A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel Part 7

The De Cossons lived in the suburbs, about two miles out on the road to the Pyramids, in a detached place without a street or a number, and quite hard to find when the sun had set. My hostess had prepared an elaborate map in two colors, red and blue, showing where I was to go and what I was to do and say after crossing the great steel bridge that spans the Nile. Armed with this formidable doc.u.ment, I went to the n.o.ble bandit who controls the carriage service in front of Shepheard's, and in a confidential whisper explained the map and the circ.u.mstances to him, at the same time slipping into his extended, yawning paw a wad of _baks.h.i.+sh_. I stipulated that I must have a driver who understood at least some English. He made a great show of grasping the intricacies of the map and the instructions that went with it, and presently, with a wild gleam in his eye, as if he had found a sure way to his "graft," he announced that he was ready and willing to take all responsibility. He had an official, high-backed chair on the sidewalk and asked me to use it till he returned. Then darting into the darkness, he quickly found a man (who looked like the First Murderer in _Macbeth_) on whom he could depend to rob me and divide the spoils with him. Dressed in his flowing oriental robes as Cairo's most abandoned criminal, he shook me warmly by the hand and whispered, as I stepped into the carriage:

"I have arranged everything."

I had a sufficient glimmering of what was going on to meekly pipe to him:

"Yes, I haven't the slightest doubt of it."

We started out at a brisk pace which soon relaxed into a funereal jog, and went on and on through narrow, squalid streets till we reached the Nile. Although I had given myself an extra hour for emergencies, I became impatient and asked him:

"But where is the big bridge with the bronze sphinxes on it that we are to cross?" He sadly wailed in reply:

"Ah, sahib, it ees so hard to find eet in the dark!"

In a burst of sarcastic anger, I shouted at him:

"Well, get off and light a match, and maybe you'll hit it by accident!"

a.s.suming with an innocent look that I had spoken seriously, he took me at my word, jumped off his perch, lit a match and peered all round him.

Then I got "real" angry, and told him De Cosson Bey kept a professional torture chamber, and that I would have him ground to sausage meat if he trifled with me another moment. Well knowing the impotence of my "hot air" blast, he simply smiled and took up his burthen of "finding" the bridge. This he soon accomplished, as it was about as easy to find as a saloon in the "Great White Way." The instructions accompanying the map stated that the Maison Antonion was on the left of the Pyramid Road after three crossroads had been pa.s.sed. I began to look out for and count the roads, so when we had crossed two and were approaching a third I halted the Jehu and said:

"This is the third road; turn down here."

"No, sahib, eet is de private entrance to Hunter Pasha's palace, an' he keep de mos' wicket dogs you ever see in awl yo' life."

So on we went till I began to realize that the kidnapper was trying to take me out to the Pyramids for a late dinner with the Sphinx. It was clear moonlight and I saw an English lady walking along the road. I tried to have the driver stop, but he pretended that he did not understand me, so I jumped out and, profusely apologizing to the lady, explained my emergency. She said:

"Why, you are a mile past De Cosson Bey's place: there it is with the flagstaff on the tower."

Then she had a heart-to-heart talk in Arabic with my friend and we returned briskly to the "third road." I halted the procession for a settlement about fifty yards from the house, well knowing that trouble was coming in pyramids, and feeling that I did not wish to a.s.sault the ears of my hosts with the clash which was now inevitable and which would undoubtedly contain a large percentage of language that could hardly be called diplomatic. He demanded about ten times the regular fare. I protested, but he explained that after sunset all fares were double and charged by the hour, at that; and that when the Nile had been crossed the driver had the privilege of fixing the fare according to the circ.u.mstances. This vested right, he claimed, had not been disputed since his ancestors had driven Napoleon out to the battle of the Pyramids a century ago. I could not deny his statement as I had not been among those present, but I reduced the settlement to a compromise by threatening to spring on him the Hessian troops that De Cosson Bey retained for such occasions. Then we drove up to the house as genially as if we had been long parted relatives, and I supposed we held the secrets of the pa.s.sage of arms between ourselves. But I was mistaken, for I noticed at dinner that my hosts smiled knowingly at each other as if they had some amusing thought in common. When I could stand this no longer I asked what they were laughing at.

