not without explaining to the
Assembly the reasons for overriding its opinion. The
ultimate word in legislation, it will be seen, remains
with the Khedivial authority. But the new procedure
will ensure at least three public discussions by the
Legislative Assembly and one private conference with
Ministers, whenever there is a disagreement between
the Government and the Assembly concerning a project

SOME RECENT REFORMS 269

of law. 'It may be anticipated with some confidence
that a project which has been the subject of such
prolonged discussion will not be promulgated by the
Government against the wishes of the Legislative
Assembly unless there are weighty reasons for such a
course ; while the lengthy debates to which such a
project has given rise, and its promulgation, if it is
considered to have successfully stood the test of so
much discussion, may be taken as a safe guarantee
that the law is really sound.'

In this way the more educated and influential mem-
bers of the Egyptian community are acquiring a gradual
association with the business of public affairs. The
Government is still nominally absolute; it keeps high
politics and the final control of legislation and adminis-
tration in its own hands. But if it does not recognise
the existence of a 'Sovereign People,' it consults its
subjects, it hears their views, it is open to receive
remonstrances and suggestions from those who are in
contact with the life of the towns and villages. And
that is the Oriental version of 'democratic ideas'; it
is all that Eastern tradition, so far as it has been kept
clear of Occidental influences, expects from a just and
enlightened ruler; it is probably as much in the way
of representative institutions as Egypt can at present
safely stand. But it is a step in advance, a further
stage in the political training of the Egyptian nation.
If the Legislative Assembly uses its present oppor-
tunities judiciously, it may eventually be entrusted
with larger powers and fuller responsibilities.

CHAPTER XXVII
THE DRAG ON THE WHEEL

THE regeneration of Egypt is still hampered by the
fetters clamped upon the country in the past. The
Khedivial Government and its English advisers have
to carry on their administrative and reforming duties
under the vexatious international restrictions from
which they have not yet succeeded in disembarrassing
themselves. Even if the Legislative Assembly were
clothed with the fullest parliamentary prerogatives,
as we understand them in Western communities, it
could not be a 'sovereign' legislature; it could not
pass laws which would be enforced throughout Egypt
and bind all its inhabitants ; nor can the Khedive
and his Council of Ministers ; nor could the British
Government if it so far departed from all its practices
and professions as to make the attempt. For Egypt
is still held in the clutch of the Mixed Tribunals and
the Capitulations ; and though she has now, under
the Anglo-French Convention of 1904, almost resumed
her financial and economic freedom, she remains in
humiliating tutelage as regards the administration of
justice and the exercise both of legislative and execu-
tive authority. The horde of foreigners and foreign

270

THE DRAG ON THE WHEEL 271

subjects are exempt from the jurisdiction of the Egyp-
tian courts and largely freed from the restraints and
obligations of the ordinary Egyptian laws. The
Mixed Tribunals, established by Nubar Pasha in 1876,
at the time when the hand of the European creditor
lay heaviest upon Egypt, decide all civil suits in which
European subjects or Americans are parties. And
these courts are independent of the Government,
which can neither appoint nor dismiss the judges, who
are nominated by eleven European Powers, great and
small, and by the United States. They also try cer-
tain penal cases, and offences against the bankruptcy
laws in which foreigners are concerned. If a foreign
subject is accused of a crime he is not amenable to the
Egyptian Parquet, but is brought before the court of
his own Consulate, which may or may not have a
competent judicial officer to deal with him.

It follows from this arrangement that the Mixed
Tribunals really exercise a dispensing authority over
Egyptian legislation, civil and criminal ; for the judges
not only interpret the law but they decide whether
they will accept and administer it. If they choose
to hold that any Khedivial decree is ultra vires or con-
trary to the Capitulations, or otherwise unsatisfactory,
they can and do ignore it. Almost every act of the
Government is done on sufferance, since there is no
means of compelling the Mixed Tribunals to recognise
and obey it. In fact the judges of the Tribunals can
make such modifications of the law as they please

272 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

by agreement amongst themselves, while the Govern-
ment is powerless to interfere with them. These
judges have now been constituted a regular legislative
committee with authority to legislate for foreigners;
but any Power, however trivial its interests in Egypt,
may object to an amendment of the existing mixed
codes, and cause indefinite delays.

This new scheme of legislation for European residents
is regarded by Lord Kitchener as 'a notable advance
on the previous state of affairs one, indeed, which
has cost the Egyptian Government, and more partic-
ularly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a very consider-
able effort.' But it still leaves the judges with power
to make the law which they themselves are supposed
to interpret, and it still places the Egyptian Executive
at the mercy of irresponsible nominees, appointed by
a dozen external authorities ; so that it cannot be
considered as 'more than a temporary makeshift, and
a more or less satisfactory palliative of the legislative
impotence under which the country has suffered so
long.' Thus the important Five Feddan law, of which
mention has been made, could not have come into
operation if the Mixed Legislative Council had refused
its assent ; for many of the moneylenders affected by it
are Greeks, Italians, and other foreigners.

The Consular criminal jurisdiction is also a nuisance
and sometimes a scandal. Here, for instance, is a
suggestive passage from the Report :

THE DRAG ON THE WHEEL 273

WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC

Under the limits imposed on their activity by the Capitula-
tions, the Egyptian police have done their best during the
year to cope with this deplorable evil. Over noo girls of
minor age have been met on disembarking and handed over
to various authorities who accept responsibility for their
welfare, while others have been rescued from vice and con-
signed to the charge of institutions fitted to take care of them.
In certain cases coming within the jurisdiction of the native
tribunals, heavy sentences have been passed for instigating
or facilitating the debauchery of minors. It is to be hoped
that the recent visit of Mr. Alexander Coote, the Secretary of
the International Bureau for the Repression of the White
Slave Traffic, to this country may help to organise and
strengthen the societies which already exist here for this pur-
pose. In present circumstances, however, as the trade is
carried on, not by Egyptians, but by foreigners, who are only
subject to their own special jurisdictions, it is impossible for
the Egyptian Government to deal effectively with the
situation. 1

It must also be remembered that it is not only for-
eigners who are amenable to this extra-territorial jus-
tice. The Mixed Courts try all civil suits in which
one party is European and the other native. There
are Egyptian judges in all these courts, sitting with
the European lawyers who are appointed on the nomi-
nation of their respective Governments. So a native
proprietor who may have a dispute with a European
land company or its agents knows that, if the quarrel
comes to be fought out by litigation, he will have to

1 Egypt, No. i (1913), p. 36.

274 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

go to the Mixed Courts, that is to say to what is practi-
cally a foreign tribunal administering a foreign system
of law. He will require the assistance of French-speak-
ing counsel, acquainted with European codes and
procedure ; and he may be carried into legal depths
which he would never have to sound if he could take
his case to the local mudir's court with the assistance
of an advocate familiar with colloquial Arabic. The
whole process is so complicated and expensive that
poor natives cannot resort to it, and they probably
suffer some amount of injustice from the less reputable
class of Europeans in consequence.

Lord Kitchener does not, however, suggest the com-
plete abolition of the mixed jurisdiction. He thinks
that it is still necessary for the due protection of the
very large financial interests held by foreigners in
Egypt. But the Tribunals need thorough-going reform.
For one thing they are no longer so well conducted as
they used to be in the early days of the Occupation ;
they do not command the services of judges of the
high stamp of Sir John Scott and his French colleagues,
nor have they quite the same reputation for indepen-
dence or for effectiveness. Moreover they are dominated
by principles, which we do not recognise in the British
Empire, and are entirely opposed to the English and
American judicial and administrative spirit.

The Mixed Courts bear witness to the influence of
the French ideas which prevailed in Egypt all through
the middle portion of the nineteenth century. They

THE DRAG ON THE WHEEL 275

imported the French institution of the Parquet, and
the French conception of the entire magisterial and
judicial body as a department of state. The judges,
the magistrates, the crown lawyers, and public prose-
cutors, the collective Parquet, are a legal hierarchy, a
portion of the executive machine. The judge often
takes upon himself the main burden of bringing a
criminal to justice, and extracting, by his own inter-
rogatories, that 'confession' to which the Parquet
attaches so much importance. This is not the English
view of the proper functions of the bench, and it does
not fit in with the political ideas we are endeavouring
to implant in the minds of educated Egyptians. The
present Judicial Adviser has suggested that various
changes in the organisation and procedure of the courts
should be introduced. But here the Egyptian Govern-
ment is met by the old trouble. Nothing can be done
except by negotiation with a bevy of Foreign OfBces
which cling obstinately to their lever for interfering
with the affairs of Egypt. 'I regard it as very unfor-
tunate,' says Lord Kitchener, 'that political opposition
should prevent the adoption of reforms in these courts
which the responsible Government of the country
considers essential.'

