The Last Frontier

n its feet, and taught it to play the game. It is the story of how northeast Africa-a region which God had seemingly forgotten-has been transf

me, I think, that it is one of the wonder-tales of history. It is a drama in which English officials and Egyptian pashas and Arab sheikhs all have their gre

Whitechapel were affluent when compared to them; they lived, for the most part, in wretched hovels of sun-dried mud scattered along the banks of the Nile, maintaining a hand-to-mouth existence by raising a low grade of cotton on a few feddans of land which they irrigated by hand, at an appalling cost of time and labour, with water drawn up in buckets from the river. As a result of the corvée, or system of forced labour on public works which prevailed, a large part of the population was virtually in a state of slavery; the taxes, which were unjustly assessed and incredibly exorbitant, could only be collected with the aid of the kourbash, as the terrible whip of rhino hide used by the slave-dealers was known. Barring the single line of ramshackle railway which connected Cairo with Alexandria and with the Suez Canal, the only means of transportation were the puffing river-boats and the plodding caravans. The unpaid and ill-disciplined army was a synonym for cowardice, as proved b

uba women,

arriors,

in the Lado E

Y IN BLACK M

suffice it to say that Arabi, then an officer in the Egyptian army, instigated [Pg 111] a military revolt which had as its object the ending of European influence in the affairs of Egypt. So rapidly did this propaganda of "Egypt for the Egyptians!" spread among the lower classes of the population, and so perilous became the position of foreigners resident in the country, that, upon Alexandria being captured and looted by the revolutionists, a British squadron bombarded and partially destroyed that city, while a British army,

al and political interests in that region, was to continue the military occupation of Egypt, for the time being at least, and boldly to begin the task of its fina

ruler of Egypt is not his Highness Abbas Hilmi II, but his Britannic Majesty's Agent and Consul-General-at present Lord Kitchener of Khartoum-who, though officially Britain's diplomatic representative in Egypt and nothing more, in reality exercises almost unlimited authority and power. In other words, England has assumed the position of a receiver for Egypt's foreign creditors and has apparently mad

any, Austria, Russia, and Italy, who are stationed at Cairo for the purpose of keeping an eye on the national revenues and periodically collecting

sovereign rights in Egypt, the International Tribunals, or "Mixed Courts," in the control of which Egypt has almost nothing to say, giving them complete jurisdiction in all civil

ssion granted to Christians, by virtue of which they were tolerated upon the soil of Islam. Though the Capitulations were never regarded by the Turks as treaties-it being obvious that the Commander of the Faithful, who is likewise the Successor of the Prophet and the Shadow of Allah, could never treat a Christian ruler as an equal-they have all the character and force of treaties nevertheless, inviolability of do

an consul, who would despatch his kavasses, as the armed guards which are attached-also by virtue of the Capitulations-to the various consulates are called, to effect the man's arrest. He would then be tried by the consul, who possesses magisterial powers, before a jury drawn from

s, he can lounge in his doorway and jeer at them with perfect safety for the simple reason that he is a Greek subject, and therefore his café is as much on Greek

ggler who drops anchor in Alexandria harbour with a cargo of it aboard knows perfectly well that the arm of the Egyptian law is not long enough to reach him. If, however, he is caught by th

lls, or cafés; to settle, either in or out of court, their quarrels and even their domestic disputes; to inspect the sanitary condition of their houses; to perform the marriage service for those who prefer a civil to a religious ceremony; and to attend to their burial and the administration of their estates when they die. It is scarcely necessary to add that, as a result of this anomalous state of affairs, there

gyptians are justiciable before the ordinary native tribunals, which now consist of forty-six summary courts having civil jurisdiction in matters up to two thousand five hundred dollars in value and criminal jurisdiction in offences punishable by a fine or by imprisonment up to three years; seven central tribunals, each of the ch

taries and advisers, without whose permission he may scarcely change his mind, but he is compelled to yield to England even in choosing the members of his ministry, the one or two attempts [Pg 117] which he has made to assert his right

gan "Egypt for the Egyptians!" flatly declined to give a cabinet portfolio to a certain Egyptian politician whose appointment had been urged by the British Consul-General and who was notori

to this decree," announced Lord Cromer, in the bl

y, "that I decline to make an appointment wh

ss," said Cromer m

ace pale with anger, "that I disregard your threat to exi

d a view of Abdin Square and threw back the curtain. "Will your Highne

British infantry, the Egyptian sun blazing down on the rows of brown helmets, on the business-like uniforms of khaki, and on the slanting lines of steel. For

of Khartoum, British Agent and Consul-General in Egypt, inspecting a

mud." A march past o

E SUDAN AND SOME

madmen, thundering past the reviewing party in a whirlwind of colour and dust and noise. It was a fine exhibition and one of which any commanding officer might well have been proud, but the Khedive had received his military education in Austria, where faultless alignment and the ability to execute intricate parade movements are reckoned among the first requisites of a soldier; so when Lord Kitchener, the conqueror of the Sudan and the maker of the Egyptian army, reined up his charger before him, saluted, and perfunctorily asked, "I trust that your Highness is satisfied with the discipline and appearance of your forces?" Abbas Hilmi, probably as much from a spirit of hostility to the English as for any other reason, answered in a voice loud enough to be heard by all around him, "They are a fine body of men, Lord Kitchener, but I am far from satisfied with their discipline." Officers who

