It is always difficult to realise the state of mind of another person, even of one who is perhaps an equal in education, and who has been reared amid the same ideas and surroundings as one’s own; but it is impossible to really take the same standpoint as one of another race, another education, and another standard of duty and of morals. We cannot, therefore, see the world as a fellah sees it; and I believe this the more readily because after living the most part of ten years among the fellahin, and being accused of having gone some way toward them, I yet feel the gulf between their nature and my own as impassable as ever. One measuring-line may perhaps give some slight idea of their position. The resemblances between Egypt of the present and mediaeval England are enough to help our feelings in the matter. There is the same prevalence of the power of the great man of the village; the same rough-and-ready justice administered by him; the same lack of intercommunication, the same suspicion of strangers; the absence of roads, and use of pack animals, is alike; the lack of shops in all but large towns, and the great importance of the weekly markets in each village, is similar again; and the mental state of the people seems to be somewhat akin to that of our ancestors.

The man who can read and write is the rare exception in the country; perhaps two per cent. of the fellahin men can do so, but probably not one woman in ten thousand. Of education there is but very little, for the great majority of the people; in villages the children of the fellah seldom go to school, and in large towns the scholars are but a minority of the boys, while the girls are nowhere. In accounts they have some sharpness, but their reckoning would amuse an infant scholar in England. I overheard some quick lads, of about sixteen, anxiously discussing what a man’s wages were at £3 a month: they pretty soon saw that it was £1, or 100 piastres, every ten days, but how many piastres a day that was puzzled them all. One fellow proposed eleven; he was contradicted by another who said twelve; then another tried 9½; and at last, as a great discovery, one sagely reminded them all that ten tens made a hundred, and so a hundred piastres in ten days must be ten piastres a day. Egypt would almost satisfy Jack Cade.

The gross superstition, and the innumerable local saints, remind us again of mediaeval times. Many—perhaps most—of the people wear charms, written on paper, and sewn up in leather; they are worn around the neck, on the purse or pouch, or on the top of the cap. Cattle are also sometimes protected by them. It is common also for a man passing a saint’s tomb to repeat a prayer in a low mumble, even without stopping; while many go into the tomb-chamber to pray. These saints are anybody who has died in an odour of sanctity, probably within this century or the last—for few, I imagine, have a perennial reputation. Some of the great saints are commonly appealed to in the slightest emergency, such as lifting a weight or climbing an obstacle; and constant appeals are made to Ya Said, ya Bedawi, ya Tantawi (‘O Said, O Bedawi, O man of Tantah’) or Ya sitteh Zenab (‘O lady Zenab,’ the wife of the prophet); while a Copt, if his legs are stiff in rising from the ground, will call out, Ya adrah Mariam (‘O virgin Mary’). The most absurd tales are readily believed, and there is little or no discrimination or criticism applied to them. At one village there lies a large number of rough stones half hidden in the ground, scattered over an acre or so; probably old remnants of building material, brought a century or two ago from the hills. A great festival of a local saint is held at the village yearly, and an intelligent fellow gravely told me that the saint had been murdered there with all his followers, of whom a thousand were buried under each of the stones. The total number, or the question of burying a thousand men in a few square yards, did not seem to matter. I have also heard the old tale of the man who stole a sheep and ate it: when questioned, he denied the theft, whereat the sheep bleated in his stomach. A station-master, who had been educated in England, told me in English, in all sincerity, a tale about a Copt he knew, who got great treasures from a hall full of gold in an ancient mound. The door of the place only opened for five minutes once a week, on Friday noon, just when all true believers are at mosque; then the Copt went and took all the gold he could carry, before the door shut. One day, tarrying, the door began to shut and wounded his heel before he could escape.

While naming the local festivals above, it may be noted that they generally take place around a tall pole fixed in some open space by the village. Some poles are stout masts thirty or forty feet high: around this central point is the celebration of the molid or birthdays of the village saint. Some molids are fairs for the whole district, lasting nine days or even more, and attended by performers, shows, jugglers, sweet-sellers, and as much riff-raff as any English fair.

