By eight o'clock in the evening, on a falling wind, we are passing Rhoda, whose tall chimneys have been long in sight. Here is one of the largest of the Khedive's sugar-factories, and a new palace which has never been occupied. We are one hundred and eighty-eight miles from Cairo, and have made this distance in two days, a speed for which I suppose history has no parallel; at least our dragoman says that such a run has never been made before at this time of the year, and we are quite willing to believe a statement which reflects so much honor upon ourselves, for choosing such a boat and such a dragoman.
This Nile voyage is nothing, after all; its length has been greatly overestimated. We shall skip up the river and back again before the season is half spent, and have to go somewhere else for the winter. A man feels all-powerful, so long as the wind blows; but let his sails collapse and there is not a more crest-fallen creature. Night and day our sail has been full, and we are puffed up with pride.
At this rate we shall hang out our colored lanterns at Thebes on Christmas night.
THE morning puts a new face on our affairs. It is Sunday, and the most devout could not desire a quieter day. There is a thick fog on the river, and not breeze enough stirring to show the stripes on our flag; the boat holds its own against the current by a sort of accumulated impulse. During the night we may have made five miles altogether, and now we barely crawl. We have run our race; if we have not come into a haven, we are at a stand-still, and it does not seem now as if we ever should wake up and go on again. However, it is just as well. Why should we be tearing through this sleepy land at the rate of four miles an hour?
The steersman half dozes at the helm; the reïs squats near him watching the flapping sails; the crew are nearly all asleep on the forward deck, with their burnouses drawn over their head and the feet bare, for it is chilly as late as nine o'clock, and the thermometer has dropped to 540. Abd-el-Atti slips his beads uneasily along between his fingers, and remembers that when he said that we would reach Asioot in another day, he forgot to ejaculate; “God willing.” Yet he rises and greets our coming from the cabin with a willing smile, and a—
“Morning sir, morning marm. I hope you enjoyin' you sleep, marm.”
“Where are we now, Abd-el-Atti?”
“Not much, marm; this is a place call him Hadji Kandeel. But we do very well; I not to complain.”
“Do you think we shall have any wind to-day?”
“I d'know, be sure. The wind come from Lord. Not so?”
Hadji Kandeel is in truth only a scattered line of huts, but one lands here to visit the grottoes or rock-tombs of Tel el Amarna. All this country is gaping with tombs apparently; all the cliffs are cut into receptacles for the dead, all along the margin of the desert on each side are old necropolises and moslem cemeteries, in which generation after generation, for almost fabulous periods of time, has been deposited. Here behind Hadji Kandeel are remains of a once vast city built let us say sixteen hundred years before our era, by Amunoph IV., a wayward king of the eighteenth dynasty, and made the capital of Egypt. In the grottoes of Tel el Amârna were deposited this king and his court and favorites, and his immediate successors—all the splendor of them sealed up there and forgotten. This king forsook the worship of the gods of Thebes, and set up that of a Semitic deity, Aten, a radiating disk, a sun with rays terminating in human hands. It was his mother who led him into this, and she was not an Egyptian; neither are the features of the persons sculptured in the grottoes Egyptian.
Thus all along the stream of Egyptian history cross currents are coming in, alien sovereigns and foreign task-masters; and great breaks appear, as if one full civilization had run its course of centuries, and decay had come, and then ruin, and then a new start and a fresh career.
Early this morning, when we were close in to the west bank, I heard measured chanting, and saw a procession of men and women coming across the field. The men bore on a rude bier the body of a child. They came straight on to the bank, and then turned by the flank with military precision and marched upstream to the place where a clumsy country ferry-boat had just landed. The chant of the men, as they walked, was deep-voiced and solemn, and I could hear in it frequently repeated the name of Mohammed. The women in straggling file followed, like a sort of ill-omened birds in black, and the noise they made, a kind of wail, was exactly like the cackle of wild geese. Indeed before I saw the procession I thought that some geese were flying overhead.
The body was laid on the ground and four men kneeled upon the bank as if in prayer. The boat meantime was unloading, men, women and children scrambling over the sides into the shallow water, and the donkeys, urged with blows, jumping after them. When they were all out the funeral took possession of the boat, and was slowly wafted across, as dismal a going to a funeral as if this were the real river of death. When the mourners had landed we saw them walking under the palm-trees, to the distant burial-place in the desert, with a certain solemn dignity, and the chanting and wailing were borne to us very distinctly.
It is nearly a dead calm all day, and our progress might be imperceptible to an eye naked, and certainly it must be so to the eyes of these natives which are full of flies. It grows warm, however, and is a summer temperature when we go ashore in the afternoon on a tour of exploration. We have for attendant, Ahmed, who carries a big stick as a defence against dogs. Ahmed does not differ much in appearance from a wild barbarian, his lack of a complete set of front teeth alone preventing him from looking fierce. A towel is twisted about his head, feet and legs are bare, and he wears a blue cotton robe with full sleeves longer than his arms, gathered at the waist by a piece of rope, and falling only to the knees. A nice person to go walking with on the Holy Sabbath.
