My Winter on the Nile

One novelty the place offered, and that was in a drinking-fountain. Under a canopy, in a wall-panel, in the street, was inserted a copper nipple, which was worn, by constant use, as smooth as the toe of St. Peter at Rome. When one wishes to drink, he applies his mouth to this nipple and draws; it requires some power of suction to raise the water, but it is good and cool when it comes. As Herodotus would remark, now I have done speaking about this nipple.

We walked on interminably and at length obtained a native boat, with a fine assortment of fellahs and donkeys for passengers, to set us over to Soohag, the capital of the province, a busy and insupportably dirty town, with hordes of free-and-easy natives loafing about, and groups of them, squatting by little dabs of tobacco, or candy, or doora, or sugar-cane, making what they are pleased to call a market.

It seemed to be a day for hauling us about. Two bright boys seized us, and urged us to go with them and see something marvelously beautiful. One of them was an erect, handsome lad, with courtly and even elegant dignity, a high and yet simple bearing, which I venture to say not a king’s son in Europe is possessed of. They led us a chase, through half the sprawling town, by lanes and filthy streets, under bazaars, into the recesses of domestic poverty, among unknown and inquisitive natives, until we began to think that we should never see our native dahabeëh again. At last we were landed in a court where sat two men, adding up columns of figures. It was an Oriental picture, but scarcely worth coming so far to see.

The men looked at us in wondering query, as if demanding what we wanted.

We stood looking at them, but couldn’t tell them what we wanted, since we did not know. And if we had known, we could not have told them. We only pointed to the boys who had brought us. The boys pointed to the ornamental portals of a closed door.

After a long delay, and the most earnest posturing and professions of our young guides, and evident suspicion of us, a key was brought, and we were admitted, into a cool and clean Coptic church, which had fresh matting and an odor of incense. Ostrich-eggs hung before the holy places, as in mosques; an old clock, with a long and richly inlaid dial-case, stood at one end; and there were paintings in the Byzantine style of “old masters.” One of them represented the patron saint of the Copts, St. George, slaying the dragon; the conception does equal honor to the saint and the artist; the wooden horse, upon which St. George is mounted, and its rider, fill nearly all the space of the canvas, leaving very little room for the landscape with its trees, for the dragon, for the maiden, and for her parents looking down upon her from the castle window. And this picture perfectly represents the present condition of art in the whole Orient.

At Soohag a steamboat passed down towing four barges, packed with motley loads of boys and men, impressed to work in the Khedive’s sugar-factory at Rhodes. They are seized, so many from a village, like the recruits for the army. They receive from two to two and a half piastres (ten to twelve and a half cents) a day wages, and a couple of pounds of bread each.

I suspect the reason the Khedive’s agricultural operations and his sugar-factories are unprofitable, is to be sought in the dishonest agents and middle-men—a kind of dishonesty that seems to be ingrained in the Eastern economy. The Khedive loses both ways:—that which he attempts to expend on a certain improvement is greatly diminished before it reaches its object; and the returns from the investment, on their way back to his highness, are rubbed away, passing through so many hands, to the vanishing point. It is the same with the taxes; the fellah pays four times as much as he ought, and the Khedive receives not the government due. The abuse is worse than it was in France with the farmers-general in the time of Louis XIV. and Louis XV. The tax apportioned to a province is required of its governor. He adds a lumping per cent, to the total, and divides the increased amount among his sub-governors for collection; they add a third to their levy and divide it among the tax-gatherers of sections of the district; these again swell their quota before apportioning it among the sheykhs or actual collectors, and the latter take the very life-blood out of the fellah.

As we sail down the river in this approaching harvest-season we are in continual wonder at the fertility of the land; a fertility on the slightest cultivation, the shallowest plowing, and without fertilization. It is customary to say that the soil is inexhaustible, that crop after crop of the same kind can be depended on, and the mud (limon) of the overflowing Nile will repair all wastes.

And yet, I somehow get an impression of degeneracy, of exhaustion, both in Upper and Lower Egypt, in the soil; and it extends to men and to animals; horses, cattle, donkeys, camels, domestic fowls look impoverished—we have had occasion to say before that the hens lay ridiculously small eggs—they put the contents of one egg into three shells. (They might not take this trouble if eggs were sold by weight, as they should be.) The food of the country does not sufficiently nourish man or beast. Its quality is deficient. The Egyptian wheat does not make wholesome bread; most of it has an unpleasant odor—it tends to speedy corruption, it lacks certain elements, phosphorus probably. The bread that we eat on the dahabeëh is made from foreign wheat. The Egyptian wheat is at a large discount in European markets. One reason of this inferiority is supposed to be the succession of a wheat crop year after year upon the same field; another is the absolute want of any fertilizer except the Nile mud; and another the use of the same seed forever. Its virtue has departed from it, and the most hopeless thing in the situation is the unwillingness of the fellah to try anything new, in his contented ignorance. The Khedive has made extraordinary efforts to introduce improved machinery and processes, and he has set the example on his own plantations It has no effect on the fellah. He will have none of the new inventions or new ways. It seems as hopeless to attempt to change him as it would be to convert a pyramid into a Congregational meeting-house.

