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Bonaparte in Egypt and the Egyptians of To-day

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Title: Bonaparte in Egypt and the Egyptians of To-day

Author: Abdullah Browne


        
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Language: English

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BONAPARTE IN EGYPT


[Illustration: HAJI BROWNE (SEATED) AND HIS SERVANT.]




  BONAPARTE IN EGYPT

  AND

  THE EGYPTIANS OF TO-DAY

  BY

  HAJI A. BROWNE


  LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN
  ADELPHI TERRACE. MCMVII




"In proportion as we love truth more and victory less, we shall become
anxious to know what it is which leads our opponents to think as they
do."

  HERBERT SPENCER.


(_All rights reserved._)




Preface


Eight years have passed since I first conceived the idea of writing
this book, but it was not until about two years ago that I was able to
find time to put together a first rough outline of the form I wished
it to take. In the interval I have been obliged from time to time to
lay it aside altogether; and, at the most favourable times, have never
had more than a few hours a week to devote to it. I had just completed
what I had intended to be the last chapter, when events occurred that
obliged me to rewrite it, and, that I might do so fitly, await the
issue of those events. As the book now stands it is at best but a mere
outline. A larger volume than this might easily be written upon each
of several of the subjects I have but glanced at, yet I hope I have
succeeded in giving a connected and intelligible sketch and one
sufficient for the attainment of the chief object I have had in view,
that of presenting the Egyptian as he really is to the many who,
whether living in Egypt or out of it, have but few and imperfect
opportunities of learning to understand him. For over thirty years I
have given of all I have had to give, for the promotion of two
objects: first, that Pan-Islamism, which I conceive to be the true
interest of the Islamic world; and, secondly, the development of
friendly relations between the Moslems of the East and the British
Empire. How much, or how little, I have been able to accomplish
towards the fulfilment of my aims it is impossible for me to estimate,
but from boyhood I have had an earnest faith in the belief that right
and truth must in the end prevail, and that he who works for these, or
for what he honestly believes these to be, never works in vain.

Knowing the Egyptian as I know him, I cannot but think that he is
greatly misunderstood, even by those who are sincerely anxious to
befriend him. His faults and his failings are to be found at large in
almost any of the scores of books that have of late years been written
about him and his country; but, though not a few have given him credit
for some of his more salient good points, yet none that I have seen
have shown any just appreciation of him as he really is.

CAIRO, _May, 1907_.




Contents


  CHAPTER                                       PAGE

      I.  THE STORY OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS           9

     II.  LINKS WITH THE PAST                     22

    III.  THE DAWN OF THE NEW PERIOD              34

     IV.  A COUNCIL OF STATE                      48

      V.  THE PROCLAMATION THAT FAILED            64

     VI.  A LONG MARCH AND A SHORT BATTLE         79

    VII.  AFTER THE BATTLE                        94

   VIII.  VICTORS AND VANQUISHED                 109

     IX.  THE GATHERING OF A STORM               128

      X.  THE BURSTING OF THE STORM              150

     XI.  AFTER THE STORM                        174

    XII.  PEACE WITHOUT HONOUR                   197

   XIII.  THE SIEGE OF CAIRO                     217

    XIV.  THE PRICE OF PEACE                     237

     XV.  AN UNGRATEFUL PEOPLE                   259

    XVI.  MAHOMED ALI AND HIS SUCCESSORS         275

   XVII.  FACHODA AND AFTER                      294

  XVIII.  HEALTHY INFLUENCES                     311

    XIX.  UNHEALTHY INFLUENCES                   336

     XX.  MORE UNHEALTHY INFLUENCES              359

    XXI.  TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW                   382

    INDEX                                        401




BONAPARTE IN EGYPT

AND THE EGYPTIANS OF TO-DAY




CHAPTER I

THE STORY OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS


It was the 23rd of June, 1898. The day in Cairo had been unusually hot
and oppressive, but as the sun went down, a cool wind from the north
came blowing softly over the city.

I was then living in a little corner of the old town still wholly
untouched by the ruthless hand of the "reform" that, in every other
part, was busy marring with modern "improvements" the old-time charm
of the "City of the Caliphs."

As midnight approached, I went up on the roof to enjoy the cool
freshness and quiet of the night, and the stillness was almost
unbroken. Now and then in the narrow lanes below, the watchmen, who in
their drab-coloured coats and with long staffs and lanterns in their
hands, made one think of Old London and the days of Dogberry, called
to one another or challenged some belated passer-by, and at times a
murmuring echo told of the restless traffic and turbulent life yet
stirring in the carriage-crowded streets of the European quarters of
the town, but otherwise the silence was undisturbed.

As I stood there, leaning on the parapet of the roof, my thoughts
wandered back to the night, just one hundred years before, the 23rd of
June, 1798, when possibly some wakeful citizen had stood, perhaps on
the very spot on which I was then standing, and gazed upon the very
scene, the same limited range of housetops and sidewalls, that was
around me. That distant night is one of which the historians of the
country make no mention, and yet it is one most worthy of note, as
having been at once one of the most peaceful and one of the most
memorable Cairo has ever known. Peaceful, for, when not lured from his
slumbers by one of the night-quenching festivals he so dearly loves,
the Cairene is an early and a sound sleeper, and being then, as now,
blessed with an easy-going conscience and unbounded faith in the
beneficence of Destiny, we may be certain that on that night he slept
the sleep of the just man who is weary. Nor was that night less
memorable than peaceful, for little as he could foresee it, it was the
last for over a century of time on which the Cairene was to sleep so
free from care or thought of the morrow. For, while the city
slumbered, away in the villages on the banks of the Nile, sleepers
were being unwontedly awakened and dismayed by the sounds of horsemen
hurrying through the night with the rushing haste of men who are
bearers of tidings of life and death.

Onward, onward they came, these messengers of the night, weary with
their long forced ride from Alexandria, the city of the sea, which
they had left the day before. Onward, onward as rapidly as they could
press forward the steeds that, as one after another failed, were
replaced by others seized from the nearest stables "for the service of
the State." Onward and onward on their trying ride, spreading as they
went the news they bore, news that murdered the sleep of those who
heard it, and flung a pall of panic fear over the land.

They were still on the road when the Cairenes rising, as all good
Mahomedans should, with the first dawn of day, proceeded to the duties
of the morning with the leisurely diligence that is one of their
characteristics. But long before mid-day the messengers had discharged
their task, and the fateful news they had brought was being discussed
throughout the town. It was news that, to the Cairene, was fraught
with most direful possibilities, for it was news that a fleet of
English ships of war had arrived at Alexandria, and that the Governor
of the town, feeling utterly incapable with the scanty resources at
his disposal, of offering any effective resistance to a hostile
landing, had sent to beg for immediate assistance in men and munitions
of war. Many and fervent were the prayers said in the mosques that
day, and loud and deep were the anathemas launched against the
foreigner who was at their gates. It is not surprising that it should
be so, for, of all evils he could imagine, a foreign invasion was, to
the Cairene, as to the people of Egypt generally, the one most
suggestive of personal loss and misery.

Exactly one hundred years had passed since that day, and the dying
hours of that century of time left the Egyptian, as its opening hours
had found him, distrustful of the English, rejecting their friendship,
and cursing them as foes. That it should have been thus, is one of the
problems that perplex those who attempt to know or understand the
Egyptian, and as I thought of these things, it seemed to me that
living as I then was amongst the most conservative class of the
people, the class that still prides itself on living the life its
fathers and grandfathers led, and holds all things foreign to be
abominations, and yet meeting from day to day with the modern
half-Europeanised citizens, and being myself almost an Oriental in
thought and sympathy, I could read the story of that one hundred years
and comprehend the feelings of the people through all its incidents,
better perhaps than any other European, and that by sketching the
history of that century as it appears to me, I might help others to
understand the people and their history better, and thus aid in
promoting the mutual goodwill that is as essential to the interests of
the Egyptian himself, as to those of the great army of foreigners who
are dwellers in his hospitable land.

As told by the writers of to-day, the history of Egypt extends over
nearly seven thousand years--three score and ten centuries--just one
for every year allotted by the Psalmist to man as the period of his
life. But of all that great stretch of time the hundred and odd years
lying between the fateful 23rd of June in 1798 and the present day,
although unfortunately the materials available for a study of it are
scant and for the most part unreliable, has more of human interest as
a chapter in the history of mankind, than all the long ages that
preceded it.

Yet if the reader would rightly comprehend the lesson of this period,
he must grasp the fact that in a very full and ample sense all history
is a part of one--nay, is but one and the same story writ in different
characters. How utterly unlike in all externals are the Gospels
written in the Latin, Greek, Arabic, Nagri, or Chinese characters and
languages, but the essence and the spirit of all these versions are
the same. So it is with the histories of men and nations. The stories
of England, France, Spain, India, Egypt, how different! and yet in all
that is the final essential of true history--the story of man's combat
with his surroundings--the same. It is so because in the last analysis
all men are the same, like the ocean, "His Sea in no showing the
same--his Sea and the same 'neath all showing."

Scattered in the deserts of Persia, the traveller comes upon isolated
villages wherein men and women are born, grow up, marry, beget
families, and die, and never once pass beyond the mirage-haunted
horizon of their little oasis. With world-encircling ideas and
ambitions, the traveller thinks of the mad maelstrom of life in the
crowded cities of the West, and wonders that men can be so different
and still be men, and yet more so, that between himself and these
Persians of the desert, drifting through life in a daily round that
never changes, never varies, there should be anything in common. And
the wonder is, not that they have the same shape and form as he, that
they can cry with Shylock, "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you
poison us, do we not die?" All that is as nothing, since it lifts the
man no higher than the brutes of the field, but in all else, in all
that is the essential differentia of man, even in these, these
children of the waste are such as we, moved by the same passions,
stirred by the same affections, urged by the same desires, however
variously all these may find expression.

Further yet afield. The miserable Mahars and Mangs of the Indian
Deccan, who, living or dead, are held by all the peoples around them
as not less vile than the carrion they do not scorn to eat. Even there
among these if you will, you may trace, as the venerable missionary
Wilson did, deep buried under the man-debasing foulness of their
lives, the humanity of the man as the dominating, all-controlling
element, severing them by an immeasurable and impassable distance from
the noblest of the animals, and linking them by an inseverable bond to
the noblest of their fellow-men. All that may characterise the
individual outside of this is but the accident of his life and being;
the essential element, guiding and swaying him in all things, is this
fundamental, ineradicable humanity.

It is the fashion nowadays to speak of the "Brotherhood of man," but
how few realise how absolutely, how completely the phrase expresses
the simple truth! a truth that nullifies all the arrogantly-arrayed
arguments and fancy-founded fallacies of Haeckel and the whole field
of Monists and Materialists. If, then, we would understand the
Egyptian or any other people, we must start by recognising that,
however wide and apparently unbridgable may be the gulf that divides
us from them, whether physical, mental, or moral, it has been caused
by the rushing flow of the multitudinous circumstances that have
moulded the life and character of each, and, as Mill and Buckle have
said, not to any originating difference in our natures.

As a boy at school to me history was the dullest of dull tasks, but
when I came to mix with the peoples of foreign lands, and, fascinated
by the charm of the living kaleidoscope of Indian life, sought some
clue to the myriad-minded moods and manners of its peoples, I longed
for a history that should tell me how and why these peoples were so
different from, and yet so like, my own. But histories, as they are
written, are rarely more than chafing-dish hashes of the "funeral
baked meats" of court chronicles served up with a posset of platitudes
and pedantry for sauce. From such histories we may gather a great
array of useless, and, for the most part, perfectly uncertain and
unreliable "facts," but of the true story of a people scarce anything
more than a few doubtful indications. For true history is no bald
chronicle of events but the history of man's, too often blind but
always intuitive, struggle towards happiness. Back in those memory
forsaken ages, of which even myth and legend now tell us nothing, men
strove in the same ceaseless, never-ending struggle. What if the
immediate aim of that struggle varied then and now with time and
place? What if the dweller in the ice-cold lands of the North should
be ever seeking the warmth from which the sunburnt inhabitant of the
torrid zone would fain escape? To neither is the heat or the cold a
thing to be desired or shunned save only as either serves to swell the
total of his enjoyment of life. But just as the nature of the climate
in which they dwell modifies their conception of enjoyment, so also a
host of other circumstances, some minute and scarcely traceable in
their influence, others broad and plainly visible, mould the ideas and
ideals of men and nations. Thus, and thus only, is it that the
Egyptian and the Englishman are so far apart in all that constitutes
the individual or national characteristics of each. Thus it is that
the restless activity and energy of the one is abhorrent to the other,
and that the Englishman to-day finds the Egyptians, as Herodotus found
them so long ago, men "distinguished from the rest of mankind by the
singularity of their institutions and their manners." I would,
therefore, have my readers avoid the error of judging the Egyptians
merely from comparison with their own standards and without due regard
to the study of the causes that have made them what they are. If the
Egyptian be found lacking in qualities upon the possession of which we
justly pride ourselves, he is not for that reason alone to be
condemned or despised. He has, even as we have, faults and
imperfections that may be justly censured. Like Meredith's Captain de
Creye, we are all "variegated with faults." These but attest our
common humanity, and for the Egyptian it may at least be said, that he
has that charity that covereth a multitude of sins, the charity of
heart that far outvalues the charity of the purse. Judged with equity
he compares favourably in many points with many other men. Less
backward than the Spaniard, less bigoted than the Portuguese, less
fanatical than any other Oriental, not embittered in spirit as the
Irish Celts, "patient in tribulation," "long-suffering," placable,
forgiving, hospitable; honest and withal one who, like Abou ben Edhem,
loves his fellow-men, there is much, very much, in the Egyptian that
may well serve to gain him the friendship and goodwill of those who
seek to know him as he really is. But with all this there is one
difference between the Egyptian and all European peoples that, as it
seems to me, forms an almost impassible barrier to the growth of close
friendship, or even intimate companionship, between the European and
the Egyptian. This difference is in their modes of thinking and
reasoning, for not until the Ethiopian changes his skin will the
Oriental think or reason as a European does.

There are hundreds of volumes wherein the Egyptian is portrayed as he
has been seen or known by the authors, but like all other Easterns,
the Egyptian is, and perhaps always will be, something of a mystery to
the European. The thoughts and reasonings of the two peoples are so
constantly and so utterly at variance on points and matters that seem
to each to admit of little or no controversy, that any attempt to
reconcile them must be abandoned as impossible. It is a natural result
of this incompatibility that the Egyptian as commonly described by
Europeans is a very different being to the Egyptian as he really is.
It is so all over the East, through all the widely differing races,
nationalities, and religions of the Asiatic continent with, perhaps,
the single exception of the Armenians, who in this respect are as
distinctly allied to the races of Europe as the Egyptians are to those
of Asia. Tourists wander for an hour or two through the bazaars of
Egypt or India and flatter themselves that they have seen and can
describe the people: young officials tell you glibly that they can
read them as a book: the veteran who has grown grey in their service
will tell you that the longer he has known them the less is he able to
comprehend them.

Orientals generally are capable of a high degree of education or
training according to our standards: in India we have men who, in
debate and authorship in our language, are entitled to rank with some
of our own best men; but mentally even these are apart from us, and in
this respect, as Kipling says, "East is East and West is West, and
never the twain shall meet." Nor is it we only who cannot understand
them, since they stumble as often and err as widely in their efforts
to comprehend us, and even, as I think, more grossly and more
hopelessly. None the less, it is, I believe, quite possible for a
European to at least partly bridge the gulf and become familiar with
Eastern thought and sentiment, but to do so he must pay a heavy price,
for it is to be done only by one who will give not merely years of
time, but years of self-abnegation, of self-suppression, of
self-isolation to the task. Abandoning all that he has been he must
seek to become that which he is not, and severing his life from all
that has made it his, forego his tastes, stifle his prejudices, ignore
his predilections, suppress his emotions, thwart his inclinations, and
laughing when he would weep, weep when he would laugh. And with this
slaying of his own individuality he must in all things strive to
identify himself with those alien to him, ever seeking to see, hear,
think, and act as they do. And he must do this not for a week, a
month, or a year, but for many years. Not in one city, town or
country, but in several, not merely mixing as best he may with the
wealthy and the poor, the illiterate and the learned, but learning to
be at home in the abodes of the prosperous and the haunts of the
miserable, become equally so with the merchant in the bazaar and the
wandering fakir in the desert. And through it all he must ever be
other than his home life and training have made him. Ceaselessly on
the alert to detect the nature, feelings, and impulses of others and
to hide his own. And he must be and do all this day and night, in the
loneliness of the desert as in the busy haunts of men. And in doing
this he is treading a road over which there is no return. The further
he goes, the more perfect is his success, the more impossible it
becomes for him to regain his starting-point. Never again can he be
that which he has been before. He may quit the East, return to the
home of his childhood and mix again with his fellows as one of them,
but he can never recover the place he has left and lost, for he who
goes down into the East, though his heart never cease to yearn for
home and the things of home, is daily, slowly, imperceptibly, yet
surely, being estranged, and he goes home to find that he no longer
has a home, that neither in the East nor in the West, is there any
rest for him. Thenceforth and for ever he is alone in the world and,
with his own sympathies enlarged and enriched, can hope for no
sympathy, no fellowship, amidst all the teeming millions of the earth.
Friends and kindred may crowd around his board, ties of love and
affection may be renewed, but even with the nearest and dearest the
fulness of old-time sympathies can never be revived, for though the
East is a bourne from which the traveller may return, it is one from
the glamour of which he may never free himself, and as in the East his
heart for ever looked yearningly to the West, so from the West it will
for ever look back with desire to the East. To him the whole world is
clothed with the horror with which "the lonely, terrible streets of
London" so bruised the heart of the Irish poet. Such is the price that
he who would know the East must pay for his knowledge, a price that
few have paid, that none would willingly or wittingly pay. "I speak
that which I know," for over thirty years have passed away since I
first went down into the East, and as "a mere boy," as Lady Burton
disdainfully described me, set myself the task I have never abandoned.
Consequently, as it is my object in this book to try and show what,
as he appears to me, the Egyptian of to-day is and how he has become
that which he is, the picture I shall draw of him will necessarily be
unlike those drawn by others, but, although I freely admit that it
will be my aim throughout to seek to gain for the Egyptian more
generous consideration than he is commonly accorded, my sketch will be
as faithful to truth as I can make it: should it fail to be
interesting, the fault will assuredly be with the writer and not with
the subject.




CHAPTER II

LINKS WITH THE PAST


To understand the Egyptian as he is, we must go back to that memorable
23rd of June in 1798, and learn not only what he then was, but how he
had become that which he was. Happily, it needs no long historical
details, or wearisome discussion of remote or doubtful causes to gain
this necessary knowledge. A few words to show how the Egyptian of
to-day is linked with his ancestors of far distant ages, and a short
sketch of the social and political conditions existing in the country
at the close of the eighteenth century will tell the reader all he
need know to enable him to comprehend the story of the years that have
since elapsed.

Although the people were then well established in the land and
possessed a high degree of civilisation, their history, as we now know
it, dates only from the reign of Menes, somewhere over five thousand
years before the birth of Christ. From that date down to the present
time we have a continuous record, the whole course of which may be
divided into three clearly distinguished periods. Of these the first
was not only by far the longest, but in every way the most brilliant.
In it Egypt was an independent country with a social system of an
advanced type, the spontaneous product of the genius of the people,
and it was the one in which, under native rulers, the land was filled
with the marvellous pyramids, temples, and sculptures that, though now
in ruins, still excite the admiration and wonder of the world.

