Cairo to Kisumu : $b Egypt—The Sudan—Kenya ColonyCarpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
History
Cairo to Kisumu : $b Egypt—The Sudan—Kenya Colony
Carpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
Egypt -- Description and travel; Kenya -- Description and travel; Sudan -- Description and travel
When I first visited this country the donkey was the chief means of
transport, and men, women, and children went about on long-eared beasts,
with Arab boys in blue gowns following behind and urging the animals
along by poking sharp sticks into patches of bare flesh, as big as a
dollar, which had been denuded of skin for the purpose. The donkey and
the donkey boy are here still, but I can get a street car in Alexandria
that will take me to any part of the town, and I frequently have to jump
to get out of the way of an automobile. There are cabs everywhere, both
Alexandria and Cairo having them by thousands.
The new hotels are extravagant beyond description. In the one where I
am now writing the rates are from eighty to one hundred piastres per
day. Inside its walls I am as far from Old Egypt as I would be in the
Waldorf Astoria in New York. The servants are French-speaking Swiss in
“swallow-tails”, with palms itching for fees just as do those of their
class in any modern city. In my bedroom there is an electric bell, and
I can talk over the telephone to our Consul General at Cairo. On the
register of the hotel, which is packed with guests, I see names of counts
by the score and lords by the dozen. The men come to dinner in steel-pen
coats and the women in low-cut evening frocks of silk and satin. There
is a babel of English, French, and German in the lounge while the guests
drink coffee after dinner, and the only evidences one perceives of a land
of North Africa and the Moslems are the tall minarets which here and
there reach above the other buildings of the city, and the voices of the
muezzins as they stand beneath them and call the Mohammedans to prayer.
The financial changes that I have mentioned are by no means confined to
the Christians. The natives have been growing rich, and the Mohammedans
for the first time in the history of Egypt have been piling up money.
Since banking and money lending are contrary to the Koran, the Moslems
invest their surplus in real estate, a practice which has done much to
swell all land values.
Egypt is still a country of the Egyptians, notwithstanding the
overlordship of the British and the influx of foreigners. It has now more
than ten million people. Of these, three out of every four are either
Arabs or Copts. Most of them are Mohammedans, although there are, all
told, something like eight hundred and sixty thousand Copts, descendants
of the ancient Egyptians, who have a rude kind of Christianity, and are,
as a body, better educated and wealthier than the Mussulmans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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