For the political economist and the humanitarian, Egypt is the most interesting and the saddest study of this age; its agriculture and its people are alike unique. For the ordinary traveler the country has not less interest, and I suppose he may be pardoned if he sometimes loses sight of the misery in the strangeness, the antique barbarity, the romance by which he is surrounded.

As we lay, windbound, a few miles below Soohag, the Nubian trading-boat I had seen the day before was moored near; and we improved this opportunity for an easy journey to Central Africa, by going on board. The forward-deck was piled with African hides so high that the oars were obliged to be hung on outriggers; the cabin deck was loaded with bags of gums, spices, medicines; and the cabin itself was stored so full, that when we crawled down into it, there was scarcely room to sit upright on the bags. Into this penetralia of barbaric merchandise, the ladies preceded us, upon the promise of the sedate and shrewd-eyed traveler to exhibit his ostrich-feathers. I suppose nothing in the world of ornament is so fascinating to a woman as an ostrich-feather; and to delve into a mine of them, to be able to toss about handfuls, sheafs of them, to choose any size and shape and any color, glossy black, white, grey, and white with black tips,—it makes one a little delirious to think of it! There is even a mild enjoyment in seeing a lady take up a long, drooping plume, hold it up before her dancing, critical eyes, turning the head a little one side, shaking the feathered curve into its most graceful fall—“Isn’t it a beauty?” Is she thinking how it will look upon a hat of the mode? Not in the least. The ostrich-feather is the symbol of truth and justice; things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other—it is also the symbol of woman. In the last Judgment before Osiris, the ostrich-feather is weighed in the balance against all the good deeds of a man’s life. You have seen many a man put all his life against the pursuit of an ostrich-feather in a woman’s hat—the plume of truth in beauty’s bonnet.

While the ostrich-trade is dragging along its graceful length, other curiosities are produced; the short, dangerous tusks of the wild boar; the long tusks of the elephant—a beast whose enormous strength is only made a snow of, like that of Samson; and pretty silver-work from Soudan.

“What is this beautiful tawny skin, upon which I am sitting?”

“Lion’s; she was the mother of one of the young lions out yonder. And this,” continued the trader, drawing something from the corner, “is her skull.” It gave a tender interest to the orphan outside, to see these remains of his mother. But sadness is misplaced on her account; it is better that she died, than to live to see her child in a menagerie.

“What’s that thick stuff in a bottle there behind you?”

“That’s lion’s oil, some of her oil.” Unhappy family, the mother skinned and boiled, the offspring dragged into slavery.

I took the bottle. To think that I held in my hand the oil of a lion! Bear’s oil is vulgar. But this is different; one might anoint himself for any heroic deed with this royal ointment.

“And is that another bottle of it?”

“Mais, no; you don’t get a lion every day for oil; that is ostrich-oil. This is good for rheumatism.”

It ought to be. There is nothing rheumatic about the ostrich. When I have tasted sufficiently the barbaric joys of the cabin I climb out upon the deck to see more of this strange craft.

Upon the narrow and dirty bow, over a slow fire, on a shallow copper dish, a dark and slender boy is cooking flap-jacks as big as the flap of a leathern apron. He takes the flap-jack up by the edge in his fingers and turns it over, when one side is cooked, as easily as if it were a sheepskin. There is a pile of them beside him, enough to make a whole suit of clothes, burnous and all, and very durable it would prove. Near him is tied, by a cotton cord, a half-grown leopard, elegantly spotted, who has a habit of running out his tongue, giving a side-lick of his chops, and looking at you in the most friendly manner. If I were the boy I wouldn’t stand with my naked back to a leopard which is tied with a slight string.

On shore, on the sand and in the edge of the wheat, are playing in the sun a couple of handsome young lions, gentle as kittens. After watching their antics for some time, and calculating the weight of their paws as they cuff each other, I satisfy a long ungratified Van Amburg ambition, by patting the youngest on the head and putting my hand (for an exceedingly brief instant) into his mouth, experiencing a certain fearful pleasure, remembering that although young he is a lion!

The two play together very prettily, and when I leave them they have lain down to sleep, face to face, with their arms round each other’s necks, like the babes in the wood. The lovely leopard occasionally rises to his feet and looks at them, and then lies down again, giving a soft sweep to his long and rather vicious tail. His countenance is devoid of the nobility of the lion’s. The lion’s face inspires you with confidence; but I can see little to trust in the yellow depths of his eyes. The lion’s eyes, like those of all untamed beasts, have the repulsive trait of looking at you without any recognition in them—the dull glare of animality.

