Cairo to Kisumu: Egypt—The Sudan—Kenya Colony
9781465682697
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
This volume on Egypt, Nubia, the Sudan, and Kenya Colony is based upon notes made during my several trips to this part of the world. At times the notes are published just as they came hot from my pen, taking you back, as it were, to the occasion on which they were written. Again they are modified somewhat to accord with present conditions. For instance, I made my first visit to Egypt as a boy, when Arabi Pasha was fomenting the rebellion that resulted in that country’s being taken over by the British. I narrowly escaped being in the bombardment of Alexandria and having a part in the wars of the Mahdi, which came a short time thereafter. Again, I was in Egypt when the British had brought order out of chaos, and put Tewfik Pasha on the throne as Khedive. I had then the talk with Tewfik, which I give from the notes I made when I returned from the palace, and I follow it with a description of my audience with his son and successor, Abbas Hilmi, sixteen years later. Now the British have given Egypt a nominal independence, and the Khedive has the title of King. In the Sudan I learned much of the Mahdi through my interview with Sir Francis Reginald Wingate, then the Governor General of the Sudan and Sirdar of the British army at Khartum, and later gained an insight into the relations of the British and the natives from Earl Cromer, whom I met at Cairo. These talks enable one to understand the Nationalist problems of the present and to appreciate some of the changes now going on. In Kenya Colony, which was known as British East Africa until after the World War, I was given especial favours by the English officials, and many of the plans that have since come to pass were spread out before me. I then tramped over the ground where Theodore Roosevelt made his hunting trips through the wilds, and went on into Uganda and to the source of the Nile. These travels have been made under all sorts of conditions, but with pen and camera hourly in hand. The talks about the Pyramids were written on the top and at the foot of old Cheops, those about the Nile in harness on the great Aswan Dam, and those on the Suez Canal either on that great waterway or on the Red Sea immediately thereafter. The matter thus partakes of the old and the new, and of the new based upon what I have seen of the old. If it be too personal in character and at times seems egotistic, I can only beg pardon by saying—the story is mine, and as such the speaker must hold his place in the front of the stage.