"Why, at your stopping so near the house for the usual stormy, cab-fare settlement. Wise visitors always settle out on the Pyramid Road, so they may regain their composure before alighting. We threw up the windows and heard every word of the picturesque, verbal duel, and we came to the conclusion when the flag fell that the oriental had had his hands full throughout the entire entertainment."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANOTHER PART OF KARNAK; ONLY ONE MAN ON THE JOB, BUT HE IS QUITE EQUAL TO ALL ITS REQUIREMENTS AND EMERGENCIES]

I left next day by train for Alexandria, and I remember it was thirty-five years ago that I started from that city for Port Said, whence I took a steamer for India, pa.s.sing through the Suez Ca.n.a.l, then not long opened. Time flies, but the ca.n.a.l is still there, at the old stand, doing a steady business with all the nations of the earth that go down to the sea in great s.h.i.+ps as daily customers. F. J. Haskin has written an interesting and graphic description of this great work, recently published in the New York _Globe_, in which he says:

"On the great breakwater at Port Said stands the bronze statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, his right hand extended in a gesture of invitation to the mariners of all nations to take their s.h.i.+ps through the great ca.n.a.l which was the fruit of his genius and diplomacy. Not one word is there to indicate that his fortune and good name lie buried in the failure of another ca.n.a.l, half way round the world.

"The romance of the Suez Ca.n.a.l is suggested by everything the visitor sees at Port Said, the 'turnstile of the nations.' But the tragedy of the ca.n.a.l, the terrible cost of life, the shameful waste of money, the enslavement of the Egyptians in governmental and financial bondage, the wreck of French hopes and aspirations--not one hint of all that tragedy is discernible. Ferdinand de Lesseps, Ismail Pasha and the Egyptian people gave civilization and commerce one of its greatest gifts in the Suez Ca.n.a.l, but the cost to them was all they had--and they were never repaid.

"Every day in the year a dozen great s.h.i.+ps make the procession through the ca.n.a.l--the ninety miles of slow travelling which saves them the cost of circ.u.mnavigating the great continent of Africa. They pay well for it, and the owners of the ca.n.a.l shares wax fat. England controls the ca.n.a.l, the construction of which John Bull attempted in every manner to prevent. English s.h.i.+ps bound from "home" to Bombay cut down the distance from 10,860 miles to 4,620 miles by taking the ca.n.a.l route, and the vast majority of s.h.i.+ps which pay tolls to the ca.n.a.l company fly the British flag. Germany comes second, a long way after; Holland third, and the French, whose dreams of commercial empire cut the ditch, are fourth. The United States has not been represented in the ca.n.a.l in a decade by any commercial s.h.i.+p--only vessels of the navy and yachts of the Yankee millionaires show the Stars and Stripes to the Bedouins of the desert who bring their caravans from Mt. Sinai to the ca.n.a.l."

MOST IMPORTANT OF Ca.n.a.lS

"The tonnage of the Suez is not one-third as great as that of the Sault Ste. Marie Ca.n.a.l in the Great Lakes, but its importance to the commerce of the world is greater than that of any other pa.s.sageway of the seas.

Wherever there is a strait or a narrow pa.s.sage through which commerce may go, there is sure to be a British flag flying, a British band playing, and a red-coated Tommy Atkins strutting about with a swagger stick. Suez is not an exception.

"Fourteen centuries before Christ, nearly 3,500 years ago, the Pharaoh Setee I., father of Rameses the Great, cut a ca.n.a.l fifty-seven miles long from a branch of the Nile delta to the bitter lakes, which are now part of the Suez Ca.n.a.l and which were then the northern extremity of the Gulf of Suez. That connected the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, and Egypt waxed great. But the nation decayed, and the sands of the desert filled up the ditch. Eight hundred years later the Pharaoh Necho undertook to dig the ca.n.a.l. More than a hundred thousand lives were sacrificed to the project, but it was abandoned when a priest predicted that its completion would cause Egypt to fall into the hands of a foreign usurper. A hundred years after Necho, the Persian Darius took up the work on the abandoned ca.n.a.l, but his engineers told him that its completion would cause a deluge, and he desisted. About three hundred years before Christ was born, Ptolemy Philadelphus constructed a lock-and-dam ca.n.a.l through which s.h.i.+ps made the journey from one of the mouths of the Nile to the site of modern Suez. Continued wars interrupted commerce, and the locks and dams fell into decay, so that Cleopatra's navy was unable to escape to the Red Sea by ca.n.a.l. The Roman engineers later patched up the ca.n.a.l so that their galleys made their way from sea to sea; but when the Arabs came in A.D. 700 they found it choked up. Amrou, the Arab, cleared it out, but it was soon permitted to fill up again, and not until the great Napoleon reached Egypt was the ca.n.a.l project again considered. Napoleon abandoned the idea only because his engineers a.s.sured him that the level of the Mediterranean was thirty feet below that of the Red Sea. He then considered a lock-and-dam ca.n.a.l, but he evacuated Egypt before anything came of it. Of course, all those ancient ca.n.a.ls were very narrow and shallow, and no boat now dignified with the business of carrying cargo for profit could have entered any one of them."

