CAIRO—HELIOPOLIS—FELLAHEEN.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5456, 21 September 1878, Page 1 (Supplement)

CAIRO—HELIOPOLIS —FELLAHEEN.

By an Old New Zealand Colonist.

* (From Round the - World Leisurely.) It 18 Christmas Day, 1875. I ara staying at Shepheard's Hotel, Cairo. I arrived from Alexandria yesterday, by rail, in four-and-a-half hours. How different to old England is the climate here at the. same time of the year \ Now, while I am writing under the wide verandah of the ho'tel, the sky is serenely clear, the sun is shining brightly, and the air is pleasantly cool, the streets are swarming with gay-turbaned Arabs and red-fezzed. Italians, Greeks, Turks, Maltese, inquisitive Yankees, mccuiial Frenchmen, stolid Englishmen, and sedate Germans. Rain has been falling during the last few days in Cairo, and the now ankle deep mud in the narrow streets will soon be'changed to legdeep in dust. How a portion of. Cairo is changed since I saw it eleven years ago ! The then open space in front of Shepheard’s Hotel is now built over with stone houses and colonnades, after the style of the Rue Rivoli in Paris. The footpaths of the new parts, too, are paved, though the flags lie unevenly. Then there are the new beautiful park-like gardens, called the Esbchce • yah, to enter which twopence-half penny is charged. In the gardens are a theatre and concert cafds, wheie I heard a native band playing dolorous music, and saw, Arab women with yeamaebs; covering parts of their faces, and engaged smoking through'tubes with the ends in glass vases; All this is of mushroom growth, and looks unnatural in an oriental city. Cairo contains 370,000'p r eople,‘*of whom 260,000 are Moslems, Muslims, Mohammedan or Mussulmen—for they all mean the same sort of person, Cairo is a walled town (two .miles by three) enclosing. a maze—a great labyrinth of narrow streets and a few open spaces. In Cairo are persons of all nations, coins of all realms, and languages of all countries. There is also an opera house, with an Italian subsidized by the wily ruler of Egypt—the Khedive, who is partial to Western ideas, which he carries out with borrowed Western money. Gambling houses X found to be plentiful in Cairo. Two of them—where roulette was played-—were fitted up magnificently, with soft carpets, gilded ornaments, silvered glass, Venetian mirrors, and inlaid furniture in a handsome suite of apartments. The proprietor of one, an American citizen, informed me he intended to malce Cairo the rival of Manaco. In the first-class gambling bouses not less than five francs are staked on a game; in the secondclass as low as one franc can be played for. So temptation to ruin is laid for all classes, in order to procure fortunes for reckless adventurers, and make Cairo attractive to knaves and to fast and foolish men from all parts of the world.