Unfortunate it is ; but it is one of the misfortunes
from which Egypt can never be completely liberated
so long as she continues to be burdened by the Ca-
pitulations.

Every reader of the books and official publications

276 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

on Egypt must be very familiar with this name. The
thing confronts one at every turn in the literature of
the subject, and it has hampered and obstructed us
constantly since the beginning of the Occupation.
British officials have found it the worst possible ob-
stacle in their path, and the most serious drag on their
efforts.

Most people know roughly what the Capitulations
are ; but it is only the resident in Egypt who is fully
aware of the manner in which their mostly baneful -
influence is exercised. The Capitulations are the
treaties and conventions which give Europeans in the
East the right of exemption from the local tribunals.
In Turkey and Egypt they date back several centuries.
They are a testimony, not to the weakness, but to the
power, of the Ottoman Empire in the past. Moham-
medanism, in its haughty disdain for the Christian
dogs, had no legal system which could apply to them;
the law of Islam was too sacred to extend its protection
to infidels. The European Powers were, therefore,
allowed to arrange that if their nationals committed
crimes their own Consular representatives should try
the offenders. It was a valuable privilege in times
when the Christian in the Moslem territories was
scarcely treated as a human being ; and it has been
jealously maintained and extended as the numbers of
European traders and settlers in the East increased.
When we took the affairs of Egypt in hand we found
that pretty nearly every civilised Power, small and

THE DRAG ON THE WHEEL 277

great, had a Capitulation in full working order for its
own subjects. Thus there was, and is, an imperium
in imperio, or rather some twenty-three of them.
Every Consul is the privileged protector and guardian
of a number of persons who owe no allegiance to the
nominal head of the state, and stand outside the ad-
ministration of justice by his officers. If a foreigner
commits a crime he cannot be arrested by the Egyptian
police, nor may he be brought up before an Egyptian
judge, and tried by Egyptian law. The police or the
aggrieved party can only bring him before his own
consular court. And before he can be punished it
must be proved that he has committed an offence,
not only against the law of Egypt, but against the law
of his own state, or at any rate against such local law
as the consular authorities agree to recognise.

In the old days this privilege was jealously asserted
by the Powers whose subjects were settled as residents
and traders in Egypt, as in other parts of the Turkish
Empire. There was a legitimate distrust of local
justice and its administration. No European cared
to be at the mercy of magistrates and police, who might
be corrupt, and were certain to be ignorant of Western
legal principles ; and who were bound to obey any
ordinance issued by a despotic Oriental government.
Without the protection afforded by the Capitulations,
foreign traders could hardly have found it possible to
carry on business in Egypt at all; and the existence
of the European mercantile community was, on the

278 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

whole, advantageous to the country, and could not
be easily dispensed with. Thus the Capitulations had
their uses so long as Egypt remained under purely
native rule. But since the influence of a Western
Power has prevailed at the centre of authority, and
permeated the entire political organism, they are
scarcely necessary, and, on the other hand, they lend
themselves easily to abuse and disorder. The Egyptian
police may not always deal successfully with native
offenders ; but with foreigners their difficulties are
more serious. They cannot even punish trifling in-
fractions of their own regulations without so much
trouble that they often decline to make the attempt,
and prefer to let the peccant alien escape the penalty
of his misdeeds.

In England and elsewhere a driver of a vehicle who
disobeys the police orders as to the speed limit in cities
or the rule of the road is summarily disposed of. In
Cairo, a lively young Frenchman, anxious to test the
paces of his new motor-car, dashes through the crowded
outlet of the great Nile bridge, sends donkeys and
loaded camels scurrying in alarm out of their course,
endangers the lives of pedestrians as he cuts round a
corner on his wrong side, and finally impinges upon a
loaded trolley, and pulls up, having done some damage
to woodwork and human limbs. If he were a native
Effendi the police would arrest him, hale him before a
magistrate, and have him duly fined or imprisoned.
As a European, they can only take his name and

THE DRAG ON THE WHEEL 279

threaten him with proceedings before his consular
court. In a case like this they would probably succeed
in getting the offender punished that is, always sup-
posing his conduct constitutes a breach of the French
code as well as a violation of the Egyptian police rules.
But suppose there is some doubt in the matter, and
the foreigner feels himself the victim of a grievance ?
Naturally the first person he goes to for redress is his
Consul, who is more interested in assisting his fellow-
countryman to get out of a difficulty than in further-
ing the ends of Egyptian justice.

In the consular courts of the greater Western Powers
there is, of course, no sort of disposition to use the
international privilege in order to shield vulgar crimi-
nals ; indeed, I have heard Englishmen aver that this
judicial impartiality is carried so far that an accused
British subject might sometimes have a better chance
of acquittal if he were tried before the native judges.
But certain of the other consulates are less particular.
Their main object is to protect and serve their own
nationals, even if these happen to deserve small in-
dulgence from society and the law. It is common
knowledge that illicit pursuits and immoral practices
have been carried on more or less openly under the
shelter of the Capitulations. A horde of Greeks,
Levantines, Italians, Algerians, Maltese, and non-
descripts of all kinds descended upon Egypt in Ismail's
time, and many of them or their descendants are there
still, all prepared to claim the protection of a foreign

28o EGYPT IN TRANSITION

flag. The smuggler of hashish, the keeper of a gambling
hell, the seller of poisoned intoxicants, the owner of a
night-house, may belong to this body of persons. In
the interests of public security and order the authori-
ties ought to be able to suppress or coerce them
promptly and effectually. But the cumbrous Capi-
tulation system ties their hands. They cannot act
without the concurrence of the Consuls, and they are
not allowed to exercise the ordinary powers with which
the police are armed against the criminal and disorderly
classes. The European scoundrel defies them, and
he is supported by his diplomatic agency, which will
not allow international rights to be pared away, even
at the risk of encouraging international ruffianism.
And in our efforts to reform Egyptian justice and
diminish crime we are constantly brought up against
this solid barrier of alien privilege.

The true remedy is the abolition, or rather the modi-
fication, of the Capitulations, on which it is under-
stood that the Government has again quite recently
approached the European Powers. 1 If the Capitula-

1 'A short time ago a Russian subject was, at the request of the Consular
authorities, arrested by the Egyptian police and handed over to them for
deportation to Russia. I am not familiar with the details of the case, neither,
for the purposes of my present argument, is any knowledge of those details
required. The nature of the offence of which this man, Adamovitch by
name, was accused, as also the question of whether he was guilty or innocent
of that offence, are altogether beside the point. The legal obligation of the
Egyptian Government to comply with the request that the man should be
handed over to the Russian Consular authorities would have been precisely
the same if he had been accused of no offence at all. The result, however,
has been to touch one of the most tender points in the English political

THE DRAG ON THE WHEEL 281

tions were abandoned, the Mixed Tribunals could
be swept away and replaced by native courts, in which,
for some time at least, European judges or assessors
would be employed as well as Egyptians ; and the
whole vexatious system of international interference
in domestic legislation would disappear. The Capitu-
lations, valuable enough so long as Egypt was involved
in Turkish misrule or local chaos, are obsolete now
that she has a stable government and an enlightened
system of law and administration. But whether our
diplomacy can succeed in the requisite process of bar-
gaining remains to be seen. France would not object,
for her acquiescence seems to be implied by the Treaty
of 1904. l But it is different with some others of the

conscience. It has become clear that a country which is not, indeed, British
territory, but which is held by a British garrison, and in which British in-
fluence is predominant, affords no safe asylum for a political refugee. With-
out in any way wishing to underrate the importance of this consideration, I
think it necessary to point out that this is only one out of the many anomalies
which might be indicated in the working of that most perplexing political
creation entitled the Egyptian Government and administration. Many
instances might, in fact, be cited which, albeit they are less calculated to
attract public attention in this country, afford even stronger ground for
holding that the time has come for reforming the system hitherto known as
that of the Capitulations.' Lord Cromer on 'The Capitulations in Egypt'
in the Nineteenth Century and After, July 1913.

1 The clause of the Anglo-French Agreement, which was at first kept
secret, but has now been published, runs as follows :

'In the event of their [His Britannic Majesty's Government] considering
it desirable to introduce in Egypt reforms tending to assimilate the Egyptian
legislative system to that in force in other civilised countries, the Government
of the French Republic will not refuse to entertain any such proposals, on
the understanding that His Britannic Majesty's Government will agree to
entertain the suggestions that the Government of the French Republic may
have to make to them with a view of introducing similar reforms in Morocco.

