How different all this is from the prettiness of the Delta Barrage, with its brickwork, originally designed and built under French influence, adorned with archways and towers, of which the lovely garden, with its flowers and shrubs, its green lawns and leafy trees, on the tongue of land which it crosses, seems a natural and appropriate part! The Assouan Dam is the work of a practical, unimaginative race. Its builders have had before them the problem of harnessing the great river with a yoke that cannot be broken; they had to hold up a reservoir containing 100,000,000 tons of water, so that for 140 miles the river is turned back upon itself; and they have succeeded.
In December all but a few of the sluice-gates are shut, for the reservoir has to be filled. But imagine it at the height of the flood, when the collected rainfall of half a continent is crashing past at the rate of nearly 1,000,000 tons a minute, and through each of the 180 openings shoots a solid cube of dark water to dash thundering in clouds of white foam on the rocks below, and rush tumultuously down the swirling slopes of the cataract. Think of the huge bulk of water held up when the reservoir is full. Then you will understand something of the difficulties of the work. Solidity and strength could not but be the first and overpowering idea in the minds of the builders. The longer you look, the more you are impressed. The vast dimensions of the Dam grow upon you from moment to moment. There is, after all, a fierce beauty in those uncompromising features, grimly set in the determination to hold the river in bondage. The massive structure is in harmony with the forces of Nature. Feeble and puny it may be compared with even the least of their handiwork, but it is impossible not to feel that its builders have been inspired with a spark of the same creative power. They drew their plans, and dug and built and strove their best to control the great river. They have succeeded because a portion of that spirit of Nature against which they struggled has passed into their work.
Is it too much to hope that a scheme of decoration may yet be found in consonance with these ideas? Some day the Dam will be raised to the full height of the original design, thus doubling the present capacity of the Reservoir. Then will be the time to finish the work magnificently, and make of it a stately monument, to be the glory of Egypt as well as the foundation of her material prosperity. The subject is worthy of a great artist. Only a scheme conceived on grand lines, perfectly simple and bold, can have the least chance of success. Anything else would be as ridiculous as a proposal to place a statue of ordinary dimensions on the top of the Great Pyramid. The difficulties are great, and so would be the expense, so great, indeed, that it would be far better to avoid any attempt at decoration, unless the results are to be admirable beyond all question. Are there no possible successors to the architects of Karnak?
The ceremony of inauguration was, like the masonry of the Dam itself, sensible and solid, but it was not impressive. Those who arranged its details had forgotten the vastness of the theatre in which it was performed. From the purely spectacular point of view it was a failure. Egypt has no money yet to spend on functions. Perhaps a better stage management might have made a better display without any greater expense. The material benefits of English rule would be appreciated none the less gratefully for a little gilding. But the Englishman in Egypt has had other things to think about than the organization of what the native would call ‘fantasias.’ So he fell back on the established custom of his own country. Wherever he goes he carries with him law and order and equity and righteousness and commonsense, and he also carries a peculiar kind of public ceremonial routine. Everybody knows it. The invited guests arrive in special trains, and perspire in top-hats and frock-coats for an interminable time, until Royalty arrives full of gracious smiles amid a cheering crowd. The distinguished persons pass into a pen carpeted with red baize, where all the notables are assembled. Somebody makes a perfectly inaudible speech, which receives a gracious and inaudible reply. A button is pressed here, a lever turned there, and several extraordinary things begin to happen in consequence. Then a number of good men and true receive some well-earned decorations, Royalty graciously departs, and everybody presses home as best he can, while the band plays the National Anthem. The whole is accompanied by the clicking of innumerable cameras, and nobody quite realizes the importance of the occasion until he reads about it afterwards. At the Nile Reservoir all this happened in due order with the necessary local variations. The officials wore red tarbushes instead of top-hats, and every sensible person carried a cotton umbrella over his head.
