230 Egypt
a half to thirteen millions. The general wealth of the
country had probably been doubled by the war. Certain
forms of wealth had decupled. Thus the total rentable
value of land rose from seventeen millions early in the
century to over one hundred millions after the war.
During the boom in cotton that followed the war, land
fetched as much as £1,000 an acre, and quite illiterate
fellaheen made large fortunes. There were such cases of
sudden affluence as that of Mohamed Bedrawi Ashur
Pasha, who rapidly amassed an income of over £250,000.
Or that of the illiterate porter of the Zagaziz ginning
mills who, speculating with his life's savings of £40,
bought the factory and re-equipped it with modern
machinery. By such anarchical aggrandisements did the
fertilising flood of British gold bring riches to an irre-
sponsible middle-class. For it is estimated that at least
£200,000,000 were poured into Egypt during the war,
Europe had certainly made a handsome reparation for its
jewing of Egypt in the previous century.
As a result of these enrichments there was a shifting
of the centre of political power. An old village sheikh,
riding his donkey to market, might be drawing the
income of a British duke and might be supporting a son
at Oxford, Unfortunately, this newly-gilded jeunesse
doree often turned out badly. We get a glimpse of the
strange lives they led in that of Ali Bey Fahmy, who
built his French mistress a palace at Gezireh and was
shot by her in the Savoy Hotel. Another result of this
revolution was that the old racial distinctions between
the Turco-Circassian-Georgian upper-class, the Syrian-
Coptic-Arabic middle-class, and the Nubian-Bedawin-
Arabic peasantry began to disappear. Class began to
differentiate into the Western divisions of profiteer, pro-
fessional, and proletarian. Or, expressed in English, into