CORRESPONDENCE.
A LETTER FROM THE NILE.
EGYPT, like Gibraltar, is a name which suggests cross-roads of thoughts. Is it the Bible for us ; or is it Herodotus ; or the Egyptological jargon of the museums, or "The Arabian Nights ; " or twenty other things P Happy here, as elsewhere, the man with a " hobby." Aristotle says we don't want a mathematician to make after-dinner speeches, but it would be worse to hear him discourse on fluxions out of place. We shall be grateful presently to the owner of the antiquarian hobby-horse, when we visit the Mosque of El Hazhar, or the Serapeum. But we do not want to mount at once. It is the present which at our first entrance into Egypt fills the eye and exercises the imagination, for Egypt is no longer the land of curiosities alone to us. It is a living country with an eventful recent history, and a promise for the future, which is to all appearance being rapidly fulfilled. I do not scruple to confess that my first feeling on setting foot in the most ancient country in the world, was that of British pride; to see evidence on all sides that we, and no one else, are driving the coach, and driving it well. It is not merely that the passenger lands without fuss or extortion, nor that he has passed through the Custom-house with far less ado than at Algesiras, for these conveniences exist at Tangier, and are not essentially connected with British rule. Port Said was created by the Canal, and is not much to be proud of, being a sentina gentium, or international sink, and an old-fashioned Oriental port may be sighed for in this vulgar, hybrid place. But as we travel on, there is a sense that English business habits have taken root everywhere, and that England turns a wheel in the rusty, vast machine of the Pharaohs.
It would be too gratifying to national pride to put down to English influence all the rustic prosperity that meets one all along the railway from Ismailia to Cairo. What we can be justly proud of is, that we have abolished the kowrbash, abolished the eortrae and conscription, equalised and systema- tised the land-tax, lightened the salt-tax; and if we have not been able to save the fellah from the consequences of his heed- less borrowing, we have removed the causes of it, and prepared everything for the departure of the usurer who gives Christians and foreigners such a bad name in Egypt. For your true Mahommedan does not lend money at 60 per cent.; he only buys up the crop beforehand at an enormous profit,—which is as lucrative as usury, and no sin. And so, as I look out of the windows of the train, I can think that if these fortunate agriculturalists knew their own blessings, they would put down their secure enjoyment of them to us, and not be in a hurry to cry, "Egypt for the Egyptians 1"—which means, according to all experience, the kernels for the Pashas and Effendis, and the shells for the people.
If any Englishman wishes to know what his country has been doing in Egypt for the last ten years—but we are strangely given to taking our national greatness as a matter of course, and giving ourselves little trouble to understand it —and has not read Mr. Milner's book on Egypt, let him lose no time in reading it and lending it to his friends. For we go so fast, that it will soon be out of date, though published in 1893. There he will see how the energy and tact of one Englishman, seconded by the best staff of subordinates in the world, has entirely changed the face of a great country. It is not a matter of sentiment, as the facts are notorious. In ten years Egypt, weak, hopelessly in debt, and bound hand and foot to foreign creditors, has become solvent and prosperous. Justice has been re-established, property made secure, police organised, taxation diminished, an army drilled and officered, education founded, many vast public works completed and others set afoot, a complex system of international govern- ment reduced to simplicity ;—and all in the face of persistent opposition from France, and grudging, camel-like acceptance of foreign rule on the part of the native rulers of Egypt. What makes this achievement the more remarkable is that Egpyt has not been treated as a conquered country. The country is governed by its own Ministers and its own staff of officials, directed by a small number of Englishmen. And this has been done so thoroughly that the Egyptians, confessing their obligation to the training which they have had from England, are saying that they have learnt their lesson and ought to be left alone to govern Egypt by themselves. Every one knows that if we are to go out of Egypt now, till the old abuses would return. The East is not so quick in unlearning old habits. Let England leave her hold of the country, and in three years or less, irrigation-works would decay, the fellaheen would be at the mercy of the tax-gatherer, and his shadow the usurer ; justice would be bought and sold, the Koran would take the place of the statute-book, the salt-tax, the palm- tree-tax, the colt& would be as burdensome as ever, and Egypt would sink back into that condition of indebtedness and corruption from which England delivered her. A few years more, and she would become again an intolerable nuisance, and have to be taken in hand. By whom P Not by Europe, for the experiment of a joint Protectorate is not likely to be repeated ; but either by England again in a stronger and sounder position, or by France, if France were prosperous and powerful, and if we could endure to see her planted in our way to India, controlling the Canal, and dominating the Mediterranean from Toulon and Biserta.
Sooner or later the Protectorate must be established. It is a• pity we lost the opportunity of establishing it ten years ago.
It would have been intelligible and justifiable, and would have saved us, or more strictly speaking, Lord Cromer, a thousand troubles and misunderstandings under which a smaller man would have been overwhelmed long ago.
