AS WE sail down into the heart of Egypt and into the remote past, living in fact, by books and by eye-sight, in eras so far-reaching that centuries count only as years in them, the word “ancient” gets a new signification. We pass every day ruins, ruins of the Old Empire, of the Middle Empire, of the Ptolomies, of the Greeks, of the Romans, of the Christians, of the Saracens; but nothing seems ancient to us any longer except the remains of Old Egypt.
We have come to have a singular contempt for anything so modern as the work of the Greeks, or Romans. Ruins pointed out on shore as Roman, do not interest us enough to force us to raise the field-glass. Small antiquities that are of the Roman period are not considered worth examination. The natives have a depreciatory shrug when they say of an idol or a brick-wall, “Roman!”
The Greeks and the Romans are moderns like ourselves. They are as broadly separated in the spirit of their life and culture from those ancients as we are; we can understand them; it is impossible for us to enter into the habits of thought and of life of the early Pharaonic times. When the variation of two thousand years in the assignment of a dynasty seems to us a trifle, the two thousand years that divide us and the Romans shrink into no importance.
In future ages the career of the United States and of Rome will be reckoned in the same era; and children will be taught the story of George Washington suckled by the wolf, and Romulus cutting the cherry-tree with his little hatchet. We must have distance in order to put things in their proper relations. In America, what have we that will endure a thousand years? Even George Washington's hatchet may be forgotten sooner than the fiabellum of Pharaoh.
The day after Christmas we are going with a stiff wind, so fresh that we can carry only the forward sail. The sky is cloudy and stormy-looking. It is in fact as disagreeable and as sour a fall day as you can find anywhere. We keep the cabin, except for a time in the afternoon, when it is comfortable sitting on deck in an overcoat. We fly by Abooteeg; Raâineli, a more picturesque village, the top of every house being a pigeon-tower; Gow, with its remnants of old Antæopolis—it was in the river here that Horus defeated Typhon in a great battle, as, thank God! he is always doing in this flourishing world, with a good chance of killing him outright some day, when Typhon will no more take the shape of crocodile or other form of evil, war, or paper currency; Tahtah, conspicuous by its vast mounds of an ancient city; and Gebel Sheykh Hereédee, near the high cliffs of which we run, impressed by the grey and frowning crags.
As we are passing these rocks a small boat dashes out to our side, with a sail in tatters and the mast carrying a curiously embroidered flag, the like of which is in no signal-book. In the stern of this fantastic craft sits a young and very shabbily clad Sheykh, and demands backsheesh, as if he had aright to demand toll of all who pass his dominions. This right our reïs acknowledges and tosses him some paras done up in a rag. I am sure I like this sort of custom-house better than some I have seen.
We go on in the night past Soohag, the capital of the province of Girgeh; and by other villages and spots of historic interest, where the visitor will find only some~heaps of stones and rubbish to satisfy a curiosity raised by reading of their former importance; by the White Monastery and the Red Convent; and, coming round a bend, as we always are coming round a bend, and bringing the wind ahead, the crew probably asleep, we ignominiously run into the bank, and finally come to anchor in mid-stream.
As if to crowd all weathers into twenty-four hours, it clears off cold in the night; and in the morning when we are opposite the the pretty town of Ekhmeem, a temperature of 51° makes it rather fresh for the men who line the banks working the shadoofs, with no covering but breech-cloths. The people here, when it is cold, bundle up about the head and shoulders with thick wraps, and leave the feet and legs bare. The natives are huddled in clusters on the bank, out of the shade of the houses, in order to get the warmth of the sun; near one group a couple of discontented camels kneel; and the naked boy, making no pretence of a superfluous wardrobe by hanging his shirt on a bush while he goes to bed, is holding it up to dry.
We skim along in almost a gale the whole day, passing, in the afternoon, an American dahabeëh tied up, repairing a broken yard, and giving Bellianeh the go-by as if it were of no importance. And yet this is the landing for the great Abydus, a city once second only to Thebes, the burial-place of Osiris himself, and still marked by one of the finest temples in Egypt. But our business now is navigation, and we improve the night as well as the day; much against the grain of the crew. There is always more or less noise and row in a night-sail, going aground, splashing, and boosting in the water to get off, shouting and chorusing and tramping on deck, and when the thermometer is as low as 520 these night-baths are not very welcome when followed by exposure to keen wind, in a cotton shirt. And with the dragoman in bed, used up like one of his burnt-out rockets, able only to grumble at “dese fellow care for nothing but smoke hasheesh,” the crew are not very subordinate. They are liable to go to sleep and let us run aground, or they are liable to run aground in order that they may go to sleep. They seem to try both ways alternately.
But moving or stranded, the night is brilliant all the same; the night-skies are the more lustrous the farther we go from the moisture of Lower Egypt, and the stars scintillate with splendor, and flash deep colors like diamonds in sunlight. Late, the moon rises over the mountains under which we are sailing, and the effect is magically lovely. We are approaching Farshoot.
