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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #52212 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52212)
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-
-Project Gutenberg's My Winter on the Nile, by Charles Dudley Warner
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll
-have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
-this ebook.
-
-
-Title: My Winter on the Nile Eighteenth Edition
-
-Author: Charles Dudley Warner
-
-Release Date: June 1, 2016 [EBook #52212]
-Last Updated: February 24, 2018
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY WINTER ON THE NILE ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously provided by the
-Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-MY WINTER ON THE NILE
-
-By Charles Dudley Warner
-
-Eighteenth Edition
-
-Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company
-
-1876
-
-
-
-TO MR. A. C. DUNHAM, AND THE VOYAGERS ON THE DAHABEËH “RIP VAN WINKLE,”
-THIS IMPERFECT RECORD OF THEIR EXPERIENCE IS DEDICATED.
-
-
-
-O Commander of the Faithful. Egypt is a compound of black earth and
-green plants, between a pulverized mountain and a red sand. Along the
-valley descends a river, on which the blessing of the Most High reposes
-both in the evening and the morning, and which rises and falls with the
-revolutions of the sun and moon. According to the vicissitudes of
-the seasons, the face of the country is adorned with a silver wave, a
-verdant emerald, and the deep yellow of a golden harvest.
-
-From Amrou, Conqueror of Egypt, to the Khalif Omar.
-
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-PREFATORY NOTE.
-
-CHAPTER I.—AT THE GATES OF THE EAST.
-
-CHAPTER II.—WITHIN THE PORTALS.
-
-CHAPTER III.—EGYPT OF TO-DAY.
-
-CHAPTER IV.—CAIRO.
-
-CHAPTER V.—IN THE BAZAAR.
-
-CHAPTER VI.—MOSQUES AND TOMBS.
-
-CHAPTER VII.—MOSLEM WORSHIP.—THE CALL TO PRAYER.
-
-CHAPTER VIII.—THE PYRAMIDS.
-
-CHAPTER IX.—PREPARATIONS FOR A VOYAGE.
-
-CHAPTER X.—ON THE NILE.
-
-CHAPTER XI.—PEOPLE ON THE RIVER BANKS.
-
-CHAPTER XII.—SPENDING CHRISTMAS ON THE NILE.
-
-CHAPTER XIII.—SIGHTS AND SCENES ON THE RIVER.
-
-CHAPTER XIV.—MIDWINTER IN EGYPT.
-
-CHAPTER XV.—AMONG THE RUINS OF THEBES.
-
-CHAPTER XVI.—HISTORY IN STONE.
-
-CHAPTER XVII.—KARNAK.
-
-CHAPTER XVIII.—ASCENDING THE RIVER.
-
-CHAPTER XIX.—PASSING THE CATARACT OF THE NILE.
-
-CHAPTER XX.—ON THE BORDERS OF THE DESERT.
-
-CHAPTER XXI—ETHIOPIA.
-
-CHAPTER XXII.—LIFE IN THE TROPICS. WADY HALFA.
-
-CHAPTER XXIII.—APPROACHING THE SECOND CATARACT.
-
-CHAPTER XXIV.—GIANTS IN STONE.
-
-CHAPTER XXV.—FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA.
-
-CHAPTER XXVI.—MYSTERIOUS PHILÆ.
-
-CHAPTER XXVII.—RETURNING.
-
-CHAPTER XXVIII.—MODERN FACTS AND ANCIENT MEMORIES.
-
-CHAPTER XXIX.—THE FUTURE OF THE MUMMY'S SOUL.
-
-CHAPTER XXX.—FAREWELL TO THEBES.
-
-CHAPTER XXXI.—LOITERING BY THE WAY.
-
-CHAPTER XXXII.—JOTTINGS.
-
-CHAPTER XXXIII.—THE KHEDIVE.
-
-CHAPTER XXXIV.—THE WOODEN MAN.
-
-CHAPTER XXXV.—ON THE WAY HOME.
-
-CHAPTER XXXVI.—BY THE RED SEA.
-
-CHAPTER XXXVII.—“EASTWARD HO!”
-
-
-
-
-PREFATORY NOTE.
-
-“My Winter on the Nile,” and its sequel, “In the Levant,” which record
-the experiences and observations of an Oriental journey, were both
-published in 1876; but as this volume was issued only by subscription,
-it has never reached the large public which is served by the general
-book trade.
-
-It is now republished and placed within the reach of those who have read
-“In the Levant.” Advantage has been taken of its reissue to give it a
-careful revision, which, however, has not essentially changed it. Since
-it was written the Khedive of so many ambitious projects has given way
-to his son, Tufik Pasha; but I have let stand what was written of Ismail
-Pasha for whatever historical value it may possess. In other respects,
-what was written of the country and the mass of the people in 1876
-is true now. The interest of Americans in the land of the oldest
-civilization has greatly increased within the past few years, and
-literature relating to the Orient is in more demand than at any previous
-time.
-
-The brief and incidental allusion in the first chapter to the
-peculiarity in the construction of the oldest temple at Pæstum—a
-peculiarity here for the first time, so far as I can find, described in
-print—is worthy the attention of archaeologists. The use of curved
-lines in this so-called Temple of Neptune is more marked than in the
-Parthenon, and is the secret of its fascination. The relation of this
-secret to the irregularities of such mediaeval buildings as the Duomo at
-Pisa is obvious.
-
-Hartford, October, 1880. C. D. W.
-
-
-
-
-
-0020
-
-CHAPT. I.—AT THE GATES OF THE EAST.
-
-The Mediterranean—The East unlike the West—A World risked for a Woman—An
-Unchanging World and a Pickle Sea—Still an Orient—Old Fashions—A Journey
-without Reasons—Off for the Orient—Leaving Naples—A Shaky Court—A
-Deserted District—Ruins of Pæstum—Temple of Neptune—Entrance to
-Purgatory—Safety Valves of the World—Enterprising Natives—Sunset on the
-Sea—Sicily—Crete—Our Passengers—The Hottest place on Record—An American
-Tourist—An Evangelical Dentist—On a Secret Mission—The Vanquished
-Dignitary
-
-CHAPT. II.—WITHIN THE PORTALS.
-
-Africa—Alexandria—Strange Contrasts—A New World—Nature—First View of
-the Orient—Hotel Europe—Mixed Nationalities—The First Backsheesh—Street
-Scenes in Alexandria—Familiar Pictures Idealized—Cemetery Day—A Novel
-Turn Out—A Moslem Cemetery—New Terrors for Death—Pompey's Pillar—Our
-First Camel—Along the Canal—Departed Glory—A set of Fine Fellows—Our
-Handsome Dragomen—Bazaars—Universal Good Humor—A Continuous
-Holiday—Private life in Egypt—Invisible Blackness—The Land of Color and
-the Sun—A Casino
-
-CHAPT. III.—EGYPT OF TO-DAY.
-
-Railways—Our Valiant Dragomen—A Hand-to-Hand Struggle—Alexandria
-to Cairo—Artificial Irrigation—An Arab Village—The Nile—Egyptian
-Festivals—Pyramids of Geezeh—Cairo—Natural Queries.
-
-CHAPT. IV.—CAIRO.
-
-A Rhapsody—At Shepherd's—Hotel life, Egyptian plan—English Noblemen—Life
-in the Streets—The Valuable Donkey and his Driver—The “swell tiling”
-in Cairo—A hint for Central Park—Eunuchs—“Yankee Doodles” of Cairo—A
-Representative Arab—Selecting Dragomen—The Great Business of Egypt—An
-Egyptian Market-Place—A Substitute for Clothes—Dahabeëhs of the Nile—A
-Protracted Negotiation—Egyptian wiles
-
-CHAPT. V.—ON THE BAZAAR.
-
-Sight Seeing in Cairo—An Eastern Bazaar—Courteous Merchants—The Honored
-Beggar—Charity to be Rewarded—A Moslem Funeral—The Gold Bazaar—Shopping
-for a Necklace—Conducting a Bride Home—A Partnership matter—Early
-Marriages and Decay—Longings for Youth
-
-CHAPT. VI.—MOSQUES AND TOMBS.
-
-The Sirocco—The Desert—The Citadel of Cairo—Scene of the Massacre of
-the Memlooks—The World's Verdict—The Mosque of Mohammed Ali—Tomb of the
-Memlook Sultans—Life out of Death
-
-CHAPT. VII.—MOSLEM WORSHIP—THE CALL TO
-PRATER.
-
-An Enjoyable City—Definition of Conscience—“Prayer is better
-than Sleep”—Call of the Muezzin—Moslems at Prayer—Interior of a
-Mosque—Oriental Architecture—The Slipper Fitters—Devotional Washing—An
-Inman's Supplications
-
-CHAPT. VIII.—THE PYRAMIDS.
-
-Ancient Sepulchres—Grave Robbers—The Poor Old Mummy—The Oldest Monument
-in the World—First View of the Pyramids—The resident Bedaween—Ascending
-the Steps—Patent Elevators—A View from the Top—The Guide's
-Opinions—Origin of “Murray's Guide Book”—Speculations on the
-Pyramids—The Interior—Absolute Night—A Taste of Death—The
-Sphinx—Domestic Life in a Tomb—Souvenirs of Ancient Egypt—Backsheesh!
-
-
-CHAPT. IX.—PREPARATIONS FOR A VOYAGE.
-
-A Weighty Question—The Seasons Bewitched—Poetic Dreams Realized—Egyptian
-Music—Public Garden—A Wonderful Rock—Its Patrons—The Playing Band—Native
-Love Songs—The Howling Derweeshes—An Exciting Performance—The Shakers
-put to Shame—Descendants of the Prophet—An Ancient Saracenic Home—The
-Land of the Elea and the Copt—Historical Curiosities—Preparing for
-our Journey—Laying in of Medicines and Rockets—A Determination to be
-Liberal—Official life in Egypt—An Interview with the Bey—Paying for our
-Rockets—A Walking Treasury—Waiting for Wind
-
-CHAPT. X.—ON THE NILE.
-
-On Board the “Rip Van Winkle”—A Farewell Dinner—The Three Months Voyage
-Commenced—On the Nile—Our Pennant's Device—Our Dahabeëh—Its Officers
-and Crew—Types of Egyptian Races—The Kingdom of the “Stick”—The false
-Pyramid of Maydoon—A Night on the River—Curious Crafts—Boat Races on
-the Nile—Native Villages—Songs of the Sailors—Incidents of the Day—The
-Copts—The Patriarch—The Monks of Gebel é Tayr—Disappointment all Round—A
-Royal Luxury—The Banks of the Nile—Gum Arabic—Unfair Reports of us—Speed
-of our Dahabeëh—Egyptian Bread—Hasheesh-Smoking—Egyptian Robbers—Sitting
-in Darkness—Agriculture—Gathering of Taxes—Successful Voyaging
-
-CHAPT.
-XI.—PEOPLE ON THE RIVER BANK.
-
-Sunday on the Nile—A Calm—A Land of Tombs—A New Divinity—Burial of
-a Child—A Sunday Companion on Shore—A Philosophical People—No Sunday
-Clothes—The Aristocratic Bedaween—The Sheykh—Rare Specimens for the
-Centennial—Tracts Needed—Woman's Rights—Pigeons and Cranes—Balmy Winter
-Nights—Tracking—Copying Nature in Dress—Resort of Crocodiles—A Hermit's
-Cave—Waiting for Nothing—Crocodile Mummies—The Boatmen's Song—Furling
-Sails—Life Again—Pictures on the Nile.
-
-CHAPT. XII.—SPENDING CHRISTMAS ON
-THE NILE.
-
-Independence in Spelling—Asioot—Christmas Day—The American Consul—A
-Visit to the Pasha—Conversing by an Interpreter—The Ghawazees at
-Home—Ancient Sculpture—Bird's Eye View of the Nile—Our Christmas
-Dinner—Our Visitor—Grand Reception—The Fire Works—Christmas Eve on the
-Nile
-
-CHAPT. XIII.—SIGHTS AND SCENES ON THE RIVER.
-
-Ancient and Modern Ruins—“We Pay Toll—Cold Weather—Night
-Sailing—Farshoot—A Visit from the Bey—The Market-Place—The Sakiyas or
-Water Wheels—The Nile is Egypt
-
-CHAPT. XIV.—MIDWINTER IN EGYPT.
-
-Midwinter in Egypt—Slaves of Time—Where the Water Jars are Made—Coming
-to Anchor and how it was Done—New Years—” Smits” Copper Popularity—Great
-Strength of the Women—Conscripts for the Army—Conscription a Good
-Thing—On the Threshold of Thebes
-
-CHAPT. XV.—AMONG THE RUINS OF THEBES.
-
-Situation of the City—Ruins—Questions—Luxor—Ivarnak—Glorification of
-the Pharaohs—Sculptures in Stone—The Twin Colossi—Four Hundred Miles in
-Sixteen Days
-
-CHAPT. XVI.—HISTORY IN STONE.
-
-A Dry City—A Strange Circumstance—A Pleasant Residence—Life on the
-Dahabeëh—Illustrious Visitors—Nose-Rings and Beauty—Little Fatimeh—A
-Mummy Hand and Thoughts upon it—Plunder of the Tombs—Exploits of the
-Great Sesostris—Gigantic Statues and their Object—Skill of Ancient
-Artists—Criticisms—Christian Churches and Pagan Temples—Society—A Peep
-into an Ancient Harem—Statue of Meiùnon—Mysteries—Pictures of Heroic
-Girls—Women in History
-
-CHAPT. XVII.—KARNAK.
-
-An Egyptian Carriage—Wonderful Ruins—The Great Hall of Sethi—The
-Largest Obelisk in The World—A City of Temples and Palaces
-
-
-
-CHAPT.
-XVIII.—ASCENDING THE RIVER.
-
-Ascending the River—An Exciting Boat Race—Inside a Sugar Factory—Setting
-Fire to a Town—Who Stole the Rockets?—Striking Contrasts—A Jail—The Kodi
-or Judge—What we saw at Assouan—A Gale—Ruins of Kom Ombos—Mysterious
-Movement—Land of Eternal Leisure
-
-CHAPT. XIX.—PASSING THE CATARACT OF THE
-NILE.
-
-Passing the Cataract of the Nile—Nubian Hills in Sight—Island
-of Elephantine—Ownership of the Cataract—Difficulties of the
-Ascent—Negotiations for a Passage—Items about Assouan—Off for the
-Cataracts—Our Cataract Crew—First Impressions of the Cataract—In
-the Stream—Excitement—Audacious Swimmers—Close Steering—A Comical
-Orchestra—The Final Struggle—Victory—Above the Rapids—The Temple of
-Isis—Ancient Kings and Modern Conquerors
-
-CHAPT. XX.—ON THE BORDERS OF
-THE DESERT.
-
-Ethiopia—Relatives of the Ethiopians—Negro Land—Ancestry of the
-Negro—Conversion Made Easy—A Land of Negative Blessings—Cool air
-from the Desert—Abd-el-Atti's Opinions—A Land of Comfort—Nubian
-Costumes—Turning the Tables—The Great Desert—Sin, Grease and Taxes
-
-
-CHAPT. XXI.—ETHIOPIA.
-
-Primitive Attire—The Snake Charmer—A House full of Snakes—A Writ of
-Ejectments—Natives—The Tomb of Mohammed—Disasters—A Dandy Pilate—Nubian
-Beauty—Opening a Baby's Eyes—A Nubian Pigville
-
-CHAPT. XXII.—LIFE IN THE
-TROPICS—WADY HALFA.
-
-Life in the Tropics—Wady Haifa—Capital of Nubia—The Centre of
-Fashion—The Southern Cross—Castor Oil Plantations—Justice to a
-Thief—Abd-el-Atti's Court—Mourning for the Dead—Extreme of our Journey—A
-Comical Celebration—The March of Civilization.
-
-CHAPT. XXIII.—APPROACHING
-THE SECOND CATARACT.
-
-Two Ways to See It—Pleasures of Canal Riding—Bird's Eye View of the
-Cataracts—Signs of Wealth—Wady Haifa—A Nubian Belle—Classic Beauty—A
-Greek Bride—Interviewing a Crocodile—Joking with a Widow—A Model Village
-
-
-CHAPT. XXIV.—GIANTS IN STONE.
-
-The Colossi of Aboo Simbel, the largest in the World—Bombast—Exploits of
-Remeses II.—A Mysterious Temple—Feting Ancient Deities—Guardians of the
-Nile—The Excavated Rock—The Temple—A Row of Sacred Monkeys—Our Last View
-of The Giants
-
-CHAPT. XXV.—FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA.
-
-Learning the Language—Models of Beauty—Cutting up a Crocodile—Egyptian
-Loafers—A Modern David—A Present—Our Menagerie—The Chameleon—Woman's
-Rights—False Prophets—Incidents—The School Master at Home—Confusion—Too
-Much Conversion—Charity—Wonderful Birds at Mecca
-
-CHAPT. XXVI.—MYSTERIOUS
-PHILÆ.
-
-Leave “well enough” Alone—The Myth of Osiris—The Heights of
-Biggeh—Cleopatra's Favorite Spot—A Legend—Mr. Fiddle—Dreamland—Waiting
-for a Prince—An Inland Excursion—Quarries—Adieu
-
-CHAPT. XXVII.—RETURNING
-
-Downward Run—Kidnapping a Sheykh—Blessed with Relatives—Making the
-Chute—Artless Children—A Model of Integrity—Justice—An Accident—Leaving
-Nubia—A Perfect Shame
-
-CHAPT. XXVIII.—MODERN FACTS AND ANCIENT MEMORIES.
-
-The Mysterious Pebble—Ancient Quarries—Prodigies of Labor—Humor
-in Stone—A Simoon—Famous Grottoes—Naughty Attractions—Bogus
-Relics—Antiquity Smith
-
-CHAPT. XXIX.—THE FUTURE OF THE MUMMY'S SOUL.
-
-Ancient Egyptian Literature—Mummies—A Visit to the Tombs—Disturbing
-the Dead—The Funeral Ritual—Unpleasant Explorations A Mummy in Pledge—A
-Desolate Way—Buried Secrets—Building for Eternity—Before the
-Judgment Seat—Weighed in the Balance The Habitation of the
-Dead—Illuminated—Accommodations for the Mummy—The Pharaoh of the
-Exodus—A Baby Charon—Bats
-
-CHAPT. XXX.—FAREWELL TO THEBES.
-
-Social Festivities—An Oriental Dinner—Dancing Girls—Honored by the
-Sultan—The Native Consul—Finger Feeding—A Dance—Ancient Style
-of Dancing—The Poetry of Night—Karnak by Moonlight—Amusements at
-Luxor—Farewell to Thebes
-
-CHAPT. XXXI.—LOITERING BY THE WAY.
-
-“Very Grammatick”—The Lying in Temple—A Holy Man—Scarecrows—Asinine
-Performers—Antiquity—Old Masters—Profit and Loss—Hopeless
-“Fellahs”—Lion's Oil—A Bad Reputation—An Egyptian Mozart
-
-CHAPT.
-XXXII.—JOTTINGS.
-
-Mission School—Education of Women—Contrasts—A Mirage—Tracks of
-Successive Ages—Bathers—Tombs of the Sacred Bulls—Religion
-and Grammar—Route to Darfoor—Winter Residence of the Holy
-Family—Grottoes—Mistaken Views—Dust and Ashes—Osman Bey—A Midsummer's
-Night Dream—Ruins of Memphis—Departed Glory—A Second Visit to the
-Pyramids of Geezeh—An Artificial Mother
-
-CHAPT. XXXIII.—THE KHEDIVE.
-
-Al Gezereh—Aboo Yusef the Owner—Cairo Again—A Question—The
-Khedive—Solomon and the Viceroy—The Khedive's Family Expenses—Another
-Joseph—Personal Government—Docks of Cairo—Raising Mud—Popular
-Superstitions—Leave Taking
-
-CHAPT. XXXIV.—THE WOODEN MAN.
-
-Visiting a Harem—A Reception—The Khedive at Home—Ladies of the
-Harem—Wife of Tufik Pasha—The Mummy—The Wooden Man Discoveries of
-Mariette Bey—Egypt and Greece Compared—Learned Opinions
-
-CHAPT. XXXV.—ON
-THE WAY HOME.
-
-Leaving our Dahabeeh—The Baths in Cairo—Curious Mode of Execution—The
-Guzeereh Palace—Empress Eugenia's Sleeping Room—Medallion of Benjamin
-Franklin in Egypt—Heliopolis—The Bedaween Bride—Holy Places—The Resting
-Place of the Virgin Mary—Fashionable Drives—The Shoobra Palace—Forbidden
-Books—A Glimpse of a Bevy of Ladies—Uncomfortable Guardians.
-
-CHAPT.
-XXXVI.—BY THE RED SEA.
-
-Following the Track of the Children of Israel—Routes to
-Suez—Temples—Where was the Red Sea Crossed?—In sight of the Bitter
-Lakes—Approaching the Red Sea—Faith—The Suez Canal—The Wells of Moses—A
-Sentimental Pilgrimage—Price of one of the Wells—Miriam of Marah—Water
-of the Wells—Returning to Suez—A Caravan of Bedaweens—Lunch
-Baskets searched by Custom Officers—The Commerce of the East
-
-CHAPT.
-XXXVII.—EASTWARD HO.
-
-Leaving Suez—Ismailia—The Lotus—A Miracle—Egyptian Steamer—Information
-Sought—The Great Highway—Port Said—Abd-el-Atti again—Great Honors
-Lost—Farewell to Egypt
-
-
-
-0028
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I.—AT THE GATES OF THE EAST.
-
-THE Mediterranean still divides the East from the West. Ages of traffic
-and intercourse across its waters have not changed this fact; neither
-the going of armies nor of embassies, Northmen forays nor Saracenic
-maraudings, Christian crusades nor Turkish invasions, neither the
-borrowing from Egypt of its philosophy and science, nor the stealing
-of its precious monuments of antiquity, down to its bones, not all the
-love-making, slave-trading, war-waging, not all the commerce of four
-thousand years, by oar and sail and steam, have sufficed to make the
-East like the West.
-
-Half the world was lost at Actium, they like to say, for the sake of a
-woman; but it was the half that I am convinced we never shall gain—for
-though the Romans did win it they did not keep it long, and they made
-no impression on it that is not, compared with its own individuality,
-as stucco to granite. And I suppose there is not now and never will be
-another woman in the East handsome enough to risk a world for.
-
-There, across the most fascinating and fickle sea in the world—a
-feminine sea, inconstant as lovely, all sunshine and tears in a moment,
-reflecting in its quick mirror in rapid succession the skies of grey
-and of blue, the weather of Europe and of Africa, a sea of romance and
-nausea—lies a world in Everything unlike our own, a world perfectly
-known yet never familiar and never otherwise than strange to the
-European and American. I had supposed it otherwise; I had been led to
-think that modern civilization had more or less transformed the East
-to its own likeness; that, for instance the railway up the Nile had
-practically “done for” that historic stream. They say that if you run
-a red-hot nail through an orange, the fruit will keep its freshness and
-remain unchanged a long time. The thrusting of the iron into Egypt may
-arrest decay, but it does not appear to change the country.
-
-There is still an Orient, and I believe there would be if it were all
-canaled, and railwayed, and converted; for I have great faith in habits
-that have withstood the influence of six or seven thousand years of
-changing dynasties and religions. Would you like to go a little way with
-me into this Orient?
-
-The old-fashioned travelers had a formal fashion of setting before the
-reader the reasons that induced them to take the journey they described;
-and they not unfrequently made poor health an apology for their
-wanderings, judging that that excuse would be most readily accepted for
-their eccentric conduct. “Worn out in body and mind we set sail,” etc.;
-and the reader was invited to launch in a sort of funereal bark upon
-the Mediterranean and accompany an invalid in search of his last
-resting-place.
-
-There was in fact no reason why we should go to Egypt—a remark that the
-reader will notice is made before he has a chance to make it—and there
-is no reason why any one indisposed to do so should accompany us. If
-information is desired, there are whole libraries of excellent books
-about the land of the Pharaohs, ancient and modern, historical,
-archaeological, statistical, theoretical, geographical; if amusement
-is wanted, there are also excellent books, facetious and sentimental. I
-suppose that volumes enough have been written about Egypt to cover every
-foot of its arable soil if they were spread out, or to dam the Nile if
-they were dumped into it, and to cause a drought in either case if they
-were not all interesting and the reverse of dry. There is therefore no
-onus upon the traveler in the East to-day to write otherwise than suits
-his humor; he may describe only what he chooses. With this distinct
-understanding I should like the reader to go with me through a winter in
-the Orient. Let us say that we go to escape winter.
-
-It is the last of November, 1874—the beginning of what proved to be the
-bitterest winter ever known in America and Europe, and I doubt not it
-was the first nip of the return of the rotary glacial period—that we go
-on board a little Italian steamer in the harbor of Naples, reaching it
-in a row-boat and in a cold rain. The deck is wet and dismal; Vesuvius
-is invisible, and the whole sweep of the bay is hid by a slanting mist.
-Italy has been in a shiver for a month; snow on the Alban hills and in
-the Tusculan theatre; Rome was as chilly as a stone tomb with the door
-left open. Naples is little better; Boston, at any season, is better
-than Naples—now.
-
-We steam slowly down the harbor amid dripping ships, losing all sight of
-villages and the lovely coast; only Capri comes out comely in the haze,
-an island cut like an antique cameo. Long after dark we see the light on
-it and also that of the Punta della Campanella opposite, friendly beams
-following us down the coast. We are off Pæstum,' and I can feel that its
-noble temple is looming there in the darkness. This ruin is in some sort
-a door into, an introduction to, the East.
-
-Pæstum has been a deadly marsh for eighteen hundred years, and deserted
-for almost a thousand. Nettles and unsightly brambles have taken the
-place of the “roses of Pæstum” of which the Roman poets sang; but still
-as a poetic memory, the cyclamen trails among the debris of the old
-city; and the other day I found violets waiting for a propitious
-season to bloom. The sea has retired away from the site of the town
-and broadened the marsh in front of it. There are at Pæstum three
-Greek temples, called, no one can tell why, the Temple of Neptune, the
-Basilica, and the Temple of Ceres; remains of the old town wall and
-some towers; a tumbledown house or two, and a wretched tavern. The
-whole coast is subject to tremors of the earth, and the few inhabitants
-hanging about there appear to have had all their bones shaken out of
-them by the fever and ague.
-
-We went down one raw November morning from Naples, driving from a
-station on the Calabrian railway, called Battipaglia, about twelve miles
-over a black marshy plain, relieved only by the bold mountains, on
-the right and left. This plain is gradually getting reclaimed and
-cultivated; there is raised on it inferior cotton and some of the vile
-tobacco which the government monopoly compels the free Italians to
-smoke, and large olive-orchards have been recently set out. The soil is
-rich and the country can probably be made habitable again. Now, the
-few houses are wretched and the few people squalid. Women were pounding
-stone on the road we traveled, even young girls among them wielding the
-heavy hammers, and all of them very thinly clad, their one sleazy skirt
-giving little protection against the keen air. Of course the women were
-hard-featured and coarse-handed; and both they and the men have the
-swarthy complexion that may betoken a more Eastern origin. We fancied
-that they had a brigandish look. Until recently this plain has been a
-favorite field for brigands, who spied the rich traveler from the height
-of St. Angelo and pounced upon him if he was unguarded. Now, soldiers
-are quartered along the road, patrol the country on horseback, and
-lounge about the ruins at Pæstum. Perhaps they retire to some height for
-the night, for the district is too unhealthy for an Italian even, whose
-health may be of no consequence. They say that if even an Englishman,
-who goes merely to shoot woodcock, sleeps there one night, in the right
-season, that night will be his last.
-
-We saw the ruins of Pæstum under a cold grey sky, which harmonized with
-their isolation. We saw them best from the side of the sea, with the
-snow-sprinkled mountains rising behind for a background. Then they stood
-out, impressive, majestic, time-defying. In all Europe there are no
-ruins better worthy the study of the admirer of noble architecture than
-these.
-
-The Temple of Neptune is older than the Parthenon, its Doric sister, at
-Athens. It was probably built before the Persians of Xerxes occupied the
-Acropolis and saw from there the flight of their ruined fleet out of the
-Strait of Salamis. It was built when the Doric had attained the acme of
-its severe majesty, and it is to-day almost perfect on the exterior.
-Its material is a coarse travertine which time and the weather have
-honeycombed, showing the petrifications of plants and shells; but of its
-thirty-six massive exterior columns not one has fallen, though those on
-the north side are so worn by age that the once deep fluting is nearly
-obliterated. You may care to know that these columns which are thirty
-feet high and seven and a half feet in diameter at the base, taper
-symmetrically to the capitals, which are the severest Doric.
-
-At first we thought the temple small, and did not even realize its two
-hundred feet of length, but the longer we looked at it the larger it
-grew to the eye, until it seemed to expand into gigantic size; and
-from whatever point it was viewed its harmonious proportions were an
-increasing delight. The beauty is not in any ornament, for even the
-pediment is and always was vacant, but in its admirable lines.
-
-The two other temples are fine specimens of Greek architecture, also
-Doric, pure and without fault, with only a little tendency to depart
-from severe simplicity in the curve of the capitals, and yet they did
-not interest us. They are of a period only a little later than the
-Temple of Neptune, and that model was before their builders, yet they
-missed the extraordinary, many say almost spiritual beauty of that
-edifice. We sought the reason, and found it in the fact that there are
-absolutely no straight lines in the Temple of Neptune. The side rows of
-columns curve a little out; the end rows curve a little in; at the
-ends the base line of the columns curves a trifle from the sides to the
-center, and the line of the architrave does the same. This may bewilder
-the eye and mislead the judgment as to size and distance, but the effect
-is more agreeable than almost any other I know in architecture. It is
-not repeated in the other temples, the builders of which do not seem to
-have known its secret. Had the Greek colony lost the art of this
-perfect harmony, in the little time that probably intervened between the
-erection of these edifices? It was still kept at Athens, as the Temple
-of Theseus and the Parthenon testify.
-
-Looking from the interior of the temple out at either end, the entrance
-seems to be wider at the top than at the bottom, an Egyptian effect
-produced by the setting of the inward and outer columns. This appeared
-to us like a door through which we looked into Egypt, that mother of all
-arts and of most of the devices of this now confused world. We were
-on our way to see the first columns, prototypes of the Doric order,
-chiselled by man.
-
-The custodian—there is one, now that twenty centuries of war and rapine
-and storms have wreaked themselves upon this temple—would not permit us
-to take our luncheon into its guarded precincts; on a fragment of the
-old steps, amid the weeds we drank our red Capri wine; not the usual
-compound manufactured at Naples, but the last bottle of pure Capri to
-be found on the island, so help the soul of the landlady at the hotel
-there; ate one of those imperfectly nourished Italian chicken's orphan
-birds, owning the pitiful legs with which the table d'hote frequenters
-in Italy are so familiar, and blessed the government for the care, tardy
-as it is, of its grandest monument of antiquity.
-
-When I looked out of the port-hole of the steamer early in the morning,
-we were near the volcanic Lipari islands and islets, a group of
-seventeen altogether; which serve as chimneys and safety-valves to this
-part of the world. One of the small ones is of recent creation, at least
-it was heaved up about two thousand years ago, and I fancy that a new
-one may pop up here any time. From the time of the Trojan war all sorts
-of races and adventurers have fought for the possession of these coveted
-islands, and the impartial earthquake has shaken them all off in turn.
-But for the mist, we should have clearly seen Stromboli, the ever-active
-volcano, but now we can only say we saw it. We are near it, however,
-and catch its outline, and listen for the groans of lost souls which the
-credulous crusaders used to hear issuing from its depths. It was at
-that time the entrance of purgatory; we read in the guide-book that the
-crusaders implored the monks of Cluny to intercede for the deliverance
-of those confined there, and that therefore Odilo of Cluny instituted
-the observance of All Souls' Day.
-
-The climate of Europe still attends us, and our first view of Sicily
-is through the rain. Clouds hide the coast and obscure the base of Ætna
-(which is oddly celebrated in America as an assurance against loss by
-fire); but its wide fields of snow, banked up high above the clouds,
-gleam as molten silver—treasure laid up in heaven—and give us the light
-of the rosy morning.
-
-Rounding the point of Faro, the locale of Charybdis and Scylla, we come
-into the harbor of Messina and take shelter behind the long, curved
-horn of its mole. Whoever shunned the beautiful Scylla was liable to be
-sucked into the strong tide Charybdis; but the rock has lost its terror
-for moderns, and the current is no longer dangerous. We get our last
-dash of rain in this strait, and there is sunny weather and blue sky at
-the south. The situation of Messina is picturesque; the shores both of
-Calabria and Sicily are mountainous, precipitous and very rocky; there
-seems to be no place for vegetation except by terracing. The town is
-backed by lofty circling mountains, which form a dark setting for its
-white houses and the string of outlying villages. Mediaeval forts cling
-to the slopes above it.
-
-No sooner is the anchor down than a fleet of boats surrounds the
-steamer, and a crowd of noisy men and boys swarms on board, to sell us
-muscles, oranges, and all sorts of merchandise, from a hair-brush to
-an under-wrapper. The Sunday is hopelessly broken into fragments in a
-minute. These lively traders use the English language and its pronouns
-with great freedom. The boot-black smilingly asks: “You black my boot?”
-
-The vender of under-garments says: “I gif you four franc for dis one. I
-gif you for dese two a seven franc. No? What you gif?”
-
-A bright orange-boy, we ask, “How much a dozen?”
-
-“Half franc.”
-
-“Too much.”
-
-“How much you give? Tast him; he ver good; a sweet orange; you no like,
-you no buy. Yes, sir. Tak one. This a one, he sweet no more.”
-
-And they were sweet no more. They must have been lemons in oranges'
-clothing. The flattering tongue of that boy and our greed of tropical
-color made us owners of a lot of them, most of which went overboard
-before we reached Alexandria, and would make fair lemonade of the streak
-of water we passed through.
-
-At noon we sail away into the warm south. We have before us the
-beautiful range of Aspromonte, and the village of Reggio bear which
-in 1862 Garibaldi received one of his wounds, a sort of inconvenient
-love-pat of fame. The coast is rugged and steep. High up is an isolated
-Gothic rock, pinnacled and jagged. Close by the shore we can trace the
-railway track which winds round the point of Italy, and some of the
-passengers look at it longingly; for though there is clear sky overhead,
-the sea has on an ungenerous swell; and what is blue sky to a stomach
-that knows its own bitterness and feels the world sinking away from
-under it?
-
-We are long in sight of Italy, but Sicily still sulks in the clouds and
-Mount Ætna will not show itself. The night is bright and the weather has
-become milder; it is the prelude to a day calm and uninteresting. Nature
-rallies at night, however, and gives us a sunset in a pale gold sky with
-cloud-islands on the horizon and palm-groves on them. The stars come out
-in extraordinary profusion and a soft brilliancy unknown in New England,
-and the sky is of a tender blue—something delicate and not to
-be enlarged upon. A sunset is something that no one will accept
-second-hand.
-
-On the morning of December 1st., we are off Crete; Greece we have left
-to the north, and are going at ten knots an hour towards great hulking
-Africa. We sail close to the island and see its long, high barren coast
-till late in the afternoon. There is no road visible on this side, nor
-any sign of human habitation, except a couple of shanties perched high
-up among the rocks. From this point of view, Crete is a mass of naked
-rock lifted out of the waves. Mount Ida crowns it, snow-capped and
-gigantic. Just below Crete spring up in our geography the little islands
-of Gozo and Antigozo, merely vast rocks, with scant patches of low
-vegetation on the cliffs, a sort of vegetable blush, a few stunted trees
-on the top of the first, and an appearance of grass which has a reddish
-color.
-
-The weather is more and more delightful, a balmy atmosphere brooding on
-a smooth sea. The chill which we carried in our bones from New York
-to Naples finally melts away. Life ceases to be a mere struggle,
-and becomes a mild enjoyment. The blue tint of the sky is beyond all
-previous comparison delicate, like the shade of a silk, fading at the
-horizon into an exquisite grey or nearly white. We are on deck all day
-and till late at night, for once enjoying, by the help of an awning,
-real winter weather with the thermometer at seventy-two degrees.
-
-Our passengers are not many, but selected. There are a German baron and
-his sparkling wife, delightful people, who handle the English language
-as delicately as if it were glass, and make of it the most naïve and
-interesting form of speech. They are going to Cairo for the winter, and
-the young baroness has the longing and curiosity regarding the land of
-the sun, which is peculiar to the poetical Germans; she has never seen a
-black man nor a palm-tree. In charge of the captain, there is an Italian
-woman, whose husband lives in Alexandria, who monopolizes the whole
-of the ladies' cabin, by a league with the slatternly stewardess, and
-behaves in a manner to make a state of war and wrath between her and
-the rest of the passengers. There is nothing bitterer than the hatred of
-people for each other on shipboard. When I afterwards saw this woman in
-the streets of Alexandria I had scarcely any wish to shorten her stay
-upon this earth. There are also two tough-fibered and strong-brained
-dissenting ministers from Australia, who have come round by the Sandwich
-Islands and the United States, and are booked for Palestine, the Suez
-Canal and the Red Sea. Speaking of Aden, which has the reputation of
-being as hot as Constantinople is wicked, one of them tells the story
-of an American (the English have a habit of fastening all their dubious
-anecdotes upon “an American”) who said that if he owned two places,
-one in Aden and the other in H——, he would sell the one in Aden. These
-ministers are distinguished lecturers at home—a solemn thought, that
-even the most distant land is subjected to the blessing of the popular
-lecture.
-
-Our own country is well represented, as it usually is abroad, whether by
-appointment or self-selection. It is said that the oddest people in the
-world go up the Nile and make the pilgrimage of Palestine. I have even
-heard that one must be a little cracked who will give a whole winter to
-high Egypt; but this is doubtless said by those who cannot afford to go.
-Notwithstanding the peculiarities of so many of those one meets drifting
-around the East (as eccentric as the English who frequent Italian
-pensions) it must be admitted that a great many estimable and apparently
-sane people go up the Nile—and that such are even found among Cook's
-“personally conducted.”
-
-There is on board an American, or a sort of Irish-American more or less
-naturalized, from Nebraska, a raw-boned, hard-featured farmer, abroad
-for a two-years' tour; a man who has no guide-book or literature, except
-the Bible which he diligently reads. He has spent twenty or thirty years
-in acquiring and subduing land in the new country, and without any time
-or taste for reading, there has come with his possessions a desire to
-see that old world about which he cared nothing before he breathed the
-vitalizing air of the West. That he knew absolutely nothing of Europe,
-Asia, or Africa, except the little patch called Palestine, and found a
-day in Rome too much for a place so run down, was actually none of our
-business. He was a good patriotic American, and the only wonder was that
-with his qualification he had not been made consul somewhere.
-
-But a more interesting person, in his way, was a slender, no-blooded,
-youngish, married man, of the vegetarian and vegetable school, also
-alone, and bound for the Holy Land, who was sick of the sea and
-otherwise. He also was without books of travel, and knew nothing of
-what he was going to see or how to see it. Of what Egypt was he had the
-dimmest notion, and why we or he or anyone else should go there. What
-do you go up the Nile for? we asked. The reply was that the Spirit had
-called him to go through Egypt to Palestine. He had been a dentist, but
-now he called himself an evangelist. I made the mistake of supposing
-that he was one of those persons who have a call to go about and
-convince people that religion is one part milk (skimmed) and three parts
-water—harmless, however, unless you see too much of them. Twice is
-too much. But I gauged him inadequately. He is one of those few who
-comprehend the future, and, guided wholly by the Spirit and not by any
-scripture or tradition, his mission is to prepare the world for its
-impending change. He is en rapport with the vast uneasiness, which I do
-not know how to name, that pervades all lands. He had felt our war in
-advance. He now feels a great change in the air; he is illuminated by an
-inner light that makes him clairvoyant. America is riper than it knows
-for this change. I tried to have him definitely define it, so that I
-could write home to my friends and the newspapers and the insurance
-companies; but I could only get a vague notion that there was about to
-be an end of armies and navies and police, of all forms of religion, of
-government, of property, and that universal brotherhood is to set in.
-
-The evangelist had come aboard on an important and rather secret
-mission; to observe the progress of things in Europe; and to publish his
-observations in a book. Spiritualized as he was, he had no need of
-any language except the American; he felt the political and religious
-atmosphere of all the cities he visited without speaking to any one.
-When he entered a picture gallery, although he knew nothing of pictures,
-he saw more than any one else. I suppose he saw more than Mr. Ruskin
-sees. He told me, among other valuable information, that he found Europe
-not so well prepared for the great movement as America, but that I would
-be surprised at the number who were in sympathy with it, especially
-those in high places in society and in government. The Roman Catholic
-Church was going to pieces; not that he cared any more for this than for
-the Presbyterian—he, personally, took what was good in any church,
-but he had got beyond them all; he was now only working for the
-establishment of the truth, and it was because he had more of the truth
-than others that he could see further.
-
-He expected that America would be surprised when he published his
-observations. “I can give you a little idea,” he said, “of how things
-are working.” This talk was late at night, and by the dim cabin lamp.
-“When I was in Rome, I went to see the head-man of the Pope. I talked
-with him over an hour, and I found that he knew all about it!”
-
-“Good gracious! You don't say so!”
-
-“Yes, sir. And he is in full sympathy. But he dare not say anything.
-He knows that his church is on its last legs. I told him that I did
-not care to see the Pope, but if he wanted to meet me, and discuss the
-infallibility question, I was ready for him.”
-
-“What did the Pope's head-man say to that?”
-
-“He said that he would see the Pope, and see if he could arrange an
-interview; and would let me know. I waited a week in Rome, but no notice
-came. I tell you the Pope don't dare discuss it.”
-
-“Then he didn't see you?”
-
-“No, sir. But I wrote him a letter from Naples.”
-
-“Perhaps he won't answer it.”
-
-“Well, if he doesn't, that is a confession that he can't. He leaves the
-field. That will satisfy me.”
-
-I said I thought he would be satisfied.
-
-The Mediterranean enlarges on acquaintance. On the fourth day we are
-still without sight of Africa, though the industrious screw brings us
-nearer every moment. We talk of Carthage, and think we can see the color
-of the Libyan sand in the yellow clouds at night. It is two o'clock
-on the morning of December the third, when we make the Pharos of
-Alexandria, and wait for a pilot.
-
-
-
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-
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-
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-
-
-CHAPTER II.—WITHIN THE PORTALS.
-
-EAGERNESS to see Africa brings us on deck at dawn. The low coast is not
-yet visible. Africa, as we had been taught, lies in heathen darkness. It
-is the policy of the Egyptian government to make the harbor difficult
-of access to hostile men-of-war, and we, who are peacefully inclined,
-cannot come in till daylight, nor then without a pilot.
-
-The day breaks beautifully, and the Pharos is set like a star in the
-bright streak of the East. Before we can distinguish land, we see the
-so-called Pompey's Pillar and the light-house, the palms, the minarets,
-and the outline of the domes painted on the straw-color of the sky—a
-dream-like picture. The curtain draws up with Eastern leisure—the sun
-appears to rise more deliberately in the Orient than elsewhere; the
-sky grows more brilliant, there are long lines of clouds, golden and
-crimson, and we seem to be looking miles and miles into an enchanted
-country. Then ships and boats, a vast number of them, become visible
-in the harbor, and as the light grows stronger, the city and land lose
-something of their beauty, but the sky grows more softly fiery till the
-sun breaks through. The city lies low along the flat coast, and seems
-at first like a brownish white streak, with fine lines of masts,
-palm-trees, and minarets above it.
-
-The excitement of the arrival in Alexandria and the novelty of
-everything connected with the landing can never be repeated. In one
-moment the Orient flashes upon the bewildered traveler; and though he
-may travel far and see stranger sights, and penetrate the hollow shell
-of Eastern mystery, he never will see again at once such a complete
-contrast to all his previous experience. One strange, unfamiliar form
-takes the place of another so rapidly that there is no time to fix
-an impression, and everything is so bizarre that the new-comer has no
-points of comparison. He is launched into a new world, and has no time
-to adjust the focus of his observation. For myself, I wished the
-Orient would stand off a little and stand still so that I could try
-to comprehend it. But it would not; a revolving kaleidoscope never
-presented more bewildering figures and colors to a child, than the port
-of Alexandria to us.
-
-Our first sight of strange dress is that of the pilot and the crew who
-bring him off—they are Nubians, he is a swarthy Egyptian. “How black
-they are,” says the Baroness; “I don't like it.” As the pilot steps on
-deck, in his white turban, loose robe of cotton, and red slippers,
-he brings the East with him; we pass into the influence of the Moslem
-spirit. Coming into the harbor we have pointed out to us the batteries,
-the palace and harem of the Pasha (more curiosity is felt about a harem
-than about any other building, except perhaps a lunatic asylum), and
-the new villas along the curve of the shore. It is difficult to see any
-ingress, on account of the crowd of shipping.
-
-The anchor is not down before we are surrounded by rowboats, six or
-eight deep on both sides, with a mob of boatmen and guides, all standing
-up and shouting at us in all the broken languages of three continents.
-They are soon up the sides and on deck, black, brown, yellow, in
-turbans, in tarbooshes, in robes of white, blue, brown, in brilliant
-waist-shawls, slippered, and bare-legged, bare-footed, half-naked,
-with little on except a pair of cotton drawers and a red fez, eager,
-big-eyed, pushing, yelping, gesticulating, seizing hold of passengers
-and baggage, and fighting for the possession of the traveler's goods
-which seem to him about to be shared among a lot of pirates. I saw a
-dazed traveler start to land, with some of his traveling-bags in
-one boat, his trunk in a second, and himself in yet a third, and a
-commissionaire at each arm attempting to drag him into two others. He
-evidently couldn't make up his mind, which to take.
-
-We have decided upon our hotel, and ask for the commissionaire of it. He
-appears. In fact there are twenty or thirty of him. The first one is a
-tall, persuasive, nearly naked Ethiop, who declares that he is the only
-Simon Pure, and grasps our handbags. Instantly, a fluent, business-like
-Alexandrian pushes him aside—“I am the commissionaire”—and is about to
-take possession of us. But a dozen others are of like mind, and Babel
-begins. We rescue our property, and for ten minutes a lively and most
-amusing altercation goes on as to who is the representative of the
-hotel. They all look like pirates from the Barbary coast, instead of
-guardians of peaceful travelers. Quartering an orange, I stand in the
-center of an interesting group, engaged in the most lively discussion,
-pushing, howling and fiery gesticulation. The dispute is finally between
-two:
-
-“I Hotel Europe!”
-
-“I Hotel Europe; he no hotel.”
-
-“He my brother, all same me.”
-
-“He! I never see he before,” with a shrug of the utmost contempt.
-
-As soon as we select one of them, the tumult subsides, the enemies
-become friends and cordially join in loading our luggage. In the first
-five minutes of his stay in Egypt the traveler learns that he is to
-trust and be served by people who haven't the least idea that lying is
-not a perfectly legitimate means of attaining any desirable end. And he
-begins to lose any prejudice he may have in favor of a white complexion
-and of clothes. In a decent climate he sees how little clothing is
-needed for comfort, and how much artificial nations are accustomed to
-put on from false modesty.
-
-We begin to thread our way through a maze of shipping, and hundreds of
-small boats and barges; the scene is gay and exciting beyond expression.
-The first sight of the colored, pictured, lounging, waiting Orient is
-enough to drive an impressionable person wild; so much that is novel
-and picturesque is crowded into a few minutes; so many colors and flying
-robes, such a display of bare legs and swarthy figures. We meet flat
-boats coming down the harbor loaded with laborers, dark, immobile groups
-in turbans and gowns, squatting on deck in the attitude which is the
-most characteristic of the East; no one stands or sits—everybody
-squats or reposes cross-legged. Soldiers are on the move; smart Turkish
-officers dart by in light boats with half a dozen rowers; the crew of an
-English man-of-war pull past; in all directions the swift boats fly, and
-with their freight of color, it is like the thrusting of quick shuttles,
-in the weaving of a brilliant carpet, before our eyes.
-
-We step on shore at the Custom-House. I have heard travelers complain of
-the delay in getting through it. I feel that I want to go slowly, that I
-would like to be all day in getting through—that I am hurried along
-like a person who is dragged hastily through a gallery, past striking
-pictures of which he gets only glimpses. What a group this is on shore;
-importunate guides, porters, coolies. They seize hold of us, We want
-to stay and look at them. Did ever any civilized men dress so gaily, so
-little, or so much in the wrong place? If that fellow would untwist
-the folds of his gigantic turban he would have cloth enough to clothe
-himself perfectly. Look! that's an East Indian, that's a Greek, that's
-a Turk that's a Syrian-Jew? No, he's Egyptian, the crook-nose is not
-uncommon to Egyptians, that tall round hat is Persian, that one is from
-Abys—there they go, we haven't half seen them! We leave our passports at
-the entrance, and are whisked through into the baggage-room, where our
-guide pays a noble official three francs for the pleasure of his chance
-acquaintance; some nearly naked coolie-porters, who bear long cords,
-carry off our luggage, and before we know it we are in a carriage, and a
-rascally guide and interpreter—Heaven knows how he fastened himself upon
-us in the last five minutes—is on the box and apparently owns us? (It
-took us half a day and liberal backsheesh to get rid of the evil-eyed
-fellow) We have gone only a little distance when half a dozen of the
-naked coolies rush after us, running by the carriage and laying hold of
-it, demanding backsheesh. It appears that either the boatman has cheated
-them, or they think he will, or they havn't had enough. Nobody trusts
-anybody else, and nobody is ever satisfied with what he gets, in Egypt.
-These blacks, in their dirty white gowns, swinging their porter's ropes
-and howling like madmen, pursue us a long way and look as if they
-would tear us in pieces. But nothing comes of it. We drive to the Place
-Mehemet Ali, the European square,—having nothing Oriental about it,
-a square with an equestrian statue of Mehemet Ali, some trees and a
-fountain—surrounded by hotels, bankers' offices and Frank shops.
-
-There is not much in Alexandria to look at except the people, and the
-dirty bazaars. We never before had seen so much nakedness, filth
-and dirt, so much poverty, and such enjoyment of it, or at least
-indifference to it. We were forced to strike a new scale of estimating
-poverty and wretchedness. People are poor in proportion as their wants
-are not gratified. And here are thousands who have few of the wants
-that we have, and perhaps less poverty. It is difficult to estimate the
-poverty of those fortunate children to whom the generous sun gives a
-warm color for clothing, who have no occupation but to sit in the same,
-all day, in some noisy and picturesque thoroughfare, and stretch out the
-hand for the few paras sufficient to buy their food, who drink at
-the public fountain, wash in the tank of the mosque, sleep in
-street-corners, and feel sure of their salvation if they know the
-direction of Mecca. And the Mohammedan religion seems to be a sort of
-soul-compass, by which the most ignorant believer can always orient
-himself. The best-dressed Christian may feel certain of one thing, that
-he is the object of the cool contempt of the most naked, opthalmic,
-flea-attended, wretched Moslem he meets. The Oriental conceit is a peg
-above ours—it is not self-conscious.
-
-In a fifteen minutes walk in the streets the stranger finds all the
-pictures that he remembers in his illustrated books of Eastern life.
-There is turbaned Ali Baba, seated on the hindquarters of his sorry
-donkey, swinging his big feet in a constant effort to urge the beast
-forward; there is the one-eyed calender who may have arrived last night
-from Bagdad; there is the water-carrier, with a cloth about his loins,
-staggering under a full goat-skin—the skin, legs, head, and all the
-members of the brute distended, so that the man seems to be carrying a
-drowned and water-soaked animal: there is the veiled sister of Zobeide
-riding a grey donkey astride, with her knees drawn up, (as all women
-ride in the East), entirely enveloped in a white garment which covers
-her head and puffs out about her like a balloon—all that can be seen
-of the woman are the toes of her pointed yellow slippers and two black
-eyes; there is the seller of sherbet, a waterish, feeble, insipid drink,
-clinking his glasses; and the veiled woman in black, with hungry eyes,
-is gliding about everywhere. The veil is in two parts, a band about
-the forehead, and a strip of black which hangs underneath the eyes and
-terminates in a point at the waist; the two parts are connected by an
-ornamented cylinder of brass, or silver if the wearer can afford it,
-two and a half inches long and an inch in diameter. This ugly cylinder
-between the restless eyes, gives the woman an imprisoned, frightened
-look. Across the street from the hotel, upon the stone coping of the
-public square, is squatting hour after hour in the sun, a row of these
-forlorn creatures in black, impassive and waiting. We are told that they
-are washerwomen waiting for a job. I never can remove the impression
-that these women are half stifled behind their veils and the shawls
-which they draw over the head; when they move their heads, it is like
-the piteous dumb movement of an uncomplaining animal.
-
-But the impatient reader is waiting for Pompey's Pillar. We drive
-outside the walls, though a thronged gateway, through streets and among
-people wretched and picturesque to the last degree. This is the road to
-the large Moslem cemetery, and to-day is Thursday, the day for visiting
-the graves. The way is lined with coffee-shops, where men are smoking
-and playing at draughts; with stands and booths for the sale of
-fried cakes and confections; and all along, under foot, so that it is
-difficult not to tread on them, are private markets for the sale of
-dates, nuts, raisins, wheat, and doora; the bare-legged owner sits on
-the ground and spreads his dust-covered untempting fare on a straw
-mat before him. It is more wretched and forlorn outside the gate than
-within. We are amid heaps of rubbish, small mountains of it, perhaps the
-ruins of old Alexandria, perhaps only the accumulated sweepings of the
-city for ages, piles of dust, and broken pottery. Every Egyptian town
-of any size is surrounded by these—the refuse of ages of weary
-civilization.
-
-What a number of old men, of blind men, ragged men—though rags are no
-disgrace! What a lot of scrawny old women, lean old hags, some of them
-without their faces covered—even the veiled ones you can see are only
-bags of bones. There is a derweesh, a naked holy man, seated in the
-dirt by the wall, reading the Koran. He has no book, but he recites the
-sacred text in a loud voice, swaying his body backwards and forwards.
-Now and then we see a shrill-voiced, handsome boy also reading the Koran
-with all his might, and keeping a laughing eye upon the passing world.
-Here comes a novel turn-out. It is a long truck-wagon drawn by one
-bony-horse. Upon it are a dozen women, squatting about the edges, facing
-each other, veiled, in black, silent, jolting along like so many bags of
-meal. A black imp stands in front, driving. They carry baskets of food
-and flowers, and are going to the cemetery to spend the day.
-
-We pass the cemetery, for the Pillar is on a little hillock overlooking
-it. Nothing can be drearier than this burying-ground—unless it may be
-some other Moslem cemetery. It is an uneven plain of sand, without a
-spear of grass or a green thing. It is covered thickly with ugly stucco,
-oven-like tombs, the whole inconceivably shabby and dust covered; the
-tombs of the men have head-stones to distinguish them from the women.
-Yet, shabby as all the details of this crumbling cheap place of
-sepulture are, nothing could be gayer or more festive than the scene
-before us. Although the women are in the majority, there are enough men
-and children present, in colored turbans, fezes, and gowns, and shawls
-of Persian dye, to transform the graveyard into the semblance of a
-parterre of flowers. About hundreds of the tombs are seated in a circle
-groups of women, with their food before them, and the flowers laid upon
-the tomb, wailing and howling in the very excess of dry-eyed grief. Here
-and there a group has employed a “welee” or holy man, or a boy, to read
-the Koran for it—and these Koran-readers turn an honest para by their
-vocation. The women spend nearly the entire day in this sympathetic
-visit to their departed friends—it is a custom as old as history, and
-the Egyptians used to build their tombs with a visiting ante-chamber for
-the accommodation of the living. I should think that the knowledge that
-such a group of women were to eat their luncheon, wailing and roosting
-about one's tomb every week, would add a new terror to death.
-
-The Pillar, which was no doubt erected by Diocletian to his own honor,
-after the modest fashion of Romans as well as Egyptians, is in its
-present surroundings not an object of enthusiasm, though it is almost a
-hundred feet high, and the monolith shaft was, before age affected it,
-a fine piece of polished Syenite. It was no doubt a few thousand years
-older than Diocletian, and a remnant of that oldest civilization; the
-base and capital he gave it are not worthy of it. Its principal use
-now is as a surface for the paint-brushes and chisels of distinguished
-travelers, who have covered it with their precious names. I cannot
-sufficiently admire the naïveté and self-depreciation of those travelers
-who paint and cut their names on such monuments, knowing as they must
-that the first sensible person who reads the same will say, “This is an
-ass.”
-
-We drive, still outside the walls, towards the Mahmoodéeh canal, passing
-amid mounds of rubbish, and getting a view of the desert-like
-country beyond. And now heaves in sight the unchanged quintessence of
-Orientalism—there is our first camel, a camel in use, in his native
-setting and not in a menagerie. There is a line of them, loaded with
-building-stones, wearily shambling along. The long bended neck apes
-humility, but the supercilious nose in the air expresses perfect
-contempt for all modern life. The contrast of this haughty
-“stuck-up-ativeness” (it is necessary to coin this word to express the
-camel's ancient conceit) with the royal ugliness of the brute, is both
-awe-inspiring and amusing. No human royal family dare be uglier than the
-camel. He is a mass of bones, faded tufts, humps, lumps, splay-joints
-and callosities. His tail is a ridiculous wisp, and a failure as an
-ornament or a fly-brush. His feet are simply big sponges. For skin
-covering he has patches of old buffalo robes, faded and with the hair
-worn off. His voice is more disagreeable than his appearance. With a
-reputation for patience, he is snappish and vindictive. His endurance is
-over-rated—that is to say he dies like a sheep on an expedition of any
-length, if he is not well fed. His gait moves every muscle like an ague.
-And yet this ungainly creature carries his head in the air, and regards
-the world out of his great brown eyes with disdain. The Sphinx is not
-more placid. He reminds me, I don't know why, of a pyramid. He has a
-resemblance to a palm-tree. It is impossible to make an Egyptian picture
-without him. What a Hapsburg lip he has! Ancient, royal? The very poise
-of his head says plainly, “I have come out of the dim past, before
-history was; the deluge did not touch me; I saw Menes come and go; I
-helped Shoofoo build the great pyramid; I knew Egypt when it hadn't
-an obelisk nor a temple; I watched the slow building of the pyramid at
-Sakkara. Did I not transport the fathers of your race across the
-desert? There are three of us; the date-palm, the pyramid, and myself.
-Everything else is modern. Go to!”
-
-Along the canal, where lie dahabeëhs that will by and by make their way
-up the Nile, are some handsome villas, palaces and gardens. This is
-the favorite drive and promenade. In the gardens, that are open to the
-public, we find a profusion of tropical trees and flowering shrubs;
-roses are decaying, but the blossoms of the yellow acacia scent the air;
-there are Egyptian lilies; the plant with crimson leaves, not native
-here, grows as high as the arbutilon tree; the red passion-flower is in
-bloom, and morning-glories cover with their running vine the tall and
-slender cypresses. The finest tree is the sycamore, with great gnarled
-trunk, and down-dropping branches. Its fruit, the sycamore fig, grows
-directly on the branch, without stem. It is an insipid fruit, sawdust-y,
-but the Arabs like it, and have a saying that he who eats one is sure to
-return to Egypt. After we had tried to eat one, we thought we should not
-care to return. The interior was filled with lively little flies; and a
-priest who was attending a school of boys taking a holiday in the grove,
-assured us that each fig had to be pierced when it was green, to let
-the flies out, in order to make it eatable. But the Egyptians eat them,
-flies and all.
-
-The splendors of Alexandria must be sought in books. The traveler will
-see scarcely any remains of a magnificence which dazzled the world in
-the beginning of our era. He may like to see the mosque that marks the
-site of the church of St. Mark, and he may care to look into the Coptic
-convent whence the Venetians stole the body of the saint, about a
-thousand years ago. Of course we go to see that wonder of our childhood,
-Cleopatra's Needles, as the granite obelisks are called that were
-brought from Alexandria and set up before a temple of Caesar in the
-time of Tiberius. Only one is standing, the other, mutilated, lies prone
-beneath the soil. The erect one stands near the shore and in the midst
-of hovels and incredible filth. The name of the earliest king it bears
-is that of Thothmes III., the great man of Egypt, whose era of conquest
-was about 1500 years before St. Mark came on his mission to Alexandria.
-
-The city which has had as many vicissitudes as most cities, boasting
-under the Cæsars a population of half a million, that had decreased to
-6,000 in 1800, and has now again grown to over two hundred thousand,
-seems to be at a waiting point; the merchants complain that the Suez
-Canal has killed its trade. Yet its preeminence for noise, dirt and
-shabbiness will hardly be disputed; and its bazaars and streets are much
-more interesting, perhaps because it is the meeting-place of all races,
-than travelers usually admit.
-
-We had scarcely set foot in our hotel when we were saluted and waited
-for by dragomans of all sorts. They knocked at our doors, they waylaid
-us in the passages; whenever we emerged from our rooms half a dozen
-rose up, bowing low; it was like being a small king, with obsequious
-attendants waiting every motion. They presented their cards, they begged
-we would step aside privately for a moment and look at the bundle of
-recommendations they produced; they would not press themselves, but if
-we desired a dragoman for the Nile they were at our service. They were
-of all shades of color, except white, and of all degrees of oriental
-splendor in their costume. There were Egyptians, Nubians, Maltese,
-Greeks, Syrians. They speak well all the languages of the Levant and
-of Europe, except the one in which you attempt to converse with them. I
-never made the acquaintance of so many fine fellows in the same space
-of time. All of them had the strongest letters of commendation from
-travelers whom they had served, well-known men of letters and of
-affairs. Travelers give these endorsements as freely as they sign
-applications for government appointments at home.
-
-The name of the handsome dragoman who walked with us through the bazaars
-was, naturally enough, Ahmed Abdallah. He wore the red fez (tarboosh)
-with a gay kuffia bound about it; an embroidered shirt without collar or
-cravat; a long shawl of checked and bright-colored Beyrout silk girding
-the loins, in which was carried his watch and heavy chain; a cloth coat;
-and baggy silk trousers that would be a gown if they were not split
-enough to gather about each ankle. The costume is rather Syrian than
-Egyptian, and very elegant when the materials are fine; but with a
-suggestion of effeminacy, to Western eyes.
-
-The native bazaars, which are better at Cairo, reveal to the traveler,
-at a glance, the character of the Orient; its cheap tinsel, its squalor,
-and its occasional richness and gorgeousness. The shops on each side of
-the narrow street are little more than good-sized wardrobes, with
-room for shelves of goods in the rear and for the merchant to sit
-cross-legged in front. There is usually space for a customer to sit with
-him, and indeed two or three can rest on the edge of the platform. Upon
-cords stretched across the front hang specimens of the wares for sale.
-Wooden shutters close the front at night. These little cubbies are not
-only the places of sale but of manufacture of goods. Everything goes on
-in the view of all the world. The tailor is stitching, the goldsmith is
-blowing the bellows of his tiny forge, the saddler is repairing the old
-donkey-saddles, the shoemaker is cutting red leather, the brazier is
-hammering, the weaver sits at his little loom with the treadle in the
-ground—every trade goes on, adding its own clatter to the uproar.
-
-What impresses us most is the good nature of the throng, under trying
-circumstances. The street is so narrow that three or four people abreast
-make a jam, and it is packed with those moving in two opposing currents.
-Through this mass comes a donkey with a couple of panniers of soil or of
-bricks, or bundles of scraggly sticks; or a camel surges in, loaded
-with building-joists or with lime; or a Turkish officer, with a gaily
-caparisoned horse impatiently stamping; a porter slams along with
-a heavy box on his back; the water-carrier with his nasty skin rubs
-through; the vender of sweetmeats finds room for his broad tray; the
-orange-man pushes his cart into the throng; the Jew auctioneer cries
-his antique brasses and more antique raiment. Everybody is jostled and
-pushed and jammed; but everybody is in an imperturbable good humor, for
-no one is really in a hurry, and whatever is, is as it always has been
-and will be. And what a cosmopolitan place it is. We meet Turks, Greeks,
-Copts, Egyptians, Nubians, Syrians, Armenians, Italians; tattered
-derweeshes, “welees” or holy Moslems, nearly naked, presenting the
-appearance of men who have been buried a long time and recently dug up;
-Greek priests, Jews, Persian Parsees, Algerines, Hindoos, negroes from
-Darfoor, and flat-nosed blacks from beyond Khartoom.
-
-The traveler has come into a country of holiday which is perpetual.
-Under this sun and in this air there is nothing to do but to enjoy life
-and attend to religion five times a day. We look into a mosque; In the
-cool court is a fountain for washing; the mosque is sweet and quiet,
-and upon its clean matting a row of Arabs are prostrating themselves
-in prayer towards the niche that indicates the direction of Mecca. We
-stroll along the open streets encountering a novelty at every step.
-Here is a musician a Nubian playing upon a sort of tambour on a frame;
-a picking, feeble noise he produces, but he is accompanied by the oddest
-character we have seen yet. This is a stalwart, wild-eyed son of the
-sand, coal-black, with a great mass of uncombed, disordered hair hanging
-about his shoulders. His only clothing is a breech-cloth and a round
-shaving-glass bound upon his forehead; but he has hung about his waist
-heavy strings of goats' hoofs, and those he shakes, in time to the
-tambour, by a tremulous motion of his big hips as he minces about.
-He seems so vastly pleased with himself that I covet knowledge of his
-language, in order to tell him that he looks like an idiot.
-
-Near the Fort Napoleon, a hill by the harbor, we encounter another
-scene peculiar to the East. A yellow-skinned, cunning-eyed conjurer has
-attracted a ring of idlers about him, who squat in the blowing dust,
-under the blazing sun, and patiently watch his antics. The conjurer
-himself performs no wonders, but the spectators are a study of color
-and feature. The costumes are brilliant red, yellow, and white. The
-complexions exhaust the possibilities of human color. I thought I had
-seen black people in South Carolina; but I saw a boy just now standing
-in a doorway who would have been invisible but for his white shirt; and
-here is a fat negress in a bright yellow gown and kerchief, whose
-jet face has taken an incredible polish; only the most accomplished
-boot-black could raise such a shine on a shoe; tranquil enjoyment oozes
-out of her. The conjurer is assisted by two mites of children, a girl
-and a boy (no clothing wasted on them), and between the three a great
-deal of jabber and whacking with cane sticks is going on, but nothing
-is performed except the taking of a long snake from a bag and tying it
-round the little girl's neck. Paras are collected, however, and that is
-the main object of all performances.
-
-A little further on, another group is gathered around a storyteller,
-who is reeling off one of the endless tales in which the Arab delights;
-love-adventures, not always the most delicate but none the less enjoyed
-for that, or the story of some poor lad who has had a wonderful career
-and finally married the Sultan's daughter. He is accompanied in his
-narrative by two men thumping upon darabooka drums, in a monotonous,
-sleepy fashion, quite in accordance however with the everlasting leisure
-that pervades the air. Walking about are the venders of sweets, and of
-greasy cakes, who carry tripods on which to rest their brass trays, and
-who split the air with their cries.
-
-It is color, color, that makes all this shifting panorama so
-fascinating, and hides the nakedness, the squalor, the wretchedness of
-all this unconcealed poverty; color in flowing garments, color in the
-shops, color in the sky. We have come to the land of the sun.
-
-At night when we walk around the square we stumble over bundles of
-rags containing men who are asleep, in all the corners, stretched on
-doorsteps, laid away on the edge of the sidewalk. Opposite the hotel is
-a casino, which is more Frank than Egyptian. The musicians are all women
-and Germans or Bohemians; the waiter-girls are mostly Italian; one of
-them says she comes from Bohemia, and has been in India, to which she
-proposes to return. The habitués are mostly young Egyptians in Frank
-dress except the tarboosh, and Italians, all effeminate fellows. All the
-world of loose living and wandering meets here. Italian is much spoken.
-There is little that is Oriental here, except it may be a complaisance
-toward anything enervating and languidly wicked that Europe has to
-offer. This cheap concert is, we are told, all the amusement at night
-that can be offered the traveler, by the once pleasure-loving city of
-Cleopatra, in the once brilliant Greek capital in which Hypatia was a
-star.
-
-
-
-0053
-
-
-
-0054
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III.—EGYPT OF TO-DAY.
-
-EGYPT has excellent railways. There is no reason why it should not have.
-They are made without difficulty and easily maintained in a land of
-no frosts; only where they touch the desert an occasional fence is
-necessary against the drifting sand. The rails are laid, without wooden
-sleepers, on iron saucers, with connecting bands, and the track is firm
-and sufficiently elastic. The express train travels the 131 miles to
-Cairo in about four and a half hours, running with a punctuality, and
-with Egyptian drivers and conductors too, that is unique in Egypt. The
-opening scene at the station did not promise expedition or system.
-
-We reach the station three quarters of an hour before the departure
-of the train, for it requires a longtime—in Egypt, as everywhere in
-Europe—to buy tickets and get baggage weighed. The officials are slower
-workers than our treasury-clerks. There is a great crowd of foreigners,
-and the baggage-room is piled with trunks of Americans, 'boxes' of
-Englishmen, and chests and bundles of all sorts. Behind a high counter
-in a smaller room stand the scales, the weigher, and the clerks. Piles
-of trunks are brought in and dumped by the porters, and thrust forward
-by the servants and dragomans upon the counter, to gain them preference
-at the scales. No sooner does a dragoman get in his trunk than another
-is thrust ahead of it, and others are hurled on top, till the whole pile
-comes down with a crash. There is no system, there are neither officials
-nor police, and the excited travelers are free to fight it out among
-themselves. To venture into the mêlée is to risk broken bones, and it
-is wiser to leave the battle to luck and the dragomans. The noise is
-something astonishing. A score or two of men are yelling at the top
-of their voices, screaming, scolding, damning each other in polyglot,
-gesticulating, jumping up and down, quivering with excitement. This is
-your Oriental repose! If there were any rule by which passengers could
-take their turns, all the trunks could be quickly weighed and passed on;
-but now in the scrimmage not a trunk gets to the scales, and a half hour
-goes by in which no progress is made and the uproar mounts higher.
-
-Finally, Ahmed, slight and agile, handing me his cane, kuffia and watch,
-leaps over the heap of trunks on the counter and comes to close quarters
-with the difficulty. He succeeds in getting two trunks upon the platform
-of the scales, but a traveler, whose clothes were made in London, tips
-them off and substitutes his own. The weighers stand patiently waiting
-the result of the struggle. Ahmed hurls off the stranger's trunk, gives
-its owner a turn that sends him spinning over the baggage, and at last
-succeeds in getting our luggage weighed. He emerges from the scrimmage
-an exhausted man, and we get our seats in the carriage just in time.
-However, it does not start for half an hour.
-
-The reader would like to ride from Alexandria to Cairo, but he won't
-care to read much about the route. It is our first experience of a
-country living solely by irrigation—the occasional winter showers being
-practically of no importance. We pass along and over the vast shallows
-of Lake Mareotis, a lake in winter and a marsh in summer, ride between
-marshes and cotton-fields, and soon strike firmer ground. We are
-traveling, in short, through a Jersey flat, a land black, fat, and rich,
-without an elevation, broken only by canals and divided into fields by
-ditches. Every rod is cultivated, and there are no detached habitations.
-The prospect cannot be called lively, but it is not without interest;
-there are ugly buffaloes in the coarse grass, there is the elegant
-white heron, which travelers insist is the sacred ibis, there are some
-doleful-looking fellaheen, with donkeys, on the bank of the canal,
-there is a file of camels, and there are shadoofs. The shadoof is the
-primitive method of irrigation, and thousands of years have not changed
-it. Two posts are driven into the bank of the canal, with a cross-piece
-on top. On this swings a pole with a bucket of leather suspended at
-one end, which is outweighed by a ball of clay at the other. The fellah
-stands on the slope of the bank and, dipping the bucket into the water,
-raises it and pours the fluid into a sluice-way above. If the bank is
-high, two and sometimes three shadoofs are needed to raise the water to
-the required level. The labor is prodigiously hard and back-straining,
-continued as it must be constantly. All the fellaheen we saw were clad
-in black, though some had a cloth about their loins. The workman usually
-stands in a sort of a recess in the bank, and his color harmonizes with
-the dark soil. Any occupation more wearisome and less beneficial to the
-mind I cannot conceive. To the credit of the Egyptians, the men alone
-work the shadoof. Women here tug water, grind the corn, and carry about
-babies, always; but I never saw one pulling at a shadoof pole.
-
-There is an Arab village! We need to be twice assured that it is a
-village. Raised on a slight elevation, so as to escape high water, it is
-still hardly distinguishable from the land, certainly not in color.
-All Arab villages look like ruins; this is a compacted collection of
-shapeless mud-huts, flat-topped and irregularly thrown together. It is
-an aggregation of dog-kennels, baked in the sun and cracked. However,
-a clump of palm-trees near it gives it an air of repose, and if it
-possesses a mosque and a minaret it has a picturesque appearance, if the
-observer does not go too near. And such are the habitations of nearly
-all the Egyptians.
-
-Sixty-five miles from Alexandria, we cross the Rosetta branch of the
-Nile, on a fine iron bridge—even this portion of the Nile is a broad,
-sprawling river; and we pass through several respectable towns which
-have an appearance of thrift—Tanta especially, with its handsome station
-and a palace of the Khedive. At Tanta is held three times a year a great
-religious festival and fair, not unlike the old fair of the ancient
-Egyptians at Bubastis in honor of Diana, with quite as many excesses,
-and like that, with a gramme of religion to a pound of pleasure. “Now,”
-says Herodotus, “when they are being conveyed to the city Bubastis, they
-act as follows:—for men and women embark together, and great numbers
-of both sexes in every barge: some of the women have castanets on which
-they play, and the men play on the flute during the whole voyage; and
-the rest of the women and men sing and clap their hands together at the
-same time.” And he goes on to say that when they came to any town they
-moored the barge, and the women chaffed those on shore, and danced with
-indecent gestures; and that at the festival more wine was consumed than
-all the rest of the year. The festival at Tanta is in honor of a famous
-Moslem saint whose tomb is there; but the tomb is scarcely so attractive
-as the field of the fête, with the story-tellers and the jugglers and
-booths of dancing girls.
-
-We pass decayed Benha with its groves of Yoosef-Effendi oranges—the
-small fruit called Mandarin by foreigners, and preferred by those who
-like a slight medicinal smell and taste in the orange; and when we are
-yet twenty miles from Cairo, there in the south-west, visible for a
-moment and then hidden by the trees, and again in sight, faintly and yet
-clearly outlined against the blue sky, are two forms, the sight of which
-gives us a thrill. They stand still in that purple distance in which we
-have seen them all our lives. Beyond these level fields and these trees
-of sycamore and date-palm, beyond the Nile, on the desert's edge, with
-the low Libyan hills falling off behind them, as delicate in form and
-color as clouds, as enduring as the sky they pierce, the Pyramids of
-Geezeh! I try to shake off the impression of their solemn antiquity, and
-imagine how they would strike one if all their mystery were removed. But
-that is impossible. The imagination always prompts the eye. And yet I
-believe that standing where they do stand, and in this atmosphere, they
-are the most impressive of human structures. But the pyramids would be
-effective, as the obelisk is not, out of Egypt.
-
-Trees increase in number; we have villas and gardens; the grey ledges of
-the Mokattam hills come into view, then the twin slender spires of the
-Mosque of Mohammed Ali on the citadel promontory, and we are in the
-modern station of Cairo; and before we take in the situation are
-ignominiously driven away in a hotel-omnibus. This might happen in
-Europe. Yes; but then, who are these in white and blue and red, these
-squatters by the wayside, these smokers in the sun, these turbaned
-riders on braying donkeys and grumbling dromedaries; what is all this
-fantastic masquerade in open day? Do people live in these houses? Do
-women peep from these lattices? Isn't that gowned Arab conscious that he
-is kneeling and praying out doors? Have we come to a land where all our
-standards fail and people are not ashamed of their religion?
-
-
-
-0058
-
-
-
-0059
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV.—CAIRO.
-
-O CAIRO! Cairo! Masr-el-Kaherah, The Victorious! City of the Caliphs, of
-Salah-e'-deen, of the Memlooks! Town of mediaeval romance projected
-into a prosaic age! More Oriental than Damascus, or Samarcand. Vast,
-sprawling city, with dilapidated Saracenic architecture, pretentious
-modern barrack-palaces, new villas and gardens, acres of compacted,
-squalid, unsunned dwellings. Always picturesque, lamentably dirty, and
-thoroughly captivating.
-
-Shall we rhapsodize over it, or attempt to describe it? Fortunately,
-writers have sufficiently done both. Let us enjoy it. We are at
-Shepherd's. It is a caravansary through which the world flows. At
-its table d'hote are all nations; German princes, English dukes and
-shopkeepers, Indian officers, American sovereigns; explorers, savants,
-travelers; they have come for the climate of Cairo, they are going
-up the Nile, they are going to hunt in Abyssinia, to join an advance
-military party on the White Nile; they have come from India, from Japan,
-from Australia, from Europe, from America.
-
-We are in the Frank quarter called the Ezbekeëh, which was many years
-ago a pond during high water, then a garden with a canal round it, and
-is now built over with European houses and shops, except the square
-reserved for the public garden. From the old terrace in front of the
-hotel, where the traveler used to look on trees, he will see now only
-raw new houses and a street usually crowded with passers and rows of
-sleepy donkeys and their voluble drivers. The hotel is two stories only,
-built round a court, damp in rainy or cloudy weather (and it is learning
-how to rain as high up the Nile as Cairo), and lacking the comforts
-which invalids require in the winter. It is kept on an ingenious
-combination of the American and European plans; that is, the traveler
-pays a fixed sum per day and then gets a bill of particulars, besides,
-which gives him all the pleasures of the European system. We heard that
-one would be more Orientally surrounded and better cared for at the
-Hotel du Nil; and the Khedive, who tries his hand at everything, has set
-up a New Hotel on the public square; but, somehow, one enters Shepherd's
-as easy as he goes into a city gate.
-
-They call the house entirely European. But there are pelicans walking
-about in the tropical garden; on one side is the wall of a harem, a
-house belonging to the Khedive's mother, a harem with closed shutters,
-but uninteresting, because there is no one in it, though ostriches are
-strutting in its paved court; in the rear of the house stretches a great
-grove of tall date-palms standing in a dusty, débris-strown field—a lazy
-wind is always singing through their tops, and a sakiya (a cow-impelled
-water-wheel) creaks there day and night; we never lock the doors of our
-rooms; long-gowned attendants are always watching in the passages, and,
-when we want one, in default of bells, we open the door and clap the
-hands. All this, with a juggler performing before the house; dragomans
-and servants and merchants in Oriental costume; the monotonous strumming
-of an Arab band in a neighboring cafe, bricklayers on the unfinished
-house opposite us, working in white night-gowns and turbans, who might
-be mistaken at a distance for female sleepwalkers; and from a minaret
-not far away, the tenor-voiced muezzins urging us in the most
-musical invitation ever extended to unbelievers, to come to prayer at
-daylight—this cannot be called European.
-
-An end of the dinner-table, however, is occupied by a loud party of
-young Englishmen, a sprinkling of dukes and earls and those attendants
-and attentive listeners of the nobility who laugh inordinately when my
-lord says a good thing, and are encouraged when my lord laughs loudly at
-a sally of theirs and declares, “well, now, that's very good;” a party
-who seem to regard Cairo as beyond the line of civilization and its
-requirements. They talk loud, roar in laughing, stare at the ladies, and
-light their cigars before the latter have withdrawn. My comrade notices
-that they call for champagne before fish; we could overlook anything but
-that. Some travelers who are annoyed at their boisterousness speak to
-the landlord about them, without knowing their rank—supposing that
-one could always tell an earl by his superior manners. These young
-representatives of England have demanded that the Khedive shall send
-them on their hunting-tour in Africa, and he is to do so at considerable
-cost; and it is said that he pays their hotel bills in Cairo. The desire
-of the Khedive to stand well with all the European powers makes him an
-easy prey to any nobleman who does not like to travel in Egypt at his
-own expense. (It ought to be added that we encountered on the Nile an
-Englishman of high rank who had declined the Khedive's offer of a free
-trip).
-
-Cairo is a city of vast distances, especially the new part which is laid
-out with broad streets, and built up with isolated houses having perhaps
-a garden or a green court; open squares are devoted to fountains and
-flower-beds. Into these broad avenues the sun pours, and through them
-the dust swirls in clouds; everything is covered with it; it imparts
-its grey tint to the town and sifts everywhere its impalpable powder.
-No doubt the health of Cairo is greatly improved and epidemics are
-lessened, by the destruction of the pestilent old houses and by running
-wide streets through the old quarters of twisting lanes and sunless
-alleys. But the wide streets are uninteresting, and the sojourner in the
-city likes to escape out of their glare and dust into the cool and
-shady recesses of the old town. And he has not far to go to do so. A
-few minutes walk from the Ezbekeëh brings one into a tangle like the
-crossing paths of an ants nest, into the very heart of the smell and
-color of the Orient, among people among shops, in the presence of
-manners, habits, costumes, occupations, centuries old, into a life in
-which the western man recognizes nothing familiar.
-
-Cairo, between the Mokattam hill of limestone and the Nile, covers a
-great deal of ground—about three square miles—on which dwell somewhere
-from a third to a half of a million of people. The traveler cannot see
-its stock-sights in a fortnight, and though he should be there months he
-will find something novel in the street-life daily, even though he does
-not, as Mr. Lane has so admirably done, make a study of the people. And
-“life” goes on in the open streets, to an extent which always surprises
-us, however familiar we may be with Italian habits. People eat, smoke,
-pray, sleep, carry on all their trades in sight of the passers by—only
-into the recesses of the harem and the faces of the women one may not
-look. And this last mystery and reserve almost outweighs the openness
-of everything else. One feels as if he were in a masquerade; the part of
-the world which is really most important—womankind—appears to him only
-in shadow and flitting phantasm. What danger is he in from these wrapped
-and veiled figures which glide by, shooting him with a dark and perhaps
-wicked eye; what peril is he in as he slips through these narrow streets
-with their masked batteries of latticed windows! This Eastern life is
-all open to the sun; and yet how little of its secrets does the stranger
-fathom. I seem to feel, always, in an Eastern town, that there is a mask
-of duplicity and concealment behind which the Orientals live; that they
-habitually deceive the traveler in his “gropings after truth.”
-
-The best way of getting about Cairo and its environs is on the donkey.
-It is cheap and exhilarating. The donkey is easily mounted and easily
-got off from; not seldom he will weaken in his hind legs and let his
-rider to the ground—a sinking operation which destroys your confidence
-in life itself. Sometimes he stumbles and sends the rider over his head.
-But the good donkey never does either. He is the best animal, of his
-size and appearance, living. He has the two qualities of our greatest
-general, patience and obstinacy. The good donkey is easy as a
-rocking-chair, sure-footed as a chamois; he can thread any crowd and
-stand patiently dozing in any noisy thoroughfare for hours. To ride him
-is only a slight compromise of one's independence in walking. One is so
-near the ground, and so absent-mindedly can he gaze at what is around
-him, that he forgets that there is anything under him. When the donkey,
-in the excitement of company on the open street and stimulated by the
-whacks and cries of his driver, breaks into the rush of a gallop, there
-is so much flying of legs and such a general flutter that the rider
-fancies he is getting over the ground at an awful rate, running a
-breakneck race; but it does not appear so to an observer. The rider has
-the feeling of the swift locomotion of the Arab steed without its danger
-or its expense. Besides, a long-legged man, with a cork hat and a flying
-linen “duster,” tearing madly along on an animal as big as a sheep, is
-an amusing spectacle.
-
-The donkey is abused, whacked, beaten till he is raw, saddled so that
-all the straps gall him, hard-ridden, left for hours to be assailed by
-the flies in the street, and ridiculed by all men. I wish we could know
-what sort of an animal centuries of good treatment would have made of
-him. Something no doubt quite beyond human deserts; as it is, he is
-simply indispensable in Eastern life. And not seldom he is a pet; he
-wears jingling bells and silver ornaments around his neck; his hair is
-shaved in spots to give him a variegated appearance, and his mane and
-tail are dyed with henna; he has on an embroidered cloth bridle and a
-handsome saddle, under which is a scarlet cloth worked with gold. The
-length and silkiness of his ears are signs of his gentle breeding. I
-could never understand why he is loaded with such an enormous saddle;
-the pommel of it rising up in front of the rider as big as a half-bushel
-measure. Perhaps it is thought well to put this mass upon his back so
-that he will not notice or mind any additional weight.
-
-The donkey's saving quality, in this exacting world, is inertia. And,
-yet, he is not without ambition. He dislikes to be passed on the road by
-a fellow; and if one attempts it, he is certain to sheer in ahead of
-him and shove him off the track. “Donkey jealous one anoder,” say the
-drivers.
-
-Each donkey has his driver or attendant, without whose presence, behind
-or at the side, the animal ceases to go forward. These boys, and some
-of them are men in stature, are the quickest-witted, most importunate,
-good-natured vagabonds in this world. They make a study of human nature,
-and accurately measure every traveler the moment he appears. They
-are agile to do errands, some of them are better guides than the
-professionals, they can be entrusted with any purchases you may make,
-they run, carrying their slippers in their hand, all day beside the
-donkey, and get only a pittance of pay. They are however a jolly,
-larkish set, always skylarking with each other, and are not unlike the
-newspaper boys of New York; now and then one of them becomes a trader or
-a dragoman and makes his fortune.
-
-If you prefer a carriage, good vehicles have become plenty of late
-years, since there are broad streets for driving; and some very handsome
-equipages are seen, especially towards evening on the Shoobra road, up
-and down which people ride and drive to be seen and to see, as they do
-in Central or Hyde parks. It is en règle to have a sais running before
-the carriage, and it is the “swell thing” to have two of them. The
-running sais before a rapidly driven carriage is the prettiest sight in
-Cairo. He is usually a slender handsome black fellow, probably a Nubian,
-brilliantly dressed, graceful in every motion, running with perfect ease
-and able to keep up his pace for hours without apparent fatigue. In the
-days of narrow streets his services were indispensable to clear the way;
-and even now he is useful in the frequented ways where every one walks
-in the middle of the street, and the chattering, chaffing throngs are as
-heedless of anything coming as they are of the day of judgment. In red
-tarboosh with long tassel, silk and gold embroidered vest and jacket,
-colored girdle with ends knotted and hanging at the side, short silk
-trousers and bare legs, and long staff, gold-tipped, in the hand, as
-graceful in running as Antinous, they are most elegant appendages to a
-fashionable turnout. If they could not be naturalized in Central Park,
-it might fill some of the requirements of luxury to train a patriot from
-the Green Isle to run before the horses, in knee-breeches, flourishing a
-shillalah. Faith, I think he would clear the way.
-
-Especially do I like to see the sais coming down the wind before a
-carriage of the royal harem. The outriders are eunuchs, two in front
-and two behind; they are blacks, dressed in black clothes, European cut,
-except the tarboosh. They ride fine horses, English fashion, rising in
-the saddle; they have long limbs, lank bodies, cruel, weak faces, and
-yet cunning; they are sleek, shiny, emasculated. Having no sex, you
-might say they have no souls. How can these anomalies have any virtue,
-since virtue implies the opportunity of its opposite? These semblances
-of men seem proud enough of their position, however, and of the part
-they play to their masters, as if they did not know the repugnance they
-excite. The carriage they attend is covered, but the silken hangings of
-the glass windows are drawn aside, revealing the white-veiled occupants.
-They indeed have no constitutional objections to being seen; the thin
-veil enhances their charms, and the observer who sees their painted
-faces and bright languishing eyes, no doubt gives them credit for as
-much beauty as they possess; and as they flash by, I suppose that every
-one, is convinced that he has seen one of the mysterious Circassian or
-Georgian beauties.
-
-The minute the traveler shows himself on the hotel terrace, the
-donkey-boys clamor, and push forward their animals upon the sidewalk; it
-is no small difficulty to select one out of the tangle; there is noise
-enough used to fit out an expedition to the desert, and it is not till
-the dragoman has laid vigorously about him with his stick that the
-way is clear. Your nationality is known at a glance, and a donkey is
-instantly named to suit you—the same one being called, indifferently,
-“Bismarck” if you are German, “Bonaparte” if you are French, and “Yankee
-Doodle” if you are American, or “Ginger Bob” at a venture.
-
-We are going to Boulak, the so-called port of Cairo, to select a
-dahabeëh for the Nile voyage. We are indeed only getting ready for this
-voyage, and seeing the city by the way. The donkey-boys speak English
-like natives—of Egypt. The one running beside me, a handsome boy in a
-long cotton shirt, is named, royally, Mahmoud Hassan.
-
-“Are you the brother of Hassan whom I had yesterday?”
-
-“No. He, Hassan not my brother; he better, he friend. Breakfast, lunch,
-supper, all together, all same; all same money. We friends.”
-
-Abd-el-Atti, our dragoman, is riding ahead on his grey donkey, and I
-have no difficulty in following his broad back and short legs, even
-though his donkey should be lost to sight in the press. He rides as
-Egyptians do, without stirrups, and uses his heels as spurs. Since
-Mohammed Abd-el-Atti Effendi first went up the Nile, it is many years
-ago now, with Mr. Wm. C. Prime, and got his name prominently into the
-Nile literature, he has grown older, stout, and rich; he is entitled by
-his position to the distinction of “Effendi.” He boasts a good family,
-as good as any; most of his relatives are, and he himself has been, in
-government employ; but he left it because, as he says, he prefers one
-master to a thousand. When a boy he went with the embassy of Mohammed
-Ali to England, and since that time he has traveled extensively as
-courier in Europe and the Levant and as mail-carrier to India. Mr. Prime
-described him as having somewhat the complexion and features of the
-North American Indian; it is true, but he has a shrewd restless eye,
-and very mobile features, quick to image his good humor or the
-reverse, breaking into smiles, or clouding over upon his easily aroused
-suspicion. He is a good study of the Moslem and the real Oriental,
-a combination of the easy, procrastinating fatalism, and yet with a
-tindery temper and an activity of body and mind that we do not usually
-associate with the East. His prejudices are inveterate, and he is an
-unforgiving enemy and a fast, self-sacrificing friend. Not to be driven,
-he can always be won by kindness. Fond of money and not forgetting the
-last piastre due him, he is generous and lavish to a fault. A devout
-Moslem, he has seen too much of the world not to be liberalized. He
-knows the Koran and the legendary history of the Arabs, and speaks and
-writes Arabic above the average. An exceedingly shrewd observer and
-reader of character, and a mimic of other's peculiarities, he is a good
-raconteur, in his peculiar English, and capital company. It is, by the
-way, worth mentioning what sharp observers all these Eastern people
-become, whose business it is to study and humor the whims and
-eccentricities of travelers. The western man who thinks that the Eastern
-people are childlike or effete, will change his mind after a few months
-acquaintance with the shrewd Egyptians. Abd-el-Atti has a good deal of
-influence and even authority in his sphere, and although his executive
-ability is without system, he brings things to pass. Wherever he goes,
-however, there is a ripple and a noise. He would like to go to Nubia
-with us this winter, he says, “for shange of air.”
-
-So much is necessary concerning the character who is to be our companion
-for many months. No dragoman is better known in the East; he is
-the sheykh of the dragomans of Cairo, and by reason of his age and
-experience he is hailed on the river as the sultan of the Nile. He
-dresses like an Englishman, except his fez.
-
-The great worry of the voyager in Egypt, from the moment he lands, is
-about a dragoman; his comfort and pleasure depend very much upon a right
-selection. The dragoman and the dahabeëh interest him more than the
-sphinx and the great pyramids. Taking strangers up the Nile seems to be
-the great business of Egypt, and all the intricacies and tricks of it
-are slowly learned. Ignorant of the language and of the character of the
-people, the stranger may well be in a maze of doubt and perplexity. His
-gorgeously attired dragoman, whose recommendations would fit him to
-hold combined the offices of President of the American Bible Society and
-caterer for Delmonico, often turns out to be ignorant of his simplest
-duties, to have an inhabited but uninhabitable boat, to furnish a meagre
-table, and to be a sly knave. The traveler will certainly have no peace
-from the importunity of the dragomans until he makes his choice. One
-hint can be given: it is always best in a Moslem country to take a
-Moslem dragoman.
-
-We are on our way to Boulak. The sky is full of white light. The air
-is full of dust; the streets are full of noise color, vivid life and
-motion. Everything is flowing, free, joyous. Naturally people fall into
-picturesque groups, forming, separating, shifting like scenes on the
-stage. Neither the rich silks and brilliant dyes, nor the tattered rags,
-and browns and greys are out of place; full dress and nakedness are
-equally en régie. Here is a grave, long-bearded merchant in full turban
-and silk gown, riding his caparisoned donkey to his shop, followed by
-his pipe-bearer; here is a half-naked fellah seated on the rear of his
-sorry-eyed beast, with a basket of greens in front of him; here are a
-group of women, hunched astride their donkeys, some in white silk and
-some in black, shapeless in their balloon mantles, peeping at the world
-over their veils; here a handsome sais runs ahead of a carriage with a
-fat Turk lolling in it, and scatters the loiterers right and left; there
-are porters and beggars fast asleep by the roadside, only their heads
-covered from the sun; there are lines of idlers squatting in all-day
-leisure by the wall, smoking, or merely waiting for tomorrow.
-
-As we get down to Old Boulak the Saturday market is encountered. All
-Egyptian markets occupy the street or some open place, and whatever is
-for sale here, is exposed to the dust and the sun; fish, candy, dates,
-live sheep, doora, beans, all the doubtful and greasy compounds on brass
-trays which the people eat, nuts, raisins, sugar-cane, cheap jewelry.
-It is difficult to force a way through the noisy crowd. The donkey-boy
-cries perpetually, to clear the way, take care, “shimalak!” to the left,
-“yemenak!” to the right, ya! riglak! look out for your left leg, look
-out for your right leg, make way boy, make way old woman; but we joggle
-the old woman, and just escape stepping on the children and babies
-strewn in the street, and tread on the edge of mats spread on the
-ground, upon which provisions are exposed (to the dust) for sale. In the
-narrow, shabby streets, with dilapidated old balconies meeting overhead,
-we encounter loaded camels, donkeys with double panniers, hawkers of
-vegetables; and dodge through, bewildered by color and stunned by
-noise. What is it that makes all picturesque? More dirt, shabbiness, and
-nakedness never were assembled. That fellow who has cut armholes in a
-sack for holding nuts, and slipped into it for his sole garment, would
-not make a good figure on Broadway, but he is in place here, and as
-fitly dressed as anybody. These rascals will wear a bit of old carpet as
-if it were a king's robe, and go about in a pair of drawers that are all
-rags and strings, and a coarse towel twisted about the head for turban,
-with a gay insouciance that is pleasing. In fact, I suppose that a good,
-well-fitting black or nice brown skin is about as good as a suit of
-clothes.