I wish I had seen Cairo twenty years ago, when the state of things described in Lane's "Modern Egyptians" was still in existence,—that is, the state of things depicted in " The Arabian Nights." Now, half the town is like the new quarter at Dresden or Berlin, and even old Cairo bazaars and mosques are profaned by the boots of the Giaour, who walks about among praying Moslems, shod with non-conducting yellow slippers. But we get on board Mr. Cook's luxurious steamer, the best passenger-boat I ever saw, and leave the beautiful city behind, feeling only a grateful recollection of the view from the citadel, than which Damascus itself cannot afford a finer prospect.
It is my first sight of the Nile ; a smiling, cheerful stream, flowing smoothly and without eddies, which tell a tale of troubles, like wrinkles on the human face. The river has been falling for three weeks, but is still high; and all along its banks from Cairo to Asiout the peasants are at their busiest, ploughing, sowing, hoeing, watering with laborious " shadoofs " and groaning sakiyehs," or waterwheels worked by oxen or camels. After two months of incessant watering, they will reap their crops of " dourra," maize, cotton, or sugar. The patient palm-tree alone needs no watering, but sends its roots down to the lower soil, where the water-supply never fails its thirst. Then they will plough and sow again, and even a third time, if the inundation has been plentiful.
The broad red river seems to invite us to visit the wonders it has to show. The wind blows fresh astern, swelling the sails of the dahabiyebs which are running south like our- selves ; to us it means only more or less comfort as we sit on deck, and we do not regard it. The aspect of the country is in harmony with the river. A peaceful horizontal landscape, bordered by low hills of yellowish colour into shadows of rose and blue, delicately coloured as one sees them in a clear air. The whole sky is full of white light, an effect almost unknown in England, where there is always a tinge of blue or yellow. The same objects repeat themselves perpetually, and for days we see nothing else ; an endless succession of palm-groves, fields of sugar-cane and dourra, squalid, picturesque, brown villages, now and then a town with some white houses and a few minarets, canals, oxen, buffaloes, turbaned men on the sky-line riding near the tails of donkeys, men half-clothed or naked working in the fields or at the water-sweeps, graceful women, like Marthas and Marys, in blue robes and black 'veils, filling water-pots or carrying them majestically on their heads, naked children, flocks of brown and black sheep and goats tended by Laban and Jacob. These are the simple 'elements of a pastoral landscape, which, however monotonous, never wearies the eyes or the attention. It might not be so, if we were distracted by the thought that these country people were oppressed and miserable. Poor, no doubt, they are ; and bad habits of government are not done away with by a 'Governor's order, nor even by ten years' patient labour ; but the worst of their grievances are removed, they have begun to nourish hope and confidence ; and their wants are a little meal, the water of the river, a few yards of cheap cotton, and a but to creep into at night. Segetis certa fides sues, the farmer's prayer, is theirs to the full. All they need to make them happy is enough money to buy water-wheels and steam- pumps,—for the shadoof employs the incessant labour of six men to an acre, and the population of Egypt gives but one man to an acre. They will have that, too, in time, if we stay here ;—but if we go P The Nile has probably lost some picturesque features since it has become a more frequent thoroughfare. No longer can we see crocodiles basking on the mud-banks, nor admire the roseate hues of flamingoes. There is no lack of birds, however. Great flocks of stupid pelicans sit aide by side with their feet in the water, or rise in vast clouds and wheel high in the air, shining as they turn in the sunlight ; patient herons stand waiting for the fish, which the black-and-white kingfisher snaps up ; pied-plovers tumble and flap like English lapwings ; bee-eaters of vivid green sit on the ground ; barred hoopoes hurry through the cane-brakes ; coffee-coloured vultures, like enormous turkeys, sit in twos and threes on the banks digesting their last meal of carrion ; hooded crows are always cheerfully employed ; and flocks of clean white egrets follow the plough in the absence of rooks. I conclude, my letter with a local picture. We landed at Asiout, and rode to the brown town with its domes and minarets. It was market-day, and the streets were crowded with people from town and country with their white turbans and blue caftans. We climbed a hill, and could look over its shoulder. On one side is the rich plough-land, with patches of verdure where the new corn is springing ; then the cheerful town, the windings of the Nile, and the blue, fertile plain to the south. On the other, as if a carpet had been laid on the sand, the green suddenly ends, and the desert stretches away for hundreds of miles to the west and south-west. Here, said our dragoman, till the troubles in the Soudan began, used to come caravans from Darfur, forty days' journey, with ivory, ostrich-feathers, and slaves, to enrich Egypt. Now the trade is at an end, and beyond the border of Egypt no caravans dare travel. I thought that if our country had done her duty at an unhappy crisis, all this country might have been open to civilisation, and happier caravans be speeding across the desert from east and west to free, not to enslave, the in- habitants of the Soudan. Such is the result of a missed opportunity. Semper nocuit &Vern paratis. F. WARRE CORNISH.
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