"Cairo promises ruins, but shows none beyond the railway-station. Nizr el-Kahíreh, the city of (planet) Mars, is still rejoicing over her narrow escape: she was saved one day before death by the gallant march of the British cavalry: the mean foreigners jealously suggest the 'horseman of St. George,' which is the golden sovereign. She is gay as Alexandria. The Shubra road that showed in 1879-80 some half-dozen shandridans is now a line of Arab riders and neat equipages, of uniforms, un-uniforms, and of Parisian toilettes. Dinner-parties are the rule; balls are in prospect; Giroflé Giroflá is rehearsing at the Opera-house, and even that abomination the grind-organ has found its way into the city of the Mamelukes.
"Yet good old 'Shepherd's' is half-empty, and the New Hotel quasi-desert. Despite bogus lists and vamped-up reports this year will be, touristically speaking, a failure. And tourists are right. The tone of the population is disagreeable; the situation is unpleasant if not dangerous. Next season will be a success, on two conditions—the absence of cholera, and the non-withdrawal of the occupying army. But Cairo has suffered greatly in the loss of Lord Dufferin. It takes away one's breath (so rare is the sight) to see the right man in the right place; to miss the square peg in the round hole; to meet, for instance, General Feilding (a Hapsburg) at the Austro-Hungarian manœuvres, and to find Earl Dufferin sent to Egypt. The diplomat is a host in himself. His personal experience of 'the East' began nearly a quarter-century ago, when he organized the Libanus. He is a hard and conscientious worker; he has a priest's will with the 'courage of his opinions,' and he owns the gift of common sense which does not always characterize his profession. With one reservation (to err is human) we may hold primâ facie that what Lord Dufferin determines is right will be rightly done. If he fail it will be from being ordered to attempt the impossible, to make an England of Egypt. Meanwhile we ardently wish he would abate the plague of locust-strangers that flock to batten upon the land. They are reviving all the conditions which led to the late troubles; and they will lead to a repetition of the drama with only the part of Arábi left out.
"One of Cairo's marvellous escapes is the unique Bulak Museum. It was offered for sale to a commercial house, they say; but here we must now believe little of what we see and less of what we hear. The old station-house is rebuilt, and may now be pronounced safe. MM. Maspero and Brugsch Bey are doing their best, but slowly: they want more assistance, which means money; and their revised catalogue will not be ready for this season. Their recovery of the old Pharaohs reads a lesson not only to the antiquary but to the political. How little the Egyptian has changed from what he was under the Double Crown may be seen in Brugsch Bey's report. The Fellah women ran bare-headed and dishevelled along the Nile-banks, keening the death-cry, as it were, for their husbands or brothers, when they heard that the mummies of their olden kings were being boated down stream by the French. The corpses were pickled some three thousand years ago, but what is that in the land of Kemi?
"Sunday, November 12th, corresponded with the first Muharram A.H. 1300. No Moslem, however, could or would tell me whether A.H. 1299 was, or 1300 is to be, the Annus Mirabilis of Mohammedanism; even the comet had complicated the question by living too long. The popular expectation was a general uprising of the Moslem world, which, however, shows no sign; a kind of 'Battle of Armageddon;' the universal conquest of El-Islam and a general preparation for the end of time (Akhir el-Zamán), which is to follow in the fourteenth century. The superstitious noted a terrible omen. The Mahmal-litter, in which Rogers Bey finds a survival of the Covenant-ark (why not go back to Osiris?), was torn off its dromedary by a telegraph wire opposite the British camp, Suez, and (horrible to relate!) was mended by a Káfir, Mr. Campbell, engineer to the Compagnie Khédiviale.
"We wished the compliments of the season, Kull ám antum bi'l-Khayr! (may every year find you fair!), to all our Egyptian friends who were not in durance or under surveillance. Every second man seemed to be in trouble, and with rare exceptions none from Caliph to churl would have come out with clean hands. Even the little black and whity-brown Beys, who haunted English dames and demoiselles at Shepherd's, found it advisable to make themselves 'scarce.' A very few words will resume the long story. Political imbecility, financial mismanagement, and the greed of bourgeois-shareholders raised up a powerful party against Europeans, and it found a fitting leader in Arábi, the Fellah-pasha. The Porte, hoping once more to conduct into shrunken and impoverished Constantinople a Nile flowing lire and piastres, resolved that the Khedivial family should, in Napoleonic phrase, 'cease to reign.' Grand old Mohammed Ali was to be succeeded by a mere Pasha, or general, removable at will and retainable only whilst douceurs, avances, and tributes were regular. Hence the scandalous gift of the Medjidiah decoration to a palpable rebel. But the Fellah is né malin. He countered the Turkish project by transferring his allegiance from a 'Caliph' (successor), whose claims rest upon no legal base, to the Sheríf (Prince) of Meccah, the lineal descendant of the Apostle of Allah, whose right to succeed, if he choose to assert it, is indefeasible. How England was left to hack at, and lastly to cut, the Gordian knot need hardly be told.