The second period began in 529 B.C. with the conquest of the country
by Cambyses. In it after nearly two hundred years of Persian rule,
interrupted by a brief restoration of the native power, Egypt was for
a little more than three and half centuries in the hands of the
Greeks, from whom in the thirtieth year of the Christian Era it passed
to the Roman Empire. Six centuries later, in 638, when the flood tide
of Islamic conquest first swept westward from Arabia, the country
became a prey to the Arabs who, in 1171, were in their turn succeeded
by their revolting slaves, under whom as the Mameluk Sultans it
remained, until, in 1517, it became a province of the Turkish Empire.
In this period, under the sway of foreigners, the country suffered
from all the ills we are accustomed to associate with the idea of the
dark ages of Europe, and everything that was great or noble in the
people or their civilisation perished. It was, indeed, during this
time that the world-famous cities of Alexandria and Cairo were built
as well as the magnificent mosques that are the pride of all Islam,
but these were all the work, not of the people themselves, but of the
foreigners by whom they were held in thraldom, and are therefore
monuments not of the country's glory but of its shame.

The third and present period began in 1798 when the landing of
Bonaparte was the first of the series of events that by the
introduction and gradual development of European influence have
brought about the now existing social and political condition of the
country. In this period Egypt has ceased to be a province of the
Turkish Empire, and having acquired the semi-independent position of a
tributary State, has been lifted from an appalling condition of social
and commercial destitution produced by the ruinous misgovernment and
reckless tyranny of a dominant class, to one of unexampled prosperity
and of social and political freedom not exceeded in any country of the
world.

The three periods into which I have thus divided Egyptian history are
then distinguished by differences so deep and so far-reaching that
almost the only links by which they can be bound into one consistent
whole are the persistence of the people and the preservation of the
monuments that testify to their former greatness.

That the Egyptian of to-day is in truth the lineal descendant of those
who inhabited the country six thousand years ago is beyond all doubt.
Wherever we go in the Nile valley or in the Delta we meet with men and
women whose faces and features are living reproductions of the
portraits of the kings and people of the most ancient times as
sculptured by the artists of their days. And in their habits, manners,
and customs, we find to-day striking traces of those that seem to have
prevailed when four thousand years before Christ, Ptah-hotep wrote his
book of "Instructions," now believed to be the oldest book in the
world. And from their building in those far-off ages down to the
present day the pyramids, temples, and tombs have stood surviving
witnesses of the early greatness of the country, and, though but
heedless spectators of its vicissitudes, silent guardians of its
departed glory, ever linking its present with its past.

Closely united as the living Egyptian thus is with his earliest
ancestors, all the men and almost all the events that preceded the
French invasion are as nothing to the Egypt of to-day. Not a single
ruler, patriot, statesman, demagogue, artist or author, in short, no
man or woman that lived before the dawn of the modern period, has been
instrumental in the making of Egypt or the Egyptians what they now
are. Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks; all these have held the
people in bondage, but their influence never reached below the surface
of the life of the country, and has vanished completely with the men
upon whom it depended, and though some of these have left monuments,
all but imperishable, of their greatness and glory, these to the
Egyptians, heirs of their creators, are but idle relics of a forgotten
and unheeded past. And as it has been with the men almost so has it
been with events, for there are but two of these that, preceding the
French invasion, have exercised an influence of such vitality as to
survive the great change in the condition of the country that has
since been wrought. These two events, with four that belong to the
modern period, are indeed all that the whole history of the country
presents to us as still clearly and prominently exerting an important
and permanent influence upon both the character of the people and the
existing circumstances and condition of their country. Of these six
events the two that belong to the second period are, the conquest of
the land by the Arabs and its subsequent seizure by the Turks. The
other four are, the French invasion, the rise of Mahomed Ali, the
English occupation and the evacuation of Fachoda by the French.

Each and all of these six events have played important parts in
moulding the present-day aspect of Egypt and its people, and the more
closely do we study the existing conditions, the more strikingly do
these six events stand out from all others as the great and dominating
landmarks in the history of modern Egypt. Compared with these all the
other incidents of that story of seventy centuries--the long
procession of dynasties of Pharaohs, Ptolemies, Caliphs, Sultans,
Khedives--are all but shadows that have come and gone. It is not so
with the landmarks I have named, for not only are these events that
have influenced and are still influencing the thoughts and feelings of
the people, but the influence they exert is recognised by the people
themselves and must be taken into account in any endeavour either to
understand the present condition of the country, or to forecast its
future. Although, therefore, the third of these landmarks forms, as we
have already seen, the starting-point of the story of modern Egypt, to
rightly comprehend that story it is necessary we should have a clear
conception of the effects wrought by the first two events and of the
influence these have had and still have upon the affairs of the
country.

Let us remember here that Egypt, like most civilised countries, has in
reality two stories, one the history of the nation as a political
body; in other words, its history as history is commonly understood
and written, the record of the rise and fall of its rulers, the tale
of their triumph and of their failures, and chronicle of their wars,
victories, defeats, and all the events that have made or marred their
destinies: the other the story of the people themselves, of the growth
of their character and institutions, and of the development of their
social and moral surroundings. It is with this latter story that we
have to deal, and it is, therefore, from the point of view thus
assumed that I have estimated the importance of the events of which I
have just spoken.

In the history of some countries the two stories, if rightly told, are
so interwoven that they become as one, but in the first and second
periods of Egyptian history they have scarce anything in common, for
so long as the people remained under the rule of the Pharaohs or of
the foreigners who succeeded them they were little more than passive
victims of the varying fortunes that affected their rulers, and almost
the only fluctuations in their state during the long ages stretching
from the time of Menes to the French invasion were those occasioned by
the varying degrees of the tyranny to which they were subjected. Now
and again under some ruler of more humanity or of greater laxity than
others their condition may be said to have for the time improved, but
such changes were far too slight and their possible duration always
far too uncertain for these benefits to be more to the people than as
the grateful but passing pleasure a fleeting morning cloud brings to
the traveller in a sunburnt desert. Hence, such as the fellaheen or
peasantry were when Cheops was building his pyramid, such they
remained in almost all respects down to the arrival of the French. The
history of the country has, therefore, in the first two periods little
to say of the people. In the modern period the two stories touch each
other more closely, for in it the people have begun to have a
political existence. They have not, indeed, a representative
government, and so they have no direct power, but they have a press,
the freedom of which is absolutely unrestricted, and they have a
"Legislative Council" as a body of elected representatives, through
whom, though they cannot control the action of the Government, they
are at least able to make their voices heard and their wishes known.
More important still, they have begun to comprehend the right of a
people to be governed, not only justly, but with a regard to their
interests as well as to those of their rulers--a fundamental principle
that in the past would have been deemed an unpardonable heresy.

The first step towards the realisation of this improvement, though one
for long wholly unproductive of any political benefit to the people,
was the Arab conquest, which by the resulting conversion of almost the
whole population to the Mahomedan religion, brought about a change
still fruitful in its influence upon their ideals and aspirations. To
fully describe the importance of this event it would be necessary to
enlarge upon the character and tendency of the Mahomedan religion at a
length my limits forbid, and I must here therefore content myself with
noting that, great as was the moral and mental revolution this
conversion occasioned, it was by no means commensurate with that which
followed the introduction of Islam into other countries. On the
everyday life of the people it seems indeed to have had but little
effect other than that of altering their moral standard and modifying
in some slight degree their habits and mode of living. It was,
perhaps, inevitable that this should be so, for of all the peoples of
the East the Egyptians were, and are, the least susceptible of
imbibing the spirit that marked the early spread of Islam, gave it the
energy that carried it to victory, and still gives it such vitality as
it continues to possess. Christianity had been for a long time the
State religion of the country, but it seems clear that the great
majority of the people were never more than mere nominal followers of
the Cross, and the arrival of the Arabs was, therefore, quickly
succeeded by the voluntary adoption of Islam by all but the small
minority to whom Christianity was something more than a name and whose
descendants constitute the Coptic Church of to-day. The political
condition of the people was little, if at all, affected by the change
in their religion; and consequently, under the Caliphs and their
successors, the Egyptian continued to be as he had been before--a man
with no higher ambition than that of passing through life with the
least possible trouble. From year to year his one prayer was for an
abundant Nile and a plentiful crop, not that he might thereby enrich
himself, but that he might thereby secure a sufficiency for himself
and his family and suffer less from the rapacious tyranny and
heartless cruelty of those never-resting oppressors, his rulers and
all who, as officials or favourites, were lifted even a little above
his own level. It was, and is, of the essence of Islam that it appeals
to freemen and favours that love of freedom that is the birthright of
every man; but Islam brought no freedom to the Egyptians, save,
indeed, the spiritual and moral one their rulers could not rob them
of. So such as he had been before, such he remained after the Arab
conquest, but with a loftier sense of the dignity of manhood, a nobler
conception of life and of its duties, and a stronger faith in a
hereafter that should compensate him for all his sufferings and
privations in this life. As an individual, therefore, he was somewhat
altered, but as a member of the State--if we may apply that term to
one who had no political existence save that involved in yielding to
his rulers the utmost pennyworth of value they could wrest from him by
tyranny and cruelty--he was the same helpless, hopeless, downtrodden
being, less valued and less cared for than the beasts in his fields.
But the conversion of the Egyptians has filled them with that intense
attachment to the faith of Islam that, shared by all Mahomedans, has
given rise to the charge of fanaticism so commonly brought against
them--a charge that, in the case of the Egyptians, if not wholly
unjust, is too often exaggerated, although none the less there is
nothing excites the wrathful passions of the people or, in milder
moods, sways their actions more than their fidelity to their religion.
It is the fact that this is so that renders the Arab conquest the
first great landmark in the story of modern Egypt, for it is not too
much to say that this attachment of the Egyptians to their faith is to
the present day the most important factor with which all who are
concerned in the administration of the country have to deal.

If socially and otherwise the Egyptians profited but little from the
establishment of the Caliphate, they gained still less from the
domination of the Turks. To the people, indeed, this change was
scarcely more than a mere nominal one. It left them practically under
the same rulers, for though the system of government was modified, it
placed the executive power, if not in the hands of the same men as
before, at least in those of men of the same stamp, who ruled them as
their predecessors had done, in the same manner, through the same
agents, and with the same cruelty and wanton oppression. Yet the
Turkish, like the Arab, conquest wrought one important effect, the
influence of which time has strengthened so that it is only second to
that in the urgency of its bearing upon existing conditions. Under the
Arabs the Egyptians had been ruled by foreigners, but by foreigners
who were in some degree allied to them. Under the Turks their
sovereign was, and is, not only a foreigner, but one of an utterly
alien race, wholly separated from them by language, character, habits,
by everything, indeed, save the bond of their common religion. None
the less a spirit of loyalty to the Turkish Empire has grown and
spread among the people, which, though it would be an error to credit
it with the intensity popular writers of the country ascribe to it,
has unquestionably a powerful influence upon the views and opinions of
the great majority of the people. To Europeans this loyalty, which, it
is worthy of mention here, is shared by the Moslems of India, has
always appeared somewhat of an enigma. No one, however, who knows the
peoples of the two countries can doubt that, apart from the fact of
the Sultan being the official head of their religion, their loyalty to
him is largely due to the desire of peoples who have lost the place
they once held in the comity of nations to associate themselves with
such kindred peoples as have in some extent maintained their ancient
status. The Indian and the Egyptian Mahomedans alike look back to the
time when Islam was the one dominant, unopposable power in their
native lands, and, conscious of their own fallen condition, would fain
relieve the darkness of their destiny by seeking a place, however
humble, within the only radiance they can claim to share. While,
therefore, the loyalty of the Egyptians to the Turkish Empire is only
a part of their loyalty to their religion, it has this, from the
political point of view, important difference--that it is not
irrevocable, but more or less dependent upon the Sultan maintaining
his political supremacy in the Mahomedan world, for should he lose the
position he holds as the most powerful ruler in Islam, not only the
Egyptians, but his own immediate subjects, would feel justified in
transferring their allegiance to any ruler who might succeed him. But
absolutely as the Sultan may depend upon the loyalty of the Egyptians
as against any non-Moslem Power, yet, as we shall have occasion to
see, not only can he not do so as against a Moslem rival, but he can
only ensure their loyalty and obedience as his subjects by ceding to
conditions they hold they have a right to impose upon him. Were,
therefore, the hopes of the large section of the Mahomedans which is
filled with the desire for the restoration of an Arab Caliphate to be
realised it would entirely depend upon circumstances that it is quite
impossible to foresee--whether the Egyptians would or would not remain
faithful to the Empire. Meanwhile the revival of the Arabic power
being a possibility too far removed from probability to take a place
in the politics of the day, the loyalty of the Egyptians to the
Turkish Empire must be accepted as a controlling feature in the
affairs of the country.

Such, then, are the links that bind the Egypt of the present day to
the Egypt of the past, but important as has been, and is, the part
that the Arab and Turkish conquests have played in shaping the present
and will yet have in moulding the future of the people, it was not to
these events but to others occurring outside the country that we owe
the inauguration of the modern period of Egyptian history.

What these events were and how they affected the making of the
Egyptian what he now is we have now to see.




CHAPTER III

THE DAWN OF THE NEW PERIOD


The period which was to be that of the regeneration of Egypt and its
people was ushered in by social and political storm and tempest. But
the first warning note of its coming, after a brief moment of panic,
was unheeded by the people. Nearly three centuries had passed since
the country had been invaded by an enemy. That enemy was now the
sovereign Power, and under the grasping, selfish rule of its executive
the trade and commerce of the country had almost entirely disappeared,
and thus isolated from the rest of the world the people had no
conception of the growth of the power and civilisation of the European
nations. They were, therefore, completely ignorant of the events and
political impulses that were, though for the moment indirectly only,
shaping the future that lay before them.

There were both Englishmen and Frenchmen in the country at the time,
but the rulers of the land, arrogant in their petty might, and the
people not less so in their degradation, alike held all foreigners in
contempt, and thus profited nothing from their presence. They had,
therefore, no means of knowing what the relations between the two
great European Powers were, or of anticipating how those relations
were liable to affect their country. Yet the fact that brought about
the opening of the modern period in their history and thus decreed the
ultimate fate of the country was the mutual hostility that swayed the
two Powers. This hostility had no relation to Egypt or its people,
and, but for contributing causes, could never have affected these, yet
it was the desire of the French Government to strike what it fondly
hoped would prove a decisive blow at the growth of English power in
the East, that was the chief inspiring cause of its decision to order
the invasion of Egypt. The Directory, which was at the time the
governing body in France, had indeed more than one reason for taking
this step, nor was it under the Directory that the eyes of the French
had been turned to the valley of the Nile for the first time.
Leibnitz, in 1672, had urged upon Louis XIV. the conquest of the
country as an object worthy of his attention, declaring that the
possession of it would render France the mistress of the world, and
though nothing was done at that time to realise the far-seeing policy
he advocated, there can be no doubt that the idea was never abandoned.
Talleyrand, indeed, said that on his accession to office, he had found
more than one project for its accomplishment lying in the pigeon-holes
of the Foreign Office, and he himself entered heartily into the
scheme, believing that it would be a most important move towards the
fulfilment of his theory that the future of France depended upon the
extension of her influence along the shores of the Mediterranean.
Volney, the traveller and author of the "Ruins of Empires," having
visited Egypt had, in 1786, reported that it was in a practically
defenceless condition, and Magallon, the French Consul at Alexandria,
having for years urged the Government to interfere on behalf of its
subjects in Egypt, had, in 1796, made a voyage to France with the
express purpose of protesting against the indignities and ill-usage
from which they were suffering, and fully confirmed the views of
Volney and Leibnitz. The Directory were thus at once shown the
possibility of acquiring a colony of the utmost value and provided
with a reasonable excuse for its annexation. These and other
arguments, against which the fact that the French nation was then at
peace and on good terms with the Sultan of Turkey, the sovereign of
the country, weighed as nothing, decided the Directory. In March,
1798, therefore, the order to organise an expedition for the conquest
of Egypt was given to Bonaparte, and two months later, on May 19th, he
set out in command of a vast armada, sailing from Toulon and other
ports of the south of France.

Thus it was the aspirations of the French nation for the extension of
its influence in the Mediterranean and for the acquisition of new
colonies and its conquest rivalry with England, and not events in the
country itself, that heralded the dawn of the new period, and
eventually, though chiefly indirectly, produced the greatest change in
the condition and prospects of the people that their history records.

The rapidity with which the French expedition was prepared, and the
secrecy with which its destination was concealed, led the Directory
and Bonaparte himself to hope that it would escape all risk of
interference on its way to Egypt. In this they were not disappointed,
but hearing of the assembling of a great military and naval force in
the south of France, and believing that it was intended to make a
descent upon the Irish coast with a view to co-operation with the
rebels there, Lord Vincent warned Nelson to watch for, and, if
possible, destroy it. The people of India were then, however, like
those of Ireland, in negotiation with the French, and in particular
the famous Tippoo Sultan, "The Tiger of Mysore," longing to be
revenged for the defeat and losses Lord Cornwallis had inflicted upon
him, had sought their aid. Nelson was aware of this, and having a
strong sense of the danger to English interests in India and the East
generally the possession of Egypt by the French would be, guessed the
real destination of the expedition, and finding that the French had
got away to sea, immediately started in pursuit, and, acting upon his
own conception as to its aim, steered straight for Egypt. Bonaparte
had, however, after leaving the French coast, proceeded to Malta,
which he seized, and being thus delayed some days on his way to Egypt,
Nelson passed without falling in with him, and thus it was that on
June 21st the Alexandrians were startled by the approach of the
English Fleet.

As soon as the character of the ships thus unexpectedly appearing on
their coast became known the town was thrown into a state of the
greatest excitement, and the Governor, believing that the fleet was a
hostile one, sent off to Cairo the messengers whose arrival there I
have already chronicled, and at the same time sent other messengers to
summon the Bedouins, or nomad Arabs, inhabiting the neighbouring
deserts, to assist in the defence of the town.

Nelson lost no time in sending ashore to seek news of the French, but
the reception given to his officers was far from friendly. Refusing to
credit the statement that the English came as friends and protectors
and not as enemies, the Governor openly expressed his distrust, and in
doing so simply voiced the feelings of the people. Utterly ignorant of
everything outside the narrow range of their own experience, it was
indeed impossible for these to comprehend how the occupation of Egypt
by the French could be a matter of vital importance to the English. So
when Nelson's officers assured the Governor that they asked nothing
more than to await the arrival of the French and to buy a few supplies
of which the fleet was in need, he answered them that they could have
nothing. "Egypt," said he, "belongs to the Sultan, and neither the
French nor any other people have anything to do with it, so please go
away."

It was a bold speech, and as foolish as it was bold, for no one knew
better than the Governor himself that he was quite powerless to oppose
the English if they wished to land, or to take what they needed by
force. It was a speech, too, worth noticing, for it affords a clue to
much that puzzles the ordinary critic of Egyptian history. Judged by
any known canon of social or international courtesy or policy, it was
not less inexcusable than indiscreet, for it was as likely to enrage
an enemy as to anger a friend, but it was just what one knowing the
people might have expected--the utterance of the impulse of the
moment, and, therefore, a full and truthful statement of the speaker's
thought. For to the Egyptian mind the visit of a fleet of foreign
ships of war could have no other object than the conquest or raiding
of the country, hence the English Fleet must be a hostile one. It was
neither lawful nor wise to give provision or succour of any kind to an
enemy, therefore they had nothing to say to the English but "Please go
away."

