CHAPTER XIII
ALEXANDRIA
We left Jaffa on the Monday, and in twenty-four hours after were landed at Alexandria. Alexandria is not a desirable place to land at; travellers have to trust generally to native boatmen, who are a race of robbers. For instance, an American gentleman described to me how it fared with him on attempting to land a few years since. He and a friend made a bargain with a respectable man to put them ashore. He called a boatman, into whose boat they got with their luggage. No sooner had the man rowed a little way from the ship than he stopped and demanded the instant payment of a sum four times the amount that had been agreed upon. The travellers said they had made an agreement with his master, and he was bound to carry it out. He replied that he had no master; that the boat was his, that the oars were his, and that he would neither take them back to the ship nor row them ashore unless they complied with his request. One of the gentlemen had a revolver, which he held at the rascal’s head, telling him to prepare for instant death. The man sullenly obeyed, but no sooner had he reached the shore than he landed and preferred against the travellers a charge of attempting to murder him. The affair promised to be serious, but it was discovered by the judge that the revolver was not loaded, nor ever had been loaded, and the travellers were at length allowed to depart in peace. I heard of another case of a Frenchman shooting his boatman, who refused to fulfil his contract. In my case, happily, I landed on the quay, and had no trouble with the boatmen at all.
At length I am fairly landed in the land of the Pharaohs – a land whose records are engraved in stones, and date thousands of years before the birth of Christ. You see nothing of Alexandria till you approach it, and then it spreads out before you in all its charm, from Pharos, the most ancient lighthouse in the world, on one side, to Pompey’s Pillar on the other. Soon after I land at the quay, I make my way to the railway-station in a carriage and pair, for which I had agreed to pay a shilling. At the station the driver has the impudence to demand two shillings, which I refuse to give, whilst a dragoman, who has fastened himself on to me, though I have attempted to get rid of him, demands a shilling for his unnecessary attendance. I offer him threepence; he is indignant. ‘I am a dragoman,’ he exclaims in an angry tone. ‘What do you take me for?’ At length I give him sixpence, and he goes away in peace. I smoke my first pipe of excellent Egyptian tobacco, swallow a tiny cup of coffee, all sugar and grounds, and survey the scene from the outside of the excellent railway-station, which is a credit to the city. Every minute a blacking boy begs me to let him clean my boots, but as I need not his services they are declined. On my way I have seen every sign of industry and wealth: spacious shops, and a fine square adorned with handsome houses, and with a good statue of Ibrahim Pasha – the man to whom modern Egypt owes its first dawn of revived prosperity. The municipal authorities of the place have done much to promote its prosperity. The traveller will find it to his advantage to stop here a day or two. The hotels are excellent, and, with one exception, by no means dear. The harbour is full of shipping and steamers, and the number of trains laden with merchandise running between Cairo and Alexandria seems incessant. The railway-carriages are an immense improvement on those which take you from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Alexandria has a population of over 300,000, and its prosperity has greatly increased of late. The English reside principally at Ramleh, five miles off, to which there is a local train service. On your way you pass the battlefield between the English and the French, where our General, Sir Ralph Abercrombie, lost his life in the hour of victory.
Commerce seems to have had her birthplace in Egypt. In the time of Joseph, we read, all countries came there to buy corn. Fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ its merchants brought indigo and muslins from India, and porcelain from China, and the fame of its mariners was great. The trade route was down the Persian Gulf, along the Tigris, through Palmyra – the Tadmor of old – down to the cities of the Mediterranean. Arab mariners also sailed from India, keeping close to the coast till they reached Berenice, in the Red Sea, whence the goods were transported to Captos, thence down the Nile to Alexandria. ‘Under such Emperors as the cruel and dissipated Commodus,’ writes Mr. R. W. Fraser, in his ‘British India,’ ‘the plundering barbarian, Caracalla, and the infamous Heliogabalus, the wealth that came from the East through Alexandria to the imperial city of Rome, passed away to Constantinople and the rising cities along the Mediterranean.’
