My Winter on the Nile
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Not more palaces and sugar-mills, O! Khedive, will save this Egypt, but some plan that will lift these women out of dirt and ignorance!
Our next run is to Assouan. Let us sketch it rapidly, and indicate by a touch the panorama it unrolled for us.
We are under way at daylight, leaving our two companions of the race asleep. We go on with a good wind, and by lovely sloping banks of green; banks that have occasionally a New England-river aspect; but palm-trees are behind them, and beyond are uneven mountain ranges, the crumbling limestone of which is so rosy in the sun. The wind freshens, and we spin along five miles an hour. The other boats have started, but they have a stern chase, and we lose them round a bend.
The atmosphere is delicious, a little under a summer heat, so that it is pleasant to sit in the sun; we seem to fly, with our great wings of sails, by the lovely shores. An idle man could desire nothing more. The crew are cutting up the bread baked yesterday and spreading it on the deck to dry. They prefer this to bread made of bolted wheat; and it would be very good, if it were not heavy and sour, and dirty to look at, and somewhat gritty to the teeth.
In the afternoon we pass the new, the Roman, and the old town of El Kab, back of which are the famous grottoes of Eilethyas with their pictures of domestic and agricultural life. We go on famously, leaving Edfoo behind, to the tune of five miles an hour; and, later, we can distinguish the top of the sail of the Philæ at least ten miles behind. Before dark we are abreast of the sandstone quarries of Silsilis, the most wonderful in the world, and the river is swift, narrow and may be rocky. We have accomplished fifty-seven miles since morning, and wishing to make a day’s run that shall astonish Egypt, we keep on in the dark. The wind increases, and in the midst of our career we go aground. We tug and push and splash, however, get off the sand, and scud along again. In a few moments something happens. There is a thump and a lurch, and bedlam breaks loose on deck.
We have gone hard on the sand. The wind is blowing almost a gale, and in the shadow of these hills the night is black. Our calm steersman lets the boat swing right about, facing down-stream, the sail jibes, and we are in great peril of upsetting, or carrying away yard, mast and all. The hubbub is something indescribable. The sailors are ordered aloft to take in the sail. They fear to do it. To venture out upon that long slender yard, which is foul and threatens to snap every moment, the wind whipping the loose sail, is no easy or safe task. The yelling that ensues would astonish the regular service. Reis and sailors are all screaming together, and above all can be heard the storming of the dragoman, who is most alive to the danger, his voice broken with excitement and passion. The crew are crouching about the mast, in terror, calling upon Mohammed. The reïs is muttering to the Prophet, in the midst of his entreaty. Abd-el-Atti is rapidly telling his beads, while he raves. At last Ahmed springs up the rigging, and the others, induced by shame and the butt-end of a hand-spike, follow him, and are driven out along the shaking yard. Amid intense anxiety and with extreme difficulty, the sail is furled and we lie there, aground, with an anchor out, the wind blowing hard and the waves pounding us, as if we were making head against a gale at sea. A dark and wildish night it is, and a lonesome place, the rocky shores dimly seen; but there is starlight. We should prefer to be tied to the bank, sheltered from the wind rather than lie swinging and pounding here. However, it shows us the Nile in a new aspect. And another good comes out of the adventure. Ahmed, who saved the boat, gets a new suit of clothes. Nobody in Egypt needed one more. A suit of clothes is a blue cotton gown.
The following morning (Sunday) is cold, but we are off early as if nothing had happened, and run rapidly against the current—or the current against us, which produces the impression of going fast. The river is narrower, the mountains come closer to the shores, and there is, on either side, only a scant strip of vegetation. Egypt, along here, is really only three or four rods wide. The desert sands drift down to the very shores, and the desert hills, broken, jagged, are savage walls of enclosure.
