Part 13

"Every day in the year a dozen great ships make the procession through the canal--the ninety miles of slow travelling which saves them the cost of circumnavigating the great continent of Africa. They pay well for it, and the owners of the canal shares wax fat. England controls the canal, the construction of which John Bull attempted in every manner to prevent. English ships bound from "home" to Bombay cut down the distance from 10,860 miles to 4,620 miles by taking the canal route, and the vast majority of ships which pay tolls to the canal company fly the British flag. Germany comes second, a long way after; Holland third, and the French, whose dreams of commercial empire cut the ditch, are fourth. The United States has not been represented in the canal in a decade by any commercial ship--only vessels of the navy and yachts of the Yankee millionaires show the Stars and Stripes to the Bedouins of the desert who bring their caravans from Mt. Sinai to the canal."

MOST IMPORTANT OF CANALS

"The tonnage of the Suez is not one-third as great as that of the Sault Ste. Marie Canal in the Great Lakes, but its importance to the commerce of the world is greater than that of any other passageway of the seas. Wherever there is a strait or a narrow passage through which commerce may go, there is sure to be a British flag flying, a British band playing, and a red-coated Tommy Atkins strutting about with a swagger stick. Suez is not an exception.

"Fourteen centuries before Christ, nearly 3,500 years ago, the Pharaoh Setee I., father of Rameses the Great, cut a canal fifty-seven miles long from a branch of the Nile delta to the bitter lakes, which are now part of the Suez Canal and which were then the northern extremity of the Gulf of Suez. That connected the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, and Egypt waxed great. But the nation decayed, and the sands of the desert filled up the ditch. Eight hundred years later the Pharaoh Necho undertook to dig the canal. More than a hundred thousand lives were sacrificed to the project, but it was abandoned when a priest predicted that its completion would cause Egypt to fall into the hands of a foreign usurper. A hundred years after Necho, the Persian Darius took up the work on the abandoned canal, but his engineers told him that its completion would cause a deluge, and he desisted. About three hundred years before Christ was born, Ptolemy Philadelphus constructed a lock-and-dam canal through which ships made the journey from one of the mouths of the Nile to the site of modern Suez. Continued wars interrupted commerce, and the locks and dams fell into decay, so that Cleopatra's navy was unable to escape to the Red Sea by canal. The Roman engineers later patched up the canal so that their galleys made their way from sea to sea; but when the Arabs came in A.D. 700 they found it choked up. Amrou, the Arab, cleared it out, but it was soon permitted to fill up again, and not until the great Napoleon reached Egypt was the canal project again considered. Napoleon abandoned the idea only because his engineers assured him that the level of the Mediterranean was thirty feet below that of the Red Sea. He then considered a lock-and-dam canal, but he evacuated Egypt before anything came of it. Of course, all those ancient canals were very narrow and shallow, and no boat now dignified with the business of carrying cargo for profit could have entered any one of them."

MEHEMET ALI WAS WARY

"Mehemet Ali, the great pasha who founded the present Egyptian khedivate, was urged to attempt the canal project, but he was wary. At last he pushed it aside, and listened to the Englishman, Robert Stephenson--the father of the railroad. Under Stephenson's supervision he built a railroad from Cairo to Suez, connecting with the line from Cairo to Alexandria. This formed the "great overland route" to India, and brought great trade and many rich tolls to the Egyptians.

"The time came when Said Pasha ruled in Cairo. To him came Ferdinand de Lesseps. Years before, while a clerk in the French consulate general in Cairo, De Lesseps dreamed the dream of the great canal. He was not an engineer, but he was a master diplomatist. He unfolded his plans to Said, who loved France and all Frenchmen, and met with encouragement. It was a magnificent scheme. The canal was not to cost Egypt one cent, but was to pay fifteen per cent. of its receipts to the Egyptian government, and at the expiration of ninety-nine years was to become the absolute property of Egypt. On such terms the concession was given to De Lesseps in 1856.

"Then De Lesseps went forth to get the money. France had just come out of the Crimean War and could not advance money for ventures. England was opposed to a canal that would let anybody have a chance at India, and the English government did everything possible to prevent the Frenchman from obtaining funds. He failed in Europe, for he could not get enough even for a survey of the canal. Nothing daunted, he went back to Egypt and borrowed money enough from Said to survey the canal and to exploit it through Europe. Then came much planning and more concessions, and much stock jobbing; but by 1860 the French company was again without money. Again the appeal was made to Said, and not without avail; for he subscribed for more than one-third or the total capital stock and promised to advance money for the construction work--and all for a project that was not to cost Egypt anything. That was the beginning of Egypt's bondage to the money lenders of Europe, for Said had to borrow the money he gave to the canal."