-
-But O! the wrinkled, flabby-breasted old women, who make a pretence of
-drawing the shawl over one eye; the naked, big-stomached children with
-spindle legs, who sit in the sand and never brush away the circle of
-flies around each gummy eye! The tumble-down houses, kennels in which
-the family sleep, the poverty of thousands of years, borne as if it were
-the only lot of life! In spite of all this, there is not, I venture to
-say, in the world beside, anything so full of color, so gay and bizarre
-as a street in Cairo. And we are in a squalid suburb.
-
-At the shore of the swift and now falling Nile, at Boulak, are moored,
-four or five deep, the passenger dahabeëhs, more than a hundred of them,
-gay with new paint and new carpets, to catch the traveler. There are
-small and large, old and new (but all looking new); those that were
-used for freight during the summer and may be full of vermin, and those
-reserved exclusively for strangers. They can be hired at from sixty
-pounds to two hundred pounds a month; the English owner of one
-handsomely furnished wanted seven hundred and fifty pounds for a
-three-months' voyage. The Nile trip adds luxury to itself every year,
-and is getting so costly that only Americans will be able to afford it.
-
-After hours of search we settle upon a boat that will suit us, a large
-boat that had only made a short trip, and so new that we are at
-liberty to christen it; and the bargaining for it begins. That is, the
-bargaining revolves around that boat, but glances off as we depart in a
-rage to this or that other, until we appear to me to be hiring half
-the craft on the river. We appear to come to terms; again and again
-Abd-el-Atti says, “Well, it is finish,” but new difficulties arise.
-
-The owners were an odd pair: a tall Arab in soiled gown and turban,
-named Ahmed Aboo Yoosef, a mild and wary Moslem; and Habib Bagdadli, a
-furtive little Jew in Frank dress, with a cast in one of his pathetic
-eyes and a beseeching look, who spoke bad French fluently. Aboo Yoosef
-was ready to come to terms, but Bagdadli stood out; then Bagdadli
-acquiesced but Aboo made conditions. Ab-del-Atti alternately coaxed and
-stormed; he pulled the Arab's beard; and he put his arm round his neck
-and whispered in his ear.
-
-“Come, let us to go, dis Jews make me mad. I can't do anything with dis
-little Jews.”
-
-Our dragoman's greatest abhorrence is a Jew. Where is this one from? I
-ask.
-
-“He from Algiers.” The Algerian Jews have a bad reputation.
-
-“No, no, monsieur, pas Algiers;” cries the little Jew, appealing to me
-with a pitiful look; “I am from Bagdad.” In proof of this there was his
-name—Habib Bagdadli.
-
-The bargaining goes on, with fine gesticulation, despairing attitudes,
-tones of anger and of grief, violent protestations and fallings into
-apathy and dejection. It is Arab against Arab and a Jew thrown in.
-
-“I will have this boat, but I not put you out of the way on it;” says
-Abd-el-Atti, and goes at it again.
-
-My sympathies are divided. I can see that the Arab and the Jew will be
-ruined if they take what we offer. I know that we shall be ruined if we
-give what they ask. This pathetic-eyed little Jew makes me feel that I
-am oppressing his race; and yet I am quite certain that he is trying to
-overreach us. How the bargain is finally struck I know not, but made it
-seems to be, and clinched by Aboo reluctantly pulling his purse from
-his bosom and handing Abd-el-Atti a napoleon. That binds the bargain;
-instead of the hirer paying something, the lessor gives a pledge.
-
-Trouble, however, is not ended. Certain alterations and additions are to
-be made, and it is nearly two weeks before the evasive couple complete
-them. The next day they offer us twenty pounds to release them. The pair
-are always hanging about for some mitigation or for some advance. The
-gentle Jew, who seems to me friendless, always excites the ire of our
-dragoman; “Here comes dis little Jews,” he exclaims as he encounters him
-in the street, and forces him to go and fulfil some neglected promise.
-
-The boat is of the largest size, and has never been above the Cataract;
-the owners guarantee that it can go, and there is put in the contract a
-forfeit of a hundred pounds if it will not. We shall see afterwards
-how the owners sought to circumvent us. The wiles of the Egyptians are
-slowly learned by the open-minded stranger.
-
-
-
-0071
-
-
-
-0072
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER V.—IN THE BAZAAR.
-
-OUR sight-seeing in Cairo is accomplished under the superintendence
-of another guide and dragoman, a cheerful, willing, good-natured
-and careful Moslem, with one eye. He looks exactly like the one-eyed
-calender of the story; and his good eye has a humorous and inquiring
-twinkle in it. His name is Hassan, but he prefers to be called Hadji,
-the name he has taken since he made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
-
-A man who has made the pilgrimage is called “the hhâgg,” a woman “the
-hhâggeh.”—often spelled and pronounced “hadj” and “hadjee.” It seems to
-be a privilege of travelers to spell Arabic words as they please, and no
-two writers agree on a single word or name. The Arabs take a new name or
-discard an old one as they like, and half a dozen favorite names do duty
-for half the inhabitants. It is rare to meet one who hasn't somewhere
-about him the name of Mohammed, Ahmed, Ali, Hassan, Hosayn, or Mahmoud.
-People take a new name as they would a garment that strikes the fancy.
-
-“You like go bazaar?” asks Hadji, after the party is mounted on donkeys
-in front of the hotel.
-
-“Yes, Hadji, go by the way of the Mooskee.”
-
-The Mooskee is the best known street in Cairo, and the only one in
-the old part of the town that the traveler can find unaided. It runs
-straight, or nearly so, a mile perhaps, into the most densely built
-quarters, and is broad enough for carriages. A considerable part of it
-is roofed lightly over with cane or palm slats, through which the
-sun sifts a little light, and, being watered, it is usually cool and
-pleasant. It cannot be called a good or even road, but carriages and
-donkeys pass over it without noise, the wheels making only a smothered
-sound: you may pass through it many times and not discover that a canal
-runs underneath it. The lower part of it is occupied by European shops.
-There are no fine shops in it like those in the Ezbekeëh, and it is
-not interesting like the bazaars, but it is always crowded. Probably no
-street in the world offers such a variety of costumes and nationalities,
-and in no one can be heard more languages. It is the main artery, from
-which branch off the lesser veins and reticulations leading into the
-bazaars.
-
-If the Mooskee is crowded, the bazaars are a jam. Different trades and
-nationalities have separate quarters, articles that are wanted are far
-apart, and one will of necessity consume a day in making two or three
-purchases. It is an achievement to find and bargain for a piece of tape.
-
-In one quarter are red slippers, nothing but red slippers, hundreds of
-shops hung with them, shops in which they are made and sold; the yellow
-slippers are in another quarter, and by no chance does one merchant keep
-both kinds. There are the silk bazaars, the gold bazaars, the silver
-bazaars, the brass, the arms, the antiquity, the cotton, the spice, and
-the fruit bazaars. In one quarter the merchants and manufacturers are
-all Egyptians, in another Turks, in another Copts, or Algerines, or
-Persians, or Armenians, or Greeks, or Syrians, or Jews.
-
-And what is a bazaar? Simply a lane, narrow, straight or crooked,
-winding, involved, interrupted by a fountain, or a mosque, intersected
-by other lanes, a congeries of lanes, roofed with matting it may be,
-on each side of which are the little shops, not much bigger than a
-dry-goods box or a Saratoga trunk. Frequently there is a story above,
-with hanging balconies and latticed windows. On the ledge of his shop
-the merchant, in fine robes of silk and linen, sits cross-legged,
-probably smoking his chibook. He sits all day sipping coffee and
-gossipping with his friends, waiting for a customer. At the times of
-prayer he spreads his prayer-carpet and pursues his devotions in sight
-of all the world.
-
-This Oriental microcosm called a bazaar is the most characteristic thing
-in the East, and affords most entertainment; in these cool recesses,
-which the sun only penetrates in glints, is all that is shabby and all
-that is splendid in this land of violent contrasts. The shops are rude,
-the passages are unpaved dirt, the matting above hangs in shreds, the
-unpainted balconies are about to tumble down, the lattice-work is grey
-with dust; fleas abound; you are jostled by an unsavory throng may be;
-run against by loaded donkeys; grazed by the dripping goat-skins of the
-water-carriers; beset by beggars; followed by Jews offering old brasses,
-old cashmeres, old armor; squeezed against black backs from the Soudan;
-and stunned by the sing-song cries of a dozen callings. But all this is
-nothing. Here are the perfumes of Arabia, the colors of Paradise. These
-narrow streets are streams of glancing color; these shops are more
-brilliant than any picture—but in all is a softened harmony, the ancient
-art of the East.
-
-We are sitting at a corner, pricing some pieces of old brass and arms.
-The merchant sends for tiny cups of coffee and offers cigarettes. He and
-the dragoman are wrangling about the price of something for which five
-times its value is asked. Not unlikely it will be sold for less than
-it is worth, for neither trader nor traveler has any idea of its value.
-Opposite is a shop where three men sit cross-legged, making cashmere
-shawls by piecing old bits of India scarfs. Next shop is occupied only
-by a boy who is reading the Koran in a loud voice, rocking forwards
-and backwards. A stooping seller of sherbet comes along clinking his
-glasses. A vender of sweetmeats sets his tray before us. A sorry beggar,
-a dwarf, beseeches in figurative language.
-
-“What does he want, Hadji?”
-
-“He say him hungry, want piece bread; O, no matter for he.”
-
-The dragomans never interpret anything, except by short cuts. What the
-dwarf is really saying, according to Mr. Lane, is, “For the sake of God!
-O ye charitable. I am seeking from my lord a cake of bread. I am the
-guest of God and the Prophet.”
-
-As we cannot content him by replying in like strain, “God enrich thee,”
-we earn his blessing by a copper or two.
-
-Across the street is an opening into a nest of shops, gaily hung with
-embroideries from Constantinople, silks from Broussa and Beyrout, stuffs
-of Damascus; a Persian rug is spread on the mastabah of the shop, swords
-and inlaid pistols with flint locks shine amid the rich stuffs. Looking
-down this street, one way, is a long vista of bright color, the street
-passing under round arches through which I see an old wall painted in
-red and white squares, upon which the sun falls in a flood of white
-light. The street in which we are sitting turns abruptly at a little
-distance, and apparently ends in a high Moorish house, with queer little
-latticed windows, and balconies, and dusty recesses full of mystery in
-this half light; and at the corner opposite that, I see part of a public
-fountain and hear very distinctly the “studying” of the school over it.
-
-The public fountain is one of the best institutions of Cairo as well
-as one of the most ornamental. On the street it is a rounded Saracenic
-structure, highly ornamented in carved marble or stucco, and gaily
-painted, having in front two or three faucets from which the water is
-drawn. Within is a tank which is replenished by water brought in skins
-from the Nile. Most of these fountains are charitable foundations, by
-pious Moslems who leave or set apart a certain sum to ensure the yearly
-supply of so many skins of water. Charity to the poor is one of the
-good traits of the Moslems, and the giving of alms and the building of
-fountains are the works that will be rewarded in Paradise.
-
-These fountains, some of which are very beautiful, are often erected
-near a mosque. Over them, in a room with a vaulted roof and open to the
-street by three or four arches with pillars, is usually a boys' school.
-In this room on the floor sit the master and his scholars. Each pupil
-has before him his lesson written on a wooden tablet, and this he is
-reading at the top of his voice, committing it to memory, and swaying
-incessantly backwards and forwards—a movement that is supposed to assist
-the memory. With twenty boys shouting together, the noise is heard
-above all the clamor of the street. If a boy looks off or stops his
-recitation, the stick of the schoolmaster sets him going again.
-
-The boys learn first the alphabet, then the ninety-nine epithets of
-God, and then the Koran, chapter by chapter. This is the sum of human
-knowledge absolutely necessary; if the boy needs writing and arithmetic
-he learns them from the steelyard weigher in the market; or if he is to
-enter any of the professions, he has a regular course of study in
-the Mosque El Ezher, which has thousands of students and is the great
-University of the East.
-
-Sitting in the bazaar for an hour one will see strange sights; wedding
-and funeral processions are not the least interesting of them. We can
-never get accustomed to the ungainly camel, thrusting his huge bulk into
-these narrow limits, and stretching his snake neck from side to side,
-his dark driver sitting high up in the dusk of the roof on the wooden
-saddle, and swaying to and fro with the long stride of the beast. The
-camel ought to be used in funeral processions, but I believe he is not.
-
-We hear now a chanting down the dusky street. Somebody is being carried
-to his tomb in the desert outside the city. The procession has to
-squeeze through the crowd. First come a half dozen old men, ragged and
-half blind, harbingers of death, who move slowly, crying in a whining
-tone, “There is no deity but God; Mohammed is God's apostle; God bless
-and save him.” Then come two or three schoolboys singing in a more
-lively air verses of a funeral hymn. The bier is borne by friends of
-the deceased, who are relieved occasionally by casual passengers. On
-the bier, swathed in grave-clothes, lies the body, with a Cashmere shawl
-thrown over it. It is followed by female hired mourners, who beat their
-breasts and howl with shrill and prolonged ululations. The rear is
-brought up by the female mourners, relations—a group of a dozen in this
-case—whose hair is dishevelled and who are crying and shrieking with
-a perfect abandonment to the luxury of grief. Passengers in the street
-stop and say, “God is most great,” and the women point to the bier and
-say, “I testify that there is no deity but God.”
-
-When the funeral has passed and its incongruous mingling of chanting and
-shrieking dies away, we turn towards the gold bazaar. All the goldsmiths
-and silversmiths are Copts; throughout Egypt the working of the precious
-metals is in their hands. Descended from the ancient Egyptians, or at
-least having more of the blood of the original race in them than others,
-they have inherited the traditional skill of the ancient workers in
-these metals. They reproduce the old jewelry, the barbarous ornaments,
-and work by the same rude methods, producing sometimes the finest work
-with the most clumsy tools.
-
-The gold-bazaar is the narrowest passage we have seen. We step down into
-its twilight from a broader street. It is in fact about three feet wide,
-a lane with an uneven floor of earth, often slippery. On each side are
-the little shops, just large enough for the dealer and his iron safe,
-or for a tiny forge, bellows and anvil. Two people have to make way for
-each other in squeezing along this alley, and if a donkey comes through
-he monopolizes the way and the passengers have to climb upon the
-mastabahs either side. The mastabah is a raised seat of stone or brick,
-built against the front of the shop and level with its floor, say two
-feet and a half high and two feet broad. The lower shutter of the
-shop turns down upon the mastabah and forms a seat upon which a rug is
-spread. The shopkeeper may sit upon this, or withdraw into his shop to
-make room for customers, who remove their shoes before drawing up their
-feet upon the carpet. Sometimes three or four persons will crowd into
-this box called a shop. The bazaar is a noisy as well as a crowded
-place, for to the buzz of talk and the cries of the itinerant venders
-is added the clang of the goldsmiths' hammers; it winds down into the
-recesses of decaying houses and emerges in another direction.
-
-We are to have manufactured a bracelet of gold of a pattern as old
-as the Pharaohs, and made with the same instruments that the cunning
-goldsmiths used three thousand years ago. While we are seated and
-bargaining for the work, the goldsmith unlocks his safe and shows us
-necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and earrings in the very forms, bizarre
-but graceful, of the jewelry of which the Israelites spoiled the
-Egyptian women. We see just such in the Museum at Boulak; though these
-are not so fine as the magnificent jewelry which Queen Aah-hotep, the
-mother of Amosis, attempted to carry with her into the under-world, and
-which the scientific violators of her tomb rescued at Thebes.
-
-In the shop opposite to us are squeezed in three Egyptian women and a
-baby, who have come to spend the day in cheapening some bit of jewelry.
-There is apparently nothing that the Cairo women like so much as
-shopping—at least those who are permitted to go out at all—and they eke
-out its delights by consuming a day or two in buying one article. These
-women are taking the trade leisurely, examining slowly and carefully the
-whole stock of the goldsmith and deliberating on each bead and drop of a
-necklace, glancing slily at us and the passers-by out of their dark eyes
-meantime. They have brought cakes of bread for lunch, and the baby
-is publicly fed as often as he desires. These women have the power of
-sitting still in one spot for hours, squatting with perfect patience in
-a posture that would give a western woman the cramp for her lifetime. We
-are an hour in bargaining with the goldsmith, and are to return late in
-the afternoon and see the bracelet made before our eyes, for no one is
-expected to trust his fellow here.
-
-Thus far the gold has only been melted into an ingot, and that with many
-precautions against fraud. I first count out the napoleons of which the
-bracelet is to be made. These are weighed. A fire is then kindled in the
-little forge, the crucible heated, and I drop the napoleons into it, one
-by one. We all carefully watch the melting to be sure that no gold is
-spilled in the charcoal and no base metal added. The melted mass is then
-run into an ingot, and the ingot is weighed against the same number of
-napoleons that compose it. And I carry away the ingot.
-
-When we return the women are still squatting in the shop in the attitude
-of the morning. They show neither impatience nor weariness; nor does the
-shopkeeper. The baby is sprawled out in his brown loveliness, and
-the purchase of a barbarous necklace of beads is about concluded. Our
-goldsmith now removes his outer garment, revealing his fine gown
-of striped silk, pushes up his sleeves and prepares for work. His
-only-tools are a small anvil, a hammer and a pair of pincers. The ingot
-is heated and hammered, and heated and hammered, until it is drawn out
-into an even, thick wire. This is then folded in three to the required
-length, and twisted, till the gold looks like molasses candy; the
-ends are then hammered together, and the bracelet is bent to its form.
-Finally it is weighed again and cleaned. If the owner wishes he can have
-put on it the government stamp. Gold ornaments that are stamped, the
-goldsmith will take back at any time and give for them their weight in
-coin, less two per cent.
-
-On our way home we encounter a wedding procession; this is the
-procession conducting the bride to the house of the bridegroom; that to
-the bath having taken place two days before. The night of the day before
-going to the bridegroom is called the “Night of henna.” The bride has an
-entertainment at her own house, receives presents of money, and has her
-hands and her feet dyed with henna. The going to the bridegroom is on
-the eve of either Monday or Friday. These processions we often meet in
-the streets of Cairo; they wander about circuitously through the town
-making all the noise and display possible. The procession is a rambling
-affair and generally attended by a rabble of boys and men.
-
-This one is preceded by half a dozen shabbily dressed musicians beating
-different sorts of drums and blowing hautboys, each instrument on its
-own hook; the tune, if there was one, has become discouraged, and
-the melody has dropped out; thump, pound, squeak, the music is more
-disorganized than the procession, and draggles on in noisy dissonance
-like a drunken militia band at the end of a day's “general training.”
-
-Next come some veiled women in black; and following them are several
-small virgins in white. The bride walks next, with a woman each side of
-her to direct her steps. This is necessary, for she is covered from head
-to feet with a red cashmere shawl hanging from a sort of crown on the
-the top of her head. She is in appearance, simply a red cone. Over her
-and on three sides of her, but open in front, is a canopy of pink silk,
-borne on poles by four men. Behind straggle more musicians, piping and
-thumping in an independent nonchalance, followed by gleeful boys. One
-attendant sprinkles rose-water on the spectators, and two or three
-others seem to have a general direction of the course of the train, and
-ask backsheesh for it whenever a stranger is met.
-
-The procession gets tired occasionally and sits down in the dust of
-the road to rest. Sometimes it is accompanied by dancers and other
-performers to amuse the crowd. I saw one yesterday which had halted by
-the roadside, all the women except the bride squatting down in patient
-resignation. In a hollow square of spectators, in front, a male dancer
-was exhibiting his steps. Holding a wand perpendicularly before him
-with both hands, he moved backwards and forwards, with a mincing gait,
-exhibiting neither grace nor agility, but looking around with the most
-conceited expression I ever saw on a human face. Occasionally he would
-look down at his legs with the most approving glance, as much as to
-say, “I trust, God being great, that you are taking particular notice of
-those legs; it seems to me that they couldn't be improved.” The fellow
-enjoyed his dancing if no one else did, and it was impossible to get
-him to desist and let the procession move on. At last the cortege made a
-detour round the man who seemed to be so popular with himself, and left
-him to enjoy his own performance.
-
-Sometimes the expense of this zeffeh, or bridal procession, is shared by
-two parties, and I have seen two brides walking under the same canopy,
-but going to different husbands. The public is not excluded from an
-interest in these weddings. The house of a bridegroom, near the Mooskee,
-was illuminated a night or two before the wedding, colored lanterns
-were hung across the street, and story-tellers were engaged to recite in
-front of the house. On the night of the marriage there was a crowd
-which greatly enjoyed the indelicate songs and stories of the hired
-performers. Late in the evening an old woman appeared at a window and
-proclaimed that the husband was contented with his wife.
-
-An accompaniment of a bridal procession which we sometimes saw we could
-not understand. Before the procession proper, walked another, preceded
-by a man carrying on his head a high wooden cabinet, with four legs, the
-front covered with pieces of looking-glass and bits of brass; behind him
-were musicians and attendants, followed by a boy on horseback, dressed
-richly in clothes too large for him and like a girl's. It turned out
-to be a parade before circumcision, the friends of the lad having taken
-advantage of the bridal ceremony of a neighbor to make a display.
-The wooden case was merely the sign of the barber who walked in the
-procession and was to perform the operation.
-
-“I suppose you are married?” I ask Hadji when the procession has gone
-by.
-
-“Yes, sir, long time.”
-
-“And you have never had but one wife?”
-
-“Have one. He quite nuff for me.”
-
-“How old was she when you married her?”
-
-“Oh, I marry he, when he much girl! I tink he eleven, maybe twelve, not
-more I tink.”
-
-Girls in Egypt are marriageable at ten or eleven, and it is said that
-if not married before they are fourteen they have an excellent chance of
-being old maids. Precocious to mature, they are quick to fall away and
-lose their beauty; the laboring classes especially are ugly and flabby
-before eighteen. The low mental, not to say physical, condition of
-Egyptian women is no doubt largely due to these early marriages. The
-girl is married and is a mother before she has an opportunity to educate
-herself or to learn the duties of wife or mother, ignorant of how to
-make a home pleasant and even of housekeeping, and when she is utterly
-unfit to have the care and training of a child. Ignorant and foolish,
-and, as Mr. Lane says, passionate, women and mothers can never produce a
-great race. And the only reform for Egypt that will give it new vitality
-and a place in the world must begin with the women.
-
-The Khedive, who either has foresight or listens to good advice, issued
-a firman some years ago forbidding the marriage of girls under fifteen.
-It does not seem to be respected either in city or country; though I
-believe that it has some influence in the city, and generally girls are
-not married so young in Cairo as in the country. Yet I heard recently in
-this city of a man of sixty who took a wife of twelve. As this was not
-his first wife, it could not be said of him, as it is said of some great
-geniuses, that he struck twelve the first time.
-
-
-
-0082
-
-
-
-0083
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VI.—MOSQUES AND TOMBS.
-
-WHAT we in Cairo like most to do, is to do nothing in the charming
-winter weather—to postpone the regular and necessary sight-seeing to
-that limbo to which the Arabs relegate everything—bookra, that is,
-tomorrow. Why not as well go to the Pyramids or to Heliopolis or to the
-tombs of the Memlooks tomorrow! It is to be the same fair weather; we
-never plan an excursion, with the proviso, “If it does not rain.” This
-calm certainty of a clear sky adds twenty-five per cent, to the value of
-life.
-
-And yet, there is the Sirocco; that enervating, depressing south wind,
-when all the sands of the hot desert rise up into the air and envelope
-everything in grit and gloom. I have been on the Citadel terrace when
-the city was only dimly outlined in the thick air, and all the horizon
-and the sky were veiled in dust as if by a black Scotch mist. We once
-waited three days after we had set a time to visit the Pyramids, for
-the air to clear. The Sirocco is bad enough in the town, the fine dust
-penetrates the closed recesses of all apartments; but outside the city
-it is unbearable. Indeed any wind raises the sand disagreeably; and dust
-is the great plague of Egypt. The streets of Cairo, except those that
-are sprinkled, are seldom free from clouds of it. And it is an ancient
-dust. I suppose the powdered dead of thousands of years are blowing
-about in the air.
-
-The desert makes itself apparent even in Cairo. Not only is it in the
-air, but it lies in wait close to the walls and houses, ready to
-enter at the gates, sifting in through every crevice. Only by constant
-irrigation can it be driven back. As soon as we pass beyond the compact
-city eastward, we enter the desert, unless we follow the course of some
-refreshing canal. The drive upon it is a favorite one on summer nights.
-I have spoken of the desert as hot; but it is always cool at night; and
-it is the habit of foreigners who are detained in Cairo in the summer to
-go every night to the desert to cool off.
-
-The most conspicuous object in Cairo, from all points, is the Citadel,
-built on a bold spur of the Mokattam range, and the adjoining Mosque of
-Mohammed Ali in which that savage old reformer is buried. The mosque
-is rather Turkish than Saracenic, and its two slender minarets are much
-criticised. You who have been in Constantinople are familiar with the
-like slight and graceful forms in that city; they certainly are not
-so rich or elegant as many of the elaborately carved and more robust
-minarets of Cairo which the genius of the old architects reared in the
-sun-burst of Saracenic architecture; but they are very picturesque and
-effective in their position and especially against a poetic evening sky.
-
-When Salah-e'-deen robbed the pyramids to build the Citadel, he
-doubtless thought he was erecting a fortification that would forever
-protect his city and be an enduring home for the Sultans of Egypt. But
-Mohammed Ali made it untenable as a fort by placing a commanding battery
-on the Mokattam ledge; and now the Citadel (by which I mean all the
-group of buildings) useless as a fort (except to overawe the city)
-and abandoned as a palace, is little more than a ghost-walk of former
-splendors. There are barracks in it; recruits are drilling in its
-squares; the minister-of-war occupies some of its stately apartments;
-the American General Stone, the chief officer of the Khedive's army,
-uses others; in some we find the printing presses and the bureaus of the
-engineers and the typographical corps; but vast halls and chambers
-of audience, and suites of apartments of the harem, richly carved and
-gilded, are now vacant and echo the footsteps of sentries and servitors.
-And they have the shabby look of most Eastern architecture when its
-first freshness is gone.
-
-We sat in the room and on the platform where Mohammed Ali sat when the
-slaughter of the Memlooks was going on; he sat motionless, so it is
-reported, and gave no other sign of nervousness than the twisting of a
-piece of paper in his hands. And yet he must have heard the cries under
-his window, and, of course, the shots of the soldiers on the walls who
-were executing his orders. We looked down from the balcony into the
-narrow, walled lane, with its closed gates, in which the five hundred
-Memlooks were hemmed in and massacred. Think of the nerve of the old
-Turk, sitting still without changing countenance while five hundred,
-or more, gallant swash-bucklers were being shot in cool blood under his
-window! Probably he would not have been so impassive if he had seen one
-of the devoted band escape by spurring his horse through a break in the
-wall and take a fearful flying leap upon the rubbish below.
-
-The world agrees to condemn this treacherous and ferocious act of
-Mohammed Ali and, generally, I believe, to feel grateful to him for it.
-Never was there a clan of men that needed exterminating so much as the
-Memlooks. Nothing less would have suited their peculiarities. They were
-merely a band of robbers, black-mailers, and freebooters, a terror
-to Egypt. Dislodged from actual power, they were still greatly to be
-dreaded, and no ruler was safe who did not obey them. The term Memlook
-means “a white male slave,” and is still so used. The Memlooks, who
-originally were mostly Circassian white slaves, climbed from the
-position of favorites to that of tyrants. They established a long
-dynasty of sultans, and their tombs yonder at the edge of the desert are
-among the most beautiful specimens of the Saracenic architecture. Their
-sovereignty was overthrown by Sultan Selim in 1517, but they remained
-a powerful and aristocratic band which controlled governors, corrupted
-even Oriental society by the introduction of monstrous vices, and
-oppressed the people. I suppose that in the time of the French invasion
-they may have been joined by bold adventurers of many nations. Egypt
-could have no security so long as any of them remained. It was doubtless
-in bad taste for Mohammed Ali to extend a friendly invitation to the
-Memlooks to visit him, and then murder them when they were caught in his
-trap; he finally died insane, and perhaps the lunacy was providentially
-on him at that time.
-
-In the Citadel precincts is a hall occupied by the “parliament” of the
-Khedive, when it is in session; a parliament whose members are
-selected by the Viceroy from all over Egypt, in order that he may have
-information of the state of the country, but a body that has no power
-and certainly not so much influence in the state as the harem has. But
-its very assemblage is an innovation in the Orient, and it may lead
-in time to infinite gab, to election briberies and multitudinous
-legislation, the accompaniments of the highest civilization. We may
-yet live to see a member of it rise to enquire into the expenses of the
-Khedive's numerous family.
-
-The great Mosque of Mohammed Ali is in the best repair and is the least
-frequented of any in Cairo. Its vast, domed interior, rich in materials
-and ambitious in design, is impressive, but this, like all other great
-mosques, strikes the Western man as empty. On the floor are beautiful
-rugs; a tawdry chandelier hangs in the center, and the great spaces are
-strung with lanterns. No one was performing ablution at the handsome
-fountain in the marble-paved court; only a single worshipper was
-kneeling at prayer in all the edifice. But I heard a bird singing
-sweetly in the airy height of the dome.
-
-The view from the terrace of the mosque is the finest in Egypt, not
-perhaps in extent, but certainly in variety and objects of interest;
-and if the atmosphere and the light are both favorable, it is the most
-poetic. From it you command not only the city and a long sweep of the
-Nile, with fields of living green and dark lines of palms, but the ruins
-and pyramids of slumberous old Memphis, and, amid the yellow sands and
-backed by the desolate Libyan hills, the dreamy pyramids of Geezeh. We
-are advised to get this view at sunset, because then the light is soft
-and all the vast landscape has color. This is good advice so far as the
-city at our feet is concerned, with its hundreds of minarets and its
-wide expanse of flat roofs, palm-tops and open squares; there is the
-best light then also on the purple Mokattam hills; and the tombs of the
-Memlooks, north of the cemetery, with their fairy domes and exquisite
-minarets and the encompassing grey desert, the whole bathed in violet
-light, have a beauty that will linger with one who has once seen them
-forever. But looking beyond the Nile, you have the sun in your face. I
-should earnestly entreat the stranger to take this view at sunrise. I
-never saw it myself at that hour, being always otherwise engaged, but I
-am certain that the Pyramids and the Libyan desert would wake at early
-morning in a glow of transcendent beauty.
-
-We drive out the gate or Bab e' Nasr beyond the desolate Moslem
-cemetery, to go to the tombs of the Circassian Memlook Sultans. We pass
-round and amid hills of rubbish, dirt, and broken pottery, the dumpings
-of the city for centuries, and travel a road so sandy that the horses
-can scarcely drag the heavy carriage through it. The public horses of
-Cairo are sorry beasts and only need a slight excuse for stopping at any
-time. There is nothing agreeable about the great Moslem cemetery; it
-is a field of sand-heaps, thickly dotted with little oven-shaped stucco
-tombs. They may be pleasanter below ground; for the vault into which the
-body is put, without a coffin, is high enough to permit its occupant to
-sit up, which he is obliged to do, whether he is able to sit up or not,
-the first night of his stay there, in order to answer the questions of
-two angels who come to examine him on his religious practices and views.
-
-The Tombs of the Sultans, which are in the desert, are in fact vast
-structures,—tombs and mosques united—and are built of parti-colored
-stone. They are remarkable for the beautiful and varied forms of their
-minarets and for their aërial domes; the latter are covered with the
-most wonderful arabesque carving and tracing. They stand deserted,
-with the sand drifting about them, and falling to rapid decay. In the
-interiors are still traces of exquisite carving and color, but much of
-the ornamentation, being of stucco on rude wooden frames, only adds to
-the appearance of decay. The decay of finery is never respectable.
-
-It is not correct, however, to speak of these mosque-tombs as deserted.
-Into all of them have crept families of the poor or of the vicious.
-And the business of the occupants, who call themselves guardians, is to
-extract backsheesh from the visitor. Spinning, knitting, baking, and all
-the simple household occupations go on in the courts and in the gaunt
-rooms; one tomb is used as a grist-mill. The women and girls dwelling
-there go unveiled; they were tattooed slightly upon the chin and the
-forehead, as most Egyptian women are; some of the younger were pretty,
-with regular features and handsome dark eyes. Near the mosques are lanes
-of wretched homes, occupied by as wretched people. The whole mortal
-neighborhood swarms (life out of death) with children; they are as thick
-as jars at a pottery factory; they are as numerous as the flies that
-live on the rims of their eyes and noses; they are as naked, most of
-them, as when they were born. The distended condition of their stomachs
-testify that they have plenty to eat, and they tumble about in the dirt,
-in the full enjoyment of this delicious climate. People can afford to be
-poor when nature is their friend.
-
-
-
-0088
-
-
-
-0089
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VII.—MOSLEM WORSHIP.—THE CALL TO PRAYER.
-
-I SHOULD like to go once to an interesting city where there are no
-sights. That city could be enjoyed; and conscience—which never leaves
-any human being in peace until it has nagged him into a perfect
-condition morally, and keeps punching him about frivolous little details
-of duty, especially at the waking morning hour—would not come to insert
-her thumb among the rosy fingers of the dawn.
-
-Perhaps I do not make myself clear about conscience. Conscience is a
-kind of gastric juice that gnaws upon the very coatings of a person's
-moral nature, if it has no indigestible sin to feed on. Of course I know
-that neither conscience nor gastric juice has a thumb. And, to get out
-of these figures, all I wish to say is, that in Cairo, when the traveler
-is aware of the glow of the morning stealing into his room, as if the
-day were really opened gently (not ripped and torn open as it is in our
-own cold north) by a rosy-fingered maiden, and an atmosphere of sweet
-leisure prevails, then Conscience suggests remorselessly: “To-day you
-must go to the Pyramids,” or, “You must take your pleasure in a drive in
-the Shoobra road,” or “You must explore dirty Old Cairo and its
-Coptic churches,” or “You must visit the mosques, and see the Howling
-Derweeshes.”
-
-But for this Conscience, I think nothing would be so sweet as the coming
-of an eastern morning. I fancy that the cool wind stirring in the palms
-is from the pure desert. It may be that these birds, so melodiously
-singing in the garden, are the small green birds who eat the fruits and
-drink the waters of Paradise, and in whose crops the souls of martyrs
-abide until Judgment. As I lie quite still, I hear the call of a muezzin
-from a minaret not far off, the voice now full and clear and now faint,
-as he walks around the tower to send his entreaty over the dark roofs of
-the city. I am not disturbed by this early call to the unconverted,
-for this is not my religion. With the clamor of morning church bells in
-Italy it is different; for to one born in New England, Conscience is in
-the bells.
-
-Sometimes at midnight I am dimly conscious of the first call to prayer,
-which begins solemnly:
-
-“Prayer is better than sleep.”
-
-But the night calls are not obligatory, and I do not fully wake. The
-calls during the night are long chants, that of the daytime is much
-shorter. Mr. Lane renders it thus:
-
-“God is most Great” (four times repeated). “I testify that there is
-no deity but God” (twice). “I testify that Mohammed is God's Apostle”
-(twice). “Come to prayer” (twice). “Come to security” (twice). “God is
-most Great” (twice). “There is no deity but God.”
-
-The muezzin whom I hear when the first faint light appears in the east,
-has a most sonorous and sweet tenor voice, and his chant is exceedingly
-melodious. In the perfect hush of that hour his voice fills all the air,
-and might well be mistaken for a sweet entreaty out of heaven. This call
-is a long one, and is in fact a confession and proclamation as well as a
-call to prayer. It begins as follows:
-
-“[I extol] the perfection of God, the Existing forever and ever” (three
-times): “the perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single,
-the Supreme: the perfection of God, the One, the Sole: the perfection
-of Him who taketh to Himself, in his great dominion, neither female
-companion nor male partner, nor any like unto Him, nor any that is
-disobedient, nor any deputy, nor any equal, nor any offspring. His
-perfection [be extolled]: and exalted be His name. He is a Deity who
-knew what hath been before it was, and called into existence what hath
-been; and He is now existing, as He was [at the first]. His perfection
-[be extolled]: and exalted be His name.”
-
-And it ends: “O God, bless and save and still beatify the beatified
-Prophet, our lord Mohammed. And may God, whose name be blessed and
-exalted, be well pleased with thee, O our lord El-Hassan, and with thee,
-O our lord El-Hoseyn, and with thee, O Aboo-Farrâg, O Sheykh of the
-Arabs, and with all the favorites ['.he welees'. of God. Amen.”
-
-The mosques of Cairo are more numerous than the churches in Rome; there
-are about four hundred, many of them in ruins, but nearly all in daily
-use. The old ones are the more interesting architecturally, but all have
-a certain attraction. They are always open, they are cool quiet retreats
-out of the glare of the sun and the noise of the street; they are
-democratic and as hospitable to the beggar in rags as to the pasha in
-silk; they offer water for the dusty feet of the pilgrim and a clean mat
-on which to kneel; and in their hushed walls, with no images to distract
-the mind and no ritual to rely on, the devout worshipper may feel the
-presence of the Unseen. At all hours you will see men praying there or
-reading the Koran, unconscious of any observers. Women I have seen in
-there occasionally, but rarely, at prayer; still it is not uncommon to
-see a group of poor women resting in a quiet corner, perhaps sewing or
-talking in low voices. The outward steps and open courts are refuges for
-the poor, the friendless, the lazy, and the tired. Especially the old
-and decaying mosques, do the poor frequent. There about the fountains,
-the children play, and under the stately colonnades the men sleep and
-the women knit and sew. These houses of God are for the weary as well as
-for the pious or the repentant.
-
-The mosques are all much alike. We enter by a few or by a flight of
-steps from the street into a large paved court, open to the sky, and
-surrounded by colonnades. There is a fountain in the center, a round
-or octagonal structure of carved stone, usually with a fanciful wooden
-roof; from faucets in the exterior, water runs into a surrounding stone
-basin about which the worshippers crouch to perform the ablutions before
-prayer. At one side of the court is the entrance to the mosque, covered
-by a curtain. Pushing this aside you are in a spacious room lighted
-from above, perhaps with a dome, the roof supported by columns rising
-to elegant arches. You will notice also the peculiar Arabic
-bracketing-work, called by architects “pendentive,” fitting the angles
-and the transitions from the corners below to the dome. In decaying
-mosques, where the plaster has fallen, revealing the round stick
-frame-work of this bracketing, the perishable character of Saracenic
-ornament is apparent.
-
-The walls are plain, with the exception of gilded texts from the Koran.
-Above, on strings extending across the room are little lamps, and very
-often hundreds of ostrich eggs are suspended. These eggs are almost
-always seen in Coptic and often in Greek churches. What they signify I
-do not know, unless the ostrich, which can digest old iron, is a symbol
-of the credulity that can swallow any tradition. Perhaps her eggs
-represent the great “cosmic egg” which modern philosophers are trying to
-teach (if we may be allowed the expression) their grandmothers to suck.
-
-The stone pavement is covered with matting and perhaps with costly rugs
-from Persia, Smyrna, and Tunis. The end towards Mecca is raised a foot
-or so; in it is the prayer niche, towards which all worshippers turn,
-and near that is the high pulpit with its narrow steps in front; a
-pulpit of marble carved, or of wood cut in bewildering arabesque, and
-inlaid with pearl.
-
-The oldest mosque in Cairo is Ahmed ebn e' Tooloon, built in 879 A.D.,
-and on the spot where, according to a tradition (of how high authority
-I do not know), Abraham was prevented from offering up his son by
-the appearance of a ram. The modern name of this hill is, indeed,
-Kalat-el-Kebsh, the Citadel of the Ram. I suppose the tradition is as
-well based as is the belief of Moslems that it was Ishmael and not
-Isaac whose life was spared. The center of this mosque is an open court,
-surrounded by rows of fine columns, five deep on the East side; and what
-gives it great interest is the fact that the columns all support pointed
-arches, and exceedingly graceful ones, with a slight curve of the
-horse-shoe at the base. These arches were constructed about three
-centuries before the introduction of the pointed arch into Europe; their
-adoption in Europe was probably one of the results of the Crusades.
-
-In this same court I saw an old Nebk tree, which grows on the spot where
-the ark of Noah is said to have rested after its voyage. This goes to
-show, if it goes to show anything, that the Flood was “general” enough
-to reach Egypt.
-
-The mosque of Sultan Hassan, notwithstanding its ruined and shabby
-condition, is the finest specimen of pure Arabic architecture in
-the city; and its lofty and ornamented porch is, I think, as fine as
-anything of its kind in the world. One may profitably spend hours in
-the study of its exquisite details. I often found myself in front of it,
-wondering at the poetic invention and sensitiveness to the beautiful in
-form, which enabled the builders to reach the same effects that their
-Gothic successors only produced by the aid of images and suggestions
-drawn from every department of nature.
-
-We ascend the high steps, pass through some dilapidated parts of the
-building, which are inhabited, and come to the threshold. Here the
-Moslem removes his shoes, or street-slippers, and carries them in his
-hand. Over this sill we may not step, shod as we are. An attendant is
-ready, however, with big slippers which go on over our shoes. Eager,
-bright little boys and girls put them on for us, and then attend us in
-the mosque, keeping a close watch that the slippers are not shuffled
-off. When one does get off, leaving the unholy shoe to touch the ground,
-they affect a sort of horror and readjust it with a laugh. Even the
-children are beginning to feel the general relaxation of bigotry.
-To-day the heels of my shoes actually touch the floor at every step, a
-transgression which the little girl who is leading me by the hand points
-out with a sly shake of the head. The attention of this pretty little
-girl looks like affection, but I know by sad experience that it means
-“backsheesh.” It is depressing to think that her natural, sweet,
-coquettish ways mean only that. She is fierce if any other girl seeks
-to do me the least favor, and will not permit my own devotion to her to
-wander.
-
-The mosque of Sultan Hassan was built in the fourteenth century, and
-differs from most others. Its great, open court has a square recess on
-each side, over which is a noble arch; the east one is very spacious,
-and is the place of prayer. Behind this, in an attached building, is
-the tomb of Hassan; lights are always burning over it, and on it lies a
-large copy of the Koran.
-
-When we enter, there are only a few at their devotions, though there are
-several groups enjoying the serenity of the court; picturesque groups,
-all color and rags! In a far corner an old man is saying his prayers
-and near him a negro, perhaps a slave, also prostrates himself. At the
-fountain are three or four men preparing for devotion; and indeed the
-prayers begin with the washing. The ablution is not a mere form with
-these soiled laborers—though it does seem a hopeless task for men of the
-color of these to scrub themselves. They bathe the head, neck, breast,
-hands and arms, legs and feet; in fact, they take what might be called a
-fair bath in any other country. In our sight this is simply a wholesome
-“wash”; to them it is both cleanliness and religion, as we know, for Mr.
-Lane has taught us what that brown man in the blue gown is saying.
-It may help us to understand his acts if we transcribe a few of his
-ejaculations.
-
-When he washes his face, he says:—“O God whiten my face with thy light,
-on the day when thou shalt whiten the faces of thy favorites; and do not
-blacken my face, on the day when Thou shalt blacken the faces of thine
-enemies.” Washing his right arm, he entreats:—“O God, give me my book in
-my right hand; and reckon with me with an easy reckoning.” Passing his
-wetted hand over his head under his raised turban, he says:—“O God,
-cover me with thy mercy, and pour down thy blessing upon me; and shade
-me under the shadow of thy canopy, on the day when there shall be no
-shade but its shade.”
-
-One of the most striking entreaties is the prayer upon washing the right
-foot:—“O God, make firm my feet upon the Sirat, on the day when feet
-shall slip upon it.”
-
-“Es Sirât” is the bridge, which extends over the midst of Hell, finer
-than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, over which all must
-pass, and from which the wicked shall fall into Hell.
-
-In these mosques order and stillness always reign, and the devotions
-are conducted with the utmost propriety, whether there are single
-worshippers, or whether the mosque is filled with lines of gowned and
-turbaned figures prostrating themselves and bowing with one consent.
-But, much stress as the Moslems lay upon prayer, they say that they do
-not expect to reach Paradise by that, or by any merit of their own,
-but only by faith and forgiveness. This is expressed frequently both
-in prayers and in the sermons on Friday. A sermon by an Imam of a Cairo
-mosque contains these implorings:—“O God! unloose the captivity of the
-captives, and annul the debts of the debtors; and make this town to be
-safe and secure, and blessed with wealth and plenty, and all the towns
-of the Moslems, O Lord of the beings of the whole earth. And decree
-safety and health to us and to all travelers, and pilgrims, and
-warriors, and wanderers, upon thy earth, and upon thy sea, such as are
-Moslems, O Lord of the beings of the whole world. O Lord, we have acted
-unjustly towards our own souls, and if Thou do not forgive us and be
-merciful unto us, we shall surely be of those who perish. I beg of
-God, the Great, that He may forgive me and you, and all the people of
-Mohammed, the servants of God.”
-
-
-
-0095
-
-
-
-0096
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VIII.—THE PYRAMIDS.
-
-THE ancient Egyptians of the Upper Country excavated sepulchres for
-their great dead in the solid rocks of the mountain; the dwellers in
-the lower country built a mountain of stone in which to hide the royal
-mummy. In the necropolis at Thebes there are the vast rock-tombs of
-the kings; at Sakkara and Geezeh stand the Pyramids. On the upper Nile
-isolated rocks and mountains cut the sky in pyramidal forms; on the
-lower Nile the mountain ranges run level along the horizon, and the
-constructed pyramids relieve the horizontal lines which are otherwise
-unbroken except by the palms.
-
-The rock-tombs were walled up and their entrances concealed as much as
-possible, by a natural arrangement of masses of rock; the pyramids were
-completely encased and the openings perfectly masked. False passages,
-leading through gorgeously carved and decorated halls and chambers to
-an empty pit or a blind wall, were hewn in the rock-tombs, simply to
-mislead the violator of the repose of the dead as to the position of the
-mummy. The entrance to the pyramids is placed away from the center, and
-misleading passages run from it, conducting the explorer away from the
-royal sarcophagus. Rock-tomb and pyramid were for the same purpose, the
-eternal security of the mummy.
-
-That purpose has failed; the burial-place was on too grand a scale, its
-contents were too tempting. There is no security for any one after death
-but obscurity; to preserve one's body is to lose it. The bones must
-be consumed if they would be safe, or else the owner of them must be a
-patriot and gain a forgotten grave. There is nothing that men so enjoy
-as digging up the bones of their ancestors. It is doubtful if even
-the Egyptian plunderers left long undisturbed the great tombs which
-contained so much treasure; and certainly the Persians, the Greeks,
-the Romans, the Saracens, left comparatively little for the scientific
-grave-robbers of our excellent age. They did, however, leave the
-tombs, the sarcophagi, most of the sculptures, and a fair share of the
-preserved dead.
-
-But time made a pretty clean sweep of the mummy and nearly all his
-personal and real property. The best sculptures of his tomb might
-legally be considered in the nature of improvements attaching themselves
-to the realty, but our scientists have hacked them off and carried them
-away as if they were personal estate. We call the Arabs thieves and
-ghouls who prowl in the the tombs in search of valuables. But motive is
-everything; digging up the dead and taking his property, tomb and
-all, in the name of learning and investigation is respectable and
-commendable. It comes to the same thing for the mummy, however, this
-being turned out of house and home in his old age. The deed has its
-comic aspect, and it seems to me that if a mummy has any humor left in
-his dried body, he must smile to see what a ludicrous failure were his
-costly efforts at concealment and repose. For there is a point where
-frustration of plans may be so sweeping as to be amusing; just as the
-mummy himself is so ghastly that his aspect is almost funny.
-
-Nothing more impresses the mind with the antiquity of Egypt than its
-vast cemeteries, into which the harvests of the dead have been gathered
-for so many thousands of years. Of old Memphis, indeed, nothing remains
-except its necropolis, whose monuments have outlasted the palaces and
-temples that were the wonder of the world. The magnificence of the city
-can be estimated by the extent of its burial-ground.
-
-On the west side of the Nile, opposite Cairo, and extending south along
-the edge of the desert, is a nearly continuous necropolis for fifteen
-miles. It is marked at intervals by pyramids. At Geezeh are three large
-and several small ones; at Abooseer are four; at Sakkara are eleven; at
-Dashoor are four. These all belonged to the necropolis of Memphis. At
-Geezeh is the largest, that of Cheops or Shoofoo, the third king of the
-fourth dynasty, reigning at Memphis about 4235 B.C., according to the
-chronology of Mariette Bey, which every new discovery helps to establish
-as the most probably correct. This pyramid was about four hundred and
-eighty feet high, and the length of a side of its base was about seven
-hundred and sixty-four feet; it is now four hundred and fifty feet high
-and its base line is seven hundred and forty-six feet. It is big enough
-yet for any practical purpose. The old pyramid at Sakkara is believed to
-have been built by Ouenephes, the fourth king of the first dynasty,
-and to be the oldest monument in the world. Like the mounds of the
-Chaldeans, it is built in degrees or stages, of which there are five.
-Degraded now and buried at the base in its own rubbish, it rises only
-about one hundred and ninety feet above the ground.
-
-It is a drive of two hours from Cairo to the Pyramids of Geezeh, over
-a very good road; and we are advised to go by carriage. Hadji is on the
-seat with the driver, keeping his single twinkling eye active in the
-service of the howadji. The driver is a polished Nubian, with a white
-turban and a white gown; feet and legs go bare. You wouldn't call it
-a stylish turnout for the Bois, but it would be all right if we had a
-gorgeous sais to attract attention from ourselves.
-
-We drive through the wide and dusty streets of the new quarter. The
-barrack-like palace, on the left of abroad place, is the one in which
-the Khedive is staying just now, though he may be in another one
-to-night. The streets are the same animated theater-like scenes of vivid
-color and picturesque costume and indolent waiting on Providence to
-which we thought we should never become accustomed, but which are
-already beginning to lose their novelty. The fellaheen are coming in to
-market, trudging along behind donkeys and camels loaded with vegetables
-or freshly cut grass and beans for fodder. Squads of soldiers in white
-uniform pass; bugle notes are heard from Kasr e' Neel, a barrack
-of troops on the river. Here, as in Europe, the great business most
-seriously pursued is the drilling of men to stand straight, handle arms,
-roll their eyes, march with a thousand legs moving as one, and shoot on
-sight other human beings who have learned the same tricks. God help us,
-it is a pitiful thing for civilized people.
-
-The banks of the Nile here above Boolak are high and steep. We cross
-the river on a fine bridge of iron, and drive over the level plain,
-opposite, on a raised and winding embankment. This is planted on each
-side with lebbekh and sycamore trees. Part of the way the trees are
-large and the shade ample; the roots going down into moist ground. Much
-of the way the trees are small and kept alive by constant watering. On
-the right, by a noble avenue are approached the gardens and the palace
-of Gezeereh. We pass by the new summer palace of Geezeh. Other large
-ones are in process of construction. If the viceroy is measured for a
-new suit of clothes as often as he orders a new palace, his tailors must
-be kept busy. Through the trees we see green fields, intersected with
-ditches, wheat, barley, and beans, the latter broad-sown and growing
-two to three feet high; here and there are lines of palms, clumps of
-acacias; peasants are at work or asleep in the shade; there are trains
-of camels, and men plowing with cows or buffaloes. Leaving the squalid
-huts that are the remains of once beautiful Geezeh, the embankment
-strides straight across the level country.
-
-And there before us, on a rocky platform a hundred feet higher than the
-meadows, are the pyramids, cutting the stainless blue of the sky with
-their sharp lines. They master the eye when we are an hour away, and as
-we approach they seem to recede, neither growing larger nor smaller, but
-simply withdrawing with a grand reserve.
-
-I suppose there are more “emotions” afloat about the pyramids than
-concerning any other artificial' objects. There are enough. It becomes
-constantly more and more difficult for the ordinary traveler to rise to
-the height of these accumulated emotions, and it is entirely impossible
-to say how much the excitement one experiences on drawing near them
-results from reading and association, and how much is due to these
-simple forms in such desolate surroundings. But there they stand,
-enduring standards, and every visitor seems inclined to measure his own
-height by their vastness, in telling what impression they produce upon
-him. They have been treated sentimentally, off-handedly, mathematically,
-solemnly, historically, humorously. They yield to no sort of treatment.
-They are nothing but piles of stone, and shabby piles at that, and they
-stand there to astonish people. Mr. Bayard Taylor is entirely right
-when he says that the pyramids are and will remain unchanged and
-unapproachably impressive however modern life may surge about them, and
-though a city should creep about their bases.
-
-Perhaps they do not appear so gigantic when the visitor is close to them
-as he thought they would from their mass at a distance. But if he stands
-at the base of the great pyramid, and casts his eye along the steps
-of its enormous side and up the dizzy height where the summit seems to
-pierce the solid blue, he will not complain of want of size. And if he
-walks around one, and walks from one to another wading in the loose sand
-and under a midday sun, his respect for the pyramids will increase every
-moment.
-
-Long before we reach the ascent of the platform we are met by Arab
-boys and men, sellers of antiquities, and most persistent beggars. The
-antiquities are images of all sorts, of gods, beasts, and birds, in
-pottery or in bronze, articles from tombs, bits of mummy-cloth, beads
-and scarabæi, and Roman copper coins; all of them at least five thousand
-years old in appearance.
-
-Our carriage is stuck in the sand, and we walk a quarter of a mile up
-the platform, attended by a rabble of coaxing, imploring, importunate,
-half-clad Bedaween. “Look a here, you take dis; dis ver much old, he
-from mummy; see here, I get him in tomb; one shillin; in Cairo you get
-him one pound; ver sheap. You no like? No anteeka, no money. How much?”
-
-“One penny.”
-
-“Ah,” ironically, “ket'-ther khâyrak (much obliged). You take him
-sixpence. Howadji, say, me guide, you want go top pyramid, go inside, go
-Sphinkee, allée tomba?”
-
-Surrounded by an increasing swarm of guides and antiquity-hawkers, and
-beset with offers, entreaties, and opportunities, we come face to face
-with the great pyramid. The ground in front of it is piled high with its
-debris. Upon these rocks, in picturesque attitudes, some in the shade
-and some in the sun, others of the tribe are waiting the arrival of
-pyramid climbers; in the intense light their cotton garments and turbans
-are like white paint, brilliant in the sun, ashy in the shadow. All
-the shadows are sharp and deep. A dark man leaning on his spear at the
-corner of the pyramid makes a picture. At a kiosk near by carriages are
-standing and visitors are taking their lunch. But men, carriages, kiosk,
-are dwarfed in this great presence. It is, as I said, a shabby pile of
-stone, and its beauty is only that of mathematical angles; but then
-it is so big, it casts such a shadow; we all beside it are like the
-animated lines and dots which represent human beings in the etchings of
-Callot.
-
-To be rid of importunities we send for the sheykh of the pyramid tribe.
-The Bedaween living here have a sort of ownership of these monuments,
-and very good property they are. The tribe supports itself mainly by
-tolls levied upon visitors. The sheykh assigns guides and climbers, and
-receives the pay for their services. This money is divided among the
-families; but what individuals get as backsheesh or by the sale
-of antiquities, they keep. They live near by, in huts scarcely
-distinguishable from the rocks, many of them in vacant tombs, and some
-have shanties on the borders of the green land. Most of them have
-the appearance of wretched poverty, and villainous faces abound. But
-handsome, intelligent faces and finely developed forms are not rare,
-either.
-
-The Sheykh, venerable as Jacob, respectable as a New England deacon,
-suave and polite as he traditionally should be, wears a scarf of camel's
-hair and a bright yellow and black kuffia, put on like a hood, fastened
-about the head by a cord and falling over the shoulders. He apportioned
-his guides to take us up the pyramid and to accompany us inside. I had
-already sent for a guide who had been recommended to me in the city,
-and I found Ali Gobree the frank, manly, intelligent, quiet man I had
-expected, handsome also, and honesty and sincerity beaming from his
-countenance. How well-bred he was, and how well he spoke English. Two
-other men were given me; for the established order is that two shall
-pull and one shall push the visitor up. And it is easier to submit
-to the regulation than to attempt to go alone and be followed by an
-importunate crowd.
-
-I am aware that every one who writes of the pyramids is expected to make
-a scene of the ascent, but if I were to romance I would rather do it in
-a fresher field. The fact is that the ascent is not difficult, unless
-the person is very weak in the legs or attempts to carry in front of
-himself a preposterous stomach. There is no difficulty in going alone;
-occasionally the climber encounters a step from three to four feet high,
-but he can always flank it. Of course it is tiresome to go up-stairs,
-and the great pyramid needs an “elevator”; but a person may leisurely
-zig-zag up the side without great fatigue. We went straight up at one
-corner; the guides insisting on taking me by the hand; the boosting Arab
-who came behind earned his money by grunting every time we reached a
-high step, but he didn't lift a pound.
-
-We stopped frequently to look down and to measure with the eye the mass
-on the surface of which we were like flies. When we were a third of the
-way up, and turned from the edge to the middle, the height to be climbed
-seemed as great as when we started. I should think that a giddy person
-might have unpleasant sensations in looking back along the corner and
-seeing no resting-place down the sharp edges of the steps short of the
-bottom, if he should fall. We measure our ascent by the diminishing size
-of the people below, and by the widening of the prospect. The guides are
-perfectly civil, they do not threaten to throw us off, nor do they even
-mention backsheesh. Stopping to pick out shells from the nummulitic
-limestone blocks or to try our glasses on some distant object, we come
-easily to the summit in a quarter of an hour.
-
-The top, thirty feet square, is strewn with big blocks of stone and
-has a flag-staff. Here ambitious people sometimes breakfast. Arabs are
-already here with koollehs of water and antiquities. When the whole
-party arrives the guides set up a perfunctory cheer; but the attempt to
-give an air of achievement to our climbing performance and to make it
-appear that we are the first who have ever accomplished the feat, is a
-failure. We sit down upon the blocks and look over Egypt, as if we were
-used to this sort of thing at home.
-
-All that is characteristic of Egypt is in sight; to the west, the Libyan
-hills and the limitless stretch of yellow desert sand; to the north,
-desert also and the ruined pyramid of Abooroâsh; to the south, that long
-necropolis of the desert marked by the pyramids of Abooseér, Sakkarah,
-and Dashoor; on the east, the Nile and its broad meadows widening into
-the dim Delta northward, the white line of Cairo under the Mokattam
-hills, and the grey desert beyond. Egypt is a ribbon of green between
-two deserts. Canals and lines of trees stripe the green of the
-foreground; white sails flicker southward along the river, winging their
-way to Nubia; the citadel and its mosque shine in the sun.
-
-An Arab offers to run down the side of this pyramid, climb the second
-one, the top of which is still covered with the original casing, and
-return in a certain incredible number of minutes. We decline, because we
-don't like to have a half-clad Arab thrust his antics between us and
-the contemplation of dead yet mighty Egypt. We regret our refusal
-afterwards, for there is nothing people like to read about so much
-as feats of this sort. Humanity is more interesting than stones. I am
-convinced that if Martha Rugg had fallen off the pyramid instead of the
-rock at Niagara Falls, people would have looked at the spot where she
-fell, and up at the stairs she came bobbing down, with more interest
-than at the pyramid itself. Nevertheless, this Arab, or another did,
-while we were there, climb the second pyramid like a monkey; he looked
-only a black speck on its side.
-
-That accidents sometimes happen on the pyramids, I gather from the
-conversation of Hadji, who is full of both information and philosophy
-to-day.
-
-“Sometime man, he fool, he go up. Man say, 'go this way.' Fool, he say,
-'let me lone.' Umbrella he took him, threw him off; he dead in hundred
-pieces.”
-
-As to the selling of Scarabæi to travelers, Hadji inclines to the side
-of the poor:—“Good one, handsome one,—one pound. Not good for much—but
-what to do? Gentleman he want it; man he want the money.”
-
-For Murray's' Guide-Book he has not more respect than guides usually
-have who have acted as interpreters in the collection of information for
-it. For “interpret” Hadji always says “spell.”
-
-“When the Murray come here I spell it to the man, the man to Murray
-and him put it down. He don't know anything before. He told me, what
-is this? I told him what it is. Something,” with a knowing nod, “be new
-after Murray. Look here, Murray very old now.”
-
-Hadji understands why the cost of living has gone up so much in Egypt.
-“He was very sheap; now very different, dearer—because plenty people. I
-build a house, another people build a house, and another people he build
-a house. Plenty men to work, make it dear.” I have never seen Hadji's
-dwelling, but it is probably of the style of those that he calls—when in
-the street we ask him what a specially shabby mud-wall with a ricketty
-door in it is—“a brivate house.”
-
-About the Great Pyramid has long waged an archaeological war. Years have
-been spent in studying it, measuring it inside and outside, drilling
-holes into it, speculating why this stone is in one position and that
-in another, and constructing theories about the purpose for which it was
-built. Books have been written on it, diagrams of all its chambers
-and passages, with accurate measurements of every stone in them, are
-printed. If I had control of a restless genius who was dangerous to the
-peace of society, I would set him at the Great Pyramid, certain that
-he would have occupation for a lifetime and never come to any useful
-result. The interior has peculiarities, which distinguish it from all
-other pyramids; and many think that it was not intended for a sepulchre
-mainly; but that it was erected for astronomical purposes, or as a
-witness to the true north, east, south, and west, or to serve as a
-standard of measure; not only has the passage which descends obliquely
-three hundred and twenty feet from the opening into the bed-rock, and
-permits a view of the sky from that depth, some connection with the
-observation of Sirius and the fixing of the Sothic year; not only is
-the porphyry sarcophagus that is in the King's Chamber, secure from
-fluctuations of temperature, a fixed standard of measure; but the
-positions of various stones in the passages (stones which certainly are
-stumbling-blocks to everybody who begins to think why they are there)
-are full of a mystic and even religious signification. It is most
-restful, however, to the mind to look upon this pyramid as a tomb,
-and that it was a sepulchre like all the others is the opinion of most
-scholars.
-
-Whatever it was, it is a most unpleasant place to go into. But we wanted
-one idea of' Cimmerian darkness, and the sensation of being buried
-alive, and we didn't like to tell a lie when asked if we had been in,
-and therefore we went. You will not understand where we went without a
-diagram, and you never will have any idea of it until you go. We, with
-a guide for each person, light candles, and slide and stumble down an
-incline; we crawl up an incline; we shuffle along a level passage that
-seems interminable, backs and knees bent double till both are apparently
-broken, and the torture of the position is almost unbearable; we get
-up the Great Gallery, a passage over a hundred and fifty feet long,
-twenty-eight high, and seven broad, and about as easy to ascend as a
-logging-sluice, crawl under three or four portcullises, and emerge,
-dripping with perspiration and covered with dust, into the king's
-chamber, a room thirty-four feet long, seventeen broad, and nineteen
-high. It is built of magnificent blocks of syenite, polished and fitted
-together perfectly, and contains the lidless sarcophagus.
-
-If it were anywhere else and decently lighted, it would be a stylish
-apartment; but with a dozen torches and candles smoking in it and
-heating it, a lot of perspiring Arabs shouting and kicking up a dust,
-and the feeling that the weight of the superincumbent mass was upon
-us, it seemed to me too small and confined even for a tomb. The Arabs
-thought they ought to cheer here as they did on top; we had difficulty
-in driving them all out and sending the candles with them, in order
-that we might enjoy the quiet and blackness of this retired situation.
-I suppose we had for once absolute night, a room full of the original
-Night, brother of Chaos, night bottled up for four or five thousand
-years, the very night in which old Cheops lay in a frightful isolation,
-with all the portcullises down and the passages sealed with massive
-stones.
-
-Out of this blackness the eye even by long waiting couldn't get a ray;
-a cat's eye would be invisible in it. Some scholars think that Cheops
-never occupied this sarcophagus. I can understand his feeling if he ever
-came in here alive. I think he may have gone away and put up “to let” on
-the door.
-
-We scrambled about a good deal in this mountain, visited the so-called
-Queen's Chamber, entered by another passage, below the King's, lost
-all sense of time and of direction, and came out, glad to have seen the
-wonderful interior, but welcoming the burst of white light and the pure
-air, as if we were being born again. To remain long in that gulf of
-mortality is to experience something of the mystery of death.
-
-Ali Gobree had no antiquities to press upon us, but he could show us
-some choice things in his house, if we would go there. Besides, his
-house would be a cool place in which to eat our lunch. We walked
-thither, a quarter of a mile down the sand slope on the edge of the
-terrace. We had been wondering where the Sphinx was, expecting it to be
-as conspicuous almost as the Pyramids. Suddenly, turning a sand-hill, we
-came upon it, the rude lion's body struggling out of the sand, the human
-head lifted up in that stiff majesty which we all know.
-
-So little of the body is now visible, and the features are so much
-damaged that it is somewhat difficult to imagine what impression this
-monstrous union of beast and man once produced, when all the huge
-proportions stood revealed, and color gave a startling life-likeness to
-that giant face. It was cut from the rock of the platform; its back
-was patched with pieces of sandstone to make the contour; its head was
-solid. It was approached by flights of stairs descending, and on the
-paved platform where it stood were two small temples; between its paws
-was a sort of sanctuary, with an altar. Now, only the back, head and
-neck are above the drifting sand. Traces of the double crown of Upper
-and Lower Egypt which crowned the head are seen on the forehead, but
-the crown has gone. The kingly beard that hung from the chin has been
-chipped away. The vast wig—the false mass of hair that encumbered the
-shaven heads of the Egyptians, living or dead—still stands out on
-either side the head, and adds a certain dignity. In spite of the
-broken condition of the face, with the nose gone, it has not lost its
-character. There are the heavy eyebrows, the prominent cheek-bones, the
-full lips, the poetic chin, the blurred but on-looking eyes. I think
-the first feeling of the visitor is that the face is marred beyond
-recognition, but the sweep of the majestic lines soon becomes apparent;
-it is not difficult to believe that there is a smile on the sweet mouth,
-and the stony stare of the eyes, once caught, will never be forgotten.
-
-The Sphinx, grossly symbolizing the union of physical and intellectual
-force, and hinting at one of those recondite mysteries which we
-still like to believe existed in the twilight of mankind, was called
-Hor-em-Khoo (“the Sun in his resting-place”), and had divine honors paid
-to it as a deity.
-
-This figure, whatever its purpose, is older than the Pyramid of Cheops.
-It has sat facing the east, on the edge of this terrace of tombs,
-expecting the break of day, since a period that is lost in the dimness
-of tradition. All the achievements of the race, of which we know
-anything, have been enacted since that figure was carved. It has seen,
-if its stony eyes could see, all the procession of history file before
-it. Viewed now at a little distance or with evening shadows on it, its
-features live again, and it has the calmness, the simple majesty that
-belong to high art. Old writers say that the face was once sweet and
-beautiful. How long had that unknown civilization lasted before it
-produced this art?
-
-Why should the Sphinx face the rising sun? Why does it stand in a
-necropolis like a sleepy warden of the dead who sleep? Was it indeed
-the guardian of those many dead, the mighty who slept in pyramids, in
-rock-hewn tombs, in pits, their bodies ready for any pilgrimage; and
-does it look to the east expecting the resurrection?
-
-Not far from the Sphinx is a marvelous temple of syenite, which the sand
-almost buries; in a well in one of its chambers was found the splendid
-red-granite statue of Chephren, the builder of the second pyramid, a
-piece of art which succeeding ages did not excel. All about the rock
-plateau are tombs, and in some of them are beautiful sculptures, upon
-which the coloring is fresh. The scenes depicted are of common life, the
-occupations and diversions of the people, and are without any religious
-signification. The admirable sculptures represent no gods and no funeral
-mysteries; when they were cut the Egyptian theology was evidently not
-constructed.
-
-The residence of our guide is a tomb, two dry chambers in the rock, the
-entrance closed by a wooden door. The rooms are large enough for tables
-and chairs; upon the benches where the mummies have lain, are piled
-antique fragments of all sorts, set off by a grinning skull or a
-thigh-bone; the floor is covered with fine yellow sand. I don't know how
-it may have seemed to its first occupant, but we found it an excellent
-luncheon place, and we could sleep there calmly and securely, when the
-door was shut against the jackals—though I believe it has never been
-objected to a tomb that one couldn't sleep in it. While we sip our
-coffee Ali brings forth his antique images and scarabæi. These are
-all genuine, for Ali has certificates from most of the well-known
-Egyptologists as to his honesty and knowledge of antiquities. We
-are looking for genuine ones; those offered us at the pyramids were
-suspicious. We say to Ali:—
-
-“We should like to get a few good scarabæi; we are entirely ignorant of
-them; but we were sent to you as an honest man. You select half a dozen
-that you consider the best, and we will pay you a fair price; if they do
-not pass muster in Cairo you shall take them back.”
-
-“As you are a friend of Mr. Blank,” said Ali, evidently pleased with the
-confidence reposed in him, “you shall have the best I have, for about
-what they cost me.”
-
-The Scarabæus is the black beetle that the traveler will constantly see
-tumbling about in the sand, and rolling up balls of dirt as he does
-in lands where he has not so sounding a name. He was sacred to the old
-Egyptians as an emblem of immortality, because he was supposed to have
-the power of self-production. No mummy went away into the shades of the
-nether world without one on his breast, with spread-wings attached to
-it. Usually many scarabæi were buried with the mummy—several hundreds
-have been found in one mummy-case. They were cut from all sorts of
-stones, both precious and common, and made of limestone, or paste,
-hardened, glazed and baked. Some of them are exquisitely cut, the
-intaglio on the under side being as clean, true, and polished as Greek
-work. The devices on them are various; the name of a reigning or a
-famous king, in the royal oval, is not uncommon, and an authentic
-scarabæus with a royal name is considered of most value. I saw an
-insignificant one in soft stone and of a grey color, held at a hundred
-pounds; it is the second one that has ever been found with the name of
-Cheops on it. The scarabæi were worn in rings, carried as charms, used
-as seals; there are large coarse ones of blue pottery which seem to have
-been invitations to a funeral, by the inscriptions on them.
-
-The Scarabæus is at once the most significant and portable souvenir of
-ancient Egypt that the traveler can carry away, and although the supply
-was large, it could not fill the demand. Consequently antique scarabæi
-are now manufactured in large quantities at Thebes, and in other places,
-and distributed very widely over the length of Egypt; the dealers have
-them with a sprinkling of the genuine; almost every peasant can produce
-one from his deep pocket; the women wear them in their bosoms.
-
-The traveler up the Nile is pretty sure to be attacked with the fever of
-buying Scarabæi; he expects to happen upon one of great value, which he
-will get for a few piastres. It is his intention to do so. The Scarabæus
-becomes to him the most beautiful and desirable object in the world. He
-sees something fascinating in its shape, in its hieroglyphics, however
-ugly it may be to untaught eyes.
-
-Ali selected our scarabæi. They did not seem to us exactly the antique
-gems that we had expected to see, and they did not give a high idea of
-the old Egyptian art. But they had a mysterious history and meaning;
-they had shared the repose of a mummy perhaps before Abraham departed
-from Ur. We paid for them. We paid in gold. We paid Ali for his
-services as guide. We gave him backsheesh on account of his kindness and
-intelligence, besides. We said good-bye to his honest face with regret,
-and hoped to see him again.
-
-It was not long before we earnestly desired to meet him. He was a most
-accomplished fellow, and honesty was his best policy. There isn't a more
-agreeable Bedawee at the Pyramids; and yet Ali is a modern Egyptian,
-just like his scarabæi, all the same. The traveler who thinks the
-Egyptians are not nimble-witted and clever is likely to pay for his
-knowledge to the contrary. An accumulated experience of five thousand
-years, in one spot, is not for nothing.
-
-We depart from the pyramids amid a clamor of importunity; prices
-have fallen to zero; antiquities old as Pharaoh will be given away;
-“backsheesh, backsheesh, O Howadji;” “I havn't any bread to mangere, I
-have six children; what is a piastre for eight persons?” They run
-after us, they hang upon the carriage, they follow us a mile, begging,
-shrieking, howling, dropping off one by one, swept behind by the weight
-of a copper thrown to them.
-
-The shadows fall to the east; there is a lovely light on the plain; we
-meet long lines of camels, of donkeys, of fellaheen returning from city
-and field. All the west is rosy; the pyramids stand in a purple light;
-the Sphinx casts its shade on the yellow sand; its expectant eyes look
-beyond the Nile into the mysterious East.
-
-
-
-0111
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IX.—PREPARATIONS FOR A VOYAGE.
-
-WE are giving our minds to a name for our dahabeëh. The owners have
-desired us to christen it, and the task is getting heavy. Whatever
-we are doing; guiding a donkey through the mazes of a bazaar; eating
-oranges at the noon breakfast; watching the stream of color and
-fantastic apparel, swaying camels and dashing harem-equipage with
-running saïses and outriding eunuchs, flowing by the hotel; following
-a wedding procession in its straggling parade, or strolling vacantly
-along, knocked, jostled, evaded by a dozen races in a dozen minutes and
-lost in the whirl, color, excitement of this perpetual masquerade, we
-are suddenly struck with, “what shall we call that boat?”
-
-We want a name that is characteristic of the country and expressive
-of our own feelings, poetic and not sentimental, sensible and not
-common-place. It seems impossible to suggest a good name that is not
-already borne by a dahabeëh on the river—names such as the Lotus, the
-Ibis, the Gazelle, Cleopatra, Zenobia, names with an Eastern flavor. And
-we must have not only a name for the boat, but a motto or device for our
-pennant, or “distinguisher flag,” as the dragoman calls the narrow fifty
-feet long strip of bunting that is to stream from the forward yard.
-We carry at the stern the flag of our country, but we float our
-individuality in the upper air. If we had been a bridal party we should
-of course have taken some such device as that of a couple who went
-up the river under the simple but expressive legend of “Nestle-down,”
-written on their banner.
-
-What would you name a Nile dahabeëh?
-
-The days go all too rapidly for us to catch the shifting illusions
-about us. It is not so much what we see of the stated sights that can
-be described, but it is the atmosphere in which we live that makes the
-strangeness of our existence. It is as if we had been born into another
-world. And the climate is as strange as the people, the costumes, the
-habits, the morals. The calendar is bewitched. December is a mixture of
-September and July. Alas, yes. There are the night-fogs of September,
-and the mosquitoes of July. You cannot tell whether the season is going
-backwards or forwards. But for once you are content to let Providence
-manage it, at least so long as there is a north wind, and you forget
-that the sky has any shade other than blue.
-
-And the prophecy of the poet is realized. The nights are filled with
-music, and the cares that infest the day are invariably put off till
-tomorrow, in this deliciously procrastinating land. Perhaps, however,
-Mr. Longfellow would not be satisfied with the music; for it seems to be
-the nasal daughter of Lassitude and Monotony, ancient gods of the East.
-Two or three strings stretched over a sounding skin and a parchment drum
-suffice to express the few notes that an Arab musician commands; harmony
-does not enter into his plan. Yet the people are fond of what they
-consider music. We hear on all sides at night the picking of strings,
-the throb of the darabooka and the occasional outburst of a wailing and
-sentimental strain. Like all barbarous music, this is always minor. When
-the performers are sailors or common strollers, it is doubtless
-exactly the same music that delighted the ancient Egyptians; even
-the instruments are the same, and the method of clapping the hands in
-accentuation of the music is unchanged.
-
-There is a café chantant on one side of the open, tree-grown court of a
-native hotel, in the Ezbekeëh where one may hear a mongrel music, that
-is not inexpressive of both the morals and the mixed condition of Cairo
-to-day. The instruments of the band are European; the tunes played are
-Egyptian. When the first strain is heard we say that it is strangely
-wild, a weird and plaintive minor; but that is the whole of it. The
-strain is repeated over and over again for a half hour, as if it were
-ground out of a coffee-mill, in an iteration sufficient to drive the
-listener insane, the dissolute scraping and thumping and barbarous
-dissonance never changing nor ending. From time to time this is varied
-with singing, of the nasal, fine-tooth-comb order, with the most
-extraordinary attempts at shakes and trills, and with all the agony of a
-moonlit cat on a house-top. All this the grave Arabs and young Egyptian
-rakes, who sit smoking, accept with entire satisfaction. Later in the
-evening dancing begins and goes on with the strumming, monotonous music
-till at least the call for morning prayer.
-
-In the handsome Ezbekeëh park or garden, where there are shady walks and
-some fine sycamores and banyans to be seen, a military band plays
-every afternoon, while the foreigners of both sexes, and Egyptian men
-promenade. Of course no Egyptian lady or woman of respectability is ever
-seen in so public a place. In another part of the garden, more retired,
-a native band is always playing at nightfall. In this sheltered spot,
-under the lee of some gigantic rock and grotto-work are tables and
-chairs, and a divan for the band. This rock has water pleasantly running
-through it, but it must have been struck by somebody besides Moses, for
-beer is brought out of its cool recesses, as well. Rows of men of all
-colors and costumes may be seen there, with pipe and mug and coffee cup;
-and on settees more elevated and next the grotto, are always sitting
-veiled women, in outer wrappers of black silk, sometimes open enough
-to show an underskirt of bright color and feet in white slippers. These
-women call for beer or something stronger, and smoke like the men; they
-run no risk in being in this publicity, for they have nothing to lose
-here or elsewhere. Opposite them on a raised divan, not unlike a roomy
-bedstead, sits the band.
-
-It is the most disreputable of bands. Nothing in the whole East so
-expressed to me its fagged-out dissoluteness as this band and its
-performances. It is a sleepy, nonchalant band, as if it had been awake
-all the previous night; some of its members are blear-eyed, some have
-one eye, some have two; they are in turbans, in tarbooshes, in gowns of
-soiled silk, of blue cotton, of white drilling. It is the feeblest band;
-and yet it is subject to spurts of bacchantic fervor. Sometimes all the
-instruments are striving together, and then only one or two dribble
-the monotonous refrain; but somehow, with all the stoppings to light
-cigarettes and sip coffee, the tune is kept groaning on, in a minor that
-is as wild as the desert and suggestive of sin.
-
-The instruments are as African as the music. There is the darabooka,
-a drum made of an earthen or wooden cylinder with a flaring head, over
-which is stretched a parchment; the tar, a kind of tambourine; kemengeh,
-a viol of two strings, with a cocoa-nut sounding-body; the kanoon, an
-instrument of strings held on the knees, and played with the fingers;
-the '.od, a sort of guitar with seven double strings; played with a
-plectrum, a slip of vultures' feather held between the thumb and finger;
-and the nay, a reed-flute blown at the end.
-
-In the midst of the thumbing and scraping, a rakish youth at the end,
-is liable, at any moment, to throw back his head and break out in a soft
-womanish voice, which may go no farther than a nasal yah, ah, m-a-r-r,
-that appears to satisfy his yearnings; or it may expand into a droning
-song, “Ya benat Iskendereeyeh,” like that which Mr. Lane renders:—
-
-
-“O ye damsels of Alexandria!
-
-Your walk over the furniture is alluring:
-
-Ye wear the Kashmeer shawl with embroidered work,
-
-And your lips are sweet as sugar.”
-
-
-Below the divan sit some idlers or supernumeraries, who, as inclination
-moves them, mark the rhythm by striking the palms of the hands together,
-or cry out a prolonged ah-yah, but always in a forgetful, uninterested
-manner, and then subside into silence, while the picking and throbbing
-of the demoralized tune goes on. It is the “devilish iteration” of it, I
-think, that steals away the senses; this, and some occult immorality
-in the debased tune, that blots virtue out of the world. Yet there is
-something comic in these blinking owls of the night, giving sentimental
-tongue to the poetic imagery of the Eastern love-song—“for a solitary
-gazelle has taken away my soul”:—
-
-
-“The beloved came to me with a vacillating gait;
-
-And her eyelids were the cause of my intoxication.
-
-I extended my hand to take the cup;
-
-And was intoxicated by her eyes.
-
-O thou in the rose-colored dress!
-
-O thou in the rose-colored dress!
-
-Beloved of my heart! remain with me.”
-
-
-Or he pipes to the “dark-complexioned, and with two white roses”:—
-
-
-“O damsel! thy silk shirt is worn out, and thine arms have become
-visible,
-
-And I fear for thee, on account of the blackness of thine eyes.
-
-I desire to intoxicate myself, and kiss thy cheeks,
-
-And do deeds that Antar did not.”
-
-
-To all of which the irresponsible chorus, swaying its head, responds O!
-y-a-a-a-h! And the motley audience sips and smokes; the veiled daughters
-of sin flash invitation from their kohl-stained eyes; and the cool night
-comes after the flaring heat of the day; and all things are as they
-have been for thousands of years. It is time to take you to something
-religious.
-
-The Howling Derweeshes are the most active religionists in the East; I
-think they spend more force in devotion than the Whirling Derweeshes,
-though they are probably not more meritorious. They exceed our own
-western “Jumpers,” and by contrast make the worship of our dancing
-Shakers tame and worldly. Of all the physical manifestations of
-religious feeling there is none more warming than the zikr of these
-devotees. The derweeshes are not all wanderers, beggars, saints in
-patched garments and filthy skin; perhaps the most of those who belong
-to one of the orders pursue some regular occupation; they are fishermen,
-laborers in the fields, artisans, and water-carriers, and only
-occasionally join in the ceremonies, processions and zikrs of their
-faith. I have seen a laborer drop into the ring, take his turn at a
-zikr, and drop out again, very much as the western man happens in and
-takes a hand in a “free fight,” and then retires.
-
-This mosque at which the Howling Derweeshes perform is circular, and
-large enough to admit a considerable number of spectators, who sit, or
-stand against the wall. Since the exercise is one of the sights of the
-metropolis, and strangers are expected, it has a little the air of a
-dress-parade, and I could not but fear that the devotion lost somewhat
-of its singleness of purpose. When we enter, about forty men stand in an
-oblong ring facing each other; the ring is open towards the mehhrab,
-or niche which marks the direction of Mecca. In the opening stands
-the Sheykh, to direct the performance; and at his left are seated the
-musicians.
-
-The derweeshes have divested themselves of turbans, fezes, outer gowns
-and slippers, which lie in a heap in the middle of the circle, an
-indistinguishable mass of old clothes, from which when the owners come
-to draw they cannot fail to get as good as they deposited. The ceremony
-begins with a little uneasiness on the part of the musical instruments;
-the sheykh bows his head and brings the palms of his hands together; and
-the derweeshes, standing close together, with their hands straight at
-their sides, begin slowly to bow and to sway to the right in a compound
-motion which is each time extended. The daraboo-ka is beaten softly
-and the '.od is picked to a slow measure. As the worshippers sway,
-they chant, La ilaha illa-llah (“There is no deity but God”) in endless
-repetition, and imperceptibly quickening the enunciation as they bow
-more rapidly. The music gets faster, and now and again one of the
-roguish boys who is thumping the drum breaks out into vocal expression
-of his piety or of his hilarity. The circle is now under full swing, the
-bowings are lower and much more rapid, and the ejaculation has become
-merely Allah, Allah, Allah, with a strong stress on the final syllable.
-
-The peculiarities of the individual performers begin to come out. Some
-only bow and swing in a perfunctory manner; others throw their strength
-into the performance, and their excitement is evinced by the working of
-the face and the rolling of the eyes. Many of them have long hair, which
-has evidently known neither scissors nor comb for years, and is matted
-and twisted in a hopeless tangle. One of the most conspicuous and
-the least clad, a hairy man of the desert, is, exactly in apparel and
-features, like the conventional John the Baptist. His enormous shock
-of faded brown hair is two feet long and its ends are dyed yellow with
-henna. When he bends forward his hair sweeps the floor, and when he
-throws his head back the mass whips over with a swish through the air.
-The most devout person, however, is a negro, who puts all the fervor
-of the tropics into his exercise. His ejaculations are rolled out with
-extraordinary volume, and his black skin shines with moisture; there is,
-too, in his swaying and bowing, an abandon, a laxity of muscles, and a
-sort of jerk that belong only to his sympathetic race.
-
-The exercise is every moment growing more rapid, but in regular
-increments, as the music hastens—five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen
-minutes—until there is a very high pressure on, the revolutions of the
-cylinder are almost one in two seconds, and the piston moves quicker and
-quicker. The music, however, is not louder, only more intense, and now
-and then the reed-flute executes a little obligato, a plaintive strain,
-that steals into the frenzy like the note of a lost bird, sweet as love
-and sad as death. The performers are now going so rapidly that they can
-only ejaculate one syllable, '.ah, 'lah, 'lah, which is aspirated in
-a hoarse voice every time the head is flung forward to the floor. The
-hands are now at liberty, and swing with the body, or are held palm to
-palm before the face. The negro cannot longer contain himself but breaks
-occasionally into a shrill “hoo!” He and two or three others have “the
-power,” and are not far from an epileptic fit.
-
-There is a limit, however, to the endurance of the body; the swaying
-has become so rapid that it is difficult to distinguish faces, and it is
-impossible for the performers to repeat even a syllable of the name of
-Allah, all they can do is to push out from the depths of the lungs a
-vast hoarse aspiration of la-a-h, which becomes finally a gush exactly
-like the cut-off of a steam engine, short and quick.
-
-The end has nearly come; in vain the cymbals clang, in vain the drum is
-beaten harder, and the horn calls to quicker work. The limit is reached,
-and while the reed expresses its plaintive fear, the speed slackens,
-the steam puffs are slower, and with an irregular hoo! from the colored
-brother, the circle stands still.
-
-You expect to see them sink down exhausted. Not a bit of it. One or
-two having had enough of it, take their clothes and withdraw, and their
-places are filled by others and by some very sensible-looking men,
-trades-people evidently. After a short rest they go through the same or
-a similar performance, and so on for an hour and a half, the variations
-being mainly in the chanting. At the end, each derweesh affectionately
-embraces the Sheykh, kisses his hand without servility, resumes his
-garments and quietly withdraws. They seem to have enjoyed the exercise,
-and certainly they had plenty of it. I should like to know what they
-think of us, the infidel spectators, who go to look at their religious
-devotions as if they were a play.
-
-That derweesh beggar in a green turban is by that token a shereef, or
-descendant of the Prophet. No one but a shereef is allowed to wear the
-green turban. The shereefs are in all ranks of society, many of them
-wretched paupers and in the most menial occupations; the title is
-inherited from either parent and the representatives of the race have
-become common. Some who are entitled to the green turban wear the
-white instead, and prefer to be called Sevd (master or lord) instead of
-Shereef. Such a man is Seyd Sadat, the most conspicous representative of
-the family of the Prophet in Cairo. His ancestors for a long period
-were the trustees of the funds of all the great mosques of Cairo, and
-consequently handled an enormous revenue and enjoyed great power. These
-millions of income from the property of the mosques the Khedive has
-diverted to his own purposes by the simple process of making himself
-their trustee. Thus the secular power interferes every few centuries,
-in all countries, with the accumulation of property in religious houses.
-The strict Moslems think with the devout Catholics, that it is an
-impious interference.
-
-Seyd Sadat lives in the house that his family have occupied for
-over eight centuries! It is perhaps the best and richest specimen of
-Saracenic domestic architecture now standing in the East. This house,
-or collection of houses and disconnected rooms opening upon courts and
-gardens, is in some portions of it in utter decay; a part, whose elegant
-arches and marvelous carvings in stone, with elaborate hanging balconies
-and painted recesses, are still studies of beauty, is used as a stable.
-The inhabited rooms of the house are tiled two-thirds of the way to the
-lofty ceilings; the floors are of variegated marbles, and the ceilings
-are a mass of wood in the most intricate arabesque carving, and painted
-in colors as softly blended as the hues of an ancient camels' hair
-shawl. In one of these gorgeous apartments, the furniture of which is
-not at all in keeping with the decorations (an incongruity which one
-sees constantly in the East—shabbiness and splendor are indissolubly
-married), we are received by the Descendant with all the ceremony of
-Eastern hospitality. Seated upon the divan raised above the fountain
-at one end of the apartment, we begin one of those encounters of
-compliments through an interpreter, out of which the traveler always
-comes beaten out of sight. The Seyd is a handsome intelligent man of
-thirty-five, sleek with good living and repose, and a master of Oriental
-courtesy. His attire is all of silk, the blue color predominating;
-his only ornament is a heavy gold chain about the neck. We frame long
-speeches to the Seyd, and he appears to reply with equal verboseness,
-but what he says or what is said to him we never know. The Eastern
-dragoman is not averse to talking, but he always interprets in a sort of
-short-hand that is fatal to conversation. I think the dragomans at such
-interviews usually translate you into what they think you ought to say,
-and give you such a reply as they think will be good for you.
-
-“Say to his lordship that we thank him for the honor of being permitted
-to pay our respects to a person so distinguished.”
-
-“His excellency (who has been talking two minutes) say you do him too
-much honor.”
-
-“We were unwilling to leave Cairo without seeing the residence of so
-celebrated a family.”
-
-“His excellency (who has now got fairly going) feels in deep the visit
-of strangers so distinguish.”
-
-“It is a great pleasure also to us to see an Arab house so old and
-magnificent.”
-
-“His excellency (who might have been reciting two chapters of the Koran
-in the interval) say not to mention it; him sorry it is not more worth
-you to see.”
-
-The attendants bring sherbet in large and costly cups, and chibooks
-elegantly mounted, and the conversation flounders along. The ladies
-visit the harem above, and we look about the garden and are shown into
-room after room, decorated in endless variety and with a festivity of
-invention and harmony of color which the moderns have lost. The harem
-turns out to be, like all ordinary harems, I think, only mysterious on
-the outside. We withdraw with profuse thanks, frittered away through our
-dragoman, and “His excellency say he hope you have pleasant voyage and
-come safe to your family and your country.” About the outer court, and
-the door where we mount our donkeys, are many idlers in the sun, half
-beggars, half attendants, all of whom want backsheesh, besides the
-regular servants who expect a fee in proportion to the “distinguish”
-of the visitor. They are probably not unlike the clients of an ancient
-Roman house, or the retainers of a baronial lord of the middle ages.
-
-If the visitor, however, really desires to see the antiquities of the
-Christian era, he will ride out to Old Cairo, and mouse about among the
-immense rubbish heaps that have been piled there since Fostat (as the
-ancient city was called) was reduced to ashes, more than seven hundred
-years ago, by a fire which raged nearly two months. There is the
-ruined mosque of Amer, and there are the quaint old Coptic convents and
-churches, built about with mud walls, and hidden away amid mounds of
-rubbish. To these dust-filled lanes and into these mouldering edifices
-the antiquarian will gladly go. These churches are the land of the flea
-and the home of the Copt. Anything dingier, darker, dirtier, doesn't
-exist. To one of them, the Sitt Miriam, Church of Our Lady, we had the
-greatest difficulty in getting admission. It is up-stairs in one of the
-towers of the old Roman gateway of Babylon. It is a small church, but
-it has five aisles and some very rich wood-carving and stone-mosaics. It
-was cleaner than the others because it was torn to pieces in the process
-of renovation. In these churches are hung ostrich eggs, as in the
-mosques, and in many of them are colored marbles, and exquisite mosaics
-of marble, mother-of-pearl, and glass. Aboo Sirgeh, the one most
-visited, has a subterranean chapel which is the seat of an historical
-transaction that may interest some minds. There are two niches in the
-wall, and in one of them, at the time of the Flight into Egypt, the
-Virgin Mary rested with the Child, and in the other St. Joseph reposed.
-That is all.
-
-A little further on, by the river bank, opposite the southern end of the
-island of Rhoda, the Moslems show you the spot where little Moses lay in
-his little basket, when the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe (for
-Pharaoh hadn't a bath-tub in his house) and espied him. The women of the
-Nile do to-day exactly what Pharaoh's daughter and her maidens did, but
-there are no bulrushes at this place now, and no lad of the promise of
-Moses is afloat.
-
-One can never have done with an exploration of Cairo, with digging down
-into the strata of overlying civilizations, or studying the shifting
-surface of its Oriental life. Here, in this Old Cairo, was an ancient
-Egyptian town no doubt; the Romans constructed here massive walls and
-towers; the followers of St. Mark erected churches; the friends of
-Mohammed built mosques; and here the mongrel subjects of the Khedive,
-a mixture of ancient Egyptian, conquering Arabian, subject Nubian,
-enslaved Soudan, inheritors of all civilizations and appropriators of
-none, kennel amid these historic ash-heaps, caring neither for their
-past nor their future. But it is drawing towards the middle of December;
-there are signs that warn us to be off to the south. It may rain. There
-are symptoms of chill in the air, especially at night, and the hotel,
-unwarmed, is cheerless as a barn, when the sun does not shine. Indeed,
-give Cairo the climate of London in November and everybody would perish
-in a week. Our preparations drift along. It is always “tomorrow.” It
-requires a week to get the new name of the boat printed on a tin. The
-first day the bargain for it is made; the work is to be finished
-bookra, tomorrow. Next day the letters are studied. The next the tin is
-prepared. The next day is Friday or Wednesday or some other day in which
-repose is required. And the next the workman comes to know what
-letters the howadji desires to have upon the tin, and how big a sign is
-required.
-
-Two other necessary articles remain to be procured; rockets and other
-fire-works to illuminate benighted Egypt, and medicines. As we were not
-taking along a physician and should find none of those experimenting
-people on the Nile, I did not see the use of carrying drugs. Besides
-we were going into the one really salubrious region of the globe. But
-everybody takes medicines; you must carry medicines. The guide-book
-gives you a list of absolutely essential, nasty drugs and compounds,
-more than you would need if you were staying at home in an artificial
-society, with nothing to do but take them, and a physician in every
-street.
-
-I bought chunks of drugs, bottles of poisons, bundles of foul smells
-and bitter tastes. And then they told me that I needed balances to weigh
-them in. This was too much. I was willing to take along an apothecary's
-shop on this pleasure excursion; I was not willing to become an
-apothecary. No, I said, if I am to feed out these nauseous things on the
-Nile, I will do it generously, according to taste, and like a physician,
-never stinting the quantity. I would never be mean about giving medicine
-to other people. And it is not difficult to get up a reputation for
-generosity on epsom salts, rhubarb and castor oil.
-
-We carried all these drugs on the entreaty of friends and the druggist,
-who said it would be very unsafe to venture so far without them. But I
-am glad we had them with us. The knowledge that we had them was a great
-comfort. To be sure we never experienced a day's illness, and brought
-them all back, except some doses that I was able to work off upon the
-crew. There was a gentle black boy, who had been stolen young out
-of Soudan, to whom it was a pleasure to give the most disagreeable
-mixtures; he absorbed enormous doses as a lily drinks dew, and they
-never seemed to harm him. The aboriginal man, whose constitution is not
-weakened by civilization, can stand a great amount of doctor's stuff.
-The Nile voyager is earnestly advised to carry a load of drugs with him;
-but I think we rather overdid the business in castor-oil; for the fact
-is that the people in Nubia fairly swim in it, and you can cut the cane
-and suck it whenever you feel like it.
