From sketch-book and diary

CHAPTER II

THE UPPER NILE

AND now for Luxor. Of all the modes of travel there is none, to my mind, so enjoyable as that by water – fresh water, be it understood – and if you can do this in a house-boat with your home comforts about you, what more can you desire? We had the “Post Boat” to Luxor, and the sailing dahabieh after that. Travelling thus on the Nile you see the life of the people on the banks, you look into their villages, yet a few yards of water afford you complete immunity from that nearer contact which travel by road necessitates; and in the East, as you know, this is just as well. Not that I really allow the drawbacks of the East to interfere with my own enjoyment, but the isolation of the boat is best, especially with little children on board.

I had read many books of travel on the Nile and knew what to look for. Is there not a charm in knowing that some city, some temple, some natural feature you have tried to realize in your mind is about to appear in very truth just round that bend of road or river? You are going to see in a few minutes that historic thing itself, not its counterfeit in a book, but it. And so, as we neared Luxor towards evening, I looked out for Karnac on the left, and lo! the first pylon glided by. My first pylon! How many like it I was to see before I had done with Old Nile. They are not beautiful in shape, nor can any Egyptian architecture, as far as form goes, be called beautiful; the shapes are barbaric – I had almost said brutal – stupidly powerful and impressive by mere bulk. The beauty lies in the colouring. What a feast these ruins afford to the eye by their colour, what a revel of blues, greens, and low-toned reds in their unfaded paintings! Taken as bits of colour only, without dwelling too much on the forms, all in such light, the shadows filled with golden reflections – taken thus, or deeply tinged with the lustrous after-glow, or the golden moonlight, they are all-satisfying.

I will not, however, burden you with these ponderous pylons and mammoth monoliths; they can only be enjoyed in situ, illuminated and glorified by the climate of their homes. Indeed, I felt often very oppressed and tired by them, but never did I weary of the landscape, the people, the animals, the river.

One very saddening glimpse of fellah life was afforded Mrs. C – and myself at Luxor by the English Consul (a negro), who arranged that we should see the registering of the young fellaheen for the conscription. I think the British have changed all this lately, so we were lucky in seeing a bit of the vanishing Past – a remnant of the Oriental Past which no one can regret. We worked our way, led by the Consul, through the Arab crowd in the village till we came to the entrance of the courtyard where the drama was about to open. At the gate was a scuffling mass of indescribably hideous old hags – the mothers and aunts and grannies of the young fellahs inside, wailing and jerking out their lamentations with marionette-like action of their shrivelled arms. As though by one accord they would stop dead for a minute and look at each other, and then all together begin again the skeleton chorus, throwing dust on their heads. The unsavoury group came in with us pell-mell when the gate was opened, and we found ourselves hoisted rather than conducted to a divan prepared for us under a shed, from whence we could see all that passed.

Three Circassian inspectors, looking horrid in European clothes, were at the head of a long rickety table, covered with a white cloth, in front of us. This white cloth, in combination with the surging groups, made a wonderfully good blank space in the composition of what I thought would make a striking picture. The sketch I insert here is in no particular arranged by me, but everything is exactly as I saw it. I noted everything down in my sketch-book on the spot. The sheiks, stately men in silken robes, who had brought each his quota of recruits from his district, sat chatting over their coffee at the farther end of the table, and the doctor at once set to to examine the miserable youths that came up for registration. Fathers pleaded exemption for their sons on one pretext or another, such as leprous heads, blindness, weak chests, and so forth; the mothers, aunts, and grannies aforesaid went on jibbering and clacking their jaws in the background, no one paying the least attention to them. If a fellah was passed by the doctor a gendarme gripped him and pummelled him all the way to the standard, where he was measured. If satisfactory, the woe-begone creature received a sounding box on the ear, just in fun, from the gendarme, and was shoved into the pen where the successful (!) candidates were interned; if he was below the mark, all the same he got his blow, and was pushed and cuffed back to his friends and relatives. One mother had crept forward while her son was having his lanky leg straightened by the doctor, the father pleading the boy’s lameness (Erckmann-Chatrian’s Conscript orientalised!): a gendarme sprang forward and knocked her down, then hauled her off by her arms, which were so very thin and suggestive of a mummy that I could not look any longer; he was so rough I really thought he would pull them out of their sockets. My friend was crying, and if I had not been so concentrated on my pencil notes I should have cried too. “Surely,” she said, “that can’t be his mother, she looks a hundred at least.” “A hundred!” I exclaimed, “she is four thousand years old – a mummy!” I felt very sick as well as sorry. We were politely offered coffee in jewelled cups, which we could not taste, and surreptitiously emptied behind the divan.

The English have worked wonders since those days with the Egyptian army. Taking the young men in the right way our officers have turned them into remarkably smart-looking soldiers, and their terror of the service, I am told, has vanished.