"Finishing my work at the capital, I 'hardened my heart' to face the dangers of the Cairo-Suez railway. It is reported that the old direct line viâ the Desert, where Burckhardt saw ostriches in 1816, will be relaid, and that a section of twenty-one miles is almost ready. Despite the expense and the waste of coin in carrying water, at the rate of three waggons to one full of passengers, our occupation will require this move. Nor must we forget the artesian wells, of which the old Olympiodorus thus speaks when describing the Lybian waste: 'In this oasis the people used to scoop out excavations one hundred to two hundred and fifty feet deep, when jets of pure water rose in tall columns.'
"At the still Burnt Station we found a trainful of half-uniformed peasants, bearing bag and baggage, including Remingtons. They will be mustered to the tune of ten thousand at Suez, and sent to the Sudan or Upper Nile Provinces with the view of putting down the long-standing insurrection. They look already beaten, and I do not envy the man who is to command. The Arch-enemy is the Mahdí, the 'False Prophet' of the European Press, a title which describes exactly enough what he is not. D'Herbelot has told the world that the twelfth Imam, or Antistes, the lineal blood-descendant of the Apostle of Allah and the legal religious head of El-Islam, was born in A.H. 255 (= A.D. 868), was named Abu 'l Kásim Mohammed, and assumed the style of El-Mahdí, or the Director, i.e. in the path of the True Faith. He mysteriously disappeared (probably murdered) under the rule of the Abbaside, El Mohtade, the fourteenth of the Baghdad House. Hence his title El-Mutabattan—the Concealed; but of the many Redivivi noticed in history, he declared that he would return before the Last Day and lead a reformed Islamism to universal dominion in preparation for certain other Second Comings. Consequently every great political heave of Mohammedanism, in Africa as in Asia, has thrown up and still throws up one or more Mahdís. Of the latest 'Director' I could learn little, save that he is an inspired Carpenter: Cairo ignored even his real name. 'Mohammed Ahmed' of Dongola means nothing. Great men, religious or laical, always on promotion prefix to their own names 'Mohammed' or some variant. Thus Tewfík is Mohammed Tewfík, and Arábi is Ahmed Arábi. This Mahdí will, probably, like most of his predecessors, meet his death at the hands of his fanatical and infuriated mob of followers. Meanwhile, despite recurring reports of his being beaten, he is still formidable, and he will give trouble during the coming winter. The one only remedy will be an English expedition—costly, but not so costly as doing nothing.
"We detrained at Zagázíg after two hours and a half of dusting, which seemed to begin the process of burying alive. The modern town is the successor of Bubastis, Pi-Pasht, city of Pasht, Isis with the tabby-cat's head. Its position—a central point where roads, railways, and canals meet—has made it a Cottonopolis, and its factories, with tall stacks and huge warehouses, have entitled it the 'Manchester of Egypt.' It is the military key of the Delta; Napoleon Buonaparte, at the beginning of the century, drew his base from Bilbays to Sálihíyah, and the Arabists intended to do the same.
"I passed a day in the house of my friend M. Vetter, for the purpose of consulting with Mr. Charles Clarke, Chef des Télégraphes. He had been the managing man during my two expeditions to the Gold Lands of Midian; and his topographical and linguistic knowledge had enabled him to render the army valuable service during the late campaign. His house was carefully looted by English soldiers, who may have thought it belonged to some employé of M. de Lesseps, and by Indian sepoys, who tore up his wife's dresses to adorn their turbans, and his comfortable rooms were still bare and desolate. He had been invited to join the Palmer Expedition, but although on friendly terms with the powerful Bedawin chief, Sulayman Pasha El-Abázeh, he had declined. The game was not worth the candle. On my next visit I hope to find Mr. Clarke travelling Director of Telegraphs, a post which will suit him and which he will suit down to the ground. As yet he has received only the barren honour of a C.M.G., and H.H. the Khedive has shirked conferring any distinction to show that Mr. Clarke acted in his interest.
"The Zagázítes showed a peculiar, independent, free-and-easy bearing, and the resident Europeans, who lately begged two English officers in uniform to walk through the town, do not hold themselves safe without the protection of a detachment, British soldiers or policemen. For many reasons this should be granted to them. The adjoining villagers absolutely refuse to believe that Arábi has been fairly beaten: his defeat and capture are known in Southern Syria, but not within cannon-shot of Tel el-Kebir. Here, too, the Fellahs are ready to rise again at any given moment. They differ in blood from the inhabitants of the Nile Valley proper, but they are no improvement upon their neighbours.