It was thus that the people of Alexandria argued then, and it is thus
that the people of Egypt generally still argue. For they have always
been incapable of taking a broad or general view of any subject. No
matter how many-sided a question may be, they, as a rule, can see but
one aspect of it at a time. They look, in fact, at all things through
a mental telescope that, bringing one narrow and limited aspect of a
subject into bold and clear relief, shuts from their vision all that
surrounds it. Hence when, as they can and sometimes do, they change
their point of view, the change is commonly as abrupt as it is
thorough, and those who see only the surface tax them with fickleness.
Of late years there have been signs that, at all events, the educated
classes are learning to reason on surer and safer grounds; but if the
reader would understand their story, he must ever bear in mind the
narrow basis of their judgments and, therefore, of their actions.

While the answer of the Governor to the English is thus illustrative
of a point to be remembered in the character of the Egyptians, the
life-story of the man himself also helps us to more fully grasp their
mental attitude under the changing circumstances of the period. This
Governor, Sayed Mahomed Kerim, was an Egyptian of humble birth, but
one of Arab blood, claiming to be a Sayed or Shereef; that is to say,
a descendant of the Prophet Mahomed's family, and thus one of the Arab
nobility. In his early manhood this man, who as a Sayed, was and is
blessed and prayed for by every Mahomedan in the world at every time
of praying, was glad to fill the modest post of a weigher in the
Customs. Gifted with intelligence and other qualities that commended
him to his superiors, by their favour and his own ability he rose
rapidly to become the local Director of Customs, and eventually, as we
find him, Governor of the town. That in this position he had the
confidence and respect of his townsmen seems clear; and it is thus
evident that, tyrannical and oppressive as was the rule under which
they lived, there was an open path to place and power for able men.
Bribery and corruption, it is true, were rife, so much so, that we may
safely assume that Sayed Mahomed did not attain his high position
wholly without their aid, but they did not play the dominating part
assigned them by historians of the time.

We shall see but little more of this Sayed Mahomed, for though still a
young man, he had but a short span of life to run, yet the little we
shall see makes him a notable man, and one that should be studied.
Bold, impulsive, proud and fearless, with that decision of character
so praised by Foster; quick to decide and unalterable in his
decisions, deciding rightly from his own standpoint, but often with
too limited a view--emphatically more of an Arab than an Egyptian
type, and yet in the few glances we get of him, illustrating, most
aptly, the Egyptian character. Thus, as his answer to the English was
essentially Egyptian and not Arab in substance and manner, so also was
his subsequent action. For an Arab in such a strait would have sought
to gain time by fair-speaking, so that he might take such measures as
he could, or at the worst secure better terms, whereas Sayed Mahomed
spoke in a manner that, had the English been, as he supposed, enemies,
must have precipitated hostilities, and having done so, again
Egyptian-like, made no adequate attempt to protect the town from the
possible consequences of his rashness.

Whether fortunately or otherwise no man can say, Nelson, too intent
upon the object he had in view to be moved from his immediate purpose,
took the rebuff offered him calmly, and, after a day's rest off the
port, sailed away, leaving the Alexandrians to congratulate themselves
upon their own astuteness and to indulge themselves in vain-glorious
anticipations of the prodigies of valour they were to perform should
the French land upon their shores.

A week having passed by without the appearance of an enemy, the people
had regained their wonted calm, when as unexpectedly as though no
warning had been given of its coming the French fleet of twenty-one
vessels of war and over three hundred transports was seen in the
offing heading for the port. This sudden and unlooked-for proof of the
reality of the danger they had refused to credit produced the utmost
consternation.

Once more the Governor despatched messengers in all haste to the
capital, and describing the French fleet as one "without beginning or
end," begged earnestly, but all too late, for aid.

The people of Cairo, like those of Alexandria, when their first alarm
at the arrival of Nelson's fleet had passed away, seeing in his
departure a confirmation of their own conception of his visit, ceased
to think of the matter save as the subject of jest, but were
overwhelmed with dismay at the new alarm, even the Government, which
had been but little moved by the first, being now stirred to activity
and a sense of danger.

The Government of Egypt was then, at least nominally, such as it had
been constituted after the Turkish conquest in 1517 by Sultan Selim.
Keenly recognising the impossibility of enforcing his authority in a
province of the Empire so far off and so difficult of access from his
own capital, the Sultan had, not unwisely, contented himself with
organising a system of government that was, in his opinion, the one
most likely to ensure the permanency of his sovereignty and guarantee
him the receipt of a goodly share of the wealth of his new possession.
Egypt was placed, therefore, as the other provinces of the Empire then
were, and still are, under the government of a Pacha, who was in
effect, though he was accorded neither the style nor the honour of
that rank, a viceroy. But the Sultan, anxious to hold the Pacha in
check by some power ever present and active, divided the territory
under his charge into twenty-four districts, and placed each of these,
as a kind of local governorship, in the hands of a Mamaluk chief or
Bey. Of the Beys chosen for these posts seven were to form a Dewan, or
Council of State, nominally to advise and assist, but in reality to
control the Pacha, whose decisions this Council was empowered to veto.
All real power was therefore vested in the Mamaluks, who, it is
perhaps scarcely necessary to recall, were the troops that, originally
brought into the country as slaves by the Fatimite Caliphs, had
gradually developed their power and influence until their chiefs had
become feudal lords, holding lands and keeping, according to their
individual means, troops of mounted followers, whose physical
qualities and effective training rendered them one of the finest
bodies of cavalry that has ever existed. As must invariably happen
when a weak and incompetent Government seeks the aid of slaves or
mercenaries to sustain its failing dominion, the Mamaluks had
eventually acquired such power that they were enabled to usurp the
government of the country, and had, as we have seen, maintained their
position as Sultans of Egypt from the time of Salah ed Deen up to the
Turkish conquest. Under the system of government established by the
Sultan Selim, though unable to regain the absolute independence they
had lost, they soon recovered almost all their former influence and
power, and as they controlled the military strength of the country,
the small Turkish garrison being quite helpless to oppose them, they
soon became, as before, the real rulers of the land. Being invariably
foreigners, or the immediate descendants of foreigners, Circassians,
Armenians, or other slaves, it was but natural that these Beys should
have no sympathy for the people of the country, and, with the
arrogance characteristic of a military body that has attained
political power, despised all outside of their own ranks, and held it
a disgrace to intermarry with the Egyptians. Actuated by none but the
most selfish aims, they sought and cared for nothing but their own
interests, each of them being a veritable Ishmael, looking upon all
men as his enemies, only accepting the co-operation of his fellow
Mamaluks as a necessary measure of defence, confiding in the loyalty
of his immediate followers only so far as he was able to control them
by rendering their faithfulness to him conducive to their own
interests. Among themselves they of necessity accepted the domination
of the one who by force of arms, intrigues, or other favouring
circumstances, was in a position to enforce his will against that of
the others, and, as might be expected, the Bey who held this prominent
position was the one to whom the post of Sheikh el Beled, or Governor
of Cairo, was accorded, that being the post of all others the most
coveted by them, this Bey being, in practice, the real Governor of the
country, his power being only limited by the necessity he was under of
consulting and conciliating the wishes of the other members of the
Dewan.

It may seem strange that with the power they thus possessed the
Mamaluks should continue to offer even a faint show of respect to the
Pacha, or of loyalty to the Empire, for light as was the yoke these
laid upon them, it was sufficiently galling to men who lived as they
did each wholly absorbed in the prosecution of his own personal aims
and interests, and the more so that, as the wealth of the country
declined under their greedy and ruthless rule, the remittances of
revenue exacted by the Sultan was a yearly draft that seriously
limited their resources. But if the Mamaluk hated and despised all men
not of his own class, he was in turn hated by all others with a hatred
all the fiercer and more bitter that it had no outlet. Thus, with no
friend upon whom he could rely save his own right arm, the Mamaluk
chief, however powerful, was fain to accept the patronage of the
Sultan as the only aid he could look for in his combat with the world,
and he must needs, therefore, be content to pay for that aid with a
certain tribute of grudging loyalty. Nor must it be forgotten that,
ever ready to combine and co-operate against a common foe, each
Mamaluk was equally ready to turn his hand and sword against his
fellow if thereby he might gain aught for himself. Had it not been for
the mutual distrust the knowledge of this fact forced upon them, they
might easily have regained the independence wrested from them by the
Turks. This had, indeed, been momentarily accomplished by Ali Bey,
who, in 1766, not only succeeded in setting himself up as Sultan of
Egypt, but aspiring to extend his rule, had attacked and conquered the
Mahomedan holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Arabia. His triumph was,
however, but shortlived, for Mahomed Bey, the most trusted of his
favourites, to whom he had confided the command of an army for the
conquest of Syria, abandoned his task, and revolting, took his master
Ali prisoner by a treacherous ambush. Unable alone to maintain the
power he had thus for the moment seized, the traitor at once tendered
his submission to the Sultan, and was, in reward for his "fidelity,"
appointed Pacha of Egypt. His tenancy of this office was, however, but
brief, his death soon after, leaving the country once more a prey to
the mutual rivalries of the Beys. In the contest for supremacy that
followed, two of these, freed slaves of his, though constantly opposed
to and frequently in arms against each other, eventually agreed to
share the power between them, the one, Murad Bey, becoming the
military chief of the Mamaluks, and the other, Ibrahim Bey, the Sheikh
el Beled.

Under the joint sway of these two men the country enjoyed a brief
period of greater quiet and peace than it had known for a long time,
and although the tyranny and oppression from which they suffered was
little if at all abated, the people had been so completely despoiled
before and had so little to lose that, as "He that is down need fear
no fall," they had but small anxiety for the morrow.

This was the condition that existed on that memorable night of the
23rd of June in 1798, the eve of the day upon which Cairo had its
first warning of the approach of the French. Could a plebiscite of the
hopes and fears of the people have been taken on that evening, we may
be sure that it would have been unfavourable to any change, and that
they would have elected to bear the ills they had, rather than face
the possibly far worse any change might bring to them.




CHAPTER IV

A COUNCIL OF STATE


As soon as the news of the arrival of the French Fleet had been
received by Murad Bey, he rode to the country house of Ibrahim Bey,
now the Kasr el Aini Hospital, on the east bank of the Nile
overlooking the Island of Rhodah.

There a council of the leading men of the city was hastily summoned to
consider the steps to be taken for the defence of the country, and it
was characteristic of the conditions under which the people were then
living, that all those present, with the single exception of Bekir
Pacha, the Governor and representative of the Sultan's authority,
belonged to one of two classes--the military rulers and the religious
leaders of the people. The excitement that prevailed in either class
was plainly evident at the meeting, though the feelings and fears
induced in each by the news they had met to discuss were very
different.

The military element consisted entirely of the Mamaluk Beys, who
formed, as we have seen, the real ruling power, their title of
Bey--or, as it is written in the Turkish language from which it is
taken, Beg--being fairly equivalent to that of Baron as used in our
own country in the days of King John, though it has long since ceased
to signify any more than the French Legion of Honour, save that, like
our Knighthood, it carries a personal title. By the people generally,
these Beys were spoken of as Emirs, a title properly nearly equal to
that of Prince, and the one employed by the rulers of Afghanistan, so
well known to us as the Ameers of that country. I have already spoken
of the dominant position the Beys held, but I may add here, as further
illustrating their character, that if they had not, as the French
nobles had in the days of Louis IX. and Philip the Fair, the right of
carrying on war among themselves, they did not hesitate to put their
rivalries to the test of battle. Confident in the prowess of their own
body, these men had treated with indifference the alarm occasioned by
the arrival of Nelson, but when the warning he had given was confirmed
by the presence of the French, and the extent of the fleet that was
gathering at Alexandria was known, not only through the exaggerated
terms in which Sayed Mahomed had described it, but also by the arrival
of reports from Rosetta and Damietta to the same effect, they awoke to
the necessity for action.

Centuries had then passed since the Arabs or their Mamaluks had
measured their strength against that of European armies, and
altogether unacquainted with the advance their ancient foes had made
in the art of war, it was perhaps natural enough that they should be a
little over-confident in their own might, especially as such stories
of the Crusades as still lingered among them were not of a kind to
excite any very lively fears of an enemy that, according to these
traditions, they had never met but to defeat. Moreover, ignorant as
they were of the progress of the world outside their own country, they
knew that the Moslem corsairs of the Mediterranean were a constant
terror to all ships of Christian countries that had to pass the
inhospitable coasts of the Barbary States, and that throughout the
north of Africa European Christians were found as the slaves of Moslem
masters. Added to this the fact that the insulting treatment they
themselves accorded to European ships visiting their ports, and their
tyrannous behaviour to European subjects resident in the country, long
continued as these abuses had been, had brought no effective or
warlike protest from the nations thus gravely injured and insulted,
and we can easily conceive that they placed no high value upon the
military or naval power of peoples who thus meekly, as it seemed to
them, submitted to such outrages upon their subjects. Hence, while
they regarded the present occasion as one calling for active measures
of defence, they had no presentiment of the disastrous fate that was
so soon to overtake them, and so, undismayed by the news of the
arrival of the French, cried vauntingly, "Let them come that we may
trample them under our horses' feet!"

As to the second class of those present at the Council, the Ulema, or
"learned men," that is to say, those who in virtue of their
proficiency in the study of the laws of Islam were the acknowledged
and duly graduated religious leaders of the people, these looked upon
the danger with very different eyes. Unlike the Mamaluks they were men
of the country, allied by blood to its people, and therefore, though
like priests and ministers of all religions in all countries, forming
a class severed from the great body of the people by special and
mutually conflicting ideals, aims, and interests, they were not, and
could not be, wholly indifferent to the welfare of the people, of
whom, by kinship of every degree, birth, marriage, and parentage, they
never ceased to form an integral part. These, therefore, had a lively
fear of the inevitable distress any warlike operations in the country
must bring upon the people, while the fact that the enemy approaching
was a Christian one, gave to their anticipations a personal character
they would not have borne had the invader been of the Moslem faith.
Like those of the Mamaluks their conceptions of the character of the
European peoples were mainly founded upon the traditions of the
Crusades--traditions that included only too many incidents, such as
that of the soldiers of the Cross, at the taking of Jerusalem, dashing
out the brains of innocent infants; traditions that are still recalled
in Moslem lands, and are in no small degree responsible for the
anti-Christian and anti-European spirit that exists among Mahomedan
peoples. Their feelings at the thought of the possibility of a French
victory were, therefore, quite apart from those of the Mamaluks, if,
indeed, these ever gave such an idea a moment's thought. If they did,
they still had before them three possibilities--victory, which to them
meant gain in many ways; defeat and flight, leaving them at least the
hope of retrieving their fortune later on, or in some other land; or
death in honourable and glorious warfare, warfare too, that being in
defence of Islam, would give them the rank and, better still, the
rewards of martyrs for the faith. On their part the Ulema could see
only two possibilities: a victory that, however glorious, would have
to be paid for at a heavy cost of suffering to the people, or a defeat
involving all that they could imagine of dire disaster and woe.

That we may fully comprehend the influences swaying the members of the
two classes of which the Council was composed, we must recall their
mutual relations. The Mamaluks, then, being Mahomedans in little more
than name, yielding their loyalty to the Sultan and to Islam simply
from a regard to their own interests, were commonly looked upon by the
Ulema, as well as by the people generally, as scarcely better than
heretics, while their ceaseless rapacity and heartless cruelty made
them at once feared and hated. Conscious of these facts, but not
daring to place themselves in open opposition to the Ulema, they
sought in every way to gain these to their support, and more
especially by their professions of loyalty to the faith, and by
treating the Ulema with all dignity and respect. This, indeed, they
were bound to do, since not only was it in the power of the Ulema to
incite the people against them, but with the aid of the Ulema of
Constantinople to secure the Sultan's action on their own behalf in
case of need. In a word, therefore, while despising the Ulema with the
man of action's contempt for the mere student or scholar, the
Mamaluks found it essential to their own safety to cultivate their
toleration, knowing well that this was all they could obtain from
them.

As to the Ulema, fully recognising the insincerity of the Mamaluks,
they were fain to accept their homage as the only course for them to
follow except one of open hostility, which, however little they, as a
body, need fear its results, to each one individually involved risks
not lightly to be run.

Having no power of excommunication, such as that possessed by the
priests of the Catholic Church or the Brahmins, the Ulema had no
direct means of coercing those who displeased them, and were thus not
infrequently obliged to accept or adopt a line of conduct that under
other circumstances they would have refused to follow. It is,
therefore, to their credit that throughout the history of their class,
they have always been an independent and, on the whole, a fearless set
of men, and that it is but rarely indeed they have been opposed to
reason or right as they have understood it, though, unhappily, their
conceptions of these have not always been such as enlightened minds
could approve. Like the clergy of all Churches, with, perhaps, the
exception of the Catholic, they have not seldom been compelled to
choose between interest and principle. That they should never err in
such a case, they must have been more than human.

Diverse as were the interests of the Beys and those of the Ulema at
this Council, the aims and hopes of the two classes were in the most
perfect accord, both being dominated by the single desire to concert
such measures as should seem best for the protection of the country.

In this they were heartily joined by Bekir Pacha. As the
representative of the Sultan's authority, his chief duty and personal
interest lay in seeing that the annual remittances to the Sultan were
made as early and as large as possible, and that the country was kept
as free from wars and seditions as might be. So long as he could in
some fair measure secure these aims, though always, like all servants
of the Empire, at the mercy of intriguing aspirants, he might hope to
retain, if not his post, at least the Sultan's favour. Although thus
constrained to court the goodwill of both the Beys and of the Ulema,
his personal sympathies were strongly with the latter, and were not
weakened by his keen sense of the treacherous nature of the friendship
for himself and of the loyalty to the Empire professed by the former.

The relations thus existing between the three parties at the
Council--the one-man party of Bekir Pacha, and those of the Mamaluks
and Ulema--had then been in force for some years, and, coupled with
the fact that Ibrahim Bey was a man who, though of approved courage,
was withal a constant promoter of peace and concord, had contributed
not a little to gain for the people the few years of comparative
immunity from care and trouble they had been enjoying.

Murad Bey was a man of different stamp. Of great energy, proud and
ambitious, ever ready to sacrifice friends as well as foes for his own
profit, he is said to have been at times daring to foolhardiness, and
again timid to poltroonery, but always consistently selfish, grasping,
and tyrannical. From the time that he and Ibrahim Bey had agreed to
work together in the government of the country they had shared between
them the greater part of the revenue; and Murad, while constantly
adding to his private property large areas of land confiscated from
the people under various pretexts, spent large sums of money in
developing the military resources at his disposal, constructing
cannon, storing ammunition, and building vessels for military service
on the Nile. Passionate, impulsive, and keenly conscious of the fact
that the Sultan looked upon him and his fellow-Mamaluks with no
friendly eye, upon hearing of the arrival of the French he jumped to
the conclusion that they had come, if not as the allies of the Sultan,
yet with his connivance. For Bekir Pacha, both as an individual and as
the Sultan's representative, he had a contempt that, though veiled
under the courtesy of pretended amity, lost no opportunity of wounding
his feelings or depreciating his authority. Swayed by these
sentiments, he did not hesitate on joining the Council to charge the
Pacha with being privy to the invasion, alleging it as inconceivable
that the French should venture upon such an undertaking if they had
not some reason to look for the support, or at least the countenance
of the Turkish Government. The spirit and tact with which the Pacha
repelled this accusation showed that had he been in a position of
greater power he might have proved himself a man better able to deal
with the danger they had to meet than was his accuser. It was soon
evident, however, that the Pacha had the confidence of the assembly.
Murad was obliged, therefore, to accept his denial, and the attention
of those present being turned to the more practical aspects of the
subject that had brought them together, after a brief consultation it
was arranged that Murad should advance to meet and oppose the French,
and, as they all hoped, drive them back into the sea, while Ibrahim
Bey was to remain at Cairo and provide for the defence of the capital
in the event of the enemy pushing their way so far.

