AN HOUR WITH LORD KITCHENER.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16120, 8 July 1914, Page 5

AN HOUR WITH LORD KITCHENER.

By F. Ashwobth Bkiggs, in the Daily Mail.

When the train for Cairo had drawn out of Port Said and cloair of the canal 1 prepared myeedi tor dust and discomfort <ind dreary vistas of sand raying back the sunlight till the oyes shrank from its glare. So it had seemed to me 10 years before, so I expected to find it now. But the desert has vanished. In its place there lies a green plain, rich, fertile, thickly peopled, immeasurably picturesque. Gloaming and beautiful, it stretches away on either side. Blue-robed Arabs, perched on the extreme and perilous ends of' donkeys, trot along the banks of the canals. Here and there a white sail and ourved mast break the vista, of the green fields. Camels, cattle, and goate are everywhere, women and children attending them. A brown a-.id dirty babe, silhouetted against the wall of a half-cut crop, shouts and wavee as the, train goes by. And we pass Tel-el-Kebir and a cemetery, for remembrance' rake. In the soft evening glow the train pOL..ds interminably along through a panorama that seems Biblically ancient and unalterable. It, is incredible that &o few years have passed since war raged and tie work of peace that followed it began.

The representative of the Providence that is thus remaking Egypt has its scat in Cairo. First its name was Cromer, then Goret—an unforkmate Providence that, —and now Kitchener. I had a great desire to penetrate to the source of this beneficent power that is changing the face of the land from the Nile inout.ns to Central Africa, making the desert to blossom, giving justice and safety to a people broken by centuries of misrule at.d oppression, bringing to the land ~-f the Pharaohs the clean and orderly ideals of an upstart civilisation. The British Agency in Cairo is a large) low building, breast-deep in foliage, upon the lank of the Nile, There is no great ceremony at the palace of the British Pharaoh. There is a senary at the gate, and a couple of stalwart lipyptiane in a red livery adorned with gold braid wait by the door under the portico. You go up steps into a high, cool hall. iAwide doorway leads to & big verandah, with, ring-dovee coomg in a cage. A curving lawn, with flowering trees and shrubs, is bounded by a parapet above the brown waters of the Nile. On the further bank a line of tall palms trembles in the wind and shimmers in the sun.

You turn back into the shadows of the house, down a passage to the right, in at the first door on the left, and yon aie in the presence of El Lord. If you have travelled enough to observe that rmich ceremony generally accompanies much sunshine, you will find the presencechamber prosaic. It is a big, dimly-lit room, with a large desk in the middle. A tall and heavy man, with whet srtists call a " grand head," rises front the desk, grasps you firmly by the hand, and waves you to a capacious armchair. Yiiu find yourself facing what light thei-3 is. Your host's features are in shad >w.

He is no longer tho youthful organiser of victory, wit'li the heavy moustache and the strong blue eyes, whom we idolised as schoolboys. He has changed even since I saw him in the Council Chambers at Calcutta, stern and forbidding at the right hand of a pink-faced Viceroy. His hair is grey, his expression and manner softer, but his eyes are as keen and piercing as in the days of the Mahdi. His converscation is extraordinarily fascinating. The deep, confident, deliberate voice bears you up and down the vast length of his dominions, a With a sober and controlled enthusiasm he speaks of the groat works he has in hand. Far down in the south beyond Khartoum he plane a dam whioh will bring greater help to Egypt even than that of Aesuan. Putting aside a cigar that has gone out, he shows roughly upon his desk how from the mountains of Central Africa he will draw more water for the use of the fellaheen. Perhaps the completion of the project must wait a little for the growth oi revenue. "A loan?" he says. " No, we want no middlemen. Why should these people " —with a wave of hie hand over the brown millions outside—" pay their profits? Wβ want every penny of the profits to ourselves." The new dam will bring under cultiva : tion huge areas of barren land 5 will benefit Sudan and Egypt alike. "But we'll have nothing sensational," he says; " nothing startling. Steady and sure development is what we seek." One.remembers those almost daily telegrams when the railway crept south. " Rail-head is now at such-and-such a place," they ran. "To-morrow it will be at so-«nd-so." And it always was so, with a monotonous regularity that made xis gasp at home.

He mentions with a certain quiet pleasure that the lAeeuan dam paid lor its whole cost of construction in a few months recently, when the Nile was at the lowest level ever known.

He turns from the problem of getting water at one end of his dominions to the problem of getting rid of it at the other. In the Delta are waste marshes fit far reclamation. They are to be drained and cultivated.. ''Not a pump has worked yet, but the mere laying of the dams has shown what the land can do. Fine soil, they tell me, fit for any use." Ho contemplates for a moment this new scene in the drama of the wilderness that blossoms like the rose. .

A passing reference is made to the famous Five-Feddan Jaw, by which the cultivator's land and implements can in no circumstances be wrested from him against his will. ".They said —a few people who disapproved of it—that the law would be unpopular. Was it eo? I tested that. Y'ou know the custom of the country —the habit of petitioning? If one man pokes a stick in another man's eye there are almost sure to be petitions to the Government. I sent for the Minister of the Interior and "said to him, ' Let me eee tho petitions against the Five-Feddan law.' Hie answer was, 'There is not one.' Not one!" he ends, striking his desk, and showing a touch of sober ecorn for the prophets ofrevil who were con founded.

Educated Egyptians of good standing had spoken to me of the gratification they felt at Lord Kitchener's friendliness and courtesy to the people of the country. They had contrasted it -with what they called Lord Cromer's rather imperial aloofness and Sir Eldon Gorst's too commonplace kindnesses. This had been a surprise to me in view of Lord Kitchener's reputation of old as something of a military autocrat. I tried to convey a vague suggestion of this, and Lord Kitchener answered in worde which form a very excellent axiom of statecraft: '' You cannot run a country as you run an army." We talked of things nearer home than Egypt; but in these Lord Kitchener is rightly careful to take no public part whatever. It struck me as a raither wonderful picture —this of the man who broke the Mahdi nursing the Mahdfs unhappy subjects: of the man whose life has been given to armies now absorbed in the betterment of a people who love him, turning the skill and wisdom gained in war ,to the furtherance of peace and progress. You need to go to Egypt to realise the greatne-es of the work he hfls done and the work h« means to do. Strong, skilful, solf-controlled, and courteous, with the large arms of the constructive genius and the business man's eye to the balance sheet, he is the ideal ruler of Egypt. His last words to me were : " I will not go from Egypt before I must." And, however «ore our need or India's may be, it will be a bad day for Egypt when El Lord vacates that dim-lit room on the bank of the sunny Nile.