But apart from the ceremonial, the scene was deeply interesting. If the day’s routine was insignificant, it was because the overpowering presence of the Dam itself dwarfed every other presence. And the names of those assembled there recalled vividly the thrilling history of Egypt during the last twenty years. There were statesmen and diplomatists, soldiers and engineers, men of business and men of letters, all of whom, in some field or other, had done their part in building up the fallen country. Some, too, were there who, submitting contentedly before the logic of accomplished facts, burying old rivalries and animosities, had come in no unfriendly spirit to witness the realization of much that it had once been their policy to hinder. But if all the rest had been absent, the presence of one man, the Chief, whose wise counsel and guiding hand had been everywhere, would have been sufficient to represent all that these twenty years have meant to Egypt. Well might Lord Cromer and the irrigation engineers review their work with satisfaction. To them the Reservoir means the successful culmination of a great policy long and steadily pursued, nothing less than the establishment of the prosperity of Egypt upon a sure and certain basis: for that is what the regulation of the Nile involves. In Egypt, at any rate, they require no formal monument. Their praise stands clearly writ on the face of every cultivated field throughout the country.
CHAPTER X
BRITISH RULE IN EGYPT
At the inauguration of the Nile Reservoir at Assouan, it was an Egyptian Minister of Public Works who read an Arabic speech congratulating the Khedive on the completion of the great work which is to make his name famous among the rulers of Egypt. Among all the flags that decorated the town and the craft on the river, the most infrequent was that of England. A casual observer, knowing nothing of the country, might easily have overlooked the number of Englishmen wearing the tarbush, that red badge of Egyptian officialdom, and gone away thinking that even the presence of the brother of the King of England marked nothing but a compliment paid by one great Power to another. He might well have been astonished to be told that the Dam, which will confirm and increase the prosperity of Egypt, is no less an evidence of the stability of British rule. It is just possible that immediately after our first occupation we might have been able to evacuate the country—not, indeed, without danger to our hold upon the highroad to India, or without detriment to the true interests of Egypt, but at least without loss of honour to ourselves. Since then, in spite of the efforts of our statesmen at home, it has become more and more impossible.
Among the guests at Assouan there might have been seen a quiet-looking old gentleman, with a gray beard and bushy whiskers, beaming benevolently through gold-rimmed spectacles. His figure was that of a man, once sturdy and square-set, over whose head had passed years of ease and good living. At the first glance, in his frock-coat and tarbush, he looked like any other comfortable Turkish gentleman. Yet there was no one present with a more interesting past than he. For this was Mukhtar Pasha, who bears the proud title of Ghazi, ‘the victorious,’ the hero of the Caucasus in the Russo-Turkish War. He came to Egypt in 1887 as special Turkish Commissioner, to arrange for the British evacuation under the Drummond-Wolff Convention. It is well known how France and Russia at the last moment intervened to prevent Turkey from ratifying the agreement. A special Providence guards the British Empire against the efforts of its rulers. But Mukhtar remains as Turkish Commissioner in Egypt without duties, and probably without pay, a reminder of past eccentricities of British policy.
We have travelled far from the days when it was seriously proposed by Conservative statesmen to make Turkey responsible for civilization and good government in Egypt. To-day no one in his senses could wish to put an end to British rule. Let a man start from Assouan and survey the great series of irrigation works—the Reservoir, the Assiout Barrage, the Regulator of the Ibrahimiyah Canal, the Koshesha Regulator, the Barrages and Weirs at the point of the Delta and at Zifta; let him examine the intricate system of canals, siphons, wheels, drains, dykes, and sluices, by which the water is distributed over the cultivated lands, and let him reflect on what would happen if all this were left in Egyptian hands. Inevitably, sooner or later, the whole thing would come to ruin, and the greater the height of prosperity to which the country has attained under the system of perennial irrigation, the greater would be its fall. Egypt has been called the classic land of baksheesh, and it will not lose its character in a generation or two. Imagine a Government in need of money; what better thumbscrew could an Oriental despot wish for than the command of the water-supply? When a land-owner knew that he could be ruined by the shutting of a sluice-gate, he would pay anything without a struggle. The golden goose would be killed in every direction. Even under a well-intentioned Government it would only be regarded as natural for a local official to make free use of such unrivalled opportunities to supplement his pay. Corruption is not a vice in Oriental eyes; it is the habit of centuries. That is why, with every extension of scientific irrigation, the need for European supervision becomes greater, and since we can allow no Power but ourselves to hold Egypt, European means British.