282 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

large and little Powers, who will not give up their last
political foothold in the Nile Valley, and their oppor-
tunity for bringing pressure to bear on the de facto
rulers of Egypt, without some consideration. More-
over, they can always urge with plausibility that they
have no guarantee for the permanence of the existing
situation. For to them Egypt is still a semi-inde-
pendent State, tributary to the Ottoman sultanate.
We are not formally responsible for its destinies ; we
are, it may be repeated, only temporarily providing
the Khedive with some British troops to assist him in
keeping order, and with a British Consul-General
and a few other officials who are kind enough to give
their 'advice' to his Ministers. You are, the Foreign
Offices may say, pledged to terminate your Occupa-
tion some time ; it may suit you, for what we know, to
redeem your pledge ten years, or two years, hence,
and then our subjects will need the safeguard of the
Capitulations as much as ever.

The unanswerable reply to all such contentions would
be to dismiss the fiction of a temporary Occupation
and declare boldly that Egypt is a British Protectorate,
and that the British Empire is, and will remain, re-
sponsible for its external safety and its internal order.
It is on the whole creditable to the self-restraint of
English diplomacy that it has forborne to take this
step during the past few years. With Austria convert-
ing its occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina into
formal incorporation, and Italy seizing the Tripolitaine,

THE DRAG ON THE WHEEL 283

it would have seemed natural enough that an English
Protectorate should have been proclaimed, particularly
as that step would have been extremely beneficial to
Egypt, besides making it clear to all the world that
we intended to maintain our position in the Eastern
Mediterranean. But we acted wisely in declining to
lend ourselves, even in appearance, to the enterprise of
despoiling Turkey in the hour of her distresses, and
inflicting a further shock upon Mussulman sentiment.
Moreover, the conversion of our anomalous super-
vision into a definite political control would be deeply
unpopular in Egypt, however advantageous to all
classes of the population.

Yet it would undoubtedly simplify the difficult
business we have undertaken in the Lower Nile lands.
The reports of Lord Cromer, Sir Eldon Gorst, and
Lord Kitchener bear constant testimony to the in-
convenience of reforming an Oriental country through
the medium of its own government. In Egypt we
are at once responsible and irresponsible. We rule
through the Khedive and his Ministers ; and we have
to get the right things done by a mixture of admonition
and veiled pressure, which must throw a heavy strain
upon the tact, temper, and firmness of all parties con-
cerned. The Khedive himself would probably have
as little cause for regret as anybody if the Occupation
were converted into a Protectorate, and if His Majesty's
Consul-General at Cairo became the British Resident.
But we owe it to ourselves, and to the pledges we have

284 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

made to the world, to maintain the present system
unless it is rendered clearly intolerable by causes which
affect the British Empire and its relations to other
Powers more than Egypt itself.

We have done much on the Lower Nile with our
hands tied. How much we can do where we are free
to act with a single eye to the good of the subject race,
we have shown in the Sudan. Something has been
said in previous chapters of the progress made by that
great tropical dependency of Britain, as it virtually
is, under the beneficent despotism of Sir Reginald
Wingate and his staff of military and civil officials.
Lord Kitchener's testimony to the value of the work
is given in a few eloquent sentences of his latest Report :

When we conquered the Sudan there was hardly a single
inhabitant who possessed any money, and, with the exception
of the fighting men, the whole population was practically
starving. Nothing, I think, strikes one more in revisiting
the Sudan to-day than the great increase which has taken
place in the individual prosperity of its inhabitants. This
increased prosperity, which is the result of careful adminis-
tration, has been so equally divided throughout the entire
population that it is not too much to say that there is now
hardly a poor man in the Sudan. Unlike the Egyptian
fellahin, the Sudan cultivators are not bound down by debts,
and have not, therefore, to struggle to meet the exorbitant
interest of the usurers who prey upon this class in Egypt.
In the Sudan the benefits of peace have been fully reaped by
the cultivators, and the increased facilities of communication
have brought markets hitherto undreamt of to their doors.
The development of the rich products of the country has been

THE DRAG ON THE WHEEL 285

carefully fostered, and a golden harvest has thus been brought
in which has remained in the country. It is, therefore, not
surprising that the people are contented, happy, and loyal.
When expressions of this happiness and contentment are
heard, it is satisfactory to feel that they are not merely word
painting for the benefit of the rulers of the country, but are
based, as the people themselves maintain, on solid facts.

This is what a few Englishmen have contrived to
effect in the Sudan in a decade and a half; and their
success has been partly due to the fact that here there
were no Capitulations to hamper them, nor the encum-
brance of an alien legal system. In Egypt, where the
task is more complex and the difficulties heavier, the
change has been less striking; but solid and substantial
benefits have been conferred upon the country, which
is beyond all question more prosperous, more peace-
ful, and more stable, than it was when the Occupation
began.

CHAPTER XXVIII
CONCLUSIONS

WE are not popular in Egypt. Feared we may be
by some ; respected, I doubt not, by many others ;
but really liked, I am sure, by very few. That the
benefits produced by the Occupation are recognised
by a considerable section of the Egyptian population
is unquestionable. The merchants, the traders, the
shopkeepers of the towns, the people who have bought
land and made money by it, would shudder at the
thought of changing the regime under which they have
so long lived in security and grown prosperous. Indeed,
it is probable that almost everybody in Egypt, who
owns property or carries on a settled business, would
be alarmed if there were any serious chance of bringing
the Occupation to an end.

But they have no love for us personally. The
Englishman has the capacity to win the esteem, and
even the affection, of primitive or semi-barbarous
peoples. You see that, for instance, in the Sudan,
where sometimes a retiring official will be escorted for
miles on his homeward journey by a crowd of sheikhs
and tribesmen who will bid him farewell with tears.
But when we have to rule civilised or partly civilised

286

CONCLUSIONS 287

communities we are less successful in conciliating our
subjects. We have the defects of our qualities, the
defects which have made difficulties for us in Ireland,
in South Africa, in Bengal, and in French Canada.
In Egypt, as elsewhere, we retain our characteristic
Anglo-Saxonism. The British official community lives
in a little world apart, thinking of * home,' and surround-
ing itself, as far as possible, with home-like associa-
tions. Of native society it sees little ; and though it
may meet educated natives in the public offices, in
the orderly-room, and in business, it does not really
get into touch with them. And the educated, Euro-
peanised, Egyptian for his part finds it hard to be at
ease with us. He prefers the continental type of
European, and when he looks westward it is to Paris,
not London, that he directs his gaze, and it is, as I have
previously explained, the peculiar products of Parisian
culture that he specially appreciates.

Throughout the entire period of our connection with
the country we have had to cope with persistent and
determined agitation which has for its avowed object
that of reclaiming ' Egypt for the Egyptians,' and re-
moving foreign (which means British) control and
supervision. We have been doing our work, subject
to constant opposition and interruption from those
who think we ought not to be doing it at all. The
Nationalist movement, which in the form of a military
insurrection was the immediate cause of our inter-
vention, has never died down. It has given birth to

288 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

various schools of 'Reformers,' some of whom merely
affect to ask that the official administration should
be left in native hands, while others demand a full
parliamentary constitution with a cabinet responsible
to an elected legislature. It finds an outlet in more
dangerous ways, in plans and combinations to over-
throw the Khedivial government and its supporters,
in the angry rhetoric of the writers and talkers of the
Geneva congresses, and in the subterranean work of
the fiercer conspirators, who weave assassination plots
and sometimes succeed in carrying them out. The
constitutional reformers have disclaimed all complicity
with such desperadoes as the fanatic Wardani, who
murdered the late amiable and high-minded Premier,
Boutros Pasha, and with those who concocted an
abortive attempt on the life of the Khedive and Lord
Kitchener. Many of them no doubt are sincere.
But in all such cases the border line between those who
only 'talk daggers,' and those who would be quite
willing to use them, is apt to be undefined. Certainly
a considerable number of the Egyptian Nationalists
are respectable, and, according to their lights, patriotic
persons, not unworthy of the ostentatious patronage
extended to them by travelling English M.P.'s and
other vindicators of the rights of peoples.

But some of these latter gentlemen would be a good
deal astonished if they discovered how close is the
connection between certain of their clients, who talk
with so much cultured ease of enlightenment and

CONCLUSIONS 289

reform, and show so laudable a familiarity with modern
progressive literature, and certain other persons who
are seeking to kindle a Moslem fury against the Fer-
inghi and all their works and ways. Even from the
latter one cannot withhold some measure of sympathy.
It is hard for any class of men, especially for men who
are young, ambitious, high-spirited, to be governed -
though it be for their own good by those who are
alien from them in religion, race, and sentiment. There
is plenty of sheer social envy, of personal greed, of
yeasty idealism, of impatient vanity, in the Egyptian
Nationalist movement. So there is in all such agita-
tions. But it has its better elements ; we can only
hope, without too confidently expecting, that we shall
gradually succeed in reconciling these to an anomalous,
but for the present an advantageous and indeed inevit-
able, political expedient.

