THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER Drop Cap T THIS is the story of how a handful of white men jerked a nation out of the desert and the depths of despair, as though by its collar, set it on its feet, and taught it to play the game. It is the story of how northeast Africa—a region which God had seemingly forgotten—has been transformed into a prosperous and self-respecting country by giving it two things which it had always needed and had never known—justice and water. It is the chronicle of a thirty years' struggle, under disheartening conditions, against overwhelming odds, and when you have finished it you will agree with me, I think, that it is one of the wonder-tales of history. It is a drama in which English officials and Egyptian pashas and Arab sheikhs all have their greater or their lesser parts, and it is as full of romance and intrigue and treachery and fighting as any moving-picture play that was ever thrown upon a screen. To my way of thinking, the rescue and rehabilitation of the Nile country is the most convincing proof of England's genius as a colonising nation. That you may be able to judge, by comparison, what she has accomplished, you must go back a third of a century or so, to the days when Ismail Pasha—he with the brow of a statesman and the chin of a libertine—still sat on the Whether this Arabi Pasha was at heart a patriot or a plunderer is a question which has never been satisfactorily decided, nor is it one which particularly concerns us, although, if you ever happen to find yourself at Kandy, in the hills of Ceylon, where he still lives in exile, I would recommend you to call upon him, for he will receive you with marked hospitality and will talk to you quite frankly about those stirring events in which he played so prominent a part. As this is a story of the present, rather than of the past, suffice it to say that Arabi, then an officer in the Egyptian army, instigated In view of the chaotic condition of the country, England naturally decided that the only way to insure the safety of her subjects, as well as of her great financial and political interests in that region, was to continue the military occupation of Egypt, for the time being at least, and boldly to begin the task of its financial, judicial, political, and military reconstruction. The form of government which has resulted is, I suppose, the most extraordinary in the history of nations. Nominally a province of the Turkish Empire, and administered by a viceroy who theoretically derives his power from the Turkish sovereign, Egypt is autonomous Another feature of Egypt's complex form of government is the International Debt Commission, which consists of delegates from England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Italy, who are stationed at Cairo for the purpose of keeping an eye on the national revenues and periodically collecting a share of them, over and above the actual running expenses of the government, to pay the interest on the Egyptian bonds held in those countries. To this administrative medley must be added the The Capitulations, many of which date back to the early days of Turkish power, are nothing less than guarantees to foreigners within the Ottoman dominions of full and complete immunity from the laws governing Turkish subjects. No reciprocal obligation was constituted by a Capitulation (which, by the way, means the instrument containing the terms of an agreement), as it was intended to be a purely gratuitous concession granted to Christians, by virtue of which they were tolerated upon the soil of Islam. Though the Capitulations were never regarded by the Turks as treaties—it being obvious that the Commander of the Faithful, who is likewise the Successor of the Prophet and the Shadow of Allah, could never treat a Christian ruler as an equal—they have all the character and force of treaties nevertheless, inviolability of domicile, freedom from taxation of every sort, and immunity from arrest for any offence whatsoever being but items in the comprehensive promise not to molest the foreigner. In short, the Capitulations give to the nations possessing them as complete jurisdiction over their citizens as Should an American sailor, for example, become involved in a drunken affray, as sometimes happens, and wound or kill an Egyptian, the Egyptian police would no more arrest him than they would the Khedive. They would merely keep him under surveillance, meanwhile notifying the American consul, who would despatch his kavasses, as the armed guards which are attached—also by virtue of the Capitulations—to the various consulates are called, to effect the man's arrest. He would then be tried by the consul, who possesses magisterial powers, before a jury drawn from American residents or tourists, and, if found guilty, would be confined in one of the several consular prisons which the United States maintains in the Turkish Empire, although, if the sentence were a long one, he would probably be sent to a prison in this country to serve it out. Though the Egyptian police may be perfectly aware that Georgios Miltiades runs a roulette game in the back room of his cafÉ, and keeps a disorderly house up-stairs, he can lounge in his doorway and jeer at them with perfect safety for the simple reason that he is a Greek subject, and therefore his cafÉ is as much on Greek soil as though it were in the Odos Ammonia in Athens, his consul alone possessing the right to enter it, to cause his arrest, and to inflict imprisonment or