half in space on each of several stories, and pictures carefully swathed hanging from rent and blistered walls. In one such house (a mere corner was left of it) a dog, singed to the skin, howled dismally beside a cradle on the fourth floor. Of how much more, then, its viceroy? No words can fittingly convey the impression made by the desolate, wretched, and abandoned city on those who viewed it that day. There is something very terrible in the aspect of a big modern town in all of whose length and breadth no living human A terrible experience, indeed, must that creature is to be seen. And thus it was drive have been to a young sovereign in in Alexandria on the 13th July, 1882. In whose mind, beside the sorrow and the all the town the flames alone were alive. shame, some thought of the cost to him The only sounds to be heard were the roll and to his country cannot fail to have enand rumble of falling masonry where the tered. Of this cost- - of the pecuniary fire had done its work, or the roar and loss sustained through the pillage and incrackle of the flames as they grappled cendiarism—some idea may be formed with a fresh task. Every house door from the statistics subsequently furnished stood wide open. Every shop-front was by the International Commission of Inshattered, displaying the wreck within. demnities. The total sum awarded was The silent, lonely streets were strewn 106,830,226 francs, or £4,341,011. thick with the jetsam of the looters' hur- this sum 26,750,175 francs, or £1,070,007, ried flight. The most miscellaneous arti- was given for house property destroyed; cles lay heaped upon the sidewalks. The and 34,635,050 francs, or £1,338,402, for roadways were littered with every kind of furniture; and 43,395,061 francs, or £I,wreckage mirrors, jewel-cases, bales of 735,806, for merchandise. When it is cloth or silk, shattered porcelain, broken borne in mind that the decree appointing furniture, tinned provisions, iron safes, the Commission expressly excluded claims their sides torn and dinted by adze and for money, jewellery, securities, and works bullet. Everything that was too cumber- of art, it will be obvious that the total some to carry away the wreckers had value of property destroyed must have destroyed in sheer luxury of wantonness. considerably exceeded the sums quoted. Pianos knelt on broken legs in the roads, or hung half out of first-floor windows, their wires torn bodily out as though by lightning, their keyboards battered and spiky. Sofas and armchairs stood in front gardens, or sprawled on flights of steps, ripped and gutted. The general search had been for hidden money, the native mind making no account of banks; and as money could not be found, the most obvious vengeance was to destroy all objects on which it had been wasted. Through this woful scene of desolation the khedive's escort, white handkerchief on sleeve and white flag on sabre-point, had to guide their master. Now and then the little procession had to dash hurriedly down a side street to escape a falling house or wall. Now and then a halt had to be called while the way was cleared sometimes of a mass of débris, sometimes Certainly in the weeks that followed of the stripped, mutilated corpse of a luck- opinions were greatly divided as to the less European, anon of half the stock in khedive. Many persons there were, even trade of a haberdasher or a milliner heaped among those most behind the scenes, who in the road, and abandoned as worthless suspected that Mehemet Tewfik, with to the looters. Now and again his High-customary Oriental duplicity, was seeking ness had a momentary sight of a blue- at once to hunt with the hounds and run gowned incendiary, with his petroleum-can and armful of cotton, skulking off amid the lime-dust and the shadows. Now and again he had a doll's house view of half a house, the other half having fallen away, with tables, chairs and bedsteads rocking Yet in the midst of this fearful scene of desolation and rapine - himself but now escaped from the doom decreed for him by Toulba with anarchy supreme throughout his realm, and the foreign au thors of the mischief, whether friends or foes to him he hardly knew, waiting to receive his person in the palace they had partially destroyed, Tewfik had the courage to maintain an appearance of dignified composure, and to salute with the kindly grace of his least troubled days the few Englishmen who uncovered before him. I did not as yet know him, but I never believed evil of him after that day. Throughout this crisis his calm demeanor excited much comment among the Englishmen who were thrown in contact with him, and probably aided to place some of his actions in an unfavorable light. with the hare. It was not so; but had the charge been justified, could we have greatly blamed him? He