MEHEMET ALI WAS WARY

"Mehemet Ali, the great pasha who founded the present Egyptian khedivate, was urged to attempt the ca.n.a.l project, but he was wary. At last he pushed it aside, and listened to the Englishman, Robert Stephenson--the father of the railroad. Under Stephenson's supervision he built a railroad from Cairo to Suez, connecting with the line from Cairo to Alexandria. This formed the "great overland route" to India, and brought great trade and many rich tolls to the Egyptians.

"The time came when Said Pasha ruled in Cairo. To him came Ferdinand de Lesseps. Years before, while a clerk in the French consulate general in Cairo, De Lesseps dreamed the dream of the great ca.n.a.l. He was not an engineer, but he was a master diplomatist. He unfolded his plans to Said, who loved France and all Frenchmen, and met with encouragement. It was a magnificent scheme. The ca.n.a.l was not to cost Egypt one cent, but was to pay fifteen per cent. of its receipts to the Egyptian government, and at the expiration of ninety-nine years was to become the absolute property of Egypt. On such terms the concession was given to De Lesseps in 1856.

"Then De Lesseps went forth to get the money. France had just come out of the Crimean War and could not advance money for ventures. England was opposed to a ca.n.a.l that would let anybody have a chance at India, and the English government did everything possible to prevent the Frenchman from obtaining funds. He failed in Europe, for he could not get enough even for a survey of the ca.n.a.l. Nothing daunted, he went back to Egypt and borrowed money enough from Said to survey the ca.n.a.l and to exploit it through Europe. Then came much planning and more concessions, and much stock jobbing; but by 1860 the French company was again without money. Again the appeal was made to Said, and not without avail; for he subscribed for more than one-third or the total capital stock and promised to advance money for the construction work--and all for a project that was not to cost Egypt anything. That was the beginning of Egypt's bondage to the money lenders of Europe, for Said had to borrow the money he gave to the ca.n.a.l."

ISMAIL PASHA WAS EASY

"In 1863 the magnificently extravagant Ismail Pasha came to the throne of Mehemet Ali. He burned with ambition to make himself the greatest ruler in the world, and the ca.n.a.l was a darling of his heart. He was the ready and willing victim of the loan sharks of Europe, and he would sign anything in the way of an obligation if there was a little yellow gold in sight.

"Meanwhile the ca.n.a.l was progressing slowly. Ismail ordered the Egyptian peasants to do the work under the ancient _corvee_ system.

Every three months 25,000 drafted fellaheen went to the big ditch to dig. Every three months a miserable remnant of the preceding 25,000 left the dead bodies of their comrades beneath the dump heaps.

"The Suez Ca.n.a.l was dug for the most part by those poor creatures who scooped up the sand and dirt with their bare hands and carried it up the steep banks to the dumps in palm-leaf baskets of their own making.

Task masters with cruel whips of hippopotamus hide punished the sick and the fainting, as well as the lazy. There were no sanitary precautions, and the men died by the thousands.

"This horrible condition of affairs aroused the indignation of John Bull, who protested to the sultan. The sultan ordered the employment of fellaheen labor to be stopped. Then De Lesseps and the ca.n.a.l ring descended upon Ismail and held him responsible for damages. The case was left to the arbitration of Napoleon III., who decided for the ca.n.a.l ring, and Ismail was forced to pay a fine of nearly $10,000,000 because his t.i.tular sovereign lord had ordered that Ismail's subjects should not be murdered in the ca.n.a.l ditch. Each month a new obligation was fastened upon suffering Egypt. Finally, when the ca.n.a.l was completed, Ismail gave a great fete to celebrate its opening. Few festivals have been so magnificent, none so extravagant. The celebration cost $21,000,000. Verdi wrote the opera _Aida_ to order that Ismail might give a box party one evening, and an opera house was built especially for that purpose."

ENGLAND IN CONTROL

"But Ismail had signed too many notes of hand. The day of reckoning came. Ismail sold his ca.n.a.l shares to the English government, and by their purchase Benjamin Disraeli gave the British empire dominion over the traffic between the East and the West. It was a bold stroke, and it brought to an end the commercial aspirations of the French of the Second Empire. The ca.n.a.l company still has its chief offices in Paris, its clerks speak French, and its tolls are charged in francs, but otherwise it is English.

"Ismail was dethroned and died in exile, his magnificence forgotten.

