The French Foreign Legion looks after the safety of travellers and does this exceedingly well. These French Legionnaires (who, by the way, are never allowed on French soil) may be a bit rough at times, but they have a tough problem on their hands. To police a region as large as Europe with a mere handful of men is no job for saints. Therefore, if we can believe common rumour, very few saints have been encouraged to enlist. The old caravan roads are beginning to lose their importance. The tractor-wheeled automobile lorry has taken the place of the smelly camel. It is much less costly and infinitely more dependable for very long distances. The days when tens of thousands of camels would foregather in Timbuktu to bring salt to the people of the western Sahara are gone forever.
Until the year 1911 that part of the Sahara which borders on the Mediterranean was ruled by a Pasha of its own who recognized the Sultan of Turkey as his overlord. In that year the Italians, knowing that the French were going to take Morocco as soon as they could do so without provoking a war with Germany, suddenly remembered that Libya (the Latin name for Tripoli) had once upon a time been a very prosperous Roman colony. They crossed the Mediterranean and took 400,000 square miles of African territory and hoisted the Italianflag over it and asked the world politely what it was going to do about it. As nobody was particularly interested in Tripoli (sand without iron or oil) the descendants of Caesar were allowed to keep their new colony and they are now busy building roads and trying to cultivate a little cotton for the textile factories of Lombardy.
On the east, this Italian experiment in the difficult art of colonizing is bordered by Egypt. This country owed most of its prosperity to the fact that it was really a sort of island cut off from the west by the Libyan desert and protected against the south by the Nubian desert, while the Red Sea and the Mediterranean took care of the boundaries in the north and in the east. The actual Egypt, the Egypt of history, the ancient land of the Pharaohs, which was the great storehouse of art and learning and science of the ancient world, consisted of a very narrow strip situated along the shore of a river almost as long as the Mississippi. The real Egypt, not counting the desert, is smaller than the kingdom of the Netherlands. But whereas Holland can feed only 7,000,000 people, the Nile valley is so fertile that it is able to support double that number. When the great irrigation works, begun by the English, shall have been finished, there will be room for many more. But the Fellahs (the tillers of the soil who are almost without exception Mohammedans) will have to stick to their farms, for industry is not easy in a country which has neither coal nor water-power.
Ever since the great Mohammedan conquest of the eighth century, Egypt had belonged to Turkey, under a khedive or king of its own. In 1882 England occupied the country under the pretext that its financial conditions were so hopelessly bad as to warrant interference on the part of a competent European power. But the demand of Egypt for the Egyptians became so insistent after the Great War that the English were forced to renounce their claims and Egypt was once more recognized as an independent kingdom which had a right to conclude treaties with other foreign powers except commercial treaties which must first be submitted to England. The British troops were to be withdrawn from all Egyptian cities except Port Sa?d. Finally Alexandria, which had become the main commercial port on the Mediterranean since Damietta and Rosetta on the delta had lost their importance, must be allowed to remain an English naval base.
It was a generous agreement and a perfectly safe one, for meanwhile England had definitely occupied that eastern part of the Sudan through which the Nile happens to flow. By retaining control over the water of this river upon which 12,000,000 little brown Egyptians depend for their living, England is certain that she can always make its wants more or less understood in distant Cairo.
No one at all familiar with political conditions in the Near East will blame England for trying to maintain a strong hold upon this part of the world. The Suez Canal, the short cut to India, runs entirely through Egyptian territory and it would be suicidal for England to let some other power get hold of that salty artery of trade.
The canal, of course, is not of England’s making. As a matter of fact, the British Government tried as hard as it could to prevent de Lesseps from beginning to dig any canal at all. There were two reasons why English have opposed this plan. In the first place, England did not have the slightest confidence in the oft-repeated assertions of Napoleon III that the canal, built by French engineers and with French money, was merely a commercial venture. Queen Victoria might love her dear brother in the Tuileries, who once upon a time had done service as a special London constable when her beloved subjects were on the verge of rioting for bread, but the average Englishman did not care to hear that name which reminded him too much of a certain nightman of half a century before. And in the second place, England feared that this short cut to the Indies and China and Japan would seriously interfere with the prosperity of her own good city on the Cape of Good Hope.