Egypt To-Day

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. FROM THAMES TO NILE. The late Edmond About visited Egypt nearly a quarter of a century ago, and recorded his impressions in a book called The Fellah. He had been so hospitably entertained by His Highness the Khedive that he shrank from making such a return as the production of a work on...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. FROM THAMES TO NILE. The late Edmond About visited Egypt nearly a quarter of a century ago, and recorded his impressions in a book called The Fellah. He had been so hospitably entertained by His Highness the Khedive that he shrank from making such a return as the production of a work on contemporary Egypt, which should be written in the spirit of his Contemporary Greece, under King Otho, or of his Contemporary Rome, under Pius IX. He doubtless felt that he could not write the truth about Egypt, as, indeed, he implied in the dedication to his friend Gerome, the great painter, without making enemies of the Egyptians in the same way that he had made many Greeks and Romans his mortal enemies. He contented himself, then, with writing a romance, of which Achmed, the hero, is a Fellah who has no parallel in the Valley of the Nile, while the heroine, Miss Grace, is an English girl such as has never been seen in England. About's purpose in visiting Egypt was more admirable than the book which he wrote after returning home. Many travellers who preceded himhad looked upon the land simply as one in which discoveries of antiquities might be made, and their minds were so intent upon restoring or revivifying the Egypt of the past that they were comparatively indifferent to the Egypt before their eyes. About's curiosity had been excited concerning the condition of the people and the nature of the country at the present day, throughout a thousand miles which are watered by the Nile. For him the ancient land of I sis and Osiris, the museum of gigantic monuments and mysterious hieroglyphics, had far less interest than the modern Egypt, with its mud-built villages, in which the tillers of the soil live and labour in the hope of earning a scanty livelihood and satisfying the tax-...