De Lesseps ventured on another ca.n.a.l project, was plunged into disgrace, and died a mental wreck. Egypt, which once levied toll on all the commerce pa.s.sing between Orient and Occident, now watches the trade s.h.i.+ps pa.s.s by. The digging of the ca.n.a.l was the greatest blow ever given to Egyptian commerce. But the losses of Ismail and De Lesseps and Egypt make up the gain of the civilized world.

"Opened just forty years ago, its importance has increased with every year, and its revenues are expanding each month. It cost $100,000,000, half of which was spent in bribes and excessive discounts. With modern machinery, such as is being used at Panama, it could have been built for one-quarter as much. As an engineering problem it is to the Panama Ca.n.a.l as a boy's toy block house to a forty-story skysc.r.a.per. How it will compare with Panama as an avenue of commerce is a question to which Americans anxiously await the answer."

The jubilee of the Suez Ca.n.a.l, work on which commenced in 1859, took place on April 25, 1909. When I pa.s.sed through in 1874 its depth was about twenty-six feet; the present depth is about thirty-two and a half feet, and improvements are now going on which will bring it to thirty-four feet. The original width was seventy-one feet on the bottom, and this has been gradually increased until at present the bottom width is ninety-seven and a half feet. In 1870 there pa.s.sed through the ca.n.a.l four hundred and eighty-six s.h.i.+ps, whose gross tonnage was 654,914. Last year 3,795 s.h.i.+ps used the ca.n.a.l, and their total tonnage was over 19,000,000. Truly this is one of the world's greatest conveniences!

[Ill.u.s.tration: PILLARS OF THOTHMES III., KARNAK, EGYPT, WITH TWO YOUNG MEN ON THE LOOKOUT FOR BUSINESS. THEY ARE BOTH WORTHY OF EVERY ENCOURAGEMENT]

These reminiscences take me back again to Alexandria, as it was there that an original seaboard bank was founded. Its first president was Katchaskatchkan, a nephew of King Ram's. The old man saw to it that all the "squeeze" from the corn crop money was deposited here and that it held the margins on Joseph's grain corner. "Katch" broke his neck by falling into the wheat pit, but the incident was soon forgotten in the advancing prosperity of the bank. The place is in ruins, but we saw the "paying teller's gun," which was a decorated club with spikes on it; it lay unnoticed in a nook in the big amalgamated copper vault, covered with papyrus books and records of the bank. Some of the old past due notes on the shelves were still drawing interest and you could hear it tick like the clanking cogs when a ferry boat makes her landing. The writer fairly shudders at what the interest on those notes would now amount to, computed at five per cent. (the prevailing rate paid for call loans in that historic corner), remembering that the interest on a penny compounded at this rate since the dawn of the Christian era would now represent fourteen millions of globes of eighteen-karat gold, each globe the size of our earth! We could not help philosophizing on the change which had taken place in banking principles and methods since those old days; and the whole inspection was very interesting.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OBELISK OF THOTHMES I AND QUEEN HAPSHEPSET XVIII DYNASTY. TWO FINE OBELISKS IN THE TEMPLE OF KARNAK--A LITTLE TOPSY-TURVY LOOKING AND VERY MUCH IN NEED OF REPAIRS]

I am reluctant to leave Egypt without saying a word about the "teep,"

as this land is the very home, the embodiment--the Gibraltar, so to speak, of the wide-open palm for services rendered--or even when they are not rendered. Egypt is not the only place, however, of which this can be said; there are others. But no matter where the dear American tourist lands he "gets it" both coming and going, and the "neck" is usually the place where it first attracts his attention. It is not a new thing, by any means, for the Greeks suffered more from it than we ever have. They called it "gifts," and if a man didn't give, why, he got nothing, just as he gets nothing to-day in "Del's" if he tries to escape with a glad smile instead of the regulation tariff. Usually, as we all know, the rough time is at the reckoning and the departure, if you haven't done the handsome. The waiter, if he knows his business, makes you feel your cheapness if you attempt to "do" him with an affable "Good-night," instead of the real thing. The change is so arranged for you that you may have a wide choice of coins, but if that scheme misses fire, there are still left the overcoat and the hat. The man who can pa.s.s through these ordeals with his nerve unfrayed and look through the waiter as if he were a pane of gla.s.s, would never have turned a hair if placed in front at the charge of Balaclava. I remember writing a _menu_ card for a dinner once, and when I came to the sweetbread course it was shown that if you hadn't a coin you must still do something. Lucullus was waiting on the bank of the river Styx for his turn on Charon's ferryboat, and of course, being a shade, he had no money in his clothes; but this is what was said:

When Lucullus got on Charon's skiff He didn't have a cent; So he handed out a sweetbread And on the boat he went.