Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

Cotton warehouses and docks extend for a mile along the Mahmudiyeh Canal connecting the port of Alexandria with the Nile River, and the prosperity of the city rises and falls with the price of cotton in the world’s markets.

Nubian women sell fruit and flowers on the streets of Alexandria to-day, but once their kings ruled all Egypt and defeated the armies of Rome. They became early converts to Christianity but later adopted Mohammedanism.

The Egypt of to-day is a land of mighty hotels and multitudinous tourists. For years it has been estimated that Americans alone spend several million dollars here every winter, and the English, French, and other tourists almost as much. It is said that in the average season ten thousand Americans visit the Nile valley and that it costs each one of them at least ten dollars for every day of his stay.

When I first visited this country the donkey was the chief means of transport, and men, women, and children went about on long-eared beasts, with Arab boys in blue gowns following behind and urging the animals along by poking sharp sticks into patches of bare flesh, as big as a dollar, which had been denuded of skin for the purpose. The donkey and the donkey boy are here still, but I can get a street car in Alexandria that will take me to any part of the town, and I frequently have to jump to get out of the way of an automobile. There are cabs everywhere, both Alexandria and Cairo having them by thousands.

The new hotels are extravagant beyond description. In the one where I am now writing the rates are from eighty to one hundred piastres per day. Inside its walls I am as far from Old Egypt as I would be in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The servants are French-speaking Swiss in “swallow-tails”, with palms itching for fees just as do those of their class in any modern city. In my bedroom there is an electric bell, and I can talk over the telephone to our Consul General at Cairo. On the register of the hotel, which is packed with guests, I see names of counts by the score and lords by the dozen. The men come to dinner in steel-pen coats and the women in low-cut evening frocks of silk and satin. There is a babel of English, French, and German in the lounge while the guests drink coffee after dinner, and the only evidences one perceives of a land of North Africa and the Moslems are the tall minarets which here and there reach above the other buildings of the city, and the voices of the muezzins as they stand beneath them and call the Mohammedans to prayer.

The financial changes that I have mentioned are by no means confined to the Christians. The natives have been growing rich, and the Mohammedans for the first time in the history of Egypt have been piling up money. Since banking and money lending are contrary to the Koran, the Moslems invest their surplus in real estate, a practice which has done much to swell all land values.

Egypt is still a country of the Egyptians, notwithstanding the overlordship of the British and the influx of foreigners. It has now more than ten million people. Of these, three out of every four are either Arabs or Copts. Most of them are Mohammedans, although there are, all told, something like eight hundred and sixty thousand Copts, descendants of the ancient Egyptians, who have a rude kind of Christianity, and are, as a body, better educated and wealthier than the Mussulmans.

The greater part of the foreign population of Egypt is to be found in Alexandria and Cairo, and in the other towns of the Nile valley, as well as in Suez and Port Said. There are more of the Greeks than of any other nation. For more than two thousand years they have been exploiting the Egyptians and the Nile valley and are to-day the sharpest, shrewdest, and most unscrupulous business men in it. They do much of the banking and money lending and until the government established banks of its own and brought down the interest rate they demanded enormous usury from the Egyptian peasants. It is said that they loaned money on lands and crops at an average charge of one hundred and fifty per cent. per annum.