The Nile no doubt once rose annually and covered these now bleached wastes, and made them fruitful. But that was long ago. At Silsilis, below here, where the great quarries are, there was once a rocky barrier, probably a fall, which set the Nile back, raising its level from here to Assouan. In some convulsion this was carried away. When? There is some evidence on this point at hand. By ten o’clock we have rounded a long bend, and come to the temples of Kom Ombos, their great columns conspicuous on a hill close to the river. They are rather fine structures, for the Ptolemies. One of them stands upon foundations of an ancient edifice built by Thothmes I. (eighteenth dynasty); and these foundations rest upon alluvial deposit. Consequently the lowering of the Nile above Silsilis, probably by breaking through the rock-dam there, was before the time of Thothmes I. The Nile has never risen to the temple site since. These striking ruins are, however, destined to be swept away; opposite the bend where they stand a large sand-island is forming, and every hour the soil is washing from under them. Upon this sand-island this morning are flocks of birds, sunning themselves, and bevies of sand-grouse take wing at our approach. A crocodile also lifts his shoulders and lunges into the water, when we get near enough to see his ugly scales with the glass.
As we pass the desolate Kom Ombos, a solitary figure emerges from the ruins and comes down the slope of the sand-hill, with turban flowing, ragged cotton robe, and a long staff; he runs along the sandy shore and then turns away into the desert, like a fleeing Cain, probably with no idea that it is Sunday, and that the “first bell” is about to ring in Christian countries.
The morning air is a little too sharp for idle comfort, although we can sit in the sun on deck and read. This west wind coming from the mountains of the desert brings always cold weather, even in Nubia.
Above Kom Ombos we come to a little village in a palm-grove—a scene out of the depths of Africa,—such as you have often seen in pictures—which is the theatre of an extraordinary commotion. There is enacted before us in dumb-show something like a pantomime in a play-house; but this is even more remote and enigmatical than that, and has in it all the elements of a picture of savagery. In the interior of Africa are they not all children, and do they not spend their time in petty quarreling and fighting?
On the beach below the village is moored a trading vessel, loaded with ivory, cinnamon, and gum-arabic, and manned by Nubians, black as coals. People are climbing into this boat and jumping out of it, splashing in the water, in a state of great excitement; people are running along the shore, shouting and gesticulating wildly, flourishing long staves; parties are chasing each other, and whacking their sticks together; and a black fellow, in a black gown and white shoes, is chasing others with an uplifted drawn sword. It looks like war or revolution, picturesque war in the bright sun on the yellow sand, with all attention to disposition of raiment and color and striking attitudes. There are hurryings to and fro, incessant clamors of noise and shoutings and blows of cudgels; some are running away, and some are climbing into palm trees, but we notice that no one is hit by cane or sword. Neither is anybody taken into custody, though there is a great show of arresting somebody. It is a very animated encounter, and I am glad that we do not understand it.
Sakiyas increase in number along the bank, taking the place of the shadoof, and we are never out of hearing of their doleful songs. Labor here is not hurried. I saw five men digging a well in the bank—into which the Sakiya buckets dip; that is, there were four, stripped, coal-black slaves from Soudan superintended by an Arab. One man was picking up the dirt with a pick-axe hoe. Three others were scraping out the dirt with a contrivance that would make a lazy man laugh;—one fellow held the long handle of a small scraper, fastened on like a shovel; to this upright scraper two ropes were attached which the two others pulled, indolently, thus gradually scraping the dirt out of the hole a spoonful at a time. One man with a shovel would have thrown it out four times as fast. But why should it be thrown out in a hurry? Must we always intrude our haste into this land of eternal leisure?
By afternoon, the wind falls, and we loiter along. The desert apparently comes close to the river on each side. On one bank are a hundred camels, attended by a few men and boys, browsing on the coarse tufts of grass and the scraggy bushes; the hard surroundings suit the ungainly animals. It is such pictures of a life, differing in all respects from ours, that we come to see. A little boat with a tattered sail is towed along close to the bank by half a dozen ragged Nubians, who sing a not unmelodious refrain as they walk and pull,—better at any rate than the groan of the sakiyas.
There is everywhere a sort of Sabbath calm—a common thing here, no doubt, and of great antiquity; and yet, you would not say that the people are under any deep religious impression.
As we advance the scenery becomes more Nubian, the river narrower and apparently smaller, when it should seem larger. This phenomenon of a river having more and more water as we ascend, is one that we cannot get accustomed to. The Nile, having no affluents, loses, of course, continually by evaporation by canals, and the constant drain on it for irrigation. No wonder the Egyptians were moved by its mystery no less than by its beneficence to a sort of worship of it.