Many visitors to Egypt see the dancing and howling derwishes, but few know of the common and less obtrusive orgies of the same kind in the villages. They are connected strictly with a devotional sentiment: a man who has just joined in such excitement will tell you that it is ‘good to see Allah’ in that way—much like the fervid and maddening religious intoxication which yet finds a place in English civilization. These derwish parties are formed from a few men and boys—perhaps a dozen or twenty—who happen to live as neighbours: they are almost always held in moonlight, generally near full moon, a point which may connect them with some pre-Islamite moon-worship; and though often without any cause but idleness, yet I have noticed them being held after a death in a village where they do not occur otherwise. A professed derwish often leads the party, but that is not essential. The people all stand in a circle, and begin repeating Al-lÁh with a very strong accent on the latter syllable; bowing down the head and body at the former, and raising it at the latter. This is done all in unison, and slowly at first; gradually the rate quickens, the accent is stronger, and becomes more of an explosive howl, sounding afar off like an engine; the excitement is wilder, and hideously wild, until a horrid creeping comes over you as you listen, and you feel that in such a state there is no answering for what may be done. Incipient madness of the intoxication of excitement seems poured out upon them all, when at last they break down from exhaustion; or perhaps one or other, completely mad for the time, rushes off into the desert, and is followed, for fear he may injure himself. After a pause, some other phrase is started, and the same round is gone through. After about half an hour of this they separate with a great sense of devotional virtue, and wearied with excitement.

Some curious observances are connected with accidental deaths. Fires of straw are lighted one month after the death, around the ground where the body has lain; and where blood has been shed iron nails are driven into the ground, and a mixture of lentils, salt, &c., is poured out. These look like offerings to appease spirits, and the fires seem as if to drive away evil influences. Funeral offerings are still placed in the tombs for the sustenance of the dead, just as they were thousands of years ago.

The very hazy notions about all foreign places, and the blankness of ignorance concerning surrounding Nature, is a strong reminder of mediaeval times. To say that the earth is round is flat heresy in Egypt; and even the ulema of Cairo—learned in all the wisdom of Islam—walked out of the government examination room to which they had been invited when a pupil was examined in geography. To listen to a description of a round world was too atrocious an insult to them. The dim ideas of Europe—some far-off heathenish land of infidels—and the questions as to how many Muslims there are in our towns and villages, show the peasant, even when intelligent, to be much on a level with the audience of Sir John Mandeville. It is no wonder that in such ignorance there is a mighty fanaticism. Islam is all in all to the fellah: the unbelievers he looks on as a miserable minority; and it is only the unpleasant fact that they cannot be crushed at present that prevents his crushing them, and asserting the supremacy of Islam. A clever Arab once remarked to me concerning a department which was mismanaged by European direction, ‘How much better it would be to have an Arab over it!’ But on my asking where he could find a native whose corruption would not be far worse than the present rule, he could but reluctantly give in. This fanatical feeling of dislike to the Nusrani, or Nazarene, was the mainstay of Arabi’s revolt; and the very existence of such a feeling shows how dangerous it might become if fed on success. The children unintentionally reveal what is the tone and talk of the households in private; they constantly greet the European with howls of Ya Nusrani (‘O Nazarene’), the full force of which title is felt when your donkey-boy urges on his beast by calling it, ‘Son of a dog! son of a pig! son of a Nazarene!’ Any abuse will do to howl at the infidel, and I have been for months shouted at across every field as Ya khawaga mafeles! (‘O bankrupt foreigner’), because I preferred walking to the slow jolt of a donkey. The fact that dozens of the villagers were depending on me for good pay all the time did not seem to weigh in the youthful mind, compared with the pleasure of finding a handy insult. This temper, if not held down, might easily rise in the arrogance of its ignorance to such a height as to need a much sharper lesson than it has ever received. That a massacre of the Coptic Christians was fully anticipated by them when Arabi drove out the foreigners, is a well-known matter of history, which should not be lightly forgotten.