The next morning, when the wind falls, we slip out from our cover, like the baffled mariners of Jason, and row past the bold, purplish-grey cliff of Gebel Sheykh Herëedee, in which are grottoes and a tomb of the sixth dynasty, and on to Tahta, a large town, almost as picturesque, in the distance, with its tall minarets and one great, red-colored building, as Venice from the Lido. Then the wind rises, and we are again tantalized with no progress. One likes to dally and eat the lotus by his own will; but when the elements baffle him, and the wind blows contrary to his desires, the old impatience, the free will of ancient Adam, arises, and man falls out of his paradise. We are tempted to wish to be hitched (just for a day, or to get round a bend,) to one of these miserable steamboats that go swashing by, frightening all the gamebirds, and fouling the sweet air of Egypt with the black smoke of their chimneys.

In default of going on, we climb a high spur of the Mokat-tam, which has a vast desert plain on each side, and in front, and up and down the very crooked river (the wind would need to change every five minutes to get us round these bends), an enormous stretch of green fields, dotted with villages, flocks of sheep and cattle, and strips of palm-groves. Whenever we get in Egypt this extensive view over mountains, desert, arable land, and river it is always both lovely and grand. There was this afternoon on the bare limestone precipices a bloom as of incipient spring verdure. There is always some surprise of color for the traveler who goes ashore, or looks from his window, on the Nile,—either in the sky, or in the ground which has been steeped in color for so many ages that even the brown earth is rich.

The people hereabouts have a bad reputation, perhaps given them by the government, against which they rebelled on account of excessive taxes; the insurrection was reduced by knocking a village or two into the original dust with cannon balls. We, however, found the inhabitants very civil. In the village was one of the houses of entertainment for wanderers—a half-open cow-shed it would be called in less favored lands. The interior was decorated with the rudest designs in bright colors, and sentences from the Koran; we were told that any stranger could lodge in it and have something to eat and drink; but I should advise the coming traveler to bring his bed, and board also. We were offered the fruit of the nabbek tree (something like a sycamore), a small apple, a sort of cross between the thorn and the crab, with the disagreeable qualities of both. Most of the vegetables and fruits of the valley we find insipid; but the Fellaheen seem to like neutral flavors as they do neutral colors. The almost universal brown of the gowns in this region harmonizes with the soil, and the color does not show dirt; a great point for people who sit always on the ground.

The next day we still have need of patience; we start, meet an increasing wind, which whirls us about and blows us up stream. We creep under a bank and lie all day, a cold March day, and the air dark with dust.

After this Sunday of rest, we walk all the following morning through fields of wheat and lentils, along the shore. The people are uninteresting, men gruff; women ugly; clothes scarce; fruit, the nabbek, which a young lady climbs a tree to shake down for us. But I encountered here a little boy who filled my day with sunshine.

He was a sort of shepherd boy, and I found him alone in a field, the guardian of a donkey which was nibbling coarse grass. But his mind was not on his charge, and he was so much absorbed in his occupation that he did not notice my approach. He was playing, for his own delight and evidently with intense enjoyment, upon a reed pipe—an instrument of two short reeds, each with four holes, bound together, and played like a clarionet.

Its compass was small, and the tune ran round and round in it, accompanied by one of the most doleful drones imaginable. Nothing could be more harrowing to the nerves. I got the boy to play it a good deal. I saw that it was an antique instrument (it was in fact Pan’s pipe unchanged in five thousand years), and that the boy was a musical enthusiast—a gentle Mozart who lived in an ideal world which he created for himself in the midst of the most forlorn conditions. The little fellow had the knack of inhaling and blowing at the same time, expanding his cheeks, and using his stomach like the bellows of the Scotch bagpipe, and producing the same droning sound as that delightful instrument. But I would rather hear this boy half a day than the bagpipe a week.

I talked about buying the pipe, but the boy made it himself, and prized it so highly that I could not pay him what he thought it was worth, and I had not the heart to offer its real value. Therefore I left him in possession of his darling, and gave him half a silver piastre. He kissed it and thanked me warmly, holding the unexpected remuneration for his genius in his hand, and looking at it with shining eyes. I feel an instant pang, and I am sorry that I gave it to him. I have destroyed the pure and ideal world in which he played to himself, and tainted the divine love of sweet sounds with the idea of gain and the scent of money. The serenity of his soul is broken up, and he will never again be the same boy, exercising his talent merely for the pleasure of it. He will inevitably think of profit, and will feverishly expect something from every traveler. He may even fall so far as to repair to landings where boats stop, and play in the hope of backsheesh.

At night we came to Assiout, greeted from afar by the sight of its slender and tall minarets and trees, on the rosy background of sunset.