The glory of Alexandria in the olden time was the Serapeum, sacred to the worship of Serapis, a god originally worshipped in Sinope, and brought to Alexandria by the Emperor Ptolemy – worshipped eventually by the Romans as the Supreme Being, the beneficent Lord of Life and Death. It is clear the Ptolemies – at one and the same time Egyptian Pharaohs and Greek princes – felt the need of a real and presiding deity for the great city, with its enormous population, not only from Greece and its colonies, but from all the nations and tribes of the Mediterranean and the East.
As the seat of a god-worship became important, so did the deity its patron. When Alexandria became the official and mercantile capital of Egypt, Serapis became the chief of all the gods of the land, and there his shrine was worshipped for nearly one thousand years. The worship of Serapis was the last to fall before the advancing force of Christianity. The philosopher saw in Serapis, writes Macrobius, nothing more than the anima mundi, the spirit of whom universal nature is the body; so that by an easy transition Serapis came to be worshipped as the embodiment of the one Supreme whose representative on earth was Christ. This is clear from a letter written by the Emperor Hadrian a. d. 131. ‘I am now become,’ writes Hadrian, ‘fully acquainted with that Egypt which you extol so highly. I have found the people vain, fickle, and shifting with every change of opinion. Those who worship Serapis are, in fact, Christians; even those who style themselves the bishops of Christ are actually devoted to Serapis. There is no chief of a Jewish synagogue, no Samaritan, no Christian bishop, who is not an astrologer, a fortune-teller, or a conjurer. The very Patriarch of Tiberias is compelled, when he comes to Egypt, by one party to adore Serapis, by another to worship Christ.’
And this seems to show that some Christians, in order to escape persecution, enjoyed their own faith under the cover of the national and local worship, which was susceptible of a spiritual interpretation quite cognate to their own ideas. A similar case occurred in Spain, as the historical reader may remember, when so many Jews, in fear of the Inquisition, nominally became Roman Catholics. Accordingly, it is clear that the tone of the higher, the fashionable society in Alexandria was to believe that on some grander or philosophic theory all these religions differed in form, but were essentially the same; that all adored one Logos or Demiurge under different names, all employed the same arts to impose on the vulgar, and all were equally despicable to the real philosopher.
The worship of Serapis was abolished in the reign of Justinian, and of the former glory of the Serapeum nothing now remains, unless it be Pompey’s Pillar, which was said by some to have formed part of the Serapeum. According to Tacitus, sick persons were accustomed to pass a night in the Serapeum in order to regain their health. The colossal statue of Serapis was involved in the ruin of his temple and religion. It was believed that if an insult were offered to that statue, chaos would ensue. When a Christian soldier aimed his first blow, even the Christians trembled for the event. The victorious soldier, Gibbon tells us, repeated his blows; the huge idol was overthrown and broken in pieces, and the limbs of Serapis were ignominiously dragged through the streets of Alexandria. His mangled carcase was burnt in the amphitheatre amidst the shouts of the people, and many persons attributed their conversion to this discovery of the impotence of their great deity. A process something similar, attended with similar results, has more than once occurred in the history of missionary enterprise.
Deeply interesting is Alexandria from a historical point of view. It was founded by Alexander the Great more than 300 years before Christ. King Ptolemy, the first of that name, made it the capital of his kingdom, laid the foundations of its enormous library, and held out inducements to men of learning to come from all parts of the world to settle there. During the siege of the city by the Romans the library was burnt, but Antony afterwards gave the library a large collection of manuscripts, which formed the nucleus of a second library. In the early centuries of our era the town was torn with religious dissensions about the Jews and religious dogma. It was here the beautiful Hypatia, the fair heroine of Kingsley’s celebrated novel, was torn to pieces by an infuriated mob. St. Mark is said to have preached the Gospel here. It was here that there arose fierce discussions between Arius and Athanasius and Cyril. The Christians were persecuted with great severity by Decius, by Valerianus, and Diocletian. The city then declined in wealth and importance. Its population dwindled away. All fanatics, Christian or pagan, seem to me equally to blame.
