THE LAST FRONTIER
BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL
THE LAST FRONTIER
GENTLEMEN ROVERS
THE END OF THE TRAIL
FIGHTING IN FLANDERS
THE ROAD TO GLORY
VIVE LA FRANCE!
ITALY AT WAR
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
“It approached at the speed of a galloping horse—a great fleecy, yellowish-brown cloud which looked for all the world like the smoke of some gigantic conflagration.”
THE LAST FRONTIER
THE WHITE MAN'S WAR
FOR CIVILISATION IN AFRICA
BY
E. ALEXANDER POWELL,
F.R.G.S.
LATE OF THE AMERICAN CONSULAR SERVICE
IN EGYPT
WITH SIXTEEN FULL-PAGE
ILLUSTRATIONS
AND MAP
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1919
Copyright, 1912, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
To
MY CHEERFUL, UNCOMPLAINING
AND COURAGEOUS COMRADE ON THE
LONG AFRICAN TRAIL
MY WIFE
The unknown lands are almost all discovered. The work of the explorer and the pioneer is nearly finished, and ere long their stern and hardy figures will have passed from the world's stage, never to return. In the Argentine, in Mexico, and in Alaska store clothes and stiff hats are replacing corduroys and sombreros; the pack-mule is giving way to the motor-car. The earth has but one more great prize with which to lure the avaricious and the adventurous: Africa—mysterious, opulent, alluring—beckons and calls.
The conditions which exist in Africa to-day closely parallel those which were to be found, within the memory of many of us, beyond the Mississippi. In North Africa the French are pushing their railways across the desert in the face of Arab opposition, just as we pushed our railways across the desert in the face of Indian opposition forty years ago. As an El Dorado the Transvaal has taken the place held by Australia, and California, and the Yukon, in their turn. The grazing lands of Morocco and the grain lands of Rhodesia will prove formidable rivals to those of our own West in a much-nearer future than most of us suppose. French and British well-drillers are giving modern versions of the miracle of Moses in the Sahara and the Sudan and converting worthless deserts into rich domains thereby.
The story of the conquest of a continent by these men with levels and transits, drills and dynamite, ploughs and spades, forms a chronicle of courage, daring, resource, and tenacity unsurpassed in history. They are no idlers, these pioneers of the desert, the jungle, and the veldt; they live with danger and hardship for their daily mates; they die with their boots on from snake-bite or sleeping-sickness or Somali spear; and remember, please, they are making new markets and new playgrounds for you and me. Morocco, Algeria, Tripolitania, Equatoria, Rhodesia, the Sahara, the Sudan, the Congo, the Rand, and the Zambezi ... with your permission I will take you to them all, and you shall see, as though with your own eyes, those strange and far-off places which mark the line of the Last Frontier, where the white-helmeted pioneers are fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation.
E. Alexander Powell.
For assistance in the preparation of this book I am grateful to many people. To the editors of Collier's , The Outlook , The Review of Reviews , The Independent , The Metropolitan , Travel , and Scribner's my thanks are due for their permission to use such portions of this volume as originally appeared in their magazines in the form of articles. I also desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Right Hon. James Bryce, O.M., for permission to avail myself of certain data contained in his admirable work on South Africa; to Charles K. Field, Esq., editor of The Sunset Magazine , for the title and introductory lines to Chapter V; to the Hon. F. C. Penfield, former American Diplomatic Agent in Egypt, from whose clear and comprehensive “Present-Day Egypt” I have drawn portions of my account of the complex administration of the Nile country; to J. Scott Keltie, LL.D., F.R.G.S., author of “The Partition of Africa” and editor of “The Statesman's Year-Book,” for much valuable information obtained from those volumes; and to Miss Isabel Savory, A. Sylva White, Esq., S. H. Leeder, Esq., C. W. Furlong, Esq., and Francis Miltoun, Esq., for suggestions derived from their writings on African subjects. To the American diplomatic and consular officials in Africa, and to missionaries of many creeds and denominations, I am indebted [Pg x] for innumerable kindnesses and much valuable information. At consulate and mission station alike, from Cape Bon to Table Bay, I found the latch-string always out and an extra chair at the table. I likewise take this opportunity of expressing my appreciation of the courtesies shown me by H. H. Abbas Hilmi II, Khedive of Egypt; H. R. H. Prince George of Greece, former High Commissioner in Crete; H. H. Ali bin Hamoud bin Mohammed, ex-Sultan of Zanzibar; H. E. the French Minister of the Colonies; H. E. the Belgian Minister of the Colonies; Sir Thomas Cullinan of the Premier Diamond Mine, Pretoria; and to the officers of the Imperial German East Africa Railways; the Beira, Mashonaland and Rhodesian Railways; and the British South Africa Company.
E. A. P.
| PAGE | ||
| Foreword | vii | |
| An Acknowledgment | ix |
| CHAPTER | ||
| I. | The Third Empire | 1 |
| II. | The Passing of the Peacock's Tail | 27 |
| III. | Sirens of the Sands | 56 |
| IV. | The Italian “White Man's Burden” | 80 |
| V. | The Land of Before-and-After | 108 |
| VI. | In Zanzibar | 143 |
| VII. | The Spiked Helmet in Africa | 165 |
| VIII. | “ All Aboard for Cape Town! ” | 190 |
| IX. | The Last Stand of the Pioneer | 205 |
| X. | The Country of Big Things | 223 |
| XI. | The Forgotten Isles | 248 |
| Index | 287 |
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE LAST FRONTIER
THE THIRD EMPIRE
WE have witnessed one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of the world. In less than a generation we have seen the French dream of an African empire stretching without interruption from the Mediterranean to the Congo literally fulfilled. French imperialism did not end, as the historians would have you believe, on that September day in 1870 when the third Napoleon lost his liberty and his throne at Sedan. The echoes of the Commune had scarcely died away before the French empire-builders were again at work, in Africa, in Asia, in Oceanica, founding on every seaboard of the world a new and greater France. In the two-score years that have elapsed since France's année terrible her neglected and scattered colonies have been expanded into a third empire—an empire oversea. She has had her revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine by forestalling Teutonic colonial ambition in every quarter of the globe: in China, in Australasia, in Equatoria, and in Morocco the advance of the German vorlopers has been halted by the harsh “ Qui vive? ” of the French videttes.
Though thirty centuries have elapsed since Phœnicia first began to nibble at the continent, it was not until 1884 that the mad rush began which ended in Africa's being apportioned among themselves by half a dozen European nations with as little scruple as a gang of boys would divide a stolen pie. This stealing of a continent, lock, stock, and barrel, is one of the most astounding performances in history. France emerged from the scramble with a larger slice of territory than any other power, a territory which she has so steadily and systematically expanded and consolidated that to-day her sphere of influence extends over forty-five per cent of the land area and twenty-four per cent of the population of Africa .
So silently, swiftly, and unobtrusively have the French empire-builders worked that even those of us who pride ourselves on keeping abreast of the march of civilisation are fairly amazed when we trace on the map the distances to which they have pushed the Republic's African frontiers. Did you happen to know that the fugitive from justice who turns the nose of his camel southward from Algiers must ride as far as from Milwaukee to the City of Mexico before he can pass beyond the shadow of the tricolour and the arm of the French law? Were you aware that if you start from the easternmost boundary of the French Sudan you will have to cover a distance equal to that from Buffalo to San Francisco before you can hear the Atlantic rollers booming against the break-water at Dakar? It is, indeed, not the slightest exaggeration to say that [Pg 3] French influence is to-day predominant over all that expanse of the Dark Continent lying west of the Nile basin and north of the Congo—a territory one and a half times the size of the United States—thus forming the only continuous empire in Africa, with ports on every seaboard of the continent.
With the exception of the negro republic of Liberia (on whose frontiers, by the way, France is steadily and systematically encroaching), the little patches of British and Spanish possessions on the West Coast, and the German colonies of Kamerun and Togoland, France has unostentatiously brought under her control that enormous tract of African soil which stretches from the banks of the Congo to the shores of the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic seaboard to the Valley of the Nile. Algeria has been French for three-quarters of a century, being regarded, indeed, as a part of France and not a colony at all. Though the Bey of Tunis still holds perfunctory audiences in his Palace of the Bardo, it is from the French Residency that the protectorate is really ruled. Though Tripolitania has passed under Italian dominion, it is French and not Italian influence which is recognised by the unsubjugated tribesmen of the hinterland. And now, after years of intrigue and machinations, which twice have brought her to the brink of war, France, by one of the most remarkable diplomatic victories of our time, has won the last of the world's great territorial prizes and has set the capstone on her colonial edifice by adding the empire of Morocco—under the guise of a protectorate—to her oversea domain.
On the West Coast the tricolour floats over the colonies of Senegal, French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Upper Senegal-Niger, and Mauritania (the last named a newly organised colony formed from portions of the Moroccan hinterland), the combined area of these possessions alone being about equal to that of European Russia.
From the Congo northward to the confines of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan stretches the great colony of French Equatorial Africa—formerly known as the French Congo—the acquirement of which by Savorgnan de Brazza, counterchecked the ambitious plans of Stanley and his patron, King Leopold, thus forming one of the most dramatic incidents in the scramble for Africa. Though potentially the most valuable of the French West African possessions, being enormously rich in both jungle and mineral products, notably rubber, ivory, and copper, France has taken surprisingly little interest in this colony's development, and, as a result, it has been permitted to fall into a state of almost pitiful neglect. There are two causes for the backwardness of French Equatorial Africa: first, its atrocious climate, the whole territory being a breeding-ground for small-pox, blood diseases, tropical fevers in their most virulent forms, and, worst of all, the terrible sleeping-sickness; second, the almost total lack of easy means of communication, the back door through the Belgian Congo being the only direct means of access to the greater part of the colony, which was virtually cut in half by the broad area lying between the southern boundary of [Pg 5] Kamerun and the equator and extending eastward from the coast to the Ubangi River, which France ceded to Germany in 1911 as a quid pro quo for being permitted a free hand in Morocco, and which has been renamed “New Kamerun.” Though the economic development of this region must prove, under any circumstances, a difficult, dangerous, and discouraging task, it can be accomplished if the government will divert its attention from its projects in North Africa long enough to make Libreville a decent port, to provide adequate steamer services on the great rivers that intersect the colony, and to link up those rivers with each other and with the coast by a system of railways.
Lying on the northern frontier of French Equatorial Africa, and separating it from the Sahara, is the great Central African state of Kanem, with its organised native government, its important commerce, and its considerably developed civilisation, which was completely subjugated by France in 1903, Wadai, its powerful neighbour to the east, accepting a French protectorate in the same year. In the centre of this ring of colonies lie the million and a half square miles of the French Sahara, which the experiments of the French engineers have proved to be as capable of irrigation and cultivation as the one-time deserts of our own Southwest. Off the other side of the continent is the great colony of Madagascar, the second largest island in the world, in itself considerably larger than the mother country; while the French Somali Coast forms the sole gateway to Abyssinia and divides with the [Pg 6] British colony of Aden the control of the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Everything considered, history can show few parallels to this marvellous colonial expansion, begun while France was still suffering from the effects of the disastrous Prussian War, and quietly carried on under the very eyes of greedy and jealous neighbours.
The territorial ambitions of most countries have been blazoned to the world by many wars. It took England two disastrous campaigns to win South Africa and two more to conquer the Sudan; Russia learned the same lesson in Manchuria at even a more terrible cost; while Italy's insecure foothold on the Red Sea shore was purchased by the annihilation of an army. Where other nations have won their colonial possessions by arms, France has won hers by adroitness. Always her policy has been one of pacific penetration. Trace the history of her African expansion and you will find no Majuba Hill, no Omdurman, no Adowa, no Modder River. Time and time again the accomplishments of her small and unheralded expeditions have proved that more territory can be won by beads and brass wire than by rifles and machine-guns.
Not long ago I asked the governor-general of Algeria what he considered the most important factors in the remarkable spread of French influence and civilisation in North Africa, and he answered, “Public schools, the American phonograph, and the American sewing-machine.” The most casual traveller cannot but be impressed by the thoroughness with which France has [Pg 7] gone into the schoolmaster business in her African dominions. She believes that the best way to civilise native races is by training their minds, and she does not leave so important a work to the missionaries, either. In Algiers there is a government university with nearly two thousand students and a faculty of one hundred professors, while in more than eighteen hundred secondary, primary, and infant schools the youth of Algeria, irrespective of whether they believe in Christ, in Abraham, or in Mohammed, are being taught how to become decent and patriotic citizens of France. In Tunisia alone there are something over fifteen hundred educational institutions; all down the fever-stricken West Coast, under the palm-thatched roofs of Madagascar and the crackling tin ones of Equatoria, millions of dusky youngsters are being taught by Gallic schoolmasters that p-a-t-r-i-e spells “France,” and the meaning of “ Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité .” To these patient, plodding, persevering men, whether they wear the white linen of the civil service or the sombre cassocks of the religious orders, I lift my hat in respect and admiration, for they are the real pioneers of progress. If I had my way, the scarlet ribbon of the Legion would be in the button-hole of every one of them. We too may claim a share in this work of civilisation, for I have seen a band of savage Arab raiders, their fierce hawk-faces lighted up by the dung-fed camp-fire, held spellbound by the strains of a Yankee phonograph; and I have seen the garments of a tribal chieftain of Central Africa being fashioned on an American sewing-machine.
“When the English occupy a country,” runs a saying which they have in Africa, “the first thing they build is a custom-house; the first thing the Germans build is a barracks; but the first thing the French build is a railway.” Nothing, indeed, is more significant of the civilising work done by the French in these almost unknown lands than the means of communication, there being in operation to-day in French Africa six thousand miles of railway, twenty-five thousand miles of telegraph, and ten thousand miles of telephone. Think of being able to buy a return ticket from Paris to Timbuktu; of telegraphing Christmas greetings to your family in Tarrytown or Back Bay or Bryn Mawr from the shores of Lake Tchad; or of sitting in the American consulate at Tamatave and chatting with a friend in Antanarivo, three hundred miles away. Why, only the other day the Sultan of Morocco, at Fez, sent birthday congratulations to the President of France, at Paris, by wireless.
To-day one can travel on an admirably ballasted road-bed, in an electric-lighted sleeping-car, with hot and cold running water in your compartment, and with a dining-car ahead, along that entire stretch of the Barbary Coast lying between the Moroccan and Tripolitanian frontiers, which, within the memory of our fathers, was the most notorious pirate stronghold in the world. A strategic line has been built six hundred miles southward from the coast city of Oran to Colomb-Bechar, in the Sahara, with Timbuktu as its eventual destination, and, now that the long-standing Moroccan controversy [Pg 9] has been settled for good and all, another railway is already being pushed forward from Ujda, on the Algerian-Moroccan border, and in another year or two the shriek of the locomotive will be heard under the walls of Fez the Forbidden. From Constantine, in Algeria, another line of rails is crawling southward via Biskra into the Sahara, with Lake Tchad as its objective, thus opening up to European commerce the great protected states of Kanem and Wadai. From Dakar, on the coast of Senegal, a combined rail and river service is in operation to the Great Bend of the Niger, so that one can now go to the mysterious city of Timbuktu by train and river steamer, in considerable comfort and under the protection of the French flag all the way. In Dahomey, within the memory of all of us a notorious cannibal kingdom, a railway is under construction to Nikki, four hundred miles into the steaming jungle; from Konakry, the capital of French Guinea, a line has just been opened to Kourassa, three hundred and fifty miles from anywhere; while even the fever-stricken, voodoo-worshipping Ivory Coast boasts two hundred miles or so of well-built line with its rail-head already half-way from the coast to Jimini. From Tamatave, the chief seaport of Madagascar, you can go by rail to the capital, Antanarivo, three hundred miles up into the mountains, and, if you wish to continue across the island, government motor-cars will run you down, over roads that would make the Glidden tourists envious, to Majunga, on the other side. From Djibouti, the capital of the French Somali Coast, another railway has been pushed [Pg 10] as far up-country as Diré-Dawah, in Menelik's dominions (fare sixty dollars for the round trip of two hundred and fifty miles), thus diverting the lucrative trade of Abyssinia from the British Sudan to the French marts in Somaliland.
France has more good harbours on the coasts of Africa than all the other nations put together. Algiers, with one of the finest roadsteads in the world, is now the most important coaling-station in the Mediterranean and a port of call for nearly all of the lines plying between America and the Near East; by the construction of a great ship-canal the French engineers have made Tunis directly accessible to ocean-going vessels, thus restoring the maritime importance of Carthage to her successor; with Tangier under French control, a naval base will doubtless eventually be constructed there which will rival Toulon and will divide with Gibraltar the control of the entrance to the Mediterranean. With its entire western portion dominated by the great French ports of Villefranche, Toulon, Ajaccio, Marseilles, Oran, Algiers, and Bizerta, the Mediterranean is well on the road to becoming, as Napoleon once prophesied, a French lake.
But, though good harbours are taken rather as a matter of course in the Mediterranean, one hardly expects to find them on the reef-bordered West Coast, which is pounded by a ceaseless and merciless surf. At all of the British, German, Spanish, and Portuguese ports in West Africa, save one, you are lowered from the steamer's heaving deck into a dancing surf-boat by [Pg 11] means of a contrivance called the “mammy chair,” and are taken ashore by a score of ebony giants who ply their trident-shaped paddles madly in their desperate efforts to prevent your being capsized. Alternately scorched by the sun and soaked by the waves, you are landed, about three times out of four, on a beach as hot as though of molten brass. The fourth time, however, your Kroo boys are not quite quick enough to escape the crest of one of those mighty combers—and you can thank your lucky stars if you get ashore at all. This is the method by which every passenger and every bale of merchandise is landed on the West Coast and it is very dangerous and unpleasant and costly. But when you come to the French port of Dakar, instead of being dangled between sea and sky in a bo's'n's chair and dropped sprawling into the bottom of a pitching surf-boat, and being paddled frantically ashore by a crew of perspiring negroes, you lounge in a cane chair on an awning-covered deck while your vessel steams grandly in, straight alongside a concrete wharf which would do credit to the Hudson River, and a steam crane dips down into the hold and lifts the cargo out, a dozen tons at a time, and loads it on a waiting train to be transported into the heart of Africa, and as you lean over the rail, marvelling at the modernity and efficiency which characterise everything in sight, you wonder if you are really in the Dark Continent, or if you are back in America again.
But if the French harbours are amazingly good, the French vessels which drop anchor in them are, for the [Pg 12] most part, amazingly bad. The Messageries Maritimes , a highly subsidised line which has a virtual monopoly of the French colonial passenger trade, and which is notorious for its we-don't-care-whether-you-like-it-or-not attitude, has the worst vessels that I know, bar none, and charges the most exorbitant fares. If you wish to visit the Somali Coast, or Madagascar, or Réunion, you will have to take this line, because there is no other, but elsewhere along the coasts of Africa you will do well to follow my advice and travel under the British or the German flag.
The struggle of the French colonial army to maintain law and order along the vast reaches of France's African frontiers forms one of the most thrilling and romantic chapters in the history of colonial expansion. Theirs has been a work of tact, rather than of force, for, where England, Germany, Italy, and Belgium have used the iron hand in dealing with the natives, France, more farsighted, has seen the wisdom of hiding it within the velvet glove. Always she has conciliated the Moslem. She has safeguarded the privacy of his mosques and harems; she has encouraged by government subsidies his schools and universities; instead of desecrating the tombs of his holy men, she has whitewashed them; the burnooses of the great tribal and religious chieftains are brilliant with French decorations; the native mollahs and cadis are utilised as local magistrates in all except the gravest cases or those involving a European. To attempt to govern a country without those, or against those, to whom it belonged, is a blunder of which France [Pg 13] has never been guilty. It has been the consistent policy of other European nations, on the contrary, neither to trust the natives nor to treat them with any degree of consideration. Hence the ominous unrest in India; hence the ever louder murmur of “Egypt for the Egyptians”! hence the refusal of the natives of German East Africa to work on German-owned plantations and their wholesale emigration from that colony; hence the fact that no Italian official in Eritrea or Benadir dares venture outside the town walls unarmed and unescorted, nor will in Tripolitania for many years to come. I have been assured repeatedly by North African sheikhs that, should France become involved in a European war, her native soldiery would volunteer almost to a man. That England is far from certain how her Egyptian and Sudanese troops would behave in such a contingency is best proved by the formidable British garrisons which she deems it wise to maintain in the land of the Valley of the Nile.
I am but reflecting the opinions of many highly placed and intimately informed European officials in North Africa when I assert that Germany's repeated interference with the French programme in Morocco was due as much to military as to political reasons, the Germans using this means to hinder the expansion of that mysterious force noire which has long been a bugaboo to the War Office authorities in Berlin. Whether this was the true reason or not for Germany's attitude in the Moroccan business, no one knows better than the German general staff that, in the event of war, the Republic [Pg 14] would be able to advance a great black army to the banks of the Rhine in thirty days—and that she would not be deterred by the scruples which prevented her utilising her African soldiery in 1870. It has been repeatedly urged, indeed, that the numerical inferiority of the annual French conscription, as compared with that of Germany, be made up for by drafting a corps of black troops drawn from French West Africa into the continental army. France has already recruited very close to twenty thousand native troops—which is the strength of an army corps—in her West African possessions alone, and as any scheme for drafting it into Algeria, so as to enable the French troops stationed there to be available elsewhere, would instantly arouse the Arab population to revolt, it is highly probable that this African army corps would, in case of war, be employed on the European continent. Though France's African army does not at present number much over fifty thousand men—all well drilled, highly disciplined, and modernly armed—the French drill-sergeants in Africa are not idle and have limitless resources to draw from. The population of the negro states under French protection runs into many millions, and would easily yield twenty per cent of fighting men, while the acquisition of Morocco has added the Berbers, that strange, warlike, Caucasian race, to the Republic's fighting line. Nothing pleases the African as an occupation more than soldiering, his native physique, courage, and endurance making him, with amazingly little training, a first-class fighting man. It is no great wonder, [Pg 15] then, that Germany looks askance at the formidable army which her rival is building up so quietly but so steadily on the other side of the Middle Sea.
No small part in the winning of North Africa has been played by the Foreign Legion—how the name smacks of romance!—that picturesque company of adventurers, soldiers of fortune, and ne'er-do-weels, ten thousand strong, most of whom serve under the French flag in preference to serving in their own prisons. In this notorious corps the French Government enlists without question any physically fit man who applies. It asks no questions and expects to be told any number of lies. It trains them until they are as hard as nails and as tough as rawhide; it works them as a negro teamster works a Kentucky mule; it pays them wages which would cause a strike among Chinese coolies; and, when the necessity arises, it sends them into action with the assurance that there will be no French widows to be pensioned. So unenviable is the reputation of the Legionnaires that even the Algerian desert towns balk at their being stationed in the vicinity, for nothing from hen-roost to harem is safe from their depredations; so they are utilised on the most remote frontiers in time of peace and invariably form the advance guard in time of war. It is commonly said that when the Legion goes into action its officers take the precaution of marching in the rear, so as not to be shot in the back, but that is probably a libel which the regiment does not deserve. Wherever the musketry is crackling along France's colonial frontiers, there this Legion of the [Pg 16] Damned is to be found, those who wear its uniform being, for the most part, bearers of notorious or illustrious names who have chosen to fight under an alien flag because they are either afraid or ashamed to show themselves under their own.
Several times each year it is customary for the commandants of the French posts along the edge of the Sahara to organise fantasias in honour of the Arab sheikhs of the region, who come in to attend them, followed by great retinues of burnoosed, turbaned, and splendidly mounted retainers, with the same enthusiasm with which an American countryside turns out to see the circus. At one of these affairs, held in southern Algeria, I could not but contrast the marked attentions paid by the French officials to the native chieftains with the cavalier and frequently insolent attitude invariably assumed by British officials toward Egyptians of all ranks, not even excepting the Khedive. Were a French official to affront one of the great Arab sheikhs as Lord Kitchener did the Khedive, when he exacted an apology from his Highness for presuming to criticise the discipline of the Sudanese troops, he would be fortunate indeed if he escaped summary dismissal.
At the fantasia in question luxuriously furnished tents had been erected for the comfort of the native guests; a champagne luncheon provided the excuse for innumerable protestations of friendship; a series of races with money prizes was arranged for the visitors' horses; and, before leaving, the sheikhs were presented with ornate saddles, gold-mounted rifles, and, in the [Pg 17] cases of the more important chieftains, with crosses of the Legion of Honour. In return for this they willingly agreed to capture and surrender certain fugitives from justice who had fled into the desert; to warn the more lawless of their tribesmen that the plundering of caravans must cease; to furnish specified quotas of recruits for the native cavalry; and to send in for sale to the Remount Department a large number of desert-bred horses. And, which is the most important of all, they go back to their tented homes in the desert immensely impressed with the power, the wealth, and the generosity of France.
Here, in the native quarters of the remote towns of the Algerian hinterland, the disciples of Pan-Islam find eager listeners to their creed of Africa for the Africans.
Photograph by Em. Frechon, Biskra.
Not content with these periodic manifestations of friendship, the French Government makes it a point occasionally to invite the native rulers of the lands under its control to visit France as the guests of the nation. Escorted by French officers who can talk with them in their own tongue, these colonial visitors in their outlandish costumes are shown the delights of Montmartre by night, they are dined by the President of the Republic at the Élysée, they are given the freedom of Paris at the Hôtel de Ville, and they finally return to their own lands the friends and allies of France for the rest of their lives. “It doesn't cost the government much,” an official of the French Colonial Office once remarked to me, à propos of a visit then being paid to Paris by the King of Cambodia, “and it tickles the niggers.”
Straggling down here and there into the desert from some of the North African coast towns go the trade [Pg 18] routes of the caravans, and it is the protection of these trade routes, traversing, as they do, a territory half again as large as that of the United States, that is entrusted to the twelve hundred méharistes composing France's Saharan forces. By a network of small oasis garrisons and desert patrols, recruited from the desert tribes and mounted on the tall, swift-trotting camels known as méhari , France has made the Saharan trade-routes, if not as safe as Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, certainly very much safer for the lone traveller than lower Clark Street, in Chicago, or the neighbourhood of the Paris Halles . It has long been the fashion to hold up the Northwest Mounted Police as the model for all constabulary forces, just as it has been the fashion to extol the English as the model colonisers, but, taking into consideration the fewness of their numbers, the vastness of the region which they control, and the character of its climate and its inhabitants, I give the blue ribbon to these lean, brown-faced, hard-riding camel-men who have carried law and order into the furthermost corners of the Great Sahara.
Though comparatively unfertile, the Sahara vastly influences the surrounding regions, just as the Atlantic Ocean influences the countries which border on it. Were commerce to be seriously interrupted upon the Atlantic, financial hardships would inevitably result in the countries on either side. So it is, then, with the Sahara, which is, to all intents and purposes, an inland ocean. Ever since the caravan of the Queen of Sheba brought gifts to King Solomon, ever since Abraham [Pg 19] came riding down from Ur, it has been customary for the nomad Arab rulers through whose territories the desert trade routes pass to exact heavy tribute from the caravan sheikhs, the Bilma trans-Saharan route alone being plundered annually to the tune of ten million francs until the coming of the French camel police. Many of these great trade caravans, you will understand, are literally moving cities, sometimes consisting of as many as twelve thousand camels, to say nothing of the accompanying horses, donkeys, sheep, and goats. To outfit such a caravan often takes a year or more, frequently at a cost of more than one million dollars, the money being subscribed in varying sums by thousands of merchants and petty traders dwelling in the region whence it starts. It is obvious, therefore, that the looting of such a caravan might well spell ruin for the people of a whole district; and it is by her successful protection of the caravan routes that France has earned the gratitude of the peoples of all those regions bordering on the Great Sahara. But the days of the caravan trade are numbered, for the telegraph wires which already stretch across the desert from the Mediterranean coast towns to the French outposts in the Congo, the Senegal, and the Sudan, are but forerunners to herald the coming of the iron horse.
France's path of colonial expansion in Africa has been remarkably free from obstructions, for, barring the Algerian campaign of 1830, and the German-created incidents in Morocco, she has acquired her vast domain—close on half the total area of the continent—at a [Pg 20] surprisingly low cost in money and lives. The only time, indeed, when her African ambitions received a serious setback was in 1898, at Fashoda (now known as Kodok), on the White Nile, when the French explorer, Major Marchand, yielded to the peremptory demand of Lord Kitchener and hauled down the tricolour which he had raised at that remote spot, thus losing to France the whole of the Western Sudan and the control of the head-waters of the Nile.
There is an interesting bit of secret diplomatic history in this connection. The story has been told me by both French and British officials—and there is good reason to believe that it is true—that the French Government had planned, in case Marchand was able to hold his position until reinforcements arrived, to divert the waters of the White Nile, at a point near its junction with the Sobat River, into the Sahara, an undertaking which, owing to the physical characteristics of that region, would, so the French engineers claimed, have been entirely feasible. France would thus have accomplished the twofold purpose of irrigating her desert territory and of turning Egypt into a desert by diverting her only supply of water; for this, remember, was in those bitter, jealous days before the Anglo-French entente . It was, indeed, the intelligence that the Khalifa proposed, by doing this very thing, to bring Egypt to her knees that caused the second Sudanese expedition to be pushed forward so rapidly. (I should add that the idea, once so popular in France, of turning the Sahara into an inland sea, has been proven impracticable, if not [Pg 21] impossible.) It is safe to say that England's prime reason for clinging so tenaciously, and at such heavy cost, to the arid tract known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, is to safeguard Egyptian prosperity by keeping control of the head-waters of the Nile. To illustrate how completely the Nile is the barometer of Egyptian prosperity, I might add that the last time I was in Khartoum the officials of the Sudanese Irrigation Service complained to me most bitterly that they were being seriously hampered in their work of desert reclamation by the restrictions placed upon the quantity of water which they were permitted to divert from the Nile, a comparatively small diversion from the upper reaches of the river causing wide-spread distress among the Egyptian agriculturists a thousand miles down-stream.
Because the map-makers from time beyond reckoning have seen fit to paint the northern half of the African continent a speckled yellow, most of us have been accustomed to look upon this region as an arid, sun-baked, worthless desert. But French explorers, French engineers, and French scientists have proved that it is very far from being worthless or past reclamation. M. Henri Schirmer, the latest and most careful student of its problems, says: “The sterility of the Sahara is due neither to the form of the land nor to its nature. The alluvium of sand, chalk, and gypsum which covers the Algerian Sahara constitutes equally the soil of the most fertile plains in the world. What causes the misery of one and the wealth of the other is the absence or the presence of water.” Now, an extensive series [Pg 22] of experiments has proven that the Sahara, like the Great American Desert, has an ample supply of underground water, which in many cases has been reached at a depth of only forty feet. There is, incidentally, hardly a desert where the experiment has been tried, whether in Asia, Africa, or America, where water has not been found within two thousand feet of the surface. Though usually not sufficient for agriculture, enough has generally been found to afford a supply for cattle, railroads, and mines. Three striking examples of what can be accomplished by scientific well-drilling in arid lands are the great wells of the Salton Desert, the flowing wells at Benson, Arizona, and a supply of seven hundred thousand gallons of water a day from the deep wells on the mesa at El Paso, each of these supplies of water being obtained from localities which were superficially hopelessly dry.
It should be borne in mind, in any discussion of North Africa, that until the early '80's the Great American Desert was as primitive, waterless, and sparsely settled a region as the Sahara. Its scattered inhabitants practised irrigation and agriculture very much as the people of southern Algeria and Tunisia do to-day, and, like them, they constructed buildings of unburnt brick and stone. Though the Indian was able to find a meagre sustenance upon the American desert, just as the Arab does upon the African, it was of a kind upon which the white man could not well exist. The unconquered Apaches plundered wagon-trains and mail-coaches just as the Tuareg occasionally plunders the [Pg 23] Saharan trade caravans to-day, and the only white men were the soldiers at scattered and lonely posts or desperadoes flying from the law. There is, indeed, a striking similarity between the conditions which prevail to-day along France's African borders and those which existed within the memories of most of us upon our own frontier.
Then the railways came to the American West, just as they are coming to North Africa to-day, and the desert was awakened from its lethargy of centuries by the shriek of the locomotive. The first railroads to be constructed were designed primarily as highways between the Atlantic and the Pacific seaboards, with hardly a thought of revenue from the desert itself. But hard on the heels of the railway-builders followed the miners and the cattlemen, so that to-day the iron highway across the desert is bordered by prosperous cities and villages, by mines and oil-derricks and ranches and white farm-houses with green blinds, this one-time arid region, which the wiseheads of thirty years ago pronounced worthless, now yielding a wealth twice as much per capita as that of any other portion of the United States.
What has already been accomplished in the American desert, French brains, French energy, and French machinery are fast accomplishing in the Sahara. Thanks to the recent invention, by a non-commissioned officer of France's African forces, of a six-wheeled motor-sledge driven by a light but powerful aeroplane engine, the problem of rapid communication in these desert [Pg 24] regions, which have hitherto been impassable to any kind of animal or mechanical traction, has been solved. As the new vehicle has proved itself capable of maintaining a speed over sand dunes of twenty miles an hour, it promises to be of invaluable assistance to the French in their work of opening up the waste places. Not only have French expeditions explored and charted the whole of the unknown regions, but they have thoroughly investigated the commercial possibilities of the immense territories which have recently come under their control. These investigations have shown that the Sahara is very far from being the sandy plain, flat as a billiard-table, which the pictures and descriptions in our school geographies led us to believe, and which the reports of those superficial travellers who had only journeyed into the desert as far as Biskra, in Algeria, or Ghadames, in Tripolitania, confirmed, but is, on the contrary, of a remarkably varied surface, here rising into plateaus like those of Tibesti and Ahaggar, there crossed by chains of large and fertile oases, and again broken into mountain ranges, with peaks eight thousand feet high, greater than the Alleghanies and very nearly as great as the Sierra Nevadas.
An oasis, by the way, does not necessarily consist, as the reading public seems to believe, of a clump of palm-trees beside a brackish well, many of them being great stretches of well-watered and cultivated soil, sometimes many square miles in extent, and rich in fig, pomegranate, orange, apricot, and olive trees. The oasis of Kaouer, for example, with its one hundred thousand [Pg 25] date-palms, furnishes subsistence for the inhabitants of a score of straggling villages, with their camels, flocks, and herds. There are said to be four million date-palms in the oases of the Algerian Sahara alone, and to cut down one of them is considered as much of a crime as arson is in a great city, for its fruit is a sufficient food, from its leaves a shelter can be made which will keep out sun and wind and rain, and its shade protects life and cultivation. Many date plantations and even vineyards have flourished for several years past in southernmost Algeria by means of water from below the surface, while the chief of the French geodetic survey recently announced that a tract in the very heart of the Sahara, nine degrees in longitude by twelve degrees in latitude, is already sufficiently watered for the raising of grain. The reports of these expeditions and commissions bear with painstaking thoroughness on the productivity of the soil, the suitability of the climate, the existence and accessibility of forest wealth, the presence and probable extent of mineral veins, and on transportation by road, rail, and river over all that huge territory which comprises France's African empire.
The story of French success in the exploration, the civilisation, the administration, and the exploitation of Africa is one of the wonder-tales of history. That she has relied on the resources of science rather than on those of militarism makes her achievement the more remarkable, for where England's possessions have largely been gained by punitive expeditions, France has won hers by pacific penetration. Look at Senegambia [Pg 26] as it is now under French rule, and compare its condition with what it was as Mungo Park describes it at the end of the eighteenth century; contrast the modernised Dahomey of to-day, with its railways, schools, and hospitals, with the blood-soaked, cannibal country of the early '60's; remember that Algeria has doubled in population since the last Dey, by striking the French consul with his fan, turned his country into a French department—and you will have a bird's-eye view, as it were, of what the French have accomplished in the colonising field.
If French Africa becomes in time a rich and prosperous dominion—and I firmly believe that it will—it is to her patient and intrepid pioneers of civilisation—-desert patrols, railway-builders, well-drillers, school-teachers, commercial investigators—that the thanks of the nation will be due; for they are pointing the way to millions of natives, on whose activities and necessities the commercial development of Africa must eventually depend. So I trust that those at home in France will give all honour to the men at work in the Sahara, the Senegal, and the Sudan or rotting in the weed-grown, snake-infested cemeteries of the Congo and Somaliland; men whose battles have been fought out in steaming jungles or on lonely oases, far away from home and friends and often from another white man's help and sympathy; sometimes with savage desert raiders, or in action against Hausa, Berber, or Moor; but oftenest of all with an unseen and deadlier foe—the dread African fever.
Perhaps the strangest city in the world. The dwellings, known as rhorfas, are built in the form of horseshoes to keep out thieves.
Photograph by Soler, Tunis.
THE PASSING OF THE PEACOCK'S TAIL
AN unaccustomed silence hung over the labyrinth of court-yards, corridors, gardens, mosques, and kiosks which compose the imperial palace in Fez. The chatter of the harem women was hushed; the white-robed officials of the household slipped through the mosaic-paved passages like melancholy ghosts; even the slovenly sentries at the gates, their red tunics over their heads to protect them from the sun, seemed to tread more softly, as though some great one lay dying. Within the palace, in a room whose furnishings were a strange jumble of Oriental taste and European tawdriness, a group of men stood about a table. Certain of them were tall and sinewy and swarthy, their white burnooses, which enveloped them from their snowy turbans to their yellow slippers, marking them unmistakably as Moors. Of the others, whose clearer skins showed them to be Europeans, some wore the sky-blue tunics and scarlet breeches of the chasseurs d'Afrique , some the braided jackets and baggy trousers of the tirailleur regiments, some the simple white linen of the civil administration, while across the chest of one, a grizzled man with the épaulettes of a general of division, slanted a broad scarlet ribbon. At the table sat an old-young man, a man with an aquiline, [Pg 28] high-bred nose, a wonderfully clear, olive skin, and a fringe of scraggy beard along the line of his chin, a man with a weak mouth and sensual lips and heavy-lidded, melancholy eyes. The man with the scarlet ribbon unrolled a parchment and, bowing, spread it upon the table. One of the native dignitaries, with a gesture of reverence which included heart and lips and head, dipped a quill pen into an ink-well and tendered it to the silent figure at the table. “Your Majesty will have the goodness to sign here?” said the soldier, half-questioningly, half-commandingly, as he indicated the place with his finger. The man at the table gravely inclined his head, reached for the pen, hesitated for a moment, then slowly began to trace, from right to left, the strange Arabic signature. “Inshallah! It is done!” he said, and throwing down the pen he sunk his face into his hands. “Vive la France!” said the general solemnly, and “Vive la France!” echoed the officers around him. Well might the one lament and the others rejoice, for, with the final flourish of the Sultan's pen, Morocco had ceased to exist as an independent nation and France had added an empire to her dominions.
“The world is a peacock,” says a Moorish proverb, “and Morocco is the tail of it.” Now, however, it has become the tail of the Gallic cock, for when, on March the thirtieth, 1912, Sultan Mulai-abd-el-Hafid signed the treaty establishing a French protectorate over his country, Morocco entered upon a new phase of its existence. With that act there ended, let us hope for all time, a situation which on more than one occasion [Pg 29] has threatened the peace of the world. Not since the English landed in Egypt a third of a century ago has an event occurred which so vitally concerns the future welfare of Africa; not since the Treaty of Tilsit has France won so decisive a diplomatic victory or added so materially to her territorial possessions. By the signing of that treaty France laid the final stone in the mighty colonial structure which she has built up in Africa, and opened to Christianity, civilisation, and commerce the door of a region which has hitherto been a synonym for mystery, cruelty, intolerance, and fanaticism.
Though scarcely forty hours of travel by train and boat separate the departure platform at the Quai d'Orsay station in Paris from the landing-beach at Tangier, though its coast is skirted by the tens of thousands of American tourists who visit the Mediterranean each year, less is known of Morocco than of many regions in central Asia or inner Africa. Though a few daring travellers have made scattering crow's-feet upon its map, there are regions as large as all our New England States put together which are wholly unexplored. It is almost the last of the unknown countries. As its women draw their veils to hide their faces from the men, so the Moors have attempted to draw a veil of mystery and intolerance over the face of their country to hide it from the stranger. What strange tribes, what ruins of an earlier civilisation, what wealth in forests or minerals lie behind its ranges can only be conjectured. Its maps are still without the names of rivers and mountains and [Pg 30] towns—though the rivers and mountains and towns are there; the sole means of travel are on camels, mules, or donkeys along the wild, worn paths, it being the only country of any size in the world which cannot boast so much as a mile of railway; its ports and the two highways leading from the coast to its capitals, Fez and Morocco City, were, until the coming of the French, alone open to the traveller—and none too safe at that; the foreigner who has the hardihood to stray from the frequented paths is taking his life in his hands. Few of the maps of Morocco are, so far as accuracy is concerned, worth the paper they are printed on, being largely based on unscientific material eked out by probabilities and conjectures, there being less accurate information, in fact, about a country larger than France, and only two days' journey from Trafalgar Square, than there is about Abyssinia or Borneo or Uganda. Even the names which we have given to the country and its inhabitants are purely European terms and are neither used nor recognised by the people themselves, who call their country El Moghreb el Aska , which means literally “Sunset Land,” the term Morocco being a European corruption of the name of one of its capitals, Marrakesh, or, as it is known to foreigners, Morocco City. A land almost as large as the State of Texas, with snow-capped mountain ranges, navigable rivers, vast forests, a fertile soil, an abundant water supply, and an ideal climate; a land of walled cities and white villages, of domed mosques and slender minarets, of veiled women and savage, turbaned men; a land of strange peoples and [Pg 31] still stranger customs; a land of mystery and fatalism, of suspicion and fanaticism, of cruelty and corruption, of confusion and contradiction—that is Morocco, where, as an Arabic writer has put it, a wise man is surprised at nothing that he sees and believes nothing that he hears.
This empire which has come under the shadow of the tricolour is, above all else, a white man's country. Unlike India and Tripolitania and Rhodesia and the Sudan, Morocco is a country which is admirably adapted for European colonisation, being blessed with every natural advantage that creation has to offer. Its only objectionable feature is its people. Lying at the western gateway of the Mediterranean, where the narrowed sea has so often proved a temptation to invasion, its Atlantic ports within striking distance of the great lanes of commerce between Europe and South America and South Africa, Morocco occupies a position of enormous strategic, political, and commercial importance. The backbone of the country is the Great Atlas, which, taken as a whole, has a higher mean elevation than that of any other range of equal length in Europe, Africa, or western Asia, attaining in places an elevation of nearly fifteen thousand feet. Snow-clad, this mighty and isolated wall rises so abruptly from the plain that it needs but little stretch of the imagination to understand how the ancients believed that on it rested the heavens—whence, indeed, its name. Personally, the thing that surprised me most in Morocco was the total absence of desert. Either because of its proximity to the Sahara, [Pg 32] or because of its camels, or the two combined, I went to Morocco expecting that I should find vast stretches of sun-baked, yellow sand. As a matter of fact, I found nothing of the kind. Traversed from east to west, as I have already said, by the strongly defined range of the Atlas, the greater part of its surface is really occupied by rolling prairies, diversified by low hills, and not at all unlike Ohio and Indiana. Though admirably adapted to the growing of cereals, the strict prohibition against the exportation of grain has naturally resulted in discouraging the native farmers, so that immense tracts of fertile land remain uncultivated. The alluvial soil, which is remarkable for its richness, frequently reaches a depth of fifteen feet and could be brought to an almost incredible degree of productiveness by the application of modern agricultural methods. What greater praise can be given to any soil than to say that it will bear three crops of potatoes in a single year and that corn is commonly sown and reaped all within the space of forty days?
Unlike its neighbouring countries, Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripolitania, Morocco does not lack for navigable waterways, for it possesses several large rivers which could be navigated for hundreds of miles inland, though at present, owing to the apathy of the inhabitants, and the unsettled condition of the regions along their banks, they are used for neither traffic nor irrigation. The chief of these is the Muluya, which, with its tributary the Sharef, provides northeastern Morocco with a valuable commercial waterway for a distance of [Pg 33] more than four hundred miles. The most important river of northwest Morocco is the Sebu, which empties into the Atlantic, while in the central and western districts the Kus, the Bu-Regreg, the Sus, and the Assaka will, under the new régime, prove invaluable as means of opening up the country.
A very large number of people seem to be under the impression that Morocco is unhealthy and suffers from a sweltering heat. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The climate is, as a matter of fact, extremely healthful, malaria, the scourge of the other countries of North Africa, being unknown. In the regions lying between the central range of the Atlas and the sea the thermometer seldom rises above ninety degrees or falls below forty degrees, the mountain wall serving as a protection from the scorching winds of the Sahara. During the winter months the rains are so heavy and frequent along the Atlantic coast that good pasturage is found as far south as Cape Juby, while in the interior the rivers frequently become so swollen that travel is both difficult and dangerous. The unpleasantness of the rains (and you don't know what discomfort is, my friends, until you have journeyed in Morocco during the rainy season) is more than compensated for by the beauties of the spring landscape. For mile after mile I have ridden across meadows literally carpeted with wild flowers, whose varied and brilliant colours, combined with the peculiar fashion in which each species confined itself to its own area, gave the countryside the appearance of a vast floral mosaic. After seeing these [Pg 34] gorgeous natural combinations of colour—dark blue, yellow, white, and scarlet, iris, marigolds, lilies, and poppies—I no longer wondered where the Moors draw the inspiration for that chromatic art of which they left such marvellous examples in the cities of southern Spain.
Though the country has, unfortunately, become largely deforested—for what Moor would ever think of planting trees, which could only be of value to another generation?—a wealth of timber still remains in the more remote valleys of the Atlas, the pines and oaks often attaining enormous size. Though Spanish concessionaires are profitably working gold mines in the Riff country, and the great German firm of Mannesmann Brothers has acquired extensive iron-ore-bearing properties in the Sus, and though large deposits of silver, copper, lead, and antimony have been discovered at various points in the interior, the mineral wealth of Morocco is still a matter for speculation. It is not likely to remain so long, however, for history has shown that it is the miners who form the real advance-guard of civilisation.
