I was also much influenced by the photographs published by Leo Weinthal in The African World and Fascinating Egypt.
We sailed from Naples to Alexandria in the November of 1907. We did not delay an hour there, but took the next train to Cairo.
At Alexandria Egypt is Roman, and the monuments which have yet been excavated are not, with the exception of one marvellous late tomb, very interesting. But Alexandria is an unexcavated Pompeii, and when some Schliemann among its leading merchants decides to devote his energies and his fortune to excavating the vast mounds which still bury Roman Alexandria, we may expect finds of astonishing interest. In the desert, about thirty miles from Alexandria, is the city of St. Menas, an early Christian Pompeii, where there has already been excavated a wonderful Basilica founded by the Emperor Arcadius.
Except for a few articles in the Queen, I did little writing in Egypt beyond taking copious notes. But these I did more completely than I ever had done before, and as my secretary was with us, they were typed out every evening, and are now bound together into a sort of diary-journal of our entire visit. To make them more complete as journals, I took eight hundred photographs, and certainly bought as many more, and as complete a collection of postcards as I could form. Therefore I was in a very sound position for writing my various books upon Egypt after I had returned home. The first book I wrote upon our visit was Egypt and the English, consisting partly of what we saw while we were staying in Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, Assuan, the Fayyum, the Great Oasis, and while we were journeying up the Nile to the second cataract, and down the Nile to its Rosetta and Damietta mouths, and over the Desert Railway into the Sudan; and partly of the result of my inquiries about the political condition of Egypt. When the book came out, many reviewers took up the attitude that what I said was too alarmist, but when Mr. Roosevelt repeated it to the letter, the Government took the warnings seriously, and appointed the best possible man, Lord Kitchener, to take the place of Sir Eldon Gorst, whose policy of scuttle and kowtow may have been dictated by the Government which appointed him.
I knew that my facts were sound, because I had not only sucked as much information as I could out of British officials and editors, and the Leader of the Egyptian Bar, but also from the leading Syrians and Armenians, who see much more behind the scenes than the English, because Arabic is their business language, and the Arabs associate with them freely in private life. Among Syrians especially I had repeated conversations with Dr. Sarrûf and Dr. Nimr, the proprietor and editor of El Mokattan, the most important Arab paper in Egypt, to whose opinions Lord Cromer had always attached the greatest importance, and they had told me how to meet such of the Nationalist leaders as spoke English. These were actual Egyptians, so Egypt and the English did give native opinion both directly from the mouths of Egyptians, and indirectly through Syrians and Armenians.
HALL CAINE
Drawn by Yoshio Markino
I wrote Egypt and the English for a commission to write Queer Things about Egypt. The then chairman of Hurst & Blackett, when he saw the political chapters in the book, considered them so interesting and important that he asked me to hold over the humorous chapters for another book. Which I did. But in the interval he sold the business of Hurst & Blackett to my old friends Hutchinson & Co., who published my real first success, The Japs at Home. They were quite ready to take another book on Egypt from me, and we decided to make these chapters the nucleus of that book to be published under the original title of Queer Things about Egypt. This book gives the humours of the native city in Cairo, and the humours of travel on the Nile. The parts of the book which attracted most attention were those which dealt with Arab life in Cairo in the native quarters round the Citadel, and with Arab architecture and art, so Hutchinson asked me to do another large volume on Egypt, devoted entirely to Oriental Cairo—the City of the Arabian Nights. For that part of Cairo is almost as much an Arab City of the Middle Ages as was Granada in the days of the Moors, and the stories of the Arabian Nights were made into a book by a Cairene in the sixteenth century.
Egypt and the English was published in 1908, Queer Things about Egypt in 1910, and Oriental Cairo in 1910.
In 1908 I also wrote, and Hurst & Blackett published, The Tragedy of the Pyramids, which has been one of the most successful of my novels. It was written as a counterblast to Hall Caine’s White Prophet, which at that time was running as a serial in the Strand Magazine. I considered that Caine was giving an entirely incorrect impression of our army in Egypt. The book is now in its ninth edition, and was an imaginary picture of the revolution which would have overtaken Egypt, if Sir Eldon Gorst’s scuttle and kowtow policy had been persisted in. I had a great deal to say about the Senussi in this book—the battle of the Pyramids was fought against a great host of invading Senussi. The British public had then heard little of the Senussi. But in the Turko-Italian war the Senussi have proved a far more dangerous enemy to Italy than the Turks, as they are very hardy and move with great rapidity. They are said to own many zawia, or convents, in Egypt, and to have established a network of wells at twenty-four hours’ distance from each other all over the great desert of the Sahara—also to have twenty-five thousand swift camels accumulated against any invasion of their country, which is almost conterminous with the great desert. Boyd Alexander, the famous explorer, is considered to have fallen a victim to his intrusion upon their territory, which they openly forbid to Christians, on pain of being assassinated. But their Prophet refused to join forces in any way with the Mahdi when he had possessed himself of the Egyptian Sudan.