I have been in many foreign cities, but I know of no people that presents such strange and complete contrasts to European civilization, as regards costumes, manners, industrial occupations, and customs, as the people in the streets of old Cairo. In a few hours, inastroll through the old city and its suburbs, I noticed: —.camels loaded with rope-made crates full of chaff, and led and driven by Nubians, black as niggers. Carts driven by fellahs (Egyptian laborers) attired in blue cotton shirts, and with coarse woollen skull-caps on their heads. Women carrying their children astride one of their shoulders, and with their faces towards the heads of their mothers. Water carriers—old men with goat-skin water-bags slung diagonally across their shoulders. Camels bearing great bundles of wood en their backs. Women with big bundles of sticks on their'heads. Myself taking notes on the back of a donkey, English carriages drawn by small Arab horses. Four-wheeled waggons drawn by donkeys. Tall Arab policemen in* blue cloth' uniform with gilt buttons, red fezzes on their heads and straight swords by their sides. A girl, with a gold-looking bracelet on her arm, carrying a large basket of twigs to light the family fire with. Two Arabs by the road side playing a queer game by making strange marks on the sand laid on a piece of old sacking. Women carrying large earthenware jars, filled with water, on their heads. Two Turkish domestics, dressed in white, throwing a pailful of slops out of the window of the new and grand Khedive’s Hotel on to the open ground at the back of it. My ragged donkey boy running after me, and prodding my donkey with a pointed stick, and crying out, ha ! ha ! ha ! that is, go on 1 A fat and stout Mahommedau in a dark stiff gown, turban and pointed shoes with toes turning upwards, and ambling along on a cream-colored donkey with a red saddle. Blocks of stone tied to the backs of camels. Black and white crows. I also saw an Arab soldier seized by the native policeman in the fields for stealing sugar-canes. Next came a European carriage, and perched behind it was a strapping Arab footman dressed in a white shirt and baggy purple trousers, with his legs extended so that his two feet rested on the ends of the two springs at the back of the vehicle. Here comes the Pasha’s son in the finest make of English brougham, and after him follows a similar carriage containing two Indies of the harem, wearing snow-white gauzy vestments, and looking voluptuous. Next I pass a'grand cafd, with a fine fountain of five j ets of water outside it, and outside it was a band of young and good looking Germans and Bohemians, female musicians, playing selections from favorite operas. There goes the omnipresent donkey, he is laden with panniers - of dried camel and cow-dung for fuel: other donkeys follow, laden with baskets of leeks, and these two combined, with the uspal want of cleanliness, produce that smell which the Arab emits, and which offers an offensive contrast to the sensesas compared with the perfumes of Arabia. Who and what is that tall, thick, muscular and well made black man, with very white teeth, red lips, red cap, with black tassel, and robed in a black dpose-fitting suit of clothes 1 I asked of a fellow European at one of the railway stations, and was told he was a Nubian, and a ennuch, and like the rest of his peculiar vocation he was reputed to bo wealthy. I entered a bazaar. Ah, I thought, here is the place to see t real oriental products, and oriental manners in’their purity. True, their manners were there; there was also truly Turkish sedateness, and the trousers were

baggy, and the head was covered with the parti-colored turban or fez. The vendor of fancy ware*, jewellry and rich silks, looked solemn, his face was expressionless, and his maimer the perfection of taciturnity. I looked at the rich -rare, and varied stock of goods, but I must admit that T felt afraid to buy. The curios might have been manufactured at Birmingham. And os "for' the rest—Paris and London might have supplied a considerable quantity of them. No doubt many of the articles were of genuine oriental workmanship, bub nob being au expert, I was at a disadvantage, and therefore full of doubt, so I declined to purchase. Such a mixture of Orientalism and Europeanism, of Eastern and Western civilization, can only bo found at Cairo. Cairo is the city of, contrasts. I saw many beautiful palaces. I was told that twenty of them belonged to the Khedive, and that in due course a palace was provided for every son. What a contrast is this to the dark mud hovels of the Fellaheen (Egyptian peasantry) ? If the prince has his sumptuous palace, why should not the people who support him and create his wealth have comfortable cottages ; but Egypt is full of these anomalies, and travellers tell -. us the people are contented, are well fed, and dp not complain. I believe the latter. They are very tractable, and remarkable for their obedient demeanor. AU feelings of independence and spirit are beaten out of them, .and they became a servile race. Rulers cannot do this to people in colder climates. Does then the intense heat of the sun in tropical zones enervate body and mind, and curtail that vigor and energetic application to work which, distinguishes European nations? I believe it does. At all events I was resolved, in a limited degree, to see and judge as to the condition of,the peasantry iu this hud of plenteous fertility.