This fanaticism is linked with an unreasoning ferocity of punishment. I have seen a coachman suddenly seize on a street-boy, and, for some word or gesture, lash him on the bare legs with the whip again and again with all his might. Even a particularly good-natured and pleasant native remarked with gusto how good it would be to take a certain family who were of thievish habits, and pour petroleum over them—from the old woman to the baby—and so burn them all up alive: he gloated over the thoroughness of the undertaking, while all the time he was cheating his own employer. It is a pity for their sakes that they do not believe in witchcraft, the whole village would so much enjoy the festivity of doing a ducking, in the fashion of our ancestors.

Akin to this fanaticism is the ruling view of everything as kismet, the allotted fate. Perhaps no abstraction is so deleterious to a character as this; as a man always can thus shut his eyes to the consequences of his own actions, and refuse to learn by experience. I never yet found a fellah who confessed to doing wrong, or to being sorry for what he had done. He may sometimes stand and look aghast at the consequences of his own carelessness; but he will do no more, and no less, if the damage is the fault of someone else. He scarcely can, in fact, express what one of ourselves would feel, as there is no word for repentance in his vocabulary, except ‘good’; nor is there any word for sorrow, except ‘angry’ or ‘annoyed.’ The very sentiment of remorse is so unknown that there are no means of expressing it in any form. The constant way of appeasing an injured party is for the offender to assure him emphatically that it is of no consequence (ma’alesh); and the more often he thus asserts that he has not done the other a wrong, the more he considers he clears himself of it, until after sufficient of this lying he goes away with a sense of virtue. If in consequence of some very plain fault a man is punished by dismissal or otherwise, expressly pointing out to him the causes of his punishment, he will sullenly shrug his shoulders and say to his companions, Kismet; it is fated he is not to work. That any blame attaches to him for his trouble seems not to be dangable into him by any means. This lack of belief in consequences is also seen in the extreme carelessness often shown. After a harvest, a large quantity of grain had been stored in a room beside a village, covered with the most inflammable of roofing—durra straw: then, in order to toast some bread, a blazing fire was lighted in the low room, and allowed to flame up to the straw overhead. Of course it was soon all in flames, and the whole of a large proprietor’s harvest was destroyed. Even when it was blazing, within a hundred feet of the canal, the only attempt to fetch water was by two or three women slowly filling their great pitchers and carrying them up on their heads as usual; no notion of a chain-gang ever seemed to occur to them. The same lack of any co-operation is seen when robbers are about. I asked why, when a house was attacked by thieves, the other villagers did not all come out and seize the men, being ten or twenty to one. The reply was, ‘When any one hears another house being robbed, he keeps as quiet as possible, and does nothing, for fear of attracting the thieves to his own house.’

This belief in kismet, and lack of co-operation, tells favourably in one way—the fellah is not revengeful. No matter whether he deserves what ill befalls him, or is an innocent sufferer, he never goes about for simple vengeance, but yields, and is ready to act as if no grudge or ill-feeling rested in his mind. What might be the case in an affront to their religion or family I would not say; but in all minor matters the fellah may be dealt with regardless of an idea of revenge.