-
-By all means, go drugged on your pleasure voyage. It is such a cheerful
-prelude to it, to read that you will need blue-pills, calomel, rhubarb,
-Dover's powder, James's powder, carbolic acid, laudanum, quinine,
-sulphuric acid, sulphate of zinc, nitrate of silver, ipecacuanha, and
-blistering plaster. A few simple directions go with these. If you feel a
-little unwell, take a few blue pills, only about as many as you can
-hold in your hand; follow these with a little Dover's powder, and then
-repeat, if you feel worse, as you probably will; when you rally, take a
-few swallows of castor-oil, and drop into your throat some laudanum; and
-then, if you are alive, drink a dram of sulphuric acid. The consulting
-friends then generally add a little rice-water and a teaspoonful of
-brandy.
-
-In the opinion of our dragoman it is scarcely reputable to go up the
-Nile without a store of rockets and other pyrotechnics. Abd-el-Atti
-should have been born in America. He would enjoy a life that was a
-continual Fourth of July. He would like his pathway to be illuminated
-with lights, blue, red, and green, and to blaze with rockets. The
-supreme moment of his life is when he feels the rocket-stick tearing out
-of his hand. The common fire-works in the Mooskee he despised; nothing
-would do but the government-made, which are very good. The passion of
-some of the Egyptians for fire-arms and gunpowder is partially due to
-the prohibition. The government strictly forbids the use of guns and
-pistols and interdicts the importation or selling of powder. On the
-river a little powder and shot are more valued than money.
-
-We had obtained permission to order some rockets manufactured at the
-government works, and in due time we went with Abd-el-Atti to the bureau
-at the citadel to pay for them. The process was attended with all that
-deliberation which renders life so long and valuable in the East.
-
-We climbed some littered and dusty steps, to a roof terrace upon which
-opened several apartments, brick and stucco chambers with cement floors,
-the walls whitewashed, but yellow with time and streaked with dirt.
-These were government offices, but office furniture was scarce. Men and
-boys in dilapidated gowns were sitting about on their heels smoking.
-One of them got up and led the way, and pulling aside a soiled curtain
-showed us into the presence of a bey, a handsomely dressed Turk, with
-two gold chains about his neck, squatting on a ragged old divan at one
-end of the little room; and this divan was absolutely all the furniture
-that this cheerless closet, which had one window obscured with dust,
-contained. Two or three officers were waiting to get the bey's signature
-to papers, and a heap of documents lay beside him, with an inkhorn, on
-the cushions. Half-clad attendants or petitioners shuffled in and out
-of the presence of this head of the bureau. Abd-el-Atti produced his
-papers, but they were not satisfactory, and we were sent elsewhere.
-
-Passing through one shabby room after another, we came into one dimmer,
-more stained and littered than the others. About the sides of the room
-upon low divans sat, cross-legged, the clerks. Before each was a shabby
-wooden desk which served no purpose, however, but to hold piles of
-equally shabby account books. The windows were thick with dust, the
-floor was dirty, the desks, books, and clerks were dirty. But the
-clerks were evidently good fellows, just like those in all government
-offices—nothing to do and not pay enough to make them uneasy to be rich.
-They rolled cigarettes and smoked continually; one or two of them were
-casting up columns of figures, holding the sheet of paper in the left
-hand and calling each figure in a loud voice (as if a little doubtful
-whether the figure would respond to that name); and some of them wrote
-a little, by way of variety. When they wrote the thin sheet of paper was
-held in the left hand and the writing done upon the palm (as the Arabs
-always write); the pen used was a blunt reed and the ink about as thick
-as tar. The writing resulting from these unfavorable conditions is
-generally handsome.
-
-Our entry and papers were an event in that office, and the documents
-became the subject of a general conversation. Other public business
-(except the cigarettes) was suspended, and nearly every clerk gave
-his opinion on the question, whatever it was. I was given a seat on a
-rickety divan, coffee was brought in, the clerks rolled cigarettes for
-me and the business began to open; not that anybody showed any special
-interest in it, however. On the floor sat two or three boys, eating
-their dinner of green bean leaves and some harmless mixture of grease
-and flour; and a cloud of flies settled on them undisturbed. What
-service the ragged boys rendered to the government I could not
-determine. Abd-el-Atti was bandying jocularities with the clerks, and
-directing the conversation now and then upon the rockets.
-
-In course of time a clerk found a scrap of paper, daubed one side of it
-with Arabic characters, and armed with this we went to another office
-and got a signature to it. This, with the other documents, we carried to
-another room much like the first, where the business appeared to take a
-fresh start; that is, we sat down and talked; and gradually induced
-one official after another to add a suggestion or a figure or two.
-Considering that we were merely trying to pay for some rockets that were
-ready to be delivered to us, it did seem to me that almost a whole day
-was too much to devote to the affair. But I was mistaken. The afternoon
-was waning when we went again to the Bey. He was still in his little
-“cubby,” and made room for me on the divan. A servant brought coffee. We
-lighted cigarettes, and, without haste, the bey inked the seal that hung
-to his gold chain, wet the paper and impressed his name in the proper
-corner. We were now in a condition to go to the treasury office and pay.
-
-I expected to see a guarded room and heavily bolted safes. Instead of
-this there was no treasury apartment, nor any strong box. But we found
-the “treasury” walking about in one of the passages, in the shape of an
-old Arab in a white turban and faded yellow gown. This personage fished
-out of his deep breast-pocket a rag of a purse, counted out some
-change, and put what we paid him into the same receptacle. The Oriental
-simplicity of the transaction was pleasing. And the money ought to be
-safe, for one would as soon think of robbing a derweesh as this yellow
-old man.
-
-The medicine is shipped, the rockets are on board, the crew have been
-fitted out with cotton drawers, at our expense, (this garment is an
-addition to the gown they wear), the name of the boat is almost painted,
-the flags are ready to hoist, and the dahabeëh has been taken from
-Boulak and is moored above the drawbridge. We only want a north wind.
-
-
-
-0126
-
-
-
-0127
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER X.—ON THE NILE.
-
-WE have taken possession of our dahabeëh, which lies moored under
-the bank, out of the current, on the west side of the river above the
-bridge. On the top of the bank are some structures that seem to be only
-mounds and walls of mud, but they are really “brivate houses,” and each
-one has a wooden door, with a wooden lock and key. Here, as at every
-other rod of the river, where the shore will permit, the inhabitants
-come to fill their water-jars, to wash clothes, to bathe, or to squat on
-their heels and wait for the Nile to run dry.
-
-And the Nile is running rapidly away. It sweeps under the arches of the
-bridge like a freshet, with a current of about three miles an hour. Our
-sandal (the broad clumsy row-boat which we take in tow) is obliged
-to aim far above its intended landing-place when we cross, and four
-vigorous rowers cannot prevent its drifting rapidly down stream. The
-Nile is always in a hurry on its whole length; even when it spreads over
-flats for miles, it keeps a channel for swift passage. It is the only
-thing that is in a hurry in Egypt; and the more one sees it the stronger
-becomes the contrast of this haste with the flat valley through which it
-flows and the apathetic inhabitants of its banks.
-
-We not only have taken possession of our boat, but we have begun
-housekeeping in it. We have had a farewell dinner-party on board. Our
-guests, who are foreigners, declare that they did not suppose such a
-dinner possible in the East; a better could not be expected in Paris. We
-admit that such dinners are not common in this hungry world out of New
-York. Even in New York the soup would not have been made of lentils.
-
-We have passed a night under a mosquito net, more comfortably than on
-shore to be sure, but we are anxious to get into motion and change the
-mosquitoes, the flies, the fleas of Cairo for some less rapacious. It
-is the seventeenth of December. We are in the bazaars, buying the last
-things, when, at noon we perceive that the wind has shifted. We hasten
-on board. Where is the dragoman! “Mohammed Effendi Abd-el-Atti goin'
-bazaar come directly,” says the waiter. At half-past two the stout
-dragoman slides off his donkey and hastens on board with all the speed
-compatible with short legs, out of breath, but issuing a storm of orders
-like a belated captain of a seventy-two. He is accompanied by a black
-boy bearing the name of our dahabeëh, rudely painted on a piece of tin,
-the paint not yet dry. The dragoman regards it with some pride, and
-well he may, for it has cost time and trouble. No Arab on the river can
-pronounce the name, but they all understand its signification when
-the legend attached to it is related, and having a similar tale in the
-Koran, they have no objection to sail in a dahabeëh called the RIP VAN
-WINKLE.
-
-The name has a sort of appropriateness in the present awakening of Egypt
-to modern life, but exactly what it is we cannot explain.
-
-We seat ourselves on deck to watch the start. There is as much noise and
-confusion as if the boat were on fire. The moment has come to cast off,
-when it is discovered that two of the crew are absent, no doubt dallying
-in some coffee-house. We cannot wait, they must catch us as they can.
-The stake is pulled up; the plank is drawn in; the boat is shoved off
-from its sand bed with grunting and yah-hoo-ing, some of the crew in the
-water, and some pushing with poles; the great sail drops down from
-the yard and the corner is hauled in to a wild chorus, and we take the
-stream. For a moment it seems as if we should be carried against the
-bridge; but the sail is large, the wind seizes us, and the three-months'
-voyage has begun.
-
-We are going slowly but steadily, perhaps at the rate of three or four
-miles an hour, past the receding city, drawing away from the fleet of
-boats and barges on the shore and the multitudinous life on its banks.
-It is a scene of color, motion, variety. The river is alive with crafts
-of all sorts, the shores are vocal with song, laughter, and the unending
-“chaff” of a river population. Beyond, the spires and domes of the city
-are lovely in the afternoon light. The citadel and the minarets gleam
-like silver against the purple of the Mokattam hills. We pass the long
-white palace of the Queen-mother; we are abreast the isle of Rhoda,
-its yellow palace and its ancient Nilometer. In the cove at Geezeh
-are passenger-dahabeëhs, two flying the American flag, with which we
-exchange salutes as we go. The people on their decks are trying with
-a telescope to make out the device on our pennant at the yard-arm. It
-affords occupation for a great many people at different times during the
-voyage. Upon a white ground is a full sun, in red; following it in red
-letters is the legend Post Nubila Phobus; it is the motto on the coat
-of arms of the City of Hartford. Here it signifies that we four Hartford
-people, beginning this voyage, exchange the clouds of New England for
-the sun of Egypt. The flag extends beyond the motto in a bifurcated blue
-streamer.
-
-Flag, streamer and sail take the freshening north wind. A smaller sail
-is set aft. The reïs crouches on the bow, watching the channel; the
-steersman, a grave figure, pushes slowly back and forth the long iron
-handle of the tiller at the stern; the crew, waiting for their supper,
-which is cooking near the mast, begin to sing, one taking the solo and
-the others striking in with a minor response; it is not a song but a
-one-line ejaculation, followed by a sympathetic and barbaric assent in
-chorus.
-
-The shores glide past like that land of the poet's dream where “it is
-always afternoon”; reposeful and yet brilliant. The rows of palms, the
-green fields, the lessening minarets, the groups of idlers in flowing
-raiment, picturesque in any attitudes they assume, the depth of blue
-above and the transparent soft air—can this be a permanent condition, or
-is it only the scene of a play?
-
-In fact, we are sailing not only away from Europe, away from Cairo, into
-Egypt and the confines of mysterious Africa; we are sailing into the
-past. Do you think our voyage is merely a thousand miles on the Nile?
-We have committed ourselves to a stream that will lead us thousands of
-years backwards in the ages, into the depths of history. When we loosed
-from Cairo we let go our hold upon the modern. As we recede, perhaps we
-shall get a truer perspective, and see more correctly the width of the
-strip of time which we call “our era.” There are the pyramids of Geezeh
-watching our departure, lifting themselves aloft in the evening sky;
-there are the pyramids of Sakkara, sentinels of that long past into
-which we go.
-
-It is a splendid start, for the wind blows steadily and we seem to be
-flying before it. It is probable that we are making five miles an hour,
-which is very well against such a current. Our dahabeëh proves to be an
-excellent sailer, and we have the selfish pleasure of passing boat
-after boat, with a little ripple of excitement not enough to destroy
-our placid enjoyment. It is much pleasanter to lift your hat to the
-travelers on a boat that you are drawing ahead of than it is to those of
-one that is dropping your boat astern.
-
-The Nile voyage is so peculiar, and is, in fact, such a luxurious method
-of passing a winter, that it may be well to say a little more concerning
-our boat. It is about one hundred and twenty feet long, and eighteen
-broad in the center, with a fiat bottom and no keel; consequently it
-cannot tack or sail contrary to the wind. In the bow is the cook's
-“cubby” with the range, open to the weather forward. Behind it stands
-the mast, some forty feet high, and on the top of it is lashed the
-slender yard, which is a hundred feet long, and hangs obliquely. The
-enormous triangular sail stretches the length of the yard and its point
-is hauled down to the deck. When it is shifted, the rope is let go,
-leaving the sail flapping, the end of the yard is carried round the mast
-and the sail is hauled round in the opposite direction, with an amount
-of pulling, roaring, jabbering, and chorusing, more than would be
-necessary to change the-course of an American fleet of war. The flat,
-open forward deck is capable of accommodating six rowers on a side. It
-is floored over now, for the sweeps are only used in descending.
-
-Then comes the cabin, which occupies the greater part of the boat, and
-makes it rather top-heavy and difficult of management in an adverse
-wind. First in the cabin are the pantry and dragoman's room; next a
-large saloon, used for dining, furnished with divans, mirrors, tables,
-and chairs, and lighted by large windows close together. Next are rows
-of bedrooms, bathroom etc; a passage between leads to the after or
-lounging cabin, made comfortable with divans and Eastern rugs. Over the
-whole cabin runs the deck, which has sofas and chairs and an awning,
-and is good promenading space. The rear portion of it is devoted to the
-steersman, who needs plenty of room for the sweep of the long tiller.
-The steering apparatus is of the rudest. The tiller goes into a
-stern-post which plays in a hole big enough for four of it, and
-creakingly turns a rude rudder.
-
-If you are familiar with the Egyptian temple you will see that our
-dahabeëh is built on this plan. If there is no pylon, there is the mast
-which was always lashed to it. Then comes the dromos of sphinxes, the
-forward deck, with the crew sitting along the low bulwarks; the first
-cabin is the hall of columns, or vestibulum; behind it on each side
-of the passage are various chambers; and then comes the adytum or
-sanctuary—the inner cabin. The deck is the flat roof upon which wound
-the solemn processions; and there is a private stairway to the deck just
-as there was always an inner passage to the roof from one of the small
-chambers of the temple.
-
-The boat is manned by a numerous company whose appearance in procession
-would excite enthusiasm in any American town. Abd-el-Atti has for
-companion and clerk his nephew, a young Egyptian, (employed in the
-telegraph office) but in Frank dress, as all government officials are
-required to be.
-
-The reïs, or captain, is Hassan, Aboo Seyda, a rather stately Arab
-of sixty years, with a full turban, a long gown of blue cotton, and
-bare-footed. He walks the deck with an ease and grace that an actor
-might envy; there is neither stiffness nor strut in it; it is a gait
-of simple majesty which may be inherited from generations of upright
-ancestors, but could never be acquired. Hassan is an admirable
-figure-head to the expedition, but he has no more pluck or authority
-than an old hen, and was of not much more use on board than a hen would
-be in a chicken-hatching establishment.
-
-Abdel Hady Hassed, the steersman, is a Nubian from the First Cataract,
-shiny black in color, but with regular and delicate features. I can
-see him now, with his turban set well back on his head, in a loose,
-long-sleeved, brown garment, and without stockings or slippers,
-leaning against his tiller and looking straight ahead with unchanging
-countenance. His face had the peculiarity, which is sometimes seen, of
-appearing always to have a smile on it. He was born with that smile;
-he will die with it. An admirable person, who never showed the least
-excitement. That man would run us fast on a sand-bank, put us on a rock
-in plain sight, or let his sail jibe, without changing a muscle of his
-face, and in the most agreeable and good-natured manner in the world.
-And he never exhibited the least petulance at his accidents. I hope
-he will be rewarded for the number of hours he patiently stood at
-that tiller. The reïs would take the helm when Abdel wanted to say his
-prayers or to eat his simple meals; but, otherwise, I always found him
-at his post, late at night or in the early morning, gazing around on
-Egypt with that same stereotyped expression of pleasure.
-
-The cook, Hasaneyn Mahrowan (the last name has an Irish sound, but
-the first is that of the sacred mosque where is buried the head of the
-martyr El Hoseyn) is first among his craft, and contrives to produce on
-his little range in the bow a dinner that would have made Raineses II. a
-better man. He is always at his post, like the steersman, and no matter
-what excitement or peril we may be in, Hasaneyn stirs his soup or bastes
-his chicken with perfect sang froid. The fact is that these Orientals
-have got a thousand or two thousand years beyond worry, and never feel
-any responsibility for what others are doing.
-
-The waiter, a handsome Cairene, is the perfection of a trained servant,
-who understands signs better than English. Hoseyn Ali also rejoices in
-a noble name. Hasan and Hoseyn are, it is well known, the “two lords of
-the youths of the people of Paradise, in Paradise”; they were grandsons
-of the Prophet. Hoseyn was slain at the battle of the Plain of Karbalà.
-Hoseyn is the most smartly dressed fellow on board. His jacket and
-trousers are of silk; he wears a gay kuffia about his fez and his waist
-is girded with a fine Cashmere shawl. The fatal defect in his dress is
-that the full trowsers do not quite meet the stockings. There is always
-some point of shabbiness or lack of finish in every Oriental object.
-
-The waiter's lieutenant is an Abyssinian boy who rejoices in the name
-of Ahman Abdallah (or, “Slave of God”); and the cook's boy is Gohah
-ebn Abdallah (“His father slave of God”). This is the poetical way of
-putting their condition; they were both slaves of Abd-el-Atti, but now,
-he says, he has freed them. For Gohah he gave two napoleons when the lad
-was new. Greater contrast could not be between two colored boys. Ahman
-is black enough, but his features are regular and well made, he has a
-bright merry eye, and is quick in all his intuitions, and intellectually
-faithful to the least particular. He divines the wants of his masters by
-his quick wit, and never neglects or forgets anything. Gohah is from the
-Soudan, and a perfect Congo negro in features and texture of skin—lips
-protruding and nose absolutely level with his cheeks; as faithful and
-affectionate as a Newfoundland dog, a mild, gentle boy. What another
-servant would know through his sharpened interest, Gohah comprehends by
-his affections.
-
-I have described these persons, because they are types of the almost
-infinite variety of races and tribes in Egypt. Besides these there are
-fourteen sailors, and no two of the same shade or with similar features.
-Most of them are of Upper Egypt, and two or three of them are Nubians,
-but I should say that all are hopelessly mixed in blood. Ahmed, for
-instance, is a Nubian, and the negro blood comes out in him in his voice
-and laugh and a certain rolling antic movement of the body. Another
-sailor has that flush of red under dark in the face which marks the
-quadroon. The dress of the crew is usually a gown, a pair of drawers,
-and a turban. Ahmed wears a piece of Turkish toweling round his head.
-The crew is an incongruous lot altogether; a third of them smoke
-hasheesh whenever they can get it; they never obey an order without
-talking about it and suggesting something different; they are all
-captains in fact; they are rarely quiet, jabbering, or quarreling, or
-singing, when they are not hauling the sail, hoisting us from a sandbar,
-or stretched on deck in deep but not noiseless slumber. You cannot but
-like the good-natured rascals.
-
-An irresponsible, hard-working, jolly, sullen, contradictory lot of
-big children, who, it is popularly reported, need a koorbag (a whip of
-hippopotamus hide) to keep them in the way of industry and obedience. It
-seems to me that a little kindness would do better than a good deal of
-whip. But the kindness ought to have begun some generations back. The
-koorbag is the legitimate successor of the stick, and the Egyptians have
-been ruled by the stick for a period of which history reports not to the
-contrary. In the sculptures on the earliest tombs, laborers are driven
-to their tasks with the stick. Sailors on the old Nile boats are menaced
-with the stick. The overseer in the field swings the stick. Prisoners
-and slaves are marshalled in line with the stick. The stick is to-day
-also the one visible and prevalent characteristic of the government of
-Egypt. And I think that it is a notion among the subject classes, that a
-beating is now and then good for them. They might feel neglected without
-it. I cannot find that Egypt was ever governed in any other way than on
-the old plan of force and fear.
-
-If there is anything that these officers and sailors do not understand,
-it is the management of a Nile boat. But this is anticipating. Just now
-all goes as merrily as a colored ball. The night is soft, the moon is
-half full; the river spreads out in shining shallows; the shores are dim
-and show lines of feathery palms against the sky; we meet or pass white
-sails which flash out of the dimness and then vanish; the long line of
-pyramids of Sakkara is outlined beyond the palms; now there is a light
-on shore and a voice or the howling of a dog is heard; along the bank
-by the ruins of old Memphis a jackal runs barking in the moonlight.
-By half-past nine we are abreast the pyramids of Dashoor. A couple of
-dahabeëhs are laid up below for the night, and the lights from their
-rows of cabin windows gleam cheerfully on the water.
-
-We go right on, holding our way deeper and deeper into this enchanted
-country. The night is simply superb, such a wide horizon, such
-brilliancy above! Under the night, the boat glides like a phantom ship;
-it is perfectly steady, and we should not know we were in motion but for
-the running ripple at the sides. By this lulling sound we sleep, having
-come, for once in the world, into a country of tranquillity, where
-nothing need ever be done till tomorrow, for tomorrow is certain to be
-like to-day.
-
-When we came on deck at eight o'clock in the morning after “flying” all
-night as on birds' wings, we found that we had made thirty-five miles,
-and were almost abreast of the False Pyramid of Maydoom, so called
-because it is supposed to be built about a rock; a crumbled pyramid but
-curiously constructed, and perhaps older than that of Cheops. From a
-tomb in the necropolis here came the two life-size and striking
-figures that are in the Boulak Museum at Cairo. The statues, carved
-in calcareous limestone, represent two exceedingly respectable and
-intelligent looking persons, who resemble each other enough to be
-brother and sister; they were probably alive in the third dynasty. They
-sit up now, with hands on knees, having a bright look on their faces
-as if they hadn't winked in five thousand years, and were expecting
-company.
-
-I said we were “flying” all night. This needs qualification. We went
-aground three times and spent a good part of the night in getting off.
-It is the most natural thing in navigation. We are conscious of a slight
-grating, then a gentle lurch, not enough to disturb a dream, followed,
-however, by a step on deck, and a jabber of voices forward. The sail is
-loosed; the poles are taken from the rack and an effort is made to
-shove off by the use of some muscle and a good deal of chorus; when
-this fails, the crew jump overboard and we hear them splashing along
-the side. They put their backs to the boat and lift, with a grunting
-“Euh-h'e, euh-h'e” which changes into a rapid “halee, halee, halee,” as
-the boat slides off; and the crew scramble on board to haul tight the
-sail, with an emphatic “Yah! Mohammed, Yah! Mohammed.”
-
-We were delayed some hours altogether, we learn. But it was not delay.
-There can be no delay on this voyage; for there is no one on board
-who is in any haste. Are we not the temporary owners of this boat, and
-entirely irresponsible for any accident, so that if it goes down with
-all on board, and never comes to port, no one can hold us for damages?
-
-The day is before us, and not only the day, but, Providence permitting,
-a winter of days like it. There is nothing to be done, and yet we are
-too busy to read even the guide-book. There is everything to be seen;
-it is drifting past us, we are gliding away from it. It is all old and
-absolutely novel. If this is laziness that is stealing over us, it is
-of an alert sort. In the East, laziness has the more graceful title of
-resignation; but we have not come to that condition even; curiosity
-is constantly excited, and it is a sort of employment to breathe this
-inspiring air.
-
-We are spectators of a pageant that never repeats itself; for although
-there is a certain monotony in the character of the river and one would
-think that its narrow strips of arable land would soon be devoid of
-interest, the scenes are never twice alike. The combinations vary, the
-desert comes near and recedes, the mountains advance in bold precipices
-or fall away; the groups of people, villages, trees, are always
-shifting.
-
-And yet, in fact, the scenery changes little during the day. There are
-great reaches of river, rapidly flowing, and wide bends across which we
-see vessels sailing as if in the meadows. The river is crowded all
-day with boats, pleasure dahabeëhs, and trading vessels uncouth and
-picturesque. The passenger dahabëeh is long, handsomely painted, carries
-an enormous sail on its long yard, has a national flag and a long
-streamer; and groups of white people sit on deck under the awning; some
-of them are reading, some sketching, and now and then a man rises and
-discharges his shot-gun at a flock of birds a half a mile beyond its
-range.
-
-The boats of African traders are short, high-pooped, and have the rudder
-stepped out behind. They usually carry no flag, and are dirty and
-lack paint, but they carry a load that would interest the most blasé
-European. Those bound up-stream, under full sail, like ourselves, are
-piled with European boxes and bales, from stem to stern; and on top of
-the freight, in the midst of the freight, sitting on it, stretched out
-on it, peeping from it, is another cargo of human beings, men, women and
-children, black, yellow, clothed in all the hues of heaven and the rags
-of earth. It is an impassive load that stares at us with incurious,
-unwinking eyes.
-
-The trading boats coming down against the current, are even more strange
-and barbarous. They are piled with merchandise, but of a different
-sort. The sails and yards are down, and the long sweeps are in motion,
-balanced on outriggers, for the forward deck is filled, and the rowers
-walk on top of the goods as they move the oars to and fro. How black the
-rowers are! How black everybody on board is! They come suddenly upon
-us, like those nations we have read of, who sit in great darkness. The
-rowers are stalwart fellows whose basalt backs shine in the sun as they
-bend to the oar; in rowing they walk towards the cabin and pull the
-heavy oars as they step backwards, and every sweep is accompanied by the
-burst of a refrain in chorus, a wild response to a line that has been
-chanted by the leader as they stepped forwards. The passengers sit
-immoveable in the sun and regard us with a calmness and gravity which
-are only attainable near the equatorial regions, where things approach
-an equilibrium.
-
-Sometimes we count nearly one hundred dahabeëhs in sight, each dipping
-or veering or turning in the sun its bird-wing sail—the most graceful
-in the world. A person with fancies, who is watching them, declares that
-the triangular sails resemble quills cut at the top for pens, and that
-the sails, seen over the tongue of land of a long bend ahead, look like
-a procession of goose quills.
-
-The day is warm enough to call out all the birds; flocks of wild geese
-clang overhead, and companies of them, ranks on ranks, stand on the low
-sand-dunes; there are pelicans also, motionless in the shallow water
-near the shore, meditating like a derweesh on one leg, and not caring
-that the thermometer does mark 740. Little incidents entertain us.
-We like to pass the Dongola, flying “Ohio” from its yard, which took
-advantage of our stopping for milk early in the morning to go by us. We
-overhaul an English boat and have a mildly exciting race with her till
-dark, with varying fortune, the boats being nearly a match, and the
-victory depending upon some trick or skill on the part of the crew. All
-the party look at us, in a most unsympathetic manner, through goggles,
-which the English always put on whenever they leave the twilight of
-England. I do not know that we have any right to complain of this habit
-of wearing wire eye-screens and goggles; persons who have it mean no
-harm by it, and their appearance is a source of gratification to others.
-But I must say that goggles have a different effect in different lights.
-When we were sailing slowly past the Englishman, the goggles regarded us
-with a feeble and hopeless look. But when the Englishman was, in turn,
-drawing ahead of us, the goggles had a glare of “Who the devil are you?”
-Of course it was only in the goggles. For I have seen many of these
-races on the Nile, and passengers always affect an extreme indifference,
-leaving all demonstrations of interest to the crews of the boats.
-
-The two banks of the river keep all day about the same relative
-character—the one sterile, the other rich. On the east, the brown sand
-licks down almost to the water; there is only a strip of green; there
-are few trees, and habitations only at long intervals. Only a little
-distance back are the Mokattam hills, which keep a rarely broken and
-level sky-line for two hundred and fifty miles south of Cairo.
-
-The west side is a broad valley. The bank is high and continually caving
-in, like the alluvial bottoms of the Missouri; it is so high that from
-our deck we can see little of the land. There are always, however,
-palm-trees in sight, massed in groves, standing in lines, or waving
-their single tufts in the blue. These are the date-palms, which have no
-branches on their long poles; each year the old stalks are cut off for
-fuel, and the trunk, a mass of twisted fibres, comes to have a rough
-bark, as if the tree had been shingled the wrong way. Stiff in form and
-with only the single crown of green, I cannot account for its effect of
-grace and beauty. It is the life of the Nile, as the Nile is life to it.
-It bears its annual crop of fruit to those who want it, and a crop of
-taxes for the Khedive. Every palm pays in fact a poll-tax, whether it
-brings forth dates or not.
-
-Where the bank slopes we can see the springing wheat and barley darkly
-green; it is sown under the palms even, for no foot of ground is left
-vacant. All along the banks are shadoofs, at which men in black stand
-all day raising water, that flows back in regulated streams; for the
-ground falls slightly away from the height of the bank. At intervals
-appears a little collection of mud hovels, dumped together without
-so much plan as you would find in a beaver settlement, but called a
-village, and having a mud minaret and perhaps a dome. An occasional
-figure is that of a man plowing with a single ox; it has just the stiff
-square look of the sculptures in the tombs.
-
-Now and then where a zig-zag path is cut, or the bank slopes, women
-are washing clothes in the river, or groups of them are filling their
-water-jars. They come in files from the villages and we hear their
-shrill voices in incessant chatter. These country-women are invariably
-in black or dark brown; they are not veiled, but draw their head
-shawl over the face as our boat passes. Their long gowns are drawn up,
-exposing bare feet and legs as they step into the stream. The jars are
-large and heavy when unfilled, and we marvel how they can raise them
-to their heads when they are full of water. The woman drags her jar out
-upon the sand, squats before it, lifts it to her head with her hands,
-and then rises steadily and walks up the steep bank and over the sand,
-holding her robe with one hand and steadying the jar with the other,
-with perfect grace and ease of motion. The strength of limbs required to
-raise that jar to the head and then rise with it, ought to be calculated
-by those in our own land who are striving to improve the condition of
-woman.
-
-We are still flying along with the unfailing wind, and the merry
-progress communicates its spirit to the crew. Before sunset they get
-out their musical instruments, and squatting in a circle on the forward
-deck, prepare to enjoy themselves. One thumps and shakes the tambourine,
-one softly beats with his fingers the darabooka drum, and another
-rattles castanets. All who are not so employed beat time by a jerking
-motion of the raised hands, the palms occasionally coming together when
-the rhythm is properly accented. The leader, who has a very good tenor
-voice, chants a minor and monotonous love-song to which the others
-respond, either in applause of the sentiment or in a burst of musical
-enthusiasm which they cannot contain. Ahmed, the Nubian, whose body is
-full of Congoism, enters into it with a delightful abandon, swaying from
-side to side and indulging in an occasional shout, as if he were at a
-camp-meeting. His ugly and good-natured face beams with satisfaction, an
-expression that is only slightly impaired by the vacant place where
-two front teeth ought to shine. The song is rude and barbarous but not
-without a certain plaintiveness; the song, and scene belong together.
-In this manner the sailors of the ancient Egyptians amused themselves
-without doubt; their instruments were the same; thus they sat upon the
-ground, thus they clapped hands, thus they improvised ejaculations to
-the absent beloved:—
-
-
-“The night! The night! O thou with sweet hands!
-
-Holding the dewy peach.”
-
-
-The sun goes down, leaving a rosy color in the sky, that changes into an
-ashes-of-roses color, that gradually fades into the indefinable softness
-of night punctured with stars.
-
-We are booming along all night, under the waxing moon. This is not so
-much a voyage as a flight, chased by the north wind. The sail is always
-set, the ripples are running always along the sides, the shores slide by
-as in a dream; the reïs is at the bow, the smiling steersman is at the
-helm; if we were enchanted we could not go on more noiselessly. There is
-something ghostly about this night-voyage through a land so imperfectly
-defined to the senses but so crowded with history. If only the dead who
-are buried on these midnight shores were to rise, we should sail through
-a vast and ghastly concourse packing the valley and stretching away into
-the desert.
-
-About midnight I step out of the cabin to look at the night. I stumble
-over a sleeping Arab. Two sailors, set to hold the sail-rope and let it
-go in case of a squall of wind, are nodding over it. The night is not
-at all gloomy or mysterious, but in all the broad sweep of it lovely
-and full of invitation. We are just passing the English dahabeëh, whose
-great sail is dark as we approach, and then takes the moon full upon it
-as we file abreast. She is hugging the bank and as we go by there is a
-snap. In the morning Abd-el-Atti says that she broke the tip of her yard
-against the bank. At any rate she lags behind like a crippled bird.
-
-In the morning we are in sight of four dahabeëhs, but we overhaul and
-pass them all. We have contracted a habit of doing it. One of them
-gets her stern-sprit knocked off as she sheers before us, whereupon the
-sailors exchange compliments, and our steersman smiles just as he would
-have done if he had sent the Prussian boat to the bottom. The morning
-is delicious, not a cloud in the sky, and the thermometer indicating a
-temperature of 56°; this moderates speedily under the sun, but if you
-expected an enervating climate in the winter on the Nile you will be
-disappointed; it is on the contrary inspiring.
-
-We pass the considerable town of Golosaneh, not caring very much about
-it; we have been passing towns and mounds and vestiges of ancient and
-many times dug-up civilizations, day and night. We cannot bother with
-every ash-heap described in the guide-book. Benisooef, which has been
-for thousands of years an enterprising city, we should like to have
-seen, but we went by in the night. And at night most of these towns
-are as black as the moon will let them be, lights being very rare. We
-usually receive from them only the salute of a barking dog. Inland
-from Golosaneh rises the tall and beautiful minaret of Semaloot, a very
-pretty sight above the palm-groves; so a church spire might rise out of
-a Connecticut meadow. At 10 o'clock we draw near the cliffs of Gebel
-e' Tayr, upon the long flat summit of which stands the famous Coptic
-convent of Sitteh Miriam el Adra, “Our Lady Mary the Virgin,”—called
-also Dayr el Adra.
-
-We are very much interested in the Copts, and are glad of the
-opportunity to see something of the practice of their religion. For the
-religion is as peculiar as the race. In fact, the more one considers the
-Copt, the more difficult it is to define him. He is a descendant of the
-ancient Egyptians, it is admitted, and he retains the cunning of the
-ancients in working gold and silver; but his blood is crossed with
-Abyssinian, Nubian, Greek and Arab, until the original is lost,
-and to-day the representatives of the pure old Egyptian type of the
-sculptures are found among the Abyssinians and the Noobeh (genuine
-Nubians) more frequently than among the Copts. The Copt usually wears
-a black or brown turban or cap; but if he wore a white one it would be
-difficult to tell him from a Moslem. The Copts universally use Arabic;
-their ancient language is practically dead, although their liturgy and
-some of their religious books are written in it. This old language is
-supposed to be the spoken tongue of the old Egyptians.
-
-The number of Christian Copts in Egypt is small—but still large enough;
-they have been persecuted out of existence, or have voluntarily accepted
-Mohammedanism and married among the faithful. The Copts in religion are
-seceders from the orthodox church, and their doctrine of the Trinity was
-condemned by the council of Chalcedon; they consequently hate the Greeks
-much more than they hate the Moslems. They reckon St. Mark their first
-patriarch.
-
-Their religious practice is an odd jumble of many others. Most of them
-practice circumcision. The baptism of infants is held to be necessary;
-for a child dying unbaptized will be blind in the next life. Their fasts
-are long and strict; in their prayers they copy both Jews and Moslems,
-praying often and with endless repetitions. They confess before taking
-the sacrament; they abstain from swine's flesh, and make pilgrimages
-to Jerusalem. Like the Moslems they put off their shoes on entering the
-place of worship, but they do not behave there with the decorum of the
-Moslem; they stand always in the church and as the service is three or
-four hours long, beginning often at daybreak, the long staff or crutch
-upon which they lean is not a useless appendage. The patriarch, who
-dwells in Cairo, is not, I think, a person to be envied. He must be
-a monk originally and remain unmarried, and this is a country where
-marriage is so prevalent. Besides this, he is obliged to wear always
-a woolen garment next the skin, an irritation in this climate more
-constant than matrimony. And report says that he lives under rules so
-rigid that he is obliged to be waked up, if he sleeps, every fifteen
-minutes. I am inclined to think, however, that this is a polite way
-of saying that the old man has a habit of dropping off to sleep every
-quarter of an hour.
-
-The cliffs of Gebel e' Tayr are of soft limestone, and seem to be two
-hundred feet high. In one place a road is cut down to the water, partly
-by a zig-zag covered gallery in the face of the rock, and this is the
-usual landing-place for the convent. The convent, which is described
-as a church under ground, is in the midst of a mud settlement of lay
-brothers and sisters, and the whole is surrounded by a mud wall. From
-below it has the appearance of an earthwork fortification. The height
-commands the river for a long distance up and down, and from it the
-monks are on the lookout for the dahabeëhs of travelers. It is their
-habit to plunge into the water, clothed on only with their professions
-of holiness, swim to the boats, climb on board and demand “backsheesh”
-on account of their religion.
-
-It is very rough as we approach the cliffs, the waves are high, and the
-current is running strong. We fear we are to be disappointed, but the
-monks are superior to wind and waves. While we are yet half a mile off,
-I see two of them in the water, their black heads under white turbans,
-bobbing about in the tossing and muddy waves. They make' heroic efforts
-to reach us; we can hear their voices faintly shouting: Ana Christian, O
-Howadji, “I am a Christian, O! Howadji.”
-
-“We have no doubt you are exceptional Christians,” we shout to them in
-reply, “Why don't you come aboard—back-s-h-e-e-s-h!”
-
-They are much better swimmers than the average Christian with us. But
-it is in vain. They are swept by us and away from us like corks on the
-angry waves, and even their hail of Christian fellowship is lost in the
-whistling wind. When we are opposite the convent another head is
-seen bobbing about in the water; he is also swept below us, but
-three-quarters of a mile down-stream he effects a landing on another
-dahabeëh. As he climbs into the jolly-boat which is towed behind and
-stands erect, he resembles a statue in basalt.
-
-It is a great feat to swim in a current so swift as this and lashed by
-such a wind. I should like to have given these monks something, if only
-to encourage so robust a religion. But none of them succeeded in getting
-on board. Nothing happens to us as to other travelers, and we have no
-opportunity to make the usual remarks upon the degraded appearance of
-these Coptic monks at Dayr el Adra. So far as I saw them they were very
-estimable people.
-
-At noon we are driving past Minieh with a strong wind. It appears to
-be—but if you were to land you would find that it is not—a handsome
-town, for it has two or three graceful minarets, and the long white
-buildings of the sugar-factory, with its tall chimneys, and the palace
-of the Khedive, stretching along the bank give it an enterprising and
-cheerful aspect. This new palace of his Highness cost about half a
-million of dollars, and it is said that he has never passed a night in
-it. I confess I rather like this; it must be a royal sensation to be
-able to order houses made like suits of clothes without ever even trying
-them on. And it is a relief to see a decent building and a garden now
-and then, on the river.
-
-We go on, however, as if we were running away from the sheriff, for we
-cannot afford to lose the advantage of such a wind. Along the banks the
-clover is growing sweet and green as in any New England meadow in May,
-and donkeys are browsing in it tended by children; a very pleasant
-sight, to see this ill-used animal for once in clover and trying to bury
-his long ears in luxury. Patches of water-melon plants are fenced about
-by low stockades of dried rushes stuck in the sand—for the soil looks
-like sand.
-
-This vegetation is not kept alive, however, without constant labor;
-weeds never grow, it is true, but all green things would speedily wither
-if the shadoofs were not kept in motion, pouring the Nile into the baked
-and thirsty soil.
-
-These simple contrivances for irrigation, unchanged since the time of
-the Pharaohs, have already been described. Here two tiers are required
-to lift the water to the level of the fields; the first dipping takes it
-into a canal parallel with the bank, and thence it is raised to the
-top. Two men are dipping the leathern buckets at each machine, and the
-constant bending down and lifting up of their dark bodies are fatiguing
-even to the spectator. Usually in barbarous countries one pities the
-woman; but I suppose this is a civilized region, for here I pity the
-men. The women have the easier tasks of washing clothes in the cool
-stream, or lying in the sand. The women all over the East have an
-unlimited capacity for sitting motionless all day by a running stream or
-a pool of water.
-
-In the high wind the palm-trees are in constant motion tossing their
-feather tufts in the air; some of them are blown like an umbrella turned
-wrong side out, and a grove presents the appearance of crowd of people
-overtaken by a sudden squall. The acacia tree, which the Arabs call the
-sont, the acanthus of Strabo (Mimosa Nilotica) begins to be seen with
-the palm. It is a thorny tree, with small yellow blossoms and bears a
-pod. But what interests us most is the gum that exudes from its bark;
-for this is the real Gum Arabic! That Heaven has been kind enough to let
-us see that mysterious gum manufacturing itself! The Gum Arabic of our
-childhood!
-
-How often have I tried to imagine the feelings of a distant and
-unconverted boy to whom Gum Arabic was as common as spruce gum to a New
-England lad.
-
-As I said, we go on as if we were evading the law; our daha-beëh seems
-to have taken the bit in its teeth and is running away with us. We pass
-everything that sails, and begin to feel no pride in doing so; it is a
-matter of course. The other dalabeëhs are left behind, some with broken
-yards. I heard reports afterwards that we broke their yards, and that
-we even drowned a man. It is not true. We never drowned a man, and never
-wished to. We were attending to our own affairs. The crew were busy the
-first day or two of the voyage in cutting up their bread and spreading
-it on the upper deck to dry—heaps of it, bushels of it. It is a black
-bread, made of inferior unbolted wheat, about as heavy as lead, and sour
-to the uneducated taste. The Egyptians like it, however, and it is said
-to be very healthful. The men gnaw chunks of it with relish, but it
-is usually prepared for eating by first soaking it in Nile-water and
-warming it over a fire, in a big copper dish. Into the “stodge” thus
-made is sometimes thrown some “greens” snatched from the shore. The crew
-seat themselves about this dish when it is ready, and each one dips his
-right hand into the mass and claws out a mouthful The dish is always
-scraped clean. Meat is very rarely had by them, only a few times during
-the whole voyage; but they vary their diet by eating green beans,
-lettuce, onions, lentils, and any sort of “greens” they can lay hands
-on. The meal is cooked on a little fire built on a pile of stones near
-the mast. When it is finished they usually gather about the fire for
-a pull at the “hubble-bubble.” This is a sort of pipe with a cocoa-nut
-shell filled with water, through which the smoke passes. Usually a lump
-of hasheesh is put into the bowl with the tobacco. A puff or two of this
-mixture is enough; it sets the smoker coughing and conveys a pleasant
-stupor to his brain. Some of the crew never smoke it, but content
-themselves with cigarettes. And the cigarettes, they are always rolling
-up and smoking while they are awake.
-
-The hasheesh-smokers are alternately elated and depressed, and sometimes
-violent and noisy. A man addicted to the habit is not good for much;
-the hasheesh destroys his nerves and brain, and finally induces idiocy.
-Hasheesh intoxication is the most fearful and prevalent vice in Egypt.
-The government has made many attempts to stop it, but it is too firmly
-fixed; the use of hasheesh is a temporary refuge from poverty, hunger,
-and all the ills of life, and appears to have a stronger fascination
-than any other indulgence. In all the towns one may see the dark little
-shops where the drug is administered, and generally rows of victims in
-a stupid doze stretched on the mud benches. Sailors are so addicted to
-hasheesh that it is almost impossible to make up a decent crew for a
-dahabeëh.
-
-Late in the afternoon we are passing the famous rock-tombs of Beni
-Hassan, square holes cut in the face of the cliff, high up. With our
-glasses we can see paths leading to them over the debris and along the
-ledges. There are two or three rows of these tombs, on different ledges;
-they seem to be high, dry, and airy, and I should rather live in them,
-dead or alive, than in the mud hovels of the fellaheen below. These
-places of sepulchre are older than those at Thebes, and from the
-pictures and sculptures in them, more than from any others, the
-antiquarians have reconstructed the domestic life of the ancient
-Egyptians. This is a desolate spot now; there is a decayed old mud
-village below, and a little south of it is the new town; both can barely
-be distinguished from the brown sand and rock in which and in front
-of which they stand. This is a good place for thieves, or was before
-Ibraheem Pasha destroyed these two villages. We are warned that this
-whole country produces very skillful robbers, who will swim off and
-glean the valuables from a dahabeëh in a twinkling.
-
-Notwithstanding the stiff breeze the thermometer marks 74°; but both
-wind and temperature sink with the sun. Before the sun sets, however, we
-are close under the east bank, and are watching the play of light on
-a magnificent palm-grove, beneath which stand the huts of the modern
-village of Sheykh Abâdeh. It adds romance to the loveliness of the scene
-to know that this is the site of ancient Antinoë, built by the Emperor
-Adrian. To be sure we didn't know it till this moment, but the traveler
-warms up to a fact of this kind immediately, and never betrays even
-to his intimate friends that he is not drawing upon his inexhaustible
-memory.
-
-“That is the ancient Antinoë, built by Adrian.”
-
-Oh, the hypocrisy and deceit of the enthusiastic,
-
-“Is it?”
-
-“Yes, and handsome Antinous was drowned here in the Nile.”
-
-“Did they recover his body?”
-
-Upon the bank there are more camels, dogs, and donkeys than we have seen
-all day; buffaloes are wallowing in the muddy margin. They are all in
-repose; the dogs do not bark, and the camels stretch their necks in a
-sort of undulatory expression of discontent, but do not bleat, or roar,
-or squawk, or make whatever the unearthly noise which they make is
-called. The men and the women are crouching in the shelter of their mud
-walls, with the light of the setting sun upon their dark faces. They
-draw their wraps closer about them to protect themselves from the north
-wind, and regard us stolidly and without interest as we go by. And when
-the light fades, what is there for them? No cheerful lamp, no book, no
-newspaper. They simply crawl into their kennels and sleep the sleep of
-“inwardness” and peace.
-
-Just here the arable land on the east bank is broader than usual, and
-there was evidently a fine city built on the edge of the desert behind
-it. The Egyptians always took waste and desert land for dwellings and
-for burial-places, leaving every foot of soil available for cultivation
-free. There is evidence all along here of a once much larger population,
-though I doubt if the east bank of the river was ever much inhabited.
-The river banks would support many more people than we find here if
-the land were cultivated with any care. Its fertility, with the annual
-deposit, is simply inexhaustible, and it is good for two and sometimes
-three crops a year. But we pass fields now and then that are abandoned,
-and others that do not yield half what they might. The people are
-oppressed with taxes and have no inducement to raise more than is
-absolutely necessary to keep them alive. But I suppose this has always
-been the case in Egypt. The masters have squeezed the last drop from the
-people, and anything like an accumulation of capital by the laborers is
-unknown. The Romans used a long rake, with fine and sharp teeth, and
-I have no doubt that they scraped the country as clean as the present
-government does.
-
-The government has a very simple method of adjusting its taxes on land
-and crops. They are based upon the extent of the inundation. So many
-feet rise, overflowing such an area, will give such a return in crops;
-and tax on this product can be laid in advance as accurately as when
-the crops are harvested. Nature is certain to do her share of the work;
-there will be no frost, nor any rain to spoil the harvest, nor any
-freakishness whatever on the part of the weather. If the harvest is not
-up to the estimate, it is entirely the fault of the laborer, who has
-inadequately planted or insufficiently watered. In the same manner a tax
-is laid upon each palm-tree, and if it does not bear fruit, that is not
-the fault of the government.
-
-There must be some satisfaction in farming on the Nile. You are always
-certain of the result of your labor. * Whereas, in our country farming
-is the merest lottery. The season will open too wet or too dry, the seed
-may rot in the ground, the young plant may be nipped with frost or grow
-pale for want of rain, the crop runs the alternate hazards of drought
-or floods, it is wasted by rust or devoured by worms; and, to cap the
-climax, if the harvest is abundant and of good quality, the price goes
-down to an unremunerative figure. In Egypt you may scratch the ground,
-put in the seed, and then go to sleep for three months, in perfect
-certainty of a good harvest, if only the shadoof and the sakiya are kept
-in motion.
-
-* It should be said, however, that the ancient Egyptians found the
-agricultural conditions beset with some vexations. A papyrus in the
-British Museum contains a correspondence between Ameneman, the librarian
-of Rameses II, and his pupil Pentaour, who wrote the celebrated epic
-upon the exploits of that king on the river Orontes. One of the letters
-describes the life of the agricultural people:—“Have you ever conceived
-what sort of life the peasant leads who cultivates the soil? Even before
-it is ripe, insects destroy part of his harvest.. . Multitudes of rats
-are in the field; next come invasions of locusts, cattle ravage his
-harvest, sparrows alight in flocks on his sheaves. If he delays to get
-in his harvest, robbers come to carry it off with him; his horse dies of
-fatigue in drawing the plow; the tax- collector arrives in the district,
-and has with him men armed with sticks, negroes with palm-branches.
-All say, 'Give us of your corn,' and he has no means of escaping their
-exactions. Next the unfortunate wretch is seized, bound, and carried
-off by force to work on the canals; his wife is bound, his children are
-stripped. And at the same time his neighbors have each of them his own
-trouble.”
-
-
-By eight o'clock in the evening, on a falling wind, we are passing
-Rhoda, whose tall chimneys have been long in sight. Here is one of the
-largest of the Khedive's sugar-factories, and a new palace which has
-never been occupied. We are one hundred and eighty-eight miles from
-Cairo, and have made this distance in two days, a speed for which I
-suppose history has no parallel; at least our dragoman says that such
-a run has never been made before at this time of the year, and we are
-quite willing to believe a statement which reflects so much honor upon
-ourselves, for choosing such a boat and such a dragoman.
-
-This Nile voyage is nothing, after all; its length has been greatly
-overestimated. We shall skip up the river and back again before the
-season is half spent, and have to go somewhere else for the winter. A
-man feels all-powerful, so long as the wind blows; but let his sails
-collapse and there is not a more crest-fallen creature. Night and day
-our sail has been full, and we are puffed up with pride.
-
-At this rate we shall hang out our colored lanterns at Thebes on
-Christmas night.
-
-
-
-0150
-
-
-
-0151
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XI.—PEOPLE ON THE RIVER BANKS.
-
-THE morning puts a new face on our affairs. It is Sunday, and the most
-devout could not desire a quieter day. There is a thick fog on the
-river, and not breeze enough stirring to show the stripes on our flag;
-the boat holds its own against the current by a sort of accumulated
-impulse. During the night we may have made five miles altogether, and
-now we barely crawl. We have run our race; if we have not come into a
-haven, we are at a stand-still, and it does not seem now as if we ever
-should wake up and go on again. However, it is just as well. Why should
-we be tearing through this sleepy land at the rate of four miles an
-hour?
-
-The steersman half dozes at the helm; the reïs squats near him watching
-the flapping sails; the crew are nearly all asleep on the forward deck,
-with their burnouses drawn over their head and the feet bare, for it is
-chilly as late as nine o'clock, and the thermometer has dropped to 540.
-Abd-el-Atti slips his beads uneasily along between his fingers, and
-remembers that when he said that we would reach Asioot in another day,
-he forgot to ejaculate; “God willing.” Yet he rises and greets our
-coming from the cabin with a willing smile, and a—
-
-“Morning sir, morning marm. I hope you enjoyin' you sleep, marm.”
-
-“Where are we now, Abd-el-Atti?”
-
-“Not much, marm; this is a place call him Hadji Kandeel. But we do very
-well; I not to complain.”
-
-“Do you think we shall have any wind to-day?”
-
-“I d'know, be sure. The wind come from Lord. Not so?”
-
-Hadji Kandeel is in truth only a scattered line of huts, but one lands
-here to visit the grottoes or rock-tombs of Tel el Amarna. All this
-country is gaping with tombs apparently; all the cliffs are cut into
-receptacles for the dead, all along the margin of the desert on each
-side are old necropolises and moslem cemeteries, in which generation
-after generation, for almost fabulous periods of time, has been
-deposited. Here behind Hadji Kandeel are remains of a once vast city
-built let us say sixteen hundred years before our era, by Amunoph IV.,
-a wayward king of the eighteenth dynasty, and made the capital of Egypt.
-In the grottoes of Tel el Amârna were deposited this king and his court
-and favorites, and his immediate successors—all the splendor of them
-sealed up there and forgotten. This king forsook the worship of the gods
-of Thebes, and set up that of a Semitic deity, Aten, a radiating disk, a
-sun with rays terminating in human hands. It was his mother who led him
-into this, and she was not an Egyptian; neither are the features of the
-persons sculptured in the grottoes Egyptian.
-
-Thus all along the stream of Egyptian history cross currents are coming
-in, alien sovereigns and foreign task-masters; and great breaks appear,
-as if one full civilization had run its course of centuries, and decay
-had come, and then ruin, and then a new start and a fresh career.
-
-Early this morning, when we were close in to the west bank, I heard
-measured chanting, and saw a procession of men and women coming across
-the field. The men bore on a rude bier the body of a child. They came
-straight on to the bank, and then turned by the flank with military
-precision and marched upstream to the place where a clumsy country
-ferry-boat had just landed. The chant of the men, as they walked, was
-deep-voiced and solemn, and I could hear in it frequently repeated the
-name of Mohammed. The women in straggling file followed, like a sort of
-ill-omened birds in black, and the noise they made, a kind of wail,
-was exactly like the cackle of wild geese. Indeed before I saw the
-procession I thought that some geese were flying overhead.
-
-The body was laid on the ground and four men kneeled upon the bank as
-if in prayer. The boat meantime was unloading, men, women and children
-scrambling over the sides into the shallow water, and the donkeys, urged
-with blows, jumping after them. When they were all out the funeral took
-possession of the boat, and was slowly wafted across, as dismal a going
-to a funeral as if this were the real river of death. When the mourners
-had landed we saw them walking under the palm-trees, to the distant
-burial-place in the desert, with a certain solemn dignity, and the
-chanting and wailing were borne to us very distinctly.
-
-It is nearly a dead calm all day, and our progress might be
-imperceptible to an eye naked, and certainly it must be so to the eyes
-of these natives which are full of flies. It grows warm, however, and
-is a summer temperature when we go ashore in the afternoon on a tour of
-exploration. We have for attendant, Ahmed, who carries a big stick as
-a defence against dogs. Ahmed does not differ much in appearance from
-a wild barbarian, his lack of a complete set of front teeth alone
-preventing him from looking fierce. A towel is twisted about his head,
-feet and legs are bare, and he wears a blue cotton robe with full
-sleeves longer than his arms, gathered at the waist by a piece of rope,
-and falling only to the knees. A nice person to go walking with on the
-Holy Sabbath.
-
-The whole land is green with young wheat, but the soil is baked and
-cracked three or four inches deep, even close to the shore where the
-water has only receded two or three days ago. The land stretches for
-several miles, perfectly level and every foot green and smiling, back to
-the desert hills. Sprinkled over this expanse, which is only interrupted
-by ditches and slight dykes upon which the people walk from village to
-village, are frequent small groves of palms. Each grove is the nucleus
-of a little settlement, a half dozen sun-baked habitations, where
-people, donkeys, pigeons, and smaller sorts of animated nature live
-together in dirty amity. The general plan of building is to erect a
-circular wall of clay six or seven feet high, which dries, hardens, and
-cracks in the sun. This is the Oriental court. In side this and built
-against the wall is a low mud-hut with a wooden door, and perhaps here
-and there are two similar huts, or half a dozen, according to the size
-of the family. In these hovels the floor is of smooth earth, there is a
-low bedstead or some matting laid in one corner, but scarcely any other
-furniture, except some earthen jars holding doora or dried fruit, and a
-few cooking utensils. A people who never sit, except on their heels, do
-not need chairs, and those who wear at once all the clothes they possess
-need no closets or wardrobes. I looked at first for a place where
-they could keep their “Sunday clothes” and “nice things,” but this
-philosophical people do not have anything that is too good for daily
-use. It is nevertheless true that there is no hope of a people who do
-not have “Sunday clothes.”
-
-The inhabitants did not, however, appear conscious of any such want.
-They were lounging about or squatting in the dust in picturesque
-idleness; the children under twelve years often without clothes and not
-ashamed, and the women wearing no veils. The women are coming and going
-with the heavy water-jars, or sitting on the ground, sorting doora and
-preparing it for cooking; not prepossessing certainly, in their black
-or dingy brown gowns and shawls of cotton. Children abound. In all the
-fields men are at work, picking up the ground with a rude hoe shaped
-like an adze. Tobacco plants have just been set out, and water-melons
-carefully shaded from the sun by little tents of rushes. These men are
-all Fellaheen, coarsely and scantily clad in brown cotton gowns, open at
-the breast. They are not bad figures, better than the women, but there
-is a hopeless acceptance of the portion of slaves in their bearing.
-
-We encountered a very different race further from the river, where
-we came upon an encampment of Bedaween, or desert Arabs, who hold
-themselves as much above the Fellaheen as the poor white trash used to
-consider itself above the negroes in our Southern States. They pretend
-to keep their blood pure by intermarrying only in desert tribes, and
-perhaps it is pure; so, I suppose, the Gipsies are pure blood enough,
-but one would not like them for neighbors. These Bedaween, according
-to their wandering and predatory habit, have dropped down here from the
-desert to feed their little flock of black sheep and give their lean
-donkeys a bite of grass. Their tents are merely strips of coarse brown
-cloth, probably camel's hair, like sacking, stretched horizontally over
-sticks driven into the sand, so as to form a cover from the sun and
-a protection from the north wind. Underneath them are heaps of rags,
-matting, old clothes, blankets, mingled with cooking-utensils and the
-nameless broken assortment that beggars usually lug about with them.
-Hens and lambs are at home there, and dogs, a small, tawny wolfish
-breed, abound. The Arabs are worthy of their dwellings, a dirty,
-thievish lot to look at, but, as I said, no doubt of pure blood, and
-having all the virtues for which these nomads have been celebrated since
-the time when Jacob judiciously increased his flock at the expense of
-Laban.
-
-A half-naked boy of twelve years escorts us to the bank of the canal
-near which the tents are pitched, and we are met by the sheykh of
-the tribe, a more venerable and courtly person than the rest of
-these pure-blood masqueraders in rags, but not a whit less dirty. The
-fellaheen had paid no attention to us; this sheykh looked upon himself
-as one of the proprietors of this world, and bound to extend the
-hospitalities of this portion of it to strangers. He received us with a
-certain formality. When two Moslems meet there is no end to their formal
-salutation and complimentary speeches, which may continue as long as
-their stock of religious expressions holds out. The usual first greeting
-is Es-salaam, aleykoom, “peace be on you,” to which the reply is
-Aleykoom es-saalam, “on you be peace.” It is said that persons of
-another religion, however, should never make use of this salutation to
-a Moslem, and that the latter should not and will not return it. But we
-were overflowing with charity and had no bigotry, and went through Egypt
-salaaming right and left, sometimes getting no reply and sometimes a
-return, to our “peace be on you,” of Wa-aleykoom, “and on you.”
-
-The salutations by gesture are as varied as those by speech When
-Abd-el-Atti walked in Cairo with us, he constantly varied his gestures
-according to the rank of the people we met. To an inferior he tossed a
-free salaam; an equal he saluted by touching with his right hand in one
-rapid motion his breast, lips, and head; to a superior he made the same
-motion except that his hand first made a dip down to his knees; and when
-he met a person of high rank the hand scooped down to the ground before
-it passed up to the head.
-
-I flung a cheerful salaam at the sheykh and gave him the Oriental
-salute, which he returned. We then shook hands, and the sheykh kissed
-his after touching mine, a token of friendship which I didn't know
-enough to imitate, not having been brought up to kiss my own hand.
-
-“Anglais or Français?” asked the sheykh.
-
-“No,” I said, “Americans.”
-
-“Ah,” he ejaculated, throwing back his head with an aspiration of
-relief, “Melicans; tyeb (good).”
-
-A ring of inquisitive Arabs gathered about us and were specially
-interested in studying the features and costume of one of our party; the
-women standing further off and remaining closely veiled kept their eyes
-fixed on her. The sheykh invited us to sit and have coffee, but the
-surroundings were not tempting to the appetite and we parted with
-profuse salutations. I had it in mind to invite him to our American
-centennial; I should like to set him off against some of our dirty red
-brethren of the prairies. I thought that if I could transport these
-Bedaween, tents, children, lank, veiled women, donkeys, and all to the
-centennial grounds they would add a most interesting (if unpleasant)
-feature. But, then, I reflected, what is a centennial to this Bedawee
-whose ancestors were as highly civilized as he is when ours were wading
-about the fens with the Angles or burrowing in German forests. Besides,
-the Bedawee would be at a disadvantage when away from the desert, or the
-bank of this Nile whose unceasing flow symbolizes his tribal longevity.
-
-As we walk along through the lush-fields which the despised Fellaheen
-are irritating into a fair yield of food, we are perplexed with the
-query, what is the use of the Bedaween in this world? They produce
-nothing. To be sure they occupy a portion of the earth that no one else
-would inhabit; they dwell on the desert. But there is no need of any one
-dwelling on the desert, especially as they have to come from it to levy
-contributions on industrious folds in order to live. At this stage of
-the inquiry, the philosopher asks, what is the use of any one living?
-
-As no one could answer this, we waded the water where it was shallow
-and crossed to a long island, such as the Nile frequently leaves in its
-sprawling course. This island was green from end to end, and inhabited
-more thickly than the main-land. We attracted a good deal of attention
-from the mud-villages, and much anxiety was shown lest we should walk
-across the wheat-fields. We expected that the dahabeëh would come on and
-take us off, but its streamer did not advance, and we were obliged to
-rewade the shallow channel and walk back to the starting-place. There
-was a Sunday calm in the scene. At the rosy sunset the broad river shone
-like a mirror and the air was soft as June. How strong is habit. Work
-was going on as usual, and there could have been no consent of sky,
-earth, and people, to keep Sunday, yet there seemed to be the Sunday
-spell upon the landscape. I suspect that people here have got into the
-way of keeping all the days. The most striking way in which an American
-can keep Sunday on the Nile is by not going gunning, not even taking a
-“flyer” at a hawk from the deck of the dahabeëh. There is a chance for a
-tract on this subject.
-
-Let no one get the impression that we are idling away our time, because
-we are on Monday morning exactly where we were on Sunday morning. We
-have concluded to “keep” another day. There is not a breath of wind
-to scatter the haze, thermometer has gone down, and the sun's rays
-are feeble. This is not our fault, and I will not conceal the adverse
-circumstances in order to give you a false impression of the Nile.
-
-We are moored against the bank. The dragoman has gone on shore to shoot
-pigeons and buy vegetables. Our turkeys, which live in cages on the
-stern-deck, have gone ashore and are strutting up and down the sand;
-their gobble is a home sound and recalls New England. Women, as usual,
-singly and in groups, come to the river to fill their heavy water-jars.
-There is a row of men and boys on the edge of the bank. Behind are two
-camels yoked wide apart drawing a plow. Our crew chaff the shore people.
-The cook says to a girl, “You would make me a good wife; we will take
-you along.” Men, squatting on the bank say, “Take her along, she is of
-no use.”
-
-Girl retorts, “You are not of more use than animals, you sit idle all
-day, while I bring water and grind the corn.”
-
-One is glad to see this assertion of the rights of women in this region
-where nobody has any rights; and if we had a tract we would leave it
-with her. Some good might be done by travelers if they would distribute
-biscuit along the Nile, stamped in Arabic with the words, “Man ought to
-do half the work,” or, “Sisters rise!”
-
-In the afternoon we explore a large extent of country, my companion
-carrying a shot-gun for doves. These doves are in fact wild pigeons,
-a small and beautiful pearly-grey bird. They live on the tops of the
-houses in nests formed for them by the insertion of tiles or earthen
-pots in the mud-walls. Many houses have an upper story of this sort on
-purpose for the doves; and a collection of mere mud-cabins so ornamented
-is a picturesque sight, under a palm-grove. Great flocks of these birds
-are flying about, and the shooting is permitted, away from the houses.
-
-We make efforts to get near the wild geese and the cranes, great numbers
-of which are sunning themselves on the sandbanks, but these birds know
-exactly the range of a gun, and fly at the right moment. A row of cranes
-will sometimes trifle with our feelings. The one nearest will let us
-approach almost within range before he lifts his huge wings and sails
-over the river, the next one will wait for us to come a few steps
-further before he flies, and so on until the sand-spit is deserted of
-these long-legged useless birds. Hawks are flying about the shore and
-great greyish crows, or ravens, come over the fields and light on the
-margin of sand—a most gentlemanly looking bird, who is under a queer
-necessity of giving one hop before he can raise himself in flight. Small
-birds, like sand-pipers, are flitting about the bank. The most beautiful
-creature, however, is a brown bird, his wing marked with white, long
-bill, head erect and adorned with a high tuft, as elegant as the
-blue-jay; the natives call it the crocodile's guide.
-
-We cross vast fields of wheat and of beans, the Arab “fool,” which are
-sown broadcast, interspersed now and then with a melon-patch. Villages,
-such as they are, are frequent; one of them has a mosque, the only one
-we have seen recently. The water for ablution is outside, in a brick
-tank sunk in the ground. A row of men are sitting on their heels
-in front of the mosque, smoking; some of them in white gowns, and
-fine-looking men. I hope there is some saving merit in this universal
-act of sitting on the heels, the soles of the feet flat on the ground;
-it is not an easy thing for a Christian to do, as he will find out by
-trying.
-
-Toward night a steamboat flying the star and crescent of Egypt, with
-passengers on board, some of “Cook's personally conducted,” goes
-thundering down stream, filling the air with smoke and frightening the
-geese, who fly before it in vast clouds. I didn't suppose there were so
-many geese in the world.
-
-Truth requires it to be said that on Tuesday morning the dahabeëh holds
-about the position it reached on Sunday morning; we begin to think we
-are doing well not to lose anything in this rapid current. The day is
-warm and cloudy, the wind is from the east and then from the south-east,
-exactly the direction we must go. It is in fact a sirocco, and fills
-one with languor, which is better than being frost-bitten at home. The
-evening, with the cabin windows all open, is like one of those soft
-nights which come at the close of sultry northern days, in which
-there is a dewy freshness. This is the sort of winter that we ought to
-cultivate.
-
-During the day we attempt tracking two or three times, but with little
-success; the wind is so strong that the boat is continually blown
-ashore. Tracking is not very hard for the passengers and gives them an
-opportunity to study the bank and the people on it close at hand. A long
-cable fastened on the forward deck is carried ashore, and to the far
-end ten or twelve sailors attach themselves at intervals by short ropes
-which press across the breast. Leaning in a slant line away from the
-river, they walk at a snail's pace, a file of parti-colored raiment and
-glistening legs; occasionally bursting into a snatch of a song, they
-slowly pull the bark along. But obstructions to progress are many. A
-spit of sand will project itself, followed by deepwater, through which
-the men will have to wade in order to bring the boat round; occasionally
-the rope must be passed round trees which overhang the caving bank; and
-often freight-boats, tied to the shore, must be passed. The leisure with
-which the line is carried outside another boat is amusing even in this
-land of deliberation. The groups on these boats sit impassive and look
-at us with a kind of curiosity that has none of our eagerness in it.
-The well-bred indifferent “stare” of these people, which is not exactly
-brazen and yet has no element of emotion in it, would make the fortune
-of a young fellow in a London season. The Nubian boatmen who are
-tracking the freight-dahabeëh appear to have left their clothes in
-Cairo; they flop in and out of the water, they haul the rope along the
-bank, without consciousness apparently that any spectators are within
-miles; and the shore-life goes on all the same, men sit on the banks,
-women come constantly to fill their jars, these crews stripped to their
-toil excite no more attention than the occasional fish jumping out of
-the Nile. The habit seems to be general of minding one's own business.
-
-At early morning another funeral crossed the river to a desolate
-burial-place in the sand, the women wailing the whole distance of the
-march; and the noise was more than before like the clang of wild geese.
-These women have inherited the Oriental art of “lifting up the voice,”
-and it adds not a little to the weirdness of this ululation and
-screeching to think that for thousands of years the dead have been
-buried along this valley with exactly the same feminine tenderness.
-
-These women wear black; all the countrywomen we have seen are dressed in
-sombre gowns and shawls of black or deep blue-black; none of them have
-a speck of color in their raiment, not a bit of ribbon nor a bright
-kerchief, nor any relief to the dullness of their apparel. And yet they
-need not fear to make themselves too attractive. The men have all the
-colors that are worn; though the Fellaheen as a rule wear brownish
-garments, blue and white are not uncommon, and a white turban or a red
-fez, or a silk belt about the waist gives variety and agreeable relief
-to the costumes. In this these people imitate that nature which we
-affect to admire, but outrage constantly. They imitate the birds. The
-male birds have all the gay plumage; the feathers of the females are
-sober and quiet, as befits their domestic position. And it must be
-admitted that men need the aid of gay dress more than women.
-
-The next morning when the sun shows over the eastern desert, the sailors
-are tracking, hauling the boat slowly along an ox-bow in the river,
-until at length the sail can catch the light west wind which sprang
-up with the dawn. When we feel that, the men scramble aboard, and the
-dahabeëh, like a duck that has been loitering in an eddy for days,
-becomes instinct with life and flies away to the cliffs opposite, the
-bluffs called Gebel Aboofayda, part of the Mokattam range that here
-rises precipitously from the river and overhangs it for ten or twelve
-miles. I think these limestone ledges are two or three hundred feet
-high. The face is scarred by the slow wearing of ages, and worn into
-holes and caves innumerable. Immense numbers of cranes are perched on
-the narrow ledges of the cliff, and flocks of them are circling in front
-of it, apparently having nests there. As numerous also as swallows in a
-sand-bank is a species of duck called the diver; they float in troops on
-the stream, or wheel about the roosting cranes.
-
-This is a spot famed for its sudden gusts of wind which sometimes
-flop over the brink and overturn boats. It also is the resort of the
-crocodile, which seldom if ever comes lower down the Nile now. But
-the crocodile is evidently shy of exhibiting himself, and we scan the
-patches of sand at the foot of the rocks with our glasses for a long
-time in vain. The animal dislikes the puffing, swashing steamboats, and
-the rifle-balls that passing travelers pester him with. At last we see
-a scaly log six or eight feet long close to the water under the rock. By
-the aid of the glass it turns out to be a crocodile. He is asleep, and
-too far off to notice at all the volley of shot with which we salute
-him. It is a great thing to say you saw a crocodile. It isn't much to
-see one.
-
-And yet the scaly beast is an interesting and appropriate feature in
-such a landscape,# and the expectation of seeing a crocodile adds to
-your enjoyment. On our left are these impressive cliffs; on the right
-is a level island. Half-naked boys and girls are tending small flocks of
-black sheep on it. Abd-el-Atti raises his gun as if he would shoot
-the children and cries out to them, “lift up your arm,” words that
-the crocodile hunter uses when he is near enough to fire, and wants to
-attract the attention of the beast so that it will raise its fore-paw
-to move off, and give the sportsman a chance at the vulnerable spot. The
-children understand the allusion and run laughing away.
-
-Groups of people are squatting on the ground, doing nothing, waiting for
-nothing, expecting nothing; buffaloes and cattle are feeding on the thin
-grass, and camels are kneeling near in stately indifference; women in
-blue-black robes come—the everlasting sight—to draw water. The whole
-passes in a dumb show. The hot sun bathes all.
-
-We pass next the late residence of a hermit, a Moslem “welee” or holy
-man. On a broad ledge of the cliff, some thirty feet above the water,
-is a hut built of stone and plaster and whitewashed, about twelve feet
-high, the roof rounded like an Esquimau snow-hut and with a knob at
-the top. Here the good man lived, isolated from the world, fed by the
-charity of passers-by, and meditating on his own holiness. Below him,
-out of the rock, with apparently no better means of support than he had,
-grows an acacia-tree, now in yellow blossoms. Perhaps the saint chewed
-the gum-arabic that oozed from it. Just above, on the river, is a slight
-strip of soil, where he used to raise a few cucumbers and other cooling
-vegetables. The farm, which is no larger than two bed blankets, is
-deserted now. The saint died, and is buried in his house, in a hole
-excavated in the rock, so that his condition is little changed, his
-house being his tomb, and the Nile still soothing his slumber.
-
-But if it is easy to turn a house into a tomb it is still easier to turn
-a tomb into a house. Here are two square-cut tombs in the rock, of which
-a family has taken possession, the original occupants probably having
-moved out hundreds of years ago. Smoke is issuing from one of them, and
-a sorry-looking woman is pulling dead grass among the rocks for fuel.
-There seems to be no inducement for any one to live in this barren spot,
-but probably rent is low. A little girl seven or eight years old comes
-down and walks along the bank, keeping up with the boat, incited
-of course by the universal expectation of backsheesh. She has on a
-head-veil, covering the back of the head and neck and a single shirt
-of brown rags hanging in strings. I throw her an apple, a fruit she has
-probably never seen, which she picks up and carries until she joined is
-by an elder sister, to whom she shows it. Neither seems to know what
-it is. The elder smells it, sticks her teeth into it, and then takes a
-bite. The little one tastes, and they eat it in alternate bites, growing
-more and more eager for fair bites as the process goes on.
-
-Near the southern end of the cliffs of Gebel Aboofayda are the
-crocodile-mummy pits which Mr. Prime explored; caverns in which are
-stacked up mummied crocodiles and lizards by the thousands. We shall
-not go nearer to them. I dislike mummies; I loathe crocodiles; I have
-no fondness for pits. What could be more unpleasant than the three
-combined! To crawl on one's stomach through crevices and hewn passages
-in the rock, in order to carry a torch into a stifling chamber, packed
-with mummies and cloths soaked in bitumen, is an exploit that we
-willingly leave to Egyptologists. If one takes a little pains, he can
-find enough unpleasant things above ground.
-
-It requires all our skill to work the boat round the bend above these
-cliffs; we are every minute about to go aground on a sand-bar, or jibe
-the sail, or turn about. Heaven only knows how we ever get on at all,
-with all the crew giving orders and no one obeying. But by five o'clock
-we are at the large market-town of Manfaloot, which has half a dozen
-minarets and is sheltered by a magnificent palm-grove. You seem to be
-approaching an earthly paradise; and one can keep up the illusion if he
-does not go ashore. And yet this is a spot that ought to interest the
-traveler, for here Lot is said to have spent a portion of the years of
-his exile, after the accident to his wife.
-
-At sunset old Abo Arab comes limping along the bank with a tin pail,
-having succeeded at length in overtaking the boat; and in reply to the
-question, where he has been asleep all day, pulls out from his bosom
-nine small fish as a peace-offering. He was put off at sunrise to get
-milk for breakfast. What a happy-go-lucky country it is.
-
-After sundown, the crew, who have worked hard all day, on and off,
-tacking, poling, and shifting sail, get their supper round an open fire
-on deck, take each some whiffs from the “hubble-bubble,” and, as we sail
-out over the broad, smooth water, sing a rude and plaintive melody to
-the subdued thump of the darabooka. Towards dark, as we are about to
-tie up, the wind, which had failed, rises, and we voyage on, the waves
-rippling against the sides in a delicious lullaby. The air is soft, the
-moon is full and peeps out from the light clouds which obscure the sky
-and prevent dew.
-
-The dragoman asleep on the cabin deck, the reïs crouched, attentive of
-the course, near him, part of the sailors grouped about the bow in low
-chat, and part asleep in the shadow of the sail, we voyage along under
-the wide night, still to the south and warmer skies, and seem to be
-sailing through an enchanted land.
-
-Put not your trust in breezes. The morning finds us still a dozen miles
-from Asioot where we desire to celebrate Christmas; we just move with
-sails up, and the crew poling. The head-man chants a line or throws out
-a word, and the rest come in with a chorus, as they walk along, bending
-the shoulder to the pole. The leader—the “shanty man” the English
-sailors call their leader, from the French chanter I suppose—ejaculates
-a phrase, sometimes prolonging it, or dwelling on it with a variation,
-like “O! Mohammed!” or “O! Howadji!” or some scraps from a love-song,
-and the men strike in in chorus: “Hâ Yàlësah, hâ Yâlësah,” a response
-that the boatmen have used for hundreds of years.
-
-We sail leisurely past a large mud-village dropped in a splendid grove
-of palms and acacias. The scene is very poetical before details are
-inspected, and the groves, we think, ought to be the home of refinement
-and luxury. Men are building a boat under the long arcade of trees,
-women are stooping with the eternal water-jars which do not appear
-to retain fluid any better than the sieves of the Danaïdes, and naked
-children run along the bank crying “Backsheesh, O Howadji.” Our shot-gun
-brings down a pigeon-hawk close to the shore. A boy plunges in and gets
-it, handing it to us on deck from the bank, but not relinquishing his
-hold with one hand until he feels the half-piastre in the other. So
-early is distrust planted in the human breast.
-
-Getting away from this idyllic scene, which has not a single resemblance
-to any civilized town, we work our way up to El Hamra late in the
-afternoon. This is the landing-place for Asioot; the city itself is a
-couple of miles inland, and could be reached by a canal at high water.
-We have come again into an active world, and there are evidences that
-this is a busy place. New boats are on the stocks, and there is a forge
-for making some sort of machinery. So much life has not been met with
-since we left Cairo. The furling our great sail is a fine sight as
-we round in to the bank, the sailors crawling out on the slender,
-hundred-feet-long yard, like monkeys, and drawing up the hanging slack
-with both feet and hands.
-
-It is long since we have seen so many or so gaily dressed people as are
-moving on shore; a procession of camels passes along; crowds of donkeys
-are pushed down to the boat by their noisy drivers; old women come to
-sell eggs, and white grease that pretends to be butter, and one of them
-pulls some live pigeons from a bag. We lie at the mud-bank, and classes
-of half-clad children, squatting in the sand, study us. Two other
-dahabeëhs are moored near us, their passengers sitting under the awning
-and indolently observing the novel scene, book in hand, after the manner
-of Nile voyagers.
-
-These are the pictures constantly recurring on the river, only they are
-never the same in grouping or color, and they never weary one. It is
-wonderful, indeed, how satisfying the Nile is in itself and how little
-effort travelers make for the society of each other. Boats pass or meet
-and exchange salutes, but with little more effusion than if they were
-on the Thames. Nothing afloat is so much like a private house as
-a dahabeëh, and I should think, by what we hear, that sociability
-decreases on the Nile with increase of travel and luxury.
-
-
-
-0166
-
-
-
-0167
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XII.—SPENDING CHRISTMAS ON THE NILE.
-
-PROBABLY this present writer has the distinction of being the only
-one who has written about the Nile and has not invented a new way of
-spelling the name of the town whose many minarets and brown roofs are
-visible over the meadows.
-
-It is written Asioot, Asyoot, Asiüt, Ssout, Siôout, Osyoot, Osioot,
-O'Sioôt, Siüt, Sioot, O'siout, Si-ôôt, Siout, Syouth, and so on,
-indefinitely. People take the liberty to spell names as they sound to
-them, and there is consequently a pleasing variety in the names of all
-places, persons, and things in Egypt; and when we add to the many ways
-of spelling an Arabic word, the French the German, and the English
-translation or equivalent, you are in a hopeless jumble of nomenclature.
-The only course is to strike out boldly and spell everything as it seems
-good in your eyes, and differently in different moods. Even the name of
-the Prophet takes on half a dozen forms; there are not only ninety-nine
-names of the attributes of God, but I presume there are ninety-nine ways
-of spelling each of them.
-
-This Asioot has always been a place of importance. It was of old called
-Lycopolis, its divinity being the wolf or the wolf-headed god; and in
-a rock-mountain behind the town were not only cut the tombs of the
-inhabitants, but there were deposited the mummies of the sacred wolves.
-About these no one in Asioot knows or cares much, to day. It is a
-city of twenty-five thousand people, with a good many thriving Copt
-Christians; the terminus, to day, of the railway, and the point of
-arrival and departure of the caravans to and from Darfoor—a desert march
-of a month. Here are made the best clay pipe-bowls in Egypt, and a great
-variety of ornamented dishes and vases in clay, which the traveler buys
-and doesn't know what to do with. The artisans also work up elephants'
-tusks and ostrich feathers into a variety of “notions.”
-
-Christmas day opens warm and with an air of festivity. Great
-palm-branches are planted along the bank and form an arbor over the
-gang-plank. The cabin is set with them, in gothic arches over windows
-and doors, with yellow oranges at the apex. The forward and saloon
-decks are completely embowered in palms, which also run up the masts and
-spars. The crew have entered with zeal into the decoration, and in the
-early morning transformed the boat into a floating bower of greenery;
-the effect is Oriental, but it is difficult to believe that this is
-really Christmas day. The weather is not right, for one thing. It is
-singularly pleasant, in fact like summer. We miss the usual snow and ice
-and the hurtling of savage winds that bring suffering to the poor and
-make charity meritorious. Besides, the Moslems are celebrating the day
-for us and, I fear, regarding it simply as an occasion of backsheesh.
-The sailors are very quick to understand so much of our religion as is
-profitable to themselves.
-
-In such weather as this it would be possible for “shepherds to watch
-their flocks by night.”
-
-Early in the day we have a visit from Wasef el Khyat, the American
-consul here for many years, a Copt and a native of Asioot, who speaks
-only Arabic; he is accompanied by one of his sons, who was educated at
-the American college in Beyrout. So far does that excellent institution
-send its light; scattered rays to be sure, but it is from it and such
-schools that the East is getting the real impetus of civilization.
-
-I do not know what the consul at Asioot does for America, but our flag
-is of great service to him, protecting his property from the exactions
-of his own government. Wasef is consequently very polite to all
-Americans, and while he sipped coffee and puffed cigars in our cabin he
-smiled unutterable things. This is the pleasantest kind of intercourse
-in a warm climate, where a puff and an occasional smile will pass for
-profuse expressions of social enjoyment.
-
-His excellency Shakirr Pasha, the governor of this large and rich
-province, has sent word that he is about to put carriages and donkeys at
-our disposal, but this probably meant that the consul would do it; and
-the consul has done it. The carriage awaits us on the bank. It is a
-high, paneled, venerable ark, that moves with trembling dignity; and
-we choose the donkeys as less pretentious and less liable to come to
-pieces. This is no doubt the only carriage between Cairo and Kartoom,
-and its appearance is regarded as an event.
-
-Our first visit is paid to the Pasha, who has been only a few days in
-his province, and has not yet transferred his harem from Cairo. We are
-received with distinguished ceremony, to the lively satisfaction of
-Abd-el-Atti, whose face beams like the morning, in bringing together
-such “distinguish” people as his friend the Pasha, and travelers in his
-charge. The Pasha is a courtly Turk, of most elegant manners, and the
-simplicity of high breeding, a man of the world and one of the ablest
-governors in Egypt. The room into which we are ushered, through a dirty
-alley and a mud-wall court is hardly in keeping with the social stilts
-on which we are all walking. In our own less favored land, it would
-answer very well for a shed or an out-house to store beans in, or for
-a “reception room” for sheep; a narrow oblong apartment, covered with a
-flat roof of palm logs, with a couple of dirty little windows high up,
-the once whitewashed walls stained variously, the cheap divans soiled.
-
-The hospitality of this gorgeous salon was offered us with effusion, and
-we sat down and exchanged compliments as if we had been in a palace.
-I am convinced that there is nothing like the Oriental imagination. An
-attendant (and the servants were in keeping with the premises) brought
-in fingans of coffee. The servant presents the cup in his right hand,
-holding the bottom of the silver receptacle in his thumb and finger;
-he takes it away empty with both hands, placing the left under and the
-right on top of it. These formalities are universal and all-important.
-Before taking it you ought to make the salutation, by touching breast,
-lips, and forehead, with the right hand—an acknowledgment not to the
-servant but to the master. Cigars are then handed round, for it is
-getting to be considered on the Nile that cigars are more “swell” than
-pipes; more's the pity.
-
-The exchange of compliments meantime went on, and on the part of
-the Pasha with a fineness, adroitness, and readiness that showed the
-practice of a lifetime in social fence. He surpassed our most daring
-invention with a smiling ease, and topped all our extravagances with an
-art that made our pool efforts appear clumsy. And what the effect would
-have been if we could have understood the flowery Arabic I can only
-guess; nor can we ever know how many flowers of his own the dragoman
-cast in.
-
-“His excellency say that he feel the honor of your visit.”
-
-“Say to his excellency that although we are only spending one day in
-his beautiful capital, we could not forego the-pleasure of paying our
-respects to his excellency.” This sentence is built by the critic, and
-strikes us all favorably.
-
-“His excellency himself not been here many days, and sorry he not know
-you coming, to make some preparations to receive you.”
-
-“Thank his excellency for the palms that decorate our boat.”
-
-“They are nothing, nothing, he say not mention it; the dahabeëh look
-very different now if the Nile last summer had not wash away all his
-flower-garden. His excellency say, how you enjoyed your voyage?”
-
-“It has been very pleasant; only for a day or two we have wanted wind.”
-
-“Your misfortune, his excellency say, his pleasure; it give him the
-opportunity of your society. But he say if you want wind he sorry no
-wind; it cause him to suffer that you not come here sooner.”
-
-“Will his excellency dine with us to-day?”
-
-“He say he think it too much honor.”
-
-“Assure his excellency that we feel that the honor is conferred by him.”
-
-And he consents to come. After we have taken our leave, the invitation
-is extended to the consul, who is riding with us.
-
-The way to the town is along a winding, shabby embankment, raised above
-high water, and shaded with sycamore-trees. It is lively with people on
-foot and on donkeys, in more colored and richer dress than that worn
-by country-people; the fields are green, the clover is springing
-luxuriantly, and spite of the wrecks of unburned-brick houses, left
-gaping by the last flood, and spite of the general untidiness of
-everything, the ride is enjoyable. I don't know why it is that an
-irrigated country never is pleasing on close inspection, neither is an
-irrigated garden. Both need to be seen from a little distance, which
-conceals the rawness of the alternately dry and soaked soil, the
-frequent thinness of vegetation, the unkempt swampy appearance of the
-lowest levels, and the painful whiteness of paths never wet and the
-dustiness of trees unwashed by rain. There is no Egyptian landscape or
-village that is neat, on near inspection.
-
-Asioot has a better entrance than most towns, through an old gateway
-into the square (which is the court of the palace); and the town has
-extensive bazaars and some large dwellings. But as we ride through it,
-we are always hemmed in by mud-walls, twisting through narrow alleys,
-encountering dirt and poverty at every step. We pass through the quarter
-of the Ghawâzees, who, since their banishment from Cairo, form little
-colonies in all the large Nile towns. There are the dancing-women whom
-travelers are so desirous of seeing; the finest-looking women and the
-most abandoned courtesans, says Mr. Lane, in Egypt. In showy dresses
-of bright yellow and red, adorned with a profusion of silver-gilt
-necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, they sit at the doors of their
-hovels in idle expectation. If these happen to be the finest-looking
-women in Egypt, the others are wise in keeping their veils on.
-
-Outside the town we find a very pretty cemetery of the Egyptian style,
-staring white tombs, each dead person resting under his own private
-little stucco oven. Near it is encamped a caravan just in from Darfoor,
-bringing cinnamon, gum-arabic, tusks, and ostrich feathers. The camels
-are worn with the journey; their drivers have a fierce and free air in
-striking contrast with the bearing of the fellaheen. Their noses are
-straight, their black hair is long and shaggy, their garment is a single
-piece of coarse brown cloth; they have the wildness of the desert.
-
-The soft limestone ledge back of the town is honeycombed with grottoes
-and tombs; rising in tiers from the bottom to the top. Some of them have
-merely square-cut entrances into a chamber of moderate size, in some
-part of which, or in a passage beyond, is a pit cut ten or twenty
-feet deep in the rock, like a grave, for the mummy. One of them has a
-magnificent entrance through a doorway over thirty feet high and fifteen
-deep; upon the jambs are gigantic figures cut in the rock. Some of
-the chambers are vast and were once pillared, and may have served for
-dwellings. These excavations are very old. The hieroglyphics and figures
-on the walls are not in relief on the stone, but cut in at the outer
-edge and left in a gradual swell in the center—an intaglio relievato.
-The drawing is generally spirited, and the figures show knowledge of
-form and artistic skill. It is wonderful that such purely conventional
-figures, the head almost always in profile and the shoulders square
-to the front, can be so expressive. On one wall is a body of infantry
-marching, with the long pointed shields mentioned by Xenophon in
-describing Egyptian troops. Everywhere are birds, gracefully drawn
-and true to species, and upon some of them the blue color is fresh.
-A ceiling of one grotto is wrought in ornamental squares—a “Greek
-pattern,” executed long before the time of the Greeks. Here we find
-two figures with the full face turned towards us, instead of the usual
-profile.
-
-These tombs have served for a variety of purposes. As long as the
-original occupants rested here, no doubt their friends came and feasted
-and were mournfully merry in these sightly chambers overlooking the
-Nile. Long after they were turned out, Christian hermits nested in them,
-during that extraordinary period of superstition when men thought they
-could best secure their salvation by living like wild beasts in the
-deserts of Africa. Here one John of Lycopolis had his den, in which he
-stayed fifty years, without ever opening the door or seeing the face
-of a woman. At least, he enjoyed that reputation. Later, persecuted
-Christians dwelt in these tombs, and after them have come wanderers, and
-jackals, and houseless Arabs. I think I should rather live here than in
-Asioot; the tombs are cleaner and better built than the houses of the
-town, and there is good air here and no danger of floods.
-
-When we are on the top of the bluff, the desert in broken ridges is
-behind us. The view is one of the best of the usual views from hills
-near the Nile, the elements of which are similar; the spectator has
-Egypt in all its variety at his feet. The valley here is broad, and we
-look a long distance up and down the river. The Nile twists and turns in
-its bed like one of the chimerical serpents sculptured in the chambers
-of the dead; canals wander from it through the plain; and groves of
-palms and lines of sycamores contrast their green with that of the
-fields. All this level expanse is now covered with wheat, barley and
-thick clover, and the green has a vividness that we have never seen in
-vegetation before. This owes somewhat to the brown contrast near at hand
-and something maybe to the atmosphere, but I think the growing grain has
-a lustre unknown to other lands. This smiling picture is enclosed by
-the savage frame of the desert, gaunt ridges of rocky hills, drifts of
-stones, and yellow sand that sends its hot tongues in long darts into
-the plain. At the foot of the mountain lies Asioot brown as the mud of
-the Nile, a city built of sun-dried bricks, but presenting a singular
-and not unpleasing appearance on account of the dozen white stone
-minarets, some of them worked like lace, which spring out of it.
-
-The consul's home is one of the best in the city, but outside it shows
-only a mud-wall like the meanest. Within is a paved court, and offices
-about it; the rooms above are large, many-windowed, darkened with
-blinds, and not unlike those of a plain house in America. The furniture
-is European mainly, and ugly, and of course out of place in Africa. We
-see only the male members of the family. Confectionery and coffee are
-served and some champagne, that must have been made by the Peninsular
-and Oriental Steamship Company; their champagne is well known in the
-Levant, and there is no known decoction that is like it. In my judgment,
-if it is proposed to introduce Christianity and that kind of wine into
-Egypt, the country would better be left as it is.
-
-During our call the consul presents us fly-whisks with ivory handles,
-and gives the ladies beautiful fans of ostrich feathers mounted in
-ivory. These presents may have been due to a broad hint from the Pasha,
-who said to the consul at our interview in the morning:—
-
-“I should not like to have these distinguished strangers go away without
-some remembrance of Asioot. I have not been here long; what is there to
-get for them?”
-
-“O, your excellency, I will attend to that,” said the consul.
-
-In the evening, with the dahabeëh beautifully decorated and hung with
-colored lanterns, upon the deck, which, shut in with canvas and spread
-with Turkish rugs, was a fine reception-room, we awaited our guests,
-as if we had been accustomed to this sort of thing in America from our
-infancy, and as if we usually celebrated Christmas outdoors, fans in
-hand, with fire-works. A stand for the exhibition of fireworks had been
-erected on shore. The Pasha was received as he stepped on board, with
-three rockets, (that being, I suppose, the number of his official
-“tails,”) which flew up into the sky and scattered their bursting bombs
-of color amid the stars, announcing to the English dahabeëhs, the two
-steamboats and the town of Asioot, that the governor of the richest
-province in Egypt was about to eat his dinner.
-
-The dinner was one of those perfections that one likes to speak of only
-in confidential moments to dear friends. It wanted nothing either in
-number of courses or in variety, in meats, in confections, in pyramids
-of gorgeous construction, in fruits and flowers. There was something
-touching about the lamb roasted whole, reclining his head on his own
-shoulder. There was something tender about the turkey. There was a
-terrible moment when the plum-pudding was borne in on fire, as if it
-had been a present from the devil himself. The Pasha regarded it with
-distrust, and declined, like a wise man, to eat flame. I fear that the
-English have fairly introduced this dreadful dish into the Orient, and
-that the natives have come to think that all foreigners are Molochs who
-can best be pleased by offering up to them its indigestible ball set on
-fire of H. It is a fearful spectacle to see this heathen people offering
-this incense to a foreign idol, in the subserviency which will sacrifice
-even religion to backsheesh.
-
-The conversation during dinner is mostly an exchange of compliments,
-in the art of which the Pasha is a master, displaying in it a wit,
-a variety of resource and a courtliness that make the game a very
-entertaining one. The Arabic language gives full play to this sort of
-social espièglerie, and lends a delicacy to encounters of compliment
-which the English language does not admit.
-
-Coffee and pipes are served on deck, and the fire-works begin to
-tear and astonish the night. The Khedive certainly employs very good
-pyrotechnists, and the display by Abd-el-Atti and his equally excited
-helpers although simple is brilliant. The intense delight that the
-soaring and bursting of a rocket give to Abd-el-Atti is expressed in
-unconscious and unrestrained demonstration. He might be himself in
-flames but he would watch the flight of the rushing stream of fire,
-jumping up and down in his anxiety for it to burst:—
-
-“There! there! that's—a he, hooray!”
-
-Every time one bursts, scattering its colored stars, the crew, led by
-the dragoman, cheer, “Heep, heep, hooray! heep, heep, hooray!”
-
-A whirligig spins upon the river, spouting balls of fire, and the crew
-come in with a “Heep, heep, hooray! heep, heep, hooray!”
-
-The steamer, which has a Belgian prince on board, illuminates, and
-salutes with shot-guns. In the midst of a fusillade of rockets and
-Roman candles, the crew develop a new accomplishment. Drilled by the
-indomitable master of ceremonies, they attempt the first line of that
-distinctively American melody,
-
-
-“We won't go home till morning.”
-
-
-They really catch the air, and make a bubble, bubble of sounds, like
-automata, that somewhat resembles the words. Probably they think that
-it is our national anthem, or perhaps a Christmas hymn. No doubt,
-“won't-go-home-till-morning” sort of Americans have been up the river
-before us.
-
-The show is not over when the Pasha pleads an engagement to take a
-cup of tea with the Belgian prince, and asks permission to retire. He
-expresses his anguish at leaving us, and he will not depart if we
-say “no.” Of course, our anguish in letting the Pasha go exceeds his
-suffering in going, but we sacrifice ourselves to the demand of his
-station, and permit him to depart. At the foot of the cabin stairs he
-begs us to go no further, insisting that we do him too much honor to
-come so far.