Farshoot is a market-town and has a large sugar-factory, the first set up in Egypt, built by an uncle of the Khedive. It was the seat of power of the Howara tribe of Arabs, and famous for its breed of Howara horses and dogs, the latter bigger and fiercer than the little wolfish curs with which Egypt swarms. It is much like other Egyptian towns now, except that its inhabitants, like its dogs, are a little wilder and more ragged than the fellaheen below. This whole district of Hamram is exceedingly fertile and bursting with a tropical vegetation.
The Turkish governor pays a formal visit and we enjoy one of those silent and impressive interviews over chibooks and coffee; in which nothing is said that one can regret. We finally make the governor a complimentary speech, which Hoseyn, who only knows a little table-English, pretends to translate. The Bey replies, talking very rapidly for two or three minutes. When we asked Hoseyn to translate, he smiled and said—“Thank you”—which was no doubt the long palaver.
The governor conducts us through the sugar-factory, which is not on so grand a scale as those we shall see later, but hot enough and sticky enough, and then gives us the inevitable coffee in his office; seemingly, if you clap your hands anywhere in Egypt, a polite and ragged attendant will appear with a tiny cup of coffee.
The town is just such a collection of mud-hovels as the others, and we learn nothing new in it. Yes, we do. We learn how to scour brass dishes. We see at the doorway of a house where a group of women sit on the ground waiting for their hair to grow, two boys actively engaged in this scouring process. They stand in the dishes, which have sand in them, and, supporting themselves by the side of the hut, whirl half-way round and back. The soles of their feet must be like leather. This method of scouring is worth recording, as it may furnish an occupation for boys at an age when they are usually, and certainly here, useless.
The weekly market is held in the open air at the edge of the town. The wares for sale are spread upon the ground, the people sitting behind them in some sort of order, but the crowd surges everywhere and the powdered dust rises in clouds. It is the most motley assembly we have seen. The women are tattooed on the face and on the breast; they wear anklets of bone and of silver, and are loaded with silver ornaments. As at every other place where a fair, a wedding, or a funeral attracts a crowd, there are some shanties of the Ghawazees, who are physically superior to the other women, but more tattooed, their necks, bosoms and waists covered with their whole fortune in silver, their eyelids heavily stained with Kohl—bold-looking jades, who come out and stare at us with a more than masculine impudence.
The market offers all sorts of green country produce, and eggs, corn, donkeys, sheep, lentils, tobacco, pipe-stems, and cheap ornaments in glass. The crowd hustles about us in a troublesome manner, showing special curiosity about the ladies, as if they had rarely seen white women. Ahmed and another sailor charge into them with their big sticks to open a passage for us, but they follow us, commenting freely upon our appearance. The sailors jabber at them and at us, and are anxious to get us back to the boat; where we learn that the natives “not like you.” The feeling is mutual, though it is discouraging to our pride to be despised by such barbarous half-clad folk.
Beggars come to the boat continually for backsheesh; a tall juggler in a white, dirty tunic, with a long snake coiled about his neck, will not go away for less than half a piastre. One tariff piastre (five cents) buys four eggs here, double the price of former years, but still discouraging to a hen. However, the hens have learned to lay their eggs small. All the morning we are trading in the desultory way in which everything is done here, buying a handful of eggs at a time, and live chickens by the single one.
In the afternoon the boat is tracked along through a land that is bursting with richness, waving with vast fields of wheat, of lentils, of sugar-cane, interspersed with melons and beans. The date-palms are splendid in stature and mass of crown. We examine for the first time the Dôm Palm, named from its shape, which will not flourish much lower on the river than here. Its stem grows up a little distance and then branches in two, and these two limbs each branch in two; always in two. The leaves are shorter than those of the date-palm and the tree is altogether more scraggy, but at a little distance it assumes the dome form. The fruit, now green, hangs in large bunches a couple of feet long; each fruit is the size of a large Flemish Beauty pear. It has a thick rind, and a stone, like vegetable ivory, so hard that it is used for drill-sockets. The fibrous rind is gnawed off by the natives when it is ripe and is said to taste like gingerbread. These people live on gums and watery vegetables and fibrous stuff that wouldn't give a northern man strength enough to gather them.
We find also the sont acacia here, and dig the gum-arabic from its bark. In the midst of a great plain of wheat, intersected by ditches and raised footways we come upon a Safciya, embowered in trees, which a long distance off makes itself known by the most doleful squeaking. These water-wheels, which are not unlike those used by the Persians, are not often seen lower down the river, where the water is raised by the shadoof. Here we find a well sunk to the depth of the Nile, and bricked up. Over it is a wheel, upon which is hung an endless rope of palm fibres and on its outer rim are tied earthen jars. As the wheel revolves these jars dip into the well and coming up discharge the water into a wooden trough, whence it flows into channels of earth. The cogs of this wheel fit into another, and the motive power of the clumsy machine is furnished by a couple of oxen or cows, hitched to a pole swinging round an upright shaft. A little girl, seated on the end of the pole is driving the oxen, whose slow hitching gait, sets the machine rattling and squeaking as if in pain, Nothing is exactly in gear, the bearings are never oiled; half the water is spilled before it gets to the trough; but the thing keeps grinding on, night and day, and I suppose has not been improved or changed in its construction for thousands of years.