With this view on my mind, I hired a dragoman. His name was Achmet, a sturdy and knowing Arab, a true follower of the Prophet Mahomet, and who had recommendations from English gentlemen with whom he had travelled in Palestine, and up the Nile. He was honest and spoke a little English ; but X never could depend on his veracity when I asked him questions about the condition of his countrymen. He invariably made them better off than I found them to be in the short time 1 could devote to that purpose. . To enable me to see the cultivated country—the Land of Goshen:—near at baud, I hired a carriage, and started for Heliopolis by the Shoobra road. This road or suburban avenue is four miles in length, and is to Cairo what the fashionable drive in Hyde Park is to London. It is the pleasantest drive out of Cairo. Here were green fields, there were plots of green clover ; now the macadamized road is lined with the beautiful lebhehh (an acacia tree), next we drive between lemon-tree hedges enclosing gardens in which are numerous orange trees displaying their tempting fruit ; houses, villas, and occasionally a palace, line the road, which is thronged with a lively assemblage of people—some on foot, others on horseback, many in carriages, numbers on onkeys, and a motley crowd they form—exhibiting the extremes of fashion, wealth, poverty, and parti-colored garments. After an hour and a hall's drive we arrived at mounds and ridges ef earth, intermixed with pottery. This was the site of the oldest of all known ancient cities—Heliopolis, the “ abode of the sun,” which the word means... Heliopolis is mentioned in scripture as the city of “ On.” In it was the famous Temple of Learning to which the learned men of adjacent countries travelled to study. Heliopolis was famous as a city before the city of Alexandria was in existence, yet Alexandria was founded 323 years before the birth of Christ. “Is this then the site of the most ancient learning in the world, and to which the ancient Greeks came to study? And is there nothing left to record its greatness, its grandeur, and its antiquity 1” I asked myself. I looked around me and answered my own question. “Yes, there is one landmark.” It is a solitary one, but appears all the grander for its isolation. There it stands, pointing to the skies, and consisting of one gigantic simple piece of stone, a rose-red colored granite monolith, without a fracture in it, and originally brought a distance of 750 miles from the plade where it was quarried, at Syene, on the borders of Nubia. It is 68 feet in height, and is a little over 0 feet square at the base or pavement, which is now 6 feet below the present surface of the alluvial ground deposited by the Nile. What is most remarkable competent authorities have computed its age to be nearly 5000 years. It was erecte'i in the reign of Osirtaaeu X. It is therefore the oldest obelisk in • the world, and perhaps as old as the Pyramids of Geezeb, and older than any other column or part of a building that we know of. Erasmus Wilson (with the Khedive), the donor of Cleopatra's Needle to London, says, that beside obelisk named above, there were five other obelisks standing in front of the temple of On. Of these, one is at Constantinople, one in Rome, one at Alexandria, one is accounted for, and the remaining one is the English one, 3500 years old, which I have stated I saw lying in a ditch in Alexandria in 1875. This obelisk met with strange adventures in its passage from Alexandria to London in October, 1877. The cylindrical pontoon which conveyed it was very near foundering while being towed across the Bay of Biscay by a large steamer in a fearful hurricane. In fact the steamer —to save herself—had to cast off the pontoon and let her drift away and sink or swim. Thus was Cleopatra's Needle, or rather the obelisk of Thothmes 111., 68£ feet long, and weighing 186 tons, abandoned to the mercy of the winds and the waves. Many persons thought it had found a final resting place at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean ; but fortunately a strange steamer picked up the pontoon, found her “ tight as a bottle,” and towed her into the Bay of Ferrol. i On the 13th of February, 1878, the pontoon, or cylinder-ship as it was called, was towed from Ferrol, in tolerably fine weather, and arrived in the river Thames on the 21st, having accomplished the voyage in six days and eight hours. This great undertaking originated and was accomplished in this way ; Mr. John Dixon, C.E., contracted with Professor Erasmus Wilson to convey the obelisk from Alexandria to London, and “ set it up safely on the Thames Embankment,” for the sum of £IO,OOO ; but if he failed he was to receive nothing, on the principle of “no cure no pay.” Mr. Dixon built au iron cylinder round the obelisk, as it lay 100 yards from the sea, then rolled it into the sea, fitted it for the voyage, and it was towed to England as stated above. I saw it safely moored in the Thames, fronting the Houses of Parliament ; thus London owes this very ancient relic of Egyptian greatness to the enthusiasm of a skilful engineer, and the liberality of an eminent surgeon. The site it is to be erected on is. at the Adelphi stairs, Thames Embankment, and situated between Charing Cross and Waterloo bridges, where it can be seen from the river as well as the road. But to return to the obalisk,* at Heliopolis X may say. At three feet from the ground I measured the west side of the obelisk, and found it to be 6ft/ lib. wide; the south 6ft.; the east 6ft. liu., and the north sft. 10in. It stands on a little green fiat of rich alluvial land, and is encompassed by heaps and ridges of earth, and debris of ancient ruius. At 15ffc. from the ground, as it tapers upwards, it still retains much of its ancient polish, and the sharpness of its four angles and hieroglyphics. On the central parts of its four sides, sand has blown, and adheres to them like honey-combed‘soil, IJin. in thickness.