This was altogether a day which showed us the seamy side of Egyptian life, for in the evening we and all the guests of the hotel went to see the dancing at the café, a sort of mud cave full of wood smoke. It was all very ugly and repulsive, and the music was impish and quite in keeping. I was glad to have this experience, but once is enough. Talking of music, I don’t know anything more appealing in its local sentiment than the song of our crew when they were hauling and poling on calm nights later on. Strange, unaccustomed intervals, and the key always in the minor. In the pauses we heard the beetles and crickets on the banks chiming in in a cheerful major.

Our sojourn at Luxor was a time of deep enjoyment, for we made almost daily excursions on both banks of the Nile, excursions beginning in the very early mornings, at sunrise, and ending in gallops home on our donkeys in the after-glow, or trips on board the ferry-boat, from Thebes, in a crowd of splendid Arabs, whose heads, figures, and blue and white robes, or brown striped camel’s hair burnouses, added greatly to the charm of the landscape. It was a joy merely to breathe that desert air. All that was wholesome and not too tiring, nor risky from the sun, was enjoyed by the children with us, but I kept them chiefly in the paradisaical hotel garden as the safest place. One had to be very careful. I cannot say that “black care” did not sometimes ride on my donkey’s crupper, for I knew W. was pressing the enemy harder every day, and that a battle was imminent. At last the great telegram came. Ginniss was fought and won, and all the enemy’s guns and standards taken. He sent me the message from the field. We might now come up. It took a day or two to get the “Fostât” ready – the dahabieh which he had sent down for us. Some wounded officers from the front brought news of the battle, and, strange to relate, the only officer killed at Ginniss was son of one of Mrs. C.’s oldest friends! What strange things happen in life. I had met young Soltau the year before at her house on Dartmoor, and she and I were destined to hear together of his death in battle on the Upper Nile.

We set sail in the first week of ‘86 for Assouan, where W. was to meet us, and I witnessed the daily development of the Nile’s beauties with the deepest pleasure, and a mind no longer over-shadowed.

I wonder how many people who have been to Egypt recognise the fact that all its beauty is reflected? It is either the sun or the moon or the stars that make Egypt glorious. Under thick cloudy skies it would be nothing. But the co-operation of the illuminated objects is admirable, and the two powers combined produce the Egypt we admire. W. and I came to the same conclusion, that much of the glory of the moonlights is owing to the response of the desert, especially the golden desert of Nubia.

But I have also seen, on rare occasions, delicate effects of veiled sunshine on river, palms, and desert too exquisite in refinement to be easily described. I remember one memorable grey day which we spent in turning the loveliest river reach of the whole series below Assouan, the wind having completely dropped – a day which dwells in my memory as a precious passage of silvery colour amidst all the gold. The palm-tree stems towards sundown were illuminated with rosy light against the pallid background of sand-hills facing the West, and of the delicate pearl-grey sky. The greens were cool and vivid, the water like a liquid opal. I wrote a whole letter to Mamma on that one grey day on the Nile. But even that evening the after-glow made itself felt through the clouds, lighting them from behind in an extraordinary manner, so that the filmy screen appeared red-hot. The beautiful cloud-veil could not shut out so fervid a rush of colour.

When a strong wind blows the desert sand into the air, obscuring the sun and thickening the sky, what a change comes over the scene! Egypt is then undoubtedly ugly, and all charm flies away on the wings of the blast.

But the blast speeds the dahabieh on its way, and pleasant it was sitting of an evening in the cosy saloon to see the hanging lamp swinging with the motion of the bounding “Fostât,” and to hear the creaking of the timbers, for the distance from Assouan, where W. was to meet us, was being sensibly diminished. On some other evenings the fair north wind was just enough to quicken the pace without dulling the brilliant light of the moon, and there was to be no tying up under the mud bank those nights. Then again a dead calm might come down upon us, and after poling, tracking, or hauling up to the kedge anchor all day to their monotonous sing-song, the crew would have orders to moor for the night. I would then venture a run along the shore with the children, and have a scamper among the palms and cotton plants, which were waving and rustling mysteriously to imperceptible sighings of the air at the water’s edge. One or two armed men, of course, landed also.

At Esneh I had the honour of entertaining the Pasha of that wonderful place, whose temple I had particularly wished to see. He received us with much ceremony, and we all went on shore escorted by his guard in great state, walking through the bazaars accompanied by the wild and ragged population. But for the soldiers and their whips we could not have moved a yard. We visited the wonderful temple, the first we had seen with the ceiling intact, which the colossal pillars were made to support. I prefer the ruins so open to the sky that the sun may be seen amongst them. Here, owing to the unbroken ceiling, all was gloom. At Edfoo I was to see a whole temple with pylons and all, almost in perfect preservation, and to know the Egyptian temple in its entirety.

How funny our party looked – two English ladies, two little children, and English maid, guarded by bashi-bazouks, slowly progressing through a crowd of indescribable dirt and wildness. We looked into an oil mill where the press was exactly like the wine-presses in Tuscany. You remember the one I sketched at Signa, the picturesque Strettojo of the vintage? We poked our noses into the cavernous recesses where gigantic negroes were dyeing the native cloth a splendid indigo, their black arms blue to the shoulder. Oh, what colour!