The Nationalists might be more effective for mis-
chief if they were less divided by internal dissensions
and more skilfully directed. They lost the ablest of
their leaders some years ago by the death of Mustapha
Kamel Pasha, the chief organiser of the extremist
party. Kamel was a man of some talent and much
power of fluent expression both in speech and writing.
His newspaper, the Egyptian Standard, was virulent
in its abuse of England and the English. But it was
written with literary skill and argumentative resource-
fulness, and some of its articles, if bad politics, were
excellent journalism, forcible, expressive, and ingeni-

290 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

ously calculated to rouse native passion against British
influence in every shape. Mustapha Kamel's national-
ism was of the most aggressive and assertive type.
His aim was to persuade his countrymen that British
control in Egypt was not merely tyrannical, but also
glaringly inefficient. He attacked the officials of
every department with unmeasured invective, not even
sparing those who had been responsible for scientific
and administrative achievements which have evoked
the admiration of the world. In many articles he
endeavoured to prove or at any rate to produce the
impression on the minds of his readers that the
splendid irrigation work of Sir Colin Scott-MoncriefF
and his successors was only a dismal failure. The
English canals and barrages were simply draining the
country of its life-blood, and would in due course send
it back to desert. Our agriculture was a mistake; our
education an imposture; our financial and judicial
services utterly inadequate. Kamel tried to persuade
his followers that Egypt was thoroughly mismanaged
under English supervision, and would remain mis-
managed until the administration was entirely trans-
ferred to native hands. His influence, not only with
the educated discontented class, but with the masses
of the large towns, was very great. Seldom has such
a mighty crowd been seen, even in an Oriental city, as
that which filled the streets of Cairo on the day that
Mustapha Kamel's body was carried to the tomb.
External events during the past few years have been

CONCLUSIONS 291

favourable to the propaganda of the Nationalists, and
have done something to counteract the weakness they
have inflicted on their own cause by their squabbles
and jealousies. Egypt has felt the impact of the wave
which has rolled through all the eastern world since
the early years of our century. With Turkey, Persia,
India, China, stirred by new ideas and strange emotions,
Egypt can hardly remain entirely irresponsive. She
also was shaken by that astounding collapse of Russia
before Japan which came like the blast of a thunder-
bolt like a new revelation from the Unseen upon
Africa as well as Asia. 'Throughout the whole of the
Dark Continent,' wrote the late Edward Dicey, who
knew Egypt well, seven years ago, 'from Cairo to
the Cape, there had, in the course of the last century,
grown up a profound conviction that in any conflict
between Europeans and natives the latter were bound
to come to grief in the end. This belief received a vio-
lent shock throughout the East as it gradually oozed
out that Russia, the greatest military Power in Europe,
had been signally and ignominiously defeated by a
native Oriental race. I do not suppose that one Egyp-
tian native in a thousand or a hundred thousand had
any conception where Japan was, who the Japanese
were, or to what race or religion they belonged. But
all over Africa north, south, west, and cast the
tidings of Russia's defeat at the hands of a coloured
race who, whatever else they might be, were certainly
not Christians or whites, spread with the strange

292 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

rapidity with which news in the East passes from hand
to hand. There is not a village in Egypt in which
there is not some Mullah or Mahdi or holy man,
learned in the Koran, who was only too glad to announce
to his adherents that the downfall of the infidel was
at hand, and that the day was coming when Islam
would once more become supreme. The Egyptians
are not fanatical Mohammedans, but they are fervent
followers of the Prophet, and they are convinced that
the decline of the Cross is certain to lead to the rise of
the Crescent.'

While this disturbing thought was still fermenting
in the native mind, there came the Turkish Revolution,
the rise of the Young Turks, the establishment of
parliamentary institutions under the very shadow of
the Calif's throne. All things considered, it is not
surprising that the Egyptian agitators have been ac-
tive during the past decade, nor is there any immedi-
ate likelihood that this activity will cease. Fortu-
nately, though it is always troublesome, it is not often
dangerous, and its least perilous phase is that which
shows itself among the articulate sections of the popu-
lation the middle classes and professional men of
the towns.

Nor are we too popular with another large and
influential class. The old governing element, the mem-
bers of the Turco-Egyptian families, the sons and
grandsons of the men who were beys and pashas under
Ismail and Said, are hostile to the Occupation, though

CONCLUSIONS 293

they may not deem it advisable to give overt expres-
sion to their hostility. These persons think that they
would have much to gain by our departure. They
would once more become a ruling aristocracy, they
would 'boss' the country, get the good places into
their own hands, and enjoy that outward consideration
which goes with the exercise of power in Oriental lands.
They are still a little sulky over their supersession,
though even if we cleared out, bag and baggage, they
would hardly be able to regain their old predom-
inance.

But what of the peasantry, the real people of Egypt ?
They ought to be grateful to us, for undoubtedly we
have improved their lot and done many things for
them. Thanks to the English, the fellah can now live
at peace on his farm, undisturbed by the fear of a
sudden raid from tax-gatherers or marauding pashas.
The land tax is paid according to a regular assessment,
and the farmer of the Delta is as well aware of the
precise nature of his public obligations as a London
ratepayer, or probably better. I spent some days
with the manager of a branch of the Agricultural Bank,
who was making loans to the peasants on mortgage,
and gathering in arrears of interest due from them;
and I was interested to observe how accurately in-
formed these people were as to their financial relations
with the State. Every man brought with him his
tax-sheet and assessment-paper, and knew to a piastre
how much his land was worth, and how much he would

294 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

have to pay on it. It was in the course of the same
journey that I had visible proof of the agrarian prog-
ress and activity which prevail under the shelter of
the Occupation. The Egyptian peasant is still for
the most part a poor, hard-working drudge ; but he
is no longer a serf, and he is safe from administrative
oppression and territorial violence. For the first
time in his history he knows what it is to live without
the kurbash and the corvee : neither money nor labour
can be extorted from him by the stick. Above all,
he has his water supply secure. The English engineers
have poured the life-giving fluid through the canals,
and the English inspectors of the Public Works Depart-
ment see that the tenant obtains his fair share without
having to bribe officials or crave favours from the
hangers-on of the local magnate.

But it is more than doubtful whether the English re-
ceive credit for these reforms. The peasantry have
little consciousness of the part we play in the adminis-
tration of the country. They know that certain officials
come among them from time to time who treat them
with more humanity and justice than their old tyrants,
and they are probably glad that the Government has
chosen to employ these agents ; but their recognition
hardly goes beyond this point. They accept good
fortune and ill with the same Oriental fatalism. It is
the will of Allah. He has been pleased that their
crops shall increase and their burdens be lightened,
and has put it into the hearts of the Effendim that

CONCLUSIONS 295

they shall no longer be beaten and plundered. Praise
to the Most Merciful. His will be done.

To tell the truth I believe the peasant thinks less of
the reforms than of the grievances under which he still
suffers, or believes himself to suffer. He is not, perhaps,
so much impressed by the abolition of the kurbash as
he ought to be. He has been flogged for so many
centuries that he has got used to the process ; that was
the will of Allah too. In a country where a gang of
labourers, working under contract, voluntarily pay a
foreman to stand over them with a stick and use it
freely on shirkers, immunity from personal chastise-
ment is not highly appreciated. Besides, the present
system has endured long enough to have dimmed the
memory of past evils. The confiscations, the oppres-
sion, the forced contributions of the old days, are for-
gotten by the younger generation ; which, on the other
hand, has its own tale of official incompetence, police
corruption, and ineffective administration of justice.
I have dwelt already on the great blot on our adminis-
tration, our failure to suppress disorder in the country
districts, to keep violent crime within limits, and to
secure the conviction of offenders. The fellah grum-
bles at these troubles, oblivious of the grosser wrongs
from which his fathers suffered.

For these and other reasons we have little gratitude
to expect in Egypt. The peasantry do not know us ;
the superior classes do not want us. Of the latter,
many who admit our services profess that they were

296 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

quite able to accomplish them without our aid, and
that a native Government, purged of the abuses of the
old Khediviate intensified as these were by the
money poured into Ismail's lap by foreign money-
mongers could have done all that was requisite ;
and could have done it, so they think, without intro-
ducing those Western usages and innovations which
are distasteful to Mussulman sentiment. Egypt, it
cannot be too often repeated, is a Mohammedan
country; and no devout Moslem likes to be ruled by
infidels.