made some mistakes that at the time appeared something more than foolish. Among them the celebrated correspondence with Arabi at Kaffr Dowar has perhaps excited most attention. It was on the 15th July, two days after his entry into Alexandria, that he summoned Arabi to him; and that his minister of war telegraphed in reply that "his Highness would be glad to hear that recruits were coming in to assist him to fight the English." Then, on the 22nd, he published a decree dismissing Arabi from his post of minister of war, and proclaiming him a rebel. This in itself was admirable, but its effect was marred in a ludicrous manner by the reasons assigned for the step, which, as set forth, were his insufficient resistance to the British fleet, the loss of four hundred guns, allowing the English to land, retreating to Kaffr Dowar, and not coming to his khedive when summoned. It cannot be denied that, considering the relations between the khedive and the British forces at this time, this decree, issued at a time when Tewfik was no longer under any sort of coercion, was on the surface as quaint a sample of an Oriental document as often comes to light. It is, however, capable of explanation. That it was foolish is beyond question, but a knowledge of the current of ideas which had produced it in Tewfik's mind removes all thought of treachery on his part. Placed in a position of exceptional difficulty, he had two reasons for issuing this curious document. On one side was the khedive, protected by the forces of Great Britain, which, having cheerfully destroyed Alexandria - or permitted it to be destroyed (it is but the more criminal), and may the blame for that shameful blunder lie heavy wherever it be due were not strong enough to advance beyond the walls. On the other side was Arabi, and behind him the whole country, the entire populace, all the princes and nobles, all the wealthy towns, the capital itself, the entire army, and all the war material that was not left to the British to destroy (another shameful blunder) in the Alexandria forts. Arabi's chief strength lay in his unscrupulous and barbarous mode of warfare; and there was so terrible a dread among the officials at the palace of what he might do or allow to be done to their property in Cairo and elsewhere, that the khedive's action was paralyzed. Would Cairo be burned and sacked, as Alexandria had been? was the question in every one's mind, and the odds were freely laid on the event. Then, again, he had at the time no certainty as to what England was going to do, and the business had already been so handsomely muddled as to leave him every margin for doubt. And, lastly, he had an idea of wiping off all old scores and beginning anew. It was true that the soldiers were fighting against his orders; but if he proclaimed it so, they became in the same moment rebels. He wished to avoid this; he wished above all things for peace, and to secure it he was ready to open the door for their escape to accept the responsibility for what had been done, to cover their guilt by his proclamation. "Only come in now; only obey me, now that I have made peace with the English, and I will take the past on myself." This was his design. This was the writing between the lines; and it will hardly be deemed that, in so electing, he showed himself to be courageous, honest, wellintentioned, and humane, even if a little foolish. "En tout cas," said one of Tewfik's ministers, with rather bitter wit, looking round upon the havoc wrought by England's half-hearted intervention, "s'il s'agit de mettre l'ordre en Egypte mieux vaut entrer par la Porte que par les fenêtres." There were at the time not a few who endorsed this opinion. Despite the Arab proverb which says, "The grass grows not where the Turk has trod;" despite the Ottoman tendency to echo the historic dictum, "J'y suis-j'y reste," the reflection could not fail to occur frequently to Tewfik, as it did to others, that, had his suzerain been permitted to send to his aid those twenty battalions he had implored, this bitter cup at least would not have been presented to him. That the sultan's interference would ultimately have been ruinous to Egypt is indisputable; but it would have been less immediately ruinous than the permitted destruction of Alexandria, for which no censure can be too severe. The pricking of the Arabi wind-bag proved no very hazardous affair. A good deal more has been made of Tel-el-Kebir than can honestly be said to have been merited by that somewhat sloppy triumph. The Egyptian soldier to-day — and espe cially his black brother from the Soudan has developed, under the careful training of his zealous and self-sacrificing English officers, into as good fighting material, Thomas Atkins excepted, as I for one would wish to march with. But in those