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Birdseye Views of Far Lands

<h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2> <h3>The Playground of Moses—Egypt</h3> Next to Palestine, Egypt is perhaps the most interesting country on the globe to visit. For great antiquity and splendor no land surpasses this cradle of civilization. The science, art and architecture of the Egyptians is the marvel of leading men even to this day. The schools of Egypt produced the greatest characters of all ages before the coming of Christ. The wisdom of this ancient race as well as some of the engineering feats command the respect of these modern days. Take a map of Texas and California together, place a map of modern Egypt upon it and you will have enough left to make West Virginia. Ancient Egypt was only about one-fourth as large as modern Egypt. The greater portion of the land always has been and is today a desert. The thirteen million people practically live on the narrow valley of the Nile in a strip of territory from five to fifteen miles wide except down near the sea. Not far from Cairo is a place called Fayoum. The name means "A Thousand Days." A missionary told me how it got this name. When Joseph was an old man some of the younger officers wanted him deposed and they said that he was no longer fit to be at the head of affairs. They said that near the city was a great swamp and if he were capable he would have drained this land. They, of course, did not think this was possible, hence the suggestion. Putting their heads together they went to the old councillor and persuaded him to put the impossible task up to Joseph believing that his failure would be so ignominious that he would be deposed. At once Joseph called Egypt's greatest civil engineers, outlined his plan, took hundreds of laborers, went to work and in sixty days the swamp was completely drained. When the old adviser was taken out to see how well the work was done, he was so amazed that he exclaimed: "That would have been a mighty work for a thousand days," and it is called Fayoum to this day. Today the gardens and orchards of Fayoum are among the finest and most productive in all Egypt. No one can go over this land without walking in the footsteps of Moses, for Egypt was his playground. Of course I was shown the exact (?) spot where the little ark was found among the bullrushes in the River Nile. When Pharoah's daughter saw the little child she was touched and thus the destiny of a nation hung on the cry of a little child. Miriam, the sister of Moses appeared just in the nick of time and when the princess told her to call one of the Hebrew women her feet hardly touched the ground in her effort to get her mother to the spot. When the little hands were held out toward the joyous mother she was told to take the child and nurse him and thus she was paid wages for bringing up her own child upon whom the sentence of death had been pronounced. Not far from the spot mentioned above is the famous Nilometer that Moses looked upon many a time. As I went down the steps to get a nearer view of this measuring apparatus a panorama of the old days seemed to come before my eyes. The very life of the people depended upon the overflow of the Nile. June 17th was one of the great days for on that day almost as regular as the sunrise the upper Nile began to rise. A few days later an anxious crowd gathered to see the water mark on the Nilometer begin to come up. About July third the criers started on their daily rounds through the city announcing the measurement. If it was up to normal the people were happy and if not they were sad. When the rise was about twenty feet the "Completion" or "Abundance of the Nile" was announced and preparation was made for the opening of the canal which time was a regular jubilee among the people. All night long before this ceremony rockets were fired at intervals and in the morning at the appointed time the governor and those with him "cut the dam" and the inundation started. For more than a month the canals were full, and the fields were flooded and a thin coat of fine pulverized soil was spread over the ground like a carpet and when seed was placed in the ground it grew like in a hothouse. At Cairo the Nile would often rise twenty-five feet. During these days a great deal of irrigating is done all through the season. In some places ponderous machinery is used but to this day a large portion of work is done by hand. One of the most common sights along the Nile is the shadoof. This is a long pole with a weight on one end and a bucket on the other. Hour after hour half dressed men and women will dip up water and pour it into irrigation ditches. Great wooden waterwheels are also used and an ox or donkey or man or woman or a blinded camel will go round and round and you can hear this wooden wheel squeak for a mile. The little buckets on the waterwheel keep an almost endless stream flowing into the irrigation ditch. Another method is a sort of a paddle wheel on a windlass upon which a native will walk hour after hour. This turns a kind of an endless chain something like the old-fashioned cistern pump with which we are all familiar. In Egypt nearly everything is done by hand as man power is cheaper than machinery. I saw them grading a railroad with wheelbarrows, not even a cart or a donkey on the job. The great bridge across the Nile used to be opened by hand and boats pulled through by hand. It was a most interesting sight to the writer for a hundred or more men to get hold of a large rope and begin to heave-to. Soon the boat would begin to move slowly. As a rule people in Egypt are very poor. The plague of flies has not yet ceased in Egypt. Children are dirty and often diseased and the streets of the old portion of the city of Cairo literally swarm with them. While the people generally look quite hearty and well fed, yet beggars are everywhere. "Backsheesh" is about the first word the little child learns to speak and the last word an old beggar