The whole land is green with young wheat, but the soil is baked and cracked three or four inches deep, even close to the shore where the water has only receded two or three days ago. The land stretches for several miles, perfectly level and every foot green and smiling, back to the desert hills. Sprinkled over this expanse, which is only interrupted by ditches and slight dykes upon which the people walk from village to village, are frequent small groves of palms. Each grove is the nucleus of a little settlement, a half dozen sun-baked habitations, where people, donkeys, pigeons, and smaller sorts of animated nature live together in dirty amity. The general plan of building is to erect a circular wall of clay six or seven feet high, which dries, hardens, and cracks in the sun. This is the Oriental court. In side this and built against the wall is a low mud-hut with a wooden door, and perhaps here and there are two similar huts, or half a dozen, according to the size of the family. In these hovels the floor is of smooth earth, there is a low bedstead or some matting laid in one corner, but scarcely any other furniture, except some earthen jars holding doora or dried fruit, and a few cooking utensils. A people who never sit, except on their heels, do not need chairs, and those who wear at once all the clothes they possess need no closets or wardrobes. I looked at first for a place where they could keep their “Sunday clothes” and “nice things,” but this philosophical people do not have anything that is too good for daily use. It is nevertheless true that there is no hope of a people who do not have “Sunday clothes.”
The inhabitants did not, however, appear conscious of any such want. They were lounging about or squatting in the dust in picturesque idleness; the children under twelve years often without clothes and not ashamed, and the women wearing no veils. The women are coming and going with the heavy water-jars, or sitting on the ground, sorting doora and preparing it for cooking; not prepossessing certainly, in their black or dingy brown gowns and shawls of cotton. Children abound. In all the fields men are at work, picking up the ground with a rude hoe shaped like an adze. Tobacco plants have just been set out, and water-melons carefully shaded from the sun by little tents of rushes. These men are all Fellaheen, coarsely and scantily clad in brown cotton gowns, open at the breast. They are not bad figures, better than the women, but there is a hopeless acceptance of the portion of slaves in their bearing.
We encountered a very different race further from the river, where we came upon an encampment of Bedaween, or desert Arabs, who hold themselves as much above the Fellaheen as the poor white trash used to consider itself above the negroes in our Southern States. They pretend to keep their blood pure by intermarrying only in desert tribes, and perhaps it is pure; so, I suppose, the Gipsies are pure blood enough, but one would not like them for neighbors. These Bedaween, according to their wandering and predatory habit, have dropped down here from the desert to feed their little flock of black sheep and give their lean donkeys a bite of grass. Their tents are merely strips of coarse brown cloth, probably camel's hair, like sacking, stretched horizontally over sticks driven into the sand, so as to form a cover from the sun and a protection from the north wind. Underneath them are heaps of rags, matting, old clothes, blankets, mingled with cooking-utensils and the nameless broken assortment that beggars usually lug about with them. Hens and lambs are at home there, and dogs, a small, tawny wolfish breed, abound. The Arabs are worthy of their dwellings, a dirty, thievish lot to look at, but, as I said, no doubt of pure blood, and having all the virtues for which these nomads have been celebrated since the time when Jacob judiciously increased his flock at the expense of Laban.
A half-naked boy of twelve years escorts us to the bank of the canal near which the tents are pitched, and we are met by the sheykh of the tribe, a more venerable and courtly person than the rest of these pure-blood masqueraders in rags, but not a whit less dirty. The fellaheen had paid no attention to us; this sheykh looked upon himself as one of the proprietors of this world, and bound to extend the hospitalities of this portion of it to strangers. He received us with a certain formality. When two Moslems meet there is no end to their formal salutation and complimentary speeches, which may continue as long as their stock of religious expressions holds out. The usual first greeting is Es-salaam, aleykoom, “peace be on you,” to which the reply is Aleykoom es-saalam, “on you be peace.” It is said that persons of another religion, however, should never make use of this salutation to a Moslem, and that the latter should not and will not return it. But we were overflowing with charity and had no bigotry, and went through Egypt salaaming right and left, sometimes getting no reply and sometimes a return, to our “peace be on you,” of Wa-aleykoom, “and on you.”
The salutations by gesture are as varied as those by speech When Abd-el-Atti walked in Cairo with us, he constantly varied his gestures according to the rank of the people we met. To an inferior he tossed a free salaam; an equal he saluted by touching with his right hand in one rapid motion his breast, lips, and head; to a superior he made the same motion except that his hand first made a dip down to his knees; and when he met a person of high rank the hand scooped down to the ground before it passed up to the head.
I flung a cheerful salaam at the sheykh and gave him the Oriental salute, which he returned. We then shook hands, and the sheykh kissed his after touching mine, a token of friendship which I didn't know enough to imitate, not having been brought up to kiss my own hand.
“Anglais or Français?” asked the sheykh.
“No,” I said, “Americans.”
“Ah,” he ejaculated, throwing back his head with an aspiration of relief, “Melicans; tyeb (good).”
A ring of inquisitive Arabs gathered about us and were specially interested in studying the features and costume of one of our party; the women standing further off and remaining closely veiled kept their eyes fixed on her. The sheykh invited us to sit and have coffee, but the surroundings were not tempting to the appetite and we parted with profuse salutations. I had it in mind to invite him to our American centennial; I should like to set him off against some of our dirty red brethren of the prairies. I thought that if I could transport these Bedaween, tents, children, lank, veiled women, donkeys, and all to the centennial grounds they would add a most interesting (if unpleasant) feature. But, then, I reflected, what is a centennial to this Bedawee whose ancestors were as highly civilized as he is when ours were wading about the fens with the Angles or burrowing in German forests. Besides, the Bedawee would be at a disadvantage when away from the desert, or the bank of this Nile whose unceasing flow symbolizes his tribal longevity.
As we walk along through the lush-fields which the despised Fellaheen are irritating into a fair yield of food, we are perplexed with the query, what is the use of the Bedaween in this world? They produce nothing. To be sure they occupy a portion of the earth that no one else would inhabit; they dwell on the desert. But there is no need of any one dwelling on the desert, especially as they have to come from it to levy contributions on industrious folds in order to live. At this stage of the inquiry, the philosopher asks, what is the use of any one living?