days he was a very different animal. "What can you expect," said Lord Palmerston, speaking of the Turks, “of a people who wear no heels to their boots?" The Egyptian officer under Arabi wore not only no heels to his boots, but for choice no boots to his feet, and which was the immediate cause of British passed all the time he could spare and military action in the Soudan (and the two it was considerable from slouching of whose regiments, that were the first to through parade, in a wadded cotton gown, break, had been opposed to England at with those white-stockinged appendages Tel-el-Kebir), may be pardoned for cheapcurled beneath him on a divan. ening somewhat in his mind that muchlauded victory of British arms on the Sweet-Water Canal. This, however, matters but little, since as a defeat it was conclusive, and put a stop to the whole rebellion. The laconic telegram sent by secretary of war in the insurgent camp, to Abd-el-Al, who was still stoutly holding out (against nothing) with his black troops in Damietta, describes the situation with delicious naïveté. "At half past ten in the morning, Turkish time". runs the message-"the enemy attacked the line of intrenchments, and firing commenced on both sides. We caused a large number of the enemy to perish beside the line of intrenchments" (the whole British loss killed was but nine officers and forty-eight non-commissioned officers and men). "I found a train about to leave Tel-el-Kebir, and got in with a few wounded. I know nothing after that except that on leaving Tel-el-Kebir I saw that a train had been smashed. Please take the necessary precautions." This gentleman's condition of mind was very much that of all the chief officers of his army. They all - and Arabi first among them took train, or engines, or horses, mules, or camels, and got away as fast as might be, and knew nothing after that, and begged somebody -it did not matter whom to take the necessary precautions. Never did gas from a torn balloon disperse more thoroughly than did Arabi's great following on the 13th September, 1882. And as the Egyptian officer, so the private. Moreover, the soldier had an unwritten code by which to regulate his demeanor. On his periodical visits to his village, he commonly thrashed his way into popular favor. And his brother fel-Yacoub Pasha Sami, who was the under laheen, who had thought rather meanly of him for being caught and made a soldier, recognized at once his claims on their respect. "He beats us," they would say, "therefore he is our superior; turn we the other cheek." In the same way, when any one, in uniform or not, beat the soldier, he in turn said, "Evidently this is my superior," and bowed himself to the smiter. Above all, he did not want to fight. He did not mind being hurt. He hardly resented being killed- some one has always to be killed, and "Allah y arrif" (God knows best); but fight he would not. In the Russo-Turkish war, Khedive Ismail sent a large force to aid his suzerain in the field, upon the sultan's appeal. The Egyptian camp at Shumla was a picture of affluent comfort beside the ragged, haggard, hungry Turkish brigades. Bright new uniforms, splendid equipment, well-found tents, men full of health and fatness. And there it ended. Every morning outside the hospital quarters, where the English doctors slaved without cess in the shambles of Turkish wounded, there paraded a long string of Egyptian soldiers, each of whom had lost the two first fingers of his trigger hand. He was a stoic after a manner, was the fellah Asker. A little suffering maybe was necessary, but it was quickly over. Two fingers on the muzzle of the rifle, and the great toe on the trigger, and the trick was done, and then adieu the bleak Balkan slopes, and hey for sunny Egypt once But, at all costs, no violence. No rude contact with a rakki-maddened Muscov, shrewdly armed. more. How great has been the change, how admirably the Egyptian soldier has developed, has been amply shown by his conduct in the past few years, and most notably at Tokar last spring; and no praise could be too high for the officers who have brought him to this state of perfection. But as to the Egyptian soldier of the old régime; whoso saw him in Turkey in 1877, and finally at the massacre of Valentine Baker's ill-fated expedition in February, 1884, Those whose privilege it was to enter Cairo on the heels of General Sir Drury Lowe will not readily forget the impression produced upon them by the seething hordes of wondering, panic-stricken natives who thronged the streets of that astonished city. They it was, be it remembered, who until the last moment had believed implicitly the boastful, vaporing reports daily published by Arabi of his triumphs over his English foes; they it was who, with the extravagant credulity of ignorant