ISMAIL PASHA WAS EASY

"In 1863 the magnificently extravagant Ismail Pasha came to the throne of Mehemet Ali. He burned with ambition to make himself the greatest ruler in the world, and the canal was a darling of his heart. He was the ready and willing victim of the loan sharks of Europe, and he would sign anything in the way of an obligation if there was a little yellow gold in sight.

"Meanwhile the canal was progressing slowly. Ismail ordered the Egyptian peasants to do the work under the ancient corvee system. Every three months 25,000 drafted fellaheen went to the big ditch to dig. Every three months a miserable remnant of the preceding 25,000 left the dead bodies of their comrades beneath the dump heaps.

"The Suez Canal was dug for the most part by those poor creatures who scooped up the sand and dirt with their bare hands and carried it up the steep banks to the dumps in palm-leaf baskets of their own making. Task masters with cruel whips of hippopotamus hide punished the sick and the fainting, as well as the lazy. There were no sanitary precautions, and the men died by the thousands.

"This horrible condition of affairs aroused the indignation of John Bull, who protested to the sultan. The sultan ordered the employment of fellaheen labor to be stopped. Then De Lesseps and the canal ring descended upon Ismail and held him responsible for damages. The case was left to the arbitration of Napoleon III., who decided for the canal ring, and Ismail was forced to pay a fine of nearly $10,000,000 because his titular sovereign lord had ordered that Ismail's subjects should not be murdered in the canal ditch. Each month a new obligation was fastened upon suffering Egypt. Finally, when the canal was completed, Ismail gave a great fete to celebrate its opening. Few festivals have been so magnificent, none so extravagant. The celebration cost $21,000,000. Verdi wrote the opera Aida to order that Ismail might give a box party one evening, and an opera house was built especially for that purpose."

ENGLAND IN CONTROL

"But Ismail had signed too many notes of hand. The day of reckoning came. Ismail sold his canal shares to the English government, and by their purchase Benjamin Disraeli gave the British empire dominion over the traffic between the East and the West. It was a bold stroke, and it brought to an end the commercial aspirations of the French of the Second Empire. The canal company still has its chief offices in Paris, its clerks speak French, and its tolls are charged in francs, but otherwise it is English.

"Ismail was dethroned and died in exile, his magnificence forgotten. De Lesseps ventured on another canal project, was plunged into disgrace, and died a mental wreck. Egypt, which once levied toll on all the commerce passing between Orient and Occident, now watches the trade ships pass by. The digging of the canal was the greatest blow ever given to Egyptian commerce. But the losses of Ismail and De Lesseps and Egypt make up the gain of the civilized world.

"Opened just forty years ago, its importance has increased with every year, and its revenues are expanding each month. It cost $100,000,000, half of which was spent in bribes and excessive discounts. With modern machinery, such as is being used at Panama, it could have been built for one-quarter as much. As an engineering problem it is to the Panama Canal as a boy's toy block house to a forty-story skyscraper. How it will compare with Panama as an avenue of commerce is a question to which Americans anxiously await the answer."

The jubilee of the Suez Canal, work on which commenced in 1859, took place on April 25, 1909. When I passed through in 1874 its depth was about twenty-six feet; the present depth is about thirty-two and a half feet, and improvements are now going on which will bring it to thirty-four feet. The original width was seventy-one feet on the bottom, and this has been gradually increased until at present the bottom width is ninety-seven and a half feet. In 1870 there passed through the canal four hundred and eighty-six ships, whose gross tonnage was 654,914. Last year 3,795 ships used the canal, and their total tonnage was over 19,000,000. Truly this is one of the world's greatest conveniences!

These reminiscences take me back again to Alexandria, as it was there that an original seaboard bank was founded. Its first president was Katchaskatchkan, a nephew of King Ram's. The old man saw to it that all the "squeeze" from the corn crop money was deposited here and that it held the margins on Joseph's grain corner. "Katch" broke his neck by falling into the wheat pit, but the incident was soon forgotten in the advancing prosperity of the bank. The place is in ruins, but we saw the "paying teller's gun," which was a decorated club with spikes on it; it lay unnoticed in a nook in the big amalgamated copper vault, covered with papyrus books and records of the bank. Some of the old past due notes on the shelves were still drawing interest and you could hear it tick like the clanking cogs when a ferry boat makes her landing. The writer fairly shudders at what the interest on those notes would now amount to, computed at five per cent. (the prevailing rate paid for call loans in that historic corner), remembering that the interest on a penny compounded at this rate since the dawn of the Christian era would now represent fourteen millions of globes of eighteen-karat gold, each globe the size of our earth! We could not help philosophizing on the change which had taken place in banking principles and methods since those old days; and the whole inspection was very interesting.