As no one could answer this, we waded the water where it was shallow and crossed to a long island, such as the Nile frequently leaves in its sprawling course. This island was green from end to end, and inhabited more thickly than the main-land. We attracted a good deal of attention from the mud-villages, and much anxiety was shown lest we should walk across the wheat-fields. We expected that the dahabeëh would come on and take us off, but its streamer did not advance, and we were obliged to rewade the shallow channel and walk back to the starting-place. There was a Sunday calm in the scene. At the rosy sunset the broad river shone like a mirror and the air was soft as June. How strong is habit. Work was going on as usual, and there could have been no consent of sky, earth, and people, to keep Sunday, yet there seemed to be the Sunday spell upon the landscape. I suspect that people here have got into the way of keeping all the days. The most striking way in which an American can keep Sunday on the Nile is by not going gunning, not even taking a “flyer” at a hawk from the deck of the dahabeëh. There is a chance for a tract on this subject.
Let no one get the impression that we are idling away our time, because we are on Monday morning exactly where we were on Sunday morning. We have concluded to “keep” another day. There is not a breath of wind to scatter the haze, thermometer has gone down, and the sun's rays are feeble. This is not our fault, and I will not conceal the adverse circumstances in order to give you a false impression of the Nile.
We are moored against the bank. The dragoman has gone on shore to shoot pigeons and buy vegetables. Our turkeys, which live in cages on the stern-deck, have gone ashore and are strutting up and down the sand; their gobble is a home sound and recalls New England. Women, as usual, singly and in groups, come to the river to fill their heavy water-jars. There is a row of men and boys on the edge of the bank. Behind are two camels yoked wide apart drawing a plow. Our crew chaff the shore people. The cook says to a girl, “You would make me a good wife; we will take you along.” Men, squatting on the bank say, “Take her along, she is of no use.”
Girl retorts, “You are not of more use than animals, you sit idle all day, while I bring water and grind the corn.”
One is glad to see this assertion of the rights of women in this region where nobody has any rights; and if we had a tract we would leave it with her. Some good might be done by travelers if they would distribute biscuit along the Nile, stamped in Arabic with the words, “Man ought to do half the work,” or, “Sisters rise!”
In the afternoon we explore a large extent of country, my companion carrying a shot-gun for doves. These doves are in fact wild pigeons, a small and beautiful pearly-grey bird. They live on the tops of the houses in nests formed for them by the insertion of tiles or earthen pots in the mud-walls. Many houses have an upper story of this sort on purpose for the doves; and a collection of mere mud-cabins so ornamented is a picturesque sight, under a palm-grove. Great flocks of these birds are flying about, and the shooting is permitted, away from the houses.
We make efforts to get near the wild geese and the cranes, great numbers of which are sunning themselves on the sandbanks, but these birds know exactly the range of a gun, and fly at the right moment. A row of cranes will sometimes trifle with our feelings. The one nearest will let us approach almost within range before he lifts his huge wings and sails over the river, the next one will wait for us to come a few steps further before he flies, and so on until the sand-spit is deserted of these long-legged useless birds. Hawks are flying about the shore and great greyish crows, or ravens, come over the fields and light on the margin of sand—a most gentlemanly looking bird, who is under a queer necessity of giving one hop before he can raise himself in flight. Small birds, like sand-pipers, are flitting about the bank. The most beautiful creature, however, is a brown bird, his wing marked with white, long bill, head erect and adorned with a high tuft, as elegant as the blue-jay; the natives call it the crocodile's guide.
We cross vast fields of wheat and of beans, the Arab “fool,” which are sown broadcast, interspersed now and then with a melon-patch. Villages, such as they are, are frequent; one of them has a mosque, the only one we have seen recently. The water for ablution is outside, in a brick tank sunk in the ground. A row of men are sitting on their heels in front of the mosque, smoking; some of them in white gowns, and fine-looking men. I hope there is some saving merit in this universal act of sitting on the heels, the soles of the feet flat on the ground; it is not an easy thing for a Christian to do, as he will find out by trying.
Toward night a steamboat flying the star and crescent of Egypt, with passengers on board, some of “Cook's personally conducted,” goes thundering down stream, filling the air with smoke and frightening the geese, who fly before it in vast clouds. I didn't suppose there were so many geese in the world.
Truth requires it to be said that on Tuesday morning the dahabeëh holds about the position it reached on Sunday morning; we begin to think we are doing well not to lose anything in this rapid current. The day is warm and cloudy, the wind is from the east and then from the south-east, exactly the direction we must go. It is in fact a sirocco, and fills one with languor, which is better than being frost-bitten at home. The evening, with the cabin windows all open, is like one of those soft nights which come at the close of sultry northern days, in which there is a dewy freshness. This is the sort of winter that we ought to cultivate.
During the day we attempt tracking two or three times, but with little success; the wind is so strong that the boat is continually blown ashore. Tracking is not very hard for the passengers and gives them an opportunity to study the bank and the people on it close at hand. A long cable fastened on the forward deck is carried ashore, and to the far end ten or twelve sailors attach themselves at intervals by short ropes which press across the breast. Leaning in a slant line away from the river, they walk at a snail's pace, a file of parti-colored raiment and glistening legs; occasionally bursting into a snatch of a song, they slowly pull the bark along. But obstructions to progress are many. A spit of sand will project itself, followed by deepwater, through which the men will have to wade in order to bring the boat round; occasionally the rope must be passed round trees which overhang the caving bank; and often freight-boats, tied to the shore, must be passed. The leisure with which the line is carried outside another boat is amusing even in this land of deliberation. The groups on these boats sit impassive and look at us with a kind of curiosity that has none of our eagerness in it. The well-bred indifferent “stare” of these people, which is not exactly brazen and yet has no element of emotion in it, would make the fortune of a young fellow in a London season. The Nubian boatmen who are tracking the freight-dahabeëh appear to have left their clothes in Cairo; they flop in and out of the water, they haul the rope along the bank, without consciousness apparently that any spectators are within miles; and the shore-life goes on all the same, men sit on the banks, women come constantly to fill their jars, these crews stripped to their toil excite no more attention than the occasional fish jumping out of the Nile. The habit seems to be general of minding one's own business.