Even the slow-thinking fellah has that feeling ; and
there are those who make it their business to stimulate
it. Mustapha Kamel worked hard to excite Mussul-
man sentiment in the villages against the Christians.
His emissaries did what they could to push the Nation-
alist agitation among the peasantry, and his successors
have made some efforts in the same direction. The
fellah is not a newspaper reader ; but in most of the
villages there are a few persons headmen, land sur-
veyors, Coptic clerks, schoolmasters who can read,
and when a copy of the provocative Cairo journal
comes into the place its inflammatory contents soon
become known. Its political arguments must often
be above the heads of the villagers. But its appeals
to Moslem passion are not. The fellah is a devout
Mohammedan ; to him his religion is all in all ; and
though at present he seems to have taken the National-
ist agitation calmly, it is not without its effect upon

CONCLUSIONS 297

him. The perfervid oratory and violent journalism
of dissatisfied townsmen may be comparatively harm-
less. But in India and in Russia this urban rhetoric
does at length begin to sting through the thick hide
of the peasant, and the same thing may happen in
Egypt. I do not know how far my informants were
correct in their estimate of the situation ; but I was
assured by some who are closely in touch with native
opinion that during our dispute with the Porte over
the Sinai frontier question some years ago popular
feeling in the villages was absolutely on the side of
the Turks. If it had come to war as it very nearly
did these observers were convinced that there would
have been furious anti-European riots in the towns and
outbreaks among the fellahin. There is a deep-lying
reservoir of Mohammedan bigotry, contemptuously
acquiescent in the presence of other religions, which
yet, under conceivable circumstances, might boil up
into steaming and scorching fanaticism.

Islam lies at the base of Egyptian society, and it is
on the future of Islam that the future of Egypt depends.
For let us make no mistake on one vital point : we are
not Christianising the East. The Mohammedan world
is farther from conversion to the faith of the West
for my part I believe the Buddhist and Brahman world
also than it was three centuries, or even ten cen-
turies, ago. Indeed one may say that in the continents
of the brown and yellow races Christianity has been
steadily receding for over a thousand years. At the

298 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

beginning of the Middle Ages it did indeed seem as if
all the world were likely to find shelter under the Cross
of Christ. There were populous Christian communities
throughout Asia Minor, Persia, Turkestan, Thibet,
China, great and powerful Christian churches spread
over North Africa and Central Africa from the Medi-
terranean to the Red Sea and the equatorial regions.
Except for a few anaemic remnants in Abyssinia, Syria,
Armenia, all these have disappeared, absorbed by Bud-
dhism and Brahmanism, or swept out by the conquering
tide of Islam. The two processes are in operation
still. Japan, which almost promised to become a
Christian country before the Protestant Reformation,
has gone back to the old gods or the old negations.
If Mohammedanism is ebbing out of Europe, it is on
the crest of the advancing wave in Africa, where its
mullahs are making converts daily, under the eyes of
our officials and our ineffectual missionaries, in the
British territories of the Atlantic sea-board.

Some optimists persuade themselves that Orientals
are adopting the morality, if not the creed, of Christen-
dom. That seems to me more than doubtful. They
are assimilating some of our ideas and ideals, but these
are for the most part not those which are distinctively
Christian. It is the common experience of everybody,
who has conversed with the educated native from
Tangier to Tokio, that this person, when he abandons
the orthodoxy of his fathers, does not accept the ortho-
doxy of his teachers. He is more likely to turn Atheist

CONCLUSIONS 299

or Rationalist than Christian : to seek refuge in a
tangle of modern Antinomianism rather than to recline
upon the New Testament and the Church Catechism.
And let us remember that the Eastern reformer is not
always the shallow creature, with a simian aptitude
for copying the tricks and habits of the people he both
hates and envies, who has become too familiar to us
in the facile pages of hasty travellers and ingenious
writers of fiction. The East, like the West, has its
seekers after light, its thinkers and real students, who
are feeling the thrill of our transitional era, and search-
ing for some solid foothold amid the floods that surge
across the old landmarks. These men are not quite
content to accept ready-made the ethical conventions,
a little time-worn and travel-stained among ourselves,
which we rather contemptuously fling down to them.
It is not always easy to meet the arguments of en-
lightened, but conservative, Moslems who insist that
it is the immorality, rather than the virtue, of the West
which is transmitted to the East.

'Our ethical system,' an intelligent and cultivated
Mohammedan might say, 'is not perfect; I am the
first to admit it. Yet we taught our young men the
Moslem virtues of devotion, gratitude, filial obedience,
temperance, hospitality, and courage. What do you
give them in exchange ? A faith they cannot believe
in, for they know you daily ignore its tenets ; a code of
morals which has not prevented your own societies
from being the battle-ground of the animal instincts

300 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

and the predatory passions. If our cities are being
sapped by drink and vice it is because they are too
closely imitating your own. You have inflicted upon
us the horrible curse of alcoholism, from which the East
was free ; you have induced our youths to learn your
languages, and they employ their knowledge to read
the pornographic romances of the boulevards. You
have put polygamy out of fashion with the wealthier
classes (it never was the fashion with the poor), and you
suppose that morality is the gainer when the Egyptian
husband supplements his single Moslem wife with a
relay of female companions, drawn from the pavements
of your capitals and the coulisses of your music-halls.
Islam may have its demerits ; but it is a working sys-
tem of religion and morals, and we shall do wisely to
cling to it.'

Cling to it, wisely or not, I believe they will, and the
reformers of the East must make their account with
the fact. Can Mohammedanism reconcile itself with
modern progress ? There are those who persistently
maintain that it cannot. 'Islam,' wrote Sir William
Muir, 'never changes;' and many Anglo-Indians and
Anglo-Egyptians agree with him. There are said to
be two main obstacles the Koran and the seclusion
of women. We are told that it is impossible for a
society to be progressive, when it is controlled by rules
and formularies, laid down for a primitive community
twelve centuries ago, and fortified by all the sanctions
of religion. The argument is an odd one in the mouths

SlK \\II.I.1AM \VlI.l.roCKS, K.C.M.Ci.

CONCLUSIONS 301

of persons who profess to regulate their own lives by a
Scripture much older than the writings of Mohammed,
and promulgated among a people no more civilised than
the Arabians of the Prophet. If the Bible is no impedi-
ment to electric tramcars, steam turbines, representative
government, joint stock companies, and university
extension lectures, perhaps the Koran need not bar the
way to these improvements either. If the Moslem
reformers are in earnest, they will, no doubt, prevail
on the ulema to interpret the sacred texts in a favour-
able sense. A priesthood, which could not stretch
the articles of its religion so as to cover the require-
ments of contemporaneous society, would be singularly
deficient in the ecclesiastical instinct.

On the other question the woman question one
must not dogmatise. None of us know much about
it in its Eastern application. Some of those who know
least are the foremost in denouncing the harem as the
blight of Oriental society, the fatal influence that nega-
tives all genuine progress. But it is an institution
which has existed for many centuries, which fits with-
out friction into the conditions of Eastern life, which
has been approved by both sexes in the countries where
it is practised ; and, at least it relieves them from
some of the miseries and failures rampant elsewhere.

I can conceive that my educated, conservative Mus-
sulman might have a few further remarks to make on
this subject. 'You are good enough to inform us,'
he might observe, 'that our family life, based as it is

302 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

on the seclusion and segregation of women, and recog-
nising, under very strict legal and social regulation,
polygamous marriage, is unsatisfactory. Possibly.
Neither polygamy nor the harem is enjoined by our
religion, and for them we do not seek our warrant in
the Koran. They have established themselves through
the practice and custom of the ages in most Oriental
countries ; but I do not deny that we may find them,
like many other ancient Eastern usages, unsuited to
modern conditions. How they can best be modified
is a matter many of us are gravely considering. But
will you excuse me, if I venture to suggest that we are
by no means disposed to accept you, without further
question, as authoritative mentors in this branch of
study ? For, so far as we can gather, you have made
rather a squalid muddle, not unmixed with sordid
tragedy, of the sexual relations in your own enlightened
and progressive communities. Are your marriages
universally, or even in a great majority of instances,
tranquil and happy ? Are your husbands always
faithful ? Are your wives invariably contented ?
Have you, any more than ourselves, been completely
successful in "subduing to the useful and the good"
those individual passions, and overpowering emotions,
which Nature has sown in the human soul and body ?

' On these points we have our doubts. We read
your newspapers, your fiction, your dramatists, and we
learn that your society is racked by sexual unrest, and
perturbed by the most horrible sexual immorality,

CONCLUSIONS 303

which you vainly strive to keep in check by ferocious,
but apparently ineffectual, penal laws. You suppress
black slavery in the East and are struggling with what
you call white slavery in the West, a degradation which
your agents have even introduced among ourselves. 1
Your matrimonial arrangements work so badly that
your men, it seems, take refuge in licentiousness, and
your women are in revolt. And with it all we discover
that you are threatened by "race suicide," and that
your system does not even provide (as ours does)
that practically every woman shall have a secure place
found for her in the world, and shall not miss the
opportunity to fulfil her primary vocation of mother-
hood. Have we, then, much to gain in all these matters
by adopting your codes and your creeds, or by hastily
assimilating the methods in which so many among
yourselves have lost confidence ? If we must change
our own social and domestic system, it is not clear to
some of us that we are compelled to replace it by yours,
or that we should be wise in doing so.'