The rocks are changing their character; granite begins to appear amid the limestone and sandstone. Along here, seven or eight miles below Assouan, there is no vegetation in sight from the boat, except strips of thrifty palm-trees, but there must be soil beyond, for the sakiyas are always creaking. The character of the population is changed also; above Kom Ombos it is mostly Nubian—who are to the Fellaheen as granite is to sandstone. The Nubian hills lift up their pyramidal forms in the south, and we seem to be getting into real Africa.
CHAPTER XIX.—PASSING THE CATARACT OF THE NILE
AT LAST, twenty-four days from Cairo, the Nubian hills are in sight, lifting themselves up in the south, and we appear to be getting into the real Africa—Africa, which still keeps its barbarous secret, and dribbles down this commercial highway the Nile, as it has for thousands of years, its gums and spices and drugs, its tusks and skins of wild animals, its rude weapons and its cunning work in silver, its slave-boys and slave-girls. These native boats that we meet, piled with strange and fragrant merchandise, rowed by antic crews of Nubians whose ebony bodies shine in the sun as they walk backward and forward at the long sweeps, chanting a weird, barbarous refrain,—what tropical freights are these for the imagination!
At sunset we are in a lonesome place, the swift river flowing between narrow rocky shores, the height beyond Assouan grey in the distance, and vultures watching our passing boat from the high crumbling sandstone ledges. The night falls sweet and cool, the soft new moon is remote in the almost purple depths, the thickly strewn stars blaze like jewels, and we work slowly on at the rate of a mile an hour, with the slightest wind, amid the granite rocks of the channel. In this channel we are in the shadow of the old historical seat of empire, the island of Elephantine; and, turning into the narrow passage to the left, we announce by a rocket to the dalabeehs moored at Assouan the arrival of another inquisitive American. It is Sunday night. Our dragoman des patches a messenger to the chief reïs of the cataract, who lives at Philæ, five miles above. A second one is sent in the course of the night; and a third meets the old patriarch on his way to our boat at sunrise. It is necessary to impress the Oriental mind with the importance of the travelers who have arrived at the gate of Nubia.
The Nile voyager who moors his dahabeëh at the sandbank, with the fleet of merchant boats, above Assouan, seems to be at the end of his journey. Travelers from the days of Herodotus even to this century have followed each other in saying that the roar of the cataract deafened the people for miles around. Civilization has tamed the rapids. Now there is neither sight nor sound of them here at Assouan. To the southward, the granite walls which no doubt once dammed the river have been broken through by some pre-historic convulsion that strewed the fragments about in grotesque confusion. The island of Elephantine, originally a long heap of granite, is thrown into the middle of the Nile, dividing it into two narrow streams. The southern end rises from the water, a bold mass of granite. Its surface is covered with ruins, or rather with the débris of many civilizations; and into this mass and hills of brick, stone, pottery and ashes, Nubian women and children may be seen constantly poking, digging out coins, beads and images, to sell to the howadji. The north portion of the island is green with wheat; and it supports two or three mud-villages, which offer a good field for the tailor and the missionary.
The passage through the east channel, between Assouan and Elephantine, is through walls of granite rocks; and southward at the end of it the view is bounded by a field of broken granite gradually rising, and apparently forbidding egress in that direction. If the traveler comes for scenery, as some do, nothing could be wilder and at the same time more beautiful than these fantastically piled crags; but considered as a navigable highway the river here is a failure.
Early in the morning the head sheykh of the cataract comes on board, and the long confab which is preliminary to any undertaking, begins. There are always as many difficulties in the way of a trade or an arrangement as there are quills on a porcupine; and a great part of the Egyptian bargaining is the preliminary plucking out of these quills. The cataracts are the hereditary property of the Nubian sheykhs and their tribes who live near them—belonging to them more completely than the rapids of the St. Lawrence to the Indian pilots; almost their whole livelihood comes from helping boats up and down the rapids, and their harvest season is the winter when the dahabeëhs of the howadji require their assistance. They magnify the difficulties and dangers and make a mystery of their skill and knowledge. But, with true Orientalism, they appear to seek rather to lessen than to increase their business. They oppose intolerable delays to the traveler, keep him waiting at Assouan by a thousand excuses, and do all they can to drive him discouraged down the river. During this winter boats have been kept waiting two weeks on one frivolous excuse or another—the day was unlucky, or the wind was unfavorable, or some prince had the preference. Princes have been very much in the way this winter; the fact would seem to be that European princes are getting to run up the Nile in shoals, as plenty as shad in the Connecticut, more being hatched at home than Europe has employment for.
