Frank G. Carpenter

“ Here every night the military bands play European and American airs, and veiled Mohammedan women walk about with white-faced French or Italian babies, of which they are the nurses. People from every part of the world listen to the music. The American jostles the Englishman while the German and the Frenchman scowl at each other; the Greek and the Italian move along side by side, as they did in the days when this country was ruled by Rome, and now and then you see an old Turk in his turban and gown, or a Bedouin Arab, or a white-robed, fair-faced heathen from Tunis. ”

“ Inside its walls I am as far from Old Egypt as I would be in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The servants are French-speaking Swiss in “swallow-tails”, with palms itching for fees just as do those of their class in any modern city. In my bedroom there is an electric bell, and I can talk over the telephone to our Consul General at Cairo. On the register of the hotel, which is packed with guests, I see names of counts by the score and lords by the dozen. The men come to dinner in steel-pen coats and the women in low-cut evening frocks of silk and satin. ”

“ Fat cattle by the hundreds grazed upon the fields, camels with loads of hay weighing about a ton upon their backs staggered along the black roads. Turbaned Egyptians rode donkeys through the fields, and the veiled women of this Moslem land crowded about the train at the villages. On one side a great waste of dazzling yellow sand came close to the edge of the green fields, and we passed grove after grove of date-palm trees holding their heads proudly in the air, and shaking their fan-like leaves to every passing breeze. ”

“ In Tripoli my eyes were made sore by the glare of the Libyan wastes and their dust blew across the Nile valley during my stay in Egypt and the British Sudan. The Arabian desert was on both sides of us as we came down the Red Sea and its sands several times covered the ship. We had the rockiest of all deserts in southern Arabia while that of Italian Somaliland was not any better.
Here at Mombasa we are in the luxuriant tropics where the surroundings remind me of Solomon’s song. All nature seems joyful. ”

“ Throughout our whole conversation the talk was of the most cordial and unceremonious character and I left the palace with the impression that the Khedive of Egypt is a man of great sense and of more than ordinary ability. He stands well with his people. Indeed, the leading men in Cairo tell me he would do much for Egypt if he were not hampered by foreign intervention. He gave up a number of his palaces a year or so ago and he is, for a king, most economical. Had other rulers of the past been equally careful, Egypt would be a rich country to-day instead of being ridden with debts. ”

“ I found a few beggars asking for backsheesh and saw half-a-dozen Mohammedans sitting gossiping by the roadside; but there was nothing else except the green of the fields, with a bleak and bare desert stretching away beyond them and the shadowy ghosts of the Pyramids looming large on the distant horizon. The obelisk is almost the twin of the one in Central Park, New York, save that the hieroglyphics on its sides are more deeply cut and the bees have made their nests in many of the figures. Bees very like our honey bees swarm over the monuments of Egypt. ”

“ On my second trip to Egypt I followed a telephone line in going from Cairo to the Pyramids and as I waded through the sands from the edge of the Nile valley up the plateau where old Cheops stands, I could see a party of foreigners playing lawn-tennis in the court of the hotel which has been built near its base. The next improvement in modernizing Egypt will probably be cable roads running to the top of these great piles of stone. ”

“ Alexandria has become commercial, money making, and fortune hunting. The rise and fall of stocks, the boom in real estate, and the modern methods of getting something for nothing are its chief subjects of conversation, and the whole population is after the elusive piastre and the Egyptian pound as earnestly as the American is chasing the nickel and the dollar.
The city grows because it is at the sea-gate to Egypt and the Sudan. It waxes fat on the trade of the Nile valley and takes toll of every cent’s worth of goods that comes in and goes out. ”

“ The south windows of the house would have a good view of the Pyramids of Sakkarah, which stand out in geometrical figures of blue upon the site of old Memphis, while on the front porch you could have as an ornament in your great yard below, the old stony-eyed Sphinx who sat with her paws stretched out before her in this same position when these mighty monuments were built, and who is one of the few females in the world who grows old without losing her beauty.
The Pyramids themselves are by no means young. ”

“ Let me describe the place that the ancient Egyptian monarchs selected for their burials, the Valley of the Kings. They wanted to hide their remains so that posterity could never find them, and to cover them so that future generations would have no idea that they and their treasures lay beneath. Our cemeteries are chosen for the beauty of their surroundings. We like to turn up our toes to the daisies and to have leafy trees whisper a requiem over our heads. ”

