Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XXIV, May 1852, Vol. IV. Various
the battle-cry. At sunset the black square tents are gone, the desolation of silence fills the air that was musical with the recited loves of Zul-Himmeh, and the light sand drifts in the evening wind over the corpse of a Bedoueen.
– So the grim Genius of the desert touches every stop of romance and of life in you as you traverse his realm and meditate his children. Yet warm and fascinating as is his breath, it does not warp your loyalty to your native West, and to the time in which you were born. Springing from your hard bed upon the desert, and with wild morning enthusiasm pushing aside the door of your tent, and stepping out to stand among the stars, you hail the desert and hate the city, and glancing toward the tent of the Armenian Khadra, you shout aloud to astonished MacWhirter,
"I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race."
But as the day draws forward, and you see the same forms and the same life that Abraham saw, and know that Joseph leading Mary into Egypt might pass you to-day, nor be aware of more than a single sunset since he passed before, then you feel that this germ, changeless at home, is only developed elsewhere – that the boundless desert freedom is only a resultless romance.
The sun sets and the camp is pitched. The shadows are grateful to your eye, as the dry air to your lungs. But as you sit quietly in the tent-door, watching the Armenian camp and the camels, your cheeks pales suddenly as you remember Abraham, and that "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day." Saving yourself, what of the scene is changed since then? The desert, the camels, the tents, the turbaned Arabs, they were what Abraham saw when "he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, lo! three men stood by him."
You are contemporary with the eldest history. Your companions are the dusky figures of vaguest tradition. The "long result of Time," is not for you. In that moment you have lost your birthright. You are Ishmael's brother. You have your morning's wish. A child of the desert, not for you are Art, and Poetry, and Science, and the glowing roll of History shrivels away.
The dream passes as the day dies, and to the same stars which heard your morning shout of desert praise, you whisper as you close the tent-door at evening,
"Better fifty years of Europe, than a cycle of Cathay."
MOHAMMAD ALEE
I do not wonder that Mohammad Alee burned to be master of Syria, and struck so bravely for it.
His career was necessarily but a brilliant bubble, and his success purely personal. That career was passed before the West fairly understood it. It was easier for the Jews to believe good from Nazareth than for us to credit genius in Egypt, and we should as soon have dreamed of old mummied Cheops throned upon the great pyramid and ruling the Pharaohs' realm anew, as of a modern king there, of kingliness unsurpassed in the century, except by Napoleon, working at every disadvantage, yet achieving incredible results.
He was the son of a fisherman – made his way by military skill – recognized the inherent instability of the Mameluke government then absolute in Egypt, and which was only a witless tyranny, sure to fall before ambitious sense and skill. He propitiated the Sublime Porte, whose Viceroy in Egypt was only a puppet of state, practically imprisoned by the Mamelukes in the citadel – and he gained brilliant victories in the Hedjaz, over the Wahabys, infidel and schismatic Muslim.
In 1811, he accomplished the famous massacre of the Mamelukes in the court of the citadel, of which Horace Vernet has painted so characteristic a picture, and for which Mohammad Alee has been much execrated.
But in Turkish politics, humanity is only a question of degree. With Mohammad Alee and the Mamelukes it was diamond cut diamond. They were a congregation of pestilent vapors, a nest of hoary-headed tyrants, whom it was a satisfaction to Humanity and Decency to smoke out and suffocate in any way. Mohammad Alee had doubtless little enough rose-water in his policy to satisfy the grimmest Carlyle. The leader of sanguinary Albanians and imbruted Egyptians against wild Arab hordes is not likely to be of a delicate stomach.
But he was clear-eyed and large-minded. He had the genius of a statesman rather than the shrewdness of a general, although as a soldier he was singularly brave and successful. Of all his acts the massacre of the Mamelukes was perhaps the least bloody, because, by crushing the few heads he had won the victory. A sudden and well-advised bloodshed is often sure to issue in a peace which saves greater misery. It was Cromwell's rule and it was Napoleon's – it was also Mohammad Alee's, and the results usually proved its wisdom.