ars, in fact, the Nile country has been more absolutely governed from London than has India, or Canada, or Australia, or South Africa, or any of the Crown colonies, and this despite the fact that between England and Egypt there is no tie that is officially recognised by any foreign power. Now, thirty years is a considerable lapse of time anywhere, particularly in the East, where men mature rapidly, so that those who were children when the British came are in the prime of life now. The fact that in that interim England has had ample time to train them for the duties of governmental administration, as witness what we have accomplished among the Filipinos [Pg 121] i

e last few years the country has been experiencing a land boom equal to that of southern California, property in Alexandria having sold at the rate of one hundred dollars a square yard; scientific irrigation, combined with the completion of the great dam at Assuan, has enormously enlarged the area of cultivation and [Pg 122] has made Egypt the second greatest cotton-producing country in the world; the national debt has been materially reduced; and, most significant of all, Egypt's European bondholders have consented to have the interest on their bonds reduced from seven to three and

prosperity, and that this, in turn, depended upon the fellaheen having an ample and steady supply of water for their farms, set their engineers at the task of devising some scheme for compelling the great river to pay tribute to the land through which it passed instead of wasting its fertilising waters in the Mediterranean. Hence the great barrage at Assuan, suggested by Sir William Willcocks, designed by Sir Benjamin Baker, built by Sir John Aird, and financed by Sir Ernest Cassel. A mile and a quarter long, containing a million tons of stone and creating a reservoir three times the area of the Lake of Geneva, this titanic barrier permits the additional irrigation of one million six hundred thousand acres of land. Though its cost was twelve million five hundred thousand dollars, it has already increased the earning power of Egypt fully thirteen million dollars annually, so it will be seen t

fields covering some one million six hundred thousand acres, most of which are in the Delta. That this source of revenue may be increased, the Egyptian Government has recently undertaken a huge drainage project, which will, it is estimated, when completed i

as the consular representative of the United States at Alexandria, I received a call one morning from the president of an American concern engaged in the manufacture of agricultural and well-drilling machinery who explained that he was passing through Egypt and asked if it would be possible for me to obtain him an audience with the Khedive. The request was duly transmitted to the Grand Master of Ceremonies, and shortly thereafter a reply reached me naming the day and hou

Highness, particularly as he is an authority on agricultural machinery

Hilmi's august nose, "I've got the niftiest little proposition in well-drilling machinery that ever struck this burg, and if you don't ju

uation dawned upon him, and, as the river of talk which is one of the chief assets of the trained American salesman flowed steadily on, he became interested in spite of himself, now and then interjecting a pertinent

rations for the recovery of the lost provinces, and, on September 2, 1898, the overthrow of the Dervish power was completed on the battle-field of Omdurman. In the following year the pleasing farce was presented [Pg 127] of a convention being signed by the British and Egyptian Governments (or, in other words, by Lord Cromer as the representative of England in Egypt and by Lord Cromer as the virtual dictator of Egypt) which provides for the administration of the territory south of the twenty-second parallel of latitude by a governor-general appoi

or as far as from Chicago to Denver, the Sudan boasts an area three times that of Texas. This area, prior to the Dervish oppression, had a population estimated at eight and a half millions, but, as a result of the wholesale massacres perpetrated by the Mahdi and his followers, it has to-da

erlooked that, beyond the sandy deserts which guard its northern frontier, there exist extensive and fertile regions which, in the provinces of Gezire and Sennar alone, are estimated at fifteen millions of acres. Added to this, the Sudan is particularly fortunate in possessing, in the Blue and the White Nile, two great waterways which are destined to prove invaluable as mediums of fertilisation and transportation. There is, indeed, no room for doubt that the Sudan is destined to be in time a great agricultural centre, for cotton, wheat, and sugar-cane are staple and give eve

in mail captured by their Saracenic ancestors from the Crusaders. The

of the Sudan. (The Sultan of Darfur is a semi-independe

LE FROM INNE

ki-clad guard on the Khartoum express, who spurned the tip I proffered him to secure a compartment to myself as insolently as the poor but virtuous heroine of the melodrama spurns the villain's gold. He drew back as though the silver I offered him were a rattlesnake in working order and his face flushed a dull brick-red; then, bowing stiffly from the waist, as a Prussian officer does when he is introduced, he turned on his heel and strode away. "I say, you got the wrong

earth's hard cases called the Foreign Legion. It didn't take him long to get all he wanted of that kind of soldiering, so one day, when he was sent down to Oran in charge of a prisoner, he swam out to a British steamer lying in the harbour, worked his passage to Alexandria, enlisted in a British cavalry regiment, took part in Kitchener's campaign against the Khalifa, was wounded in the shindy at Omdurman, and retired on a pen

he same reason that a man wears a white suit in the tropics, which have windows of blue glass to prevent the sun-glare from injuring the passengers' eyes, and which are provided with both outside and inside blinds in an attempt to keep out a little of the heat. Looked at from any stand-point that you please, the thirty hours' railway journey