At early morning another funeral crossed the river to a desolate burial-place in the sand, the women wailing the whole distance of the march; and the noise was more than before like the clang of wild geese. These women have inherited the Oriental art of “lifting up the voice,” and it adds not a little to the weirdness of this ululation and screeching to think that for thousands of years the dead have been buried along this valley with exactly the same feminine tenderness.
These women wear black; all the countrywomen we have seen are dressed in sombre gowns and shawls of black or deep blue-black; none of them have a speck of color in their raiment, not a bit of ribbon nor a bright kerchief, nor any relief to the dullness of their apparel. And yet they need not fear to make themselves too attractive. The men have all the colors that are worn; though the Fellaheen as a rule wear brownish garments, blue and white are not uncommon, and a white turban or a red fez, or a silk belt about the waist gives variety and agreeable relief to the costumes. In this these people imitate that nature which we affect to admire, but outrage constantly. They imitate the birds. The male birds have all the gay plumage; the feathers of the females are sober and quiet, as befits their domestic position. And it must be admitted that men need the aid of gay dress more than women.
The next morning when the sun shows over the eastern desert, the sailors are tracking, hauling the boat slowly along an ox-bow in the river, until at length the sail can catch the light west wind which sprang up with the dawn. When we feel that, the men scramble aboard, and the dahabeëh, like a duck that has been loitering in an eddy for days, becomes instinct with life and flies away to the cliffs opposite, the bluffs called Gebel Aboofayda, part of the Mokattam range that here rises precipitously from the river and overhangs it for ten or twelve miles. I think these limestone ledges are two or three hundred feet high. The face is scarred by the slow wearing of ages, and worn into holes and caves innumerable. Immense numbers of cranes are perched on the narrow ledges of the cliff, and flocks of them are circling in front of it, apparently having nests there. As numerous also as swallows in a sand-bank is a species of duck called the diver; they float in troops on the stream, or wheel about the roosting cranes.
This is a spot famed for its sudden gusts of wind which sometimes flop over the brink and overturn boats. It also is the resort of the crocodile, which seldom if ever comes lower down the Nile now. But the crocodile is evidently shy of exhibiting himself, and we scan the patches of sand at the foot of the rocks with our glasses for a long time in vain. The animal dislikes the puffing, swashing steamboats, and the rifle-balls that passing travelers pester him with. At last we see a scaly log six or eight feet long close to the water under the rock. By the aid of the glass it turns out to be a crocodile. He is asleep, and too far off to notice at all the volley of shot with which we salute him. It is a great thing to say you saw a crocodile. It isn't much to see one.
And yet the scaly beast is an interesting and appropriate feature in such a landscape,# and the expectation of seeing a crocodile adds to your enjoyment. On our left are these impressive cliffs; on the right is a level island. Half-naked boys and girls are tending small flocks of black sheep on it. Abd-el-Atti raises his gun as if he would shoot the children and cries out to them, “lift up your arm,” words that the crocodile hunter uses when he is near enough to fire, and wants to attract the attention of the beast so that it will raise its fore-paw to move off, and give the sportsman a chance at the vulnerable spot. The children understand the allusion and run laughing away.
Groups of people are squatting on the ground, doing nothing, waiting for nothing, expecting nothing; buffaloes and cattle are feeding on the thin grass, and camels are kneeling near in stately indifference; women in blue-black robes come—the everlasting sight—to draw water. The whole passes in a dumb show. The hot sun bathes all.
We pass next the late residence of a hermit, a Moslem “welee” or holy man. On a broad ledge of the cliff, some thirty feet above the water, is a hut built of stone and plaster and whitewashed, about twelve feet high, the roof rounded like an Esquimau snow-hut and with a knob at the top. Here the good man lived, isolated from the world, fed by the charity of passers-by, and meditating on his own holiness. Below him, out of the rock, with apparently no better means of support than he had, grows an acacia-tree, now in yellow blossoms. Perhaps the saint chewed the gum-arabic that oozed from it. Just above, on the river, is a slight strip of soil, where he used to raise a few cucumbers and other cooling vegetables. The farm, which is no larger than two bed blankets, is deserted now. The saint died, and is buried in his house, in a hole excavated in the rock, so that his condition is little changed, his house being his tomb, and the Nile still soothing his slumber.
But if it is easy to turn a house into a tomb it is still easier to turn a tomb into a house. Here are two square-cut tombs in the rock, of which a family has taken possession, the original occupants probably having moved out hundreds of years ago. Smoke is issuing from one of them, and a sorry-looking woman is pulling dead grass among the rocks for fuel. There seems to be no inducement for any one to live in this barren spot, but probably rent is low. A little girl seven or eight years old comes down and walks along the bank, keeping up with the boat, incited of course by the universal expectation of backsheesh. She has on a head-veil, covering the back of the head and neck and a single shirt of brown rags hanging in strings. I throw her an apple, a fruit she has probably never seen, which she picks up and carries until she joined is by an elder sister, to whom she shows it. Neither seems to know what it is. The elder smells it, sticks her teeth into it, and then takes a bite. The little one tastes, and they eat it in alternate bites, growing more and more eager for fair bites as the process goes on.