Had the Council limited itself to the discussion of these points I
might have passed it with briefer notice; but perhaps the only really
debatable issue brought before it was one the reception of which
throws some light upon the important question of the feelings of those
present towards the Christians then living in the country.

Urged, mainly, in all probability, by the desire not to remain a mere
silent member of the Council, one of those present suggested, as a
measure of defence, a massacre of all the Christians in the town.
There is, I believe, no record as to who made this wild proposal, but
we may be certain that it was one of the youngest, and a man little
read in either the history or teaching of his religion.

To the tolerant spirit that now happily prevails in England and the
West of Europe, such a suggestion, made, even as it was, in an hour of
panic, seems savagely revolting. But in our criticisms of this and
other incidents in history we too often overlook the lapse of time and
compare the Egyptians and other peoples of the past to that which we
are at present, and not to that which we ourselves were at the same
time. Thus when we condemn the fanaticism of those who made and
supported this proposal at the Kasr El Aini Council, we forget to
remember what was even then passing in our own country. This Council
was held on the 4th of July, in 1798, and on that day the Irish rebels
who had been defeated at Vinegar Hill, on the 21st of June, the very
day on which Nelson had reached the Egyptian coast, these rebels were
still trembling fugitives sheltering in the mountains and bogs of
their native land from the ruthless "no-quarter" pursuit of the
vengeance-wrecking soldiers of the Crown. Nor let it be thought that
in speaking of this I am taking a partial or party view of the events
of those days, for my ancestors were with the pursuers, not with the
pursued. And if it be objected that this was in Ireland, and that the
atrocities perpetrated by both parties were due rather to political
than to religious rancour, let us go back but eighteen years, for was
it not in 1780 that for four days the Gordon rioters held London in
their hands, and, crying "Death to the Catholics!" sacked and
pillaged, burned and wrecked the churches, shops, and houses of
Catholics and of those who favoured the cause of Catholic
emancipation? Let it be remembered, too, that the fanatics of Cairo
had at least this excuse, that they were in terror of an approaching
foe to whom those they proposed to slay were friendly, while the only
danger that the London mob had to face was at most a political one,
and that one based upon mere possibilities, and not even on
probabilities. Let us--but no! the Reign of Terror in France, the
echoes of which were then still ringing throughout Europe, the one
unsurpassable horror of all time, that was the maniac outbreak of a
people frenzied by the long pent-up wrath of their endless wrongs and
sufferings, a horror only possible when the inhumanity of a class had
shattered the humanity of the mass. But we may recall the crimes of
the Commune, which in our own days washed the streets of Paris with
blood, and was an unreasoning, insensate outburst of political
fanaticism, and also the recent massacres of Jews in Russia.

These events have had but little in common, except that they were
alike the products of fanaticism--whether political or religious--but
they show that in condemning the fanaticism of the Cairo Council we
must make allowance for time, place, and circumstances, and,
remembering how much more grievously we ourselves and our European
kinsmen have sinned, hesitate to accept such incidents as these as
stamping the people as in this respect other than ourselves.

Bearing these facts and dates in mind, let us now learn what was the
fate of the bloodthirsty proposal thus brought before the Cairo
Council, but first a word as to who and what the Christians were whose
lives were thus endangered.

The Christians then resident in Cairo, as in other parts of Egypt,
were of two classes, distinguished from each other and from the
Mahomedan inhabitants by the different political conditions under
which they lived. These classes were the Copts and the Franks. The
former were the descendants of those Egyptians who, after the Arab
conquest, remained faithful to their religion, and the latter
Christians of European origin. The Copts were, and still are, the
purest descendants of the early Egyptians left in the country, as
since the Arab invasion they have intermarried almost exclusively with
their own race, whereas the Mahomedans have freely mixed themselves
with the Soudanese and other wholly alien peoples. Under the Mamaluks
the Copts almost entirely monopolised the service of the Government as
clerks and accountants, and wherever mere clerical skill was an
essential. Docile, or rather servile, in their submission to all in
authority over them, they were in spirit and act hostile to the people
generally, and readily availing themselves of their power as petty
officials to further the tyrannous oppression of the rulers, at the
same time enriched themselves at the expense of all unable to resist
their rapacity. The Franks, who were mostly Levantines, were almost
all engaged in trade. Like the Copts they were compelled to live
within certain fixed limits of the town, the Frank quarter being the
street still known as the Mousky, and now the "Cheapside" of Cairo.
This locality was chosen for the accommodation of the European
Christians by Salah ed Deen, who, in 1173, granted to the Republic of
Pisa the first of the long list of "Capitulations," or Treaties, which
the Turkish Government has accorded the European Powers, with a view
to encourage their subjects to visit and settle in the country, and
which grant to those who do so, special rights and privileges for the
protection of their lives and property, and the freedom and
encouragement of their trade. As the Copts then did and still do, the
Franks then wore the costume of the country, and at the time of the
French invasion, almost all of those who remained at Cairo had been
born in Egypt. Earlier in the century there appears to have been a
considerable number of foreign-born Europeans residing in the capital,
but in 1770, owing to the gross oppression of all foreigners by the
Mamaluks, who did not hesitate to despoil them by the imposition of
taxes and charges of all kinds whenever the Government was in need of
funds, the number of French subjects resident at Cairo had fallen so
low that there were but fifteen houses there engaged in trade, and a
few years later, the French Consul having withdrawn, the number
continued to decrease until, in 1785, only three French firms were
left, and the English, who had been endeavouring to utilise the desert
route between Cairo and Suez to develop trade with India, finding it
impossible to contend against the constant raiding of their caravans
by the Bedouins and the oppressive exactions of the Government, had
likewise abandoned the town.

The Christians whose massacre had been demanded at the Kasr el Aini
Council were therefore practically all natives of the country, but
natives subject to the same vile treatment, gross injustice, and
wanton outrage that the Christians of Europe then and even now were,
and are, inflicting upon the unhappy descendants of Israel. Indeed, no
one who has read the accounts of the recent persecutions of the Jews
in Europe and will compare them with those of Christians in Moslem
lands, can fail to admit that the balance to be drawn is in favour of
the Moslem. And there has constantly been, especially in Egypt, this
important distinction between Christian and Moslem persecutions, that
persecution in Christian lands has almost invariably originated with
the people, while in Moslem lands, when not occasioned by the
fanatical bigotry of some despotic ruler, it has almost as constantly
been the result of a weak and impotent Government fomenting fanaticism
for the promotion of its own ends. In both cases it is indisputably
true that the greater the fanaticism has been, the more clearly and
surely can it be traced to the teaching of the spiritual leaders of
the peoples concerned. Not that these leaders have necessarily or
directly advocated persecution, but that their teaching, even when
professedly and honestly denouncing it, has been such that it could
have no other effect than that of rendering those who accepted it
fanatical in spirit, for of what avail can it be that the ministers of
a religion should preach toleration, if at the same time they
vehemently denounce the followers of other religions as the "enemies
of God," doomed to eternal damnation?

Now let us take note that the suggestion of a massacre of the
Christians was made at this Council at a moment when almost every
possible condition that could favour its acceptance was present, and
that in spite of this the proposal was rejected.

There was not a man at that Council who did not know that the
withdrawal of the protection of the Government from the Christians
would have been hailed with delight by the populace, not from
fanaticism, but for the sake of the plunder that would thus have been
brought within their reach. It is, therefore, to the credit of Bekir
Pacha and Ibrahim Bey that, waiving the mutual want of sympathy that
separated them on ordinary matters, they in this instantly joined in
protesting against the suggested massacre. Each of them knew that in
thus acting he was risking his own personal interests. On his part
Bekir Pacha was only too well aware that, although he was the
accredited Governor of the country, the small semblance of authority
he was permitted to exercise was accorded to him by the Beys only for
their own purposes; that it was their delight to thwart his aims,
tarnish his honour, and diminish his influence on every possible
occasion and in every possible way, and that it was to the Ulema that
he had to look for any local support in any contest with his powerful
foes. This knowledge, and the fact that, as we have seen, Murad had
openly taxed him with being accessory to the arrival of the French,
although his denial had been accepted, might well have caused him to
hesitate to speak in defence of the Christians. None the less he did
so, promptly and boldly, and, referring more particularly to the
Copts, he reminded those present that as subjects of the Sultan they
paid the Capitation tax, and that while their doing so exempted them
from military service, it gave them a right both by the laws of Islam
and by the laws and customs of the Empire to the fullest protection.
Happily for the Christians of Cairo the good counsels of these men,
supported by the better informed and more enlightened of the Ulema,
prevailed, and the Council, not satisfied with simply deciding the
matter thus, issued proclamations prohibiting any interference with
the Christians.

This matter having been thus settled, the Council broke up never to
meet again, and thus the last official act of the Beys and Ulemas of
Cairo acting together in a Council of State was one for which
Christianity and Humanity should never cease to have a grateful
memory, the more so that the protection given to the Christians was
not limited to mere words, since, finding that the people, whether
instigated by fanatics or acting for themselves, were assuming a
threatening attitude towards the Franks, Ibrahim Bey had these all
brought from the European quarter and placed under the care of his own
and other reliable men. For the ladies of the Frankish colony the
Bey's wife opened one of his residences, a palatial building in the
southern part of the city known as the Birket el Feel, or Elephant's
Pond, then one of the best and pleasantest portions of the town. Thus
the safety and decent comfort of the whole community was provided
for.




CHAPTER V

THE PROCLAMATION THAT FAILED


As soon as Bonaparte's flagship, _l'Orient_, had arrived sufficiently
near to the shore a boat was sent into the harbour to bring off the
French Consul, Monsieur Magallon. With their usual want of tact in a
sudden emergency the people at once protested against his leaving, and
would have prevented his going had it not been that the commander of a
Turkish warship then in the harbour, having probably a keen sense of
the possible results to himself and his ship a refusal might produce,
persuaded the Governor to allow him to go. From Monsieur Magallon,
therefore, Bonaparte learned the little serious opposition the town
could offer, since not only was the garrison limited to a body of
about five hundred janissaries, a species of militia possessing
scarcely any military training or experience, but it was so wholly
unprovided with ammunition and other necessaries that at the most it
could make but a momentary resistance. Bonaparte, influenced no doubt
by the fear that Nelson returning might surprise him in the act of
disembarking, decided upon landing immediately. It was in vain that
Admiral Brueys pleaded for a brief delay, urging that the weather was
most unpropitious, and that the roughness of the sea, their distance
from the shore, their ignorance of the coast, the rocky and dangerous
nature of the landing-place, and the approach of night, all combined
to render the operation a most hazardous one. Bonaparte would hear of
no delay, and so, the fleet having been warily drawn close to the
shore, the task of landing the forty thousand men of the expedition
was commenced.

The spot chosen for this purpose was one about three miles to the west
of the town, and the first boatloads reached the shore at ten o'clock
at night. The beaching of the boats was a work of the utmost danger
and difficulty, the darkness upon the rocky beach rendering the scene
one of the greatest confusion. Fortunately for the French, no attempt
was made to oppose their landing, for had the full resources of the
town been brought to bear upon them at this critical point, slight as
those resources were, the invaders must have suffered heavily. As it
was, Bonaparte himself landed a little after midnight, and having
slept for an hour or so upon the sands, set out on foot for the town
with a party of four hundred men. He was, we are told, in the best of
spirits, and marched gaily along with no ear for the surges beating on
the beach, and never recking that, even then, other surges were
drearily droning on the shores of St. Helena the melancholy music that
was to be the doleful dirge of his dying days.

Just as the day was breaking a number of Bedouin Arabs attacked the
little force, but after exchanging a few shots retired beyond range,
and Bonaparte, followed near at hand by additional troops, continued
his advance without further incident until close under the walls of
the town.

Although quite conscious of the hopelessness of their position, the
Governor and the townspeople determined to resist, and the arrival of
the French was therefore saluted with a brisk but ineffectual
cannonading from the walls. Promptly dividing his force into three
divisions, Bonaparte commanded a general assault to be made, and soon,
in spite of the fusillading of the enemy and the showers of stones and
burning materials thrown upon them, two of the divisions succeeded in
scaling the walls, while the third forced its way through one of the
gates. A sharp but brief contest followed in the streets of the town,
but the Governor and the militia having retired to one of the forts,
the people, accepting the assurances that Bonaparte had conveyed to
them, that he came to re-establish the authority of the Sultan and to
overthrow their oppressors, the Mamaluks, by whom it had been usurped,
and that their own lives, property, and religion would be respected,
threw down their arms.

The town thus occupied by the French, the Governor, short of
ammunition, and without hope of succour or aid of any description,
yielded to the inevitable and surrendered with his troops. Anxious to
conciliate the people as much as possible, Bonaparte at once offered
to reinstate the Governor upon the condition of his consenting to
remain faithful to the French, and the offer having been accepted he
was replaced in charge of the town, but subject to the supervision of
General Kleber, who having been wounded in the attack was to remain
for the time in command of the French garrison.

Having thus easily established himself upon Egyptian soil, Bonaparte
lost no time in preparing for an advance upon Cairo, and the landing
of the remainder of the troops, together with the horses for the
cavalry, and the whole of the baggage and equipment of the expedition,
was pressed forward as rapidly as possible. Both as a measure tending
to facilitate this movement and as an important part of the policy he
had resolved to follow in his dealings with the people, Bonaparte set
himself to gain their friendship. Strict orders were, therefore,
issued that the people were not to be molested in any way, and some
soldiers having been detected in looting after the surrender of the
town, he seized the opportunity to give a proof that his assurances
were not intended to be an idle parade of words, and had the offenders
summarily and severely punished. In this, as in other ways, it is
evident that Bonaparte was under the impression that he could gain, if
not the full allegiance, at least the passive neutrality of the
Alexandrians, and, indeed, it was clear from the preparations that he
had made prior to his actual arrival in the country, that he had
looked forward to being received by the Egyptians as a deliverer and
saviour. Two of these preparations deserve special mention here. One,
curiously characteristic of the French spirit of the day, was the
provision of an immense number of tricoloured cockades to be
distributed to, and worn by, the people as evidence of their
reconciliation with the French; the other was the composition and
printing of a proclamation in Arabic which was to serve at once as a
declaration of the aims and intentions of the French in entering Egypt
and as an appeal to the friendship and support of the people. This
proclamation has, with great justice, been described as a most
extraordinary document. Of considerable length, it was framed
throughout with the object of soothing the religious susceptibilities
of the Egyptians, and was so worded as to represent Bonaparte and the
French, if not as Mahomedans, at least as the special friends and
protectors of Islam. Beginning with the well-known formula, "In the
name of the most merciful God," invariably prefixed by Mahomedans to
all important writings, it proceeded to state that the French had
arrived in Egypt with the intention of punishing the Mamaluks for
their ill-treatment of the French and other foreign subjects resident
in the country; to restore to the people themselves the rights of
which they were deprived by their tyrannical rulers, and to
re-establish the authority of the Sultan of Turkey, the legitimate
sovereign. Had the proclamation stopped here it would in all
probability have been accepted by the people as a genuine expression
of the purport and scope of the invasion, but it went on with great
elaboration to promise boons to the people that these were quite
incapable of either comprehending, or had they done so, of
appreciating. These promises were couched in the spirit then dominant
in Paris, and, indeed, throughout France, that is to say, the spirit
of the Revolution, the "Gospel" of "Liberty, equality, and
fraternity," that was to turn the world into a paradise. Thenceforth,
it declared, it was to be possible for all to arrive at the most
exalted posts; public affairs were to be directed by the most learned,
virtuous, and intelligent; and thus the people were to be made happy.
All this was in perfect accord with the theory and teaching of the
Mahomedan religion, but it was in some respects very far indeed from
the practice to which the people had for centuries been accustomed. As
to the promise of opening out facilities for advancement, we have seen
that in the Governor of the town the people had a convincing proof
that these already existed, and it is not at all probable that it ever
occurred to them that the facilities at which the French General
hinted were of a very different nature to those of which Sayed Mahomed
had availed himself. It is not surprising, therefore, that these
promises seemed to the Egyptians nothing more than mere idle bombast,
and were by them promptly put down as simply a valueless bid for their
favour. What followed was still less calculated to win their
confidence, for, as evidence of the friendly spirit of the invasion,
Bonaparte went on to declare his faith in the unity of God, his
respect for the Prophet Mahomed and the Koran, and to claim that he
had "destroyed the Pope" and the Knights of Malta because they were
the enemies of Islam. Such professions as these to the Egyptians
carried on their face their own contradiction, for, if Bonaparte was
in truth a Moslem, or a friend of Islam, how was it, they asked, that
he had entered the dominions of the Sultan without some acknowledgment
from him of the claim thus made to be acting upon his behalf?

The concluding phrases of the proclamation came, too, rather as an
anti-climax to the lofty spirit of benevolence and high aim that the
body of it was intended to express, for the whole rigmarole--I can
scarcely find a better word for it--came to an end with a commonplace
promise that those who submitted to the French should be "exalted,"
while those who opposed them should be "utterly destroyed." One can
fancy how the Egyptians smiled to themselves at this conclusion and
accepted it as in itself the whole object and purport of the document.
But whatever may have been their private feelings on the subject, and
their own historians have told us how little reliance they put upon
the professions and promises thus offered them, it is certain that
outwardly the Alexandrians discreetly accepted both the cockades and
the proclamation without any show of feeling other than that of amused
curiosity. So little, indeed, did they betray their true feelings, the
French were unquestionably deceived, and did not realise how different
these were from those which they had expected the proclamation to
excite. But it is certain that none of the Egyptians were in the least
deceived by its plausible tone, and while they refrained from any
display of hostility to the French, they were looking forward with
high hopes to their early annihilation by the Mamaluks.

Large numbers of this proclamation having been printed by the aid of
the Oriental type and printing presses, with which the expedition was
provided, Bonaparte not only had it freely distributed in Alexandria,
but forwarded copies of it to Cairo and elsewhere, using as his
messengers for this purpose some Mahomedans he had released from the
prisons of Malta, and had brought with him to Egypt, with the object
of utilising them as interpreters, and in the hope that gratitude for
their release would cause them to espouse and advocate his cause.