fine. Notwithstanding the fact that the importation of As a result of the privileges granted to foreigners by the Capitulations, the consuls stationed in Egypt, as well as in other parts of the Turkish Empire, are virtually the governors of their respective colonies, possessing powers which cause their wishes to be respected and their orders obeyed. They are expected to keep a watchful eye on the doings of their nationals, especially those who keep saloons, dance-halls, or cafÉs; to settle, either in or out of court, their quarrels and even their domestic disputes; to inspect the sanitary condition of their houses; to perform the marriage service for those who prefer a civil to a religious ceremony; and to attend to their burial and the administration of their estates when they die. It is scarcely necessary to add that, as a result of this anomalous state of affairs, there is constant friction and frequent conflicts of authority between the foreign consuls and the local authorities. So jealously, indeed, do the foreign powers guard the privileges conferred upon them by the Capitulations, that Cairo can have no modern drainage system because In matters of personal law, such as marriage, divorce, guardianship, succession, and the like, foreigners are, in general, subject to their own patriarchs or other religious heads, while similar questions are decided for the natives by the native courts known as Mehkemmehs, which are presided over by the Cadis. In other matters Egyptians are justiciable before the ordinary native tribunals, which now consist of forty-six summary courts having civil jurisdiction in matters up to two thousand five hundred dollars in value and criminal jurisdiction in offences punishable by a fine or by imprisonment up to three years; seven central tribunals, each of the chambers of which consists of three judges; and a court of appeals at Cairo, about half of whose members are European. Since its reorganisation, the native Egyptian bench has won an enviable record for honesty, energy, and efficiency, and would, if granted complete jurisdictional powers, prove a great influence for good in the land. So far as the Khedive is concerned, he has about as much to say in the direction of the government as the child Emperor of China had before the revolution put a president in his stead. Not only is Abbas Hilmi surrounded by English secretaries and advisers, without whose permission he may scarcely change his mind, but he is compelled to yield to England even in choosing the members of his ministry, the one or two attempts Some years ago, when that grim old statesman, Lord Cromer, was still deus ex machina in Egypt, the Khedive, emboldened by the rapid spread of the Nationalist movement, which has for its slogan “Egypt for the Egyptians!” flatly declined to give a cabinet portfolio to a certain Egyptian politician whose appointment had been urged by the British Consul-General and who was notoriously a British tool. The following morning Lord Cromer drove to the Abdin Palace and demanded an audience with the Khedive. There were no euphemisms employed in the interview which ensued. “I have come to obtain your Highness's signature to this decree,” announced Lord Cromer, in the blunt and aggressive manner so characteristic of him. “Suppose, my lord,” the Khedive asked quietly, “that I decline to make an appointment which is not for the good of Egypt—what then?” “Then, your Highness,” said Cromer menacingly, “Ceylon.” “But suppose, my lord,” Abbas Hilmi again inquired, his face pale with anger, “that I disregard your threat to exile me to Ceylon and still refuse to sign this commission?” Lord Cromer strode across the room to a window The Khedive stepped to the window and looked down. There, drawn up in motionless ranks which stretched from end to end of the great square, was a brigade of British infantry, the Egyptian sun blazing down on the rows of brown helmets, on the business-like uniforms of khaki, and on the slanting lines of steel. For five full minutes Abbas Hilmi stood in silence, looking down on that grim display of power. Then he turned slowly to Lord Cromer. “Give me the pen,” he said. Here is another example of the harshness of the attitude which England has seen fit to adopt in her dealings with the Egyptian sovereign. In the days when Lord Kitchener, fresh from his triumphs in the Sudan, was still Sirdar of the Egyptian army, the Khedive announced that he would utilise the occasion of his approaching visit to Khartoum to review the troops of the garrison. For hours the sinewy, brown-faced soldiery marched and countermarched before the Khedive on the field of Omdurman. The infantry in their sand-coloured uniforms swept by with the swing of veterans; the field batteries—the same that had mown down the Mahdi's fanatic tribesmen—rumbled by at a gallop; the camel corps, the riders swaying on their strange mounts like vessels in a gale, paced past; then the cavalry came, as fast as the horses could lay The men who really transact the business of the Egyptian Government are not the holders of cabinet portfolios, but the departmental under-secretaries, all of whom are English, their plans being perfunctorily submitted to their Egyptian chiefs for their approval, though they would be used whether they received it or not. The national revenues and expenditures are controlled by an English financial adviser, without whose permission the Khedive and his ministers cannot spend so much as a piastre of government funds. Similarly, the