Near the southern end of the cliffs of Gebel Aboofayda are the crocodile-mummy pits which Mr. Prime explored; caverns in which are stacked up mummied crocodiles and lizards by the thousands. We shall not go nearer to them. I dislike mummies; I loathe crocodiles; I have no fondness for pits. What could be more unpleasant than the three combined! To crawl on one's stomach through crevices and hewn passages in the rock, in order to carry a torch into a stifling chamber, packed with mummies and cloths soaked in bitumen, is an exploit that we willingly leave to Egyptologists. If one takes a little pains, he can find enough unpleasant things above ground.
It requires all our skill to work the boat round the bend above these cliffs; we are every minute about to go aground on a sand-bar, or jibe the sail, or turn about. Heaven only knows how we ever get on at all, with all the crew giving orders and no one obeying. But by five o'clock we are at the large market-town of Manfaloot, which has half a dozen minarets and is sheltered by a magnificent palm-grove. You seem to be approaching an earthly paradise; and one can keep up the illusion if he does not go ashore. And yet this is a spot that ought to interest the traveler, for here Lot is said to have spent a portion of the years of his exile, after the accident to his wife.
At sunset old Abo Arab comes limping along the bank with a tin pail, having succeeded at length in overtaking the boat; and in reply to the question, where he has been asleep all day, pulls out from his bosom nine small fish as a peace-offering. He was put off at sunrise to get milk for breakfast. What a happy-go-lucky country it is.
After sundown, the crew, who have worked hard all day, on and off, tacking, poling, and shifting sail, get their supper round an open fire on deck, take each some whiffs from the “hubble-bubble,” and, as we sail out over the broad, smooth water, sing a rude and plaintive melody to the subdued thump of the darabooka. Towards dark, as we are about to tie up, the wind, which had failed, rises, and we voyage on, the waves rippling against the sides in a delicious lullaby. The air is soft, the moon is full and peeps out from the light clouds which obscure the sky and prevent dew.
The dragoman asleep on the cabin deck, the reïs crouched, attentive of the course, near him, part of the sailors grouped about the bow in low chat, and part asleep in the shadow of the sail, we voyage along under the wide night, still to the south and warmer skies, and seem to be sailing through an enchanted land.
Put not your trust in breezes. The morning finds us still a dozen miles from Asioot where we desire to celebrate Christmas; we just move with sails up, and the crew poling. The head-man chants a line or throws out a word, and the rest come in with a chorus, as they walk along, bending the shoulder to the pole. The leader—the “shanty man” the English sailors call their leader, from the French chanter I suppose—ejaculates a phrase, sometimes prolonging it, or dwelling on it with a variation, like “O! Mohammed!” or “O! Howadji!” or some scraps from a love-song, and the men strike in in chorus: “Hâ Yàlësah, hâ Yâlësah,” a response that the boatmen have used for hundreds of years.
We sail leisurely past a large mud-village dropped in a splendid grove of palms and acacias. The scene is very poetical before details are inspected, and the groves, we think, ought to be the home of refinement and luxury. Men are building a boat under the long arcade of trees, women are stooping with the eternal water-jars which do not appear to retain fluid any better than the sieves of the Danaïdes, and naked children run along the bank crying “Backsheesh, O Howadji.” Our shot-gun brings down a pigeon-hawk close to the shore. A boy plunges in and gets it, handing it to us on deck from the bank, but not relinquishing his hold with one hand until he feels the half-piastre in the other. So early is distrust planted in the human breast.
Getting away from this idyllic scene, which has not a single resemblance to any civilized town, we work our way up to El Hamra late in the afternoon. This is the landing-place for Asioot; the city itself is a couple of miles inland, and could be reached by a canal at high water. We have come again into an active world, and there are evidences that this is a busy place. New boats are on the stocks, and there is a forge for making some sort of machinery. So much life has not been met with since we left Cairo. The furling our great sail is a fine sight as we round in to the bank, the sailors crawling out on the slender, hundred-feet-long yard, like monkeys, and drawing up the hanging slack with both feet and hands.
It is long since we have seen so many or so gaily dressed people as are moving on shore; a procession of camels passes along; crowds of donkeys are pushed down to the boat by their noisy drivers; old women come to sell eggs, and white grease that pretends to be butter, and one of them pulls some live pigeons from a bag. We lie at the mud-bank, and classes of half-clad children, squatting in the sand, study us. Two other dahabeëhs are moored near us, their passengers sitting under the awning and indolently observing the novel scene, book in hand, after the manner of Nile voyagers.
These are the pictures constantly recurring on the river, only they are never the same in grouping or color, and they never weary one. It is wonderful, indeed, how satisfying the Nile is in itself and how little effort travelers make for the society of each other. Boats pass or meet and exchange salutes, but with little more effusion than if they were on the Thames. Nothing afloat is so much like a private house as a dahabeëh, and I should think, by what we hear, that sociability decreases on the Nile with increase of travel and luxury.
PROBABLY this present writer has the distinction of being the only one who has written about the Nile and has not invented a new way of spelling the name of the town whose many minarets and brown roofs are visible over the meadows.