That Bonaparte's conception of the probable attitude of the Egyptians
towards the expedition was entirely erroneous, is clearly evident from
the whole tone of the proclamation. Thoroughly well-informed as he
appears to have been, as to the actual state of the country and the
deplorable misgovernment from which it was suffering, he and his
countrymen seem to have jumped to the conclusion that they would be
received and welcomed by the people as deliverers. That they should
have so thought is a very noticeable fact, for it plainly proves that
all the information that they had received, including that furnished
by the Consul Magallon and other French residents, afforded no ground
for any suspicion that the French would incur any risk or danger from
fanaticism on the part of the people. That they were keenly awake to
the absolute necessity of conciliating the intense attachment of the
Egyptians to their faith, is not more clearly evident than is the fact
that they had no conception of hostile fanaticism as a factor to be
considered in their relations with the people. It was with
self-satisfied bigotry and not fanaticism that Bonaparte considered he
had to deal, and as we shall see in the course of our story, he was so
far perfectly correct. But in arguing from this assumption, he was led
by ignorance of the facts with which he had to deal, to absolutely
erroneous conclusions. The fundamental error into which he fell is one
that, notwithstanding the warning his experience might have conveyed,
was repeated by ourselves in the beginning of the present occupation
of the country, and distinguishes even the recommendations of the
brilliant statesman, Lord Dufferin. This error was the assumption that
a people so sorely oppressed and downtrodden as were the Egyptians
could not fail to be grateful and friendly to any one who should
deliver them from their oppressors, yet it needed but a slight
acquaintance with the people, with the evils from which they suffered,
and the light in which they regarded those evils, to show that this
could not be so. As we have seen, the dominant trait of the Egyptians'
character was, and is, their loyalty to Islam, and, as a consequence,
their fidelity to the Sultan. Knowing nothing of the Christian
religion or of the political condition of Christendom, they looked
with contempt upon Christians generally as in every way their
inferiors, and recalling how great but unavailing had been the
struggle of the Christians for the possession of the Holy Land, they
regarded their long abstention from all further effort for its
conquest, as a proof and tacit admission of their inability to face
the armies of the Sultan. Thus the Egyptians of that day, as indeed
the great mass of them still do, believed the Sultan to be the
greatest and most powerful monarch in the world. That his rule in
Egypt was little more than nominal they did not perceive. In their
eyes it was a real and substantial power. That they should thus be
blind to what seems to us self-evident truth, is largely to be
attributed to the fact that almost all that was done in the country,
was done in the name of the Sultan. It was in his name and, as they
were often assured, by his authority that the taxes and exactions by
which they were ruined were imposed; and since Beys, Ulema, and all
who represented these, were never tired of preaching that all
resistance or disobedience was rebellion against the Sultan, it was
but natural that they should regard his rule as very far indeed from
being the mere fiction it in reality was.

Nor did the tyranny and oppression from which they suffered in the
least militate against their loyalty, for they never for a moment
attributed their woes or troubles to any more distant cause than the
officials by whose immediate action they were inflicted. That the
higher officials did not protect them was, as they thought, due solely
to the misrepresentations, indifference, or ill-faith of those through
whom alone they had access to them. There was not a fellah in the land
in those days, nor is there one to-day, that did not or does not
believe that if he could only lay his grievances before the Sultan or
the Khedive in person, he would receive perfect justice and ample
compensation for all his tribulations. They were confirmed in this
opinion by the nature of the oppression from which they suffered, for
this necessarily varied in different places and at different times,
according to the personal character of the officials through or by
whom it was inflicted. Moreover, among the worst of their tyrants of
high degree, however callous these might be to the miseries of the
people, there were but few, indeed, who did not consider it a matter
of policy, and therefore in some measure one of pleasure, to pose now
and then as a minister of justice, or as a benevolent benefactor. To
render justice to the poor and oppressed, and to be profuse in
liberality, have ever been the surest means of gaming the real and
sincere approbation or devotion of the Egyptians, as of all other
Oriental peoples. None knew this fact or appreciated it more
thoroughly than some of those from whose heartless cruelty they
suffered most. Nor was it difficult in the roughly organised
administration of the country, for the worst of their oppressors to
play the part of an innocent victim of the wrong-doing of others, for
when appealed to, the higher officials threw the blame upon their
subordinates, while these in their turn professed to be the unwilling
but helpless agents of their superiors. Thus finding all complaints
useless, the sufferers always nourished the thought that if they could
only plead their case personally to the Sultan, the one and only
person who could not urge his own impotency to remedy the evils they
complained of, or grant them the relief they sought, they would be
assured of the justice and mercy they so sorely needed, and which they
could gain from no other. That this should be their idea is not
surprising, for they have never as yet risen beyond the idea of
personal government, and therefore while their belief in the
immaculate justice and merciful disposition of the Sultan was
liberally fed and encouraged by all around them, even by those from
whose tyranny and greed they suffered most, they attributed his
evident indifference to their griefs to the impossibility of his
knowing and dealing with all the acts of all the officials of his
Empire. Of an organised system of government, in which the controlling
power is able to exert itself through all grades of its officials from
the highest downwards to the lowest, they had no knowledge, and indeed
could have no conception, nor even in the present day, after more than
twenty years' experience of the working of such a Government, have
they any just idea of its organisation or of the principles or methods
upon which its efficiency is based. Nor did the Egyptians see the
cruelty and tyranny from which they suffered from the same point of
view as the French did, or as we do. However limited and imperfect
were the services that the Government rendered them, they were
conscious that they were in some respects dependent upon it. It at
least afforded them a certain amount of protection for life and
property, and gave them a rude system of justice. As a return for
these benefits they admitted its right to tax them, and being thus
entitled to tax them, it naturally, as it seemed to them, taxed them
to the uttermost penny, while they as naturally paid as little as
possible.

It was simply a contest between the Government and the governing, not
unlike the bargaining that was their sole method of carrying on trade
in the bazaars and markets, and they had and could have no conception
of any other manner in which the Government of a country could be
conducted. It was not possible, therefore, for the people to grasp the
ideas Bonaparte was anxious to press upon them, nor was it possible
that during his short stay in Alexandria they should have any
opportunity of gaining a better comprehension of his Republican
ideals, so utterly at conflict with all their conceptions of the
relations of a people with those who governed them. It is true, that
having confirmed Mahomed Kerim as Governor of the town, Bonaparte had
appointed a Dewan, or Council of seven members, to aid in the
administration of its affairs; and to these he, no doubt, gave sage
advice and strict injunctions as to the duty of governing for the
benefit of the people; but while to him this Council was suggestive of
the Directory of Paris, and thus of the spirit of the Republic, to the
Alexandrians it was but a reproduction of the Dewan at Cairo, which to
them was typical of nothing but tyranny and torture. Further, the
strict discipline necessarily enforced upon all the members of the
expedition, and rendered all the more evident and striking, in that
all ranks were ceaselessly engaged in the work of receiving the stores
from the ships and preparing for the advance, when contrasted with the
laxity that prevailed in the ranks of the Mamaluks and of all other
troops that the people had previously had any knowledge of, was not at
all calculated to point with any but sarcastic emphasis the doctrines
of equality and fraternity presented to them.

And not only the spirit, but even the wording of the proclamation, was
fatal to its success. In it Bonaparte had declared that "all men are
equal in the sight of God." This, to Mahomedan ears, was nothing short
of rank and absolute blasphemy, for the Koran, which to the Mahomedan
is the veritable and literal "Word of God," emphatically asserts, and
in the plainest terms, the contrary. This clause was, therefore, in
itself sufficient to stamp the whole document with impotency, and
showed how imperfectly Bonaparte and his advisers were informed on
some of the points most affecting the sentiments and spirit of the
people. To the Moslem all mankind is divided into two classes--the
Moslems and the non-Moslems. Between these they admit of no equality
whatever. Among themselves they are theoretically equal. As a Moslem
the Sultan himself is no more than his meanest servant. Hence the
democratic spirit that exists everywhere in Islam, and hence the
freedom with which servants and even slaves address their masters. But
in contradiction to this, the man who rules, whether as Sultan or as
his deputy, or in any minor degree as the master of a household or
otherwise, is, from the mere fact of his ruling, regarded as being
invested with a Divine right to do so, since, although one subject to
limitations, it is equally a doctrine of the Koran, that all power is
from God, and therefore to be respected as such. Thus in Islam
democracy and despotism go hand in hand; and while the Moslem of
Egypt, as the Moslem of other lands, sees no incongruity or difficulty
in this, to the European mind the concurrent operation of these two
conflicting theories gives rise to many puzzling problems. Yet the
solution is simple enough, for the democracy of Islam is the democracy
of the grave, the recognition of the truth that all must die, and that
in death all are equal; for though this belief be shared by all men as
the one great truism of life, among Mahomedans everywhere there is an
active sense of its verity that ever present with them modifies all
their views of life and death in a manner wholly foreign to the
European mind.

To the Egyptians, therefore, the proclamation was a mere flood of
futile folly, and so little confidence was placed in its promises or
in the French protestations of amity, that many of the people who
could afford to do so made haste to quit the town and seek shelter in
Rosetta or elsewhere, wherever they could speed by boat or by land as
opportunity offered.




CHAPTER VI

A LONG MARCH AND A SHORT BATTLE


That the advance to Cairo might be made as rapidly as possible,
Bonaparte decided that the bulk of his army should proceed direct to
Damanhour, a town thirty-three miles to the south of Alexandria, and
on the most direct road to the capital. As it would have been most
difficult to convey the heavy baggage of the expedition by this route,
lying as it did across desert and inhospitable lands, General Dugua
was commissioned to proceed by the longer but more practical and
agreeable one, usually adopted by the people of the country. This led
by Rosetta, a town situated four miles from the sea on the west bank
of the Nile, and forty-five miles from Alexandria. Thence as soon as
the town had been effectively occupied the General, accompanied by a
flotilla of boats, which were to be sent round from Alexandria as
transports for the troops and stores, was to proceed up the Nile to
Ramanieh, where his division was to meet the main army under the
immediate command of Bonaparte.

Short as was the distance to Damanhour, the march over the barren,
burning desert was a most trying one for the troops of the
expedition, who suffered severely from the want of food and water.
Meat and bread were alike unobtainable, and the famished soldiers at
the end of their day's march had to satisfy their hunger with rude
cakes of grain crushed between stones and roughly baked on open fires.
Nor did their arrival at Damanhour bring them any very sensible relief
or encouragement, for there, as everywhere on their advance, the plain
evidence the miserable homes of the people afforded of the chronic
poverty in which they lived, was such as to wholly damp the ardour of
the troops and fill them with dismay at the prospect of a sojourn and
campaign in such an inhospitable country. Fortunately for them it was
the season of the water-melons, and on these and the coarse cakes of
bread I have mentioned they had to support the fatigues of their march
as best they might. To add to their distress, small parties of Arabs
hovered perpetually around the wretched column and, while keeping at a
safe distance from the main body, lost no opportunity of slaughtering
every weary straggler who got separated from his companions.

These Arabs were all Bedouins, or nomadic Arabs belonging to tribes
inhabiting the deserts that skirt the Delta and valley of the Nile,
and, possessing all the characteristics of their race, were nothing
more than restless, roving bands of robbers, ever ready to prey upon
all unhappy enough to fall into their hands. Arabs by race and
Mahomedans by religion, they yet acknowledged no ties of kinship or
brotherhood outside of their own tribes, and were as ready to
plunder, ill-use, and massacre the Egyptians as the French, or to
unite with either against the other as the interest of the moment
might dictate. In attacking the French, therefore, they were actuated
by no other desire than that of securing the spoil of arms and other
loot to be reaped from the bodies of their victims.

Of the people of the country the French during their advance saw
almost nothing; for fearing, not only the loss of everything they
possessed, but that they themselves might be seized and compelled to
work as slaves in the service of the army or be sent for sale in
foreign lands, and dreading that their women would be outraged and
their children massacred, they had, at the first warning of the
approach of the French enemy, hastened to forsake their homes and seek
safety in distant towns or villages, taking with them their flocks and
herds and as much as possible of their portable property.

After spending a couple of nights at Damanhour in taking the rest it
so badly needed, the army set out for Ramanieh by a route leading
almost at right angles to that which they had been following. On the
way they fell in with a small party of the Mamaluks, with which they
had a brief skirmish, Bonaparte himself narrowly escaping capture
while separated, with a few attendants, from the main column of the
force. At Ramanieh the army again halted for a rest and to await the
arrival of the division for Rosetta.

Meanwhile General Dugua, with the force under his command, had arrived
at Rosetta. This town, now fallen into decay and yearly decreasing in
population, was then a place of considerable importance, owing to its
position at the mouth of the Nile, and the fact of its being the
chosen terminus of the journey by boat of those travelling between
Cairo and Alexandria. In many ways one of the most pleasant spots in
the whole of Egypt, surrounded by gardens and cultivation, and having
markets well filled with all the produce of the country, it was at
that time probably of all the towns of Egypt the one most attractive
to foreigners.

Here as in other parts of the country there was a small colony of
Christians, including some few Europeans, and when the fugitives from
Alexandria began to arrive with the news of the landing of the French
and their occupation of that town, these were thrown into a state of
the greatest alarm by the prompt outbreak of a fanatical cry for their
assassination. There were in the town a number of Candiotes who had
been drawn to it by the fact that the acting Governor was a countryman
of theirs, and these had brought with them the fanatical spirit common
in their own country. It was among these that the demand for a
massacre of the Christians was started, and the Governor himself
appears to have been favourable to the project, which was in fact one
of plunder rather than of murder, conceived in the hope that it would
provide the Candiotes with an opportunity of enriching themselves safe
from all danger of retribution. That the Egyptians did not readily
accept the proposal is clear, as otherwise it would undoubtedly have
been put into immediate practice. Happily for the Christians the
opposition offered was strong enough to delay the carrying out of the
plan the turbulent bigots had formed. The matter was still being
heatedly discussed when messengers arrived from Alexandria with copies
of Bonaparte's proclamation. These testified that so far the people of
that town had not only received generous treatment from the French,
but were being liberally paid for all that the French required from
them.

The assurances they thus received that they had nothing to fear as to
the safety of their lives or property were accepted by the people of
Rosetta with the thoughtless impulsiveness of the true Egyptian. From
a condition of panic and despair they passed at a bound to one of
scarcely doubting satisfaction. Difficult as it may be for us to
realise it, this was but the natural consequence of the character of
the people and of the circumstances in which they lived. As we have
seen, their rulers, the Mamaluks, were foreigners, to whom they were
united by no ties, whom they hated and feared, and from whom they
could expect no benefit or advantage of any kind. When, therefore,
they learned upon the testimony of their own countrymen the generous
behaviour of the French to their vanquished enemy, they had reason
rather to welcome than to oppose them, their hostility to the idea of
being ruled by Christians being for the moment wholly outweighed by
the rapture of their release from appalling alarm.

The panic that had arisen being thus allayed the counsels of the
tolerant Egyptians were promptly accepted, and so heartily was the
suggestion of an attack upon the Christians repudiated by the people
in general, that the Governor and some others who had been foremost in
the agitation for the massacre hastened to leave the town, and set out
to join the forces of the Mamaluks. As soon as their departure became
known it was decided to offer no opposition to the French, and when,
therefore, General Dugua approached he was met by a deputation which
presented the keys of the town to him, and gave him an assurance of
the peaceful disposition of the inhabitants.

Of the attitude of the people of Alexandria and Rosetta towards the
French after their first glad acceptance of the terms accorded them,
we can learn little from the native historians; it is not, however,
difficult to conceive what that attitude really was. Assured for the
time of the peaceful possession of their lives and property, and freed
from the terrors that had assailed them at the first coming of the
enemy, they were in no mood to criticise or question the good faith of
the newcomers, but as their feelings regained their wonted calm doubts
began to arise. It was to them an altogether unheard-of thing that a
military force should occupy a country and not at once seize upon its
wealth, or at least exact tribute of some kind or other from the
people. Nor could they forget that the Mamaluks when moving in the
country, alike in time of peace or in time of war, ruthlessly took all
they needed as a right to which they were entitled. How came it, then,
that the French not only did not despoil them, but paid and paid well
for what they required? Why should they pay when they could if they
would help themselves freely? That, in the abstract, it was but
justice the people knew well enough, but that any people could possess
so keen a sense of justice as to thus conciliate its claims they could
not understand, for, after all, they could not but regard it as a
voluntary foregoing of what seemed to them a clearly defined and
evident right. Hence they were not long in coming to the conclusion
that the forbearance of the French might be a mere trick to enable
them to more effectually carry out some deep-laid scheme for the
complete spoliation of the people. But the honest man has an inborn
sense of the false and true that is seldom misled. Rogues batten upon
rogues. And the Egyptian, by nature honest in thought and deed, is not
slow to recognise honesty in others, so the straightforward sincerity
of the French beat back his doubts; and baffled and perplexed he took
refuge in a halting attitude, a kind of moral armed neutrality,
neither fully accepting nor yet rejecting their proffered friendship.
As to the French, though they could not but be conscious that they had
not been received with the open arms they had expected to greet them,
and were sensible that the people were acting under some restraint,
they had no just conception of the real position, and believed that
only a little time was needed to enable them to gain the full
confidence of the people.

On the whole, therefore, things went smoothly enough in the early days
of the occupation, and General Dugua lost no time in establishing at
Rosetta a provisional administration on the lines of that set up by
Bonaparte in Alexandria. This having been done the work of preparing a
flotilla for the ascent of the Nile was carried on with the utmost
despatch. It took but a few days to do all that was necessary, and
General Dugua, leaving a small force as a garrison, started with the
division under his command for Ramanieh, which he reached without
encountering any difficulty or opposition.

From Ramanieh the French army continued its advance upon Cairo, and
keeping always within touch of the west bank of the Nile, was
accompanied by the flotilla laden with the stores and provisions. As
is usual at that time of the year, the ascent of the river was
facilitated by the strong winds which blow across the country and up
the river with a strength more than sufficient to counteract the swift
downward flow of the stream. Coming from the north these winds
naturally tend to moderate the temperature, but though thus beneficial
to the troops, who had already suffered so much from the parching heat
of the desert, they proved an unexpected source of danger, for, its
progress exceeding that of the troops, the flotilla unexpectedly
encountered near Shebriss a fleet of gunboats from Cairo that, borne
by the downward current of the river, was approaching it at a speed
not less than its own, and was supported on either bank of the river
by large bodies of the Mamaluks. The French finding themselves thus
running right into the midst of their enemies, while their own troops
were as yet too far behind to succour them, the boats of the flotilla
were hastily anchored in the positions they happened to occupy at the
moment. A brisk engagement followed, in which the invaders were so
sorely pressed that had not the explosion of a powder magazine on one
of the Egyptian boats suddenly thrown the enemy into confusion, it is
more than probable the whole flotilla would have fallen into the hands
of the Egyptians. As it was, several of the French boats were
captured, and their crews either driven into the river or ruthlessly
cut down, and their decapitated heads exposed to the horrified gaze of
their companions. So evident was the danger that pressed them that
Bertillon, one of the _savants_ who accompanied the force, began to
fill his pockets with stones gathered from the ballast of the boat in
which he happened to be, and when asked why he did so replied that he
might sink rapidly rather than fall into the hands of the enemy.
Fortunately for the French, ere the Egyptians had recovered from the
confusion the explosion had created the fall of night put an end to
the contest.

