Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

I am again in Alexandria, the great sea-port of the valley of the Nile. My first visit to it was just before Arabi Pasha started the rebellion which threw Egypt into the hands of the British. I saw it again seven years later on my way around the world. I find now a new city, which has risen up and swallowed the Alexandria of the past.

The Alexandria of to-day stands upon the site of the greatest of the commercial centres of antiquity, but its present buildings are as young as those of New York, Chicago, or Boston. It is one of the boom towns of the Old World, and has all grown up within a century. When George Washington was president it was little more than a village; it has now approximately a half million inhabitants.

This is a city with all modern improvements. It has wide streets as well paved as those of Washington, public squares that compare favourably with many in Europe, and buildings that would be an ornament to any metropolis on our continent. It is now a city of street cars and automobiles. Its citizens walk or ride to its theatres by the light of electricity, and its rich men gamble by reading the ticker in its stock exchange. It is a town of big hotels, gay cafés, and palaces galore. In addition to its several hundred thousand Mohammedans, it has a large population of Greeks, Italians, and other Europeans, among them some of the sharpest business men of the Mediterranean lands. Alexandria has become commercial, money making, and fortune hunting. The rise and fall of stocks, the boom in real estate, and the modern methods of getting something for nothing are its chief subjects of conversation, and the whole population is after the elusive piastre and the Egyptian pound as earnestly as the American is chasing the nickel and the dollar.

The city grows because it is at the sea-gate to Egypt and the Sudan. It waxes fat on the trade of the Nile valley and takes toll of every cent’s worth of goods that comes in and goes out. More than four thousand vessels enter the port every year and in the harbour there are steamers from every part of the world. I came to Egypt from Tripoli via Malta, where I took passage on a steamer bound for India and Australia, and any week I can get a ship which within fifteen days will carry me back to New York.

One of the things to which Alexandria owes its greatness is the canal that Mehemet Ali, founder of the present ruling dynasty of Egypt, had dug from this place to the Nile. This remarkable man was born the son of a poor Albanian farmer and lived for a number of years in his little native port as a petty official and tobacco trader. He first came into prominence when he led a band of volunteers against Napoleon in Egypt. Later still he joined the Sultan of Turkey in fighting the Mamelukes for the control of the country. The massacre of the Mamelukes in 1811 left the shrewd Albanian supreme in the land, and, after stirring up an Egyptian question that set the Powers of Europe more or less by the ears with each other and with the Sultan of Turkey, he was made Viceroy of Egypt, with nominal allegiance to the Turkish ruler. When he selected Alexandria as his capital, it was a village having no connection with the Nile. He dug a canal fifty miles long to that great waterway, through which a stream of vessels is now ever passing, carrying goods to the towns of the valley and bringing out cotton, sugar, grain, and other products, for export to Europe. The canal was constructed by forced labour. The peasants, or fellaheen, to the number of a quarter of a million, scooped the sand out with their hands and carried it away in baskets on their backs. It took them a year to dig that fifty-mile ditch, and they were so overworked that thirty thousand of them died on the job.

Ismail Pasha, grandson of Mehemet Ali, made other improvements on the canal and harbour, and after the British took control of Egypt they bettered Alexandria in every possible way.

It has now one of the best of modern harbours. The port is protected by a breakwater two miles in length, and the biggest ocean steamers come to the quays. There are twenty-five hundred acres of safe anchorage inside its haven, while the arrangements for coaling and for handling goods are unsurpassed.

These conditions are typical of the New Egypt. Old Mother Nile, with her great dams and new irrigation works, has renewed her youth and is growing in wealth like a jimson weed in an asparagus bed. When I first saw the Nile, its valley was a country of the dead, with obelisks and pyramids as its chief landmarks. Then its most interesting characters were the mummified kings of more than twenty centuries ago and the principal visitors were antiquity hunters and one-lunged tourists seeking a warm winter climate. These same characters are here to-day, but in addition have come the ardent dollar chaser, the capitalist, and the syndicate. Egypt is now a land of banks and stock exchanges. It is thronged with civil engineers, irrigation experts, and men interested in the development of the country by electricity and steam. The delta, or the great fan of land which begins at Cairo and stretches out to the Mediterranean, is gridironed with steel tracks and railroad trains, continuing almost to the heart of central Africa.

I find Egypt changing in character. The Mohammedans are being corrupted by the Christians, and the simple living taught by the Koran, which commands the believer to abstain from strong drink and other vices, has become infected with the gay and giddy pleasures of the French. In many cases the system of the harem is being exchanged for something worse. The average Moslem now has but one wife, but in many cases he has a sweetheart in a house around the corner, “and the last state of that man is worse than the first.”

The ghouls of modern science are robbing the graves of those who made the Pyramids. A telephone line has been stretched out of Cairo almost to the ear of the Sphinx, and there is a hotel at the base of the Pyramid of Cheops where English men and women drink brandy and soda between games of tennis and golf.