Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

We are accustomed to look upon Egypt as a very hot country. This is not so. The greater part of it lies just outside the tropics, so that it has a warm climate and a sub-tropical plant life. The hottest month is June and the coldest is January. Ice sometimes forms on shallow pools in the delta, but there is no snow, although hail storms occur occasionally, with very large stones. There is no rain except near the coast and a little near Cairo. Fogs are common in January and February and it is frequently damp in the cultivated tracts.

For centuries Egypt has been in the hands of other nations. The Mohammedan Arabs and the Ottoman Turks have been bleeding her since their conquest. Greece once fed off her. Rome ate up her substance in the days of the Cæsars and she has had to stake the wildest extravagancies of the khedives of the past. It must be remembered that Egypt is almost altogether agricultural, and that all of the money spent in and by it must come from what the people can raise on the land. The khedives and officials have piped, and Egypt’s farmers have had to pay.

It was not long before my second visit to Egypt that the wastefulness and misrule of her officials had practically put her in the hands of a receiver. She had gone into debt for half a billion dollars to European creditors—English, French, German, and Spanish—and England and France had arranged between them to pull her out. Later France withdrew from the agreement and Great Britain undertook the job alone.

At that time the people were ground down to the earth and had barely enough for mere existence. Taxes were frightfully high and wages pitifully low. The proceeds from the crops went mostly to Turkey and to the bankers of Europe who had obtained the bonds given by the government to foreigners living in Egypt. In fact, they had as hard lives as in the days of the most tyrannical of the Pharaohs.

But since that time the British have had a chance to show what they could do, irrigation projects and railroad schemes have been put through, cotton has come into its own, and I see to-day a far more prosperous land and people than I did at the end of the last century.

CHAPTER V
FELLAHEEN ON THEIR FARMS

For the last month I have been travelling through the farms of the Nile valley. I have visited many parts of the delta, a region where the tourist seldom stops, and have followed the narrow strip that borders the river for several hundred miles above Cairo.

The delta is the heart of Egypt. It has the bulk of the population, most of the arable land, the richest soil, and the biggest crops. While it is one of the most thickly settled parts of the world, it yields more to the acre than any other region on earth, and its farm lands are the most valuable. I am told that the average agricultural yield for all Europe nets a profit of thirty-five dollars per acre, but that of Lower Egypt amounts to a great deal more. Some lands produce so much that they are renting for fifty dollars an acre, and there are instances where one hundred dollars is paid.

I saw in to-day’s newspapers an advertisement of an Egyptian land company, announcing an issue of two and one half million dollars’ worth of stock. The syndicate says in its prospectus that it expects to buy five thousand acres of land at “the low rate of two hundred dollars per acre,” and that by spending one hundred and fifty thousand dollars it can make that land worth four hundred dollars per acre within three years. Some of this land would now bring from two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars per acre, and is renting for twenty dollars per acre per annum. The tract lies fifty miles north of Cairo and is planted in cotton, wheat, and barley.