Cairo to Kisumu : $b Egypt—The Sudan—Kenya Colony — John Shaqi
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
The whole of to-day has been spent wandering about the cotton wharves
of Alexandria. They extend for a mile or so up and down the Mahmudiyeh
Canal, which joins the city to the Nile, and are flanked on the other
side by railroads filled with cotton trains from every part of Egypt.
These wharves lie under the shadow of Pompey’s Pillar and line the canal
almost to the harbour. Upon them are great warehouses filled with bales
and bags. Near by are cotton presses, while in the city itself is a great
cotton exchange where the people buy and sell, as they do at Liverpool,
from the samples of lint which show the quality of the bales brought in
from the plantations.
Indeed, cotton is as big a factor here as it is in New Orleans, and the
banks of this canal make one think of that city’s great cotton market.
The warehouses are of vast extent, and the road between them and the
waterway is covered with bales of lint and great bags of cotton seed.
Skullcapped blue-gowned Egyptians sit high up on the bales on long-bedded
wagons hauled by mules. Other Egyptians unload the bales from the cars
and the boats and others carry them to the warehouses. They bear the
bales and the bags on their backs, while now and then a man may be seen
carrying upon his head a bag of loose cotton weighing a couple of hundred
pounds. The cotton seed is taken from the boats in the same way, seed to
the amount of three hundred pounds often making one man’s load.
Late in the afternoon I went down to the harbour to see the cotton
steamers. They were taking on cargoes for Great Britain, Russia, France,
Germany, and the United States. This staple forms three fourths of the
exports of Egypt. Millions of pounds of it are annually shipped to the
United States, notwithstanding the fact that we raise more than two
thirds of all the cotton of the world. Because of its long fibre, there
is always a great demand for Egyptian cotton, which is worth more on the
average than that of any other country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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