To the stranger who confines his investigations to the highways which connect the capitals with the coast, Morocco gives the impression of being very sparsely settled. This is due to the fact that the natives take pains to avoid the highroads as they would the plague, the continual passage of troops and of travellers, all of whom practise the time-honoured custom of living on the country and never paying for what they take, having [Pg 35] had the natural result of driving the inhabitants into less travelled regions, though traders and others whose business takes them into the back country find that it is far more densely populated than most foreigners suspect. Heretofore it has been possible for almost any foreigner, by the judicious use of bakshish, to obtain from the authorities an official order which required the people living along the roads to supply food both for him and his escort and fodder for their horses. Now, this was a very serious tax, especially among a people as poverty-stricken as the Moorish peasantry, and as a result of it the heedless traveller often caused much misery and suffering. But if the occasional traveller proved so serious a burden, imagine what it meant to these poor people when the Sultan himself passed, for, able to move only with an army, without any commissariat or transport, and feeding itself as it went, he devastated the land of food and fodder as though he was an invader instead of a ruler, sweeping as ruthlessly across his empire as the Huns did across southern Europe, and leaving his subjects to starve. Is it any wonder, then, that the desperation of the wretched, half-starved peasantry has vented itself in repeated revolutions? The coming of the French is bound to change this deplorable and demoralising state of affairs, however, for, once assured of protection for their crops and justice for themselves, the fugitive country folk will quickly flock back and resume the cultivation of their abandoned lands.
One of the facts about Morocco that will probably [Pg 36] surprise most people—I know that it surprised me—is that the Berbers, who form fully two thirds of the population, are a purely white race, as white indeed, barring the tan which results from life under an African sun, as we ourselves. Though the generic term Moor is applied by Europeans to all the inhabitants of Morocco, there are really four distinct racial divisions of the population: the Berbers, who, being the earliest-known possessors of the land, are the genuine Moroccans, and are, when of unmixed blood, a very energetic and vigorous people, indeed; the Arabs, who are the descendants of the Mohammedan conquerors of the country and possess to the full the Arab characteristics of arrogance, indolence, and cruelty; the negroes, brought into the country as slaves from Central Africa in an influx extending over centuries, this admixture having resulted in deteriorating both the Berbers and the Arabs, the infusion of black blood showing itself in dark skins, thickened lips, low foreheads, sensual tastes, and a marked stupidity; and lastly, but by no means the least important, the ubiquitous, persecuted, and persecuting Jews. The Berbers dwell for the most part in the mountains, while the Arabs, on the contrary, are to be found only on the plains, it being the weak, sensual, and intolerant amalgam produced by the fusion of these two races, and tinctured with negro blood, which forms the population of the Moorish cities and to which the name “Moor” most properly belongs.
Between the Moor of the mountains and the Moor of the towns there is as wide a gulf as there is between [Pg 37] the natives of Vermont and the natives of Venezuela. The town Moor is sullen, suspicious of all strangers, vacillating; the pride, but none of the energy, of his ancestors remains. In his youth he is licentious in his acts; in his old age he is licentious in his thoughts. He is abominably lazy. He never runs if he can walk; he never walks if he can stand still; he never stands if he can sit; he never sits if he can lie down. The only thing he puts any energy into is his talking; he believes that nothing can be done really well without a hullabaloo. The men of the mountains are cast in a wholly different mould, however, from that of the men of the towns. Fierce enemies and stanch friends, they like fighting for fighting's sake. They are intelligent and industrious; though fonder of the sword and the pistol than of the plough and the hoe, their fertile mountain valleys are nevertheless fairly well cultivated. They are a hardy, warlike, and indomitable race and have never yet been conquered. It is well to remember in any discussion of these people that, through all the vicissitudes of their history, they have never before had the flag of another nation flying over them. All the successive invaders of North Africa have been confronted with the problem of subduing them, but always they have failed and have gone back. Not only that, but once the Moors went invading on their own account, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, conquering all southern Spain, holding it for five hundred years, and leaving behind them the architectural glories of Seville, of Cordova, and of Granada to tell the story. Unless I am very much mistaken, [Pg 38] therefore, it will cost France many lives and much money to make them amenable to her rule.
The decadence of the Moors is primarily due to two things: immorality and racial jealousies. They are probably the most licentious race, in both thought and act, in the world. Compared to them the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were positively prudish. This extreme moral degeneracy is in itself enough to ruin the sturdiest people, but, as though it was not sufficient, the two principal races, Arab and Berber, hate each other as the Armenian hates the Turk, this racial antagonism in itself making impossible the upbuilding of a strong and united nation. In fact, the only thing they have in common is their religion, which is the air they breathe, and which, though incapable of producing internal harmony, unites them in hostility to the unbeliever.
There is less public spirit in Morocco than in any place I know. No Moor takes the slightest interest in anything outside his personal affairs, and no one ever plans for the future—other than to hope that he will get a comfortable divan and his share of houris in Paradise. The last thing that would occur to a Moor would be to spend money on anything which will not bring him in an immediate profit, so that, as a consequence, trees are never planted, mines never worked, roads never made, bridges never built. He does not want civilisation. He does not believe in modern inventions or improvements. What was good enough for his father is good enough for him. Why lug in railways and [Pg 39] telegraphs, and similar contrivances of the devil, then, when things are good enough as they are?
There is no cause for the other European nations to envy France the obligations she assumed when she declared a protectorate over Morocco. She has a long and hilly road to travel before she can convert her latest acquisition into a national asset. Before Morocco can be thrown open to French settlers its savage and hostile population will have to be as effectually subdued as were the Indians of our own West. The tribes of southern Morocco are especially hostile to the French occupation, and many military experts believe that the protectorate will never be enforced in those regions without a long campaign and much shedding of blood, while one eminent French general has openly asserted that it will take at least a dozen years fully to subdue the country.
Personally, I am a firm believer in the future of Morocco and the Moors under the guidance and protection of France. I have seen too much of what France has accomplished in far less favoured regions, and under far more discouraging conditions, to think otherwise. Nothing illustrates the latent possibilities of the Moorish character better than an experiment which was made some years ago. At the request of the Sultan, the British minister to Morocco asked his government for permission to send a body of Moors to Gibraltar for the purpose of being instructed in British drill and discipline. The War Office acceding to the request, two hundred Moors, selected at random from various tribes throughout the empire, were sent to [Pg 40] Gibraltar and remained there for three years, the men being occasionally changed as they acquired a knowledge of drill. They had good clothing given them, slept in tents, and were allowed by the Sultan a shilling a day, receiving precisely the same treatment as British soldiers. During the three years they were stationed on the Rock, there were only two cases in the police court against them for dissolute conduct or disorder. The soldiers of what civilised nation could have made such a record? Colonel Cameron, under whose superintendence they were placed, reported that they learned the drill as quickly and as well as any Englishmen, and that they were sober, steady, and attentive to their duties. (The Moors, it should be remarked, are noted for their abstemiousness, the precepts of the Koran which forbid the use of spirits and tobacco being rigidly observed.) This tends to show that Moors, living under a just and humane government, and having, as these men had, proper provision made for their livelihood, are not a lawless or even a disorderly people, and that they are capable of being transformed, under such a form of government as France has established in Algeria and Tunisia, into the splendid warriors which their ancestors were in Spain. It was, as I think I have remarked in the preceding chapter, the knowledge that France, in acquiring Morocco, would obtain the material for a formidable addition to her military forces which was, it is generally believed, one of the motives that inspired Germany's persistent opposition to a French protectorate.
Though the reins of Moorish power are already firmly in the hands of the French Resident-General at Fez, there is no reason to believe that the French expect, for the present at least, to depose the Sultan, it being to their interests, for obvious reasons, to maintain the pleasant fiction that Morocco is still an independent empire to which they have disinterestedly lent their protection, In August, 1912, Sultan Mulai-abd-el-Hafid, appreciating the emptiness of his title under the French régime, abdicated in favour of his brother, Mulai Youssef, who is known to be friendly to France. The new Sultan, who is the seventeenth of the dynasty of the Alides and the thirty-seventh lineal descendant of Ali, uncle and son-in-law of the Prophet, is known to his subjects as Emir-el-Mumenin, or Prince of True Believers, and as such he exercises a spiritual influence over his subjects which the French are far too shrewd to disregard. The position of the Sultan of Morocco has, indeed, become strikingly similar to that of his fellow-ruler in the other corner of Africa, the Khedive of Egypt, for, like him, he must needs content himself henceforth with the shadow of power. Even if the imperial form of government is permanently maintained (and this I very much doubt, for it is characteristic of the Latin races—as Taine puts it—that they always want to occupy a “sharply defined and terminologically defensible position”), its real ruler will be the Resident-General of France, whose policies will be carried out by French advisers in every department of the government and whose orders will be backed up by French bayonets. [Pg 42] So long as Mulai Youssef is content meekly to play the part of a puppet, with French officials pulling the strings, he will be permitted to enjoy all the honours and comforts of royalty, but let him once give ear to sedition, let him make the slightest attempt to undermine the authority of the French régime, and he will find himself occupying a sentry-guarded villa in Algiers near the residences of the ex-Queen of Madagascar and the ex-King of Annam, those other Oriental rulers who thought to match themselves against the power of France.
The Sherifian umbrella, which is the Moorish equivalent of a crown, is hereditary in the family of the Filali Sherifs of Tafilelt. Each Sultan is supposed, prior to his death, to indicate the member of the imperial family who, according to his conscientious belief, will best replace him. This succession is, however, elective, and all members of the Sherifian family are eligible. It has generally happened that the late Sultan's nominee has been elected by public acclamation at noonday prayers the Friday after the Sultan's death, as the nominee generally has obtained possession of the imperial treasure and is supported by the body-guard, from whose ranks most of the court officials are appointed. I might add that all of the Moorish Sultans in recent years have been so extremely bad that no successor whom they could appoint, or who could appoint himself, could by any possibility be worse. The present Sultan knows scarcely half a dozen places in his whole empire, and has spent most of his life in two of them—Marrakesh and Fez—having held, up to the [Pg 43] time of his accession to the throne, the important post of Khalif of the latter city. The Moors never pray for their sovereign to journey among them, for, so disturbed has been the condition of the country for many years past, and so numerous have been the pretenders to the Sherifian throne, that recent Sultans have rarely ventured outside the walls of their capitals with less than thirty thousand followers behind them, so that when they had occasion to pass through the territory of a hostile tribe, as not infrequently happened, they fought their way through, leaving ruin and desolation behind them. Though both Mulai Youssef and his predecessors have always resided at one or the other of the two official capitals, the coast city of Tangier has heretofore been the real capital of Morocco. Here lived the diplomatic and consular representatives of the foreign powers and, with a cynical disregard for the Moorish Government and people, ran things between them. Though considerations of safety doubtless entered into the matter, the chief reason for making Tangier the diplomatic capital was the extreme inconvenience to the foreign legations of being obliged to follow the court in its periodical migrations from one capital to the other. Therefore the diplomatic folk remained comfortably in Tangier—which, incidentally, can readily be overawed by a war-ship's guns—and the Sultan appointed ministers to treat with them there and thus carry on the foreign business of the state. When questions of great importance had to be negotiated special missions were sent to the capital at which the Sultan happened to be [Pg 44] residing, the departure of these ambassadorial caravans, with their secretaries, attachés, kavasses, servants, and body-guards, not to mention the immense train of pack-mules and baggage camels, providing a spectacle quite as picturesque and entertaining as any circus procession. That feature of Moorish life disappeared with the coming of the French, however, for the foreign ministers will doubtless shortly be withdrawn; and hereafter, when any negotiations are to be conducted anent Morocco, instead of a diplomatic mission having to make a two-hundred-mile journey on horses or camels, the ambassador at Paris of the power in question will step into his motor-car and whirl over to the Ministry of the Colonies in the Rue Oudinot.
I know of nothing which gives so graphic an idea of the amazing conditions which have heretofore prevailed in Morocco, and to which the French are, thank Heaven, putting an end, as the speech which a former British minister, Sir John Drummond Hay, made some years ago to the reigning Sultan, and which was, probably, the most extraordinary address ever made by a diplomatic representative to a foreign ruler.
“Your Majesty has been so gracious as to ask me,” said Sir John, looking the despot squarely in the eye, “to express frankly my opinion of affairs in Morocco. The administration of the government in Morocco is the worst in the world. The government is like a community of fishes; the giant fish feed upon those that are small, the smaller upon the least, and these again feed upon the worms. In like manner the vizier and other [Pg 45] dignitaries of the court, who receive no salaries, depend for their livelihood upon peculation, trickery, corruption, and the money they extract from the governors of provinces. The governors are likewise enriched through peculation from tithes and taxes, and extortion from sheikhs, wealthy farmers, and traders. A Moor who becomes rich is treated as a criminal. Neither life nor property is secure. Sheikhs and other subordinate officials subsist on what they can extort from the farmers and the peasantry. Then again, even the jailers are not paid; they gain their livelihood by taking money from prisoners, who, when they are paupers, are taught to make baskets, which are sold by the jailers for their own benefit. How can a country, how can a people, prosper under such a government? The tribes are in a constant state of rebellion against their governors. When the Sultan resides in his northern capital of Fez, the southern tribes rebel, and when he marches south to the city of Morocco, eating up the rebels and confiscating their property, the northern tribes rebel. The armies of the Sultan, like locusts, are constantly on the move, ravaging the country to quell the revolts. Agriculture is destroyed, the farmers and peasantry only grow sufficient grain for their own requirements, and rich lands are allowed to lie fallow because the farmers know the crops would be plundered by the governors and sheikhs. Thus it happens with cattle and horses. Breeding is checked, since the man who may become rich through his industry is treated as a criminal and all his possessions [Pg 46] are taken from him, as in the fable the goose is killed to get the golden eggs.”
France, in pursuing her Moroccan adventure, will do well to bear in mind two danger-spots: the Riff and the Sus. Unless she treads carefully in the first she is likely to become embroiled in a quarrel with Spain; with the natives of the Sus she will probably have trouble whether she treads lightly or not. Sooner or later France is bound to come into collision with Spain, for, with Morocco avowedly a French protectorate, I fail to see how she can tolerate Spanish soldiers on its soil. Spain, basing her pretensions on her expulsion of the Moors from Granada in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, has always considered herself one of the heirs of Morocco. In fact, a secret treaty was signed between France and Spain in 1905 which distinctly defined the respective spheres of influence of the two powers in that country. By the terms of this treaty Spain was acknowledged to have predominating interests in those regions adjacent to the ports of Ceuta, Melilla, and El Araish, as well as in the Riff, a little-known and exceedingly mountainous district, believed to be rich in minerals, which lies in the northwestern corner of the empire, two days' journey eastward from Tetuan. Spain distinctly engaged not to take any action in the zone thus allotted to her other than to proceed with its commercial exploitation, but it was stipulated that, should the weakness of the Sherifian government make the maintenance of the status quo impossible, she should have a free hand in her sphere.
France, meanwhile, steadily continued her “pacific penetration” of Morocco, pushing her Algerian railways closer and closer to Morocco's eastern frontier, mobilising troops at strategic points, and overrunning the Sultan's dominions with “scientific” expeditions and secret agents. Spain soon began to regard with envy and impatience the subtle game which the French were so successfully playing, but it was not until 1910 that she found the opportunity and the excuse for which she had been eagerly waiting. Some Spanish labourers, who were working on a railway which was being laid from Melilla to some mines a few miles distant, were attacked by Riffian tribesmen and a number of the Spaniards were killed. Spain jumped at the opportunity which this incident afforded as a hungry trout jumps at a fly, and a few days later a Spanish army was being disembarked on Moroccan soil. A sharp campaign ensued which ended in the temporary subjugation of the Riffians and the occupation by Spain of a considerable tract of territory extending from Ceuta eastward to Cabo del Agua and southward as far as Seluan, thus comprising practically all of Morocco's Mediterranean seaboard. A Moorish envoy was sent to Madrid and, after protracted negotiations, a convention was signed which permitted Spain to establish a force of Moorish gendarmerie, under Spanish officers, at Melilla, Aljucemas, and Ceuta, for the maintenance of order in the districts near those places. Until this force has shown itself capable of maintaining order, the Spaniards assert that they will remain in occupation of the territory they [Pg 48] now hold. Emboldened by her success in this adventure, and greedy for further expansion, Spain, in June, 1911, sent a vessel to El Araish (Laraiche) on the Atlantic coast, and a column was despatched from there to Alcázar, which lies some twenty miles inland. The region was apparently perfectly calm at the time, and the reasons given by Spain for her action—that mysterious horsemen had been seen upon the walls of Alcázar—appeared, in France at least, to be mere pretensions and raised a storm of indignation. As things now stand, France has proclaimed a definite protectorate over the whole of Morocco, an arrangement to which the Sultan has consented. Despite that proclamation, however, Spain continues to occupy a rich and extensive district of the country with an army of forty thousand men. By what means France will attempt to oust her—for oust her she certainly will—is an interesting subject for speculation and one which is giving both French and Spanish diplomats many sleepless nights.
A word, in passing, upon the region known as the Riff. It is more discussed and less known than any other quarter of Morocco. Nothing has been written upon it except from hearsay and no European has penetrated across its length and breadth, and this although it is but two days' ride on horseback from Tetuan. Situated in the very heart of the Great Atlas range, and accessible only through narrow passes and over rough mountain trails, this region has, from time beyond reckoning, been the home and the refuge of that savage and mysterious clan known as the Riffs. Their feudal chieftains [Pg 49] live in great castles built of stone and lead much the same lives as did the European nobles of the Middle Ages. The passes giving access to the Riff are commanded by hilltop forts impregnable to anything short of modern artillery—and to get within range of them the artillery would need to have wings. They are a people rich in possibilities, are these Riffs, and one whom it is wiser to conciliate than to fight, as France will doubtless sooner or later learn. Brigands by nature, farmers in a small way by occupation, disciples of the vendetta, scorners of the law, suspicious of strangers, their only courts the gun and dagger, the Riffs have more in common with the mountaineers of the Blue Ridge than any people that I know. They have nothing in common with the other inhabitants of Morocco except their dress, wearing the universal brown hooded jellab and over it the toga-like white woollen haik , a skull-cap of red or brown, a belt with pouches of gaily coloured leather, and in it, always, a muzzle-loading pistol and the vicious curved knife, while over the shoulder slants the ten-foot-long Riff rifle, coral-studded, brass-bound, ivory-butted, and almost as dangerous to the man behind it as to the one in front. The Riffs are fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and quite frequently red-haired, and claim to be descended from the Romans, which is no unreasonable assumption on their part, as the Romans were adventuring in Morocco—they called it Mauritania—long before Cæsar's day.
The other danger-point in Morocco is the Sus, a “forbidden” and unknown country through which only [Pg 50] a handful of European travellers have ever passed, all in disguise and all in peril of their lives. The Sus is the rich and fertile valley lying between the Great Atlas and the Anti Atlas, and touching the Atlantic coast at Agadir. It is said to be thickly populated; it is believed to contain rich mines; it is fanatical to the last degree. Its Berber inhabitants, who are separated from the Arabs of the surrounding regions by a totally distinct language known as the Tamazight , or Tongue of the Free, though acknowledging the religious supremacy of the reigning Sultan, have always maintained a semi-independence, having never submitted to Moorish rule nor paid tax nor tribute to the government of Morocco. Twice within the last three or four decades Moorish Sultans have invaded and attempted to conquer the Sus, but each time they have been driven back across the Atlas. The origin of the people of this region is lost in the mists of antiquity. According to the Koran its original inhabitants were natives of Syria, where they proved themselves such undesirable citizens that King David ordered them to be tied up in sacks and carried out of the country on camels, since he wished to see their faces no more. Arrived in the vicinity of the Atlas Mountains, the leader of the caravan called out in the Berber tongue “ Sus! ” which means “Let down! Empty out!” So the exiled undesirables were dumped unceremoniously out of their sacks, and the country in which they found themselves, and where they settled, is called the Sus to this day. The people of the Sus have never liked the French, and [Pg 51] there is little doubt that they will oppose any attempt to treat them as a province of Morocco, and consequently subject to French control. It is obvious that France will sooner or later be obliged to send an expedition into the Sus for the purpose of asserting her power as well as to counteract the German influence which is rapidly gaining ground there, for the Sus, remember, is the region where Germany's interests in Morocco are centred and provided the excuse for sending her gun-boat to Agadir and almost provoking a European war thereby. Germany still retains her commercial interests in the Sus Valley, and France will be obliged to step gingerly indeed if she wishes to avoid stirring up still another affaire Marocaine .
If France accomplishes nothing more in Morocco than the extermination of the slave trade she will have performed a genuine service to humanity. Though slavery has been abolished in every other quarter of Africa, no attempt has ever been made by the European powers to put a check upon the practice in Morocco. Something over three thousand slaves, it is estimated, are imported into Morocco every year, most of them being brought by the terrible desert routes from Equatoria and the Sudan, the trails of the slave caravans being marked by the bleaching bones of the thousands who have died on the way from heat, hunger, or exhaustion. Many smug-faced people will assure you that slavery has been wiped out in Africa—praise be to the Lord!—but I can take you into half a dozen Moroccan cities and show you slaves being auctioned to the [Pg 52] highest bidder as openly as they were in our own South fifty years ago. There is a large and profitable demand for slaves, particularly girls and boys, in all of the Moroccan cities, a young negress having a market value of anywhere from eighty dollars to one hundred and twenty dollars. Although, as I have already remarked, the bulk of the slaves are driven across the Sahara by the time-honoured method, exceptionally pretty girls are often brought from West African ports in French vessels as passengers and disposed of to wealthy Moors by private sale. So great is the demand for young and attractive women that girls are occasionally stolen from Moorish villages, the slave-dealer laying a trail of sweets, of which the native women are inordinately fond, from the outskirts of the villages up to neighbouring clumps of trees, behind which he conceals himself, pouncing out upon his unsuspecting victims as they approach. If France succeeds in stamping out the slave trade in Morocco as effectually as she has in her other African possessions, she will prove herself, as our missionary friends would put it, the flail of the Lord.
Of all France's ambitious projects for the exploitation of North Africa in general, and the opening up of Morocco in particular, the one which most appeals to the imagination, and which, when executed, is likely to be of the greatest benefit to the world, is her astounding scheme for bringing South America a week nearer to Europe by means of a railway from Tangier, in Morocco, to Dakar, in Senegal. The route, as at present planned, would run from Tangier, via Fez, to Tuat. [Pg 53] From Tuat the Sahara would be crossed and the Niger gained at Timbuktu. Though about three hundred miles of this section would lie through the most hopeless desert country, it presents no great obstacle to engineers, the Sudanese line from Wady Halfa to Khartoum proving how easily the difficulties of desert construction and lack of water can be overcome. The third section would be from Timbuktu to Dakar, where the French within the last few years have created a magnificent naval port and commercial harbour. Already Timbuktu and Dakar are in regular communication by a mixed steamer and railway service, the journey taking, when the Senegal is in flood, but five days. As such a system would have, of necessity, to be independent of the Niger and Senegal river services, which are not always reliable, a line is now under construction which will bring Timbuktu into direct rail communication with Dakar, thus eliminating the difficulties and uncertainties of river navigation. From Dakar to Pernambuco, in Brazil, is less than fifteen hundred miles, which could be covered by a fast steamer in three days. There are already regular sailings between these ports, but with the completion of this trans-African system (and, believe me, it is far from being as chimerical as it sounds, for the French do not let the grass grow under their feet when they once get a clear right of way for railway-building) ocean greyhounds will be placed in service between Dakar and the South American ports, it being estimated that the traveller who purchases his ticket via Madrid, Gibraltar, and then over the [Pg 54] Moroccan-Saharan system, can journey from Paris to Rio de Janeiro in twelve days. It is obvious that in some such scheme as this lies the future of the French Sahara, as well as the enormously increased prosperity of the Moroccan hinterland and of the Niger-Senegal possessions, for it was just such a transcontinental line, remember, which brought population and prosperity to the desert regions of our own West.
It is no light task to which France has pledged herself in agreeing to effect the regeneration of an empire so decrepit and decadent as Morocco, but that she will accomplish it is as certain as that the leaves come with the spring. The changes which the coming of the French will effect in Morocco stretch the imagination almost to the breaking-point. Already the wireless crackles and splutters from a mast erected over the French Residency in Fez. With the proclamation of the protectorate the waiting railway-builders jumped their rail-heads across the Moroccan border as homesteaders, hearing the signal gun, jump their horses over the border of newly opened lands. Two or three years more and the traveller will be able to purchase through tickets to Fez and Marrakesh as easily as he can now to San Francisco or Milan. At Tangier, Rabat, El Araish, Mogador, and Agadir harbours will be dredged, break-waters built, and wharves constructed, while the filthy, foul-smelling cities will be made as clean and sanitary as Tunis and Algiers. Under French control Tangier, with its ideal climate, its picturesque features, and its splendid situation, will rival Cairo and the Riviera as [Pg 55] a fashionable winter resort. The Moorish peasantry will be permitted to till their farms in peace, undisturbed by devastating armies, while the warlike Riffs can have their fill of fighting in French uniforms and under the French flag. This is no empty vision, remember. Peace, progress, and prosperity are bound to come to Morocco, just as they have come to those other African regions upon which the Frenchman has set his hand. Just how soon they come depends largely upon the Moors themselves.
SIRENS OF THE SANDS
ZORAH-BEN-ABDALLAH was a perilously pretty girl, judged by any standard that you please. She was unveiled—a strange thing for an Eastern woman—and the clearness of her café-au-lait complexion was emphasised by carmine lips and by blue-black hair, bewilderingly becoiffed and bewitchingly bejewelled; her eyes Scherazade would have envied. She was leaning from the window of a second-class compartment in the ramshackle train which plies between Constantine and Biskra and was quite openly admiring the very tight light-blue tunic and the very loose scarlet riding-breeches of my companion, a young officer of chasseurs d'Afrique who was rejoining his regiment at El-Kantara.
“She's a handsome girl,” said I.
“Not for an Ouled-Naïl,” said he, adjusting his monocle and staring at her critically, very much as though he were appraising a horse. “An Ouled-Naïl's face is her fortune, you know, and in the Ziban, where they come from, she wouldn't get a second look.”
“She would get several second looks on Broadway,” said I, taking another one myself. “I once travelled twelve thousand miles to see some women not half as pretty.”
That is why I went to the Ziban, that strange and almost unknown zone of oasis-dotted steppes in southernmost Algeria. Hemmed in between the Atlas Mountains and the Great Sahara, it forms the real Algerian hinterland, a region vastly different in people, manners, and customs from either the desert or the littoral. Here, in this fertile borderland, where the red tarbooshes and baggy trousers of the French outposts are the sole signs of civilisation, is the home of the Ouled-Naïls, that curious race, neither Arab, Berber, nor Moor, the beauty of whose dusky, daring daughters is a staple topic of conversation in every harem and native coffee-house between the Pyramids and the Pillars of Hercules.
Rather than that you should be scandalised later on, it would be well for you to understand in the beginning that the women of the Ouled-Naïl are, so far as morality is concerned, as easy as an old shoe. It comes as something of a shock, after seeing these petite and pretty and indescribably picturesque women on their native heath, or rather on their native sands, to learn that from earliest childhood they are trained for a life of indifferent virtue very much as a horse is trained for the show-ring. But it is one of those conditions of African life which must be accepted by the traveller, just as he accepts as a matter of course the heat and the insects and the dirt.
Breaking home ties almost before they have entered their teens, they make their way to Biskra, to Constantine, and to Algiers, yes, and to Tripoli on the east and to Tangier on the west, dancing in the native [Pg 58] coffee-houses or in the harems of the rich and not infrequently earning considerable sums thereby. The Ouled-Naïl promptly converts all of her earnings that she can spare into gold, linking these gold pieces together into a sort of breastplate, not at all unlike that jingling, glittering affair which Mary Garden wears in her portrayal of Salome . When this golden garment becomes long enough to reach from her slender, supple neck to her still more supple waist, the Ouled-Naïl retires from business, returns to the tents of her people in the edge of the Great Sands, hides her pretty face behind the veil common to all respectable Moslem women, and, setting her daintily slippered feet on the straight and narrow path of virtue, leads a strictly moral life ever after.
The peculiar dances of the Ouled-Naïls demand many years of arduous and constant practice. A girl is scarcely out of her cradle before, under the tutelage of her mother, who has herself been a danseuse in her time, she begins the inconceivably severe course of gymnastics and muscle training which is the foundation of their strange and suggestive dances. From infancy until, scarcely in her teens, she bids farewell to the tent life of the desert and sets out to make her fortune in the cities along the African littoral, she is as carefully groomed and trained as a colt entered at the county fair. Morning, noon, and night, day after day, year after year, the muscles of her chest, her back, her hips, and her abdomen are developed and trained and suppled until they will respond to her wishes as readily as [Pg 59] her slender, henna-stained fingers. Her lustrous, blue-black hair is brushed and combed and oiled and brushed again; she is taught to play the hautboy, the zither, and the flute and to sing the weird and plaintive songs the Arab loves; to make the thick, black native coffee and with inimitable dexterity to roll a cigarette. By the time she is thirteen she is ready to make her début in the dance-hall of some Algerian town, whence, after three or four or possibly five years of a life of indifferent virtue, she returns, a-clank with gold pieces, to the tented village from which she came, to marry some sheikh or camel-dealer and to bear him children, who, if they are boys, will don the white turban and scarlet burnoose of the Spahis and serve in the armies of France, or, if they are girls, will live the life of their mother all over again. It will be seen, therefore, that the profession is an hereditary one, which all the women of the tribe pursue without incurring, so far as I could learn, a hint of scandal or a trace of shame. It is a queer business, and one to which no other country, so far as I am aware, offers a parallel, for whereas the geishas of Japan, the nautches of India, and the odalisques of Turkey are but classes, the Ouled-Naïls are a race, as distinct in features, language, and customs as the Bedouin, the Nubian, or the Jew.
That the men of the Ouled-Naïl (which, by the way, is pronounced as though the last syllable were spelled “Nile”) look upon the lives led by their sisters, daughters, and sweethearts with much the same toleration and approval that an up-State farmer shows for the [Pg 60] village maid who goes to the city to earn a living as a waitress, a stenographer, or a shop-girl, is proved by a little incident which Mr. S. H. Leeder, the English author-traveller, tells of having once witnessed on the station-platform at Biskra. A tall young tribesman of the Ouled-Naïl, the son of a sheikh of some importance, was leaving Biskra, to which town he had been paying a short visit with his mother. He was taking back with him one of his countrywomen, a dancing-girl named Kadra, who had been a resident in the Rue Sainte, as Biskra's Tenderloin is known, for two or three years, and was quite celebrated for her beauty, with the intention of marrying her. Here was this girl, after such an amazing episode in her career, quietly dressed, veiled to the eyes, and carefully chaperoned by the prospective bridegroom's mother, returning to assume a position of rank and consideration among her own people, while several of her late companions, tears of sorrow at the parting pouring down their unveiled and painted faces, clung to and caressed her with every sign of childlike affection. And such marriages, I have been assured by French officials, are not the exception but the rule in the Ziban. Never was the truth brought home to me more sharply that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” than in the land of the Ouled-Naïls, where, unlike our own, it is never too late to mend; not even for a woman.
Barring the two who appeared in the production of “The Garden of Allah,” the only genuine Ouled-Naïls ever seen in the United States were those who, [Pg 61] owing to the enterprise of some far-seeing showman, were responsible for introducing that orgy of suggestiveness known as the danse du ventre to the American public at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, a dance which, thanks to numerous but unskilled imitators, French, Egyptian, and Syrian, spread from ocean to ocean under the vulgar but descriptive nickname of “the houchee-kouchee.” As a matter of fact, the danse du ventre , as seen in the questionable resorts of our own country, has about as much in common with the real dance of the desert people, as performed on a silken carpet spread before the tent of some nomad sheikh, as the so-called “Spanish fandango” of the vaudeville stage has with the inimitably beautiful and difficult dances to be seen at Señor Otero's dancing-academy in Seville. The dance of the Ouled-Naïls is the very essence of Oriental depravity. It is the dance of the pasha's harem; it is the dance of those native cafés which the European tourists are always so eager to visit; it is the dance which every little girl of the tribe is taught—long years before she knows its meaning.
Depraved though they are, the Ouled-Naïls never depart in their dress from that which would be considered perfectly proper and respectable even by Mr. Anthony Comstock. The painters of every country seem to have taken a peculiar delight in depicting Arab dancing-girls as conspicuously shy of clothing, but, picturesqueness aside, the décolleté gown of an American woman would embarrass and shock these daughters of the sands as much as it would all Moslems, for though [Pg 62] they may be somewhat lacking in morals they are never lacking in clothes. The women of the Ouled-Naïl are considerably below the medium height and, owing to the peculiar fashion in which their gaudy-hued tarlatan skirts are bunched out around the waist and are shortened to display their trim ankles and massive silver anklets, they appear even smaller than they really are. Their hands and feet are small and wonderfully perfect—if one is able to overlook the nails stained crimson with henna; arched eyebrows meet over eyes as big and lustrous and melting as those of a gazelle; while their wonderful blue-black hair, plaited into ropes and heavily bejewelled—whether the “jewels” are genuine or not is no great matter—is brought down over the ears in the fashion which made Cléo de Mérode famous.
But the really distinguishing feature of the Ouled-Naïl's costume is her jewelry. She has so much of it, in fact, that there is no gold to be had in Algeria. Ask for napoleons instead of paper money at your bank in Algiers and you will meet with a prompt
“Impossible, m'sieur.”
“But why is it impossible?” you ask.
“Because we have no gold, m'sieur,” is the polite response.
“Where is it, then?” you inquire, scenting a robbery or an anticipated run on the bank.
“On the Ouled-Naïls, m'sieur,” the cashier courteously replies.
And he speaks the literal truth. Every centime that a dancing-girl can beg, borrow, or earn goes toward [Pg 63] the purchase of massive silver jewelry, anklets, bracelets, and the like, and these in turn are exchanged for gold pieces—whether French napoleons, English sovereigns, or Turkish liras she is not at all particular—which, linked together in that golden armour of which I have already spoken, envelops her lithe young body from neck to hips. When her portable wealth has attained to such dimensions it is usually the sign for the Ouled-Naïl to retire from business, going to her desert husband with her dowry about her neck.
When it is remembered that the native quarters of these towns in the edge of the Sahara are frequented by savage desert tribesmen who know little and care less about civilisation and the law, is it to be wondered at that time and time again these unprotected girls are done to death in the little rooms up the steep, dark stairs for the sake of the gold which they display so lavishly as part of their allurements? During my stay in one of these Algerian towns an Arab, stealthily coming up behind an Ouled-Naïl as she was returning one night from the dance-hall through the narrow, deserted streets, drove a knife between her shoulders and, snatching the little fortune which hung about her neck, fled with it into the desert. But the arm of the French law is very long, reaching even across the sand wastes of the Great Sahara, and months later, when he thought all search for him had been abandoned, the fugitive felt its grasp as he sat, cross-legged, in the distant bazaars of Wadai. After that came the trial and the guillotine, for in Algeria, as in the other lands which they have conquered, [Pg 64] the French have taught the natives by such grim object-lessons that punishment follows swift on the heels of crime.
Now, if that same crime had been committed fifty miles to the eastward, across the Tunisian frontier, the murderer would, in all likelihood, have gotten off with thirteen months in jail—that is, if he was caught at all. For, though the regency of Tunisia is French in pretty much everything but name, it has been deemed wise to maintain the fiction of Tunisian independence by permitting the Bey a good deal of latitude so far as the punishment of his own subjects is concerned, his ideas of justice ( la justice du Bey it is called, in contra-distinction to la justice française , which is a very different sort of justice indeed) usually working out in a fashion truly Oriental. In Tunisia all death sentences must be confirmed by the Bey in person, the condemned man being brought before him as he sits on his gilt-and-velvet throne in the great white palace of the Bardo. In the presence of the sovereign the murderer is suddenly brought face to face with the members of his victim's family, for such things are always done dramatically in the East. The Bey then inquires of the family if they insist on the execution of the murderer, or if they are willing to accept the blood-money, as it is called, a sum equivalent to one hundred and forty dollars, which in theory is paid by the murderer to the relatives of his victims as a sort of indemnity if he is allowed to escape with his life. If, however, he does not possess so large a sum, as is frequently the case, [Pg 65] the Bey makes it up out of his private purse. Nine times out of ten, if the victim was a woman, the blood-money is promptly accepted—and praise be to Allah for getting it!—for in Africa women are plenty but gold is scarce. In case the blood-money is accepted the murderer's sentence is commuted to imprisonment for twelve months and twenty-seven days, though just why the odd twenty-seven I have never been able to learn. But it may have been that it was an only son, or a husband, or a chieftain of importance who was murdered, and in such cases the relatives invariably demand the extreme penalty of the law.
“Do you insist on his blood?” inquires the Bey, a portly and easy-going Oriental who has a marked aversion to taking life, even in the case of murderers.
“We do, your Highness,” replies the spokesman of the family, salaaming until his tarboosh-tassel sweeps the floor.
“Be it so,” says the Bey, shrugging his shoulders. “I call upon you to bear witness that I am innocent of his death. May Allah the Compassionate have mercy upon him! Turn him toward the gate of the Bardo,” which last is the local euphemism for “Take him out and hang him.” Five minutes later the wretch is adorning a gallows which has been set up in the palace gardens.
Due north from the land of the Ouled-Naïls, and hemmed in by the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas, is the Grand Kabylia, a wild, strange region, peopled by many but known to few. Whence the Kabyles came [Pg 66] nobody knows, though their fair complexions, red hair, and blue eyes lead the ethnologists to suppose that they are a branch of that equally white and equally mysterious Berber race who occupy the Moroccan ranges of the Atlas. Thirteen hundred years ago they came to North Africa from out of the East, bringing with them a civilisation and a culture and institutions distinctively their own. Retreating into their mountain fastnesses before that Arab invasion which spread the faith of the Prophet over all North Africa, they have dwelt there ever since, the French, who conquered them in the middle of the last century only after heavy losses, having wisely refrained from interference in their tribal laws or customs, which remain, therefore, almost unmodified.
Though the Kabyles, of all the Moslem races, treat their women with the greatest respect, neither imprisoning them in harems nor hiding them beneath veils and swaddling-clothes, they share with the mountaineers of the Caucasus the somewhat dubious distinction of selling their daughters to the highest bidder. Between the Circassians and the Kabyles there is, however, a distinction with a difference, for, whereas the former sell their daughters in cold blood and take not the slightest interest in what becomes of them thereafter, the Kabyle parent expects, even if he does not always insist, that the man who purchases his daughter shall marry her. A fine, upstanding Kabyle maiden of fifteen or thereabouts, with the lines of a thoroughbred, the profile of a cameo, and a skin the colour of a bronze statue, will fetch her parents anywhere from eighty to three hundred [Pg 67] dollars, at least so I was told at Tizi-Ouzou, the chef-lieu of the district, and the man who told me assured me very earnestly that, the crops having been bad, a girl could be bought very cheaply, and begged me to think it over.
Though the Mauresques of Algeria, the Jewesses of Tunisia, and the fair-skinned beauties of Circassia combine a voluptuous figure with an altogether exceptional beauty of complexion and features, the women of Kabylia, with their flashing teeth, their sparkling eyes, their full red lips, their lithe, slender bodies, and their haughty, insolent manners, suggest a civilisation older and more sensuous, and entirely alien to our own. The humblest peasant girl, grinding the family flour between the upper and the nether stones in the doorway of a mud hovel, possesses so marked a distinction of feature and figure and bearing that it is not difficult to believe that Cleopatra or Helen of Troy might well have come from this same race.
The approach of a Kabyle woman is heralded in two ways: first, by a strong-scented perfume, which, like the celebrated parfum du Bey of Tunis, is composed of the blended scents of a score or more different kinds of blossoms, the odour changing from carnation to rose, to heliotrope, to violet, and so on every few minutes (no, I didn't believe it either, until I tried it); and, secondly, by the clink and jingle of the bracelets, anklets, necklaces, and bijoux of gold, silver, turquoise, and coral with which they are loaded down, and which sound, when they move, like an approaching four-in-hand. [Pg 68] Good specimens of this Kabyle jewelry are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, by the way, and bring high prices in the shops of Tunis and Algiers, being eagerly sought after by collectors.
Personally, I am quite unable to picture an admirer making love to one of these insolent-eyed beauties, for they are headstrong and hot of temper, and if the gentleman happened to say the wrong thing he would very probably find the yataghan , which every Kabyle maiden carries, planted neatly between his shoulders. They seem to be fond of cold steel, do these Kabyles, for at the conclusion of a wedding ceremony the bridegroom, walking backward, holds before him an unsheathed dagger and the bride, following him, keeps the point of it between her teeth. Another wedding custom of Kabylia, no less strange, consists of the partial martyrdom of the bride, who, clad in her marriage finery, stands for an entire morning with her back to a stone pillar in the village square, her eyes closed, her arms close at her sides, and her only foothold the column's narrow base, the cynosure of hundreds of curious eyes. Despite the stern stuff of which the Kabyle women are made, it is small wonder that the bride usually faints before this peculiarly harrowing ordeal is over.
As far removed from these half-savage women of Ouled-Naïl and of Kabylia as a Philadelphia Quakeress is from a Cheyenne squaw are those poor prisoner women of whose pale, half-hidden faces the visitor to the North African coast towns sometimes gets a glimpse at the barred window of a harem, or meets at nightfall [Pg 69] hastening home from their sole diversion, the weekly excursion to the cemetery. You can see them for yourself any Friday afternoon if you will loiter without the whitewashed gateway to the cemetery of Bou-Kabrin, on the hill above Algiers, for they believe that on that day—the Moslem Sabbath—the spirits of the dead re-visit the earth, and hence their weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery to keep them company. When the sun begins to sink behind the Atlas these white-veiled pyramids of femininity reluctantly begin to make their way back through the narrow, winding lanes of the native city, disappearing one by one through doors which will not open for them until another Friday has rolled around. Picture such a life, my friends: six days a week encloistered behind jealously guarded doors and on the seventh taking an outing in the cemetery !
That many of these Mauresque women of the coast towns are very beautiful—just as many others are exceedingly ugly—there is but little doubt, though they are so sheeted, shrouded, veiled, and draped from prying masculine eyes that a man may know of their beauty only by hearsay. I imagine that the dress of the Mauresque woman was specially designed to baffle masculine curiosity, for if Aphrodite herself were enveloped in a white linen sheet from head to waist, and in enormous and ridiculous pantaloons from waist to ankle, she could go where she pleased without being troubled by admirers. Not only is a Mauresque woman never permitted to see a man—or rather, the man is not permitted to see her, for despite all precautions she sometimes [Pg 70] manages to catch glimpses of people through the lattices of her harem windows—but she may not receive a visit from her father or brother without her husband's permission. When she is ill enough to require the services of a physician—and she has to be very ill indeed before one is summoned—incredibly elaborate are the preparations. All the women of her household are ranged about the bed, while her servants hide her under the bedclothes almost to the point of suffocation. If her pulse has to be felt a servant covers her hand and arm so carefully that only an inch or so of her wrist is visible. If she has hurt her shoulder, or back, or leg, a hole is made in the bedclothes so that the doctor may just be able to see the injured place, and nothing more. Should he have the hardihood to insist on looking at her tongue, the precautions are still more elaborate, the attendants covering the patient's face with their hands and just leaving room between their fingers so that her tongue may be stuck out. I know a French physician in Tunis who told me that he was once called to attend the favourite wife of a wealthy Arab merchant, and that while he was conducting the examination the lady's husband stood behind him with the muzzle of a revolver pressed into the small of his back.
“They believe that the spirits of the dead revisit the earth, and hence the weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery to keep them company.”
Always over the head of the Arab woman hangs the shadow of divorce. Nowhere in the world does the law so facilitate the separation of man and wife. If a man grows weary of his wife's looks, of her temper, or of her dress; if he wishes to replace her with another; or if [Pg 71] he is tired of married life and does not wish a wife at all, he has but scant difficulty in getting rid of her, for in North Africa a divorce can be had in fifteen minutes at a total cost of a dollar and twenty cents. In theory, either husband or wife may divorce the other by a simple formality, without assigning any reason whatever. As a matter of fact, however, actual divorce by the man is rare, the Moslem husband usually preferring to get rid of his wife by a process called repudiation, which bears with great injustice and cruelty on the woman. If he tires of her for any reason, or merely wishes to replace her, he drives her away with the words “Woman, get thee hence; take thy goods and go.” In this case, although the husband is free to remarry, the woman is not and can only obtain a legal release by returning to the man the money which he paid for her. The woman may apply to the courts for divorce without her husband's consent only if she is able to prove that he ill-treats or beats her without sufficient reason , if he refuses her food, clothes, or lodging, or if she discovers a previous wooing on her husband's part, all previous betrothals, or even offers of marriage, whether the other lady refused or accepted him, being considered ground for divorce.