It was at one time, as I have said, the headquarters of the worship of Serapis. The temple stood to the east of Alexandria, near Pompey’s Pillar. It is said to have been one of the most remarkable buildings in the world, and was filled with excellent statues and other works of art. It was destroyed by the Christian fanatic, Theophilus, during the reign of Theodosius II. Gibbon describes the prelate as ‘a bold, bad man, the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and blood.’ The library of the Serapeum is said to have contained about 400,000 manuscripts; at any rate, when it was burnt by the command of the Khalif Omar, the manuscripts were said to have been sufficiently numerous to heat the public baths for six months. Perhaps it is as well they were not all preserved. Of making many books there is no end, and many are the books published in this intelligent age, the burning of which would be no loss, but a gain, to the reading public. Among the famous men who studied in the original library of Alexandria were Strabo, Hipparchus, Archimedes, Plato, and Euclid.
Then came the blighting rule of the Turk, and the wise men moved away. They are all vanished – gone; in their place have come the Jew banker, the tradesman, and the merchant prince. The people amuse me. They wear the cotton tunic longer, and have a more Arabian cast of feature than the Jews. I see a funeral, with a long line of women following. I see a Turk at his devotions. He spreads a small carpet before him, then raises his arms above his head, muttering something all the while; then he bows his body so that the head touches the ground, and so he goes on.
In a little while we are off for Cairo, or Caire, as they call it here. On my way I get my first glimpse of one of the branches of the Nile, one of the largest, and certainly the most renowned, rivers in the world. In a few days I see more of the Nile, the overflow of which has not yet been dried up, and watch the people in the mud, far too soft to admit of ploughing, hoeing the land, rich and dark, and casting in the seed which is soon to bear an abundant harvest. On our way to Cairo we pass a fertile country, and see crops of sugarcane and rice and maize growing, and the blue-clad fellaheen at work. We pass several big towns, which seem thickly populated and full of life. The houses are everywhere the same – white, with flat roofs.
As originally founded, Alexandria was only equalled by Rome itself. It comprehended a circumference of fifteen miles, and was peopled by 300,000 free inhabitants, besides at least an equal number of slaves. The lucrative trade of Arabia and India flowed through its port to Rome and the provinces. No one lived an idle life. There was plenty of work for all, chiefly in glass-blowing, weaving of linen, and the manufacture of papyrus. The people, a mixture of all nations under the sun, were difficult to rule, and always ready for sedition. A transient scarcity of flesh or lentils, the neglect of a public salutation, a mistake of precedency in the public baths, or a religious dispute, such as the sacrilegious murder of a divine cat, was quite sufficient to create a bloody tumult.
Origen was a native of Alexandria. It was there, after his time, that the endless controversy as to the nature of the Three Persons in the Trinity originated – a controversy which lasted for centuries, which led to wars and massacres, and which finally separated the Churches of Greece and Rome. The Jews, who had settled in Alexandria by the invitation of the Ptolemies, carried the teaching of Plato into their religious speculations. In time Arius arose to proclaim his idea of the Logos, and Athanasius to oppose and protest, and ultimately triumph. The Homoousians prevailed, and the Homoiousians were branded and persecuted as heretics – enemies alike to God and man; yet Athanasius was driven from his diocese, and the famous St. George of Cappadocia reigned in his stead. The pagans of Alexandria, who still formed a numerous and discontented party, were easily persuaded to desert a Bishop whom they feared and esteemed. At a later time Cyril became the Archbishop, and distinguished his orthodox career by the animosity with which he expelled the Jews, and opposed the doctrine of Nestorius, who taught that there was a Divine and human Christ, and refused to worship the Virgin Mary as the mother of God.