During our walk we are attended by a friendly crowd of men and boys; there are always plenty of them who are as idle as we are, and are probably very much puzzled to know why we roam about in this way. I am sure a New England farmer, if he saw a troop of these Arabs, strolling through his corn-field, would set his dogs on them.
Both sides of the river are luxuriant here. The opposite bank, which is high, is lined with shadoofs, generally in sets of three, in order to raise the water to the required level. The view is one long to remember:—the long curving shore, with the shadoofs and the workmen, singing as they dip; people in flowing garments moving along the high bank, and processions of donkeys and camels as well; rows of palms above them, and beyond the purple Libyan hills, in relief against a rosy sky, slightly clouded along the even mountain line. In the foreground the Nile is placid and touched with a little color.
We feel more and more that the Nile is Egypt. Everything takes place on its banks. From our boat we study its life at our leisure. The Nile is always vocal with singing, or scolding, or calling to prayer; it is always lively with boatmen or workmen, or picturesque groups, or women filling their water-jars. It is the highway; it is a spectacle a thousand miles long. It supplies everything. I only wonder at one thing. Seeing that it is so swift, and knowing that it flows down and out into a world whence so many wonders come, I marvel that its inhabitants are contented to sit on its banks year after year, generation after generation, shut in behind and before by desert hills, without any desire to sail down the stream and get into a larger world. We meet rather intelligent men who have never journeyed so far as the next large town.
Thus far we have had only a few days of absolutely cloudless skies; usually we have some clouds, generally at sunrise and sunset, and occasionally an overcast day like this. But the cloudiness is merely a sort of shade; there is no possibility of rain in it.
And sure of good weather, why should we hasten? In fact, we do not. It is something to live a life that has in it neither worry nor responsibility. We take an interest, however, in How and Disnah and Fow, places where people have been living and dying now for a long time, which we cannot expect you to share. In the night while we are anchored a breeze springs up, and Abd-el-Atti roars at the sailors, to rouse them, but unsuccessfully, until he cries, “Come to prayer!”
The sleepers, waking, answer, “God is great, and Mohammed is his prophet.”
They then get up and set the sail. This is what it is to carry religion into daily life.
To-day we have been going northward, for variety. Keneh, which is thirty miles higher up the river than How, is nine minutes further north. The Nile itself loiters through the land. As the crew are poling slowly along this hot summer day, we have nothing to do but to enjoy the wide and glassy Nile, its fertile banks vocal with varied life. The songs of Nubian boatmen, rowing in measured stroke down the stream, come to us. The round white wind-mills of Keneh are visible on the sand-hills above the town. Children are bathing and cattle and donkeys wading in the shallows, and the shrill chatter of women is heard on the shore. If this is winter, I wonder what summer here is like.
WHETHER we go north or south, or wait for some wandering, unemployed wind to take us round the next bend, it is all the same to us. We have ceased to care much for time, and I think we shall adopt the Assyrian system of reckoning.
The period of the precession of the equinoxes was regarded as one day of the life of the universe; and this day equals 43,200 of our years. This day, of 43,200 years, the Assyrians divided into twelve cosmic hours or “sars,” each one of 3,600 years; each of these hours into six “ners,” of 600 years; and the “ner” into ten “sosses” or cosmic minutes, of 600 years. And thus, as we reckon sixty seconds to a minute, our ordinary year was a second of the great chronological period. What then is the value of a mere second of time? What if we do lie half a day at this bank, in the sun, waiting for a lazy breeze? There certainly is time enough, for we seem to have lived a cosmic hour since we landed in Egypt.
One sees here what an exaggerated importance we are accustomed to attach to the exact measurement of time. We constantly compare our watches, and are anxious that they should not gain or lose a second. A person feels his own importance somehow increased if he owns an accurate watch. There is nothing that a man resents more than the disparagement of his watch. (It occurs to me, by the way, that the superior attractiveness of women, that quality of repose and rest which the world finds in them, springs from the same amiable laisser aller that suffers their watches never to be correct. When the day comes that women's watches keep time, there will be no peace in this world). When two men meet, one of the most frequent interchanges of courtesies is to compare watches; certainly, if the question of time is raised, as it is sure to be shortly among a knot of men with us, every one pulls out his watch, and comparison is made.
We are, in fact, the slaves of time and of fixed times. We think it a great loss and misfortune to be without the correct time; and if we are away from the town-clock and the noon-gun, in some country place, we importune the city stranger, who appears to have a good watch, for the time; or we lie in wait for the magnificent conductor of the railway express, who always has the air of getting the promptest time from headquarters.
Here in Egypt we see how unnatural and unnecessary this anxiety is. Why should we care to know the exact time? It is 12 o'clock, Arab time, at sunset, and that shifts every evening, in order to wean us from the rigidity of iron habits. Time is flexible, it waits on our moods and we are not slaves to its accuracy. Watches here never agree, and no one cares whether they do or not. My own, which was formerly as punctual as the stars in their courses, loses on the Nile a half hour or three quarters of an hour a day (speaking in our arbitrary, artificial manner); so that, if I were good at figures, I could cypher out the length of time, which would suffice by the loss of time by my watch, to set me back into the age of Thothmes III.—a very good age to be in. We are living now by great cosmic periods, and have little care for minute divisions of time.