The next time you happen to be in Tunis don't fail to pay a visit to the divorce court. It is the most Haroun-al-Raschidic institution this side of Samarkand. A great hall of justice, vaulted and floored with marble and strewn with Eastern carpets, forms the setting, while husbands in turbans and lawyers in tarbooshes, [Pg 72] white-veiled women and green-robed, gray-bearded judges complete a scene which might have been taken straight from the Arabian Nights . The women, closely veiled and hooded, and herded like so many cattle within an iron grill, take no part in the proceedings which so intimately affect their futures, their interests being left in the hands of a voluble and gesticulative avocat . On either side of the hall is a series of alcoves, and in each alcove, seated cross-legged on a many-cushioned divan, is a gold-turbaned and green-robed cadi . To him the husband states his case, the wife putting in her defence—if she has any—through her lawyer and rarely appearing in person. The judge considers the facts in silence, gravely stroking his long, gray beard, and then delivers his decision—in nine cases out of ten, so I was told, in favour of the husband. Should either party be dissatisfied, he or she can take an appeal by the simple process of walking across the room and laying the case before one of the judges sitting on the other side, whose decision is final. A case, even if appealed, is generally disposed of in less than an hour and at a total cost of six francs, which goes to show that the record for quick-and-easy divorces is not held by Reno.
It is characteristic of the Moslem view-point that infidelity on the part of the husband is no cause for divorce whatsoever, while infidelity on the part of the wife, owing to the strict surveillance under which Moslem women are kept and the prison-like houses in which they are confined, occurs so rarely as to be scarcely [Pg 73] worth mentioning. Should a Moslem woman so far succeed in evading the vigilance of her jailers as to enter into a liaison with a man, instead of a divorce trial there would be two funerals. To put his wife and her paramour out of the way without detection is a matter of no great difficulty for an Arab husband, for if any one disappears in a Mohammedan country the harem system renders a search extremely difficult, if not, indeed, wholly out of the question. In fact, it has happened very frequently, especially in such populous centres as Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, that a man has enticed his rival into his house, either keeping him a prisoner for life or slowly killing him by torture. Though the French authorities are perfectly well aware of such occurrences, neither they in Algeria and Tunisia nor the English in Egypt feel themselves strongly enough intrenched to risk the outburst of fanaticism which would inevitably ensue should they violate the privacy of a harem.
I am perfectly aware of the fact that it has become the fashion among those travellers who confine their investigations of African life to the lanes about Mustapha Supérieur, to the souks of Tunis, and to the alleys back of the Mousky, to pooh-pooh the idea that slavery still exists in North Africa. As a matter of fact, however—though this the European officials will, for reasons of policy, stoutly deny—slavery not only exists sub rosa in Algeria and Tunisia and in Egypt, but slave markets are still openly maintained in the inland towns of Morocco and Tripolitania, the French and Italian [Pg 74] occupations notwithstanding. When a wealthy Moslem wants slaves nowadays he does not send traders to Circassia or raiders to Uganda, but he applies to one of the well-known dealers in Tetuan, or Tripoli, or Trebizond, a marriage contract is drawn up, and all the ceremonies of legal wedlock are gone through by proxy. By resorting to these fictitious marriages and similar subterfuges, the owner of a harem may procure as many slaves, white, brown, or black, as he wishes, and once they are within the walls of his house, no one can possibly interfere to release them, for, the police being under no conditions permitted to violate the privacy of a harem, there is obviously no safeguard for the liberty, or even the lives, of its inmates. As a result of this system, a constant stream of female slaves—fair-haired beauties from Georgia and Circassia, brown-skinned Arab girls from the borders of the Sahara, and negresses from Equatoria—trickles into the North African coast towns by various roundabout channels, and, though the European officials are perfectly well aware of this condition of things, they are powerless to end it. The women thus obtained, though nominally wives, are in reality slaves, for they are bought for money, they are not consulted about their sale, they cannot go away if they are discontented, and their very lives are at the disposal of their masters. If that is not slavery, I don't know what is.
In those cases where the European authorities have ventured to meddle with native customs, particularly those concerning a husband's treatment of his wife, the [Pg 75] interference frequently has had curious results. A wealthy Arab from the interior of Oran, starting on a journey to the capital of that province, bade the wife whom he adored an affectionate good-bye. Returning several days before he was expected, he seized the smiling woman, who rushed to greet him, tied her hands, and dragging her into the street gave her a furious beating in the presence of the astounded neighbours. No, she had not been unfaithful to him, he said, between the blows, nor had she been unkind. He not only was not tired of her, so he assured the onlookers, but she was a veritable jewel of a wife. Finally, when his arm grew tired and he stopped to take breath, he explained that, passing through a street in Oran, he had seen a crowd following a man who was being dragged along by two gendarmes. Upon inquiry he learned that he was being taken to prison for having beaten his wife. Therefore he had ridden home at top speed, without even waiting to complete his business, so that he might prove to himself, to his wife, and to his neighbours that he, at least, was still master in his own house and could beat his wife when he chose.
And here is another incident which illustrates the fashion in which the French administrators in Algeria deal with those ticklish questions which involve Arab domestic relations. A farmer and his wife were travelling through the interior; he was on a donkey and she, of course, on foot. Along came an Arab sheikh on horseback and offered the woman a lift. She accepted, and presently, growing confidential, admitted that she was [Pg 76] unhappily married and detested her husband. Her companion proposing an elopement, she readily agreed. Accordingly, when they came to a by-road, this Lochinvar of the desert put spurs to his horse and galloped off with the lady across his saddle-bow, paying no heed to the shouts and protestations of the husband toiling along in the dust behind. Though he succeeded in tracing the runaway couple to the sheikh's village, the husband quickly found that plans had been made against his coming, for the villagers asserted to a man that they had known the eloping pair for years as man and wife and that the real husband was nothing but an impudent impostor. Unable to regain his wife, he then appealed to the French authorities of the district, who were at first at somewhat of a loss how to act in the circumstances, for the Europeans in North Africa are always sitting on top of a powder barrel and a hasty or ill-considered action may result in blowing them higher than Gilderoy's kite. Finally, an inspiration came to the juge d'instruction before whom the matter had been brought. Placing the dogs of the real husband in one room, and those of the pretended husband in another, he confronted the woman with them both. Now, Arab dogs are notoriously faithful to the members of their own households and equally unfriendly toward all strangers, so that though her own dogs fawned upon her and attempted to lick her hand, those of the sheikh snarled at sight of her and showed every sign of distrust. The judge promptly ordered her to be returned to her lawful husband—who, I fancy, punished her in [Pg 77] true Arab fashion—and had the village placarded with a notice in Arabic which read: “The testimony of one dog is more to be believed than that of a townful of Arabs.” To appreciate how much more effective than any amount of fines or imprisonment this notice proved, one must remember that the deadliest insult an Arab can give another is to call him a dog.
Perhaps it is because they live so far from the contaminating influence of civilisation, or what stands for civilisation in North Africa, that the lives of those women who dwell beneath the black camel's-hair tents of the Sahara are far freer and happier than those led by their urban cousins. Which reminds me of a little procession that I once met while riding through southern Algeria. It consisted of an Arab, his wife, and a donkey. The man strode in front, his rifle over his shoulder. Then came the donkey, bearing nothing heavier than its harness. In the rear trudged the wife, carrying the plough. Though the Arab women may, and probably do, till the fields yoked beside a camel, a donkey, or an ox, their faces are unveiled and they are permitted free intercourse with the men of their tribe. Even among the nomad desert folk, however, women are regarded with indifference and contempt, the Arabs saying of a boy “It is a benediction,” but of a girl “It is a malediction.” With the Arabs a woman is primarily regarded as a servant, and long before a daughter of the “Great Tents” has entered her teens she has been taught how to cut and fit a burnoose, to sew a tent cover, and to make a couscous , that peculiar dish of [Pg 78] half-ground barley, raisins, honey, hard-boiled eggs, and mangled fowl, stewed with a gravy in a sealed vessel, of which the Arabs are so fond. By the time she is ten her parents have probably received and accepted an offer for her hand—and praise Allah for ridding them of her!—and by the time she is twelve she is married and a mother. When a match has been decided upon—and it is by no means an uncommon thing for an unborn child to become conditionally engaged—several days of haggling as to the price which is to be paid for her ensue, the bridegroom eventually getting her at a cost of several camels, cattle, or goats, her value being based upon her looks and the position of her parents. On the day of the wedding the bride—on whose unveiled face, remember, the bridegroom has never laid eyes—concealed within a swaying camel-litter which looks for all the world like a young balloon, preceded by a band and accompanied by all her relatives, is taken with much ceremony to her new home. When the long-drawn-out marriage feast is over, the hideous racket of the flutes and tom-toms ceases and the wedding guests depart. Alone in her tent, the bride awaits her husband, who will see her face for the first time. Seating himself by her side, her husband makes her take off, one by one, her necklaces, her rings, and her anklets, so that, unadorned, she may be estimated at her true worth. If, thus stripped of her finery, she is not up to his expectations, the man may even at this late hour declare the marriage off and send the girl back to her parents. Should he be satisfied with his latest [Pg 79] acquisition—for it is more than likely that he already has three or four other wives—he produces a club, which he places on the floor beside her, a custom whose significance requires no explanation. An Arab husband does not confine himself to a stick in regulating his domestic affairs, however, for only a few months ago the French authorities of Oran divested a desert sheikh of the burnoose of authority because, in a fit of jealous rage, he had cut off his wife's nose.
“Followed by rejoicing relatives, the bride is taken to her husband's home in a swaying camel litter which looks like a young balloon.”
Photograph by Em. Frechon, Biskra.
THE ITALIAN “WHITE MAN'S BURDEN”
SINCE the world began the arm of Italy has reached out into the Mediterranean toward Africa, its finger pointing straight at Tripoli. Phœnicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards, and Turks followed the suggestion of that finger in their turn, but of them all only the Arab and the Turk remain. In every case a colonial empire was the mirage which beckoned to those land-hungry peoples from behind the golden haze which hangs over the African coast-line, and in every case their African adventures ended in disappointment and disaster. After an interim of centuries, in which the roads and ramparts and reservoirs built along that shore by those primeval pioneers have crumbled into dust, the troop-laden transports of a regenerated Italy have followed in the wake of those Greek galleys, those Roman triremes, and those Spanish caravels. Undeterred by the recollection of her disastrous Abyssinian adventure, Italy is imbued with the idea, just as were her powerful predecessors, that her commercial and political interests demand the extension of her dominion across the Middle Sea.
Ever since the purple sails of Phœnicia first flaunted along its coasts the history of Tripolitania has been one [Pg 81] of invasion and conquest. In the very dawn of history the galleys of Greece dropped anchor off this shore, in the belief that it was the Garden of the Hesperides, and the vestiges of their colony of Cyrenaica lure the archæologists to-day. The Greeks, who, because of its three leagued cities of Oëa, Sabrata, and Leptis, named their new possession Tripolis, just as Decapolis signified the region of ten cities and Pentapolis of five, retreated before Carthage's colonial expansion, and the Carthaginians gave way in turn to the conquering Romans, who included the captured territory within their province of Africa and called it Regio Tripolitana—whence the name it bears to-day. Christianity was scarcely four centuries old when the hordes of fierce-faced, skin-clad Vandals, sweeping down from their Germanic forests, burst into Gaul, poured through the passes of the Pyrenees, overran Spain, and, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, carried fire and sword and torture from end to end of the Mediterranean. Before another century had rolled around, however, Belisarius, the great captain of Byzantium, had broken the Vandal power forever, and the troubled land of Tripolitania once again came under the shadow of the cross. Then the wave of Arab conquest came, rolling across North Africa, breaking upon the coasts of Spain, and not subsiding until it reached the marches of France, supplanting the feeble Christianity of the natives of all this region with the vigorous and fanatical faith of Islam. Though Ferdinand the Catholic, not content with expelling the Moors from Spain, continued his crusade [Pg 82] against the infidel by capturing the Tripolitan capital, the Knights of Saint John, to whom he turned the city over, surrendered to the beleaguering Turks just as the sixteenth century had reached its turning-point, and Turkish it has remained, at least in name, ever since.
We of the West can never be wholly indifferent to the fate and fortunes of this much-harassed land, for our flag has fluttered from its ramparts and the bayonets of our soldiers and the cutlasses of our sailors have served to write some of the most stirring chapters of its history. So feeble and nominal did the Turkish rule become that the beginning of the last century found Tripolitania little more than a pirate stronghold, ruled by a pasha who had not only successfully defied, but had actually levied systematic tribute upon, every sea-faring nation in the world. It was not, however, until the Pasha of Tripoli overstepped the bounds of our national complaisance by demanding an increase in the annual tribute of eighty-odd thousand dollars which the United States had been paying as the price of its maritime exemption that the American consul handed him an ultimatum and an American war-ship backed it up with the menace of its guns. Standing forth in picturesque and striking relief from the tedium of the four years' war which ensued was the capture by the Tripolitans in 1803 of the frigate Philadelphia , which had run aground in the harbour of Tripoli, and the enslavement of her crew; her subsequent recapture and destruction by a handful of blue-jackets under the intrepid [Pg 83] Decatur; and the heroic march across the desert to Derna of General William Eaton and his motley army.
Eaton's exploit, like that of Reid and the General Armstrong at Fayal, seems to have been all but lost in the mazes of our national history. With the object of placing upon the Tripolitan throne the reigning Pasha's exiled elder brother, who had agreed to satisfy all the demands of the United States, William Eaton, soldier of fortune, frontiersman, and former American consul at Tunis, recruited at Alexandria what was thought to be a ridiculously insufficient expeditionary force for the taking of Derna, a strongly fortified coast town six hundred miles due west across the Libyan desert. With a handful of adventurous Americans, some two-score Greeks, who fought the Turk whenever opportunity offered, and a few squadrons of Arab mercenaries—less than five hundred men in all—he set out under the blazing sun of an African spring. Though his Arabs mutinied, his food and water gave out, and his animals died from starvation and exhaustion, Eaton pushed indomitably on, covering the six hundred miles of burning sand in fifty days, carrying the city by storm, and raising the American flag over its citadel—the first and only time it has ever floated over a fortification on that side of the Atlantic.
A territory larger than all the Atlantic States, from Florida to Maine, put together; a dry climate as hot in summer and as cold in winter as that of New Mexico; a surface which varies between the aridity of the Staked [Pg 84] Plains and the fertility of the San Joaquin Valley of California; so sparsely populated that its fanatic, turbulent, poverty-stricken population averages but two inhabitants to the square mile—that is Tripolitania. Bounded on the west by Tunisia and the French and on the east by Egypt and the English, the hinterland of the regency stretches into the Sahara as far as the Tropic of Cancer. Its eleven hundred miles of coast-line set squarely in the middle of the north African littoral; its capital almost equidistant from the Straits, the Dardanelles, and the Suez Canal; and half the great ports of the Mediterranean not twelve hours' steam away, the strategical, political, and commercial position of Tripolitania is one of great importance.
Tripolitania, as the regency should properly be called, or Libya, as the Italians have classically renamed it, consists of four more or less distinctly defined divisions: Tripoli, Fezzan, Benghazi, and the Saharan oases. Under the Turkish régime the districts of Tripoli and Fezzan have formed a vilayet under a vali , or governor-general; Benghazi has been a separately administered province under a mutes-sarif directly responsible to Constantinople, while the oases have not been governed at all. The district of Tripoli, which occupies the entire northwestern portion of the regency, is for the most part an interminable stony table-land, riverless, waterless, and uninhabited save along the fertile coast. The stretches of yellow sand which the traveller sees from the deck of his ship are not, as he fondly imagines, the edge of the Sahara, but merely [Pg 85] sand dunes blown in by the sea, such as may be seen elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast.
Sloping from these coastal sand dunes up to the barren interior plateau is a zone, averaging perhaps five miles in width, of an altogether remarkable fertility, for its deep ravines, filled with considerable streams during the winter rains, continue to send down a supply of subterranean water even during the dry season. By means of countless wells, round and round which blindfolded donkeys and oxen plod ceaselessly, the water is drawn up into reservoirs and conducted thence to the fields. In this coast oasis it is harvest-time all the year round, for, notwithstanding the primitive agricultural implements of the natives and their crude system of irrigation, the soil is amazingly productive. From April to June almonds, apricots, and corn are gathered in; in July and August come the peaches; from July to September is the vintage season, and the Tripolitan grapes vie with those of Sicily; from July to September the black tents of the nomad date and olive pickers dot the fields, though the yellow date of the coast is not to be spoken of in the same breath with the luscious, mahogany-coloured fruit of the interior oases; from November to April the orange groves are ablaze with a fruit which rivals that of Jaffa; the early spring sees the shipment of those “Malta potatoes” which are quoted on the menus of every fashionable hostelry and restaurant in Europe; while lemons are to be had for the picking at almost any season of the year.
Southward into the Sahara from the southern borders of Tripoli stretches the province of Fezzan, its inaccessibility, its prevalent malaria, and its deadly heat having popularised it with Abdul-Hamid, of unsavoury memory, as a place of exile for disgraced courtiers and overpopular officials, presumably because of the exceeding improbability of any of them ever coming back. Artesian wells and scientific farming have proved in other and equally discouraging quarters of Africa, however, that the words “desert” and “worthless” are no longer synonymous, so there is no reason to believe that the agricultural miracles which France has performed in Algeria and Tunisia on the one hand, and England in Egypt and the Sudan on the other, could not be successfully attempted by the Italians in Fezzan. Arid and inhospitable as this region appears to-day, it should be remembered that its Greek and Roman colonists boasted of it as “the granary of Europe.” What has been done once may well be done again. All that this soil needs, after its centuries of impoverishment and neglect, is decent treatment, and any one who has seen those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads clinging to the rocky hill-sides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic care, will predict a promising agricultural future for an Italian Tripolitania. In its physical aspects, northern Tripolitania resembles Europe much more than it does Africa; its climate is no warmer than southern Italy in summer and not nearly as unhealthy as the Campagna [Pg 87] Romana ; while its soil, as I have already remarked, holds great possibilities for patient, hardy, frugal, industrious agriculturists of the type of those twenty thousand Sicilians who are forced by poverty to emigrate each year to America or the Argentine. Keeping these facts in mind, one does not have to seek far for the causes which underlay Italy's sudden aggression.
For sheer majesty and grandeur, the only thing that is at all comparable with a Saharan sunrise is daybreak in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.
Reaching Egyptward in the form of a mighty fist is the peninsula of Barka, the Cyrenaica of the ancients, officially known as the Mutessariflik of Benghazi, its many natural advantages of climate, soil, and vegetation making it the most favoured region in the regency, if not, indeed, in all North Africa. While the climate and vegetation of southern Tripoli and of Fezzan are distinctly Saharan, the date-palm being the characteristic tree, Benghazi is just as decidedly Mediterranean, its fertile, verdure-clad uplands being covered with groves of oak, cypress, olive, fig, and pine. Though well supplied with rain and, as I have said, extremely fertile, the Benghazi province, once the richest of the Greek colonies, is now but scantily populated. Scattered along its coasts are Benghazi, the capital, with an inextricably mixed population and one of the worst harbours in the world; Tobruk, which, because of its excellent roadstead and its proximity to the Egyptian frontier and the Canal, Germany has long had a covetous eye on; and the insignificant ports of Derna and Khoms, the lawless highlands of the interior being occupied by hordes of warlike and nomadic Arabs [Pg 88] who acknowledge no authority other than their tribal sheikhs.
South by east into the Libyan Desert straggle the Aujila and Kufra chains of oases, marking the course of the historic caravan route to Upper Egypt and presenting the aspect of a long, winding valley, extending from the Benghazi plateau almost to the banks of the Nile. Underground reservoirs lie so near the surface of the desert that all of these sand-surrounded islands have water in abundance, that of Jof, for example, supporting over a million date-palms and several thousand people, together with their camels, horses, and goats.
Such, in brief, bold outline, are the more salient characteristics—climatic, agricultural, and geographical—of the region which Italy has seized. Everything considered, it was not such a long look ahead that the Italian statesmen took when they decided to play their cards for such a stake. Though neither soil nor climate has changed since the days of Tripolitania's ancient prosperity, centuries of wretched and corrupt Turkish rule, with its system of absentee landlords and irresponsible officials, has reduced the peasantry to the same state of dull and despairing apathy in which the Egyptian fellaheen were before the English came. If Tripolitania is to be redeemed, and I firmly believe that it will be, the work of regeneration cannot be done by government railways and subsidised steam-ship lines and regiments of brass-bound officials, but by patient, painstaking, plodding men with artesian-well drilling machines and steam-ploughs and barrels of fertiliser. It [Pg 89] may well be, as the Italian expansionists enthusiastically declare, that Tripolitania constitutes a “New Italy” lying at the very ports of old Italy, but it is going to take many, many millions of lire and much hard work to make it worth the having.
To those unaccustomed to the sights and sounds and smells of the East, a visit to the town of Tripoli is more interesting than enjoyable. Both its harbour and its hostelry are so incredibly bad that no one ever visits them a second time if he can possibly help it. The harbour of Jaffa, in Palestine, is a trifle worse, if anything, than that of Tripoli; but the only hotel I know of which deserves to be classed with the Albergo Minerva in Tripoli is the one next door to the native jail in Aden. Picture a cluster of square, squat, stuccoed houses, their tedious sky-lines broken by the minarets of mosques and the flagstaffs of foreign consulates, facing on a crescent-shaped bay. Under the sun of an African summer the white buildings of the town blaze like the whitewashed base of a railway-station stove at white heat; the stretch of yellow beach which separates the harbour from the town glows fiery as brass; while the waters of the bay look exactly as though they had been blued in readiness for the family washing. Within the crumbling ramparts of the town is a network of dim alleys and byways, along which the yashmaked Moslem women flit like ghosts, and vaulted, trellis-roofed bazaars where traders of two-score nationalities haggle and gesticulate and doze and pray and chatter the while they and their wares and the passing camels [Pg 90] smell to heaven. Scattered here and there among the shops are native bakeries, in the reeking interiors of which, after your eyes become accustomed to the darkness, you can discern patient camels plodding round and round and round, grinding the grain in true Eastern fashion between the upper and the nether millstones.
Follow the narrow Strada della Marina past the custom-house, where the Italian sentry peers at you suspiciously from beneath the bunch of cock's feathers which adorns his helmet; past the odorous fish-market and so into the unpaved, unlighted, foul-smelling quarter of the Jews, and your path will be blocked eventually by the sole remaining relic of Tripoli's one-time greatness, the marble arch of triumph erected by the Romans in the reign of Antoninus Pius, now half-buried in débris, its chiselled boasts of victory mutilated, and its arches ruthlessly plastered up, the shop of a dealer in dried fish. In that defaced and degraded memorial is typified the latter-day history of Tripolitania. Before the Italian occupation disrupted the commerce of the country and isolated Tripoli from the interior, by long odds the most interesting of the city's sights were the markets, which were held upon the beach on the arrival of the trans-Saharan caravans, for they afforded the foreigner fleeting but characteristic glimpses, as though on a moving-picture screen, of those strange and savage peoples—Berbers, Hausas, Tuaregs, Tubbas, and Wadaians—who are retreating farther and farther into the recesses of the continent before the white man's implacable advance.
All down the ages Tripoli has been the gateway through which weapons, cutlery, and cotton have entered, and slaves, ostrich feathers, and ivory have come out of inner Africa by plodding caravan. Since the sons of Ham first found their way across the wilderness of Shur, this region has been the terminus of three historic trade routes. The first of these runs due south across the desert to Lake Tchad and the great native states of Kanem, Sokoto, Bagirmi, and Wadai; the second follows a southwesterly course across the Sahara to the Great Bend of the Niger and the storied city of Timbuktu; while the third, going south by east, long carried British cottons and German jack-knives to the natives of Darfur and the Sudan. Is it any wonder, then, that, fired by the speeches of the expansionists in the Roman senate, all Italy should dream of a day when the red-white-and-green banner should float over this gateway to Africa and endless lines of dust-coloured camels, laden with glass beads from Venice and cotton goods from Milan, should go rolling southward to those countries which lie beyond the great sands? But, lost in the fascination of their dream, the Italians forgot one thing: modern commerce cannot go on the back of a camel. No longer may Tripolitania be reckoned the front door, or even the side door, to central Africa. As the result of French and British encroachment and enterprise, not only has nearly all of the Tripolitanian hinterland been absorbed by one or the other of these powers, but, what is of far more commercial importance, they have succeeded in diverting the large and important [Pg 92] caravan trade of which the Italians dreamed, and which for centuries has found its way to the sea through Tripoli, to their own ports on the Nile, the Senegal, and the Niger, leaving to Tripolitania Italiana nothing but its possibilities as an agricultural land.
The statesmen who planned, and the soldiers and sailors who executed, the seizure of Tripolitania, were obeying a voice from the grave. Though the overwhelming disaster to the Italians at Adowa in 1896, when their army of invasion was wiped out by Menelik's Abyssinian tribesmen, caused the political downfall of Crispi, the greatest Italian of his time, his dream of Italian colonial expansion, like John Brown's soul, went marching on. With the vision of a prophet that great statesman saw that the day was not far distant when the steady increase in Italy's population and production would compel her to acquire a colonial market oversea. Crispi lies mouldering in his grave, but the Italian Government, in pursuance of the policy which he inaugurated, has been surreptitiously at work in Tripolitania these dozen years or more.
Never has that forerunner to annexation known as “pacific penetration” been more subtly or more systematically conducted. Even the Pope lent the government's policy of African aggrandisement his sanction, for is not the Moslem the hereditary foe of the church, and does not the cross follow close in the wake of Christian bayonets? Italian convents and monasteries dot the Tripolitanian littoral, while cowled and sandalled missionaries from the innumerable Italian [Pg 93] orders have carried the gospel, and the propaganda of Italian annexation, to the oppressed and poverty-stricken peasantry of the far interior. Under the guise of scientists, Italian political and commercial agents have been quietly investigating the problems and possibilities of the regency from end to end, while the powerful Banco di Roma, an institution backed with the funds of the Holy See, through its branches in Tripoli and Benghazi, has been systematically buying up arable farm-lands from the impoverished peasantry at a few lire the hectare, which quadrupled in value with the landing of the first Italian soldier.
Though prior to the war there were probably not two thousand native-born Italians in the whole of Tripolitania, the numerous Jews, in whose hands was practically the entire trade of the country, were offered inducements of one kind and another to become Italian subjects, Italy thus laying a foundation for her claims to predominating interests in that region. On the pretext that the Turkish authorities had tampered with the foreign mail-bags, Italy demanded and obtained permission to establish her own post-offices at the principal ports, so that for many years past the anomalous spectacle has been presented, just as in other portions of the Turkish Empire, of letters from a Turkish colony being franked with surcharged Italian stamps. The most ingenious stroke, however, was the establishment of numerous Italian schools—and very good schools they are—where the young idea, whether Arab, Maltese, or Jew, has been taught to shoot—along Italian lines.
To those really conversant with the situation, Italy's pretexts that the activities of her subjects resident in Tripolitania had been interfered with and their lives and interests seriously endangered sound somewhat hollow. To tell the truth, Italians have had a freer rein in the regency—and, incidentally, have caused more trouble—than any other people. Italy's real reasons for the seizure of Tripolitania were two, and only two: first, she wanted it; and second, she could get it.
Now that she has Tripolitania in her grasp, however, her task is but begun, for setting forward the hands of progress by occupation of Moslem territory has ever been a perilous proceeding. Though France shouldered the white man's burden in Algeria with alacrity, she paid for the privilege with just forty years of fighting; it took England, with all the resources of her colonial experience and her colonial army, sixteen years to conquer the ill-armed Arabs of the Sudan, while the desperate resistance of the Mad Mullah and his fanatic tribesmen has compelled her practically to evacuate Somaliland; overthrown ministries, depleted war-chests, and thousands of unmarked graves in the hinterland bear witness to the deep solicitude displayed for the cause of civilisation in Morocco by both France and Spain; Russia spent a quarter of a century and the lives of ten thousand soldiers in forcing her beneficent rule on the Moslems of Turkestan. Italy will be more fortunate than her colonising neighbours, therefore, if she emerges unscathed from her present Tripolitanian adventure, [Pg 95] for every page of the history of latter-day colonisation proves that seizure of Moslem territory never ends with a naval demonstration, a landing party, a staff with a descending and an ascending flag, and the flash and thunder of a national salute.
When Italy pointed the noses of her transports Tripoliward she committed the incredible blunder of underestimating for a second time the resistance that she would encounter. She made just such a mistake some years ago in Abyssinia, and the plain of Adowa is still sprinkled with the bleaching bones of her annihilated army. The Italian agents in Tripolitania had assured their government that, as a result of Turkish oppression, corruption, and overtaxation, the Turks were heartily disliked by the Tripolitanians—all of which was perfectly true. But when they went on to say that the Tripolitanians would welcome the expulsion of the Turks and the substitution of an Italian régime, they overshot the mark. In other words, the Tripolitanians much preferred to be ill-treated by the Turks, who are their coreligionists, than to be well-treated by the Italians, who are despised unbelievers. The Italians, having had no previous experience with Moslem peoples, landed at Tripoli with every expectation of being welcomed as saviours by the native population. It is quite true that the natives gave the Italians an exceedingly warm reception—with rifles and machine guns. Here, then, were some sixty thousand Italian soldiers, who had anticipated about as much trouble in taking Tripolitania as we should in taking Hayti, instead [Pg 96] of being permitted to play the jaunty and picturesque rôles of deliverers from oppression, being forced to battle desperately for their lives against the very people whom they had come to save and civilise. It was a graphic instance of the workings of Mohammedanism. How Kitchener and Cromer, those two grim men who have had more experience than any other Europeans in fighting and governing Mohammedans, must have smiled to themselves when they read the Italian statements that the taking of Tripolitania meant only a campaign of a fortnight.
To comprehend thoroughly the peculiar situation in which Italy finds herself, you should understand that the portly, sleepy-eyed, good-natured old gentleman who theoretically rules Turkey under the title of Mohammed V is, politically speaking, as much a dual personality as Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde. As Sultan of Turkey, or, to give him his proper title, Emperor of the Ottomans, he is the nominal ruler of some twenty-four millions of divided, discontented, and disgruntled Turkish subjects—Osmanlis, Arabs, Syrians, Armenians, Circassians, Bulgars, Greeks, Jews—and in that capacity plays no great part in ordering the affairs of the world. But Mohammed V is more than Sultan of Turkey: he is likewise Successor of the Prophet, Commander of the Faithful, and Caliph of all Islam, and as such is the spiritual and temporal leader of the two hundred and twenty millions who compose the Moslem world. Nor is there any way of disassociating the two offices. In making war on the Sultan of Turkey, therefore, [Pg 97] Italy automatically made war on the chief of all Mohammedans, thus shaking her fist in the face not alone of a nation but of a religion—and the most militant and fanatical of all religions at that. There is not a wearer of turban or tarboosh between the Gold Coast and the China coast, be he Hausa, Tuareg, Berber, Moor, Algerian, Tunisian, Tripolitanian, Egyptian, Sudanese, Somali, Arab, Kurd, Turk, Circassian, Persian, Turkoman, Afghan, Sikh, Indian, Malay, or Moro, who does not regard Italy's aggression in Tripolitania as an affront to himself and to his faith.
Among all Moslems there is growing an ominous unrest, a fierce consciousness that the lands which they have for centuries regarded as their own are gradually slipping from them, and a decision that they must fight or disappear. On the Barbary coast, the Nile, the Congo, the Niger, and the Zambezi they see the turbans and the tarbooshes retreating before the white helmets' implacable advance, and now they see even the Ottoman throne, to them a great throne, shaking under the pressure. Hence there is not a Moslem in the world to-day who will remain indifferent to any action which hints at the dismemberment of Turkey, for he knows full well that the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the political fortunes of Islam are inextricably interwoven.
That Italy can hold the Tripolitanian coast towns as long as her ammunition, her patience, and her public purse hold out, no one acquainted with the conditions of modern warfare will attempt to deny. Unless, however, the militant section of Islam, of which this region [Pg 98] is the very focus, can be induced to acquiesce in an Italian occupation, the life of an Italian soldier who ventures out of range of his war-ships' guns will not be worth an hour's purchase. Hordes of fanatical, desert-bred Arabs, inured to hardship, deadly sun, scanty food, and dearth of water, mounted on swift camels and as familiar with the trackless desert as the woodsman is with the forest in which he works, ablaze with a religion which assures them that the one sure way to paradise is to die in battle with the unbelievers, can harass the Italian army of occupation for years to come by a guerilla warfare. Even though Turkey agrees to surrender Tripolitania and to withdraw her garrisons from that province, Italy will still have far from smooth sailing, for the simple reason that she is not fighting Turks alone, but Moslems, and, as a result of her ill-advised slaughter of the Arabs, she has made the Moslem population of Tripolitania permanently hostile. Most significant of all, the Arab resistance to an Italian advance into the interior of the country will be directed, controlled, and financed by that sinister and mysterious power known as the Brotherhood of the Senussiyeh.
To American ears the word “Senussiyeh” doubtless conveys but little meaning, but to the French administrateurs in Algeria and Tunisia, and to the officers of the Military Intelligence Department in Egypt and the Sudan, it is a word of ominous import. Though the Brotherhood of the Senussiyeh is, without much doubt, the most powerful organisation of its kind in the world, so complete is the veil of secrecy behind which it works [Pg 99] that comparatively little is definitely known as to its designs, ramifications, and resources. Briefly, it is a secret Moslem society, organised about a century ago by an Algerian dervish, Mohammed ben Ali ben Es Senussi, from whom it takes its name; its object is the restoration of the Mohammedan religion to its original purity, austerity, and political power, the first step toward which is the expulsion of the Christian from Moslem lands; its initiated members, scattered throughout the Mohammedan world, have been variously estimated at from five to fifteen millions; the present grand master of the order, Senussi Ahmed-el-Sherif, the third of the succession, is admittedly a man of exceptional intelligence, resource, and sagacity; his monastic court at Jof, in the oasis of Kufra, five hundred miles, as the camel goes, south of Benghazi and about the same distance from the Nile, is the capital of a power whose boundaries are the boundaries of Islam.
It is no secret that the growing power of the Senussiyeh is causing considerable concern to the military and political officials of those European nations that have possessions in North Africa, for, in addition to the three-hundred-odd zawias , or monasteries, scattered along the African littoral from Egypt to Morocco, the long arm of the order reaches down to the mysterious oases which dot the Great Sahara, it embraces the strange tribes of the Tibesti highlands, it controls the robber Tuaregs and the warlike natives who occupy the regions adjacent to Lake Tchad, and is, as the [Pg 100] French and British have discovered, a power to be reckoned with in the protected states of Kanem, Sokoto, Bagirmi, Bornu, and Wadai.
The organisation of the order is both strong and simple. The khuan , or brothers, whose names are carefully recorded in the books of the mother lodge at Jof, owe unquestioning obedience to the mokaddem , or prefect, in charge of the district to which they belong. Each mokaddem has under his orders a corps of secret agents, known as wekils , whose duty is to keep him constantly in touch with all that is going on in his district and to communicate his instructions to the brothers. On Grand Bairam—the Mohammedan Easter—the mokaddems meet in conclave at Jof, on which occasion the spiritual and political condition of the order is discussed and its course of action decided on for the ensuing year. Above the mokaddems , and acting as an intermediary between them and the veiled and sacred person of the Senussi himself, is a cabinet of viziers, who, by means of a remarkable system of camel couriers, are enabled to keep constantly in touch with all the districts of the order.
At Jof, from which no European investigator has ever returned, are centred all the threads of this vast organism. There is kept the war-chest of the order, constantly increased by large and small contributions from true believers all over the world, for every member of the Senussiyeh who has a total income of more than twenty dollars a year must contribute two and one half per cent of it to the order annually; there the Senussi [Pg 101] has established depots of stores and war material and factories for the manufacture, or rather the assembling, of modern fire-arms; thither come to him from the obscure harbours of the Tripolitanian coast cargoes of arms and ammunition; thither flock pilgrims from North and West Africa, from the Niger and from the Nile, to receive his orders and to seek his blessing; there is centred one of the most remarkable secret-service systems in the world, its agents not alone in every corner of the Mohammedan world, but likewise keeping their fingers ever on the political pulse of Europe.
A place better fitted for its purpose than Jof it would be hard to imagine. Here, surrounded by inhospitable desert, with wells a long day's camel-ride apart, and the route known only to experienced and loyal guides, the Senussi has been free to educate, drill, and arm his disciples, to accumulate great stores of arms and ammunition, and to push forward his propaganda of a regenerated and reinvigorated Islam, without any possibility of interference from the Christian nations. There seems to be but little doubt that factories have been erected at Jof for the assembling of weapons of precision, the materials for which have been systematically smuggled across the Mediterranean from Greece and Turkey for years past. Strange as it may sound, these factories are under the direction of skilled engineers and mechanics, for so well laid are the plans of the order that it annually sends a number of Moslem youths to be educated in the best technical schools of Europe. Upon completing their courses of instruction [Pg 102] they return to Jof, or other centres of Senussiyeh activity, to place their trained services at the disposal of the order, others being sent Europeward to be educated in their turn. The Senussiyeh's military affairs are equally well organised, the Arabs, than whom there is admittedly no finer fighting material in the world, being instructed along European lines, modified for desert warfare, by veteran drill-masters who have learned their trade in the native armies of England and France. The nucleus of this mobile and highly effective force is, so I am told by French officials in Africa, an admirably mounted and equipped camel corps of five thousand men which the Senussi keeps always on a war footing in the Kufra oases. These facts in themselves prove definitely that it would be no sporadic resistance, but a vast, organised movement, armed with improved weapons, trained by men who learned their business under European drill-masters, and directed by a high intelligence, with which Italy would have to reckon should she attempt the hazardous experiment of an advance in the real hinterland of Tripolitania.
Let me make it perfectly clear that the grand master of the Senussiyeh is a man of altogether exceptional ability. Under his direction the order has advanced with amazing strides, for he is a remarkable organiser and administrator, two qualities rarely found among the Arabs. The destruction of the Mahdi and of the Khalifa, and the more recent dethronement of Abdul-Hamid, resulted in bringing a large accession of force to his standard by the extinction of all religious authority [Pg 103] in Africa except his own. Though the Sultan of Turkey is, as I have said, the titular head of the Moslem religion, and is venerated as such wherever praying-rugs are spread, the chief of this militant order is undoubtedly regarded by the average Mohammedan as the most actively powerful figure, if not as the saviour, of Islam. The first Senussi was powerful enough to excommunicate the Sultan Abdul-Medjid from the order because of his intimacy with the European powers; the father of the present Khedive of Egypt was accustomed to address the second Senussi in such terms as a disciple would use to a prophet, while Abbas Hilmi II, the reigning Khedive, a few years ago journeyed across the Libyan desert to pay his respects to the present head of the order.
Those who are in a position to know whereof they speak believe that the Senussiyeh would actively oppose any attempt on the part of the Italians to occupy the hinterland of Tripolitania, for it is obvious that such an occupation would not alone bring the Christian in dangerous proximity to the chief stronghold of the order, but it would effectually cut off the supplies of arms and ammunition which caravans in the pay of the Senussiyeh have regularly been transporting to Jof from obscure ports on the Tripolitanian coast. It has been the policy of the Senussiyeh, supported by the Turkish administration in Tripolitania, to close the regions under its control to Christians, so it is scarcely likely that it would do other than resist an Italian penetration of the country, even in the face of a Turkish [Pg 104] evacuation. Though the order encouraged resistance to the French advance in the Sudan, considering that the extension of the French sphere of influence threatened its own prestige in those regions, it has, as a rule, refrained from displaying antagonism toward the rulers of the adjoining regions. Aside from proselytism, the Senussiyeh has performed a great work in the Sahara in the colonisation and cultivation of the oases, the encouragement of trade, the building of rest-houses, the sinking of wells, and the protection of trans-Saharan caravans.
Stripped of the glamour and exaggeration with which sensational writers and superficial travellers have invested the subject, it is apparent that the Senussi controls a very wide-spread and powerful organisation—an organisation probably unique in the world. As a fighting element his followers are undoubtedly far superior to the wild and wretchedly armed tribesmen who charged the British squares so valorously at Abu Klea and Omdurman and who wiped out an Italian army in the Abyssinian hills. Their remarkable mobility, their wonderful powers of endurance, their large supplies of the swift and hardy racing-camel known as hegin , and their marvellous knowledge of this great, inhospitable region, coupled with the fact that they can always retreat to their bases in the desert, where civilised troops cannot follow them, are all advantages of which the Senussi and his followers are thoroughly aware.
Although the Senussi is, as I have shown, amply [Pg 105] capable of causing the Italians serious trouble, it is very unlikely that he will prove actively hostile if they refrain from encroaching upon those remote regions which he looks upon as his own. Italy will have her hands full with the development of the coastal regions for many years to come, so, if she is wise, she will leave the interior of the country severely alone, recognise the religious authority of the Senussi, and, if possible, effect some such working agreement with him as England has done with an equally dangerous neighbour, the Amir of Afghanistan.
From the glimpses which I have given you of the inhospitable character of Tripolitania and the still more inhospitable people who inhabit it, it will be seen that Italy's task does not end with the ousting of the Turk. She has set her hand to the plough, however, and started it upon a long and arduous and very costly furrow, the end of which no man can see. For a nation to have a colony, or colonies, wherein she can turn loose the overflow of her population and still keep them under her own flag, is an undeniable asset, particularly when the colony is as accessible from the mother country as Libya [1] (for we must accustom ourselves to the new name sooner or later) is from Italy. But if Italy is to be a success as a colonising nation she must school herself to do things differently in Tripolitania from what she has in her other African dependencies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.
[1] The Italians have given their new possession the historic name of Libya.
First and foremost, she must pick the men who are to settle her new colony as carefully as she picks the men [Pg 106] for her carabinieri , choosing them with a view to their intelligence, industry, energy, and sobriety, for to flood Tripolitania with such a class of emigrants as every vessel from Italy dumps on our hospitable shores is but to invite disaster.
Secondly, she must impress on these colonists the imperative necessity of keeping on friendly terms with the natives, who are, after all, the real owners of the soil, and of obtaining their co-operation in the development of the country. The Arab, remember, unlike the negro, cannot be bullied and domineered with impunity, Germany's African colonies providing significant examples of the failures which invariably result from ill-treatment of the native population.
Thirdly, there must be no “absentee landlordism,” the future of the colony largely depending, to my way of thinking, upon frugal, hard-working peasant farmers, owning their own farms, whose prosperity will thus be indissolubly linked with that of the colony.
Lastly, all local questions of administration should be taken entirely out of the hands of Rome and left to “the man on the spot,” for history is filled with the chronicles of promising colonies which have been ship-wrecked on the rocks of a highly centralised form of government.
If the Italians will take these things to heart, I believe that their conquest of Tripolitania will prove, in the end, for the country's own best good, contributing to its peace and to the welfare of its inhabitants, native as well as foreign, and that it will promote the opening [Pg 107] up of the dark places to civilisation, if not to Christianity—for the Moslem does not change his faith. When, therefore, all is said and done, I cannot but feel that the cross of the House of Savoy portends more good to Africa in general, and to Tripolitania in particular, than would ever the star and crescent.
THE LAND OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER
THIS is the story of how a handful of white men jerked a nation out of the desert and the depths of despair, as though by its collar, set it on its feet, and taught it to play the game. It is the story of how northeast Africa—a region which God had seemingly forgotten—has been transformed into a prosperous and self-respecting country by giving it two things which it had always needed and had never known—justice and water. It is the chronicle of a thirty years' struggle, under disheartening conditions, against overwhelming odds, and when you have finished it you will agree with me, I think, that it is one of the wonder-tales of history. It is a drama in which English officials and Egyptian pashas and Arab sheikhs all have their greater or their lesser parts, and it is as full of romance and intrigue and treachery and fighting as any moving-picture play that was ever thrown upon a screen.
To my way of thinking, the rescue and rehabilitation of the Nile country is the most convincing proof of England's genius as a colonising nation. That you may be able to judge, by comparison, what she has accomplished, you must go back a third of a century or so, to the days when Ismail Pasha—he with the brow of a statesman and the chin of a libertine—still sat on the [Pg 109] throne of the Pharaohs, wielding an extravagant, vacillating, and ineffectual rule over a region which stretched from the Mediterranean seaboard southward to Uganda and the sleeping-sickness, and from the Red Sea shore westward until it lost itself in the sand wastes of the Great Sahara. Of the one million three hundred and fifty thousand square miles at that time included within the Egyptian borders, less than five thousand were cultivated land; the rest was yellow desert and nothing more. The seven millions of blacks and browns who composed the population were so poor that the dwellers in the slums of Whitechapel were affluent when compared to them; they lived, for the most part, in wretched hovels of sun-dried mud scattered along the banks of the Nile, maintaining a hand-to-mouth existence by raising a low grade of cotton on a few feddans of land which they irrigated by hand, at an appalling cost of time and labour, with water drawn up in buckets from the river. As a result of the corvée , or system of forced labour on public works which prevailed, a large part of the population was virtually in a state of slavery; the taxes, which were unjustly assessed and incredibly exorbitant, could only be collected with the aid of the kourbash , as the terrible whip of rhino hide used by the slave-dealers was known. Barring the single line of ramshackle railway which connected Cairo with Alexandria and with the Suez Canal, the only means of transportation were the puffing river-boats and the plodding caravans. The unpaid and ill-disciplined army was a synonym for cowardice, as proved by its [Pg 110] defeats by the tribesmen of Abyssinia and the Sudan. The Khedive was a profligate and a spendthrift; his ministers and governors were cruel, dishonest, and tyrannical; the national resources had been dissipated in a veritable debauch of extravagance and corruption. I doubt, indeed, if the sun ever shone on a more decadent, demoralised, and discouraged nation than was Egypt on that June day in 1879, when a cablegram from Constantinople, addressed, significantly enough, to “Ismail Pasha, ex-Khedive of Egypt,” brought the Sultan's demand for his immediate abdication in favour of his son Tewfik. Called to a heritage of bankruptcy and wide-spread discontent, the new ruler, anxious though he undoubtedly was to use his prerogatives for his people's good, found himself forced to decide between European intervention and native rebellion. The question was decided for him, however, for, in the spring of 1882, Arabi and his lawless soldiery broke loose and overran the land.
