Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

Twenty thousand and more of the Egyptian fellahs were employed upon the Suez Canal at a time, and they scooped up much of the dirt in their hands and carried it away in baskets. At the start men were paid from ten to fifteen cents a day and boys under twelve only five cents. After a time they were not paid at all. The Khedive agreed to furnish all the labourers, and they worked for the French under the lash just as the Hebrews did for the Egyptians in the days of Pharaoh ages ago. With up-to-date canal-dredging machinery and steam shovels the work of digging the canal at Suez could perhaps be reproduced at one half its original cost. The actual cost was probably quadrupled through the money spent in graft, extravagance, and high interest rates by the French and Egyptians in connection with it. When Ismail Pasha was forced from the throne he left Egypt in debt to the amount of five hundred million dollars, most of which was directly or indirectly caused by canal expenditures.

One would think that Egypt ought to receive a big revenue for the right of way through her country and for the canal which her money and her people practically built. By the original concession with Said Pasha she was to receive fifteen percent of the net profits for the entire term of the concession, which was ninety-nine years. But after Ismail Pasha was deposed, the Egyptian government, finding itself without money or credit, sold this claim on the canal profits to the Crédit Foncier of France for a little more than four million dollars, and the only interest it now has in the canal is in the trade which the ships passing through bring to the country. Had Egypt retained that fifteen per cent. it would have been receiving millions of dollars a year from the tolls, and within a short time it could have recouped itself for all Ismail Pasha’s extravagances. During the term of the concession it could easily have repaid its debt to Turkey, and could have made itself one of the richest countries of the world. As it is, the canal, with all its property, becomes the possession of Egypt in 1968, when the receipts at the present ratio of increase will be so enormous as to make it, in proportion to its population, a Crœsus among the nations of the world.

I spent all of last night on the Suez Canal. It was afternoon when our ship left Port Said, and as the darkness came on we were in the heart of the Arabian Desert. The air was clear, and the scenes were weird but beautiful. The stars of the tropics, brighter by far than our stars at home, made the heavens resplendent, while a great round moon of burning copper turned the famous waterway into a stream of molten silver. As we ploughed our way through, we could look out over the silent desert of Arabia, and now and then see a caravan of long-legged camels with their ghost-like riders bobbing up and down under the moon. Our own pathway was made brighter by electric lights. We had one blazing globe at our masthead, fed by a dynamo on deck, and another at our prow. The latter threw its rays this way and that across the channel in front of the steamer, making the waters an opalescent blue like that of the Blue Grotto of Capri. We passed many ships. In the distance they appeared only as two blazing eyes—the reflectors which all vessels are required to keep lighted as they pass through. As the ships came nearer they rose up like spectres from the water, the masses of hulls and rigging back of the fiery eyes making one think of demons about to attack.

The trip through the canal is slow, for the ships are allowed to go only five or six miles an hour. Now and then they have to tie up to posts, which have been set along both sides of the canal all the way from Port Said to Suez. The canal rules require that when two ships meet one must stop and hug the bank until the other has passed by.

Parts of the banks are walled with stones to prevent the sand from falling in and filling up the canal, but notwithstanding this the dredges have to be kept at work all the year round. Not far from Port Said I saw great steam pumps sucking the sand from the bottom of the channel and carrying it through pipes far out over the desert, and I am told that the process of cleaning and deepening the waterway is always going on.

There are stations, or guard houses, at intervals along the course of the waterway and a few small towns have grown up here and there. While the boat was stopping at one of these, a dirty Arab brought alongside a leg of raw mutton. He offered to sell it to the passengers but found no buyer. Outside of these towns and the guard houses we see few signs of life. Here a camel caravan trots along over the desert. There a flock of long-necked cranes springs from the water into the air. When the sun is right, away across the hot desert at the side of the ship there looms up out of the sands a strange ship on other waters, apparently as real as those through which we are moving. That is the wonderful mirage of the desert, which so often deceives the thirsty traveller passing through it on camels. As we approach it, it soon fades and disappears like a veritable castle of the air.

The Suez Canal of to-day is far different from that which was opened in 1869. As originally planned, the channel was less than twenty-five feet deep and so narrow that it could not have accommodated the shipping which goes through it nowadays. It has since been widened so that its average width at the surface is about three hundred feet, and the curves in it have been straightened so as to shorten the time of transit and enable ships to pass the more easily. The shipping facilities have been greatly improved both at Port Tewfik and at Port Said. At Port Said the coaling arrangements have been so improved that the largest steamers can load thousands of tons in a very few hours.

The chief towns on the canal are Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez. Port Said is at the northern end of the canal where we took the steamer. This city, long said to be the wickedest and most dissipated station on the way from London to the Far East, was made and lives by the canal, the harbour being full of shipping from one year’s end to another.

Ismailia, midway of the canal, is still scarcely more than a small town. It is now said to be a healthful place, although at one time it was malarial. The Arabs call it the “cleansed tomb.” This town is at the end of the fresh-water canal which was made during the building of the Suez Canal to supply the workmen with water, and is not far from Zagazig and the old Land of Goshen.