140 The Sinai Peninsula [1906 



holding the latter. No exact demarcation, however, of the village 

 district of either El Arish or of Akabah was made, and I believe 

 that in fact the Egyptian Government has exercised jurisdiction for a 

 number of miles east of El Arish. The boundary stone spoken of as 

 having been recently removed by the Turks is, I suspect, considerably 

 east of the village and of the Wady of El Arish (the River of Egypt). 

 So that if the Sultan now claims some miles of land west of the Akabah 

 fort and village he is probably doing no more than the Egyptian Govern- 

 ment has long been doing at the other end of the frontier line. It is 

 obvious that a frontier line cannot be drawn exactly to the walls of 

 either village. 



" As to the exercise of administration in the disputed district, that 

 is to say, the desert between the southern inhabited limit of Palestine 

 and the Suez Canal, there has been practically none by either Govern- 

 ment. In 1876, and again in 1881, I travelled through the whole of 

 it, and can affirm that with the exception of the fort of Nakhl there was 

 then no permanently inhabited place, and that the very few Bedouins 

 camped in it owned allegiance to neither Government. 



" The Bedouins of the Sinai district, which lies south of Nakhl, are 

 very poor and few in number. Before the Suez Canal was made, they 

 lived by trading their dates and such small curiosities as their district 

 produced, including rough turquoises, at Cairo, and by conducting Rus- 

 sian and Greek pilgrims to the Sinai monastery. The cutting of the 

 canal, however, has made a barrier between them and Egypt, which has 

 practically ruined them, through the imposition at first of tolls for 

 crossing the canal and later by quarantine regulations either for them- 

 selves or their animals. I know well their sufferings on this head, as 

 for the last twenty-five years they have made me the confidant of their 

 complaints. Moreover, a concession was given of their turquoise mines 

 to a European company, now I believe abandoned as unworkable, 

 whereby they were much harassed, and the whole peninsula has been 

 treated as an infected district through the establishment of a quaran- 

 tine station at Tor for the Mecca pilgrimage. Thus they have shared 

 in no way in the material prosperity of Egypt and have been persist- 

 ently ignored by its government, until apparently for a political reason 

 we find Lord Cromer, in his this year's Report, detailing the benefits 

 he proposes to bestow on them. The scheme he mentions of irrigation 

 for the Peninsula is mere nonsense, as the whole district is dry desert 

 without streams, for the most part an elevated plateau with a very 

 rare rainfall, and no alluvial soil. I mention these matters because it 

 is sure to be put forward that in opposing the Turkish occupation of 

 Tabah we are defending the inhabitants from Ottoman oppression. 

 No such inhabited place as Tabah existed when I was in the country, 