On going back to the dahabieh we all, except myself, had our fortunes told in a narrow lane where a row of Soudanese fortune-tellers were squatting with patches of smooth sand before them on which they made the person interested impress his or her hand. Upon the impression they made many signs and marks. Everything was quite satisfactory. The children were to have “pleasant paths in life and strong loins.” The maid was to marry a white man, which was a comfort.

In the evening the Pasha dined on board. He spoke in French, and nothing could surpass the florid eulogies he bestowed on “his brother, that lion,” my husband. I saw him depart on his sleek and fat white ass, which stood quite fourteen hands, and was equipped in Arab trappings of indigo and dead gold. In the morning I received the Pasha’s presents of fruit, vegetables, eggs in hundreds, two live turkeys, and a black lamb. A gorgeous cavass in sky blue and carrying a wand of office was installed on board for the rest of the voyage to Assouan. There had been feasting and much thumping of tom-toms and whinings of curious fiddles on deck during dinner the night before, where the crew were entertaining the Pasha’s body-guard. My dragoman’s bill next day included these items: “Trinks and trymbals for the crew”; “hay for the limp.” The poor black “limp” with his hay was put into the little boat in tow, and I had to deliver him up, as a matter of course, to the crew a few days later. Then came Edfoo, whose temple is one of the most conspicuous in Egypt. I had been on the look-out for its mighty pylons with especial eagerness, and I was glad that we had time to spend two hours on land while some repairs were being done on the “Fostât.” The Esneh cavass was useful as well as extremely ornamental, as he kept off the wild crowd in the village by magical waves of his wand of office, and an occasional thump on a screaming villager.

The guard turned out and saluted our party, and altogether things went very well, and I enjoyed my long-looked-forward-to Edfoo.

Then on board again, with a steady north breeze which, if it had filled our eyes with sand at Edfoo, was making up for the discomfort by carrying us in spanking style towards Assouan and the meeting.

After one of our fair-wind nights, when the “Fostât” was bowling along over the lumpy water, I asked the reis if we had come to Comombos. He made vigorous signs showing we had passed it in the night. “Silsileh?”; again the welcome backward wave of his arm. That, too, was long passed. We were getting very near. I noticed the people on the banks were becoming blacker and there were fewer of them; the mountains had vanished and were replaced by lion-coloured sand-hills, typically African. The black rocks looked like sleeping crocodiles.

A faint whisp of smoke presently rose beyond a bend of the river, far ahead. “What is that?” I asked the dragoman. “English steamer.” Great excitement. The little armed steamer puffs into sight; some one is waving a red handkerchief from the turret! “Furl the “Fostât’s” mainsail!” The crew swarm up the spar. Ding, ding goes the electric bell on the gunboat. The meeting is an accomplished fact – we from Plymouth, he from Wady Halfa. We are soon at Assouan, and while the “Fostât” is being hauled by great gangs of negroes through the cataract, we are guests of the General in that command on board his charming dahabieh moored under Philæ. There the solemn rocks echo the waltzes of the military band and the talk and laughter of our réunions on board the “Pharaon.”

If the Egyptian desert answered back in harmonious tones the light of the sun and moon, what a crescendo of glowing response came from the Nubian sands! Immediately we crossed the frontier my eyes were surprised by the golden tone the desert had assumed, and the polished rocks that studded it had suddenly put on the richest colours granite holds – deep red and purple, and the black of basalt. It was a new scheme of colouring. The sunset and the after-glow were still more astonishing than those of Egypt, the colour of the shadows on the golden sands at sundown more positive in their limpid colours. One felt looking at the stars and planets as though one had been lifted to a world nearer to them than before, so large and clear had they grown even from the extraordinary clearness they had at Luxor. Oh! land of enchantment, is it any wonder the Nile is so passionately loved, especially by the artist, to whom the joy of the eye is supreme? As to worthily painting the Egyptian landscape, I cannot think any one will ever do it – the light is its charm, and this light is unattainable. There is one thing very certain, oil paints are hopelessly “out of it,” and in water-colours alone can one hope to suggest that light. I soon gave up oils in Egypt, not only on account of their heaviness, but the miseries I endured from flies and sand were heart-breaking; your skies are seamed with the last wanderings and struggles of moribund flies, and coated with whiffs of sand suddenly flung on them by a desert gust! I was particularly anxious to get a souvenir of the doorway in the court of the temple on Philæ Island, where Napoleon’s soldiers engraved their high-sounding “Une page d’histoire ne doit pas,” etc. Unfortunately, on the day I chose, we had a high wind, a very exasperating ordeal, and my attempt at oil-sketching this subject was a fiasco. After persevering with one half-blinded eye open at a time and with sand thickly mixed with my paints, I saw the panel I had been desperately holding on the easel hurled to the ground on its buttered side as for a moment I turned to answer a remark of Mrs. C.’s. She said I bore it angelically. As since those days lovely Philæ Island is being submerged and the temple melting away, the poor little panel has become more historically valuable than I thought it ever would do at the time, and I insert its replica in water-colours minus the smudges.