ministries of the interior, of justice, of communications, and of agriculture are dictated by English “advisers.” For upward of thirty years, in fact, the Nile country has been more absolutely governed from London than has India, or Canada, or Australia, or South Africa, or any of the Crown colonies, and this despite the fact that between England and Egypt there is no tie that is officially recognised by any foreign power. Now, thirty years is a considerable lapse of time anywhere, particularly in the East, where men mature rapidly, so that those who were children when the British came are in the prime of life now. The fact that in that interim England has had ample time to train them for the duties of governmental administration, as witness what we have accomplished among the Filipinos Let it be perfectly clear, however, that nothing is farther from my intention than to intimate that British rule has not been beneficial to Egypt. No fair-minded person who was familiar with the appalling condition of the country and its people before the English came, and with their present state of prosperity, would cast so much as the shadow of a doubt on the wonderful improvement which has been brought about. The story of Egypt's rise from practical bankruptcy until its securities are now quoted nearly as high as English consols reads like a romance of the gold fields. During the last few years the country has been experiencing a land boom equal to that of southern California, property in Alexandria having sold at the rate of one hundred dollars a square yard; scientific irrigation, combined with the completion of the great dam at Assuan, has enormously enlarged the area of cultivation and To my way of thinking, the most interesting chapter in the history of present-day Egypt is that which records the development of scientific irrigation. Northeast Africa being practically rainless, its sole source of water supply is the Nile, this mighty river created by torrential rains in the mountains of Abyssinia and by the overflow of equatorial lakes, and which is without tributaries in Egypt proper, having an overflow which varies with the seasons. For four months the flood rushing seaward, which is known as “high Nile,” enriches hundreds of square miles of what would otherwise be arid and worthless land. Then come eight months of low Nile, which, were it not for the genius of an English engineer, would mean unwatered fields, But if Upper Egypt suffers from being too dry, Lower Egypt suffers from being too wet. The prosperity of the country, remember, depends almost entirely upon its cotton crop, which has an approximate value of one hundred million dollars annually, the cotton fields covering some one million six hundred thousand acres, most of which are in the Delta. That this source of revenue may be increased, the Egyptian Government has recently undertaken a huge drainage project, which will, it is estimated, when completed in 1915, redeem a great tract of flooded and hitherto worthless land, bringing a million additional acres under cultivation, almost doubling the production of cotton, and, incidentally, draining Lake Mariout, that historic body of water disappearing forever. Agriculture and its attendant problems of irrigation and fertilisation constitute the sole hobby and amusement of the present Khedive, Abbas Hilmi II, and, consequently, he is keenly interested in anything that pertains to it, being a ready and liberal purchaser of all improved types of agricultural machinery, which he puts to practical use on the great estates which he owns near Alexandria, in the Delta, and in the Western “It gives me particular pleasure,” I began, “to present Mr. K—— to your Highness, particularly as he is an authority on agricultural machinery—a subject in which your Highness is, I know, considerably interested.” “Say, Khedive,” exclaimed my fellow-countryman, suddenly leaning forward and emphasising every sentence by waggling his finger under Abbas Hilmi's august nose, “I've got the niftiest little proposition in well-drilling machinery that ever struck this burg, and if you don't jump at a chance to get in on the ground The Khedive, being, naturally, quite unaccustomed to this form of verbal assault and still more unaccustomed to having any one waggle a finger under his nose, at first drew back haughtily; then the humour of the situation dawned upon him, and, as the river of talk which is one of the chief assets of the trained American salesman flowed steadily on, he became interested in spite of himself, now and then interjecting a pertinent question, and terminating the audience by giving the American an order for several thousand dollars' worth of American machinery, which, the last I heard of it, was giving excellent satisfaction on the royal farms. If it is difficult to fix the exact legal status of Egypt, it is still more difficult to explain that of the Sudan, which is described in the official blue-books as “an Anglo-Egyptian condominium.” Until 1882 the Sudan was as much a part of Egypt proper as Florida is a part of the United States, but in that year Egyptian rule was interrupted by the revolt of the Mahdi, who, with his successor the Khalifa, held the country for sixteen years under a bloody and desolating tyranny. In 1896 an Anglo-Egyptian army under Sir Herbert Kitchener began operations for the recovery of the lost provinces, and, on September 2, 1898, the overthrow of the Dervish power was completed on the battle-field of Omdurman. In