-
-The soft night grows more brilliant. Abd-el-Atti and his minions are
-still blazing away. The consul declares that Asioot in all his life
-has never experienced a night like this. We express ourselves as humbly
-thankful in being the instruments of giving Asioot (which is asleep
-there two miles off) such an “eye-opener.” (This remark has a finer
-sound when translated into Arabic.)
-
-The spectacle closes by a voyage out upon the swift river in the sandal.
-We take Roman candles, blue, red, and green lights and floaters which
-Abd-el-Atti lets off, while the crew hoarsely roar, “We won't go home
-till morning,” and mingle “Heep, heep, hooray,” with “Hà Yàlësah, hâ
-Yâlësah.”
-
-The long range of lights on the steamers, the flashing lines and
-pyramids of colors on our own dahabeëh, the soft June-like night, the
-moon coming up in fleecy clouds, the broad Nile sparkling under so many
-fires, kindled on earth and in the sky, made a scene unique, and as
-beautiful as any that the Arabian Nights suggest.
-
-To end all, there was a hubbub on shore among the crew, caused by one of
-them who was crazy with hasheesh, and threatened to murder the reïs
-and dragoman, if he was not permitted to go on board. It could be
-demonstrated that he was less likely to slay them if he did not come on
-board, and he was therefore sent to the governor's lock-up, with a fair
-prospect of going into the Khedive's army. We left him behind, and about
-one o'clock in the morning stole away up the river with a gentle and
-growing breeze.
-
-Net result of pleasure:—one man in jail, and Abd-el-Atti's wrist so
-seriously burned by the fire-works, that he has no use of his arm for
-weeks. But, “'twas a glorious victory.” For a Christmas, however, it was
-a little too much like the Fourth of July.
-
-
-
-0177
-
-
-
-0178
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIII.—SIGHTS AND SCENES ON THE RIVER.
-
-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.
-
-
-
-0185
-
-
-
-0186
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIV.—MIDWINTER IN EGYPT.
-
-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.
-
-
-
-0196
-
-
-
-0197
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XV.—AMONG THE RUINS OF THEBES.
-
-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.
-
-
-
-0203
-
-
-
-02004
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVI.—HISTORY IN STONE.
-
-IT NEVER rains at Thebes; you begin with that fact. But everybody is
-anxious to have it rain, so that he can say, “It rained when I was at
-Thebes, for the first time in four thousand years.”
-
-It has not rained for four thousand years, and the evidence of this
-is that no representation of rain is found in any of the sculptures on
-temples or monuments; and all Egyptologists know that what is not found
-thus represented has had no existence.
-
-To-day, it rained for the first time in four thousand years The
-circumstances were these. We were crossing at sunset from the west side
-to the island, in a nasty little ferry, built like a canal-barge, its
-depths being full of all uncleanliness and smell—donkeys, peasants, and
-camels using it for crossing. (The getting of a camel in and out of such
-a deep trough is a work of time and considerable pounding and roaring
-of beast and men.) The boat was propelled by two half-clad, handsome,
-laughing Egyptian boys, who rowed with some crooked limbs of trees, and
-sang “Hà! Yâlesah,” and “Yah! Mohammed” as they stood and pulled the
-unwieldy oars.
-
-We were standing, above the reek, on a loose platform of sticks at the
-stern, when my comrade said, “It rains, I think I felt a drop on my
-hand.”
-
-“It can't be,” I said, “it has not rained here in four thousand years;”
-and I extended my hand. I felt nothing. And yet I could not swear that a
-drop or two did not fall into the river.
-
-It had that appearance, nearly. And we have seen no flies skipping on
-the Nile at this season.
-
-In the sculpture we remember that the king is often represented
-extending his hand. He would not put it out for nothing, for everything
-done anciently in Egypt, every scratch on a rock, has a deep and
-profound meaning. Pharaoh is in the attitude of fearing that it is going
-to rain. Perhaps it did rain last night. At any rate, there were light
-clouds over the sky.
-
-The morning opens with a cool west wind, which increases and whirls the
-sand in great clouds over the Libyan side of the river, and envelopes
-Luxor in its dry storm. Luxor is for the most part a collection of
-miserable mud-hovels on a low ridge, with the half-buried temple for a
-nucleus, and a few houses of a better sort along the bank, from which
-float the consular flags.
-
-The inhabitants of Luxor live upon the winter travelers. Sometimes a
-dozen or twenty gay dahabeëhs and several steamboats are moored here,
-and the town assumes the appearance of a fashionable watering-place. It
-is the best place on the river on the whole, considering its attractions
-for scholars and sightseers, to spend the winter, and I have no doubt it
-would be a great resort if it had any accommodations for visitors. But
-it has not; the stranger must live in his boat. There is not indeed in
-the whole land of Egypt above Cairo such a thing as an inn; scarcely
-a refuge where a clean Christian, who wishes to keep clean, can pass
-a night, unless it be in the house of some governor or a palace of the
-Khedive. The perfection of the world's climate in winter is, to be
-sure, higher up, in Nubia; but that of Thebes is good enough for people
-accustomed to Europe and New England. With steamboats making regular
-trips and a railroad crawling up the river, there is certain to be the
-Rameses Hotel at Thebes before long, and its rival a Thothmes House;
-together with the Mummy Restaurant, and the Scarabæus Saloon.
-
-You need two or three weeks to see properly the ruins of Thebes, though
-Cook's “personally conducted tourists” do it in four days, and have a
-soiree of the dancing-girls besides. The region to be traveled over
-is not only vast (Strabo says the city was nine miles long) but it
-is exceedingly difficult getting about, and fatiguing, if haste is
-necessary. Crossing the swift Nile in a sandal takes time; you must wade
-or be carried over shallows to the island beach; there is a weary walk
-or ride over this; another stream is to be crossed, and then begins
-the work of the day. You set out with a cavalcade of mules, servants,
-water-carriers, and a retinue of hungry, begging Arabs, over the fields
-and through the desert to the temples and tombs. The distances are long,
-the sand is glaring, the incandescent sun is reflected in hot waves from
-the burning Libyan chain. It requires hours to master the plan of a vast
-temple in its ruins, and days to follow out the story of the wonderful
-people who built it, in its marvelous sculptures—acres of inside and
-outside walls of picture cut in stone.
-
-Perhaps the easiest way of passing the time in an ancient ruin was that
-of two Americans, who used to spread their rugs in some shady court, and
-sit there, drinking brandy and champagne all day, letting the ancient
-civilization gradually reconstruct itself in their brains.
-
-Life on the dahabeëh is much as usual; in fact, we are only waiting
-a favorable wind to pursue our voyage, expecting to see Thebes
-satisfactorily on our return. Of the inhabitants and social life of
-Luxor, we shall have more to say by and by. We have daily a levee of
-idlers on the bank, who spend twilight hours in watching the boat; we
-are visited by sharp-eyed dealers in antiquities, who pull out strings
-of scarabæi from their bosoms, or cautiously produce from under their
-gowns a sculptured tablet, or a stone image, or some articles from
-a mummy-case—antiques really as good as new. Abd-el-Atti sits on the
-forward-deck cheapening the poor chickens with old women, and surrounded
-by an admiring group of Arab friends, who sit all day smoking and
-sipping coffee, and kept in a lively enjoyment by his interminable
-facetiae and badinage.
-
-Our most illustrious visitors are the American consul, Ali Effendi
-Noorad, and the English consul, Mustapha Aga. Ali is a well-featured,
-bronze-complexioned Arab of good family (I think of the Ababdehs), whose
-brother is Sheykh of a tribe at Karnak.
-
-He cannot speak English, but he has a pleasanter smile than any other
-American consul I know. Mustapha, now very old and well known to all
-Nile travelers, is a venerable wise man of the East, a most suave,
-courtly Arab, plausible, and soft of speech; under his bushy eyebrows
-one sees eyes that are keen and yet glazed with a film of secrecy; the
-sort of eye that you cannot look into, but which you have no doubt looks
-into you.
-
-Mustapha, as I said, built his house between two columns of the temple
-of Luxor. These magnificent columns, with flaring lotus capitals, are
-half-buried in sand, and the whole area is so built in and over by Arab
-habitations that little of the once extensive and splendid structure
-can be seen. Indeed, the visitor will do well to be content with the
-well-known poetic view of the columns from the river. The elegant
-obelisk, whose mate is in Paris, must however be seen, as well as the
-statues of Rameses II. sitting behind it up to their necks in sand—as if
-a sitz-bath had been prescribed. I went one day into the interior of the
-huts, in order to look at some of the sculptures, especially that of a
-king's chariot which is shaded by a parasol—an article which we invented
-three or four thousand years after the Egyptians, who first used it, had
-gone to the shades where parasols are useless. I was sorry that I went.
-The private house I entered was a mud enclosure with a creaky wooden
-door. Opening this I found myself in what appeared to be a private
-hen-yard, where babies, chickens, old women, straw, flies, and dust,
-mingled with the odors of antiquity; about this were the rooms in which
-the family sleep—mere dog-kennels. Two of the women had nose-rings put
-through the right nostril, hoops of gold two or three inches across. I
-cannot say that a nose-ring adds to a woman's beauty, but if I had to
-manage a harem of these sharp-tongued creatures I should want rings in
-their noses—it would need only a slight pull of the cord in the ring to
-cause the woman to cry, in Oriental language, “where thou goest, I will
-go.” The parasol sculpture was half-covered by the mud-wall and the
-oven; but there was Pharaoh visible, riding on in glory through all this
-squalor. The Pharaohs and priests never let one of the common people
-set foot inside these superb temples; and there is a sort of base
-satisfaction now! in seeing the ignorant and oppressed living in their
-palaces, and letting the hens roost on Pharaoh's sun-shade. But it was
-difficult to make picturesque the inside of this temple-palace, even
-with all the flowing rags of its occupants.
-
-We spend a day in a preliminary visit to the Memnonium and the vast
-ruins known as those of Medeenet Hâboo. Among our attendants over the
-plain are half a dozen little girls, bright, smiling lasses, who salute
-us with a cheery “Good morning,” and devote themselves to us the whole
-day. Each one carries on her head a light, thin water-koolleh, that
-would hold about a quart, balancing it perfectly as she runs along.
-I have seen mere infants carrying very small koollehs, beginning thus
-young to learn the art of walking with the large ones, which is to be
-the chief business of their lives.
-
-One of the girls, who says her name is Fatimeh (the name of the
-Prophet's favorite daughter is in great request), is very pretty, and
-may be ten or eleven years old, not far from the marriageable age. She
-has black hair, large, soft, black eyes, the lids stained with kohl,
-dazzling white teeth and a sweet smile. She wears cheap earrings,
-a necklace of beads and metal, and a slight ring on one hand; her
-finger-nails and the palms of her little hands are stained with henna.
-For dress she has a sort of shawl used as a head-veil, and an ample
-outer-garment, a mantle of dark-blue cotton, ornamented down the front
-seams with colored beads—a coquettish touch that connects her with her
-sisters of the ancient régime who seem to have used the cylindrical
-blue bead even more profusely than ladies now-a-day the jet “bugles,”
-in dress trimming. I fear the pretty heathen is beginning to be aware of
-her attractions.
-
-The girls run patiently beside us or wait for us at the temples all day,
-bruising their feet on the stony ways, getting nothing to eat unless we
-give them something, chatting cheerfully, smiling at us and using their
-little stock of English to gain our good will, constantly ready with
-their koollehs, and say nothing of backsheesh until they are about to
-leave us at night and go to their homes. But when they begin to ask, and
-get a copper or two, they beg with a mixture of pathos and anxiety and a
-use of the pronouns that is irresistible.
-
-“You tired. Plenty backsheesh for little girl. Yes.”
-
-“Why don't you give us backsheesh? We are tired too,” we reply.
-
-“Yes. Me give you backsheesh you tired all day.”
-
-Fatimeh only uses her eyes, conscious already of her power. They are
-satisfied with a piastre; which the dragoman says is too much, and
-enough to spoil them. But, after all, five cents is not a magnificent
-gift, from a stranger who has come five thousand miles, to a little girl
-in the heart of Africa, who has lighted up the desert a whole day with
-her charming smiles!
-
-The donkey-boy pulls the strings of pathos for his backsheesh, having
-no beauty to use; he says, “Father and mother all dead.” Seems to have
-belonged to a harem.
-
-Before we can gain space or quiet either to examine or enjoy a temple,
-we have to free ourselves of a crowd of adhesive men, boys, and girls,
-who press upon us their curiosities, relics of the dead, whose only
-value is their antiquity. The price of these relics is of course wholly
-“fancy,” and I presume that Thebes, where the influence of the antique
-is most strong, is the best market in the world for these trifles; and
-that however cheaply they may be bought here, they fetch a better price
-than they would elsewhere.
-
-I suppose if I were to stand in Broadway and offer passers-by such
-a mummy's hand as this which is now pressed upon my notice, I could
-scarcely give it away. This hand has been “doctored” to sell; the
-present owner has re-wrapped its bitumen-soaked flesh in mummy-cloth,
-and partially concealed three rings on the fingers. Of course the hand
-is old and the cheap rings are new. It is pleasant to think of these
-merchants in dried flesh prowling about among the dead, selecting a limb
-here and there that they think will decorate well, and tricking out with
-cheap jewelry these mortal fragments. This hand, which the rascal has
-chosen, is small, and may have been a source of pride to its owner
-long ago; somebody else may have been fond of it, though even he—the
-lover—would not care to hold it long now. A pretty little hand; I
-suppose it has in its better days given many a caress and love-pat, and
-many a slap in the face; belonged to one of the people, or it would
-not have been found in a common mummy-pit; perhaps the hand of a sweet
-water-bearer like Fatimeh, perhaps of some slave-girl whose fatal beauty
-threw her into the drag-net that the Pharaohs occasionally cast along
-the Upper Nile—slave-hunting raids that appear on the monuments as great
-military achievements. This hand, naked, supple, dimpled, henna-tipped,
-may have been offered for nothing once; there are wanted for it four
-piastres now, rings and all. A dear little hand!
-
-Great quantities of antique beads are offered us in strings, to one end
-of which is usually tied a small image of Osiris, or the winged sun, or
-the scarabæus with wings. The inexhaustible supply of these beads
-and images leads many to think that they are manufactured to suit the
-demand. But it is not so. Their blue is of a shade that is not produced
-now-a-days. And, besides, there is no need to manufacture what exists
-in the mummy-pits in such abundance. The beads and bugles are of glass;
-they were much used for necklaces and are found covering the breasts of
-mummies, woven in a network of various patterns, like old bead purses.
-The vivid blue color was given by copper.
-
-The little blue images of Osiris which are so abundant are also genuine.
-They are of porcelain, a sort of porcelain-glass, a sand-paste, glazed,
-colored blue, and baked. They are found in great quantities in all
-tombs; and it was the Egyptian practice to thickly strew with them the
-ground upon which the foundations and floors of temples were laid. These
-images found in tombs are more properly figures of the dead under the
-form of Osiris, and the hieroglyphics on them sometimes give the name
-and quality of the departed. They are in fact a sort of “p.p. c.”
-visiting-card, which the mummy has left for future ages. The Egyptians
-succeeded in handing themselves down to posterity; but the manner in
-which posterity has received them is not encouraging to us to salt
-ourselves down for another age.
-
-The Memnonium, or more properly Rameseum, since it was built by Rameses
-II., and covered with his deeds, writ in stone, gives you even in
-its ruins a very good idea of one of the most symmetrical of Egyptian
-temples; the vast columns of its great hall attest its magnificence,
-while the elaboration of its sculpture, wanting the classic purity of
-the earlier work found in the tombs of Geezeh and Sakkara, speaks of a
-time when art was greatly stimulated by royal patronage.
-
-It was the practice of the Pharaohs when they came to the throne to make
-one or more military expeditions of conquest and plunder, slay as many
-enemies as possible (all people being considered “enemies” who did not
-pay tribute), cut as wide a swarth of desolation over the earth as they
-were able, loot the cities, drag into captivity the pleasing women,
-and return laden with treasure and slaves and the evidences of enlarged
-dominion. Then they spent the remainder of their virtuous days in
-erecting huge temples and chiseling their exploits on them. This is, in
-a word, the history of the Pharaohs.
-
-But I think that Rameses II., who was the handsomest and most conceited
-swell of them all, was not so particular about doing the deeds as he was
-about recording them. He could not have done much else in his long reign
-than erect the temples, carve the hieroglyphics, and set up the statues
-of himself, which proclaim his fame. He literally spread himself all
-over Egypt, and must have kept the whole country busy, quarrying, and
-building, and carving for his glorification. That he did a tenth of the
-deeds he is represented performing, no one believes now; and I take a
-vindictive pleasure in abusing him. By some historic fatality he got
-the name of the Great Sesostris, and was by tradition credited with the
-exploits of Thothmes III., the greatest of the Pharaohs, a real hero and
-statesman, during whose reign it was no boast to say that Egypt “placed
-her frontier where it pleased herself,” and with those of his father
-Sethi I., a usurper in the line, but a great soldier.
-
-However, this Rameses did not have good luck with his gigantic statues;
-I do not know one that is not shattered, defaced, or thrown down. This
-one at the Rameseum is only a wreck of gigantic fragments. It was a
-monolith of syenite, and if it was the largest statue in Egypt, as it
-is said, it must have been over sixty feet high. The arithmeticians
-say that it weighed about eight hundred and eighty-seven tons, having a
-solid content of three times the largest obelisk in the world, that at
-Karnak. These figures convey no idea to my mind. When a stone man is as
-big as a four-story house, I cease to grasp him. I climbed upon the arm
-of this Rameses, and found his name cut deeply in the hard granite,
-the cutting polished to the very bottom like the finest intaglio. The
-polishing alone of this great mass must have been an incredible labor.
-How was it moved from its quarry in Assouan, a hundred and thirty miles
-distant? And how was it broken into the thousand fragments in which it
-lies? An earthquake would not do it. There are no marks of drilling or
-the use of an explosive material. But if Cambyses broke it—and Cambyses
-must have been remembered in Egypt as Napoleon I. is in Italy, the one
-for smashing, the other for stealing—he had something as destructive as
-nitro-glycerine.
-
-Rameses II. impressed into his service not only art but literature.
-One of his achievements depicted here is his victory over the Khitas
-(Hittites), an Asiatic tribe; the king is in the single-handed act of
-driving the enemy over the river Orontes,—a bluish streak meandering
-down the wall. This scene is the subject of a famous poem, known as
-the Poem of Pentaour, which is carved in hieroglyphics at Karnak and
-at Luxor. The battle is very spiritedly depicted here. On the walls are
-many side-scenes and acts characteristic of the age and the people. The
-booty from the enemy is collected in a heap; and the quantity of gold
-is indicated by the size of a bag of it which is breaking the back of
-an ass; a soldier is pulling the beard of his prisoner, and another is
-beating his captives, after the brutal manner of the Egyptians.
-
-The temples at Medeenet Haboo are to me as interesting as those at
-Karnak. There are two; the smaller one is of various ages; but its
-oldest portions were built by Amun-noo-het, the sister of Thothmes,
-the woman who has left more monuments of her vigor than any other in
-history, and, woman-like, the monuments are filial offerings, and not
-erections to her own greatness; the larger temple is the work of Rameses
-III. The more you visit it, the more you will be impressed with the
-splendor of its courts, halls and columns, and you may spend days in the
-study of its sculptures without exhausting them.
-
-Along these high-columned halls stalk vast processions, armies going
-to battle, conquerors in triumphal entry, priests and soldiers bearing
-sacrifices, and rows of stone deities of the Egyptian pantheon receiving
-them in a divine indifference. Again the battle rages, the chariots
-drive furiously, arrows fill the air, the foot-troops press forward with
-their big spears and long shields, and the king is slaying the chief,
-who tumbles from his car. The alarm has spread to the country beyond;
-the terrified inhabitants are in flight; a woman, such is the detail, is
-seen to snatch her baby and run into the woods, leaving her pot of broth
-cooking on the fire.
-
-The carving in this temple is often very deep, cut in four or five
-inches in the syenite, and beautifully polished to the bottom, as if
-done with emery. The colors that once gave each figure its character,
-are still fresh, red, green, blue, and black. The ceilings of some
-of the chambers yet represent the blue and star-sprinkled sky. How
-surpassingly brilliant these must have been once! We see how much
-the figure owed to color, when the color designated the different
-nationalities, the enemies or the captives, the shade of their skin,
-hair, beard and garments. We recognize, even, textures of cloth, and
-the spotted leopard-skins worn by the priests. How gay are the birds of
-varied plumage.
-
-There is considerable variety in sculpture here, but, after all an
-endless repetition on wall after wall, in chamber after chamber of the
-same royal persons, gods, goddesses, and priests. There is nothing on
-earth so tiresome as a row of stone gods, in whom I doubt if anybody
-ever sincerely believed, standing to receive the offerings of a
-Turveydrop of a king. Occasionally the gods take turn about, and pour
-oil on the head of a king, at his coronation, and with this is usually
-the very pretty device of four birds flying to the four quarters of
-the globe to announce the event. But whatever the scene, warlike or
-religious, it is for the glorification of Pharaoh, all the same. He is
-commonly represented of gigantic size, and all the other human figures
-about him are small in comparison. It must have kept the Pharaoh in a
-constantly inflated condition, to walk these halls and behold, on all
-sides, his extraordinary apotheosis. But the Pharaoh was not only king
-but high priest, and the divine representative on earth, and about to
-become, in a peculiar sense, Osiris himself, at his death.
-
-The Egyptians would have saved us much trouble if they had introduced
-perspective into these pictures. It is difficult to feel that a pond of
-water, a tree and a house, one above the other on a wall, are intended
-to be on the same level. We have to accustom ourselves to figures always
-in profile, with the eye cut in full as if seen in front, and both
-shoulders showing. The hands of prisoners are tied behind them, but this
-is shown by bringing both elbows, with no sort of respect for the
-man's anatomy, round to the side, toward us, yet it is wonderful what
-character and vivacity they gave to their figures, and how by simple
-profile they represent nationalities and races, Ethiops, Nubians, Jews,
-Assyrians, Europeans.
-
-These temples are inlaid and overlaid and surrounded with heaps of
-rubbish, and the débris of ancient and modern mud and unbaked-brick
-dwellings; part of the great pillars are entirely covered. The
-Christians once occupied the temples, and there are remains of a church,
-and a large church, in one of the vast courts, built of materials at
-hand, but gone to ruin more complete than the structure around it. The
-early Christians hewed away the beautiful images of Osiris from the
-pillars (an Osiride pillar is one upon one side of which, and the length
-of it, is cut in full relief, only attached at the back, a figure of
-Osiris), and covered the hieroglyphics and sculptures with plaster.
-They defaced these temples as the Reformers hacked and whitewashed the
-cathedrals of Germany. And sometimes the plaster which was meant to
-cover forever from sight the images of a mysterious religion, has
-defeated the intentions of the plasterers, by preserving, to an age that
-has no fear of stone gods, the ancient pictures, sharp in outline and
-fresh in color.
-
-It is indeed marvelous that so much has been preserved, considering what
-a destructive creature man is, and how it pleases his ignoble soul to
-destroy the works of his forerunners on the earth. The earthquake
-has shaken up Egypt time and again, but Cambyses was worse; he was an
-earthquake with malice and purpose, and left little standing that he had
-leisure to overturn. The ancient Christians spent a great deal of time
-in rubbing out the deep-cut hieroglyphics, chiseling away the heads
-of strange gods, covering the pictures of ancient ceremonies and
-sacrifices, and painting on the walls their own rude conceptions of holy
-persons and miraculous occurrences. And then the Moslems came, hating
-all images and pictorial representations alike, and scraped away or
-battered with bullets the work of pagans and Christians.
-
-There is much discussion whether these so-called temples were not
-palaces and royal residences as well as religious edifices. Doubtless
-many of them served a double purpose; the great pylons and propylons
-having rooms in which men might have lived, who did not know what a
-comfortable house is. Certainly no palaces of the Pharaohs have been
-discovered in Egypt, if these temples are not palaces in part; and it
-is not to be supposed that the Pharaoh dwelt in a mud-house with a
-palm-roof, like a common mortal. He was the religious as well as the
-civil head, Pope and Cæsar in one, and it is natural that he should have
-dwelt in the temple precincts.
-
-The pyramidal towers of the great temple of Medeenet Haboo are thought
-to be the remains of the palace of Rameses III. Here indeed the
-Egyptologists point out his harem and the private apartments, when the
-favored of Amun-Re unbent himself from his usual occupation of seizing a
-bunch of captives by the hair and slashing off their heads at a blow,
-in the society of his women and the domestic enjoyments of a family man.
-Here we get an insight into the private life of the awful monarch, and
-are able to penetrate the mysteries of his retirement. It is from
-such sculptures as one finds here that scholars have been able to
-rehabilitate old Egyptian society and tell us not only what the
-Egyptians did but what they were thinking about. The scholar, to whom
-we are most indebted for the reconstruction of the ancient life of the
-Egyptians, Sir Gardner Wilkinson, is able not only to describe to us
-a soirée, from paintings in tombs at Thebes, but to tell us what the
-company talked about and what their emotions were. “In the meantime,”
-he says, “the conversation became animated,” (as it sometimes does at
-parties) “and the ladies fluently discussed the question of dress,” “the
-maker of an earring and the shop where it was purchased was anxiously
-inquired.” On one occasion when the guests were in “raptures of
-admiration” over something, an awkward youth overturned a pedestal,
-creating great confusion and frightening the women, who screamed;
-however, no one was hurt, and harmony being restored, “the incident
-afforded fresh matter for conversation, to be related in full details to
-their friends when they returned home.”
-
-This is very wonderful art, and proves that the Egyptians excelled all
-who came after them in the use of the chisel and brush; since they could
-not only represent in a drawing on the wall of a tomb the gaiety of an
-evening party and the subject of its conversation, but could make the
-picture convey as well the talk of the guests to their friends after
-they returned home!
-
-We had read a good deal about the harem of Rameses III., and it was
-naturally the first object of our search at Medeenet Haboo. At the
-first visit we could not find it, and all our expectation of his sweet
-domestic life was unrealized. It was in vain that we read over the
-description:—“Here the king is attended by his harem, some of whom
-present him with flowers, or wave before him fans and flabella; and a
-favorite is caressed, or invited to divert his leisure hours with a game
-of draughts.” We climbed everywhere, and looked into every room, but the
-king and his harem were not visible. And yet the pictures, upon which
-has been built all this fair fabric of the domestic life of Rameses,
-must exist somewhere in these two pyramidal towers. And what a gallery
-of delights it must be, we thought. The king attended by his harem!
-
-Upon a subsequent visit, we insisted that the guide should take us
-into this harem. That was not possible, but he would show it to us. We
-climbed a broken wall, from the top of which we could look up, through a
-window, into a small apartment in the tower. The room might be ten feet
-by twelve in size, probably smaller. There was no way of getting to it
-by any interior stairway or by any exterior one, that we could see, and
-I have no doubt that if Pharaoh lived there he climbed up by a ladder
-and pulled his harem up after him.
-
-But the pictures on the walls, which we made out by the help of an
-opera-glass, prove this to have been one of the private apartments, they
-say. There are only two pictures, only one, in fact, not defaced; but
-as these are the only examples of the interior decoration of an ancient
-royal palace in all Egypt, it is well to make the most of them. They are
-both drawn in spirited outlines and are very graceful, the profile
-faces having a Greek beauty. In one Rameses III., of colossal size, is
-represented seated on an elegant fauteuil, with his feet on a stool. He
-wears the royal crown, a necklace, and sandals. Before him stands a lady
-of his harem, clad in a high crown of lotus-stems, a slight necklace,
-and sandals turned up like skates. It must be remembered that the
-weather was usually very warm in Thebes, especially on this side the
-river. The lady is holding up a lotus-flower, but it is very far from
-the royal nose, and indeed she stands so far off, that the king has to
-stretch out his arm to chuck her under the chin. The Pharaoh's beautiful
-face preserves its immortal calm, and the “favorite is caressed” in
-accordance with the chastest requirements of high art.
-
-In the other picture, the Pharaoh is seated as before, but he is playing
-at draughts. In his left hand he holds some men, and his right is
-extended lifting a piece from the draughtboard. His antagonist has been
-unfortunate. Her legs are all gone; her head has disappeared. There
-remain of this “favorite” only the outline of part of the body, the
-right arm and the hand which lifts a piece, and a suggestion of the left
-arm extended at full length and pushing a lotus-bud close to the king's
-nose. It is an exhibition of man's selfishness-The poor woman is not
-only compelled to entertain the despot at the game, but she must regale
-his fastidious and scornful nose at the same time; it must have been
-very tiresome to keep the left hand thus extended through a whole game.
-What a passion the Egyptians had for the heavy perfume of this flower.
-They are smelling it in all their pictures.
-
-We climbed afterwards, by means of a heap of rubbish, into a room
-similar to this one, in the other tower, where we saw remains of the
-same sculpture. It was like the Egyptians to repeat that picture five
-hundred times in the same palace.
-
-The two Colossi stand half a mile east of the temple of Medeenet Haboo,
-and perhaps are the survivors of like figures which lined an avenue
-to another temple. One of them is better known to fame than any other
-ancient statue, and rests its reputation on the most shadowy basis. In
-a line with these statues are the remains of other colossi of nearly the
-same size, buried in the alluvial deposit. These figures both represent
-Amunoph III. (about 1500 or 1600 b. c.); they are seated; and on either
-side of the legs of the king, and attached to the throne, are the
-statues of his mother and daughter, little women, eighteen feet high.
-The colossi are fifty feet high without the bases, and must have stood
-sixty feet in the air before the Nile soil covered the desert on which
-they were erected. The pedestal is a solid stone thirty-three feet long.
-
-Both were monoliths. The southern one is still one piece, but shockingly
-mutilated. The northern one is the famous Vocal Statue of Memnon; though
-why it is called of Memnon and why “vocal” is not easily explained. It
-was broken into fragments either by some marauder, or by an earthquake
-at the beginning of our era, and built up from the waist by blocks
-of stone, in the time of the Roman occupation, during the reign of
-Septimius Severus.
-
-There was a tradition—perhaps it was only the tradition of a
-tradition—that it used to sing every morning at sunrise. No mention is
-made of this singing property, however, until after it was overthrown;
-and its singing ceased to be heard after the Roman Emperor put it into
-the state in which we now see it. It has been assumed that it used to
-sing, and many theories have been invented to explain its vocal method.
-Very likely the original report of this prodigy was a Greek or Roman
-fable; and the noise may have been produced by a trick for Hadrian's
-benefit (who is said to have heard it) in order to keep up the
-reputation of the statue.
-
-Amunoph III. (or Amenôphis, or Amen-hotep—he never knew how to spell
-his name) was a tremendous slasher-about over the territories of
-other people; there is an inscription down at Samneh (above the second
-cataract) which says that he brought, in one expedition, out of Soudan,
-seven hundred and forty negro prisoners, half of whom were women and
-children. On the records which this modest man made, he is “Lord of both
-worlds, absolute master, Son of the Sun.” He is Horus, the strong bull.
-“He marches and victory is gained, like Horus, son of Isis, like the
-Sun in heaven.” He also built almost as extensively as Rameses II; he
-covered both banks of the Nile with splendid monuments; his structures
-are found from Ethiopia to the Sinaitic peninsula. He set up his image
-in this Colossus, the statue which the Greeks and Romans called Memnon,
-the fame of which took such possession of the imagination of poets and
-historians. They heard, or said they heard, Memnon, the Ethiopian, one
-of the defenders of Troy, each morning saluting his mother, Aurora.
-
-If this sound was heard, scientists think it was produced by the action
-of the sun's rays upon dew fallen in the crevices of the broken figure.
-Others think the sound was produced by a priest who sat concealed in the
-lap of the figure and struck a metallic stone. And the cavity and the
-metallic stone exist there now. Of course the stone was put in there
-and the cavity left, when the statue was repaired, it having been a
-monolith. And as the sound was never heard before the statue was broken
-nor after it was repaired, the noise was not produced by the metallic
-stone. And if I am required to believe that the statue sang with his
-head off, I begin to doubt altogether. I incline to think that we have
-here only one of those beautiful myths in which the Greeks and Romans
-loved to clothe the distant and the gigantic.
-
-One of the means of accounting for a sound which may never have been
-heard, is that the priests produced it in order to strike with awe the
-people. Now, the Egyptian priests never cared anything about the people,
-and wouldn't have taken the trouble; indeed, in the old times “people”
-wouldn't have been allowed anywhere within such a sacred inclosure as
-this in which the Colossus stood. And, besides, the priest could not
-have got into the cavity mentioned. When the statue was a monolith, it
-would puzzle him to get in; and there is no stairway or steps by which
-he could ascend now. We sent an Arab up, who scaled the broken fragments
-with extreme difficulty, and struck the stone. The noise produced
-was like that made by striking the metallic stones we find in the
-desert,—not a resonance to be heard far.
-
-So that I doubt that there was any singing at sunrise by the so-called
-Memnon (which was Amunoph), and I doubt that it was a priestly device.
-
-This Amunoph family, whose acquaintance we have been obliged to make,
-cut a wide swath in their day; they had eccentricities, and there are
-told a great many stories about them, which might interest you if you
-could believe that the Amunophs were as real as the Hapsburgs and the
-Stuarts and the Grants.
-
-Amunoph I. (or Amen-hotep) was the successor of Amosis (or Ahmes) who
-expelled the Shepherds, and even pursued them into Canaan and knocked
-their walled-towns about their heads. Amunoph I. subdued the Shasu
-or Bedaween of the desert between Egypt and Syria, as much as those
-hereditary robbers were ever subdued. This was in the seventeenth
-century b. c. This king also made a naval expedition up the Nile into
-Ethiopia, and it is said that he took captive there the “chief of
-the mountaineers.” Probably then, he went into Abyssinia, and did not
-discover the real source of the Nile.
-
-The fourth Amunoph went conquering in Asia, as his predecessors had
-done, for nations did not stay conquered in those days. He was followed
-by his seven daughters in chariots of war. These heroic girls fought,
-with their father, and may be seen now, in pictures, gently driving
-their chariot-wheels over the crushed Asiatics. When Amunoph IV. came
-home and turned his attention to religion, he made lively work with the
-Egyptian pantheon. This had grown into vast proportions from the time of
-Menes, and Amunoph did not attempt to improve it or reform it; he simply
-set it aside, and established a new religion. He it was who abandoned
-Thebes and built Tel-el-Amarna, and there set up the worship of a single
-god, Aten, represented by the sun's disc. He shut up the old temples,
-effaced the images of the ancient gods, and persecuted mercilessly their
-worshippers throughout the empire.
-
-He was prompted to all this by his mother, for he himself was little
-better than an imbecile. It was from his mother that he took his foreign
-religion as he did his foreign blood, for there was nothing of the
-Egyptian type in his face. His mother, Queen Taia, wife of Amunoph
-III., had light hair, blue eyes and rosy cheeks, the characteristics of
-northern women. She was not of royal family, and not Egyptian; but the
-child of a foreign family then living in the Delta, and probably the
-king married her for her beauty and cleverness.
-
-M. Lenormant thinks she was a Hebrew. That people were then very
-numerous in the Delta, where they lived unmolested keeping their own
-religion, a very much corrupted and materialized monotheism. Queen Taia
-has the complexion and features of the Hebrews—I don't mean of the
-Jews who are now dispersed over the continents. Lenormant credits the
-Hebrews, through the Queen Taia, with the overthrow of the Pharaonic
-religion and the establishment of the monotheism of Amunoph IV.—a
-worship that had many external likenesses to the Hebrew forms. At
-Tel-el-Amarna we see, among the utensils of the worship of Aten,
-the Israelitish “Table of Shew-bread.” It is also noticed that the
-persecution of the Hebrews coincides with the termination of the
-religious revolution introduced by the son of Taia.
-
-Whenever a pretty woman of talent comes into history she makes mischief.
-The episode of Queen Taia is however a great relief to the granite-faced
-monotony of the conservative Pharaohs. Women rulers and regents always
-make the world lively for the time being—and it took in this case two or
-three generations to repair the damages. Smashing things and repairing
-damages—that is history.
-
-History starts up from every foot of this Theban plain, piled four or
-five deep with civilizations. These temples are engulfed in rubbish;
-what the Persians and the earthquake spared, Copts and Arabs for
-centuries have overlaid with their crumbling habitations. It requires
-a large draft upon the imagination to reinstate the edifices that once
-covered this vast waste; but we are impressed with the size of the city,
-when we see the long distances that the remaining temples are apart, and
-the evidence, in broken columns, statues, and great hewn blocks of stone
-shouldering out of the sand, of others perhaps as large.
-
-
-
-0222
-
-
-
-0223
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVII.—KARNAK.
-
-THE WEATHER is almost unsettled. There was actually a dash of rain
-against the cabin window last night—over before you could prepare an
-affidavit to the fact—and today is cold, more or less cloudy with a
-drop, only a drop, of rain occasionally. Besides, the wind is in the
-south-west and the sand flies. We cannot sail, and decide to visit
-Karnak, in spite of the entreaty of the hand-book to leave this, as the
-crown of all sight-seeing, until we have climbed up to its greatness
-over all the lesser ruins.
-
-Perhaps this is wise; but I think I should advise a friend to go at once
-to Karnak and outrageously astonish himself, while his mind is fresh,
-and before he becomes at all sated with ruins or familiar with other
-vast and exceedingly impressive edifices. They are certain to dull a
-little his impression of Karnak even “Madam—” it is Abd-el-Atti who
-comes in, rubbing his hands—“your carriage stops the way.”
-
-“Carriage?”
-
-“Yes, ma'am, I just make him.”
-
-The carriage was an arm-chair slung between two pushing-poles; between
-each end of them was harnessed a surly diminutive donkey who seemed to
-feel his degradation. Each donkey required a driver; Ahmed, with his
-sleeves rolled up and armed with a big club, walked beside, to steady
-the swaying chair, and to beat the boys when their donkeys took a fancy
-to lie down; and a cloud of interested Arabs hovered about it,
-running with it, adding to the noise, dust, and picturesqueness of our
-cavalcade.
-
-On the outskirts of the mud-cabins we pass through the weekly market,
-a motley assemblage of country-folks and produce, camels, donkeys,
-and sheep. It is close by the Ghawazee quarter, where is a colony of
-a hundred or more of these dancing-girls. They are always conspicuous
-among Egyptian women by their greater comeliness and gay apparel. They
-wear red and yellow gowns, many tinkling ornaments of silver and gold,
-and their eyes are heavily darkened with kohl. I don't know what it is
-in this kohl, that it gives woman such a wicked and dangerous aspect.
-They come out to ask for backsheesh in a brazen but probably intended
-to be a seductive manner; they are bold, but some of them rather
-well-looking. They claim to be an unmixed race of ancient lineage; but I
-suspect their blood is no purer than their morals. There is not much in
-Egypt that is not hopelessly mixed.
-
-Of the mile-and-a-half avenue of Sphinxes that once connected Luxor with
-Karnak, we see no trace until we are near the latter. The country is
-open and beautiful with green wheat, palms, and sycamores. Great Karnak
-does not show itself until we are close upon it; its vast extent is
-hidden by the remains of the wall of circuit, by the exterior temples
-and pylons. It is not until we have passed beyond the great—but called
-small—temple of Rameses III., at the north entrance, and climbed
-the pyramidal tower to the west of the Great Hall, that we begin to
-comprehend the magnitude of these ruins, and that only days of wandering
-over them and of study would give us their gigantic plan.
-
-Karnak is not a temple, but a city rather; a city of temples, palaces,
-obelisks, colossal statues, It is, like a city, a growth of many
-centuries. It is not a conception or the execution of a purpose; it is
-the not always harmonious accretion of time and wealth and vanity. Of
-the slowness of its growth some idea may be gained from the fact that
-the hieroglyphics on one face of one of its obelisks were cut two
-hundred and fifty years after those on the opposite face. So long ago
-were both chiseled, however, they are alike venerable to us. I shouldn't
-lose my temper with a man who differed with me only a thousand years
-about the date of any event in Egypt.
-
-They were working at this mass of edifices, sacred or profane, all the
-way from Osirtasen I. down to Alexander II.; that is from about 3064
-B. c. according to Mariette (Bunsen, 2781, Wilkinson, 2080,—it doesn't
-matter) to only a short time before our era. There was a modest
-beginning in the plain but chaste temple of Osirtasen; but each king
-sought to outdo his predecessor until Sethi I. forever distanced rivalry
-in building the Great Hall. And after him it is useless for anyone else
-to attempt greatness by piling up stones. The length of the temples,
-pylons, and obelisks, en suite from west to east, is 1180 feet; but
-there are other outlying and gigantic ruins; I suppose it is fully a
-mile and a half round the wall of circuit.
-
-There is nothing in the world of architecture like the Great Hall;
-nothing so massive, so surprising, and, for me, at least, so crushingly
-oppressive. What monstrous columns! And how thickly they are crowded
-together! Their array is always compared to a forest. The comparison
-is apt in some respects; but how free, uplifting is a forest, how
-it expands into the blue air, and lifts the soul with it. A piece of
-architecture is to be judged, I suppose, by the effect it produces. It
-is not simply that this hall is pagan in its impression; it misses the
-highest architectural effect by reason of its unrelieved heaviness.
-It is wonderful; it was a prodigious achievement to build so many big
-columns.
-
-The setting of enormous columns so close together that you can only
-see a few of them at one point of view is the architecture of the Great
-Hall. Upon these, big stones are put for a roof. There is no reason why
-this might not have been repeated over an acre of ground. Neither from
-within nor from without can you see the extent of the hall. * The best
-view of it is down the center aisle, formed by the largest columns;
-and as these have height as well as bulk, and the sky is now seen above
-them, the effect is of the highest majesty. This hall was dimly lighted
-by windows in the clerestory, the frames of which exhibit a freedom of
-device and grace of carving worthy of a Gothic cathedral. These columns,
-all richly sculptured, are laid up in blocks of stone of half the
-diameter, the joints broken. If the Egyptians had dared to use the arch,
-the principle of which they knew, in this building, so that the columns
-could have stood wide apart and still upheld the roof, the sight of
-the interior would have been almost too much for the human mind. The
-spectator would have been exalted, not crushed by it.
-
-* The Great Hall measures one hundred and seventy feet by three hundred
-and twenty-nine; in this space stand one hundred and thirty-four
-columns; twelve of these, forming the central avenue of one hundred and
-seventy feet, are sixty-two feet high, without plinth and abacus, and
-eleven feet six inches in diameter; the other one hundred and twenty-two
-columns are forty-two feet five inches in height and about nine feet in
-diameter. The great columns stand only fifteen or sixteen feet apart.
-
-Not far off is the obelisk which Amunoo-het erected to the memory of her
-father. I am not sure but it will stand long after The Hall of Sethi is
-a mass of ruins; for already is the water sapping the foundations of the
-latter, some of the columns lean like reeling drunken men, and one day,
-with crash after crash, these giants will totter, and the blocks of
-stone of which they are built will make another of those shapeless heaps
-to which sooner or later our solidest works come. The red granite shaft
-of the faithful daughter lifts itself ninety-two feet into the air, and
-is the most beautiful as it is the largest obelisk ever raised.
-
-The sanctuary of red granite was once very rich and beautiful; the high
-polish of its walls and the remains of its exquisite carving, no less
-than the colors that still remain, attest that. The sanctuary is a heap
-of ruins, thanks to that ancient Shaker, Cambyses, but the sculptures
-in one of the chambers are the most beautiful we have seen; the colors,
-red, blue, and green are still brilliant, the ceiling is spangled with
-stars on a blue firmament. Considering the hardness of this beautiful
-syenite and the difficulty of working it, I think this is the most
-admirable piece of work in Thebes.
-
-It may be said of some of the sculptures here, especially of the very
-spirited designs and intelligent execution of those of the Great Hall,
-that they are superior to those on the other side of the river. And yet
-there is endless theological reiteration here; there are dreary miles
-of the same gods in the same attitudes; and you cannot call all of them
-respectable gods. The longer the religion endured the more conventional
-and repetitious its representations became. The sculptors came to have
-a traditional habit of doing certain scenes and groups in a certain
-way; and the want of life and faith in them becomes very evident in the
-sculptures of the Ptolemaic period.
-
-In this vast area you may spend days and not exhaust the objects worth
-examination. On one of our last visits we found near the sacred lake
-very striking colossal statues which we had never seen before.
-
-When this city of temples and palaces, the favorite royal residence, was
-entire and connected with Luxor by the avenue of sphinxes, and the great
-edifices and statues on the west side of the river were standing,
-this broad basin of the Nile, enclosed by the circle of rose-colored
-limestone mountains, which were themselves perforated with vast tombs,
-must have been what its splendid fame reports, when it could send to war
-twenty thousand chariots. But, I wonder whether the city, aside from its
-conspicuous temples and attached palaces, was one of mud-hovels, like
-those of most peoples of antiquity, and of the modern Egyptians.
-
-
-0227
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVIII.—ASCENDING THE RIVER.
-
-WE resume our voyage on the sixth of January, but we leave a hostage
-at Luxor as we did at Asioot. This is a sailor who became drunk and
-turbulent last night on hasheesh, and was sent to the governor.
-
-We found him this morning with a heavy chain round his neck and tied to
-a stake in one corner of the court-yard of the house where the governor
-has his office. I think he might have pulled up the stake and run away;
-but I believe it is not considered right here for a prisoner to escape.
-The common people are so subdued that they wilt, when authority puts its
-heavy hand on them. Near the sailor was a mud-kennel into which he could
-crawl if he liked. This is the jail of Luxor. Justice is summary here.
-This sailor is confined without judge or jury and will be kept till he
-refunds his advance wages, since he was discharged from the boat as a
-dangerous man.
-
-The sailors dread the lock-up, for they may be forced into the army as
-the only way out of it; they would much prefer the stick. They are used
-to the stick; four thousand years of Egyptians have been accustomed
-to the stick. A beating they do not mind much, or at least are not
-humiliated by it as another race would be. But neither the prospect of
-the jail nor the stick will wean them from hasheesh, which is the curse
-of Egypt.
-
-We spread our sails to a light breeze and depart in company with two
-other dahabeëhs, one English (the Philæ) and one American (the Dongela).
-Africa and weeks of leisure and sunny skies are before us. We loiter
-along in company, in friendly company one may say, now passing a boat
-and now falling behind, like three ducks coquetting in a swift current.
-We are none of us in a hurry, we are indifferent to progress, our minds
-are calm and our worst passions not excited. We do not appear to be
-going rapidly, I sometimes doubt if we are going forward at all, but it
-gradually becomes apparent that we are in the midst of a race!
-
-Everything in this world is relative. I can imagine a fearfully exciting
-match of mud-turtles on a straight track. Think of the agony, prolonged,
-that the owner of the slow turtle would suffer! We are evidently in for
-it; and a race like this, that lasts all day, will tire out the hardiest
-sportsman.
-
-The Rip Van Winkle is the largest boat and happens to have the lead; but
-the Philo, a very graceful, gay boat, is crawling up to us; the Dongola
-also seems to feel a breeze that we have not. We want a strong wind—the
-Rip Van Winkle does not wake up in a mild air. As we desire, it freshens
-a little, the big sail swells, and the ripples are louder at the bow.
-Unfortunately there is breeze enough for three, and the other vessels
-shake themselves out like ducks about to fly. It is a pretty sight just
-now; the spread of three great bird-wing sails, the long gaily-painted
-cabins and decks, the sweeping yards and the national colors and
-variegated streamers flying!
-
-They are gaining on us; the Philae gets inside, and taking our wind, for
-a moment, creeps ahead, and attempts to sheer across our bow to force us
-into the swifter current; the Dongola sails in at the same time, and a
-jam and collision appear inevitable. A storm of language bursts out
-of each boat; men run to stern and bow, to ward off intruders or
-to disengage an entangled spar; all the crew, sailors, reises, and
-dragomans are in the most active vociferation. But the Philae. sails out
-of the coil, the Dongola draws ahead at the risk of going into the bank,
-and our crew seize the punt-poles and have active work to prevent going
-fast on a sand-bar to leeward.
-
-But the prosperity of the wicked is short. The wind falls flat.
-Instantly our men are tumbling into the water and carrying the rope
-ashore to track. The lines are all out, and the men are attempting to
-haul us round a deep bend. The steersmen keep the head of the vessels
-off shore, and the strain on the trackers is tremendous. The cables flop
-along the bank and scrape over the shadoofs, raking down a stake now
-and then, and bring out from their holes the half-naked, protesting
-proprietors, who get angry and gesticulate,—as if they had anything to
-do with our race!
-
-The men cannot hold the cable any longer; one by one they are forced
-to let go, at the risk of being drawn down the crumbling bank, and the
-cable splashes into the water. The sailors run ahead and come down upon
-a sand-spit; there are puffs of wind in our sail, and we appear to
-have made a point, when the men wade on board and haul in the rope. The
-Dongola is close upon us; the Philae has lost by keeping too far out in
-the current. Oh, for a wind!
-
-Instead of a wind, there is a bland smile in the quiet sky. Why, O
-children, do you hasten? Have not Nile sailors been doing this for four
-thousand years? The boats begin to yaw about. Poles are got out. We are
-all in danger of going aground; we are all striving to get the inside
-track at yonder point; we are in danger of collision; we are most of all
-in danger of being left behind. The crews are crazy with excitement;
-as they hurriedly walk the deck, rapidly shifting their poles in the
-shallow water, calling upon Yàlësah in quicker and quicker respirations,
-“Hâ Yâlësah,” “Hâ Yàlësah,” as they run to change the sail at the least
-indication of a stray breeze, as they see first one dahabeëh and then
-the other crawling ahead, the contest assumes a serious aspect, and
-their cries are stronger and more barbaric.
-
-The Philæ gets inside again and takes the bank. We are all tracking,
-when we come to the point, beyond which is a deep bay. If we had wind
-we should sail straight across; the distance round the bay is much
-greater—but then we can track along the bank; there is deep water close
-under the bank and there is deep water in mid-river. The Philæ stands
-away into the river, barely holding its own in the light zephyr. The
-Dongola tries to follow the Philæ, but swings round, and her crew take
-to the poles. Our plan appears to be more brilliant. Our men take the
-cable out upon a sand-bank in the stream and attempt to tow us along the
-center channel. All goes well. We gain on the Philæ and pass it. We see
-the Dongola behind, struggling in the shallows. But the sand-bank is
-a failure. The men begin to go from it into deeper water; it is up to
-their knees, it reaches our “drawers,” which we bought for the crew; it
-comes to the waist, their shoulders are going under. It is useless; the
-cable is let go, and the men rush back to the sand-bar. There they are.
-Our cable is trailing down-stream; we have lost our crew, and the
-wind is just coming up. While we are sending the sandal to rescue our
-mariners, the Philae sails away, and the Dongola shows her stern.
-
-The travelers on the three boats, during all this contest, are sitting
-on the warm, sunny decks, with a pretence of books, opera-glasses in
-hand; apparently regarding the scene with indifference, but no doubt,
-underneath this mask, longing to “lick” the other boats.
-
-After all, we come to Erment (which is eight miles from Luxor) not far
-apart. The race is not to the swift. There is no swift on the Nile. But
-I do not know how there could be a more exciting race of eight miles a
-day!
-
-At Erment is a large sugar-factory belonging to the Khedive; and a
-governor lives here in a big house and harem. The house has an extensive
-garden laid out by old Mohammed Ali, and a plantation of oranges, Yusef
-Effendis, apples, apricots, peaches, lemons, pomegranates, and limes.
-The plantation shows that fruit will grow on the Upper Nile, if one will
-take the trouble to set out and water the trees. But we see none. The
-high Nile here last September so completely washed out the garden that
-we can get neither flowers nor vegetables. And some people like the
-rapidly-grown watery vegetables that grow along the Nile.
-
-Our dragoman wanted some of the good, unrefined loaf-sugar from the
-factory here, and I went with him to see how business is transacted.
-We had difficulty in finding any office or place of sale about the
-establishment.
-
-But a good-natured dwarf, who seemed to spring out of the ground on
-our landing, led us through courts and amid dilapidated warehouses to a
-gate, in which sat an Arab in mixed costume. Within the gate hung a
-pair of steelyards, and on one side was a bench. The gate, the man, the
-steelyards and the bench constituted an office. Beyond was an avenue,
-having low enclosures on each side, that with broken pillars and walls
-of brick looked very much like Pompeii; in a shallow bin was a great
-heap of barley, thrashed, and safe and dry in the open air.
-
-The indifferent man in the gate sent for a slow boy, who, in his own
-time, came, bearing a key, a stick an inch square and a foot long, with
-four short iron spikes stuck in one side near the end. He led us up
-a dirty brick stairway outside a building, and inserting the key in
-a wooden lock to match (both lock and key are unchanged since the
-Pharaohs) let us into a long, low room, like an old sail-loft full of
-dust, packages of sugar-paper and old account-books. When the shutters
-were opened we found at one end a few papers of sugar, which we bought,
-and our own sailor carried down to the steelyards. The indifferent man
-condescended to weigh the sugar, and took the pay: but he lazily handed
-the money to the boy, who sauntered off with it. Naturally, you
-wouldn't trust that boy; but there was an indescribable sense of
-the worthlessness of time and of money and of all trade, about this
-transaction, that precluded the possibility of the smartness of theft.
-
-The next day the race is resumed, with little wind and a good deal of
-tracking; we pass the Dongola and are neck-and-neck with the Philæ till
-afternoon, when we bid her good-bye; and yet not with unmixed pleasure.
-
-It is a pleasure to pass a boat and leave her toiling after; but the
-pleasure only lasts while she is in sight. If I had my way, we should
-constantly overhaul boats and pass them, and so go up the stream in
-continual triumph. It is only the cold consciousness of duty performed
-that sustains us, when we have no spectators of our progress.
-
-We go on serenely. Hailing a crossing ferry-boat, loaded with squatting,
-turbaned tatterdemalion Arabs, the dragoman cries, “Salaam aleykoom.”
-
-The reply is, “Salaam; peace be with you; may God meet you in the way;
-may God receive you to himself.” The Old Testament style.
-
-While we were loitering along by Mutâneh—where there is a sugar-factory,
-and an irrigating steam-pump—trying to count the string of camels,
-hundreds of them moving along the bank against the sunset—camels that
-bring the cane to be ground—and our crew were eating supper, I am sorry
-to say that the Philæ poled ahead of us, and went on to Esneh. But
-something happened at Esneh.
-
-It was dark when we arrived at that prosperous town, and, of course,
-Abd-el-Atti, who would like to have us go blazing through Egypt like
-Cambyses, sent up a rocket. Its fiery serpent tore the black night above
-us, exploded in a hundred colored stars, and then dropped its stick into
-the water. Splendid rockets! The only decent rockets to be had in Egypt
-are those made by the government; and Abd-el-Atti was the only dragoman
-who had been thoughtful enough to make interest with the authorities and
-procure government rockets. Hence our proud position on the river. We
-had no firman, and the Khedive did not pay our expenses, but the Viceroy
-himself couldn't out-rocket us.
-
-As soon as we had come to shore and tied up, an operation taking some
-time in the darkness, we had a visit from the governor, a friend of our
-dragoman; but this visit was urgent and scarcely friendly. An attempt
-had been made to set the town on fire! A rocket from an arriving boat
-had been thrown into the town, set fire to the straw on top of one of
-the houses and—
-
-“Did it spread?”
-
-“No, but it might. Allah be praised, it was put out. But the town might
-have been burned down. What a way is this, to go along the Nile firing
-the towns at night?”
-
-“'Twasn't our rocket. Ours exploded in the air and fell into the river.
-Did the other boat, did the Philæ send up a rocket when she arrived?”
-
-“Yes. There was another rocket.”
-
-“Dat's it, dat's it,” says Abd-el-Atti. “Why you no go on board the
-Philæ and not come here?” And then he added to us, as if struck by a new
-idea, “Where the Philæ get dat rocket? I think he have no rocket before.
-Not send any up Christmas in Asioot, not send any up in Luxor. I think
-these very strange. Not so?”
-
-“What kind of rocket was it, that burnt the town?” we ask the governor.
-
-“I have it.” The governor ran to the cabin door and called. A servant
-brought in the exploded missile. It was a large-sized rocket, like our
-own; twice as large as the rockets that are not made by the government,
-and which travelers usually carry.
-
-“Seems like our stick,” cries Abd-el-Atti, getting excited. He examined
-the sheath with great care. We all gathered round the cabin lamp to
-look at the fatal barrel. It had a mark on it, something in Arabic.
-Abd-el-Atti turned it sideways and upside down, in an effort to get at
-the meaning of the writing.
-
-“That is government; make 'em by the government; no doubt,” he says,
-standing off and becoming solemn. “Dat rocket been stole. Looks like our
-rocket.”
-
-Abd-el-Atti flies out, and there is a commotion outside. “Who has been
-stealing rockets and sell 'em to that dragoman?” Boxes are opened.
-Rockets are brought in and compared. The exploded one has the same mark
-as ours, it is the same size.
-
-A new anxiety dawns upon Abd-el-Atti. What if the Philæ has government
-rockets? Our distinction is then gone. No It can't be. “I know what
-every dragoman do in Cairo. He can't get dese rocket. Nobody get 'em
-dis year 'cept us.” Abd-el-Atti is for probing the affair to the bottom.
-Perhaps the hasheesh-eating sailor we discharged at Luxor stole some
-of our rockets and sold them, and thus they came into possession of the
-dragoman of the Philæ.
-
-The young governor, however, has had enough of it. He begins to see
-a great deal of vexation to himself, and a row with an English and an
-American dahabeëh and with natives besides. Let it drop, he says. The
-governor sits on the divan smoking a cigar. He is accompanied by a Greek
-friend, a merchant of the place. When the governor's cigar goes out, in
-his distraction, the Greek takes it, and re-lights it, puffing it till
-it is well enflamed, and then handing it again to the governor. This is
-a custom of the East. The servant often “starts” the cigarette for his
-master.
-
-“Oh, let it go,” says the governor, appealing to us: “It is finish now.
-It was no damage done.”
-
-“But it might,” cries Abd-el-Atti, “it might burn the town,” taking now
-the rôle which the governor had dropped.
-
-“But you are not to blame. It is not you have done it.”
-
-“Then why you come to me, why you come to us wid de rocket? Why you no
-go to the Philo? Yes. You know that we, nobody else on the river got
-government rockets. This government rocket—look the mark,” seizing the
-exploded one and a new one, and bringing the ends of both so near the
-lamp that we all fear an explosion. “There is something underhands
-here.”
-
-“But it's all right now.”
-
-“How it's all right? Story go back to Cairo; Rip Van Winkle been gone
-set fire to Esneh. Whose rockets? Government rockets. Nobody have
-government rockets 'cept Abd-el-Atti.”
-
-A terrific confab goes on in the cabin for nearly an hour between
-the dragoman, the governor, and the Greek; a lively entertainment and
-exhibition of character which we have no desire to curtail. The
-governor is a young, bright, presentable fellow, in Frank dress, who for
-liveliness of talk and gesture would pass for an Italian.
-
-When the governor has departed, our reïs comes in and presents us a
-high-toned “certificate” from the gentleman on board the Philo.—he has
-learned from our reïs, steersman and some sailors (who are in a panic)
-that they are all to be hauled before the governor and punished on
-a charge of stealing rockets and selling them to his dragoman. He
-certifies that he bought his own rockets in the Mooskee; that his
-dragoman was with him when he bought them; and that our men are
-innocent. The certificate further certifies that our conduct toward our
-crew is unjustifiable and an unheard of cruelty!
-
-Here was a casus belli! Foreign powers had intervened. The right of
-search and seizure was again asserted; the war of 1812 was about to be
-renewed. Our cruelty unheard of? We should think so. All the rest of
-it was unheard of also. We hadn't the slightest intention of punishing
-anybody or hauling anybody before the governor. When Abd-el-Atti hears
-the certificate, he shakes his head:—
-
-“Buy 'em like this in the Mooskee? Not be. Not find government rockets
-in any shop in the Mooskee. Something underhands by that dragoman!”
-
-Not wishing to light the flames of war in Africa, we immediately
-took servants and lanterns and called on the English Man-of-War. The
-Man-of-War had gone to bed. It was nine o'clock.
-
-“What for he send a certificate and go to bed?” Abd-el-Atti wants to
-know. “I not like the looks of it.” He began to be suspicious of all the
-world.
-
-In the morning the gentleman returned our call. He did not know or care
-whose rocket set fire to the town. Couldn't hurt these towns much to
-burn them; small loss if all were burned. The governor had called on him
-to say that no damage was done. Our dragoman had, however, no right to
-accuse his of buying stolen rockets. His were bought in Cairo, etc.,
-etc. And the matter dropped amicably and without bloodshed. But
-Abd-el-Atti's suspicions widened as he thought it over:—
-
-“What for de Governor come to me? What for he not go to dat boat what
-fire de rocket? What for de Governor come been call on me wid a rocket?
-The Governor never come been call on me wid a rocket before!”
-
-It is customary for all boats which are going above the first cataract
-to stop at Esneh twenty-four hours to bake bread for the crew;
-frequently they are detained longer, for the wheat has to be bought,
-ground in one of the little ox-power mills, mixed and baked; and the
-crew hire a mill and oven for the time being and perform the labor.
-We had sent sailors ahead to bake the bread, and it was ready in the
-morning; but we stayed over., according to immemorial custom. The
-sailors are entitled to a holiday, and they like to take it where there
-are plenty of coffee-houses and a large colony of Ghawazee girls.
-
-Esneh is not a bad specimen of an Egyptian town. There is a temple here,
-of which only the magnificent portico has been excavated; the remainder
-lies under the town. We descend some thirty feet to get to the floor
-of the portico,—to such a depth has it been covered. And it is a modern
-temple, after all, of the period of the Roman occupation. We find here
-the cartouches of the Cæsars. The columns are elegant and covered with
-very good sculpture; each of the twenty-five has a different capital,
-and some are developed into a hint of the Corinthian and the composite.
-The rigid constraints of the Egyptian art are beginning to give way.
-
-The work in the period of the Romans differs much from the ancient; it
-is less simple, more ornamented and debased. The hieroglyphics are not
-so carefully and nicely cut. The figures are not so free in drawing, and
-not so good as the old, except that they show more anatomical knowledge,
-and begin to exhibit a little thought of perspective. The later artists
-attempt to work out more details in the figure, to show muscles and
-various members in more particularity. Some of the forms and faces have
-much beauty, but most of them declare a decline of art, or perhaps an
-attempt to reconcile the old style with new knowledge, and consequent
-failure.
-
-We called on the governor. He was absent at the mosque, but his servant
-gave us coffee. The Oriental magnificence of the gubernatorial residence
-would impress the most faithless traveler. The entrance was through a
-yard that would be a fair hen-yard (for common fowl) at home, and the
-small apartment into which we were shown might serve for a stable; but
-it had a divan, some carpets and chairs, and three small windows. Its
-roof was flat, made of rough split palm-trees covered with palm-leaves.
-The governor's lady lives somewhere in the rear of this apartment of the
-ruler, in a low mud-house, of which we saw the outside only.
-
-Passing near the government house, we stopped in to see the new levy of
-soldiers, which amounts to some four hundred from this province. Men are
-taken between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, and although less
-than three per cent, of those liable are seized, the draft makes a
-tremendous excitement all along the river. In some places the bazaars
-are closed and there is a general panic as if pestilence had broken out.
-
-Outside the government house, and by the river bank, are women,
-squatting in the sand, black figures of woe and dirt, bewailing their
-relations taken away. In one mud-hovel there is so much howling and
-vocal grief that we think at first a funeral is in progress. We are
-permitted to look into the lock-up where the recruits are detained
-waiting transportation down the river. A hundred or two fellaheen, of
-the average as to nakedness and squalor of raiment, are crowded into a
-long room with a dirt floor, and among them are many with heavy chains
-on their ankles. These latter are murderers and thieves, awaiting trial
-or further punishment. It is in fact the jail, and the soldiers are
-forced into this companionship until their departure. One would say this
-is a bad nursery for patriots.
-
-The court of justice is in the anteroom of this prison; and the two
-ought to be near together. The Kadi, or judge, sits cross-legged on the
-ground, and others squat around him, among them a scribe. When we enter,
-we are given seats on a mat near the judge, and offered coffee and
-pipes. This is something like a court of justice, sociable and friendly.
-It is impossible to tell who is prisoner, who are witnesses, and who are
-spectators. All are talking together, the prisoner (who is pointed out)
-louder than any other, the spectators all joining in with the witnesses.
-The prisoner is allowed to “talk back,” which must be a satisfaction
-to him. When the hubbub subsides, the judge pronounces sentence; and
-probably he does as well as an ordinary jury.
-
-The remainder of this town is not sightly. In fact I do not suppose that
-six thousand people could live in one dirtier, dustier, of more wretched
-houses; rows of unclean, shriveled women, with unclean babies, their
-eyes plastered with flies, sitting along the lanes called streets;
-plenty of men and boys in no better case as to clothing; but the men are
-physically superior to the women. In fact we see no comely women except
-the Ghawazees. Upon the provisions, the grain, the sweet-cakes exposed
-for sale on the ground, flies settle so that all look black.
-
-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.
-
-
-
-0244
-
-
-
-0245
-
-
-
-
-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.
-
-It is not at all what we have expected. In appearence this is a cataract
-without any falls and scarcely any rapids. A person brought up on
-Niagara or Montmorency feels himself trifled with here. The fishermen
-in the mountain streams of America has come upon many a scene that
-resembles this—a river-bed strewn with boulders. Only, this is on a
-grand scale. We had been led to expect at least high precipices, walls
-of lofty rock, between which we should sail in the midst of raging
-rapids and falls; and that there would be hundreds of savages on the
-rocks above dragging our boat with cables, and occasionally plunging
-into the torrent in order to carry a life-line to the top of some
-seagirt rock. All of this we did not see; but yet we have more respect
-for the cataract before we get through it than when it first came in
-sight.
-
-What we see immediately before us is a basin, it may be a quarter of a
-mile, it may be half a mile broad, and two miles long; a wild expanse
-of broken granite rocks and boulders strewn hap-hazard, some of them
-showing the red of the syenite and others black and polished and shining
-in the sun; a field of rocks, none of them high, of fantastic shapes;
-and through this field the river breaks in a hundred twisting passages
-and chutes, all apparently small, but the water in them is foaming and
-leaping and flashing white; and the air begins to be pervaded by the
-multitudinous roar of rapids. On the east, the side of the land-passage
-between Assouan and Philæ, were high and jagged rocks in odd forms, now
-and then a palm-tree, and here and there a mud-village. On the west the
-basin of the cataract is hemmed in by the desert hills, and the yellow
-Libyan sand drifts over them in shining waves and rifts, which in some
-lights have the almost maroon color that we see in Gerome's pictures.
-To the south is an impassable barrier of granite and sand—mountains of
-them—beyond the glistening fields of rocks and water through which we
-are to find our way.
-
-The difficulty of this navigation is not one cataract to be overcome
-by one heroic effort, but a hundred little cataracts or swift tortuous
-sluiceways, which are much more formidable when we get into them than
-they are when seen at a distance. The dahabeëhs which attempt to wind
-through them are in constant danger of having holes knocked in their
-hulls by the rocks.
-
-The wind is strong, and we are sailing swiftly on. It is im possible to
-tell which one of the half-dozen equally uninviting channels we are to
-take. We guess, and of course point out the wrong one. We approach, with
-sails still set, a narrow passage through which the water pours in what
-is a very respectable torrent; but it is not a straight passage, it has
-a bend in it; if we get through it, we must make a sharp turn to the
-left or run upon a ridge of rocks, and even then we shall be in a
-boiling surge; and if we fail to make head against the current we shall
-go whirling down the caldron, bumping on the rocks—not a pleasant thing
-for a dahabeëh one hundred and twenty feet long with a cabin in it as
-large as a hotel. The passage of a boat of this size is evidently an
-event of some interest to the cataract people, for we see groups of them
-watching us from the rocks, and following along the shore. And we think
-that seeing our boat go up from the shore might be the best way of
-seeing it.
-
-We draw slowly in, the boat trembling at the entrance of the swift
-water; it enters, nosing the current, feeling the tug of the sail, and
-hesitates. Oh, for a strong puff of wind! There are five watchful men at
-the helm; there is a moment's silence, and the boat still hesitates. At
-this critical instant, while we hold our breath, a naked man, whose name
-I am sorry I cannot give to an admiring American public, appears on the
-bow with a rope in his teeth; he plunges in and makes for the nearest
-rock. He swims hand over hand, swinging his arms from the shoulders
-out of water and striking them forward splashing along like a
-sidewheeler—the common way of swimming in the heavy water of the Nile.
-Two other black figures follow him and the rope is made fast to the
-point of the rock. We have something to hold us against the stream.
-
-And now a terrible tumult arises on board the boat which is seen to be
-covered with men; one gang is hauling on the rope to draw the great sail
-close to its work; another gang is hauling on the rope attached to the
-rock, and both are singing that wild chanting chorus without which no
-Egyptian sailors pull an ounce or lift a pound; the men who are not
-pulling are shouting and giving orders; the Sheykhs, on the upper deck
-where we sit with American serenity exaggerated amid the Babel,
-are jumping up and down in a frenzy of excitement, screaming and
-gesticulating. We hold our own; we gain a little; we pull forward where
-the danger of a smash against the rocks is increased. More men appear
-on the rocks, whom we take to be spectators of our passage. No; they lay
-hold of the rope. With the additional help we still tremble in the jaws
-of the pass. I walk aft, and the stern is almost upon the rocks; it
-grazes them; but in the nick of time the bow swings round, we turn short
-off into an eddy; the great wing of a sail is let go, and our cat-like
-sailors are aloft, crawling along the slender yard, which is a hundred
-feet in length, and furling the tugging canvas. We breathe more freely,
-for the first danger is over. The first gate is passed.
-
-In this lull there is a confab with the Sheykhs. We are at the island of
-Sehâyl, and have accomplished what is usually the first day's journey of
-boats. It would be in harmony with the Oriental habit to stop here for
-the remainder of the day and the night. But our dragoman has in mind
-to accomplish, if not the impossible, what is synonymous with it in the
-East, the unusual. The result of the inflammatory stump-speeches on both
-sides is that two or three gold pieces are passed into the pliant hand
-of the head Sheykh, and he sends for another Sheykh and more men.
-
-For some time we have been attended by increasing processions of men and
-boys on shore; they cheered us as we passed the first rapid; they came
-out from the villages, from the crevices of the rocks, their blue and
-white gowns flowing in the wind, and make a sort of holiday of our
-passage. Less conspicuous at first are those without gowns—they are
-hardly distinguishable from the black rocks amid which they move. As we
-lie here, with the rising roar of the rapids in our ears, we can see no
-further opening for our passage.
-
-But we are preparing to go on. Ropes are carried out forward over the
-rocks. More men appear, to aid us. We said there were fifty. We count
-seventy; we count eighty; there are at least ninety. They come up by
-a sort of magic. From whence are they, these black forms: They seem to
-grow out of the rocks at the wave of the Sheykh's hand; they are of the
-same color, shining men of granite. The swimmers and divers are simply
-smooth statues hewn out of the syenite or the basalt. They are not
-unbaked clay like the rest of us. One expects to see them disappear like
-stones when they jump into the water. The mode of our navigation is to
-draw the boat along, hugged close to the shore rocks, so closely that
-the current cannot get full hold of it, and thus to work it round the
-bends.
-
-We are crawling slowly on in this manner, clinging to the rocks, when
-unexpectedly a passage opens to the left. The water before us runs like
-a mill-race. If we enter it, nothing would seem to be able to hold the
-boat from dashing down amidst the breakers. But the bow is hardly let to
-feel the current before it is pulled short round, and we are swinging
-in the swift stream. Before we know it we are in the anxiety of another
-tug. Suppose the rope should break! In an instant the black swimmers
-are overboard striking out for the rocks; two ropes are sent out, and
-secured; and, the gangs hauling on them, we are working inch by inch
-through, everybody on board trembling with excitement. We look at our
-watches; it seems only fifteen minutes since we left Assouan; it is an
-hour and a quarter. Do we gain in the chute? It is difficult to say;
-the boat hangs back and strains at the cables; but just as we are in the
-pinch of doubt, the big sail unfurls its wing with exciting suddenness,
-a strong gust catches it, we feel the lift, and creep upward, amid an
-infernal din of singing and shouting and calling on the Prophet from the
-gangs who haul in the sail-rope, who tug at the cables attached to the
-rocks, who are pulling at the hawsers on the shore. We forge ahead and
-are about to dash into a boiling caldron before us, from which there
-appears to be no escape, when a skillful turn of the great creaking helm
-once more throws us to the left, and we are again in an eddy with the
-stream whirling by us, and the sail is let go and is furled.
-
-The place where we lie is barely long enough to admit our boat; its
-stern just clears the rocks, its bow is aground on hard sand. The number
-of men and boys on the rocks has increased; it is over one hundred, it
-is one hundred and thirty; on a re-count it is one hundred and fifty.
-An anchor is now carried out to hold us in position when we make a new
-start; more ropes are taken to the shore, two hitched to the bow and one
-to the stern. Straight before us is a narrow passage through which the
-water comes in foaming ridges with extraordinary rapidity. It seems to
-be our way; but of course it is not. We are to turn the corner sharply,
-before reaching it; what will happen then we shall see.
-
-There is a slight lull in the excitement, while the extra hawsers are
-got out and preparations are made for the next struggle. The sheykhs
-light their long pipes, and squatting on deck gravely wait. The men who
-have tobacco roll up cigarettes and smoke them. The swimmers come on
-board for reinforcement. The poor fellows are shivering as if they had
-an ague fit. The Nile may be friendly, though it does not offer a warm
-bath at this time of the year, but when they come out of it naked on
-the rocks the cold north wind sets their white teeth chartering. The
-dragoman brings out a bottle of brandy. It is none of your ordinary
-brandy, but must have cost over a dollar a gallon, and would burn a hole
-in a new piece of cotton cloth. He pours out a tumblerful of it, and
-offers it to one of the granite men. The granite man pours it down his
-throat in one flow, without moving an eye-winker, and holds the glass
-out for another. His throat must be lined with zinc. A second tumblerful
-follows the first. It is like pouring liquor into a brazen image.
-
-I said there was a lull, but this is only in contrast to the preceding
-fury. There is still noise enough, over and above the roar of the
-waters, in the preparations going forward, the din of a hundred people
-screaming together, each one giving orders, and elaborating his opinion
-by a rhetorical use of his hands. The waiting crowd scattered over the
-rocks disposes itself picturesquely, as an Arab crowd always does,
-and probably cannot help doing, in its blue and white gowns and white
-turbans. In the midst of these preparations, and unmindful of any
-excitement or contusion, a Sheykh, standing upon a little square of sand
-amid the rocks, and so close to the deck of the boat that we can hear
-his “Allâhoo Akbar” (God is most Great), begins his kneelings and
-prostrations towards Mecca, and continues at his prayers, as undisturbed
-and as unregarded as if he were in a mosque, and wholly oblivious of
-the babel around him. So common has religion become in this land of its
-origin! Here is a half-clad Sheykh of the desert stopping, in the
-midst of his contract to take the howadji up the cataract, to raise his
-forefinger and say, “I testify that there is no deity but God; and I
-testify that Mohammed is his servant and his apostle.”
-
-Judging by the eye, the double turn we have next to make is too short
-to admit our long hull. It does not seem possible that we can squeeze
-through; but we try. We first swing out and take the current as if we
-were going straight up the rapids. We are held by two ropes from the
-stern, while by four ropes from the bow, three on the left shore and one
-on an islet to the right, the cataract people are tugging to draw us up.
-As we watch almost breathless the strain on the ropes, look! there is a
-man in the tumultuous rapid before us swiftly coming down as if to his
-destruction. Another one follows, and then another, till there are half
-a dozen men and boys in this jeopardy, this situation of certain death
-to anybody not made of cork. And the singular thing about it is that the
-men are seated upright, sliding down the shining water like a boy, who
-has no respect for his trowsers, down a snow-bank. As they dash past us,
-we see that each man is seated on a round log about five feet long; some
-of them sit upright with their legs on the log, displaying the soles of
-their feet, keeping the equilibrium with their hands. These are smooth
-slimy logs that a white man would find it difficult to sit on if they
-were on shore, and in this water they would turn with him only once—the
-log would go one way and the man another. But these fellows are in
-no fear of the rocks below; they easily guide their barks out of the
-rushing floods, through the whirlpools and eddies, into the slack
-shore-water in the rear of the boat, and stand up like men and demand
-backsheesh. These logs are popular ferry-boats in the Upper Nile; I have
-seen a woman crossing the river on one, her clothes in a basket and the
-basket on her head—and the Nile is nowhere an easy stream to swim.
-
-Far ahead of us the cataract people are seen in lines and groups,
-half-hidden by the rocks, pulling and stumbling along; black figures are
-scattered along lifting the ropes over the jagged stones, and freeing
-them so that we shall not be drawn back, as we slowly advance; and
-severe as their toil is, it is not enough to keep them warm when the
-chilly wind strikes them. They get bruised on the rocks also, and have
-time to show us their barked shins and request backsheesh. An Egyptian
-is never too busy or too much in peril to forget to prefer that request
-at the sight of a traveler. When we turn into the double twist I spoke
-of above, the bow goes sideways upon a rock, and the stern is not yet
-free. The punt-poles are brought into requisition; half the men are in
-the water; there is poling and pushing and grunting, heaving, and
-“Yah Mohammed, Yah Mohammed” with all which noise and outlay of brute
-strength, the boat moves a little on and still is held close in hand.
-The current runs very swiftly We have to turn almost by a right angle
-to the left and then by the same angle to the right; and the question
-is whether the boat is not too long to turn in the space. We just scrape
-along the rocks, the current growing every moment stronger, and at
-length get far enough to let the stern swing. I run back to see if it
-will go free. It is a close fit. The stern is clear; but if our boat
-had been four or five feet longer, her voyage would have ended then
-and there. There is now before us a straight pull up the swiftest and
-narrowest rapid we have thus far encountered.
-
-Our sandal—the row-boat belonging to the dahabeëh, that becomes a
-felucca when a mast is stepped into it—which has accompanied us fitfully
-during the passage, appearing here and there tossing about amid the
-rocks, and aiding occasionally in the transport of ropes and men to one
-rock and another, now turns away to seek a less difficult passage. The
-rocks all about us are low, from three feet to ten feet high. We have
-one rope out ahead, fastened to a rock, upon which stand a gang of men,
-pulling. There is a row of men in the water under the left side of the
-boat, heaving at her with their broad backs, to prevent her smashing on
-the rocks. But our main dragging force is in the two long lines of men
-attached to the ropes on the left shore. They stretch out ahead of us
-so far that it needs an opera-glass to discover whether the leaders are
-pulling or only soldiering. These two long struggling lines are led and
-directed by a new figure who appears upon this operatic scene. It is a
-comical Sheykh, who stands upon a high rock at one side and lines out
-the catch-lines of a working refrain, while the gangs howl and haul,
-in a surging chorus. Nothing could be wilder or more ludicrous, in the
-midst of this roar of rapids and strain of cordage. The Sheykh holds a
-long staff which he swings like the baton of the leader of an orchestra,
-quite unconscious of the odd figure he cuts against the blue sky. He
-grows more and more excited, he swings his arms, he shrieks, but always
-in tune and in time with the hauling and the wilder chorus of the
-cataract men, he lifts up his right leg, he lifts up his left leg, he
-is in the very ecstasy of the musical conductor, displaying his white
-teeth, and raising first one leg and then the other in a delirious
-swinging motion, all the more picturesque on account of his flowing
-blue robe and his loose white cotton drawers. He lifts his leg with a
-gigantic pull, which is enough in itself to draw the boat onward, and
-every time he lifts it, the boat gains on the current. Surely such an
-orchestra and such a leader was never seen before. For the orchestra is
-scattered over half an acre of ground, swaying and pulling and singing
-in rhythmic show, and there is a high wind and a blue sky, and rocks and
-foaming torrents, and an African village with palms in the background,
-amid the debris of the great convulsion of nature which has resulted
-in this chaos. Slowly we creep up against the stiff boiling stream,
-the good Moslems on deck muttering prayers and telling their beads, and
-finally make the turn and pass the worst eddies; and as we swing round
-into an ox-bow channel to the right, the big sail is again let out and
-hauled in, and with cheers we float on some rods and come into a quiet
-shelter, a stage beyond the journey usually made the first day. It is
-now three o'clock.
-
-We have come to the real cataract, to the stiffest pull and the most
-dangerous passage.
-
-A small freight dahabeëh obstructs the way, and while this is being
-hauled ahead, we prepare for the final struggle. The chief cataract is
-called Bab (gate) Aboo Rabbia, from one of Mohammed Ali's captains who
-some years ago vowed that he would take his dahabeëh up it with his own
-crew and without aid from the cataract people. He lost his boat. It is
-also sometimes called Bab Inglese from a young Englishman, named Cave,
-who attempted to swim down it early one morning, in imitation of the
-Nubian swimmers, and was drawn into the whirlpools, and not found for
-days after. For this last struggle, in addition to the other ropes, an
-enormous cable is bent on, not tied to the bow, but twisted round the
-cross-beams of the forward deck, and carried out over the rocks. From
-the shelter where we lie we are to push out and take the current at a
-sharp angle. The water of this main cataract sucks down from both sides
-above through a channel perhaps one hundred feet wide, very rapid and
-with considerable fall, and with such force as to raise a ridge in the
-middle. To pull up this hill of water is the tug; if the ropes let go
-we shall be dashed into a hundred pieces on the rocks below and be
-swallowed in the whirlpools. It would not be a sufficient compensation
-for this fate to have this rapid hereafter take our name.
-
-The preparations are leisurely made, the lines are laid along the rocks
-and the men are distributed. The fastenings are carefully examined.
-Then we begin to move. There are now four conductors of this gigantic
-orchestra (the employment of which as a musical novelty I respectfully
-recommend to the next Boston Jubilee), each posted on a high rock, and
-waving a stick with a white rag tied to it. It is now four o'clock. An
-hour has been consumed in raising the curtain for the last act. We are
-now carefully under way along the rocks which are almost within reach,
-held tight by the side ropes, but pushed off and slowly urged along by a
-line of half-naked fellows under the left side, whose backs are against
-the boat and whose feet walk along the perpendicular ledge. It would
-take only a sag of the boat, apparently, to crush them. It does not need
-our eyes to tell us when the bow of the boat noses the swift water. Our
-sandal has meantime carried a line to a rock on the opposite side of the
-channel, and our sailors haul on this and draw us ahead. But we are held
-firmly by the shore lines. The boat is never suffered, as I said, to get
-an inch the advantage, but is always held tight in hand.
-
-As we appear at the foot of the rapid, men come riding down it on logs
-as before, a sort of horseback feat in the boiling water, steering
-themselves round the eddies and landing below us. One of them swims
-round to the rock where a line is tied, and looses it as we pass;
-another, sitting on the slippery stick and showing the white soles of
-his black feet, paddles himself about amid the whirlpools. We move so
-slowly that we have time to enjoy all these details, to admire the deep
-yellow of the Libyan sand drifted over the rocks at the right, and
-to cheer a sandal bearing the American flag which is at this moment
-shooting the rapids in another channel beyond us, tossed about like a
-cork. We see the meteor flag flashing out, we lose it behind the
-rocks, and catch it again appearing below. “Oh star spang”—but our own
-orchestra is in full swing again. The comical Sheykh begins to swing his
-arms and his stick back and forth in an increasing measure, until his
-whole body is drawn into the vortex of his enthusiasm, and one leg after
-the other, by a sort of rhythmic hitch, goes up displaying the white
-and baggy cotton drawers. The other three conductors join in, and a
-deafening chorus from two hundred men goes up along the ropes, while
-we creep slowly on amid the suppressed excitement of those on board
-who anxiously watch the straining cables, and with a running fire of
-“backsheesh, backsheesh,” from the boys on the rocks close at hand. The
-cable holds; the boat nags and jerks at it in vain; through all the
-roar and rush we go on, lifted I think perceptibly every time the sheykh
-lifts his leg.
-
-At the right moment the sail is again shaken down; and the boat at once
-feels it. It is worth five hundred men. The ropes slacken; we are going
-by the wind against the current; haste is made to unbend the cable; line
-after line is let go until we are held by one alone; the crowd thins
-out, dropping away with no warning and before we know that the play is
-played out, the cataract people have lost all interest in it and are
-scattering over the black rocks to their homes. A few stop to cheer;
-the chief conductor is last seen on a rock, swinging the white rag,
-hurrahing and salaaming in grinning exultation; the last line is cast
-off, and we round the point and come into smooth but swift water, and
-glide into a calm mind. The noise, the struggle, the tense strain, the
-uproar of men and waves for four hours are all behind; and hours of
-keener excitement and enjoyment we have rarely known. At 12.20 we
-left Assouan; at 4.45 we swung round the rocky bend above the last and
-greatest rapid. I write these figures, for they will be not without a
-melancholy interest to those who have spent two or three days or a week
-in making this passage.
-
-Turning away from the ragged mountains of granite which obstruct the
-straight course of the river, we sail by Mahatta, a little village of
-Nubians, a port where the trading and freight boats plying between the
-First and Second Cataract load and unload. There is a forest of masts
-and spars along the shore which is piled with merchandise, and dotted
-with sunlit figures squatting in the sand as if waiting for the goods
-to tranship themselves. With the sunlight slanting on our full sail, we
-glide into the shadow of high rocks, and enter, with the suddenness of a
-first discovery, into a deep winding river, the waters of which are dark
-and smooth, between lofty walls of granite. These historic masses, which
-have seen pass so many splendid processions and boastful expeditions
-of conquest in what seems to us the twilight of the world, and which
-excited the wonder of Father Herodotus only the other day, almost in
-our own time (for the Greeks belong to us and not to antiquity as it now
-unfolds itself), are piled in strange shapes, tottling rock upon rock,
-built up grotesquely, now in likeness of an animal, or the gigantic
-profile of a human face, or temple walls and castle towers and
-battlements. We wind through this solemn highway, and suddenly, in the
-very gateway, Philæ! The lovely! Philæ, the most sentimental ruin
-in Egypt. There are the great pylon of the temple of Isis, the long
-colonnades of pillars, the beautiful square temple, with lofty columns
-and elongated capitals, misnamed Pharaoh's bed. The little oblong
-island, something like twelve hundred feet long, banded all round by an
-artificial wall, an island of rock completely covered with ruins, is set
-like the stone of a ring, with a circle of blue water about it, in the
-clasp of higher encircling granite peaks and ledges. On the left bank,
-as we turn to pass to the east of the island, is a gigantic rock which
-some persons have imagined was a colossus once, perhaps in pre-Adamic
-times, but which now has no resemblance to human shape, except in a
-breast and left arm. Some Pharaoh cut his cartouche on the back—a sort
-of postage-stamp to pass the image along down the ages. The Pharaohs
-were ostentatious; they cut their names wherever they could find a
-conspicuous and smooth place.
-
-While we are looking, distracted with novelty at every turn and excited
-by a grandeur and loveliness opening upon us every moment, we have come
-into a quiet haven, shut in on all sides by broken ramparts,—alone with
-this island of temples. The sun is about to set, and its level light
-comes to us through the columns, and still gilds with red and yellow
-gold the Libyan sand sifted over the cliffs. We moor at once to a
-sand-bank which has formed under the broken walls, and at once step on
-shore. We climb to the top of the temple walls; we walk on the stone
-roof; we glance into the temple on the roof, where is sculptured the
-resurrection of Osiris. This cannot be called an old temple. It is
-a creation of the Ptolemies, though it doubtless replaced an older
-edifice. The temple of Isis was not begun more than three centuries
-before our era. Not all of these structures were finished—the priests
-must have been still carving on their walls these multitudes of
-sculptures, when Christ began his mission; and more than four centuries
-after that the mysterious rites of Isis were still celebrated in these
-dark chambers. It is silent and dead enough here now; and there lives
-nowhere upon the earth any man who can even conceive the state of
-mind that gave those rites vitality. Even Egypt has changed its
-superstitions.
-
-Peace has come upon the earth after the strain of the last few hours. We
-can scarcely hear the roar of the rapids, in the beating of which we had
-been. The sun goes, leaving a changing yellow and faint orange on the
-horizon. Above in the west is the crescent moon; and now all the sky
-thereabout is rosy, even to the zenith, a delicate and yet deep color,
-like that of the blush-rose—a transparent color that glows. A little
-later we see from our boat the young moon through the columns of the
-lesser temple. The January night is clear and perfectly dry; no dew
-is falling—no dew ever falls here—and the multiplied stars burn with
-uncommon lustre. When everything else is still, we hear the roar of the
-rapids coming steadily on the night breeze, sighing through the old and
-yet modern palace-temples of the parvenu Ptolemies, and of Cleopatra—a
-new race of conquerors and pleasure-hunters, who in vain copied the
-magnificent works of the ancient Pharaohs.
-
-Here on a pylon gate, General Dessaix has recorded the fact that
-in February (Ventose) in the seventh year of the Republic, General
-Bonaparte being then in possession of Lower Egypt he pursued to this
-spot the retreating Memlooks. Egyptian kings, Ethiopian usurpers,
-Persians, Greeks, Romans, Nectanebo, Cambyses, Ptolemy, Philadelphus,
-Cleopatra and her Roman lovers, Dessaix,—these are all shades now.
-
-
-
-0264
-
-
-
-0265
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XX.—ON THE BORDERS OF THE DESERT.
-
-IN PASSING the First Cataract of the Nile we pass an ancient boundary
-line; we go from the Egypt of old to the Ethiopia of old; we go from
-the Egypt proper of to-day, into Nubia. We find a different country, a
-different river; the people are of another race; they have a different
-language. We have left the mild, lazy, gentle fellaheen—a mixed lot, but
-in general of Arabic blood—and come to Barâbra, whose district extends
-from Philæ to the Second Cataract, a freer, manlier, sturdier people
-altogether. There are two tribes of them, the Kendos and the Nooba; each
-has its own language.
-
-Philæ was always the real boundary line, though the Pharaohs pushed
-their frontier now and again, down towards the Equator, and built
-temples and set up their images, as at Aboo Simbel, as at Samneh, and
-raked the south land for slaves and ivory, concubines and gold. But the
-Ethiopians turned the tables now and again, and conquered Egypt, and
-reigned in the palaces of the Pharaohs, taking that title even, and
-making their names dreaded as far as Judea and Assyria.
-
-The Ethiopians were cousins indeed of the old Egyptians, and of the
-Canaanites, for they were descendants of Cush, as the Egyptians were of
-Mizriam, and the Canaanites were of Canaan; three of the sons of Ham.
-The Cushites, or Ethiops, although so much withdrawn from the theater
-of history, have done their share of fighting—the main business of man
-hitherto. Besides quarrels with their own brethren, they had often the
-attentions of the two chief descendants of Shem,—the Jews and the Arabs;
-and after Mohammed's coming, the Arabs descended into Nubia and forced
-the inhabitants into their religion at the point of the sword. Even
-the sons of Japhet must have their crack at these children of the
-“Sun-burned.” It was a Roman prefect who, to avenge an attack on Svene
-by a warlike woman, penetrated as far south as El Berkel (of the present
-day), and overthrew Candace the Queen of the Ethiopians in Napata, her
-capital; the large city, also called Meroë, of which Herodotus heard
-such wonders.
-
-Beyond Ethiopia lies the vast, black cloud of Negroland. These negroes,
-with the crisp, woolly hair, did not descend from anybody, according to
-the last reports; neither from Shem, Ham nor Japhet. They have no part
-in the royal house of Noah. They are left out in the heat. They are
-the puzzle of ethnologists, the mystery of mankind. They are the real
-aristocracy of the world, their origin being lost in the twilight of
-time; no one else can trace his descent so far back and come to nothing.
-M. Lenormant says the black races have no tradition of the Deluge.
-They appear to have been passed over altogether, then. Where were they
-hidden? When we first know Central Africa they are there. Where did
-they come from? The great effort of ethnologists is to get them dry-shod
-round the Deluge, since derivation from Noah is denied them. History
-has no information how they came into Africa. It seems to me that, in
-history, whenever we hear of the occupation of a new land, there is
-found in it a primitive race, to be driven out or subdued. The country
-of the primitive negro is the only one that has never invited the
-occupation of a more powerful race. But the negro blood, by means of
-slavery, has been extensively distributed throughout the Eastern world.
-
-These reflections did not occur to us the morning we left Philæ. It was
-too early. In fact, the sun was just gilding “Pharaoh's bed,” as the
-beautiful little Ptolemaic temple is called, when we spread sail and, in
-the shadow of the broken crags and savage rocks, began to glide out of
-the jaws of this wild pass. At early morning everything has the air of
-adventure. It was as if we were discoverers, about to come into a new
-African kingdom at each turn in the swift stream.
-
-One must see, he carnot imagine, the havoc and destruction hereabout,
-the grotesque and gigantic fragments of rock, the islands of rock, the
-precipices of rock, made by the torrent when it broke through here. One
-of these islands is Biggeh—all rocks, not enough soft spot on it to set
-a hen. The rocks are piled up into the blue sky; from their summit we
-get the best view of Philæ—the jewel set in this rim of stone.
-
-Above Philæ we pass the tomb of a holy man, high on the hill, and
-underneath it, clinging to the slope, the oldest mosque in Nubia, the
-Mosque of Belal, falling now into ruin, but the minaret shows in color
-no sign of great age. How should it in this climate, where you might
-leave a pair of white gloves upon the rocks for a year, and expect to
-find them unsoiled.
-
-“How old do you suppose that mosque is Abd-el-Atti?”
-
-“I tink about twelve hundred years old. Him been built by the Friends of
-our prophet when they come up here to make the people believe.”
-
-I like this euphuism. “But,” we ask, “suppose they didn't believe, what
-then?”
-
-“When thim believe, all right; when thim not believe, do away wid 'em.”
-
-“But they might believe something else, if not what Mohammed believed.”
-
-“Well, what our Prophet say? Mohammed, he say, find him anybody believe
-in God, not to touch him; find him anybody believe in the Christ, not to
-touch him; find him anybody believe in Moses, not to touch him; find him
-believe in the prophets, not to touch him; find him believe in bit wood,
-piece stone, do way wid him. Not so? Men worship something wood, stone,
-I can't tell—I tink dis is nothing.”
-
-Abd-el-Atti always says the “Friends” of Mohammed, never followers or
-disciples. It is a pleasant word, and reminds us of our native land.
-Mohammed had the good sense that our politicians have. When he wanted
-anything, a city taken, a new strip of territory added, a “third term,”
-or any trifle, he “put himself in the hands of his friends.”
-
-The Friends were successful in this region. While the remote Abyssinians
-retained Christianity, the Nubians all became Moslems, and so remain to
-this day.
-
-“You think, then, Abd-el-Atti, that the Nubians believed?”
-
-“Thim 'bliged. But I tink these fellows, all of 'em, Musselmens as far
-as the throat; it don't go lower down.”