It is written Asioot, Asyoot, Asiüt, Ssout, Siôout, Osyoot, Osioot, O'Sioôt, Siüt, Sioot, O'siout, Si-ôôt, Siout, Syouth, and so on, indefinitely. People take the liberty to spell names as they sound to them, and there is consequently a pleasing variety in the names of all places, persons, and things in Egypt; and when we add to the many ways of spelling an Arabic word, the French the German, and the English translation or equivalent, you are in a hopeless jumble of nomenclature. The only course is to strike out boldly and spell everything as it seems good in your eyes, and differently in different moods. Even the name of the Prophet takes on half a dozen forms; there are not only ninety-nine names of the attributes of God, but I presume there are ninety-nine ways of spelling each of them.
This Asioot has always been a place of importance. It was of old called Lycopolis, its divinity being the wolf or the wolf-headed god; and in a rock-mountain behind the town were not only cut the tombs of the inhabitants, but there were deposited the mummies of the sacred wolves. About these no one in Asioot knows or cares much, to day. It is a city of twenty-five thousand people, with a good many thriving Copt Christians; the terminus, to day, of the railway, and the point of arrival and departure of the caravans to and from Darfoor—a desert march of a month. Here are made the best clay pipe-bowls in Egypt, and a great variety of ornamented dishes and vases in clay, which the traveler buys and doesn't know what to do with. The artisans also work up elephants' tusks and ostrich feathers into a variety of “notions.”
Christmas day opens warm and with an air of festivity. Great palm-branches are planted along the bank and form an arbor over the gang-plank. The cabin is set with them, in gothic arches over windows and doors, with yellow oranges at the apex. The forward and saloon decks are completely embowered in palms, which also run up the masts and spars. The crew have entered with zeal into the decoration, and in the early morning transformed the boat into a floating bower of greenery; the effect is Oriental, but it is difficult to believe that this is really Christmas day. The weather is not right, for one thing. It is singularly pleasant, in fact like summer. We miss the usual snow and ice and the hurtling of savage winds that bring suffering to the poor and make charity meritorious. Besides, the Moslems are celebrating the day for us and, I fear, regarding it simply as an occasion of backsheesh. The sailors are very quick to understand so much of our religion as is profitable to themselves.
In such weather as this it would be possible for “shepherds to watch their flocks by night.”
Early in the day we have a visit from Wasef el Khyat, the American consul here for many years, a Copt and a native of Asioot, who speaks only Arabic; he is accompanied by one of his sons, who was educated at the American college in Beyrout. So far does that excellent institution send its light; scattered rays to be sure, but it is from it and such schools that the East is getting the real impetus of civilization.
I do not know what the consul at Asioot does for America, but our flag is of great service to him, protecting his property from the exactions of his own government. Wasef is consequently very polite to all Americans, and while he sipped coffee and puffed cigars in our cabin he smiled unutterable things. This is the pleasantest kind of intercourse in a warm climate, where a puff and an occasional smile will pass for profuse expressions of social enjoyment.
His excellency Shakirr Pasha, the governor of this large and rich province, has sent word that he is about to put carriages and donkeys at our disposal, but this probably meant that the consul would do it; and the consul has done it. The carriage awaits us on the bank. It is a high, paneled, venerable ark, that moves with trembling dignity; and we choose the donkeys as less pretentious and less liable to come to pieces. This is no doubt the only carriage between Cairo and Kartoom, and its appearance is regarded as an event.
Our first visit is paid to the Pasha, who has been only a few days in his province, and has not yet transferred his harem from Cairo. We are received with distinguished ceremony, to the lively satisfaction of Abd-el-Atti, whose face beams like the morning, in bringing together such “distinguish” people as his friend the Pasha, and travelers in his charge. The Pasha is a courtly Turk, of most elegant manners, and the simplicity of high breeding, a man of the world and one of the ablest governors in Egypt. The room into which we are ushered, through a dirty alley and a mud-wall court is hardly in keeping with the social stilts on which we are all walking. In our own less favored land, it would answer very well for a shed or an out-house to store beans in, or for a “reception room” for sheep; a narrow oblong apartment, covered with a flat roof of palm logs, with a couple of dirty little windows high up, the once whitewashed walls stained variously, the cheap divans soiled.
The hospitality of this gorgeous salon was offered us with effusion, and we sat down and exchanged compliments as if we had been in a palace. I am convinced that there is nothing like the Oriental imagination. An attendant (and the servants were in keeping with the premises) brought in fingans of coffee. The servant presents the cup in his right hand, holding the bottom of the silver receptacle in his thumb and finger; he takes it away empty with both hands, placing the left under and the right on top of it. These formalities are universal and all-important. Before taking it you ought to make the salutation, by touching breast, lips, and forehead, with the right hand—an acknowledgment not to the servant but to the master. Cigars are then handed round, for it is getting to be considered on the Nile that cigars are more “swell” than pipes; more's the pity.
The exchange of compliments meantime went on, and on the part of the Pasha with a fineness, adroitness, and readiness that showed the practice of a lifetime in social fence. He surpassed our most daring invention with a smiling ease, and topped all our extravagances with an art that made our pool efforts appear clumsy. And what the effect would have been if we could have understood the flowery Arabic I can only guess; nor can we ever know how many flowers of his own the dragoman cast in.
“His excellency say that he feel the honor of your visit.”
“Say to his excellency that although we are only spending one day in his beautiful capital, we could not forego the-pleasure of paying our respects to his excellency.” This sentence is built by the critic, and strikes us all favorably.
“His excellency himself not been here many days, and sorry he not know you coming, to make some preparations to receive you.”
“Thank his excellency for the palms that decorate our boat.”
“They are nothing, nothing, he say not mention it; the dahabeëh look very different now if the Nile last summer had not wash away all his flower-garden. His excellency say, how you enjoyed your voyage?”
“It has been very pleasant; only for a day or two we have wanted wind.”