I am reluctant to leave Egypt without saying a word about the "teep," as this land is the very home, the embodiment--the Gibraltar, so to speak, of the wide-open palm for services rendered--or even when they are not rendered. Egypt is not the only place, however, of which this can be said; there are others. But no matter where the dear American tourist lands he "gets it" both coming and going, and the "neck" is usually the place where it first attracts his attention. It is not a new thing, by any means, for the Greeks suffered more from it than we ever have. They called it "gifts," and if a man didn't give, why, he got nothing, just as he gets nothing to-day in "Del's" if he tries to escape with a glad smile instead of the regulation tariff. Usually, as we all know, the rough time is at the reckoning and the departure, if you haven't done the handsome. The waiter, if he knows his business, makes you feel your cheapness if you attempt to "do" him with an affable "Good-night," instead of the real thing. The change is so arranged for you that you may have a wide choice of coins, but if that scheme misses fire, there are still left the overcoat and the hat. The man who can pass through these ordeals with his nerve unfrayed and look through the waiter as if he were a pane of glass, would never have turned a hair if placed in front at the charge of Balaclava. I remember writing a menu card for a dinner once, and when I came to the sweetbread course it was shown that if you hadn't a coin you must still do something. Lucullus was waiting on the bank of the river Styx for his turn on Charon's ferryboat, and of course, being a shade, he had no money in his clothes; but this is what was said:

When Lucullus got on Charon's skiff He didn't have a cent; So he handed out a sweetbread And on the boat he went.

This was as straight a tip as was ever given to a waiter or at a horse-race. There was nothing between Lucullus and the "bread line" except his last sweetbread; yet as a gentleman he gave it up to the ferryman rather than lose his poise when leaving the earth.

But to return to the twentieth century, about four thousand years since the incident just related occurred: we have a variety of names for the same thing. It is pour boire in France; tip in England; macaroni "for the crew" in Italy; sugar-cane "for the donkey" on the Nile; bakshish in Africa; "bakshish" the first word the traveler hears when he gets there, "bakshish" the last when he is leaving. Why, they say the Sphinx herself tears her hair and plaintively wails when the sun has set, "Bakshish! Bakshish!! Bakshish!!!" And the only reason she does not hold out her hands for it is that she hasn't any.

Sailing from Alexandria we headed for the Straits of Messina and reached them the day following, taking a passing look at Etna and Stromboli. Messina was not so badly damaged, we thought, as had been reported, and it will undoubtedly be rebuilt. Then we steamed past Capri and made fast to the wharf at Naples.

ITALY

NAPLES

After strolling round Naples for a couple of days we took the train for Rome.

On one of these strolls I saw what seemed to me a curious funeral. There were six horses with nodding plumes, hung with black robes, and driven in three spans by a coachman who was a wonder in himself. He wore a hat with an enormous yellow cockade; a purple coat; patent leather Hessian boots, with tassels; green tights showing the shape of his fine calves (of which he was evidently very proud), and on his whip he carried many silk ribbon bows. "Beau Brummel" might have had a coachman like him--but I doubt it. Through a pane of glass might have been seen, thoroughly ornamented and painted for public inspection, the face of the principal whom these proceedings interested no more. The hearse sported a forest of plumes also, and behind it stalked six stalwart, high-class, professional mourners, likewise in green tights and Tower-of-London hats, all members of the Pallbearers' International Union (purple card), with flowing beards and curling moustaches--probably the only men on earth whom money causes to weep and pluck their beards in pretended sorrow when in the throes of their commercial emotion. If paid enough money they do not hesitate to use the onion freely to produce the real thing in tears. Next followed a dozen of mere puling mutes, of no caste or distinction whatever but that lent by a big brass badge on the breast of each. Then came four rickety carriages of the Columbus era; they hadn't a soul in them, but their cloth upholstered seats had been whitewashed with white lead and showed by many cracks the risk any live human would take in entering the vehicles. There were no relatives of the dead present--and you could not blame them. The question arose, What is the meaning of it all? It seemed as though they had consigned the man to the grave at the least expense with no bother--a curious form of burial from our standpoint; it was strictly professional.