Whether this Arabi Pasha was at heart a patriot or a plunderer is a question which has never been satisfactorily decided, nor is it one which particularly concerns us, although, if you ever happen to find yourself at Kandy, in the hills of Ceylon, where he still lives in exile, I would recommend you to call upon him, for he will receive you with marked hospitality and will talk to you quite frankly about those stirring events in which he played so prominent a part. As this is a story of the present, rather than of the past, suffice it to say that Arabi, then an officer in the Egyptian army, instigated [Pg 111] a military revolt which had as its object the ending of European influence in the affairs of Egypt. So rapidly did this propaganda of “Egypt for the Egyptians!” spread among the lower classes of the population, and so perilous became the position of foreigners resident in the country, that, upon Alexandria being captured and looted by the revolutionists, a British squadron bombarded and partially destroyed that city, while a British army, hurried from Malta for the protection of the Canal, in which England held the dominating interest, dispersed Arabi's forces at Tel-el-Kebir, pushed on across the desert to Cairo, stamped out the remaining embers of the revolt, and restored in a measure the authority of the Khedive, though not without taking the precaution of surrounding him with British “advisers” and garrisoning his cities with British troops. Such, in tabloid form, is the story of the beginnings of British domination in the land of the Valley of the Nile.
In view of the chaotic condition of the country, England naturally decided that the only way to insure the safety of her subjects, as well as of her great financial and political interests in that region, was to continue the military occupation of Egypt, for the time being at least, and boldly to begin the task of its financial, judicial, political, and military reconstruction. The form of government which has resulted is, I suppose, the most extraordinary in the history of nations.
Nominally a province of the Turkish Empire, and administered by a viceroy who theoretically derives his power from the Turkish sovereign, Egypt is autonomous [Pg 112] (so far as Turkey is concerned), though it still pays annual tribute of about three million five hundred thousand dollars to the Sultan. Though the title “khedive” means sovereign or king, without qualification or limitation, the real ruler of Egypt is not his Highness Abbas Hilmi II, but his Britannic Majesty's Agent and Consul-General—at present Lord Kitchener of Khartoum—who, though officially Britain's diplomatic representative in Egypt and nothing more, in reality exercises almost unlimited authority and power. In other words, England has assumed the position of a receiver for Egypt's foreign creditors and has apparently made the receivership—which has never been agreeable to the khedivial government—a permanent one. Egypt's situation might, indeed, be quite aptly compared to a railway system which has been forced into bankruptcy by the extravagant methods of its directors, and one of whose largest creditors has become receiver with full power to reorganise the system for its stockholders' and its creditors' best good.
Another feature of Egypt's complex form of government is the International Debt Commission, which consists of delegates from England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Italy, who are stationed at Cairo for the purpose of keeping an eye on the national revenues and periodically collecting a share of them, over and above the actual running expenses of the government, to pay the interest on the Egyptian bonds held in those countries.
To this administrative medley must be added the [Pg 113] complications caused by the Ottoman Capitulations—by which fourteen foreign governments, including our own, exercise almost sovereign rights in Egypt, the International Tribunals, or “Mixed Courts,” in the control of which Egypt has almost nothing to say, giving them complete jurisdiction in all civil cases in which aliens may be involved with each other or with Egyptians, while the foreign consuls possess absolute authority in criminal cases where their nationals are concerned.
The Capitulations, many of which date back to the early days of Turkish power, are nothing less than guarantees to foreigners within the Ottoman dominions of full and complete immunity from the laws governing Turkish subjects. No reciprocal obligation was constituted by a Capitulation (which, by the way, means the instrument containing the terms of an agreement), as it was intended to be a purely gratuitous concession granted to Christians, by virtue of which they were tolerated upon the soil of Islam. Though the Capitulations were never regarded by the Turks as treaties—it being obvious that the Commander of the Faithful, who is likewise the Successor of the Prophet and the Shadow of Allah, could never treat a Christian ruler as an equal—they have all the character and force of treaties nevertheless, inviolability of domicile, freedom from taxation of every sort, and immunity from arrest for any offence whatsoever being but items in the comprehensive promise not to molest the foreigner. In short, the Capitulations give to the nations possessing them as complete jurisdiction over their citizens as [Pg 114] they exercise at home, the Egyptian Government being powerless to lay so much as a finger on a foreigner who breaks its laws.
Should an American sailor, for example, become involved in a drunken affray, as sometimes happens, and wound or kill an Egyptian, the Egyptian police would no more arrest him than they would the Khedive. They would merely keep him under surveillance, meanwhile notifying the American consul, who would despatch his kavasses , as the armed guards which are attached—also by virtue of the Capitulations—to the various consulates are called, to effect the man's arrest. He would then be tried by the consul, who possesses magisterial powers, before a jury drawn from American residents or tourists, and, if found guilty, would be confined in one of the several consular prisons which the United States maintains in the Turkish Empire, although, if the sentence were a long one, he would probably be sent to a prison in this country to serve it out.
Though the Egyptian police may be perfectly aware that Georgios Miltiades runs a roulette game in the back room of his café, and keeps a disorderly house up-stairs, he can lounge in his doorway and jeer at them with perfect safety for the simple reason that he is a Greek subject, and therefore his café is as much on Greek soil as though it were in the Odos Ammonia in Athens, his consul alone possessing the right to enter it, to cause his arrest, and to inflict imprisonment or fine.
Notwithstanding the fact that the importation of [Pg 115] hasheesh into Egypt is strictly prohibited, the government making every effort to stamp out its use by the natives, the Italian smuggler who drops anchor in Alexandria harbour with a cargo of it aboard knows perfectly well that the arm of the Egyptian law is not long enough to reach him. If, however, he is caught by the local police in the act of taking the contraband ashore, it will be confiscated, though he himself can be arrested and punished only by the Italian consular official resident at that port.
As a result of the privileges granted to foreigners by the Capitulations, the consuls stationed in Egypt, as well as in other parts of the Turkish Empire, are virtually the governors of their respective colonies, possessing powers which cause their wishes to be respected and their orders obeyed. They are expected to keep a watchful eye on the doings of their nationals, especially those who keep saloons, dance-halls, or cafés; to settle, either in or out of court, their quarrels and even their domestic disputes; to inspect the sanitary condition of their houses; to perform the marriage service for those who prefer a civil to a religious ceremony; and to attend to their burial and the administration of their estates when they die. It is scarcely necessary to add that, as a result of this anomalous state of affairs, there is constant friction and frequent conflicts of authority between the foreign consuls and the local authorities. So jealously, indeed, do the foreign powers guard the privileges conferred upon them by the Capitulations, that Cairo can have no modern drainage system because [Pg 116] certain of the European governments refuse to give the Egyptian sanitary inspectors permission to enter the houses of their subjects.
In matters of personal law, such as marriage, divorce, guardianship, succession, and the like, foreigners are, in general, subject to their own patriarchs or other religious heads, while similar questions are decided for the natives by the native courts known as Mehkemmehs , which are presided over by the Cadis. In other matters Egyptians are justiciable before the ordinary native tribunals, which now consist of forty-six summary courts having civil jurisdiction in matters up to two thousand five hundred dollars in value and criminal jurisdiction in offences punishable by a fine or by imprisonment up to three years; seven central tribunals, each of the chambers of which consists of three judges; and a court of appeals at Cairo, about half of whose members are European. Since its reorganisation, the native Egyptian bench has won an enviable record for honesty, energy, and efficiency, and would, if granted complete jurisdictional powers, prove a great influence for good in the land.
So far as the Khedive is concerned, he has about as much to say in the direction of the government as the child Emperor of China had before the revolution put a president in his stead. Not only is Abbas Hilmi surrounded by English secretaries and advisers, without whose permission he may scarcely change his mind, but he is compelled to yield to England even in choosing the members of his ministry, the one or two attempts [Pg 117] which he has made to assert his right to independence of action in this respect having been met by England with a military demonstration in the streets of his capital which was not abated until the office was filled by an Egyptian satisfactory to the British Consul-General.
Some years ago, when that grim old statesman, Lord Cromer, was still deus ex machina in Egypt, the Khedive, emboldened by the rapid spread of the Nationalist movement, which has for its slogan “Egypt for the Egyptians!” flatly declined to give a cabinet portfolio to a certain Egyptian politician whose appointment had been urged by the British Consul-General and who was notoriously a British tool. The following morning Lord Cromer drove to the Abdin Palace and demanded an audience with the Khedive. There were no euphemisms employed in the interview which ensued.
“I have come to obtain your Highness's signature to this decree,” announced Lord Cromer, in the blunt and aggressive manner so characteristic of him.
“Suppose, my lord,” the Khedive asked quietly, “that I decline to make an appointment which is not for the good of Egypt—what then?”
“Then, your Highness,” said Cromer menacingly, “Ceylon.”
“But suppose, my lord,” Abbas Hilmi again inquired, his face pale with anger, “that I disregard your threat to exile me to Ceylon and still refuse to sign this commission?”
Lord Cromer strode across the room to a window [Pg 118] which commanded a view of Abdin Square and threw back the curtain. “Will your Highness look out of this window before you give me a final answer?” he asked.
The Khedive stepped to the window and looked down. There, drawn up in motionless ranks which stretched from end to end of the great square, was a brigade of British infantry, the Egyptian sun blazing down on the rows of brown helmets, on the business-like uniforms of khaki, and on the slanting lines of steel. For five full minutes Abbas Hilmi stood in silence, looking down on that grim display of power. Then he turned slowly to Lord Cromer. “Give me the pen,” he said.
Here is another example of the harshness of the attitude which England has seen fit to adopt in her dealings with the Egyptian sovereign. In the days when Lord Kitchener, fresh from his triumphs in the Sudan, was still Sirdar of the Egyptian army, the Khedive announced that he would utilise the occasion of his approaching visit to Khartoum to review the troops of the garrison. For hours the sinewy, brown-faced soldiery marched and countermarched before the Khedive on the field of Omdurman. The infantry in their sand-coloured uniforms swept by with the swing of veterans; the field batteries—the same that had mown down the Mahdi's fanatic tribesmen—rumbled by at a gallop; the camel corps, the riders swaying on their strange mounts like vessels in a gale, paced past; then the cavalry came, as fast as the horses could lay [Pg 119] foot to ground, lances levelled, the troopers cheering like madmen, thundering past the reviewing party in a whirlwind of colour and dust and noise. It was a fine exhibition and one of which any commanding officer might well have been proud, but the Khedive had received his military education in Austria, where faultless alignment and the ability to execute intricate parade movements are reckoned among the first requisites of a soldier; so when Lord Kitchener, the conqueror of the Sudan and the maker of the Egyptian army, reined up his charger before him, saluted, and perfunctorily asked, “I trust that your Highness is satisfied with the discipline and appearance of your forces?” Abbas Hilmi, probably as much from a spirit of hostility to the English as for any other reason, answered in a voice loud enough to be heard by all around him, “They are a fine body of men, Lord Kitchener, but I am far from satisfied with their discipline.” Officers who witnessed this incident have told me that Lord Kitchener was as amazed as though he had received a slap in the face. Within an hour his resignation as Sirdar was in the hands of the Khedive, who as promptly accepted it. But England could never permit her foremost soldier to be so wantonly and so publicly affronted, for to do so would be dangerously to impair her prestige among all classes of Egyptians. So the cable flashed a message from Downing Street to the British Agency in Cairo and a few hours later the Khedive was peremptorily informed that he could choose between apologising to Lord Kitchener and requesting him to withdraw his [Pg 120] resignation or of abdicating in favour of his brother. Appreciating that it was wiser to apologise and keep his throne than to remain stubborn and lose it, Abbas Hilmi requested Kitchener to remain on as Sirdar—and he himself remained on as Khedive.
The men who really transact the business of the Egyptian Government are not the holders of cabinet portfolios, but the departmental under-secretaries, all of whom are English, their plans being perfunctorily submitted to their Egyptian chiefs for their approval, though they would be used whether they received it or not. The national revenues and expenditures are controlled by an English financial adviser, without whose permission the Khedive and his ministers cannot spend so much as a piastre of government funds. Similarly, the ministries of the interior, of justice, of communications, and of agriculture are dictated by English “advisers.” For upward of thirty years, in fact, the Nile country has been more absolutely governed from London than has India, or Canada, or Australia, or South Africa, or any of the Crown colonies, and this despite the fact that between England and Egypt there is no tie that is officially recognised by any foreign power. Now, thirty years is a considerable lapse of time anywhere, particularly in the East, where men mature rapidly, so that those who were children when the British came are in the prime of life now. The fact that in that interim England has had ample time to train them for the duties of governmental administration, as witness what we have accomplished among the Filipinos [Pg 121] in less than half that time, but that she has made little, if any, effort to do so, is quite naturally taken by all thinking Egyptians as a proof that there is no sincerity back of her repeated assertions that she intends to turn Egypt over to them as soon as they are fitted to administer it. In fact, I have heard responsible British officials assert that, to their way of thinking, the natives were getting altogether too much education as it was, and that the less they were taught to think the easier it would be for England to hold the country. Frankly stated, England's attitude toward the Egyptians has been “You cannot go near the water until you know how to swim.”
Let it be perfectly clear, however, that nothing is farther from my intention than to intimate that British rule has not been beneficial to Egypt. No fair-minded person who was familiar with the appalling condition of the country and its people before the English came, and with their present state of prosperity, would cast so much as the shadow of a doubt on the wonderful improvement which has been brought about. The story of Egypt's rise from practical bankruptcy until its securities are now quoted nearly as high as English consols reads like a romance of the gold fields. During the last few years the country has been experiencing a land boom equal to that of southern California, property in Alexandria having sold at the rate of one hundred dollars a square yard; scientific irrigation, combined with the completion of the great dam at Assuan, has enormously enlarged the area of cultivation and [Pg 122] has made Egypt the second greatest cotton-producing country in the world; the national debt has been materially reduced; and, most significant of all, Egypt's European bondholders have consented to have the interest on their bonds reduced from seven to three and a half per cent. Life and property have been made as safe in Port Said and Zagazig and the Fayoum as they are in Yonkers or Salem or New Rochelle; slavery has been abolished; official corruption has been rooted out; forced labour for public works is no longer permitted; an admirable system of railways brings the entire cultivated area within reach of the coast; hospitals have been established in all of the larger towns; while every phase of the public health has been so closely watched that the population of the country has actually doubled in the thirty years since the English came.
To my way of thinking, the most interesting chapter in the history of present-day Egypt is that which records the development of scientific irrigation. Northeast Africa being practically rainless, its sole source of water supply is the Nile, this mighty river created by torrential rains in the mountains of Abyssinia and by the overflow of equatorial lakes, and which is without tributaries in Egypt proper, having an overflow which varies with the seasons. For four months the flood rushing seaward, which is known as “high Nile,” enriches hundreds of square miles of what would otherwise be arid and worthless land. Then come eight months of low Nile, which, were it not for the genius of an English engineer, would mean unwatered fields, [Pg 123] scanty crops, and probably famine. The British administrators, appreciating from the very outset that Egypt's entire future depended upon its agricultural prosperity, and that this, in turn, depended upon the fellaheen having an ample and steady supply of water for their farms, set their engineers at the task of devising some scheme for compelling the great river to pay tribute to the land through which it passed instead of wasting its fertilising waters in the Mediterranean. Hence the great barrage at Assuan, suggested by Sir William Willcocks, designed by Sir Benjamin Baker, built by Sir John Aird, and financed by Sir Ernest Cassel. A mile and a quarter long, containing a million tons of stone and creating a reservoir three times the area of the Lake of Geneva, this titanic barrier permits the additional irrigation of one million six hundred thousand acres of land. Though its cost was twelve million five hundred thousand dollars, it has already increased the earning power of Egypt fully thirteen million dollars annually, so it will be seen that it more than pays for itself to the country every twelvemonth. The systematic liberation, during the burning summer months, of the water thus conserved, means unfailing prosperity for Egypt, for it is almost unbelievable, to one who has not seen it with his own eyes, what agricultural magic water can work in this naturally fertile soil. As the regions capable of responding to irrigation are almost boundless, and as the water supply is almost inexhaustible, and as the engineers—and, what is far more important, the financiers—have come to appreciate [Pg 124] that the pregnant soil can be made to pay for the cost of any reservoir, or series of reservoirs, which they may construct, it is only reasonable to assume that the great dam at Assuan is but the forerunner of many others, so that eventually the Valley of the Nile will be white with cotton and yellow with grain from the Delta to the Sudd.
But if Upper Egypt suffers from being too dry, Lower Egypt suffers from being too wet. The prosperity of the country, remember, depends almost entirely upon its cotton crop, which has an approximate value of one hundred million dollars annually, the cotton fields covering some one million six hundred thousand acres, most of which are in the Delta. That this source of revenue may be increased, the Egyptian Government has recently undertaken a huge drainage project, which will, it is estimated, when completed in 1915, redeem a great tract of flooded and hitherto worthless land, bringing a million additional acres under cultivation, almost doubling the production of cotton, and, incidentally, draining Lake Mariout, that historic body of water disappearing forever.
Agriculture and its attendant problems of irrigation and fertilisation constitute the sole hobby and amusement of the present Khedive, Abbas Hilmi II, and, consequently, he is keenly interested in anything that pertains to it, being a ready and liberal purchaser of all improved types of agricultural machinery, which he puts to practical use on the great estates which he owns near Alexandria, in the Delta, and in the Western [Pg 125] Desert. It so happened that, while I was the consular representative of the United States at Alexandria, I received a call one morning from the president of an American concern engaged in the manufacture of agricultural and well-drilling machinery who explained that he was passing through Egypt and asked if it would be possible for me to obtain him an audience with the Khedive. The request was duly transmitted to the Grand Master of Ceremonies, and shortly thereafter a reply reached me naming the day and hour when his Highness would receive my compatriot and myself at the palace of Ras-el-Tin. Frock-coated and top-hatted, we drove to the palace on the day appointed, were received by the officials of the khedivial household, and shown into the salle de réception , where Abbas Hilmi stood awaiting us. After a cordial greeting—for the Khedive makes no secret of his liking for Americans—he drew me down beside him on a small sofa, motioning my companion to take a chair opposite us.
“It gives me particular pleasure,” I began, “to present Mr. K—— to your Highness, particularly as he is an authority on agricultural machinery—a subject in which your Highness is, I know, considerably interested.”
“Say, Khedive,” exclaimed my fellow-countryman, suddenly leaning forward and emphasising every sentence by waggling his finger under Abbas Hilmi's august nose, “I've got the niftiest little proposition in well-drilling machinery that ever struck this burg, and if you don't jump at a chance to get in on the ground [Pg 126] floor, then all I've got to say is that you're throwing away the chance of your lifetime.”
The Khedive, being, naturally, quite unaccustomed to this form of verbal assault and still more unaccustomed to having any one waggle a finger under his nose, at first drew back haughtily; then the humour of the situation dawned upon him, and, as the river of talk which is one of the chief assets of the trained American salesman flowed steadily on, he became interested in spite of himself, now and then interjecting a pertinent question, and terminating the audience by giving the American an order for several thousand dollars' worth of American machinery, which, the last I heard of it, was giving excellent satisfaction on the royal farms.
If it is difficult to fix the exact legal status of Egypt, it is still more difficult to explain that of the Sudan, which is described in the official blue-books as “an Anglo-Egyptian condominium.” Until 1882 the Sudan was as much a part of Egypt proper as Florida is a part of the United States, but in that year Egyptian rule was interrupted by the revolt of the Mahdi, who, with his successor the Khalifa, held the country for sixteen years under a bloody and desolating tyranny. In 1896 an Anglo-Egyptian army under Sir Herbert Kitchener began operations for the recovery of the lost provinces, and, on September 2, 1898, the overthrow of the Dervish power was completed on the battle-field of Omdurman. In the following year the pleasing farce was presented [Pg 127] of a convention being signed by the British and Egyptian Governments (or, in other words, by Lord Cromer as the representative of England in Egypt and by Lord Cromer as the virtual dictator of Egypt) which provides for the administration of the territory south of the twenty-second parallel of latitude by a governor-general appointed by Egypt with the assent of England; and which declares that the British and Egyptian flags shall be used together; that laws shall be made by proclamation; that no duties shall be levied on imports from Egypt; and that slavery is prohibited. In view of England's absolute domination of Egypt, it is obvious that the term “condominium,” as applied to the Sudan, is a euphemism for “British possession,” and that England controls this great region as completely as though her flag alone flew over it and King George's picture ornamented its stamps.
The name Sudan is short for Beled-es-Sudan, which means the Land of the Blacks. Extending from the southern frontier of Egypt to Uganda, a distance equal to that from Saint Paul to New Orleans, and from the shores of the Red Sea to the confines of the great central African kingdom of Wadai, or as far as from Chicago to Denver, the Sudan boasts an area three times that of Texas. This area, prior to the Dervish oppression, had a population estimated at eight and a half millions, but, as a result of the wholesale massacres perpetrated by the Mahdi and his followers, it has to-day less than two and a half millions. Since the return of peace, however, the Sudan is gradually recovering from the effects of the [Pg 128] Dervishes' barbaric rule, during which the whole country was depopulated, wide tracts of land went out of cultivation, and trade was largely abandoned.
At present the poverty, the scanty population, and the lack of irrigation in the Sudan form a striking contrast to the wealth, the density of population, and the high state of cultivation found in Egypt. But, though it has been, until very recently, little better than an abandoned estate, with practically no market value, the money and labour which its British proprietors are expending upon it are already beginning to produce highly promising results. As a matter of fact, the agricultural resources of this inland empire are hardly guessed at, for the fact is too apt to be overlooked that, beyond the sandy deserts which guard its northern frontier, there exist extensive and fertile regions which, in the provinces of Gezire and Sennar alone, are estimated at fifteen millions of acres. Added to this, the Sudan is particularly fortunate in possessing, in the Blue and the White Nile, two great waterways which are destined to prove invaluable as mediums of fertilisation and transportation. There is, indeed, no room for doubt that the Sudan is destined to be in time a great agricultural centre, for cotton, wheat, and sugar-cane are staple and give every promise of prolific crops—many English experts prophesying that, when provided with facilities for irrigation, it will supplant the United States as the chief cotton-growing country of the world—while, farther afield, there are excellent cattle ranges and untold wealth in forest lands. But although much [Pg 129] money has already been spent upon the Sudan, much more will have to be spent before it can have more than a speaking acquaintance with prosperity, for none of its three great needs—population, irrigation, and transportation—can be provided for nothing or in a hurry.
I was told so repeatedly by people in other and more favoured parts of Africa that the Sudan was nothing but a waste of sun-scorched sand, that I went there as much to see if the description were a true one as for any other reason. You don't have to search for romance in the Sudan; it's there waiting for you when you arrive. It met me on the station platform at Wady Halfa, which is the first town across the Sudanese frontier, in the form of a fair-haired, moon-faced, khaki-clad guard on the Khartoum express, who spurned the tip I proffered him to secure a compartment to myself as insolently as the poor but virtuous heroine of the melodrama spurns the villain's gold. He drew back as though the silver I offered him were a rattlesnake in working order and his face flushed a dull brick-red; then, bowing stiffly from the waist, as a Prussian officer does when he is introduced, he turned on his heel and strode away. “I say, you got the wrong one that time, old chap,” remarked an Englishman who had witnessed the little incident and who, judging from his pith helmet and riding-breeches, was of the country. “You probably didn't know that you were offering a tip to a former captain in his German Majesty's garde du corps ?” I remarked that a month before a former general of division of the Bey of Tunis had accepted [Pg 130] with marked gratitude a tip not half so large for showing me through the Palace of the Bardo.
“Well, this Johnnie won't,” was the reply. “He may not have much money, but he's loaded to the gunwales with pride. The story of his career sounds as if it had served as a model for one of Ouida's novels. Refused to marry the girl his parents had picked out for him, so his father cut off his allowance and left him to shift for himself. He sent in his papers, went to Algeria, and enlisted—of all fool things!—in that regiment of earth's hard cases called the Foreign Legion. It didn't take him long to get all he wanted of that kind of soldiering, so one day, when he was sent down to Oran in charge of a prisoner, he swam out to a British steamer lying in the harbour, worked his passage to Alexandria, enlisted in a British cavalry regiment, took part in Kitchener's campaign against the Khalifa, was wounded in the shindy at Omdurman, and retired on a pension. Now he wears a guard's uniform and carries a green flag and walks up and down the platform shouting 'All aboard for Khartoum!' And at home he would have a coronet on his visiting-cards and spend his afternoons swaggering along Unter den Linden. Extraordinary what a man will do if he has to, isn't it? But you'll find lots more of the same kind in the Sudan. It's no place for idlers down here; every one works or gets out.”
That struck me as a pretty promising introduction to a country which, so I had been assured elsewhere, had nothing more interesting to recommend it than sun and sand, and it was with a marked rise in my anticipations [Pg 131] that I saw my luggage stowed away in a compartment of one of the long railway carriages, which are painted white for the same reason that a man wears a white suit in the tropics, which have windows of blue glass to prevent the sun-glare from injuring the passengers' eyes, and which are provided with both outside and inside blinds in an attempt to keep out a little of the heat. Looked at from any stand-point that you please, the thirty hours' railway journey from Wady Halfa to Khartoum is far from being an enjoyable experience, for a light in your compartment means a plague of flies, while any attempt to get air, other than that kicked up by the electric fan, means suffocating dust. It being too dark to read and too hot to sleep, the only alternative is to sit in your pajamas, swelter, and smoke.
Considering the obstacles it has had to overcome, the Sudan government deserves great credit for the railways it has built and the trains it operates. The construction of the railway to Khartoum was undertaken by General Kitchener in 1896, in order to support the advance of his army, and, in spite of the difficulty of laying a railway line across the sandy and stony surface of the desert, the work was so energetically carried on that the line advanced at the rate of a mile a day. The most serious obstacle was, of course, the provision of an adequate supply of water for the engines and workmen, so a series of watering-stations was established, at which wells, sunk to a depth of eighty feet or more, tap the subterranean water. These stations are so far apart, however, that to supply the engines it is necessary [Pg 132] to attach two or more tank-cars to each train. Still another difficulty is the shifting sand, which, during the period of the khamsin , or desert wind, proves as disastrous to railroading in the Sudan as snow does to the railroads of our own Northwest, an inch of sand throwing an engine from the rails far more effectually than a yard of snow.
It was my fortune, by the way, to encounter one of the huboubs , or sand-storms, for which the Sudan is famous. To give an adequate idea of it, however, is as impossible as it is to describe any other overwhelming phenomenon of nature. Far off across the desert we saw it approaching at the speed of a galloping horse—a great fleecy, yellowish-brown cloud which looked for all the world like the smoke of some gigantic conflagration. A distant humming, which sounded at first like the drone of a million sewing-machines, gradually rose into such a roar as might be made by a million motor-cars, and then the storm was upon us. The sand poured down as though shaken through a sieve; the landscape was blotted out; the sun was obscured and there came a yellow darkness, like that of a London fog; men and animals threw themselves, or were hurled, to the ground before the fury of the wind, while a mantle of sand, inches thick, settled upon every animate and inanimate thing. Then it was gone, as suddenly as it had come, and we were left dizzy, bewildered, blinded, half-strangled, and gasping for breath, amid a landscape which was as completely shrouded in yellow sand as an American countryside in winter is covered with snow. [Pg 133] Under any circumstances a sand-storm is a disagreeable experience, but out on the desert, where the traveller's life frequently depends upon the plainness of the caravan trails, it ofttimes brings death in its train.
It is a gratifying compliment to American mechanical skill that the running-time between Wady Halfa and Khartoum has been shortened four hours by the recent adoption of American locomotives, which run, fittingly enough, over American-made rails. In the construction of its trains the Sudan government has avoided the irksome privacy of the European compartment car and the unremitting publicity of the American Pullman by designing a car which combines the best features of both. The first-class cars on the Sudanese express trains contain a series of coupés, each somewhat roomier than the drawing-room in a Pullman sleeper and each opening into a spacious corridor which runs the length of the car. For day use there is one long cushioned seat running crosswise of each compartment, which at night forms the lower berth, the back of the seat swinging up on hinges to form the upper. Each coupé is provided with running water, a folding table, two arm-chairs of wicker, and an electric fan, without which last, owing to the almost incredible dust which a train sets in motion, one would all but suffocate. At several stations along the line are well-equipped baths, at which the trains stop long enough for the passengers hurriedly to refresh themselves.
The mention of these railway baths recalls an incident which seems amusing enough to relate. I once [Pg 134] had as a fellow-passenger on the journey from Khartoum northward a red-faced, white-moustached, choleric-tempered English globe-trotter, who was constitutionally opposed to the practice of tipping, which he took occasion to characterise on every possible occasion as “An outrage—a damnable outrage, sir!” Now, at these wayside bath stations it has long been the accepted custom to give the equivalent of five cents to the silent-footed native who fills the tub, brings you your soap and towels, and brushes your garments. But this the irascible Englishman, true to his principles, refused to do, still further unpopularising himself by loudly cursing the cleanliness of the tub, the warmth of the water, the size of the towels, and the slowness of the Sudanese attendant. Five minutes before the time for the train to leave the whistle gave due warning and the passengers scrambled from the bath into their clothes, which the native attendants were accustomed to brush and leave outside the bath-room doors. Every one hurried into his clothes, as I have remarked, except the anti-tipping Englishman, who almost choked with blasphemy when he found that his garments had mysteriously disappeared. Though a hasty search was instituted, not a trace of them could be found, the impassive Sudanese stolidly declaring that they had seen nothing of the effendi's missing apparel. The engine shrieked its final warning and the laughing travellers piled aboard—all, that is, but the Englishman, who rushed onto the platform clad in a bath towel, only to retreat before the shocked glances of the women passengers. My last [Pg 135] impression of that God-forsaken, sun-blistered bath station in the desert was the rapidly diminishing sound of his imprecations as he continued his fruitless search for his garments. There was no other train, I should add, for three days. Weeks later I heard that his clothes were eventually returned to him by a native, who said that he had found them, neatly folded, underneath a near-by culvert.
Nowhere is the overpowering romance of the land brought more vividly before you than in the dining-cars or on the decks of the river steamers. The tall young Englishman in flannels who sits opposite you at table remarks casually that he is using a four months' leave of absence to go up Gondokoro-way after elephant, and a French marquis who is sitting near by, happening to overhear the conversation, leans across to inquire about the chances for sport on the Abyssinian frontier. “You can't go across there, you know,” interrupts a bimbashi, whose freckled Irish face looks strangely out of place beneath the tarboosh which denotes an officer in the Egyptian service. “The Hadendowas are on the rampage again and the Sirdar has issued orders that no one is to be permitted to cross into Menelik's territory until things have quieted down. There's no use your trying it, for the camel police are jolly well certain to turn you back.” The bearded man in the ill-fitting clothes, who would be taken almost anywhere for a commercial traveller, is, you are told, one of the most celebrated big-game shots in the world, and just now is on his way to the Lado Enclave in search of a [Pg 136] certain rare species of antelope for the Berlin museum. The grizzled Egyptian officer sitting by himself—for the British no more mingle socially with the Egyptians than Americans do with negroes—once served under Gordon, as the bit of faded blue ribbon on the breast of his tunic denotes; the brown-faced Englishman in riding-clothes, with the wrinkles about his eyes which come from staring out across the sands under a tropic sun, is a pasha and the governor of a province as large as many a European kingdom, and farther up the line he will get off the train and disappear into the desert on one of his periodical tours of inspection, perhaps not seeing another white face for three months or more. It struck me that there was something particularly fine and manly and self-reliant about these young Englishmen who are acting as policemen and judges and administrators and agricultural experts rolled into one, out there at the Back of Beyond. “It's only the hard work that makes it bearable,” said one of them in answer to my question. “What with the heat and the flies and the never-ending vista of yellow sand and the lack of companionship, we should die from sheer loneliness if we didn't work from dawn until bedtime. Besides, every two years we get long enough leave to go home.” (And oh, the caress in that word home.) Then he asked me with pathetic eagerness about the latest song-hits at the London music-halls, and was this new Russian dancer at Covent Garden as wonderful as the illustrated weeklies made her out, and honestly, now, did I think the government was [Pg 137] going to be such a bally ass as to give the Irish home rule? That young man—he was twenty-four on his last birthday, he told me—has charge of a province four times as large as New York State, and in it he wields a power which is a strange cross between the patriarchal and the despotic. With a score or so of camel police he maintains law and order among a population which, until very recent years, were as savage and intractable as the Sioux; he holds the high justice, the middle, and the low; and he is, incidentally, a practical authority on such varied subjects as wheat-growing, cotton-raising, camel-breeding, fertilising, and irrigation. Nor would I fail to call attention to the little-known but wonderful work of a handful of British officers, who, working continuously since 1898, in those fever-ridden swamps near Lake No, have finally succeeded in removing the last block of Sudd, [2] twenty-four miles long, thus making the Nile a free, navigable waterway from Khartoum to Rejaf, in Uganda, a distance of twelve hundred miles. And these young men, remember, are but isolated examples of the thousands, in Africa, in Asia, in America, and in Oceanica, who are binding together Britain's colonial empire.
[2] The name given to the dense masses of water plants which have long obstructed the upper reaches of the Nile.
Its discomforts notwithstanding, the railway journey from Wady Halfa to Khartoum is filled with interest, comparing not at all unfavourably with that other remarkable desert journey by the Trans-Caspian railway from Krasnovodsk to Samarkand. For two hundred miles or more after leaving Wady Halfa we see [Pg 138] through the blue glass of the windows nothing but endless wastes of black rocks and orange sand. Then the desert gives place to undulating sand-hills, and these in turn to clusters of dom-palms, to fields of barley, to conical acacias, and finally a fringe of palms announces the proximity of the river. We pass in turn Gebel Barka, the sacred mountain of the ancient Egyptians, and, at its base, the ruins of Napata, once the capital of an Ethiopian kingdom. A few miles south of Atbara, which is the junction of the railway to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, we pass the so-called Island of Meroe, with its score of pyramids, beside which the majestic monuments of Egypt are but the creations of yesterday, for this region, remember, was the cradle of the Egyptian arts and sciences. In the settlements along the banks we now begin to see the typical round straw huts of Central Africa, with their pointed roofs and airy recubas , or porches. The peoples change with the scenery, the slender, tarbooshed Nubian giving way to the fierce-faced, shock-headed Hadendowas, that savage fighting-clan who hold the country between the Nile and the Red Sea, and they, in turn, to the Kabbabish Bedouins, those freebooters of the desert, who, perched high on their lean white racing camels, were the terror of every caravan in the days before the British came. The cultivated patches become thicker, the signs of civilisation grow increasingly frequent, the train rumbles across a long iron bridge which spans the river, and slowing, comes to a halt before a long, low station building on which is the word “Khartoum.”
Like another Phœnix, Khartoum has risen from its [Pg 139] ashes on the site of that city which formed the funeral pyre of the heroic Gordon. The name—“elephant's trunk”—refers to the shape of the long peninsula on which the city stands and which forms the point of separation of the Nile into its Blue and White branches. It is a brand-new city which the British engineers have constructed; a city with a ground plan as mathematically laid out and with streets as broad as Washington; a city with pavements and sidewalks and gutters and sewers and lighting facilities on the most modern lines. As all the buildings are of a dust-coloured brick, the business portion of the city has a certain air of substantial permanence, but so uncompromising is the architecture and so destitute of shade are the streets that it looks more like a Russian penal settlement than like an African capital. In the residential quarter, however, the picturesque has not been sacrificed to the utilitarian, for along the bank of the Blue Nile a splendid boulevard—a sort of African Riverside Drive—has been constructed, and here no business or commercial trespass will be permitted, for from the Grand Hotel to the Palace, a distance of a mile or more, it is lined with the residences of the British officials, low-roofed, broad-verandaed bungalows nestling in luxuriant gardens. The thing that impresses one most about Khartoum is the extraordinary width of its streets and diagonal avenues and the frequency of its open circles, but the British will tell you quite frankly that military considerations, rather than beauty, guided them in planning it and that a few field-guns, properly placed, can sweep the [Pg 140] entire city. There are two buildings in Khartoum which seem to me to be more significant of the new era which has begun for the Sudan than all the other features of the city combined. One is the Gordon Memorial College, built with the object of training the sons of the Sudanese sheikhs and chieftains along those lines which are best calculated to make for the future peace, progress, and prosperity of the country. With his laurels as the victor of Omdurman still fresh upon him, Lord Kitchener appealed to his countrymen for one hundred thousand pounds for the establishment of this institution, which he felt that England owed to the memory of Gordon, and, so prompt and general was the response, the entire sum was subscribed within a few days. The other building to which I referred is the recently completed Anglican Cathedral, which stands as a recognition of Gordon's great work as a missionary and as an impressive exhibition of the advance of the Christian faith. Could Gordon have returned to life on the occasion of the consecration of this cathedral, and have seen harmoniously gathered beneath its lofty roof religious dignitaries of such different minds and faiths as the Bishop of London, the Coptic Archbishop of Alexandria, the Greek Patriarch of Abyssinia, and the Grand Cadi and the Grand Mufti, the heads of the Mohammedan community in the Sudan, he might well have exclaimed, “I did not die in vain.”
I have now sketched for you the conditions which prevailed in the Valley of the Nile before the English [Pg 141] came and those which obtain there to-day. What its future is to be depends wholly upon the action of England. Were she to leave the country now, or within the near future, she would leave it under conditions which would soon result in chaos, and the good that she has done would be largely lost. The extensive schemes of irrigation upon which she has entered, and upon which the prosperity of this whole region so largely depends, could never be financed by an independent Egypt, and the same is true of the question of transportation, which is at the bottom of all the problems of economic development in the Sudan.
That England's position in the Nile country is illegal and illogical her stanchest supporters do not attempt to deny, but those who are really familiar with Egyptian conditions and character will agree with me, I think, that Egypt could suffer no greater calamity than to have the English go. Not that I think that there is the slightest probability of their doing so, for Italy's aggression in Tripolitania, combined with the attitude of the other members of the Triple Alliance, has resulted in Britain strengthening, rather than relaxing, her grip on Egypt and the Suez Canal. The canal provides, indeed, the key to the entire Egyptian situation, for upon her control of it depends England's entire scheme of administration in India and the Farther East. To withdraw her forces from Egypt would be tantamount to leaving the gateway to her Eastern possessions unguarded, and that, I am convinced, she will never do. Two lesser, though in themselves important, [Pg 142] reasons militate against her surrendering the control of the Valley of the Nile. One is her hope of eventually realising, in spite of German opposition, Cecil Rhodes's dream of an “All Red” route from the Cape to Cairo, of which Egypt and the Sudan would be the northern links. The other is the belief that in the scientific irrigation and cultivation of the fertile Nile lands lie the means of freeing British manufacturers from their dependence on American cotton. I am inclined to believe, therefore, that in the not far-distant future England will become convinced that candour is a better policy than hypocrisy, and will frankly add to her globe-girdling chain of colonial possessions the whole of that vast region lying between the mouths of the Nile and the swamps of the Sudd.
IN ZANZIBAR
THERE is no name between the covers of the atlas more redolent of romance and adventure. Ever since Livingstone entered the African jungle on his mission of proselytism; ever since Stanley entered the same jungle on his quest of Livingstone; and ever since the railway-builders began to run their levels and lay their rails along the trail blazed by them both, Zanzibar has been the chief gateway through which Christianity, civilisation, and commerce have entered the Dark Continent. Though its area has been steadily lessened by spoliation, treaty, and purchase, until the sultanate, which once extended from Cape Guardafui to Delagoa Bay and inland to the Great Lakes, has dwindled to two coastwise islands in the Indian Ocean, Zanzibar the capital is still the most important place, politically and commercially, in all East Africa, and one of the most picturesque and interesting cities in the world.
It bears the impress of the many kinds of men of many nationalities—Arab sultans, slave-traders and pirates, Portuguese merchants, European explorers, and ivory-hunters—who have swaggered across the pages of its history. Four hundred years ago Vasco da Gama's exploring caravels dropped anchor in its harbour, and the architecture of the city is still Portuguese; [Pg 144] a century later the dhows of the piratical sultans of Muskat swooped down, giving to Zanzibar an Arab dynasty, a lucrative slave trade and the Arabic tongue; then a British war-ship came, bringing with it British law and order and decency, and, under the mask of a “protectorate,” British rule. Though its golden age ended with the extermination of the trade in “black ivory,” it is still a place of considerable importance: the end of several submarine cables, a port of call for many steamship lines, a naval base within easy striking distance of the German and Portuguese colonies on the East Coast and guarding the lines of communication between the Cape and the Canal, and the place of export for the major portion of the world's supply of copra, cloves, and ivory.
Seen from the harbour, Zanzibar has little to commend it. So uninviting, indeed, is the face that it turns seaward, that the story is told of an American politician sent there as consul, who, after taking one look from the steamer's deck at the sun-baked town, with its treeless, yellow beach and its flat-roofed, whitewashed houses, refused to go ashore at all, from the next port at which the steamer called cabling his resignation to Washington. Though a city of something over one hundred thousand people, with the major portion of the trade of East Africa in its hands, Zanzibar has neither dock, jetty, nor wharf, passengers and packages alike being disembarked in small boats and carried through the surf on the shoulders of Swahili boatmen. There are no words in the language adequate to describe the scene [Pg 145] which takes place on the beach bordering the harbour when a mail steamer comes in. The passengers—white-helmeted tourists; pompous, drill-clad officials; sallow-faced Parsee merchants; chattering Hindoo artisans; haughty, hawk-nosed Arabs; and cotton-clad Swahilis from the mainland—are unceremoniously dumped with their belongings on the sand, where they instantly become the centres of shouting, pleading, cursing, struggling, gesticulating, perspiring mobs of porters and hotel-runners, from whose rough importunities they are rescued only by the efforts of a dozen askaris , who lay their rhinoceros-hide whips about them indiscriminately.
When a poor imitation of order has been restored and the luggage has been rescued and sorted, you start for the hotel—there is only one deserving of the name—with a voluble hotel-runner clinging to your arm as though afraid you would break away, and followed by a miniature safari of porters balancing trunks, hat-boxes, kit-bags, gun-cases, bath-tubs, and the other impedimenta of an African traveller on their turbaned heads. Returning the ostentatious salute of the tan-coloured sentry at the head of the water-stairs, you follow your guide through a series of tortuous and narrow alleys, plunge into the darkness of an ill-smelling tunnel, and suddenly emerge, blinded with the sun-glare, into a thoroughfare lined on either side with tiny, fascinating, hole-in-the-wall shops, whose owners rush out and offer you their silver, ivory, and ostrich-feather wares vociferously.
Quite unexpectedly the procession halts under a swinging sign bearing the legend “Afrika Hotel.” The proprietor, a rotund, red-cheeked German who looks as if he had stepped straight out of a Munich beer-garden, escorts you pantingly up two—three—four flights of stone stairs, lined on either side with strange native weapons and East Coast curios, to a brick-floored cell under the roof, there being more likelihood of catching an occasional breeze, he explains, near the top. Wind in any form is as scarce in Zanzibar as rain is in the Sahara, and when they do get a breath of air strong enough to stir the window curtains it is as much of an event as a cyclone is in Kansas. The furniture of the room, monastic in its simplicity, consists of an iron bed, an iron table, an iron chair, and an iron washstand supporting a tin bowl and pitcher, for anything which is not of metal stands an excellent chance of destruction by the devastating swarms of red ants. The bed is draped with a double thickness of mosquito netting of so fine a mesh that the air within feels strained and unnourishing, like milk that has been skimmed and watered, and the heavy shutters are closed in a fruitless attempt to keep out some of the stifling mid-day heat, though the proprietor, after glancing at the thermometer, remarks that it isn't so hot after all, being only 120 in the shade.
Photograph by DeLord, Zanzibar.
You are advised to go to bed in the dark, as a light would attract the mosquitoes, and never, never, under any circumstances, to get into bed until you have assured yourself that there are no mosquitoes inside the [Pg 147] curtains, though the proprietor cheerfully adds: “But you can only get fever from the black-and-white-striped ones.” Likewise, you are solemnly warned never to go out of doors during the day without a topée lest you die from sunstroke (I knew one man who took off his helmet long enough to wave good-bye to a departing friend and was dead in an hour in consequence); never to drink other than bottled water (at two rupees the bottle) lest you die from typhoid; never to stay out of doors after nightfall lest you contract malaria; never to put on your boots without first shaking them out lest a snake or scorpion have chosen them to spend the night in; never to return late at night from the club without getting a policeman to escort you, lest a native thug run a knife between your shoulder-blades; and never to put your revolver under your pillow, where it cannot be reached without attracting attention, but to keep it beside you in the bed, so that you can shoot through the bedclothes without warning if you should wake up to find an intruder in your room.
The best and most interesting thing about the Afrika Hotel is its bath, a forbidding, stone-floored room, totally devoid of furniture or tub. It is separated from the sleeping-room by the hotel parlour, so that lady callers unaccustomed to Zanzibar ways are sometimes a trifle startled to see a gentleman whose only garment is a bath-towel pass through the parlour with a hop-skip-and-jump on his way to the bath. You clap your hands, which is the East Coast equivalent for pressing a button, and in prompt response appears an [Pg 148] ebony-skinned domestic bearing on his head a Standard Oil can filled with water. Running through a staple in the ceiling is a rope, and to the end of this rope he attaches the can, hoisting it until it swings a dozen feet above your head. Hanging from a hole in the side of the can is a cord. When you are ready for your bath you stand underneath the can, jerk the cord sharply, and the can empties itself over you like a cloudburst. Then you clap your hands and wait until the Swahili brings more water, when you do it all over again.