Moreover, in the matter of this massacre, the balance of sympathy is restored by the fact that only a short time previous to the Mamelukes' Banquet of Death in the citadel, they had arranged Mohammad Alee's assassination upon his leaving Suez. By superior cunning he ascertained the details of this pleasant plan, and publicly ordered his departure for the following morning, but privately departed upon a swift-trotting dromedary in the evening. There was great consequent frustration of plan and confusion of soul among the Mamelukes, who had thought, in this ingenious manner, to cut the knot of difficulty, and they were only too glad to hurry with smooth faces to the Pacha's festival – too much in a hurry, indeed, to reflect upon his superior cunning and to be afraid of it. They lost the game. They were the diamond cut, and evidently deserve no melodious tear.
Mohammad Alee thus sat as securely in his seat as a Turkish Pacha can ever hope to sit. He assisted the Porte in the Greek troubles, perpetrating other massacres there; and afterward, when Abdallah, Pacha of Acre, rebelled against "the Shadow," Mohammad Alee was sent to subdue him. He did so, and then interceded with the Porte for Abdallah's safety.
Meanwhile, Mohammad Alee had ascertained his force, and was already sure of the genius to direct it. He had turned the streams of French and English skill into the agriculture, manufactures, and military discipline of Egypt. His great aim for years had been to make Egypt independent – to revive the ancient richness of the Nile valley, and to take a place for Egypt among the markets of the world. He accomplished this so far, that, restoring to the plain of Thebes the indigo which was once famous there, he poured into the European market so much and so good indigo that the market was sensibly affected. His internal policy was wrong, but we can not here consider it.
Watching and waiting, in the midst of this internal prosperity and foreign success and amazement, while Egyptian youth were thronging to the Parisian Universities, and the Parisian youth looked to Egypt as the career of fame and fortune – as the young Spaniards of a certain period looked to the diamond-dusted Americas – in the midst of all the web Mohammad Alee sat nursing his ambition and biding his time.
Across the intervening desert, Syria wooed him to take her for his slave. Who was there to make him afraid? Leaning on Lebanon, and laving her beautiful feet in the sea, she fascinated him with love. He should taste boundless sway. Eastward lay Bagdad and Persia, thrones of Caliphs who once sat in his seat – why should not he sit in theirs? Then with softer whispers she pointed to the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, and looked what she dared not speak.
I do not wonder that he was enchanted. I do not wonder that he burned to be master of the superb slave that lay so lovely and fair in the sun, dreaming, as now we see her dream, under the vines and olives. His peer, Napoleon Bonaparte, against whom, in Egypt, his maiden sword was fleshed, whom he loved to name and to hear that they were born in the same year, had thus seen from Elba the gorgeous Fata-Morgana of European empire. How could Mohammad Alee reflect that sallying forth to grasp it, that peer had bitten the dust? That fate deterred the Pacha, as the experience of others always deters ourselves – as a blade of grass stays the wind. Shall not you and I, my reader, swim to our Heros, though a thousand Leanders never came to shore?
It was this Syria through which we plod, this brilliant morning, that seduced Mohammad Alee.
A land of glorious resources and without a population. Here grow wheat, rye, barley, beans and the cotton plant. Oats are rare; but Palestine produces sesame and dourra, a kind of pulse like lentils. Baalbec grows maize. Sugar and rice are not unknown at Beyrout. Lebanon is wreathed with vines. Indigo flourishes without cultivation on the banks of the Jordan. The Druses cultivate the white mulberry. Gaza has dates like those of Mecca, and pomegranates as fine as those of Algiers. Figs and bananas make the gardens of Antioch tropical. From Aleppo come pistachio-nuts. The almond, the olive and the orange thrive in the kindly air; and Damascus revels in twenty