This morning we are at Balias, no one knows how, for we anchored three times in the night. At Balias are made the big earthen jars which the women carry on their heads, and which are sent from here the length of Egypt. Immense numbers of them are stacked upon the banks, and boat-loads of them are waiting for the wind. Rafts of these jars are made and floated down to the Delta; a frail structure, one would say, in the swift and shallow Nile, but below this place there are neither rocks in the stream nor stones on the shore.
The sunrise is magnificent, opening a cloudless day, a day of hot sun, in which the wheat on the banks and under the palm-groves, now knee-high and a vivid green, sparkles as if it had dew on it. At night there are colors of salmon and rose in the sky, and on the water; and the end of the mountain, where Thebes lies, takes a hue of greyish or pearly pink. Thebes! And we are really coming to Thebes! It is fit that it should lie in such a bath of color. Very near to-night seems that great limestone ledge in which the Thebans entombed their dead; but it is by the winding river thirty miles distant.
The last day of the year 1874 finds us lounging about in this pleasant Africa, very much after the leisurely manner of an ancient maritime expedition, the sailors of which spent most of their time in marauding on shore, watching for auguries, and sailing a little when the deities favored. The attempts, the failures, the mismanagements of the day add not a little to your entertainment on the Nile.
In the morning a light breeze springs up and we are slowly crawling forward, when the wind expires, and we come to anchor in mid-stream. The Nile here is wide and glassy, but it is swift, and full of eddies that make this part of the river exceedingly difficult of navigation. We are too far from the shore for tracking, and another resource is tried. The sandal is sent ahead with an anchor and a cable, the intention being to drop the anchor and then by the cable pull up to it, and repeat the process until we get beyond these eddies and treacherous sand-bars.
Of course the sailors in the sandal, who never think of two things at the same time, miscalculate the distance, and after they drop the anchor, have not rope enough to get back to the dahabeëh. There they are, just above us, and just out of reach, in a most helpless condition, but quite resigned to it. After various futile experiments they make a line with their tracking-cords and float an oar to us, and we send them rope to lengthen their cable. Nearly an hour is consumed in this. When the cable is attached, the crew begin slowly to haul it in through the pullies, walking the short deck in a round and singing a chorus of, “O Mohammed” to some catch-word or phrase of the leader. They like this, it is the kind of work that boys prefer, a sort of frolic:—
“Allah, Allah!”
And in response,
“O Mohammed!”
“God forgive us!”
“O Mohammed!”
“God is most great!”
“O Mohammed!”
“El Hoseyn!”
“O Mohammed!”
And so they go round as hilarious as if they played at leapfrog, with no limit of noise and shouting. They cannot haul a rope or pull an oar without this vocal expression. When the anchor is reached it is time for the crew to eat dinner.
We make not more than a mile all day, with hard work, but we reach the shore. We have been two days in this broad, beautiful bend of the river, surrounded by luxuriant fields and palm-groves, the picture framed in rosy mountains of limestone, which glow in the clear sunshine. It is a becalmment in an enchanted place, out of which there seems to be no way, and if there were we are losing the desire to go. At night, as we lie at the bank, a row of ragged fellaheen line the high shore, like buzzards, looking down on us. There is something admirable in their patience, the only virtue they seem to practice.
Later, Abd-el-Atti is thrown into a great excitement upon learning that this is the last day of the year. He had set his heart on being at Luxor, and celebrating the New Year with a grand illumination and burst of fire-works. If he had his way we should go blazing up the river in a perpetual fizz of pyrotechnic glory. At Luxor especially, where many boats are usually gathered, and which is for many the end of the voyage, the dragomans like to outshine each other in display. This is the fashionable season at Thebes, and the harvest-time of its merchants of antiquities; entertainments are given on shore, boats are illuminated, and there is a general rivalry in gaiety. Not to be in Thebes on New Year's is a misfortune. Something must be done. The Sheykh of the village of Tookh is sent for, in the hope that he can help us round the bend. The Sheykh comes, and sits on the deck and smokes. Orion also comes up the eastern sky, like a conqueror, blazing amid a blazing heaven. But we don't stir.
Upon the bank sits the guard of men from the village, to protect us; the sight of the ragamuffins grouped round their lanterns is very picturesque. Whenever we tie up at night we are obliged to procure from the Sheykh of the nearest village a guard to keep thieves from robbing us, for the thieves are not only numerous but expert all along the Nile. No wonder. They have to steal their own crops, in order to get a fair share of the produce of the land they cultivate under the exactions of the government. The Sheykh would not dare to refuse the guard asked for. The office of Sheykh is still hereditary from father to eldest son, and the Sheykh has authority over his own village, according to the ancient custom, but he is subject to a Bey, set by the government to rule a district.
New Year's morning is bright, sparkling, cloudless. When I look from my window early, the same row of buzzards sit on the high bank, looking down upon our deck and peering into our windows. Brown, ragged heaps of humanity; I suppose they are human. One of the youngsters makes mouths and faces at me; and, no doubt, despises us, as dogs and unbelievers. Behold our critic:—he has on a single coarse brown garment, through which his tawny skin shows in spots, and he squats in the sand.