-
-The story is that this mosque was built by one of Mohammed's captains
-after the great battle here with the Infidels—the Nubians. Those
-who fell in the fight, it is also only tradition, were buried in the
-cemetery near Assouan, and they are martyrs: to this day the Moslems who
-pass that way take off their slippers and shoes.
-
-After the battle, as the corpses of the slain lay in indistinguishable
-heaps, it was impossible to tell who were martyrs and who were
-unbelievers. Mohammed therefore ordered that they should bury as Moslems
-all those who had large feet, and pleasant faces, with the mark
-of prayer on the forehead. The bodies of the others were burned as
-infidels.
-
-As we sweep along, the mountains are still high on either side, and the
-strips of verdure are very slight. On the east bank, great patches of
-yellow sand, yellow as gold, and yet reddish in some lights, catch the
-sun.
-
-I think it is the finest morning I ever saw, for clearness and dryness.
-The thermometer indicates only 60°, and yet it is not too cool. The air
-is like wine. The sky is absolutely cloudless, and of wonderful clarity.
-Here is a perfectly pure and sweet atmosphere. After a little, the wind
-freshens, and it is somewhat cold on deck, but the sky is like sapphire;
-let the wind blow for a month, it will raise no cloud, nor any film of
-it.
-
-Everything is wanting in Nubia that would contribute to the discomfort
-of a winter residence:—
-
-It never rains;
-
-There is never any dew above Philæ;
-
-There are no flies;
-
-There are no fleas;
-
-There are no bugs, nor any insects whatever.
-
-The attempt to introduce fleas into Nubia by means of dahabeëhs has been
-a failure.
-
-In fact there is very little animal life; scarcely any birds are seen;
-fowls of all sorts are rare. There are gazelles, however, and desert
-hares, and chameleons. Our chameleons nearly starved for want of flies.
-There are big crocodiles and large lizards.
-
-In a bend a few miles above Philæ is a whirlpool called Shaymtel Wah,
-from which is supposed to be a channel communicating under the mountain
-to the Great Oasis one hundred miles distant. The popular belief in
-these subterranean communications is very common throughout the East.
-The holy well, Zem-Zem, at Mecca, has a connection with a spring at El
-Gebel in Syria. I suppose that is perfectly well known. Abd-el-Atti has
-tasted the waters of both; and they are exactly alike; besides, did he
-not know of a pilgrim who lost his drinking-cup in Zem-Zem and recovered
-it in El Gebel.
-
-This Nubia is to be sure but a river with a colored border, but I
-should like to make it seem real to you and not a mere country of
-the imagination. People find room to live here; life goes on after a
-fashion, and every mile there are evidences of a mighty civilization and
-a great power which left its record in gigantic works. There was a time,
-before the barriers broke away at Silsilis, when this land was inundated
-by the annual rise; the Nile may have perpetually expanded above here
-into a lake, as Herodotus reports.
-
-We sail between low ridges of rocky hills, with narrow banks of
-green and a few palms, but occasionally there is a village of square
-mud-houses. At Gertassee, boldly standing out on a rocky platform, are
-some beautiful columns, the remains of a temple built in the Roman time.
-The wind is strong and rather colder with the turn of noon; the nearer
-we come to the tropics the colder it becomes. The explanation is that
-we get nothing but desert winds; and the desert is cool at this season;
-that is, it breeds at night cool air, although one does not complain of
-its frigidity who walks over it at midday.
-
-After passing Tafa, a pretty-looking village in the palms, which boasts
-ruins both pagan and Christian, we come to rapids and scenery almost as
-wild and lovely as that at Philæ. The river narrows, there are granite
-rocks and black boulders in the stream; we sail for a couple of miles
-in swift and deep water, between high cliffs, and by lofty rocky
-islands—not without leafage and some cultivation, and through a series
-of rapids, not difficult but lively. And so we go cheerily on, through
-savage nature and gaunt ruins of forgotten history; past Kalâbshe, where
-are remains of the largest temple in Nubia; past Bayt el Wellee—“the
-house of the saint”—where Rameses II. hewed a beautiful temple out of
-the rock; past Gerf Hossdyn, where Rameses II. hewed a still larger
-temple out of the rock and covered it with his achievements, pictures
-in which he appears twelve feet high, and slaying small enemies as a
-husbandman threshes wheat with a flail. I should like to see an ancient
-stone wall in Egypt, where this Barnum of antiquity wasn't advertising
-himself.
-
-We leave him flailing the unfortunate; at eight in the evening we are
-still going on, first by the light of the crescent moon, and then by
-starlight, which is like a pale moonlight, so many and lustrous are the
-stars; and last, about eleven o'clock we go aground, and stop a little
-below Dakkeh, or seventy-one miles from Philæ, that being our modest run
-for the day.
-
-Dakkeh, by daylight, reveals itself as a small mud-village attached to a
-large temple. You would not expect to find a temple here, but its great
-pylon looms over the town and it is worth at least a visit. To see such
-a structure in America we would travel a thousand miles; the traveler on
-the Nile debates whether he will go ashore.
-
-The bank is lined with the natives who have something to sell, eggs,
-milk, butter in little greasy “pats,” and a sheep. The men are, as to
-features and complexion, rather Arabic than Nubian. The women have
-the high cheek-bones and broad faces of our Indian squaws, whom they
-resemble in a general way. The little girls who wear the Nubian costume
-(a belt with fringe) and strings of beads, are not so bad; some of
-them well formed. The morning is cool and the women all wear some outer
-garment, so that the Nubian costume is not seen in its simplicity,
-except as it is worn by children. I doubt if it is at any season. So far
-as we have observed the Nubian women they are as modest in their dress
-as their Egyptian sisters. Perhaps ugliness and modesty are sisters in
-their country. All the women and girls have their hair braided in a sort
-of plait in front, and heavily soaked with grease, so that it looks as
-if they had on a wig or a frontlet of leather; it hangs in small, hard,
-greasy curls, like leathern thongs, down each side. The hair appears
-never to be undone—only freshly greased every morning. Nose-rings and
-earrings abound.
-
-This handsome temple was began by Ergamenes, an Ethiopian king ruling at
-Meroë, at the time of the second Ptolemy, during the Greek period; and
-it was added to both by Ptolemies and Cæsars. This Nubia would seem to
-have been in possession of Ethiopians and Egyptians turn and turn about,
-and, both having the same religion, the temples prospered.
-
-Ergamenes has gained a reputation by a change he made in his religion,
-as it was practiced in Meroë. When the priests thought a king had
-reigned long enough it was their custom to send him notice that the gods
-had ordered him to die; and the king, who would rather die than commit
-an impiety, used to die. But Ergamenes tried another method, which he
-found worked just as well; he assembled all the priests, and slew them—a
-very sensible thing on his part.
-
-You would expect such a man to build a good temple. The sculptures
-are very well executed, whether they are of his time, or owe their
-inspiration to Berenice and Cleopatra; they show greater freedom and
-variety than those of most temples; the figures of lion, monkeys, cows,
-and other animals are excellent; and there is a picture of a man playing
-on a musical instrument, a frame with strings stretched over it, played
-like a harp but not harp shaped—the like of which is seen nowhere else.
-The temple has the appearance of a fortification as well as a place of
-worship. The towers of the propylon are ascended by interior flights
-of stairs, and have, one above the other, four good-sized chambers. The
-stairways and the rooms are lighted by slits in the wall about an inch
-in diameter on the outside; but cut with a slant from the interior
-through some five feet of solid stone. These windows are exactly like
-those in European towers, and one might easily imagine himself in a
-Middle Age fortification. The illusion is heightened by the remains of
-Christian paintings on the walls, fresh in color, and in style very like
-those of the earliest Christian art in Italian churches. In the temple
-we are attended by a Nubian with a long and threatening spear, such
-as the people like to carry here; the owner does not care for blood,
-however; he only wants a little backsheesh.
-
-Beyond Dakkeh the country opens finely; the mountains fall back, and we
-look a long distance over the desert on each side, the banks having only
-a few rods of green. Far off in the desert on either hand and in front,
-are sharp pyramidal mountains, in ranges, in groups, the resemblance
-to pyramids being very striking. The atmosphere as to purity is
-extraordinary. Simply to inspire it is a delight for which one may well
-travel thousands of miles.
-
-We pass small patches of the castor-oil plant, and of a reddish-stemmed
-bush, bearing the Indian bendigo, Arabic bahima, the fruit a sort of
-bean in appearance and about as palatable. The castor-oil is much used
-by the women as a hair-dressing, but they are not fastidious; they use
-something else if oil is wanting. The demand for butter for this purpose
-raised the price of it enormously this morning at Dakkeh.
-
-In the afternoon, waiting for wind, we walk ashore and out upon the
-naked desert—the desert which is broken only by an occasional oasis,
-from the Atlantic to the Red Sea; it has a basis of limestone, strewn
-with sand like gold-dust, and a detritus of stone as if it had been
-scorched by fire and worn by water. There is a great pleasure in
-strolling over this pure waste blown by the free air. We visit a Nubian
-village, and buy some spurious scarabæi off the necks of the ladies of
-the town—alas, for rural simplicity! But these women are not only sharp,
-they respect themselves sufficiently to dress modestly and even draw
-their shawls over their faces. The children take the world as they find
-it, as to clothes.
-
-The night here, there being no moisture in the air is as brilliant as
-the day; I have never seen the moon and stars so clear elsewhere. These
-are the evenings that invite to long pipes and long stories. Abd-el-Atti
-opens his budget from time to time, as we sit on deck and while the time
-with anecdotes and marvels out of old Arab chronicles, spiced with his
-own ready wit and singular English. Most of them are too long for these
-pages; but here is an anecdote which, whether true or not illustrates
-the character of old Mohammed Ali:—
-
-“Mohammed Ali sent one of his captains, name of Walee Kasheef, to Derr,
-capital of Nubia (you see it by and by, very fashionable place, like
-I see 'em in Hydee Park, what you call Rotten Row). Walee when he come
-there, see the women, their hair all twisted up and stuck together with
-grease and castor-oil, and their bodies covered with it. He called the
-sheykhs together and made them present of soap, and told them to make
-the women clean the hair and wash themselves, and make themselves fit
-for prayer. It was in accordin' to the Moslem religion so to do.
-
-“The Nubians they not like this part of our religion, they not like it
-at all. They send the sheykhs down to have conversation with Mohammed
-Ali, who been stop at Esneh. They complain of what Walee done. Mohammed
-send for Walee, and say, 'What this you been done in Nubia?' 'Nothing,
-your highness, 'cept trying to make the Nubians conform to the
-religion.' 'Well,' says old Mohammed, 'I not send you up there as a
-priest; I send you up to get a little money. Don't you trouble the
-Nubians. We don't care if they go to Gennéh or Gehennem, if you get the
-money.'.rdquo;
-
-So the Nubians were left in sin and grease, and taxed accordingly. And
-at this day the taxes are even heavier. Every date-palm and every sakiya
-is taxed. A sakiya sometimes pays three pounds a year, when there is not
-a piece of fertile land for it to water three rods square.
-
-
-
-0274
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXI—ETHIOPIA.
-
-IT IS a sparkling morning at Wady Saboda; we have the desert and some
-of its high, scarred, and sandy pyramidal peaks close to us, but as
-is usual where a wady, or valley, comes to the river, there is more
-cultivated land. We see very little of the temple of Rameses II. in this
-“Valley of the Lions,” nor of the sphinxes in front of it. The desert
-sand has blown over it and over it in drifts like snow, so that we walk
-over the buried sanctuary, greatly to our delight. It is a pleasure to
-find one adytum into which we cannot go and see this Rameses pretending
-to make offerings, but really, as usual, offering to show himself.
-
-At the village under the ledges, many of the houses are of stone, and
-the sheykh has a pretentious stone enclosure with little in it, all to
-himself. Shadoofs are active along the bank, and considerable crops
-of wheat, beans, and corn are well forward. We stop to talk with a
-bright-looking Arab, who employs men to work his shadoofs, and lives
-here in an enclosure of cornstalks, with a cornstalk kennel in one
-corner, where he and his family sleep. There is nothing pretentious
-about this establishment, but the owner is evidently a man of wealth,
-and, indeed, he has the bearing of a shrewd Yankee. He owns a camel,
-two donkeys, several calves and two cows, and two young Nubian girls for
-wives, black as coal and greased, but rather pleasant-faced. He has also
-two good guns—appears to have duplicates of nearly everything. Out of
-the cornstalk shanty his wives bring some handsome rugs for us to sit
-on.
-
-The Arab accompanies us on our walk, as a sort of host of the country,
-and we are soon joined by others, black fellows; some of them carry the
-long flint-lock musket, for which they seem to have no powder; and all
-wear a knife in a sheath on the left arm; but they are as peaceable
-friendly folk as you would care to meet, and simple-minded. I show the
-Arab my field-glass, an object new to his experience. He looks through
-it, as I direct, and is an astonished man, making motions with his hand,
-to indicate how the distant objects are drawn towards him, laughing with
-a soft and childlike delight, and then lowering the glass, looks at it,
-and cries, “Bismillah! Bismillah,” an ejaculation of wonder, and also
-intended to divert any misfortune from coming upon him on account of his
-indulgence in this pleasure.
-
-He soon gets the use of the glass and looks beyond the river and all
-about, as if he were discovering objects unknown to him before. The
-others all take a turn at it, and are equally astonished and delighted.
-But when I cause them to look through the large end at a dog near by,
-and they see him remove far off in the desert, their astonishment is
-complete. My comrade's watch interested them nearly as much, although
-they knew its use; they could never get enough of its ticking and of
-looking at its works, and they concluded that the owner of it must be a
-Pasha.
-
-The men at work dress in the slight manner of the ancient Egyptians;
-the women, however, wear garments covering them, and not seldom hide the
-face at our approach. But the material of their dress is not always of
-the best quality; an old piece of sacking makes a very good garment for
-a Nubian woman. Most of them wear some trinkets, beads or bits of silver
-or carnelian round the neck, and heavy bracelets of horn. The boys have
-not yet come into their clothing, but the girls wear the leathern belt
-and fringe adorned with shells.
-
-The people have little, but they are not poor. It may be that this
-cornstalk house of our friend is only his winter residence, while his
-shadoof is most active, and that he has another establishment in town.
-There are too many sakiyas in operation for this region to be anything
-but prosperous, apparently. They are going all night as we sail along,
-and the screaming is weird enough in the stillness. I should think that
-a prisoner was being tortured every eighth of a mile on the bank. We are
-never out of hearing of their shrieks. But the cry is not exactly that
-of pain; it is rather a song than a cry, with an impish squeak in it,
-and a monotonous iteration of one idea, like all the songs here.
-It always repeats one sentence, which sounds like Iskander
-logheh-n-e-e-e-n—whatever it is in Arabic; and there is of course a
-story about it. The king, Alexander, had concealed under his hair two
-horns. Unable to keep the secret to himself he told it in confidence
-to the sakiya; the sakiya couldn't hold the news, but shrieked out,
-“Alexander has two horns,” and the other sakiyas got it; and the scandal
-went the length of the Nile, and never can be hushed.
-
-The Arabs personify everything, and are as full of superstitions as the
-Scotch; peoples who have nothing in common except it may be that the
-extreme predestinationism of the one approaches the fatalism of the
-other—begetting in both a superstitious habit, which a similar cause
-produced in the Greeks. From talking of the sakiya we wander into
-stories illustrative of the credulity and superstition of the Egyptians.
-Charms and incantations are relied on for expelling diseases and warding
-off dangers. The snake-charmer is a person still in considerable request
-in towns and cities. Here in Nubia there is no need of his offices, for
-there are no snakes; but in Lower Egypt, where snakes are common, the
-mud-walls and dirt-floors of the houses permit them to come in and be
-at home with the family. Even in Cairo, where the houses are of brick,
-snakes are much feared, and the house that is reputed to have snakes in
-it cannot be rented. It will stand vacant like an old mansion occupied
-by a ghost in a Christian country. The snake-charmers take advantage of
-this popular fear.
-
-Once upon a time when Abd-el-Atti was absent from the city, a
-snake-charmer came to his house, and told his sister that he divined
-that there were snakes in the house. “My sister,” the story goes on,
-“never see any snake to house, but she woman, and much 'fraid of snakes,
-and believe what him say. She told the charmer to call out the snakes.
-He set to work his mumble, his conjor—('.xorcism'. yes, dat's it,
-exorcism 'em, and bring out a snake. She paid him one dollar.
-
-“Then the conjuror say, 'This the wife; the husband still in the house
-and make great trouble if he not got out.'.rdquo;
-
-“He want him one pound for get the husband out, and my sister give it.
-
-“When I come home I find my sister very sick, very sick indeed, and I
-say what is it? She tell me the story that the house was full of snakes
-and she had a man call them out, but the fright make her long time ill.
-
-“I said, you have done very well to get the snakes out, what could we do
-with a house full of the nasty things? And I said, I must get them out
-of another house I have—house I let him since to machinery.
-
-“Machinery? For what kind of machinery! Steam-engines?”
-
-“No, misheenary—have a school in it.”
-
-“Oh, missionary.”
-
-“Yes, let 'em have it for bout three hundred francs less than I get
-before. I think the school good for Cairo. I send for the snake-charmer,
-and I say I have 'nother house I think has snakes in it, and I ask him
-to divine and see. He comes back and says, my house is full of snakes,
-but he can charm them out.
-
-“I say, good, I will pay you well. We appointed early next morning for
-the operation, and I agreed to meet the charmer at my house. I take with
-me big black fellow I have in the house, strong like a bull. When we get
-there I find the charmer there in front of the house and ready to begin.
-But I propose that we go in the house, it might make disturbance to the
-neighborhood to call so many serpents out into the street. We go in, and
-I sav, tell me the room of the most snakes. The charmer say, and as soon
-as we go in there, I make him sign the black fellow and he throw the
-charmer on the ground, and we tie him with a rope. We find in his bosom
-thirteen snakes and scorpions. I tell him I had no idea there were so
-many snakes in my house. Then I had the fellow before the Kadi; he had
-to pay back all the money he got from my sister and went to prison.
-But,” added Abd-el-Atti, “the doctor did not pay back the money for my
-sister's illness.”
-
-Alexandria was the scene of another snake story. The owner of a house
-there had for tenants an Italian and his wife, whose lease had
-expired, but who would not vacate the premises. He therefore hired a
-snake-charmer to go to the house one day when the family were out, and
-leave snakes in two of the rooms. When the lady returned and found
-a snake in one room she fled into another, but there another serpent
-raised his head and hissed at her. She was dreadfully frightened, and
-sent for the charmer, and had the snakes called out but she declared
-that she wouldn't occupy such a house another minute. And the family
-moved out that day of their own accord. A novel writ of ejectment.
-
-In the morning we touched bottom as to cold weather, the thermometer
-at sunrise going down to 47° it did, indeed, as we heard afterwards, go
-below 40° at Wady Haifa the next morning, but the days were sure to
-be warm enough. The morning is perfectly calm, and the depth of the
-blueness of the sky, especially as seen over the yellow desert sand
-and the blackened surface of the sandstone hills, is extraordinary. An
-artist's representation of this color would be certain to be called
-an exaggeration. The skies of Lower Egypt are absolutely pale in
-comparison.
-
-Since we have been in the tropics, the quality of the sky has been the
-same day and night—sometimes a turquoise blue, such as on rare days we
-get in America through a break in the clouds, but exquisitely delicate
-for all its depth. We passed the Tropic of Cancer in the night,
-somewhere about Dendodr, and did not see it. I did not know, till
-afterwards, that there had been any trouble about it. But it seems that
-it has been moved from Assouan, where Strabo put it and some modern
-atlases still place it, southward, to a point just below the ruins of
-the temple of Dendoor, where Osiris and Isis were worshipped. Probably
-the temple, which is thought to be of the time of Augustus and
-consequently is little respected by any antiquarian, was not built with
-any reference to the Tropic of Cancer; but the point of the turning of
-the sun might well have been marked by a temple to the mysterious deity
-who personified the sun and who was slain and rose again.
-
-Our walk on shore to-day reminded us of a rugged path in Switzerland.
-Before we come to Kalkeh (which is of no account, except that it is in
-the great bend below Korosko) the hills of sandstone draw close to the
-east bank, in some places in sheer precipices, in others leaving a strip
-of sloping sand. Along the cliff is a narrow donkey-path, which travel
-for thousands of years has worn deep; and we ascend along it high above
-the river. Wherever at the foot of the precipices there was a chance to
-grow a handful of beans or a hill of corn, we found the ground occupied.
-In one of these lonely recesses we made the acquaintance of an Arab
-family.
-
-Walking rapidly, I saw something in the path, and held my foot just in
-time to avoid stepping upon a naked brown baby, rather black than brown,
-as a baby might be who spent his time outdoors in the sun without any
-umbrella.
-
-“By Jorge! a nice plumpee little chile,” cried Abd-el-Atti, who is fond
-of children, and picks up and shoulders the boy, who shews no signs of
-fear and likes the ride.
-
-We come soon upon his parents. The man was sitting on a rock smoking
-a pipe. The woman, dry and withered, was picking some green leaves
-and blossoms, of which she would presently make a sort of purée, that
-appears to be a great part of the food of these people. They had three
-children. Their farm was a small piece of the sloping bank, and was in
-appearance exactly like a section of sandy railroad embankment grown to
-weeds. They had a few beans and some squash or pumpkin vines, and there
-were remains of a few hills of doora which had been harvested.
-
-While the dragoman talked with the family, I climbed up to their
-dwelling, in a ravine in the rocks. The house was of the simplest
-architecture—a circular stone enclosure, so loosely laid up that you
-could anywhere put your hand through it. Over a segment of this was laid
-some cornstalks, and under these the piece of matting was spread for the
-bed. That matting was the only furniture of the house. All their clothes
-the family had on them, and those were none too many—they didn't hold
-out to the boy. And the mercury goes down to 470 these mornings! Before
-the opening of this shelter, was a place for a fire against the rocks,
-and a saucepan, water-jar, and some broken bottles The only attraction
-about this is its simplicity. Probably this is the country-place of the
-proprietor, where he retires for “shange of air” during the season when
-his crops are maturing, and then moves into town under the palm-trees
-during the heat of summer.
-
-Talking about Mohammed (we are still walking by the shore) I found that
-Abd-el-Atti had never heard the legend of the miraculous suspension of
-the Prophet's coffin between heaven and earth; no Moslem ever believed
-any such thing; no Moslem ever heard of it.
-
-“Then there isn't any tradition or notion of that sort among Moslems?”
-
-“No, sir. Who said it?”
-
-“Oh, it's often alluded to in English literature—by Mr-Carlyle for one,
-I think.”
-
-“What for him say that? I tink he must put something in his book to make
-it sell. How could it? Every year since Mohammed died, pilgrims been
-make to his grave, where he buried in the ground; shawl every year
-carried to cover it; always buried in that place. No Moslem tink that.”
-
-“Once a good man, a Walee of Fez, a friend of the Prophet, was visited
-by a vision and by the spirit of the Prophet, and he was gecited
-(excited) to go to Mecca and see him. When he was come near in the way,
-a messenger from the Prophet came to the Walee, and told him not to come
-any nearer; that he should die and be buried in the spot where he then
-was. And it was so. His tomb you see it there now before you come to
-Mecca.
-
-“When Mohammed was asked the reason why he would not permit the Walee to
-come to his tomb to see him, he said that the Walee was a great friend
-of his, and if he came to his tomb he should feel bound to rise and see
-him; and he ought not to do that, for the time of the world was not
-yet fully come; if he rose from his tomb, it would be finish, the world
-would be at an end. Therefore he was 'bliged to refuse his friend.
-
-“Nobody doubt he buried in the ground. But Ali, different. Ali, the
-son-in-law of Mohammed (married his daughter Fat'meh, his sons Hasan and
-Hoseyn,) died in Medineh. When he died, he ordered that he should be
-put in a coffin, and said that in the morning there would come from the
-desert a man with a dromedary; that his coffin should be bound upon the
-back of the dromedary, and let go. In the morning, as was foretold, the
-man appeared, leading a dromedary; his head was veiled except his eyes.
-The coffin was bound upon the back of the beast, and the three went away
-into the desert; and no man ever saw either of them more, or knows, to
-this day, where Ali is buried. Whether it was a man or an angel with the
-dromedary, God knows!”
-
-Getting round the great bend at Korosko and Amada is the most vexatious
-and difficult part of the Nile navigation. The distance is only about
-eight miles, but the river takes a freak here to run south-south-east,
-and as the wind here is usually north-north-west, the boat has both wind
-and current against it. But this is not all; it is impossible to track
-on the west bank on account of the shallows and sandbars, and the
-channel on the east side is beset with dangerous rocks. We thought
-ourselves fortunate in making these eight miles in two days, and one of
-them was a very exciting day. The danger was in stranding the dahabeëh
-on the rocks, and being compelled to leave her; and our big boat was
-handled with great difficulty.
-
-Traders and travelers going to the Upper Nile leave the river at
-Korosko. Here begins the direct desert route—as utterly waste, barren
-and fatiguing as any in Africa—to Aboo Hamed, Sennaar and Kartoom. The
-town lies behind a fringe of palms on the river, and backed by high and
-savage desert mountains.
-
-As we pass we see on the high bank piles of merchandise and the white
-tents of the caravans.
-
-This is still the region of slavery. Most of the Arabs, poor as they
-appear, own one or two slaves, got from Sennaar or Darfoor—though called
-generally Nubians. We came across a Sennaar girl to day of perhaps ten
-years of age, hoeing alone in the field. The poor creature, whose ideas
-were as scant as her clothing, had only a sort of animal intelligence;
-she could speak a little Arabic, however (much more than we
-could—speaking of intelligence!) and said she did not dare come with
-us for fear her mistress would beat her. The slave trade is, however,
-greatly curtailed by the expeditions of the Khedive. The bright
-Abyssinian boy, Ahmed, whom we have on board, was brought from his home
-across the Red Sea by way of Mecca. This is one of the ways by which a
-few slaves still sift into Cairo.
-
-We are working along in sight of Korosko all day. Just above it, on some
-rocks in the channel, lies a handsome dahabeëh belonging to a party
-of English gentlemen, which went on a week ago; touched upon concealed
-rocks in the evening as the crew were tracking, was swung further on by
-the current, and now lies high and almost dry, the Nile falling daily,
-in a position where she must wait for the rise next summer. The boat is
-entirely uninjured and no doubt might have been got off the first day,
-if there had only been mechanical skill in the crew. The governor at
-Derr sent down one hundred and fifty men, who hauled and heaved at it
-two or three days, with no effect. Half a dozen Yankees, with a couple
-of jack-screws, and probably with only logs for rollers, would have set
-it afloat. The disaster is exceedingly annoying to the gentlemen, who
-have, however, procured a smaller boat from Wady Haifa in which to
-continue their voyage. We are several hours in getting past these two
-boats, and accomplish it not without a tangling of rigging, scraping
-off of paint, smashing of deck rails, and the expenditure of a whole
-dictionary of Arabic. Our Arabs never see but one thing at a time. If
-they are getting the bow free, the stay-ropes and stern must take care
-of themselves. If, by simple heedlessness, we are letting the yard of
-another boat rip into our rigging, God wills it. While we are in this
-confusion and excitement, the dahabeëh of General McClellan and half a
-dozen in company, sweep down past us, going with wind and current.
-
-It is a bright and delicious Sunday morning that we are still tracking
-above Korosko. To-day is the day the pilgrims to Mecca spend upon the
-mountain of Arafat. Tomorrow they sacrifice; our crew will celebrate it
-by killing a sheep and eating it—and it is difficult to see where the
-sacrifice comes in for them. The Moslems along this shore lost their
-reckoning, mistook the day, and sacrificed yesterday.
-
-This is not the only thing, however, that keeps this place in our
-memory. We saw here a pretty woman. Considering her dress, hair, the
-manner in which she had been brought up, and her looks, a tolerably
-pretty woman; a raving beauty in comparison with her comrades. She has
-a slight cast, in one eye, that only shows for a moment occasionally and
-then disappears. If these feeble tributary lines ever meet that eye, I
-beg her to know that, by reason of her slight visual defect, she is like
-a revolving light, all the more brilliant when she flashes out.
-
-We lost time this morning, were whirled about in eddies and drifted on
-sandbars, owing to contradictory opinions among our navigators, none of
-whom seem to have the least sconce. They generally agree, however, not
-to do anything that the pilot orders. Our pilot from Philæ to Wady Haifa
-and back, is a Barâbra, and one of the reises of the Cataract, a fellow
-very tall, and thin as a hop-pole, with a withered face and a high
-forehead. His garments a white cotton nightgown without sleeves, a brown
-over-gown with flowing sleeves, both reaching to the ankles, and a white
-turban. He is barefooted and barelegged, and, in his many excursions
-into the river to explore sandbars, I have noticed a hole where he has
-stuck his knee through his nightgown. His stature and his whole bearing
-have in them something, I know not what, of the theatrical air of the
-Orient.
-
-He had a quarrel to day with the crew, for the reason mentioned above,
-in which he was no doubt quite right, a quarrel conducted as usual with
-an extraordinary expense of words and vituperation. In his inflamed
-remarks, he at length threw out doubts about the mother of one of the
-crew, and probably got something back that enraged him still more. While
-the wrangle went on, the crew had gathered about their mess-dish on
-the forward deck, squatting in a circle round it, and dipping out great
-mouthfuls of the puree with the right hand. The pilot paced the upper
-deck, and his voice, which is like that of many waters, was lifted up in
-louder and louder lamentations, as the other party grew more quiet and
-were occupied with their dinner—throwing him a loose taunt now and then,
-followed by a chorus of laughter. He strode back and forth, swinging his
-arms, and declaring that he would leave the boat, that he would not stay
-where he was so treated, that he would cast himself into the river.
-
-“When you do, you'd better leave your clothes behind,” suggested
-Abd-el-Atti.
-
-Upon this cruel sarcasm he was unable to contain himself longer. He
-strode up and down, raised high his voice, and tore his hair and rent
-his garments—the supreme act of Oriental desperation. I had often
-read of this performance, both in the Scriptures and in other Oriental
-writings, but I had never seen it before. The manner in which he
-tore his hair and rent his garments was as follows, to wit:—He
-almost entirely unrolled his turban, doing it with an air of
-perfect recklessness; and then he carefully wound it again round his
-smoothly-shaven head. That stood for tearing his hair. He then swung
-his long arms aloft, lifted up his garment above his head, and with
-desperate force, appeared to be about to rend it in twain. But he never
-started a seam nor broke a thread. The nightgown wouldn't have stood
-much nonsense.
-
-In the midst of his most passionate outburst, he went forward and
-filled his pipe, and then returned to his tearing and rending and his
-lamentations. The picture of a strong man in grief is always touching.
-
-The country along here is very pretty, the curved shore for miles being
-a continual palm-grove, and having a considerable strip of soil which
-the sakiya irrigation makes very productive. Beyond this rise mountains
-of rocks in ledges; and when we climb them we see only a waste desert
-of rock strewn with loose shale and, further inland, black hills of
-sandstone, which thickly cover the country all the way to the Red Sea.
-
-Under the ledges are the habitations of the people, square enclosures of
-stone and clay of considerable size, with interior courts and kennels.
-One of them—the only sign of luxury we have seen in Nubia—had a porch in
-front of it covered with palm boughs. The men are well-made and rather
-prepossessing in appearance, and some of them well-dressed—they had no
-doubt made the voyage to Cairo; the women are hideous without exception.
-It is no pleasure to speak thus continually of woman; and I am sometimes
-tempted to say that I see here the brown and bewitching maids, with the
-eyes of the gazelle and the form of the houri, which gladden the sight
-of more fortunate voyagers through this idle land; but when I think of
-the heavy amount of misrepresentation that would be necessary to give
-any one of these creatures a reputation for good looks abroad, I shrink
-from the undertaking.
-
-They are decently covered with black cotton mantles, which they make
-a show of drawing over the face; but they are perhaps wild rather than
-modest, and have a sort of animal shyness. Their heads are sights to
-behold. The hair is all braided in strings, long at the sides and cut
-off in front, after the style adopted now-a-days for children (and
-women) in civilized countries, and copied from the young princes,
-prisoners in the Tower. Each round strand of hair hasa dab of clay on
-the end of it. The whole is drenched with castor-oil, and when the sun
-shines on it, it is as pleasant to one sense as to another. They have
-flattish noses, high cheek-bones, and always splendid teeth; and they
-all, young girls as well as old women, hold tobacco in their under lip
-and squirt out the juice with placid and scientific accuracy. They wear
-two or three strings of trumpery beads and necklaces, bracelets of horn
-and of greasy leather, and occasionally a finger-ring or two. Nose-rings
-they wear if they have them; if not, they keep the bore open for one by
-inserting a kernel of doora.
-
-In going back to the boat we met a party of twenty or thirty of these
-attractive creatures, who were returning from burying a boy of the
-village. They came striding over the sand, chattering in shrill and
-savage tones. Grief was not so weighty on them that they forgot to
-demand backsheesh, and (unrestrained by the men in the town) their
-clamor for it was like the cawing of crows; and their noise, when
-they received little from us, was worse. The tender and loving
-woman, stricken in grief by death, is, in these regions, when denied
-backsheesh, an enraged, squawking bird of prey. They left us with scorn
-in their eyes and abuse on their tongues.
-
-At a place below Korosko we saw a singular custom, in which the women
-appeared to better advantage. A whole troop of women, thirty or forty of
-them, accompanied by children, came in a rambling procession down to the
-Nile, and brought a baby just forty days old. We thought at first that
-they were about to dip the infant into Father Nile, as an introduction
-to the fountain of all the blessings of Egypt. Instead of this, however,
-they sat down on the bank, took kohl and daubed it in the little
-fellow's eyes. They perform this ceremony by the Nile when the boy is
-forty days old, and they do it that he may have a fortunate life. Kohl
-seems to enlarge the pupil, and doubtless it is intended to open the
-boy's eyes early.
-
-At one of the little settlements to-day the men were very hospitable,
-and brought us out plates (straw) of sweet dried dates. Those that we
-did not eat, the sailor with us stuffed into his pocket; our sailors
-never let a chance of provender slip, and would, so far as capacity
-“to live on the country” goes, make good soldiers. The Nubian dates are
-called the best in Egypt. They are longer than the dates of the Delta,
-but hard and quite dry. They take the place of coffee here in the
-complimentary hospitality. Whenever a native invites you to take
-“coffee,” and you accept, he will bring you a plate of dates and
-probably a plate of popped doora, like our popped corn. Coffee seems not
-to be in use here; even the governors entertain us with dates and popped
-corn.
-
-We are working up the river slowly enough to make the acquaintance
-of every man, woman, and child on the banks; and a precious lot of
-acquaintances we shall have. I have no desire to force them upon the
-public, but it is only by these details that I can hope to give you any
-idea of the Nubian life.
-
-We stop at night. The moon-and-starlight is something superb. From
-the high bank under which we are moored, the broad river, the desert
-opposite, and the mountains, appear in a remote African calm—a calm only
-broken by the shriek of the sakiyas which pierce the air above and below
-us.
-
-In the sakiya near us, covered with netting to keep off the north wind,
-is a little boy, patient and black, seated on the pole of the wheel,
-urging the lean cattle round and round. The little chap is alone and at
-some distance from the village, and this must be for him lonesome work.
-The moonlight, through the chinks of the palm-leaf, touches tenderly
-his pathetic figure, when we look in at the opening, and his small voice
-utters the one word of Egypt—“backsheesh.”
-
-Attracted by a light—a rare thing in a habitation here—we walk over to
-the village. At the end of the high enclosure of a dwelling there is
-a blaze of fire, which is fed by doora-stalks, and about it squat five
-women, chattering; the fire lights up their black faces and hair shining
-with the castor-oil. Four of them are young; and one is old and skinny,
-and with only a piece of sacking for all clothing. Their husbands are
-away in Cairo, or up the river with a trading dahabeëh (so they tell our
-guide); and these poor creatures are left here (it may be for years it
-may be forever) to dig their own living out of the ground. It is quite
-the fashion husbands have in this country; but the women are attached
-to their homes; they have no desire to go elsewhere. And I have no doubt
-that in Cairo they would pine for the free and simple life of Nubia.
-
-These women all want backsheesh, and no doubt will quarrel over the
-division of the few piastres they have from us. Being such women as I
-have described, and using tobacco as has been sufficiently described
-also, crouching about these embers, this group composes as barbaric a
-picture as one can anywhere see. I need not have gone so far to set such
-a miserable group; I could have found one as wretched in Pigville (every
-city has its Pigville)? Yes, but this is characteristic of the country.
-These people are as good as anybody here. (We have been careful to
-associate only with the first families.) These women have necklaces and
-bracelets, and rings in their ears, just like any women, and rings in
-the hair, twisted in with the clay and castor-oil. And in Pigville one
-would not have the range of savage rocks, which tower above these huts,
-whence the jackals, wolves, and gazelles come down to the river, nor
-the row of palms, nor the Nile, and the sands beyond, yellow in the
-moonlight.
-
-
-
-0288
-
-
-
-0289
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXII.—LIFE IN THE TROPICS. WADY HALFA.
-
-OURS is the crew to witch the world with noble seamanship. It is like a
-first-class orchestra, in which all the performers are artists. Ours
-are all captains. The reïs is merely an elder brother. The pilot is not
-heeded at all. With so many intentions on board, it is an hourly miracle
-that we get on at all.
-
-We are approaching the capital of Nubia, trying to get round a sharp
-bend in the river, with wind adverse, current rapid, sandbars on all
-sides. Most of the crew are in the water ahead, trying to haul us round
-the point of a sand-spit on which the stream foams, and then swirls in
-an eddy below. I can see now the Pilot, the long Pilot, who has gone in
-to feel about for deep water, in his white nightgown, his shaven head,
-denuded of its turban, shining in the sun, standing in two feet of
-water, throwing his arms wildly above his head, screaming entreaties,
-warnings, commands, imprecations upon the sailors in the river and the
-commanders on the boat. I can see the crew, waist deep, slacking the
-rope which they have out ahead, stopping to discuss the situation. I
-can see the sedate reïs on the bow arguing with the raving pilot, the
-steersman, with his eternal smile, calmly regarding the peril, and the
-boat swinging helplessly about and going upon the shoals. “Stupids,”
-mutters Abd-el-Atti, who is telling his beads rapidly, as he always does
-in exciting situations.
-
-When at length we pass the point, we catch the breeze so suddenly and
-go away with it, that there is no time for the men to get on board, and
-they are obliged to scamper back over the sand-spits to the shore and
-make a race of it to meet us at Derr. We can see them running in
-file, dodging along under the palms by the shore, stopping to grab
-occasionally a squash or a handful of beans for the pot.
-
-The capital of Nubia is the New York of this region, not so large, nor
-so well laid out, nor so handsomely built, but the centre of fashion and
-the residence of the ton. The governor lives in a whitewashed house,
-and there is a Sycamore here eight hundred years old, which is I suppose
-older than the Stuyvesant Pear in New York. The houses are not perched
-up in the air like tenement buildings for the poor, but aristocratically
-keep to the ground in one-story rooms; and they are beautifully moulded
-of a tough clay. The whole town lies under a palm-grove. The elegance
-of the capital, however, is not in its buildings, but in its women; the
-ladies who come to the the river to fill their jars are arrayed in the
-height of the mode. Their hair is twisted and clayed and castoroiled,
-but, besides this and other garments, they wear an outer robe of black
-which sweeps the ground for a yard behind, and gives them the grace
-and dignity that court-robes always give. You will scarcely see longer
-skirts on Broadway or in a Paris salon. I have, myself, no doubt that
-the Broadway fashions came from Derr, all except the chignons. Here the
-ladies wear their own hair.
-
-Making no landing in this town so dangerous to one susceptible to the
-charms of fashion, we went on, and stopped at night near Ibreem, a lofty
-precipice, or range of precipices, the southern hill crowned with ruins
-and fortifications which were last occupied by the Memlooks, half a
-century and more ago. The night blazed with beauty; the broad river was
-a smooth mirror, in which the mountains and the scintillating hosts of
-heaven were reflected. And we saw a phenomenon which I have never
-seen elsewhere. Not only were the rocky ledges reproduced in a perfect
-definition of outline, but even in the varieties of shade, in black and
-reddish-brown color.
-
-Perhaps it needs the affidavits of all the party to the more surprising
-fact, that we were all on deck next morning before five o'clock, to
-see the Southern Cross. The moon had set, and these famous stars of the
-southern sky flashed color and brilliancy like enormous diamonds. “Other
-worlds than ours”? I should think so! All these myriads of burning
-orbs only to illuminate our dahabeëh and a handful of Nubians, who are
-asleep! The Southern Cross lay just above the horizon and not far from
-other stars of the first quality. There are I believe only three stars
-of the first magnitude and one of the second, in this constellation, and
-they form, in fact, not a cross but an irregular quadrilateral. It needs
-a vivid imagination and the aid of small stars to get even a semblance
-of a cross out of it. But if you add to it, as we did, for the foot of
-the cross, a brilliant in a neighboring constellation, you have a noble
-cross.
-
-This constellation is not so fine as Orion, and for all we saw, we would
-not exchange our northern sky for the southern; but this morning we had
-a rare combination. The Morning Star was blazing in the east; and the
-Great Bear (who has been nightly sinking lower and lower, until he dips
-below the horizon) having climbed high up above the Pole in the night,
-filled the northern sky with light. In this lucid atmosphere the whole
-heavens from north to south seemed to be crowded with stars of the first
-size.
-
-During the morning we walked on the west bank through a castor-oil
-plantation; many of the plants were good-sized trees, with boles two and
-a half to three inches through, and apparently twenty-five feet high.
-They were growing in the yellow sand which had been irrigated by
-sakiyas, but was then dry, and some of the plants were wilting. We
-picked up the ripe seeds and broke off some of the fat branches; and
-there was not water enough in the Nile to wash away the odor afterwards.
-
-Walking back over the great sand-plain towards the range of desert
-mountains, we came to an artificial mound—an ash-heap, in fact—fifty or
-sixty feet high. At its base is a habitation of several compartments,
-formed by sticking the stalks of castor-oil plants into the ground, with
-a roof of the same. Here we found several women with very neat dabs of
-clay on the ends of their hair-twists, and a profusion of necklaces,
-rings in the hair and other ornaments—among them, scraps of gold. The
-women were hospitable, rather modest than shy, and set before us plates
-of dried dates; and no one said “backsheesh.” A better class of people
-than those below, and more purely Nubian.
-
-It would perhaps pay to dig open this mound. Near it are three small
-oases, watered by sakiyas, which draw from wells that are not more than
-twenty feet deep. The water is clear as crystal but not cool. These are
-ancient Egyptian wells, which have been re-opened within a few years;
-and the ash-mound is no doubt the débris of a village and an old
-Egyptian settlement.
-
-At night we are a dozen miles from Aboo Simbel (Ipsamboul), the
-wind—which usually in the winter blows with great and steady force from
-the north in this part of the river—having taken a fancy to let us see
-the country.
-
-A morning walk takes us over a rocky desert; the broken shale is
-distributed as evenly over the sand as if the whole had once been under
-water, and the shale were a dried mud, cracked in the sun. The miserable
-dwellings of the natives are under the ledges back of the strip of
-arable land. The women are shy and wild as hawks, but in the mode; they
-wear a profusion of glass beads and trail their robes in the dust.
-
-It is near this village that we have an opportunity to execute justice.
-As the crew were tracking, and lifting the rope over a sakiya, the
-hindmost sailor saw a sheath-knife on the bank, and thrust it into
-his pocket as he walked on. In five minutes the owner of the knife
-discovered the robbery, and came to the boat to complain. The sailor
-denied having the knife, but upon threat of a flogging gave it up. The
-incident, however, aroused the town, men and women came forth discussing
-it in a high key, and some foolish fellows threatened to stone our boat.
-Abd-el-Atti replied that he would stop and give them a chance to do it.
-Thereupon they apologized; and as there was no wind, the dragoman asked
-leave to stop and do justice.
-
-A court was organized on shore. Abd-el-Atti sat down on a lump of earth,
-grasping a marline-spike, the crew squatted in a circle in the high
-beans, and the culprit was arraigned. The owner testified to his
-knife, a woman swore she saw the sailor take it, Abd-el-Atti pronounced
-sentence, and rose to execute it with his stake. The thief was thrown
-upon the ground and held by two sailors. Abd-el-Atti, resolute and
-solemn as an executioner, raised the club and brought it down with a
-tremendous whack—not however upon the back of the victim, he had at
-that instant squirmed out of the way. This conduct greatly enraged the
-minister of justice, who thereupon came at his object with fury, and
-would no doubt have hit him if the criminal had not got up and ran,
-screaming, with the sailors and Abd-el-Atti after him. The ground was
-rough, the legs of Abd-el-Atti are not long and his wind is short. The
-fellow was caught, and escaped again and again, but the punishment was
-a mere scrimmage; whenever Abd-el-Atti, in the confusion, could get a
-chance to strike he did so, but generally hit the ground, sometimes the
-fellow's gown and perhaps once or twice the man inside, but never to his
-injury. He roared all the while, that he was no thief, and seemed a good
-deal more hurt by the charge that he was, than by the stick. The beating
-was, in short, only a farce laughable from beginning to end, and not a
-bad sample of Egyptian justice. And it satisfied everybody.
-
-Having put ourselves thus on friendly relations with this village, one
-of the inhabitants brought down to the boat a letter for the dragoman to
-interpret. It had been received two weeks before from Alexandria, but no
-one had been able to read it until our boat stopped here. Fortunately
-we had the above little difficulty here. The contents of the letter gave
-the village employment for a month. It brought news of the death of two
-inhabitants of the place, who were living as servants in Alexandria, one
-of them a man eighty years old and his son aged sixty.
-
-I never saw grief spread so fast and so suddenly as it did with the
-uncorking of this vial of bad news. Instantly a lamentation and wild
-mourning began in all the settlement. It wasn't ten minutes before the
-village was buried in grief. And, in an incredible short space of time,
-the news had spread up and down the river, and the grief-stricken began
-to arrive from other places. Where they came from, I have no idea; it
-did not seem that we had passed so many women in a week as we saw now
-They poured in from all along the shore, long strings of them, striding
-over the sand, throwing up their garments, casting dust on their
-heads (and all of it stuck), howling, flocking like wild geese to a
-rendezvous, and filling the air with their clang. They were arriving for
-an hour or two.
-
-The men took no part in this active demonstration. They were seated
-gravely before the house in which the bereaved relatives gathered;
-and there I found Abd-el-Atti, seated also, and holding forth upon the
-inevitable coming of death, and saying that there was nothing to be
-regretted in this case, for the time of these men had come. If it hadn't
-come, they wouldn't have died. Not so?
-
-The women crowded into the enclosure and began mourning in a vigorous
-manner. The chief ones grouping themselves in an irregular ring, cried
-aloud: “O that he had died here!”
-
-“O that I had seen his face when he died;” repeating these lamentations
-over and over again, throwing up the arms, and then the legs in a
-kind of barbaric dance as they lamented, and uttering long and shrill
-ululations at the end of each sentence.
-
-To-day they kill a calf and feast, and tomorrow the lamentations and the
-African dance will go on, and continue for a week. These people are all
-feeling. It is a heathen and not a Moslem custom however; and whether
-it is of negro origin or of ancient Egyptian I do not know, but probably
-the latter. The ancient Egyptian women are depicted in the tombs
-mourning in this manner; and no doubt the Jews also so bewailed, when
-they “lifted up their voices” and cast dust on their heads, as we saw
-these Nubians do. It is an unselfish pleasure to an Eastern woman to
-“lift up the voice.” The heavy part of the mourning comes upon the
-women, who appear to enjoy it. It is their chief occupation, after the
-carrying of water and the grinding of doora, and probably was so with
-the old race; these people certainly keep the ancient customs; they
-dress the hair, for one thing, very much as the Egyptians did, even to
-the castor-oil.
-
-At this village, as in others in Nubia, the old women are the
-corn-grinders. These wasted skeletons sit on the ground before a stone
-with a hollow in it; in this they bruise the doora with a smaller stone;
-the flour is then moistened and rubbed to a paste. The girls and younger
-women, a great part of the time, are idling about in their finery. But,
-then, they have the babies and the water to bring; and it must be
-owned that some of them work in the field—grubbing grass and stuff for
-“greens” and for fuel, more than the men. The men do the heavy work of
-irrigation.
-
-But we cannot stay to mourn with those who mourn a week in this style;
-and in the evening, when a strong breeze springs up, we spread our sail
-and go, in the “daylight of the moon,” flying up the river, by black
-and weird shores; and before midnight pass lonesome Aboo Simbel, whose
-colossi sit in the moonlight with the impassive mien they have held for
-so many ages.
-
-In the morning, with an easy wind, we are on the last stage of our
-journey. We are almost at the limit of dahabeëh navigation. The country
-is less interesting than it was below. The river is very broad, and we
-look far over the desert on each side. The strip of cultivated soil is
-narrow and now and again disappears altogether. To the east are seen,
-since we passed Aboo Simbel, the pyramid hills, some with truncated
-tops, scattered without plan over the desert. It requires no stretch
-of fancy to think that these mathematically built hills are pyramids
-erected by races anterior to Menes, and that all this waste that they
-dot is a necropolis of that forgotten people.
-
-The sailors celebrate the finishing of the journey by a ceremony of
-state and dignity. The chief actor is Farrag, the wit of the crew.
-Suddenly he appears as the Governor of Wady Haifa, with horns on his
-head, face painted, a long beard, hair sprinkled with flour, and dressed
-in shaggy sheepskin. He has come on board to collect his taxes. He opens
-his court, with the sailors about him, holding a long marline spike
-which he pretends to smoke as a chibook. His imitation of the town
-dignitaries along the river is very comical, and his remarks are greeted
-with roars of laughter. One of the crew acts as his bailiff and summons
-all the officers and servants of the boat before him, who are thrown
-down upon the deck and bastinadoed, and released on payment of
-backsheesh. The travelers also have to go before the court and pay a
-fine for passing through the Governor's country. The Governor is
-treated with great deference till the end of the farce, when one of
-his attendants sets fire to his beard, and another puts him out with a
-bucket of water.
-
-'The end of our journey is very much like the end of everything
-else—there is very little in it. When we follow anything to its utmost
-we are certain to be disappointed—simply because it is the nature of
-things to taper down to a point. I suspect it must always be so with
-the traveler, and that the farther he penetrates into any semi-savage
-continent, the meaner and ruder will he find the conditions of life.
-When we come to the end, ought we not to expect the end?
-
-We have come a thousand miles not surely to see Wady Haifa but to see
-the thousand miles. And yet Wady Haifa, figuring as it does on the
-map, the gate of the great Second Cataract, the head of navigation, the
-destination of so many eager travelers, a point of arrival and departure
-of caravans, might be a little less insignificant than it is. There is
-the thick growth of palm-trees under which the town lies, and beyond
-it, several miles, on the opposite, west bank, is the cliff of Aboosir,
-which looks down upon the cataract; but for this noble landmark,
-this dominating rock, the traveler could not feel that he had arrived
-anywhere, and would be so weakened by the shock of arriving nowhere at
-the end of so long a journey (as a man is by striking a blow in the air)
-that he would scarcely have strength to turn back.
-
-At the time of our arrival, however, Wady Haifa has some extra life. An
-expedition of the government is about to start for Darfoor. When we moor
-at the east bank, we see on the west bank the white tents of a military
-encampment set in right lines on the yellow sand; near them the
-government storehouse and telegraph-office, and in front a mounted
-howitzer and a Gatling gun. No contrast could be stronger. Here is Wady
-Halfah, in the doze of an African town, a collection of mud-huts under
-the trees, listless, apathetic, sitting at the door of a vast region,
-without either purpose or ambition. There, yonder, is a piece of life
-out of our restless age. There are the tents, the guns, the instruments,
-the soldiers and servants of a new order of things for Africa. We hear
-the trumpet call to drill. The flag which is planted in the sand in
-front of the commander's tent is to be borne to the equator.
-
-But this is not a military expedition. It is a corps of scientific
-observation, simply. Since the Sultan of Darfoor is slain and the
-Khedive's troops have occupied his capital, and formally attached
-that empire to Egypt, it is necessary to know something of its extent,
-resources, and people, concerning all of which we have only the
-uncertain reports of traders. It is thought by some that the annexation
-of Darfoor adds five millions to the population of the Khedive's growing
-empire. In order that he may know what he has conquered, he has sent
-out exploring expeditions, of which this is one. It is under command
-of Purdy Bey assisted by Lieutenant-Colonel Mason, two young American
-officers of the Khedive, who fought on opposite sides in our civil war.
-They are provided with instruments for making all sorts of observations,
-and are to report upon the people and the physical character and
-capacity of the country. They expect to be absent three years, and after
-surveying Darfoor, will strike southward still, and perhaps contribute
-something to the solution of the Nile problem. For escort they have a
-hundred soldiers only, but a large train of camels and intendants.
-In its purpose it is an expedition that any civilized ruler might be
-honored for setting on foot. It is a brave overture of civilization to
-barbarism. The nations are daily drawing nearer together. As we sit in
-the telegraph-office here, messages are flashed from Cairo to Kartoom.
-
-
-
-0298
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXIII.—APPROACHING THE SECOND CATARACT.
-
-THERE are two ways of going to see the Second Cataract and the cliff
-of Aboosir, which is about six miles above Wady Haifa; one is by small
-boat, the other by dromedary over the desert. We chose the latter, and
-the American officers gave us a mount and their company also. Their camp
-presented a lively scene when we crossed over to it in the morning.
-They had by requisition pressed into their service three or four hundred
-camels, and were trying to select out of the lot half a dozen fit to
-ride. The camels were, in fact, mostly burden camels and not trained to
-the riding-saddle; besides, half of them were poor, miserable rucks of
-bones, half-starved to death; for the Arabs, whose business it had been
-to feed them, had stolen the government supplies. An expedition which
-started south two weeks ago lost more than a hundred camels, from
-starvation, before it reached Semneh, thirty-five miles up the river.
-They had become so weak, that they wilted and died on the first hard
-march. For his size and knotty appearance, the camel is the most
-disappointing of beasts. He is a sheep as to endurance. As to temper, he
-is vindictive.
-
-Authorities differ in regard to the distinction between the camel and
-the dromedary. Some say that there are no camels in Egypt, that they
-are all dromedaries, having one hump; and that the true camel is the
-Bactrian, which has two humps. It is customary here, however, to call
-those camels which are beasts of burden, and those dromedaries which are
-trained to ride; the distinction being that between the cart-horse and
-the saddle-horse.
-
-The camel-drivers, who are as wild Arabs as you will meet anywhere,
-select a promising beast and drag him to the tent. He is reluctant to
-come; he rebels against the saddle; he roars all the time it is being
-secured on him, and when he is forced to kneel, not seldom he breaks
-away from his keepers and shambles off into the desert. The camel does
-this always; and every morning on a inarch he receives his load only
-after a struggle. The noise of the drivers is little less than the roar
-of the beasts, and with their long hair, shaggy breasts, and bare legs
-they are not less barbarous in appearance.
-
-Mounting the camel is not difficult, but it has some sweet surprises
-for the novice. The camel lies upon the ground with all his legs shut up
-under him like a jackknife. You seat yourself in the broad saddle, and
-cross your legs in front of the pommel. Before you are ready, something
-like a private earthquake begins under you. The camel raises his
-hindquarters suddenly, and throws you over upon his neck; and, before
-you recover from that he straightens up his knees and gives you a jerk
-over his tail; and, while you are not at all certain what has happened,
-he begins to move off with that dislocated walk which sets you into a
-see-saw motion, a waving backwards and forwards in the capacious saddle.
-Not having a hinged back fit for this movement, you lash the beast with
-your koorbâsh to make him change his gait. He is nothing loth to do it,
-and at once starts into a high trot which sends you a foot into the air
-at every step, bobs you from side to side, drives your backbone into
-your brain, and makes castanets of your teeth. Capital exercise. When
-you have enough of it, you pull up, and humbly enquire what is the
-heathen method of riding a dromedary.
-
-It is simple enough. Shake the loose halter-rope (he has neither bridle
-nor bit) against his neck as you swing the whip, and the animal at once
-swings into an easy pace; that is, a pretty easy pace, like that of
-a rocking-horse. But everything depends upon the camel. I happened to
-mount one that it was a pleasure to ride, after I brought him to the
-proper gait We sailed along over the smooth sand, with level keel, and
-(though the expression is not nautical) on cushioned feet. But it is
-hard work for the camel, this constant planting of his spongy feet in
-the yielding sand.
-
-Our way lay over the waste and rolling desert (the track of the southern
-caravans,) at some little distance from the river; and I suppose six
-miles of this travel are as good as a hundred. The sun was blazing hot,
-the yellow sand glowed in it, and the far distance of like sand and
-bristling ledges of black rock shimmered in waves of heat. No tree, no
-blade of grass, nothing but blue sky bending over a sterile land. Yet,
-how sweet was the air, how pure the breath of the desert, how charged
-with electric life the rays of the sun!
-
-The rock Aboosir, the ultima Thule of pleasure-travel on the Nile, is a
-sheer precipice of perhaps two to three hundred feet above the Nile;
-but this is high enough to make it one of the most extensive lookouts in
-Egypt. More desert can be seen here than from almost anywhere else. The
-Second Cataract is spread out beneath us. It is less a “fall” even than
-the First. The river is from a half mile to a mile in breadth and for
-a distance of some five miles is strewn with trap-rock, boulders and
-shattered fragments, through which the Nile swiftly forces itself in a
-hundred channels. There are no falls of any noticeable height. Here, on
-the flat rock, where we eat our luncheon, a cool breeze blows from the
-north. Here on this eagle's perch, commanding a horizon of desert and
-river for a hundred miles, fond visitors have carved their immortal
-names, following an instinct of ambition that is well-nigh universal,
-in the belief no doubt that the name will have for us who come after all
-the significance it has in the eyes of him who carved it. But I cannot
-recall a single name I read there; I am sorry that I cannot, for it
-seems a pitiful and cruel thing to leave them there in their remote
-obscurity.
-
-From this rock we look with longing to the southward, into vast Africa,
-over a land we may not further travel, which we shall probably never
-see again; or the far horizon the blue peaks of Dongola are visible,
-and beyond these we know are the ruins of Meroë, that ancient city, the
-capital of that Ethiopian Queen, Candace, whose dark face is lighted up
-by a momentary gleam from the Scriptures.
-
-On the beach at Wady Haifa are half a dozen trading-vessels, loaded with
-African merchandise for Cairo, and in the early morning there is a great
-hubbub among the merchants and the caravan owners. A sudden dispute
-arises among a large group around the ferry-boat, and there ensues that
-excited war, or movement, which always threatens to come to violence in
-the East but never does; Niagaras of talk are poured out; the ebb and
-flow of the parti-colored crowd, and the violent and not ungraceful
-gestures make a singular picture.
-
-Bales of merchandise are piled on shore, cases of brandy and cottons
-from England, to keep the natives of Soudan warm inside and out; Greek
-merchants splendid in silk attire, are lounging amid their goods, slowly
-bargaining for their transportation. Groups of camels are kneeling on
-the sand with their Bedaween drivers. These latter are of the Bisharee
-Arabs, and free sons of the desert. They wear no turban, and their only
-garment is a long strip of brown cotton thrown over the shoulder so as
-to leave the right arm free, and then wound about the waist and loins.
-The black hair is worn long, braided in strands which shine with oil,
-and put behind the ears. This sign of effeminacy is contradicted by
-their fine, athletic figures; by a bold, strong eye, and a straight,
-resolute nose.
-
-Wady Haifa (wady is valley, and Haifa is a sort of coarse grass) has a
-post-office and a mosque, but no bazaar, nor any center of attraction.
-Its mud-houses are stretched along the shore for a mile and a half, and
-run back into the valley, under the lovely palm-grove; but there are no
-streets and no roads through the deep sand. There is occasionally a
-sign of wealth in an extensive house, that is, one consisting of several
-enclosed courts and apartments within one large mud-wall; and in one we
-saw a garden, watered by a sakiya, and two latticed windows in a second
-story looking on it, as if some one had a harem here which was handsome
-enough to seclude..
-
-We called on the Kadi, the judicial officer of this district, whose
-house is a specimen of the best, and as good as is needed in this land
-of the sun. On one side of an open enclosure is his harem; in the other
-is the reception-room where he holds court. This is a mud-hut, with
-nothing whatever in it except some straw mats. The Kadi sent for rugs,
-and we sat on the mud-bench outside, while attendants brought us dates,
-popped-corn, and even coffee; and then they squatted in a row in front
-of us and stared at us, as we did at them. The ladies went into the
-harem, and made the acquaintance of the judge's one wife and his dirty
-children. Not without cordiality and courtesy of manner these people;
-but how simple are the terms of life here; and what a thoroughly African
-picture this is, the mud-huts, the sand, the palms, the black-skinned
-groups.
-
-The women here are modestly clad, but most of them frightfully ugly and
-castor-oily; yet we chanced upon two handsome girls, or rather married
-women, of fifteen or sixteen. One of them had regular features and a
-very pretty expression, and evidently knew she was a beauty, for she sat
-apart on the ground, keeping her head covered most of the time, and
-did not join the women who thronged about us to look with wonder at the
-costume of our ladies and to beg for backsheesh. She was loaded with
-necklaces, bracelets of horn and ivory, and had a ring on every finger.
-There was in her manner something of scorn and resentment at our
-intrusion; she no doubt had her circle of admirers and was queen in it.
-Who are these pale creatures who come to stare at my charms? Have they
-no dark pretty women in their own land? And she might well have asked,
-what would she do—a beauty of New York city, let us say—when she sat
-combing her hair on the marble doorsteps of her father's palace in
-Madison Square, if a lot of savage, impolite Nubians, should come and
-stand in a row in front of her and stare?
-
-The only shops here are the temporary booths of traders, birds of
-passage to or from the equatorial region. Many of them have pitched
-their gay tents under the trees, making the scene still more like a fair
-or an encampment for the night. In some are displayed European finery
-and trumpery, manufactured for Africa, calico in striking colors, glass
-beads and cotton cloth; others are coffee-shops, where men are playing
-at a sort of draughts—the checker-board being holes made in the sand and
-the men pebbles. At the door of a pretty tent stood a young and handsome
-Syrian merchant, who cordially invited us in, and pressed upon us the
-hospitality of his house. He was on his way to Darfoor, and might remain
-there two or three years, trading with the natives. We learned this
-by the interpretation of his girl-wife, who spoke a little barbarous
-French. He had married her only recently, and this was their bridal
-tour, we inferred. Into what risks and perils was this pretty woman
-going? She was Greek, from one of the islands, and had the naïvete and
-freshness of both youth and ignorance. Her fair complexion was touched
-by the sun and ruddy with health. Her blue eyes danced with the pleasure
-of living. She wore her hair natural, with neither oil nor ornament, but
-cut short and pushed behind the ears. For dress she had a simple calico
-gown of pale yellow, cut high in the waist, à la Grecque, the prettiest
-costume women ever assumed. After our long regimen of the hideous women
-of the Nile, plastered with dirt, soaked in oil, and hung with tawdry
-ornaments, it may be imagined how welcome was this vision of a woman,
-handsome, natural and clean, with neither the shyness of an animal nor
-the brazenness of a Ghawazee.
-
-Our hospitable entertainers hastened to set before us what they had;
-a bottle of Maraschino was opened, very good European cigars were
-produced, and a plate of pistachio nuts, to eat with the cordial. The
-artless Greek beauty cracked the nuts for us with her shining teeth,
-laughing all the while; urging us to eat, and opening her eyes in wonder
-that we would not eat more, and would not carry away more. It must
-be confessed that we had not much conversation, but we made it up in
-constant smiling, and ate our pistachios and sipped our cordial in great
-glee. What indeed could we have done more with words, or how have
-passed a happier hour? We perfectly understood each other; we drank each
-other's healths; we were civilized beings, met by chance in a barbarous
-place; we were glad to meet, and we parted in the highest opinion of
-each other, with gay salaams, and not in tears. What fate I wonder had
-these handsome and adventurous merchants among the savages of Darfoor
-and Kordofan?
-
-The face of our black boy, Gohah, was shining with pleasure when we
-walked away, and he said with enthusiasm, pointing to the tent, “Sitt
-tyeb, quéi-is.” Accustomed as he was to the African beauties of
-Soudan, I do not wonder that Gohah thought this “lady” both “good” and
-“beautiful.”
-
-We have seen Wady Haifa. The expedition to Darfoor is packing up to
-begin its desert march in the morning. Our dahabeëh has been transformed
-and shorn of a great part of its beauty. We are to see no more the great
-bird-wing sail. The long yard has been taken down and is slung above us
-the whole length of the deck. The twelve big sweeps are put in place;
-the boards of the forward deck are taken up, so that the Lowers will
-have place for their feet as they sit on the beams. They sit fronting
-the cabin, and rise up and take a step forward at each stroke, settling
-slowly back to their seats. On the mast is rigged the short stern-yard
-and sail, to be rarely spread. Hereafter we are to float, and drift, and
-whirl, and try going with the current and against the wind.
-
-At ten o'clock of a moonlight night, a night of summer heat, we swing
-off, the rowers splashing their clumsy oars and setting up a shout and
-chorus in minor, that sound very much like a wail, and would be quite
-appropriate if they were ferrymen of the Styx. We float a few miles, and
-then go aground and go to bed.
-
-The next day we have the same unchanging sky, the same groaning and
-creaking of the sakiyas, and in addition the irregular splashing of
-the great sweeps as we slide down the river. Two crocodiles have the
-carelessness to show themselves on a sand-island, one a monstrous beast,
-whose size is magnified every time we think how his great back sunk into
-the water when our sandal was yet beyond rifle-shot. Of course he did
-not know that we carried only a shot-gun and intended only to amuse him,
-or he would not have been in such haste.
-
-The wind is adverse, we gain little either by oars or by the current,
-and at length take to the shore, where something novel always rewards
-us. This time we explore some Roman ruins, with round arches of unburned
-bricks, and find in them also the unmistakable sign of Roman occupation,
-the burnt bricks—those thin slabs, eleven inches long, five wide, and
-two thick, which, were a favorite form with them, bricks burnt for
-eternity, and scattered all over the East wherever the Roman legions
-went.
-
-Beyond these is a village, not a deserted village, but probably the
-laziest in the world. Men, and women for the most part too, were
-lounging about and in the houses, squatting in the dust, in absolute
-indolence, except that the women, all of them, were suckling their
-babies, and occasionally one of them was spinning a little cotton-thread
-on a spindle whirled in the hand. The men are more cleanly than the
-women, in every respect in better condition, some of them bright,
-fine-looking fellows. One of them showed us through his house, which was
-one of the finest in the place, and he was not a little proud of it. It
-was a large mud-wall enclosure. Entering by a rude door we came into
-an open space, from which opened several doors, irregular breaks in
-the wall, closed by shackling doors of wood. Stepping over the sill and
-stooping, we entered the living-rooms. First, is the kitchen; the roof
-of this is the sky—you are always liable to find yourself outdoors in
-these houses—and the fire for cooking is built in one corner. Passing
-through another hole in the wall we come to a sleeping-room, where were
-some jars of dates and doora, and a mat spread in one corner to lie on.
-Nothing but an earth-floor, and dust and grime everywhere. A crowd of
-tittering girls were flitting about, peeping at us from doorways, and
-diving into them with shrill screams, like frightened rabbits, if we
-approached.
-
-Abd-el-Atti raises a great laugh by twisting a piastre into the front
-lock of hair of the ugliest hag there, calling her his wife, and drawing
-her arm under his to take her to the boat. It is an immense joke. The
-old lady is a widow and successfully conceals her reluctance. The tying
-the piece of silver in the hair is a sign of marriage. All the married
-women wear a piastre or some scale of silver on the forehead; the widows
-leave off this ornament from the twist; the young girls show, by the
-hair plain, except always the clay dabs, that they are in the market.
-The simplicity of these people is noticeable. I saw a woman seated on
-the ground, in dust three inches thick, leaning against the mud-bank
-in front of the house, having in her lap a naked baby; on the bank sat
-another woman, braiding the hair of the first, wetting it with muddy
-water, and working into it sand, clay, and tufts of dead hair. What a
-way to spend Sunday!
-
-This is, on the whole, a model village. The people appear to have
-nothing, and perhaps they want nothing. They do nothing, and I suppose
-they would thank no one for coming to increase their wants and set them
-to work. Nature is their friend.
-
-I wonder what the staple of conversation of these people is, since the
-weather offers nothing, being always the same, and always fine.
-
-A day and a night and a day we fight adverse winds, and make no headway.
-One day we lie at Farras, a place of no consequence, but having, almost
-as a matter of course, ruins of the time of the Romans and the name
-Rameses II. cut on a rock. In a Roman wall we find a drain-tile exactly
-like those we use now. In the evening, after moon-rise, we drop down to
-Aboo Simbel.
-
-
-
-0306
-
-
-
-0307
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXIV.—GIANTS IN STONE.
-
-WHEN daylight came the Colossi of Aboo Simbel (or Ipsambool) were
-looking into our windows; greeting the sunrise as they have done every
-morning for three thousand five hundred years; and keeping guard still
-over the approach to the temple, whose gods are no longer anywhere
-recognized, whose religion disappeared from the earth two thousand years
-ago:—vast images, making an eternity of time in their silent waiting.
-
-The river here runs through an unmitigated desert. On the east the sand
-is brown, on the west the sand is yellow; that is the only variety.
-There is no vegetation, there are no habitations, there is no path on
-the shore, there are no footsteps on the sand, no one comes to break the
-spell of silence. To find such a monument of ancient power and art
-as this temple in such a solitude enhances the visitor's wonder and
-surprise. The Pyramids, Thebes, and Aboo Simbel are the three wonders of
-Egypt. But the great temple of Aboo Simbel is unique. It satisfies the
-mind. It is complete in itself, it is the projection of one creative
-impulse of genius. Other temples are growths, they have additions,
-afterthoughts, we can see in them the workings of many minds and many
-periods. This is a complete thought, struck out, you would say, at a
-heat.
-
-In order to justify this opinion, I may be permitted a little detail
-concerning this temple, which impressed us all as much as anything in
-Egypt. There are two temples here, both close to the shore, both cut in
-the mountain of rock which here almost overhangs the stream. We need not
-delay to speak of the smaller one, although it would be wonderful, if
-it were not for the presence of the larger. Between the two was a rocky
-gorge. This is now nearly filled up, to the depth of a hundred feet, by
-the yellow sand that has drifted and still drifts over from the level of
-the desert hills above.
-
-This sand, which drifts exactly like snow, lies in ridges like snow,
-and lies loose and sliding under the feet or packs hard like snow, once
-covered the façade of the big temple altogether, and now hides a portion
-of it. The entrance to the temple was first cleared away in 1817 by
-Belzoni and his party, whose gang of laborers worked eight hours a day
-for two weeks with the thermometer at 1120 to 1160 Fahrenheit in the
-shade—an almost incredible endurance when you consider what the heat
-must have been in the sun beating upon this dazzling wall of sand in
-front of them.
-
-The rock in which the temple is excavated was cut back a considerable
-distance, but in this cutting the great masses were left which were to
-be fashioned into the four figures. The façade thus made, to which these
-statues are attached, is about one hundred feet high. The statues are
-seated on thrones with no intervening screens, and, when first seen,
-have the appearance of images in front of and detached from the rock of
-which they form a part. The statues are all tolerably perfect, except
-one, the head of which is broken and lies in masses at its feet; and
-at the time of our visit the sand covered the two northernmost to the
-knees. The door of entrance, over which is a hawk-headed figure of Re,
-the titular divinity, is twenty feet high. Above the colossi, and as a
-frieze over the curve of the cornice, is a row of monkeys, (there were
-twenty-one originally, but some are split away), like a company of
-negro minstrels, sitting and holding up their hands in the most comical
-manner. Perhaps the Egyptians, like the mediaeval cathedral builders,
-had a liking for grotesque effects in architecture; but they may have
-intended nothing comic here, for the monkey had sacred functions; he
-was an emblem of Thoth, the scribe of the under-world, who recorded the
-judgments of Osiris.
-
-These colossi are the largest in the world *; they are at least fifteen
-feet higher than the wonders of Thebes, but it is not their size
-principally that makes their attraction. As works of art they are worthy
-of study. Seated, with hands on knees, in that eternal, traditional
-rigidity of Egyptian sculpture, nevertheless the grandeur of the head
-and the noble beauty of the face take them out of the category of
-mechanical works. The figures represent Rameses II. and the features
-are of the type which has come down to us as the perfection of Egyptian
-beauty.
-
-* The following are some of the measurements of one of these
-giants:—height of figure sixty-six feet; pedestal on which it sits, ten;
-leg from knee to heel, twenty; great toe, one and a half feet thick;
-ear, three feet, five inches long; fore-finger, three feet; from inner
-side of elbow-joint to end of middle finger, fifteen feet.
-
-I climbed up into the lap of one of the statues; it is there only that
-you can get an adequate idea of the size of the body. What a roomy
-lap! Nearly ten feet between the wrists that rest upon the legs! I sat
-comfortably in the navel of the statue, as in a niche, and mused on the
-passing of the nations. To these massive figures the years go by like
-the stream. With impassive, serious features, unchanged in expression
-in thousands of years, they sit listening always to the flowing of the
-unending Nile, that fills all the air and takes away from that awful
-silence which would else be painfully felt in this solitude.
-
-The interior of this temple is in keeping with its introduction. You
-enter a grand hall supported by eight massive Osiride columns, about
-twenty-two feet high as we estimated them. They are figures of
-Rameses become Osiris—to be absorbed into Osiris is the end of all the
-transmigrations of the blessed soul. The expression of the faces of such
-of these statues as are uninjured, is that of immortal youth—a beauty
-that has in it the promise of immortality. The sides of this hall are
-covered with fine sculptures, mainly devoted to the exploits of Rameses
-II.; and here is found again, cut in the stone the long Poem of the poet
-Pentaour, celebrating the single-handed exploit of Rameses against the
-Khitas on the river Orontes. It relates that the king, whom his troops
-dared not follow, charged with his chariot alone into the ranks of the
-enemy and rode through them again and again, and slew them by hundreds.
-Rameses at that time was only twenty-three; it was his first great
-campaign. Pursuing the enemy, he overtook them in advance of his troops,
-and, rejecting the councils of his officers, began the fight at once.
-“The footmen and the horsemen then,” says the poet (the translator is M.
-de Rouge), “recoiled before the enemy who were masters of Kadesh, on
-the left bank of the Orontes.... Then his majesty, in the pride of
-his strength, rising up like the god Mauth, put on his fighting dress.
-Completely armed, he looked like Baal in the hour of his might. Urging
-on his chariot, he pushed into the army of the vile Khitas; he was
-alone, no one was with him. He was surrounded by 2,500 chariots, and the
-swiftest of the warriors of the vile Khitas, and of the numerous nations
-who accompanied them, threw themselves in his way.... Each chariot bore
-three men, and the king had with him neither princes nor generals, nor
-his captains of archers nor of chariots.”
-
-Then Rameses calls upon Amun; he reminds him of the obelisk he has
-raised to him, the bulls he has slain for him:—“Thee, I invoke, O my
-Father! I am in the midst of a host of strangers, and no man is with me.
-My archers and horsemen have abandoned me; when I cried to them, none of
-them has heard, when I called for help. But I prefer Amun to thousands
-of millions of archers, to millions of horsemen, to millions of young
-heroes all assembled together. The designs of men are nothing, Amun
-overrules them.”
-
-Needless to say the prayer was heard, the king rode slashing through
-the ranks of opposing chariots, slaying, and putting to rout the host.
-Whatever basis of fact the poem may have had in an incident of battle or
-in the result of one engagement, it was like one of Napoleon's bulletins
-from Egypt. The Khitas were not subdued and, not many years after, they
-drove the Egyptians out of their land and from nearly all Palestine,
-forcing them, out of all their conquests, into the valley of the Nile
-itself. During the long reign of this Rameses, the power of Egypt
-steadily declined, while luxury increased and the nation was exhausted
-in building the enormous monuments which the king projected. The close
-of his pretentious reign has been aptly compared to that of Louis XIV.—a
-time of decadence; in both cases the great fabric was ripe for disaster.
-
-But Rameses liked the poem of Pentaour. It is about as long as a book
-of the Iliad, but the stone-cutters of his reign must have known it
-by heart. He kept them carving it and illustrating it all his life, on
-every wall he built where there was room for the story. He never,
-it would seem, could get enough of it. He killed those vile Khitas a
-hundred times; he pursued them over all the stone walls in his kingdom.
-The story is told here at Ipsambool; it is carved in the Rameseum; the
-poem is graved on Luxor and Karnak.
-
-Out of this great hall open eight other chambers, all more or less
-sculptured, some of them covered with well-drawn figures on which the
-color is still vivid. Two of these rooms are long and very narrow, with
-a bench running round the walls, the front of which is cut out so as to
-imitate seats with short pillars. In one are square niches, a foot deep,
-cut in the wall. The sculptures in one are unfinished, the hieroglyphics
-and figures drawn in black but not cut—some event having called off
-the artists and left their work incomplete We seem to be present at
-the execution of these designs, and so fresh are the colors ot those
-finished, that it seems it must have been only yesterday that the
-workman laid down the brush. (A small chamber in the rock outside the
-temple, which was only opened in 1874, is wonderful in the vividness
-of its colors; we see there better than anywhere else the colors of
-vestments.)
-
-These chambers are not the least mysterious portion of this temple. They
-are in absolute darkness, and have no chance of ventilation. By what
-light was this elaborate carving executed? If people ever assembled in
-them, and sat on these benches, when lights were burning, how could they
-breathe? If they were not used, why should they have been so decorated?
-They would serve very well for the awful mysteries of the Odd Fellows.
-Perhaps they were used by the Free Masons in Solomon's time.
-
-Beyond the great hall is a transverse hall (having two small chambers
-off from it) with four square pillars, and from this a corridor leads to
-the adytum. Here, behind an altar of stone, sit four marred gods, facing
-the outer door, two hundred feet from it. They sit in a twilight that is
-only-brightened by rays that find their way in at the distant door; but
-at morning they can see, from the depth of their mountain cavern, the
-rising sun.
-
-We climbed, up the yielding sand-drifts, to the top of the precipice in
-which the temple is excavated, and walked back to a higher ridge.
-The view from there is perhaps the best desert view on the Nile,
-more extensive and varied than that of Aboosir. It is a wide sweep of
-desolation. Up and down the river we see vast plains of sand and groups
-of black hills; to the west and north the Libyan desert extends with no
-limit to a horizon fringed with sharp peaks, like aiguilles of the Alps,
-that have an exact resemblance to a forest.
-
-At night, we give the ancient deities a sort of Fourth of July, and
-illuminate the temple with colored lights. A blue-light burns upon
-the altar in the adytum before the four gods, who may seem in their
-penetralia to receive again the worship to which they were accustomed
-three thousand years ago. A green flame in the great hall brings out
-mysteriously the features of the gigantic Osiride, and revives the
-midnight glow of the ancient ceremonies. In the glare of torches and
-colored lights on the outside, the colossi loom in their gigantic
-proportions and cast grotesque shadows.
-
-Imagine this temple as it appeared to a stranger initiated into
-the mysteries of the religion of the Pharaohs—a cultus in which
-the mathematical secrets of the Pyramid and the Sphinx, art and
-architecture, were wrapped in the same concealment with the problem of
-the destiny of the soul; when the colors on these processions of gods
-and heroes, upon these wars and pilgrimages sculptured in large on
-the walls, were all brilliant; when these chambers were gorgeously
-furnished, when the heavy doors that then hung in every passage,
-separating the different halls and apartments, only swung open to admit
-the neophyte to new and deeper mysteries, to halls blazing with light,
-where he stood in the presence of these appalling figures, and of hosts
-of priests and acolytes.
-
-The temple of Aboo Simbel was built early in the reign of Rameses II.,
-when art, under the impulse of his vigorous predecessors was in its
-flower, and before the visible decadence which befel it later under
-a royal patronage and “protection,” and in the demand for a wholesale
-production, which always reduces any art to mechanical conditions. It
-seemed to us about the finest single conception in Egypt. It must have
-been a genius of rare order and daring who evoked in this solid mountain
-a work of such grandeur and harmony of proportion, and then executed it
-without a mistake. The first blow on the exterior, that began to reveal
-the Colossi, was struck with the same certainty and precision as that
-which brought into being the gods who are seated before the altar in the
-depth of the mountain. A bolder idea was never more successfully wrought
-out.
-
-Our last view of this wonder was by moonlight and by sunrise. We arose
-and went forth over the sand-bank at five o'clock. Venus blazed as never
-before. The Southern Cross was paling in the moonlight. The moon, in its
-last half, hung over the south-west corner of the temple rock, and threw
-a heavy shadow across a portion of the sitting figures. In this dimness
-of the half-light their proportions were supernatural. Details were
-lost.
-
-These might be giants of pre-historic times, or the old fabled gods of
-antediluvian eras, outlined largely and majestically, groping their way
-out of the hills.
-
-Above them was the illimitable, purplish blue of the sky. The Moon, one
-of the goddesses of the temple, withdrew more and more before the coming
-of Re, the sun-god to whom the temple is dedicated, until she cast no
-shadow on the façade. The temple, even the interior, caught the first
-glow of the reddening east. The light came, as it always comes at dawn,
-in visible waves, and these passed over the features of the Colossi,
-wave after wave, slowly brightening them into life.
-
-In the interior the first flush was better than the light of many
-torches, and the Osiride figures were revealed in their hiding-places.
-At the spring equinox the sun strikes squarely in, two hundred feet,
-upon the faces of the sitting figures in the adytum. That is their
-annual salute! Now it only sent its light to them; but it made rosy the
-Osiride faces on one side of the great hall.
-
-The morning was chilly, and we sat on a sand-drift, wrapped up against
-the cutting wind, watching the marvellous revelation. The dawn seemed
-to ripple down the gigantic faces of the figures outside, and to touch
-their stony calm with something like a smile of gladness; it almost gave
-them motion, and we would hardly have felt surprised to see them arise
-and stretch their weary limbs, cramped by ages of inaction, and sing
-and shout at the coming of the sun-god. But they moved not, the
-strengthening light only revealed their stony impassiveness; and when
-the sun, rapidly clearing the eastern hills of the desert, gilded first
-the row of grinning monkeys, and then the light crept slowly down over
-faces and forms to the very feet, the old heathen helplessness stood
-confessed.
-
-And when the sun swung free in the sky, we silently drew away and left
-the temple and the guardians alone and unmoved. We called the reis and
-the crew; the boat was turned to the current, the great sweeps dipped
-into the water, and we continued our voyage down the eternal river,
-which still sings and flows in this lonely desert place, where sit the
-most gigantic figures man ever made.
-
-
-
-0314
-
-
-
-0315
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXV.—FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA.
-
-WE HAVE been learning the language. The language consists merely of
-tyeb. With tyeb in its various accents and inflections, you can carry
-on an extended conversation. I have heard two Arabs talking for a half
-hour, in which one of them used no word for reply or response except
-tyeb “good.”
-
-Tyeb is used for assent, agreement, approval, admiration, both
-interrogatively and affectionately. It does the duty of the Yankee “all
-right” and the vulgarism “that's so” combined; it has as many meanings
-as the Italian va bene, or the German So! or the English girl's yes!
-yes? ye-e-s, ye-e-as? yes (short), 'n ye-e-es in doubt and really a
-negative—ex.:—“How lovely Blanche looks to-night!” “'n ye-e-es.” You may
-hear two untutored Americans talking, and one of them, through a long
-interchange of views will utter nothing except, “that's so,” “that's
-so?” “that's so,” “that's so.” I think two Arabs meeting could come to a
-perfect understanding with:
-
-“Tyeb?'
-
-“Tyeb.”
-
-“Tyeb!” (both together).
-
-“Tyeb?” (showing something).
-
-“Tyeb” (emphatically, in admiration).
-
-“Tyeb” (in approval of the other's admiration).
-
-“Tyeb Ketér” (“good, much”).
-
-“Tyeb Keter?”
-
-“Tyeb.”
-
-“Tyeb.” (together, in ratification of all that has been said).
-
-I say tyeb in my satisfaction with you; you say tyeb in pleasure at my
-satisfaction; I say tyeb in my pleasure at your pleasure. The
-servant says tyeb when you give him an order; you say tyeb upon his
-comprehending it. The Arabic is the richest of languages. I believe
-there are three hundred names for earth, a hundred for lion, and so
-on. But the vocabulary of the common people is exceedingly limited. Our
-sailors talk all day with the aid of a very few words.
-
-But we have got beyond tyeb. We can say eiwa (“yes”)—or nam, when we
-wish to be elegant—and la (“no”). The universal negative in Nubia,
-however, is simpler than this—it is a cluck of the tongue in the left
-check and a slight upward jerk of the head. This cluck and jerk makes
-“no,” from which there is no appeal. If you ask a Nubian the price
-of anything—be-kam dee?—and he should answer khamsa (“five”), and you
-should offer thelata (“three”), and he should kch and jerk up his
-head, you might know the trade was hopeless; because the kch expresses
-indifference as well as a negative. The best thing you could do would be
-to say bookra (“to-morrow”), and go away—meaning in fact to put off the
-purchase forever, as the Nubian very well knows when he politely adds,
-tyeb.
-
-But there are two other words necessary to be mastered before the
-traveller can say he knows Arabic. To the constant call for “backsheesh”
-and the obstructing rabble of beggars and children, you must be able to
-say mafeesh (“nothing”), and im'shee (“getaway,” “clear out,” “scat.”)
-It is my experience that this im'shee is the most necessary word in
-Egypt.
-
-We do nothing all day but drift, or try to drift, against the north
-wind, not making a mile an hour, constantly turning about, floating from
-one side of the river to the other. It is impossible to row, for the
-steersman cannot keep the boat's bow to the current.
-
-There is something exceedingly tedious, even to a lazy and resigned man,
-in this perpetual drifting hither and thither. To float, however slowly,
-straight down the current, would be quite another thing. To go sideways,
-to go stern first, to waltz around so that you never can tell which bank
-of the river you are looking at, or which way you are going, or what the
-points of the compass are, is confusing and unpleasant. It is the
-one serious annoyance of a dahabeëh voyage. If it is calm, we go on
-delightfully with oars and current; if there is a southerly breeze
-we travel rapidly, and in the most charming way in the world. But our
-high-cabined boats are helpless monsters in this wind, which continually
-blows; we are worse than becalmed, we are badgered.
-
-However, we might be in a worse winter country, and one less
-entertaining. We have just drifted in sight of a dahabeëh, with the
-English flag, tied up to the bank. On the shore is a picturesque crowd;
-an awning is stretched over high poles; men are busy at something under
-it—on the rock near sits a group of white people under umbrellas. What
-can it be? Are they repairing a broken yard? Are they holding a court
-over some thief? Are they performing some mystic ceremony? We take the
-sandal and go to investigate.
-
-An English gentleman has shot two crocodiles, and his people are
-skinning them, stuffing the skin, and scraping the flesh from the bones,
-preparing the skeletons for a museum. Horrible creatures they are, even
-in this butchered condition. The largest is twelve feet long; that is
-called a big crocodile here; but last winter the gentleman killed one
-that was seventeen feet long; that was a monster.
-
-In the stomach of one of these he found two pairs of bracelets, such
-as are worn by Nubian children, two “cunning” little leathern bracelets
-ornamented with shells—a most useless ornament for a crocodile.
-The animal is becoming more and more shy every year, and it is very
-difficult to get a shot at one. They come out in the night, looking for
-bracelets. One night we nearly lost Ahmed, one of our black boys; he had
-gone down upon the rudder, when an enquiring crocodile came along and
-made a snap at him—when the boy climbed on deck he looked white even by
-starlight.
-
-The invulnerability of the crocodile hide is exaggerated. One of these
-had two bullet-holes in his back. His slayer says he has repeatedly put
-bullets through the hide on the back.
-
-When we came away we declined steaks, but the owner gave us some eggs,
-so that we might raise our own crocodiles.
-
-Gradually we drift out of this almost utterly sterile country, and come
-to long strips of palm-groves, and to sakiyas innumerable, shrieking on
-the shore every few hundred feet. We have time to visit a considerable
-village, and see the women at their other occupation (besides
-lamentation) braiding each other's hair; sitting on the ground,
-sometimes two at a head, patiently twisting odds and ends of loose hair
-into the snaky braids, and muddling the whole with sand, water,
-and clay, preparatory to the oil. A few women are spinning with a
-hand-spindle and producing very good cotton-thread. All appear to have
-time on their hands. And what a busy place this must be in summer, when
-the heat is like that of an oven! The men loaf about like the women, and
-probably do even less. Those at work are mostly slaves, boys and girls
-in the slightest clothing; and even these do a great deal of “standing
-round.” Wooden hoes are used.
-
-The desert over which we walked beyond the town was very different
-from the Libyan with its drifts and drifts of yellow sand. We went over
-swelling undulations (like our rolling prairies), cut by considerable
-depressions, of sandstone with a light sand cover but all strewn with
-shale or shingle. This black shale is sometimes seen adhering like a
-layer of glazing to the coarse rock; and, though a part of the rock, it
-has the queer appearance of having been a deposit solidified upon it and
-subsequently broken off. On the tops of these hills we found everywhere
-holes scooped out by the natives in search of nitre; the holes showed
-evidence, in dried mud, of the recent presence of water.
-
-We descended into a deep gorge, in which the rocks were broken
-squarely down the face, exhibiting strata of red, white, and variegated
-sandstone; the gorge was a Wady that ran far back into the country among
-the mountains; we followed it down to a belt of sunt acacias and palms
-on the river. This wady was full of rocks, like a mountain stream
-at home; a great torrent running long in it, had worn the rocks into
-fantastic shapes, cutting punch-bowls and the like, and water had
-recently dried in the hollows. But it had not rained on the river.
-
-This morning we are awakened by loud talking and wrangling on deck,
-that sounds like a Paris revolution. We have only stopped for milk! The
-forenoon we spend among the fashionable ladies of Derr, the capital of
-Nubia, studying the modes, in order that we may carry home the latest.
-This is an aristocratic place. One of the eight-hundred-years-old
-sycamore trees, of which we made mention, is still vigorous and was
-bearing the sycamore fig. The other is in front of a grand mud-house
-with latticed windows, the residence of the Kashefs of Sultan Selim
-whose descendants still occupy it, and, though shorn of authority, are
-said to be proud of their Turkish origin. One of them, Hassan Kashef, an
-old man in the memory of our dragoman, so old that he had to lift up
-his eyelids with his finger when he wanted to see, died only a few years
-ago. This patriarch had seventy-two wives as his modest portion in this
-world; and as the Koran allows only four, there was some difficulty in
-settling the good man's estate. The matter was referred to the Khedive,
-but he wisely refused to interfere. When the executor came to divide the
-property among the surviving children, he found one hundred and five to
-share the inheritance.
-
-The old fellow had many other patriarchal ways. On his death-bed he left
-a legacy of both good and evil wishes, requests to reward this friend,
-and to “serve out” that enemy, quite in the ancient style, and in the
-Oriental style, recalling the last recorded words of King David, whose
-expiring breath was an expression of a wish for vengeance upon one of
-his enemies, whom he had sworn not to kill. It reads now as if it might
-have been spoken by a Bedawee sheykh to his family only yesterday:—“And,
-behold, thou hast with thee Shimei the son of Gera, a Benjamite of
-Bahurim, which cursed me with a grievous curse in the day when I went to
-Mahanaim; but he came down to meet me at Jordan, and I sware to him
-by the Lord, saying, I will not put thee to death with the sword. Now
-therefore hold him not guiltless: for thou art a wise man, and knowest
-what thou oughtest to do unto him; but his hoar head bring thou down to
-the grave with blood. So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in
-the city of David.”
-
-We call at the sand-covered temple at A'mada, and crawl into it; a very
-neat little affair, with fresh color and fine sculptures, and as old as
-the time of Osirtasen III. (the date of the obelisk of Heliopolis, of
-the Tombs of Beni Hassan, say about fifteen hundred years before Rameses
-II.); and then sail quickly down to Korosko, passing over in an hour or
-so a distance that required a day and a half on the ascent.
-
-At Korosko there are caravans in from Kartoom; the camel-drivers wear
-monstrous silver rings, made in the interior, the crown an inch high and
-set with blood-stone. I bought from the neck of a pretty little boy
-a silver “charm,” a flat plate with the name of Allah engraved on it.
-Neither the boy nor the charm had been washed since they came into
-being.
-
-The caravan had brought one interesting piece of freight, which had
-just been sent down the river. It was the head of the Sultan of Darfoor,
-preserved in spirits, and forwarded to the Khedive as a present. This
-was to certify that the Sultan was really killed, when Darfoor was
-captured by the army of the Viceroy; though I do not know that there is
-any bounty on the heads of African Sultans. It is an odd gift to send to
-a ruler who wears the European dress and speaks French, and whose chief
-military officers are Americans.
-
-The desolate hills behind Korosko rise a thousand feet, and we climbed
-one of the peaks to have a glimpse of the desert route and the country
-towards Kartoom. I suppose a more savage landscape does not exist. The
-peak of black disintegrated rocks on which we stood was the first of an
-assemblage of such as far as we could see south; the whole horizon was
-cut by these sharp peaks; and through these thickly clustering hills the
-caravan trail made its way in sand and powdered dust. Shut in from
-the breeze, it must be a hard road to travel, even with a winter sun
-multiplying its rays from all these hot rocks; in the summer it would be
-frightful. But on these summits, or on any desert swell, the air is
-an absolute elixir of life; it has a quality of lightness but not the
-rarity that makes respiration difficult.
-
-At a village below Korosko we had an exhibition of the manner of
-fighting with the long Nubian war-spear and the big round shield made of
-hippopotamus-hide. The men jumped about and uttered frightening cries,
-and displayed more agility than fight, the object being evidently to
-terrify by a threatening aspect; but the scene was as barbarous as any
-we see in African pictures. Here also was a pretty woman (pretty for
-her) with beautiful eyes, who wore a heavy nose-ring of gold, which she
-said she put on to make her face beautiful; nevertheless she would sell
-the ring for nine dollars and a half. The people along here will
-sell anything they have, ornaments, charms to protect them from the
-evil-eye,—they will part with anything for money. At this village we
-took on a crocodile ten feet long, which had been recently killed, and
-lashed it to the horizontal yard. It was Abd-el-Atti's desire to present
-it to a friend in Cairo, and perhaps he was not reluctant, when we
-should be below the cataract, to have it take the appearance, in the
-eyes of spectators, of having been killed by some one on this boat.
-
-We obtained above Korosko one of the most beautiful animals in the
-world—a young gazelle—to add to our growing menagerie; which consists
-of a tame duck, who never gets away when his leg is tied; a timid desert
-hare, who has lived for a long time in a tin box in the cabin, trembling
-like an aspen leaf night and day; and a chameleon.
