CAIRO TO KISUMU

as they stand beneath them and call the Mohammedans to prayer.

The financial changes that I have mentioned are by no means confined to the Christians. The natives have been growing rich, and the Mohammedans for the first time in the history of Egypt have been piling up money. Since banking and money lending are contrary to the Koran, the Moslems invest their surplus in real estate, a practice which has done much to swell all land values.

Egypt is still a country of the Egyptians, notwithstand¬ ing the overlordship of the British and the influx of foreign¬ ers. It has now more than ten million people. Of these, three out of every four are either Arabs or Copts. Most of them are Mohammedans, although there are, all told, something like eight hundred and sixty thousand Copts, descendants of the ancient Egyptians, who have a rude kind of Christianity, and are, as a body, better educated and wealthier than the Mussulmans.

The greater part of the foreign population of Egypt is to be found in Alexandria and Cairo, and in the other towns of the Nile valley, as well as in Suez and Port Said. There are more of the Greeks than of any other nation.

For more than two thousand years they have been exploit¬ ing the Egyptians and the Nile valley and are to-day the sharpest, shrewdest, and most unscrupulous business men in it. They do much of the banking and money lending and until the government established banks of its own and brought down the interest rate they demanded enor¬ mous usury from the Egyptian peasants. It is said that they loaned money on lands and crops at an average charge of one hundred and fifty per cent, per annum.

This was changed, however, by the establishment of

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