To look upon the purlomed obelisks at Alexandria, Rome, Paris, and one now in London, is something ; but to see the one at Heliopolis surpasses all conception, for one looks on the oldest column on the face of the globe, and which still stands where its royal builder placed it fifty centuries ago. Regardless of this fact, there are many who will look at this mammoth pillar of antiquity, and exclaim, “ Oh, it is only an old stone !” So it is, but it is also an everlasting and incomparable work of art and skill, and of its kind, with all our boasted engineering attainments, we have nothing to equal it. It was hewn from its quarry, shaped, polished, and conveyed hundreds of miles, and erected when the arts and sciences were in their infancy, and was a mute sentinel and, in its way, kept watch before Julius Cicsar invaded Britain—before Alexander conquered the world—before Rome was founded, and before Greece was known.

< On the site of ancient Heliopolis stands a village of Nile-mud houses, built of dried mud, and about nine feet in height. Here live some of the peasants, the fellaheen or farm laborers of Egypt. Water is the life of Egypt, so wells and water-wheels abound. At this village I noticed a very large one. The wheel was ten feet in diameter, with earthenware buckets rising and falling in regular succession, and kept going by an ox blinded with a sack. The whole apparatus was of wood, and apparently of a very ancient and primitive construction. •

I had a great desire to see inside an Egyptian farmhouse,' and the family arrangements

* Obelisk is from the Greek word obcliskos, meaning bodkin, hence our English word " needle," ap plied to the obelisk.

thereof. This I found was a somewhat diffi-

cult matter to accomplish. The fellaheen are,! inclined to resent European intrusion on their domestic privacy. I conferred with my dragoman, Achmet; he did not give me much encouragement. I argued with him, that did. not prevail; I used persuasion, that was of no use ; at last I tried the most convincing of all Egyptian arguments, X promised backsheesh—; and he was convinced I : . The Egyptian farmhouse or cottage I was to examine was close at hand. I entered it with the owner or head man, and another fellah, by a doorway of the ordinary shape and size. His wife—his only one—a comely person, and of course dark skinned, hid herself as soon as she saw me. She wore the usual Mahomedan covering, to her face, the yetmash, and was dressed in the ordinary dark cottoir

gown, t The first room on my left was a store-room, and about eight feet square; the walls were, twelve inches thick, and constructed-of brown tenacious earth, that is, the ordinary alluvial soil; the floor was formed of the same material, 'and the roof consisted of maize-straw, loosely laid on maize stalks and extending horizontally, from wall to wall. From thin room a passage, four feet wide, and with a ceiling or roof made with slight bundles of maize-straw, led to the kitchen, which was very large, and contained a cow, a buffalo, a camel, three geese, five sheep, one wife, and six duaky children—three boys and three girls. A thin layer of maize stalks roughly laid on poles formed a sort of internal verandah on the four insides of this lai*ge apartment, which was made to serve as kitchen, stable.

cow-house, sheep'pen, camel-shed, and a place for the geese. The centre of this generalabode was open to the sky, and there on the

mud floor was a fireplace. A copper vase-, shaped kettle, a copper vessel, three or four. , earthenware bowls and bottles formed the kitchen utensils. Three stones on the ground arranged in the shape of a triangle raised the four-gallon, copper kettle from the earth so that the -fire under it might bum freely. While talking. here with the head-man (not a sheik-el-beled) and his neighbor, through \ Achmet, who acted as interpreter, the wife of the former and the wife of his friend stole into the kitchen, with unveiled faces, and set to work grinding corn in a corner of the room. By this time the whole family had banished their shyness and fear of a white face, and seemed quite willing to show me anything and explain any thing, most probably on account of the promised-backsheesh. In the corner sat the two brown wives, each adorned with two brass wire bracelets, and alternately grinding at the mill. The mi was au odd-looking affair. It consisted of a large and heavy lower stone about 18 inches in diameter, and a thin fiat top stone, fitted into a sunk part of the lower one, and revolving round an iron pin fixed in the centre of the under or base stone, The upper stone was turned by, means of a piece of upright stick, inserted in a hole made in one side of it, the flour escaped through a hole or slit at the back , of tile bottom stone, which was hollow underneath, and had a hole in the front out of which the flour was taken. The wives explained the nature of the mill, and both women and men smiled and talked in an agreeable way. They seemed contented and absolutely resigned to', their lowly and toiling position in life, for bitter experience had taught them that they had nothing better to expect in this world. From the kitebeu I was conducted to what I will term the bedroom. It was the family . bedroom. The ceiling consisted of maize . stalks plastered over on the outside with mud; It was only about 7 feet high and 10 feet square. On the one side of this little hovel and extending the whole length of it was a high bank of earth about seven feet wide. This • was the family bed, and being ten feet one way and seven feet the other, would afford sleep- :