-
-The chameleon ought to have a chapter to himself. We have reason to
-think that he has the soul of some transmigrating Egyptian. He is the
-most uncanny beast. We have made him a study, and find very little good
-in him. His changeableness of color is not his worst quality. He has the
-nature of a spy, and he is sullen and snappish besides. We discovered
-that his color is not a purely physical manifestation, but that it
-depends upon his state of mind, upon his temper. When everything is
-serene, he is green as a May morning, but anger changes him instantly
-for the worse. It is however true that he takes his color mainly from
-the substance upon which he dwells, not from what he eats; for he eats
-flies and allows them to make no impression on his exterior. When he was
-taken off an acacia-tree, this chameleon was of the bright-green color
-of the leaves. Brought into our cabin, his usual resting-place was on
-the reddish maroon window curtains, and his green changed muddily into
-the color of the woollen. When angry, he would become mottled with dark
-spots, and have a thick cloudy color. This was the range of his changes
-of complexion; it is not enough (is it?) to give him his exaggerated
-reputation.
-
-I confess that I almost hated him, and perhaps cannot do him justice.
-He is a crawling creature at best, and his mode of getting about is
-disagreeable; his feet have the power of clinging to the slightest
-roughness, and he can climb anywhere; his feet are like hands; besides,
-his long tail is like another hand; it is prehensile like the monkey's.
-He feels his way along very carefully, taking a turn with his tail about
-some support, when he is passing a chasm, and not letting go until his
-feet are firmly fixed on something else. And, then, the way he uses his
-eye is odious. His eye-balls are stuck upon the end of protuberances on
-his head, which protuberances work like ball-and-socket joints—as if
-you had your eye on the end of your finger. When he wants to examine
-anything, he never turns his head; he simply swivels his eye round and
-brings it to bear on the object. Pretending to live in cold isolation on
-the top of a window curtain, he is always making clammy excursions round
-the cabin, and is sometimes found in our bed-chambers. You wouldn't like
-to feel his cold tail dragging over you in the night.
-
-The first question every morning, when we come to breakfast, is,
-
-“Where is that chameleon?”
-
-He might be under the table, you know, or on the cushions, and you might
-sit on him. Commonly he conceals his body behind the curtain, and just
-lifts his head above the roller. There he sits, spying us, gyrating his
-evil eye upon us, and never stirring his head; he takes the color of
-the curtain so nearly that we could not see him if it was not for that
-swivel eye. It is then that he appears malign, and has the aspect of a
-wise but ill-disposed Egyptian whose soul has had ill luck in getting
-into any respectable bodies for three or four thousand years. He lives
-upon nothing,—you would think he had been raised in a French pension.
-Few flies happen his way; and, perhaps he is torpid out of the sun so
-much of the time, he is not active to catch those that come. I carried
-him a big one the other day, and he repaid my kindness by snapping my
-finger. And I am his only friend.
-
-Alas, the desert hare, whom we have fed with corn, and greens, and tried
-to breed courage in for a long time, died this morning at an early hour;
-either he was chilled out of the world by the cold air on deck, or he
-died of palpitation of the heart; for he was always in a flutter of
-fear, his heart going like a trip-hammer, when anyone approached him.
-He only rarely elevated his long silky ears in a serene enjoyment of
-society. His tail was too short, but he was, nevertheless, an animal to
-become attached to.
-
-Speaking of Hassan Kashef's violation of the Moslem law, in taking more
-than four wives, is it generally known that the women in Mohammed's
-time endeavored also to have the privileges of men? Forty women who
-had cooked for the soldiers who were fighting the infidels and had done
-great service in the campaign, were asked by the Prophet to name their
-reward. The chief lady, who was put forward to prefer the request of
-the others, asked that as men were permitted four wives women might be
-allowed to have four husbands. The Prophet gave them a plain reason for
-refusing their petition, and it has never been renewed. The legend shows
-that long ago women protested against their disabilities.
-
-The strong north wind, with coolish weather, continues. On Sunday we are
-nowhere in particular, and climb a high sandstone peak, and sit in the
-shelter of a rock, where wandering men have often come to rest. It is a
-wild, desert place, and there is that in the atmosphere of the day which
-leads to talk of the end of the world.
-
-Like many other Moslems, Abd-el-Atti thinks that these are the
-last days, bad enough days, and that the end draws near. We have
-misunderstood what Mr. Lane says about Christ coming to “judge” the
-world. The Moslems believe that Christ, who never died, but was taken up
-into heaven away from the Jews,—a person in his likeness being crucified
-in his stead,—will come to rule, to establish the Moslem religion and a
-reign of justice (the Millenium); and that after this period Christ will
-die, and be buried in Medineh, not far from Mohammed. Then the world
-will end, and Azrael, the angel of death, will be left alone on the
-earth for forty days. He will go to and fro, and find no one; all will
-be in their graves. Then Christ and Mohammed and all the dead will rise.
-But the Lord God will be the final judge of all.
-
-“Yes, there have been many false prophets. A man came before Haroun e'
-Rasheed pretending to be a prophet.
-
-“'What proof have you that you are one? What miracle can you do?'.rdquo;
-
-“'Anything you like.'.rdquo;
-
-“'Christ, on whom be peace, raised men from the dead.'.rdquo;
-
-“'So will I.' This took place before the king and the chief-justice.
-'Let the head of the chief-justice be cut off,' said the pretended
-prophet, 'and I will restore him to life.'.rdquo;
-
-“'Oh,' cried the chief-justice, 'I believe that the man is a real
-prophet. Anyone who does not believe can have his head cut off, and try
-it.'.rdquo;
-
-“A woman also claimed to be a prophetess. 'But,' said the Khalif Haroun
-e' Rasheed, 'Mohammed declared that he was the last man who should be a
-prophet.'.rdquo;
-
-“'He didn't say that a woman shouldn't be,' the woman she answer.”
-
-The people vary in manners and habits here from village to village, much
-more than we supposed they would. Walking this morning for a couple of
-miles through the two villages of Maharraka—rude huts scattered under
-palm-trees—we find the inhabitants, partly Arab, partly Barabra, and
-many negro slaves, more barbaric than any we have seen; boys and girls,
-till the marriageable age, in a state of nature, women neither so shy
-nor so careful about covering themselves with clothing as in other
-places, and the slaves wretchedly provided for. The heads of the young
-children are shaved in streaks, with long tufts of hair left; the women
-are loaded with tawdry necklaces, and many of them, poor as they
-are, sport heavy hoops of gold in the nose, and wear massive silver
-bracelets.
-
-The slaves, blacks and mulattoes, were in appearance like those seen
-formerly in our southern cotton-fields. I recall a picture, in abolition
-times, representing a colored man standing alone, and holding up his
-arms, in a manner beseeching the white man, passing by, to free him.
-To-day I saw the picture realized. A very black man, standing nearly
-naked in the midst of a bean-field, raised up both his arms, and cried
-aloud to us as we went by. The attitude had all the old pathos in it.
-As the poor fellow threw up his arms in a wild despair, he cried
-“Backsheesh, backsheesh, O! howadji!”
-
-For the first time we found the crops in danger. The country was overrun
-with reddish-brown locusts, which settled in clouds upon every green
-thing; and the people in vain attempted to frighten them from their
-scant strip of grain. They are not, however, useless. The attractive
-women caught some, and, pulling off the wings and legs, offered them to
-us to eat. They said locusts were good; and I suppose they are such as
-John the Baptist ate. We are not Baptists.
-
-As we go down the river we take in two or three temples a day, besides
-these ruins of humanity in the village,—-Dakkeh, Gerf Hossâyn, Dendoor.
-It is easy to get enough of these second-class temples. That at
-Gerf Hossâyn is hewn in the rock, and is in general arrangement like
-Ipsambool—it was also made by Rameses II.—but is in all respects
-inferior, and lacks the Colossi. I saw sitting in the adytum four
-figures whom I took to be Athos, Parthos, Aramis, and D'Artignan—though
-this edifice was built long before the day of the “Three Guardsmen.”
-
-The people in the village below have such a bad reputation that the
-dragoman in great fright sent sailors after us, when he found we were
-strolling through the country alone. We have seen no natives so well
-off in cattle, sheep, and cooking-utensils, or in nose-rings, beads, and
-knives; they are, however, a wild, noisy tribe, and the whole village
-followed us for a mile, hooting for backsheesh. The girls wear a
-nose-ring and a girdle; the boys have no rings or girdles. The men are
-fierce and jealous of their wives, perhaps with reason, stabbing and
-throwing them into the river on suspicion, if they are caught talking
-with another man. So they say. At this village we saw pits dug in the
-sand (like those described in the Old Testament), in which cattle, sheep
-and goats were folded; it being cheaper to dig a pit than to build a
-stone fence.
-
-At Kalâbshee are two temples, ruins on a sufficiently large scale to
-be imposing; sculptures varied in character and beautifully colored;
-propylons with narrow staircases, and concealed rooms, and deep windows
-bespeaking their use as fortifications and dungeons as well as temples;
-and columns of interest to the architect; especially two, fluted (time
-of Rameses II.) with square projecting abacus like the Doric, but
-with broad bases. The inhabitants are the most pestilent on the river,
-crowding their curiosities upon us, and clamoring for money. They have
-for sale gazelle-horns, and the henna (which grows here), in the form of
-a green powder.
-
-However, Kalâbshee has educational facilities. I saw there a boys'
-school in full operation. In the open air, but in the sheltering angle
-of a house near the ruins, sat on the ground the schoolmaster. Behind
-him leaned his gun against the wall; before him lay an open Koran; and
-in his hand he held a thin palm rod with which he enforced education. He
-was dictating sentences from the book to a scrap of a scholar, a boy who
-sat on the ground, with an inkhorn beside him, and wrote the sentences
-on a board slate, repeating the words in aloud voice as he wrote. Nearby
-was another urchin, seated before a slate leaning against the angle of
-of the wall, committing the writing on it to memory, in a loud voice
-also. When he looked off the stick reminded him to attend to his slate.
-I do not know whether he calls this a private or a public school.
-
-Quitting these inhospitable savages as speedily as we can, upon the
-springing up of a south wind, we are going down stream at a spanking
-rate, leaving a rival dahabeëh, belonging to an English lord, behind,
-when the adversary puts it into the head of our pilot to steer across
-the river, and our prosperous career is suddenly arrested on a sandbar.
-We are fast, and the English boat, keeping in the channel, shows us her
-rudder and disappears round the bend.
-
-Extraordinary confusion follows; the crew are in the water, they are on
-deck, the anchor is got out, there are as many opinions, as people, and
-no one obeys. The long pilot is a spectacle, after he has been wading
-about in the stream and comes on deck. His gown is off and his turban
-also; his head is shaved; his drawers are in tatters like lace-work. He
-strides up and down beating his breast, his bare poll shining in the
-sun like a billiard ball. We are on the sand nearly four hours, and the
-accident, causing us to lose this wind, loses us, it so happens, three
-days. By dark we tie up near the most excruciating Sakiya in the world.
-It is suggested to go on shore and buy the property and close it out.
-But the boy who is driving will neither sell nor stop his cattle.
-
-At Gertassee we have more ruins and we pass a beautiful, single column,
-conspicuous for a long distance over the desert, as fine as the once
-“nameless column” in the Roman forum, These temples, or places of
-worship, are on the whole depressing. There was no lack of religious
-privileges if frequency of religious edifices gave them. But the people
-evidently had no part in the ceremonies, and went never into these dark
-chambers, which are now inhabited by bats. The old religion does not
-commend itself to me. Of what use would be one of these temples on
-Asylum Hill, in Hartford, and how would the Rev. Mr. Twichell busy
-himself in its dark recesses, I wonder, even with the help of the
-deacons and the committee? The Gothic is quite enough for us.
-
-This morning—we have now entered upon the month of February—for the
-first time in Nubia, we have early a slight haze, a thin veil of it; and
-passing between shores rocky and high and among granite breakers, we
-are reminded of the Hudson river on a June morning. A strong north wind,
-however, comes soon to puff away this illusion, and it blows so hard
-that we are actually driven up-stream.
-
-The people and villages under the crumbling granite ledges that this
-delay enables us to see, are the least promising we have encountered;
-women and children are more nearly barbarians in dress and manners; for
-the women, a single strip of brown cotton, worn à la Bedawee, leaving
-free the legs, the right arm and breast, is a common dress. And yet,
-some of these women are not without beauty. One pretty girl sitting on
-a rock, the sun glistening on the castor-oil of her hair, asked for
-backsheesh in a sweet voice, her eyes sparkling with merriment. A flower
-blooming in vain in this desert!
-
-Is it a question of “converting” these people? Certainly, nothing but
-the religion of the New Testament, put in practice here, bringing in
-its train, industry, self-respect, and a desire to know, can awaken the
-higher nature, and lift these creatures into a respectable womanhood.
-But the task is more difficult than it would be with remote tribes in
-Central Africa. These people have been converted over and over again.
-They have had all sorts of religions during the last few thousand years,
-and they remain essentially the same. They once had the old Egyptian
-faith, whatever it was; and subsequently they varied that with the
-Greek and Roman shades of heathenism. They then accepted the early
-Christianity, as the Abyssinians did, and had, for hundreds of years,
-opportunity of Christian worship, when there were Christian churches
-all along the Nile from Alexander to Meroë, and holy hermits in every
-eligible cave and tomb. And then came Mohammed's friends, giving them
-the choice of belief or martyrdom, and they embraced the religion of
-Mecca as cordially as any other.
-
-They have remained essentially unchanged through all their changes. This
-hopelessness of their condition is in the fact that in all the shiftings
-of religions and of dynasties, the women have continued to soak their
-hair in castor-oil. The fashion is as old as the Nile world. Many people
-look upon castor-oil as an excellent remedy. I should like to know what
-it has done for Africa.
-
-At Dabod is an interesting ruin, and a man sits there in front of his
-house, weaving, confident that no rain will come to spoil his yarn.
-He sits and works the treadle of his loom in a hole in the ground, the
-thread being stretched out twenty or thirty feet on the wall before
-him. It is the only industry of the village, and a group of natives are
-looking on. The poor weaver asks backsheesh, and when I tell him I have
-nothing smaller than an English sovereign, he says he can change it!
-
-Here we find also a sort of Holly-Tree Inn, a house for charitable
-entertainment, such as is often seen in Moslem villages. It is a square
-mud-structure, entered by two doors, and contains two long rooms with
-communicating openings. The dirt-floors are cleanly swept and fresh mats
-are laid down at intervals. Any stranger or weary traveler, passing
-by, is welcome to come in and rest or pass the night, to have a cup of
-coffee and some bread. There are two cleanly dressed attendants, and
-one of them is making coffee, within, over a handful of fire, in a
-tiny coffee-pot. In front, in the sun, on neat mats, sit half a dozen
-turbaned men, perhaps tired wanderers and pilgrims in this world, who
-have turned aside to rest for an hour, for a day, or for a week. They
-appear to have been there forever. The establishment is maintained by
-a rich man of the place; but signs of an abode of wealth we failed to
-discover in any of the mud-enclosures.
-
-When we are under way again, we express surprise at finding here such an
-excellent charity.
-
-“You no think the Lord he take care for his own?” says Abd-el-Atti.
-“When the kin' [king] of Abyssinia go to 'stroy the Kaabeh in Mecca”—
-
-“Did you ever see the Kaabeh?”
-
-“Many times. Plenty times I been in Mecca.”
-
-“In what part of the Kaabeh is the Black Stone?”
-
-“So. The Kaabeh is a building like a cube, about, I think him, thirty
-feet high, built in the middle of the mosque at Mecca. It was built by
-Abraham, of white marble. In the outside the east wall, near the corner,
-'bout so (four feet) high you find him, the Black Stone, put there by
-Abraham, call him haggeh el ashad, the lucky, the fortunate stone. It is
-opposite the sunrise. Where Abraham get him? God knows. If any one sick,
-he touch this stone, be made so well as he was. So I hunderstand.
-The Kaabeh is in the centre of the earth, and has fronts to the four
-quarters of the globe, Asia, Hindia, Egypt, all places, toward which
-the Moslem kneel in prayer. Near the Kaabeh is the well, the sacred well
-Zem-Zem, has clear water, beautiful, so lifely. One time a year, in the
-month before Ramadan, Zem-Zem spouts up high in the air, and people come
-to drink of it. When Hagar left Ishmael, to look for water, being very
-thirsty, the little fellow scratched with his fingers in the sand, and a
-spring of water rushed up; this is the well Zem-Zem. I told you the same
-water is in the spring in Syria, El Gebel; I find him just the same;
-come under the earth from Zem-Zem.”
-
-“When the kin' of Abyssinia, who not believe, what you call infidel,
-like that Englishman, yes, Mr. Buckle, I see him in Sinai and Petra—very
-wise man, know a great deal, very nice gentleman, I like him very much,
-but I think he not believe—when the kin' of Abyssinia came with all his
-great army and his elephants to fight against Mecca, and to 'stroy the
-Kaabeh as well the same time to carry off all the cattle of the people,
-then the people they say, 'the cattle are ours, but the Kaabeh is the
-Lord's, and he will have care over it; the Kaabeh is not ours.' There
-was one of the elephants of the kin' of Abyssinia, the name of Mahmoud,
-and he was very wise, more wise than anybody else. When he came in sight
-of Mecca, he turned back and went the other way, and not all the spears
-and darts of the soldiers could stop him. The others went on. Then the
-Lord sent out of the hell very small birds, with very little stones,
-taken out of hell, in their claws, no larger than mustard seeds; and
-the birds dropped these on the heads of the soldiers that rode on the
-elephants—generally three or four on an elephant. The little seeds went
-right down through the men and through the elephants, and killed them,
-and by this the army was 'stroyed.”
-
-“When the kin', after that, come into the mosque, some power outside
-himself made him to bow down in respect to the Kaabeh. He went away and
-did not touch it. And it stands there the same now.”
-
-
-
-0331
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXVI.—MYSTERIOUS PHILÆ.
-
-WE are on deck early to see the approach to Philæ, which is through a
-gateway of high rocks. The scenery is like parts of the Rhine; and as we
-come in sight of the old mosque perched on the hillside, and the round
-tomb on the pinnacle above, it is very like the Rhine, with castle
-ruins. The ragged and rock island of Biggeh rises before us and seems to
-stop the way, but, at a turn in the river, the little temple, with its
-conspicuous columns, then the pylon of the great temple, and at length
-the mass of ruins, that cover the little island of Philæ, open on the
-view.
-
-In the narrows we meet the fleet of government boats conveying the
-engineer expedition going up to begin the railway from Wady Haifa to
-Berber. Abd-el-Atti does not like the prospect of Egypt running deeper
-and deeper in debt, with no good to come of it, he says; he believes
-that the Khedive is acting under the advice of England, which is
-entirely selfish and only desires a short way to India, in case the
-French should shut the Suez Canal against them (his view is a very good
-example of a Moslem's comprehension of affairs). Also thinking, with all
-Moslems, that it is best to leave the world and its people as the Lord
-has created and placed them, he replied to an enquiry about his opinion
-of the railroad, with this story of Jonah:—
-
-“When the prophet Jonah came out of the whale and sat down on the bank
-to dry under a tree (I have seen the tree) in Syria, there was a blind
-man sitting near by, who begged the prophet to give him sight. Then
-Jonah asked the Lord for help and the blind man was let to see. The man
-was eating dates at the same time, and the first thing he did when he
-got his eyes open was to snap the hard seeds at Jonah, who you know
-was very tender from being so long in the whale. Jonah was stung on his
-skin, and bruised by the stones, and he cry out, 'O! Lord, how is this?'
-And the Lord said, 'Jonah, you not satisfied to leave things as I placed
-'em; and now you must suffer for it'.”
-
-One muses and dreams at Philæ, and does not readily arouse himself
-to the necessity of exploring and comprehending the marvels and the
-beauties that insensibly lead him into sentimental reveries. If ever the
-spirit of beauty haunted a spot, it is this. Whatever was harsh in the
-granite ledges, or too sharp in the granite walls, whatever is repellant
-in the memory concerning the uses of these temples of a monstrous
-theogony, all is softened now by time, all asperities are worn away;
-nature and art grow lovely together in a gentle decay, sunk in a repose
-too beautiful to be sad. Nowhere else in Egypt has the grim mystery of
-the Egyptians cultus softened into so harmless a memory.
-
-The oval island contains perhaps a hundred acres. It is a rock, with
-only a patch or two of green, and a few scattered palms, just enough to
-give it a lonely, poetic, and not a fruitful aspect, and, as has been
-said, is walled all round from the water's edge. Covered with ruins, the
-principal are those of the temple of Isis. Beginning at the southern end
-of the island, where a flight of steps led up to it, it stretches along,
-with a curved and broadening colonnade, giant pylons, great courts and
-covered temples. It is impossible to imagine a structure or series of
-structures, more irregular in the lines or capricious in the forms. The
-architects gave free play to their fancy, and we find here the fertility
-and variety, if not the grotesqueness of imagination of the mediaeval
-cathedral builders. The capitals of the columns of the colonnade are
-sculptured in rich variety; the walls of the west cloister are covered
-with fine carvings, the color on them still fresh and delicate; and the
-ornamental designs are as beautiful and artistic as the finest Greek
-work, which some of it suggests: as rich as the most lovely Moorish
-patterns, many of which seem to have been copied from these living
-creations—-diamond-work, birds, exquisite medallions of flowers, and
-sphinxes.
-
-Without seeing this mass of buildings, you can have no notion of the
-labor expended in decorating them. All the surfaces of the gigantic
-pylons, of the walls and courts, exterior and interior, are covered with
-finely and carefully cut figures and hieroglyphics, and a great deal of
-the work is minute and delicate chiselling. You are lost in wonder if
-you attempt to estimate the time and the number of workmen necessary to
-accomplish all this. It seems incredible that men could ever have had
-patience or leisure for it. A great portion of the figures, within and
-without, have been, with much painstaking, defaced; probably it was done
-by the early Christians, and this is the only impress they have left of
-their domination in this region.
-
-The most interesting sculptures, however, at Philæ are those in a small
-chamber, or mortuary chapel, on the roof of the main temple, touching
-the most sacred mystery of the Egyptian religion, the death and
-resurrection of Osiris. This myth, which took many fantastic forms, was
-no doubt that forbidden topic upon which Herodotus was not at liberty to
-speak. It was the growth of a period in the Egyptian theology when the
-original revelation of one God grew weak and began to disappear under
-a monstrous symbolism. It is possible that the priests, who held their
-religious philosophy a profound secret from the vulgar (whose religion
-was simply a gross worship of symbols), never relinquished the belief
-expressed in their sacred texts, which say of God “that He is the sole
-generator in heaven and earth, and that He has not been begotten....
-That He is the only living and true God, who was begotten by Himself....
-He who has existed from the beginning.... who has made all things and
-was not Himself made.” It is possible that they may have held to this
-and still kept in the purity of its first conception the myth of the
-manifestation of Osiris, however fantastic the myth subsequently became
-in mythology and in the popular worship.
-
-Osiris, the personification of the sun, the life-giving, came upon the
-earth to benefit men, and one of his titles was the “manifester of good
-and truth.” He was slain in a conflict with Set the spirit of evil and
-darkness; he was buried; he was raised from the dead by the prayers of
-his wife, Isis; he became the judge of the dead; he was not only the
-life-giving but the saving deity; “himself the first raised from the
-dead, he assisted to raise those who were justified, after having aided
-them to overcome all their trials.”
-
-But whatever the priests and the initiated believed, this myth is here
-symbolized in the baldest forms. We have the mummy of Osiris passing
-through its interment and the successive stages of the under-world; then
-his body is dismembered and scattered, and finally the limbs and organs
-are reassembled and joined together, and the resurrection takes place
-before our eyes. It reminds one of a pantomime of the Ravels, who used
-to chop up the body of a comrade and then put him together again as good
-as new, with the insouciance of beings who lived in a world where such
-transactions were common. This whole temple indeed, would be a royal
-place for the tricks of a conjurer or the delusions of a troop of stage
-wizards. It is full of dark chambers and secret passages, some of them
-in the walls and some subterranean, the entrances to which are only
-disclosed by removing a close-fitting stone.
-
-The great pylons, ascended by internal stairways, have habitable
-chambers in each story, lighted by deep slits of windows, and are
-like palace fortresses. The view from the summit of one of them is
-fascinating, but almost grim; that is, your surroundings are huge masses
-of granite mountains and islands, only relieved by some patches of green
-and a few palms on the east shore. But time has so worn and fashioned
-the stones of the overtopping crags, and the color of the red granite is
-so warm, and the contours are so softened that under the brilliant sky
-the view is mellowed and highly poetical, and ought not to be called
-grim.
-
-This little island, gay with its gorgeously colored walls, graceful
-colonnades, garden-roofs and spreading terraces, set in its rim of swift
-water, protected by these granite fortresses, bent over by this sky,
-must have been a dear and sacred place to the worshippers of Isis and
-Osiris, and we scarcely wonder that the celebration of their rites
-was continued so long in our era. We do not need, in order to feel
-the romance of the place, to know that it was a favorite spot with
-Cleopatra, and that she moored her silken-sailed dahabeëh on the
-sandbank where ours now lies. Perhaps she was not a person of romantic
-nature. There is a portrait of her here (the authenticity of which rests
-upon I know not what authority) stiffly cut in the stone, in which she
-appears to be a resolute woman with full sensual lips and a determined
-chin. Her hair is put up in decent simplicity. But I half think that she
-herself was like her other Egyptian sisters and made her silken locks
-to shine with the juice of the castor-oil plant. But what were these
-mysteries in which she took part, and what was this worship, conducted
-in these dark and secret chambers? It was veiled from all vulgar eyes;
-probably the people were scarcely allowed to set foot upon the sacred
-island.
-
-Sunday morning was fresh and cool, with fleecy clouds, light and
-summer-like. Instead of Sabbath bells, when I rose late, I heard the
-wild chant of a crew rowing a dahabeëh down the echoing channel. And I
-wondered how church bells, rung on the top of these pylons, would sound
-reverberating among these granite rocks and boulders. We climbed, during
-the afternoon, to the summit of the island of Biggeh, which overshadows
-Philæ, and is a most fantastic pile of crags. You can best understand
-this region by supposing that a gigantic internal explosion lifted the
-granite strata into the air, and that the fragments fell hap-hazard.
-This Biggeh might have been piled up by the giants who attempted to
-scale heaven, when Zeus blasted them and their work with his launched
-lightning.
-
-From this summit, we have in view the broken, rock-strewn field called
-the Cataract, and all the extraordinary islands of rock above, that
-almost dam the river; there, over Philæ, on the north shore, is the
-barrack-like Austrian Mission, and neat it the railway that runs through
-the desert waste, round the hills of the Cataract, to Assouan. These
-vast piled-up fragments and splintered ledges, here and all about
-us, although of raw granite and syenite, are all disintegrating and
-crumbling into fine atoms. It is this decay that softens the hardness
-of the outlines, and harmonizes with the ruins below. Wild as the
-convulsion was that caused this fantastic wreck, the scene is not
-without a certain peace now, as we sit here this Sunday afternoon, on a
-high crag, looking down upon the pagan temples, which resist the
-tooth of time almost as well as the masses of granite rock that are in
-position and in form their sentinels.
-
-Opposite, on the hill, is the mosque, and the plastered dome of the
-sheykh's tomb, with its prayer-niche, a quiet and commanding place
-of repose. The mosque looks down upon the ever-flowing Nile, upon the
-granite desolation, upon the decaying temple of Isis,—converted
-once into a temple of the true God, and now merely the marvel of the
-traveler. The mosque itself, representative of the latest religion, is
-falling to ruin. What will come next? What will come to break up this
-civilized barbarism?
-
-“Abd-el-Atti, why do you suppose the Lord permitted the old heathen
-to have such a lovely place as this Philæ for the practice of their
-superstitions?”
-
-“Do' know, be sure. Once there was a stranger, I reckon him travel
-without any dragoman, come to the tent of the prophet Abraham, and ask
-for food and lodging; he was a kind of infidel, not believe in God, not
-to believe in anything but a bit of stone. And Abraham was very angry,
-and sent him away without any dinner. Then the Lord, when he saw it,
-scolded Abraham.
-
-“'But,' says Abraham, 'the man is an infidel, and does not believe in
-Thee.'
-
-“'Well,' the Lord he answer to Abraham, 'he has lived in my world all
-his life, and I have suffered him, and taken care of him, and prospered
-him, and borne his infidelity; and you could not give him a dinner, or
-shelter for one night in your house!
-
-“Then Abraham ran after the infidel, and called him back, and told him
-all that the Lord he say. And the infidel when he heard it, answer,
-'If the Lord says that, I believe in Him; and I believe that you are a
-prophet.'.rdquo;
-
-“And do you think, Abd-el-Atti, that men have been more tolerant, the
-Friends of Mohammed, for instance, since then?”
-
-“Men pretty nearly always the same; I see 'em all 'bout alike. I read
-in our books a little, what you call 'em?—yes, anecdote, how a Moslem
-'ulama, and a Christian priest, and a Jewish rabbi, were in a place
-together, and had some conversation, and they agreed to tell what each
-would like best to happen.
-
-“The priest he began:—'I should like,' says he, 'as many Moslems to die
-as there are animals sacrificed by them on the day of sacrifice.'
-
-“'And I,' says the 'ulama, 'would like to see put out of the way so many
-Christians as they eat eggs on Easter.'
-
-“Now it is your turn, says they both to the rabbi:—'Well, I should like
-you both to have your wishes.' I think the Jew have the best of it. Not
-so?”
-
-The night is soft and still, and envelopes Philæ in a summer warmth. The
-stars crowd the blue-black sky with scintillant points, obtrusive and
-blazing in startling nearness; they are all repeated in the darker
-blue of the smooth river, where lie also, perfectly outlined, the heavy
-shadows of the granite masses. Upon the silence suddenly breaks the
-notes of a cornet, from a dahabeëh moored above us, in pulsations,
-however, rather to emphasize than to break the hush of the night.
-
-“Eh! that's Mr. Fiddle,” cries Abd-el-Atti, whose musical nomenclature
-is not very extensive, “that's a him.”
-
-Once on a moonless night in Upper Nubia, as we lay tied to the bank,
-under the shadow of the palms, there had swept past us, flashing
-into sight an instant and then gone in the darkness, an upward-bound
-dahabeëh, from the deck of which a cornet-à-piston flung out, in
-salute, the lively notes of a popular American air. The player (whom the
-dragoman could never call by any name but “Mr. Fiddle”) as we came to
-know later, was an Irish gentleman, Anglicized and Americanized, and
-indeed cosmopolitan, who has a fancy for going about the world and
-awaking here and there remote and commonly undisturbed echoes with his
-favorite brass horn. I daresay that moonlight voyagers on the Hudson
-have heard its notes dropping down from the Highlands; it has stirred
-the air of every land on the globe except India; our own Sierras have
-responded to its invitations, and Mount Sinai itself has echoed its
-strains. There is a prejudice against the cornet, that it is not exactly
-a family instrument; and not more suited to assist in morning and
-evening devotions than the violin, which a young clergyman, whom I
-knew, was endeavoring to learn, in order to play it, gently, at family
-prayers.
-
-This traveled cornet, however, begins to play, with deliberate
-pauses between the bars, the notes of that glorious hymn, “How firm a
-foundation ye saints of the Lord,” following it with the Prayer from
-Der Freischutz, and that, again, with some familiar Scotch airs (a
-transition perfectly natural in home-circles on Sunday evening), every
-note of which, leisurely floating out into the night, is sent back in
-distant echoes. Nothing can be lovelier than the scene,—the tropical
-night, the sentimental island, the shadows of columns and crags, the
-mysterious presence of a brooding past,—and nothing can be sweeter than
-these dulcet, lingering, re-echoing strains, which are the music of our
-faith, of civilization, of home. From these old temples did never come,
-in the days of the flute and the darabooka, such melodies. And do the
-spirits of Isis and Osiris, and of Berenice, Cleopatra, and Antoninus,
-who worshipped them here, listen, and know perhaps that a purer and
-better spirit has come into the world?
-
-In the midst of this echoing melody, a little boat, its sail noiselessly
-furled, its gunwales crowded with gowned and white-turbaned Nubians,
-glides out of the shadow and comes alongside, as silently as a
-ferry-boat of the under-world bearing the robed figures of the departed,
-and the venerable Reis of the Cataract steps on board, with es-salam
-'aleykum; and the negotiation for shooting the rapids in the morning
-begins.
-
-The reïs is a Nubian of grave aspect, of a complexion many shades darker
-than would have been needed to disqualify its possessor to enjoy civil
-rights in our country a few years ago, and with watchful and shrewd
-black eyes which have an occasional gleam of humor; his robe is mingled
-black and white, his turban is a fine camels-hair shawl; his legs are
-bare, but he wears pointed red-morocco slippers. There is a long confab
-between him and the dragoman, over pipes and coffee, about the down
-trip. It seems that there is a dahabeëh at Assouan, carrying the English
-Prince Arthur and a Moslem Prince, which has been waiting for ten days
-the whim of the royal scion, to make the ascent. Meantime no other
-boat can go up or down. The cataract business is at a standstill. The
-government has given orders that no other boat shall get in the way; and
-many travelers' boats have been detained from one to two weeks; some of
-them have turned back, without seeing Nubia, unable to spend any longer
-time in a vexatious uncertainty. The prince has signified his intention
-of coming up the Cataract tomorrow morning, and consequently we
-cannot go down, although the descending channel is not the same as
-the ascending. A considerable fleet of boats is now at each end of the
-cataract, powerless to move.
-
-The cataract people express great dissatisfaction at this interference
-in their concerns by the government, which does not pay them as much as
-the ordinary traveler does for passing the cataract. And yet they have
-their own sly and mysterious method of dealing with boats that is not
-less annoying than the government favoritism. They will very seldom take
-a dahabeëh through in a day; they have delight in detaining it in the
-rapids and showing their authority.
-
-When, at length, the Reis comes into the cabin, to pay us a visit of
-courtesy, he is perfect in dignity and good-breeding, in spite of his
-bare legs; and enters into a discourse of the situation with spirit and
-intelligence. In reply to a remark, that, in America we are not obliged
-to wait for princes, his eyes sparkle, as he answers, with much vivacity
-of manner, “You quite right. In Egypt we are in a mess. Egypt is a ewe
-sheep from which every year they shear the wool close off; the milk that
-should go the lamb they drink; and when the poor old thing dies, they
-give the carcass to the people—the skin they cut up among themselves.
-This season,” he goes on, “is to the cataracts like what the pilgrimage
-is to Mecca and to Jerusalem—the time when to make the money from the
-traveler. And when the princes they come, crowding the traveler to one
-side, and the government makes everything done for them for nothing,
-and pays only one dollar for a turkey for which the traveler pays two,
-'bliges the people to sell their provisions at its own price,”—the
-sheykh stopped.
-
-“The Reis, then, Abd-el-Atti, doesn't fancy this method of doing
-business?”
-
-“No, him say he not like it at all.”
-
-And the Reis kindled up, “You may call the Prince anything you like, you
-may call him king; but the real Sultan is the man who pays his money and
-does not come here at the cost of the government. Great beggars some of
-these big nobility; all the great people want the Viceroyal to do 'em
-charity and take 'em up the Nile, into Abyssinia, I don't know where
-all. I think the greatest beggars always those who can best afford to
-pay.”
-
-With this philosophical remark the old Sheykh concludes a long harangue,
-the substance of which is given above, and takes his leave with a
-hundred complimentary speeches.
-
-Forced to wait, we employed Monday advantageously in exploring the
-land-route to Assouan, going by Mahatta, where the trading-boats lie and
-piles of merchandise lumber the shore. It is a considerable village, and
-full of most persistent beggars and curiosity venders. The road, sandy
-and dusty, winds through hills of granite boulders—a hot and desolate
-though not deserted highway, for strings of camels, with merchandise,
-were in sight the whole distance. We passed through the ancient
-cemetery, outside of Assouan, a dreary field of sand and rocks, the
-leaning grave-stones covered with inscriptions in old Arabic, (or
-Cufic), where are said to rest the martyred friends of the prophet who
-perished in the first battle with the infidels above Philæ.
-
-Returning, we made a detour to the famous syenite quarries, the openings
-of several of which are still visible. They were worked from the sides
-and not in pits, and offer little to interest the ordinary sight-seer.
-Yet we like to see where the old workmen chipped away at the rocks;
-there are frequent marks of the square holes that they drilled, in order
-to split off the stone with wet wedges of wood. The great obelisk which
-lies in the quarry, half covered by sand, is unfinished; it is tapered
-from the base to its tip, ninety-eight feet, but it was doubtless, as
-the marks indicate, to be worked down to the size of the big obelisk at
-Karnak; the part which is exposed measures ten to eleven feet square.
-It lies behind ledges of rock, and it could only have been removed by
-cutting away the enormous mass in front of it or by hoisting it over.
-The suggestion of Mr. Wilkinson that it was to be floated out by a
-canal, does not commend itself to one standing on the ground.
-
-We came back by the long road, the ancient traveled way, along which,
-on the boulders, are rudely-cut sculptures and hieroglyphics, mere
-scratchings on the stone, but recording the passage of kings and armies
-as long ago as the twelfth dynasty. Nearly all the way from Assouan to
-Philæ are remains of a huge wall of unburnt bricks, ten to fifteen feet
-broad and probably fifteen to twenty feet high, winding along the valley
-and over the low ridges. An apparently more unnecessary wall does not
-exist; it is said by people here to have been thrown up by the Moslems
-as a protection against the Nubians when they first traversed this
-desert; but it is no doubt Roman. There are indications that the Nile
-once poured its main flood through this opening.
-
-We emerge not far from the south end of the railway track, and at the
-deserted Austrian Mission. A few Nubian families live in huts on the
-bank of the stream. Among the bright-eyed young ladies, with shining
-hair, who entreat backsheesh, while we are waiting for our sandal, is
-the daughter of our up-river pilot. We should have had a higher opinion
-of his dignity and rank if we had not seen his house and his family.
-
-After sunset the dahabeëhs of the Prince came up and were received with
-salutes by the waiting boats, which the royal craft did not return. Why
-the dragoman of the arriving dahabeëh came to ours with the Prince's
-request, as he said, for our cards, we were not informed; we certainly
-intended no offence by the salute; it was, on the part of the other
-boats, a natural expression of pleasure that the royal boat was at last
-out of the way.
-
-At dark we loose from lovely Philæ, in order to drop down to Mahatta and
-take our station for running the cataract in the morning. As we draw
-out from the little fleet of boats, Irish, Hungarian, American, English,
-rockets and blue lights illumine the night, and we go off in a blaze of
-glory. Regardless of the Presence, the Irish gentleman responds on his
-cornet with the Star-Spangled Banner, the martial strains of which echo
-from all the hills.
-
-In a moment, the lights are out, the dahabeëhs disappear and the
-enchanting island is lost to sight. We are gliding down the swift
-and winding channel, through granite walls, under the shadow of giant
-boulders, immersed in the gloom of a night which the stars do not
-penetrate. There is no sound save the regular, chopping fall of the
-heavy sweeps, which steady the timorous boat, and are the only sign,
-breaking the oppressive silence, that we are not a phantom ship in a
-world of shades. It is a short but ghostly voyage, and we see at length
-with a sigh of relief the lines of masts and spars in the port of
-Mahatta. Working the boat through the crowd that lie there we moor for
-the night, with the roar of the cataract in our ears.
-
-
-
-0342
-
-
-
-0343
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXVII.—RETURNING.
-
-WE ARE on deck before sunrise, a film is over the sky and a light breeze
-blows out our streamer—a bad omen for the passage.
-
-The downward run of the Cataract is always made in the early morning,
-that being the time when there is least likely to be any wind. And a
-calm is considered absolutely necessary to the safety of the boat. The
-north wind, which helps the passage up, would be fatal going down. The
-boat runs with the current, and any exterior disturbance would whirl her
-about and cast her upon the rocks.
-
-If we are going this morning, we have no time to lose, for it is easy to
-see that this breeze, which is now uncertainly dallying with our colors,
-will before long strengthen. The Cataract people begin to arrive; there
-is already a blue and white row of them squatting on the bank above
-us, drawing their cotton robes about them, for the morning is a trifle
-chilly. They come loitering along the bank and sit down as if they were
-merely spectators, and had no interest in the performance.
-
-The sun comes, and scatters the cloud-films; as the sun rises we are
-ready to go; everything has been made snug and fast above and below; and
-the breeze has subsided entirely. We ought to take instant advantage of
-the calm; seconds count now. But we wait for the Reis of the Cataract,
-the head reïs, without whose consent no move can be made. It is the sly
-old sheykh with whom we have already negociated, and he has his reasons
-for delaying. By priority of arrival at Philæ our boat is entitled to be
-first taken down; but the dragoman of another boat has been crossing the
-palms of the guileless patriarch with gold pieces, and he has agreed to
-give the other boat the preference. It is not probable that the virtuous
-sheykh ever intended to do so, but he must make some show of keeping his
-bargain. He would like to postpone our voyage, and take the chances of
-another day.
-
-But here he comes, mounted on a donkey, in state, wrapped about the
-head and neck in his cashmere, and with a train of attendants—the
-imperturbable, shrewd old man. He halts a moment on the high bank,
-looks up at our pennant, mutters something about “wind, not good day, no
-safe,” and is coolly about to ride by.
-
-Our dragoman in an instant is at his side, and with half-jocular but
-firm persistence, invites him to dismount. It is in vain that the sheykh
-invents excuse after excuse for going on. There is a neighbor in the
-village whose child is dead, and he must visit him. The consolation,
-Abd-el-Atti thinks, can be postponed an hour or two, Allah is all
-merciful. He is chilly, his fingers are cold, he will just ride to the
-next house and warm his hands, and by that time we can tell whether
-it is to be a good morning; Abd-el-Atti is sure that he can warm his
-fingers much better on our boat, in fact he can get warm all through
-there.
-
-“I'll warm him if he won't come.” continues the dragoman, turning to us;
-“if I let him go by, the old rascal, he slip down to Assouan, and that
-become the last of him.”
-
-Before the patriarch knows exactly what has happened, or the other
-dragoman can hinder, he is gently hustled down the steep bank aboard our
-boat. There is a brief palaver, and then he is seated, with a big bowl
-of coffee and bread; we are still waiting, but it is evident that the
-decisive nod has been given. The complexion of affairs has changed!
-
-The people are called from the shore; before we interpret rightly their
-lazy stir, they are swarming on board. The men are getting their places
-on the benches at the oars—three stout fellows at each oar; it looks
-like “business.” The three principal reïses are on board; there are at
-least a dozen steersmen; several heads of families are present, and a
-dozen boys. More than seventy-five men have invaded us—and they may all
-be needed to get ropes ashore in case of accident. This unusual swarm
-of men and the assistance of so many sheykhs, these extra precautions,
-denote either fear, or a desire to impress us with the magnitude of
-the undertaking. The head reïs shakes his head at the boat and mutters,
-“much big.” We have aboard almost every skillful pilot of the rapids.
-
-The Cataract flag, two bands of red and yellow with the name of “Allah”
-worked on it in white, is set up by the cabin stairs.
-
-There is a great deal of talking, some confusion, and a little
-nervousness. Our dragoman cheerfully says, “we will hope for the
-better,” as the beads pass through his fingers. The reïses are audibly
-muttering their prayers. The pilots begin to strip to their work. A
-bright boy of twelve years, squat on deck by the tiller, is loudly and
-rapidly reciting the Koran.
-
-At the last moment, the most venerable reïs of the cataract comes on
-board, as a great favor to us. He has long been superannuated, his hair
-is white, his eye-sight is dim, but when he is on board all will go
-well. Given a conspicous seat in a chair on the cabin deck, he begins
-at once prayers for our safe passage. This sheykh is very distinguished,
-tracing his ancestry back beyond the days of Abraham; his family is very
-large—seven hundred is the number of his relations; this seems to be a
-favorite number; Ali Moorad at Luxor has also seven hundred relations.
-The sheykh is treated with great deference; he seems to have had
-something to do with designing the cataract, and opening it to the
-public.
-
-The last rope is hauled in; the crowd on shore cheer; our rowers dip
-the oars, and in a moment we are sweeping along in the stiff current,
-avoiding the boulders on either side. We go swiftly. Everybody is
-muttering prayers now; two venerable reïses seated on a box in front of
-the rudder increase the speed of their devotions; and the boy chants the
-Koran with a freer swing.
-
-Our route down is not the same as it was up. We pass the head of the
-chief rapid—in which we struggle—into which it would need only a wink of
-the helm to turn us—and sweep away to the west side; and even appear to
-go a little out of our way to run near a precipice of rock. A party of
-ladies and gentlemen who have come down from their dahabeëh above,
-to see us make the chûte, are standing on the summit, and wave
-handkerchiefs and hats as we rush by.
-
-Before us, we can see the great rapids—a down-hill prospect. The passage
-is narrow, and so crowded is the hurrying water that there is a ridge
-down the centre. On this ridge, which is broken and also curved, we are
-to go. If it were straight, it would be more attractive, but it curves
-short to the right near the bottom of the rapid, and, if we do not turn
-sharp with it, we shall dash against the rocks ahead, where the waves
-strike in curling foam. All will depend upon the skill and strength of
-the steersmen, and the sheer at the exact instant.
-
-There is not long to think of it, however, and no possibility now of
-evading the trial. Before we know it, the nose of the boat is in the
-rapid, which flings it up in the air; the next second we are tossed on
-the waves. The bow dips, and a heavy wave deluges the cook's domain; we
-ship a tun or two of water, the dragoman, who stands forward, is wet to
-his breast; but the boat shakes it off and rises again, tossed like an
-egg-shell. It is glorious. The boat obeys her helm admirably, as the
-half-dozen pilots, throwing their weight upon the tiller, skillfully
-veer it slightly or give it a broad sweep.
-
-It is a matter of only three or four minutes, but they are minutes of
-intense excitement. In the midst of them, the reïs of our boat, who has
-no command now and no responsibility, and is usually imperturbably calm,
-becomes completely unmanned by the strain upon his nerves, and breaks
-forth into convulsive shouting, tears and perspiration running down his
-cheeks. He has “the power,” and would have hysterics if he were not a
-man. A half-dozen people fly to his rescue, snatch off his turban, hold
-his hands, mop his face, and try to call him out of his panic. By the
-time he is somewhat composed, we have shunned the rocks and made the
-turn, and are floating in smoother but still swift water. The reises
-shake hands and come to us with salaams and congratulations. The chief
-pilot desires to put my fez on his own head in token of great joy and
-amity. The boy stops shouting the Koran, the prayers cease, the beads
-are put up. It is only when we are in a tight place that it is necessary
-to call upon the name of the Lord vigorously.
-
-“You need not have feared,” says a reïs of the Cataract to ours,
-pointing to the name on the red and yellow flag, “Allah would bring us
-through.”
-
-That there was no danger in this passage we cannot affirm. The dahabeëhs
-that we left at Mahatta, ready to go down, and which might have been
-brought through that morning, were detained four or five days upon
-the whim of the reises. Of the two that came first, one escaped with a
-slight knock against the rocks, and the other was dashed on them, her
-bottom staved in, and half filled with water immediately. Fortunately,
-she was fast on the rock; the passengers, luggage, and stores were got
-ashore; and after some days the boat was rescued and repaired.
-
-For a mile below this chûte we have rapid going, rocks to shun, short
-turns to make, and quite uncertainty enough to keep us on the qui vive,
-and finally, another lesser rapid, where there is infinitely more noise
-by the crew, but less danger from the river than above.
-
-As we approach the last rapid, a woman appears in the swift stream,
-swimming by the help of a log—that being the handy ferry-boat of the
-country; her clothes are all in a big basket, and the basket is secured
-on her head. The sandal, which is making its way down a side channel,
-with our sheep on board, is signalled to take this lady of the lake in,
-and land her on the opposite shore. These sheep of ours, though much
-tossed about, seem to enjoy the voyage and look about upon the raging
-scene with that indifference which comes of high breeding. They are
-black, but that was not to their prejudice in their Nubian home. They
-are comely animals in life, and in death are the best mutton in the
-East; it is said that they are fed on dates, and that this diet imparts
-to their flesh its sweet flavor. I think their excellence is quite as
-much due to the splendid air they breathe.
-
-While we are watching the manoeuvring of the boat, the woman swims to
-a place where she can securely lodge her precious log in the rocks and
-touch bottom with her feet. The boat follows her and steadies itself
-against the same rocks, about which the swift current is swirling. The
-water is up to the woman's neck, and the problem seems to be to get the
-clothes out of the basket which is on her head, and put them on, and not
-wet the clothes. It is the old myth of Venus rising from the sea, but
-under changed conditions, and in the face of modern sensitiveness. How
-it was accomplished, I cannot say, but when I look again the aquatic
-Venus is seated in the sandal, clothed, dry, and placid.
-
-We were an hour passing the rapids, the last part of the time with
-a strong wind against us; if it had risen sooner we should have had
-serious trouble. As it was, it took another hour with three men at each
-oar, to work down to Assouan through the tortuous channel, which is
-full of rocks and whirlpools, The men at each bank of oars belonged to
-different tribes, and they fell into a rivalry of rowing, which resulted
-in an immense amount of splashing, spurting, yelling, chorusing, and
-calling on the Prophet. When the contest became hot, the oars were all
-at sixes and sevens, and in fact the rowing gave way to vituperation
-and a general scrimmage. Once, in one of the most ticklish places in the
-rapids, the rowers had fallen to quarrelling, and the boat would have
-gone to smash, if the reïs had not rushed in and laid about him with a
-stick. These artless children of the sun! However we came down to our
-landing in good form, exchanging salutes with the fleet of boats waiting
-to make the ascent.
-
-At once four boats, making a gallant show with their spread wings,
-sailed past us, bound up the cataract. The passengers fired salutes,
-waved their handkerchiefs, and exhibited the exultation they felt in
-being at last under way for Philæ; and well they might, for some of them
-had been waiting here fifteen days.
-
-But alas for their brief prosperity. The head reïs was not with them;
-that autocrat was still upon our deck, leisurely stowing away coffee,
-eggs, cold meat, and whatever provisions were brought him, with the
-calmness of one who has a good conscience. As the dahabeëhs swept by he
-shook his head and murmured, “not much go.”
-
-And they did “not much go.” They stopped indeed, and lay all day at the
-first gate, and all night. The next morning, two dahabeëhs, carrying
-persons of rank, passed up, and were given the preference, leaving
-the first-comers still in the rapids; and two days after, they were in
-mid-passage, and kept day after day in the roar and desolation of the
-cataract, at the pleasure of its owners. The only resource they had was
-to write indignant letters of remonstrance to the governor at Assouan.
-
-This passage of the cataract is a mysterious business, the secrets of
-which are only mastered by patient study. Why the reises should desire
-to make it so vexatious is the prime mystery. The traveler who reaches
-Assouan often finds himself entangled in an invisible web of restraints.
-There is no opposition to his going on; on the contrary the governor,
-the reises, and everyone overflow with courtesy and helpfulness. But,
-somehow, he does not go on, he is played with from day to day. The old
-sheykh, before he took his affectionate leave of us that morning, let
-out the reason of the momentary hesitation he had exhibited in agreeing
-to take our boat up the cataract when we arrived. The excellent owners,
-honest Aboo Yoosef and the plaintive little Jew of Bagdad, had sent him
-a bribe of a whole piece of cotton cloth, and some money to induce him
-to prevent our passage. He was not to refuse, not by any means, for in
-that case the owners would have been liable to us for the hundred pounds
-forfeit named in the contract in case the boat could not be taken up;
-but he was to amuse us, and encourage us, and delay us, on various
-pretexts, so long that we should tire out and freely choose not to go
-any farther.
-
-The integrity of the reïs was proof against the seduction of this bribe;
-he appropriated it, and then earned the heavy fee for carrying us up, in
-addition. I can add nothing by way of eulogium upon this clever old man,
-whose virtue enabled him to withstand so much temptation.
-
-We lay for two days at the island Elephantine, opposite Assouan, and
-have ample time to explore its two miserable villages, and to wander
-over the heaps on heaps, the débris of so many successive civilizations.
-All day long, women and children are clambering over these mounds
-of ashes, pottery, bricks, and fragments of stone, unearthing coins,
-images, beads, and bits of antiquity, which the strangers buy. There is
-nothing else on the island. These indistinguishable mounds are almost
-the sole evidence of the successive occupation of ancient Egyptians,
-Canaanites, Ethiopians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, and
-conquering Arabs. But the grey island has an indefinable charm. The
-northern end is green with wheat and palms; but if it were absolutely
-naked, its fine granite outlines would be attractive under this splendid
-sky. The days are lovely, and the nights enchanting. Nothing more poetic
-could be imagined than the silvery reaches of river at night, with their
-fringed islands and shores, the stars and the new moon, the uplifted
-rocks, and the town reflected in the stream.
-
-Of Assouan itself, its palm-groves and dirty huddle of dwellings, we
-have quite enough in a day. Curiosity leads us to visit the jail, and
-we find there, by chance, one of our sailors, who is locked up for
-insubordination, and our venerable reïs keeping him company, for being
-inefficient in authority over his crew. In front of the jail, under the
-shade of two large acacia trees, the governor has placed his divan and
-holds his levées in the open air, transacting business, and entertaining
-his visitors with coffee and cigars. His excellency is a very
-“smartish,” big black fellow, not a negro nor a Nubian exactly, but
-an Ababdeh, from a tribe of desert Arabs; a man of some aptitude for
-affairs and with very little palaver. The jail has an outer guard-room,
-furnished with divans and open at both ends, and used as a court of
-justice. A not formidable door leads to the first room, which is some
-twenty feet square; and here, seated upon the ground with some thirty
-others, we are surprised to recognize our reïs. The respectable old
-incapable was greatly humiliated by the indignity. Although he was
-speedily released, his incarceration was a mistake; it seemed to break
-his spirit, and he was sullen and uncheerful ever afterwards. His
-companions were in for trivial offences: most of them for not paying the
-government taxes, or for debt to the Khedive, as the phrase was. In
-an adjoining, smaller room, were the great criminals, the thieves and
-murderers. Three murderers were chained together by enormous iron cables
-attached to collars about their necks, and their wrists were clamped in
-small wooden stocks. In this company were five decent-looking men, who
-were also bound together by heavy chains from neck to neck; we were told
-that these were the brothers of men who had run away from the draft, and
-that they would be held until their relations surrendered themselves.
-They all sat glumly on the ground. The jail does not differ in comfort
-from the ordinary houses; and the men are led out once a day for fresh
-air; we saw the murderers taking an airing, and exercise also in lugging
-their ponderous irons.
-
-We departed from Assouan early in the morning, with water and wind
-favorable for a prosperous day. At seven o'clock our worthy steersman
-stranded us on a rock. It was a little difficult to do it, for he had to
-go out of his way and to leave the broad and plainly staked-out channel.
-But he did it very neatly. The rock was a dozen feet out of water, and
-he laid the boat, without injury, on the shelving upper side of it, so
-that the current would constantly wash it further on, and the falling
-river would desert it. The steersman was born in Assouan and knows every
-rock and current here, even in the dark. This accident no doubt happened
-out of sympathy with the indignity to the reïs. That able commander is
-curled up on the deck ill, and no doubt felt greatly grieved when he
-felt the grating of the bottom upon the rock; but he was not too ill to
-exchange glances with the serene and ever-smiling steersman. Three hours
-after the stranding, our crew have succeeded in working us a little
-further on than we were at first, and are still busy; surely there are
-in all history no such navigators as these.
-
-It is with some regret that we leave, or are trying to leave, Nubia,
-both on account of its climate and its people. The men, various sorts
-of Arabs as well as the Nubians, are better material than the fellaheen
-below, finer looking, with more spirit and pride, more independence and
-self-respect. They are also more barbarous; they carry knives and heavy
-sticks universally, and guns if they can get them, and in many places
-have the reputation of being quarrelsome, turbulent, and thieves. But we
-have rarely received other than courteous treatment from them. Some of
-the youngest women are quite pretty, or would be but for the enormous
-nose and ear rings, the twisted hair and the oil; the old women are all
-unnecessarily ugly. The children are apt to be what might be called
-free in apparel, except that the girls wear fringe, but the women are as
-modest in dress and manner as those of Egypt. That the highest morality
-invariably prevails, however, one cannot affirm, notwithstanding the
-privilege of husbands, which we are assured is sometimes exercised, of
-disposing of a wife (by means of the knife and the river) who may have
-merely incurred suspicion by talking privately with another man. This
-process is evidently not frequent, for women are plenty, and we saw no
-bodies in the river.
-
-But our chief regret at quitting Nubia is on account of the climate.
-It is incomparably the finest winter climate I have ever known; it is
-nearly perfect. The air is always elastic and inspiring; the days are
-full of sun; the nights are cool and refreshing; the absolute dryness
-seems to counteract the danger from changes of temperature. You may do
-there what you cannot in any place in Europe in the winter—get warm. You
-may also, there, have repose without languor.
-
-We went on the rock at seven and got off at two. The governor of Assouan
-was asked for help and he sent down a couple of boat-loads of men, who
-lifted us off by main strength and the power of their lungs. We drifted
-on, but at sunset we were not out of sight of the mosque of Assouan.
-Strolling ashore, we found a broad and rich plain, large palm-groves
-and wheat-fields, and a swarming population—in striking contrast to
-the country above the Cataract. The character of the people is wholly
-different; the women are neither so oily, nor have they the wild shyness
-of the Nubians; they mind their own business and belong to a more
-civilized society; slaves, negroes as black as night, abound in
-the fields. Some of the large wheat-fields are wholly enclosed by
-substantial unburnt brick walls, ten feet high.
-
-Early in the evening, our serene steersman puts us hard aground again on
-a sandbar. I suppose it was another accident. The wife and children of
-the steersman live at a little town opposite the shoal upon which we
-have so conveniently landed, and I suppose the poor fellow wanted an
-opportunity to visit them. He was not permitted leave of absence while
-the boat lay at Assouan, and now the dragoman says that, so far as he
-is concerned, the permission shall not be given from here, although the
-village is almost in sight; the steersman ought to be punished for his
-conduct, and he must wait till he comes up next year before he can see
-his wife and children. It seems a hard case, to separate a man from his
-family in this manner.
-
-“I think it's a perfect shame,” cries Madame, when she hears of it, “not
-to see his family for a year!”
-
-“But one of his sons is on board, you know, as a sailor. And the
-steersman spent most of his time with his wife the boy's mother, when we
-were at Assouan.”
-
-“I thought you said his wife lived opposite here?”
-
-“Yes, but this is a newer one, a younger one; that is his old wife, in
-Assouan.”
-
-“Oh!”
-
-“The poor fellow has another in Cairo.”
-
-“Oh!”
-
-“He has wives, I daresay, at proper distances along the Nile, and
-whenever he wants to spend an hour or two with his family, he runs us
-aground.”
-
-“I don't care to hear anything more about him.”
-
-The Moslem religion is admirably suited to the poor mariner, and
-especially to the sailor on the Nile through a country that is all
-length and no width.
-
-
-
-0354
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXVIII.—MODERN FACTS AND ANCIENT MEMORIES.
-
-ON a high bluff stands the tottering temple of Kom Ombos conspicuous
-from a distance, and commanding a dreary waste of desert. Its gigantic
-columns are of the Ptolemaic time, and the capitals show either Greek
-influence or the relaxation of the Egyptian hieratic restraint.
-
-The temple is double, with two entrances and parallel suites of
-apartments, a happy idea of the builders, impartially to split the
-difference between good and evil; one side is devoted to the worship of
-Horus, the embodiment of the principle of Light, and the other to that
-of Savak, the crocodile-headed god of Darkness. I fear that the latter
-had here the more worshippers; his title was Lord of Ombos, and the fear
-of him spread like night. On the sand-bank, opposite, the once-favored
-crocodiles still lounge in the sun, with a sharp eye out for the rifle
-of the foreigner, and, no doubt, wonder at the murderous spirit which
-has come into the world to supplant the peaceful heathenism.
-
-These ruins are an example of the jealousy with which the hierarchy
-guarded their temples from popular intrusion. The sacred precincts were
-enclosed by a thick and high brick wall, which must have concealed the
-temple from view except on the river side; so formidable was this wall,
-that although the edifice stands upon an eminence, it lies in a basin
-formed by the ruins of the enclosure. The sun beating in it at noon
-converted it into a reverberating furnace—a heat sufficient to melt any
-image not of stone, and not to be endured by persons who do not believe
-in Savak.
-
-We walked a long time on the broad desert below Ombos, over sand as
-hard as a sea-beach pounded by the waves, looking for the bed of pebbles
-mentioned in the handbook, and found it a couple of miles below. In
-the soft bank an enormous mass of pebbles has been deposited, and is
-annually added to—sweepings of the Nubian deserts, flints and agates,
-bits of syenite from Assouan, and colored stones in great variety. There
-is a tradition that a sailor once found a valuable diamond here, and it
-seems always possible that one may pick some precious jewel out of the
-sand. Some of the desert pebbles, polished by ages of sand-blasts, are
-very beautiful.
-
-Every day when I walk upon the smooth desert away from the river, I look
-for colored stones, pebbles, flints, chalcedonies, and agates. And I
-expect to find, some day, the ewige pebble, the stone translucent,
-more beautiful than any in the world—perhaps, the lost seal of Solomon,
-dropped by some wandering Bedawee. I remind myself of one looking,
-always in the desert, for the pearl of great price, which all the
-markets and jewelers of the world wait for. It seems possible, here
-under this serene sky, on this expanse of sand, which has been trodden
-for thousands of years by all the Oriental people in turn, by caravans,
-by merchants and warriors and wanderers, swept by so many geologic
-floods and catastrophes, to find it. I never tire of looking, and
-curiously examine every bit of translucent and variegated flint that
-sparkles in the sand. I almost hope, when I find it, that it will not
-be cut by hand of man, but that it will be changeable in color, and
-be fashioned in a cunning manner by nature herself. Unless, indeed, it
-should be, as I said, the talismanic ring of Solomon, which is known to
-be somewhere in the world.
-
-In the early morning we have drifted down to Silsilis, one of the most
-interesting localities on the Nile. The difference in the level of the
-land above and below and the character of the rocky passage at Silsilis
-teach that the first cataract was here before the sandstone dam wore
-away and transferred it to Assouan. Marks have been vainly sought here
-for the former height of the Nile above; and we were interested in
-examining the upper strata of rocks laid bare in the quarries. At a
-height of perhaps sixty feet from the floor of a quarry, we saw between
-two strata of sandstone a layer of other material that had exactly the
-appearance of the deposits of the Nile which so closely resemble rock
-along the shore. Upon reaching it we found that it was friable and, in
-fact, a sort of hardened earth. Analysis would show whether it is a Nile
-deposit, and might contribute something to the solution of the date of
-the catastrophe here.
-
-The interest at Silsilis is in these vast sandstone quarries, and very
-little in the excavated grottoes and rock-temples on the west shore,
-with their defaced and smoke-obscured images. Indeed, nothing in Egypt,
-not even the temples and pyramids, has given us such an idea of
-the immense labor the Egyptians expended in building, as these vast
-excavations in the rock. We have wondered before where all the stone
-came from that we have seen piled up in buildings and heaped in miles
-of ruins; we wonder now what use could have been made of all the stone
-quarried from these hills. But we remember that it was not removed in a
-century, nor in ten centuries, but that for great periods of a thousand
-years workmen were hewing here, and that much of the stone transported
-and scattered over Egypt has sunk into the soil out of sight.
-
-There are half a dozen of these enormous quarries close together, each
-of which has its communication with the river. The method of working was
-this:—a narrow passage was cut in from the river several hundred feet
-into the mountain, or until the best-working stone was reached, and then
-the excavation was broadened out without limit. We followed one of these
-passages, the sides of which are evenly-cut rock, the height of the
-hill. At length we came into an open area, like a vast cathedral in the
-mountain, except that it wanted both pillars and roof. The floor was
-smooth, the sides were from fifty to seventy-five feet high, and all
-perpendicular, and as even as if dressed down with chisel and hammer.
-This was their general character, but in some of them steps were left
-in the wall and platforms, showing perfectly the manner of working. The
-quarrymen worked from the top down perpendicularly, stage by stage. We
-saw one of these platforms, a third of the distance from the top, the
-only means of reaching which was by nicks cut in the face of the rock,
-in which one might plant his feet and swing down by a rope. There was
-no sign of splitting by drilling or by the the use of plugs, or of any
-explosive material. The walls of the quarries are all cut down in fine
-lines that run from top to bottom slantingly and parallel. These lines
-have every inch or two round cavities, as if the stone had been bored by
-some flexible instrument that turned in its progress. The workmen seem
-to have cut out the stone always of the shape and size they wanted to
-use; if it was for a statue, the place from which it came in the quarry
-is rounded, showing the contour of the figure taken. They took out every
-stone by the most patient labor. Whether it was square or round, they
-cut all about it a channel four to five inches wide, and then separated
-it from the mass underneath by a like broad cut. Nothing was split away;
-all was carefully chiseled out, apparently by small tools. Abandoned
-work, unfinished, plainly shows this. The ages and the amount of labor
-required to hew out such enormous quantities of stone are heightened
-in our thought, by the recognition of this slow process. And what hells
-these quarries must have been for the workmen, exposed to the blaze of
-a sun intensified by the glaring reflection from the light-colored rock,
-and stifled for want of air. They have left the marks of their unending
-task in these little chiselings on the face of the sandstone walls.
-Here and there some one has rudely sketched a figure or outlined a
-hieroglyphic. At intervals places are cut in the rock through which
-ropes could be passed, and these are worn deeply, showing the use of
-ropes, and no doubt of derricks, in handling the stones.
-
-These quarries are as deserted now as the temples which were taken from
-them; but nowhere else in Egypt was I more impressed with the duration,
-the patience, the greatness of the race that accomplished such prodigies
-of labor.
-
-The grottoes, as I said, did not detain us; they are common
-calling-places, where sailors and wanderers often light fires at night
-and where our crew slept during the heat of this day, We saw there
-nothing more remarkable than the repeated figure of the boy Horus taking
-nourishment from the breast of his mother, which provoked the irreverent
-remark of a voyager that Horus was more fortunate than his dragoman had
-been in finding milk in this stony region.
-
-Creeping on, often aground and always expecting to be, the weather
-growing warmer as we went north, we reached Edfoo. It was Sunday,
-and the temperature was like that of a July day, a south wind and the
-mercury at 85°.
-
-In this condition of affairs it was not unpleasant to find a temple,
-entire, clean, perfectly excavated, and a cool retreat from the glare
-of the sun. It was not unlike entering a cathedral. The door by which we
-were admitted was closed and guarded; we were alone; and we experienced
-something of the sentiment of the sanctuary, that hush and cool
-serenity which is sometimes mistaken for religion, in the presence of
-ecclesiastical architecture.
-
-Although this is a Ptolemaic temple, it is, by reason of its nearly
-perfect condition, the best example for study. The propylon which is two
-hundred and fifty feet high and one hundred and fifteen long, contains
-many spacious chambers, and confirms our idea that these portions of the
-temples were residences. The roof is something enormous, being composed
-of blocks of stone, three feet thick, by twelve wide, and twenty-two
-long. Upon this roof are other chambers. As we wandered through the vast
-pillared courts, many chambers and curious passages, peered into the
-secret ways and underground and intermural alleys, and emerged upon the
-roof, we thought what a magnificent edifice it must have been for the
-gorgeous processions of the old worship, which are sculptured on the
-walls.
-
-But outside this temple and only a few feet from it is a stone wall of
-circuit, higher than the roof of the temple itself. Like every inch
-of the temple walls, this wall outside and inside is covered with
-sculptures, scenes in river life, showing a free fancy and now and then
-a dash of humor; as, when a rhinoceros is made to tow a boat—recalling
-the western sportiveness of David Crockett with the alligator. Not only
-did this wall conceal the temple from the vulgar gaze, but outside
-it was again an enciente of unbaked brick, effectually excluding and
-removing to a safe distance all the populace. Mariette Bey is of the
-opinion that all the imposing ceremonies of the old ritual had no
-witnesses except the privileged ones of the temple; and that no one
-except the king could enter the adytum.
-
-It seems to us also that the King, who was high priest and King, lived
-in these palace-temples, the pylons of which served him for fortresses
-as well as residences. We find no ruins of palaces in Egypt, and it
-seems not reasonable that the king who had all the riches of the land at
-his command would have lived in a hut of mud.
-
-From the summit of this pylon we had an extensive view of the Nile and
-the fields of ripening wheat. A glance into the squalid town was not so
-agreeable. I know it would be a severe test of any village if it were
-unroofed and one could behold its varied domestic life. We may from such
-a sight as this have some conception of the appearance of this world to
-the angels looking down. Our view was into filthy courts and roofless
-enclosures, in which were sorry women and unclad children, sitting in
-the dirt; where old people, emaciated and feeble, and men and women ill
-of some wasting disease, lay stretched upon the ground, uncared for,
-stifled by the heat and swarmed upon of flies.
-
-The heated day lapsed into a delicious evening, a half-moon over head,
-the water glassy, the shores fringed with palms, the air soft. As
-we came to El Kab, where we stopped, a carawan was whistling on the
-opposite shore—a long, shrill whistle like that of a mocking-bird. If
-we had known, it was a warning to us that the placid appearances of the
-night were deceitful, and that violence was masked under this smiling
-aspect. The barometer indeed had been falling rapidly for two days. We
-were about to have our first experience of what may be called a simoon.
-
-Towards nine o'clock, and suddenly, the wind began to blow from the
-north, like one of our gusts in summer, proceeding a thunderstorm. The
-boat took the alarm at once and endeavored to fly, swinging to the wind
-and tugging at her moorings. With great difficulty she was secured by
-strong cables fore and aft anchored in the sand, but she trembled and
-shook and rattled, and the wind whistled through the rigging as if we
-had been on the Atlantic—any boat loose upon the river that night must
-have gone to inevitable wreck. It became at once dark, and yet it was a
-ghastly darkness; the air was full of fine sand that obscured the sky,
-except directly overhead, where there were the ghost of a wan moon and
-some spectral stars. Looking upon the river, it was like a Connecticut
-fog—but a sand fog; and the river itself roared, and high waves ran
-against the current. When we stepped from the boat, eyes, nose, and
-mouth were instantly choked with sand, and it was almost impossible to
-stand. The wind increased, and rocked the boat like a storm at sea; for
-three hours it blew with much violence, and in fact did not spend itself
-in the whole night.
-
-“The worser storm, God be merciful,” says Abd-el-Atti, “ever I saw in
-Egypt.”
-
-When it somewhat abated, the dragoman recognized a divine beneficence in
-it; “It show that God 'member us.”
-
-It is a beautiful belief of devout Moslems that personal afflictions
-and illnesses are tokens of a heavenly care. Often when our dragoman has
-been ill, he has congratulated himself that God was remembering him.
-
-“Not so? A friend of me in Cairo was never in his life ill, never any
-pain, toothache, headache, nothing. Always well. He begin to have fear
-that something should happen, mebbe God forgot him. One day I meet him
-in the Mooskee very much pleased; all right now, he been broke him the
-arm; God 'member him.”
-
-During the gale we had a good specimen of Arab character. When it was
-at its height, and many things about the attacked vessel needed looking
-after, securing and tightening, most of the sailors rolled themselves
-up, drawing their heads into their burnouses, and went sound asleep.
-The after-sail was blown loose and flapping in the wind; our reïs sat
-composedly looking at it, never stirring from his haunches, and let the
-canvas whip to rags; finally a couple of men were aroused, and secured
-the shreds. The Nile crew is a marvel of helplessness in an emergency;
-and considering the dangers of the river to these top-heavy boats, it
-is a wonder that any accomplish the voyage in safety. There is no more
-discipline on board than in a district-school meeting at home. The boat
-might as well be run by ballot.
-
-It was almost a relief to have an unpleasant day to talk about. The
-forenoon was like a mixed fall and spring day in New England, strong
-wind, flying clouds, but the air full of sand instead of snow; there
-was even a drop of rain, and we heard a peal or two of feeble
-thunder—evidently an article not readily manufactured in this country;
-but the afternoon settled back into the old pleasantness.
-
-Of the objects of interest at Eilethyas I will mention only two, the
-famous grottoes, and a small temple of Amunoph III., not often visited.
-It stands between two and three miles from the river, in a desolate
-valley, down which the Bisharee Arabs used to come on marauding
-excursions. What freak placed it in this remote solitude? It contains
-only one room, a few paces square, and is, in fact, only a chapel, but
-it is full of capital pieces of sculptures of a good period of art. The
-architect will find here four pillars, which clearly suggest the Doric
-style. They are fourteen-sided, but one of the planes is broader than
-the others and has a raised tablet of sculptures which terminate above
-in a face, said to be that of Lucina, to whom the temple is dedicated,
-but resembling the cow-headed Isis. These pillars, with the sculptures
-on one side finished at the top with a head, may have suggested the
-Osiride pillars.
-
-The grottoes are tombs in the sandstone mountain, of the time of the
-eighteenth dynasty, which began some thirty-five hundred years ago.
-Two of them have remarkable sculptures, the coloring of which is still
-fresh; and I wish to speak of them a little, because it is from them
-(and some of the same character) that Egyptologists have largely
-reconstructed for us the common life of the ancient Egyptians. Although
-the work is somewhat rude, it has a certain veracity of execution which
-is pleasing.
-
-We assume this tomb to have been that of a man of wealth. This is
-the ante-chamber; the mummy was deposited in a pit let into a small
-excavation in the rear. On one wall are sculptured agricultural scenes:
-plowing, sowing, reaping wheat and pulling doora (the color indicates
-the kind of grain), hatcheling the latter, while oxen are treading out
-the wheat, and the song of the threshers encouraging the oxen is written
-in hieroglyphics above; the winnowing and storing of the grain; in
-a line under these, the various domestic animals of the deceased are
-brought forward to a scribe, who enumerates them and notes the numbers
-on a roll of papyrus. There are river-scenes:—grain is loaded into
-freight-boats; pleasure-dahabeëhs are on the stream, gaily painted, with
-one square sail amidship, rowers along the sides, and windows in the
-cabin; one has a horse and chariot on board, the reïs stands at the
-bow, the overseer, kurbash in hand, is threatening the crew, a sailor is
-falling overboard. Men are gathering grapes, and treading out the
-wine with their feet; others are catching fish and birds in nets, and
-dressing and curing them. At the end of this wall, offerings are made to
-Osiris. In one compartment a man is seated holding a boy on his lap.
-
-On the opposite wall are two large figures, supposed to be the occupant
-of the tomb and his wife, seated on a fauteuil; men and women, in two
-separate lines, facing the large figures, are seated, one leg bent under
-them, each smelling a lotus flower. In the rear, men are killing and
-cutting up animals as if preparing for a feast. To the leg of the
-fauteuil is tied a monkey; and Mr. Wilkinson says that it was customary
-at entertainments for the hosts to have a “favorite monkey” tied to the
-leg of the chair. Notwithstanding the appearance of the monkey here
-in that position, I do not suppose that he would say that an ordinary
-entertainment is represented here. For, although there are preparations
-for a feast, there is a priest standing between the friends and the
-principal personages, making offerings, and the monkey may be present
-in his character of emblem of Thoth. It seems to be a funeral and not
-a festive representation. The pictures apparently tell the story of the
-life of the deceased and his occupations, and represent the mourning at
-his tomb. In other grottoes, where the married pair are seated as here,
-the arm of the woman on the shoulder of the man, and the “favorite
-monkey” tied to the chair, friends are present in the act of mourning,
-throwing dust on their heads, and accompanied by musicians; and the
-mummy is drawn on a sledge to the tomb, a priest standing on the front,
-and a person pouring oil on the ground that the runners may slip easily.
-
-The setting sun strikes into these chambers, so carefully prepared for
-people of rank of whom not a pinch of dust now remains, and lights them
-up with a certain cheer and hope. We cannot make anything melancholy out
-of a tomb so high and with such a lovely prospect from its front door.
-The former occupants are unknown, but not more unknown than the peasants
-we see on the fields below, still at the tasks depicted in these
-sculptures. Thirty-five hundred years is not so very long ago! Slowly
-we pick our way down the hill and regain our floating home; and, bidding
-farewell forever to El Kab, drift down in the twilight. In the morning
-we are at Esneh.
-
-In Esneh the sound of the grinding is never low. The town is full of
-primitive ox-power mills in which the wheat is ground, and there are
-always dahabeëhs staying here for the crew to bake their bread. Having
-already had one day of Esneh we are tired of it, for it is exactly
-like all other Egyptian towns of its size: we know all the possible
-combinations of mud-hovels, crooked lanes, stifling dust, nakedness,
-squalor. We are so accustomed to picking our way in the street amid
-women and children sprawling in the dirt, that the scene has lost its
-strangeness; it is even difficult to remember that in other countries
-women usually keep indoors and sit on chairs.
-
-The town is not without liveliness It is half Copt, and beggars demand
-backsheesh on the ground that they are Christians, and have a common
-interest with us. We wander through the bazaars where there is nothing
-to buy and into the market-place, always the most interesting study in
-an unknown city. The same wheat lies on the ground in heaps; the same
-roots and short stalks of the doora are tied in bundles and sold for
-fuel, and cakes of dried manure for the like use; people are lying about
-in the sun in all picturesque attitudes, some curled up and some on
-their backs fast asleep; more are squating before little heaps of
-corn or beans or some wilted “greens,” or dried tobacco-leaves and
-pipe-bowls; children swarm and tumble about everywhere; donkeys and
-camels pick their way through the groups.
-
-I spent half an hour in teaching a handsome young Copt how to pronounce
-English words in his Arabic-English primer. He was very eager to learn
-and very grateful for assistance. We had a large and admiring crowd
-about us, who laughed at every successful and still more at every
-unsuccessful attempt on the part of the pupil, and repeated the English
-words themselves when they could catch the sound,—an exceedingly
-good-natured lot of idlers. We found the people altogether pleasant,
-some in the ingrained habit of begging, quick to take a joke and easily
-excited. While I had my scholar, a fantasia of music on two tambourines
-was performed for the amusement of my comrade, which had also its ring
-of spectators watching the effect of the monotonous thumping, upon
-the grave howadji; he was seated upon the mastabah of a shop, with
-all formality, and enjoyed all the honors of the entertainment, as was
-proper, since he bore the entire expense alone,—about five cents.
-
-The coffee-shops of Esneh are many, some respectable and others
-decidedly otherwise. The former are the least attractive, being merely
-long and dingy mud-apartments, in which the visitors usually sit on
-the floor and play at draughts. The coffee-houses near the river have
-porticoes and pleasant terraces in front, and look not unlike some
-picturesque Swiss or Italian wine-shops. The attraction there seems to
-be the Ghawazees or dancing-girls, of whom there is a large colony here,
-the colony consisting of a tribe. All the family act as procurers
-for the young women, who are usually married. Their dress is an
-extraordinary combination of stripes and colors, red and yellow being
-favorites, which harmonize well with their dark, often black, skins, and
-eyes heavily shaded with kohl. I suppose it must be admitted, in spite
-of their total want of any womanly charm of modesty, that they are
-the finest-looking women in Egypt, though many of them are ugly; they
-certainly are of a different type from the Egyptians, though not of
-a pure type; they boast that they have preserved themselves without
-admixture with other peoples or tribes from a very remote period;
-one thing is certain, their profession is as old as history and their
-antiquity may entitle them to be considered an aristocracy of vice. They
-say that their race is allied in origin to that of the people called
-gypsies, with whom many of their customs are common. The men are
-tinkers, blacksmiths, or musicians, and the women are the ruling element
-in the band; the husband is subject to the wife. But whatever their
-origin, it is admitted that their dance is the same as that with which
-the dancing-women amused the Pharaohs, the same that the Phoenicians
-carried to Gades and which Juvenal describes, and, Mr. Lane thinks, the
-same by which the daughter of Herodias danced off the head of John the
-Baptist. Modified here and there, it is the immemorial dance of the
-Orient.
-
-Esneh has other attractions for the sailors of the Nile; there are the
-mahsheshehs, or shops where hasheesh is smoked; an attendant brings
-the “hubble-bubble” to the guests who are lolling on the mastabah; they
-inhale their portion, and then lie down in a stupor, which is at every
-experiment one remove nearer idiocy.
-
-Still drifting, giving us an opportunity to be on shore all the morning.
-We visit the sugar establishment at Mutâneh, and walk along the high
-bank under the shade of the acacias for a couple of miles below it.
-Nothing could be lovelier in this sparkling morning—the silver-grey
-range of mountains across the river and the level smiling land on our
-left. This is one of the Viceroy's possessions, bought of one of his
-relations at a price fixed by his highness. There are ten thousand acres
-of arable land, of which some fifteen hundred is in sugar-cane, and the
-rest in grain. The whole is watered by a steam-pump, which sends a
-vast stream of water inland, giving life to the broad fields and the
-extensive groves, as well as to a village the minaret of which we can
-see. It is a noble estate. Near the factory are a palace and garden,
-somewhat in decay, as is usual in this country, but able to offer us
-roses and lemons.
-
-The works are large, modern, with improved machinery for crushing and
-boiling, and apparently well managed; there is said to be one of the
-sixteen sugar-factories of the Khedive which pays expenses; perhaps this
-is the one. A great quantity of rum is distilled from the refuse. The
-vast field in the rear, enclosed by a whitewashed wall, presented a
-lively appearance, with camels bringing in the cane and unloading it and
-arranging it upon the endless trough for the crushers. In the factory,
-the workmen wear little clothing and are driven to their task; all
-the overseers march among them kurbash in hand; the sight of the black
-fellows treading about in the crystallized sugar, while putting it up in
-sacks, would decide a fastidious person to take her tea unsweetened.
-
-The next morning we pass Erment without calling, satisfied to take the
-word of others that you may see there a portrait of Cleopatra; and by
-noon come to our old mooring-place at Luxor, and add ours to the painted
-dalabeëhs lounging in this idle and gay resort.
-
-During the day we enjoyed only one novel sensation. We ate of the ripe
-fruit ot the dôm-palm. It tastes and smells like stale gingerbread, made
-of sawdust instead of flour.
-
-I do not know how long one could stay contentedly at Thebes; certainly
-a winter, if only to breathe the inspiring air, to bask in the sun,
-to gaze, never sated, upon plains and soft mountains which climate and
-association clothe with hues of beauty and romance, to yield for once
-to a leisure that is here rebuked by no person and by no urgency of
-affairs; perhaps for years, if one seriously attempted a study of
-antiquities.
-
-The habit of leisure is at least two thousand years old here; at any
-rate, we fell into it without the least desire to resist its spell. This
-is one of the eddies of the world in which the modern hurry is unfelt.
-If it were not for the coughing steamboats and the occasional glimpse
-one has of a whisking file of Cook's tourists, Thebes would be entirely
-serene, and an admirable place of retirement.
-
-It has a reputation, however, for a dubious sort of industry. All along
-the river from Geezeh to Assouan, whenever a spurious scarabæus or a
-bogus image turned up, we would hear, “Yes, make 'em in Luxor.” As we
-drew near to this great mart of antiquities, the specification became
-more personal—“Can't tell edzacly whether that make by Mr. Smith or by
-that Moslem in Goorneh, over the other side.”
-
-The person named is well known to all Nile voyagers as Antiquity Smith,
-and he has, though I cannot say that he enjoys, the reputation hinted at
-above. How much of it is due to the enmity of rival dealers in relics of
-the dead, I do not know; but it must be evident to anyone that the very
-clever forgeries of antiquities, which one sees, could only be produced
-by skillful and practiced workmen. We had some curiosity to see a man
-who has made the American name so familiar the length of the Nile, for
-Mr. Smith is a citizen of the United States. For seventeen years he has
-been a voluntary exile here, and most of the time the only foreigner
-resident in the place; long enough to give him a good title to the
-occupation of any grotto he may choose.
-
-In appearance Mr. Smith is somewhat like a superannuated agent of the
-tract society, of the long, thin, shrewd, learned Yankee type. Few
-men have enjoyed his advantages for sharpening the wits. Born in
-Connecticut, reared in New Jersey, trained for seventeen years among the
-Arabs and antiquity-mongers of this region, the sharpest in the Orient,
-he ought to have not only the learning attached to the best-wrapped
-mummy, but to be able to read the hieroglyphics on the most inscrutable
-human face among the living.
-
-Mr. Smith lives on the outskirts of the village, in a house, surrounded
-by a garden, which is a kind of museum of the property, not to say the
-bones, of the early Egyptians.
-
-“You seem to be retired from society here Mr. Smith,” we ventured to
-say.
-
-“Yes, for eight months of the year, I see nobody, literally nobody. It
-is only during the winter that strangers come here.”
-
-“Isn't it lonesome?”
-
-“A little, but you get used to it.”
-
-“What do you do during the hottest months?”
-
-“As near nothing as possible.”
-
-“How hot is it?”
-
-“Sometimes the thermometer goes to 120° Fahrenheit. It stays a long time
-at 100°. The worst of it is that the nights are almost as hot as the
-days.”
-
-“How do you exist?”
-
-“I keep very quiet, don't write, don't read anything that requires the
-least thought. Seldom go out, never in the daytime. In the early morning
-I sit a while on the verandah, and about ten o'clock get into a big
-bath-tub, which I have on the ground-floor, and stay in it nearly all
-day, reading some very mild novel, and smoking the weakest tobacco. In
-the evening I find it rather cooler outside the house than in. A white
-man can't do anything here in the summer.”
-
-I did not say it to Mr. Smith, but I should scarcely like to live in
-a country where one is obliged to be in water half the year, like a
-pelican. We can have, however, from his experience some idea what this
-basin must have been in summer, when its area was a crowded city, upon
-which the sun, reverberated from the incandescent limestone hills, beat
-in unceasing fervor.
-
-
-
-0368
-
-
-
-0369
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXIX.—THE FUTURE OF THE MUMMY'S SOUL.
-
-I SHOULD like to give you a conception, however faint, of the Tombs of
-the ancient Egyptians, for in them is to be found the innermost
-secret of the character, the belief, the immortal expectation of that
-accomplished and wise people. A barren description of these places
-of sepulchre would be of small service to you, for the key would be
-wanting, and you would be simply confused by a mass of details and
-measurements, which convey no definite idea to a person who does not see
-them with his own eyes. I should not indeed be warranted in attempting
-to say anything about these great Tombs at Thebes, which are so
-completely described in many learned volumes, did I not have the hope
-that some readers, who have never had access to the works referred to
-will be glad to know something of that which most engaged the educated
-Egyptian mind.
-
-No doubt the most obvious and immediate interest of the Tombs of old
-Egypt, is in the sculptures that depict so minutely the life of the
-people, represent all their occupations and associations, are, in fact,
-their domestic and social history written in stone. But it is not of
-this that I wish to speak here; I want to write a word upon the tombs
-and what they contain, in their relation to the future life.
-
-A study of the tombs of the different epochs, chronologically pursued,
-would show, I think, pretty accurately, the growth of the Egyptian
-theology, its development, or rather its departure from the primitive
-revelation of one God, into the monstrosities of its final mixture
-of coarse polytheistic idolatry and the vaguest pantheism. These two
-extremes are represented by the beautiful places of sepulchre of the
-fourth and fifth dynasties at Geezeh and Memphis, in which all the
-sculptures relate to the life of the deceased and no deities are
-represented; and the tombs of the twenty-fourth dynasty at Thebes which
-are so largely covered with the gods and symbols of a religion become
-wholly fantastic. It was in the twenty-sixth dynasty (just before the
-conquest of Egypt by the Persians) that the Funeral Ritual received
-its final revision and additions—the sacred chart of the dead which had
-grown, paragraph by paragraph, and chapter by chapter, from its brief
-and simple form in the earliest times.
-
-The Egyptians had a considerable, and also a rich literature, judging by
-the specimens of it preserved and by the value set upon it by classical
-writers; in which no department of writing was unrepresented. The works
-which would seem of most value to the Greeks were doubtless those
-on agriculture, astronomy, and geometry; the Egyptians wrote also on
-medicine, but the science was empirical then as it is now. They had
-an enormous bulk of historical literature, both in verse and prose,
-probably as semifabulous and voluminous as the thousand great volumes of
-Chinese history. They did not lack, either, in the department of belles
-lettres; there were poets, poor devils no doubt who were compelled to
-celebrate in grandiose strains achievements they did not believe; and
-essayists and letter-writers, graceful, philosophic, humorous. Nor
-was the field of fiction unoccupied; some of their lesser fables and
-romances have been preserved; they are however of a religious
-character, myths of doctrine, and it is safe to say different from our
-Sunday-School tales. The story of Cinderella was a religious myth. No
-one has yet been fortunate enough to find an Egyptian novel, and we may
-suppose that the quid-nunes, the critics of Thebes, were all the time
-calling upon the writers of that day to make an effort and produce The
-Great Egyptian Novel.
-
-The most important part, however, of the literature of Egypt was the
-religious, and of that we have, in the Ritual or Book of the Dead,
-probably the most valuable portion. It will be necessary to refer to
-this more at length. A copy of the Funeral Ritual, or “The Book of
-the Manifestation to Light” as it was entitled, or some portion of
-it—probably according to the rank or wealth of the deceased, was
-deposited with every mummy. In this point of view, as this document was
-supposed to be of infinite service, a person's wealth would aid him in
-the next world; but there came a point in the peregrination of every
-soul where absolute democracy was reached, and every man stood for
-judgment on his character. There was a foreshadowing of this even in the
-ceremonies of the burial. When the mummy, after the lapse of the seventy
-days of mourning, was taken by the friends to the sacred lake of the
-nome (district), across which it must be transported in the boat of
-Charon before it could be deposited in the tomb, it was subjected to an
-ordeal. Forty-two judges were assembled on the shore of the lake, and if
-anyone accused the deceased, and could prove that he led an evil life,
-he was denied burial. Even kings were subjected to this trial, and those
-who had been wicked, in the judgment of their people, were refused the
-honors of sepulchre. Cases were probably rare where one would dare to
-accuse even a dead Pharaoh.
-
-Debts would sometimes keep a man out of his tomb, both because he was
-wrong in being in debt, and because his tomb was mortgaged. For it was
-permitted a man to mortgage not only his family tomb but the mummy of
-his father,—a kind of mortmain security that could not run away, but a
-ghastly pledge to hold. A man's tomb, it would seem, was accounted his
-chief possession; as the one he was longest to use. It was prepared at
-an expense never squandered on his habitation in life.
-
-You may see as many tombs as you like at Thebes, you may spend weeks
-underground roaming about in vast chambers or burrowing in zig-zag
-tunnels, until the upper-world shall seem to you only a passing show;
-but you will find little, here or elsewhere, after the Tombs of the
-Kings, to awaken your keenest interest; and the exploration of a very
-few of these will suffice to satisfy you. We visited these gigantic
-masoleums twice; it is not an easy trip to them, for they are situated
-in wild ravines or gorges that lie beyond the western mountains which
-circle the plain and ruins of Thebes. They can be reached by a footpath
-over the crest of the ridge behind Medeenet Haboo; the ancient and usual
-road to them is up a valley that opens from the north.
-
-The first time we tried the footpath, riding over the blooming valley
-and leaving our donkeys at the foot of the ascent. I do not know how
-high this mountain backbone may be, but it is not a pleasant one to
-scale. The path winds, but it is steep; the sun blazes on it; every
-step is in pulverized limestone, that seems to have been calcined by
-the intense heat, and rises in irritating powder; the mountain-side
-is white, chalky, glaring, reflecting the solar rays with blinding
-brilliancy, and not a breath of air comes to temper the furnace
-temperature. On the summit however there was a delicious breeze, and we
-stood long looking over the great basin, upon the temples, the villages,
-the verdant areas of grain, the patches of desert, all harmonized by the
-wonderful light, and the purple eastern hills—a view unsurpassed. The
-descent to the other side was steeper than the ascent, and wound by
-precipices, on narrow ledges, round sharp turns, through jagged gorges,
-amid rocks striken with the ashy hue of death, into the bottoms of
-intersecting ravines, a region scarred, blasted, scorched, a grey
-Gehenna, more desolate than imagination ever conceived.
-
-Another day we rode to it up the valley from the river, some three
-miles. It is a winding, narrow valley, little more than the bed of a
-torrent; but as we advanced windings became shorter, the sides higher,
-fantastic precipices of limestone frowned on us, and there was evidence
-of a made road and of rocks cut away to broaden it. The scene is wilder,
-more freakishly savage, as we go on, and knowing that it is a funereal
-way and that only, and that it leads to graves and to nothing else, our
-procession imperceptibly took on the sombre character of an expedition
-after death, relieved by I know not what that is droll in the impish
-forms of the crags, and the reaction of our natures against this
-unnecessary accumulation of grim desolation. The sun overhead was like a
-dish from which poured liquid heat, I could feel the waves, I thought I
-could see it running in streams down the crumbling ashy slopes; but
-it was not unendurable, for the air was pure and elastic and we had no
-sense of weariness; indeed, now and then a puff of desert air suddenly
-greeted us as we turned a corner. The slender strip of sky seen above
-the grey limestone was of astonishing depth and color—a purple, almost
-like a night sky, but of unimpeachable delicacy.
-
-Up this strange road were borne in solemn state, as the author of Job
-may have seen, “the kings and counsellors of the earth, which built
-desolate places for themselves;” the journey was a fitting prelude to
-an entry into the depths of these frightful hills. It must have been an
-awful march, awful in its errand, awful in the desolation of the way:
-and, in the heat of summer, a mummy passing this way might have melted
-down in his cercueil before he could reach his cool retreat.
-
-When we come to the end of the road, we see no tombs. There are paths
-winding in several directions, round projecting ridges and shoulders of
-powdered rock, but one might pass through here and not know he was in a
-cemetery. Above the rubbish here and there we see, when they are pointed
-out, holes in the rock. We climb one of these heaps, and behold the
-entrance, maybe half-filled up, of one of the great tombs. This entrance
-may have been laid open so as to disclose a portal cut in the face of
-the rock and a smoothed space in front. Originally the tomb was not
-only walled up and sealed, but rocks were tumbled down over it, so as
-to restore that spot in the hill to its natural appearance. The chief
-object of every tomb was to conceal the mummy from intrusion forever.
-All sorts of misleading devices were resorted to for this purpose.