What can come out of such a people? Their ignorance exceeds their poverty; and they appear to own nothing save a single garment. They look not ill-fed, but ill-conditioned. And the country is skinned; all the cattle, the turkeys, the chickens are lean. The fatness of the land goes elsewhere.
In what contrast are these people, in situation, in habits, in every thought, to the farmers of America. This Nile valley is in effect cut off from the world; nothing of what we call news enters it, no news, or book, no information of other countries, nor of any thought, or progress, or occurrences.
These people have not, in fact, the least conception of what the world is; they know no more of geography than they do of history. They think the world is flat, with an ocean of water round it. Mecca is the center. It is a religious necessity that the world should be flat in order to have Mecca its center. All Moslems believe that it is flat, as a matter of faith, though a few intelligent men know better.
These people, as I say, do not know anything, as we estimate knowledge. And yet these watchmen and the group on the bank talked all night long; their tongues were racing incessantly, and it appeared to be conversation and not monologue or narration. What could they have been talking about? Is talk in the inverse ratio of knowledge, and do we lose the power or love for mere talk, as we read and are informed?
These people, however, know the news of the river. There is a sort of freemasonry of communication by which whatever occurs is flashed up and down both banks. They know all about the boats and who are on them, and the name of the dragomans, and hear of all the accidents and disasters.
There was an American this year on the river, by the name of Smith—not that I class the coming of Smith as a disaster—who made the voyage on a steamboat. He did not care much about temples or hieroglyphics, and he sought to purchase no antiquities. He took his enjoyment in another indulgence. Having changed some of his pounds sterling into copper paras, he brought bags of this money with him. When the boat stopped at a town, Smith did not go ashore. He stood on deck and flung his coppers with a free hand at the group of idlers he was sure to find there. But Smith combined amusement with his benevolence, by throwing his largesse into the sand and into the edge of the river, where the recipients of it would have to fight and scramble and dive for what they got. When he cast a handful, there was always a tremendous scrimmage, a rolling of body over body, a rending of garments, and a tumbling into the river. This feat not only amused Smith, but it made him the most popular man on the river. Fast as the steamer went, his fame ran before him, and at every landing there was sure to be a waiting crowd, calling, “Smit, Smit.” There has been no one in Egypt since Cambyses who has made so much stir as Smit.
I should not like to convey the idea that the inhabitants here are stupid; far from it; they are only ignorant, and oppressed by long misgovernment. There is no inducement for any one to do more than make a living. The people have sharp countenances, they are lively, keen at a bargain, and, as we said, many of them expert thieves. They are full of deceit and cunning, and their affability is unfailing. Both vices and good qualities are products not of savagery, but of a civilization worn old and threadbare. The Eastern civilization generally is only one of manners, and I suspect that of the old Egyptian was no more.
These people may or may not have a drop of the ancient Egyptian blood in them; they may be no more like the Egyptians of the time of the Pharaohs than the present European Jews are like the Jews of Judea in Herod's time; but it is evident that, in all the changes in the occupants of the Nile valley, there has been a certain continuity of habits, of modes of life, a holding to ancient traditions; the relation of men to the soil is little changed. The Biblical patriarchs, fathers of nomadic tribes, have their best representatives to-day, in mode of life and even in poetical and highly figurative speech, not in Israelite bankers in London nor in Israelite beggars in Jerusalem, but in the Bedaween of the desert. And I think the patient and sharp-witted, but never educated, Egyptians of old times are not badly represented by the present settlers in the Nile valley.
There are ages of hereditary strength in the limbs of the Egyptian women, who were here, carrying these big water-jars, before Menes turned the course of the Nile at Memphis. I saw one to-day sit down on her heels before a full jar that could not weigh less than a hundred pounds, lift it to her head with her hands, and then rise straight up with it, as if the muscles of her legs were steel. The jars may be heavier than I said, for I find a full one not easy to lift, and I never saw an Egyptian man touch one.
We go on towards Thebes slowly; though the river is not swifter here than elsewhere, we have the feeling that we are pulling up-hill. We come in the afternoon to Negâdeh, and into one of the prettiest scenes on the Nile. The houses of the old town are all topped with pigeon-towers, and thousands of these birds are circling about the palm-groves or swooping in large flocks along the shore. The pigeons seem never to be slain by the inhabitants, but are kept for the sake of the fertilizer they furnish. It is the correct thing to build a second story to your house for a deposit of this kind. The inhabitants here are nearly all Copts, but we see a Roman Catholic church with its cross; and a large wooden cross stands in the midst of the village—a singular sight in a Moslem country.
A large barge lies here waiting for a steamboat to tow it to Keneh. It is crowded, packed solidly, with young fellows who have been conscripted for the army, so that it looks like a floating hulk covered by a gigantic swarm of black bees. And they are all buzzing in a continuous hum, as if the queen bee had not arrived. On the shore are circles of women, seated in the sand, wailing and mourning as if for the dead—the mothers and wives of the men who have just been seized for the service of their country. We all respect grief, and female grief above all; but these women enter into grief as if it were a pleasure, and appear to enjoy it. If the son of one of the women in the village is conscripted, all the women join in with her in mourning.