“Your misfortune, his excellency say, his pleasure; it give him the opportunity of your society. But he say if you want wind he sorry no wind; it cause him to suffer that you not come here sooner.”
“Will his excellency dine with us to-day?”
“He say he think it too much honor.”
“Assure his excellency that we feel that the honor is conferred by him.”
And he consents to come. After we have taken our leave, the invitation is extended to the consul, who is riding with us.
The way to the town is along a winding, shabby embankment, raised above high water, and shaded with sycamore-trees. It is lively with people on foot and on donkeys, in more colored and richer dress than that worn by country-people; the fields are green, the clover is springing luxuriantly, and spite of the wrecks of unburned-brick houses, left gaping by the last flood, and spite of the general untidiness of everything, the ride is enjoyable. I don't know why it is that an irrigated country never is pleasing on close inspection, neither is an irrigated garden. Both need to be seen from a little distance, which conceals the rawness of the alternately dry and soaked soil, the frequent thinness of vegetation, the unkempt swampy appearance of the lowest levels, and the painful whiteness of paths never wet and the dustiness of trees unwashed by rain. There is no Egyptian landscape or village that is neat, on near inspection.
Asioot has a better entrance than most towns, through an old gateway into the square (which is the court of the palace); and the town has extensive bazaars and some large dwellings. But as we ride through it, we are always hemmed in by mud-walls, twisting through narrow alleys, encountering dirt and poverty at every step. We pass through the quarter of the Ghawâzees, who, since their banishment from Cairo, form little colonies in all the large Nile towns. There are the dancing-women whom travelers are so desirous of seeing; the finest-looking women and the most abandoned courtesans, says Mr. Lane, in Egypt. In showy dresses of bright yellow and red, adorned with a profusion of silver-gilt necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, they sit at the doors of their hovels in idle expectation. If these happen to be the finest-looking women in Egypt, the others are wise in keeping their veils on.
Outside the town we find a very pretty cemetery of the Egyptian style, staring white tombs, each dead person resting under his own private little stucco oven. Near it is encamped a caravan just in from Darfoor, bringing cinnamon, gum-arabic, tusks, and ostrich feathers. The camels are worn with the journey; their drivers have a fierce and free air in striking contrast with the bearing of the fellaheen. Their noses are straight, their black hair is long and shaggy, their garment is a single piece of coarse brown cloth; they have the wildness of the desert.
The soft limestone ledge back of the town is honeycombed with grottoes and tombs; rising in tiers from the bottom to the top. Some of them have merely square-cut entrances into a chamber of moderate size, in some part of which, or in a passage beyond, is a pit cut ten or twenty feet deep in the rock, like a grave, for the mummy. One of them has a magnificent entrance through a doorway over thirty feet high and fifteen deep; upon the jambs are gigantic figures cut in the rock. Some of the chambers are vast and were once pillared, and may have served for dwellings. These excavations are very old. The hieroglyphics and figures on the walls are not in relief on the stone, but cut in at the outer edge and left in a gradual swell in the center—an intaglio relievato. The drawing is generally spirited, and the figures show knowledge of form and artistic skill. It is wonderful that such purely conventional figures, the head almost always in profile and the shoulders square to the front, can be so expressive. On one wall is a body of infantry marching, with the long pointed shields mentioned by Xenophon in describing Egyptian troops. Everywhere are birds, gracefully drawn and true to species, and upon some of them the blue color is fresh. A ceiling of one grotto is wrought in ornamental squares—a “Greek pattern,” executed long before the time of the Greeks. Here we find two figures with the full face turned towards us, instead of the usual profile.
These tombs have served for a variety of purposes. As long as the original occupants rested here, no doubt their friends came and feasted and were mournfully merry in these sightly chambers overlooking the Nile. Long after they were turned out, Christian hermits nested in them, during that extraordinary period of superstition when men thought they could best secure their salvation by living like wild beasts in the deserts of Africa. Here one John of Lycopolis had his den, in which he stayed fifty years, without ever opening the door or seeing the face of a woman. At least, he enjoyed that reputation. Later, persecuted Christians dwelt in these tombs, and after them have come wanderers, and jackals, and houseless Arabs. I think I should rather live here than in Asioot; the tombs are cleaner and better built than the houses of the town, and there is good air here and no danger of floods.
When we are on the top of the bluff, the desert in broken ridges is behind us. The view is one of the best of the usual views from hills near the Nile, the elements of which are similar; the spectator has Egypt in all its variety at his feet. The valley here is broad, and we look a long distance up and down the river. The Nile twists and turns in its bed like one of the chimerical serpents sculptured in the chambers of the dead; canals wander from it through the plain; and groves of palms and lines of sycamores contrast their green with that of the fields. All this level expanse is now covered with wheat, barley and thick clover, and the green has a vividness that we have never seen in vegetation before. This owes somewhat to the brown contrast near at hand and something maybe to the atmosphere, but I think the growing grain has a lustre unknown to other lands. This smiling picture is enclosed by the savage frame of the desert, gaunt ridges of rocky hills, drifts of stones, and yellow sand that sends its hot tongues in long darts into the plain. At the foot of the mountain lies Asioot brown as the mud of the Nile, a city built of sun-dried bricks, but presenting a singular and not unpleasing appearance on account of the dozen white stone minarets, some of them worked like lace, which spring out of it.
The consul's home is one of the best in the city, but outside it shows only a mud-wall like the meanest. Within is a paved court, and offices about it; the rooms above are large, many-windowed, darkened with blinds, and not unlike those of a plain house in America. The furniture is European mainly, and ugly, and of course out of place in Africa. We see only the male members of the family. Confectionery and coffee are served and some champagne, that must have been made by the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company; their champagne is well known in the Levant, and there is no known decoction that is like it. In my judgment, if it is proposed to introduce Christianity and that kind of wine into Egypt, the country would better be left as it is.
