SCENE OF THE OUTRAGES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume X, Issue 498, 27 October 1882, Page 11

SCENE OF THE OUTRAGES.

Tantah, the scene of the latest Bgyptain massacres, scarcely less fiendish in their cruelty than those of Alexandiia, is the capital of the Goibdeyeh province in the Delta. The city is fifty-four miles north of Cairo, on the Cairo and Alexandria railroad, and is the third city in Egypt. Its population is variously estimated at from 60,000 to 100,000 souls. In the military operations doubtless soon to follow, Tantah will become an important strategical point, and a rallying centre for the adherents of Arabi, for this unique city is the capital of religious fanaticism in Lower Egypt. Its situation, in about the middle of the Delta, renders it easily accessible to those who go there on the triennial religious pilgrimages to celebrate th« birthplace of a great Moslem saint, the Seyid Ahmad El-Redawec. The greatest of thesis festivals, which is near the end of the Christian year, attracts more pilgrims than any other in Egypt, and in this respect is second only to the pilgrimage to Mecca. They are characterised by debauchery, crime and riot, and exceed in this respect the revelries of Bubastis and Oanopus. Few Christians ever attend the mammoth gathering known among the Franks as the " Tantah Fair " because of the dauger attending iuteicourse with fanatics maddened with the potent araki, a beverage brewed from rice, The Herald correspondent visited one of these great religious mobs, whicn, in fine, is nothing more than a Mohammedan camp meeting, and being in Christian garb, without even the fez, he was everywhere regarded with scowls of hatred, gestures of defiance and words of menace. It was a singular spectacle to be in the midst of one of these huge assemblies, numbering as high as 300,000 souls, coming from every part of Syria, Arabia, even India aud Northern Africa, and particularly at ni^ht by their rude camp fires, beating on the tom-tom, singing rude negro and Egyptian chants, telling fortunes, with the howling dervishes sending forth the most hideous and ear-rending howls while whirling in their maddening testimony of fealty to the Moslem God. It can be imagined that when sometimes 500,000 strangers have thus gathered on the plain of Tantah, with water by no means plenty and with the modern Egyptian by no means disposed to use it, that cleanliness would not be a prevailing virtue. In fact, it is doubtful if any camp city was ever the theatre of so much general and personal filth, with all of its consequences, as the chief pilgrimage in honor of the patrou saint of Tantah. As a consequence, epidemic and contagious fevers spread all over the Delta provinces are carried by the rail to Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and a large mortality ensues, for the modern Egyptian and the Bedouin are the most helpless of mortals when sick. Members of their medical profession would scarcely be allowed to treat swine in America ; and the natives have a great reluctance, on account of religious scruples, to being treated by a Chr.stian. The Herald correspondent, however, on the occasion of one of the great feasts, was careful to have with him his medicine chest — not an insignificant affair either, for it was prepared by Dr. Grant, the English physician to the Khedive, with elaborate instructions. This was a companion in travel as much for self- protection as it was to obtaiu a useful popularity among the natives for medical science— a very easily acquired reputatiou in Egypt. It was discovered in endeavouring to treat many of the ordinary afflictions engendered by such close and filthy communion tliat they were temporarily cured only to recur. It is this Mohammedan business of pilgrimages which gives rise and has caused time out of mind, the great pestilences sweeping over the earth from the neighbourhoods of .»iedina, Mecca, Tantah and other holy cities, eventually following the water courses and routes of travel and sending the messenger of death to the capitals of Western Europe as ia the " Black Death " which made so much havoc in Paris in 1848.