As a matter of fact you have only to walk through a
street in Cairo to see that there are plenty of ladies in
Egypt who are evidently allowed, or who allow them-
selves, a personal freedom not often extended to their
well-to-do sisters in other Mohammedan countries.
The Egyptian veil seems in a metaphorical, as well as
a literal, sense a much more transparent vestment than

1 See the passage from Lord Kitchener's Report quoted above (chapter
xxvii, p. 248).

304 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

the Indian purdah. But on the other hand one some-
times hears that the movement for the emancipation of
married women has little vitality, except among the
reformers and the small Europeanising 'smart set'
of the capital. Some of the ladies reject the veil and
the separate female apartments, receive masculine
visitors in their family circle, wear European dresses,
and accompany their husbands to Paris or Mentone.
But I believe the whole number of these vindicators
of women's rights is still very limited, and the example,
in spite of the impulse given by the princesses of the
Khedivial family, is not being followed to any consid-
erable extent. One hears of cases of well-born and
highly cultured Moslem ladies who, after some experi-
ence of emancipation and intercourse in the Western
fashion, have voluntarily and deliberately returned to
the seclusion of the zenana. One lady who has done
so I know, and I have spoken with, though I have
never seen, her. She is the wife of an accomplished
scholar, and might herself claim that title, having
studied not only English and French literature but also
Egyptian antiquities and archaeology. For some years
she mingled freely in the most cultivated foreign so-
ciety of the capital. Now she has thought it right to
resume the habits of her people. She passes her days
in her own apartments, and only leaves them to drive
out, closely veiled, in her carriage. But occasionally
she will converse on the subjects which interest her
with an English professor or learned official or some

CONCLUSIONS 305

other foreign gentleman through the telephone !
Thus do science and Moslem convention work com-
fortably together.

If the status of the Egyptian woman of the middle
and well-to-do classes is to be changed, the most
efficient factor will be the spread of female education.
There is a growing interest in this subject in the coun-
try. 'There is probably nothing more remarkable
in the social history of Egypt during the last dozen
years than the growth of opinion among all classes of
Egyptians in favour of the education of their daughters.
The girls' schools belonging to the Ministry of Educa-
tion are crowded, and to meet the growing demand sites
have been acquired and fresh schools are to be con-
structed, one in Alexandria and two in Cairo. Very
many applications for admission have, however, to be
refused. The Provincial Councils have during the
past year done something to remedy this deficiency.
Girls' schools have been opened by the Councils in
five mudirias, and in other cases private girls' schools
have been taken over. The increase in the schools
directed by the Education Department, and the
activity of the local educational authorities in the same
direction, have revealed the fact that the supply of
trained female teachers is entirely inadequate. The
Sania Training College was founded in 1900 to meet
this need, and twenty-eight girl students are at present
in attendance there. Several also have been sent to
England for professional training. At present, how-

306 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

ever, it is clear that neither the Training College nor
the Educational Mission is able to provide the number
of teachers required, and it can only be hoped that the
increase of the facilities for primary instruction for
girls will enlarge the field of recruitment for this
purpose. In the case of elementary vernacular educa-
tion, again, the desire to secure this instruction for
girls has completely outrun the possibility of provid-
ing adequate accommodation.' l

A growing desire is manifest among Moslem parents
to have their daughters educated ; they are clamouring
for more primary schools, and they even send their
girls to be taught by Coptic priests and American
missionaries rather than that they should not be taught
at all. There is a famous private school in Cairo,
under an English headmistress, where hundreds of
Mohammedan young ladies are brought up precisely
as high-school girls are in England, no whit less alert,
as intelligent, and as eagerly interested in their studies.
The great want is that of qualified native teachers ;

1 Egypt, No. i (1912), p. 25. In the Report for the following year,
Egypt, No. i (1913), we read:

'The demand for girls' schools in Egypt shows no tendency to decrease.
Reference was made in last year's report to the want of suitable accommodation
and properly qualified teachers, which makes it difficult to keep pace with
this growing movement. Some progress has been made in the past year.
The Sania and Abbas Primary Schools for girls contain 461 pupils. Both are
full, and unable to meet a constantly increasing demand for admission.
The attendance at the Sania Training College increased in 1912, and several
Egyptian girl students, as in previous years, have been sent to England to
complete their professional training, but further provision for the training of
Egyptian women teachers appears to be very necessary.'

CONCLUSIONS 307

and here the Ministry of Education, under its late ca-
pable chief, Zaghlul Pasha, set the good precedent of
picking out promising female pupils from the second-
ary schools and sending them to be trained in England.
The difficulty, as his Excellency rather mournfully
explained to me, is that marriage is still the only recog-
nised profession for women in the East ; and there
will be little hope of keeping the young preceptresses
at their work beyond the age of twenty-two or twenty-
three. One of these prize pupils, I was told, on passing
her examination and obtaining a Government nomina-
tion, immediately received no fewer than seventeen
offers of marriage, which shows at least that the
Egyptian bridegroom does not despise feminine cult-
ure. But one wonders how an educated young woman
will contrive to settle down to matrimonial immure-
ment after her year or two spent at a training college
or a university in England.

Feminine education, as well as technical and agri-
cultural education, the British Agent and the advisers
of the Ministers are doing their best to encourage.
Literary culture on Western lines is regarded rather
coldly ; it is felt that Egypt is likely to get quite as
many educated young gentlemen, with the latest im-
ported ideas, as it will require, without much official
assistance. Of journalists, lawyers, candidates for
government employment, it needs only a moderate
supply. What it does want are trained native doctors,
architects, engineers, estate managers, surveyors, men

308 EGYPT IN TRANSITION

of business generally, and students properly prepared
for industrial and commercial pursuits. And these
the technical schools and colleges are gradually fur-
nishing. In this way we may produce some effect
on the intellectual movement, and the attitude of those
who will give it shape in the future, as well as upon the
economic progress of the country.

But with the possible awakening of Islam, with the
social and ethical consequences of the dynamic change
that is passing through the Eastern mind, we have little
direct concern. Egypt, like other Oriental lands, will
in due course try to work out its own salvation, per-
haps in unison with the West, quite possibly by shap-
ing a different synthesis for itself. We may have to
abandon our conception of the huge, somnolent, amor-
phous Orient, waiting passively for the West to stamp
the impress of its vitalising energy upon the lethargic
bulk. It is a favourite literary tradition :

The East bowed low before the blast,

In patient, deep disdain,
She heard the legions thunder past,

And plunged in dreams again.

Did she ? At any rate the East seems more inclined
for action than dreaming just now. She is clearing
the mists of sleep from her eyes, and is showing a
tendency to be self-assertive, practical, and indepen-
dently constructive. The East may take over from
us various external forms and material appendages,
such as parliaments, military tactics, super-Dread-

CONCLUSIONS 309

noughts, and bowler hats, without necessarily assimi-
lating our spirit, our morals, or our view of life. It was
our teacher before, and it may have much to teach us
again, even in the purely scientific sphere, when it
has learnt from us the grammar and the alphabet
of modern knowledge.

Meanwhile, and without prejudice to the ultimate
results, we have a task to perform in Egypt which will
not be completely fulfilled for many years to come.
Quietly and steadily, and with as little interference as
possible from outside, we must go on doing our duty as
we have done it throughout the Occupation period,
making the best of the country and the people, eco-
nomically and otherwise, according to our lights.
Our lights may not be those of our clients, they may
even sometimes be a little dim and flickering for our-
selves ; but, such as they are, we must steer by them,
not expecting any particular gratitude, understanding
that we are not popular, but steadfastly discharging
an obligation we cannot as yet abandon.

That we shall be relieved of it some time has been
the conviction of Lord Cromcr and the other men who
have been engaged with him in the reconstruction of
Egypt. But they are equally convinced that the
period of our release is far distant. The habits and
traditions of centuries are not changed in a few years ;
and it must be long before Egypt is adapted for that
self-government, combined with freedom from foreign
dictation, for which we have been preparing her.