I presume there are many hard cases of separation, and that there is real grief enough in the scene before us. The expression of it certainly is not wanting; relays of women relieve those who have wailed long enough; and I see a little clay hut into which the women go, I have no doubt for refreshments, and from which issues a burst of sorrow every time the door opens.
Yet I suppose that there is no doubt that the conscription (much as I hate the trade of the soldier) is a good thing for the boys and men drafted, and for Egypt. Shakirr Pasha told us that this is the first conscription in fifteen years, and that it does not take more than two per cent, of the men liable to military duty—one or two from a village. These lumpish and ignorant louts are put for the first time in their lives under discipline, are taught to obey; they learn to read and write, and those who show aptness and brightness have an opportunity, in the technical education organized by General Stone, to become something more than common soldiers. When these men have served their time and return to their villages, they will bring with them some ideas of the world and some habits of discipline and subordination. It is probably the speediest way, this conscription, by which the dull cloddishness of Egypt can be broken up. I suppose that in time we shall discover something better, but now the harsh discipline of the military service is often the path by which a nation emerges into a useful career.
Leaving this scene of a woe over which it is easy to be philosophical—the raw recruits, in good spirits, munching black bread on the barge while the women howl on shore—we celebrate the night of the New Year by sailing on, till presently the breeze fails us, when it is dark; the sailors get out the small anchor forward, and the steersman calmly lets the sail jibe, and there is a shock, a prospect of shipwreck, and a great tumult, everybody commanding, and no one doing anything to prevent the boat capsizing or stranding. It is exactly like boys' play, but at length we get out of the tangle, and go on, Heaven knows how, with much pushing and hauling, and calling upon “Allah” and “Mohammed.”
No. We are not going on, but fast to the bottom, near the shore.
In the morning we are again tracking with an occasional puff of wind, and not more than ten miles from Luxor. We can, however, outwalk the boat; and we find the country very attractive and surprisingly rich; the great fields of wheat, growing rank, testify to the fertility of the soil, and when the fields are dotted with palm-trees the picture is beautiful.
It is a scene of wide cultivation, teeming with an easy, ragged, and abundant life. The doleful sakiyas are creaking in their ceaseless labor; frequent mud-villages dot with brown the green expanse, villages abounding in yellow dogs and coffee-colored babies; men are working in the fields, directing the irrigating streams, digging holes for melons and small vegetables, and plowing. The plow is simply the iron-pointed stick that has been used so long, and it scratches the ground five or six inches deep. The effort of the government to make the peasants use a modern plow, in the Delta, failed. Besides the wheat, we find large cotton-fields, the plant in yellow blossoms, and also ripening, and sugar-cane. With anything like systematic, intelligent agriculture, what harvests this land would yield.
“Good morning!”
The words were English, the speaker was one of two eager Arabs, who had suddenly appeared at our side.
“Good morning. O, yes. Me guide Goorna.”
“What is Goorna?”
“Yes. Temp de Goorna. Come bime by.”
“What is Goorna?”
“Plenty. I go you. You want buy any antiques? Come bime by.”
“Do you live in Goorna?”
“All same. Memnonium, Goorna, I show all gentlemens. Me guide. Antiques! O plenty. Come bime by.”
Come Bime By's comrade, an older man, loped along by his side, unable to join in this intelligent conversation, but it turned out that he was the real guide, and all the better in that he made no pretence of speaking any English.
“Can you get us a mummy, a real one, in the original package, that hasn't been opened?”
“You like. Come plenty mummy. Used be. Not now. You like, I get. Come bime by, bookra.”
We are in fact on the threshold of great Thebes. These are two of the prowlers among its sepulchres, who have spied our dahabeeh approaching from the rocks above the plain, and have come to prey on us. They prey equally upon the living and the dead, but only upon the dead for the benefit of the living. They try to supply the demand which we tourists create. They might themselves be content to dwell in the minor tombs, in the plain, out of which the dead were long ago ejected; but Egyptologists have set them the example and taught them the profit of digging. If these honest fellows cannot always find the ancient scarabæi and the vases we want, they manufacture very good imitations of them. So that their industry is not altogether so ghastly as it may appear.
We are at the north end of the vast plain upon which Thebes stood; and in the afternoon we land, and go to visit the northernmost ruin on the west bank, the Temple of Koorneh (Goorneh), a comparatively modern structure, begun by Sethi I., a great warrior and conqueror of the nineteenth dynasty, before the birth of Moses.
YOU need not fear that you are to have inflicted upon you a description of Thebes, its ruins of temples, its statues, obelisks, pylons, tombs, holes in the ground, mummy-pits and mounds, with an attempt to reconstruct the fabric of its ancient splendor, and present you, gratis, the city as it was thirty-five hundred years ago, when Egypt was at the pinnacle of her glory, the feet of her kings were on the necks of every nation, and this, her capital, gorged with the spoils of near and distant maraudings, the spectator of triumph succeeding triumph, the depot of all that was precious in the ancient world, at once a treasure-house and a granary, ruled by an aristocracy of cruel and ostentatious soldiers and crafty and tyrannical priests, inhabited by abject Egyptians and hordes of captive slaves—was abandoned to a sensuous luxury rivaling that of Rome in her days of greatest wealth and least virtue in man or woman.