The first thing the new arrival in Zanzibar does is to bathe and put on a fresh suit of white linen, for to appear presentable in the terrible humidity of the East Coast requires at least four white suits a day; and the second thing he does is to call upon the consul, a very homesick young gentleman, who is so glad to see any one from “God's country” that he is only too eager to spend his meagre salary in entertaining him. If it is drawing toward sunset you will probably find him just starting for the golf club, which is the rendezvous at nightfall for Zanzibar's European society, whose chief recreations, so far as I could see, are golf, gambling, and gossip. With a sturdy, khaki-clad Swahili, a brass American eagle on the front of his fez, trotting between the shafts of the consular 'rickshaw (the Department of State refuses to appropriate enough money to provide our representative with a carriage), and another pushing behind, you whirl down the bright red highway which leads to the suburb of Bububu; past the white residency from which the British consul-general gives [Pg 149] his orders to the little brown man who is permitted to play at ruling Zanzibar; past the police barracks, where, at sight of the eagle on the 'rickshaw coolies' fezes, the sentry on duty shouts some unintelligible jargon, a bugle blares, and a group of native constables spring into line and bring their hands smartly to the salute as you pass; past the Marconi station on the cliff, where the wireless chatters ceaselessly with Bagamoyo and Kilindini and Dar-es-Salam; until you come to a sudden halt before a bungalow, almost hidden in a wonderful tropic garden, whose broad verandas overlook an emerald velvet golf course which stretches from the highway to the sea.
Playing golf in Zanzibar always struck me as one of the most incongruous things I ever did. It seems as though one ought to devote his energies to pirating or pearl-fishing or slave-trading in a place with such a name. Moreover, there is such a continuous circus procession passing along the highway—natives in kangas of every pattern and colour; Masai and Swahili warriors from the mainland; Parsee bankers in victorias and Hindoo merchants in 'rickshaws; giant privates of the King's African Rifles in bottle-green tunics and blue puttees; veiled women of the Sultan's zenana out for an airing in cumbersome, gaudily painted barouches, preceded and followed by red-jacketed lancers on white horses; perhaps his Highness himself, a dapper, discontented-looking young mulatto, whirling by in a big gray racing-car—that it is quite out of the question to keep your eye on the ball, and you play very bad golf [Pg 150] in consequence. Another trouble is that the caddies are all natives, and golf is discouraging enough in itself without having to shout “Fore!” or ask for a mashie or a putter in Swahili.
After a perfunctory round or two you go back to the club-house veranda, where the European society of Zanzibar is seated in cane chairs, with the English illustrated weeklies, and tall glasses with ice tinkling in them. The talk is the talk of exiled white folk everywhere: the news contained in the Reuter's despatches which are posted each evening on the club bulletin-board; the condition of the ivory market; the prospects for big game-shooting under the new German game laws; the favourites for the next day's cricket match, the next week's polo game, or the next month's race meet; the latest books, the newest plays—as gathered from the illustrated weeklies; what is going to become of Smyth-Cunninghame's widow, whose husband has just died of fever; is it true that Major Buffington has been transferred from the “K. A. R.” to a line regiment; and is Germany really looking for war?
That night the consul gives a dinner for you at the Zanzibar Club, where you are served by bare-footed servants immaculate in crimson turbans and white linen, and eat with solid silver from irreproachable china, in a room made almost comfortable by many swinging punkahs. After dinner you sit on the terrace in the dark, somewhere between the ocean and the stars, and over the coffee and cigars you listen to strange stories of “the Coast,” told by men who themselves played a [Pg 151] part in them. One man tells you what Stanley really said when, after months in the jungle without seeing a white man's face, he finally stumbled on the camp of Livingstone, and how, instead of rushing up and throwing his arms around him and crying, “Saved at last, old fellow; saved at last!” he lifted his helmet at sight of the gaunt, fever-stricken man sitting in front of the tent, and said very politely, just as he would if accosting a stranger on Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, “Doctor Livingstone, I believe?” Another, a wiry, bright-eyed Frenchman, with a face tanned to the colour of mahogany, tells of the days when the route from Tanganyika to the coast was marked by the bleaching skeletons of slaves, and he points out to you, across the house-tops, the squalid dwelling in which Tippoo Tib, the greatest of all the slave-traders, died. A British commissioner, the glow of his cigar lighting up his ruddy face, his scarlet cummerbund, and his white mess jacket, relates in strictest confidence a chapter of secret diplomatic history, and you learn how the German Foreign Office shattered the British dream of an all-red Cape-to-Cairo railway, and why England is so desirous of the Congo being placed under international control. A captain of the King's African Rifles holds you spellbound with a recital of the amazing exploits of the American elephant poacher, Rogers, who, jeering at the attempts of three governments to capture him, made himself, single-handed, the uncrowned king of Equatoria. Then a Danish ivory-hunter breaks in, and you hear all sorts of wild tales of life on safari, of ivory-trading in the [Pg 152] Lado Enclave, of brushes with the Uganda police south of Gondokoro, and of strange tribal customs practised in the hinterland. When the dawn begins to creep up out of the east, the Englishmen tell the drowsy steward to bring them Scotch and sodas and the Frenchmen order absinthes; then every one shakes hands with every one else and you make your way back to your hotel through the narrow, silent streets, returning the salute of the night constable sleepily.
No visitor leaves Zanzibar without going to the cemetery. Like the palace, and the stone ship built by a former sultan, it is one of the show places of the city. I saw it under the guidance of a gloomy English resident, who said that he always walked there every evening “so as to get accustomed to the place before staying in it permanently.” Leading me across the well-kept grass to two newly dug graves, he waved his hand in a “take-your-choice; they're-both-ready” gesture. “Two deaths to-day?” I queried. “Not yet,” said he, “but we always keep a couple of graves ready-dug for Europeans. In this climate, you know, we have to bury very quickly.” For in Zanzibar, as all along the East Coast, the white man's hardest fight is with a foe he can feel only as a poison in his burning veins, and can see only in the dreams of his delirium—the deadly black-water fever.
Though the streets in the outskirts of Zanzibar are wide, well shaded, and excellently macadamised with some kind of bright-red soil which recalls the roads outside of Colombo, in Ceylon, the business portion of the [Pg 153] town, where the natives chiefly live, is a labyrinth of narrow streets and dim bazaars, hemmed in with tiny shops and wretched dwellings, with here and there an ancient house dating from the Portuguese occupation, impregnable as a feudal castle, its massive doorways of exquisitely carved teakwood in sharp contrast to the surrounding squalor. Every shop is open to the street, and half of them, it seemed to me, are devoted to the sale of ivory carvings, ostrich feathers, brassware, and silver-work, though the Arab workmanship is in all cases poorly executed and crude in design. The most typical things to be bought in Zanzibar are the quaint images of African animals which the natives carve from the coarser grades of ivory and which make charming, though costly, souvenirs. Nothing is cheap in Zanzibar, or, for that matter, anywhere else in Africa, and every purchase is a matter of prolonged and wearisome negotiation, the seller fixing a fantastic price and lowering it gradually, as he thinks discreet, his rock-bottom figure depending upon the behaviour and appearance of the customer.
Zanzibar is still the chief ivory market of the world, the supplies of both elephant and rhino ivory, so I was assured by British officials, steadily increasing rather than diminishing. A few years ago it was feared that the supply of ivory would soon run out, but the indiscriminate slaughter of elephants has been checked, at least in British territory, by strict game laws rigidly enforced. Whether from the laxity of its laws or the indifference of its officials, German East Africa is still [Pg 154] the ivory-hunter's paradise, the extermination of elephants in that colony proceeding almost unchecked. When one remembers that African ivory brings all the way from fifty dollars to five hundred dollars per hundredweight in the open market, and that the tusks of a full-grown elephant weigh anywhere from one hundred to five hundred pounds, it will be seen that the ivory-hunter's trade is a profitable though a hazardous one. Other ivory-hunters, instead of going after the elephants themselves, spend their time in journeying from village to village and bartering with the natives for the stores of ivory—some of them the produce of centuries—which most of them possess. Unless the trader knows his business, however, the simple-minded natives will sell him the so-called “dead” ivory from the bottom of the pile rather than the “live” ivory of elephants recently killed, which, because of its greater elasticity and better colour, commands a much higher price, and, I might add, forms but a small part of the supply. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of half a million pounds of ivory are shipped from Zanzibar each year to make the toilet-articles and billiard-balls and piano-keys of the world.
The population of Zanzibar is pretty evenly divided between Arabs and Swahilis, with a considerable sprinkling of East Indians, who play the same rôles of peddlers, petty tradesmen, and money-lenders in the Orient that the Jews and Armenians do in the Occident. The dress of the Swahili is as simple as it is striking: two lengths of cotton cloth, called kanga , one draped about the waist and the other about the shoulders, with [Pg 155] an extra remnant twisted into a turban, form the costume of men and women alike, though the Swahili women, in addition to the kanga proper, wear cotton pantalets resembling those in fashion in ante-bellum days, edged at the ankles with neat little frills, like those the chefs at fashionable restaurants put on lamb chops. These kangas are crudely stamped in an endless variety of startling patterns, some of the more elaborate designs looking, from a little distance, as though embroidered. The inventiveness of the British, Belgian, and German designers must be sorely taxed, for the fashions in East Africa change as rapidly as they do in Paris and with as little warning, the kangas stamped with card-pips—hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades—which were all the rage among Zanzibar's dusky leaders of fashion for a time, suddenly giving place to those bearing crude pictures of sailing-ships or Arabic quotations from the Koran. One negro dandy whom I saw paraded the streets, the envied of all his fellows, wearing a kanga on which was printed, in endless repetition, the British coat of arms and the loyal motto “God Save the King!” while still another swaggered by in a garment sprinkled over with the legend in letters six inches high “Remember the Maine!” Though the important trade in cotton goods which we once had with East Africa has long since passed into British and German hands, there is a certain melancholy satisfaction in knowing that, so firmly does the reputation of our cottons endure, the natives of all this region still insist on the piece goods which they purchase, whether made in [Pg 156] Manchester or Dresden, bearing the stamp “American,” and will take no other.
The costumes of the Arabs, on the other hand, recall all the stories of pirates and slave-traders which one associates with this romantic coast, for the men, ignoring the law which prohibits the carrying of arms, swagger insolently through the streets with dagger-filled sashes and trailing scimiters, their white jibbahs flapping about their sandalled feet and their snowy turbans cocked rakishly. The dress of the Arab women of Zanzibar resembles the costume of no other people, its characteristic features being the immense, doughnut-shaped turbans and the frilled, skin-tight trousers striped like barber-poles.
“Their dress resembles the costume of no other people, its characteristic features being the immense, doughnut-shaped turbans and the frilled, skin-tight trousers striped like barber-poles.”
The universal medium of communication in Zanzibar and along the East Coast is Swahili, this lingua franca being generally used not only between Arabs and natives, and between natives and Europeans, but between Europeans themselves, the English, French, and Portuguese traders who do business in German East Africa depending entirely upon this mutually understood tongue for conversing with the Germans. I remember once, in Dar-es-Salam, listening to an Englishman who knew no French and a Frenchman who knew no English hold an animated political argument, and later on bargain with the German hotel-keeper for accommodations in the same outlandish tongue.
I have always found that the farther people dwell from civilisation, the more punctilious they are about observing its usages. That is why English officials [Pg 157] at remote and lonely stations in India invariably put on evening clothes before they sit down to their solitary dinners, and why the question of precedence is not taken nearly as seriously in London or Paris or New York as it is in Entebbe or Sierra Leone. One would quite naturally suppose that the Europeans dwelling in those sun-scorched, fever-ridden, God-forsaken countries along the East Coast would adopt the careless attitude of Kipling's homesick soldier, who longed for a land “where there ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst”; but, strangely enough, the exact opposite is the case. There is plenty of drinking throughout Africa, it is true, for the white men dwelling there will assure you that to exist in such a climate a man must “keep his liver afloat,” but, though heavy drinking is the rule, the man who so far loses control of himself as to step beyond the bounds of decency is ostracised with a promptness and completeness unheard of in more civilised places. This respect for the social conventions was graphically illustrated by an unpleasant little episode which occurred during my stay in Zanzibar. A young Englishman, who had been rubber-prospecting in the wilds of the back country for nearly a year, celebrated his return to civilisation, or what stands out there for civilisation, by giving a stag dinner at the club. It was rather a hilarious affair, as such things go, and when it broke up at dawn every one had had quite as much to drink as was good for him, while the youthful host had had entirely too much. In fact, he insisted on winding up the jollification by smashing all the crockery and [Pg 158] glassware in sight, and, when the native steward remonstrated, he tripped him up very neatly and sat on him. Some hours later, being sober and very much ashamed of himself, he sent a check for the damage he had done, together with a manly letter of apology, to the board of governors, which promptly responded by demanding his resignation. Now, to drop a man from a club in East Africa is equivalent to marooning him on a desert island, for out there the club is invariably the rendezvous of the respectable European society, the only place where one can get a European book or newspaper to read or a well-cooked meal to eat, and the scene of those dinners, dances, card parties, charades, and other forms of amusement which help to make existence in that region endurable. Not content with demanding his resignation and thus closing to him the gateway to every decent form of recreation in Zanzibar, the virtuous board of governors notified every other club on the coast of its action, so that when business called the youngster to Mombasa or Dar-es-Salam or Lourenço Marques, he found himself barred from the privileges of the clubs in those places as well. But his punishment did not end there, for, a few days after his escapade, two club members to whom he nodded upon the street cut him dead, while another, a man whom he had known intimately for years, answered his greeting by remarking, as he raised his eyebrows, “Really, sir, I don't think I have the pleasure of your acquaintance.”
In the happy-go-lucky days before the reorganisation of our consular service a profane and uncouth [Pg 159] lumberman named Mulligan—the name will do as well as another—was rewarded for certain political services by being appointed consul at Zanzibar. At that time the American consulate was in a building on the edge of the harbour and almost next door to the Sultan's palace. Mulligan had not been in Zanzibar a week before he began to complain that he was being robbed of his sleep by the women of the royal harem, who chose the comparatively cool hour just before sunrise in which to bathe on the sandy beach below the consulate windows. Mulligan, after making numerous complaints without receiving any satisfaction, openly announced that the next morning he was disturbed he would take the law into his own hands. He did not have to wait long for an opportunity, for, returning a few nights later from an unusually late séance at the club, he had scarcely fallen asleep when he was aroused by the shrieks of laughter of native women bathing beneath his window. Springing out of bed, he caught up a shot-gun standing in the corner, slipped in a shell loaded with bird-shot, and, pushing the muzzle out of the window, fired at random. The roar of the discharge was echoed by a chorus of piercing screams and Arabic ejaculations of pain and terror, whereupon the consul, satisfied that he had effectually frightened the disturbers of his rest, returned to bed and to sleep. An hour later he was reawakened by his excited vice-consul, who burst into the bedroom exclaiming, “You'll have to get out of here quick, Mr. Consul! It won't be healthy for you in Zanzibar after what happened this [Pg 160] morning. There's a German boat in the harbour and if you hurry you'll just about catch her! But there's no time to spare.” “Now, what the devil have I got to get out of here for, confound you?” demanded the consul, now thoroughly awake and thoroughly angry. “Certainly not because I frightened a lot of nigger wenches who were waking me up at four o'clock every morning with their damned hullabaloo?” “Nigger wenches nothing!” exclaimed the vice-consul, as he began to throw his chief's belongings into a trunk. “When you let off that load of bird-shot this morning you peppered the Sultan's favourite wife, and now the old man's fairly hopping with rage and swears that he'll have your life even if you are the American consul.” Forty minutes later ex-Consul Mulligan ascended the gangway of a homeward-bound steamer, for those were the days before the British protectorate, when the tyrannical sultans of Zanzibar were laws unto themselves.
The morning before I left I went with the consul to call on his Highness Seyyid Ali bin Hamoud bin Mohammed, the Sultan of Zanzibar. [3] The 'rickshaw stopped with a jerk in front of the handsome iron gates of the palace; the guard turned out and presented arms, while a negro bugler sounded a barbaric fanfare; an official in white linen and much gold lace met us at the entrance and escorted us up flight after flight of heavily carpeted stairs, until we emerged, breathless and perspiring, [Pg 161] on the breeze-swept upper veranda of the four-story building, which, with its long piazzas and its uncompromising architecture, looks more than anything else like an American summer hotel. After a quarter of an hour spent in smoking highly perfumed cigarettes, another official announced that his Highness would receive us, and we were ushered into a small room furnished like an office, where a pleasant-looking young negro of twenty-six or so was sitting at an American roll-top desk dictating letters to an English secretary. Like every one else, he was dressed entirely in white linen, with a red tarboosh, gold shoulder-straps, and pumps of white buckskin. Motioning us to be seated, he offered us more of the perfumed cigarettes, inquiring, with an Eton accent, as to the state of my health, when I arrived, what were my impressions of Zanzibar, when I intended to leave, and where I was going. As we were bowing ourselves out, after ten minutes of perfunctory conversation, the Sultan's secretary sidled up and whispered: “His Highness expects that you will give him the pleasure of staying to luncheon.”
[3] Since this was written Sultan Ali bin Hamoud has abdicated in favour of his cousin, Seyyid Khalifa.
The luncheon was very much the same as one would get at Sherry's or Claridge's or the Café de Paris, except that for our special benefit a few native dishes with strange names and still stranger flavours had been added to the menu. The wines were irreproachable and the Hodeidah coffee and Aleppo cigarettes could have been had nowhere west of Suez. My eye was caught by the magnificence of the jewel-monogrammed cigarette-case which the Sultan constantly passed to me, and I ventured [Pg 162] to comment on it admiringly. “Do you like it?” said he, with a pleased smile. “It is only a trifle that I picked up last spring in Paris. Accept it from me as a little souvenir of your visit to Zanzibar—really—please do.” Quite naturally I hesitated, as who would not at accepting offhand a thing worth a couple of thousand rupees. The Sultan looked disappointed. “It is not worthy of you,” he remarked. “Some day I shall send you something more fitting,” and he put it back in his pocket. All the rest of my stay in Zanzibar I kept thinking how near I came to getting that magnificent case, and what a story it would have made to tell at dinner tables over the camembert and coffee; and it almost spoiled my visit. As I was leaving the palace the military secretary inquired: “Why on earth didn't you take the cigarette case when the Sultan offered it?” “Polite hesitation,” I replied. “I was going to accept it in just a minute.” “In the East you should accept first and hesitate afterward,” he answered.
After luncheon I played billiards with the Sultan. He is a good player, and it was no trouble at all to let royalty win gracefully. The conversation turned on America. It seemed that the two Americans whom his Highness most admired were Theodore Roosevelt and John Philip Sousa; the one because he had visited Africa and proved himself a real shikari ; the other because he had immortalised the Sultan's dominions in his A Typical Tune of Zanzibar . (It happened that a month or so later I dined with Mr. Sousa in Johannesburg and told him this incident, whereupon he offered to send the [Pg 163] Sultan an autographed copy of El Capitan . If he has forgotten to do it, this will serve to remind him that the Sultan's address is still “The Palace, Zanzibar.”) Incidentally his Highness mentioned that he was about to be married. Later on the English secretary supplemented this by explaining that his latest bride—he already had three wives—was the fifteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do merchant in the bazaars, with whom the Sultan had been haggling regarding the price to be paid for the girl for a year or more. After a time we strolled out on the breeze-swept veranda. As I leaned over the railing I noticed something sticking up out of the harbour and I pointed to it. “What is that, your Highness?” I inquired. “A wreck,” he answered shortly. “A wreck! A wreck of what?” I persisted. “The wreck of the Zanzibar navy,” he said, turning away—and I suddenly recalled the story of the little gun-boat with its negro crew that stood up to the great British cruiser and banged away with its toy guns until it was sent to the bottom with every man on board, and all at once I felt very sorry for this youth, whose fathers held sway over a dominion as large as all that part of the United States lying west of the Rocky Mountains, but which, thanks to the insatiable land hunger of the European nations, has dwindled to a territory scarcely larger than Rhode Island.
That in the not far-distant future Zanzibar will again play a part in the drama of international politics there is but little doubt. The island's position adjacent to the mainland, from which it is separated by a channel [Pg 164] less than thirty miles wide, combined with the advantages of its deep and roomy harbour, mark it naturally as the chief entrepôt of all East Africa, and the gate through which the interior of the continent is destined to be opened up to European settlement and exploitation. Being almost equidistant—some two thousand four hundred miles—from India, the Cape, and the Canal, and controlling the lines of cable communication with Madagascar and Mauritius, it affords a strategic position of immense importance as a naval base in the contingency of closing the Suez Canal in time of war. Germany has long had a greedy eye on Zanzibar, for the nation that holds it controls, both strategically and commercially, Germany's East African possessions and their capital of Dar-es-Salam. That England would be willing to turn Zanzibar over to Germany in return for the cession of a strip of territory through German East Africa which would permit the completion of her long-dreamed-of, and at present indefinitely interrupted, Cape-to-Cairo trunk line, there is every reason to believe. So I trust that the little brown man in the white-and-gold uniform will enjoy playing at sovereignty while he may, for if that day ever comes to pass when the red banner on his palace flagstaff is replaced with the standard of Germany, there will pass into the pleasant oblivion of the Paris boulevards the last of a long line of one-time powerful, oftentimes piratical, but always picturesque rulers, the Sultans of Zanzibar.
THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA
THE other day two suave, frock-coated gentlemen, seated at a green-covered table in the Foreign Office in Berlin, by putting their names to the bottom of a piece of parchment, caused a territory almost as large as the State of Texas to become French, and another territory, larger than the State of Oregon, to become German. About as many people were affected, though not consulted, by that international dicker—which has passed into history as the Morocco-Equatoria Convention—as there are in the county of London. The lot of about four-fifths of these people will doubtless be materially improved, and in a few years, if they have any gratitude in their Moorish souls, they will be thanking Allah for having given them French instead of Sherifian justice. As for those Congolese blacks who compose the other fifth, they will soon find, unless I am very much mistaken, that the red-white-and-black flag stands for something very different from the red-white-and-blue one, and that the stiff-backed, guttural-tongued German officers in their tight-fitting uniforms will prove sterner masters than the easy-going French administrateurs in their topées and white linen.
Now the significance of that convention does not lie in its ethics—which are very questionable; nor in [Pg 166] the territory and population and resources concerned—which are very great; but in the fact that it brings within reasonable measure of fulfilment the imperial dream which William II began dreaming some seven and twenty years ago, and which he recently translated to the world in the declaration “Germany's future lies oversea.” In those four words is found the foreign policy of the Fatherland. The episode which began with the sending of a war-ship to an obscure port of Morocco and ended with Germany's acquirement of a material addition to her African domain was not, as the world supposes, an example of the haphazard land-grabbing so popular with European nations, but a single phase of a vast and carefully laid scheme whose aim is the creation of a new and greater Germany oversea—a Deutschland über Meer .
To solve the problems with which she has been confronted by her amazing increase in population and production, Germany has deliberately embarked on a systematic campaign of world expansion and exploitation. Finding that she needs a colonial empire in her business, she is setting out to build one just as she would build a fleet of dreadnoughts or a ship canal. The fact that she has nothing or next to nothing to start with, does not worry her at all. What she cannot obtain by purchase or treaty site will obtain by threats, and what she cannot obtain by threats she stands perfectly ready to obtain by going to war. Having once made up her mind that the realisation of her political, commercial, and economic ambitions requires her to have a colonial [Pg 167] dominion, she is not going to permit anything to stand in the way of her getting it. In other words, wherever an excuse can be provided for raising a flagstaff, whether on an ice-floe in the Arctic or an atoll in the South Pacific, there the German flag shall flutter; wherever trade is to be found, there Hamburg cargo boats shall drop their anchors, there Stettin engines shall thunder over Essen rails, there Solingen cutlery and Silesian cottons shall be sold by merchants speaking the language of the Fatherland. It is a scheme astounding by its very vastness, as methodically planned as a breakfast-food manufacturer's advertising campaign and as systematically conducted; and already, thanks to Teutonic audacity, aggressiveness, and perseverance, backed up by German banks, fleets, and armies, much nearer realisation than most people suppose.
In Morocco, East Africa, and the Congo; in Turkey, Persia, and Malaysia; in Hayti, Brazil, and the Argentine; on the shores of all the continents and the islands of all the seas, German merchants and German money are working twenty-four hours a day building up that oversea empire of which the Kaiser dreams. The activities of these pioneers of commerce and finance are as varied as commerce and finance themselves. Their guttural voices are heard in every market place; their footsteps resound in every avenue of human endeavour. Their holdings in Brazil are the size of European kingdoms, and so absolute has their power become in at least two states—Santa Catharina and Rio Grande do Sul—that the Brazilian Government has [Pg 168] become seriously alarmed. Their mines in Persia and China and the Rand rival the cave of Aladdin. They are completing a trunk line across western Asia which threatens to endanger England's commercial supremacy in India; in Africa they are pushing forward another railway from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the Great Lakes which will rival the Cape-to-Cairo system in tapping the trade of the Dark Continent. They own the light, power, and transportation monopolies of half the capitals of Latin America. In China the coal mines and railways of the great province of Shantung are in their hands. They work tea plantations in Ceylon, tobacco plantations in Cuba and Sumatra, coffee plantations in Guatemala, rubber plantations in the Congo, hemp plantations in East Africa, and cotton plantations in the Delta of the Nile. Their argosies, flying the house flags of the Hamburg American, the North German Lloyd, the German East Africa, the Deutsche Levante, and a score of other lines, carry German goods to German warehouses in the world's remotest corners, while German war-ships are constantly aprowl all up and down the Seven Seas, ready to protect the interests thus created by the menace of their guns.
Back of the German miners and traders and railway builders are the great German banks, which, when all is said and done, are the real exploiters of Germany's interests oversea. So completely are the foreign interests of the nation in their hands that there is no reason to doubt the story that the Emperor, when warned by the great bankers whom he had summoned to a [Pg 169] conference over the ominous Moroccan situation that war with France would endanger, if not destroy, Germany's oversea ambitions, turned to his ministers with the remark, “Then, gentlemen, we must find a peaceable solution.” We of the West have not yet awakened to a realisation of the magnitude of Germany's foreign interests or to the almost sovereign powers which the banks behind them exercise in certain quarters of the world—particularly in that Latin America which we have complacently regarded as securely within our own commercial sphere. In Asia Minor the Deutsche Bank not only controls the great Anatolian Railway system but it is building the Bagdad Railway—probably the most important of Germany's foreign undertakings—these two German-owned systems providing a route by which German goods can be carried over German rails to India more cheaply than England can transport her own goods to her possessions in her own bottoms. In one hand the Disconto Bank Gesellschaft holds the railway and mining concessions of the Chinese province of Shantung, while with the other it reaches out across the world to grasp the railway system of Venezuela, it being to enforce certain claims of this bank that the German gun-boat Panther —the same that occupied Agadir—bombarded La Guayra in 1902 and as a consequence brought the relations of the United States and Germany uncomfortably close to the breaking-point. Seven German banks—the German-Asiatic Bank, the German-Brazilian Bank, the German-Orient Bank, the German-Palestine Bank, the Bank of [Pg 170] Chile and Germany, the Bank of Central America, and the German Overseas Bank—devote themselves exclusively to the exploitation of foreign concessions, either owning or dominating enterprises of every conceivable character in the regions denoted by their titles or lending financial assistance to German subjects engaged in such undertakings.
A few years ago, when Germany was starting in the race for naval supremacy, the Imperial Admiralty issued a review of Germany's oversea interests for the purpose of impressing the Reichstag with the necessity for dreadnoughts and then more dreadnoughts. Here are some of the figures, taken from the list at random, and the more impressive because they are from official sources and because, since they were published, they have materially increased:
| North Africa | $25,000,000 |
| Egypt | 22,500,000 |
| Liberia | 1,250,000 |
| Zanzibar | 1,500,000 |
| Mozambique | 2,750,000 |
| Madagascar | 1,500,000 |
| British South Africa | 337,500,000 |
| Turkey and the Balkans | 112,500,000 |
| British India and Ceylon | 27,500,000 |
| Straits Settlements | 8,750,000 |
| China | 87,500,000 |
| Mexico | 87,500,000 |
| Venezuela and Colombia | 312,500,000 |
| Peru and Chile | 127,500,000 |
| Argentine | 187,500,000 |
| Brazil | 400,000,000 |
And this endless caravan of figures represents but a fraction of Germany's transmarine interests, remember, for [Pg 171] it does not include her colonies on both coasts of Africa, in North China, and in the South Seas. Now, if you will again glance over the above list of Germany's foreign interests, you can hardly fail to be struck by the fact that by far the greater part of them are in countries notorious for the weakness and instability of their governments, as, for example, China, Morocco, Turkey, Liberia, Mexico, and Venezuela; or in countries which, though possessing stable governments, would not be strong enough successfully to resist German aggression or German demands. In regions where German settlers abound and where German banks are in financial control it is seldom difficult for Germany to find an excuse for meddling. It may be that a German settler is attacked, or a German consul insulted, or a German bank has difficulty in collecting its debts. So the slim cables carry a dash-dotted message to the Foreign Office in Berlin; instantly the cry goes up that in Morocco or China or Venezuela or Hayti German “interests” are imperilled; and before the government of the country in question realises that anything out of the ordinary has happened a cruiser with a German flag drooping from her taffrail is lying off one of its coast towns. Before the silent menace of that war-ship is removed, Germany generally manages to obtain a concession to build a railway, or a ninety-nine-year lease of a coaling-station, or the cession of a strip of more or less valuable territory, and so goes merrily and steadily on the work of building up a German empire oversea.
But these interests, world-wide though they are, [Pg 172] fail to satisfy the German expansionist party whose prophet is the Kaiser. They demand something more material than figures; they would see the German flag floating over government houses instead of warehouses, over fortifications instead of plantations. They would see more of the map of the world painted in German colours. But Germany was late in getting into the colonising game, so that wherever she has gone she has found other nations already in possession. In North Africa her prospectors and concession-hunters found the French too firmly established to be ousted; the only territory left in South Africa over which she could raise her flag was so arid and worthless that neither England nor Portugal had troubled to include it in their dominions; though she bullied China into leasing her the port of Kiauchau, the further territorial expansion in the Celestial Empire of which she had dreamed was halted by Russian jealousy and Japanese ambition; around Latin America—the most enticing field of all—stretched the protecting arm of the Monroe Doctrine.
Now, these “Keep Off the Grass” signs with which she was everywhere confronted did not improve Germany's disposition. They made her feel abused and peevish, and whenever she saw a foreign flag flying over some God-forsaken islet in the Pacific or a stretch of snake-infested African jungle, she resented it deeply and said that she was being denied “a place in the sun.” So when France despatched an expedition to Fez in the summer of 1911 to teach the Moorish tribesmen proper respect for French property and French lives, Germany [Pg 173] seized on that action as an excuse for occupying a Moroccan harbour and a strip of the adjacent coast, on the pretext that her interests there were being jeopardised, and flatly refused to evacuate it unless France gave her something in return. I might mention, in passing, that Germany's interests in Morocco are considerably more important than is generally supposed, the powerful Westphalian firm of Mannesmann Brothers having obtained from Sultan Abdul Aziz extensive mining, ranching, and plantation concessions in that portion of his empire which the German newspapers proceeded to prematurely dub “ West Marokko Deutsch .” The rich iron deposits in this region, when taken in conjunction with the alarming decrease of the ore supply in the German mines and the consequent shortage which threatens the German iron and steel industry, undoubtedly provided one of the reasons underlying the Kaiser's interference with the French programme in Morocco.
France, knowing full well the enormous political and commercial value of Morocco, and determined to complete her African empire by its acquirement, after months of haggling, during which battle-ships and army corps were moved about like chessmen, consented to compensate Germany by ceding her a slice of the colony of French Equatorial Africa, better known, perhaps, as the French Congo. [4] It was a good bargain that France made, too, for she took an empire and gave a jungle in [Pg 174] exchange. But Germany made the better bargain, it seems to me, for by agreeing to a French protectorate over Morocco she obtained one hundred thousand square miles of African soil without its costing her a foot of land or a dollar in exchange. From the view-point of the world at large, Germany emerged from the Moroccan imbroglio with a good-sized strip of equatorial territory, presumably rich in undeveloped resources, certainly rich in savages, snakes, and fevers, and, everything considered, of very doubtful value. But to Germany this stretch of jungle land meant far more than that. It was a territory which she had wanted, watched, and waited for ever since she entered the game of colonial expansion. It is one of the links—in many respects the most essential one—which she requires to connect her scattered possessions in the Dark Continent and to bar the advance of her great rival, England, to the northward by stretching an unbroken chain of German colonies across Africa from coast to coast. The acquisition of that piece of west-coast jungle marked the greatest stride which Germany has yet taken in her march toward an empire oversea.
[4] Germany has given her new colony the official designation “New Kamerun.”
Heretofore Germany has been in much the same predicament as a boy who tries to put a picture puzzle together when some of the pieces are missing. In Germany's case the missing pieces were held by England, France, Belgium, and Portugal, and they refused to give them up. If you will open the family atlas to the map of Africa, you will see that Germany's four colonies on that continent are so widely separated that their consolidation [Pg 175] is apparently out of the question. Northernmost of all, and set squarely in the middle of that pestilential coast-line variously named and noted for its slaves, its ivory, and its gold, and aptly called “the rottenest coast in the world,” is the colony of Togo. Approximately the size of Cuba and rich in native products, it is so remote from the other German possessions that its only value is in providing Germany with a quid pro quo which she can use in negotiating for some territory more desirable. In the right angle formed by the Gulf of Guinea is the colony of Kamerun, a rich, fertile, and exceedingly unhealthful possession about the size of Spain. Though its hinterland reaches inland to Lake Tchad, it has hitherto been destitute of good harbours or navigable rivers, being barred from the Niger by British Nigeria and from the Congo, until the recent territorial readjustment, by French Equatorial Africa. Follow the same coast-line twelve hundred miles to the southward and you will come to German Southwest Africa, a barren, inhospitable, sparsely populated land, stretching from a harbourless coast as far inland as the Desert of Kalahari. On the other side of the continent, just south of the Equator, lies German East Africa, almost twice the size of the mother country and the largest and richest of the Kaiser's transmarine possessions. The combined area of these four colonies is equal to that of all the States east of the Mississippi put together; certainly a substantial foundation on which to begin the erection of an empire, especially when it is remembered that French Africa, which now [Pg 176] comprises forty-five per cent of the continent, is for the most part the work of but a single generation.
When Monsieur Cambon and Herr von Kiderlein-Waechter put their pens to the piece of parchment of which I have already spoken, the boundary of the Kamerun was automatically extended southward almost to the Equator and eastward some hundreds of miles to the Logone River, the apex of the angle formed by the meeting of these new frontiers touching the Congo River and thereby bringing the Kamerun into contact with the Belgian Congo. In other words, Germany's great colonies on either coast are no longer separated by French and Belgian territory, but by Belgian alone—and Belgium, remember, is both weak and neutral. Now, it is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that Belgium might consent to sell Germany either the whole or a portion of the Congo, for the financial difficulties of that colony have been very great, and it has never been able to pay its way, its wants having been supplied at first by large gifts of money from King Leopold, and more recently by loans raised and guaranteed by Belgium. This unsatisfactory financial condition not having helped to popularise the Congo with the thrifty Belgians, there is considerable reason to believe that the Brussels Government would lend an attentive ear to any proposals which Germany might make toward its purchase. England might be expected, of course, to oppose the sale of the Congo to Germany tooth and nail, it being the fear of just such an eventuality which caused her to seize on the rubber atrocities as an excuse for her [Pg 177] vigorous and persistent advocacy of the internationalisation of the Congo. Though France holds the reversionary rights to the Congo, there are no grounds for believing that she would place any serious obstacles in the way of its acquisition by Germany, for she has given it to be understood that she intends devoting her energies henceforward to the exploitation of her enormous possessions in North Africa. Assuming, then—and these assumptions, believe me, are not nearly so chimerical as they may sound—that the Belgian Government should sell Germany all or a part of the Congo, Germany's possessions would then stretch across the continent from coast to coast, comprising all that is most worth having in Equatorial Africa.
While we are about it, let us carry our assumptions one step farther and take it for granted that Portugal could be induced to dispose of her great west-coast colony of Angola, to which Germany already possesses the reversionary rights. It is not only possible, but probable, that a good round offer of money, or perhaps another Agadir performance, based on some easily found pretext and backed up by German war-ships in the Tagus, would induce the Lisbon Government to hand over Angola, along with its fevers and its slavery, to the Germans. Portugal is bitterly poor, its government is weak and vacillating, and a long list of failures has left the people with little stomach for colonisation. The Portuguese Republic has few friends among the monarchical nations of Europe and could count on scant aid from them in resisting Teutonic coercion. It [Pg 178] is asserted in diplomatic circles, indeed, that the ink on the Morocco-Equatoria Convention was scarcely dry before the German minister in Lisbon had opened secret pourparlers with the Portuguese Foreign Office with a view to the purchase of both Angola and the east-coast colony of Mozambique. [5] The acquisition of Angola would supply Germany with the final link needed to unite her colonies in East, West, and Southwest Africa, thus giving her an African empire second in size only to that of France. Far-fetched and far-distant as all this may sound, I have but roughly sketched for you that imperial dream for whose fulfilment the Kaiser and his people are indefatigably working and confidently waiting.
[5] Though commonly applied to the colony of Portuguese East Africa, the name Mozambique belongs, strictly speaking, only to the northernmost province of that possession.
Very few people are aware that, as long ago as 1898, England and Germany concluded a secret agreement which definitely provides for the eventual disposition of Portugal's African possessions. Of its true history and scope, however, little has ever leaked out. It grew out of Joseph Chamberlain's restless and ambitious schemes for the consolidation of British dominion in Africa. Appreciating, early in the Boer War, that England's success in that struggle would largely depend upon Germany remaining strictly neutral, that master statesman proposed to the Berlin Government a plan the effect of which was to divide the reversion of Angola and Mozambique between Great Britain and [Pg 179] Germany, inferentially leaving the former a free hand south of the Zambezi. This was the famous Secret Treaty, the final text of which was afterward signed by Lord Salisbury, and it was largely in virtue of this agreement that England was free from German interference during the Boer War. It is an interesting comment on the ethics of international politics that this remarkable agreement was concluded without any consultation of Portugal, the country the most vitally concerned. Delagoa Bay is no longer as imperative a necessity to England as it was in 1898, at which time it was the quickest way to reach the Transvaal, and, on the other hand, the West Coast is daily becoming more important for strategical and commercial reasons, for the “Afro” railway, of which I have made mention in the chapter on Morocco, will become in the near future the great highway between Europe and South America, while the railway now being built between Benguela (Lobito Bay) and the Katanga region will provide the easiest and quickest means of communicating with Rhodesia and the Transvaal. The terms of the Anglo-German Secret Treaty are of interest, however, as indicating how that portion of the African continent lying south of the Congo will be eventually parcelled out, and as showing the framework on which is being slowly but surely constructed Germany's African empire.
The erection of such a German state across the middle of Africa would have far-reaching results in more directions than one. In the first place, it would end [Pg 180] forever England's long-cherished ambition of eventually linking up her Sudanese and South African possessions and thus completing an “All Red” route from Cairo to the Cape. In the second place, Germany is now in a position to build her own transcontinental railway—from east to west instead of from north to south—on German or neutral soil all the way, thus removing the completion of the Cape-to-Cairo system, even under international auspices, to a very distant day, and making Dar-es-Salam and Duala, instead of Cape Town and Alexandria, the starting-points for those highways of steel which are destined to open up inner Africa.
It is surprising how little even the well-informed know of these far places which Germany has taken for her own. Fertile spots as any upon earth, covered with hard-wood forests and watered by many rivers, when seen from the shade of an awning over a ship's deck they are as alluring as the stage of a theatre set for a sylvan opera. Go a thousand yards back from that smiling coast, however, and the illusion disappears, for you find a country whose hostile natives, savage beasts, and deadly fevers combine to make it deserving of its title—“the white man's graveyard.” The statesmen of the Wilhelmstrasse must have taken a long look into the future when they raised the German flag over such lands as these. The returns they have yielded thus far would have discouraged a man less sanguine than William Hohenzollern. Though subsidised German steam-ships ply along their coasts, though their forests resound to the clank and clang of German railway-builders' [Pg 181] tools, though the plantations of government-assisted settlers dot the back country, though she has spent on them thousands of lives and millions of marks, Germany's only returns thus far have been a few annual tons of ivory, copra, and rubber, some excellent but unprofitable harbours, and many lonely stations where her sons contract fevers and pessimism. But I would stake my life that this out-of-the-way, back-of-beyond, sun-blistered, fever-stricken German Africa will be a great colony some day.
From the care with which they are laid out, from the perfection of their sanitary arrangements, from the substantiality of their public buildings and official residences and their suitability to the climatic conditions, the travellers who confine their investigations to the coast are readily deceived into thinking that Tanga and Bagamoyo and Dar-es-Salam and Swakopmund and Duala are the gateways to rich and prosperous colonies. From the very outset, however, the imperial government based its claim for popular support in its colonial ventures upon the erroneous assumption that German colonies would attract Germans, and that in this way the language of the Fatherland would be spread abroad and eventually supplant that of Shakespeare. The Germans, however, have stubbornly refused to go to their own colonies, preferring those where English is the speech and where there are fewer officials and more freedom. To-day, therefore, you find the model German towns, so perfectly built that you feel as though you were walking through a municipal exhibition, almost [Pg 182] wholly peopled by brass-bound, hide-bound officials, while the German traders are carrying on thriving businesses under the English flag at Mombasa and Zanzibar and Sierra Leone.
Now, Germany has no one but herself to blame for this condition of affairs, having brought it about by the short-sightedness of her colonial policy and the harshness and incapacity of her officials. Intending to found industrial colonies, she created military settlements instead, administering and exploiting them, not as if they were German lands, but as if they were an enemy's country. Nothing emphasises more sharply the purely military character of Germany's African colonies than the fact that there are seven soldiers or officials to every German civilian. Dwelling in idleness, in one of the most trying climates in the world, the officials seem to take a malicious satisfaction in interfering with the civil population, thus driving the traders—who form the backbone of every colony—to take up their residence in English ports and so paralysing German trade. The soldiers, for want of something better to do, are forever seeking advancement by making unnecessary expeditions into the hinterland for the purpose of “punishing” the natives, thus causing them to migrate by wholesale into British, Belgian, and even Portuguese territory, so that the German colonies are left without labour and the plantations are consequently being ruined.
The needless severity of Germany's colonial rule is graphically illustrated by the fact that during 1911 there were 14,849 criminal convictions in German East [Pg 183] Africa alone, or one conviction to every 637 natives; while in the adjoining protectorate of Uganda, among the same type of natives but under a British administration, the ratio of convictions was only one in 2,047. There is not a town in German East Africa where you cannot see boys of from eight to fourteen years, shackled together by chains running from iron collar to iron collar and guarded by soldiers with loaded rifles, doing the work of men under a deadly sun. Natives with bleeding backs are constantly making their way into British and Belgian territory with tales of maltreatment by German planters, while stories of German tyranny, brutality, and corruption—of some instances of which I was myself a witness—form staple topics of conversation on every club veranda and steamer's deck along these coasts. In German Southwest Africa the dearth of labour, owing to the practical extermination of the Herero nation in Germany's last “little war” in that colony, has become a serious and pressing problem. In a single campaign—which cost Germany five hundred million marks and the lives of two thousand soldiers, and which could have been avoided altogether by a little tact and kindness—half the total population of the colony was killed in battle or driven into the desert to perish. That is why the builders of the Swakopmund-Otavi Railway in German Southwest Africa—the longest two-foot-gauge line in the world—have to send to Europe for their labour. Until Germany makes a radical change in her methods of colonial administration, and until she learns that traders and labourers are [Pg 184] more essential to a colony's prosperity than pompous and domineering officials, her colonial accounts will continue to stand heaviest on the debit side of the ledger.
Successful colonial administration in Africa, as in all tropical countries, is largely a matter of temperament, and the stolid sons of the Fatherland seem, strangely enough, to be more quickly affected by the demoralising climate and to be irritated more easily than either the English or the French. The Englishman's sense of justice and the Frenchman's sense of humour are their chief assets as successful colonisers and rulers of alien peoples, but the German colonial official, who is generally serious by nature and almost always domineering as the result of his training, possesses neither of these invaluable attributes and is heavily handicapped in consequence. It is no easy task with which he is confronted, remember. The loneliness and the privations of the white man's life, and the debility that comes from the heat and the rains and the fevers, when combined with the strain of governing and educating an inconceivably lazy, stubborn, stupid, and intractable people, make the job of an African official one of the most trying in the world. The loneliness and the climate seem to grip a German as they never do an Englishman, and he becomes irritable and ugly and unreasonably annoyed by trifles, so that when a native fails to get out of his way quickly enough, or to salute him with the punctiliousness which he considers his due, he flies into a rage and orders the man to be flogged. The native goes back to his village with a bleeding back [Pg 185] and hatred in his heart, and, as likely as not, a bloody, costly, and troublesome native uprising ensues. The African native is, after all, nothing but an overgrown and very aggravating child, and his upbringing is a job for school-teachers instead of drill sergeants, and the sooner the imperial government appreciates that fact the better.