fanaticism, had regarded as representations of facts those marvellous, illdrawn, color-blotched posters issued in profusion by the rebel commander, depict. ing the annihilation of the British fleet in Alexandria waters; they it was who, taught that the captured midshipman Duchair, who had wandered into the lines at Kaffr Dowar, was the only son of the British admiral, saved alone from drowning with all in his father's ships, had with contemptuous mirth dragged through the streets of the town and beneath the windows of the citadel where the young man lay captive, a mangy cur, whose appellation in Arabic permitted the suggestion that the son of Seymour* was an unclean creature. And now that they found English cavalry in their midst and Indian troops camped beneath their walls, now that their false leaders were either already in prison or being daily brought back in ignominy to jail, they knew not, poor, bewildered folk, what to think and what to believe, and in their plight could do nought but pace the streets open-mouthed for days and nights together, gazing in utter amazement at those strange animals, the Highlanders, and those even more fearsome objects, the Indian cavalry men. That it was some time before either natives or foreigners settled down will not be hard of belief. "You must be very glad," I said pleasantly to a young officer of Highlanders, "to find yourself in Cairo after the discomforts of the desert." The remark was innocent enough, but it was resented. "My experience," said he shortly, "of the blessings of civilization hitherto has been that I have slept in a gutter with my mosquito curtain hitched to a lamp-post." In a few days, however, the town resumed its ordinary complexion. The khedive returned to Abdin Palace, on whose threshold the blood of slaughtered bullocks proclaimed the inauguration of a new era of progress. The three days' illuminations flickered and died out, and the reinstalled ruler commenced conscientiously and loyally his role of constitutional sovereign. The farce known as the Arabi trial was not, perhaps, a very worthy beginning of a new career; but for this Tewfik must not be blamed. So complicated a network of intrigue, involving Turkey, France, many of the highest men in Egypt, the royal princes, even the suzerain himself would have been brought to light by full investigation, that it was in every way better to let the unsavory matter fall to the ground, even at the cost of practical immunity to some of those most criminally concerned. It might well be thought that a period of respite would have been allowed to this distressful country in which to recover somewhat from the blows already massed upon it. It was not to be. Scarcely had Ebn Semour, son of a female dog. It was in October, 1882, that Abdul Kader, governor-general of the Soudan, who may be supposed to have known very little of the inner workings of the Arabi plot, telegraphed to Cairo announcing that the troops he had sent against the Mahdi (for the Mahdi was already a power) had been cut off, and demanding reinforcements of ten thousand men. They were sent to him, with what result we know. Poor Hicks Pasha and his English staff were the first of that long list of victims sacrificed on the altar of those great false prophets, the tide of whose power ebbed and flowed between El Obeid and Downing Street. And while General Hicks was toiling through the desert sands towards his grave at El Rahat (the place of repose), than which no spot could have been more admirably named as the last resting place of nine thousand men, a yet more insidious enemy than the Fehadich attacked lower Egypt in her midst. This terrible foe - the cholera - made its headquarters at Damietta, than which a more ruinous, unsavory, and picturesque hothouse of foul germs never desecrated the mouth of a noble river. Once a prosperous and thriving town, Damietta was undone by the construction of the Suez Canal, and the consequent mushroomgrowth of Port Said on piles out of the mud. Nor was nature any kinder than man to the historic town. To complete its ruin and discomfiture, a sand-bar silted across the river mouth, with the result that only small sailing craft can now approach the little bay. As a consequence the population, once numbering near a hundred thousand, drifted sadly away or died of sheer weariness, and none came to replace them. Then the long sojourn of Abdel-Al and his black troops, aided and abetted by a plague among the cattle of the delta- the imposition of a horn tax on the burial of beasts had inspired the frugal-minded peasantry to push their carcases gently into the canals or river flowing 785 by their doors, when the kindly current | Somewhere the blame should rest, and floated the carrion into Damietta's keel- rest heavily. For all that has happened