lisps before he dies. From noon until two-thirty or three o'clock shops are closed and thousands of people drop down where they are and go to sleep. Riding through old Cairo at this time of day my donkey had to pick his way, often stepping over people who were sound asleep. Many of the customs of Egyptians always have been different from those of other nations. Here women seldom pray to any god but men pray to all of them. Women carry burdens on their shoulders while men carry them on their heads. Women buy and sell in the market while their men sit at home and spin. The daughter instead of the son is supposed to care for the old folks when they become feeble and helpless. In kneading dough they use their feet while in handling mud they use their hands. Other peoples consider themselves above the beasts but the Egyptians made gods of the beasts and worshipped them. When an ancient enemy attacked Egypt, dogs, cats, and other beasts were driven at the head of the army and the Egyptians would surrender rather than run the risk of killing their sacred animals. The people in Egyptian cities do not eat their evening meal until from eight to ten at night. The restaurants have their tables in the streets and the people eat and shop at the same time. Watching the people at a large restaurant in Cairo, one night, I wrote down a list of the articles offered for sale while they were eating their evening meal. Here is the list: Alarm clocks, nuts, bread, lead pencils, fish, knives, cards, live chickens, cigars, cigarettes, cakes, eggs, mutton, matches, melons, watches, flowers, rugs, fancy boxes, stands, socks, perfumes, balloons, fruits of all kinds, slippers, canes, neckties, whips and guns. In addition to these venders, blind beggars and cripples, traveling musicians, gamblers with all kinds of devices, fortune tellers with wheels of fortune and many others were among the people all the time. After eating, many of the people drink wine and play cards until the early morning. All this time nearly everybody was talking at once and it was a regular circus to watch them. Several times hot words were passed but as a rule the people were in good humor and seemed to be having a good time. One of the much used and often abused beasts in Egypt is the camel. Riding a camel for the first time is quite an experience. The beast will lie down, but it is continually snarling and when it gets up you go through all kinds of motions. As I rode around the great pyramid and sphinx on one of these beasts the swing was not unlike that of a great rocking chair and while this ship of the desert did not seem to be going fast I noticed that the driver was running and the donkey alongside was on the gallop most of the time. At the time I was in Egypt one could purchase a fairly good camel for a little less than one hundred dollars. These beasts can live on next to nothing. They will strip a shrub of leaves and stems. A camel can eat and drink enough at one time to last it a week or ten days. The natives say that it lives on the fat of its hump. When a camel is weary from a long march across the desert the hump almost disappears and then as it eats its fill the hump becomes strong and hard again. It will carry a burden of from five to six hundred pounds. The city of Cairo is full of interesting sights. The streets of the better portion of the city are well paved and the buildings substantial and several stories high. The streets are sprinkled by hand. These men carry a skin of water—often half a barrel—and by means of a nozzle they throw it everywhere. There are many beautiful parks and drives in and about the city. The wonderful palms and other trees furnish shade and although the sun shines very hot it is quite cool under these trees. Runners go ahead of carriages containing prominent persons telling people to get out of the way for so and so is coming. Many people stop and look as they go by. An interesting sight was a wedding procession. It was headed by a band and an enclosed carriage with a black cloth over it contained the bride while the groom walked alongside holding on to the carriage. Following along behind on foot were the relatives and the rabble of the streets. My guide explained that when a wedding takes place a cloth is hung from the window and kept there for three days so one can go through the city and pick out the homes where they have had a wedding within that time. One of the lost arts is the Egyptian method of embalming the bodies of the dead. It seems that they believed that the spirit will return to the body in the course of time and they undertook to preserve the body as near perfect as possible until that time arrived. There are multiplied thousands of these mummies in Egypt. In the great museum in Cairo the mummy of the Pharoah who made the burdens of the enslaved Hebrews heavier can be seen today. Little did he think that in thousands of years the descendants of these people would spit in the face of his mummy, but they often do that very thing. In the old days it is said that they used to license robbery and govern it by law. The spoil was taken to the robber chief and the victim could go and claim his property and by paying a certain per cent of its value recover the property, after which the man who did the stealing could secure from the chief his portion of the proceeds. We laugh at this but how much worse is it than some of the things we license today? I had a most pleasant visit in the home of Dr. Ewing, a United Presbyterian missionary. The United Presbyterian people have done and are doing a most remarkable work in Egypt. A visit to their mission in Cairo was wonderfully interesting to say the least. I was presented with some coins there, the smallest of which was worth, at that time, one-sixteenth of a penny, but the missionaries assured me that those coins were seldom used except in church collections. <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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