‘He was a most expert logician,’ writes Zosimus, ‘but perverted his talents to evil powers, and had the audacity to preach what no one before him had ever suggested, namely, that the Son of God was made out of that which had no prior existence; that there was a period of time in which He existed not; that as possessing free will, He was capable of vice; and that He was created, not made.’ At the Council of Nicæa, held in the reign of Constantine, it was decided that Christ and the Father were of one and the same nature, and the doctrine of Arius, that Christ and God were only similar in nature, was declared heretical. Nevertheless, the Arians became more numerous than ever under the reign of Valens. As soon as the Christians of the West, writes Gibbon, had extricated themselves from the snares of the creed of Rimini, they happily relapsed into the slumber of orthodoxy, and the small remains of the Arian party that still subsisted in Sirmium or Milan might be considered as objects of contempt rather than resentment. But in the provinces of the East, from the Euxine to the extremity of Thebais, the strength and number of the hostile factions were equally balanced, and this equality, instead of recommending the counsels of peace, served only to perpetuate the horrors of religious war. The monks and bishops supported their arguments by invectives, and their invectives were sometimes followed by blows. Athanasius still reigned at Alexandria, but the thrones of Constantinople and Antioch were occupied by Arian prelates, and every episcopal vacancy was the occasion of a popular tumult. The Homoousians were fortified by the reconciliation of fifty-nine Macedonian or semi-Arian bishops, but their secret reluctance to embrace the Divinity of the Holy Ghost clouded the splendour of their triumph, and the declaration of Valens, who in the first years of his reign had imitated the impartial conduct of his brother, was an important victory on the side of Arianism. Well might Dr. Arnold write that it was an evil hour for the Church when Constantine connected Christianity with the State. It is really wonderful that real Christianity survived that fatal step when the sword of the civil magistrate was drawn in its support. It is hardly yet recognised that the religion of Jesus of Nazareth flourishes best when free from State patronage and control.
CHAPTER XIV
IN CAIRO
Covered with dust, parched with thirst, exhausted with hunger, burnt up with heat, I am landed at the charming Hôtel du Nil, in the gardens of which, filled up with American rocking-chairs, and trees bearing gorgeous red flowers and bananas and palms, and eucalyptus and banyan-trees all around, I realize as I have never done before something of the splendour and the wondrous beauty of the East. It must have been a fairy palace at one time or other, this Hôtel du Nil, with an enchanted garden. In the day it is intolerably hot, but the mornings and evenings are simply perfection. If there be an Elysium on earth, it is this. I feel inclined to pitch my tent here, and for ever bid adieu to my native land. The dinners are all that can be desired, the bedrooms large and lofty, and the servants, who, with the exception of the German waiters, are Soudanese – tall, white-robed, with a girdle round the middle – seem to me to be the best and most attentive in the world. There is nothing they will not do for me, and they are honest as the day. Apparently the dark boys have a good deal of the negro in their blood. I walk out to see the fine buildings and palaces which lie between me and the railway-station, but I cannot stand the bustle and confusion of the street, and soon beat a hasty retreat. The infirmities of old age follow me into this land of perpetual youth.
I walk outside the narrow and sombre lane which leads to the hotel in the quaint and ancient street Mousky. Let me attempt to describe it, and it will give the reader an accurate idea of Oriental life. The Mousky is the busiest street in all Cairo. Here meet Greek and Syrian, Anglo-Saxons, American or English, Armenian and Turk, Maronite and Druse, Italians, French, Russians, German, Dutch, and Belgian, and the vast army of residents, men, women, and children, of all shades and complexions, from the ebony-black Soudanese to the olive-tinted Arab, walk its length, penetrate its dark and confusing bazaars, and there is nothing more for you to see. Donkey drivers, who beset me at every step, and the guides on the look-out for their prey, are a perpetual nuisance, even though they assure me they like the English and are glad to see them here.
Crowded together are nooks and corners where native merchants ply their trades, and the gloom of some dark recess is lit by the glowing blue and scarlet and purple of Persian rugs, and the glare of polished and embossed brass. In the street the modern descendant of Tubal Cain is hard at work, and the tailor plies his needle, and the cigarette-maker rolls up his tobacco in its thin wrapper of paper, and the weaver bends over his loom, differing in nothing from that used by his forefathers a thousand years ago. Eatables and drinkables of strange flavour and colour are exposed for sale, and pedlars meet you at every turn uttering hoarse and discordant cries. There is quite a buzz of conversation, but I cannot understand a word. Why, I ask, did not Leibnitz carry out his grand idea and give us a universal language? It would have saved some of us a good deal of trouble. The pavement is too narrow for anyone to walk on, as the shopkeeper sits outside smoking his cigarette, while the customers also do the same, and the street is completely blocked. You are obliged to get into the narrow way where carriages and donkey and luggage waggons meet you at every step.