Meanwhile, intelligence of what was happening having been sent to
Bonaparte, he had hastened to the aid of the flotilla, but only
succeeded in reaching it too late to take any part in the battle.
Early the next morning, however, the two armies were drawn up in
battle array, and the Mamaluks, with the fearless and impetuous
bravery which had always been characteristic of them, lost no time in
opening the attack and charged right up to the French line. Their
accustomed dash and reckless courage proved, however, of no avail, and
they were speedily repulsed by the veterans to whom they were opposed,
who kept their ranks unbroken, and waited for the near approach of
their foes to pour upon them a galling and destructive fire. Baffled
by the stolid calmness of the French, and puzzled by the impotency of
their own wild charge, the Mamaluks hastily withdrew beyond the French
line of fire and halted, apparently uncertain what course to pursue.
In the pause that followed an incident occurred curiously illustrating
the widely different ideas and spirit by which the two armies were
animated. One of the Mamaluk Beys rode unaccompanied towards the
French line, and boldly challenged his foes to single combat; but, for
the French at all events, as a French historian cynically remarks, the
time for such chivalrous exploits was past, and to the disgrace of the
French the daring Mamaluk was shot down on the spot. Discomfited by
the repulse they had sustained and with the whole of their forces
thrown into disorder, the Mamaluk chiefs decided to abandon the field,
and turning their horses' heads retreated precipitately towards Cairo.

Thenceforth the expedition continued its advance without further
opposition until within sight of Cairo, always keeping close to the
river, not only for the sake of the water, but for that of the more
abundant supplies obtainable in its vicinity, and for the mutual
support of the army and the flotilla. To carry out these latter
objects more effectually a strong detachment was sent across the river
to guard the east bank, and to forage in the villages of the Delta. On
both sides of the river the troops continued to be harassed by small
parties of the Bedouins, who, following all their movements, availed
themselves of every opportunity of cutting off stragglers. One of
these raiding parties having surprised a junior officer, whom from his
uniform and appearance they mistakenly supposed to be a man of high
rank, carried him into their camp with a view to holding him for
ransom. Bonaparte at once sent a messenger to offer a few guineas for
his release. Thereupon a dispute arose among his captors as to which
of them should receive the ransom, and was continued so heatedly that
the chief of the party, enraged at their obstinacy, declaring that
none of them should have it, shot the unfortunate prisoner and sent
the ransom back.

As the force moved onwards towards Cairo the heat became daily more
and more oppressive and enervating to the troops, to whom, fresh from
the genial spring climate of Southern Europe, the fierce and dazzling
glare of the sun in the shelterless lands through which their route
lay, was little short of an agonising misery. To add to their
sufferings the food obtainable was, as before, neither adequate nor
adapted to their needs.

It was not until the 20th of July that the army caught its first sight
of the pyramids and of the Mokattam hills overhanging the city of
Cairo. As they had drawn nearer the capital, the evidence of a greatly
increased density of population, and the greater abundance and variety
of the supplies they had been able to secure, gave the jaded troops
fresh energy and hope. They were still much more than a long day's
march from the pyramids when Bonaparte received intelligence that the
Mamaluk army was encamped at Embabeh, a village on the west bank of
the river, at the spot where it is now crossed by the railway bridge.
As it was then evening the army was halted and bivouacked for the
night at the hamlet of Om el Dinar, but only to rise and resume its
march before the first dawn of day. Animated by the prospect of the
combat now but a few hours before them, and which, as they confidently
expected, was to gain them a fair reward for all the hardships they
had been enduring, the troops pressed onward eager for battle, but it
was not until two o'clock in the afternoon that at the end of a twelve
hours' march, they found themselves in touch with the enemy.

Learning that the Mamaluks had entrenched themselves in front of the
village of Embabeh, and had planted a battery of forty guns in
position behind their trenches, Bonaparte decided that it would be
necessary to advance in such a way as to be able to attack the enemy's
position upon its flanks, and he therefore so disposed his forces
that, each division marching in the form of a hollow square, the whole
would approach the enemy's position in the form of a crescent, and so
that, while the right and left wings would threaten the Mamaluks'
flanks, the centre would be prepared to repulse the front attack he
expected them to make according to their custom.

Murad Bey, who, with his long white beard covering his breast, was in
personal command of the Mamaluks, was not slow to detect the aim of
the French General, and quickly ordered Eyoub Bey, one of the best
and bravest of the Mamaluk commanders, to advance and attack the
division of General Desaix, who was moving round towards the west with
a view to outflanking the left wing of the Egyptian position. Eyoub,
who had under him a large and fearless, but wholly undisciplined, body
of cavalry, at once bore straight down on the French without seeking
cover of any kind, and, when within charging distance, dashed upon the
French square with the wild cries, brandishing of arms, and tumultuous
crowding customary to all Oriental warfare of that day.

Faithful to the orders they had received, the French withheld their
fire until the enemy were close upon them, so close that the ruthless
rending of the ranks of the Mamaluks by the fierce hail of shot poured
upon them was all insufficient to stay their headlong charge, which,
bearing down the resistance of their foes, carried them into the
centre of the broken square. But the French veterans, always cool and
prompt, turned about, and the Mamaluks, finding themselves encircled
by their enemies' fire, fought their way back and out of the square,
but only to bring themselves under a heavy crossfire from the square
and the division of General Kleber, who was moving up to its support.
Eyoub's party being thus routed, the French made a direct attack in
force upon the entrenched position in front of the village of Embabeh
and carried it at the bayonet's point, while the divisions forming the
left wing of the attack pushed on between the village and the river.
The Mamaluks were thus caught between the horns of a crescent that
was threatening to close and entirely surround them. Seeing the
danger, Murad Bey at once withdrew his men, and sought the scanty
shelter of a grove of date-trees at a little distance from the
village. In doing this he was compelled to leave behind him some
hundreds of the Mamaluk troops who, caught between the French and the
river, utterly unable to defend themselves or to fly, were
deliberately shot down by the French or perished in an attempt to
escape across the river. As one historian says, it was no longer a
fight but a massacre; and thus ingloriously ended what is termed by
the Egyptians the "Battle of Embabeh," and by the French the "Battle
of the Pyramids," a battle by which the power of the Mamaluks was
shattered, and Bonaparte was left for the moment master of Egypt; a
battle in which the steady discipline of modern warfare proved once
and for all its immeasurable superiority over the wild chivalry of the
past; a battle which, apart from this and the vast consequences that
have resulted from its issue, is scarcely worthy of remembrance.

The whole combat had lasted rather less than an hour, and when it was
over the French soldiers, forgetting their fatigues and weariness,
turned the field into a vast mart, bartering and selling the spoils of
rich armour, weapons, apparel and other things they were able to reap
from the bodies of their vanquished foes.

Murad Bey, finding it impossible to recover his position, and that his
forces were too disorganised and dismayed by a system of warfare so
strange and incomprehensible to them to make any further effort,
abandoned the field and hastened away to his summer palace at Ghizeh,
whence, after collecting his most portable valuables, he set out for
Upper Egypt.

The justice that never fails had thus overtaken the iniquities of the
Mamaluks. For centuries they had desolated the land, sacrificing all
else to their own ambitious greed, and now they were "shattered and
broken," never again to recover. For a short time they were to
struggle and hope vainly for a return to power, but it was not to be.
The fiat of Heaven itself was against them, and the decree of their
doom went forth as infinitely more inexorable than the laws of the
Medes and the Persians as Omnipotence is to impotency. Some years
afterwards, when the British were encamped upon the banks of the Nile
near Beni Souif, a poor, half-blind, wholly-destitute fugitive sought
protection and a pittance at their hands. It was Ibrahim, the last of
the great Mamaluk Beys, a man by no means typical of the baser of his
class, with many faults, yet with some good points, one who under
happier circumstances might have left an honourable record of service
for the welfare of his fellow-men. As it was, his fate was but a part
of the answer of that wrath that had at last heard the cry of the
distressed, and avenged the wrongs of the widow and the orphan.




CHAPTER VII

AFTER THE BATTLE


Before leaving Cairo to meet and oppose the French advance, Murad Bey
had arranged that a large chain was to be stretched, as a boom, across
the river, and batteries erected upon the adjacent shore to play upon
the enemy in the confusion he anticipated would arise from their
meeting with this obstacle. It was not, however, until the news of the
defeat of the Mamaluks at Shebriss had thrown the capital into the
utmost confusion, that any serious efforts were made to prepare the
defences of the city. When that news came to the people, who had been
looking forward to receiving tidings of the destruction of the French,
then Ibrahim Bey and Bekir Pacha, filled with alarm at this first note
of disaster, jointly called upon the whole population to take up arms
and hasten to the riverside for the defence of their homes and
families. Weapons and ammunition were served out as long as they could
be got to all comers, and when the supply of deadlier arms ran short,
the deficiency was made good in intention, if not in fact, by the
distribution of naboots, long staffs of hard wood, which the Egyptians
of the lower classes are accustomed to use much as our distant
forebears used their quarter-staffs. Other impromptu weapons were
provided by the people themselves, such as knives lashed to the end of
long sticks, this primitive arm which could be either wielded as a
lance or thrown as a javelin being destined at a later date to deprive
the French of one of their ablest generals.

Cairo was at that time separated from the river by an open stretch of
ground, now covered by the avenues lined by the villas and mansions
that form the Kasr el Aini and Ismailia quarters of the town. At the
north end of this space was the small town of Boulac, which served as
the port of the city then as it still does. This was the spot chosen
by Ibrahim Bey as the headquarters for the defence of the town, and
here and around the people were gathered, and quantities of stores and
ammunition of every kind collected, whatever was needed or desired, if
not found in the magazines of the State, being seized without ceremony
wherever it could be got. For several days the space between the two
towns was covered with the crowds coming and going, engaged in the
transport of the various materials required; and so great was the
haste to finish the work and the desire to help it on, that men of
almost all degrees assisted in the task. As it was impossible to find
accommodation for everybody at Boulac, a large number of the people
returned to their homes in the city to pass the night and gain
well-earned repose, but only to return at the first dawn of day.
Unwonted and severe as was the labour they had to undergo, all worked
not only willingly but with the greatest enthusiasm, and with all the
needless noise and tumult that is a never-failing part of any exertion
the Egyptian worker is called upon to make. Not unnaturally the
workers encouraged each other by vaunting cries of contempt and
derision for the enemy they were expecting, and thus incurred the
censure of the Egyptian historian Gabarty, who condemns such conduct
as lacking in the dignity that should distinguish the defence of
Islam.

The Ulema, who, like the Druids of old, have always been exempt from
military service and taxation, were like them, not backward in
encouraging others in their toil or in assisting in such ways and
manners as befitted their character. Very properly they busied
themselves especially in prayer, and at all the stated hours of
worship offered up fervent supplications to the Deity for protection
and victory, and, the children of all the schools being under their
charge, they gathered these and led them in processions reciting
invocations suited to the occasion.

The dervishes, or, as they are often incorrectly termed, the "Monks of
Islam," who are in reality simply members of lay confraternities, such
as those of the Catholic Church, also assembled themselves and paraded
the streets flying their banners and accompanied by the weird Arab
music of pipes and drums that, unwelcome to European ears, has a
strange fascination for the Arab and Egyptian, and, like the "Ca ira"
or "Marseillaise" in the streets of Paris, fills its hearers with a
fierce longing for action and excitement, a wild craving to be up and
doing they know not what, or why.

Some of the wealthier citizens left the town to seek refuge in the
neighbouring villages, others simply sent their families and valuables
away and joined the gathering at Boulac, and the town being thus
practically deserted--even the Sheikhs el Harah, petty officials
appointed in all the quarters of the town to look after public order,
being engaged at Boulac--the streets, which in ordinary times were
swept and watered daily, were neglected, and business of every kind
being of necessity at a standstill, the poorer classes, who lived from
hand to mouth on their daily earnings, no longer finding any
employment, were driven by sheer starvation to seek in robbery and
crime a means of living.

The Dewan having been broken up by the departure of Murad Bey and
others of the Mamaluk chiefs, no regular council could be held; but
Bekir Pacha, with some of the Ulema and leading men who remained, held
frequent consultations and were in constant communication with Ibrahim
Bey, who remained at Boulac day and night to supervise the work there
and along the river, by the side of which batteries were being erected
for a distance of nearly three miles north of Boulac.

Ibrahim Bey appears to the last to have preserved his confidence in
the certainty of the Mamaluks proving victorious, but Bekir Pacha,
when the news of the near approach of the French was received, decided
in conjunction with some of the Ulema to make an attempt to treat with
the enemy. With this object in view they sent for a Monsieur Bandeuf,
who was regarded as the leader of the French colony, and begged him to
tell them candidly what he thought was the object of the invasion. He,
of course, was no better informed upon this point than they were
themselves, but he could at least form an idea, and his reply was that
he believed it most likely the French desired nothing more than a free
passage through the country to enable them to proceed to India to join
their countrymen there in their struggle with the English. Accepting
this as, at least, a possibly true explanation of the invasion, they
proposed to Monsieur Bandeuf that he should go as an envoy from them
to Bonaparte, and assure him of their willingness to facilitate him in
every way if such were his object. Not without some hesitation
occasioned by his fear that it would not be possible for him to reach
the French camp in safety, Monsieur Bandeuf consented to do this, and
was preparing to set out, with an escort of the Mamaluks of Ibrahim
Bey for his protection, when the reverberations of the cannon at
Embabeh were heard, and they realised that it was too late for such an
embassy as they had proposed.

As soon as Ibrahim Bey heard the commencement of the battle he began
to take such steps as he could to forward assistance to Murad Bey, but
long before any effective move in that direction could be made the
battle was over, and Ibrahim Bey, hearing of the flight of Murad,
hastened back to Cairo with Bekir Pacha, to take their families and
valuables and flee.

Words fail to describe the panic that overwhelmed the people. Utterly
helpless, and unaccustomed to think or act for themselves, unarmed and
without any possible means of defence, they saw themselves, deserted
by their leaders, at the mercy of a foe from whom, as they thought,
they could expect no quarter and no pity, while the military force, in
the protection of which they had felt such unbounded confidence, was
in full flight leaving them to their fate. To any unwarlike and
helpless people to be thus suddenly abandoned as a prey to an unknown
foe must have seemed an appalling disaster, but in this case no
circumstance seems to have been wanting that could by any possibility
add to the natural terror of the people at the calamity that had so
suddenly befallen them. In less than an hour they were plunged from an
exulting ecstasy of triumphant anticipation to the crushing
despondency of the direst despair. The consternation that had been
occasioned by the first news of the defeat of the Mamaluks at Shebriss
had been largely, if not wholly, dissipated by the representations of
the Mamaluks, and so loud and blatant were the vauntings of the people
that Gabarty, whose Arab blood had but little sympathy for any open
expression of the emotions, speaks in the most contemptuous terms of
their conduct as wholly unworthy of a people deserving of any esteem.
Nor had the Mamaluks, knowing well how little love the people bore
them, neglected to contribute all they could to their fear of the
French by attributing to these the lust of rapine and bloodthirsty
cruelty. And with the news of the defeat and flight of Murad Bey came
the tale of the slaughter of the Mamaluks by the riverside to confirm
and augment the worst fears of the people. Later on reports were
spread that the French were still busy slaying and destroying all
before them, and, Ibrahim Bey having ordered the burning of all the
boats to prevent the French using them to cross the river, the people,
ignorant of this, took the dense columns of smoke arising from the
riverside as confirmation of the ruthless ravage the French were said
to be wrecking. In the dire madness of the despair that seized them no
room was left for any other thoughts than those of self-preservation,
and, as the evening closed in and night fell, the whole population,
laden with all they could carry of their goods or wealth, streamed out
of the city gates. In the maddened rush for safety, all the claims of
blood and friendship were forgotten, and men and women alike, frantic
from their fears, fought their way through the fleeing crowds heedless
of parents, wives, brothers, sisters.

More than one writer has taken this wild exodus as a text to accuse
the people of cowardice. Nothing could be more unjust. They were
flying from what to them was a very real and immediate danger, and for
the most part on foot from mounted foes. They could see no other
choice but fly or die, and the darkness of the night, the suddenness
of the danger, everything helped to urge them onward. Not more sure
was Christian that he was fleeing from the City of Destruction than
were they. It was a panic such as seizes a people with all the more
uncontrollable force in that it comes as a sudden revulsion from
peaceful ease; one such as those that in our own days in London,
Paris, New York, and San Francisco have turned laughing, joyous crowds
of pleasure-seekers into mobs of frenzied fugitives. When in the days
of the dynamite scare in London the crash of the Scotland Yard
explosion was heard in the Strand, men dashed here and there for
safety from the danger that had passed. Not long after I saw a roomful
of men hurl themselves headlong down a narrow flight of stairs,
fleeing madly from the report of a detonating cigar! I have seen panic
seize a thousand emigrants on board a German ship in mid-ocean;
another, the pilgrims for Mecca on an Austrian ship in Bombay Harbour;
another, the coolies working on the Hurnai Railway in Beloochistan. In
these cases the panic-creating danger was an imaginary one, and yet in
real danger these same victims of panic remained calm and collected.
It was so, as we shall have occasion to see, with the unhappy
Cairenes.

I have spoken already of the fears that the coming of the French had
awakened in the hearts of the people, and to the Cairenes it must have
seemed on that most miserable of nights as if the realisation of all
the worst of those fears was but the question of a few moments. As the
evening had fallen had they not seen the columns of flame-emblazoned
smoke that to them were a proof of the ferocious fury of the foe? Had
they not seen the Mamaluk Chiefs, the bravest of the brave, fleeing
for life with breathless haste? With no arms, no leaders, nothing but
instant flight as the only means of safety they could conceive, surely
a people who had not been panic-stricken in such dire peril would
have been a nation of heroes such as the world has never yet seen!

But if safety for them lay outside the city, it was not beneath its
walls, for there the Bedouin tribesmen, whom Ibrahim Bey had summoned
to assist him in the defence of the town, disappointed of the plunder
of the French army to which they had looked forward as their only
inducement to take part in the contest, with untroubled consciences
turned to the pillage of the unhappy fugitives as a heaven-sent
compensation for their unrealised hopes. Nor were they content with
the rich plunder that thus easily fell into their hands, but with
wanton savagery murdered the men and outraged and slew the women. Thus
finding at the hands of their co-religionists, who had been summoned
for their defence, no better mercy than the unrestrained cruelty they
feared from the French, the unhappy people, or at least so many of
them as escaped from the Bedouins, returned to their homes, while the
Mamaluk Chiefs and their followers rode away through the desert
indifferent to the fate of all they had left behind them.

Meanwhile the French army, after a short rest, had advanced along the
left bank of the river as far as Ghizeh, a village lying in the line
between the city and the pyramids, where Bonaparte decided to encamp.
On their way from Embabeh the troops had an opportunity of seeing
across the river the town of Cairo and the nearly mile-wide stretch of
open land lying between, studded with the gardens and summer
residences of some of the wealthier of the Beys. Elated by their
victory, and perhaps still more so by the rich loot they had gleaned
from the dead bodies of their fallen foes, they forgot the fatigues of
their long advance, and set themselves to enjoy the rest they so much
needed and the comparatively luxurious fare they expected to
compensate them for all the hardships they had endured. Many were the
castles that rose in the air as they sat around the bivouac fires, and
joked and jested until, wearied by the labours of the day, "Nature's
soft nurse" lulled them to the repose she withheld from their
vanquished enemies.

But the coming of daylight on the morrow of the battle brought to the
horror-whelmed citizens some small gleam of comfort. Fugitives from
the west bank of the river told them how the French had settled
peacefully down at Ghizeh, and people coming into the town from Boulac
explained the fires that had added so much to the terror of the night.
With the calmer mood thus induced came the remembrance of what they
had heard of the mildness and humanity of the French at Alexandria and
Rosetta, and along the line of their advance, and though the mourners
were wailing for their dead and missing in every street and corner of
the town, and their homes had been dismantled or disordered by the
flight of the night before, and swept by the thieves of the city of
whatever had been left behind, the people still, as ever, impulsive
and hopeful, began with the truest of courage to repair as best they
might the havoc that awful night had wrought, and to face the fears
and dangers yet before them with a spirit little short of heroism.