I went to German East Africa, which is the Kaiser's star colony, expecting to be deeply impressed; I came away deeply disappointed. It is only about fifty miles from Zanzibar across to Dar-es-Salam, the capital of the colony, but the local steamer, which is the size of a Hudson River tugboat and rolls horribly on the slightest provocation, manages to use up the better part of a day in making the trip. Seen from the steamer's deck, Dar-es-Salam presents one of the most enchanting pictures that I know, and every one who goes ashore there does so with high expectations. Imagine, if you can, a city of two hundred thousand people, with the imposing, red-roofed schools and churches and hospitals and barracks and municipal buildings of, say, Düsseldorf, and the white-walled, broad-verandaed, bungalow dwellings of southern California; with concrete wharves and cement sidewalks and beautifully macadamised roads and many public parks: imagine all this, I say, dropped down in the midst of a palm grove on one of the hottest and unhealthiest coasts in the world—that is Dar-es-Salam. The hotel is, barring the one at Kandy in Ceylon and another at Ancon in the Canal Zone, the best and most beautiful tropical hostelry I have ever [Pg 186] seen, but, as it is owned and run by the government, for the benefit of its officials, its manager, a blond, florid-faced, pompadoured Prussian, was as independent as a hotel clerk in a city where a presidential convention is going on. Just as in the other German colonies, I found East Africa to be suffering from a severe attack of militarism. I saw more sentries and patrols and guards during my four days' stay in Dar-es-Salam than I did in Constantinople during the Turkish Revolution. I was lulled to sleep by regimental bugles and I was awakened by them again at daybreak, and I never set foot out of doors without meeting a column of native soldiery, their black faces peering out stolidly from beneath the sun-aprons, their spindle shanks encased in spiral puttees, their feet rising and falling in the senseless “parade step” in time to the monotonous “ rechts! links! rechts! links! ” of the German sergeant. But what struck me most forcibly about Dar-es-Salam was that it appeared to have no business. Apparently the soldiers had frightened it away. The harbours of Mombasa and Zanzibar and Beira and Lourenço Marques are alive with steamers taking on or discharging cargo (and quite two out of three of them fly the German flag), and their streets are lined with offices and warehouses and “factories” (over the doors of many of which are signs bearing German names), and their wharves are piled high with bales of merchandise going to or coming from the four corners of the earth; but in the harbour of Dar-es-Salam, as in all the other German harbours I visited, the only vessels are white German gun-boats [Pg 187] or rusty German tramps; its streets are lined with government offices instead of business offices; on its wharves are a few puncheons of palm-oil, or other products of the bush, and nothing more.
However much the administration of the German colonies may be open to criticism, and however slow they may have been in commercial development, I have nothing but praise and admiration for the accomplishments of their railway-builders. From Dar-es-Salam I travelled inland by railway motor-car nearly to Kilamatinde, a distance of three hundred and seventy miles, through one of the most savage regions in Africa, over one of the best graded and ballasted roadbeds I have ever seen. The line is now being pushed forward from Kilamatinde toward Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, which it will reach, so the chief engineer assured me, by the summer of 1914. From Ujiji, which, by the way, is the place where Stanley discovered Livingstone, a steamer service will be inaugurated to Albertville, on the Belgian shore of the lake, whence a line is under construction to the navigable waters of the Lualaba, which is one of the chief tributaries of the Congo; while another line of steamers will ply between Ujiji and Kituta, in northeastern Rhodesia, which point the British Cape-to-Cairo system is approaching. By the close of 1914, in all probability therefore, the traveller who lands at Dar-es-Salam will be able to travel by train, with the passage across Lake Tanganyika as the only interruption, to the Cape of Good Hope, or by train and river steamer to the mouth of the Congo, and in [Pg 188] perfect comfort and safety all the way. As Walfish Bay, the only harbour in Southwest Africa worthy of the name, belongs to England, the Germans, finding themselves unable to buy it and appreciating that a harbourless colony is all but worthless, promptly set to work and built themselves artificial harbours at Swakopmund and at Lüderitz Bay, though at appalling cost. That Germany is exceedingly anxious to acquire Walfish Bay, and that she stands ready to make almost any reasonable concession to obtain it, there is little doubt. The mere fact that Walfish Bay is owned by England is a source of constant aggravation to the Germans, for it lies squarely in the middle of their Southwest African coast-line, its roomy roadstead and deep anchorage being in sharp contrast to the German port of Lüderitz Bay, which is being rapidly sanded up, and that of Swakopmund, a harbour on which the Berlin Government has already thrown away several millions of marks. Lüderitz Bay is already connected with the inland town of Keetmanshoop by three hundred and fifty miles of narrow-gauge line, and plans are now under consideration for pushing this southeastward so as to link up with the South African system near Kimberley, while from Swakopmund another iron highway, four hundred miles long, gives access to the Otavi copper-mining country and will doubtless be extended, in the not far-distant future, to the Rhodesian border, tapping the main line of the Cape-to-Cairo system in the neighbourhood of the Victoria Falls.
I have laid considerable stress upon the subject of [Pg 189] railways, because it seems to me that in them lies the chief hope of the German colonies, for wherever the railway goes there goes civilisation. Throughout the vast and potentially rich regions thus being opened up by the locomotive the imperial government is pouring out money unstintingly in the construction of roads, bridges, and reservoirs, the sinking of artesian wells, the establishment of telegraph lines and postal routes, the erection of schools and hospitals, in furnishing trees to the planters and machinery and live-stock to the farmers, and in assisting immigration. So, if keeping everlastingly at it brings success, I cannot but feel that the day will come when these officers and officials, these soldiers and settlers, these traders and tribesmen, will find their places and play their parts in the Kaiser's imperial scheme of a new and greater Germany over the sea.
“ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!”
IN Bulawayo, which is in Matabeleland, stands one of the most significant and impressive statues in the world. From the middle of that dusty, sun-baked thoroughfare known as Main Street rises the bronze image of a bulky, thick-set, shabbily clad man, his hands clasped behind him, his feet planted firmly apart, as he stares in profound meditation northward over Africa. Cecil John Rhodes was the dreamer's name, and in his vision he saw twin lines of steel stretching from the Cape of Good Hope straight away to the shores of the Mediterranean; a railway, to use his own words, “cutting Africa through the centre and picking up trade all the way.”
If ever a man was a strange blending of dreamer and materialist, of utopian and buccaneer, of Clive and Hastings with Hawkins and Drake, it was Cecil Rhodes. In other words, he dreamed great dreams and let no scruples stand in the way of their fulfilment. Having trekked over nearly the whole of that vast territory that stretches northward from the Orange and the Vaal to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, his imagination saw in this fertile, sparsely settled country virgin soil for the building up of a new and greater Britain. The predominance of the British in Egypt and in South Africa, [Pg 191] and the fact that the territory under British control stretched with but a single break from the mouths of the Nile to Table Bay, gave rise in the great empire-builder's mind to the project of a trunk-line railway “from the Cape to Cairo,” and under the British flag all the way. Though Rhodes's dream of an “All Red” railway was rudely shattered by the Convention of 1889, which allowed Germany to stretch a barrier across the continent from the Indian Ocean to the Congo State, he never abandoned the hope that a British zone would eventually be acquired through German East Africa, either by treaty or purchase, even going so far as to open negotiations with the Kaiser to this end on his own initiative.
It was a picturesque vision, said the men to whom he confided his dream, but impractical and impossible, for in those days the line from Alexandria to Assuan and another from Cape Town to Kimberley practically comprised the railway system of the continent, and five thousand miles of unmapped forest, desert, and jungle, filled with hostile natives, savage beasts, and deadly fevers, lay between. But the man who had added to the British Empire a territory greater than France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy combined; who had organised the corporation controlling the South African diamond fields; who had put down a formidable native uprising by going unarmed and unaccompanied into the rebel camp; and who was responsible, more than any other person, for the Boer War, was not of the stamp which is daunted by either pessimistic predictions or obvious obstacles.
It was a slow and disheartening business at first, this building of a railway with a soul-inspiring name. The discovery of the diamond fields had already brought the line up to Kimberley; the finding of gold carried it northward again to the Rand; the opening up of Rhodesia led the iron highway on to Bulawayo, and there it stopped, apparently for good. But Rhodes was undiscouraged. He felt that to push the railway northward from Bulawayo to the southern shores of Lake Tanganyika was an obvious and necessary enterprise—the actual proof, as it were, of the British occupation. But the Boer War was scarcely over, the national purse was drained almost dry, and even the most optimistic financiers shrank from the enormous expense and problematical success of building a railway into the heart of a savage and unknown country.
Finally Rhodes turned to the imperial government for assistance in this imperial enterprise, for the man who had added Zululand, Bechuanaland, Matabeleland, Mashonaland, Barotseland, and Nyasaland to the empire felt that the empire owed him something in return. He first laid his scheme before Lord Salisbury, then prime minister, who said that nothing could be done until he had a closer estimate of the expense. Returning to Central Africa, Rhodes had a flying survey of the route made in double-quick time, and with the figures in his pocket hastened back to London. This time the premier sent him to see Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the chancellor of the exchequer. Hicks-Beach, who was notorious for his parsimony in the expenditure [Pg 193] of national funds, was frigid and discouraging, but finally relaxed enough to say: “Get a proper survey made of your proposed railway, with estimates drawn up by responsible engineers, and if the figure is not too unreasonable we will see what can be done.” Fortified with this shred of hope, Rhodes again betook himself to the country north of the Zambezi, and, after months of work, hardship, and privation, facing death from native spears, poisonous snakes, and the sleeping-sickness, his men weakened by malaria and his animals killed by the dreaded tsetse-fly, he returned to England and presented his revised surveys and estimates to the chancellor of the exchequer. That immaculately clad statesman negligently twirled his eye-glass on its string as he regarded with obvious disfavour the fever-sunken cheeks and unkempt appearance of the pioneer. “Really, Mr. Rhodes,” he remarked coldly, “I fear it is quite out of the question for her Majesty's government to lend your scheme its countenance or assistance.” It is a pleasingly human touch that as the indignant empire-builder went out of the minister's room he slammed the door so that the pictures rattled on the wall.
After dinner that night Rhodes strolled over to see a friend of Kimberley days, a Hebrew financier named Alfred Beit, in whom he found a sympathetic listener. As Rhodes took his hat to go, Beit casually remarked, “Look here, Rhodes, you'll want a start. Four and a half million pounds is a big sum to raise. We'll do half a million of it, Wernher [his partner] and I.” That [Pg 194] meant success. Though ministers of the Crown turned a cold shoulder to the great imperialist who came to them with a great imperial enterprise, help came from two German Jews who had become naturalised Englishmen. The next day the City brought the total up to a million and a half, and within little more than a fortnight the entire four and a half millions were subscribed, the three names, Rhodes, Beit, and Wernher, being accepted by the man in the street as sufficient guarantee of success. It was in this fashion that Cecil Rhodes raised the money for another great stride in his railway march northward.
By 1904 the road had progressed as far as the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, where it crosses the river on a wonderful steel-arch bridge—the highest in the world—its span, looking for all the world like a frosted cobweb, rising four hundred and twenty feet above the angry waters. “I want the bridge to cross the river so close to the falls,” directed Rhodes, “that the travellers will have the spray in their faces.” “That is impossible,” objected the engineers. “What you ask cannot be done.” “Then I will find some one who can do it,” said Rhodes—and he did. The bridge was built where he wanted it, and as the Zambezi Express rolls out above the torrent the passengers have to close the windows to keep from being drenched with spray. By 1906 the rail-head had been pushed forward to Broken Hill, a mining centre in northern Rhodesia; three years later found it at Bwana M'kubwa, on the Congo border. Here the task of construction was taken up by the [Pg 195] Katanga Railway Company, and in February, 1911, freight and passenger trains were in operation straight through to Elisabethville, in the heart of the Belgian Congo, two thousand three hundred and sixteen miles north of Cape Town and only two hundred and eighty miles from the southern end of Lake Tanganyika.
As you sit on the observation platform of your electric-lighted sleeping-car, anywhere along that section of the “Cape-to-Cairo” between Cape Town and the Zambezi, you rub your eyes incredulously as you watch the rolling, verdure-clad plains stretching away to the foot-hills of distant ranges, and note the entire absence of those dense forests and steaming jungles which have always been associated, in the minds of most of us, with Central Africa. The more you see of this open, homely, rather monotonous country the harder it becomes for you to convince yourself that you are really in the heart of that mysterious, storied Dark Continent and not back in America again.
And the illusion is completed by the people, for the only natives you see are careless, happy, decently clad darkies who might have come straight from the levees of Vicksburg or New Orleans, while on every station platform are groups of fine, bronze-faced, up-standing fellows in corded riding-breeches and brown boots, their flannel shirts open at the neck, their broad-brimmed hats cocked rakishly—just such types, indeed, as were common beyond the Mississippi twenty years ago, before store clothes and the motor-car had spoiled the picturesqueness of our own frontier.
North of the Zambezi it is a different story, however, for there it is frontier still, with many of a frontier's drawbacks, for the prices of necessities are exorbitant and of luxuries fantastic; skilled workmen can command almost any wages they may ask, and common labour is both scarce and poor. The miner, the scientifically trained farmer, and the skilled workman have rich opportunities in this quarter of Africa, however, for the mineral wealth is amazing, much of the soil is excellent, and civilisation is advancing over a great area with three-league boots.
For excitement, variety, and picturesqueness I doubt if the journey through Barotseland and the Katanga district of the Congo can be equalled on any railway in the world. It is true that the Uganda Railway—which, by the way, does not touch Uganda at all—has been better advertised, but in quantity of game and facilities for hunting it the territory through which it runs is no whit superior to that traversed by the “Cape-to-Cairo.” Stroll a mile up or down the Zambezi from the railway bridge and you can see hippos as easily as you can at the Zoo in Central Park; in Northwest Rhodesia herds of bush-buck, zebras, and ostriches scamper away at sight of the train; and as you lie in your sleeping-berth at night, while the train halts on lonely sidings, you can hear the roar of lions and see the gleam of the camp-fires by means of which the railway employees keep them away. On one occasion, when our train was lying on a siding south of the Zambezi, the conductor of the dining-car suddenly [Pg 197] exclaimed, “Look there, gentlemen—look over there!” His excitement was justified, for from over a screen of bushes, scarcely a biscuit's throw away, a herd of five giraffes craned their preposterous necks and peered at us curiously. Once, when I was travelling through Northwest Rhodesia, our engine struck a bull elephant which had decided to contest the right of way. As the train was running at full speed, both engine and elephant went off the track. Returning that way some days later, we noted that the local station-master had scraped the gargantuan skull to the bone, filled it with earth, and set it on the station platform as a jardinière to grow geraniums in. He was an ingenious fellow.
From the Cairo end, meanwhile, the northern section of the great transcontinental system was being pushed steadily, if slowly, southward. The difficulties of river transportation experienced by the two Sudanese expeditions had proved conclusively that if the Sudan was ever to be opened up to European exploitation it must be by rail rather than by river. It was the Khalifa who was unconsciously responsible for the rapid completion of much of the Sudanese section of the “Cape-to-Cairo,” for, in order to come to hand-grips with him, Kitchener and his soldiers pushed the railway down the desert to Khartoum at record speed, laying close on two miles of track between each sunrise and sunset. There it halted for a number of years; but after the British had done their work, and Khartoum had been transformed from a town of blood, lust, and fanaticism into a city with broad, shaded streets, along [Pg 198] which stalks law and order in the khaki tunic of a Sudanese policeman, the railway-building fever, which affects some men as irresistibly as the Wanderlust does others, took hold of Those Who Have the Say, and the line was again pushed southward, along the banks of the Blue Nile, to Sennar, one hundred and fifty-eight miles south of Khartoum. With the completion, in 1910, of several iron bridges, it was advanced to Kosti, a post on the White Nile, with the northern end of Lake Tanganyika some twelve hundred miles away.
That a few more years will see the northern section extending southward, via Gondokoro, to Lake Victoria Nyanza, and the southern section northward to Lake Tanganyika, there is little doubt. Indeed, the plans are drawn, the routes mapped, the levels run, and on the Katanga-Tanganyika section the railway-builders are even now at work. But when the Victoria Nyanza has been reached by the one section, and Tanganyika by the other, there will come a halt, for between the two rail-heads there will still be six hundred miles of intervening territory—and that territory is German.
Unless, therefore, England can obtain, by treaty or purchase, a railway zone across German East Africa, such as we have obtained for the Canal across the Isthmus of Panama, it looks very much as though there would never be an all-British railway from the Mediterranean to the Cape, and as though the life dream of Cecil John Rhodes would vanish into thin air. There are several reasons why Germany is not inclined to give England the much-desired right of way. First, because [Pg 199] between the two nations a bitter rivalry, political and commercial, exists, and the Germans feel that already far too much of the continent is under the shadow of the Union Jack; secondly, because the Germans are, as I have already mentioned in the preceding chapter, themselves building a railway from Dar-es-Salam, the capital of their east-coast colony, to Lake Tanganyika, and by means of this line they expect to divert to their own ports the trade of all that portion of inner Africa lying between Rhodesia and the Sudan; thirdly, because it is unlikely in the extreme that England would give Germany such a quid pro quo as she would demand—as, for example, the cession of Walfish Bay, the British port in German Southwest Africa, or of the British protectorate of Zanzibar, or of both; fourthly, because the Germans now have the British in just such a predicament regarding the completion of the “Cape-to-Cairo” railway as the British have the Germans regarding the completion of the Bagdad railway. In other words, the only condition on which either country will permit its rival's railway to be built through its territory is internationalisation.
That there will ever be an all-British railway from the Mediterranean to the Cape seems to me exceedingly doubtful, for the political, territorial, and financial obstacles are many, and not easily to be disposed of; but that the not-far-distant future will see the completion, under international auspices, of this great transcontinental trunk line seems to me to be as certain as that the locomotive sparks fly upward or that the hoar-frost [Pg 200] on the rails disappears before the sun. Rhodes always said that the success of such a system must largely depend on the junctions to the east and west coasts, which would affect such a line very much as tributary streams affect a river. A number of such feeders are already in operation and others are rapidly building. Beginning at the north, the main line of the “Cape-to-Cairo” is tapped at Cairo by the railways from Port Said and Suez; and at Atbara Junction, in the Sudan, a constantly increasing stream of traffic flows in over the line from Port Sudan, a harbour recently built to order on the Red Sea. The misnamed Uganda Railway is in regular operation between Mombasa on the Indian Ocean and Port Florence on the Victoria Nyanza, whence there is a steamer service to Entebbe in Uganda. From Dar-es-Salam, the capital of German East Africa, the Germans are rushing a railway through to Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the engineer-in-chief assuring me that it would be completed and in operation by the summer of 1914. From Beira, in Portuguese East Africa, the Beira, Mashonaland, and Rhodesia Railway carries an enormous stream of traffic inland to its junction with the main line at Bulawayo. Still farther south a line from the Portuguese possession of Delagoa Bay connects with the main system at Mafeking, on the borders of Bechuanaland, while Kimberley is the junction for a line from Durban, in Natal, and De Aar for feeders from East London and Port Elizabeth, in Cape of Good Hope.
From Swakopmund, on the other side of the continent, [Pg 201] a railway has already been pushed nearly five hundred miles into the interior of German Southwest Africa which will eventually link up with the “Cape-to-Cairo” in the vicinity of the Victoria Falls, running through German territory practically all the way. Still another line is being built inland from Lobito Bay in Angola (Portuguese West Africa) to join the transcontinental system near the Congo border, nearly half of its total length of twelve hundred miles being completed. It is estimated that by means of this line the journey between England and the cities of the Rand will be shortened by at least six days. It will be seen, therefore, that the “Cape-to-Cairo” system will have eleven great feeders, eight of which are already completed and in operation, while all of the remaining four will be carrying freight and passengers before the close of 1914.
When the last rail of the “Cape-to-Cairo” is laid, and the last spike driven, its builders may say, without fear of contradiction, “In all the world no road like this.” And in the nature of things it is impossible that there can ever be its like again, for there will be no more continents to open up, no more frontiers to conquer. It will start on the sandy shores of the Mediterranean and end under the shadow of Table Mountain. In between, it will pass through jungle, swamp, and desert; it will zigzag across plains where elephants play by day and lions roar by night; it will corkscrew up the slopes of snow-capped mountains, meander through the cultivated patches of strange inland tribes, [Pg 202] stride long-legged athwart treacherous, pestilential swamps, plough through the darkness of primeval forests, and stretch its length across the rolling, wind-swept veldt, until it finally ends in the great antipodean metropolis on the edge of the Southern Ocean. On its way it traverses nearly seventy degrees of latitude, samples every climate, touches every degree of temperature, experiences every extreme. At Gondokoro, in the swamp-lands of the Sudd, the red-fezzed engine-driver will lean gasping from his blistered cab; at Kimberley, in the highlands of the Rand, he will stamp with numbed feet and blow with chattering teeth on his half-frozen fingers.
The traveller who climbs into the Cape-to-Cairo Limited at the Quay Station in Alexandria, in response to the conductor's cry of “All aboard! All aboard for Cape Town!” can lean from the window of his compartment as the train approaches Cairo and see the misty outlines of the Pyramids, those mysterious monuments of antiquity which were hoary with age when London was a cluster of mud huts and Paris was yet to be founded in the swamps beside the Seine; at Luxor he will pass beneath the shadow of ruined Thebes, a city beside which Athens and Rome are ludicrously modern; at Assuan he will catch a glimpse of the greatest dam ever built by man—a mile and a quarter long and built of masonry weighing a million tons—holding in check the waters of the longest river in the world; at Khartoum, peering through the blue-glass windows which protect the passengers' eyes from the blinding sun [Pg 203] glare, he can see the statue of Gordon, seated on his bronze camel, peering northward across the desert in search of the white helmets that came too late; at Entebbe his eyes will be dazzled by the shimmering waters of the Victoria Nyanza, barring Lake Superior the greatest of all fresh-water seas; at Ujiji he will see natives in German uniforms drilling on the spot where Stanley discovered Livingstone. He will hold his breath in awe as the train rolls out over the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, for there will lie below him the mightiest cataract in the world—an unbroken sheet of falling, roaring, smoking water, two and a half times the height and ten times the width of the American Fall at Niagara; at Kimberley he will see the great pits in the earth which supply the women of the world with diamonds; in the outskirts of Johannesburg he will see the mountains of ore from which comes one-third of the gold supply of the world. And finally, when his train has at last come to a halt under the glass roof of the Victoria Terminal in Cape Town, with close on six thousand miles of track behind it, the traveller, if he has any imagination and any appreciation in his soul, will make a little pilgrimage to that spot on the slopes of Table Mountain known as “World's View,” where another statue of that same bulky, thick-set, shabbily clad man, this time guarded by many British lions, stares northward over Africa. He will take his stand in front of that mighty memorial and, lifting his hat, will say: “You, sir, were a great man, the greatest this benighted continent has ever known, and if one day it is [Pg 204] transformed into a land of civilisation, of peace, and of prosperity, it will be due, more than anything else, to the great iron highway, from the Nile's mouth to the continent's end, which is the fulfilment of your dream.”
THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER
WHEN the penniless younger son of the English society play is jilted by the luxury-loving heroine, he invariably packs his portmanteau and betakes himself to Rhodesia to make his fortune. Fifty years ago he sought the golden fleece in California; thirty years ago he took passage by P. & O. boat for the Australian diggings; ten years ago he helped to swell the mad rush to the Yukon; to-day his journey's end is the newest of the great, new nations—Rhodesia. He returns in the fourth act, broad-hatted, bronzed, and boisterous, to announce that he is the owner of a ten-thousand-acre farm, or a diamond field, or a gold mine, or all of them, and that he has come home to find a girl to share his farm-house on the Rhodesian veldt, where good cooking is more essential in a wife than good clothes and a good complexion.
Now, beyond having a vague idea that Rhodesia is a frontier country somewhere at the back of beyond, there is only about one in every fifty of the audience who has any definite notion where or what it really is. Picture, then, if you can, a territory about the size of all the Atlantic States, from Florida to Maine, put together, with the dry, dusty, sunny climate of southern California and the fertile, rolling, well-watered, and well-wooded [Pg 206] surface of Indiana; picture such a country dropped down in the heart of equatorial Africa—that is Rhodesia. It lies a little above and to the right of that speckled yellow patch on the map of Africa which was labelled in our school geographies the Kalahari Desert. Bearing the name of the great empire-builder is the whole of that region which is bounded on the north by the Congo and the sleeping-sickness, on the east by Mozambique and the black-water fever, on the west by Angola and the cocoa atrocities, and on the south by the Transvaal and the discontented Dutch. It is watered by the Limpopo, which forms its southernmost boundary; by the Zambezi, which separates Southern Rhodesia from the northeast and northwest provinces; and by the innumerable streams which unite to form the Congo.
When the railway which English concessionaires are now pushing inland from the coast of Angola to the Zambezi is completed, the front door to Rhodesia will be Lobito Bay, thus bringing Bulawayo within sixteen days of the Strand by boat and rail. At present, however, the country must be entered through the cellar, which means Cape Town and a railway journey of fourteen hundred miles; or by the side door at Beira, a fever-stricken Portuguese town on the East Coast, which is fortunate in being but a night's journey by rail from the Rhodesian frontier and is, in consequence, the gateway through which British jams, American harvesters, and German jack-knives are opening up inner Africa to foreign exploitation.
The Rhodesia-bound traveller who escapes landing at Beira in a basket is fortunate, for it has a poorly sheltered harbour and neither dock, jetty, nor wharf, so that in the monsoon months, when the great combers come roaring in from the Indian Ocean mountain-high, there is about as much chance of getting the steam tender alongside the rolling liner as there is of getting a frightened horse alongside a panting automobile. If a dangerous sea is running, the disembarking passenger is put into a cylindrical, elongated basket, a sort of enlarged edition of those used for soiled towels in the lavatories of hotels; a wheezing donkey-engine swings it up and outward and, if the man at the lever calculates the roll of the ship correctly, drops it with a thud on the deck of the tender plunging off-side.
Built on a stretch of sun-baked sand, between a miasmal jungle and the sea, Beira is the hottest and unhealthiest place in all East Africa. “It is one of the places that the Lord has overlooked,” remarked a sallow-faced resident, as he took his hourly dose of quinine. Even the paid-to-be-enthusiastic author of the steamship company's glowing booklet hesitates at depicting this fever-haunted, sun-baked, sand-suffocated seaport of Mozambique, contenting himself with the noncommittal statement that “it is indescribable; it is just Beira.” The town has but three attractions: a broad-verandaed hotel where they charge you forty cents for a lemonade with no ice in it; a golf course, laid out by a newly arrived Englishman, who died of sunstroke the first day he played on it; and a trolley system which [Pg 208] makes every resident the owner of his own street-car. The heat in Beira being too great to permit of walking—a shaded thermometer not infrequently climbs to one hundred and twenty degrees; the streets being too deep in sand for the use of vehicles; and the tsetse-fly killing off horses in a few days, those European traders and officials who are condemned to dwell in Beira get about in “trolleys” of their own. These two-seated, hooded conveyances, which are a sort of cross between a hand-car, a baby-carriage, and the wheeled chairs on the board walk at Atlantic City, are pushed by half-naked and perspiring natives over a track which extends from one end of the town to the other and with sidings into every man's front yard. It struck me, however, that the most interesting things in Beira were the corrugated-iron shanty and the stretch of wooden platform which mark the terminus of the railway, and from which, in answer to my anxious queries, I was assured that a train departed twice weekly for Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. I used to sit on the veranda of the hotel and stare across the stretch of burning sand at that wretched station as longingly as the small boy stares at the red numeral on the calendar which indicates the Fourth of July.
A temperature of one hundred and eighteen degrees in my compartment of the sleeping-car; miasma rising in cloud wreaths from the jungle; a station platform, alive with slovenly Portuguese soldiers with faces as yellow as their uniforms; helmeted, gaunt-cheeked traders and officials, and cotton-clad Swahilis, comprised [Pg 209] my last recollection of Beira and the terrible East Coast. The next morning I awoke in my compartment shivering, not from fever but from cold. Gone, as though in a bad dream, were the glaring sands, the steaming jungle, and the sallow, fever-racked men. Instead, my car window framed a picture of rolling, grass-covered uplands, dotted here and there with herds of grazing cattle and substantial, whitewashed farm-houses, while back of all was the gray-blue of distant mountains. As I looked at the transformed landscape incredulously, the train halted at a way-station swarming with broad-hatted, flannel-shirted, sun-tanned men with clean-cut Anglo-Saxon faces. A row of saddle-horses were tied to the station fence, while their owners stamped up and down the platform impatiently, awaiting the sorting of the infrequent mail from home; a democrat wagon and a clumsy Cape cart were drawn up in the roadway; and at a house close by a woman in a sunbonnet was feeding chickens. “Where are we?” I inquired of the guard, as he passed through the train. “We're just into Rhodesia now, sir,” said he, touching his cap. “This is Umtali, in Mashonaland.” (Now, if I had asked that same question of a brakeman on one of our own railways, he would probably have answered, with the independence of his kind: “Can't you read the sign on the station for yourself?”) “Surely there must be some mistake,” I said to myself. “This cannot be Central Africa, for where are the impenetrable jungles through which Livingstone cut his way, the savage animals which Du Chaillu shot, and the naked savages [Pg 210] with whom Stanley alternately battled and bartered? This is not Africa; this is our own West, with its men in corduroy and sombreros and its women in gingham, with its open, rolling prairies and its air like dry champagne.” Indeed, throughout my stay in Rhodesia I could not rid myself of the impression that I was back in the American West of thirty years ago, before the pioneer, the prospector, and the cow-puncher had retreated before the advance of the railway, the harvester, and the motor-car.
The story of the taking and making of Rhodesia forms one of the most picturesque and thrilling chapters in the history of England's colonial expansion. About the time that the nineteenth century had reached its turning-point, a strange tale, passing by word of mouth from native kraal to native kraal, came at last to the ears of a Scotch worker in the mission field of Bechuanaland. It was a tale of a waterfall somewhere in the jungles of the distant north; a waterfall so mighty, declared the natives, that the spray from it looked like a storm cloud on the horizon and the thunder of its waters could be heard four days' trek away. So the missionary, wearied with the tedium of proselyting amid a peaceful people and restless with the curiosity of the born explorer, set out on a long and lonely march to the northward, through a country which no white man's eyes had ever seen. It took him three years to reach the falls for which he started, but when at last he stood upon the brink of the canyon and looked down upon the waters of the Zambezi as they hurtled over four hundred [Pg 211] feet of sheerest cliff, he was so awed by their majesty and their beauty that he named them after Victoria, the young English queen. Before he left the missionary-explorer carved his name on the trunk of a near-by tree, where it can be seen to-day; the name is David Livingstone.
For a quarter of a century the regions adjacent to the Zambezi were disturbed only by migratory bands of natives and marauding animals. Then Stanley came with his mile-long caravan of porters, halting long enough to explore and map the region, on his historic march from coast to coast. In the middle eighties a young English prospector, trekking through the country with a single wagon, found that for which he was seeking—gold. Likewise he saw that its verdure-clad prairies would support many cattle and that its virgin soil was adapted for many kinds of crops; that it was, in short, a white man's country. Unarmed and unaccompanied, he penetrated to the kraal of Lobenguela, the chief of the warlike Matabele, who occupied the region, and induced him to sign a treaty placing his country under British protection. The price paid him was five hundred dollars a month and a thousand antiquated rifles; cheap enough, surely, for a territory three times the size of Texas and as rich in natural resources as California. A year later the British South Africa Company, a corporation capitalised at thirty million dollars, under a charter granted by the Imperial Government, began the work of exploiting the concession; naming it, properly enough, after Cecil John [Pg 212] Rhodes, the lone prospector who, with the vision of a prophet, had foreseen its possibilities and by whose unaided efforts it had been obtained. Such was the first step in Rhodes's policy of British expansion northward—a policy so successful that in his own lifetime he saw the frontiers of British Africa pushed from the Orange River to the Nile.
To hand over a colonial possession, its inhabitants and its resources, to be administered and exploited by a private corporation, sounds like a strange proceeding to American ears. Imagine turning the Philippines over to the Standard Oil Company and giving that corporation permission to appoint its own officials, make its own laws, assess its own taxes, and maintain its own military force in those islands. That, roughly speaking, was about what England did when she turned Rhodesia over to the chartered company. It should be remembered, however, that, beginning when the European nations were entering upon an era of economic exploration of hitherto virgin territories, these chartered companies have played a large part in the history of colonisation in general and in the upbuilding of the British Empire in particular, though in the great majority of cases it was trade, not empire, at which they aimed. Warned, however, by the fashion in which the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company abused their power, the British Government keeps a jealous eye on the activities of the Rhodesian concessionaires , their charter, while conferring broad trading privileges and great administrative powers, differing [Pg 213] from earlier instruments in neither delegating sovereignty nor granting an exclusive monopoly.
The Rhodesia protectorate is the result of the consolidation of four great native kingdoms: Mashonaland in the southeast, Matabeleland in the southwest, Barotseland in the northwest, and in the northeast a portion of the now separately administered protectorate of Nyasaland. Practically the whole country is an elevated veldt, or plateau, ranging from three thousand five hundred to five thousand feet above sea-level; studded with granite kopjes which in the south attain to the dignity of a mountain chain; well watered by tributaries of the Congo, the Zambezi, and the Limpopo; and covered with a luxuriant vegetation. Like California, Southern Rhodesia has a unique and hospitable climate, free from the dangerous heats of an African summer and from cold winds in winter. Though the climate of nearly all of Southern Rhodesia is suitable for Europeans, much of the trans-Zambezi provinces, especially along the river valleys and in the low-lying, swampy regions near the great equatorial lakes, reeks with malaria, while in certain other areas, now carefully delimited and guarded by governmental regulation, the tsetse-fly commits terrible ravages among cattle and horses and the sleeping-sickness among men. The climate as a whole, however, is characterised by a rather remarkable equability of temperature, especially when it is remembered that Rhodesia extends from the borders of the temperate zone to within a few degrees of the equator. At Salisbury, the capital, for example, the [Pg 214] mean July temperature is 57.5° and for January 70.5°, the extremes for the year ranging from 34° to 93°. It is a significant fact, however, that the glowing prospectuses of the chartered company touch but lightly on the climatic conditions which prevail north of the Zambezi, a region from which, it struck me, the European settler who does not possess a system that is proof against every form of tropical fever, a head that is proof against sunstroke, and a mind which is proof against that oftentimes fatal form of homesickness which the army surgeons call nostalgia, is much more likely to go home in a coffin than in a cabine de luxe .
In mines of gold, of silver, and of diamonds Rhodesia is very rich; agriculturally it is very fertile, for in addition to the native crops of rice, tobacco, cotton, and india-rubber, the fruits, vegetables, and cereals of Europe and America are profitably grown. The great fields of maize, or “mealies,” as all South Africans call it, through which my train frequently passed, constantly reminded me of scenes in our own “corn belt”; but in the watch-towers which rise from every corn-field, atop of which an armed Kaffir sits day and night to protect the crops from the raids of wild pigs and baboons, Rhodesia has a feature which she is welcome to consider exclusively her own.
Though Rhodesia is distinctly a frontier country, with many of a frontier's defects, her towns—Salisbury, Bulawayo, Umtali, and the rest—are not frontier towns as we knew them in Butte, Cheyenne, Deadwood, and Carson City. There are saloons, of course, but they [Pg 215] are not of the “gin palace” variety, nor did it strike me that intoxication was particularly common; certainly nothing like what it used to be during the gold-rush days in Alaska or in our own West. This may be due to the fantastic prices charged for liquor—a whiskey-and-soda costs sixty cent—and then again it maybe due to the fact that most of the settlers have brought their families with them, so that, instead of spending their evenings leaning over green tables or polished bars, they devote them to cricket, gardening, or a six-weeks-old English paper. Though nearly every one goes armed, the streets of the Rhodesian towns are as peaceable as Commonwealth Avenue, in Boston, on a Sunday morning. Indeed, the commandant of police in Bulawayo assured me that he had had only one shooting affray during his term of office. In Rhodesia, should a man draw his gun as the easiest means of settling a quarrel, his companions, instead of responding by drawing theirs, would probably call a constable and have him bound over to keep the peace. Even the rights of the natives are rigidly safeguarded by law, an American settler in Umtali complaining to me most bitterly that “it's more dangerous for a white man to kick a nigger down here than it is for him to kill one in the States.” Now, all this was rather disappointing for one who, like myself, was on the lookout for the local colour and picturesqueness and whoop-her-up-boys excitement which one naturally associates with life on a frontier; but I might have expected just what I found, for wherever the flag of England flies, whether over the gold-miners [Pg 216] of the Yukon, the ivory-traders of Uganda, or the settlers of Rhodesia, there will be found the deep-seated respect of the Englishman for English order and English law.
In my opinion the country club, more than any other single factor, has contributed most to the making, socially and morally, of Rhodesia. Though the American West is dotted with just such towns as Salisbury, Bulawayo, Gwelo, and Umtali, with the same limitations, pitfalls, and possibilities, the men's centre of interest, after the day's work is over, is the saloon, the dance-hall, or the barber-shop with a pool-room in the rear. They do things differently in central Africa. In every Rhodesian town large enough to support one—and the same is true of all Britain's colonial possessions—I found that a “sports club” had been established on the edge of the town. Often it was nothing but a ramshackle shed or cottage that had been given a coat of paint and had a veranda added, but files of the English newspapers and illustrated weeklies were to be found inside, while from the tea tables on the veranda one overlooked half a dozen tennis courts, a cricket ground, and a foot-ball field. It is here that the settlers—men, women, and children—congregate toward evening, to discuss the crop prospects, the local taxes, the latest gold discoveries, and, above all else, the news contained in the weekly mail from home. Why have not our own progressive prairie towns some simple social system like this? It was in speaking of this very thing that the mayor of Salisbury—himself [Pg 217] an American-remarked: “In the little, every-day things which make for successful colonisation of a new country, you fellows in the States are twenty years behind us.”
Living is expensive in Rhodesia, the prices of necessaries usually being high and of luxuries ofttimes fantastic. To counterbalance this, however, wages are extraordinarily high. It is useless to attempt to quote wages, for the farther up-country a man gets the higher pay he can command, so I will content myself with the bare statement that for the skilled workman, be he carpenter, blacksmith, mason, or wheelwright, larger wages are to be earned than in any part of the world that I know. The same is true of the man who has had practical experience in agriculture or stock-raising, there being a steady demand for men conversant with dairying, cattle-breeding, and irrigation. Let me drive home and copper-rivet the fact, however, that in Rhodesia, as in nearly all new countries, where there is a considerable native population to draw upon, there is no place for the unskilled labourer.
For the man with resource and a little capital there are many roads to wealth in British Africa. I know of one, formerly a laundry employee in Chicago, who landed in Rhodesia with limited capital but unlimited confidence. Recognising that the country had arrived at that stage of civilisation where the people were tired of wearing flannel shirts, but could not afford to have white ones ruined by Kaffir washermen, he started a chain of sanitary up-to-date laundries, and is to-day [Pg 218] one of the wealthy men of the colony. If you ever had to pay one of his laundry bills you would understand why. Another American, starting business as a hotel-keeper in Salisbury, soon perceived that the people were ripe for some form of amusement other than that provided by the cricket fields and saloons; so he built a string of cinematograph and vaudeville theatres combined, and to-day, on the very spot where Lobenguela's medicine-men performed their bloody rites a dozen years ago, you can hear the whir of the moving-picture machine and see on the canvas screen a military review at Aldershot or a bathing scene at Asbury Park. Still another American whom I met has increased the thickness of his wallet by supplying prospectors and settlers with sectional houses which are easily portable and can be erected in an hour. Taking the circular, conical-roofed hut of the Matabele as his model, he evolved an affair of corrugated iron which combines simplicity, portability, and practicability with a low price, so that to-day, as you travel through Rhodesia, you will see these American-made imitations of Kaffir huts dotting the veldt.
Though Rhodesia has a black population of one million six hundred thousand, as against twenty thousand whites, there has thus far been no such thing as race troubles or a colour question, due in large measure, no doubt, to the firm and just supervision exercised by the British resident commissioners. Arms, ammunition, and liquor excepted, natives and Europeans are under the same conditions. Land has been set apart for [Pg 219] tribal settlements, the mineral rights being reserved to the company, but, if the native occupation is disturbed, new lands must immediately be assigned, all disputes being ultimately referrible to the British high commissioner. Those natives living near the towns are segregated in settlements of their own, a native under no circumstances being permitted to remain within the town limits after nightfall, or to enter them in the day-time without a pass signed by the commandant of police. Though possessing many of the temperamental characteristics of the American negro, and in particular his aversion for manual work, the Rhodesian native is, on the whole, honest and trustworthy, a well-disciplined and efficient force of native constabulary having been recruited from the warlike Barotse and Matabele.
In the heart of the jungle in Northeastern Rhodesia near the Congo border. This is the sort of country through which portions of the “Cape-to-Cairo” railway will pass.
Highways of steel bisect Rhodesia in both directions. From Plumtree, on the borders of Bechuanaland, the Rhodesian section of the great Cape-to-Cairo system stretches straight across the country to Bwana M'kubwa, on the Congo frontier, while another line, the Rhodesia, Mashonaland, and Beira, links up, as its name indicates, the transcontinental system with the East Coast. Though the much-advertised Zambezi Express is scarcely the “veritable train de luxe” which the railway folders call it, it is a comfortable enough train nevertheless, with electric-lighted dining and sleeping cars, the latter being fitted, as befits a dusty country, with baths. The dining-car tariff is on a sliding scale; the farther up-country you travel the higher the prices ascend. Between Cape Town and [Pg 220] Mafeking the charges for meals seemed to me exceedingly reasonable (fifty cents for breakfast, sixty cents for luncheon, and seventy-five cents for dinner); between Mafeking and Bulawayo they are only moderate; between Bulawayo and the Zambezi they are high; and north of the Zambezi—when you can get any food at all—the charges for it are exorbitant. When the section to Lake Tanganyika is completed only a millionaire can afford to enter the dining-car. It speaks volumes for the development of British South Africa, however, that one can get into a sleeping-car in Cape Town and get out of it again, six days later, on the navigable head-waters of the Congo, covering the distance of nearly two thousand five hundred miles at a total cost of eighty dollars—and much of it through a country which has been opened to the white man scarcely a dozen years.
Just as every visitor to the United States heads straight for Niagara, so every visitor to South Africa purchases forthwith a ticket to the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, the mighty cataract in the heart of Rhodesia which is the greatest natural wonder in the Dark Continent and, perhaps, in the world. The natives call the falls Mosi-oa-tunya , which means “Thundering Smoke,” and you appreciate the name's significance when your train halts at daybreak at a wayside station, sixty miles away, and you see above the tree-tops a cloud of smoky vapour and hear a low humming like a million sewing-machines. It is so utterly impossible for the eye, the mind, and the imagination to grasp the size, grandeur, [Pg 221] and beauty of the Victoria Falls that it is futile to attempt to describe them. If you can picture an unbroken sheet of water forty city blocks in width, or as long as from the Grand Central Station, in New York, to Washington Square, hurtling over a precipice twice as high as the Flatiron Building, you will have the best idea that I can give you of what the Victoria Falls are like. They are unique in that the level of the land above the falls is the same as that below, the entire breadth of the second greatest river in Africa falling precipitately into a deep and narrow chasm, from which the only outlet is an opening in the rock less than one hundred yards wide. From the Boiling Pot, as this seething caldron of waters is called, the contents of the Zambezi rush with unbridled fury through a deep and narrow gorge of basaltic cliffs, which, nowhere inferior to the rapids at Niagara, extends with many zigzag windings for more than forty miles. My first glimpse of the falls was in the early morning, and the lovely, reeking splendour of the scene, as the great, placid river, all unconscious of its fate, rolls out of the mysterious depths of Africa, comes suddenly to the precipice's brink, and plunges in one mighty torrent into the obscurity of the cavern below, the rolling clouds of spray, the trembling earth, the sombre rain-forest on the opposite bank, and a rainbow stealing over all, made a picture which will remain sharp and clear in my memory as long as I live.
The Outer Lands are almost all exploited; the work of the pioneer and the frontiersman is nearly finished, and in another decade or so we shall see their like no [Pg 222] more. Rhodesia is the last of the great new countries open to colonisation under Anglo-Saxon ideals of government and climatically suitable for the propagation of the Anglo-Saxon race. Though the handful of hardy settlers who have already made it their home speak with the burr of the shires instead of the drawl of the plains; though they wear corded riding-breeches instead of leather “chaps”; and stuff Cavendish into their pipes instead of rolling their cigarettes from Bull Durham, they and the passing plainsmen of our own West are, when all is said and done, brothers under their skins.
With the completion of the Cape-to-Cairo trunk line and its subsidiary systems to either coast, with the exploitation of the mineral deposits which constitute so much of Rhodesia's wealth, and with the harnessing of the great falls and the utilisation of the limitless power which will be obtainable from them, this virgin territory in the heart of Africa bids fair to be to the home and fortune seekers of to-morrow what the American West was to those of yesterday, and what northwestern Canada is to those of to-day. A few years more and it will be a developed and prosperous nation. To-day it is the last of the world's frontiers, where the hardy and adventurous of our race are still fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation.
THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS
THE most significant thing I saw in South Africa was an old-fashioned gabled, whitewashed house. The name of it is Groote Schuur , and it stands in very beautiful grounds on the slopes of Table Mountain, a mile or so at the back of Cape Town. That house was the home of Cecil John Rhodes, who, more than any other man, was responsible for the Boer War and for the resultant British predominance south of the Congo, and in his will he directed that it should be used as the official residence of the prime minister of that South African confederation which his prophetic mind foresaw. The welding of the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State with the British colonies of Natal and the Cape of Good Hope produced the great antipodal commonwealth of which the empire-builder dreamed, but the man who, as prime minister, dwells under Groote Schuur's gabled roof and directs the policies of the new nation is a member of that Boer race which Rhodes hated and feared and whose political power he firmly believed had been broken forever. Fortune never doubled in her tracks more completely than when she made General Louis Botha, the last leader of Boer troops in the field, the first prime minister of a united South Africa.