, the work was so energetically carried on that the line advanced at the rate of a mile a day. The most serious obstacle was, of course, the provision of an adequate supply of water for the engines and workmen, so a series of watering-stations was established, at which wells, sunk to a depth of eighty feet or more, tap the subterranean water. These stations are so far apart, however, tha

drone of a million sewing-machines, gradually rose into such a roar as might be made by a million motor-cars, and then the storm was upon us. The sand poured down as though shaken through a sieve; the landscape was blotted out; the sun was obscured and there came a yellow darkness, like that of a London fog; men and animals threw themselves, or were hurled, to the ground before the fury of the wind, while a mantle of sand, inches thick, settled upon every animate and inanimate th

by designing a car which combines the best features of both. The first-class cars on the Sudanese express trains contain a series of coupés, each somewhat roomier than the drawing-room in a Pullman sleeper and each opening into a spacious corridor which runs the length of the car. For day use there is one long cushioned seat running crosswise of each compartment, which at night forms the lower berth, the back of t

l further unpopularising himself by loudly cursing the cleanliness of the tub, the warmth of the water, the size of the towels, and the slowness of the Sudanese attendant. Five minutes before the time for the train to leave the whistle gave due warning and the passengers scrambled from the bath into their clothes, which the native attendants were accustomed to brush and leave outside the bath-room doors. Every one hurried into his clothes, as I have remarked, except the anti-tipping Englishman, who almost choked with blasphemy when he found that his garments had mysteriously disappeared. Though a hasty search was instituted, not a trace of them could be found, the impassive Sudanese stolidly declarin

y with the Egyptians than Americans do with negroes-once served under Gordon, as the bit of faded blue ribbon on the breast of his tunic denotes; the brown-faced Englishman in riding-clothes, with the wrinkles about his eyes which come from staring out across the sands under a tropic sun, is a pasha and the governor of a province as large as many a European kingdom, and farther up the line he will get off the train and disappear into the desert on one of his periodical tours of inspection, perhaps not seeing another white face for three months or more. It struck me that there was something particularly fine and manly and self-reliant about these young Englishmen who are acting as policemen and judges and administrators and agricultural experts rolled into one, out there at the Back of Beyond. "It's only the hard work that makes it bearable," said one of them in answer to my question. "What with the heat and the flies and the never-ending vista of yellow sand and the lack of companionship, we should die from sheer loneliness if we didn't work from dawn until bedtime. Besides, every two years we get long enough leave to go home." (And oh, the caress in that word home.) Then he asked me with pathetic eagerness about the latest song-hits at the London music-halls, and was this new Russian dancer at Covent Garden

s of water plants which have long obs

Barka, the sacred mountain of the ancient Egyptians, and, at its base, the ruins of Napata, once the capital of an Ethiopian kingdom. A few miles south of Atbara, which is the junction of the railway to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, we pass the so-called Island of Meroe, with its score of pyramids, beside which the majestic monuments of Egypt are but the creations of yesterday, for this region, remember, was the cradle of the Egyptian arts and sciences. In the settlements along the banks we now begin to see the typical round straw huts of Central Africa, with their pointed roofs and airy recubas, or porches. The peoples change with t

d-a sort of African Riverside Drive-has been constructed, and here no business or commercial trespass will be permitted, for from the Grand Hotel to the Palace, a distance of a mile or more, it is lined with the residences of the British officials, low-roofed, broad-verandaed bungalows nestling in luxuriant gardens. The thing that impresses one most about Khartoum is the extraordinary width of its streets and diagonal avenues and the frequency of its open circles, but the British will tell you quite frankly that military considerations, rather than beauty, guided them in planning it and that a few field-guns, properly placed, can sweep the [Pg 140] entire city. There are two buildings in Khartoum which seem to me to be more significant of the new era which has begun for the Sudan than all the other features of the city combined. One is the Gordon Memorial College, built with the object of training the sons of the Sudanese sheikhs and chieftains along those lines which are best calculated to make for the future peace, progres

e country now, or within the near future, she would leave it under conditions which would soon result in chaos, and the good that she has done would be largely lost. The extensive schemes of irrigation upon which she has entered, and upon whic

provides, indeed, the key to the entire Egyptian situation, for upon her control of it depends England's entire scheme of administration in India and the Farther East. To withdraw her forces from Egypt would be tantamount to leaving the gateway to her Eastern possessions unguarded, and that, I am convinced, she will never do. Two lesser, though in themselves important, [Pg 142] reasons militate against her surrendering the control of the Valley of the Nile. One is her hope of eventually realising, in spite of German opposition, Cecil Rhodes's dream of an "All Red" route from the Cape