The cardinal principle to remember in dealing with Egyptians is that they have no forbearance, and know no middle course. The notion of means exactly meeting an end, is outside of the fellah’s sense. If he is careless about a danger, he is so careless in many cases as to be killed; if he thinks about it, he is so afraid that he will not face it at all. If he has to make anything secure, no amount of surplus security seems too great. If he knows that you have power, he cannot be too submissive, and insists on kissing your hand, or at the least so honouring the aroma of it where it has touched his own. But if he has power himself, he gets all he can out of it; and the grasping and overbearing nature of the village shekh is too generally well known to those under him. Nothing seems to have astonished and disgusted Stanley more than the scheming of the Egyptian soldiers, whom he expected to follow him, in retreating. Yet the whole affair was characteristically Egyptian: fleeing from the Mahdists; only too glad to find anyone so foolish in their eyes as to be troubled about them; and then clumsily plotting—without any regard to time—for making the best profit they could out of the affair, by seizing whatever seemed to have come into their power. It would have been nothing to them to make away with people who were so indiscreet as to put ammunition within their grasp. The scheme seems to be the natural course of things to anyone who has watched the ways of Egypt. Peremptory orders are understood; and the more peremptorily they are enforced the more cheerfully they are obeyed, though roughness or harshness is seldom necessary: but if you do not rule, you must submit to be ruled. And the fellah has a positive dislike to having a choice of action left to him. In matters indifferent to me, I often tell them to do what they please; and that generally ends in their helplessly doing nothing, especially if they need to co-operate. At last, seeing their trouble, I give a precise order, and every one at once obeys it with thankfulness.

From this it follows that the fellah is one of the most easily managed people in the world. When once he knows who is master, there is little or no trouble. And if you can pick and choose your men, and keep them well in hand, instantly dismissing any who may disobey, it would be impossible to find a more cheerful, pleasant, well-disposed, and kindly set of fellows. The only danger is that they may perceive too much of your confidence in them. All the best men I have had have gone lamentably to the bad when they found that they were at all trusted. The temptation of having any credit of character is too great for them; they hasten to commute it for instant advantage, as soon as they see that there is anything to be made of it. The goose that lays golden eggs has a short and perilous life in Egypt.

That there is scarcely any sense of honour as to truthfulness need hardly be remarked. The idea of truth for its own sake does not weigh appreciably against either present advantage or serving the interest of another. The most respectable fellahin I have known would lie readily and unlimitedly, if they thought it beneficial. One very good fellow came to tell me one day what he had heard, prefacing it by saying how he had not two minutes before obtained the information by solemnly promising never to tell me about it. That he avowed the most unblushing and deliberate lying never seemed to occur to his mind as anything noticeable, but rather a virtuous attention to my interests. Another superior fellow lost some letters, which were entrusted to him to post: when he came back he mentioned the loss, without any regret, and immediately went on to praise himself for the great virtue he had shown in acknowledging it, and the elevation of his moral standpoint above the sinners around him. It was, perhaps, a triumph of candour for an Egyptian.

From all that we have just noticed it will be plain that Egypt is a land of bribery. Every person who wants anything pays for it; time, attention, favour, facilities, screening, and escaping, all have their price. And it is the length of this price that is the deterrent from crime, and the dread of those who get into trouble over any affair. I reported a case of a villager throwing a dead buffalo into the canal. A policeman visited the shekh to enquire; a sovereign changed hands, and he returned stating that it was all a mistake, and that no dead buffalo ever existed there. But a few weeks later another policeman in search of prey rode round; and, finding a dead dog, pocketed a dollar for his acuteness. And the policeman is the fellah in trousers, armed, and in authority. A good false accusation will sometimes do, and is even occasionally worked on a wholesale scale for small bribes. Briefly, it may be stated that the working of petty jurisdiction is, that the law lays down what are offences, and attaches certain penalties to them; these penalties, then, roughly are the maximum limits to which the police can reward themselves by the discovery of such offences. The system works all right in the long run, as well as any system could in so corrupt a country: it is part payment by results to the police, with a minimum daily wage secured to them, and the pickings in proportion to their acuteness. Of course all this is profanity to the ears of High Officials, who never have a chance of hearing the quiet doings in the villages. The European dignitaries, and many of the natives also, duly and diligently administer justice when an affair comes to their ears; but the little minor assaults and thefts and squabbles are adjusted on a rougher and readier system, which had better be left alone if it cannot be improved away altogether.