Strange things have happened in South Africa in the dozen years that have passed since the musketry crackled along the Modder and the Tugela, for the country that the world believed had been won for good and all by British arms is being slowly but surely rewon by Boer astuteness. Already the bonds which hold the new Union of South Africa to the British Empire have become very loose ones. The man who, as prime minister, is the virtual ruler of the young nation, is a far-sighted and sagacious Dutchman, while seven out of the eleven portfolios in his cabinet are held by men of the same race. The Union not only makes its own laws and fixes its own tariffs, but the leading Dutch organ of the country recently went so far as to urge that, in case Great Britain should become engaged in a European war, it would be possible and might be proper for South Africa to declare its neutrality and take no part in it. Not only is the white population of the Union overwhelmingly Dutch, but in many parts of the country English is becoming merely a subsidiary tongue, while it is not at all unlikely, in view of the bill recently passed by the Parliament making Dutch compulsory in the schools, that the language of the Netherlands will eventually become the predominant tongue throughout all South Africa. Most suggestive of all, perhaps, the Orange River Colony, upon entering the Union, promptly reverted to its old name of the Orange Free State, which it bore before the war with England. Indeed, it may sadly perplex the historians of the future to decide who won the Boer War.
If South Africa is to become a union in fact as well as in name its people will have to face and solve the great national problems of race and colour. Of these, the former are, if not the more important, certainly the more pressing. Two of the four provinces of the Union, remember, are British solely by right of conquest; a third is bound by the closest ties of blood and tradition to the Dutch people; while only one of the four is British in sentiment and population. Many intelligent people with whom I talked, both in England and in Africa, assured me that the formation of the Union was the first step toward cutting the bonds which join South Africa to the mother country. While most Englishmen scoff at any such suggestion, swaggeringly asserting that they “have whipped the Dutch once and can do it again,” the Dutch retort, on the other hand, that it took England, with all her financial and military resources, four years, and cost her tens of thousands of lives and millions of pounds, to conquer the two little Boer republics, and that she would not have beaten them then if their money had held out. Though there is certainly no love lost between the English and the Boers, I think that the majority of the latter are convinced that it is to their own best interests to be loyal to the new government, in the direction of which they have, after all, the greatest say.
The attitude which the British Government has adopted in its treatment of the Boer population since the close of the war has been remarkable for its generosity and far-sightedness. In all its colonial history it has [Pg 226] done few wiser things than the recognition of the military, as well as the civic, ability of General Botha. Not only is this sagacious Dutchman, who led the forces of the embattled Boers until dispersed by the tremendously superior might of England, and then inaugurated a guerilla warfare by which the conflict was prolonged for two years with victories which will go down in history as notable, now prime minister of the new nation, but, early in 1912, he was appointed to the rank of general in that very army which he so long and so valorously defied. This is, I believe, an almost unprecedented instance of the wise and politic exercise of imperial authority in the strengthening of imperial power and can hardly fail to result in increasing the loyalty of South Africa's Boer population.
The men who planned and brought the Union into being have had to pick their steps with care, and more than once their ingenuity has been taxed to the utmost to avoid the outcropping of racial jealousies and enmities. The white population of South Africa, you should understand, consists of three classes: the Boers, which means simply “tillers of the soil,” and which is the name applied by the South African Dutch to themselves; the Colonials, or British immigrants, most of whom have come out with the intention of returning to England as soon as they have made their fortunes; and, lastly, the Africanders, men whose fathers were British immigrants, but who were themselves born and bred in South Africa and who have intermarried with the Boers so often that it is almost impossible to draw [Pg 227] the line between the races. Given these three factions, therefore, with their different customs, ideals, and aspirations, and it needs no saying that the task confronting those who are responsible for the smooth working of the governmental machinery is no easy one. The political jealousy existing between Briton and Boer in South Africa to-day is comparable only to that which existed between Northerners and Southerners during reconstruction days. The racial antagonism which arose over the location of the Federal capital, and which threatened at one time to upset the whole scheme of federation, was only overcome by the novel expedient of creating two capitals instead of one, Pretoria, the old capital of the Transvaal, where Krüger held sway, being made the residence of the Governor-General and the seat of the executive power, while the Parliament sits in Cape Town.
The Union Parliament consists of a Senate having forty members—eight of whom are appointed by the Governor-General, the other thirty-two being elected, eight by each province—and a House of Assembly with 121 members chosen as follows: Cape of Good Hope 51, Natal 17, Transvaal 36, and Orange Free State 17. No voter is disqualified by race or colour, but the members of Parliament must be English subjects of European descent who have lived in the colony for at least five years. Now, a very great deal, so far as the well-being of the native races of South Africa are concerned, depends upon the interpretation that is given to the words “European descent.” In Cuban society every [Pg 228] one who is not absolutely black is treated as white, whereas in the United States every one who is suspected of having even a “touch of the tar brush” is treated as black. Though the Federal constitution is very far from giving the native races a standing equal to that of the whites, intelligent government of the natives is promised by a clause which provides that four of the Senate, out of a total of forty, shall be appointed because of their special knowledge of the wants and wishes of the coloured population.
If the racial problem is the most pressing, the colour problem is by far the most serious question before the people of South Africa, for the blacks not only outnumber the whites four to one, but there is the ever-present danger that rebellion may spring up among them without the slightest warning. Apart from all other considerations, the very numbers of the natives in South Africa form a dangerous element in the problem, for there are close on five million blacks south of the Limpopo as against a million and a quarter Europeans. If, in our own South, where the blacks are only half as numerous as the whites, there exists a problem of which no satisfactory solution has been offered, how much more serious is the state of affairs in a country where a handful of white men—themselves split into two camps by racial and political animosities—are face to face with a vast, warlike, and constantly increasing native population! In fact, the colour problem which has arisen would be strikingly similar to that in our Southern States were it not that there is a vast difference in type [Pg 229] and temperament between the South African native and the Southern darky. The native races are three in number: the Bushmen, the aborigines of South Africa, a race of pygmy savages of a very low order of intelligence, who are fast becoming extinct; the Hottentots, a people considerably more advanced toward civilisation but rapidly decreasing from epidemics; and the Kaffirs, as the various sections of the great Zulu race are commonly known, a warlike, courageous, and handsome people who, since the British Government ended their inter-tribal wars, are rapidly multiplying, having increased fifteen per cent in the last seven years. Although the Europeans in South Africa universally regard the Kaffirs with contempt, it is not altogether unmixed with fear, for a nation of fighting men, such as the Zulus, who organised a great military power, enacted a strict code of laws, and held the white man at bay for a quarter of a century, will not always remain in a state of subjection, nor will they tamely submit to being driven into the wilderness north of the Zambezi, a solution of the colour problem which has frequently been proposed.
That the attitude of Great Britain toward the colour question in South Africa is similar to that of the Northern States toward the same problem in the South, while the attitude of the European settlers is almost identical with that of the Southerners, is strikingly illustrated by a case which recently occurred in South Africa, in which a European jury found a native guilty of attempting to assault a white woman, a crime as unknown under the old régime in South Africa as it was [Pg 230] in our own South before the Civil War. Though the judge sentenced the man to death, the Governor-General promptly commuted the sentence on the ground that the “fact of crime” had not been established. Immediately a storm of protest and indignation arose among the white population which swept the country from the Zambezi to the Cape, the settlers asserting that if the decree of commutation were to form a precedent, no white woman would be safe in South Africa. The echoes of this controversy had not yet died away before two other cases occurred which intensely aggravated the situation. One was the case of a settler named Lewis, who shot a native for an insult to his daughters, while the other was that of the Honourable Galbraith Cole, a son of the Earl of Enniskillen, who killed a native on the alleged charge of theft. Both men were tried by white juries on charges of murder, and both were promptly acquitted, though Mr. Cole, in spite of his acquittal, was deported from South Africa by the government. As though to emphasise their colour prejudice, the lawyers of the Union about this time took concerted action to prevent native attorneys from practising among them. How, then, can the natives, who form three fourths of the population of the new Union, and who are far more children of the soil than the Europeans, be said to have protection of their most elementary rights if they are to be debarred from having men of their own colour and race to defend them, and if no white jury can be trusted to do justice where a native is concerned?
The imperial government deserves the greatest credit, however, for the steps it has taken to preserve his lands to the native. In the native protectorates and reservations of Basutoland, Swaziland, Bechuanaland, Griqualand, Tembuland, and Pondoland the government has reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of the natives territories considerably larger than the combined area of our three Pacific-coast States. Though these territories are under the control of British resident commissioners, the native chiefs are allowed to exercise jurisdiction according to tribal laws and customs in all civil matters between natives, special courts having been established to deal with serious civil or criminal matters in which Europeans are concerned. Though certain small areas of land in these rich territories are held by whites, the bulk of the country is reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of the natives, and it is not at all likely that any more land will be alienated for purposes of settlement by Europeans. (Could anything be in more striking contrast to our disgraceful treatment of the Indian?) Though South Africa has much in common with Canada, and with Australia, and with our own Southwest, it is, when all is said and done, a black man's country ruled by the white man, and it is upon the justice, liberality, and intelligence of this rule that the peace and prosperity of the young nation must eventually depend.
Two great obstacles will always stand in the way of the white man having an easy row to hoe in South Africa: the climate and the lack of water. Though the [Pg 232] climate of the uplands is pleasant and makes men want to lead an outdoor life, I am not at all certain that it tends to develop or maintain the keenness and energy characteristic of dwellers in the north temperate zone. The climate of the coastal regions is, moreover, distinctly bad, the sharply cold nights and the misty, steaming days producing the coast fever, which is a combination of rheumatism, influenza, dysentery, and malaria, and is very debilitating indeed. The white man who intends to make his permanent home in South Africa has, therefore, two alternatives: he can submit to the exactions of the climate, take life easily, leave the black bottle severely alone, and live a long but unprogressive life, or he can exhaust his energies and undermine his health in fighting the climate and die of old age at sixty. If the climate is not all that is desirable for men, it is infinitely worse for animals, for every disease known to the veterinarian abounds. Time and again the herds of the country have been almost exterminated by the hoof-and-mouth disease, or by the rinderpest, a highly contagious cattle distemper which is probably identical with that “murrain” with which Moses smote the herds of ancient Egypt and which helped to bring Pharaoh to terms. In the low-lying regions along the East Coast, and in the country north of the Limpopo it is necessary to keep horses shut up every night until the poisonous mists and dew have disappeared before the sun lest they contract the “blue-tongue,” a disease characterised by a swollen, purplish-hued tongue which kills them in a few hours by choking; [Pg 233] while in certain other districts, especially in the vicinity of the Zambezi and of the Portuguese territories, the deadly tsetse-fly makes it impossible to keep domestic animals at all.
The other great obstacle to the prosperity of South Africa is the lack of water, for less than one-tenth of the country is suitable for raising any kind of a crop without water being led onto it—and irrigation by private enterprise is out of the question, as even the indomitable Rhodes was forced to admit. The government is fully alive to the crying need for water, however, and a scheme for a national system of irrigation is filling a large part of the Ministry of Agriculture's programme. If carried out, this scheme will enormously enlarge the area of tillage, for some of the regions now hopelessly arid, such as the Karroo, have a soil of amazing fertility and need only water to make them produce luxuriant crops. Were the rains of the wet season conserved by means of the great tanks so common in India, or were artesian wells sunk like those which have transformed the desert regions of Algeria and Arizona, the vast stretch of the Karroo, instead of being yellow with sand, might be yellow with waving corn.
Though agriculture is, and probably always will be, the least important of the country's great natural sources of wealth, the development of rural industries is, thanks to governmental assistance, steadily progressing. Roads and bridges are being built, experimental farms organised on a large scale, the services of scientific experts engaged, blooded live-stock imported, agricultural [Pg 234] banks established, and literature dealing with agricultural problems is being distributed broadcast over the country. The exports of fruit are steadily increasing; sugar is being grown on the hot lands of Natal and might be grown all the way to the Zambezi; tea has lately been introduced in the coastal regions and would probably also flourish in the north; the tobacco of the Transvaal is as good a pipe tobacco as any grown, and those who have become accustomed to it will use no other; with the exception of the olive, which does not thrive, and of the vine, which succeeds only in a limited area around Cape Town, nearly all of the products of the temperate zone and of subtropical regions can be grown successfully. Though South Africa unquestionably presents many promising openings in farming, in fruit-growing, and in truck gardening, it is folly for a man to attempt any one of them unless he possesses practical experience, a modest capital, and a willingness to work hard and put up with many inconveniences, for in no other English-speaking country are the necessities of life so dear and so poor in quality, nowhere is labour so unsatisfactory, and nowhere is lack of comfort so general.
South Africa's chief source of wealth is, and always will be, its minerals. It was, strangely enough, the latest source to become known, for nobody suspected it until, in 1867, a Boer hunter, his eye caught by a sparkle among the pebbles on the Orange River, picked up the first diamond. The diamonds found in that region since then have amounted in value to nearly a [Pg 235] billion dollars. Fifteen years after the great diamond finds which sent the adventurers and fortune-seekers of the world thronging to South Africa, came the still greater gold discoveries on the Witwatersrand, or “The Rand,” as the reef of gold-bearing quartz in the Transvaal is commonly called. The total value of the gold production of the Rand for the twenty-five years ending in June, 1910, was nearly one and a half billion dollars. But though the Rand produces more gold than America and Australia put together; though Kimberley has a virtual monopoly of the world's supply of diamonds; though seams of silver, iron, coal, copper, and tin are only waiting for capital and skill to unlock their treasures, South Africa is, in the midst of this stupendous wealth, poor, for she is as dependent on foreign sources for her food supply as England. In other words, a region as large as all the States west of the Rocky Mountains, in which flourish nearly all the products of every zone from the Equator to the Pole, is unable to supply the wants of a white population which is less than that of Connecticut. In California, on the other hand, which is strikingly similar to South Africa in many respects, the cultivation of the land kept pace with the production of gold and eventually outstripped it. Until the mining industry of South Africa is likewise put upon a solid agricultural foundation, the country can never hope to be self-supporting.
In many respects Johannesburg, the “golden city,” is the most interesting place I have ever seen. In 1886 [Pg 236] it was nothing but a collection of miserable shanties. To-day “Joburg,” as it is commonly called, is a city of a quarter of a million people, with asphalted streets, imposing office buildings, one of the best street-railway systems that I know, the finest hotel south of the Equator, and one of the most beautiful country clubs in the world. It is a city of contrasts, however, for you can stand under the porte-cochère of the palatial Carlton Hotel and hear the click of roulette balls, the raucous scrape of fiddles, and the shouts of drunken miners issuing from a row of gambling-hells, dance-halls, and gin palaces still housed in one-story buildings of corrugated iron; a beplumed and bepainted Zulu will pull you in a 'rickshaw, over pavements as smooth and clean as those of Fifth Avenue, to a theatre where you will have the privilege of paying Metropolitan Opera House prices to witness much the same sort of a performance that you would find in a Bowery music-hall; in the Rand Club you can see bronzed and booted prospectors, fresh from the mining districts of Rhodesia or the Congo, leaning over the bar, cheek-by-jowl with sleek, immaculately groomed financiers from London and Berlin and New York. Johannesburg is a spendthrift city, a place of easy-come and easy-go, for the mine-workers are paid big wages, the mine-managers receive big salaries, and the mine-owners make big profits, and they all spend their money as readily as they make it. The English miner averages five dollars a day, which he spends between Saturday night and Monday morning in a drunken spree, while a native labourer will save enough [Pg 237] in a few months to keep him in idleness and his conception of comfort for the rest of his life.
There is pleasant society in Johannesburg and much hospitality to a stranger. I took nearly a score of letters of introduction with me to the Rand, but one would have done as well, for you present one letter, and at the dinner which the man to whom it is addressed promptly gives for you at the Rand Club or at the Carlton you will meet several of the other people to whom you bear introductions. Through their club life and their business relations the English and Americans in South Africa are linked together in acquaintance like rings in a shirt of chain-mail, so that if a man in Bulawayo or Kimberley or Johannesburg gets to living beyond his income, or loses heavily at cards, or pays undue attention to another man's wife, they will be discussing his affairs in the club bars or on the hotel verandas of Cape Town and Durban within a fortnight. I found that nearly all of the mines on the Rand are managed by Americans, and that the mine-owners, who are nearly all English or German, preferred them to any other nationality, which struck me as being very complimentary to the administrative and mechanical abilities of our people. One of these American mine-managers drove forty miles in his motor-car so as to shake hands with me, merely because he had learned in a roundabout way that I came from the same part of New York State as himself, while another fellow-countryman, who had made a great fortune during the Boer War by contracting to wash the clothes of the British army, and [Pg 238] received war-time prices for his work, kidnapped me from the hotel where I was staying, and landed me, baggage and all, in his home, and actually felt affronted when I tried to leave after a week.
Few places could be more unlike Johannesburg than Pretoria, the new capital of the Union, only thirty miles away. It is as different from the “golden city” as sleepy Bruges is from bustling Antwerp; as Tarrytown, New York, is from Paterson, New Jersey. At first sight I was surprised to find so English a town, but after I had strolled in the shade of the wooden arcades formed by the broad verandas of the shops I decided that the atmosphere of the city was Indian; the rows of mud-bespattered saddle-horses tied to hitching-posts along the main streets and the rural produce being sold from wagons in the central market-place recalled our own West; but the substantial, white-plastered houses, with their old-fashioned stoeps , their red-brick sidewalks, and their prim and formal gardens, finally convinced me that the town was, after all, Dutch. Every visitor to Pretoria goes to see Krüger's house, the low, whitewashed dwelling with the white lions on the stoep , where the stubborn old President used to sit, smoking his long pipe and drinking his black coffee and giving parental advice to his people. Across the way is the old Dutch church where he used to hold forth on Sundays, with the gold hands still missing from the clock-face on its steeple, for in the last days of the South African Republic they were melted down and went to swell the slender war-chest of the Boer army. In the cemetery hard by the crafty, [Pg 239] indomitable old man lies buried, while the hated flag against which he fought so long flies over the capital where he collected his guns and hatched his schemes of conquest, and within sight of his black-marble tomb there are rising in brick and stone the great new buildings which mark Pretoria as the capital of a united South Africa.
Thirty miles northward across the veldt from Pretoria is the great hole in the ground known as the Premier Diamond Mine, the newest and potentially the richest of the South African diamond fields. Here, in January, 1905, the surface manager, a Scotchman named McHardy, while strolling through the pit during the noon hour, saw the sparkle of what he at first took to be a broken bottle. Prying it loose with his stick from the surrounding rubble, he found it to be a diamond as large as a good-sized orange. This remarkable stone, which is the largest diamond heretofore found, has since become known to the world as the Great Cullinan, being named after Sir Thomas Cullinan, one of the owners of the mine. It is a pure white stone, 4 by 2¼ by 2 inches, weighing 3,025 carats, or 1.37 pounds, and worth in the neighbourhood of a million dollars. As the surface cleavage shows that it is undoubtedly a fragment of a much larger crystal, one cannot but wonder what the original stone was like. The Great Cullinan was immediately purchased by the Transvaal Government—or, rather, the mine's share was purchased, for the government receives sixty per cent of the value of all diamonds found—and presented to King Edward. The question then arose of how so valuable [Pg 240] a gem could be transported to England in safety, for no sooner had its discovery been announced than the criminals of the world began to lay their plans to get possession of it. After many discussions and innumerable suggestions and much newspaper comment, four men, armed to the teeth, left the Premier Mine, carrying with them a red-leather despatch box. Crossing the thirty miles of veldt to Pretoria under heavy escort, they were conveyed in a private car to Cape Town; in the liner by which they took passage to England a safe had been specially installed and the red-leather despatch box was placed in it, two of the men remaining on duty in front of it night and day. From Southampton a special train took them up to London and a strong guard of detectives and police surrounded them on their way to the bank at which the diamond was to be delivered. When the despatch box was opened in the presence of a group of curious officials it was found to contain nothing more valuable than a lump of coal! The stone itself—and as Sir Thomas Cullinan told me the story it is undoubtedly true—was wrapped in cotton wool and tissue paper, put in a pasteboard box, wrapped up in brown paper, and sent to England by parcels post, not even the post-office authorities being given an inkling that it was in the mails. I almost forgot to mention, by the way, that McHardy, the discoverer of the great stone, was given a bonus of ten thousand dollars, though it is a sad and peculiar commentary that within a year his wife died, the bank in which he put the money failed, and his house burned down.
The diamonds are found in beds of clay, of which [Pg 241] there are two layers: a soft, yellow clay, lying on or near the surface, and a hard, blue clay, lying deeper. These clays, which are usually covered by a thin stratum of calcareous rock, are supposed to be the remains of mud pits due to volcanic action, such as the boiling springs of the Yellowstone. Imagine a great hollow, looking like a gigantic bowl, perhaps half a mile in diameter and one hundred feet deep, enclosed by a series of barbed-wire fences and filled by thousands of Kaffir workmen, looking, from a distance, like a gigantic swarm of ants—such was my first impression of the Premier Mine. The native labourers, who work in three shifts of eight hours each, after cleaving the “hard-blue” with their picks, load it onto trolley-cars, which are attached to a cable and hauled to the surface of the pit, where it is spread on mile-long fields and exposed for several months to rain, wind, and sun so as to effect decomposition. The softened lumps of earth, after being brought into still smaller fragments by the pickaxe, are then sent to the mills, where they are crushed, pulverised, washed, and finally sent to the “greaser” to get at the stones. Until very recently men had to be employed to sort the washed “concentrates” and pick out the diamonds. But they would miss some. And the men had to be guarded lest they steal the gems. And detectives had to be hired to watch the guards who watched the men. But one day a mine employee named Kirsten happened to notice that the diamonds, no matter how small or discoloured, always stuck to a greasy surface, just as iron filings stick to a magnet, while the [Pg 242] dirt and other stones did not. That was the suggestion which led to the invention of the “Kirsten greaser,” a series of sloping boards, heavily coated with grease, which are gently agitated as the mud and slime containing the diamonds are slowly washed over them, and which never fail to collect the precious stones.
At Kimberley, which is the only other diamond-producing district of any importance in South Africa, the gem-bearing ground extends over an area of but thirty-three acres, so that open mining has long since given way to shafts, which have now been sunk to a depth of two thousand five hundred feet, galleries being driven through the producing ground at every forty-foot level, precisely as in a coal mine. Kimberley has a romantic and picturesque history. In 1869 you could not have found its name upon the map. In the following year a Boer hunter, pitching his tent on the banks of the Orange River, chanced to pick up a glittering stone from among the pebbles. The news of his find making its way overland to Cape Town, the submarine cables flashed it to every quarter of the globe, so that within a twelvemonth adventurers and fortune-seekers had flocked there in tens of thousands. By 1871 sixteen hundred claims, each thirty-one feet square, were being worked, each man digging out the earth on his own small plot, carrying it to one side, pulverising it by hand, and sifting it for diamonds. The dirt from one claim would fall into a neighbouring one, while some miners could not get their dirt out at all without crossing another's property, so that quarrels and lawsuits and [Pg 243] shooting affrays soon began. About this time two quiet, uncommunicative, shabbily clad men appeared at Kimberley and began to buy up the various claims, until, before any one really appreciated what was happening, the whole diamond industry of South Africa was in their hands. Those men were Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Barnato, and the great amalgamation which their skill and shrewdness effected, now known as the DeBeers Consolidated Mining Company, was one of the greatest coups in the history of finance. It is this corporation which the women of the world have to blame for keeping up the price of diamonds, for the first thing it did was to close the greater part of the Kimberley mines, keeping just enough open to produce the amount of stones which experience has proved that Europe and America are able to take at a price high enough to leave a gratifying profit. Although, as a result of this policy, the price of diamonds has been well maintained, the population of Kimberley has been greatly reduced, the one great corporation, with its comparatively small staff of employees and its labour-saving machinery, having taken the place of the horde of independent adventurers of the early days.
It struck me that by far the most interesting sights, both at the Kimberley and the Premier mines, were the so-called compounds, in which the native labourers are confined, for the native who hires out to work in a diamond mine must submit, during the term of his contract, to as close confinement as a convict in a penitentiary; he knows that he is in danger of being shot by the [Pg 244] guards if he attempts to escape; he is prepared to be searched daily with the same minuteness which customs inspectors display in the case of a known smuggler; and when his contract expires he has still to put up with a fortnight's solitary confinement, in which emetics and cathartics play an unpleasant part. The mine compounds are huge enclosures, unroofed but covered with a wire netting to prevent anything being thrown out over the walls. Around the interior of the wall are rows of corrugated-iron huts, in which the natives live and sleep when they are not at work, while the open space in the middle is used for cooking, for washing, and for native games. The compounds are surrounded by three lines of barbed-wire fence which are constantly patrolled by armed sentries and illuminated at night by powerful search-lights; every entrance is as jealously guarded as that of a German fortress; and visitors are never admitted unless they bear a pass signed by the administration and are accompanied by a responsible official of the mine. Although the government—which, as I have already remarked, takes sixty per cent of the mine's earnings—has made I. D. B. (illicit diamond-buying) a penal offence with a uniform punishment of twenty years at hard labour, and though the mining companies maintain espionage systems which rival those of many Continental governments, no employee, from director down to day labourer, ever being free from scrutiny, millions of dollars' worth of diamonds are smuggled out of the mines each year. To encourage honesty, ten per cent of the value of any stone which a workman [Pg 245] may find is given to him if he brings it himself to the overseer, well over a quarter of a million dollars being paid out annually on stones thus found.
The compound of the Premier Mine contained, at the time of my visit, something over twelve thousand natives, representing nearly every tribe from Pondoland to the head-waters of the Congo. Here one sees Zulus, Fingos, Pondos, Basutos, Bechuanas, Matabele, Mashonas, Makalaka, and even Bushmen from the Kalahari country and Masai from German East Africa, all attracted by the high wages, which range from five to eight dollars a week. When the native's six-month contract has ended, he takes his wages in British sovereigns—and his earnings accumulate quickly because he can live on very little—goes home to his own tribe, perhaps six weeks' journey away, buys a wife and a yoke of oxen, and lives lazily ever after. Not all of the natives are of so thrifty a turn of mind, however, for the company store holds many attractions for them and they are heavy purchasers of camel's-hair blankets, French perfumes, and imported cutlery, refusing almost invariably to take anything but the best.
I have tried to paint for you a comprehensive, though necessarily an impressionistic, picture of this great new nation that has sprung up so quickly in the antipodes, and to give you at least a rough idea of what its people, its soil, its towns, its climate, its resources, and its problems are like. That South Africa will always be a country of great mineral wealth there is little doubt, for, when the supplies of gold and [Pg 246] diamonds are exhausted, copper, iron, and coal should still furnish good returns. Likewise, it will always be a great ranching country, for nearly all of its vast veldt is ideal, both in climate and pasturage, for live-stock. It will probably never become a manufacturing country, for coal is of poor quality, there is neither water power nor inland waterways, and labour is neither good nor cheap. If, as I have already remarked, government irrigation can be introduced as successfully as it has been in our own Southwest, and if the malaria which makes the rich coast-lands almost uninhabitable can be exterminated as effectually as we have exterminated it on the Isthmus of Panama, I can see no reason why South Africa should not eventually become one of the great agricultural countries of the world. Though many South Africans look forward to a day when the natives will begin to retire to the country north of the Zambezi, and when a large European population will till their own farms, by their own labour, with the aid of government-assisted irrigation, I am personally of the opinion that South Africa will never become at all evenly populated, but that it will always bear a marked resemblance to our Southwest, with large areas devoted to the raising of sheep and cattle, with certain other areas irrigated for the raising of fruit, and with its population centred for the most part in towns scattered at long distances from one another, but connected by rapid railway communications.
Everything considered, South Africa is a country of big things—big pay, big prices, big opportunities, big [Pg 247] obstacles, big resources, big rewards—and she needs young men to help her fight her battles and solve her problems. So, if I were a youngster, with the sheep-skin of a technical or agricultural school in my pocket, a few hundred dollars in my purse, and a longing for fortune and adventure in my heart, I think that I should walk into one of those steam-ship offices in Bowling Green and book a passage for that land of which some one has said, “Fortune knocks at a man's door once in most countries, but in South Africa she knocks twice.”
THE FORGOTTEN ISLES
THERE can be no doubt about it: real cannibal kings are getting scarce. Ever since, as a youngster, I read of Du Chaillu's adventures among the man-eating natives of Equatoria, I had hankered to see a real live cannibal in the flesh. But when, in later years, I made inquiries about them from missionaries and traders and officials in Senegal and Uganda and Nyasaland, I invariably received the reply: “Oh, that's all over now; except among a few of the West Coast tribes, cannibalism is a thing of the past.” So when the captain of the little German cargo boat on which I was loitering up and down Africa's Indian seaboard remarked at breakfast one morning that he had decided to put in to Mahé, in the Seychelle group, and that I might care to pass the time while he was taking on cargo by visiting the colony of cannibal royalties who were in exile there, I felt that one of my boyhood dreams was to be realised at last.
Do you happen, by any chance, to have been to Mahé, in the Seychelles? No? Of course not. Then you must picture an emerald island dropped down in a turquoise sea. Peacock-coloured waves ripple on a silver strand, and this loses itself almost immediately in a dense forest of giant palms, which, mounting leisurely, [Pg 249] dwindles and straggles and runs out in a peak of bare blue rock, which disappears, in turn, behind a great, low-hanging, purple heat cloud. To reach these delectable isles one must have time and patience a-plenty, for they lie far from the ocean highways and are visited by scarcely a dozen vessels, all told, each year. Draw a line straight across the Indian Ocean from Colombo to Zanzibar, and where that line intersects the equator are the Seychelles, mere specks in that expanse of ocean. Mahé, the largest of the group, is everything that a tropical island should be, according to the story-books, even to its inaccessibility, for, barring the French mail steamer which touches there every other month on its way to Madagascar, and an occasional German freighter or British tramp which drops in on its way from Goa to Kilindini, on the chance of picking up a cargo of copra, it is as completely cut off from the outside world as though it were in Mars.
I rather imagine that they are the loneliest people in the world, those score of men and women—English, French, and German—who constitute the entire white population of the islands. That is why they are so pathetically eager to welcome the rare visitors who come their way. Indeed, until I went to Mahé I never knew what hospitality really meant. When our anchor rumbled down under the shadow of the Morne Seychellois, and the police boat—its crew of negroes, with their flashing teeth and big, good-humoured faces, their trim, blue sailor suits and broad-brimmed straw wide-awakes, looking like overgrown children—had [Pg 250] taken me ashore, I promptly found myself surrounded by the entire European population.
“I am the wife of the legal adviser to the Crown,” said a sweet-faced little Irishwoman. “My husband and I would be so pleased if you would come up to our bungalow for dinner. You can have no idea how good it seems to see a white face again.”
“Oh, I say, then you must promise to breakfast with me,” urged a tall young Englishman in immaculate white linen, who, it proved, was the superior judge of the colony. “You won't disappoint me, will you, old chap? I'm dying to hear what's going on in the world. And if you should have any magazines or newspapers that you could spare——”
But the government chaplain, wasting no time in words, fairly hustled me into a diminutive dog-cart and, amid the reproaches of his fellow-exiles, off we rattled behind the only horse on the island. The padre was not to monopolise me for long, however, for the little group of homesick exiles pursued us to his bungalow, where they settled me in a long cane chair, thrust upon me cheroots and whiskey-and-sodas, and listened breathlessly to the bits of world gossip for which I ransacked the pigeon-holes of my memory for their benefit. The newest songs, the most recent plays, the latest fashions, all the gossip of Broadway and Oxford Street and the Avenue de l'Opéra—they hung on my words with an eagerness that was pathetic.
“I hope you'll pardon us,” apologised my host, “but it's so seldom that we see a pukka white man out [Pg 251] here that we quite forget the few manners we have left in our eagerness to learn what is going on at home—the little things, you know, that are not important enough to put in the cables and that they never think to put in the letters. Until you have lived in such a place as this, my friend, you don't know the meaning of that word 'home.'”
It is hot in the Seychelles; hot with a damp, sticky, humid, enervating heat which is unknown away from the Line. They tell a story in Mahé of an English resident who died from fever and went to the lower regions. A few days later his friends received a message from the departed. It said, “Please send down my blankets.” There are days in an American midsummer when indoors becomes oppressive; it is always oppressive in the Seychelles, in January as in August, at midnight as at noon. During the “hot season” it is overpoweringly so, for you live for six months at a stretch in a bath of perspiration and wonder whether you will ever know what it is to be cool again. “There are six hundred minutes in every hour of the hot weather,” the governor's wife remarked to me, “and not one of them bearable. Although,” she added, “after the mercury in your bedroom thermometer has climbed above one hundred and thirty, a few more degrees don't much matter.” In her bungalow, for the greater part of the day, the white woman in the Seychelles is as much a prisoner by reason of the heat as is a Turkish woman in a harem from custom. Having neither shopping, domestic duties, nor callers to occupy her, the only break in the day's [Pg 252] terrible monotony comes at sunset, when every one meets every one else at the little club on the water-front which, with its breeze-swept verandas and its green croquet lawns and tennis courts, is the universal gathering-place between the hours of six and eight. An afternoon nap is universal—if the flies will allow it. Flies by day and mosquitoes by night are as wearing on European nerves as the climate, the beds being from necessity so smothered in mosquito netting that the air that gets within is as unsatisfactory as strained milk. In the hot weather a punkah is kept going all night—this huge, swinging fan, pulled by a coolie who squats in the veranda outside, and who can go to sleep without ceasing his pulling, being as necessary for comfort as a pillow—while, during the hottest nights, it is customary to sleep unclad and uncovered, save for a sheet, which the punkah-coolie, slipping in every hour, sprinkles with water.
The white woman in this part of the world is an early riser. A cup of tea is always served her when she is awakened, and as soon as she is dressed comes chota hazri , or the little breakfast, consisting of tea, toast, eggs, and fruit. The most is made of the cool hours of the morning, for in the hot weather it is customary to “shut up the bungalow” at about seven A. M. , when the temperature is moderately low compared with what it will rise to a few hours later. Every door and window is closed and thereafter the greatest care is taken to make entrances and exits as quickly as possible, for a door left open for any length of time quickly [Pg 253] raises the temperature. If kept carefully closed, however, it is remarkable how cool the room keeps as compared with the stifling heat without.
Though a Seychellian bungalow is generally barn-like without and barren within, its European mistress usually contrives to make its rooms pretty and inviting, it being astonishing what marvels of transformation can be accomplished by means of native mattings, Indian printed curtains, and furniture of Chinese wicker, all effective and ridiculously cheap. The kitchen is a detached building, erected as far away from the bungalow as possible, and the white woman who knows when she is well off seldom enters it. Once a month, however, she inspects her cooking pots and pans, because, being made of copper, they have to be periodically tinned or they become poisonous, almost as many lives being lost in the tropics by the neglect of this simple precaution as by failure to have every drop of drinking water boiled. As there is no ice-making plant in the Seychelles, water is cooled for drinking by being placed in a porous earthenware vessel and swung to and fro in the heated atmosphere until, though still far from cool, it is a little less tepid and nauseous.
But the European residents are not the only exiles in the Seychelles, nor, to my way of thinking, the ones most to be pitied, for of recent years these islands, presumably because of their very remoteness, have been turned into a political prison for those deposed cannibal kings whose kingdoms have, on one excuse and another, been added to the dominions of the British Crown. [Pg 254] At present there are three political prisoners of note on the island of Mahé—King Kabanga of Uganda, King Assibi of the Gold Coast, and King Prempeh of Ashantee. Though all of these ebony royalties were enthusiastic patrons of the cooking-pot, King Prempeh is by far the most notorious and the most interesting personality of the three, for it was his palace at Kumasi that was built of the skulls and surrounded by a neat picket fence made from the leg and arm bones of the people he and his tribesmen had eaten. Hard by the palace was the ghastly “crucifixion grove” where the victims were slaughtered and their bodies hung until sufficiently gamy to suit the royal palate. Owing to an error of judgment in selecting a British commissioner as the pièce de résistance for one of his feasts, an expedition was sent to Ashantee, the country annexed to the British empire, and its ruler forced to exchange his skull-walled palace in Kumasi for a four-roomed, tin-roofed cottage in the outskirts of Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, where, surrounded by the huts of the chieftains who accompanied him into exile, he lives on the meagre pension granted him by the British Government.
Clad in the flaming cotton robe of red and yellow which is the West African equivalent of royal ermine, worn over a pair of very soiled pajamas, his Majesty received me on the veranda of his little dwelling in the presence of the constable who guards him and who acts as interpreter when the King's scanty store of English gives out. Now I am not an entire stranger to the ways of the Lord's Anointed, but this audience with Prempeh [Pg 255] of Ashantee was one of the most memorable experiences that I can recall. In the first place, the mercury had crept up and up and up until it hovered in the neighbourhood of one hundred and thirty degrees in the shade of the house; in the second place, the sons of the King (he told me that he had forty-two in all) had crowded into the tiny room until the place fairly reeked with the smell of perspiration; in the third place, I was at a loss what to talk to his Majesty about. The questions which one would like to ask a cannibal king are obvious—whether he takes his meat rare or well done, whether he prefers the tenderloin or the sirloin, whether he likes white meat better than black—but Prempeh of Ashantee is not at all the sort of person with whom one would feel inclined to take liberties, and I was very far from being sure whether he would consider such questions as liberties or not. After an awkward pause, during which the King shuffled his feet uneasily and I wiped away rivulets of perspiration, he said something in Ashantee—at least I suppose it was Ashantee—to one of his attendants, who shortly returned with a tin tray holding a bottle of whiskey, a siphon of lukewarm seltzer, and a couple of very dirty glasses. After another long and uncomfortable pause, the King asked me if I wouldn't have something to drink. Taking it for granted that Prempeh's capacity for drink would be as outré as his choice of food, I poured his beer glass full to the brim with whiskey, giving to myself the drink sanctioned by civilised custom.
“In my country,” said the King, leaning forward [Pg 256] and speaking in the broken English which he had acquired from the government chaplain, “bad men sometimes try to poison king, so king turn drinks other way round,” and, suiting the action to the words, he turned the tray so as to place before me the beer-glassful of whiskey. I have never been quite certain whether there was a twinkle in the eye of that simple-hearted cannibal when he literally turned the table on me or not.
At the time of my visit to Prempeh he was in the throes of marital unhappiness, the details of which he confided to me. It seems that for several years past he had been endeavouring to gain admission to the Church-of-England fold, arguing, plausibly enough, that such a proof of his complete regeneration might result in inducing the British Government to send him back to his home in Ashantee. Working on that assumption, he had, not long before, asked the government chaplain to confirm him, to which request that gratified but still somewhat sceptical clergyman had replied: “I am sorry to say that what your Majesty asks is at present impossible, as your Majesty's marital affairs are not pleasing to the church.”
So Prempeh, who had brought only twelve of his wives with him into exile, thinking that the church held such a number to be incompatible with his dignity,—for the workings of the West African mind are peculiar, remember,—sent a message to the governor of the Seychelles asking permission to take a maiden of Mahé for his thirteenth spouse, and it was not until the indignant chaplain remonstrated with him for his fall from grace [Pg 257] that he grasped the fact that Christianity demands of its converts the minimum instead of the maximum number of wives.
“So me ship three wives back Africa,” Prempeh explained to me in his quaint West Coast English. “Now me have only nine. Nine wives not many for great king. But if chappy [chaplain] not let me in church with nine wives, then me ship them back Africa too, for me very much homesick to see Ashantee.”
Poor, deposed, exiled, homesick king, he will never again see that African home for which he longs, I fear, for he cost England far too much in lives and money. He came out on the veranda of his little house to say good-by, and as I looked back, as my 'rickshaw boy drew me swiftly down the road, he was still standing there waving to me—a real, dyed-in-the-wool cannibal king, who has killed and eaten more human beings, I suppose, than almost any man that ever lived.
Two days' steam southward from the Seychelles, and midway between the island of Mahé and Diégo-Suarez, on the north coast of Madagascar, lies the islet of Saint Pierre, whence comes much of the guano with which we fertilise our flower-beds and gardens, and those giant sea-turtles whose shells supply our women-folk with fans, combs, and brooches. Here, on this half a square mile of sun-baked rock in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the Scotch manager of the syndicate which works the guano deposits lives the whole year round, during half of which time he sees no human face, [Pg 258] during the other half having the company of a few score blacks who are brought over from Mahé under contract to gather the rich deposits of guano. His only shelter a wooden shack, his only companions the clouds of clamorous sea-fowl, his only fresh food turtles and fish, his only communication with the world two times a year when the workers come and go, I expected to find him unshaven and slovenly, the most exiled of all exiles, the loneliest of the lonely. I made up a bundle of two-months-old newspapers and pictured the pleasure it would give him to learn the news of that big, busy, teeming world which lay over there beyond the rim of the Indian Ocean. I imagined that he would cling to my arm and beg piteously for news from home, and I thought it quite possible that he might weep on my shoulder. But when a crew of blacks had taken me through the booming surf in a tiny native dugout, and I and my bundle of newspapers had been hauled up an overhanging cliff at the end of a rope, I found the poor exile whose lonely lot I had come to cheer immaculate in white linen and pipe-clayed shoes and wholly contented with the shade of a green palm, the murmur of a turquoise sea, a book of Robert Burns's verses, and the contents of a large black bottle.
When De Lesseps, that lean Frenchman with the vision of a prophet and the energy of a Parisian, drove his spade through the sands of Suez and thereby shortened the sea-road from Europe to the East by five thousand miles, he gave France her revenge on Saint Helena. [Pg 259] Ever since Clive won England her Indian empire, this obscure rock in the South Atlantic had been a prosperous half-way house on the road to the Farther East, its lonely islanders driving a roaring trade with the winged fleets of war and commerce that stopped there long enough to replenish their larders and refill their casks. But when the completion of the Canal altered the trade routes of the world, the tedious Cape journey was abandoned, the South Atlantic was deserted, and Saint Helena was ruined. By the genius of one of her sons, France had settled her score with that grim island, whose name still leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of Frenchmen.
He who would see the prison place of the great Emperor for himself must be rich in time and patience, for the vessels that earn their government subsidy by grudgingly dropping anchor for a few hours in Jamestown's open roadstead are only indifferently good and very far between. Scarcely larger than the island of Nantucket—or Staten Island, if that conveys more meaning; almost midway between the fever-haunted coasts of Angola and Brazil; sixteen days' steam from Southampton Water and seven from Table Bay; its rockbound coasts as precipitous and forbidding as the walls of the Grand Canyon; and with a population less than that of many of New York's down-town office buildings, Saint Helena possesses one attraction, nevertheless, which more than repaid me for the long and arduous journey. That attraction is a mean and lonely cottage, set on a bleak and barren hill. To stand within [Pg 260] the walls of that wretched dwelling and to stare out across the wastes of ocean from that wind-swept hilltop, I travelled twenty thousand miles, for on that distant stage was played the last act of the mightiest tragedy of modern times.
Loitering up and down the seven seas, I have seen many islands, but none, that I can recall, that turns toward the seafarer a face at once so gloomy and so forbidding. It needs no vivid imagination, no knowledge of its history, to transform the perpendicular cliffs of Saint Helena into the grim walls of a sea-surrounded prison. It is a place so stern, so solemn, and so awesome that it makes you shiver in spite of yourself. As I leaned over the rail of a Castle steamer, with sunrise still an hour away and the Cross flaming overhead, and watched the island's threatening profile loom up out of the night, I shuddered in sympathy with that stern, cold man who came as a prisoner to these same shores close on a century ago.
From the view-points of safety and severity, the captors of the fallen Emperor could not have chosen better. For the safe-keeping of a man whose ambitions had decimated, bankrupted, and exhausted the people of a continent, it was imperative that a prison should be found whence escape or rescue would be out of the question by reason of its very isolation and remoteness. Twelve hundred miles from the nearest continental land, and that a savage and fever-infested wilderness; with but a single harbour, and that so poor that landing there is perilous except in the very best of weather; its [Pg 261] great natural strength increased by impregnable forts; its towering rocks commanding a sea view of sixty miles in every direction, thus obviating the possibility of a surprise attack, Saint Helena admirably fulfilled the requirements for a prison demanded by a harassed, weakened, and frightened Europe.
Though those travellers who take passage by the slow and infrequent “intermediate” steamers to the Cape are usually afforded an opportunity of setting foot on Saint Helena's soil, the brief stay which is made there permits of their doing little else. As the house occupied by Napoleon stands in the very heart of the island and on its highest point, and as the road which leads to it is so rough and precipitous that those who hire one of the few available vehicles generally walk most of the way out of pity for the horses, there is rarely time for the traveller who intends proceeding by the same boat to set eyes on the spot which gives the island its fame. I heard, indeed, of scores of travellers who had chosen the discomforts of this roundabout and tedious route for the express purpose of visiting the house where Napoleon died, and who found, on arriving at Saint Helena, that they would have time for nothing more than a hurried promenade in the town. Nor are any efforts made by the indolent islanders to induce travellers to stay over a steamer, for there are neither hotels nor boarding-houses, and a visitor would have to depend for his bed and board on the hospitality of some private family.
The South Atlantic, her bosom rising and falling [Pg 262] lazily under the languorous influence of the tropic morning, had exchanged her sombre night robe for a shimmering, sparkling garment of sun-flecked blue before the sleepy-eyed quarantine officer had laboriously climbed the port ladder; and the yellow flag at our masthead, fluttering down, had signalled to the clamorous crews of negroes waiting eagerly alongside that they could take us ashore. In the pitiless light of the early morning the island looked even more forbidding than when the harshness of its features was veiled by night. Naked slope and ridge rose everywhere, and everywhere they were cut and cross-cut by equally bare valleys and ravines, but not a house, not a tree, not a sign of life, vegetable or animal, could we detect as we drew near. Even the sea-birds seemed afraid to alight on those grim cliffs, darting in on outspread wings as though to settle on them, only to wheel away with frightened, discordant cries, the while an everlasting surf hurled itself angrily against the smooth black rocks, voicing its impotence in a sullen, booming roar.