During our call the consul presents us fly-whisks with ivory handles, and gives the ladies beautiful fans of ostrich feathers mounted in ivory. These presents may have been due to a broad hint from the Pasha, who said to the consul at our interview in the morning:—
“I should not like to have these distinguished strangers go away without some remembrance of Asioot. I have not been here long; what is there to get for them?”
“O, your excellency, I will attend to that,” said the consul.
In the evening, with the dahabeëh beautifully decorated and hung with colored lanterns, upon the deck, which, shut in with canvas and spread with Turkish rugs, was a fine reception-room, we awaited our guests, as if we had been accustomed to this sort of thing in America from our infancy, and as if we usually celebrated Christmas outdoors, fans in hand, with fire-works. A stand for the exhibition of fireworks had been erected on shore. The Pasha was received as he stepped on board, with three rockets, (that being, I suppose, the number of his official “tails,”) which flew up into the sky and scattered their bursting bombs of color amid the stars, announcing to the English dahabeëhs, the two steamboats and the town of Asioot, that the governor of the richest province in Egypt was about to eat his dinner.
The dinner was one of those perfections that one likes to speak of only in confidential moments to dear friends. It wanted nothing either in number of courses or in variety, in meats, in confections, in pyramids of gorgeous construction, in fruits and flowers. There was something touching about the lamb roasted whole, reclining his head on his own shoulder. There was something tender about the turkey. There was a terrible moment when the plum-pudding was borne in on fire, as if it had been a present from the devil himself. The Pasha regarded it with distrust, and declined, like a wise man, to eat flame. I fear that the English have fairly introduced this dreadful dish into the Orient, and that the natives have come to think that all foreigners are Molochs who can best be pleased by offering up to them its indigestible ball set on fire of H. It is a fearful spectacle to see this heathen people offering this incense to a foreign idol, in the subserviency which will sacrifice even religion to backsheesh.
The conversation during dinner is mostly an exchange of compliments, in the art of which the Pasha is a master, displaying in it a wit, a variety of resource and a courtliness that make the game a very entertaining one. The Arabic language gives full play to this sort of social espièglerie, and lends a delicacy to encounters of compliment which the English language does not admit.
Coffee and pipes are served on deck, and the fire-works begin to tear and astonish the night. The Khedive certainly employs very good pyrotechnists, and the display by Abd-el-Atti and his equally excited helpers although simple is brilliant. The intense delight that the soaring and bursting of a rocket give to Abd-el-Atti is expressed in unconscious and unrestrained demonstration. He might be himself in flames but he would watch the flight of the rushing stream of fire, jumping up and down in his anxiety for it to burst:—
“There! there! that's—a he, hooray!”
Every time one bursts, scattering its colored stars, the crew, led by the dragoman, cheer, “Heep, heep, hooray! heep, heep, hooray!”
A whirligig spins upon the river, spouting balls of fire, and the crew come in with a “Heep, heep, hooray! heep, heep, hooray!”
The steamer, which has a Belgian prince on board, illuminates, and salutes with shot-guns. In the midst of a fusillade of rockets and Roman candles, the crew develop a new accomplishment. Drilled by the indomitable master of ceremonies, they attempt the first line of that distinctively American melody,
“We won't go home till morning.”
They really catch the air, and make a bubble, bubble of sounds, like automata, that somewhat resembles the words. Probably they think that it is our national anthem, or perhaps a Christmas hymn. No doubt, “won't-go-home-till-morning” sort of Americans have been up the river before us.
The show is not over when the Pasha pleads an engagement to take a cup of tea with the Belgian prince, and asks permission to retire. He expresses his anguish at leaving us, and he will not depart if we say “no.” Of course, our anguish in letting the Pasha go exceeds his suffering in going, but we sacrifice ourselves to the demand of his station, and permit him to depart. At the foot of the cabin stairs he begs us to go no further, insisting that we do him too much honor to come so far.
The soft night grows more brilliant. Abd-el-Atti and his minions are still blazing away. The consul declares that Asioot in all his life has never experienced a night like this. We express ourselves as humbly thankful in being the instruments of giving Asioot (which is asleep there two miles off) such an “eye-opener.” (This remark has a finer sound when translated into Arabic.)
The spectacle closes by a voyage out upon the swift river in the sandal. We take Roman candles, blue, red, and green lights and floaters which Abd-el-Atti lets off, while the crew hoarsely roar, “We won't go home till morning,” and mingle “Heep, heep, hooray,” with “Hà Yàlësah, hâ Yâlësah.”
The long range of lights on the steamers, the flashing lines and pyramids of colors on our own dahabeëh, the soft June-like night, the moon coming up in fleecy clouds, the broad Nile sparkling under so many fires, kindled on earth and in the sky, made a scene unique, and as beautiful as any that the Arabian Nights suggest.
To end all, there was a hubbub on shore among the crew, caused by one of them who was crazy with hasheesh, and threatened to murder the reïs and dragoman, if he was not permitted to go on board. It could be demonstrated that he was less likely to slay them if he did not come on board, and he was therefore sent to the governor's lock-up, with a fair prospect of going into the Khedive's army. We left him behind, and about one o'clock in the morning stole away up the river with a gentle and growing breeze.
Net result of pleasure:—one man in jail, and Abd-el-Atti's wrist so seriously burned by the fire-works, that he has no use of his arm for weeks. But, “'twas a glorious victory.” For a Christmas, however, it was a little too much like the Fourth of July.