the following year the pleasing farce was presented The name Sudan is short for Beled-es-Sudan, which means the Land of the Blacks. Extending from the southern frontier of Egypt to Uganda, a distance equal to that from Saint Paul to New Orleans, and from the shores of the Red Sea to the confines of the great central African kingdom of Wadai, or as far as from Chicago to Denver, the Sudan boasts an area three times that of Texas. This area, prior to the Dervish oppression, had a population estimated at eight and a half millions, but, as a result of the wholesale massacres perpetrated by the Mahdi and his followers, it has to-day less than two and a half millions. Since the return of peace, however, the Sudan is gradually recovering from the effects of the At present the poverty, the scanty population, and the lack of irrigation in the Sudan form a striking contrast to the wealth, the density of population, and the high state of cultivation found in Egypt. But, though it has been, until very recently, little better than an abandoned estate, with practically no market value, the money and labour which its British proprietors are expending upon it are already beginning to produce highly promising results. As a matter of fact, the agricultural resources of this inland empire are hardly guessed at, for the fact is too apt to be overlooked that, beyond the sandy deserts which guard its northern frontier, there exist extensive and fertile regions which, in the provinces of Gezire and Sennar alone, are estimated at fifteen millions of acres. Added to this, the Sudan is particularly fortunate in possessing, in the Blue and the White Nile, two great waterways which are destined to prove invaluable as mediums of fertilisation and transportation. There is, indeed, no room for doubt that the Sudan is destined to be in time a great agricultural centre, for cotton, wheat, and sugar-cane are staple and give every promise of prolific crops—many English experts prophesying that, when provided with facilities for irrigation, it will supplant the United States as the chief cotton-growing country of the world—while, farther afield, there are excellent cattle ranges and untold wealth in forest lands. But although much I was told so repeatedly by people in other and more favoured parts of Africa that the Sudan was nothing but a waste of sun-scorched sand, that I went there as much to see if the description were a true one as for any other reason. You don't have to search for romance in the Sudan; it's there waiting for you when you arrive. It met me on the station platform at Wady Halfa, which is the first town across the Sudanese frontier, in the form of a fair-haired, moon-faced, khaki-clad guard on the Khartoum express, who spurned the tip I proffered him to secure a compartment to myself as insolently as the poor but virtuous heroine of the melodrama spurns the villain's gold. He drew back as though the silver I offered him were a rattlesnake in working order and his face flushed a dull brick-red; then, bowing stiffly from the waist, as a Prussian officer does when he is introduced, he turned on his heel and strode away. “I say, you got the wrong one that time, old chap,” remarked an Englishman who had witnessed the little incident and who, judging from his pith helmet and riding-breeches, was of the country. “You probably didn't know that you were offering a tip to a former captain in his German Majesty's garde du corps?” I remarked that a month before a former general of division of the Bey of Tunis had accepted “Well, this Johnnie won't,” was the reply. “He may not have much money, but he's loaded to the gunwales with pride. The story of his career sounds as if it had served as a model for one of Ouida's novels. Refused to marry the girl his parents had picked out for him, so his father cut off his allowance and left him to shift for himself. He sent in his papers, went to Algeria, and enlisted—of all fool things!—in that regiment of earth's hard cases called the Foreign Legion. It didn't take him long to get all he wanted of that kind of soldiering, so one day, when he was sent down to Oran in charge of a prisoner, he swam out to a British steamer lying in the harbour, worked his passage to Alexandria, enlisted in a British cavalry regiment, took part in Kitchener's campaign against the Khalifa, was wounded in the shindy at Omdurman, and retired on a pension. Now he wears a guard's uniform and carries a green flag and walks up and down the platform shouting 'All aboard for Khartoum!' And at home he would have a coronet on his visiting-cards and spend his afternoons swaggering along Unter den Linden. Extraordinary what a man will do if he has to, isn't it? But you'll find lots more of the same kind in the Sudan. It's no place for idlers down here; every one works or gets out.” That struck me as a pretty promising introduction to a country which, so I had been assured elsewhere, had nothing more interesting to recommend it than sun and sand, and it was with a marked rise in my anticipations Considering the obstacles it has had to overcome, the Sudan government deserves great credit for the railways it has built and the trains it operates. The construction of the railway to Khartoum was undertaken by General Kitchener in 1896, in order to support the advance of his army, and, in spite of the difficulty of laying a railway line across the sandy and stony surface of the desert, the work was so energetically carried on that the line advanced at the rate