The barrier which exists between the fellah and the European official is almost insurmountable. Not many officials visit the country districts at all; when they do they stop at the shekhs’ houses, and are always attended by servants, before whom no man would speak if he could avoid it, as they would talk about him to the natives in the offices. Then the fellah is timid, dreads men who go about on prancing horses, and wear riding-boots and spurs—all that means police and terrorism to him. Unless therefore there is something very seriously amiss, the fellah in general will not fly to the European official, on the rare occasion when he sees him in the distance, and get himself into the fire by trying to put some one else into the frying-pan. If any one wanted to learn what was going on, and what was the state of affairs, let him go on foot occasionally and tramp through some villages, chat to the people by the way, avoid the shekhs like poison; and, while not at all disguising who he was in conversation, move about in as different a manner to the ordinary official as he possibly can. Some wiseacres have even said, ‘Well, let them petition if there is anything amiss.’ Petition, indeed! from people who cannot write, and have no knowledge in general of who is the proper official to appeal to, or where he is! If they go to one of the clerks at the wayside—where they sit about the office doors,—he will at once inform the natives in the very office which may be in fault: if they go to the village scribe, he is generally a right-hand man of the shekh, who may be the very defendant in question. No! European administration, except in important or flagrant cases, scarcely touches the life of the fellah directly.

When I first met the fellah, I had always impressed upon me by an old Arab that no one ever did anything rightly unless they were heartily afraid; and though this may be a harsh way to state it, the fact is true at bottom. There is no need to terrorise or to bully, and with most Egyptians perfect suavity is the best course; but if a man transgresses in any way he must be met by sternness, and emphatically put into his right place. One of the most effective of minor rebukes is to raise a laugh at the transgressor among the bystanders: to make a man’s doings ridiculous to his neighbours crushes him more than any expostulations. The fellah has a good sense of the ludicrous, though he very seldom originates a joke. I have known little comparisons or nicknames that I have given, taken up all round by the people with a relish, and be repeated sometimes for days afterwards. Nothing smoothes matters more than getting them into a cheerful mood; and I have often watched the faces when a discussion or difference has occurred, and by just throwing in a remark when a passing smile appeared, to bring it out into a laugh, the scale has been turned and business settled. The native in general squabbles over a difference with his fellows, shouts, and insists, shows fight, seizes the garments of his opponent, and threatens to tear them; all for, perhaps, a pennyworth of advantage one way or other. They think equally that persistent worrying will wear out the determination of the European; and, until they learn by long experience, they will try that method. I have known a shekh stand facing me for over half an hour persisting that I should employ certain men to work for me; and, though my refusals increased in strength, it was not until he was wearied out that he ceased: it is a simple battle of endurance in such cases. He knew that his position would prevent direct personal ejection by force, and he accordingly used up that forbearance as so much leverage for his request.

Two principles of the fellah nature which Europeans cannot realise at first are that they cannot exercise forbearance, as we have noticed; and secondly, that they cannot stand long-continued temptation. Residents sometimes say that the native is incurably bad; that he may serve you for years, and rob you at the end. But such cases are really the fault of the employer, who has no more right to tempt people to rob him than to tempt them to murder him. To reconcile such a view of the fellah with the astonishing honesty and particularity that I have often found, may seem difficult. But time is the source of the difference. A man who will at once correct his accounts against himself, or bring you some trifle that you have overlooked or forgotten, will be quite incapable of even far less honesty, if the temptation is before him for months. Their impulses are generally sound and honest; but if they begin to look on anything as being in their hands, they drift easily into regarding it as their own. It is only a more rapid application of what may be seen in England regarding long trusts, charities, tenant-right, &c. The straightforward honesty that I have found on most occasions when an immediate temptation was before the fellah, has surprised me, and makes it needful to remember that this must not be strained and tried by continual temptation, the exposure to which will almost certainly spoil the character, and oblige one to cast aside a man who might otherwise have been useful and honest. Knowing this, I regard these failings of the fellah as lying quite as much at his employer’s door as at his own.

