The daily unremitting toil of Tourah must be preferable to all but the incurably idle. Yet the terror of “Tourah” is now universal up and down Egypt. It is the great “bogey” of the daily life among the lower classes, the threat held over the fractious child or the misconducted donkey boy who claims an exorbitant “bakshish.” To accuse any decent fellah of having been in Tourah is the worst sort of insult and at once indignantly denied. When my own connection with the English prisons became known, I was generally called the pasha of the English Tourah, and my official position gained me very marked respect among classes spoiled by many thousands of annual tourists,--the greedy guides and donkey boys, the shameless vendors of sham curiosities, the importunate beggars that infest hotel entrances, swarm in the villages and make hideous the landing stages up the Nile. An old hand will best silence a persistent cry for alms or the wail of _miski_ (poverty stricken), of “Halas! finish father, finish mother” (the ornate expression for an orphan), by talking of the _caracol_, “police station,” and a promise of “Tourah” to follow.
Life in Tourah must be hard. The monotonous routine from daylight to sundown, the long nights of thirteen or fourteen hours, from early evening to morning, caged up with forty or fifty others tainted with every vice and crime, must be a heavy burden upon all but the absolutely debased. The evils of association, of herding criminals together, left to their own wicked devices, without supervision, were present in the highest degree in Egyptian prisons. At last, however, a move was made to provide separate cells for a certain number, and a new prison of 1,200 cells was built by convict labour at Tourah immediately opposite the new hospitals and at some distance from the old prison. Much mischievous conspiracy of the worst kind is prevented by keeping individuals apart during the idle hours of the night, for it was then that those concerted escapes of large numbers were planned, which have occurred more than once at Tourah, but have been generally abortive, ending only in bloodshed; for the black Sudanese, who form the convict guards, are expert marksmen and surely account for a large part of the fugitives.