3 io EGYPT IN TRANSITION

The preparation may take a slightly different form
in the near future. We have made mistakes, and have
learnt lessons from experience ; and we may antici-
pate that the system will undergo some important
modifications, tending generally, I imagine, in the
direction of associating competent natives more closely
with the responsible business of administration in all
departments. But, in the main, the system will be
retained, and it will be animated, one may hope, with
the same spirit of integrity, self-sacrifice, and zeal for
the public benefit, which has rendered the British
Occupation of Egypt the most honourable episode in
the recent history of our race. It has been a difficult
experiment, which seemed foredoomed to failure ; it
is creditable to many Englishmen and some Egyptians
that it has been, on the whole, a success.

INDEX

ABBAS HILMI PASHA, Khedive of
Egypt, his attempt to reform
system of education in University
of El-Azhar, 210; State recep-
tions held by, 212; he remains
nominally the supreme power in
Egypt, 215, seq.; character of,
219; abortive assassination plot
against, 258

Abu Hamed, 7, 8, 10; station of,
40, 71

'Advisers' British, Report on prisons,
247 ; suggested reform of mixed
Courts, by, 219, 275, seq.; duties
of, 220

Agitators, Lord Kitchener, on, 258

Agricultural Bank, working of, 293

Ahmed, Mohammed. See Mahdi.

Amenophis II., tomb of, 166

'Anglo- Egyptian Sudan,' its polit-
ical position, 5, 149; and see
Sudan.

Army, Egyptian; Sudanese regi-
ments of, 51 ; conscription in,
54 ; loth Sudanese inspected,
86; theoretically part of Turkish
forces, 214

'Army of Occupation,' British,
53; Kasr-en-Nil barracks of, 173

Arabi Pasha, 216, 217

Assiut, barrage at, 143

Assuan dam, 135; cost of, 144;
original designs for, modified
to save temples at Philx, 144;
begun in 1898, completed, 1902,
147 ; its length and storage capacity,
147; additions to, 1007-1912, 149'

Atbara, bridge over the, 8, 71, 95;
cotton land, 121

BAKER, SIR BENJAMIN, his schemes
for Nile irrigation, 140; his ap-
pointment on Sir Colin Scott-
MoncrieS's Commission, 1890,
143 ; modification of his design
for Assuan dam, 144

Berber, 8, 59, 95, 121

Bernard, Col. E. E., Financial
Secretary to Sudan Government, 55

Blue Nile. See Nile.

Blue Nile Province, 69

Boutros Pasha, murder of, 257, 288

CABINET MINISTERS, position of,
267, 268

Cairo, Egyptian War Office in, 53 ;
climate of, 158, 169; shops in,
160; museum in, 168; first im-
pressions of, 169; French in-
fluence on, 169-171; citadel
of, 176; mosques of, 176; its
position as the seat of the Uni-
versity of El-Azhar, 202 ; school
for girls in, 306

Capitulations, the; not in force
in the Sudan, 52; hampering
effect of, in Egypt, 276 ; advan-
tages of, before the Occupation,
277, 278; necessity for their modi-
fication to suit modern require-
ments, 280

Cassel, Sir Ernest, 144

Christianity, efforts at conversion
of Mohammedans forbidden in
most parts of the Sudan, 64, 65 ;
its waning power in the East, 66, 297

Condominium, Anglo-Egyptian, 5, 25,
52

Consular Courts, 276-279

312

INDEX

Cook, Thomas, pioneer of Egyptian
tourist-travel, 155

Copts, their employment in Sudan
Government Offices, 25 ; their
clerical employment in Cairo,
169, 174; their character and
origin, 225; their representation
in the Legislative Assembly, 267

Corvee, 141, 186

Cotton, its cultivation in the Sudan,
1 20, 121; crop on Zeidab Estate,
127; Egypt's contribution to the
world's supply of, 140; official
markets for sale of, 262

Crime, frequency of, 242 ; increase
of, 244; Eastern attitude towards,
248; old and new methods for
punishment of, 251

Cromer, Earl of, his release of Zubeir,
60; he opens Nile-Red-Sea Rail-
way, 1906, 93 ; his abolition of the
corvee, 186; his opinion of British
policy in Egypt, 217; his great
achievements in the early days of
the Occupation, 218; his later policy,
241 ; his opinion on the Capitu-
lations in Egypt, 280 n. ; and on
the possible abandonment of the
Occupation, 309

DELTA, the, 72; British element
in, 1 80; climate of, 181; neces-
sity of drainage, 185 ; the Delta
fanner, 189; inadequate punish-
ment of crime in, 242, seq.

Dual Control, 234

Dufferin, Marquess of, his Report, 266

EDUCATION; Lord Kitchener's first
educational efforts in the Sudan,
25; Gordon College and its aims,
26, 28; University of El-Azhar,
202, seq. institution of New Uni-
versity College, Cairo, 202 ; anti-
quated system of, at El-Azhar,
208, 209 ; Minister of, 210 ; New
law promulgated in ign, to en-
large syllabus at El-Azhar, 211

El-Azhar, university of, 202 ; cos-
mopolitan constituency of, 203;

expenses of the establishment
met by the Administration des
Wakfs, 205 ; its antiquated sys-
tem of education, 207 ; syllabus
enlarged, 1911, 1912, 211

FELLAHIN, 54; their attempts to
evade conscription, 80; physique
of, 8 1 ; description of, in the Delta,
1 80, 185; their aversion from in-
novations, 1 88; their tendency to
hoard money, 189, 190; Lord Kitch-
ener's interest in, 261 ; their
indebtedness to English rule not
acknowledged, 293, seq, ; influence
of Nationalist agitators among, 296,
297 ; religious feeling of, 296 ; their
sympathy with Turks, 297

Five Feddans Law, enactment of,
189; its operation dependent on
Mixed Legislative Council, 272

Flogging, daily practice of, under
Abdullah, 36; indifference of the
fellahin towards, 295 ; abolition of,
in prisons, 247 ; abolition of the
kurbash, 190, 294

GARSTIN, SIR WILLIAM, his opinion
on wheat and cotton crops, 120, 121 ;
his irrigation schemes, 134, 140;
modification of his original de-
signs for Assuan dam, to save
temples of Phila;, 144; his further
irrigation schemes, 151; his pro-
ject for diverting the course of
the Nile from the Sudd regions, 151

General Assembly, the scope and
policy of, 266; its reappearance
as the Legislative Assembly under
the New Organic Law, 1913, 266;
its restrictions, 270, 272, seq.

Ghedit, Sir Reginald Wingate's
victory over the Khalifa at, 47

Ghezireh, 173

Gordon, Charles George, attempt to
rescue him, u; memorial to, 16;
death of, 17, 59, 60; his crusade
against slavery, 68

Gordon College, Khartum, 26;
aims and methods of, 28, 54, 64

INDEX

313

Gorst, Sir Eldon, his report on Nile-
Red-Sea Railway, 93; his suc-
cession to Lord Cromer, as British
Agent, 93 ; his real and nominal
position, 213; misinterpretation of
his attitude by Nationalists, 257

HALAKAS, or official cotton-markets,
institution of, 262 ; description of,
263

Haifa. See Wady Haifa.

Herodotus, the first special corre-
spondent on the Nile, 155

Hills of the Dead, sterility and
solitude of, 165 ; Tombs of the
Kings, 1 66, 167

INSPECTORS, British, attached to
Ministry of Interior and Ministry
of Finance, 224; functions of, 233;
nomination of, 235 ; some diffi-
culties experienced by, 236, seq,

Irrigation, allotment of perennial
water, 123; pumping apparatus
at Zeidab, 126; antiquity of basin
irrigation, 133; use of Nilometers,
137 ; basin irrigation superseded
by perennial irrigation, 139; canals,
chains and barrages, 142 ; Assuan
dam, 144 ; completion of Assuan
dam in 1902, 147; antiquity of
bucket and lever, water-wheel and
hand-pump, 148; advantages of
perennial irrigation, 185; its abuse
by the fellahin, 261

Ismail Pasha, Khedive, oppressive
rule of, 59 ; his preference for
French officials, 234 ; his extrav-
agance and extortion, 254

KAJIF.L, Mustapha, death of, 289;
attacks on English officials, 289,

attacks on Knglisn otnciais, 269,
; his agitations in the villages,

290

296

Karnak, 162, seq.

Kerreri, Battle of. See Omdurman.
Khalifa, the (Abdullah), to, 31,

32 ; his house and enclosure in

Omdurman, 33, 35 ; his death, 48, 66
Khedive, position of, 52

Khedives. See Abbas, Ismail, Said,
Tewfik.