Approaching the shore, we were amazed to see that what had appeared from the ship's deck to be a solid, perpendicular wall of rock was split in the middle, as though by a mighty chisel, and in the cleft thus formed nestled Jamestown, the island's capital, flanked on either side by towering, fort-crowned cliffs which effectually conceal it from the sea. Landing at the same stone water-stairs where the captive Emperor had come ashore nearly a century before, we followed a stone-paved causeway, bordered on the land side by a deep [Pg 263] but empty moat, over a creaking drawbridge, through an ancient portcullised gateway, and so into a spacious square, shaded by many patriarchal trees and dotted here and there with groups of antiquated cannon. Bordering the square are the post-office, which does a thriving business in the sale of the rare surcharged stamps of the islands when the steamers come in; the custom-house, the law courts, the yellow church of Saint James, and the castle, a picturesque and straggling structure, begun by the first English governor in 1659, which is used by the governor for his “town” residence, though his “country” place is barely a mile away. The town itself is simply a mean and straggling street, lined on either side by whitewashed, red-roofed, green-shuttered houses which become less and less pretentious and more and more scattered as you make your way up the ever narrowing valley until it loses itself in the hills. If there is a more dead-and-alive place than Jamestown I have yet to see it. A New Hampshire hamlet on a Sunday morning is positively boisterous in comparison. Once a month, however, when the British mail comes in, the town arouses itself long enough to go down to the post-office and get the letters and the papers—especially the illustrated weeklies—from that far-off place which every islander, even though he was born and raised on Saint Helena, refers to as “home.”
From the very edge of the village square the cliff known as Ladder Hill rises sheer, its great bulk throwing an ominous shadow over the little town. It takes its name from the Jacob's ladder whose seven hundred [Pg 264] wooden steps will bring you, panting and perspiring, to the fort and the wireless station which occupy the top. I suppose there is no other such ladder in the world, it being, so I was proudly assured by the islanders, nine hundred and ninety-three feet long and six hundred and two feet high. Nor can I conceive of any other place wanting such an accommodation, for those who use it are constantly in danger of bursting their lungs going up or of breaking their necks coming down.
A biscuit's throw from the foot of the ladder, and facing the public gardens, stands the sedate, old-fashioned house where Napoleon spent the first few nights after his arrival on the island. It is a prim, two-story residence, the sombreness of its snuff-coloured plaster relieved by white stone trimmings and window-sills—just such a place, in fact, as the British colonists built by the hundreds in our own New England towns. By one of the most remarkable coincidences of which I have ever heard, Napoleon was given the same bedroom which had been occupied by the Duke of Wellington—then Sir Arthur Wellesley—on his homeward voyage from India only a few years before.
Leaving Jamestown in its gloomy, rock-walled ravine, we followed the incredibly rough high-road which bumps and jolts and twists and turns and climbs back and up onto the table-land which forms, as it were, the roof of the island. The deeper we penetrated into the interior the more luxuriant the vegetation became. The dry, barren, soilless, lichen-coated rocks of the coast [Pg 265] zone gave way to grassy valleys abloom with English gorse and broom and dotted with the bright green of willows and the dark green of firs, and these merged, in turn, into a land of bamboos and bananas, of oranges and lemons and date-palms, where the vegetation was so luxuriant and tropical as to give it almost the appearance of a botanic garden. I know, indeed, of no other place in the world where one can pass through three distinct zones of vegetation in the course of an hour's drive, the first few miles into the interior of Saint Helena being, so far as the scenery is concerned, like a journey from the rocky, desolate shores of Labrador, through the pine forests and fertile farm-lands of New England and New York, and so southward into the essentially tropical vegetation of lower Florida.
The road wound on and on, uncovering new beauties at every turn. Cheerful, low-roofed bungalows peeped out at us from gardens ablaze with camelias, fuchsias, and roses; through the vistas formed by fig, pear, and guava orchards we caught glimpses of prosperous-looking stone farm-houses whose thick walls and high gables showed that they dated from the Dutch occupation; passing above a tiny sylvan valley, our driver pointed out the rambling Balcombe place, where the Emperor lived for some weeks while Longwood was being prepared for his occupancy, and in the box-bordered gardens of which he made quiet love to his host's pretty daughter. In the same valley, not a pistol-shot away, are the whitewashed, broad-verandaed quarters of the Eastern Telegraph Company's force of [Pg 266] operators—tennis-courts, cricket-fields, and a swimming-pool set in a lawn of emerald velvet serving to make the enforced exile of these young Englishmen, who relay the news of the world between Europe and the Cape, a not unpleasant one.
Steeper and steeper became the road; scantier and less luxuriant the vegetation, until at last we emerged upon a barren, wind-swept table-land. A farm-yard gate barred our road, but at the impatient crack of the driver's whip a small brown maiden hastened from a near-by lodge to open it, curtseying to us prettily as we rattled through. Three minutes' drive across a desolate, gorse-covered moor, and our driver pulled up sharply at a gate in a scraggy privet hedge surrounding just such a ramshackle, weather-beaten farm-house as you find by the hundreds scattered along the coast of Maine. “Longwood,” he remarked laconically, pointing with his whip. Convinced that I could not have heard aright, I asked him over again, for, despite all the accounts I had read of the mean surroundings amid which the Emperor ended his days, I could not bring myself to believe that this miserable cottage, with its sunken roof and lichen-coated walls, could have sheltered for more than half a decade the conqueror of Europe, the master of the Tuileries and Fontainebleau and Versailles, the man whose troopers had stabled their horses in every capital of the Continent.
Longwood House is an old-fashioned, rambling cottage, only one story high, unless you count the quarters improvised for the members of the Emperor's [Pg 267] suite in the garret, which were lighted by means of small windows cut in the shingle roof. The house is built in the form of a T, the entrance, which is reached by four or five stone steps and a tiny latticed veranda, being represented by the bottom of the letter, while the dining-room, kitchens, and offices are represented by the top. Originally the dwelling of a peasant farmer, at the time Napoleon reached the island it was being used as a sort of shooting-box by the lieutenant-governor, the present front of the house being hastily added to form a reception-room for the Emperor. In addition to this salle de réception , where you are asked to sign the visitor' book by the old French soldier who is the official guardian of the place, there is a drawing-room, a dining-room, the Emperor's study, his bedroom, bath, and dressing-room—all small, ill-lighted, damp, and cheerless. Practically the entire lower floor of the house was used by Napoleon, the members of his entourage —marshals, ministers, and courtiers, remember, who were accustomed to the life of the most brilliant court in Europe—being accommodated in tiny, unventilated cubby-holes directly under the eaves. With the exception of two or three small pier-glasses, the house is now quite destitute of furniture, though in other respects it is kept religiously as it was in Napoleon's time, even the faded blue wall-paper, sprinkled with golden stars, having been carefully preserved. On the walls of the various rooms are notices in French and English indicating the purposes to which they were put during the imperial occupancy. Between two windows [Pg 268] of the reception-room, where the Emperor's bed was removed from his bedroom a few days before his death because of the better light, stands a marble bust made from the cast taken immediately after his death, which, barring the one made by Canova during his life, is the only likeness of Napoleon admittedly correct. Without the house is the small and unkept garden in which the Emperor walked and sometimes worked, the arbour under which he spent so many hours, and the cement-lined fish-pond which he built with his own hands. Inside or out, there is not one suggestion of colour, of comfort, or of cheer: it is a prison-house and nothing more.
Near the bottom of the brown and windy hill on which Longwood stands is Geranium Valley, which contains the tomb, or rather the cenotaph, of the Emperor. It was by Napoleon's own wish that his body was buried in this exquisite spot, close beside the spring at which he so often used to drink and amid the wild geraniums of which he was so fond. The famous willow-tree still overshadows the little grave-space, which is enclosed by a high iron railing and a carefully trimmed hedge of box, while masses of flowers give brightness to a spot hallowed by many memories, for it was in this shady glen that the Emperor passed the most peaceful hours of his exile and it was here that he rested for twenty years until France brought him back in triumph to his final resting-place under the great gilt dome of Les Invalides.
Both Longwood and the grave occupy the peculiar position of being French territory in the heart of a [Pg 269] British colony, for half a century ago Queen Victoria presented the property to the French nation, an official appointed by the French Government residing on and caring for the place and showing it with mingled pride and sadness to the few visitors who make their way to this one of the world's far corners. It was an interesting but gloomy experience, that pilgrimage to the prison place of the great Emperor, for it visualised for me, as nothing else ever could do, the sordidness, the humiliations, and the mental tortures which marked the last years of Napoleon. As my vessel steamed steadily northward across the Atlantic, with the boulevards of Paris not three weeks away, I leaned over the taffrail and, staring back at the receding cliffs of that grim island, I seemed to see the short, stoop-shouldered, gray-coated, cock-hatted figure of the Emperor staring wistfully out across those leagues of ocean toward France.
To locate the next of these “Forgotten Isles,” and the most completely forgotten of all of them, you had better get out the family atlas and, with a ruler and a pencil, do a little Morris-chair exploring. Draw a line due south from Cape Verde, which is the westernmost point of Africa, and another line due east from Cape San Roque, which is the easternmost point in South America, and where those two lines meet, out in the wastes of the South Atlantic, you will find a barren rock which resembles, as, indeed, it is, an extinct and partially submerged volcano. This rock, which is considerably smaller than its sister island of Saint Helena, [Pg 270] seven hundred miles away, is officially designated by the British Government as H.M.S. “Ascension.” Entirely under the control and jurisdiction of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, it is unique in that it is the only island in the world which has the rating of a man-o'-war, being garrisoned, or rather manned, by a detachment of sailors and marines, and being administered in every respect as though it were a unit of the British navy. With the exception of a dozen acres of vegetable garden, there is not a single green thing on the island—grass, shrub, or tree. The island of Saint Pierre, of which I made mention earlier in this chapter, is bad enough, goodness knows, but it at least has a palm-tree. Ascension hasn't even that. How they get men to go there is altogether beyond my comprehension. If I had to take my choice between being sentenced to exile on Ascension (which Heaven forbid!) or confinement in Sing Sing, I rather think I should choose the prison. There are people on Ascension, nevertheless, the population, which consists of officers, seamen, and marines, together with a handful of cable operators and a score of Kroo boys from Sierra Leone, numbering in all about one hundred and thirty. There were also four women—relatives of the officers—on the island when I was there. They had been there only six months, I was told, yet when our vessel arrived not one of them was on speaking terms with the others. Ascension, is, however, one of the most flourishing “match factories” in the British empire, it being safe to say that any unattached female, no matter what her disqualifications, can get a [Pg 271] husband in a week's stay on the island. A young Englishman and his bride boarded our boat at Ascension. She had been born and had spent all of her life on Saint Helena (which is not exactly a roaring metropolis itself), and had married one of the cable operators stationed at Ascension, who was taking her on her first visit to the outside world. She told me that the event of her life, her marriage excepted, had been going out to a vessel to see a motor-car which was being transported to Cape Town. Here was an educated and intelligent English girl who had come to womanhood without ever having seen a railway train, a street-car, a building over two stories high, or a crowd of more than five hundred people. When we reached Teneriffe, in the Canaries, which is about as somnolent a place as any I know, her husband took her ashore to see the sights with keen anticipation. She rode on an electric car, she took tea in a four-story hotel, she attended a moving-picture show—and was brought back to the steamer suffering from violent hysterics. A week later we reached Southampton, where she was so completely prostrated by the roar and bustle of her first city that she had to go to bed under medical attention.
To those British officials and soldiers who are performing the manifold duties of empire along Africa's fever-stricken West Coast, the island of Ascension is a godsend, for an excellent sanatorium has been built by the government on its highest point, and to it come wasted, sunken-cheeked, fever-racked skeletons from all parts of that coast of death to build up their strength before [Pg 272] going back to their work again. Not only is Ascension a coaling, cable, and health station of considerable importance, but it is also the chief habitat of the sea-turtle, which comes there in thousands between January and May, to lay its eggs in the sand. After having seen the enormous size these creatures attain, it is almost possible to believe some of those fantastic yarns about his trained turtles with which Baron de Rougemont set Europe gasping a few years back. During the year that I visited Ascension more than two hundred turtles were captured, ranging in weight from five hundred to eight hundred pounds apiece. Four of the monsters, each weighing close to half a ton, were put aboard our vessel, being sent by the officers of the garrison as a gift to his Majesty the King. They must have had turtle soup at Buckingham Palace for several days in succession after those turtles arrived.
It could not have been long after daybreak when a frousy-headed Greek steward awoke me with an intimation that we were off Canea. The evil-smelling mixture which was called coffee only by courtesy, and which was really chicory in disguise, held no attraction for me, for, through the port-holes of the dining-saloon I could see, rising from a sapphire sea, the green-clad, snow-capped mountains of Crete, the island of mythology and massacre.
Our little steamer forged ahead at half-speed and the white town kept coming nearer and nearer, until we could distinguish the caiques in the harbour, and the [Pg 273] queer, narrow houses with their latticed harem windows which encircled it, and the white mosque with a palm-tree silhouetted against its slender minaret, and even the crowd of ebony, tan, and coffee-coloured humanity that fought for posts of vantage at the water-stairs. It was a picture of sunshine and animation, of vivid colours and strange peoples, such as one seldom sees except in some gorgeously staged comic opera, and as I surveyed it sleepily from the steamer's deck I had a momentary feeling that I was only an onlooker at a play and that the curtain would go down presently and I should have to go out into the drab, prosaic, humdrum world again.
But even as this was in my mind a gun boomed out from a crumbling bastion and five little balls ran up five flagstaffs which I had already noticed standing all in a row on the uppermost ramparts and had mistaken, naturally enough, for some new form of Marconi apparatus. The five little balls broke out into five flags and the morning breeze caught up their folds and held them straight out as though for our benefit, so that we could make them out quite plainly. Four of them were old friends that I had known on many seas—the Union Jack and the Tricolour and the Saint Andrew's cross of Russia and the red-white-and-green banner of Italy—but the fifth flag, which flew somewhat higher than the others, was of unfamiliar design; but the blood-red square of bunting, traversed by the Greek cross and bearing in its upper corner the star of Bethlehem, told its own story and I knew it for the flag of Crete. And I knew that there was deep significance in the design [Pg 274] of that unknown flag and in the position of the four familiar ones that flew below it, for they signalled to the world that the Turk had been driven out, never to return; that Christianity had triumphed over Mohammedanism, and that the cross had, indeed, replaced the crescent; that the centuries of massacre were now but memories; that peace, in the guise of foreign soldiery, had, for a time at least, found an abiding-place in Crete; and, most significant of all, that the new flag with its single star would be upheld, if necessary, by the mightiest array of bayonets and battle-ships in Christendom.
The island of Crete, which is about the size of Porto Rico, not only occupies a very important strategical position, being nearly equidistant from the coasts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, commanding every line of communication in the eastern Mediterranean, and being within easy striking distance of the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the Canal, but it is also one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, or would be if the warring elements among its population would permit the rattle of the harvester to replace the rattle of the machine-gun. Ever since the Turks wrested the island from the Venetians, close on two and a half centuries ago, its history has been one of corruption, cruelty, and massacre. Almost annually, for more than seventy years, the island Christians rose in rebellion against their Turkish masters, and just as regularly the Turks suppressed those rebellions with a severity which turned the towns of the island into shambles and its fertile farm-lands into a deserted wilderness. The cruelty [Pg 275] which coupled the name of Turk with execration in Armenia and Macedonia assumed such atrocious forms in Crete that finally the great powers were aroused to action, and in 1898 the fleets of England, France, Italy, and Russia dropped anchor in Suda Bay, the Turkish officials were forcibly deported, and a board of admirals assumed control of the affairs of the unhappy island. After a few months of martial government, during which the admirals squabbled continuously among themselves, the intervening powers proclaimed the island an autonomous state, subject to the Porte, but paying no tribute, and ruled by a high commissioner to be appointed by the King of the Hellenes. Though theoretically independent, it was provided that all questions concerning the foreign relations of Crete should be determined by the representatives of the powers, who would also maintain in the island, for a time at least, an international army of occupation. Recent events in the Balkans having resulted in bringing about an agitation in Crete for annexation to Greece, where a propaganda has long been vigorously carried on with that end in view, the protecting powers have definitely announced that the administration of the island will be continued by the “constituted authorities” (this should read “ self -constituted”) until the question can be settled with the consent of Turkey. As things stand at present, the withdrawal of the international troops from Crete is about as distant as the withdrawal of the British garrisons from Egypt. To tell the truth, each of the protecting powers is exceedingly anxious to get the island for [Pg 276] itself—England because it forms an admirable half-way house between Gibraltar and the Canal; France because its occupation would carry French influence into the eastern end of the Mediterranean; Italy because it would serve as a connecting link between the peninsula and Tripolitania; and Russia because it would give her the command of the entrance to the Dardanelles—and hence, though they will certainly never restore it to Turkey, they are far from anxious to hand it over to Greece, to whom, after all, it belongs historically, geographically, and ethnologically. As a result, the Cretan question will probably disturb the chancelleries of Europe for some years to come.
As I strained my eyes across the sparkling waters in vain search for signs of a hotel and breakfast, a boat flying the port-captain's flag and manned by gendarmes—splendid, muscular fellows with high boots and bare knees and baggy Turkish trousers, their keen brown faces peering out from under their fluttering cap-covers—came racing out from shore. As it came alongside the crew tossed oars with all the smartness of man-o'-war's-men; the white-clad officer in the stern, who was very stout and very stiffly starched, climbed the stairs gingerly, as though fearful of injuring the faultless crease in his linen trousers, and, after the exchange of ceremonious bows and laboured compliments in French, informed me that the High Commissioner had placed the boat at my disposal. There is always something peculiarly satisfying to the soul about going ashore under official auspices, not only because of the envious [Pg 277] glances of your fellow-passengers who line the rail, but because of the powerlessness of the customs officials to annoy you.
Canea, which is the seat of government, is the most picturesquely cosmopolitan place west of Suez. It has a mild and equable climate; living is cheap and reasonably good; there is a large garrison of foreign soldiery; there are no extradition treaties in force; and trouble of one kind or another is always brewing. Like a magnet, therefore, Canea has attracted the scum and offscourings of all the Levant—needy soldiers of fortune, professional revolution-makers, smooth-spoken gamblers and confidence men, rouged and powdered women of easy virtue from east and west, Egyptian donkey-boys, out-at-elbows dragomans who speak a score of tongues and hail from goodness knows where—all that rabble of the needy, the adventurous, and the desperate which follow the armies of occupation and are always to be found on the fringe of civilisation.
The foreign troops are quartered for the most part on the massive Venetian ramparts which still surround the town, but all business centres along the narrow, stone-paved quay bordering the harbour, and in a straggling thoroughfare which, leaving the water-front through a fine old gate still bearing the carven lion of Saint Mark, serves as the vertebra for an amazing tangle of dim alleys and deafening bazaars, in which all the products of the Levant are bought and sold amid indescribable confusion.
Canea is at its best at sunset, for it is not until [Pg 278] then that the town awakens to life. As the sun begins to sink behind the Aspra Vouna, the streets, hitherto deserted, become thronged as though by magic; the spaces before the cafés are packed with coffee-drinking, nargileh-smoking humanity of all shades and of all religions; the soldiers begin to appear in groups of twos and threes and fours; the clerks in the shipping-offices put on white drill jackets, and sit in chairs tipped back against their doors, and drink from tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them, and the muezzin, brazen-throated, appears on the balcony of his minaret, reminding one for all the world of a Swiss cuckoo-clock as he pops out to chant his interminable call to prayer: “Allahu il Allahu! Allahu Akbar! God is most great! Come to prayer! There is no God but Allah! He giveth life and dieth not! Your sins are great; greater is Allah's mercy! I extol his perfections! Allahu il Allahu! Allahu Akbar!”
It is such a scene as one marks with the white milestone of remembrance that he may go back to it in memory in after years. Picture, if you can, a stone-paved promenade bordering a U-shaped harbour. In the harbour are many craft—all small ones, for it is too shallow for the great steamers to enter. There are caiques with sails of orange, of scarlet, and of yellow; schooners, grain-laden, from Egypt and Turkey and Greece; fishing-boats with rakish lateen-sails and great goggle eyes painted at their bows to ward off the evil eye, and, so the sailors will tell you, to detect the fish. And along the quayside, where the human stream wanders [Pg 279] restlessly, there are Greeks in tufted shoes and snowy fustanellas that make them look like ballet-dancers; swarthy Turks in scarlet sashes and scarlet fezes, wearing the unsightly trousers peculiar to their race; bare-kneed Cretan highlanders, descendants in form and feature of the ancient Greeks, swaggering along with insolent grace in their braided, sleeveless jackets and high boots of yellow, untanned leather; Algerians in graceful flowing burnooses and Egyptians with tarbooshes and Arabs with turbans—now and then a mollah with scornful, intolerant eyes and the green turban which marks the wearer as a descendant of the Prophet—and brawny, coal-black negroes from Tripoli, from Nubia, and from the Sudan.
And then there are the soldiers: British Tommies, smart even in khaki, boots shining, buckles shining, faces shining, swaggering along this Cretan street and flourishing their absurd little canes precisely as their fellows are doing all over the globe; French colonials, swathed in blue puttees from ankle to knee and in red cummerbunds from hip to chest, their misery completed by mushroom helmets so large that nothing can be seen of the wearer but his chin; chattering Italian bersaglieri , who strut about in cocks' feathers and crimson facings when at home in the Corso or the Toledo or the Via Vittorio Emmanuele, but out here must needs content their vanity with white linen uniforms and green hackle in their helmets; sad-faced Russians, uniformed as they would be in summer in Saint Petersburg or Moscow, flat white caps, belted white smocks, trousers [Pg 280] tucked in boots, their good-humoured, ignorant faces stamped with all the signs of homesickness, for their thoughts are far away in some squalid tenement in the poor quarter of Warsaw perhaps, or in a peasant's cabin beside the head-waters of the Volga.
Though Canea is the seat of government, Candia—or Heraklian, the classic name by which the Greeks prefer to call it—is the largest and most important town on the island. Disregarding the advice of friends, I went from Canea to Candia on a Greek coasting steamer. No one ever takes a first-class passage on a Greek boat, for the second and third class passengers invariably come aft and stay there, despite the commands and entreaties of the purser, so a third-class ticket answers quite as well as a first. Fortunately—or unfortunately, as you choose to regard it—I had as fellow voyagers a company of British infantry, which was being transferred to Candia after three years' service in the western end of the island. The soldiers, who had managed to smuggle aboard a considerable quantity of rum, quickly got beyond the control of the boy lieutenant, just out of Sandhurst, who was in command, and who, appreciating that discretion is the better part of valour, especially where a hundred drunken soldiers are concerned, wisely left them to their own boisterous devices and retreated with me to the captain's quarters on the bridge, where we remained until we sighted Candia's harbour lights and our anchor rumbled down inside the breakwater.
Were it not for the massive Venetian walls which [Pg 281] surround it, Candia would have almost the appearance of an Indian town, the similarity being increased by its dark-faced, gaily dressed inhabitants and by the British soldiers who throng its streets. A single broad, stone-paved thoroughfare, lined in places with shade-trees and surprisingly clean, winds like a snake from the harbour up the hill, past rows of blackened ruins—grim reminders of the latest insurrection—past square after square of white-walled, red-tiled houses; through noisy bazaars where the turbaned shopkeepers squat patiently in their doorways; past unkept marble fountains whose stained carvings would make many a museum director envious; past mosques with slender, graceful minarets and groups of filthy beggars grovelling on their steps for alms; past the ornate, twin-domed Greek cathedral, and so on to the ramparts where the British garrison is quartered in yellow barracks that overlook the sea.
But the real Crete is no more to be judged from glimpses of Canea and Candia than America could be judged by visiting New York and Chicago. It is in the picturesque mountain villages of the Sphakiote range that the genuine, untamed, unmixed fighting Cretan is to be found, for these dwellers on the slopes of Mount Ida, alone of all the scattered branches of the great Hellenic family, have preserved in form and feature the splendid physical characteristics of the ancient Greeks. With the Governor of Candia for my guide, the mountain village of Archanais as our destination, and with an escort of gendarmerie clattering at our heels, we set out from Candia one morning before the [Pg 282] sun was over the walls, for we had forty miles of hard riding between us and dinner, and roads in the Sphakiote country often consist of nothing more than dried-up water-courses. For the first few miles the road was crowded with peasantry bringing their produce to market—droves of donkeys, wine-skin-laden; long strings of the sturdy, shaggy native ponies tethered head to tail and tail to head, their panniers filled with purple figs or new-dug potatoes; sullen-eyed Turks driving rude native carts, their women-folk veiled to the eyes and hiding even them in the presence of the giaours ; chattering Greeks with homespun rugs or bundles of the heavy native lace; now and then a prosperous farmer, striding along with a peculiar rolling walk, due to the round-soled boots affected by the islanders, carrying a measure of potatoes or perhaps a pair of fowls in the baggy seat of his enormous trousers. We passed a grass-grown Turkish cemetery where the gilded tombstones, capped by carven fezes or turbans in the case of men, and shells in that of women, blazed in the morning sunlight, while, a little farther on, we halted for a few moments before the tomb of a revered sheikh, almost hidden by the bits of cloth which the passing faithful had torn from their garments and tied to it.
Some half a dozen miles inland from Candia lie the ruins of Knossos, the one-time palace of King Minos, a powerful monarch of the Mycenæan age who is supposed to have ruled in Crete during that hazy era when mythology ended and history began. The audience chamber and the royal throne, which were old when the [Pg 283] Pyramids were built, are still in a perfect state of preservation, though these amazing evidences of prehistoric grandeur are no more interesting than the marvellous network of cellars and subterranean passages which underlie the palace, many of them still lined, just as they were five thousand years ago, with row upon row of mammoth earthen jars for the storage of grain, of olives, and of wine in time of famine or siege. Many eminent archæologists, by the way, maintain that it was from this bewildering maze of corridors and passage-ways that the legend of the Minotaur and the labyrinth, the scene of which was laid in Crete, arose. Were Crete as easy of access as Egypt, these ruins of Knossos would long since have taken rank with those which dot the banks of the Upper Nile.
Half a dozen hours of riding over an open, sun-baked country and later through gloomy pine woods and mountain defiles, with an occasional halt at a wayside xenodocheion that the troopers of our escort might refresh themselves with that nauseous-tasting fermentation of rice known as arrack , which is the national drink of Greece, brought us at last, hot, saddle-worn, and weary, into the village square of Archanais. The demarch of the town, with a dozen or so of the insurrectionist chieftains from the surrounding mountains, awaited our coming beneath a hoary plane-tree that shaded half the village square. Seats were placed for us beneath its grateful shade, and, with the ceremony of which the Greeks are so fond, we were served with small cups of Turkish coffee and with the inevitable [Pg 284] loukoum , which is a candy resembling “Turkish delight.” This formal welcome, which no Cretan ever neglects, completed, we were escorted to the house of the demarch, with whom we were to dine. It was a long, low-roofed, homelike dwelling, red tiles above and white plaster beneath, and surrounding it a garden ablaze with flowers. Met at the door by a servant with a pitcher of chased brass, we proceeded to wash in the open air, the domestic pouring the water over our hands in a steady stream, according to the Cretan fashion.
The dinner was beyond description. From a Cretan standpoint it was doubtless a feast for the gods. I, being ravenous with hunger, asked not the names of the strange dishes, but enjoyed everything that was set before me as only a hungry man can. The meal began with ripe olives and spiced meat chopped up with wheat grains and wrapped in mulberry leaves; it passed on through a course that resembled fried egg-plant but wasn't; through duck, stuffed with rice and olives and cooked in oil, and a pudding that tasted as though it had been flavoured with eau de cologne , concluding with small native melons, which I have never seen equalled for flavour except in Turkestan, and, of course, coffee and cigarettes. The meal lasted something over three hours, and then, sitting cross-legged on the divan which ran entirely around the room, the whole party dropped one by one to sleep. The one recollection of Archanais which will always remain with me is that of a roomful of swarthy-faced, black-moustached, baggy-trousered, armed-to-the-teeth, overfed men, notorious revolutionists [Pg 285] every one, all sound asleep and all snoring like steam-engines.
That night we rode down the mountains in the moonlight, the snow-capped peaks looming luridly against the purple sky. The moonbeams lighted up the ruined farmsteads which we passed and played fitfully among the gnarled branches of the ancient olive-trees, giving to the silent land an aspect of unutterable peace. The whole world seemed sleeping and the hoofs of our horses rang loudly against the stones. The road which had been white with dust in the morning was a ribbon of silver now; the stately palm-trees stirred ever so gently in the night breeze; the ruins of ancient Knossos grew larger in the moonlight until all its ancient glory seemed restored; the crosses on the Greek cathedral and the crescents on the slender minarets seemed to raise themselves in harmony like fingers pointing toward heaven; the great guns that frowned from the ramparts were hidden in the shadows—all was silence, beauty, infinite peace, until, as we walked our tired horses slowly across the creaking drawbridge into the city, a helmeted figure stepped from the shadow of the walls, a rifle flashed in the moonlight, and a harsh voice challenged:
“Halt! Who goes there?”
- Abbas Hilmi II, 112 .
- Abyssinia, 10 .
- Africanders, 226 .
- Agriculture in: French Africa, 24 ;
- German Africa, 181 ;
- Morocco, 32 ;
- Rhodesia, 214 ;
- South Africa, 234 ;
- the Sudan, 128 ;
- Tripolitania, 85-86 .
- Ahaggar (Sahara), 24 .
- Alexandria, bombardment of, 111 .
- Algeria, 3 , 9 , 14 , 16 .
- Algerian hinterland, 57 .
- Algiers, 10 .
- Americans in: Rhodesia, 217-8 ;
- the Transvaal, 237 .
- Anglo-German secret treaty, 178-9 .
- Angola, 177-8 .
- Antanarivo, 9 .
- Arab: justice, 75 ;
- resistance to Italian rule, 98 ;
- weddings, 78 ;
- women, 77 .
- Arabi Pasha, 110 .
- Arabi's rebellion, 111 .
- Archanais (Crete), 283 .
- Artesian wells in the Sahara, 22 .
- Ascension Island, 269 .
- Ashantee, 254 .
- Assuan dam, 123 .
- Atlas Mountains, 31 .
- Aujila oases, 88 .
- Bagirmi, 100 .
- Barbary Coast, 8 .
- Barka (Tripolitania), 87 .
- Barnato, Barney, 243 .
- Barotseland, 196 .
- Beira (Port. East Africa), 206 et seq.
- Beit, Alfred, 193 .
- Belgian Congo, 176-7 ;
- communications in, 187 ;
- reversion of, 177 .
- Benghazi (Tripolitania), 84 , 87 .
- Berbers, 36 .
- Bey of Tunis, 64 .
- Big game in Rhodesia, 196 .
- Biskra (Algeria), 60 .
- “Blue tongue,” 232 .
- Boers, 226 .
- Bornu, 100 .
- Botha, General Louis, 233 et seq.
- Bridge over the Zambezi, 194 .
- British in: Egypt, 111 et seq. ;
- South Africa, 223 et seq.
- British South Africa Company, 212 .
- Broken Hill (Rhodesia), 194 .
- Bulawayo (Rhodesia), 190 .
- Bwana M'kubwa (Rhodesia), 194 .
- Candia (Crete), 280 et seq.
- Canea (Crete), 272 et seq.
- Cannibalism, 253 .
- “Cape-to-Cairo” Railway, 190 et seq.
- Cape Town, 203 , 227 .
- Capitulations, privileges conferred by Ottoman, 113 .
- Caravans, 17 , 19 , 91 .
- Ceuta (Morocco), 47 .
- Chartered companies, 212 .
- Colomb-Bechar (Morocco), 8 .
- Colour problem in South Africa, 226-8 .
- Consuls, powers of, in Egypt, 114 et seq.
- Cost of living in Rhodesia, 217 .
- Cotton culture in: Egypt, 124 ;
- the Sudan, 142 .
- Country clubs, beneficial effects of, in Rhodesia, 216 .
- Crete, 272 et seq. ;
- administration of, 275 ;
- foreign troops in, 279-280 ;
- hospitality in, 283-4 ;
- insurrections in, 274 .
- Crime in South Africa, 229 .
- Crispi, 92 .
- Cromer, Lord, 117 .
- Cullinan, “The Great,” diamond, 239 . [Pg 288]
- Cyrenaica, 87 .
- Dahomey, 4 , 9 , 25 .
- Dakar (Senegal), 11 , 53 .
- Dam at Assuan, 202 .
- Dancing girls, 58 et seq.
- Dar-es-Salam (German East Africa), 185 .
- DeBeers syndicate, formation of, 243 .
- Delta of the Nile, 124 .
- Derna, capture of, by Americans, 83 .
- Desert: reclamation, 21 ;
- transportation, 23 .
- Diamond: fields at Kimberley, 242 ;
- mining, 234 et seq.
- Dining-cars on “Cape-to-Cairo” Ry., 219 .
- Diré-Dawah (Abyssinia), 10 .
- Divorce: court in Tunis, 71 ;
- in Algeria, 70 .
- Djibouti (French Somali Coast), 9 .
- Drainage project in Egypt, 124 .
- Dutch in South Africa, 224 .
- Eaton's, Gen. William, capture of Derna, 83 .
- Education in French Africa, 6 .
- Egypt, 108 et seq. ;
- army, 118 ;
- education, 120 ;
- future of, 141 ;
- government, 111 et seq. ;
- irrigation, 122 ;
- justice, 113 , 116 ;
- Khedive, 112 , 116 , 117 , 124 ;
- land values in, 121 .
- Egyptian Debt Commission, 112 .
- El Araish (Morocco), 48 .
- England's desire for railway zone in German Africa, 198 .
- Execution in Tunis, 65 .
- Fantasias, 16 .
- Fashoda: see Kodok.
- Fevers in East Africa, 152 .
- Fez (Morocco), 9 .
- Fezzan (Tripolitania), 84 , 86 .
- Flowers in Morocco, 33 .
- Foreign Legion, 15 .
- France's African army, 12-14 .
- Franco-Spanish treaty, 46 .
- French: Africa, 1 et seq. ;
- colonial expansion, 1 et seq. ;
- Congo (see French Equatorial Africa );
- Equatorial Africa, 4 ;
- Guinea, 4 , 9 ;
- Sahara, 5 ;
- Somali Coast, 5 ;
- sphere of influence, 2 et seq. ;
- steamers, 11 ;
- treatment of natives, 16 , 42 , 75 .
- German Africa, 165 et seq. ;
- climate of, 180 ;
- railways in, 179 .
- German colonial expansion, 166 ;
- desire for the Congo, 176 et seq. ;
- desire for Zanzibar, 164 ;
- East Africa, 175 , 185-6 ;
- trade of, 186 ;
- interests in Morocco, 172 .
- German militarism in Africa, 182 , 186 ;
- overseas banks, 168-170 ;
- treatment of the natives, 182-4 ;
- Southwest Africa, 175 .
- Germany's foreign policy, 171-2 ;
- oversea interests, 170 .
- Golf in Zanzibar, 149 .
- Gordon, General Charles George, 203 .
- Gordon Memorial College at Khartoum, 140 .
- Great Bend of the Niger, 9 .
- “ Groote Schuur , ” the home of Cecil Rhodes, 223 .
- Guano islands, 257 .
- Harbours: in French West Africa, 10 ;
- in German Southwest Africa, 188 .
- Harems, life in, 69 et seq.
- Hay's, Sir John Drummond, speech to Sultan of Morocco, 44 .
- Heraklian. (See Candia. )
- Hicks-Beach, Sir Michael, and Cecil Rhodes, 192 .
- Illicit diamond buying, 244 .
- Irrigation in: Egypt, 122 ;
- French North Africa, 21 ;
- South Africa, 233 ;
- Sudan, 21 , 128 .
- Ismail Pasha, 108 et seq.
- Italy in Africa, 80 et seq.
- Ivory Coast, 4 , 9 .
- Ivory: market in Zanzibar, 153 ;
- trade, 153 et seq. [Pg 289]
- Jamestown (Saint Helena), 262-4 .
- Jimini (Ivory Coast), 9 .
- Jof (Sahara), 99 et seq.
- Johannesburg, 203 , 235 et seq.
- Kabyle marriage customs, 68 .
- Kabyles, the, 65 et seq. ;
- sale of their daughters by, 66 .
- Kabylia (Algeria), 65 .
- Kamerun, 173-6 .
- Kamerun, New, 173-6 .
- Kanem (French Sudan), 5 , 9 , 100 .
- Kangas , 154 .
- Karroo, the, 233 .
- Katanga District (Belgian Congo), 195-6 .
- Keetmanshoop (German Southwest Africa), 188 .
- Khalifa, the, 20 , 197 .
- Khartoum, 138 et seq.
- King Assibi of the Gold Coast, 254 .
- King Kabanga of Uganda, 254 .
- King Minos of Crete, 282 .
- King Prempeh of Ashantee, 254 et seq.
- Kitchener, Lord, of Khartoum, 112 , 118 .
- Knossos, ruins of, 282 .
- Kodok (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 20 .
- Kosti (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 198 .
- Kourassa (French Guinea), 9 .
- Krüger, President Paul, 238 .
- Kufra Oases, 88 , 99 .
- Kumasi (Ashantee), 254 .
- Labor, demand for, in Rhodesia, 218 .
- Lake No, 137 .
- Lake Tanganyika, 187 .
- Lake Tchad, 9 .
- Language problem in South Africa, 224 .
- Laraiche. (See El Araish. )
- Liberia, 3 .
- Libya, 80 et seq.
- Livingstone, David, finding of, by Stanley, 151 .
- Livingstone's discovery of Victoria Falls, 210 .
- Lobenguela, 211 .
- Lobito Bay Railway, 179 , 201 .
- “Longwood,” residence of Napoleon, 266 .
- Lualaba River, 187 .
- Lüderitz Bay (German Southwest Africa), 188 .
- Madagascar, 5 , 9 , 12 .
- Mahé (Seychelles), 248 et seq.
- Majunga (Madagascar), 9 .
- Mannesmann Brothers in Morocco, 173 .
- Marchand, Major, and the Fashoda incident, 20 .
- Marrakesh (Morocco), 30 .
- Mashonaland, 209 .
- Matabeleland, 190 .
- Mauresque women, 67-69 .
- Mauritania, 4 .
- Méharistes, 18 .
- Melilla (Morocco), 47 .
- Meroe, Island of (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 138 .
- Mineral resources of South Africa, 234 .
- Mohammedanism, spread of, in Africa, 95 et seq.
- Moorish character, 38 .
- Moors, the, 36 .
- Morals of Europeans in East Africa, 157 .
- Morocco, 27 et seq. ;
- agriculture, 32 ;
- climate, 33 ;
- flowers, 33 ;
- future of, 41 , 54 ;
- natural resources, 34 ;
- railways projected in, 52 ;
- slavery in, 51 ;
- travel in, difficulties of, 35 .
- Morocco City. (See Marrakesh. )
- Morocco-Equatoria Convention, 165 .
- Mount Ida (Crete), 281 .
- Mozambique, 178 .
- Mulai-abd-el-Hafid, ex-Sultan of Morocco, 28 .
- Mulai Youssef, Sultan of Morocco, 41 .
- Napoleon's exile on Saint Helena, 259 et seq. [Pg 290]
- Natal, 234 .
- Native: labor in South African mines, 243 ;
- troops in French Africa, 13 .
- Natives: treatment of Rhodesian, 218 ;
- treatment of South African, 229 .
- New Kamerun, 5 , 173-6 .
- Nikki (Dahomey), 9 .
- Nile, the, 122 ;
- as agent of prosperity, 21 ;
- plan to divert the, 20 .
- Oases, Saharan, 24 .
- Oasis of: Kaouer, 24 ;
- Kufra, 88 , 99 ;
- Jof, 99 et seq. ;
- Tuat, 52 .
- Omdurman (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 126 .
- Orange River Free State, 224 .
- Otavi District (German Southwest Africa), 188 .
- Ouled-Naïls, 56 et seq.
- Papal assistance to Italy in taking of Tripolitania, 92 .
- Parliament of Union of South Africa, 227 .
- Port Florence (British East Africa), 200 .
- Portugal in Africa, 177 .
- Portuguese East Africa, 178 .
- Premier Diamond Mine, 239 .
- Pretoria (Transvaal), 238 .
- Race problem in South Africa, 225 .
- Railway: “Afro,” 52 , 179 ;
- “Cape-to-Cairo,” 190 et seq. ;
- Lobito Bay, 179 , 201 ;
- Otavi, 188 ;
- Uganda, 200 .
- Railways in: Abyssinia, 10 ;
- Algeria, 8 ;
- Central Africa, 190 ;
- French Africa, 8 ;
- German Africa, 179 ;
- Morocco, 52 ;
- Rhodesia, 219 ;
- the Sahara, 8 ;
- the Sudan, 131-3 ;
- West Africa, 9 .
- Rand, the, 235 .
- Rejaf (Uganda), 137 .
- Réunion, 12 .
- Rhodes, Cecil John, 190 et seq. , 211 , 212 .
- Rhodes Memorial near Cape Town, 203 .
- Rhodesia, 205 et seq. ;
- agriculture, 214 ;
- climate, 209 , 213-4 ;
- cost of living in, 217 ;
- country clubs in, 216 ;
- future of, 222 ;
- government, 212 ;
- labour, demand for skilled, 217 ;
- law and order in, 214 ;
- natives, 218 ;
- railways, 219 ;
- resources, 214 .
- Riff, the (Morocco), 46-48 .
- Rinderpest, 232 .
- Rogers, American adventurer, 151 .
- Sahara, 18 , 21 .
- Saint Helena, 258 et seq.
- Saint Pierre Island, 257 .
- Salisbury, Lord, 192 .
- Salisbury (Rhodesia), 213 .
- Sand storms, 132 .
- Sea turtles, 272 .
- Sebu River (Morocco), 32 .
- Senegal, 4 .
- Senegambia, 25 .
- Senussi, the sheikh, 99 et seq.
- Senussiyeh, Brotherhood of, 98 et seq.
- Seychelles, 248 et seq. ;
- climate of, 251 ;
- housekeeping in, 252-3 .
- Sharef River (Morocco), 32 .
- Sherifian dynasty, 42 .
- Slavery in North Africa, 73 .
- Sleeping-sickness, 213 .
- Sobat River, 20 .
- Sokoto (Nigeria), 100 .
- South Africa, Union of, 223 et seq. ;
- agriculture, 234 ;
- colour problem in, 226-8 ;
- diamond-mining, 234 et seq. ;
- future of, 246 ;
- language problem in, 224 ;
- mineral resources of, 234 ;
- need of irrigation in, 233 ;
- race problem in, 225 ;
- treatment of natives in, 228-231 .
- Spanish sphere of influence in Morocco, 46 .
- Sphakiote Mountains (Crete), 281 .
- Stanley, Henry M., 151 , 211 .
- Sudan, the Anglo-Egyptian, 126 et seq. [Pg 291] ;
- agriculture, 128 ;
- future of, 141 ;
- government, 127 ;
- railways, 131-3 .
- Sudd, the, 137 .
- Suez Canal, 141 .
- Sultan of Morocco, 41 .
- Sultan of Turkey, 96 .
- Sultan of Zanzibar, 160 et seq.
- Sus, the (Morocco), 46 , 49 .
- Swahili: language, 156 ;
- race, 154 .
- Swakopmund (German Southwest Africa), 188 , 200 .
- Table Mountain (Cape of Good Hope), 203 .
- Tamatave (Madagascar), 9 .
- Tangier (Morocco), 10 , 43 , 54 .
- Teneriffe (Canary Islands), 271 .
- Tewfik Pasha, 110 .
- Tibesti (Sahara), 24 .
- Timbuktu (Upper Senegal-Niger Territories), 8 , 9 , 53 .
- Tippoo Tib, 151 .
- Tobruk (Tripolitania), 87 .
- Togoland, 175 .
- Tortoise shell from Saint Pierre, 257 .
- Transvaal, 235 .
- Treatment of women in North Africa, 74-79 .
- Tripoli (Tripolitania), 84-89 .
- Tripolitania, 80 et seq. ;
- future of, 88 , 105 ;
- trade of, 91 .
- Tsetse-fly, 208 , 213 .
- Tuaregs, 99 .
- Tuat (Sahara), 52 .
- Tunisia, 3 .
- Tunisian justice, 64 .
- Tunisian perfumery, 67 .
- Turkish Sultan's influence in Africa, 96 .
- Uganda Railway, 200 .
- Ujda (Morocco), 9 .
- Ujiji (German East Africa), 187 .
- Umtali (Mashonaland), 209 .
- United States in Africa, 82 et seq.
- Upper Senegal-Niger Territories, 4 .
- Vasco da Gama, 143 .
- Victoria (Seychelles), 254 .
- Victoria Falls, 194 , 210 , 220 et seq.
- Victoria Nyanza, 198 , 203 .
- Wadai, 5 , 9 , 100 .
- Wady Haifa (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 137 .
- Walfish Bay (German Southwest Africa), 188 .
- Women of North Africa, 56 et seq.
- “World's View” (Cape of Good Hope), 203 .
- Zambezi River, 221 .
- Zanzibar, 143 et seq. ;
- climate, 146 ;
- future of, 163 ;
- German desire for, 164 ;
- hotel accommodation in, 146-7 ;
- ivory market in, 153 ;
- natives of, 154 ;
- Sultan of, 160 et seq. ;
- tropical diseases in, 152 .
- Ziban, the (Algerian Sahara), 57 .
- Zulus, 229 .
Transcriber's Note:
- The original spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been retained, with the exception of apparent typographical errors, which have been corrected.
- Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
- Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant form was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
- Mid-paragraph illustrations have been moved between paragraphs and some illustrations have been moved closer to the text that references them. The List of Illustrations paginations were changed accordingly.
- The book cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.