The people of Egypt not only paid taxes, but their possessions were seized ruthlessly, their lands misappropriated, their cattle and goods confiscated; they were mere slaves whose right to work on their own account was forfeited; and the whole population was driven forth from their villages with whips, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, under the iniquitous system of enforced labour, to make roads through the Khedive’s estates, till the cotton fields and build embankments to control the distribution of the life-giving Nile. No escape from these hardships was possible, no relief from this most grievous Egyptian bondage. The arbitrary despot backed his demands by a savage system of punishments, and when the courbash was ineffectual, he banished malcontents to the remote provinces of central Africa, where, after a terrible journey, they expiated their offences at Fazoglo or Fashoda. Sometimes the highest officials were arrested and despatched in chains, without any form of trial, and were detained for years in this tropical Siberia. To speak of the Nemesis that eventually overtook Ismail and deprived him with ignominy of a power he so shamefully misused is beyond the scope of this work. But reference must be made in some detail to the many merciful changes introduced into the administration of justice under the British protectorate that has succeeded to Egyptian rule.

In Egypt, at the present time, every son of the soil is safe from arbitrary and illegal arrest; the imposition of taxes is regulated strictly according to law; there is no enforced labour,—the corvee has been absolutely swept out of existence. Every peaceably disposed citizen may live sheltered and protected from outrage and in the undisturbed enjoyment of his possessions, waxing rich by his own exertion, safe from the attack or interference of evil-doers. It was not always so, and the great boons of personal security and humane, equitable treatment now guaranteed to every soul in the land have been only slowly acquired. Until 1844 the Egyptian police was ineffective, the law was often a dead letter, and the prisons were a disgrace to humanity and civilisation. Before that date the country was covered with zaptiehs, or small district prisons, in which illegal punishment and every form of cruelty were constantly practised. It was quite easy for anyone in authority to consign a fellah to custody. One of the first of the many salutary reforms introduced by the new prison department established under British predominance was an exact registration of every individual received at the prison gate, and the enforcement of the strict rule that no one should be admitted without an order of committal duly signed by some recognised judicial authority. To-day, of course, any such outrage as illegal imprisonment is out of the question. Another form of oppression in the old days was the unconscionable delay in bringing the accused to trial. Hundreds were thus detained awaiting gaol delivery for six or nine months, sometimes for one or two years. At that time, too, there was no separation of classes; the innocent were herded with the guilty, children with grown men; only the females, as might be expected in a Mohammedan country, were kept apart, but their number then and since has always been exceedingly few.

The first step taken by the new régime was to concentrate prisoners in a certain number of selected prisons, such as they were, but the best that could be found. In these, twenty-one in number, strenuous efforts were made to introduce order; cleanliness was insisted upon and disinfectants were largely used, while medical men were appointed at each place, who attended daily to give medicine and move the sick into hospital. The health of the prisoners was so much improved that they constituted one per cent. of the daily average of prisoners, and this ratio has been maintained, so that in the cholera epidemic in 1896 only a few convicts died.

A good prison system could only be introduced in improved prisons, and the first created was the great convict establishment at Tourah, a village about eight miles above Cairo on the banks of the Nile and at the foot of the great limestone quarries that have supplied the city with its building material from the earliest days. In 1885 the old military hospital at Tourah was handed over to be converted into a public works prison; a few of the wards were converted into cells, and a draft of 250 convicts was brought from the arsenal at Alexandria to occupy them. These proved skilful workmen, as the fellaheen, whether captive or free, invariably are, and with the help of a few paid stone-masons they restored the half-ruined upper story of the ancient building and converted it into a satisfactory prison to hold one hundred and fifty more inmates. The four hundred steadfastly continued their labours and to such good purpose, demolishing, removing, cleaning, and constructing new roads and approaches, that in May, 1886, an entirely new prison for five hundred convicts was completed and occupied. Many forms of industry were carried on with excellent financial results, as will be seen from the following details.

All the lime for buildings was burned in two lime kilns constructed for the purpose; all the furniture and woodwork, the tables, beds and doors were made by convict carpenters; all the ironwork, the bolts and bars for safe custody, the very leg-irons, their own inalienable livery under the old Egyptian prison code, were turned out by convict blacksmiths; and hundreds of baskets for carrying earth and stone have been manufactured. The industrial labour at Tourah is now of many useful kinds. New prison clothing, new boots (although these usually indispensable articles are only issued to a favoured few prisoners in Egypt), the baking of bread and biscuit for home consumption, or to be sent to out-stations, plate laying and engine fitting, stone dressing for prison buildings, both at Tourah and elsewhere,—all these are constantly in progress at the Tourah prison. The money made in the prison provides funds for many things necessary for further development, such as tram lines, locomotives, improved tools and machinery of all kinds.