Women abound, all clad in black, with a black cloth over their faces, leaving only the eyes and nose visible, and a cheek of pallid skin. The nose is covered with a little gilt ornament, I suppose they call it, coming from the forehead, so that you really see nothing of it. Now and then you pass a coffee-house where smoking and gambling seem to be going on all day. In the course of my ramblings I came to a street lined with scribes on stones writing letters for their clients, and was struck with the firm, clear hand in which their letters are written – all in Arabic, of course. Every now and then a swell passes me in his carriage, with a running footman to clear the way with a white or black staff. I expect to be knocked down every minute. To walk the Mousky in peace and safety, you require to be as deaf as a post and to have a pair at least of good eyes at the back of your head.
Wearied, I return to the quiet and shady groves of the hotel, a large pile of buildings streaked red and yellow, with a grand bit of garden ground at the back, and a wooden tower, from which you may see all Cairo at a glance. All the houses are flat-roofed, and many of them look unfinished, though not in reality so. I sink into a rocking-chair, light my pipe, and talk of the future of Cairo. I say I want to visit a Coptic Church, the church which was held heretical by the Orthodox Church, as they were said to have held imperfect ideas of the dual nature of Christ. One gentleman tells me I had better keep away, as the priests will pick your pockets in the very church. He has 30 °Copts in his employ, and gives them all a very bad character. I ask as to the Khedive; everyone gives him a bad character, though he has discovered one wife is enough for any man. ‘He has the bad blood of his father and grandfather,’ says an Englishman to me. He has a thin veneer of civilization, but he is weak and ignorant, eaten up with ambition, and over head and ears in debt, though his allowance is £100,000 a year, a sum which should go far in a city where the price of labour is from two piastres to five, the piastre being valued at twopence halfpenny.
The people live exclusively on maize-corn, certainly not an expensive article of diet. The intelligent people are all in favour of the English Government, but, alas! the majority does not in Cairo, as I am told it does at home, represent the enlightened opinions of an intelligent people. I hear the shilly-shally policy of the English Government bitterly condemned. We are here, and must remain here. As it is, the people know not what to expect. There is no progress, but a terrible paralysis all over the city. ‘I like you English,’ said an intelligent native; ‘but you are here to-day and may be gone to-morrow, and then we who have adhered to England will all have our throats cut. We are like a boat between two shores, and know not whither we are going. The English must either stop or go.’ Our stay is to the lasting advantage of all the European nations.
We have wonderfully improved the condition of the fellaheen, who, according to all I hear, are not too thankful for the liberty we have gained for them. I met an intelligent old Greek, who deeply resented that we had abolished flogging – a little of it now and then, according to him, did the natives good. Manual labour is so cheap that it is used in every department. At the hotel I note that they bring the coals in in baskets, and in the railway-station I see a native employed in laying the dust, with a skin of water, which he carries on his back, using the neck as a water-spout.
Of all the cities I have known – and, like Ulysses, I am ever wandering with a hungry heart – I infinitely prefer Cairo, and am not surprised that it is becoming more and more the winter residence of the English aristocracy. It was a delight to live when I was there, and as I took my breakfast al fresco in the beautiful grounds of the Hôtel du Nil, with tropical plants in full flower all round me, a bright sun and unclouded blue sky above, the question whether life was worth living seemed to me an absurdity. But, alas! no one can look for perfect happiness – at any rate, on earth. In Cairo there are the flies, not so bad as I have seen them in Australia or America, but a terrible infliction nevertheless. One of my companions, Mr. Willans, the popular proprietor of the Leeds Daily Mercury, suffered much from them, and had for a time to give up reading and writing, and to wear coloured glasses, but I was let off more easily. In Cairo, for the first time, I realized what a luxury it was to have dates to eat. We at home, who buy dates at the grocer’s, have no idea how juicy the date of Cairo is. Then the heat is great, and walking far is out of the question. But what of that? Directly you turn into the street the donkey-boy comes up to offer you a ride; and the Cairo donkey is lively, large, and white, and well groomed, sure of foot, swift in speed, and beautiful to look at. An English coster’s moke is not to be named on the same day with the Cairo donkey, on which you can have a ride for a trifling sum.
