These are the proteges which bring the British nation into
disrepute at Cairo. And Italians are known chiefly as "istruttori" and
"distruttori"[FN#36]-doctors, druggists, and pedagogues.
Yet Egyptian human nature is, like human nature everywhere,
contradictory. Hating and despising Europeans, they still long for
European rule. This people admire
[p.112]an iron-handed and lion-hearted despotism; they hate a timid and
a grinding tyranny.[FN#37] Of all foreigners, they would prefer the
French yoke,-a circumstance which I attribute to the diplomatic skill
and national dignity of our neighbours across the Channel.[FN#38] But
whatever European nation secures Egypt will win a treasure. Moated on
the north and south by seas, with a glacis of impassable deserts to the
eastward and westward, capable of supporting an army of 180,000 men, of
paying a
[p.113]heavy tribute, and yet able to show a considerable surplus of
revenue, this country in western hands will command India, and by a
ship-canal between Pelusium and Suez would open the whole of Eastern
Africa.[FN#39]
There is no longer much to fear from the fanaticism of the people, and
a little prudence would suffice to command the interests of the
Mosque.[FN#40] The chiefs of corporations,[FN#41] in the present state
of popular feeling, would offer [p.114]even less difficulty to an
invader or a foreign ruler than the Olema. Briefly, Egypt is the most
tempting prize which the East holds out to the ambition of Europe, not
excepted even the Golden Horn.
[FN#1] In the capitals of the columns, for instance.
[FN#2] This direct derivation is readily detected in the Mosques at Old
Cairo.
[FN#3] The roof supported by arches resting on pillars, was unknown to
classic antiquity, and in the earliest ages of Al-Islam, the cloisters
were neither arched nor domed. A modern writer justly observes, "A
compound of arcade and colonnade was suggested to the architects of the
Middle Ages by the command that ancient buildings gave them of marble
columns."
[FN#4] "The Oriental mind," says a clever writer on Indian subjects,
"has achieved everything save real greatness of aim and execution."
That the Arab mind always aimed, and still aims, at the physically
great is sufficiently evident. Nothing affords the Meccans greater
pride than the vast size of their temple. Nothing is more humiliating
to the people of Al-Madinah than the comparative smallness of their
Mosque. Still, with a few exceptions, Arab greatness is the vulgar
great, not the grand.
[FN#5] That is to say, imitations of the human form. All the doctors of
Al-Islam, however, differ on this head: some absolutely forbidding any
delineation of what has life, under pain of being cast into hell;
others permitting pictures even of the bodies, though not of the faces,
of men.