A visit to Tourah is both interesting and instructive. The chief employment of the convicts is in the quarries, a couple of miles from the prison, to which the gangs proceed every morning at daylight and where they remain every day of the week but Friday, which is their Sabbath, until four o’clock in the afternoon. There is no time wasted in marching to and fro. The dinner, or midday meal, is carried out to the quarries by the cooks, and after it is eaten the convicts are allowed an hour’s rest in such shade as can be found in the nearly blinding heat of the dazzling white quarries. As this midday siesta is the common hour for trains to pass on to the neighbouring health resort of Helouan, casual observers might think that rest and refreshment formed a great part of the Egyptian convict’s daily life. But that would be a grievous mistake. During the hours of labour, ceaseless activity is the rule; all around the picks resound upon the unyielding stone; some are busy with the levers raising huge blocks, stimulated by the sing-song, monotonous chant, without which Arabs, like sailors, cannot work with any effect. The burden of the song varies, but it is generally an appeal for divine or heavenly assistance, “Allahiteek!” “May God give it,” the phrase used by the initiated to silence the otherwise too importunate beggar, or “Halimenu,” “Hali Elisa,” ending in an abrupt “Hah!” or “Hop!” at the moment of supreme effort.

A visitor of kindly disposition is not debarred from encouraging effort by the gift of a few cigarettes to the convicts. Tobacco is not forbidden in the prisons of Egypt. It is issued to convicts in the works prisons in small rations as a reward, according to the governor’s judgment. The unconvicted and civil prisoners undergoing merely detention are at liberty to purchase it. I was the witness, the cause indeed, of a curious and unwonted scene in the small prison at Assiut when I inspected it in 1898. The sale of tobacco was in progress in the prison yard, where all of the prisoners, a hundred and more, were at exercise. An official stood behind a small table on which lay the little screws of tobacco for disposal, each for a few milliems, the smallest of Egyptian coins, the fractional part of a farthing. The eagerness with which the poor prisoners eyed the precious weed excited my generosity, and I bought up the whole table load, then and there, for a couple of shillings. The prisoners crowding around saw the deal and understood it. Hardly had I put down the ten piastres when the whole body “rushed” the table, overset it, threw the screws of tobacco upon the ground, and all hands pounced down on the scattered weed in one great struggling, scrambling, combatant medley. The tobacco was quite wasted, of course, and I have no idea who got the money. The mêlée was so unmanageable that it was necessary to call out the guard to drive the prisoners back to their wards. I was aghast at my indiscretion and ready to admit that I should have known better.

The daily unremitting toil of Tourah must be preferable to all but the incurably idle. Yet the terror of “Tourah” is now universal up and down Egypt. It is the great “bogey” of the daily life among the lower classes, the threat held over the fractious child or the misconducted donkey boy who claims an exorbitant “bakshish.” To accuse any decent fellah of having been in Tourah is the worst sort of insult and at once indignantly denied. When my own connection with the English prisons became known, I was generally called the pasha of the English Tourah, and my official position gained me very marked respect among classes spoiled by many thousands of annual tourists,—the greedy guides and donkey boys, the shameless vendors of sham curiosities, the importunate beggars that infest hotel entrances, swarm in the villages and make hideous the landing stages up the Nile. An old hand will best silence a persistent cry for alms or the wail of miski (poverty stricken), of “Halas! finish father, finish mother” (the ornate expression for an orphan), by talking of the caracol, “police station,” and a promise of “Tourah” to follow.

Life in Tourah must be hard. The monotonous routine from daylight to sundown, the long nights of thirteen or fourteen hours, from early evening to morning, caged up with forty or fifty others tainted with every vice and crime, must be a heavy burden upon all but the absolutely debased. The evils of association, of herding criminals together, left to their own wicked devices, without supervision, were present in the highest degree in Egyptian prisons. At last, however, a move was made to provide separate cells for a certain number, and a new prison of 1,200 cells was built by convict labour at Tourah immediately opposite the new hospitals and at some distance from the old prison. Much mischievous conspiracy of the worst kind is prevented by keeping individuals apart during the idle hours of the night, for it was then that those concerted escapes of large numbers were planned, which have occurred more than once at Tourah, but have been generally abortive, ending only in bloodshed; for the black Sudanese, who form the convict guards, are expert marksmen and surely account for a large part of the fugitives.

There must be something very tempting to the untutored mind—and many of these Tourah convicts are half-wild creatures, Bedouins of the desert or the lowest scum of the cities—in the seeming freedom of their condition during so many hours of the day. Liberty seems within easy reach. Not a mile from the quarries are great overhanging cliffs, honey-combed with caves, deep, cavernous recesses affording secure hiding places, and it is for these that the rush is made. In August of 1896 there was a serious attempt of this kind, and success was achieved by some of the runaways. The hour chosen was that of the break-off from labour, when the gangs, surrounded by their guards, converge on a central point, very much as may be seen on any working-day at Portland or Dartmoor, and thence march home in one compact body to the distant prison. It is a curiously picturesque scene. The convicts, mostly fine, stalwart men, their ragged, dirty white robes flying in the wind and their chains rattling, swing past, two by two, in an almost endless procession. Below, the mighty river, flowing between its belt of palm and narrow fringe of green, shines like burnished silver under the declining sun; beyond stretches the wide desert to the foot of the Pyramids, those of Sakhara at one end of the landscape, those of Cheops at the other,—colossal monuments of enforced labour very similar to that now surviving at Tourah.