Several thousand people, dwelling along the banks from Assouan to three or four miles above Philæ, share in the profits of the passing boats; and although the sheykhs, and head reises (or captains) of the cataract get the elephant’s share, every family receives something—it may be only a piastre or two—on each dahabeëh; and the sheykhs draw from the villages as many men as are required for each passage. It usually takes two days for a boat to go up the cataract and not seldom they are kept in it three or four days, and sometimes a week. The first day the boat gets as far as the island of Séhayl, where it ties up and waits for the cataract people to gather next morning. They may take it into their heads not to gather, in which case the traveler can sun himself all day on the rocks, or hunt up the inscriptions which the Pharaohs, on their raids into Africa for slaves and other luxuries, cut in the granite in their days of leisure three or four thousand years ago, before the world got its present impetus of hurry. Or they may come and pull the boat up a rapid or two, then declare they have not men enough for the final struggle, and leave it for another night in the roaring desolation. To put on force enough, and cables strong enough not to break, and promptly drag the boat through in one day would lessen the money-value of the achievement perhaps, in the mind of the owner of the boat. Nature has done a great deal to make the First Cataract an obstacle to navigation, but the wily Nubian could teach nature a lesson; at any rate he has never relinquished the key to the gates. He owns the cataracts as the Bedowees own the pyramids of Geezeh and the routes across the desert to Sinai and Petra.
The aged reïs comes on board; and the preliminary ceremonies, exchange of compliments, religious and social, between him and our astute dragoman begin. Coffee is made, the reïs’s pipe is lighted, and the conversation is directed slowly to the ascent of the cataracts. The head reïs is accompanied by two or three others of inferior dignity and by attendants who squat on the deck in attitudes of patient indifference. The world was not made in a day. The reïs looks along the deck and says: “This boat is very large; it is too long to go up the cataract.” There is no denying it. The dahabeëh is larger than almost any other on the river; it is one hundred and twenty feet long. The dragoman says:
“But you took up General McClellan’s boat, and that is large.”
“Very true, Effendi; but why the howadji no come when Genel Clemen come, ten days ago?”
“We chose to come now.”
“Such a long boat never went up. Why you no come two months ago when the river was high?” This sort of talk goes on for half an hour. Then the other sheykh speaks:—“What is the use of talking all this stuff to Mohammed Abd-el-Atti Effendi; he knows all about it.”
“That is true. We will go.”
“Well, it is ‘finish’,” says Abd-el-Atti.
When the long negotiation is concluded, the reïs is introduced into the cabin to pay his respects to the howadji; he seats himself with dignity and salutes the ladies with a watchful self-respect. The reïs is a sedate Nubian, with finely cut features but a good many shades darker than would be fellowshipped by the Sheltering Wings Association in America, small feet, and small hands with long tapering fingers that confess an aristocratic exemption from manual labor. He wears a black gown, and a white turban; a camel’s hair scarf distinguishes him from the vulgar. This sheykh boasts I suppose as ancient blood as runs in any aristocratic veins, counting his ancestors back in unbroken succession to the days of the Prophet at least, and not improbably to Ishmael. That he wears neither stockings nor slippers does not detract from his simple dignity. Our conversation while he pays his visit is confined to the smoking of a cigar and some well-meant grins and smiles of mutual good feeling.