Khartum, romance of, 9, 1 1 ; its
foundation, destruction, growth,
trade, 18, seq. ; its climate, 40

Kitchener of Khartum, Viscount,
his expedition to the Sudan in 1898,
7; his entry into Khartum, 19;
his educational projects in the
Sudan, 25 ; his destruction of the
Mahdi's tomb, 34; his treatment
of the religious question, 64; his
new Five Feddans Law, 189; his
campaigns in 1897, 194; his re-
port on El-Azhar, in 1912, 211;
his endeavours to supplement police
force in the Delta, 244; his report,
'Egypt, No. N 3 (1913),' 255, seq. ;
his appointment to British Agency,
1911, 256, 258; plot to murder
him, 258; his report on Nationalist
agitations, 1912, 260; his interest
in the fellahin, 261 ; his reform of
the Legislative Assembly, 267 ; his
account of progress in the Sudan,
284

Kom Ombo, 126

Kordofan, province of, 70

Kurbash, 190, 294

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY, election
to, 266, 267 ; restricted powers
of, 267. (See General Assembly.)

Legislative Council, constitution
of, 266. (See General Assembly.)

Luxor, climate of, 158, 162; ruins
and monuments at, 162, 163; situa-
tion of, 164

MAHDI, the (Mohammed Ahmed),
12, 15; his order to spare Gordon
disobeyed, : 7 ; his destruction of
Khartum, 19; his capture of Father
Ohrwalder, 33 ; his tomb in Om-
durman, 34; his Puritanism, Si

Merit-met Ali, 12; his foundation
of Khartum, 19; conquests of,
58 ; founder of modern Egypt,
138; initiator of system of peren-
nial irrigation, 142 ; mosque of, 176

INDEX

Meroe and Merowi, pyramids and
temples at, 71

Metcmmeh, massacre at, 128

Mixed Tribunals, established 1876,
270; authority over Egyptian legis-
lation of, 271; unsatisfactory con-
ditions of, 274; their abolition
suggested, 280

Mudir, position of, 52; military
status of, in the Sudan, 88; na-
tionality of, in the provinces, 224;
responsibilities of, in the provinces,
238, 247 ; local importance of,
238

Murders, frequency of, 242 ; large
proportion unpunished, 243 ; in-
adequate causes for, 243 ; increase
of, in Cairo, 244 ; difficulty of ob-
taining convictions for, 249

Mohammedanism, its prevalence in
the Sudan, and the deference paid
to its observances by British officials,
62, seq. ; its former attitude towards
Christians, 276; its influence over
the peasantry, 296, 297 ; its in-
creasing power in the East, 298;
its ethical system, 299 ; its effect
on progress, 300; its matrimonial
system, 301

NATIONALIST agitations, attitude of
Sir Eldon Gorst and Lord Kitch-
ener towards, 257, seq. ; plots
and murders connected with, 287,
288; death of ablest leader of,
Mustapha Kamel Pasha, 289, 290;
influence on the peasantry, 296

Nile, prior claim of Egypt over the
Sudan, to its waters, 123; canals,
125, 126; its supreme importance
to Egypt, 132, seq. ; its source,
134; basin irrigation now obsolete,
142 ; barrages and dams, 142, 144,
146; navigation of, 147; clearance
of sudd and a use found for the
refuse, 150; its whole length laid
open, 150

Nile, Blue, its junction with the White
Nile at Khartum, 21, 135; tides of,
135, 136

Nile, White, its junction with the

Blue Nile at Khartum, 21 ; source

of, 134-

Nilometers, 137
Nubar Pasha, political ability of,

222,231; his institution of the

Mixed Tribunals, 270

OHRWALDER, Father, 33

Omdurman, town of, transmutation
of, 31 ; area and population, 31 ;
its market and cotton mills, 36, 37

Omdurman, battle of, 13

Organic Law of 1913, new consti-
tutional system promulgated by the,
265

PHIUE, temples of, i ; agitation
against their submersion by the
erection of the Assuan dam, 144

Police force, inadequacy of, 244, 246;
necessity of extra police-tax, 249;
restrictions on, imposed by Capitu-
lations, 278

Port Sudan, opening of Nile-Red-
Sea Railway at, 93 ; rapid growth
of, 94 ; harbour of, 96 ; construc-
tion of, 97 ; imports and exports
of, 99 ; climate of, 101 ; buildings
of, 109

Provincial Councils, 305

Pyramids, the great, 177, 178

Pyramids at Merowi, 71

Public Works Department, adminis-
trators of, 134; engineers of, 139;
English inspection of, 294; advan-
tages of, to the fellah, 186

RAILWAYS, 69, seq. ; opening of Nile-
Red-Sea Railway, 93 ; Suakin-Ber-
ber Railway project, 95, 98; their
public ownership in Sudan, 105

Riaz Pasha, race and ability of, 231

SAID PASHA, Khedive, father of
Ismail, 182

Scott-Moncrieff, Sir Colin, his ser-
vices in the Egyptian Public Works
Department to further Nile irriga-
tion, 134; his adaptation of Mougel's

INDEX

barrage, 142; his commission in
1800, 143; his services, 218; his
irrigation schemes attacked, 200

Slatin Pasha, Sir Rudolf von, 33

Slaves, import and export of, pro-
hibited in the Sudan, 52 ; manu-
mission of, 66; special department
to control trade in, 66

Strabo, in Egypt, 155

Sudan, conquest of, 2 ; under two
flags, xiv, 4 ; its area, fertility,
population, 6 ; its possibilities
of development, 6; character-
istics of natives, 23, seq. ; gov-
ernment of, 50; its division into
fourteen provinces, 52; its revenue,
55 ; religious observances in, 62, seq. ;
slave trade in, 66 ; its three chief
requirements, 68; irrigation of, 72;
need of labourers in, 72; physique
of natives compared with Egyptians,
81 ; musical taste of natives, 82 ;
wives of native soldiers, 84, seq. ;
first Government of, 87, seq. ; Civil
Service, 88, seq. ; Civil Service,
genesis of, xv ; train-service of,
98 ; state socialism in, 103, seq. ;
its control of the irrigation of Egypt,
132 ; its virtual position as a British
dominion, 225; Lord Kitchener on
increased prosperity of, 284

Sudd, 135; use discovered for, 150

TEWFIK PASHA, Khedive, character
of, 218, seq.

Thebes, Colossi of, 156; the City
of the Dead, 164

Tombs of the Kings, 164

Tourists in Egypt, their antiquity,
155; Greek and Roman, 150;
modern, 157

Turkey, its participation in govern-
ment of the Sudan, 51,52; theoretical
control of Egyptian politics, 213, srq.

'Turks' (Turco-Egyptians), the real
governing element in Egypt be-
fore 1882, and their attitude towards
English rule, 231, 232; relations
with Nationalist agitators, 257;
rise of Young Turks, 292

Turkish, the official language of the
Egyptian army, 51 ; High Com-
missioner in Cairo, 214; Revolution,
293,

WADY HALFA, site of, i ; railway
junction, 3

Wellcome Institute, 29

White Nile. See Nile.

White Slave Traffic, 273

Willcocks (Sir William), 134; his
scheme for perennial irrigation,
140; his presidency of Sir Colin
Scott MoncriefTs Commission, 1890,
143; modification of his designs
for Assuan dam, 144; his proposal
to utilize the great lakes as storage
reservoirs, 151, 218

Wingate, Sir Reginald, Sirdar of the
Egyptian army and Governor-
General of the Sudan, xiv ; Lord
Cromer's testimony to value of
his long tenure of office, xx ;
in the Palace at Khartum, 16;
rescue of Father Ohrwalder, 33 ;
a 'shrewd and kindly autocrat,"
43 ; his linguistic and antiquarian
attainments, 47 ; his military ca-
pacity in the campaign of Ghedit,
47 ; his brilliant and final victory
over the Khalifa at that place,
48 ; student and soldier, 49 ; at
review of Khartum garrison, 81 ;
extraordinary progress in prosperity
and good order of Sudan under his
direction, 284

Wolseley, Viscount, his expedition
in 1884, 7, 103; his attitude to
Suakin-Berbcr Railway, 95 ; his
entry into Cairo, in i.SS^. 216

Women, more numerous than men
in the Northern Sudan, :.>, ; educa-
tion of, in Khartum. (>j; their
(X)sition and treatment in lines
of Sudanese regiments. 85, 87 ;
question of their future in Egypt,
301 ; seclusion of, recognized by
established Eastern usage. 30.2 ;
steps towards emancipation of, 304 ;
education of. 305

316

INDEX

YOUNG, Captain, formerly Mudir of

Omdunnan, 35
Young Turk movement, its effect in

Egypt, 257, 292

ZAGHLTJL PASHA, his scheme for
sending native girl-students to be
trained in England, 307

Zeidab Estate, visited and described,
1 20, seq.

Zubeir Pasha, his origin and career,
59, 60; meeting with him at Khar-
tum, 60; his farms and estates,
124

' I A HE following pages contain advertisements of a
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MODERN EGYPT

By
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BRITISH AGENT AND CONSUL GENERAL 1883-1907

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