ing space for a man, his wife, =»nd six or seven children. But, strange to say, this was not the ouly use it was put to, for in the front side of this solid bank of earth, three feet high, were two circular holes about a foot in diameter.- One of these holes was half way up the bank, and penetrated it several feet. The other was closo to the floor. The lower one, I was told, was the fire-place, the upper one for baking their thin girdle-cakes. I tasted the cakes, and found them soft, sour, and not very palatable. I thought this bank a very useful elevation of earth, for it served as a family oven as well as a family bed.

As regards the rest of this human habitation there were no windows, and only Uilf doors at the sleeping places, and as to furniture, &c., I have already enumerated it; for there were no tables, chairs, Waives, forks, or plates. Towards the latter part of my visit, the natives from the village came in and began to crowd about me, as .news of a pale-

faced strsuger’a arrival bad reached them,; but they were civil, and only curious to see what was going on. The head-man was civil and obliging to the end of my inquiries. I found the inside of the house close and offensive, and the flies troublesome, •

Corn stalk and dried animal dung appeared to be the principal fuel for their very limited cooking operations, and the climate being generally very warm and dry, inore was not wanted.

A piece of matting to lie on was the only bedding to their bed of raised mother earth,, As for covering, they slept in their clothes and wanted none. In summer, in the very hot weather, they slept in the outer apartments on the bare ground. The general food of the ordinary fellaheen, at the best, consists of bread and beaus varied with radishes, onions, and a kind of cheese they make. Now and then they indulge in a little vinegar and oil I should say the cost of t

board and lodgings to the fellah is lower than that of any other mati, not excepting the uncivilised Maori in his pa in New Zealand, and there is the instinct of manliness, free-lom, and independence about the uliei Vvkicu the former does not possess. The fellaheen toils from sunrise to sunset, excepting a short rest he takes at midday, eats bread aud vegetables,' drinks Nile water, dresses in a cotton or coarse woollen gown, and shelters himself in a mud hovel. He pays, in annual taxes, from 30s. to 355. foe each feddan (acre) be holds, which all goes to support a corrupt Government, composed of officials and a reigning house of Turkish extraction. Egypt proper contains a population of five millions. It has. also five million acres of the richest of land, yielding two aud three crops in a year. Thus there is about one soul to every acre of fertile land ; but out of the total five millions, the Khedive has succeeded in “gradually compelling the fellahs throughout Egypt to s*ll to him the best of their land at nominal prices, a process by which he has already acquired over a million of acres.’The fellaheen are docile, servile, patient, and incessant toilers, and if they are deceitfully cunning, ages upon ages of tyranny have helped to make them so. It is the old, the very old story over, again. Long continued oppression begets servility, and servility is the father of cruelty, falsehood, and cowardice.

The ordinary Arab men and women about Cairo are a fine comely race, the men tall, well made, and athletic. Though most of them go about without shoes or stocking*, yet in other respects they are decently dressed in long serge or cotton gowns (not unlike a barrister's gown), some white, others blue, and many black, and for head gear they have the turban or skull-cap.- Some of them wear a sort of underbody or shirt. Their civility is carried to the extreme, their begging is a nuisance, and they are dirty in their persons. Their religion enjoins them to practise frequent ablutions, and they comply with this in-

junction by daily washing, not their persons, but their bauds and feet, and this often in dirty water. In sonny spots, in a public square, I have seen some of the begging fraternity lying about and picking the vermin off their clothes. The richer class, of course, are more cleanly in their habits, and in their dress well and gaily attired.

In returning from Heliopolis, I was shown the “Virgin’s Tree,” under which the Holy Family are said to have sat and rested after the flight into Egypt. The tree I found to be a sycamore of very large dimensions and venerable aspect. The jagged branches and dilapidated appearance, while presenting serious signs of decay, also gave evidence of its extreme old age.