I should like to do it, but you would go to sleep before you were half through it, and forget to thank the cause of your comfortable repose. We can see, however, in a moment, the unique situation of the famous town.
We shall have to give up, at the outset, the notion of Homer's “hundred-gated Thebes.” It is one of his generosities of speech. There never were any walls about Thebes, and it never needed any; if it had any gates they must have been purely ornamental structures; and perhaps the pylons of the many temples were called gates. If Homer had been more careful in the use of his epithets he would have saved us a deal of trouble.
Nature prepared a place here for a vast city. The valley of the Nile, narrow above and below, suddenly spreads out into a great circular plain, the Arabian and Libyan ranges of mountains falling back to make room for it. In the circle of these mountains, which are bare masses of limestone, but graceful and bold in outline, lies the plain, with some undulation of surface, but no hills: the rim of the setting is grey, pink, purple, according to the position of the sun; the enclosure is green as the emerald. The Nile cuts this plain into two unequal parts. The east side is the broader, and the hills around it are neither so near the stream nor so high as the Libyan range.
When the Nile first burst into this plain it seems to have been undecided what course to take through it. I think it has been undecided ever since, and has wandered about, shifting from bluff to bluff, in the long ages. Where it enters, its natural course would be under the eastern hills, and there, it seems to me, it once ran. Now, however, it sweeps to the westward, leaving the larger portion of the plain on the right bank.
The situation is this: on the east side of the river are the temple of Luxor on a slight elevation and the modern village built in and around it; a mile and a half below and further from the river, are the vast ruins of Karnak; two or three miles north-east of Karnak are some isolated columns and remains of temples. On the west side of the river is the great necropolis. The crumbling Libyan hills are pierced with tombs. The desert near them is nothing but a cemetery. In this desert are the ruins of the great temples, Medeenet Hâboo, Dayr el Bahree, the Memnonium (or Rameseum, built by Rameses IL, who succeeded in affixing his name to as many things in Egypt as Michael Angelo did in Italy), the temple of Koorneh, and several smaller ones. Advanced out upon the cultivated plain a mile or so from the Memnonium, stand the two Colossi. Over beyond the first range of Libyan hills, or precipices, are the Tombs of the Kings, in a wild gorge, approached from the north by a winding sort of canon, a defile so hot and savage that a mummy passing through it couldn't have had much doubt of the place he was going to.
The ancient city of Thebes spread from its cemetery under and in the Libyan hills, over the plain beyond Ivarnak. Did the Nile divide that city? Or did the Nile run under the eastern bluff and leave the plain and city one?
It is one of the most delightful questions in the world, for no one knows anything about it, nor ever can know. Why, then, discuss it? Is it not as important as most of the questions we discuss? What, then, would become of learning and scholarship, if we couldn't dispute about the site of Troy, and if we all agreed that the temple of Pandora Regina was dedicated to Neptune and not to Jupiter? I am for united Thebes.
Let the objector consider. Let him stand upon one of the terraces of Dayr el Bahree, and casting his eye over the plain and the Nile in a straight line to Ivarnak, notice the conformity of directions of the lines of both temples, and that their avenues of sphinxes produced would have met; and let him say whether he does not think they did meet.
Let the objector remember that the Colossi, which now stand in an alluvial soil that buries their bases over seven feet and is annually inundated, were originally on the hard sand of the desert; and that all the arable land of the west side has been made within a period easily reckoned; that every year adds to it the soil washed from the eastern bank.
Farther, let him see how rapidly the river is eating away the bank at Luxor; wearing its way back again, is it not? to the old channel under the Arabian bluff, which is still marked. The temple at Luxor is only a few rods from the river. The English native consul, who built his house between the pillars of the temple thirty years ago, remembers that, at that time, he used to saddle his donkey whenever he wanted to go to the river. Observation of the land and stream above, at Erment, favors the impression that the river once ran on the east side and that it is working its way back to the old channel.
The village of Erment is about eight miles above Luxor, and on the west side of the river. An intelligent Arab at Luxor told me that one hundred and fifty years ago Erment was on the east side. It is an ancient village, and boasts ruins; among the remaining sculptures is an authentic portrait of Cleopatra, who appears to have sat to all the stone-cutters in Upper Egypt. Here then is an instance of the Nile going round a town instead of washing it away.
One thing more: Karnak is going to tumble into a heap some day, Great Hall of Columns and all. It is slowly having its foundations sapped by inundations and leachings from the Nile. Now, does it stand to reason that Osirtasen, who was a sensible king and a man of family; that the Thothmes people, and especially Hatasoo Thothmes, the woman who erected the biggest obelisk ever raised; and that the vain Rameses II., who spent his life in an effort to multiply his name and features in stone, so that time couldn't rub them out, would have spent so much money in structures that the Nile was likely to eat away in three or four thousand years?
