But They Are Tolerably Safe Guides When
Groping Your Way Through The Mind Of Man In His So-Called Natural
State, A Being Of Impulse, In That Chrysalis Condition Of Mental
Development Which Is Rather Instinct Than Reason.
Before my departure, however, there was much to be done.
The land of the Pharaohs is becoming civilised, and unpleasantly so:
nothing can be more uncomfortable than its present middle state,
between barbarism and the reverse. The prohibition against carrying
arms is rigid as in Italy; all "violence" is violently denounced; and
beheading
[p.18]being deemed cruel, the most atrocious crimes, as well as those
small political offences, which in the days of the Mamluks would have
led to a beyship or a bow-string, receive fourfold punishment by
deportation to Fayzoghlu, the local Cayenne. If you order your peasant
to be flogged, his friends gather in threatening hundreds at your
gates; when you curse your boatman, he complains to your consul; the
dragomans afflict you with strange wild notions about honesty; a
Government order prevents you from using vituperative language to the
"natives" in general; and the very donkey boys are becoming cognisant
of the right of man to remain unbastinadoed. Still the old leaven
remains behind: here, as elsewhere in the "Morning-land," you cannot
hold your own without employing the voie de fait. The passport system,
now dying out of Europe, has sprung up, or rather has revived, in
Egypt, with peculiar vigour.[FN#4] Its good effects claim for it our
respect; still we cannot but lament its inconvenience.
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