forsaken harbor- and coupled with an in the Soudan provinces-from the death exceptionally sultry summer, produced the of Hicks to the fall of Khartoum — Ennatural and inevitable result. The dis- gland is primarily responsible. It was in ease incubated in the most favorable January, 1884, that Gordon went to Kharconditions that could have been provided, toum. ravaged poor stricken Damietta, ran flame- March Generals Graham and Stewart inIn the following February and like up the Nile, and along the water-ways, flicted crushing defeat on the forces of to Mansourah, to Beneh, to Tantah, and Osman Digna at Tokar and Tamai. BerZagazig, and finally settled with a firm ber was then still loyal; and after those hold on the river-side quarters of the capi-signal victories had a force — even a small tal itself, where gradually it spent its force force and was stamped out. been sent, as Sir Herbert Stewart was a work of time, and though ably per- to the town that was at once the key of the This, however, so eagerly desired, along the Berber road formed under Salem Pasha (the same Nile and of the desert routes, there had whose treatment of the late khedive has needed no Nile expedition with its voybeen the subject of some remark in the ageurs and its Sidi boys and whale-boats, European press) and the twelve English its nigger minstrels and its gampots and medical men who volunteered from Lon- its failure; there had been no fall of don to aid him, it was not completed with- Khartoum, no martyrdom of Gordon, no out affording to Tewfik an opportunity to withdrawal from and abandonment on begive another proof of the passive courage half of the khedive of the immense terriand devotion with which his honest soul tory conquered by his forefathers, and now was filled. archy as has convulsed no other corner of allowed to lapse into such hideous anthe globe. The court was at Alexandria-as is usual at the season - when the scourge reached the hovels of Boulak. There was great clamor for strict isolation, for rigid cordons, for stern measures of repression on pain of death, of all inhabitants of the pestilence stricken districts. Tewfik, as in duty bound, sanctioned and ratified all the regulations that could aid to confine the disease within given limits, and then announced his intention of putting his own head into the lion's mouth by returning to Cairo. Protestations, appeals, were vain. He would go where his people suffered. And go he did — accompanied, as indeed he was in all his trouble, by the khediviah, his wife — as stanch and devoted a little lady as ever worthy gentleman deserved. And arrived at Cairo, he drove around the hospitals, visiting the sufferers, examining into and ministering to their comforts, and supplying the needs of the poor and the bereaved from his private purse at no time too well filled. -a purse It would not be possible within the limits of a magazine article - which is already long to follow the course of the Soudan rebellion from its inception down to the present time. Still less would it be possible to discuss, or to criticise, the lamentable blunders, the childlike errors of judgment, the bland ignorance of causes and results, the disregard of every-day experience, the vacillations, the hesitancies, the outputtings and withdrawals which have gone to give to the movement the momentous gravity it has acquired. 3998 LIVING AGE. VOL. LXXVII. been free from war upon her borders. It For now ten years Egypt has at no time was ever recorded against the Soudan that it cost more money than the province produced to maintain Egyptian power there. How are the tables now turned, when it costs as much, if not more, to keep the Soudanese out of Egypt! And when will be the end? There has been no element of finality in anything done hitherto, and we know nothing of passing events in that great terror-ridden land. This much we do know, however taught it that in inverse ratio to the exrecent events have tent of our ignorance of the doings of the Fehadich and their leaders is their knowledge of our acts and declared intentions in Egypt. The Khalifa is regularly supplied by his agents with the translations of all newspaper matter published in this country and in France. If we were as Omdurrman, there would unquestionably well informed as to events and projects at be no further talk of England's withdrawal from the Nile delta. errors in the Soudan operations, there can But whatever may have been England's be no question as to the able conduct of the affairs of Egypt proper in the past ten years by the khedive's ministers, aided by the agents of this country and by English officials lent to the viceregal government. Egypt is to-day in a condition of peaceful, law-abiding prosperity such as ten years ago the most sanguine of her well-wishers |