“ If life were a matter of pleasure I would be a fool to remain on the throne. I believe, however, that God put man on the world for a purpose. Duty, not pleasure, is the chief end of man. I do the best I can for my country and my people, and I feel happiest when I do the most work and when my work is the hardest.”
“In the famous Abdin Palace I interviewed Tewfik Pasha, when he was Khedive of Egypt, and later, in the same audience room, talked with Abbas Hilmi, his son and successor.” ”

“ A jungle of green on a foundation of coral, Mombasa is only a mile or so wide and three miles in length, but it rises well up out of the sea and is so close to the continent that one can almost hear the wind blow through the coconut groves over the way. On the island itself the jungle has been cut up into wide roads. There is a lively town with a polyglot population at one end of it, and the hills are spotted with the homes of the British officials. The island has two good harbours, a little one and a big one. The little one, which is in the main part of the town, is frequented by small craft. ”

“ For the last month I have been travelling through the farms of the Nile valley. I have visited many parts of the delta, a region where the tourist seldom stops, and have followed the narrow strip that borders the river for several hundred miles above Cairo.
The delta is the heart of Egypt. It has the bulk of the population, most of the arable land, the richest soil, and the biggest crops. While it is one of the most thickly settled parts of the world, it yields more to the acre than any other region on earth, and its farm lands are the most valuable. ”

“ No other man has visited all parts of the globe and written on the ground, in plain and simple language, the story of what he has found. Carpenter’s World Travels are not the casual record of incidents of the journey, but the painstaking study of a trained observer, devoting his life to the task of international reporting. Each book is complete in itself; together they form the most vivid, interesting, and understandable picture of our modern world yet published. They are the fruit of more than thirty years of unparalleled success in writing for the American people. ”

“ Cairo is a city of the Egyptians. Not one tenth of its inhabitants are Christians and it is the hundreds of thousands of natives who make up the life blood of this metropolis. They are people of a different world from ours, as we can see if we go down for a stroll through their quarters. They do business in different ways and trade much as they have been trading for generations. Their stores are crowded along narrow streets that wind this way and that until one may lose himself in them. Nearly every store is a factory, and most of the goods offered are made in the shop where they are sold. ”

“ The houses stretch along the Nile for seven or eight miles, and the water front is fringed with a thicket of boats. Some of the town is on the main stream, and reaches out from the river in all directions. It is a city of mud in every sense of the word. Of its many thousand houses there are not a score which are of more than one story, and you can count on your fingers the houses made of burnt brick. ”

“ Indeed, the world is not old, and it is not hard to realize that those people of the past had the same troubles, the same worries, and the same tastes as we have. I can take you through tombs not far from Cairo upon the walls of which are portrayed the life work of the men of ancient Egypt. You may see them using the same farm tools that the fellaheen use now. They plough, they reap, and thresh. They drink wine and gorge themselves with food. In one of the tombs I saw the picture of a woman milking a cow while her daughter held the calf back by the knees to prevent it from sucking. ”

“ Away up the Nile valley, so far from the Mediterranean that it took me four days by steamship and railroad to reach it, almost within a stone’s throw of where whole tribes are going naked, and near the site of what was one of the slave centres of Africa, the English have built up a school that is turning out native teachers and judges, government clerks and bookkeepers, mechanics of all sorts, and within certain limits, civil engineers. ”

“ It is a strange thing to go to sleep in the woods and then awake to find one’s self rolling over a high, treeless country with game by the thousand gambolling along the car tracks. We awoke on the Kapiti plains, which are about a mile above the sea and two hundred and sixty-eight miles from Mombasa. ”

“ The sun is hot but we have an awning above us, and the salt breeze cools our cheeks. We have returned by rail and by river from Khartum to Cairo, have gone over the Nile delta to Port Said, have passed through the Suez Canal, and have sailed south into the Red Sea. We are now off the coast of Arabia, on our way into the Indian Ocean, bound for the port of Mombasa, whence we shall go across a mighty plateau to the great African lakes. ”

“ On the contrary, I am told that they rank much better in this regard than the maidens of Uganda in the province adjoining, nearly all of whom wear clothing. Virtue stands high here, and infractions of its laws are always punished, though less severely now than in the past. Divorces are not common, but a man can get rid of his wives if he will. One curious custom decrees that if a husband and wife have a quarrel, and she leaves the hut and he shuts the door after her, that action alone is equivalent to a divorce and the woman goes back to her own people at once. ”