While the morning hours pass, we have time to gather all the knowledge of Assouan that one needs for the enjoyment of life in this world. It is an ordinary Egyptian town of sunbaked brick, brown, dusty and unclean, with shabby bazaars containing nothing, and full of importunate beggars and insatiable traders in curiosities of the upper country. Importunate venders beset the traveler as soon as he steps ashore, offering him all manner of trinkets which he is eager to purchase and doesn’t know what to do with when he gets them. There are crooked, odd-shaped knives and daggers, in ornamental sheaths of crocodile skin, and savage spears with great round hippopotamus shields from Kartoom or Abyssinia; jagged iron spears and lances and ebony clubs from Darfoor; cunning Nubian silver-work, bracelets and great rings that have been worn by desert camel-drivers; moth-eaten ostrich feathers; bows and arrows tipped with flint from the Soudan, necklaces of glass and dirty leather charms (containing words from the Koran); broad bracelets and anklets cut out of big tusks of elephants and traced in black, rude swords that it needs two hands to swing; bracelets of twisted silver cord and solid silver as well; earrings so large that they need to be hitched to a strand of the hair for support; nose-rings of brass and silver and gold, as large as the earrings; and “Nubian costumes” for women—a string with leather fringe depending to tie about the loins—suggestions of a tropical life under the old dispensation.
The beach, crowded with trading vessels and piled up with merchandise, presents a lively picture. There are piles of Manchester cotton and boxes of English brandy—to warm outwardly and inwardly the natives of the Soudan—which are being loaded, for transport above the rapids, upon kneeling dromedaries which protest against the load in that most vulgar guttural of all animal sounds, more uncouth and less musical than the agonized bray of the donkey—a sort of grating menagerie-grumble which has neither the pathos of the sheep’s bleat nor the dignity of the lion’s growl; and bales of cinnamon and senna and ivory to go down the river. The wild Bisharee Arab attends his dromedaries; he has a clear-cut and rather delicate face, is bareheaded, wears his black hair in ringlets long upon his shoulders, and has for all dress a long strip of brown cotton cloth twisted about his body and his loins, leaving his legs and his right arm free. There are the fat, sleek Greek merchant, in sumptuous white Oriental costume, lounging amid his merchandise; the Syrian in gay apparel, with pistols in his shawl-belt, preparing for his journey to Kartoom; and the black Nubian sailors asleep on the sand. To add a little color to the picture, a Ghawazee, or dancing-girl, in striped flaming gown and red slippers, dark but comely, covered with gold or silver-gilt necklaces and bracelets, is walking about the shore, seeking whom she may devour.
At twelve o’clock we are ready to push off. The wind is strong from the north. The cataract men swarm on board, two or three Sheykhs and thirty or forty men. They take command and possession of the vessel, and our reïs and crew give way. We have carefully closed the windows and blinds of our boat, for the cataract men are reputed to have long arms and fingers that crook easily. The Nubians run about like cats; four are at the helm, some are on the bow, all are talking and giving orders; there is an indescribable bustle and whirl as our boat is shoved off from the sand, with the chorus of “Hâ! Yâlêsah. Hâ! Yâlêsah!” and takes the current. The great sail, shaped like a bird’s wing, and a hundred feet long, is shaken out forward, and we pass swiftly on our way between the granite walls. The excited howadji are on deck feeling to their finger ends the thrill of expectancy.
* Yalesah (I spell the name according the sound of the pronunciation) was, some say, one of the sons of Noah who was absent at the time the ark sailed, having gone down into Abyssinia. They pushed the ark in pursuit of him, and Noah called after his son, as the crew poled along, “Ha! Yalesah!” And still the Nile boatmen call Yalesah to come, as they push the poles and haul the sail, and urge the boat toward Abyssinia. Very likely “Ha! Yale-sah” (as I catch it) is only a corruption of “Halee!’.esà Seyyidnà Eesà” is the Moslem name for “Our Lord Jesus.”
The first thing the Nubians want is something to eat—a chronic complaint here in this land of romance. Squatting in circles all over the boat they dip their hands into the bowls of softened bread, cramming the food down their throats, and swallow all the coffee that can be made for them, with the gusto and appetite of simple men who have a stomach and no conscience.
While the Nubians are chattering and eating, we are gliding up the swift stream, the granite rocks opening a passage for us; but at the end of it our way seems to be barred. The only visible opening is on the extreme left, where a small stream struggles through the boulders. While we are wondering if that can be our course, the helm is suddenly put hard about, and we then shoot to the right, finding our way, amid whirlpools and boulders of granite, past the head of Elephantine island; and before we have recovered from this surprise we turn sharply to the left into a narrow passage, and the cataract is before us.