-
-Twenty-five tombs (of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties) have been
-opened in this locality, but some of them belonged to princes and other
-high functionaries; in a valley west of this are tombs of the eighteenth
-dynasty, and in still another gorge are the tombs of the queens. These
-tombs all differ in plan, in extent, in decoration; they are alike in
-not having, as many others elsewhere have, an exterior chamber where
-friends could assemble to mourn; you enter all these tombs by passing
-through an insignificant opening, by an inclined passage, directly
-into the heart of the mountain, and there they open into various halls
-chambers, and grottoes. One of them, that of Sethi I., into whose
-furthermost and most splendid halls Belzoni broke his way, extends
-horizontally four hundred and seventy feet into the hill, and descends
-to a depth of one hundred and eighty feet below the opening. The line
-of direction of the excavation is often changed, and the continuation
-skillfully masked, so that the explorer may be baffled. You come by
-several descents and passages, through grand chambers and halls, to a
-hall vast in size and magnificently decorated; here is a pit, here is
-the granite sarcophagus; here is the fitting resting-place of the royal
-mummy. But it never occupied this sarcophagus. Somewhere in this hall is
-a concealed passage. It was by breaking through a wall of solid masonry
-in such a room, smoothly stuccoed and elaborately painted with a
-continuation of the scenes on the side-walls, that Belzoni discovered
-the magnificent apartment beyond, and at last a chamber that was never
-finished, where one still sees the first draughts of the figures for
-sculpture on the wall, and gets an idea of the bold freedom of the
-old draughtsmen, in the long, graceful lines, made at a stroke by the
-Egyptian artists. Were these inner chambers so elaborately concealed,
-by walls and stucco and painting, after the royal mummy was somewhere
-hidden in them? Or was the mummy deposited in some obscure lateral pit,
-and was it the fancy of the king himself merely to make these splendid
-and highly decorated inner apartments private?
-
-It is not uncommon to find rooms in the tombs unfinished. The excavation
-of the tomb was began when the king began to reign; it was a work of
-many years and might happen to be unfinished at his death. He might
-himself become so enamoured of his enterprise and his ideas might expand
-in regard to his requirements, as those of builders always do, that
-death would find him still excavating and decorating. I can imagine that
-if one thought he were building a house for eternity—or cycles beyond
-human computation,—he would, up to his last moment, desire to add to it
-new beauties and conveniences. And he must have had a certain humorous
-satisfaction in his architectural tricks, for putting posterity on a
-false scent about his remains.
-
-It would not be in human nature to leave undisturbed tombs containing
-so much treasure as was buried with a rich or royal mummy. The Greeks
-walked through all these sepulchres; they had already been rifled by
-the Persians; it is not unlikely that some of them had been ransacked by
-Egyptians, who could appreciate jewelry and fine-work in gold as much as
-we do that found by M. Mariette on the cold person of Queen Aah-hotep.
-This dainty lady might have begun to flatter herself, having escaped
-through so many ages of pillage, that danger was over, but she had not
-counted upon there coming an age of science. It is believed that she was
-the mother of Amosis, who expelled the Shepherds, and the wife of Kamés,
-who long ago went to his elements. After a repose here at Thebes, not
-far from the temple of Koorneh, of about thirty-five hundred years,
-Science one day cried,—“Aah-hotep of Drah-Aboo-l-neggah! we want you
-for an Exposition of the industries of all nations at Paris; put on your
-best things and come forth.”
-
-I suppose that there is no one living who would not like to be the
-first to break into an Egyptian tomb (and there are doubtless still some
-undisturbed in this valley), to look upon its glowing paintings before
-the air had impaired a tint, and to discover a sweet and sleeping
-princess, simply encrusted in gems, and cunning work in gold, of
-priceless value—in order that he might add something to our knowledge of
-ancient art!
-
-But the government prohibits all excavations by private persons. You are
-permitted, indeed, to go to the common pits and carry off an armful of
-mummies, if you like; but there is no pleasure in the disturbance of
-this sort of mummy; he may perhaps be a late Roman; he has no history,
-no real antiquity, and probably not a scarabæus of any value about him.
-
-When we pass out of the glare of the sun and descend the incline down
-which the mummy went, we feel as if we had begun his awful journey. On
-the walls are sculptured the ceremonies and liturgies of the dead, the
-grotesque monsters of the under-world, which will meet him and assail
-him on his pilgrimage, the deities friendly and unfriendly, the
-tremendous scenes of cycles of transmigration. Other sculptures there
-are; to be sure, and in some tombs these latter predominate, in which
-astronomy, agriculture, and domestic life are depicted. In one chamber
-are exhibited trades, in another the kitchen, in another arms, in
-another the gay boats and navigation of the Nile, in another all the
-vanities of elegant house-furniture. But all these only emphasize the
-fact that we are passing into another world, and one of the grimmest
-realities. We come at length, whatever other wonders or beauties may
-detain us, to the king, the royal mummy, in the presence of the
-deities, standing before Osiris, Athor, Phtah, Isis, Horus, Anubis, and
-Nofre-Atmoo.
-
-Somewhere in this vast and dark mausoleum the mummy has been deposited;
-he has with him the roll of the Funeral Ritual; the sacred scarabæus is
-on his breast; in one chamber bread and wine are set out; his bearers
-withdraw, the tomb is closed, sealed, all trace of its entrance effaced.
-The mummy begins his pilgrimage.
-
-The Ritual * describes all the series of pilgrimages of the soul in the
-lower-world; it contains the hymns, prayers, and formula for all funeral
-ceremonies and the worship of the dead; it embodies the philosophy and
-religion of Egypt; the basis of it is the immortality of the soul,
-that is of the souls of the justified, but a clear notion of the soul's
-personality apart from the body it does not give.
-
-* Lenormant's Epitome.
-
-The book opens with a grand dialogue, at the moment of death, in which
-the deceased, invoking the god of the lower-world, asks entrance to
-his domain; a chorus of glorified souls interposes for him; the priest
-implores the divine clemency; Osiris responds, granting permission, and
-the soul enters Kar-Neter, the land of the dead; and then renews his
-invocations. Upon his entry he is dazzled by the splendor of the
-sun (which is Osiris) in this subterranean region, and sings to it a
-magnificent hymn.
-
-The second part traces the journeys of the soul. Without knowledge, he
-would fail, and finally be rejected at the tribunal.
-
-Knowledge is in Egyptian sbo, that is, “food in plenty,” knowledge and
-food are identified in the Ritual; “the knowledge of religious truths is
-the mysterious nourishment that the soul must carry with it to sustain
-it in its journeys and trials.” This necessary preliminary knowledge
-is found in the statement of the Egyptian faith in the Ritual; other
-information is given him from time to time on his journey. But although
-his body is wrapped up, and his soul instructed, he cannot move, he has
-not the use of his limbs; and he prays to be restored to his faculties
-that he may be able to walk, speak, eat, fight; the prayer granted, he
-holds his scarabæus over his head, as a passport, and enters Hades.
-
-His way is at once beset by formidable obstacles; monsters, servants of
-Typhon, assail him; slimy reptiles, crocodiles, serpents seek to devour
-him; he begins a series of desperate combats, in which the hero and his
-enemies hurl long and insulting speeches at each other. Out of these
-combats he comes victorious, and sings songs of triumph; and after rest
-and refreshment from the Tree of Life, given him by the goddess Nu,
-he begins a dialogue with the personification of the divine Light, who
-instructs him, explaining the sublime mysteries of nature. Guided
-by this new Light, he advances, and enters into a series of
-transformations, identifying himself with the noblest divine symbols: he
-becomes a hawk, an angel, a lotus, the god Ptah, a heron, etc.
-
-Up to this time the deceased has been only a shade, an eidolon, the
-simulacrum of the appearance of his body. He now takes his body, which
-is needed for the rest of the journey; it was necessary therefore that
-it should be perfectly preserved by the embalming process. He goes on to
-new trials and dangers, to new knowledge, to severer examinations of his
-competence: he shuns wiles and delusions; he sails down a subterranean
-river and comes to the Elysian Fields, in fact, to a reproduction of
-Egypt with its camels and its industries, when the soul engages in
-agriculture, sowing and reaping divine fruit for the bread of knowledge
-which he needs now more than ever.
-
-At length he comes to the last and severest trial, to the judgment-hall
-where Osiris awaits him, seated on his throne, accompanied by the
-forty-two assessors of the dead. Here his knowledge is put to the test;
-here he must give an account of his whole life. He goes on to justify
-himself by declaring at first, negatively, the crimes that he has not
-committed. “I have not blasphemed,” he says in the Ritual; “I have not
-stolen; I have not smitten men privily; I have not treated any person
-with cruelty; I have not stirred up trouble; I have not been idle; I
-have not been intoxicated; I have not made unjust commandmants; I
-have shown no improper curiosity; I have not allowed my mouth to tell
-secrets; I have not wounded anyone; I have not put anyone in fear; I
-have not slandered anyone; I have not let envy gnaw my heart; I have
-spoken evil neither of the king nor of my father; I have not falsely
-accused anyone; I have not withheld milk from the mouths of sucklings; I
-have not practiced any shameful crime; I have not calumniated a slave to
-his master.”
-
-The deceased then speaks of the good he has done in his lifetime; and
-the positive declarations rise to a higher morality than the negative;
-among them is this wonderful sentence:—“I have given food to the hungry,
-drink to the thirsty, and clothes to the naked.”
-
-The heart of the deceased, who is now called Osiris, is then weighed in
-the balance against “truth,” and (if he is just) is not found wanting;
-the forty-two assessors decide that his knowledge is sufficient, the god
-Osiris gives sentence of justification, Thoth (the Hermes of the
-Greeks, the conductor of souls, the scribe of Osiris, and also the
-personification of literature or letters) records it, and the soul
-enters into bliss.
-
-In a chamber at Dayr el Medeeneh you may see this judgment-scene. Osiris
-is seated on his throne waiting the introduction of souls into Amenti;
-the child Harpocrates, with his finger on his lip, sits upon his crook;
-behind are the forty-two assessors. The deceased humbly approaches;
-Thoth presents his good deeds written upon papyrus; they are weighed in
-the balance against an ostrich-feather, the symbol of truth; on the beam
-sits a monkey, the emblem of Thoth.
-
-The same conceit of weighing the soul in judgment-scenes was common to
-the mediaeval church; it is very quaintly represented in a fresco in the
-porch of the church of St. Lawrence at Rome.
-
-Sometimes the balance tipped the wrong way; in the tomb of Rameses VI.
-is sculptured a wicked soul, unjustified, retiring from the presence of
-Osiris in the ignoble form of a pig.
-
-The justified soul retired into bliss. What was this bliss? The third
-part of the Ritual is obscure. The deceased is Osiris, identified with
-the sun, traversing with him, and as him, the various houses of heaven;
-afterwards he seems to pass into an identification with all the deities
-of the pantheon. This is a poetical flight. The justified soul was
-absorbed into the intelligence from which it emanated. For the wicked,
-there was annihilation; they were destroyed, decapitated by the evil
-powers. In these tombs you will see pictures of beheadings at the block,
-of dismembered bodies.
-
-It would seem that in some cases the souls of the wicked returned to
-the earth and entered unclean animals. We always had a suspicion, a mere
-idle fancy, that the chameleon, which we had on our boat, which had a
-knowing and wicked eye, had been somebody.
-
-The visitor's first astonishment here is to find such vast and rich
-tombs, underground temples in fact, in a region so unutterably desolate,
-remote from men, to be reached only by a painful pilgrimage. He is
-bewildered by the variety and beauty of the decorations, the grace and
-freedom of art, the minute finish of birds and flowers, the immortal
-loveliness of faces here and there; and he cannot understand that all
-this was not made for exhibition, that it was never intended to be seen,
-that it was not seen except by the workmen and the funeral attendants,
-and that it was then sealed away from human eyes forever. Think of the
-years of labor expended, the treasure lavished in all this gorgeous
-creation, which was not for men to see! Has human nature changed?
-Expensive monuments and mausoleums are built now as they have been in
-all the Christian era; but they are never concealed from the public
-view. I cannot account for these extraordinary excavations, not even for
-one at the Assaseef, which extends over an acre and a quarter of ground,
-upon an ostentation of wealth, for they were all closed from inspection,
-and the very entrances masked. The builders must have believed in the
-mysteries of the under-world, or they would not have expended so much in
-enduring representations of them; they must have believed also that
-the soul had need of such a royal abode. Did they have the thought that
-money lavished in this pious labor would benefit the soul, as much as
-now-a-days legacies bequeathed to missions and charities?
-
-On our second visit to these tombs we noticed many details that had
-escaped us before. I found sculptured a cross of equal arms, three or
-four inches long, among other sacred symbols. We were struck by the
-peculiar whiteness of the light, the sort of chalkiness of the sunshine
-as we saw it falling across the entrance of a tomb from which we were
-coming, and by the lightness of the shadows. We illuminated some of
-the interiors, lighting up the vast sculptured and painted halls and
-corniced chambers, to get the tout ensemble of colors and figures. The
-colors came out with startling vividness on the stuccoed, white walls,
-and it needed no imagination, amidst these awful and bizarre images and
-fantastic scenes, to feel that we were in a real underworld. And all
-this was created for darkness!
-
-But these chambers could neither have been cut nor decorated without
-light, and bright light. The effect of the rich ceiling and sides could
-not have been obtained without strong light. I believe that these rooms,
-as well as the dark and decorated chambers in the temples, must have
-been brilliantly illuminated on occasion; the one at the imposing
-funeral ceremonies, the other at the temple services. What light was
-used? The sculptures give us no information. But the light must have
-been not only a very brilliant but a pure flame, for these colors were
-fresh and unsullied when the tombs were opened. However these chambers
-were lighted, some illuminating substance was used that produced no
-smoke, nor formed any gas that could soil the whiteness of the painted
-lotus.
-
-In one of these brilliant apartments, which is finished with a carved
-and painted cornice, and would serve for a drawing-room with the
-addition of some furniture, we almost had a feeling of comfort and
-domesticity—as long as the illumination lasted. When that flashed but,
-and we were left in that thick darkness of the grave which one can feel
-gathering itself in folds about him, and which the twinkling candles in
-our hands punctured but did not scatter, and we groped our way, able
-to see only a step ahead and to examine only a yard square of wall at a
-time, there was something terrible in this subterranean seclusion. And
-yet, this tomb was intended as the place of abode of the deceased owner
-during the long ages before soul and body, united, should be received
-into bliss; here were buried with him no doubt some portions of his
-property, at least jewels and personal ornaments of value; here were
-pictured his possessions and his occupations while on earth; here were
-his gods, visibly cut in stone; here were spread out, in various symbols
-and condensed writing, the precepts of profound wisdom and the liturgies
-of the book of the dead. If at any time he could have awakened (as
-no doubt he supposed he should), and got rid of his heavy granite
-sarcophagus (if his body ever lay in it) and removed the myrrh and pitch
-from his person, he would have found himself in a most spacious and gay
-mansion, of which the only needs were food, light, and air.
-
-While remembering, however, the grotesque conception the Egyptians had
-of the next world, it seems to me that the decorators of these tombs
-often let their imaginations run riot, and that not every fantastic
-device has a deep signification. Take the elongated figures on the
-ceiling, stretching fifty feet across, the legs bent down one side and
-the head the other; or such a picture as this:—a sacred boat having a
-crocodile on the deck, on the back of the crocodile a human head, out
-of the head a long stick protruding which bears on its end the crown of
-lower Egypt; or this conceit:—a small boat ascending a cataract, bearing
-a huge beetle (scarabæus) having a ram's head, and sitting on each side
-of it a bird with a human head. I think much of this work is pure fancy.
-
-In these tombs the snake plays a great part, the snake purely, coiled
-or extended, carried in processions his length borne on the shoulders
-of scores of priests, crawling along the walls in hideous convolutions;
-and, again, the snake with two, three, and four heads, with two and six
-feet; the snake with wings; the snake coiled about the statues of the
-gods, about the images of the mummies, and in short everywhere. The
-snake is the most conspicuous figure.
-
-The monkey is also numerous, and always pleasing; I think he is the
-comic element of hell, though perhaps gravely meant. He squats about
-the lower-world of the heathen, and gives it an almost cheerful and
-debonnair aspect. It is certainly refreshing to meet his self-possessed,
-grave, and yet friendly face amid all the serpents, crocodiles, hybrids,
-and chimerical monsters of the Egyptian under-world.
-
-Conspicuous in ceremonies represented in the tombs and in the temples
-is the sacred boat or ark, reminding one always, in its form and use and
-the sacredness attached to it, of the Jewish Ark of the Covenant. The
-arks contain the sacred emblems, and sometimes the beetle of the sun,
-overshadowed by the wings of the goddess of Thmei or Truth, which
-suggest the cherubim of the Jews. Mr. Wilkinson notices the fact, also,
-that Thmei, the name of the goddess who was worshipped under the double
-character of Truth and Justice, is the origin of the Hebrew Thummim—a
-word implying “truth”; this Thummim (a symbol perfectly comprehensible
-now that we know its origin) which was worn only by the high priest of
-the Jews, was, like the Egyptian figure, which the archjudge put on when
-he sat at the trial of a case, studded with precious stones of various
-colors.
-
-Before we left the valley we entered the tomb of Menephtah (or
-Merenphtah), and I broke off a bit of crumbling limestone from the inner
-cave as a memento of the Pharaoh of the Exodus. I used to suppose that
-this Pharaoh was drowned in the Red Sea; but he could not have been if
-he was buried here; and here certainly is his tomb. It is the opinion
-of scholars that Menephtah long survived the Exodus. There is nothing
-to conflict with this in the Biblical description of the disaster to the
-Egyptians. It says that all Pharaoh's host was drowned, but it does not
-say that the king was drowned; if he had been, so important a fact, it
-is likely, would have been emphasized. Joseph came into Egypt during the
-reign of one of the usurping Shepherd Kings, Apepi probably. Their seat
-of empire was at Tanis, where their tombs have been discovered.
-The Israelites were settled in that part of the Delta. After some
-generations the Shepherds were expelled, and the ancient Egyptian race
-of kings was reinstated in the dominion of all Egypt. This is probably
-the meaning of the passage, “now there arose up a new king over Egypt,
-which knew not Joseph.” The narrative of the Exodus seems to require
-that the Pharaoh should be at Memphis. The kings of the nineteenth
-dynasty, to which Menephtah belonged, had the seat of their empire at
-Thebes; he alone of that dynasty established his court at Memphis. But
-it was natural that he should build his tomb at Thebes.
-
-We went again and again to the temples on the west side and to the tombs
-there. I never wearied of the fresh morning ride across the green plain,
-saluting the battered Colossi as we passed under them, and galloping
-(don't, please, remember that we were mounted on donkeys) out upon the
-desert. Not all the crowd of loping Arabs with glittering eyes and lying
-tongues, who attended us, offering their dead merchandise, could put me
-out of humor. Besides, there were always slender, pretty, and cheerful
-little girls running beside us with their water-koollehs. And may I
-never forget the baby Charon on the vile ferry-boat that sets us over
-one of the narrow streams. He is the cunningest specimen of a boy in
-Africa. His small brothers pole the boat, but he is steersman, and
-stands aft pushing about the tiller, which is level with his head. He is
-a mere baby as to stature, and is in fact only four years old, but he
-is a perfect beauty, even to the ivory teeth which his engaging smile
-discloses. And such self-possession and self-respect. He is a man of
-business, and minds his helm, “the dear little scrap,” say the ladies.
-When we give him some evidently unexpected coppers, his eyes and whole
-face beam with pleasure, and in the sweetest voice he says, Ket'ther
-khdyrak, keteer (“Thank you very much indeed”).
-
-I yield myself to, but cannot account for the fascination of this vast
-field of desolation, this waste of crumbled limestone, gouged into
-ravines and hills, honeycombed with tombs and mummy-pits, strewn with
-the bones of ancient temples, brightened by the glow of sunshine on
-elegant colonnades and sculptured walls, saddened by the mud-hovels of
-the fellaheen. The dust is abundant, and the glare of the sun reflected
-from the high, white precipices behind is something unendurable.
-
-Of the tombs of the Assaseef, we went far into none, except that of the
-priest Petamunoph, the one which occupies, with its many chambers and
-passages, an acre and a quarter of underground. It was beautifully
-carved and painted throughout, but the inscriptions are mostly illegible
-now, and so fouled by bats as to be uninteresting. Our guide said truly,
-“bats not too much good for 'scriptions.” In truth, the place smells
-horribly of bats,—an odor that will come back to you with sickening
-freshness days after,—and a strong stomach is required for the
-exploration.
-
-Even the chambers of some of the temples here were used in later times
-as receptacles for mummies. The novel and most interesting temple
-of Dayr el Bahree did not escape this indignity. It was built by
-Amun-noo-het, or Hatasoo as we more familiarly call her, and like
-everything else that this spirited woman did it bears the stamp of
-originality and genius. The structure rises up the side of the
-mountain in terraces, temple above temple, and is of a most graceful
-architecture; its varied and brilliant sculptures must be referred to a
-good period of art. Walls that have recently been laid bare shine with
-extraordinary vividness of color. The last chambers in the rock are
-entered by arched doorways, but the arch is in appearance, not in
-principle. Its structure is peculiar. Square stones were laid up on each
-side, the one above lapping over the one beneath until the last two met
-at the top; the interior corners were then cut away, leaving a perfect
-round arch; but there is no lateral support or keystone. In these
-interior rooms were depths on depths of mummy-wrappings and bones, and a
-sickening odor of dissolution.
-
-There are no tombs better known than those of Sheykh el Koorneh, for it
-is in them that so much was discovered revealing the private life, the
-trades, the varied pursuits of the Egyptians. We entered those called
-the most interesting, but they are so smoked, and the paintings are so
-defaced, that we had small satisfaction in them. Some of them are full
-of mummy-cloths and skeletons, and smell of mortality, to that degree
-that it needs all the wind of the desert to take the scent of death out
-of our nostrils.
-
-All this plain and its mounds and hills are dug over and pawed out
-for remnants of the dead, scarabæi, beads, images, trinkets sacred and
-profane. It is the custom of some travelers to descend into the horrible
-and common mummy-pits, treading about among the dead, and bring up in
-their arms the body of some man, or some woman, who may have been, for
-aught the traveler knows, not a respectable person. I confess to an
-uncontrollable aversion to all of them, however well preserved they are.
-The present generation here (I was daily beset by an Arab who wanted
-always to sell mean arm or a foot, from whose eager, glittering eyes
-I seemed to see a ghoul looking out,) lives by plundering the dead. A
-singular comment upon our age and upon the futile hope of security for
-the body after death, even in the strongest house of rock.
-
-Old Petamunoph, with whom be peace, builded better than he knew; he
-excavated a vast hotel for bats. Perhaps he changed into bats himself in
-the course of his transmigrations, and in this state is only able to see
-dimly, as bats do, and to comprehend only partially, as an old Egyptian
-might, our modern civilization.
-
-
-
-0386
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXX.—FAREWELL TO THEBES.
-
-SOCIAL life at Thebes, in the season, is subject to peculiar conditions.
-For one thing, you suspect a commercial element in it. Back of all the
-politeness of native consuls and resident effendis, you see spread out
-a collection of antiques, veritable belongings of the ancient Egyptians,
-the furniture of their tombs, the ornaments they wore when they began
-their last and most solemn journey, the very scarabæus, cut on the back
-in the likeness of the mysterious eye of Osiris, which the mummy held
-over his head when he entered the ominously silent land of Kar-Neter,
-the intaglio seal which he always used for his signature, the “charms”
-that he wore at his guard-chain, the necklaces of his wife, the rings
-and bracelets of his daughter.
-
-These are very precious things, but you may have them—such is the
-softening influence of friendship—for a trifle of coined gold, a mere
-trifle, considering their value and the impossibility of replacing them.
-What are two, five, even ten pounds for a genuine bronze figure of Isis,
-for a sacred cat, for a bit of stone, wrought four thousand years ago by
-an artist into the likeness of the immortal beetle, carved exquisitely
-with the name of the Pharaoh of that epoch, a bit of stone that some
-Egyptian wore at his chain during his life and which was laid upon his
-breast when he was wrapped up for eternity. Here in Thebes, where the
-most important personage is the mummy and the Egyptian past is the only
-real and marketable article, there comes to be an extraordinary value
-attached to these trinkets of mortality. But when the traveler gets
-away, out of this charmed circle of enthusiasm for antiquity, away from
-this fictitious market in sentiment, among the cold people of the world
-who know not Joseph, and only half believe in Potiphar, and think the
-little blue images of Osiris ugly, and the me my-beads trash, and who
-never heard of the scarabæus, when, I say, he comes with his load of
-antiques into this air of scepticism, he finds that he has invested in
-a property no longer generally current, objects of vertu for which Egypt
-is actually the best market. And if he finds, as he may, that a good
-part of his purchases are only counterfeits of the antique, manufactured
-and doctored to give them an appearance of age, he experiences a sinking
-of the heart mingled with a lively admiration of the adroitness of the
-smooth and courtly Arabs of Luxor.
-
-Social life is so peculiar in the absence of the sex that is thought
-to add a charm to it in other parts of the world. We receive visits or
-ceremony or of friendship from the chief citizens of the village, we
-entertain them at dinner, but they are never accompanied by their wives
-or daughters; we call at their houses and are feted in turn, but the
-light of the harem never appears. Dahabeëhs of all nations are arriving
-and departing, there are always several moored before the town, some of
-them are certain to have lovely passengers, and the polite Arabs are
-not insensible to the charm of their society: there is much visiting
-constantly on the boats; but when it is returned at the houses of the
-natives, at an evening entertainment, the only female society offered is
-that of the dancing-girls.
-
-Of course, when there is so much lingual difficulty in intercourse, the
-demonstrations of civility must be mainly overt, and in fact they are
-mostly illuminations and “fantasies.” Almost every boat once in the
-course of its stay, and usually upon some natal day or in honor of some
-arrival, will be beautifully illuminated and display fireworks. No sight
-is prettier than a dahabeëh strung along its decks and along its masts
-and yards with many colored lanterns. The people of Luxor respond with
-illuminations in the houses, to which they add barbarous music and the
-kicking and posturing of the Ghawazees. In this consists the gaiety of
-the Luxor season.
-
-Perhaps we reached the high-water mark of this gaiety in an
-entertainment given us by Ali Moorad Effendi, the American consular
-agent, in return for a dinner on the dahabeëh. Ali is of good Bedawee
-blood; and has relations at Karnak enough to fill an opera-house, we
-esteemed him one of the most trustworthy Arabs in the country, and he
-takes great pains and pleasure in performing all the duties of his
-post, which are principally civilities to American travelers. The
-entertainment consisted of a dinner and a 'fantasia.' It was understood
-that it was to be a dinner in Arab style.
-
-We go at sunset when all the broad surface of the Nile is like an opal
-in the reflected light. The consul's house is near the bank of the
-river, and is built against the hill so that we climb two or three
-narrow stairways before we get to the top of it. The landing-places of
-the stairways are terraces overlooking the river; and the word terrace
-has such a grand air that it is impossible to describe this house
-without making it appear better than it is. The consul comes down to
-the bank to receive us; we scramble up its crumbling face. We ascend a
-stairway to the long consular reception-room, where we sit for half an
-hour, during which coffee is served and we get the last of the glowing
-sunset from the windows.
-
-We are then taken across a little terrace, up another flight of steps,
-to the main house, which is seen to consist of a broad hall with small
-rooms on each side. No other members of the consul's family appear,
-and, regarding Arab etiquette, we make no inquiry for them. We could not
-commit a greater breach of good-breeding than to ask after the health of
-any members of the harem. Into one of the little rooms we are shown for
-dinner. It is very small, only large enough to contain a divan and a
-round table capable of seating eight persons. The only ornaments of the
-room are an American flag, and a hand-mirror hung too high for anyone to
-see herself in it. The round table is of metal, hammered out and turned
-at the edge,—a little barrier that prevents anything rolling off. At
-each place are a napkin and a piece of bread—no plate or knives or
-forks.
-
-Deference is so far paid to European prejudice that we sit in chairs,
-but I confess that when I am to eat with my fingers I prefer to sit on
-the ground—the position in a chair is too formal for what is to follow.
-When we are seated, a servant brings water in a basin and ewer, and a
-towel, and we wash our right hands—the left hand is not to be used. Soup
-is first served. The dish is placed in the middle of the table, and we
-are given spoons with which each one dips in, and eats rapidly or slowly
-according to habit; but there is necessarily some deliberation about it,
-for we cannot all dip at once. The soup is excellent, and we praise it,
-to the great delight of our host, who shows his handsome teeth and says
-tyeb all that we have hitherto said was tyeb, we now add kateér. More
-smiles; and claret is brought in—another concession to foreign tastes.
-
-After the soup, we rely upon our fingers, under the instructions of Ali
-and an Arab guest. The dinner consists of many courses, each article
-served separately, but sometimes placed upon the table in three or four
-dishes for the convenience of the convive in reaching it. There are
-meats and vegetables of all sorts procurable, fish, beef, mutton, veal,
-chickens, turkeys, quails and other small birds, pease, beans, salad,
-and some compositions which defied such analysis as one could make with
-his thumb and finger. Our host prided himself upon having a Turkish
-artist in the kitchen, and the cooking was really good and toothsome,
-even to the pastry and sweetmeats; we did not accuse him of making the
-champagne.
-
-There is no difficulty in getting at the meats; we tear off strips,
-mutually assisting each other in pulling them asunder; but there is
-more trouble about such dishes as pease and a purée of something. One
-hesitates to make a scoop of his four fingers, and plunge in; and then
-it is disappointing to an unskilled person to see how few peas he
-can convey to his mouth at a time. I sequester and keep by me the
-breast-bone of a chicken, which makes an excellent scoop for small
-vegetables and gravies, and I am doing very well with it, until there is
-a universal protest against the unfairness of the device.
-
-Our host praises everything himself in the utmost simplicity, and urges
-us to partake of each dish; he is continually picking out nice bits from
-the dish and conveying them to the mouth of his nearest guest. My friend
-who sits next to All, ought to be grateful for this delicate attention,
-but I fear he is not. The fact is that Ali, by some accident, in
-fishing, hunting, or war, has lost the tip of the index finger of his
-right hand, the very hand that conveys the delicacies to my friend's
-mouth. And he told me afterwards, that he felt each time he was fed that
-he had swallowed that piece of the consul's finger.
-
-During the feast there is music by performers in the adjoining hall,
-music in minor, barbaric strains insisted on with the monotonous
-nonchalance of the Orient, and calculated, I should say, to excite a
-person to ferocity, and to make feeding with his fingers a vent to his
-aroused and savage passions. At the end of the courses water is brought
-for us to lave our hands, and coffee and chibooks are served.
-
-“Dinner very nice, very fine,” says Ali, speaking the common thought
-which most hosts are too conventional to utter.
-
-“A splendid dinner, O! consul; I have never seen such an one in
-America.”
-
-The Ghawazees have meantime arrived; we hear a burst of singing
-occasionally with the wail of the instruments. The dancing is to be in
-the narrow hall of the house, which is lighted as well as a room can be
-with so many dusky faces in it. At the far end are seated on the
-floor the musicians, with two stringed instruments, a tambourine and a
-darabooka. That which answers for a violin has two strings of horsehair,
-stretched over a cocoanut-shell; the bowstring, which is tightened
-by the hand as it is drawn, is of horsehair. The music is certainly
-exciting, harassing, plaintive, complaining; the very monotony of it
-would drive one wild in time. Behind the musicians is a dark cloud of
-turbaned servants and various privileged retainers of the house. In
-front of the musicians sit the Ghawazees, six girls, and an old women
-with parchment skin and twinkling eyes, who has been a famous dancer in
-her day. They are waiting a little wearily, and from time to time one
-of them throws out the note or two of a song, as if the music were
-beginning to work in her veins. The spectators are grouped at the
-entrance of the hall and seated on chairs down each side, leaving but a
-narrow space for the dancers between; and there are dusky faces peering
-in at the door.
-
-Before the dance begins we have an opportunity to see what these
-Ghawazees are like, a race which prides itself upon preserving a pure
-blood for thousands of years, and upon an ancestry that has always
-followed the most disreputable profession. These girls are aged say
-from sixteen to twenty; one appears much older and looks exactly like an
-Indian squaw, but, strange to say, her profile is also exactly that of
-Rameses as we see it in the sculptures. The leading dancer is dressed
-in a flaring gown of red and figured silk, a costly Syrian dress; she is
-fat, rather comely, but coarsely uninteresting, although she is said to
-have on more jewelry than any other dancing-girl in Egypt; her abundant
-black hair is worn long and in strands thickly hung with gold coins; her
-breast is covered with necklaces of gold-work and coins; and a mass of
-heavy twinkling silver ornaments hangs about her waist. A third dancer
-is in an almost equally striking gown of yellow, and wears also much
-coin; she is a Pharaonic beauty, with a soft skin and the real
-Oriental eye and profile. The dresses of all are plainly cut, and
-straight-waisted, like an ordinary calico gown of a milkmaid. They
-wear no shawls or any other Oriental wrappings, and dance in their
-stocking-feet.
-
-At a turn in the music, the girl in red and the girl in yellow stand up;
-for an instant they raise their castanets till the time of the music is
-caught, and then start forward, with less of languor and a more skipping
-movement than we expected; and they are not ungraceful as they come
-rapidly down the hall, throwing the arms aloft and the feet forward,
-to the rattle of the castanets. These latter are small convex pieces of
-brass, held between the thumb and finger, which have a click like the
-rattle of the snake. In mid-advance they stop, face each other, chassée,
-retire, and again come further forward, stop, and the peculiar portion
-of the dance begins, which is not dancing at all, but a quivering,
-undulating motion given to the body, as the girl stands with feet
-planted wide apart. The feet are still, the head scarcely stirs, except
-with an almost imperceptible snakelike movement, but the muscles of the
-body to the hips quiver in time to the monotonous music, in muscular
-thrills, in waves running down, and at intervals extending below
-the waist. Sometimes one side of the body quivers while the other is
-perfectly still, and then the whole frame, for a second, shares in the
-ague. It is certainly an astonishing muscular performance, but you
-could not call it either graceful or pleasing. Some people see in the
-intention of the dance a deep symbolic meaning, something about the Old
-Serpent of the Nile, with its gliding, quivering movement and its fatal
-fascination. Others see in it only the common old Snake that was in
-Eden. I suppose in fact that it is the old and universal Oriental dance,
-the chief attraction of which never was its modesty.
-
-After standing for a brief space, with the body throbbing and quivering,
-the castanets all the time held above the head in sympathetic throbs,
-the dancers start forward, face each other, pass, pirouette, and
-take some dancing steps, retire, advance and repeat the earthquake
-performance. This is kept up a long time, and with wonderful endurance,
-without change of figure; but sometimes the movements are more rapid,
-when the music hastens, and more passion is shown. But five minutes of
-it is as good as an hour. Evidently the dance is nothing except with a
-master, with an actress who shall abandon herself to the tide of feeling
-which the music suggests and throw herself into the full passion of it;
-who knows how to tell a story by pantomime, and to depict the woes
-of love and despair. All this needs grace, beauty, and genius. Few
-dancing-girls have either. An old resident of Luxor complains that the
-dancing is not at all what it was twenty years ago, that the old fire
-and art seem to be lost.
-
-“The old hag, sitting there on the floor, was asked to exhibit the
-ancient style; she consented, and danced marvelously for a time, but the
-performance became in the end too shameful to be witnessed.”
-
-I fancy that if the dance has gained anything in propriety, which
-is hard to believe, it has lost in spirit. It might be passionate,
-dramatic, tragic. But it needs genius to make it anything more than a
-suggestive and repulsive vulgarity.
-
-During the intervals, the girls sing to the music; the singing is very
-wild and barbaric. The song is in praise of the Night, a love-song
-consisting of repeated epithets:—
-
-
-“O the Night! nothing is so lovely as the Night!
-
-O my heart! O my soul! O my liver!
-
-My love he passed my door, and saw me not;
-
-O the night! How lovely is the Night!”
-
-
-The strain is minor, and there is a wail in the voices which stridently
-chant to the twanging strings. Is it only the echo of ages of sin in
-those despairing voices? How melancholy it all becomes! The girl in
-yellow, she of the oblong eyes, straight nose and high type of Oriental
-beauty, dances down alone; she is slender, she has the charm of grace,
-her eyes never wander to the spectators. Is there in her soul any faint
-contempt for herself or for the part she plays? Or is the historic
-consciousness of the antiquity of both her profession and her sin strong
-enough to throw yet the lights of illusion over such a performance?
-Evidently the fat girl in red is a prey to no such misgiving, as she
-comes bouncing down the line, and flings herself into her ague fit.
-
-“Look out, the hippopotamus!” cries Abd-el-Atti, “I 'fraid she kick me.”
-
-While the dance goes on, pipes, coffee, and brandy are frequently
-passed; the dancers swallow the brandy readily. The house is
-illuminated, and the entertainment ends with a few rockets from the
-terrace. This is a full-blown “fantasia.”
-
-As the night is still young and the moon is full, we decide to efface,
-as much as may be, the vulgarities of modern Egypt, by a vision of the
-ancient, and taking donkeys we ride to Karnak.
-
-For myself I prefer day to night, and abounding sunshine to the most
-generous moonlight; there is always some disappointment in the night
-effect in ruins, under the most favorable conditions. But I have great
-deference to that poetic yearning for half-light, which leads one to
-grope about in the heavy night-shadows of a stately temple; there is
-no bird more worthy of respect than the round-eyed attendant of
-Pallas-Athene.
-
-And it cannot be denied that there is something mysterious and almost
-ghostly in our silent night ride. For once, our attendants fall into the
-spirit of the adventure, keep silent, and are only shades at our side.
-Not a word or a blow is heard as we emerge from the dark lanes of Luxor
-and come out into the yellow light of the plain; the light seems strong
-and yet the plain is spectral, small objects become gigantic, and
-although the valley is flooded in radiance, the end of our small
-procession is lost in dimness. Nothing is real, all things take
-fantastic forms, and all proportions are changed. One moves as in a
-sort of spell, and it is this unreality which becomes painful. The
-old Egyptians had need of little imagination to conjure up the
-phantasmagoria of the under-world; it is this without the sun.
-
-So far as we can see it, the great mass of stone is impressive as we
-approach—I suspect because we know how vast and solid it is; and the
-pylons never seemed so gigantic before. We do our best to get into a
-proper frame of mind, by wandering apart, and losing ourselves in the
-heavy shadows. And for moments we succeed. It would have been the shame
-of our lives not to have seen Karnak by moonlight. The Great Hall, with
-its enormous columns planted close together, it is more difficult to
-see by night than by day, but such glimpses as we have of it, the silver
-light slanting through the stone forest and the heavy shadows, are
-profoundly impressive. I climb upon a tottering pylon where I can see
-over the indistinct field and chaos of stone, and look down into the
-weird and half-illumined Hall of Columns. In this isolated situation
-I am beginning to fall into the classical meditation of Marius at
-Carthage, when another party of visitors arrives, and their donkeys,
-meeting our donkeys in the center of the Great Hall, begin (it is
-their donkeys that begin) such a braying as never was heard before; the
-challenge is promptly responded to, and a duet ensues and is continued
-and runs into a chorus, so hideous, so unsanctified, so wretchedly
-attuned, and out of harmony with history, romance, and religion, that
-sentiment takes wings with silence and flies from the spot.
-
-We can pick up again only some scattered fragments of emotion by
-wandering alone in the remotest nooks. But we can go nowhere that an
-Arab, silent and gowned, does not glide from behind a pillar or step
-out of the shade, staff in hand, and stealthily accompany us. Even the
-donkey-boys have cultivated their sensibilities by association with
-other nocturnal pilgrims, and encourage our gush of feeling by remarking
-in a low voice, “Karnak very good.” One of them, who had apparently
-attended only the most refined and appreciative, keeps repeating at each
-point of view, “Exquisite!”
-
-As I am lingering behind the company a shadow glides up to me in the
-gloom of the great columns, with “good evening”; and, when I reply, it
-draws nearer, and, in confidential tones, whispers, as if it knew that
-the moonlight visit was different from that by day, “Backsheesh.”
-
-There is never wanting something to do at Luxor, if all the excursions
-were made. There is always an exchange of courtesies between dahabeëhs,
-calls are made and dinners given. In the matter of visits the naval
-etiquette prevails, and the last comer makes the first call. But if you
-do not care for the society of travelers, you can at least make one of
-the picturesque idlers on the bank; you may chance to see a display
-of Arab horsemanship; you may be entertained by some new device of the
-curiosity-mongers; and there always remain the “collections” of the
-dealers to examine. One of the best of them is that of the German
-consul, who rejoices in the odd name of Todrous Paulos, which reappears
-in his son as Moharb Todrous; a Copt who enjoys the reputation among
-Moslems of a trustworthy man—which probably means that a larger
-proportion of his antiquities are genuine than of theirs. If one were
-disposed to moralize there is abundant field for it here in Luxor.
-I wonder if there is an insatiable demoralization connected with the
-dealing in antiquities, and especially in the relics of the departed.
-When a person, as a business, obtains his merchandise from the
-unresisting clutch of the dead, in violation of the firman of his ruler,
-does he add to his wickedness by manufacturing imitations and selling
-them as real? And what of the traveler who encourages both trades by
-buying?
-
-One night the venerable Mustapha Aga gave a grand entertainment, in
-honor of his reception of a firman from the Sultan, who sent him a
-decoration of diamonds set in silver. Nothing in a Moslem's eyes could
-exceed the honor of this recognition by the Khalif, the successor of
-the Prophet. It was an occasion of religious as well as of social
-demonstration of gratitude. There was service, with the reading of the
-Koran in the mosque, for the faithful only; there was a slaughter of
-sheep with a distribution of the mutton among the poor; and there was a
-fantasia at the residence of Mustapha (the house built into the columns
-of the temple of Luxor), to which everybody was bidden. There had been
-an arrival of Cook's Excursionists by steamboat, and there must have
-been as many as two hundred foreigners at the entertainment in the
-course of the evening.
-
-The way before the house was arched with palms and hung with colored
-lanterns; bands of sailors from the dahabeëhs sat in front, strumming
-the darabooka and chanting their wild refrains; crowds of Arabs squatted
-in the light of the illumination and filled the steps and the doorway.
-Within were feasting, music, and dancing, in Oriental abandon. In the
-hall, which was lined with spectators, was to be seen the stiff-legged
-sprawling-about and quivering of the Ghawazees, to the barbarous
-tum-tum, thump-thump, of the musicians; in each side-room also dancing
-was extemporized, until the house was pervaded with the monotonous
-vulgarity, which was more pronounced than at the house of Ali.
-
-In the midst of these strange festivities, the grave Mustapha received
-congratulations upon his newly conferred honor, with the air of a man
-who was responding to it in the finest Oriental style. Nothing grander
-than this entertainment could be conceived in Luxor.
-
-Let us try to look at it also with Oriental eyes. How fatal it would
-be to it not to look at it with Oriental eyes, we can conceive by
-transferring the scene to New York. A citizen, from one of the
-oldest families, has received from the President, let us suppose, the
-decoration of the Grand Order of Inspector of Consulates. In order to
-do honor to the occasion, he throws open his residence on Gramercy Park,
-procures a lot of sailors to sit on his steps and sing nautical ditties,
-and drafts a score of girls from Centre-street to entertain his guests
-with a style of dancing which could not be worse if it had three
-thousand years of antiquity.
-
-I prefer not to regard this Luxor entertainment in such a light; and
-although we hasten from it as soon as we can with civility, I am
-haunted for a long time afterwards by I know not what there was in it of
-fantastic and barbaric fascination.
-
-The last afternoon at Luxor we give to a long walk to Karnak and beyond,
-through the wheat and barley fields now vocal with the songs of birds.
-We do not, however, reach the conspicuous pillars of a temple on the
-desert far to the northeast; but, returning, climb the wall of circuit
-and look our last upon these fascinating ruins. From this point the
-relative vastness of the Great Hall is apparent. The view this afternoon
-is certainly one of the most beautiful in the world. You know already
-the elements of it.
-
-Late at night, after a parting dinner of ceremony, and with a pang of
-regret, although we are in bed, the dahabeëh is loosed from Luxor and we
-quietly drop down below old Thebes.
-
-
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-
-CHAPTER XXXI.—LOITERING BY THE WAY.
-
-WE ARE at home again. Our little world, which has been somewhat
-disturbed by the gaiety of Thebes, and is already as weary of tombs as
-of temples and of the whole incubus of Egyptian civilization, readjusts
-itself and settles into its usual placid enjoyment.
-
-We have now two gazelles on board, and a most disagreeable lizard,
-nearly three feet long; I dislike the way his legs are set on his sides;
-I dislike his tail, which is a fat continuation of his body; and the
-“feel” of his cold, creeping flesh is worse than his appearance; he is
-exceedingly active, darting rapidly about in every direction to the end
-of his rope. The gazelles chase each other about the deck, frolicking in
-the sun, and their eyes express as much tenderness and affection as any
-eyes can, set like theirs. If they were mounted in a woman's head, and
-properly shaded with long lashes, she would be the most dangerous being
-in existence.
-
-Somehow there is a little change in the atmosphere of the dahabeëh. The
-jester of the crew, who kept them alternately laughing and grumbling,
-singing and quarreling, turbulent with hasheesh or sulky for want of it,
-was left in jail at Assouan. The reïs has never recovered the injury to
-his dignity inflicted by his brief incarceration, and gives us no more
-a cheerful good-morning. The steersman smiles still, with the fixed look
-of enjoyment that his face assumed when it first came into the world,
-but he is listless; I think he has struck a section of the river in
-which there is a dearth of his wives; he has complained that his feet
-were cold in the fresh mornings, but the stockings we gave him he does
-not wear, and probably is reserving for a dress occasion. Abd-el-Atti
-meditates seriously upon a misunderstanding with one of his old friends
-at Luxor; he likes to tell us about the diplomatic and sarcastic letter
-he addressed him on leaving; “I wrote it,” he says, “very grammatick,
-the meaning of him very deep; I think he feel it.” There is no language
-like the Arabic for the delivery of courtly sarcasm, in soft words, at
-which no offence can be taken,—for administering a smart slap in the
-face, so to say, with a feather.
-
-It is a ravishing sort of day, a slight haze, warm but life-giving air,
-and we row a little and sail a little down the broadening river, by the
-palms, and the wheat-fields growing yellow, and the soft chain of Libyan
-hills,—the very dolce far niente of life. Other dahabeëhs accompany us,
-and we hear the choruses of their crews responding to ours. From the
-shore comes the hum of labor and of idleness, men at the shadoofs, women
-at the shore for water; there are flocks of white herons and spoonbills
-on the sandbars; we glide past villages with picturesque pigeon-houses;
-a ferry-boat ever and anon puts across, a low black scow, its sides
-banked up with clay, a sail all patches and tatters, and crowded in it
-three or four donkeys and a group of shawled women and turbaned men,
-silent and sombre. The country through which we walk, towards night,
-is a vast plain of wheat, irrigated by canals, with villages in all
-directions; the peasants are shabbily dressed, as if taxes ate up all
-their labor, but they do not beg.
-
-The city of Keneh, to which we come next morning, is the nearest point
-of the Nile to the Red Sea, the desert route to Kosseir being only one
-hundred and twenty miles; it is the Neapolis of which Herodotus speaks,
-near which was the great city of Chemmis, that had a temple dedicated to
-Perseus. The Chemmitæ declared that this demi-god often appeared to them
-on earth, and that he was descended from citizens of their country who
-had sailed into Greece; there if no doubt that Perseus came here when he
-made the expedition into Libya to bring the Gorgon's head.
-
-Keneh is now a thriving city, full of evidences of wealth, and of
-well-dressed people, and there are handsome houses and bazaars like
-those of Cairo. From time immemorial it has been famous for its
-koollehs, which are made of a fine clay found only in this vicinity,
-of which ware is manufactured almost as thin as paper. The process of
-making them has not changed since the potters of the Pharaohs' time.
-The potters of to-day are very skillful at the wheel. A small mass of
-moistened clay, mixed with sifted ashes of halfeh-grass and kneaded like
-bread, is placed upon a round plate of wood which whirls by a treadle.
-As it revolves the workman with his hands fashions the clay into vessels
-of all shapes, graceful and delicate, with a sleight of hand that is
-wonderful. He makes a koolleh, or a drinking-cup, or a vase with a
-slender neck, in a few seconds, fashioning it as truly as if it were
-cast in a mould. It was like magic to see the fragile forms grow in
-his hands. We sat for a long time in one of the cool rooms where two or
-three potters were at work, shaded from the sun by palm-branches,
-which let the light flicker upon the earth-floor, upon the freshly made
-vessels and the spinning wheels of the turbaned workmen, whose deft
-fingers wrought out unceasingly these beautiful shapes from the
-revolving clay.
-
-At the house of the English consul we have coffee; he afterwards lunches
-with us and insists, but in vain, that we stay and be entertained by a
-Ghawazee dance in the evening. It is a kind of amusement of which a very
-little satisfies one. At his house, Prince Arthur and his suite were
-also calling; a slender, pleasant appearing young gentleman, not
-noticeable anywhere and with a face of no special force, but bearing
-the family likeness. As we have had occasion to remark more than once,
-Princes are so plenty on the Nile this year as to be a burden to the
-officials,—especially German princes, who, however, do not count any
-more. The private, unostentatious traveler, who asks no favor of the
-Khedive, is becoming almost a rarity. I hear the natives complain that
-almost all the Englishmen of rank who come to Egypt, beg, or shall we
-say accept? substantial favors of the Khedive. The nobility appear to
-have a new rendering of noblesse oblige. This is rather humiliating to
-us Americans, who are, after all, almost blood-relations of the English;
-and besides, we are often taken for Inglese, in villages where
-few strangers go. It cannot be said that all Americans are modest,
-unassuming travelers; but we are glad to record a point or two in their
-favor:—they pay their way, and they do not appear to cut and paint their
-names upon the ruins in such numbers as travelers from other countries;
-the French are the greatest offenders in this respect, and the Germans
-next.
-
-We cross the river in the afternoon and ride to the temple of Athor
-or Venus at Denderah. This temple, although of late construction, is
-considered one of the most important in Egypt. But it is incomplete,
-smaller, and less satisfactory than that at Edfoo. The architecture of
-the portico and succeeding hall is on the whole noble, but the columns
-are thick and ungraceful, and the sculptures are clumsy and unartistic.
-The myth of the Egyptian Avenues is worked out everywhere with the
-elaboration of a later Greek temple. On the ceiling of several rooms her
-gigantic figure is bent round three sides, and from a globe in her lap
-rays proceed in the vivifying influence of which trees are made to grow.
-
-Everywhere in the temple are subterranean and intramural passages,
-entrance to which is only had by a narrow aperture, once closed by a
-stone. For what were these perfectly dark alleys intended? Processions
-could not move in them, and if they were merely used for concealing
-valuables, why should their inner sides have been covered with such
-elaborate sculptures?
-
-The most interesting thing at Denderah is the small temple of Osiris,
-which is called the “lying-in temple,” the subjects of sculptures being
-the mystical conception, birth, and babyhood of Osiris. You might think
-from the pictures on the walls, of babes at nurse and babes in arms,
-that you had obtruded into one of the institutions of charity called a
-Day Nursery. We are glad to find here, carved in large, the image of the
-four-headed ugly little creature we have been calling Typhon, the spirit
-of evil; and to learn that it is not Typhon but is the god Bes, a jolly
-promoter of merriment and dancing. His appearance is very much against
-him.
-
-Mariette Bey makes the great mystery of the adytum of the large temple,
-which the king alone could enter, the golden sistrum which was kept
-there. The sistrum was the mysterious emblem of Venus; it is sculptured
-everywhere in this building—although it is one of the sacred symbols
-found in all temples. This sacred instrument par excellence of the
-Egyptians played as important a part in their worship, says Mr.
-Wilkinson, as the tinkling bell in Roman Catholic services. The great
-privilege of holding it was accorded to queens, and ladies of rank who
-were devoted to the service of the deity. The sistrum is a strip of
-gold, or bronze, bent in a long loop, and the ends, coming together,
-are fastened in an ornamented handle. Through the loop bars are run upon
-which are rings, and when the instrument is shaken the rings move to
-and fro. Upon the sides of the handle were sometimes carved the faces of
-Isis and of Nephthys, the sister goddesses, representing the beginning
-and the end.
-
-It is a little startling to find, when we get at the inner secret of the
-Egyptian religion, that it is a rattle! But it is the symbol of eternal
-agitation, without which there is no life. And the Egyptians profoundly
-knew this great secret of the universe.
-
-We pass next day, quietly, to the exhibition of a religious devotion
-which is trying to get on without any sistrum or any agitation whatever.
-Towards sunset, below How, we come to a place where a holy man, called
-Sheykh Saleem, roosts forever on a sloping bank, with a rich country
-behind him; beyond, on the plain, hundreds of men and boys are at work
-throwing up an embankment against the next inundation; but he does not
-heed them. The holy man is stark naked and sits upon his haunches, his
-head, a shock of yellow hair, upon his knees. He is of that sickly,
-whitey-black color which such holy skin as his gets by long exposure.
-Before him on the bank is a row of large water-jars; behind him is a
-little kennel of mud, into which he can crawl if it ever occurs to him
-to go to bed.
-
-About him, seated on the ground, is a group of his admirers. Boys run
-after us along the bank begging backsheesh for Sheykh Saleem. A crowd
-of hangers-on, we are told, always surround him, and live on the charity
-that his piety evokes from the faithful. His own wants are few. He spend
-his life in this attitude principally, contemplating the sand between
-his knees. He has sat here for forty years.
-
-People pass and repass, camels swing by him, the sun shines, a breeze as
-of summer moves the wheat behind him and our great barque, with its gay
-flags and a dozen rowers rowing in time, sweeps before him, but he
-does not raise his head. Perhaps he has found the secret of perfect
-happiness. But his example cannot be widely imitated. There are not many
-climates in the world in which a man can enjoy such a religion out of
-doors at all seasons of the year.
-
-We row on and by sundown are opposite Farshoot and its sugar-factories;
-the river broadens into a lake, shut in to the north by limestone hills
-rosy in this light, and it is perfectly still at this hour. But for the
-palms against the sky, and the cries of men at the shadoofs, and the
-clumsy native boats with their freight of immobile figures, this might
-be a glassy lake in the remote Adirondack forest, especially when the
-light has so much diminished that the mountains no longer appear naked.
-
-The next morning as we were loitering along, wishing for a breeze to
-take us quickly to Bellianeh, that we might spend the day in visiting
-old Abydus, a beautiful wind suddenly arose according to our desire.
-
-“You always have good fortune,” says the dragoman.
-
-“I thought you didn't believe in luck?”
-
-“Not to call him luck. You think the wind to blow 'thout the Lord know
-it?”
-
-We approach Bellianeh under such fine headway that we fall almost into
-the opposite murmuring, that this helpful breeze should come just when
-we were obliged to stop and lose the benefit. We half incline to go on,
-and leave Abydus in its ashes, but the absurdity of making a journey of
-seven thousand miles and then passing near to, but unseen, the spot most
-sacred to the old Egyptians, flashes upon us, and we meekly land. But
-our inclination to go on was not so absurd as it seems; the mind is so
-constituted that it can contain only a certain amount of old ruins, and
-we were getting a mental indigestion of them. Loathing is perhaps too
-strong a word to use in regard to a piece of sculpture, but I think that
-a sight at this time, of Rameses II. in his favorite attitude of slicing
-off the heads of a lot of small captives, would have made us sick.
-
-By eleven o'clock we were mounted for the ride of eight miles, and it
-may give some idea of the speed of the donkey under compulsion, to say
-that we made the distance in an hour and forty minutes. The sun was hot,
-the wind fresh, the dust considerable,—a fine sandy powder that, before
-night, penetrated clothes and skin. Nevertheless, the ride was charming.
-The way lay through a plain extending for many miles in every direction,
-every foot of it green with barley (of which here and there a spot was
-ripening), with clover, with the rank, dark Egyptian bean. The air was
-sweet, and filled with songs of the birds that glanced over the fields
-or poised in air on even wing like the lark. Through the vast, unfenced
-fields were narrow well-beaten roads in all directions, upon which
-men women, and children, usually poorly and scantily clad, donkeys and
-camels, were coming and going. There was the hum of voices everywhere,
-the occasional agonized blast of the donkey and the caravan bleat of the
-camel. It often seems to us that the more rich and broad the fields and
-the more abundant the life, the more squalor among the people.
-
-We had noticed, at little distances apart in the plain, mounds of dirt
-five or six feet high. Upon each of these stood a solitary figure,
-usually a naked boy—a bronze image set up above the green.
-
-“What are these?” we ask.
-
-“What you call scarecrows, to frighten the birds; see that chile throw
-dirt at 'em!”
-
-“They look like sentries; do the people here steal?”
-
-“Everybody help himself, if nobody watch him.”
-
-At length we reach the dust-swept village of Arâbat, on the edge of the
-desert, near the ruins of the ancient Thinis (or Abvdus), the so-called
-cradle of the Egyptian monarchy. They have recently been excavated. I
-cannot think that this ancient and most important city was originally so
-far from the Nile; in the day of its glory the river must have run near
-it. Here was the seat of the first Egyptian dynasty, five thousand and
-four years before Christ, according to the chronology of Mariette Bey. I
-find no difficulty in accepting the five thousand but I am puzzled about
-the four years. It makes Menes four years older than he is generally
-supposed to have been. It is the accuracy of the date that sets one
-pondering. Menes, the first-known Egyptian king, and the founder of
-Memphis, was born here. If he established his dynasty here six thousand
-eight hundred and seventy-nine years ago, he must have been born some
-time before that date; and to be a ruler he must have been of noble
-parents, and no doubt received a good education. I should like to know
-what sort of a place, as to art, say, and literature, and architecture,
-Thinis was seven thousand and four years ago. It is chiefly sand-heaps
-now.
-
-Not only was Menes born here, in the grey dawn of history, but Osiris,
-the manifestation of Light on earth, was buried here in the greyer dawn
-of a mythic period. His tomb was venerated by the Pharaonic worshippers
-as the Holy Sepulchre is by Christians, and for many ages. It was the
-last desire of the rich and noble Egyptians to be buried at Thinis, in
-order that they might lie in the same grave with Osiris; and bodies were
-brought here from all parts of Egypt to rest in the sacred earth. Their
-tombs were heaped up one above another, about the grave of the god.
-There are thousands of mounds here, clustering thickly about a larger
-mound; and, by digging, M. Mariette hopes to find the reputed tomb of
-Osiris. An enclosure of crude brick marks the supposed site of this
-supposed most ancient city of Egypt.
-
-From these prehistoric ashes, it is like going from Rome to Peoria,
-to pass to a temple built so late as the time of Sethi I., only about
-thirty-three hundred years ago. It has been nearly all excavated and it
-is worth a long ride to see it. Its plan differs from that of all other
-temples, and its varied sculpture ranks with the best of temple carving;
-nowhere else have we found more life and grace of action in the figures
-and more expressive features; in number of singular emblems and devices,
-and in their careful and beautiful cutting, and brilliant coloring, the
-temple is unsurpassed. The non-stereotyped plan of the temple beguiled
-us into a hearty enjoyment of it. Its numerous columns are pure Egyptian
-of the best style—lotus capitals; and it contains some excellent
-specimens of the Doric column, or of its original, rather. The famous
-original tablet of kings, seventy-six, from Menes to Sethi, a partial
-copy of which is in the British Museum, has been re-covered with sand
-for its preservation. This must have been one of the finest of the old
-temples. We find here the novelty of vaulted roofs, formed by a singular
-method. The roof stones are not laid flat, as elsewhere, but on edge,
-and the roof, thus having sufficient thickness, is hollowed out on the
-under side, and the arch is decorated with stars and other devices. Of
-course, there is a temple of Rameses II., next door to this one, but it
-exists now only in its magnificent foundations.
-
-We rode back through the village of Arâbat in a whirlwind of dust, amid
-cries of “backsheesh,” hailed from every door and pursued by yelling
-children. One boy, clad in the loose gown that passes for a wardrobe in
-these parts, in order to earn his money, threw a summersault before us,
-and, in a flash, turned completely out of his clothes, like a new-made
-Adam! Nothing was ever more neatly done; except it may have been a feat
-of my donkey a moment afterwards, executed perhaps in rivalry of the
-boy. Pretending to stumble, he went on his head, and threw a summersault
-also. When I went back to look for him, his head was doubled under his
-body so that he had to be helped up.
-
-When we returned we found six other dahabeëhs moored near ours. Out of
-the seven, six carried the American flag—one of them in union with the
-German—and the seventh was English. The American flags largely outnumber
-all others on the Nile this year; in fact Americans and various kinds
-of Princes appear to be monopolizing this stream. A German, who shares a
-boat with Americans, drops in for a talk. It is wonderful how much more
-space in the world every German needs, now that there is a Germany. Our
-visitor expresses the belief that the Germans and the Americans are to
-share the dominion of the world between them. I suppose that this means
-that we are to be permitted to dwell on our present possessions in
-peace, if we don't make faces; but one cannot contemplate the extinction
-of all the other powers without regret.
-
-Of course we have outstayed the south wind; the next morning we are
-slowly drifting against the north wind. As I look from the window before
-breakfast, a Nubian trader floats past, and on the bow deck is crouched
-a handsome young lion, honest of face and free of glance, little
-dreaming of the miserable menagerie life before him. There are two lions
-and a leopard, and a cargo of cinnamon, senna, elephants' tusks, and
-ostrich-feathers, on board; all Central Africa seems to float beside us,
-and the coal-black crew do not lessen the barbaric impression.
-
-It is after dark when we reach Girgeh, and are guided to our moorage by
-the lights of other dahabeëhs. All that we see of this decayed but once
-capital town, are four minarets, two of them surrounding picturesque
-ruins and some slender columns of a mosque, the remainder of the
-building having been washed into the river. As we land, a muezzin sings
-the evening call to prayer in a sweet, high tenor voice; and it sounds
-like a welcome.
-
-Decayed, did we say of Girgeh? What is not decayed, or decaying, or
-shifting, on this aggressive river? How age laps back on age and one
-religion shuffles another out of sight. In the hazy morning we are
-passing Menshéëh, the site of an old town that once was not inferior to
-Memphis; and then we come to Ekhmeem—ancient Panopolis. You never heard
-of it? A Roman visitor called it the oldest city of all Egypt; it was in
-fact founded by Ekhmeem, the son of Misraim, the offspring of Cush,
-the son of Ham. There you are, almost personally present at the Deluge.
-Below here are two Coptic convents, probably later than the time of the
-Empress Helena. On the shore are walking some Coptic Christians, but
-they are in no way superior in appearance to other natives; a woman,
-whom we hail, makes the sign of the cross, and then demands backsheesh.
-
-We had some curiosity to visit a town of such honorable foundation.
-We found in it fine mosques and elegant minarets, of a good Saracenic
-epoch. Upon the lofty stone top of one sat an eagle, who looked down
-upon us unscared; the mosque was ruinous and the door closed, but
-through the windows we could see the gaily decorated ceiling; the whole
-was in the sort of decay that the traveler learns to think Moslemism
-itself.
-
-We made a pretence of searching for the remains of a temple of
-Pan,—though we probably care less for Pan than we do for Rameses. Making
-known our wants, several polite gentlemen in turbans, offered to show
-us the way—the gentlemen in these towns seem to have no other occupation
-than to sit on the ground and smoke the chibook—and we were attended by
-a procession, beyond the walls, to the cemetery. There, in a hollow, we
-saw a few large stones, some of them showing marks of cutting. This
-was the temple spoken of in the hand-book. Our hosts then insisted upon
-dragging us half a mile further through the dust of the cemetery mounds,
-in the glare of the sun, and showed us a stone half buried, with a few
-hieroglyphics on one end. Never were people so polite. A grave man here
-joined us, and proposed to show us some quei-is antéeka (“beautiful
-antiquities”); and we followed this obliging person half over town; and
-finally, in the court of a private house, he pointed to the torso of
-a blue granite statue. All this was done out of pure hospitality; the
-people could not have been more attentive if they had had something
-really worth seeing. The town has handsome, spacious coffee-houses and
-shops, and an appearance of Oriental luxury.
-
-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.
-
-
-
-0417
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXXII.—JOTTINGS.
-
-LETTING our dahabeëh drift on in the morning, we spend the day at
-Assiout, intending to overtake it by a short cut across the oxbow which
-the river makes here. We saw in the city two examples, very unlike, of
-the new activity in Egypt. One related to education, the other to the
-physical development of the country and to conquest.
-
-After paying out respects to the consul, we were conducted by his two
-sons to the Presbyterian Mission-School. These young men were educated
-at the American College in Beyrout. Nearly everywhere we have been in
-the East, we have found a graduate of this school, that is as much as
-to say, a person intelligent and anxious and able to aid in the
-regeneration of his country. It would not be easy to overestimate the
-services that this one liberal institution of learning is doing in the
-Orient.
-
-The mission-school was under the charge of the Rev. Dr. John Hogg and
-his wife (both Scotch), with two women-teachers, and several native
-assistants. We were surprised to find an establishment of about one
-hundred and twenty scholars, of whom over twenty were girls. Of course
-the majority of the students were in the primary studies, and some were
-very young; but there were classes in advanced mathematics, in logic,
-history, English, etc. The Arab young men have a fondness for logic and
-metaphysics, and develop easily an inherited subtlety in such studies.
-The text-books in use are Arabic, and that is the medium of teaching.
-
-The students come from all parts of Upper Egypt, and are almost all
-the children of Protestant parents, and they are, with an occasional
-exception, supported by their parents, who pay at least their board
-while they are at school. There were few Moslems among them, I think
-only one Moslem girl. I am bound to say that the boys and young men
-in their close rooms did not present an attractive appearance; an
-ill-assorted assembly, with the stamp of physical inferiority and
-dullness—an effect partially due to their scant and shabby apparel, for
-some of them had bright, intelligent faces.
-
-The school for girls, small as it is, impressed us as one of the most
-hopeful things in Egypt. I have no confidence in any scheme for the
-regeneration of the country, in any development if agriculture, or
-extension of territory, or even in education, that does not reach woman
-and radically change her and her position. It is not enough to say that
-the harem system is a curse to the East: woman herself is everywhere
-degraded. Until she becomes totally different from what she now is, I am
-not sure but the Arab is right in saying that the harem is a necessity:
-the woman is secluded in it (and in the vast majority of harems there
-is only one wife) and has a watch set over her, because she cannot be
-trusted. One hears that Cairo is full of intrigue, in spite of locked
-doors and eunuchs. The large towns are worse than the country; but I
-have heard it said that woman is the evil and plague of Egypt—though
-I don't know how the country could go on without her. Sweeping
-generalizations are dangerous, but it is said that the sole education of
-most Egyptian women is in arts to stimulate the passion of men. In the
-idleness of the most luxurious harem, in the grim poverty of the lowest
-cabin, woman is simply an animal.
-
-What can you expect of her? She is literally uneducated, untrained in
-every respect. She knows no more of domestic economy than she does of
-books, and she is no more fitted to make a house attractive or a room
-tidy than she is to hold an intelligent conversation. Married when she
-is yet a child, to person she may have never seen, and a mother at an
-age when she should be in school, there is no opportunity for her to
-become anything better than she is.
-
-A primary intention in this school is to fit the girls to become good
-wives, who can set an example of tidy homes economically managed,
-in which there shall be something of social life and intelligent
-companionship between husband and wife. The girls are taught the common
-branches, sewing, cooking, and housekeeping—as there is opportunity for
-learning it in the family of the missionaries. This house of Dr. Hogg's,
-with its books, music, civilized menage, is a school in itself, and the
-girl who has access to it for three or four years will not be content
-with the inconvenience, the barren squalor of her parental hovel; for
-it is quite as much ignorance as poverty that produces miserable homes.
-Some of the girls now here expect to become teachers; some will marry
-young men who are also at this school. Such an institution would be of
-incalculable service if it did nothing else than postpone the marriage
-of women a few years. This school is a small seed in Egypt, but it is,
-I believe, the germ of a social revolution. It is, I think, the only one
-in Upper Egypt. There is a mission school of similar character in Cairo,
-and the Khedive also has undertaken schools for the education of girls.
-
-In the last room we came to the highest class, a dozen girls, some of
-them mere children in appearence, but all of marriageable age. I asked
-the age of one pretty child, who showed uncommon brightness in her
-exercises.
-
-“She is twelve,” said the superintendent, “and no doubt would be
-married, if she were not here. The girls become marriageable from eleven
-years, and occasionally they marry younger; if one is not married at
-fifteen she is in danger of remaining single.”
-
-“Do the Moslems oppose your school?”
-
-“The heads of the religion endeavor to prevent Moslem children coming
-to it; we have had considerable trouble; but generally the mothers would
-like to have their girls taught here, they become better daughters and
-more useful at home.”
-
-“Can you see that you gain here?”
-
-“Little by little. The mission has been a wonderful success. I have
-been in Egypt eighteen years; since the ten years that we have been
-at Assiout, we have planted, in various towns in Upper Egypt, ten
-churches.”
-
-“What do do you think is your greatest difficulty?”
-
-“Well, perhaps the Arabic language.”
-
-“The labor of mastering it?”
-
-“Not that exactly, although it is an unending study. Arabic is an
-exceedingly rich language, as you know—a tongue that has often a
-hundred words for one simple object has almost infinite capabilities for
-expressing shades of meaning. To know Arabic grammatically is the work
-of a lifetime. A man says, when he has given a long life to it, that
-he knows a little Arabic. My Moslem teacher here, who was as learned an
-Arab as I ever knew, never would hear me in a grammatical lesson upon
-any passage he had not carefully studied beforehand. He begged me to
-excuse him, one morning, from hearing me (I think we were reading from
-the Koran) because he had not had time to go over the portion to be
-read. Still, the difficulty of which I speak, is that Arabic and
-the Moslem religion are one and the same thing, in the minds of the
-faithful. To know Arabic is to learn the Koran, and that is the learning
-of a learned Arab. He never gets to the end of the deep religious
-meaning hidden in the grammatical intricacies. Religion and grammar thus
-become one.”
-
-“I suppose that is what our dragoman means, when he is reading me
-something out of the Koran, and comes to a passage that he calls too
-deep.”
-
-“Yes. There is room for endless differences of opinion in the rendering
-of almost any passage, and the disagreement is important, because it
-becomes a religious difference. I had an example of the unity of the
-language and the religion in the Moslem mind. When I came here the
-learned thought I must be a Moslem because I knew the grammatical
-Arabic; they could not conceive how else I should know it.”
-
-When we called upon his excellency, Shakeer Pasha, the square in front
-of his office and the streets leading to it were so covered with sitting
-figures that it was difficulty to make a way amidst them. There was an
-unusual assembly of some sort, but its purport we could not guess. It
-was hardly in the nature of a popular convention, although its members
-sat at their ease, smoking, and a babel of talk arose. Nowhere else
-in Egypt have I seen so many fine and even white-looking men gathered
-together. The center of every group was a clerk, with inkhorn and reed,
-going over columns of figures.
-
-The governor's quarters were a good specimen of Oriental style and
-shabbiness; spacious whitewashed apartments, with dirty faded curtains.
-But we were received with a politeness that would have befitted
-a palace, and with the cordial ease of old friends. The Pasha was
-heartbroken that we had not notified him of our coming, and that now our
-time would not permit us to stay and accept a dinner—had we not promised
-to do so on our return? He would send couriers and recall our boat, he
-would detain us by force. Allowing for all the exaggeration of Oriental
-phraseology, it appeared only too probable that the Pasha would die if
-we did not stay to dinner and spend the night. But we did not.
-
-This great concourse? Oh, they were sheykhs and head men of all the
-villages in the country round, whom he had summoned to arrange for
-the purchase of dromedaries. The government has issued orders for the
-purchase of a large number, which it wants to send to Darfour.
-The Khedive is making a great effort to open the route to Darfour
-(twenty-eight days by camel) to regular and safe travel, and to
-establish stations on the road. That immense and almost unknown
-territory will thus be brought within the commercial world.
-
-During our call we were served with a new beverage in place of coffee;
-it was a hot and sweetened tea of cinnamon, and very delicious.
-
-On our return to the river, we passed the new railway station building
-which is to be a handsome edifice of white limestone. Men women, and
-children are impressed to labor on it, and, an intelligent Copt told
-us, without pay. Very young girls were the mortar-carriers, and as
-they walked to and fro, with small boxes on their heads, they sang, the
-precocious children, an Arab love-song;—
-
-
-“He passed by my door, he did not speak to me.”
-
-
-We have seen little girls, quite as small as these, forced to load coal
-upon the steamers, and beaten and cuffed by the overseers. It is a
-hard country for women. They have only a year or two of time, in which
-all-powerful nature and the wooing sun sing within them the songs of
-love, then a few years of married slavery, and then ugliness, old age,
-and hard work.
-
-I do not know a more melancholy subject of reflection than the
-condition, the lives of these women we have been seeing for three
-months. They have neither any social nor any religious life. If there
-were nothing else to condemn the system of Mohammed, this is sufficient.
-I know what splendors of art it has produced, what achievements in war,
-what benefits to literature and science in the dark ages of Europe.
-But all the culture of a race that in its men has borne accomplished
-scholars, warriors, and artists, has never touched the women. The
-condition of woman in the Orient is the conclusive verdict against the
-religion of the Prophet.
-
-I will not contrast that condition with the highest; I will not compare
-a collection of Egyptian women, assembled for any purpose, a funeral or
-a wedding, with a society of American ladies in consultation upon some
-work of charity, nor with an English drawing-room. I chanced once to be
-present at a representation of Verdi's Grand Mass, in Venice, when all
-the world of fashion, of beauty, of intelligence, assisted. The
-coup d'oil was brilliant. Upon the stage, half a hundred of the
-chorus-singers were ladies. The leading solo-singers were ladies. I
-remember the freshness, the beauty even, the vivacity, the gay decency
-of the toilet, of that group of women who contributed their full share
-in a most intelligent and at times profoundly pathetic rendering of the
-Mass. I recall the sympathetic audience, largely composed of women, the
-quick response to a noble strain nobly sung, the cheers, the tears even
-which were not wanting in answer to the solemn appeal, in fine, the
-highly civilized sensitiveness to the best product of religious art.
-Think of some such scene as that, and of the women of an European
-civilization; and then behold the women who are the product of this,—the
-sad, dark fringe of water-drawers and baby-carriers, for eight hundred
-miles along the Nile.
-
-We have a row in the sandal of nine miles before we overtake our
-dahabeëh, which the wind still baffles. However, we slip along under the
-cover of darkness, for, at dawn, I hear the muezzin calling to prayer at
-Manfaloot, trying in vain to impress a believing but drowsy world, that
-prayer is better than sleep. This is said to be the place where Lot
-passed the period of his exile. Near here, also, the Holy Family
-sojourned when it spent a winter in Egypt. (The Moslems have
-appropriated and localized everything in our Scriptures which is
-picturesque, and they plant our Biblical characters where it is
-convenient). It is a very pretty town, with minarets and gardens.
-
-It surprises us to experience such cool weather towards the middle of
-March; at nine in the morning the thermometer marks 550; the north wind
-is cold, but otherwise the day is royal. Having nothing better to do we
-climb the cliffs of Gebel Aboofeyda, at least a thousand feet above the
-river; for ten miles it presents a bold precipice, unscalable except at
-intervals. We find our way up a ravine. The rocks' surface in the river
-and the ravine are worn exactly as the sea wears rock, honeycombed by
-the action of water, and excavated into veritable sea-caves near the
-summit. The limestone is rich in fossil shells.
-
-The plain on top presented a singular appearance. It was strewn with
-small boulders, many of them round and as shapely as cannon-balls, all
-formed no doubt before the invention of the conical missiles. While we
-were amusing ourselves with the thousand fantastic freaks of nature in
-hardened clay, two sinister Arabs approached us from behind and cut
-off our retreat. One was armed with a long gun and the other with a
-portentous spear. We saluted them in the most friendly manner, and hoped
-that they would pass on: but, no, they attached themselves to us. I
-tried to think of cases of travelers followed into the desert on the
-Nile and murdered, but none occurred to me. There seemed to be no danger
-from the gun so long as we kept near its owner, for the length of it
-would prevent his bringing it into action close at hand. The spear
-appeared to be the more effective weapon of the two; it was so, for I
-soon ascertained that the gun was not loaded and that its bearer had
-neither powder nor balls. It turned out that this was a detachment of
-the local guard, sent out to protect us; it would have been a formidable
-party in case of an attack.
-
-Continuing our walk over the stone-clad and desolate swells, it
-suddenly occurred to us that we had become so accustomed to this sort
-of desert-walking, with no green or growing thing in sight, that it
-had ceased to seem strange to us. It gave us something like a start,
-therefore, shortly after, to see, away to the right, blue water forming
-islands out of the hill-tops along the horizon; there was an appearance
-of verdure about the edge of the water, and dark clouds sailed over it.
-There was, however, when we looked steadily, about the whole landscape a
-shimmer and a shadowy look that taught us to know that it was a mirage,
-the rich Nile valley below us, with the blue water, the green fields,
-the black lines of palms, was dimly mirrored in the sky and thrown upon
-the desert hills in the distance. We stood where we could compare the
-original picture with the blurred copy.
-
-Making our way down the face of the cliff, along some ledges, we
-came upon many grottoes and mummy-pits cut in the rock, all without
-sculptures, except one; this had on one side an arched niche and
-pilasters from which the arch sprung. The vault of the niche had been
-plastered and painted, and a Greek cross was chiseled in each pilaster;
-but underneath the plaster the rock was in ornamental squares, lozenges
-and curves in Saracenic style, although it may have been ancient
-Egyptian. How one religion has whitewashed, and lived on the remains of
-another here; the tombs of one age become the temples of another and the
-dwellings of a third. On these ledges, and on the desert above, we found
-bits of pottery. Wherever we have wandered, however far into the desert
-from the river, we never get beyond the limit of broken pottery; and
-this evidence of man's presence everywhere, on the most barren of
-these high or low plains of stone and sand, speak of age and of human
-occupation as clearly as the temples and monuments. There is no virgin
-foot of desert even; all is worn and used. Human feet have trodden it in
-every direction for ages. Even on high peaks where the eagles sit, men
-have piled stones and made shelters, perhaps lookouts for enemies,
-it may be five hundred, it may be three thousand years ago. There is
-nowhere in Egypt a virgin spot.
-
-By moonlight we are creeping under the frowning cliffs of Aboofeyda,
-and voyage on all night in a buccaneerish fashion; and next day sail by
-Hadji Kandeel, where travelers disembark for Tel el Amarna. The remains
-of a once vast city strew the plain, but we only survey it through a
-field-glass. What, we sometimes say in our more modern moments, is
-one spot more than another? The whole valley is a sepulchre of dead
-civilizations; its inhabitants were stowed away, tier on tier, shelf on
-shelf, in these ledges.
-
-However, respect for age sent us in the afternoon to the grottoes on the
-north side of the cliff of Sheykh Said. This whole curved range, away
-round to the remains of Antinoë, is full of tombs. Some that we visited
-are large and would be very comfortable dwellings; they had been used
-for Christian churches, having been plastered and painted. Traces of one
-painting remain—trees and a comical donkey, probably part of the story
-of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. We found in one the ovals
-of Cheops, the builder of the great pyramid, and much good sculpture in
-the best old manner—agricultural scenes, musicians, dancers, beautifully
-cut, with careful details and also with spirit. This is very old work,
-and, even abused as it has been, it is as good as any the traveler will
-find in Egypt. This tomb no doubt goes back to the fourth dynasty, and
-its drawing of animals, cows, birds, and fish is better than we usually
-see later. In a net in which fish are taken, many kinds are represented,
-and so faithfully that the species are recognizable; in a marsh is
-seen a hippopotamus, full of life and viciousness, drawn with his mouth
-stretched asunder wide enough to serve for a menagerie show-bill. There
-are some curious false doors and architectural ornaments, like those of
-the same epoch in the tombs at the pyramids.
-
-At night we were at Rhoda, where is one of the largest of the Khedive's
-sugar-factories; and the next morning at Beni Hassan, famed, next to
-Thebes, for its grottoes, which have preserved to us, in painted scenes,
-so much of the old Egyptian life. Whoever has seen pictures of these
-old paintings and read the vast amount of description and inferences
-concerning the old Egyptian life, based upon them, must be disappointed
-when he sees them to-day. In the first place they are only painted, not
-cut, and in this respect are inferior to those in the grottoes of Sheykh
-Saïd; in the second place, they are so defaced, as to be with difficulty
-deciphered, especially those depicting the trades.
-
-Some of the grottoes are large—sixty feet by forty feet; fine apartments
-in the rock, high and well lighted by the portal. Architecturally, no
-tombs are more interesting; some of the ceilings are vaulted, in three
-sections; they are supported by fluted pillars some like the Doric, and
-some in the beautiful lotus style; the pillars have architraves; and
-there are some elaborately wrought false doorways. And all this goes
-to show that, however ancient these tombs are, they imitated stone
-buildings already existing in a highly developed architecture.
-
-Essentially the same subjects are represented in all the tombs; these
-are the trades, occupations, amusements of the people. Men are blowing
-glass, working in gold, breaking flax, tending herds (even doctoring
-animals that are ill), chiseling statues, painting, turning the potter's
-wheel; the barber shaves his customer; two men play at draughts; the
-games most in favor are wrestling and throwing balls, and in the
-latter women play. But what one specially admires is the honesty of the
-decorators, which conceals nothing from posterity; the punishment of the
-bastinado is again and again represented, and even women are subject
-to it; but respect was shown for sex; the women was not cast upon the
-ground, she kneels and takes the flagellation on her shoulders.
-
-We saw in these tombs no horses among the many animals; we have never
-seen the horse in any sculptures except harnessed in a war-chariot; “the
-horse and his rider” do not appear.
-
-There is a scene here which was the subject of a singular mistake, that
-illustrates the needless zeal of early explorers to find in everything
-in Egypt confirmation of the Old Testament narrative. A procession,
-painted on the wall, now known to represent the advent of an Asiatic
-tribe into Egypt, perhaps the Shepherds, in a remote period, was
-declared to represent the arrival of Joseph's brethren. The tomb,
-however, was made several centuries before the advent of Joseph himself.
-And even if it were of later date than the event named, we should
-not expect to find in it a record of an occurrence of such little
-significance at that time. We ought not to be surprised at the absence
-in Egypt of traces of the Israelitish sojourn, and we should not be,
-if we looked at the event from the Egyptian point of view and not from
-ours. In a view of the great drama of the ancient world in the awful
-Egyptian perspective, the Jewish episode is relegated to its proper
-proportion in secular history. The whole Jewish history, as a worldly
-phenomenon, occupies its narrow limits. The incalculable effect upon
-desert tribes of a long sojourn in a highly civilized state, the
-subsequent development of law and of a literature unsurpassed in after
-times, and the final flower into Christianity,—it is in the light of all
-this that we read the smallest incident of Jewish history, and are
-in the habit of magnifying its contemporary relations. It was the
-slenderest thread in the days of Egyptian puissance. In the ancient
-atmosphere of Egypt, events purely historical fall into their proper
-proportions. Many people have an idea that the ancient world revolved
-round the Jews, and even hold it as a sort of religious faith.
-
-It is difficult to believe that the race we see here are descendants of
-the active, inventive, joyous people who painted their life upon these
-tombs. As we lie all the afternoon before a little village opposite
-Beni Hassan I wonder for the hundredth time what it is that saves such
-miserable places from seeming to us as vile as the most wretched abodes
-of poverty in our own land. Is it because, with an ever-cheerful sun and
-a porous soil, this village is not so filthy as a like abode of misery
-would be with us? Is it that the imagination invests the foreign and the
-Orient with its own hues; or is it that our reading, prepossessing our
-minds, gives the lie to all our senses? I cannot understand why we are
-not more disgusted with such a scene as this. Not to weary you with a
-repetition of scenes sufficiently familiar, let us put the life of the
-Egyptian fellah, as it appears at the moment, into a paragraph.
-
-Here is a jumble of small mud-hovels, many of them only roofed with
-cornstalks, thrown together without so much order as a beaver would use
-in building a village, distinguishable only from dog-kennels in that
-they have wooden doors—not distinguishable from them when the door
-is open and a figure is seen in the aperture. Nowhere any comfort or
-cleanliness, except that sometimes the inner kennel, of which the woman
-guards the key, will have its floor swept and clean matting in one
-corner. The court about which there are two or three of these kennels,
-serves the family for all purposes; there the fire for cooking is built,
-there are the water-jars, and the stone for grinding corn; there the
-chickens and the dogs are; there crouch in the dirt women and men, the
-women spinning, making bread, or nursing children, the men in vacant
-idleness. While the women stir about and go for water, the men will
-sit still all day long. The amount of sitting down here in Egypt is
-inconceivable; you might almost call it the feature of the country. No
-one in the village knows anything, either of religion or of the world;
-no one has any plans; no one exhibits any interest in anything; can any
-of them have any hopes? From this life nearly everything but the animal
-is eliminated. Children, and pretty children, swarm, tumbling about
-everywhere; besides, nearly every woman has one in her arms.
-
-We ought not to be vexed at this constant north wind which baffles us,
-for they say it is necessary to the proper filling out of the wheat
-heads. The boat drifts about all day in a mile square, having passed
-the morning on a sand-spit where the stupidity and laziness of the crew
-placed it; and we have leisure to explore the large town of Minieh,
-which lies prettily along the river. Here is a costly palace, which I
-believe has never been occupied by the Khedive, and a garden attached,
-less slovenly in condition than those of country palaces usually are.
-The sugar-factory is furnished with much costly machinery, which could
-not have been bought for less than half a million of dollars. Many of
-the private houses give evidences of wealth in their highly ornamented
-doorways and Moorish arches, but the mass of the town is of the usual
-sort here—tortuous lanes in which weary hundreds of people sit in dirt,
-poverty, and resignation. We met in the street and in the shops many
-coal-black Nubians and negroes, smartly dressed in the recent European
-style, having an impudent air, who seemed to be persons of wealth and
-consideration here. In the course of our wanderings I came to a large
-public building, built in galleries about an open court, and unwittingly
-in my examination of it, stumbled into the apartment of the Governor,
-Osman Bey, who was giving audience to all comers. Justice is still
-administered in patriarchal style; the door is open to all; rich and
-poor were crowding in, presenting petitions and papers of all sorts, and
-among them a woman preferred a request. Whether justice was really done
-did not appear, but Oriental hospitality is at least unfailing. Before
-I could withdraw, having discovered my blunder, the governor welcomed
-me with all politeness and gave me a seat beside him. We smiled at each
-other in Arabic and American, and came to a perfect understanding on
-coffee and cigarettes.
-
-The next morning we are slowly passing the Copt convent of Gebel e'
-Tayr, and expecting the appearance of the swimming Christians. There is
-a good opportunity to board us, but no one appears. Perhaps because it
-is Sunday and these Christians do not swim on Sunday. No. We learn from
-a thinly clad and melancholy person who is regarding us from the rocks
-that the Khedive has forbidden this disagreeable exhibition of muscular
-Christianity. It was quite time. But thus, one by one, the attractions
-of the Nile vanish.
-
-What a Sunday! But not an exceptional day. “Oh dear,” says madame, in
-a tone of injury, “here's another fine day!” Although the north wind is
-strong, the air is soft, caressing, elastic.
-
-More and more is forced upon us the contrast of the scenery of Upper
-and Lower Egypt. Here it is not simply that the river is wider and the
-mountains more removed and the arable land broader; the lines are all
-straight and horizontal, the mountain-ranges are level-topped, parallel
-to the flat prairies—at sunset a low level of white limestone hills in
-the east looked exactly like a long line of fence whitewashed. In Upper
-Egypt, as we have said, the plains roll, the hills are broken, there are
-pyramidal mountains, and evidences of upheaval and disorder. But these
-wide sweeping and majestic lines have their charm; the sunsets and
-sunrises are in some respects finer than in Nubia; the tints are not so
-delicate, the colors not so pure, but the moister atmosphere and clouds
-make them more brilliant and various. The dawn, like the after-glow, is
-long; the sky burns half round with rose and pink, the color mounts high
-up. The sunsets are beyond praise, and always surprise. Last night the
-reflection in the east was of a color unseen before—almost a purple
-below and a rose above; and the west glowed for an hour in changing
-tints. The night was not less beautiful—we have a certain comfort in
-contrasting both with March in New England. It was summer; the Nile
-slept, the moon half-full, let the stars show; and as we glided swiftly
-down, the oars rising and falling to the murmured chorus of the
-rowers, there were deep shadows under the banks, and the stately palms,
-sentinelling the vast plain of moonlight over which we passed,—the great
-silence of an Egyptian night—seemed to remove us all into dreamland. The
-land was still, except for the creak of an occasional shadoof worked by
-some wise man who thinks it easier to draw water in the night than
-in the heat of the day, or an aroused wolfish dog, or a solitary bird
-piping on the shore.
-
-Thus we go, thus we stay, in the delicious weather, encouraged now and
-again by a puff of southern wind, but held back from our destination by
-some mysterious angel of delay. But one day the wind comes, the sail is
-distended, the bow points downstream, and we move at the dizzy rate of
-five miles an hour.
-
-It is a day of incomparable beauty. We see very little labor along the
-Nile; the crops are maturing. But the whole population comes to the
-river, to bathe, to sit in the shallows, to sit on the bank. All the
-afternoon we pass groups, men, women, children, motionless, the picture
-of idleness. There they are, hour after hour, in the sun. Women, coming
-for water, put down their jars, and bathe and frolic in the grateful
-stream. In some distant reaches of the river there are rows of women
-along the shore, exactly like the birds which stand in the shallow
-places or sun themselves on the sand. There are more than twenty miles
-of bathers, of all sexes and ages.
-
-When at last we come to a long sand-reef, dotted with storks, cranes and
-pelicans, the critic says he is glad to see something with feathers on
-it.
-
-We are in full tide of success and puffed up with confidence: it is
-perfectly easy to descend the Nile. All the latter part of the afternoon
-we are studying the False Pyramid of Maydoom, that structure, older
-than Cheops, built, like all the primitive monuments, in degrees, as
-the Tower of Babel was, as the Chaldean temples were. It lifts up, miles
-away from the river, only a broken mass from the debris at its base.
-We leave it behind. We shall be at Bedreshayn, for Memphis, before
-daylight. As we turn in, the critic says, “We've got the thing in our
-own hands now.”
-
-Alas! the Lord reached down and took it out. The wind chopped suddenly,
-and blew a gale from the north. At breakfast time we were waltzing round
-opposite the pyramids of Dashoor, liable to go aground on islands and
-sandbars, and unable to make the land. Determined not to lose the day,
-we anchored, took the sandal, had a long pull, against the gale, to
-Bedreshayn, and mounted donkeys for the ruins of ancient Memphis.
-
-When Herodotus visited Memphis, probably about four hundred and fifty
-years before Christ, it was a great city. He makes special mention of
-its temple of Vulcan, whose priests gave him a circumstantial account of
-the building of the city by Menes, the first Pharaoh. Four hundred
-years later, Diodorus found it magnificent; about the beginning of the
-Christian era, Strabo says it was next in size to Alexandria. Although
-at the end of the twelfth century it had been systematically despoiled
-to build Cairo, an Arab traveler says that, “its ruins occupy a space
-half a day's journey every way,” and that its wonders could not
-be described. Temples, palaces, gardens, villas, acres of common
-dwellings—the city covered this vast plain with its splendor and its
-squalor.
-
-The traveler now needs a guide to discover a vestige, a stone here and
-there, of this once most magnificent capital. Here came Moses and
-Aaron, from the Israelitish settlement in the Delta, from Zoan (Tanis)
-probably, to beg Menephtah to let the Jews depart; here were performed
-the miracles of the Exodus. This is the Biblical Noph, against which
-burned the wrath of the prophets. “No (Heliopolis, or On) shall be
-rent asunder, and Noph shall have distresses daily.” The decree was
-“published in Noph”:—“Noph shall be waste and desolate without an
-inhabitant;” “I will cause their images to cease out of Noph.”
-
-The images have ceased, the temples have either been removed or have
-disappeared under the deposits of inundations; you would ride over old
-Memphis without knowing it, but the inhabitants have returned to this
-fertile and exuberant plain. It is only in the long range of pyramids
-and the great necropolis in the desert that you can find old Memphis.
-
-The superabundant life of the region encountered us at once. At
-Bedreshayn is a ferry, and its boats were thronged, chiefly by women,
-coming and going, and always with a load of grain or other produce on
-the head. We rode round the town on an elevated dyke, lined with palms,
-and wound onward over a flat, rich with wheat and barley, to Mitrahenny,
-a little village in a splendid palm-grove. This marks the central
-spot of the ruins of old Memphis. Here are some mounds, here are found
-fragments of statues and cut stones, which are preserved in a temporary
-shelter. And here, lying on its side, in a hollow from which the water
-was just subsiding, is a polished colossal statue of Rameses II.—the
-Pharaoh who left more monuments of less achievements than any other
-“swell” of antiquity. The face is handsome, as all his statues are, and
-is probably conventionalized like our pictures of George Washington,
-or Napoleon's busts of himself. I confess to a feeling of perfect
-satisfaction at seeing his finely chiseled nose rooting in the mud.
-
-This—some mounds, some fragments of stone, and the statue,—was all we
-saw of Memphis. But I should like to have spent a day in this lovely
-grove, which was carpeted with the only turf I saw in Egypt; reclining
-upon the old mounds in the shade, and pretending to think of Menes and
-Moses and Menephtah; and of Rhampsinitus, the king who “descended alive
-into the place which the Greeks call Hades, and there played at dice
-with Ceres, and sometimes won, and other times lost,” and of the
-treasure-house he built here; and whether, as Herodotus believed, Helen,
-the beautiful cause of the Iliad, really once dwelt in a palace here,
-and whether Homer ever recited his epic in these streets.
-
-We go on over the still rich plain to the village of Sakkarah—chiefly
-babies and small children. The cheerful life of this prairie fills us
-with delight—flocks of sheep, herds of buffaloes, trains of dromedaries,
-hundreds of laborers of both sexes in the fields, children skylarking
-about; on every path are women, always with a basket on the head, their
-blue cotton gown (the only article of dress except a head-shawl,) open
-in front, blowing back so as to show their figures as they walk.
-
-When we reach the desert we are in the presence of death—perhaps the
-most mournful sight on this earth is a necropolis in the desert, savage,
-sand-drifted, plundered, all its mounds dug over and over. We ride along
-at the bases of the pyramids. I stop at one, climb over the débris at
-its base, and break off a fragment of stone. The pyramid is of crumbling
-limestone, and, built in stages or degrees, like that of Maydoom; it is
-slowly becoming an unsightly heap. And it is time. This is believed
-to be the oldest structure in the world, except the Tower of Babel. It
-seems to have been the sepulchre of Keken, a king of the second dynasty.
-At this period hieroglyphic writing was developed, but the construction
-and ornamentation of the doorway of the pyramid exhibit art in its
-infancy. This would seem to show that the Egyptians did not emigrate
-from Asia with the developed and highly perfected art found in the
-sculptures of the tombs of the fourth, fifth, and sixth dynasties, as
-some have supposed, but that there was a growth, which was arrested
-later.
-
-But no inference in regard to old Egypt is safe; a discovery tomorrow
-may upset it. Statues recently found, representing persons living in
-the third dynasty, present a different type of race from that shown in
-statues of the fourth and fifth dynasties. So that, in that period in
-which one might infer a growth of art, there may have been a change of
-the dominating race.