Life and prosperity seem everywhere to prevail, and the station at Cairo conducts you at once into a fine city, with broad streets, well watered, and shaded by trees, handsome shops, fine hotels, beautiful gardens, and the inevitable statue of Mohammed Ali, who did so much to develop modern Egypt. Palaces of all kinds attract the eye, one of the finest of these being the residence of Lord Cromer. Cairo is distinctly a society place, though, perhaps, not so much so as Cannes or Nice, and living is dear, though cheaper than it used to be. French seems the language principally used, though the guides, who pester you at every corner, and the donkey-boys, who are equally persistent, have a confusing smattering of English. The resident English colony is chiefly composed of the diplomatic and Consular bodies, or of those connected with the different Consular departments, and of officers of the garrison. You meet many English soldiers whose appearance is creditable to the country, and amongst the birds of passage are many Americans. There are two good clubs for visitors – the Khediveal and the Turf, the latter chiefly supported by army officers. The theatre, where French plays and Italian operas are performed, is a very fine building. In the same neighbourhood is also a café chantant in the gardens. All day long, under the bright blue sky, the scene is very animated.
But the visitors, although a welcome addition, do not entirely make up Cairene society. The gaiety begins and is mainly kept up by the residents, especially the British civil and military, who are always most hospitable at the winter time of year. Cairo is no doubt a court and capital, the residence of the sovereign to whom diplomatists are accredited from all the civilized Powers. But it is also a British military station, and it owes much of its present liveliness to the British officers and civil servants.
It was the British garrison that established the Cairo Sporting Club, where good polo is played, and very fair cricket, ‘squash’ rackets, and lawn-tennis; where there are monthly race-meetings, and officers ride steeplechases on their own horses. The big lunches, the pleasant afternoon teas, the dances and flirtations so constantly in progress, are essentially British.
Out at Mena, under the shadow of the Sphinx, there is a golf-course, and the caddie is an Arab boy in a long blue bed-gown, and you can aim your ball from the putting-green straight at the Pyramid of Cheops. Out at Matarieh, just where Mr. Wilfrid Blunt lives the life of an Arab patriarch, under tents, surrounded by his flocks and herds, there is a training stable, and the British sporting subaltern keeps his ‘tit’ there, and comes out to give him his gallops at early dawn.
But it is as you get away from the broad streets of new Cairo, and plunge into the bazaars and the narrow streets, that you realize what a bewildering place old Cairo is. The city of Cairo covers an area of three square miles, and greatly exceeds the limit of the old walls. On the south stands the ancient citadel, on a rock, memorable for the massacre of the Mamelukes. Of the most perfect of the old gateways still remaining is the Gate of Victory. Above the archway is an Arabic inscription: ‘There is no god but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet.’ The streets are narrow and irregular, and badly paved, while the white houses, with their overhanging windows, are, at any rate, picturesque.
The bazaars are of all sorts: the leather-sellers have one, the carpet-dealers another, silk-merchants another, and everywhere purchaser and buyer seem to spend a great deal of time in smoking cigarettes. The gold bazaar is so narrow that three persons can scarcely pass; there, and at the silver bazaar, you see the artificers constantly at work. Coptic churches and mosques you meet everywhere. There is a good attendance at the English Church; there are also a Presbyterian Church, and two Roman Catholic churches. I saw the bishop of one of them, who was to preach, driving along in very grand style. The Wesleyans have also a chapel. The howling dervishes have also their sanctum, where they exhibit their peculiarly unpleasant powers. I decline to go and see them, as everyone tells me they are a fraud; and if I want to be deceived, there is the Egyptian conjuror always ready with his little tricks. He comes daily to the hotel to give a performance; also daily resort there the Egyptian minstrels, whose performances we all greatly applaud.
The English have a party paper called the Sphinx, which, however, I fancy has little influence in the formation of public opinion. In Alexandria a daily English paper is published, which reaches Cairo about eight in the evening, but which gives little general news, and is chiefly devoted to trade and commerce. It was with a heavy heart I left Cairo and its bright and busy life for the gray skies and bleak winds of my native land. My consolation is that we breed better men than they do in southern climes – a fact of which the Roman Cæsars were aware when they drew their best troops from Britain or Northern Gaul.