Early in the morning the Ulema and the few leading men who remained in
the town gathered together to consult as to what course it would be
best for them to follow. They had not much scope for discussion, for
they recognised from the first that the only question left for them to
deal with was how best to conciliate the conquerors. Eventually it was
agreed to send a deputation to the French camp to announce their
submission and crave the forbearance and protection of the French
General, and thus to ascertain as far as possible what they had to
hope and what to fear. Tactless as he is in a moment of emergency,
when he stays to take thought with himself in calm and serious mood,
the Egyptian not unfrequently shows a wisdom that his critics seldom
accord him. Thus, wholly inexperienced as they were in such diplomatic
matters, they wisely judged that to send as the representatives of the
town men who could claim to be neutrals would tend to further the
objects of their mission. Two Maghribeen Sheikhs--that is members of
the Ulema from the Barbary States--were therefore selected, and with
many injunctions and entreaties counselled to plead the cause of the
town in the most earnest manner they could achieve. Accompanied by the
prayers and blessings of the whole population, the deputation, not
without some small lingering doubt as to the nature of the reception
that might await it, set out for Guizeh.

Bonaparte, to whom their coming was not so unexpected as they
themselves thought it to be, received them with the affability he so
well knew how to show, and which throughout his stay in Egypt did much
to lessen the friction between the two peoples. One of the Sheikhs was
able to speak French, and had had some experience of French manners,
and he, acting as spokesman, discharged his task well and discreetly,
and concluded his address by an appeal for clemency. Bonaparte replied
that he was the friend of the Egyptians--not their enemy--that he came
to the country to release them from the tyranny of the Mamaluks, and
in short gave them a verbal restatement of the proclamation, with many
fine flourishes, about the high aims and noble ideals by which the
French were actuated. So with many fair words the deputation was
dismissed, but with the request that the chief men remaining in the
town should wait in person upon the General to hear from him the
arrangements he proposed to make.

All the town was awaiting the return of the deputation with an
eagerness and suppressed excitement that made their short absence seem
an age, and great was the relief when they were seen once more
approaching the landing, and great the joy with which the news they
bore was received throughout the town. No time was lost in responding
to Bonaparte's invitation, and, taking with them the keys of the city,
all the chief men set out for Guizeh, anxious at once to gain renewed
assurance of the fair hopes awakened by the report of the deputation,
and at the same time give the French General a proof of their
readiness to comply with his desires.

Bonaparte was, if possible, more gracious than before, and again
dilated upon the purely friendly and beneficent intentions of the
invasion, of his sympathy for Islam, and his desire to make his coming
the opening of a new era in the history of the people, who were
thenceforth to enjoy all the blessings that the establishment of the
Republic had already conferred upon the French themselves. He was
listened to with the emotionless stolidity of the Oriental, but not
without occasional exclamations of approval, yet as he went on his
hearers were moved by steadily growing wonder at and distrust of a
speech so utterly unlike anything they had ever heard of, or conceived
as possible, from the lips of a conqueror. They had, indeed, read the
proclamation, copies of which had been sent to Cairo, but it had
failed with them, as with the people of Alexandria, to convey any
intelligible conception of the ideas it was intended to impart, and
the "Little Corporal's" discourse reaching them through the mouth of
an interpreter helped them nothing at all to grasp the real aims and
object of the French. All that they could comprehend was that they
were expected to accept the French as their rulers; that their lives,
property, and religion would be respected; and that the French were as
eager to reward their friends as to annihilate their enemies. But
loyalty to the French and loyalty to the Sultan were so mixed up in
the proclamation and in Bonaparte's speech, and were in themselves, in
the eyes of the Egyptians, two such absolutely irreconcilable things,
that the Sheikhs were completely bewildered by the attempt to solve
the enigma thus presented to them. So they were content for the
moment to accept the French assurance that they were to be treated as
friends, and for the rest God was great, and they put their trust in
Him.

But if the speech of Bonaparte thus made upon them but little
impression of a definite kind, the courtesy shown them by all the
French with whom they came in contact was not so barren. Accustomed as
they were to the hollow insincerity of Court life under the Beys, the
Sheikhs could not fail to appreciate the genuine character of the
politeness with which they had been received by the French. It was due
rather to this appreciation than to the plausible promises of the
General that they returned to the city somewhat, though not wholly,
reassured as to the immediate future. On their part the French were
sufficiently pleased with the docility of the deputation, and from the
dignity, self-possession, and courtesy of its members augured well for
the realisation of their own views.

As a consequence of the good understanding thus arrived at, boats were
sent over to Guizeh to convey the advance guard of the army to Cairo,
and returning after sunset with a detachment of the troops escorted
through the town by some of the leading men, and, lighted by torches,
led to the citadel, of which it took possession.

The following day the bulk of the army was moved across the river, and
historians record, with some disgust, the revolting glee with which
the soldiers fished out of the stream the hideously swollen and
disfigured bodies of the Mamaluks and of the horses that had perished
in the attempted escape from Embabeh that they might despoil the
miserable carcases of whatever remained upon them of value. We must
remember, however, that in those days the armies of Europe were
recruited from classes that had scarcely as yet been touched by the
advance of civilisation. Nowhere was human life then regarded with the
sanctity a more enlightened age accords it. To his superiors the
soldier was of no value but as "food for powder," and it is not
surprising that the little value placed upon his life by others should
lead him to look upon the lives of his foes at a still lower rate and
deprive him of all feelings of humanity towards them.

As to the people of the town, released from the fears that had plunged
them in such disastrous despair and as responsive as always to the
impulse of the moment and the play of their surroundings, these
received the French, if not with the open arms that Bonaparte had
looked for, at least with a toleration and absence of hostile
demonstration that speedily put the French at their ease. Everything
thus bidding fair for the realisation of all his hopes, Bonaparte
himself crossed over the river on the 27th of July and took up his
quarters in a new palace that Elfy Bey, one of the wealthiest of the
Mamaluk chiefs, had only just had completed and furnished in a
magnificent manner, on the bank of the small lake to the north-west of
the city, the site of which is now occupied by the garden and
buildings of the Esbekieh quarter of the new town.




CHAPTER VIII

VICTORS AND VANQUISHED


Bonaparte having thus accomplished the first and, though he did not
think so, last step on the way towards the building of the great
Eastern Empire that he had dreamed was to "take Europe in reverse,"
despatched a portion of the army in pursuit of the fugitive Mamaluks,
and settled down in his new quarters to scheme and prepare for the
future.

The troops remaining in Cairo, in the best of humour at the agreeable
change the city gave them from the hardships of the advance, began
with the rough good-humour of the soldier to fraternise with the
people. At first, diffident and distrustful of the French, the lower
classes seeing that these went about unarmed, and that not only were
their own lives and property respected, but that even the common
soldiers paid liberally and promptly for all they needed, were not
slow in adapting themselves to the position. They were still depressed
by the loss of kin and property that had resulted from the panic, but
believing, as all Moslems do, in Pope's doctrine that "Whatever is, is
right," they rapidly recovered their wonted cheerfulness, and
wherever the French went in the town they, like Rasselas, "met gaiety
and kindness, and heard the song of joy or the laugh of the careless,"
almost untinged by the dread of reflection Imlac so dolefully
attributed to the merriest.

That the people should have thus readily accepted the rule of an alien
army has often enough been the subject of cynical criticism on the
part of authors compiling the history of the country from such
documents as fell in their way, but from their ignorance of the people
and of humanity in general, incapable of reading aright the true
meaning of the records they perused. Let us avoid their error, and try
to grasp the real meaning of this oft-condemned "levity" of the
Egyptians, and let us do so with the more seriousness of purpose that,
in learning what we can of the real attitude of the people towards the
French in 1798, we shall be learning much that will help us to
understand their attitude towards the English in more recent years. To
begin with let us note that in fraternising with the French the
Cairenes were true to their natural instinct, for they are and always
have been a volatile, light-hearted people, fond of jest and pleasure,
enjoying the present with no heed for the morrow, and the rank and
file of the invaders being of the same temperament, these traits
supplied a ready bond of good feeling between the two bodies. And in
yielding to the spirit of fellowship thus engendered the Egyptians
betrayed no trust, and were guilty of no treachery or disloyalty. To
the Mamaluks they owed no more loyalty than did the Saxon English or
the Celtic Irish to the Normans, and no more love than the French
revolutionists had had for the aristocrats. Whatever of loyalty they
had was given to the Sultan, and since Bonaparte professed to respect
his authority and to be acting in his interest, this loyalty was not
outraged by the presence of the French. Nor did the flight of Bekir
Pacha, the Sultan's representative, impeach the good faith of the
French, for it was no uncommon sight to see a Turkish governor in arms
against, or fleeing from, his sovereign.

Two things only separated the victors from the vanquished, the want of
a common language and the religion, or rather irreligion, of the
French. The former was too trivial a matter to sway either the French
or the Egyptians, and the latter, though it was an effectual barrier
to any deep friendship between the two peoples, was scarcely any
restraint upon such purely social intercourse as was possible between
them. Finally, the Egyptians had but one of two courses open to
them--they must either frankly accept friendly relations or offer a
sullen and unavailing opposition. This was so because they were as
little anxious for, as incapable of, self-government, or
self-protection. Without some governing body to direct the affairs of
the country they would have been like a flock without its bellwether.
Of this they were conscious, and though it is not probable that they
for a moment looked at the question before them with regard to this
fact, it was chiefly this that prevented their seeing any alternative
to the acceptance of the French. To the present day, many of the
peoples of India are influenced by the same sense of their own
incapacity, and it is there one of the strongest of the elements
tending to the consolidation of the Empire under its British rulers.
As this incapacity and the belief that it is an irradicable defect of
the peoples concerned has largely affected public opinion in Europe as
to the present and future of the Egyptians, it will be well for us to
see here to what causes it is due.

Remembering how little we can see beyond the surface of the lives, not
only of our own countrymen but even of our own most intimate friends,
we need not wonder that in seeking to gauge the character of a people
so altogether apart from us as are the Egyptians we are apt to wander
widely from the truth in our efforts to understand the ideas by which
they are guided, and to be misled by giving undue weight to some
feature that seems to mark them out as different from ourselves. It is
thus we find the Egyptians so commonly spoken of as "fatalists"--a
term perhaps not unfairly applied as a reproach to them, but one that
is too often most wrongly taken as a sufficient explanation of all
their real or alleged incapacity. It is this, we are told, that has
rendered them incapable of controlling their own affairs, this that
has made them "the servile slaves of foreign masters." The truth is
that the fatalism of the Egyptians not only plays a very small part in
the framing of their characters or the guidance of their lives, but it
is a fatalism of a kind not commonly understood or implied by the
term. We must look elsewhere, therefore, for the explanation we need,
and a slight knowledge of their history is enough to point us to the
enervation caused by the system of government under which they have
lived for so many centuries as at least a powerful factor in the
limitation of their aptitudes. From generation to generation deprived
of all right or power of initiative, wholly without voice or influence
in the affairs of the country, and habitually treated as slaves,
having no other duty and owning no other privilege than that of the
most perfect submission to all representing the governing power of the
moment, they were of necessity entirely unaccustomed to think of or
discuss any other subjects than the paltry matters of their daily
lives. Yet it must not be supposed that they were debarred the liberty
of speech or of comment and criticism, or that they were in any sense
wholly passive victims of the tyranny from which they suffered. Under
the Beys they from time to time "demonstrated" as loudly, if not as
effectively, as our own people are wont to do. Thus, as a protest
against a new impost, or, as the Tudors and Stuarts would have termed
it, "Benevolence," laid upon them in the year 1794, with common
consent all the business of the town was suspended, and the people
went in a mass to the Cadi, or Chief Justice, and the leading Ulema,
and through their intermediation obtained the revocation of the
impost--for the moment, but for the moment only, for the wily Beys,
though they stormed and fumed, felt it wiser to submit and to annul
the impost, but a little later substituted for it a whole series of
imposts, which, being demanded at intervals and only from one or two
sections of the people at a time, finally proved more profitable to
the Beys and more burthensome to the people than it would have been in
its first form. It is clear, however, from this incident that the
people had a fair conception of the power of united action, but the
mob that marched to the Cadi's, while it was like those of the French
Revolution, leaderless, could not like those march in column, but
pressed forward in a mass, a mere throng of men stirred by a common
impulse. When the Beys, to adopt a military phrase, attacked them in
detail this want of leadership was fatal to their cause, and this want
of leaders was due to the conditions under which the people were
living, for the man who had dared to act as leader would have paid the
penalty of his folly with his life, and the people would have been
helpless to avenge his death. Hence anything in the nature of
effective organisation or combination was impossible. Unlike their
critics, the Egyptians saw then, as they do now, that without the
power and opportunity of arming themselves they were, and must remain,
helpless to combat the tyranny of their rulers, otherwise than by such
passive means as the suspension of all trade and business.

It will be seen, then, that the condition of the Egyptians at the time
of the French invasion was, in a broad way, similar to that of the
Saxons under the Normans, but we need not go back to the time when
Gurth bewailed the condition of his countrymen to find the masses of
the English people but little better off in this respect than were the
Egyptians under the Mamaluks. When in 1795 Bishop Horsley, speaking in
the House of Lords, said he "did not know what the mass of the people
in any country had to do with the laws but to obey them"; and the
Chief Justice, in sentencing Muir, cried, "As for the rabble, who have
nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation on them?" they
might both have been speaking for the Mamaluk rulers of Egypt, and yet
they spoke nothing more than the sentiment of their class. In many
other ways the condition of the English people at the close of the
eighteenth century was not only not better than that of the Egyptians,
but absolutely worse. In Egypt the people suffered from the
Corvee--that is to say, their liability to forced labour. In England
the press-gangs dragged them from their homes for foreign service. In
Egypt the people were liable to be flogged or executed on the least
pretext at the whim of their rulers; in England they were subject to
the same penalties by "just process of law," interpreted by such
humane and benevolent persons as the two men whom I have just quoted.
Let any one who will study the records of the time with regard to the
condition of the people of England, those of France, and those of
Egypt, and they cannot fail to see that the advantage lay with the
Egyptians. I have elsewhere tried to show how the Egyptians looked
upon the evils from which they suffered, and it must be obvious from
what I have there said that this people had but little inducement to
revolt. Could they have risen and annihilated the Mamaluks the only
result would have been the immediate invasion of the country by a
Turkish army that they could not possibly withstand and which would
not fail to exact a terrible penalty from them for their temporary
success.

In Egypt, then, the people had to endure much, but the ills that
afflicted them were intermittent, coming upon them only now and then
after longer or shorter intervals of at least comparative peace and
comfort, reminding one, indeed, of the hurricanes that ravage the
South Sea Islands with death and destruction, but, swiftly passing,
leave the people once more to the enjoyment of the indolent, care-free
life they ordinarily live.

How different had it been in France just before the Revolution! In
Egypt the people always had the Ulema to plead their cause, and if
these commonly urged them to the exercise of patience and submission,
they did so with a sympathy that was real. In France priest and
politician alike were aloof from the people, and the evils that were
crushing these were growing steadily day by day with increasing force,
with no intermission, and with no possibility for a hope of better
days, no possibility but one--one that found its expression in the cry
of "Down with the aristocrats!" There was no such agony of want and
misery for the people of Cairo as there was for the people of Paris in
those bitter days when the Revolution, unseen but with many warning
mutterings, was gathering to itself the hearts of men that these
might form its army of vengeance upon that "cream of civilisation"
that had grown so exquisitely fine and sensitive that it had lost its
natural sympathies and ceased to be conscious of its fellowship with
any humanity not fitted to adorn its salons. To the Egyptian the cry
of "Down with the Beys!" would but have meant "Up with the Turks!" To
the French the cry of "Down with the aristocrats!" meant "Up with
myself!" and so Justice, robed in the crimson garb of Vengeance, swept
over the land and, like another Frankenstein, aristocratic brutality
fled from its own creation.

In England, bad as was the condition of the people, the circumstances
that determined their action were very different from those that
controlled the French or the Egyptians. In Egypt everything tended to
discourage the people from any attempt to permanently better their
condition. In France everything drove them to desperate but victorious
struggle. In England the people had every incentive to action of
another type. There the principle of constitutional government was
recognised, and if the laws were "the most savage that ever disgraced
a statute book" it was within the bounds of possibility to hope for
their improvement. The right of the people to govern themselves was
not yet admitted, but their right to be heard was only denied by a
class which was not beyond attack or defeat by legal means, and in the
last resort rebellion was possible and by no means foredoomed to
failure. The English were in the same position as the Egyptians in one
respect, namely, that it was not a change in the form of government
or the normal and proper condition of the people that they needed, but
simply the abolition of evils that were accidental and not essential
to that form or those conditions. To the French reform had become
virtually impossible. No making or mending of laws or regulations will
mend the hearts of men. The Beys of Egypt, the governing class in
England, and the aristocrats in France were all heartlessly
tyrannical, but the Beys were so through capricious selfishness, the
English through distorted views of justice and right, and the French
through callous, persistent inhumanity. The difference in character of
the tyranny under which each of the three peoples were groaning was,
therefore, not less than that of their hopes for its mitigation.

The mere fact that the oppression from which he suffered was
consistent with the laws of the land stirred the Englishman to hope
for better things, for if he could by any means bring about a change
of the laws he could not fail to benefit from it, and that such
changes as he desired could be brought about he was convinced. French
and Egyptians suffered not from the laws, but from the abuse of such
legal authority as existed. The English, too, might, and did, hope to
benefit from the mutual rivalries of the parties and classes that
jointly oppressed them. The others had no such resource. And the
Englishman's belief in his ability to rebel, and to rebel
successfully, gave him a self-reliance and determination that
everything denied to the Egyptian, and which the French could only
employ in the extermination of their tyrants. Other influences were
in favour of the peaceful realisation of the Englishman's hopes. He
had friends in the classes above him. There were men like Howard and
Wilberforce to plead the cause of the prisoner and the slave, like
Cobbett, Paine, and Wilkes to stir the people up to effort, like Burke
and Pitt to preach reform, and yet more potent than all these, like
Lindsey and Raikes, the founders of Sunday Schools, who, by teaching
the people the value of education, laid the real foundations of the
England of to-day. In Egypt there were not, and could not be, such men
as these. The Egyptians had, as we have seen, friends and protectors
in the Ulema, but friends whose ability to aid them was altogether out
of proportion to their willingness, and whose narrow training and
insufficient culture unfitted them to cope with the evils they had to
face, and which many of them would have honestly laboured to amend
could they but have found a way to do so. Thus all the conditions and
circumstances in the three countries tended in different
directions--in one, to move the people to peaceful action; in another,
to drive them to destructive wrath; and in the third, to lead them to
patient submission. For the Englishman and the French, then, there
were ways to progress--ways encumbered with difficulties and dangers,
but with something more than a mere possibility of success to draw
them onward--while the Egyptian was on all sides hemmed in by the
impossible. Nor have we yet seen all the causes that have helped to
determine the present character of the English and that of the
Egyptians.