One of the pleasantest points of the Egyptian character is the genuine and unfeigned hospitality so often met with. If in walking through a village I happen to pass the shekh sitting at his door, he will usually press the stranger to come in and have coffee, and hardly take a refusal. When pitching tent for the night, it is well to avoid coming under the shekh’s notice, or probably he will insist on your stopping in his house: and in the larger towns the shekhs have sometimes excellent guest-chambers, with European furniture. This is hospitality for which no return is expected, or would be accepted. Even with poor people it is the custom for them to press one to stay, and to have coffee or food with them. An Egyptian travelling in England would think it very brutal that neither the squire nor any of the inhabitants of a village should press him to stay for a meal or for the night with them: he would set us down as shamelessly mercenary, and without any sense of propriety or generosity.

It is certain that the perceptions of an Egyptian are far less keen than ours. Their feeling of pain is hardly comparable with our own: with bad injuries, such as torn or crushed fingers, they do not seem at all distressed; and a boy said to me that it was no wonder I healed quickly, as I did not disturb a wound, ‘whereas an Arab would pull a cut open to look at it inside.’ With pain, so with the senses in health. They cannot distinguish one person from another by the footstep; they do not easily distinguish a voice; they seldom respond or seem to perceive any words when called from a distance, unless the attention is aroused by loudly calling the person’s name; they never notice slight or distant sounds, and seem to suppose that you will never perceive a whisper from one to another. That the sense of smell is not much developed is only too evident from the fearfully filthy condition of the village surroundings, which are sometimes poisonous to an European.

Unfortunately the result of education is rather to spoil than to develop natural ability. Of the very few peasants I have met with who had been taught to write, two were fools in other matters, all common sense and ability appearing to have been crushed out of them. Nor is this at all surprising, when we know that the cardinal part of Muslim education is the learning of the pointless prolixities of the Koran by heart, as a pure matter of rote, without the use of the reason or intellect. To burden a child’s mind with such a fearful task is enough to ruin it, if not strong. It is a sad sight to see the whole of the coming intellects of a town rocking themselves to and fro while they gabble through sura after sura of the Koran in a gusty sing-song voice without pause or point; and then to reflect that this is the end and aim of nearly all their education. The native Coptic schools are the only encouraging sight of indigenous training; and the ability shown by some of their boys is astonishing.

What then can we look forward to as the hope of improvement of such a people? In the first place, a strong and just government, with a sufficient amount of an incorruptible European element to crush out bribery and ensure justice; this, in a couple of generations, would go far to alter the national character. To trust one’s money to the care of the government at the post-office, is the idea which astounds a fellah more than anything else he can learn of England. An education in which the Koran is but incidental, and not a crushing load on the memory, is another necessity. A spread of some sanitary ideas, and a cheap supply of some staple medicines for the commonest ailments, would be a great step: the utter ignorance and lack of all common sense in such matters is appalling. Probably improved dwellings, on some large estates, would be the most powerful means for changing their notions; only such must not be Europeanised, but thoroughly native houses reasonably arranged as to ventilation, dryness, and disposal of all refuse; thus they might lead to imitation; and a small premium on well-built houses would push the subject. The only class yet appreciably affected for the better by foreign influence is the Coptic community; and in that the energy of the American missionaries, and the good example of their followers, has produced a healthy awakening amid the body of the race, which is perhaps the most promising sight in the country at present. The enterprise of the Copt in education and improvement, with the advantage of the higher standard of Christianity above the ethics of the Koran, may now develop a better moral fibre in the nation, without which its advance is hopeless. The great snare to be avoided is the foreign character of improvements; so long as speaking a foreign language, wearing foreign clothes, and aping foreign manners are thought to be the objects of a change, we cannot expect to see a real progress in the character of a nation. That English influence has a vast field for philanthropic enterprise in this six millions of people is obvious; but the best intentions may be too easily nullified by ignorance of the conditions of the case, and by the incapacity and resistance of the average native official, by whom it is useless to expect any serious change or solid advance to be carried out to order.