of a mile a day. The most serious obstacle was, of course, the provision of an adequate supply of water for the engines and workmen, so a series of watering-stations was established, at which wells, sunk to a depth of eighty feet or more, tap the subterranean water. These stations are so far apart, however, that to supply the engines it is necessary It was my fortune, by the way, to encounter one of the huboubs, or sand-storms, for which the Sudan is famous. To give an adequate idea of it, however, is as impossible as it is to describe any other overwhelming phenomenon of nature. Far off across the desert we saw it approaching at the speed of a galloping horse—a great fleecy, yellowish-brown cloud which looked for all the world like the smoke of some gigantic conflagration. A distant humming, which sounded at first like the drone of a million sewing-machines, gradually rose into such a roar as might be made by a million motor-cars, and then the storm was upon us. The sand poured down as though shaken through a sieve; the landscape was blotted out; the sun was obscured and there came a yellow darkness, like that of a London fog; men and animals threw themselves, or were hurled, to the ground before the fury of the wind, while a mantle of sand, inches thick, settled upon every animate and inanimate thing. Then it was gone, as suddenly as it had come, and we were left dizzy, bewildered, blinded, half-strangled, and gasping for breath, amid a landscape which was as completely shrouded in yellow sand as an American countryside in winter is covered with snow. It is a gratifying compliment to American mechanical skill that the running-time between Wady Halfa and Khartoum has been shortened four hours by the recent adoption of American locomotives, which run, fittingly enough, over American-made rails. In the construction of its trains the Sudan government has avoided the irksome privacy of the European compartment car and the unremitting publicity of the American Pullman by designing a car which combines the best features of both. The first-class cars on the Sudanese express trains contain a series of coupÉs, each somewhat roomier than the drawing-room in a Pullman sleeper and each opening into a spacious corridor which runs the length of the car. For day use there is one long cushioned seat running crosswise of each compartment, which at night forms the lower berth, the back of the seat swinging up on hinges to form the upper. Each coupÉ is provided with running water, a folding table, two arm-chairs of wicker, and an electric fan, without which last, owing to the almost incredible dust which a train sets in motion, one would all but suffocate. At several stations along the line are well-equipped baths, at which the trains stop long enough for the passengers hurriedly to refresh themselves. The mention of these railway baths recalls an incident which seems amusing enough to relate. I once Nowhere is the overpowering romance of the land brought more vividly before you than in the dining-cars or on the decks of the river steamers. The tall young Englishman in flannels who sits opposite you at table remarks casually that he is using a four months' leave of absence to go up Gondokoro-way after elephant, and a French marquis who is sitting near by, happening to overhear the conversation, leans across to inquire about the chances for sport on the Abyssinian frontier. “You can't go across there, you know,” interrupts a bimbashi, whose freckled Irish face looks strangely out of place beneath the tarboosh which denotes an officer in the Egyptian service. “The Hadendowas are on the rampage again and the Sirdar has issued orders that no one is to be permitted to cross into Menelik's territory until things have quieted down. There's no use your trying it, for the camel police are jolly well certain to turn you back.” The bearded man in the ill-fitting clothes, who would be taken almost anywhere for a commercial traveller, is, you are told, one of the most celebrated big-game shots in the world, and just now is on his way to the Lado Enclave in search of a Its discomforts notwithstanding, the railway journey from Wady Halfa to Khartoum is filled with interest, comparing not at all unfavourably with that other remarkable desert journey by the Trans-Caspian railway from Krasnovodsk to Samarkand. For two hundred miles or more after leaving Wady Halfa we see Like another Phoenix, Khartoum has risen from its I have now sketched for you the conditions which prevailed in the Valley of the Nile before the English That England's position in the Nile country is illegal and illogical her stanchest supporters do not attempt to deny, but those who are really familiar with Egyptian conditions and character will agree with me, I think, that Egypt could suffer no greater calamity than to have the English go. Not that I think that there is the slightest probability of their doing so, for Italy's aggression in Tripolitania, combined with the attitude of the other members of the Triple Alliance, has resulted in Britain strengthening, rather than relaxing, her grip on Egypt and the Suez Canal. The canal provides, indeed, the key to the entire Egyptian situation, for upon her control of it depends England's entire scheme of administration in India and the Farther East. To withdraw her forces from Egypt would be tantamount to leaving the gateway to her Eastern possessions unguarded, and that, I am convinced, she will never do. Two lesser, though in themselves important, |