The objector may say that the bed of the Nile has risen; and may ask how the river got over to the desert of the west side without destroying Karnak on its way. There is Erment, for an example.
Have you now any idea of the topography of the plain? I ought to say that along the western bank, opposite Luxor, stretches a long sand island joined to the main, in low water, and that the wide river is very shallow on the west side.
We started for Koorneh across a luxuriant wheat-field, but soon struck the desert and the debris of the old city. Across the river, we had our first view of the pillars of Luxor and the pylons of Karnak, sights to heat the imagination and set the blood dancing. But how far off they are; on what a grand scale this Thebes is laid out—if one forgets London and Paris and New York.
The desert we pass over is full of rifled tombs, hewn horizontally in rocks that stand above the general level. Some of them are large chambers, with pillars left for support. The doors are open and the sand drifts in and over the rocks in which they are cut. A good many of them are inhabited by miserable Arabs, who dwell in them and in huts among them. I fancy that, if the dispossessed mummies should reappear, they would differ little, except perhaps in being better clad, from these bony living persons who occupy and keep warm their sepulchres.
Our guide leads us at a lively pace through these holes and heaps of the dead, over sand hot to the feet, under a sky blue and burning, for a mile and a half. He is the first Egyptian I have seen who can walk. He gets over the ground with a sort of skipping lope, barefooted, and looks not unlike a tough North American Indian. As he swings along, holding his thin cotton robe with one hand, we feel as if we were following a shade despatched to conduct us to some Unhappy Hunting-Grounds.
Near the temple are some sycamore-trees and a collection of hovels called Koorneh, inhabited by a swarm of ill-conditioned creatures, who are not too proud to beg and probably are not ashamed to steal. They beset us there and in the ruins to buy all manner of valuable antiquities, strings of beads from mummies, hands and legs of mummies, small green and blue images, and the like, and raise such a clamor of importunity that one can hold no communion, if he desires to, with the spirits of Sethi I., and his son Rameses II., who spent the people's money in erecting these big columns and putting the vast stones on top of them.
We are impressed with the massiveness and sombreness of the Egyptian work, but this temple is too squat to be effective, and is scarcely worth visiting, in comparison with others, except for its sculptures. Inside and out it is covered with them; either the face of the stone cut away, leaving the figures in relief, or the figures are cut in at the sides and left in relief in the center. The rooms are small—from the necessary limitations of roof-stones that stretched from wall to wall, or from column to column; but all the walls, in darkness or in light, are covered with carving.
The sculptures are all a glorification of the Pharaohs. We should like to know the unpronounceable names of the artists, who, in the conventional limits set them by their religion, drew pictures of so much expression and figures so life-like, and chiseled these stones with such faultless execution; but there are no names here but of Pharaoh and of the gods.
The king is in battle, driving his chariot into the thick of the fight; the king crosses rivers, destroys walled cities, routs armies the king appears in a triumphal procession with chained captives, sacks of treasure, a menagerie of beasts, and a garden of exotic trees and plants borne from conquered countries; the king is making offerings to his predecessors, or to gods many, hawk-headed, cow-headed, ibis-headed, man-headed. The king's scribe is taking count of the hands, piled in a heap, of the men the king has slain in battle. The king, a gigantic figure, the height of a pylon, grasps by the hair of the head a bunch of prisoners, whom he is about to slay with a raised club—as one would cut off the tops of a handful of radishes.
There is a vein of “Big Injun” running through them all. The same swagger and boastfulness, and cruelty to captives. I was glad to see one woman in the mythic crowd, doing the generous thing: Isis, slim and pretty, offers her breast to her son, and Horus stretches up to the stone opportunity and takes his supper like a little gentleman. And there is color yet in her cheek and robe that was put on when she was thirty-five hundred years younger than she is now.
Towards the south we saw the more extensive ruins of the Memnonium and, more impressive still, the twin Colossi, one of them the so-called vocal statue of Memnon, standing up in the air against the evening sky more than a mile distant. They rose out of a calm green plain of what seemed to be wheat, but which was a field of beans. The friendly green about them seemed to draw them nearer to us in sympathy. At this distance we could not see how battered they were. And the unspeakable calm of these giant figures, sitting with hands on knees, fronting the east, like the Sphinx, conveys the same impression of lapse of time and of endurance that the pyramids give.
The sunset, as we went back across the plain, was gorgeous in vermilion, crimson, and yellow. The Colossi dominated the great expanse, and loomed up in the fading light like shapes out of the mysterious past.
Our dahabeëh had crept up to the east side of the island, and could only be reached by passing through sand and water. A deep though not wide channel of the Nile ran between us and the island. We were taken over this in a deep tub of a ferryboat. Laboriously wading through the sand and plowed fields of the island, we found our boat anchored in the stream, and the shore so shallow that even the sandal could not land. The sailors took us off to the row-boat on their backs.
In the evening the dahabeëh is worked across and secured to the crumbling bank of the Luxor. And the accomplishment of a voyage of four hundred and fifty miles in sixteen days is, of course, announced by rockets.