“ Oriental Cairo is a city of donkeys and camels. In the French quarter you may have a ride on an electric street car for a few cents, or you may hire an automobile to carry you over the asphalt. The streets of the native city are too narrow for such things, and again and again we are crowded to the wall for fear that the spongy feet of the great camels may tread upon us. We are grazed by loaded donkeys, carrying grain, bricks, or bags on their backs, and the donkey boy trotting behind an animal ridden by some rich Egyptian or his wife calls upon us to get out of the way. ”

“ It is built ten feet above the fields of the Nile valley and on each side the green stretches away to the north and south until it is lost in the horizon. One sees groves of palm trees, camels and donkeys, farmers ploughing and women carrying water, together with the other strange scenes that make up the oriental setting of this land of the Arabian Nights. ”

“ For most of the way it flows through a desert of rock and sand as dry as the Sahara. In the summer many of the winds that sweep over Cairo are like the blast from a furnace, and in Upper Egypt a dead dog thrown into the fields will turn to dust without an offensive odour. The dry air sucks the moisture out of the carcass so that there is no corruption.
Nearly all of the cultivated lands lie along the Nile banks and depend for their supply of water on the rise of the river, caused by the rains in the region around its sources. ”

“ In the airplane of our imagination, let us take the trip they made. We may be sure of excitement, for even under favourable conditions we are starting out on one of the most dangerous air journeys known to the world. But let us first look at a map and pick out our route. It is a jagged line, extending from north to south, the length of the continent. It is marked with dots and triangles, each showing a place where we may land. As we look at the map it seems quite simple and easy, but actual experience proves its great difficulties.
We shall leave Cairo at dawn and follow the Nile to Khartum. ”

“ I find this African village the most interesting part of Mombasa. Its inhabitants number over twenty-five thousand and comprise natives of perhaps one hundred tribes, each of which has its own dress and its own customs. Most of the women are bare-headed and bare-legged; and some of the men are clad in little more than breech cloths. Now and then one sees a girl bare to the waist, and the little ones wear only jewellery. On the mainland all go more or less naked. ”

“ Each rises back end first, the bags swaying to and fro as he does so. How angry he is! He goes off with his lower lip hanging down, grumbling and groaning like a spoiled child. The camels make queer figures as they travel. The bags on each side their backs reach almost to the ground, so that the lumbering creatures seem to be walking on six legs apiece. ”

“ That figure with the head and bust of a woman upon the body of a lion, carved out of the ages-old rock which stood here upon the desert, has been noted among the peoples of the world as far back as history extends, and those stony eyes have seen civilization after civilization rise and fall.
It would take a good-sized city lot to hold the Sphinx. The body is one hundred and forty feet long, and the paws each measure fifty feet. Her head alone is so big that a vault fourteen feet square and the height of a three-story house would be just large enough to contain it. ”

“ As the Nile rushes in, the embankments are watched as the Dutch watch the dikes of Holland. They are patrolled by the village headmen and the least break is filled with stalks of millet and earth. The town officials have the right to call out the people to help, and no one refuses. If the Nile gets too high it sometimes overflows into the settlements and the mud huts crumble. During the flood the people go out in boats from village to village. The donkeys, buffaloes, and bullocks live on the dikes, as do also the goats, sheep, and camels. ”

“ We do not believe it right to drink anything intoxicating and good Moslems drink neither wine nor liquor. I believe that every man should be faithful to the religion which he professes. My faith is that of Islam and I try to follow it as well as I can. I am not illiberal in it, however, for I tolerate all religions and all sects in my kingdom. We have Copts, Jews, and Christians, and your missionaries are at work in the land. They make very few converts, if any, among the people of my faith, but they have schools in Upper Egypt that are doing much in the way of education. ”

“ The people are stranger than any I have ever seen so far in my African travels. They come from all parts of the Sudan and represent forty or fifty-odd tribes. Some of the faces are black, some are dark brown, and others are a rich cream colour. One of the queerest men I met during my journey was an African with a complexion as rosy as that of a tow-headed American baby and hair quite as white. He was a water carrier, dressed in a red cap and long gown. ”