Then, as now, the Mahomedan peoples were taught by the Ulema, as were,
and are, the people of England by the Church Catechism, that it is
their bounden duty to submit themselves to all their governors,
teachers, spiritual pastors and masters, and to order themselves lowly
and reverently to all their betters. But the reception accorded to
this teaching by the two peoples was, and is, vastly different, and
that it was and is so is mainly due to the conditions under which they
are placed. The blood of the English is largely tinged with that of
the restless, adventurous peoples whose early invasions of their
island fill so many pages of its early history, and by descent, the
influence of climate, and the whole course of their history they have
become possessed of a spirit of independence, energy, and
self-reliance that instinctively leads them to a broad and healthy
interpretation of this doctrine. But this spirit was altogether
foreign and unknown to the Egyptian, and that it should be so was an
almost inevitable result of the peculiar conditions affecting their
country as contrasted with those prevailing in England. Thus in our
sea-girt home, with its uncertain weather, the success of the farmer's
labours was always in a great measure dependent upon his own skill and
energy. Through all the changes of the seasons of the year each day
brought to him its round of duties to be performed, duties exacting
not only toilsome labour, but thoughtful care and wise foresight in
adjusting that labour to the ever-varying conditions he had to meet.
It was not so in Egypt. There the measure of the farmer's success was
mainly the result of the operations of Nature, for the richness or
poverty of his harvest was proportioned, not to his efforts, but to
the abundance or scarcity of the inundation of the Nile. With a
bountiful flood he had little to think of but the purely routine
labours of his fields; with a scanty stream no labour, no energy of
his could save him from the disaster of an impoverished harvest. In
England, therefore, where constant foresight, thought, and
well-arranged labour were needed to win subsistence from an ungenerous
soil, the farmer learned to think and act for himself, whereas in
Egypt, where he was at the mercy of the Nile, he drifted on from day
to day undisturbed by aught but the mere mechanically performed labour
of the fields. In both countries the bent thus given to the minds of
the agricultural classes with respect to their daily labour naturally
affected their manner of regarding other matters. Thus the Englishman
brought to all matters that he had to deal with at least something of
the care and thought he gave to his daily work, and weighed and
balanced probabilities and possibilities in his political and social
affairs just as he did in the choosing of a crop, while the Egyptian
left almost all things to shape their own course, even as he of
necessity accepted his harvest as it came. The character which the
agricultural classes in the two countries thus acquired reacted upon
the people generally, for it is the character of the great mass of the
people that in general finally decides the character and fate of a
nation.

And other causes contributed to increase the difference in the
character of the two peoples. In England taxation was excessive and
crushing in its effects upon all but the wealthy, but it was
systematic and did not prohibit or prevent the accumulation of wealth,
whereas in Egypt, while the nominal taxation was lighter it was in
effect far worse, and the more so that its arbitrary assessment and
irregular collection, coupled with the atrocious tyranny and cruelty
by which these were accompanied, and the oft-recurring infliction of
illegal taxes and impositions, effectually deprived the people of all
opportunity of, or desire for, improving their position. In England,
too, labour of some kind was indispensable. Life was a constant
struggle, and he who did not work was ever in imminent danger of
starving. It was quite otherwise in Egypt. The grinding, hopeless
poverty that not only then but still exists, though happily we may
hope in an ever-lessening degree in England, was and is unknown in the
East. There so few and simple are the needs of the poor that the
humblest can always afford to share the little he has, and the
absolute destitution, but too common in England, is there practically
impossible. Moreover, the Englishman, though enjoying the benefit of a
temperate climate, if he would not perish from inanition from the
inclemency of its winter, was compelled to find by some means or other
food of a more nourishing and stimulating quality than that which the
Egyptian needed. He had also to provide himself with an amount of
clothing and artificial warmth which the genial though enervating air
of his native land rendered altogether unnecessary to the Egyptian. Of
necessity, therefore, the Englishman's needs stirred him to an
activity and energy to which the conditions of life in Egypt supplied
no inducement.

Lastly, the Englishman who could acquire wealth was assured of the
peaceful enjoyment of it, whereas the Egyptian knew but too well that
the merest rumour of his possessing aught more than the bare
necessaries of life could but subject him to tyranny and torture,
until he had surrendered his last coin or seizable pennyworth of
value. From this diversity in the conditions and circumstances of the
two people, we can see why to the one the instruction to be content
with that state of life in which he found himself was as unpalatable
as to the other, it was a mere summing-up of the whole philosophy of
life. However hard the condition of the Englishman's lot might be he
could always look to improve it; in fact for him the one hope of
happiness lay in the possibility of bettering his condition, while
that of the Egyptian lay in passive submission to the chains that
bound him. That, of the two people, the Egyptian was in some respects,
for the time, the happiest is at least possible. Like the Englishman,
the Egyptian prizes more than all else his individual freedom: the
mere liberty to come and go, to work or idle as the impulse of the
moment dictates, and detests constraint and compulsion of every kind.
This freedom he enjoyed with no other bar than the recurring fear of
the tax-collector, the Corvee, or the Korbag, to which he was liable.
These, however, were evils that afflicted him only at intervals, and
the Corvee, one that he always hopefully looked to escape from, while
as to the Korbag, the long strip of hippopotamus hide, which was the
common instrument of punishment and extortion, ever in the hands of
his oppressors, though too often used with the murderous brutality to
which the negro slaves of America were then and long after subject,
this would seem in general to have been to the fellaheen not much more
terrible than was the cane of a flogging master to the boys of an
English Dotheboys School of the time. Hence his personal wants being
too few and too easily supplied to give him any serious thought, the
Egyptian sauntered through life on the whole contentedly enough, while
the Englishman was ever ceaselessly engaged in a struggle for the bare
necessaries of life; and it was as natural, therefore, for the
Egyptian to accept with passive acquiescence the submission taught him
by his guides, as it was inevitable that the Englishman should
criticise or ignore that preached to him. Thus it was the
circumstances of their lives, and not, as has so often been said,
their religion, or their "fatalism," that caused the Egyptians to lack
so absolutely the energy and self-reliance so dominant in the
character of the Englishman, and this lack that rendered them so
incapable of self-government.

That this is a correct deduction from the facts, we may see by
comparing the Egyptian Moslems with the Copts, for these are of the
same race, inhabit the same country, and are subject to most of the
conditions of life affecting the Moslem Egyptians, and yet are
essentially different from them in character and aptitude. So great
and so marked is this difference that it is referred to and commented
upon by every one who has undertaken to write of Egypt and its
peoples, although, apparently incapable of discovering the true origin
of the contrast, those who have discussed it have either dismissed it
as a problem admittedly beyond their comprehension, or have claimed
that the Copt's superiority in intelligence and energy is the product
of his religion. But save in matters of doctrine and dogma the
religious teaching that the Copt receives is almost exactly the same
as that given to the Egyptian Moslem, with this important difference,
namely, that the Copts have always considered that obedience given to
a non-Christian Government is but a duty of expediency, one exacted by
force and not by right, and binding upon them only so far as
submission is essential to their self-preservation. It was a matter of
life and death to the Copt that he should court the forbearance and
favour of his superiors. That he should do this he was bound to
acquire all that he could of wealth and influence, and his relations
with the rulers of the country as an indispensable servant enabled him
to do this in a manner, and to an extent, wholly impossible to his
Moslem countrymen.

Thus political conditions acted upon the Copt as climate and social
conditions upon the Englishman, forcing him to bestir himself with
energy on his own behalf, to cultivate and exercise his natural
ingenuity, and trust solely in his own ability. The comparatively
easy-going life of the peasant was not for him, inasmuch as he was not
permitted to own land, and therefore, like the Englishman, he must
either work or starve. And in doing this he had not only to compete
against his fellows, but to make his way against the open hostility of
the governing classes and of the people generally. Hence it is not to
his religion but to the circumstances surrounding his profession of
that religion that the Copt is indebted for both the good and bad
characteristics by which he is distinguished, for it was these that
gave him the energy, intelligence, and self-reliance he undoubtedly
possesses, while at the same time they too often rendered him servile,
false, bigoted, and fanatical.

It should now be clear that it is neither the "fatalism" nor the
religion of the Egyptian Moslem that unfits him to govern his country.
If any further evidence be wanted to justify this conclusion it is to
be found in the Mamaluks and the Jews. The former, although they were
Mahomedans, were by race, training, and all the circumstances of their
lives, exactly opposed to the Egyptian Moslems in all their
characteristics; their restless activity was strenuously employed in
promoting their own interests, and in the acquisition of wealth, and
in seeking these they were recklessly indifferent to the baseness of
the treacheries and brutal tyranny that served their ends, and yet
their religion and fatalism were the same as those of the Egyptians.
As to the Jews, these were a people suffering graver political and
social disabilities than those that burthened the Copts, and wholly
foreign to the Egyptian Moslem or Copt in race, habits, and aptitudes;
yet under the same conditions we see them developing, not in Egypt
only, but in all parts of the world, the same qualities as those of
the Copts and developing them in greater or less degree, precisely as
the exigencies of their surroundings control them. And as the
inhabitants of towns and cities in which the struggle for existence is
always keener than it is in rural districts are invariably
intellectually superior to the people of those districts, so it was in
Cairo, the Moslem traders and artisans, who formed the bulk of the
population there, approaching the Copts in the intelligence and energy
so lacking in those employed in the cultivation of the land.

I have now, I hope, shown with sufficient clearness and detail how the
character and actions of the Egyptians in 1798 corresponded to the
circumstances of their lives. We have been told that men should rise
above their surroundings, but as I have already said, the very
existence of the Egyptian depended upon his submission. The swimmer,
caught in the fierce rush of a cataract, has no hope of safety but in
submitting to the current and devoting all his energies to guarding
himself from the rocks and eddies that are the most pressing of the
dangers of his position. Such was the case with the Egyptian. To have
struggled against the stream would but have been to waste his strength
in futile and fatal effort, and although it was probably unconsciously
that he did so, he acted in the only way to ensure the continuance of
his own existence.




CHAPTER IX

THE GATHERING OF A STORM


Cairo in 1798 as a city wherein to wander was much safer for the
wanderer than was London in that year of grace. It had no Alsatia,
such as Whitefriars had been in the days of Nigel, nor "Holy Land,"
such as the Seven Dials was down almost to our own day. It had no
criminal class, and its mendicants were then as now few, and almost
all strangers from elsewhere. The peaceful citizen or stranger could
walk through any part of the town by day or night free from the
dangers he would even to-day encounter if he ventured through some of
the slums of the "World's Metropolis." Cairo is to-day unchanged from
what it was in this respect save in the infamous quarter of the town
devoted to the nightly carnival of vice that European civilisation
demands, and, under the august protection of Consuls-General and all
the pomp and glory of diplomatic dignity, obtains.

Volney has drawn a sufficiently deplorable picture of the visible
poverty of the Cairenes as he saw them in 1783, but it is highly
probable that this glaring poverty was to a large extent of the same
self-flaunting type so common in India, where certain sufficiently
well-to-do classes of the people seem by their outward showing to know
no mean between ostentatious prodigality and a pretence of poverty.
But there was then in Cairo a class that gained its uncertain meals
from still more uncertain employment, or from the hospitality or
charity that in the East so seldom fails. There were, too, some waifs
and wastrels, as there will always be in all great cities and towns
until civilisation shall have passed its present hobbledehoy-hood.
These two classes suffered much from the total suspension of business
in the town, and rendered desperate by the complete failure of all
their ordinary means of livelihood, and emboldened by the absence of
all authority resulting from the flight of the Mamaluks and almost all
the officials and leading men of the town, broke out in lawless
disorder, and, joined by many of those whom the panic-stampede had
reduced to poverty, began pillaging the deserted houses and mansions
of all that was left in them.

Bonaparte being informed of this, at once sent parties of soldiers
into the town with the double object of suppressing outrage and
robbery and of seizing everything of value that the Mamaluks and other
fugitives had been forced by the haste of their departure to leave
behind them. Proclamation was also made that whatever had been taken
by any person from any of the deserted houses should at once be
surrendered to the French, and, as a warning to those who might be
inclined to disobey this command, several men who were caught either
in the act of stealing or in the possession of stolen property were
summarily executed. Not content with these measures for the recovery
and protection of what he no doubt regarded as his lawful booty,
Bonaparte is said to have countenanced, if he did not actually order,
the infliction of torture with a view to forcing the disclosure of
hidden wealth.

The prompt and energetic steps taken by the French quickly restored
order in the town, and this having been done Bonaparte began to take
in hand the work of introducing civilisation as it was then understood
in France. Like the common type of "Reformer" and "Philanthropist," in
doing this he effectually barred the way to the success of his efforts
by coupling his professions of friendship for the people with
conditions. It was a case of "Be my brother, or I will slay you." He
was going to render the people for ever happy and content beyond their
dreams, but they, on their part, must yield the most implicit
obedience to all that seemed necessary or advisable to him. They were
to have cake and apples like the good children in the nursery tale,
but, like them, they must all sit in a row and behave nicely--in the
French fashion, which at least was appropriate, since the cakes and
apples they were promised were all of the latest fashion from Paris
itself. It is rather a pitiable picture that the "Little Corporal"
makes, thus playing the part of a glorified Bumble with "Civilisation"
and other fallacious figments for his "parochial" board, and the
porridge bowl of "the house" filled with "Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity," to be doled out in duly measured spoonfuls to the hungry
and needy. Poor Cairenes! like the hungry Oliver they were to take
what they got and be thankful, and not mutinously set up a standard of
their own. They were not only to be fed but feasted. They were to
remain good Mahomedans, be free in all respects, and be most happy and
prosperous but--they must wear the cockade, and shout "Vive la
Republique" in such French or Arabic as they could. So, as a foretaste
of the banquet to which they were invited, fair words and fine
promises were lavishly scattered among them, but not without a liberal
seasoning of orders, warnings, and threats. For a short time all went
well, but it was not very long before the people began to think that
the seasoning was somewhat out of proportion to the rest of the dish.

In the time of the Beys, which within a week seemed to the Cairenes to
have grown old and distant, the streets of the town had been swept and
watered by day and lit by night, but, like everything else good and
useful in those days, these things had been done in a manner that left
much to be desired. As the town settled slowly back to its old round
of life, if left to themselves the people would, undoubtedly, have
renewed these and others of their ancient customs; but these were
matters in which French propriety could brook no delay, and orders
were therefore issued that sweeping, watering, and lighting should at
once be brought into play. To this no objection would have been taken
had the order stopped there; unfortunately it is a virtuous vice of
the French to love precision--a quality which the Egyptian
appreciates only when applied to the attainment of grammatical purity
in the use of the Arabic language, but which, being otherwise
repugnant to his spirit, is not to be found in his native dialect or
everyday speech or thought, and still less in more important matters.
Hence when the French, in obedience to their natural impulse, fixed
times and methods and degrees for the sweepings and waterings and
lightings they demanded from the people, and enforced the orders by
the proclamation of pains and penalties to be inflicted upon
defaulters, and, moreover, did all this without consulting anyone as
to the native customs and recognised conventions applicable to such
matters, there was much grumbling. Thus the lighting of the streets by
night was ordered on a scale that made it a real grievance, for each
and every house was commanded to hang out upon its outer wall not a
banner but a lamp--a prodigality of illumination that the Cairene
looked upon as utterly unprofitable. Very primitive were the lamps
available in those days. In London itself ladies returning in their
chairs at night from balls and routs, and not improbably bemoaning the
damage done to their attire by drippings from the spluttering candles
of the ballroom they had left, were lighted on their way by linkmen
carrying torches. And since even the Beau Brummels of those days had
to put up with such primitive forerunners of the incandescent lights
that to-day seem to us as indispensable for comfort, it is not
surprising that the honest citizen of Cairo, when delayed from home
until after dark, was content to be accompanied by a servant carrying
a small, rudely made lamp set in a lantern of paper--a custom that
survives to the present day in the harahs, or back streets of the
native town, though now the lamps used are lit by Russian oil and
sheltered from the wind in lanterns of Austrian glass. But when every
reputable man who went through the town at night had his
lantern-bearer with him there was not much need for the lighting of
the streets in a more general way, and so the Cairenes had been
satisfied to consider a street well lighted if it had a lamp hung out
here and there at longer or shorter intervals to serve rather as a
beacon than as a light. A lamp to every house was to them, therefore,
an absurd extravagance, and when householders were further made
responsible, under penalty of a fine, not only for the placing and
lighting of the lamps, but also for seeing that they were kept alight
throughout the night, this, to the French idea, most judicious measure
became to the Cairenes a very real grievance and one that worried and
annoyed all classes.

To provide for the administration of the affairs of the town
generally, and to act as an intermediary between the French and the
people, a Dewan was constituted similar to that which had already been
established at Alexandria. This consisted of ten Sheikhs, who appear
to have been chosen principally as being those most openly opposed to
the Mamaluks. But on the urgent representations of the leading men,
that the Turks or Mamaluks were the only men in the country accustomed
to, or capable of, exercising efficient authority, Bonaparte very
unwillingly appointed three or four Mamaluk officials who had
remained in the town to different posts; and several Frenchmen were
added, nominally to co-operate with, but in reality to control, the
native members of the Dewan. Notwithstanding the assurances thus given
to the people, that it was the intention of the French to carry on the
government with all respect to their religion and customs, the
merchants and dealers showed some reluctance to reopening their shops
and stores. When, however, the troops mixing freely with the people,
as we have seen, and abstaining from the violence and injustice that
it had always been the experience of the townsmen to receive at the
hands of the followers of the Beys, confidence was restored, not only
was the former trade of the town resumed, but shops, especially
intended for the benefit and service of the French, were started.

Meanwhile, the expedition having been accompanied by a body of
scientific experts, who had been instructed to prepare the most
detailed and elaborate accounts of everything that could throw light
upon the state of the country and its people, and the capacity of each
for development, these men were set to work, each with a definite task
to fulfil. Furnished with quarters in the deserted mansions of the
fugitive Beys, they at once commenced the labours which were to give
to the world the vast, though unhappily incomplete, description of
Egypt, which is unquestionably the most marvellous work of the kind
ever undertaken. Of these men it may be said that they represented all
that is best and noblest in the French nation and the higher
aspirations of the revolution.

But however eager Bonaparte was to restore order in Cairo and to
promote the scientific, commercial, and colonising objects of the
expedition, his strongest desires and ambitions lay in another
direction, and he began therefore to prepare for further action. That
he might do this with the greater ease he resolved upon two steps,
which tended not a little to diminish the contentment of the people
with his rule. The first of these was a demand for money presented to
the Dewan, which was instructed to collect the stipulated amount from
the whole community, Christian and Jewish as well as Moslem. To this,
though not without demur, the Dewan consented; but the announcement of
the impost that was to be raised was to the people the betrayal of the
cloven hoof, and although it was a measure they had been fearing, and
which, had it been imposed upon them immediately after the arrival of
the French in the city, would have been accepted as a natural exercise
of the prerogative of a conqueror, was now looked upon as a breach of
faith, and as such completely destroyed confidence in the fair words
and promises of the French. The discontent and uneasiness thus
occasioned gave birth to open and evident dismay and agitation when
the second measure taken by Bonaparte was announced. From its first
building, the town had been divided into harahs or quarters--districts
separated from each other by the run of the streets, and by walls and
gates. These gates it was the custom to close soon after sunset, and
thereafter no one was allowed to pass from one quarter to another
without the permission of the watchmen charged with the care of the
gates. In

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