-
-The first great work of Mariette Bey in Egypt—and it is a monument of
-his sagacity, enthusiasm, and determination, was the unearthing, in this
-waste of Memphis, the lost Serapeum and the Apis Mausoleum, the tombs of
-the sacred bulls. The remains of the temple are again covered with sand;
-but the visitor can explore the Mausoluem. He can walk, taper in hand,
-through endless galleries, hewn in the rock, passing between rows of
-gigantic granite sarcophagi, in which once rested the mummies of
-the sacred bulls. Living, the bull was daintily fed—the Nile water
-unfiltered was thought to be too fattening for him—and devotedly
-worshipped; and dying, he was entombed in a sepulchre as magnificent as
-that of kings, and his adorers lined the walls of his tomb with votive
-offerings. It is partly from these stelæ, or slabs with inscriptions,
-that Mariette Bey has added so much to our knowledge of Egyptian
-history.
-
-Near the Serapeum is perhaps the most elegant tomb in Egypt, the tomb
-of Tih, who lived in the fifth dynasty, some time later than Cheops, but
-when hippopotami abounded in the river in front of his farm,
-Although Tih was a priest, he was a gentleman of elegant tastes, an
-agriculturist, a sportsman. He had a model farm, as you may see by the
-buildings and by the thousand details of good management here carved.
-His tomb does him great credit. In all the work of later times there is
-nothing so good as this sculpture, so free, so varied, so beautiful; it
-promises everything. Tih even had, what we do not expect in people of
-that early time, humor; you are sure of it from some of the pictures
-here. He must have taken delight in decorating his tomb, and have spent,
-altogether, some pleasant years in it before he occupied it finally; so
-that he had become accustomed to staying here.
-
-But his rule was despotic, it was that of the “stick.” Egyptians have
-never changed in this respect, as we have remarked before. They are
-now, as then, under the despotism of some notion of governance—divine
-or human—despotic and fateful. The “stick” is as old as the monarchy;
-it appears in these tombs; as to day, nobody then worked or paid taxes
-without its application.
-
-The sudden arrest of Egyptian art was also forced upon us next day, in a
-second visit to the pyramids of Geezeh. We spent most of the day in the
-tombs there. In some of them we saw the ovals of all the kings of the
-fourth dynasty, many of them perfect and fresh in color. As to drawing,
-cutting, variety, liveliness of attitude and color, there is nothing
-better, little so good, in tombs of recent date. We find almost every
-secular subject in the early tombs that is seen in the latest. In
-thousands of years, the Egyptians scarcely changed or made any progress.
-The figures of men and animals are better executed in these old
-tombs than in the later. Again, these tombs are free from the endless
-repetitions of gods and of offerings to them. The life of the people
-represented is more natural, less superstitious; common events are
-naively portrayed, with the humorous unconsciousness of a simple age;
-art has thought it not unworthy its skill to represent the fact in one
-tomb, that men acted as midwives to cows, in the dawn of history.
-
-While we lay at Geezeh we visited one of the chicken-hatching
-establishments for which the Egyptians have been famous from a remote
-period. It was a very unpretending affair, in a dirty suburb of the
-town. We were admitted into a low mud-building, and into a passage with
-ovens on each side. In these ovens the eggs are spread upon mats, and
-the necessary fire is made underneath. The temperature is at 100° to
-108° Fahrenheit. Each oven has a hole in the center, through which the
-naked attendant crawls to turn the eggs from time to time. The process
-requires usually twenty-one days, but some eggs hatch on the twentieth.
-The eggs are supplied by the peasants who usually receive, without
-charge, half as many chickens as they bring eggs. About one third of the
-eggs do not hatch. The hatching is only performed about three months in
-the year, during the spring.
-
-In the passage, before one of the ovens, was a heap of soft chickens,
-perhaps half a bushel, which the attendant scraped together whenever
-they attempted to toddle off. We had the pleasure of taking up some
-handfuls of them. We also looked into the ovens, where there was a stir
-of life, and were permitted to hold some eggs while the occupants kicked
-off the shell.
-
-I don't know that a plan will ever be invented by which eggs, as well as
-chickens, will be produced without the intervention of the hen. If one
-could be, it would leave the hen so much more time to scratch—it would
-relieve her from domestic cares so that she could take part in public
-affairs. The hen in Egypt is only partially emancipated, But since she
-is relieved from setting, I do not know that she is any better hen. She
-lays very small eggs.
-
-This ends what I have to say about the hen. We have come to Cairo, and
-the world is again before us.
-
-
-
-0436
-
-
-
-0437
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXXIII.—THE KHEDIVE.
-
-WHAT excitement there is in adjacency to a great city! To hear its
-inarticulate hum, to feel the thrill of its myriads, the magnetism of a
-vast society! How the pulse quickens at the mere sight of multitudes
-of buildings, and the overhanging haze of smoke and dust that covers a
-little from the sight of the angels the great human struggle and folly.
-How impatient one is to dive into the ocean of his fellows.
-
-The stir of life has multiplied every hour in the past two days. The
-river swarms with boats, the banks are vocal with labor, traffic,
-merriment. This morning early we are dropping down past huge casernes
-full of soldiers—the bank is lined with them, thousands of them, bathing
-and washing their clothes, their gabble filling the air. We see again
-the lofty mosque of Mohamed Ali, the citadel of Salàdin, the forest of
-minarets above the brown roofs of the town. We pass the isle of Rhoda
-and the ample palaces of the Queen-Mother. We moor at Gezereh amid a
-great shoal of dahabeëhs, returned from High Egypt, deserted of their
-passengers, flags down, blinds closed—a spectacle to fill one with
-melancholy that so much pleasure is over.
-
-The dahabeëhs usually discharge their passengers at Gezereh, above
-the bridge. If the boat goes below with baggage it is subject to a
-port-duty, as if it were a traveler,—besides the tax for passing the
-draw-bridge. We decide to remain some days on our boat, because it is
-comfortable, and because we want to postpone the dreaded breaking up
-of housekeeping, packing up our scattered effects, and moving. Having
-obtained permission to moor at the government dock below Kasr-el-Nil, we
-drop down there.
-
-The first person to greet us there is Aboo Yusef, the owner. Behind him
-comes Habib Bagdadli, the little Jew partner. There is always that in
-his mien which says, “I was really born in Bagdad, but I know you still
-think I am a Jew from Algiers. No, gentlemens, you wrong a man to whom
-reputation is everything.” But he is glad to see his boat safe; he
-expresses as much pleasure as one can throw from an eye with a cast in
-it. Aboo Yusef is radiant. He is attired gorgeously, in a new suit, from
-fresh turban to red slippers, on the profits of the voyage. His robe is
-silk, his sash is cashmere. He overflows with complimentary speech.
-
-“Allah be praised, I see you safe.”
-
-“We have reason to be grateful.”
-
-“And that you had a good journey.”
-
-“A perfect journey.”
-
-“We have been made desolate by your absence; thank God, you have enjoyed
-the winter.”
-
-“I suppose you are glad to see the boat back safe also?”
-
-“That is nothing, not to mention it, I not think of it; the return of
-the boat safe, that is nothing. I only think that you are safe. But it
-is a good boat. You will say it is the first-class of boats? And she
-goes up the cataract all right. Did I not say she go up the cataract?
-Abd-el-Atti he bear me witness.”
-
-“You did. You said so. Habib said so also. Was there any report here in
-Cairo that we could not go up.”
-
-“Mashallah. Such news. The boat was lost in the cataract; the reïs
-was drowned. For the loss of the boat I did not care; only if you were
-safe.”
-
-“Did you hear that the cataract reises objected to take us up?”
-
-“What rascals! They always make the traveler some trouble. But, Allah
-forgive us all, the head reïs is dead. Not so, Abd-el-Atti?”
-
-“What, the old reïs that we said good-bye to only a little while ago at
-Assouan?”
-
-“Him dead,” says Abd-el-Atti. “I have this morning some conversation
-with a tradin' boat from the Cataract. Him dead shortly after we leave.”
-
-It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that one of these tough
-old Bedaween could die in the ordinary manner.
-
-But alas his spirit was too powerful for his frame. We have not in this
-case the consolation of feeling that his loss is our gain; for there
-are plenty more like him at the First Cataract. He took money from Aboo
-Yusef for not taking us up the Cataract, and he took money from us for
-taking us up. His account is balanced. He was an impartial man. Peace to
-his colored ashes.
-
-Aboo Yusef and the little Jew took leave with increased demonstrations
-of affection, and repeated again and again their joy that we had
-ascended the Cataract and returned safe. The Jew, as I said, had a
-furtive look, but Aboo is open as the day. He is an Arab you would
-trust. I can scarcely believe that it was he and his partner who sent
-the bribe to the reïs of the Cataract to prevent our going up.
-
-As we ride to town through the new part, the city looks exceedingly
-bright and attractive; the streets are very broad; the handsome square
-houses—ornamented villas, with balconies, pillared piazzas, painted with
-lively figures and in bizarre patterns—stand behind walls overgrown with
-the convolvulus, and in the midst of gardens; plats in the center
-of open spaces and at the angles of streets are gay with flowers in
-bloom—chiefly scarlet geraniums. The town wears a spring aspect, and
-would be altogether bright but for the dust which overlays everything,
-houses, streets, foliage. No amount of irrigation can brighten the
-dust-powdered trees.
-
-When we came to Cairo last fall, fresh from European cities, it seemed
-very shabby. Now that we come from Upper Egypt, with our eyes trained
-to eight hundred miles of mud-hovels, Cairo is magnificent. But it
-is Cairo. There are just as many people squatting in the dust of the
-highways as when we last saw them, and they have the air of not having
-moved in three months. We ride to Shepherd's Hotel; there are twenty
-dragomans for every tourist who wants to go to Syria, there is the usual
-hurry of arrival and departure, and no one to be found; we call at the
-consul's: it is not his hour; we ride through the blindest ways to
-the bankers, in the Rosetti Gardens (don't imagine there is any garden
-there), they do no business from twelve to three. It is impossible to
-accomplish anything in Cairo without calm delay. And, falling into the
-mode, we find ourselves sauntering through one of the most picturesque
-quarters, the bazaar of Khan Khaléel, feasting the eye on the Oriental
-splendors of silks, embroidered stuffs, stiff with gold and silver,
-sown with pearls, antique Persian brasses, old arms of the followers
-of Saladin. How cool, how quiet it is. All the noises are soft. Noises
-enough there are, a babel of traffic, jostling, pushing, clamoring;
-and yet we have a sense of quiet in it all. There is no rudeness, no
-angularity, no glare of sun. At times you feel an underflow of silence.
-I know no place so convenient for meditation as the recesses of these
-intricate bazaars. Their unlikeness to the streets of other cities is
-mainly in the absence of any hard pavement. From the moment you come
-into the Mooskee, you strike a silent way, no noise of wheels or hoofs,
-nor footfalls of the crowd. It is this absence of footfall-patter which
-is always heard in our streets, that gives us the impression here of the
-underflow of silence.
-
-Returning through the Ezbekeëh Park and through the new streets, we are
-glad we are not to judge the manhood of Egypt by the Young Egypt we
-meet here, nor the future of Egypt by the dissolute idlers of Cairo and
-Alexandria. From Cairo to Wady Halfeh we have seen men physically well
-developed, fine specimens of their race, and better in Nubia than in
-Egypt Proper; but these youths are feeble, and of unclean appearance,
-even in their smart European dress. They are not unlike the effeminate
-and gilded youth of Italy that one sees in the cities, or Parisians of
-the same class. Egypt, which needed a different importation, has added
-most of the vices of Europe to its own; it is noticeable that the
-Italians, who emigrate elsewhere little, come here in great numbers, and
-men and women alike take kindly to this loose feebleness. French as well
-as Italians adapt themselves easily to Eastern dissoluteness. The
-French have never shown in any part of the globe any prejudice against a
-mingling of races. The mixture here of the youths of the Latin races
-and the worn-out Orientals, who are a little polished by a lacquer of
-European vice, is not a good omen for Egypt. Happily such youths are
-feeble and, I trust, not to be found outside the two large cities.
-
-The great question in Egypt, among foreigners and observers (there is
-no great question among the common people), is about the Khedive, Ismail
-Pasha, his policy and his real intentions with regard to the country.
-You will hear three distinct opinions; one from devout Moslems, another
-from the English, and a third from the Americans. The strict and
-conservative Moslems like none of the changes and innovations, and
-express not too much confidence in the Khedive's religion. He has bought
-pictures and statues for his palaces, he has marble images of himself,
-he has set up an equestrian statue in the street; all this is contrary
-to the religion. He introduces European manners and costumes, every
-government employé is obliged to wear European dress, except the
-tarboosh. What does he want with such a great army; why are the taxes so
-high, and growing higher every day?
-
-With the Americans in Cairo, as a rule, the Khedive is popular; they
-sympathize with his ambition, and think that he has the good of Egypt
-at heart; almost uniformly they defend him. The English, generally,
-distrust the Khedive and criticise his every movement. Scarcely ever
-have I heard Englishmen speak well of the Khedive and his policy. They
-express a want of confidence in the sincerity of his efforts to suppress
-the slave-trade, for one thing. How much the fact that American officers
-are preferred in the Khedive's service has to do with the English
-and the American estimate, I do not know; the Americans are naturally
-preferred over all others, for in case of a European complication over
-Egypt they would have no entangling alliances.
-
-The Americans point to what has actually been accomplished by the
-present Viceroy, the radical improvements in the direction of a better
-civilization, improvements which already change the aspect of Egypt to
-the most casual observer. There are the railroads, which intersect the
-Delta in all directions, and extend over two hundred and fifty miles up
-the Nile, and the adventurous iron track which is now following the
-line of the telegraph to distant Kartoom. There are the canals, the
-Sweet-Water that runs from Cairo and makes life on the Isthmus possible,
-and the network of irrigating canals and system of ditches, which have
-not only transformed the Delta, but have changed its climate, increasing
-enormously the rainfall. No one who has not seen it can have any
-conception of the magnitude of this irrigation by canals which all draw
-water from the Nile, nor of the immense number of laborers necessary
-to keep the canals in repair. Talk of the old Pharaohs, and their
-magnificent canals, projected or constructed, and their vaunted
-expeditions of conquest into Central Africa! Their achievements, take
-them all together, are not comparable to the marvels the Khedive
-is producing under our own eyes, in spite of a people ignorant,
-superstitious, reluctant. He does not simply make raids into Africa:
-he occupies vast territories, he has absolutely stopped the Nile
-slave-trade, he has converted the great slave-traders into his allies,
-by making it more their interest to develope legitimate commerce than
-to deal in flesh and blood; he has permanently opened a region twice
-as large as Egypt to commercial intercourse; he sends explorers and
-scientific expeditions into the heart of Africa. It is true that he
-wastes money, that he is robbed and cheated by his servants, but he
-perseveres, and behold the results. Egypt is waking out of its sleep,
-it is annexing territory, and population by millions, it is becoming a
-power. And Ismail Pasha is the center and spring of the whole movement.
-
-Look at Cairo! Since the introduction of gas, the opening of broad
-streets, the tearing down of some of the worst rookeries, the admission
-of sun and air, Cairo is exempt from the old epidemics, the general
-health is improved, and even that scourge, ophthalmia, has diminished.
-You know his decree forbidding early marriages; you know he has
-established and encourages schools for girls; you see what General Stone
-is doing in the education of the common soldiers, and in his training
-of those who show any aptitude in engineering, draughting, and the
-scientific accomplishments of the military profession.
-
-Thus the warmest admirers of the Khedive speak. His despotism, which
-is now the most absolute in the world, perhaps, and least disputed, is
-referred to as a “personal government.” And it is difficult to see
-how under present circumstances it could be anything else. There is
-absolutely in Egypt no material for anything else. The Khedive has
-annually summoned for several years, a sort of parliament of the
-chief men of Egypt, for information and consultation. At first it was
-difficult to induce the members to say a word, to give any information
-or utter an opinion. It is a new thing in a despotic government, the
-shadow even of a parliament.
-
-An English gentleman in Cairo, and a very intelligent man, gives the
-Khedive credit for nothing but a selfish desire to enrich himself, to
-establish his own family, and to enjoy the traditional pleasures of the
-Orient.
-
-“But he is suppressing the slave-trade.”
-
-“He is trying to make England believe so. Slaves still come to Cairo;
-not so many down the Nile, but by the desert. I found a slave-den in
-some desert tombs once over the other side the river; horrible treatment
-of women and children; a caravan came from Darfour by way of Assiout.”
-
-“But that route is cut off by the capture of Darfour.”
-
-“Well, you'll see; slaves will come if they are wanted. Why, look at the
-Khedive's harem!”
-
-“He hasn't so many wives as Solomon, who had seven hundred; the Khedive
-has only four.”
-
-“Yes, but he has more concubines; Solomon kept only three hundred, the
-Khedive has four hundred and fifty, and perhaps nearer five hundred.
-Some of them are beautiful Circassians for whom it is said he paid as
-much as £2000 and even £3000 sterling.”
-
-“I suppose that is an outside price.”
-
-“Of course, but think of the cost of keeping them. Then, each of
-his four wives has her separate palace and establishment. Rather an
-expensive family.”
-
-“Almost as costly as the royal family of England.”
-
-“That's another affair; to say nothing of the difference of income.
-The five hundred, more or less, concubines are under the charge of
-the Queen-mother, but they have carte blanche in indulgence in jewels,
-dress, and all that. They wear the most costly Paris modes. They
-spend enormous sums in pearls and diamonds. They have their palaces
-refurnished whenever the whim seizes them, re-decorated in European
-style. Where does the money come from? You can see that Egypt is taxed
-to death. I heard to-day that the Khedive was paying seventeen per cent,
-for money, money borrowed to pay the interest on his private debts. What
-does he do with the money he raises?”
-
-“Spends a good deal of it on his improvements, canals, railroads, on his
-army.”
-
-“I think he runs in debt for his improvements. Look again at his family.
-He has something like forty palaces, costing from one half-million to
-a million dollars each; some of them, which he built, he has never
-occupied, many of them are empty, many of those of his predecessors,
-which would lodge a thousand people, are going to decay; and yet he is
-building new ones all the time. There are two or three in process of
-erection on the road to the pyramids.”
-
-“Perhaps they are for his sons or for his high officers? Victor Emanuel,
-whose treasury is in somewhat the condition of the Khedive's, has a
-palace in every city of Italy, and yet he builds more.”
-
-“If the Khedive is building for his children, I give it up. He has
-somewhere between twenty and thirty acknowledged children. But he does
-give away palaces and houses. When he has done with a pretty slave, he
-may give her, with a palace or a fine house here in town, to a favorite
-officer. I can show you houses here that were taken away from their
-owners, at a price fixed by the Khedive and not by the owner, because
-the Viceroy wanted them to give away with one or another of his
-concubines.”
-
-“I suppose that is Oriental custom.”
-
-“I thought you Americans defended the Khedive on account of his
-progressive spirit.”
-
-“He is a man who is accomplishing wonders, trammelled as he is by usages
-thousands of years old, which appear monstrous to us, but are to him as
-natural as any other Oriental condition. Yet I confess that he stands
-in very contradictory lights. If he knew it, he could do the greatest
-service to Egypt by abolishing his harem of concubines, converting it
-into—I don't know what—a convent, or a boarding-school, or a milliner's
-shop, or an establishment for canning fruit—and then set the example of
-living, openly, with one wife.”
-
-“Wait till he does. And you talk about the condition of Egypt! Every
-palm-tree, and every sakiya is taxed, and the tax has doubled within a
-few years. The taxes are now from one pound and a half to three pounds
-an acre on all lands not owned by him.”
-
-“In many cases, I know this is not a high tax (compared with taxes
-elsewhere) considering the yield of the land, and the enormous cost of
-the irrigating canals.”
-
-“It is high for such managers as the fellahs. But they will not have to
-complain long. The Khedive is getting into his own hands all the lands
-of Egypt. He owns I think a third of it now, and probably half of it is
-in his family; and this is much the better land.”
-
-“History repeats itself in Egypt. He is following the example of Joseph
-who, you know, taking advantage of the famine, wrung all the land,
-except that in possession of the priests, from the people, and made
-it over to Pharaoh; by Joseph's management the king owned, before the
-famine was over, not only all the land, but all the money, all the
-cattle, and all the people of Egypt. And he let the land to them for a
-fifth of its increase.”
-
-“I don't know that it is any better because Egypt is used to it. Joseph
-was a Jew. The Khedive pretends to be influenced by the highest motives,
-the elevation of the condition of the people, the regeneration of
-Egypt.”
-
-“I think he is sincerely trying to improve Egypt and the Egyptians. Of
-course a despot, reared in Oriental prejudices, is slow to see that you
-can't make a nation except by making men; that you can't make a rich
-nation unless individuals have free scope to accumulate property. I
-confess that the chief complaint I heard up the river was, that no one
-dared to show that he had any money, or to engage in extensive business,
-for fear he would be 'squeezed.'.rdquo;
-
-“So he would be. The Khedive has some sixteen sugar-factories, worked by
-forced labor, very poorly paid. They ought to be very profitable.”
-
-“They are not.”
-
-“Well, he wants more money, at any rate. I have just heard that he
-is resorting to a forced loan, in the form of bonds. A land-owner is
-required to buy them in the proportion of one dollar and a half for
-each acre he owns; and he is to receive seven per cent, interest on the
-bonds. In Cairo a person is required to take these bonds in a certain
-proportion on his personal property. And it is said that the bonds are
-not transferable, and that they will be worthless to the heirs. I heard
-of this new dodge from a Copt.”
-
-“I suppose the Khedive's friends would say that he is trying to change
-Egypt in a day, whereas it is the work of generations.”
-
-When we returned to the dahabeëh we had a specimen of “personal
-government.” Abd-el-Atti was standing on the deck, slipping his beads,
-and looking down.
-
-“What has happened?”
-
-“Ahman, been took him.”
-
-“Who took him?”
-
-“Police, been grab him first time he go 'shore, and lock him up.”
-
-“What had he been doing?”
-
-“Nothing he been done; I send him uptown of errand; police catch him
-right out there.”
-
-“What for?”
-
-“Take him down to Soudan to work; the vice-royal he issue an order for
-the police to catch all the black fellows in Cairo, and take 'em to the
-Soudan, down to Gondokora for what I know, to work the land there.”
-
-“But Ahman is our servant; he can't be seized.”
-
-“Oh, I know, Ahman belong to me, he was my slave till I give him
-liberty; I go to get him out directly. These people know me, I get him
-off.”
-
-“But if you had no influence with the police, Ahman would be dragged off
-to Soudan to work in a cotton or rice field?”
-
-“Lots of black fellows like him sent off. But I get him back, don't you
-have worry. What the vice-royal to do with my servant—I don't care if he
-Kin' of Constantinople!”
-
-Sure enough, early in the evening the handsome Abyssinian boy came back,
-none the worse, except for a thorough scare, eyes and teeth shining, and
-bursting into his usual hearty laugh upon allusion to his capture.
-
-“Police tyeb?”
-
-“Moosh-tyeb” (“bad”), with an explosion of merriment.
-
-The boy hadn't given himself much uneasiness, for he regards his master
-as his Providence.
-
-We are moored at the dock and below the lock of the Sweet-Water Canal
-which runs to Ismailia. A dredge-boat lies in the entrance, and we
-have an opportunity of seeing how government labor is performed; we
-can understand why it is that so many laborers are needed, and that the
-great present want of Egypt is stout and willing arms.
-
-In the entrance of the canal and in front of the lock is a flat-boat
-upon which are fifteen men. They have two iron scoops, which would hold
-about a gallon each; to each is attached a long pole and a rope. Two
-men jab the pole down and hold the pot on the bottom, while half a dozen
-pull leisurely on the rope, with a “yah-sah” or other chorus, and haul
-in the load; when it comes up, a man scrapes out the mud with his hand,
-sometimes not getting more than two quarts. It is very restful to watch
-their unexhausting toil. It takes several minutes to capture a pot of
-sand. There are fifteen men at this spoon-work, but one scoop is only
-kept going at a time. After it is emptied, the men stop and look about,
-converse a little, and get ready for another effort, standing meantime
-in liquid mud, ankle deep. When they have rested, over goes the scoop
-again, and the men stand to the rope, and pull feebly, but only at
-intervals, that is when they sing the response to the line of the
-leader. The programme of singing and pulling is something like this:
-
-Salee ah nadd (voice of the leader).
-
-Yalee, halee (chorus, pull altogether).
-
-Salee ah nadd.
-
-Yalee, halee (pull).
-
-Salee ah nadd.
-
-Yalee, halee (pull).
-
-And the outcome of three or four minutes of hauling and noise enough to
-raise a ton, is about a quart of mud!
-
-The river panorama is always varied and entertaining, and we are of a
-divided mind between a lazy inclination to sit here and watch the busy
-idleness of the population, or address ourselves to the much that still
-remains to be seen in Cairo. I ought to speak, however, of an American
-sensation on the river. This is a little steam-yacht—fifty feet long by
-seven and a half broad—which we saw up the Nile, where it attracted
-more attention along the banks than anything else this season. I call
-it American, because it carries the American flag and is owned by a
-New-York art student, Mr. Anderson, and an English-American, Mr. Medler;
-but the yacht was built in London, and shipped on a large steamboat to
-Alexandria. It is the first steam-vessel, I believe, carrying anything
-except Egyptian (or Turkish) colors that has ever been permitted to
-ascend the Nile. We took a trip on it one fine morning up to Helwân, and
-enjoyed the animation of its saucy speed. When put to its best, it makes
-eighteen miles an hour; but life would not be as long on it as it is
-on a dahabeëh. At Helwân are some hot sulphur-springs, famous and
-much resorted to in the days of the Pharaohs, and just now becoming
-fashionable again.
-
-Our days pass we can hardly say how, while we wait for the proper season
-for Syria, and regard the invincible obstacles that debar us from the
-longed-for desert journey to Sinai and Arabia Petra. The bazaars are
-always a refuge from the heat, a never-failing entertainment. We spend
-hours in lounging through them. We lunch at the shops of the sweatmeat
-makers, on bread, pistachio-nuts, conserve of roses, I know not what,
-and Nile-water, with fingans of coffee fetched hot and creamy from the
-shop near by. We give a copper to an occasional beggar: for beggars
-are few in the street, and these are either blind or very poor, or
-derweeshes; and to all these, being regarded as Allah's poor, the
-Moslems give cheerfully, for charity is a part of their religion. We
-like also to stand at the doors of the artisans. There is a street where
-all the workmen are still making the old flint-lock guns and pistols,
-and the firearms with the flaring blunderbuss muzzles, as if the object
-was to scatter the charge, and hit a great many people but to kill none.
-I think the peace society would do well to encourage this kind of gun.
-There are shops also where a man sits before a heap of flint-chalk,
-chipping the stone with a flat iron mallet, and forming the flints for
-the antiquated locks.
-
-We happen to come often in our wanderings, the distinction being a
-matter of luck, upon a very interesting old city-gate of one of the
-quarters. The gate itself is a wooden one of two leaves, crossed with
-iron bands fastened with heavy spikes, and not remarkable except as an
-illustration of one of the popular superstitions of the Arabs. The wood
-is driven full of nails, bits of rags flutter on it, and human teeth are
-crowded under the iron bands. It is believed that if a person afflicted
-with headache will drive a nail into this door he will never have the
-headache again. Other ills are relieved by other offerings, bits of
-rag, teeth, etc. It would seem to be a pretty sure cure for toothache
-to leave the tooth in this gate. The Arabs are called the most
-superstitious of peoples, they wear charms against the evil-eye (“charm
-from the eye of girl, sharper than a spike; charm from the eye of boy,
-more painful than a whip”), and they have a thousand absurd practices.
-Yet we can match most of them in Christian communities.
-
-How patiently all the people work, and wait. Complaints are rare. The
-only reproof I ever received was from a donkey-boy, whom I had kept
-waiting late one evening at the Hotel Nil. When I roused him from his
-sleep on the ground, he asked, with an accent of weariness, “how much
-clock you got?”
-
-By the twenty-third day of March it is getting warm; the thermometer is
-81°. It is not simply the heat, but the Khâmaseen, the south wind, the
-smoky air, the dust in the city, the languor. To-day it rained a few
-drops, and looked threatening, just as it does in a hot summer day at
-home. The outskirts of Cairo are enveloped in dust, and the heat begins
-to simmer over the palaces and gardens. The travelers are leaving. The
-sharp traders, Jews from Bagdad, Syrians, Jews from Constantinople,
-Greeks, Armenians from Damascus, all sorts, are packing up their goods,
-in order to meet the traveler and fleece him again in Jerusalem, in
-Beyrout, in Damascus, in Smyrna, on the Golden Horn. In the outskirts,
-especially on the open grounds by the canal, are the coffee-booths and
-dance-shanties—rows of the disreputable. The life, always out of doors
-even in the winter, is now more flamboyantly displayed in these open and
-verandahed dwellings; there is a yielding to the relaxation of summer.
-We hear at night, as we sit on the deck of our dahabeëh, the throbbing
-of the darabookah-drum and the monotonous song of the dissolute ones.
-
-
-
-0450
-
-
-
-0451
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXXIV.—THE WOODEN MAN.
-
-THE Khedive and his court, if it may be so called, are not hedged in by
-any formidable barriers; but there are peculiarities of etiquette. When
-his Highness gives a grand ball and public reception, of course only the
-male members of his household are present, only the men of the Egyptian
-society; it would in fact be a male assembly but for the foreign ladies
-visiting or residing in the city. Of course there cannot be any such
-thing as “society” under such circumstances; and as there are no women
-to regulate the ball invitations, the assembly is “mixed.” There is no
-such thing as reciprocity with the Arabs and Turks; they are willing to
-meet the wives or the female friends of all foreigners; they never show
-their own.
-
-If a lady visiting Cairo wishes to visit one of the royal harems, it is
-necessary that her husband or some gentleman of her party, should first
-be presented to the Khedive. After this ceremony, notice is received
-through the chamberlain of the Viceroy that the lady will be received
-on such a day and hour, in a palace named, by her Highness So So. Which
-Highness? That you can never tell before the notice is received. It is a
-matter of royal convenience at the time. In a family so large and varied
-as that of the Khedive, you can only be presented to a fragment of
-it. You may be received by one of his wives; it may please the Queen,
-mother, who is in charge of his largest harem, to do the honors or the
-wife of the heir-apparent, or of one of the younger sons, may open her
-doors to you. I suppose it is a good deal a matter of whim with the
-inmates of the harem; sometimes they are tired of seeing strangers and
-of dressing for them. Usually they are eager to break the monotony of
-their lives with a visit that promises to show them a new costume. There
-is only one condition made as to the dress of the lady who is to
-be received at a royal harem; she must not wear black, there is a
-superstition connected with a black dress, it puts the inmates of the
-harem in low spirits. Gentlemen presented to the Khedive wear the usual
-evening dress.
-
-The Khedive's winter-residence is the Palace of Abdeen, not far from the
-Ezbekeëh, and it was there that Dr. Lamborn and myself were presented to
-his highness by Mr. Beardsley, our consul-general. Nothing regal could
-be more simple or less ceremonious. We arrived at the door at the moment
-fixed, for the Khedive is a man of promptness and I imagine has his
-entire day parcelled out in engagements. We first entered a spacious
-entrance-hall, from which a broad stairway leads to the first story;
-here were thirty or forty janizaries, gentlemen-in-waiting, and eunuchs,
-standing motionless, at the sides, and guarding the approach to the
-stairway, in reception attitudes. Here we were received by an attendant
-who conducted us to a room on the left, where we were introduced to the
-chamberlain, and deposited our outer coats and hats. The chamberlain
-then led us to the foot of the stairs, but accompanied us no further; we
-ascended to the first landing, and turning to another broad stairway saw
-the Khedive awaiting us at the head of it. He was unattended; indeed we
-saw no officer or servant on this floor. The furniture above and below
-was European, except the rich, thick carpets of Turkey and Persia.
-
-His Highness, who wore a dress altogether European except the fez,
-received us cordially, shaking hands and speaking with simplicity, as a
-private gentleman might, and, wasting no time in Oriental compliments,
-led the way to a small reception-room furnished in blue satin. We were
-seated together in a corner of the apartment, and an animated talk at
-once began. Dr. Lamborn's special errand was to ascertain whether Egypt
-would be represented in our Centennial, about which the Khedive was
-well informed. The conversation then passed to the material condition of
-Egypt, the development of its resources, its canals and railroads, and
-especially the new road into Soudan, and the opening of Darfour. The
-Khedive listened attentively to any practical information, either about
-railroads, factories, or agriculture, that my companion was able to give
-him, and had the air of a man eager to seize any idea that might be for
-the advancement of Egypt; when he himself spoke, it was with vivacity,
-shrewdness, and good sense. And he is not without a gleam of humor now
-and then,—a very hopeful quality in a sovereign and especially in an
-Oriental ruler.
-
-The Khedive, in short, is a person to inspire confidence; he appears to
-be an able, energetic man of affairs, quick and resolute; there is not
-the slightest stiffness or “divine right” pretence in his manner. He is
-short, perhaps five feet seven or eight inches in height, and stout. He
-has a well-proportioned, solid head, good features, light complexion,
-and a heavy, strong jaw, which his closely-trimmed beard does not
-conceal. I am not sure that the penetration of his glance does not gain
-a little from a slight defect in one eye—the result of ophthalmia in his
-boyhood.
-
-When the interview had lasted about fifteen minutes, the Khedive ended
-it by rising; at the head of the stairs we shook hands and exchanged the
-proper speeches; at the bottom of the first flight we turned and bowed,
-his highness still standing and bowing, and then we saw him no more. As
-we passed out an order had come from above which set the whole household
-in a flurry of preparation, a running hither and thither as for speedy
-departure—the sort of haste that is mingled with fear, as for the
-command of a power that will not brook an instant's delay.
-
-Exaggerated notions are current about harems and harem-receptions,
-notions born partly of the seclusion of the female portion of the
-household in the East. Of course the majority of harems in Egypt are
-simply the apartment of the one wife and her children. The lady who
-enters one of them pays an ordinary call, and finds no mystery whatever.
-If there is more than one wife, a privileged visitor, able to converse
-with the inmates, might find some skeletons behind the screened windows.
-It is also true that a foreign lady may enter one of the royal harems
-and be received with scarcely more ceremony than would attend an
-ordinary call at home. The receptions at which there is great display,
-at which crowds of beautiful or ugly slaves line the apartments, at
-which there is music and dancing by almehs, an endless service of sweets
-and pipes and coffee, and a dozen changes of dress by the hostess during
-the ceremony, are not frequent, are for some special occasion, the
-celebration of a marriage, or the entertainment of a visitor of high
-rank. One who expects, upon a royal invitation to the harem, to wander
-into the populous dove-cote of the Khedive, where languish the beauties
-of Asia, the sisters from the Gardens of Gul, pining for a new robe of
-the mode from Paris, will be most cruelly disappointed.
-
-But a harem remains a harem, in the imagination. The ladies went one
-day to the house—I suppose it is a harem—of Hussein, the waiter who has
-served us with unremitting fidelity and cleverness. The house was one of
-the ordinary sort of unburnt brick, very humble, but perfectly tidy
-and bright. The secret of its cheerfulness was in a nice, cheery, happy
-little wife, who made a home for Hussein such as it was a pleasure to
-see in Egypt. They had four children, the eldest a daughter, twelve
-years old and very good-mannered and pretty. As she was of marriageable
-age, her parents were beginning to think of settling her in life.
-
-“What a nice girl she is, Hussein,” says Madame.
-
-“Yes'm,” says Hussein, waving his hands in his usual struggle with the
-English language, and uttering the longest speech ever heard from him in
-that tongue, but still speaking as if about something at table, “yes'm;
-good man have it; bad man, drinkin' man, smokin' man, eatin' man not
-have it.”
-
-I will describe briefly two royal presentations, one to the favorite
-wife of the Khedive, the other to the wife of Mohammed Tufik Pasha, the
-eldest son and heir-apparent, according to the late revolution in the
-rules of descent. French, the court language, is spoken not only by the
-Khedive but by all the ladies of his family who receive foreigners. The
-lady who was presented to the Khedive's wife, after passing the usual
-guard of eunuchs in the palace, was escorted through a long suite of
-showy apartments. In each one she was introduced to a maid of honor who
-escorted her to the next, each lady-in-waiting being more richly attired
-than her predecessor, and the lady was always thinking that now this one
-must be the princess herself. Female slaves were in every room, and a
-great number of them waited in the hall where the princess received her
-visitor. She was a strikingly handsome woman, dressed in pink satin and
-encrusted with diamonds. The conversation consisted chiefly of the most
-exaggerated and barefaced compliments on both sides, both as to articles
-of apparel and personal appearance. Coffee, cigarettes, and sweets
-without end, in cups of gold set with precious stones, were served by
-the female slaves. The wife was evidently delighted with the impression
-made by her beauty, her jewels, and her rich dress.
-
-The wife of Tufik Pasha received at one of the palaces in the suburbs.
-At the door eunuchs were in waiting to conduct the visitors up the
-flight of marble steps, and to deliver them to female slaves in waiting.
-Passing up several broad stairways, they were ushered into a grand
-reception-hall furnished in European style, except the divans. Only a
-few servants were in attendance, and they were white female slaves. The
-princess is petite, pretty, intelligent, and attractive. She received
-her visitors with entire simplicity, and without ceremony, as a lady
-would receive callers in America. The conversation ran on the opera, the
-travel on the Nile, and topics of the town. Coffee and cigarettes were
-offered, and the sensible interview ended like an occidental visit. It
-is a little disenchanting, all this adoption of European customs; but
-the wife of Tufik Pasha should ask him to go a little further, and send
-all the eunuchs out of the palace.
-
-We had believed that summer was come. But we learned that March in Cairo
-is, like the same month the world over, treacherous. The morning of the
-twenty-sixth was cold, the thermometer 60°. A north wind began to blow,
-and by afternoon increased to a gale, such as had not been known here
-for years. The town was enveloped in a whirlwind of sand; everything
-loose was shaking and flying; it was impossible to see one's way, and
-people scudding about the streets with their heads drawn under their
-robes continually dashed into each other. The sun was wholly hidden.
-From our boat we could see only a few rods over the turbulent river.
-The air was so thick with sand, that it had the appearance of a yellow
-canvas. The desert had invaded the air—that was all. The effect of the
-light through this was extremely weird; not like a dark day of
-clouds and storm in New England, but a pale, yellowish, greenish,
-phantasmagoric light, which seemed to presage calamity. Such a light as
-may be at the Judgment Day. Cairo friends who dined with us said they
-had never seen such a day in Egypt. Dahabeëhs were torn from their
-moorings; trees were blown down in the Ezbekëeh Gardens.
-
-We spent the day, as we had spent other days, in the Museum of
-Antiquities at Boulak. This wonderful collection, which is the work of
-Mariette Bey, had a thousand times more interest for us now than before
-we made the Nile voyage and acquired some knowledge of ancient Egypt
-through its monuments. Everything that we saw had meaning—statues,
-mummy-cases, images, scarabæi, seals, stelae, gold jewelry, and the
-simple articles in domestic use.
-
-It must be confessed that to a person uninformed about Egypt and
-unaccustomed to its ancient art, there is nothing in the world so dreary
-as a collection of its antiquities. The endless repetition of designs,
-the unyielding rigidity of forms, the hideous mingling of the human and
-the bestial, the dead formality, are insufferably wearisome. The
-mummy is thoroughly disagreeable. You can easily hate him and all his
-belongings; there is an air of infinite conceit about him; I feel it in
-the exclusive box in which he stands, in the smirk of his face painted
-on his case. I wonder if it is the perkishness of immortality—as if his
-race alone were immortal. His very calmness, like that of so many of the
-statues he made, is an offensive contempt. It is no doubt unreasonable,
-but as a living person I resent this intrusion of a preserved dead
-person into our warm times,—an appearance anachronistic and repellant.
-
-But as an illustration of Egyptian customs, art, and history, the Boulak
-museum is almost a fascinating place. True it is not so rich in many
-respects as some European collections of Egyptian antiquities, but it
-has some objects that are unique; for instance, the jewels of Queen
-Aah-hotep, a few statues, and some stelæ, which furnish the most
-important information.
-
-This is not the place, had I the knowledge, to enter upon any discussion
-of the antiquity of these monuments or of Egyptian chronology. I believe
-I am not mistaken, however, in saying that the discoveries of Mariette
-Bey tend strongly to establish the credit of the long undervalued list
-of Egyptian sovereigns made by Manetho, and that many Oriental scholars
-agree with the director of this museum that the date of the first
-Egyptian dynasty is about five thousand years before the Christian era.
-But the almost startling thought presented by this collection is not
-in the antiquity of some of these objects, but in the long civilization
-anterior to their production, and which must have been necessary to the
-growth of the art here exhibited.
-
-It could not have been a barbarous people who produced, for instance,
-these life-like images found at Maydoom, statues of a prince and
-princess who lived under the ancient king Snéfrou, the last sovereign of
-the third dynasty, and the predecessor of Cheops. At no epoch, says M.
-Mariette, did Egypt produce portraits more speaking, though they want
-the breadth of style of the statue in wood—of which more anon. But it
-is as much in an ethnographic as an art view that these statues are
-important. If the Egyptian race at that epoch was of the type offered
-by these portraits, it resembled in nothing the race which inhabited the
-north of Egypt not many years after Snéfrou. To comprehend the problem
-here presented we have only to compare the features of these statues
-with those of others in this collection belonging to the fourth and
-fifth dynasties.
-
-The best work of art in the Museum is the statue of Chephron, the
-builder of the second pyramid. “The epoch of Chephron,” says M.
-Mariette, “corresponding to the third reign of the fourth dynasty of
-Manetho, our statue is not less than six thousand years old.” It is
-a life-size sitting figure, executed in red granite. We admire its
-tranquil majesty, we marvel at the close study of nature in the moulding
-of the breast and limbs, we confess the skill that could produce an
-effect so fine in such intractable material. It seems as if Egyptian art
-were about to burst its trammels. But it never did; it never exceeded
-this cleverness; on the contrary it constantly fell away from it.
-
-The most interesting statue to us, and perhaps the oldest image in
-Egypt, and, if so, in the world, is the Wooden Man, which was found at
-Memphis. This image, one metre and ten centimetres high, stands erect,
-holding a staff. The figure is full of life, the pose expresses vigor,
-action, pride, the head, round in form, indicates intellect. The eyes
-are crystal, in a setting of bronze, giving a startling look of life to
-the regard. It is no doubt a portrait. “There is nothing more striking,”
-says its discoverer, “than this image, in a manner living, of a person
-who has been dead six thousand years.” He must have been a man of mark,
-and a citizen of a state well-civilized; this is not the portrait of
-a barbarian, nor was it carved by a rude artist. Few artists, I think,
-have lived since, who could impart more vitality to wood.
-
-And if the date assigned to this statue is correct, sculpture in
-Egypt attained its maximum of development six thousand years ago. This
-conclusion will be resisted by many, and on different grounds. I heard
-a clergyman of the Church of England say to his comrade, as they were
-looking at this figure:—
-
-“It's all nonsense; six thousand years! It couldn't be. That's before
-the creation of man.”
-
-“Well,” said the other, irreverently, “perhaps this was the model.”
-
-This museum is for the historian, the archaeologist, not for the artist,
-except in his study of the history of art. What Egypt had to impart
-to the world of art was given thousands of years ago—intimations,
-suggestions, outlines that, in freer circumstances, expanded into works
-of immortal beauty. The highest beauty, that last touch of genius, that
-creative inspiration which is genius and not mere talent, Egyptian art
-never attained. It achieved wonders; they are all mediocre wonders;
-miracles of talent. The architecture profoundly impresses, almost
-crushes one; it never touches the highest in the soul, it never charms,
-it never satisfies.
-
-The total impression upon myself of this ancient architecture and this
-plastic art is a melancholy one. And I think this is not altogether due
-to its monotony. The Egyptian art is said to be sui generis; it has a
-character that is instantly recognized; whenever and wherever we see a
-specimen of it, we say without fear of mistake, “that is Egyptian.” We
-are as sure of it as we are of a piece of Greek work of the best age,
-perhaps surer. Is Egyptian art, then, elevated to the dignity of a type,
-of itself? Is it so to be studied, as something which has flowered into
-a perfection of its kind? I know we are accustomed to look at it as
-if it were, and to set it apart; in short, I have heard it judged
-absolutely, as if it were a rule to itself. I cannot bring myself so to
-look at it. All art is one. We recognize peculiarities of an age or of a
-people; but there is only one absolute standard; to that touchstone all
-must come.
-
-It seems to me then that the melancholy impression produced by Egyptian
-art is not alone from its monotony, its rigidity, its stiff formality,
-but it is because we recognize in it an arrested development. It is
-archaic. The peculiarity of it is that it always remained archaic.
-We have seen specimens of the earliest Etruscan figure-drawing, Gen.
-Cesnola found in Cyprus Phoenician work, and we have statues of an
-earlier period of Greek sculpture, all of which more or less resemble
-Egyptian art. The latter are the beginnings of a consummate development.
-Egypt stopped at the beginnings. And we have the sad spectacle of an
-archaic art, not growing, but elaborated into a fixed type and adhered
-to as if it were perfection. In some of the figures I have spoken of in
-this museum, you can find that art was about to emancipate itself. In
-all later works you see no such effort, no such tendency, no such
-hope. It had been abandoned. By and by impulse died out entirely. For
-thousands of years the Egyptians worked at perfecting the mediocre.
-Many attribute this remote and total repression to religious influence.
-Something of the same sort may be seen in the paintings of saints in
-the Greek chambers of the East to-day; the type of which is that of the
-Byzantine period. Are we to attribute a like arrest of development in
-China to the same cause?
-
-It is a theory very plausibly sustained, that the art of a people is the
-flower of its civilization, the final expression of the conditions
-of its growth and its character. In reading Mr. Taine's ingenious
-observations upon art in the Netherlands and art in Greece, we are ready
-to assent to the theory. It may be the general law of a free development
-in national life and in art. If it is, then it is not disturbed by the
-example of Egypt. Egyptian art is not the expression of the natural
-character, for its art was never developed. The Egyptians were a joyous
-race, given to mirth, to the dance, to entertainments, to the charms of
-society, a people rather gay than grave; they lived in the open air,
-in the most friendly climate in the world. The sculptures in the early
-tombs represent their life—an existence full of gaiety, grace, humor.
-This natural character is not expressed in the sombre temples, nor in
-their symbolic carvings, nor in these serious, rigid statues, whose calm
-faces look straight on as if into eternity. This art may express the
-religion of the priestly caste; when it had attained the power to
-portray the rigid expectation of immortality, the inscrutable repose of
-the Sphinx, it was arrested there, and never allowed in any respect to
-change its formality. And I cannot but believe that if it had been
-free, Egyptian art would have budded and bloomed into a grace of form in
-harmony with the character of the climate and the people.
-
-It is true that the architecture of Egypt was freer than its sculptures,
-but the whole of it together is not worth one edifice like the Greek
-temple at Pæstum. And to end, by what may seem a sweeping statement, I
-have had more pleasure from a bit of Greek work—an intaglio, or a coin
-of the best period, or the sculptures on a broken entablature—than from
-anything that Egypt ever produced in art.
-
-
-
-0461
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXXV.—ON THE WAY HOME.
-
-FOR two days after the sand-storm, it gives us pleasure to write,
-the weather was cold, raw, thoroughly unpleasant, resembling dear New
-England quite enough to make one homesick. As late as the twenty-eighth
-of March, this was. The fact may be a comfort to those who dwell in a
-region where winter takes a fresh hold in March.
-
-We broke up our establishment on the dahabeëh and moved to the hotel,
-abandoning I know not how many curiosities, antiquities and specimens,
-the possession of which had once seemed to us of the last importance. I
-shall spare you the scene at parting with our crew. It would have
-been very touching, but for the backsheesh. Some of them were faithful
-fellows to whom we were attached; some of them were graceless scamps.
-But they all received backsheesh. That is always the way. It was clearly
-understood that we should reward only the deserving, and we had again
-and again resolved not to give a piastre to certain ones of the crew.
-But, at the end, the obdurate howadji always softens; and the Egyptians
-know that he will. Egypt is full of good-for-nothings who have not only
-received presents but certificates of character from travelers whom
-they have disobliged for three months. There was, however, some
-discrimination in this case; backsheesh was distributed with some regard
-to good conduct; at the formal judgment on deck, Abd-el-Atti acted the
-part of Thoth in weighing out the portions, and my friend took the rôle
-of Osiris, receiving, vicariously for all of us, the kisses on his hand
-of the grateful crew. I shall not be misunderstood in saying that
-the faithful Soudan boy, Gohah, would have felt just as much grief in
-bidding us good-bye if he had not received a penny (the rest of the
-crew would have been inconsolable in like case); his service was always
-marked by an affectionate devotion without any thought of reward. He
-must have had a magnanimous soul to forgive us for the doses we gave him
-when he was ill during the voyage.
-
-We are waiting in Cairo professedly for the weather to become settled
-and pleasant in Syria—which does not happen, one year with another, till
-after the first of April; but we are contented, for the novelties of
-the town are inexhaustible, and we are never weary of its animation and
-picturesque movement. I suppose I should be held in low estimation if
-I said nothing concerning the baths of Cairo. It is expected of every
-traveler that he will describe them, or one at least—one is usually
-sufficient. Indeed when I have read these descriptions, I have wondered
-how the writers lived to tell their story. When a person has been for
-hours roasted and stifled, and had all his bones broken, you could
-not reasonably expect him to write so powerfully of the bath as many
-travelers write who are so treated. I think these bath descriptions are
-among the marvels of Oriental literature; Mr. Longfellow says of the
-Roman Catholic system, that it is a religion of the deepest dungeons and
-the highest towers; the Oriental bath (in literature) is like this; the
-unwashed infidel is first plunged in a gulf of dark despair, and then he
-is elevated to a physical bliss that is ecstatic. The story is too long
-at each end.
-
-I had experience of several different baths in Cairo, and I invariably
-found them less vigorous, that is milder in treatment, than the Turkish
-baths of New York or of Germany. With the Orientals the bath is a
-luxury, a thing to be enjoyed, and not an affair of extreme shocks and
-brutal surprises. In the bath itself there is never the excessive heat
-that I have experienced in such baths in New York, nor the sudden change
-of temperature in water, nor the vigorous manipulation. The Cairo bath,
-in my experience, is gentle, moderate, enjoyable. The heat of the rooms
-is never excessive, the air is very moist, and water flows abundantly
-over the marble floors; the attendants are apt to be too lazy to
-maltreat the bather, and perhaps err in gentleness. You are never
-roasted in a dry air and then plunged suddenly into cold water. I do not
-wonder that the Orientals are fond of their bath. The baths abound,
-for men and for women, and the natives pay a very small sum for the
-privilege of using them. Women make up parties, and spend a good part
-of the day in a bath; having an entertainment there sometimes, and a
-frolic. It is said that mothers sometimes choose wives for their sons
-from girls they see at the baths. Some of them are used by men in the
-forenoon and by women in the afternoon, and I have seen a great crowd
-of veiled women waiting at the door at noon. There must be over
-seventy-five of these public baths in Cairo.
-
-As the harem had not yet gone over to the Gezeereh palace, we took the
-opportunity to visit it. This palace was built by the Khedive, on what
-was the island of Gezeereh, when a branch of the Nile was suffered
-to run to the west of its present area. The ground is now the seat
-of gardens, and of the most interesting botanical and horticultural
-experiments on the part of the Khedive, under charge of competent
-scientific men. A botanist or an arboriculturist would find material
-in the nurseries for long study. I was chiefly interested (since I half
-believe in the malevolence of some plants) in a sort of murderous East
-Indian cane, which grows about fifteen to twenty feet high, and so
-rapidly that (we were told) it attains its growth in a day or two. At
-any rate, it thrusts up its stalks so vigorously and rapidly that Indian
-tyrants have employed it to execute criminals. The victim is bound to
-the ground over a bed of this cane at night, and in the morning it has
-grown up through his body. We need such a vengeful vegetable as this in
-our country, to plant round the edges of our city gardens.
-
-The grounds about the palace are prettily, but formally laid out in
-flower-gardens, with fountains and a kiosk in the style of the Alhambra.
-Near by is a hot-house, with one of the best collections of orchids
-in the world; and not far off is the zoological garden, containing a
-menagerie of African birds and beasts, very well arranged and said to be
-nearly complete.
-
-The palace is a square building of iron and stucco, the light pillars
-and piazzas painted in Saracenic designs and Persian colors, but the
-whole rather dingy, and beginning to be shabby. Inside it is at once a
-showy and a comfortable palace, and much better than we expected to see
-in Egypt; the carpenter and mason work are, however, badly done, as if
-the Khedive had been swindled by sharp Europeans; it is full of rich and
-costly furniture. The rooms are large and effective, and we saw a good
-deal of splendor in hangings and curtains, especially in the apartments
-fitted up for the occupation of the Empress Eugénie. It is wonderful, by
-the way, with what interest people look at a bed in which an Empress
-has slept; and we may add awe, for it is usually a broad, high and
-awful place of repose. Scattered about the rooms are, in defiance of
-the Prophet's religion, several paintings, all inferior, and a few busts
-(some of the Khedive) and other pieces of statuary. The place of honor
-is given to an American subject, although the group was executed by an
-Italian artist. It stands upon the first landing of the great staircase.
-An impish-looking young Jupiter is seated on top of a chimney, below
-which is the suggestion of a house-roof. Above his head is the point of
-a lightning-rod. The celestial electrician is discharging a bolt into
-the rod, which is supposed to pass harmless over the roof below.
-Upon the pedestal is a medallion, the head of Benjamin Franklin, and
-encircling it, the legend:—Eripuit coelo fulmen. 1790. The group looks
-better than you would imagine from the description.
-
-Beyond the garden is the harem-building, which was undergoing a thorough
-renovation and refurnishing, in the most gaudy French style—such being
-the wish of the ladies who occupy it. They are eager to discard the
-beautiful Moorish designs which once covered the walls and to substitute
-French decoration. The dormitory portions consist of passages with rooms
-on each side, very much like a young ladies' boarding-school; the rooms
-are large enough to accommodate three or four occupants. While we were
-leisurely strolling through the house, we noticed a great flurry and
-scurry in the building, and the attendants came to us in a panic,
-and made desperate efforts to hurry us out of the building by a
-side-entrance, giving signs of woe and destruction to themselves if we
-did not flee. The Khedive had arrived, on horseback, and unexpectedly,
-to inspect his domestic hearths.
-
-We rode, one sparkling morning, after a night of heavy rain, to
-Heliopolis; there was no mud, however, the rain having served to beat
-the sand firm. Heliopolis is the On of the Bible, and in the time of
-Herodotus, its inhabitants were esteemed the most learned in history of
-all the Egyptians. The father-in-law of Joseph was a priest there, and
-there Moses and Plato both learned wisdom. The road is excellent and
-planted most of the distance with acacia trees; there are extensive
-gardens on either hand, plantations of trees, broad fields under
-cultivation, and all the way the air was full of the odor of flowers,
-blossoms of lemon and orange. In luxuriance and riant vegetation, it
-seemed an Oriental paradise. And the whole of this beautiful land of
-verdure, covered now with plantations so valuable, was a sand-desert as
-late as 1869. The water of the Nile alone has changed the desert into a
-garden.
-
-On the way we passed the race-course belonging to the Khedive, an
-observatory, and the old palace of Abbas Pasha, now in process of
-demolition, the foundations being bad, like his own. It is said that
-the favorite wife of this hated tyrant, who was a Bedawee girl of rank,
-always preferred to live on the desert, and in a tent rather than a
-palace. Here at any rate, on the sand, lived Abbas Pasha, in hourly fear
-of assassination by his enemies. It was not difficult to conjure up the
-cowering figure, hiding in the recesses of this lonely palace, listening
-for the sound of horses' hoofs coming on the city road, and ready to
-mount a swift dromedary, which was kept saddled night and day in the
-stable, and flee into the desert lor Bedaween protection.
-
-At Mataréëh, we turned into a garden to visit the famous Sycamore tree,
-under which the Virgin sat to rest, in the time of the flight of the
-Holy Family. It is a large, scrubby-looking tree, probably two hundred
-years old. I wonder that it does not give up the ghost, for every inch
-of its bark, even to the small limbs, is cut with names. The Copt, who
-owns it, to prevent its destruction, has put a fence about it; and that
-also is covered all over. I looked in vain for the name of “Joseph”; but
-could find it neither on the fence nor on the tree.
-
-At Heliopolis one can work up any number of reflections; but all he can
-see is the obelisk, which is sunken somewhat in the ground. It is more
-correct, however, to say that the ground about it, and the whole site
-of the former town and Temple of the Sun, have risen many feet since the
-beginning of the Christian Era. This is the oldest obelisk in Egypt, and
-bears the cartouche of Amenemhe I., the successor of Osirtasen I.—about
-three thousand b. c., according to Mariette; Wilkinson and Mariette are
-only one thousand years apart, on this date of this monument. The wasps
-or bees have filled up the lettering on one side, and given it the
-appearance of being plastered with mud. There was no place for us to sit
-down and meditate, and having stood, surrounded by a swarm of the latest
-children of the sun, and looked at the remains as long as etiquette
-required, without a single historical tremor, we mounted and rode
-joyfully city-ward between the lemon hedges.
-
-In this Spring-time, late in the afternoon, the fashionable drive out
-the Shoobra road, under the arches of sycamore trees, is more thronged
-than in winter even. Handsome carriages appear and now and then a pair
-of blooded Arab horses. There are two lines of vehicles extending for a
-mile or so, the one going out and the other returning, and the round
-of the promenade continues long enough for everybody to see everybody.
-Conspicuous always are the neat two-horse cabriolets, lined with gay
-silks and belonging to the royal harem; outriders are in advance, and
-eunuchs behind, and within each are two fair and painted Circassians,
-shining in their thin white veils, looking from the windows, eager to
-see the world, and not averse to be seen by it. The veil has become with
-them, as it is in Constantinople, a mere pretext and a heightener of
-beauty. We saw by chance one day some of these birds of paradise abroad
-in the Shoobra Garden—and live to speak of it.
-
-The Shoobra palace and its harem, hidden by a high wall, were built
-by Mohammed Ali; he also laid out the celebrated garden; and the
-establishment was in his day no doubt the handsomest in the East. The
-garden is still rich in rare trees, fruit-trees native and exotic,
-shrubs, and flowers, but fallen into a too-common Oriental decay.
-Instead of keeping up this fine place the Khedive builds a new one.
-These Oriental despots erect costly and showy palaces, in a manner that
-invites decay, and their successors build new ones, as people get new
-suits of clothes instead of wearing the garments of their fathers.
-
-In the midst of the garden is a singular summer-palace, built upon
-terraces and hidden by trees; but the great attraction is the immense
-Kiosk, the most characteristic Oriental building I have seen, and a very
-good specimen of the costly and yet cheap magnificence of the Orient.
-It is a large square pavilion, the center of which is a little lake, but
-large enough for boats, and it has an orchestral platform in the
-middle; the verandah about this is supported on marble pillars and has a
-highly-decorated ceiling; carvings in marble abound; and in the corners
-are apartments decorated in the height of barbaric splendor.
-
-The pipes are still in place which conveyed gas to every corner
-and outline of this bizarre edifice. I should like to have seen it
-illuminated on a summer night when the air was heavy with the garden
-perfumes. I should like to have seen it then thronged with the dark-eyed
-girls of the North, in their fleecy splendors of drapery, sailing like
-water-nymphs in these fairy boats, flashing their diamonds in the mirror
-of this pool, dancing down the marble floor to the music of soft
-drums and flutes that beat from the orchestral platform hidden by the
-water-lilies. Such a vision is not permitted to an infidel. But on such
-a night old Mohammed Ali might have been excused if he thought he was
-already in El Genneh, in the company of the girls of Paradise, “whose
-eyes will be very large and entirely black, and whose stature will be
-proportioned to that of the men, which will be the height of a tall
-palm-tree,” or about sixty feet and that he was entertained in “a tent
-erected for him of pearls, jacinths, and emeralds, of a very large
-extent.”
-
-While we were lounging in this place of melancholy gaiety, which in the
-sunlight bears something the aspect of a tawdry watering-place when the
-season is over, several harem carriages drove to the entrance: but the
-eunuchs seeing that unbelievers were in the kiosk would not permit
-the ladies to descend, and the cortege went on and disappeared in the
-shrubbery. The attendants invited us to leave. While we were still
-near the kiosk the carriages came round again, and the ladies began to
-alight. The attendants in the garden were now quite beside themselves,
-and endeavored to keep our eyes from beholding, and to hustle us down a
-side-path.
-
-It was in vain that we said to them that we were not afraid, that we
-were accustomed to see ladies walk in gardens, and that it couldn't
-possibly harm us. They persisted in misunderstanding us, and piteously
-begged us to turn away and flee. The ladies were already out of the
-carriages, veils withdrawn, and beginning to enjoy rural life in the
-garden. They seemed to have no more fear than we. The horses of the
-out-riders were led down our path; superb animals, and we stopped to
-admire them. The harem ladies, rather over-dressed for a promenade, were
-in full attire of soft silks, blue and pink, in delicate shades, and
-really made a pretty appearance amid the green. It seemed impossible
-that it could be wrong to look at them. The attendants couldn't deny
-that the horses were beautiful, but they regarded our admiration of them
-as inopportune. They seemed to fear we might look under, or over, or
-around the horses, towards that forbidden sight by the kiosk. It was
-useless for us to enquire the age and the breed of the horses. Our
-efforts to gain information only added to the agony of the gardeners.
-They wrung their hands, they tried to face us about, they ran hither and
-thither, and it was not till we were out of sight of the odalisques that
-they recovered any calmness and began to cull flowers for us, and to
-produce some Yusef Effendis, as a sign of amity and willingness to
-accept a few piastres.
-
-The last day of March has come. It is time to depart. Even the harem
-will soon be going out of town. We have remained in the city long enough
-to imbibe its atmosphere; not long enough to wear out its strangeness,
-nor to become familiar with all objects of interest. And we pack our
-trunks with reluctance, in the belief that we are leaving the most
-thoroughly Oriental and interesting city in all the East.
-
-
-
-0469
-
-
-
-0470
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXXVI.—BY THE RED SEA.
-
-A GENTLEMAN started from Cairo a few days before us, with the avowed
-purpose of following in the track of the Children of Israel and viewing
-the exact point where they crossed the Red Sea. I have no doubt that
-he was successful. So many routes have been laid out for the Children
-across the Isthmus, that one can scarcely fail to fall into one of them.
-Our purpose was merely to see Suez and the famous Sea, and the great
-canal of M. Lesseps; not doubting, however, that when we looked over the
-ground we should decide where the Exodus must have taken place.
-
-The old direct railway to Suez is abandoned; the present route is by
-Zagazeeg and Ismailia—a tedious journey, requiring a day. The ride
-is wearisome, for the country is flat and presents nothing new to one
-familiar with Egyptian landscapes. The first part of the journey is,
-however, enlivened by the company of the canal of Fresh Water, and
-by the bright verdure of the plain which the canal produces. And this
-luxuriant vegetation continues until you come to the still unreclaimed
-desert of the Land of Goshen. Now that water can be supplied it only
-needs people to make this Land as fat as it was in the days of the
-Israelites.
-
-Some twenty miles from Cairo we pass near the so-called Mound of the
-Jew, believed to be the ruins of the city of Orion and the temple
-built by the high priest Onias in the reign of Ptolemy Philometer and
-Cleopatra, as described by Josephus. The temple was after the style of
-that at Jerusalem. This Jewish settlement was made upon old Egyptian
-ruins; in 1870 the remains of a splendid temple of the time of Rameses
-II. were laid open. The special interest to Biblical scholars of this
-Jewish colony here, which multiplied itself and spread over considerable
-territory, is that its establishment fulfilled a prophesy of Isaiah
-(xix, 19, etc.); and Onias urged this prophesy, in his letter to the
-Ptolemy, asking permission to purge the remains of the heathen temple
-in the name of Heliopolis and to erect there a temple to Almighty God.
-Ptolemy and Cleopatra replied that they wondered Onias should desire to
-build a temple in a place so unclean and so full of sacred animals, but
-since Isaiah foretold it, he had leave to do so. We saw nothing of this
-ancient and once flourishing seat of Jewish enterprise, save some sharp
-mounds in the distance.
-
-Nor did we see more of the more famous city of Bubastis, where was the
-temple to Pasht, the cat or lioness-headed deity (whom Herodotus called
-Diana), the avenger of crimes. According to Herodotus, all the cats of
-Egypt were embalmed and buried in Bubastis. This city was the residence
-of the Pharaoh Sheshonk I. (the Shishak of the Bible) who sacked
-Jerusalem, and it was at that time the capital of Egypt. It was from
-here, on the Bubastic (or Pelusiac) branch of the Nile, that the ancient
-canal was dug to connect with the Heroôpolite Gulf (now the Bitter
-Lakes), the northernmost arm of the Red Sea at that date; and the city
-was then, by that fresh-water canal, on the water-way between the Red
-Sea and the Mediterranean. But before the Christian era the Red Sea had
-retired to about its present limit (the Bitter Lakes being cut off from
-it), and the Bubastic branch of the Nile was nearly dried up. Bubastis
-and all this region are now fed by the canal which leaves the Nile
-at Cairo and runs to Ismailia, and thence to Suez. It is a startling
-thought that all this portion of the Delta, east, and south, and the
-Isthmus depend for life upon the keeper of the gate of the canal at
-Cairo. If we were to leave the train here and stumble about in the
-mounds of Bubastis, we should find only fragments of walls, blocks of
-granite, and a few sculptures.
-
-At the Zagazeeg station, where there is a junction with the Alexandria
-and Cairo main line, we wait some time, and find very pleasant the
-garden and the picturesque refreshment-house in which our minds are
-suddenly diverted from ancient Egypt by a large display of East Indian
-and Japanese curiosities on sale.
-
-From this we follow, substantially, the route of the canal, running by
-villages and fertile districts, and again on the desert's edge. We
-come upon no traces of the Israelites until we reach Masamah, which is
-supposed to be the site of Rameses, one of the treasure-cities mentioned
-in the Bible, and the probable starting-point of the Jews in their
-flight. This is about the center of the Land of Goshen, and Rameses may
-have been the chief city of the district.
-
-If I knew exactly the route the Israelites took, I should not dare to
-disclose it; for this has become, I do not know why, a tender subject.
-But it seems to me that if the Jews were assembled here from the Delta
-for a start, a very natural way of exit would have been down the Wadee
-to the head of the Heroopolite Gulf, the route of the present and the
-ancient canal. And if it should be ascertained beyond a doubt that Sethi
-I. built as well as planned such a canal, the argument of probability
-would be greatly strengthened that Moses led his vast host along the
-canal. Any dragoman to-day, desiring to cross the Isthmus and be beyond
-pursuit as soon as possible, supposing the condition of the country now
-as it was at the time of the Exodus, would strike for the shortest line.
-And it is reasonable to suppose that Moses would lead his charge to
-a point where the crossing of the sea, or one of its arms, was more
-feasible than it is anywhere below Suez; unless we are to start with the
-supposition that Moses expected a miracle, and led the Jews to a spot
-where, apparently, escape for them was hopeless if the Egyptian pursued.
-It is believed that at the time of the Exodus there was a communication
-between the Red Sea and the Bitter Lakes—formerly called Heroopolite
-Gulf—which it was the effort of many rulers to keep open by a canal.
-Very anciently, it is evident, the Red Sea extended to and included
-these lakes; and it is not improbable that, in the time of Moses, the
-water was, by certain winds, forced up to the north into these lakes:
-and again, that, crossings could easily be made, the wind being
-favorable, at several points between what is now Suez and the head of
-the Bitter Lakes. Many scholars make Cha-loof, about twelve miles above
-Suez the point of passage.
-
-We only touch the outskirts of Ismailia in going on to Suez. Below, we
-pass the extensive plantation and garden of the Khedive, in which he
-has over fifty thousand young trees in a nursery. This spot would be
-absolute desert but for the Nile-water let in upon it. All day our
-astonishment has increased at the irrigation projects of the Viceroy,
-and his herculean efforts to reclaim a vast land of desert; the
-enlarging of the Sweet-Water Canal, and the gigantic experiments in
-arboriculture and agriculture.
-
-We noticed that the Egyptian laborers at work with the wheelbarrows
-(instead of the baskets formerly used by them) on the enlargement of
-the canal, were under French contractors, for the most part. The men
-are paid from a franc to a franc and a quarter per day; but they told
-us that it was very difficult to get laborers, so many men being drafted
-for the army.
-
-At dark we come in sight of the Bitter Lakes, through which the canal is
-dredged; we can see vessels of various sorts and steamers moving across
-them in one line; and we see nothing more until we reach Suez. The train
-stops “at nowhere,” in the sand, outside the town. It is the only train
-of the day, but there are neither carriages nor donkeys in waiting.
-There is an air about the station of not caring whether anyone comes or
-not. We walk a mile to the hotel, which stands close to the sea,
-with nothing but a person's good sense to prevent his walking off the
-platform into the water. In the night the water looked like the sand,
-and it was only by accident that we did not step off into it; however,
-it turned out to be only a couple of feet deep.
-
-The hotel, which I suppose is rather Indian than Egyptian, is built
-round a pleasant court; corridors and latticed doors are suggestive
-of hot nights; the servants and waiters are all Hindoos; we have come
-suddenly in contact with another type of Oriental life.
-
-Coming down from Ismailia, a friend who was with us had no ticket.
-It was a case beyond the conductor's experience; he utterly refused
-backsheesh and he insisted on having a ticket. At last he accepted ten
-francs and went away. Looking in the official guide we found that the
-fare was nine francs and a quarter. The conductor, thinking he had
-opened a guileless source of supply, soon returned and demanded two
-francs more. My friend countermined him by asking the return of the
-seventy-five centimes overpaid. An amusing pantomime ensued. At length
-the conductor lowered his demand to one franc, and, not getting that,
-he begged for backsheesh. I was sorry to have my high ideal of a
-railway-conductor, formed in America, lowered in this manner.
-
-We are impatient above all things for a sight of the Red Sea. But in the
-brilliant starlight, all that appears is smooth water and a soft picture
-of vessels at anchor or aground looming up in the night. Suez, seen by
-early daylight, is a scattered city of some ten thousand inhabitants,
-too modern and too cheap in its buildings to be interesting. There is
-only a little section of it, where we find native bazaars, twisting
-streets, overhanging balconies, and latticed windows. It lies on a sand
-peninsula, and the sand-drifts close all about it, ready to lick it up,
-if the canal of fresh water should fail.
-
-The only elevation near is a large mound, which may be the site of the
-fort of ancient Clysma, or Gholzim as it was afterwards called—the city
-believed to be the predecessor of Suez. Upon this mound an American has
-built, and presented to the Khedive, a sort of châlet of wood—the whole
-transported from America ready-made, one of those white, painfully
-unpicturesque things with two little gables at the end, for which our
-country is justly distinguished. Cheap. But then it is of wood, and wood
-is one of the dearest things in Egypt. I only hope the fashion of it may
-not spread in this land of grace.
-
-It was a delightful morning, the wind west and fresh. From this hillock
-we commanded one of the most interesting prospects in the world. We
-looked over the whole desert-flat on which lies the little town, and
-which is pierced by an arm of the Gulf that narrows into the Suez canal;
-we looked upon two miles of curved causeway which runs down to the
-docks and the anchoring place of the steam-vessels—there cluster the
-dry-docks, the dredges, the canal-offices, and just beyond the shipping
-lay; in the distance we saw the Red Sea, like a long lake, deep-green or
-deep-blue, according to the light, and very sparkling; to the right was
-the reddish limestone range called Gebel Attâka—a continuation of the
-Mokattam; on the left there was a great sweep of desert, and far off—one
-hundred and twenty miles as the crow flies—the broken Sinai range of
-mountains, in which we tried to believe we could distinguish the sacred
-peak itself.
-
-I asked an intelligent railway official, a Moslem, who acted as guide
-that morning, “What is the local opinion as to the place where the
-Children of Israel crossed over?”
-
-“The French,” he replied, “are trying to make it out that it was at
-Chaloof, about twenty miles above here, where there is little water.
-But we think it was at a point twenty miles below here; we must put it
-there, or there wouldn't be any miracle. You see that point, away to the
-right? That's the spot. There is a wady comes down the side.”
-
-“But where do the Christians think the crossing was?”
-
-“Oh, here at Suez; there, about at this end of Gebel Attâka.” The
-Moslems' faith in the miraculous deliverance is disturbed by no
-speculations. Instead of trying to explain the miracle by the use of
-natural causes, and seeking for a crossing where the water might at one
-time have been heaped and at another forced away by the winds, their
-only care is to fix the passage where the miracle would be most
-striking.
-
-After breakfast and preparations to visit Moses' Well, we rode down the
-causeway to the made land where the docks are. The earth dumped here by
-the dredging-machines (and which now forms solid building ground), is
-full of a great variety of small sea-shells; the walls that enclose it
-are of rocks conglomerate of shells. The ground all about gives evidence
-of salt we found shallow pools evaporated so that a thick crust of
-excellent salt had formed on the bottom and at the sides. The water in
-them was of a decidedly rosy color, caused by some infusorial growth.
-The name, Red Sea, however, has nothing to do with this appearance, I
-believe.
-
-We looked at the pretty houses and gardens, the dry-dock and the shops,
-and the world-famous dredges, without which the Suez Canal would very
-likely never have been finished. These enormous machines have arms or
-ducts, an iron spout of semi-elliptical form, two hundred and thirty
-feet long, by means of which the dredger working in the center of the
-channel could discharge its contents over the bank. One of them removed,
-on an average, eighty thousand cubit yards of soil a month. A faint idea
-may be had of this gigantic work by the amount of excavation here, done
-by the dredgers, in one month,—two million seven hundred and sixty-three
-thousand cubic yards. M. de Lesseps says that if this soil were “laid
-out between the Arc de Triomphe and the Place de la Concorde, it would
-cover the entire length and breadth of the Champs Elysées, a distance
-equal to a mile and a quarter, and reach to the top of the trees on
-either side.”
-
-At the pier our felucca met us and we embarked and sailed into the mouth
-of the canal. The channel leading to it is not wide, and is buoyed at
-short intervals. The mouth of the canal is about nine hundred feet wide
-and twenty-seven deep, * and it is guarded on the east by a long stone
-mole projected from the Asiatic shore. There is considerable ebb and
-flow of the tide in this part of the canal and as far as the Bitter
-Lakes, where it is nearly all lost in the expanse, being only slightly
-felt at Lake Timsah, from which point there is a slight uniform current
-to the Mediterranean.
-
-* Total length of Canal, 100 miles. Width of water-line, where banks are
-low, 328 feet; in deep cuttings, 190; width at base, 2; depth, 26.
-
-From the canal entrance we saw great ships and steamboats in the
-distance, across the desert, and apparently sailing in the desert; but
-we did not follow them; we turned, and crossed to the Asiatic shore.
-We had brought donkeys with us, and were soon mounted for a scrambling
-gallop of an hour and a half, down the coast, over level and hard sand,
-to Moses' Well. The air was delicious and the ride exhilarating. I tried
-to get from our pleasant Arab guide, who had a habit of closing one eye,
-what he thought of the place of the passage.
-
-“Where did the Children of Israel cross?”
-
-“Over dat mountain.”
-
-“Yes, but where did they cross the Sea?”
-
-“You know Moses?”
-
-“Yes, I know Moses. Where did he cross?”
-
-“Well,” closing his eye very tight, “him long time ago, not now. He
-cross way down there, can't see him from here.”
-
-On the way we passed the white tents of the Quarantine Station, on
-our right by the shore, where the caravan of Mecca pilgrims had been
-detained. We hoped to see it: but it had just set out on its desert
-march further inland. It was seen from Suez all day, straggling along
-in detachments, and at night camped about two miles north of the town.
-However, we found a dozen or two of the pilgrims, dirty, ragged, burned
-by the sun, and hungry, lying outside the enclosure at the wells.
-
-The Wells of Moses (or Ain Moosa, “Moses' Well,” in the Arabic) are
-distant a mile or more from the low shore, and our first warning of
-nearness to them was the appearance of some palms in a sandy depression.
-The attempt at vegetation is rather sickly, and the spot is but a
-desolate one. It is the beginning of the route to Mount Sinai, however,
-and is no doubt a very welcome sight to returning pilgrims. Contrast is
-everything; it is contrast with its surroundings that has given Damascus
-its renown.
-
-There are half a dozen of these wells, three of which are some fifteen
-to twenty feet across, and are in size and appearance very respectable
-frog-ponds. One of them is walled with masonry, evidently ancient, and
-two shadoofs draw water from it for the garden, an enclosure of an acre,
-fenced with palm-matting. It contains some palms and shrubs and a few
-vegetables. Here also is a half-deserted house, that may once have been
-a hotel and is now a miserable trattoria without beds. It is in charge
-of an Arab who lives in a hut at the other side of the garden, with
-his wife and a person who bore the unmistakable signs of being a
-mother-in-law. The Arab made coffee for us, and furnished us a table,
-on which we spread our luncheon under the verandah. He also gave us
-Nile-water which had been brought from Suez in a cask on camel-back;
-and his whole charge was only one bob (a shilling) each. I mention the
-charge, because it is disenchanting in a spot of so much romance to pay
-for your entertainment in “bobs.”
-
-We had come, upon what I may truly call a sentimental pilgrimage, on
-account of Moses and the Children of Israel. If they crossed over from
-Mount Attâka yonder, then this might be the very spot where Miriam sang
-the song of triumph. If they crossed at Chaloof, twenty miles above, as
-it is more probable they did, then this might be the Marah whose bitter
-waters Moses sweetened for the time being; the Arabs have a tradition
-that Moses brought up water here by striking the ground with his stick.
-At all events, the name of Moses is forever attached to this oasis, and
-it did not seem exactly right that the best well should be owned by an
-Arab who makes it the means of accumulating bobs. One room of the house
-was occupied by three Jews, traders, who establish themselves here
-a part of the year in order to buy, from the Bedaween, turquoise and
-antiquities which are found at Mount Sinai. I saw them sorting over a
-peck of rough and inferior turquoise, which would speedily be forwarded
-to Constantinople, Paris, and London. One of them sold me a small
-intaglio, which was no doubt of old Greek workmanship, and which he
-swore was picked up at Mount Sinai. There is nothing I long more to
-know, sometimes, than the history of wandering coins and intaglios which
-we see in the Orient.
-
-It is not easy to reckon the value of a tradition, nor of a traditional
-spot like this in which all the world feels a certain proprietorship. It
-seemed to us, however, that it would be worth while to own this famous
-Asiatic well; and we asked the owner what he would take for it. He
-offered to sell the ranche for one hundred and fifty guineas; this,
-however, would not include the camel,—for that he wanted ten pounds
-in addition; but it did include a young gazelle, two goats, a
-brownish-yellow dog, and a cat the color of the sand. And it also
-comprised, in the plantation, a few palms, some junipers, of the
-Biblical sort, the acacia or “shittah” tree of the Bible, and, best of
-all, the large shrub called the tamarisk, which exudes during two
-months in the year a sweet gummy substance that was the “manna” of the
-Israelites.
-
-Mother-in-law wore a veil, a string of silver-gilt imitation coins,
-several large silver bracelets, and a necklace upon which was sewed a
-string of small Arabic gold coins. As this person more than anyone else
-there represented Miriam,—not being too young,—we persuaded her to sell
-us some of the coins as mementoes of our visit. We could not determine,
-as I said, whether this spot is associated with Miriam or whether it is
-the Marah of bitter waters; consequently it was difficult to say what
-our emotions should be. However, we decided to let them be expressed
-by the inscription that a Frenchman had written on a wall of the house,
-which reads:—Le cour me palpitait comme un amant qui revoit sa bien
-aimée.
-
-There are three other wells enclosed, but unwalled, the largest of
-which—and it has near it a sort of loggia or open shed where some dirty
-pilgrims were reposing—is an unsightly pond full of a green growth of
-algæ. In this enclosure, which contains two or three acres, are three
-smaller wells, or natural springs, as they all are, and a considerable
-thicket of palms and tamarisks. The larger well is the stronger in taste
-and most bitter, containing more magnesia. The water in all is flat
-and unpleasant, and not enlivened by carbonic acid gas, although we saw
-bubbles coming to the surface constantly. If the spring we first visited
-could be aerated, it would not be worse to drink than many waters that
-are sought after. The donkeys liked it; but a donkey likes any thing.
-About these feeble plantations the sand drifts from all directions, and
-it would soon cover them but for the protecting fence. The way towards
-Sinai winds through shifting sand-mounds, and is not inviting.
-
-The desert over which we return is dotted frequently with tufts of a
-flat-leafed, pale-green plant, which seem to thrive without moisture;
-and in the distance this vegetation presents an appearance of large
-shrub growth, greatly relieving the barrenness of the sand-plain. We had
-some fine effects of mirage, blue lakes and hazy banks, as of streams
-afar off. When we reached an elevation that commanded a view of the
-indistinct Sinai range, we asked the guide to point out to us the “rosy
-peaks of Mount Sinai” which Murray sees from Suez when he is there. The
-guide refused to believe that you can see a rosy peak one hundred
-and twenty miles through the air, and confirmed the assertion of the
-inhabitants of Suez that Mount Sinai cannot be seen from there.
-
-On our return we overtook a caravan of Bedaween returning from the holy
-mount, armed with long rifles, spears, and huge swords, swinging along
-on their dromedaries,—a Colt's revolver would put the whole lot of
-braggarts to flight. One of them was a splendid specimen of manhood, and
-we had a chance to study his graceful carriage, as he ran besides us all
-the way; he had the traditional free air, a fine face and well-developed
-limbs, and his picturesque dress of light-blue and buff, somewhat in
-rags, added to his attractions. It is some solace to the traveler to
-call these fellows beggars, since he is all the time conscious that
-their natural grand manner contrasts so strongly with the uncouthness of
-his more recent and western civilization.
-
-Coming back into Suez, from this journey to another continent, we
-were stopped by two customs-officers, who insisted upon searching our
-lunch-basket, to see if we were attempting to smuggle anything from
-Asia. We told the guide to give the representative of his Highness, with
-our compliments, a hard-boiled egg.
-
-Suez itself has not many attractions. But we are much impressed at the
-hotel by the grave Hindoo waiters, who serve at table in a close-fitting
-habit, like the present extremely narrow gown worn by ladies, and
-ludicrous to our eyes accustomed to the flowing robes of the Arabs.
-They wear also, while waiting, broad-brimmed, white, cork hats, slightly
-turned up at the rim. It is like being waited on by serious genii. These
-men also act as chambermaids. Their costume is Bengalee, and would not
-be at all “style” in Bombay.
-
-Suez is reputed a healthful place, enjoying both sea and desert air,
-free from malaria, and even in summer the heat is tempered. This is what
-the natives say. The English landlady admits that it is very pleasant in
-winter, but the summer is intensely hot, especially when the Khamseen,
-or south wind, blows—always three days at a time—it is hardly endurable;
-the thermometer stands at 110° to 1140 in the shaded halls of the hotel
-round the court. It is unsafe for foreigners to stay here more than two
-years at a time; they are certain to have a fever or some disease of the
-liver.
-
-The town is very much depressed now, and has been ever since the opening
-of the canal. The great railway business fell off at once, all freight
-going by water. Hundreds of merchants, shippers and forwarders are
-out of employment. We hear the Khedive much blamed for his part in the
-canal, and people here believe that he regrets it. Egypt, they say,
-is ruined by this loss of trade; Suez is killed; Alexandria is ruined
-beyond reparation, business there is entirely stagnant. What a builder
-and a destroyer of cities has been the fluctuation of the course of the
-East India commerce!
-
-
-
-0481] \ [illustration: 0482
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXXVII.—“EASTWARD HO!”
-
-WE left Suez at eight in the morning by rail, and reached Ismailia in
-four hours, the fare—to do justice to the conductor already named—being
-fourteen francs. A part of the way the Bitter Lakes are visible, and
-we can see where the canal channel is staked out through them. Next
-we encountered the Fresh-Water Canal, and came in view of Lake Timsah,
-through which the Suez canal also flows. This was no doubt once a
-fresh-water lake, fed by water taken from the Nile at Bubastis.
-
-Ismailia is a surprise, no matter how much you have heard of it. True,
-it has something the appearance of a rectangular streeted town dropped,
-ready-made, at a railway station on a western prairie; but Ismailia
-was dropped by people of good taste. In 1860 there was nothing here but
-desert sand, not a drop of water, not a spear of vegetation. To-day
-you walk into a pretty village, of three or four thousand inhabitants,
-smiling with verdure. Trees grow along the walks; little gardens bloom
-by every cottage. Fronting the quay Mohammed Ali, which extends along
-the broad Fresh-Water Canal, are the best residences, and many of them
-have better gardens than you can find elsewhere, with few exceptions, in
-Egypt.
-
-The first house we were shown was that which had most interest for
-us—the Swiss-like châlet of M. de Lesseps; a summerish, cheerful box,
-furnished simply, but adorned with many Oriental curiosities. The garden
-which surrounds it is rich in native and exotic plants, flowers and
-fruits. On this quay are two or three barn-like, unfurnished palaces
-built hastily and cheaply by the Khedive for the entertainment of
-guests. The finest garden, however, and as interesting as any we saw
-in the East, is that belonging to M. Pierre, who has charge of the
-waterworks. In this garden can be found almost all varieties of European
-and Egyptian flowers; strawberries were just ripening. We made inquiry
-here, as we had done throughout Egypt, for the lotus, the favorite
-flower of the old Egyptians, the sacred symbol, the mythic plant, the
-feeding upon which lulls the conscience, destroys ambition, dulls the
-memory of all unpleasant things, enervates the will, and soothes one in
-a sensuous enjoyment of the day to which there is no tomorrow. It seems
-to have disappeared from Egypt with the papyrus.
-
-The lotus of the poets I fear never existed, not even in Egypt. The
-lotus represented so frequently in the sculptures, is a water-plant,
-the Nymphaea lutea, and is I suppose the plant that was once common. The
-poor used its bulb for food in times of scarcity. The Indian lotus, or
-Nelumbium, is not seen in the sculptures, though Latin writers say it
-existed in Egypt. It may have been this that had the lethean properties;
-although the modern eaters and smokers of Indian hemp appear to be the
-legitimate descendants of the lotus-eaters of the poets. However, the
-lotus whose stalks and buds gave character to a distinct architectural
-style, we enquired for in vain on the Nile. If it still grows there it
-would scarcely be visible above water in the winter. But M. Pierre has
-what he supposes to be the ancient lotus-plant; and his wife gave
-us seeds of it in the seed-vessel—a large flat-topped funnel-shaped
-receptacle, exactly the shape of the sprinkler of a watering-pot.
-Perhaps this is the plant that Herodotus calls a lily like a rose, the
-fruit of which is contained in a separate pod, that springs up from the
-root in form very like a wasp's nest; in this are many berries fit to be
-eaten.
-
-The garden adjoins the water-works, in which two powerful
-pumping-engines raise the sweet water into a stand-pipe, and send it
-forward in iron pipes fifty miles along the Suez Canal to Port Said, at
-which port there is a reservoir that will hold three days' supply. This
-stream of fresh water is the sole dependence of Port Said and all the
-intervening country.
-
-We rode out over the desert on an excellent road, lined with sickly
-acacias growing in the watered ditches, to station No 6 on the canal.
-The way lies along Lake Timsah. Upon a considerable elevation, called
-the Heights of El Guisr, is built a château for the Khedive; and from
-this you get an extensive view of the desert, of Lake Timsah and the
-Bitter Lakes. Below us was the deep cutting of the Canal. El Guisr is
-the highest point in the Isthmus, an elevated plateau six miles across
-and some sixty-five feet above the level of the sea. The famous gardens
-that flourished here during the progress of the excavation have entirely
-disappeared with the cessation of the water from Ismailia. While we were
-there an East India bound steamboat moved slowly up the canal, creating,
-of course, waves along the banks, but washing them very little, for the
-speed is limited to five miles an hour.
-
-Although the back streets of Ismailia are crude and unpicturesque, the
-whole effect of the town is pleasing; and it enjoys a climate that must
-commend it to invalids. It is dry, free from dust, and even in summer
-not too warm, for there is a breeze from the lakes by day, and the
-nights are always cooled by the desert air. Sea-bathing can be enjoyed
-there the year round. It ought to be a wholesome spot, for there is
-nothing in sight around it but sand and salt-water. The invalid who
-should go there would probably die shortly of ennui, but he would escape
-the death expected from his disease. But Ismailia is well worth seeing.
-The miracle wrought here by a slender stream of water from the distant
-Nile, is worthy the consideration of those who have the solution of the
-problem of making fertile our western sand-deserts.
-
-We ate at Suez and Ismailia what we had not tasted for several
-months—excellent fish. The fish of the Nile are nearly as good as a
-New-England sucker, grown in a muddy mill-pond. I saw fishermen angling
-in the salt canal at Ismailia, and the fish are good the whole length
-of it; they are of excellent quality even in the Bitter Lakes, which are
-much salter than the Mediterranean—in fact the bottom of these lakes is
-encrusted with salt.
-
-We took passage towards evening on the daily Egyptian pocket-boat for
-Port Said—a puffing little cigar-box of a vessel, hardly fifty feet
-long. The only accommodation for passengers was in the forward cabin,
-which is about the size of an omnibus, and into it were crammed twenty
-passengers, Greeks, Jews, Koorlanders, English clergymen, and American
-travelers, and the surly Egyptian mail-agent, who occupied a great deal
-of room, and insisted on having the windows closed. Some of us tried
-perching on the scrap of a deck, hanging our legs over the side; but it
-was bitterly cold and a strong wind drove us below. In the cabin the air
-was utterly vile; and when we succeeded in opening the hatchway for a
-moment, the draught chilled us to the bones.
-
-I do not mean to complain of all this; but I want it to appear
-that sailing on the Suez Canal, especially at night, is not a
-pleasure-excursion. It might be more endurable by day; but I do not
-know. In the hours we had of daylight, I became excessively weary of
-looking at the steep sand-slopes between which we sailed, and of hoping
-that every turn would bring us to a spot where we could see over the
-bank.
-
-At eight o'clock we stopped at Katanah for supper, and I climbed the
-bank to see if I could obtain any information about the Children of
-Israel. They are said to have crossed here. This is the highest point
-of the low hills which separate Lake Menzaleh from the interior lakes.
-Along this ridge is still the caravan-route between Egypt and Syria;
-it has been, for ages unnumbered, the great highway of commerce and of
-conquest. This way Thothmes III., the greatest of the Pharaohs and the
-real Sesostris, led his legions into Asia; and this way Cambyses came to
-repay the visit with interest.
-
-It was so dark that I could see little, but I had a historic sense of
-all this stir and movement, of the passage of armies laden with spoils,
-and of caravans from Nineveh and Damascus. And, although it was my first
-visit to the place, it seemed strange to see here a restaurant, and
-waiters hurrying about, and travelers snatching a hasty meal in the
-night on this wind-blown sand-hill. And to feel that the stream of
-travel is no more along this divide but across it! By the half-light I
-could distinguish some Bedaween loitering about; their little caravan
-had camped here, for they find it very convenient to draw water from the
-iron pipes.
-
-It was quite dark when we presently sailed into Lake Menzaleh, and we
-could see little. I only know that we held a straight course through it
-for some thirty miles to Port Said. In the daytime you can see a dreary
-expanse of morass and lake, a few little islands clad with tamarisks,
-and flocks of aquatic birds floating in the water or drawn up on the
-sand-spits in martial array—the white spoonbill, the scarlet flamingo,
-the pink pelican. It was one o'clock in the morning when we saw the
-Pharos of Port Said and sailed into the basin, amid many lights.
-
-Port Said was made out of nothing, and it is pretty good. A town of
-eight to ten thousand inhabitants, with docks, quays, squares, streets,
-shops, mosques, hospitals, public buildings; in front of our hotel is a
-garden and public square; all this fed by the iron pipe and the pump at
-Ismailia—without this there is no fresh water nearer than Damietta. It
-is a shabby city, and just now has the over-done appearance of one of
-our own western town inflations. But its history is a record of one of
-the most astonishing achievements of any age. Before there could be any
-town here it was necessary to build a standpoint for it with a dredging
-machine.
-
-Along this coast from Damietta to the gulf of Pelusium, where once
-emptied the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, is a narrow strip of sand,
-separating the Mediterranean from Lake Menzaleh; a high sea often breaks
-over it. It would have saved much in distance to have carried the canal
-to the Pelusium gulf, but the Mediterranean is shallow there many miles
-from shore. The spot on which Port Said now stands was selected for the
-entrance of the canal, because it was here that the land can be best
-approached—the Mediterranean having sufficient depth at only two miles
-from the shore. Here therefore, the dredgers began to work. The lake
-was dredged for interior basins; the strip of sand was cut through; the
-outer harbor was dredged; and the dredgings made the land for the town.
-Artificial stone was then manufactured on the spot, and of this the long
-walls, running out into the sea and protecting the harbor, the quays,
-and the lighthouses were built. We saw enormous blocks of this composite
-of sand and hydraulic lime, which weigh twenty-five tons each.
-
-It is impossible not to respect a city built by such heroic labor as
-this; but we saw enough of it in half a day. The shops are many, and the
-signs are in many languages, Greek being most frequent. I was pleased to
-read an honest one in English—“Blood-Letting and Tooth-picking.” I have
-no doubt they all would take your blood. In the streets are vagabonds,
-adventurers, merchants, travelers, of all nations; and yet you would
-not call the streets picturesque. Everything is strangely modernized and
-made uninteresting. There is, besides, no sense of permanence here. The
-traders appear to occupy their shops as if they were booths for the day.
-It is a place of transit; a spot of sand amid the waters. I have never
-been in any locality that seemed to me so nearly nowhere. A spot for
-an African bird to light on a moment on his way to Asia. But the world
-flows through here. Here lie the great vessels in the Eastern trade; all
-the Mediterranean steamers call here.
-
-The Erymanthe is taking in her last freight, and it is time for us to
-go on board. Abd-el-Atti has arrived with the baggage from Cairo. He has
-the air of one with an important errand. In the hotels, on the street,
-in the steamer, his manner is that of one who precedes an imposing
-embassy. He likes state. If he had been born under the Pharaohs he would
-have been the bearer of the flabellum before the king; and he would have
-carried it majestically, with perhaps a humorous twinkle in his eye for
-some comrade by the way. Ahman Abdallah, the faithful, is with him.
-He it was who made and brought us the early morning coffee
-to-day,—recalling the peace of those days on the Nile which now are
-in the dim past. It is ages ago since we were hunting in the ruins of
-Abydus for the tomb of Osiris. It was in another life, that delicious
-winter in Nubia, those weeks following weeks, free from care and from
-all the restlessness of this driving age.
-
-“I shouldn't wonder if you were right, Abd-el-Atti, in not wanting to
-start for Syria sooner. It was very cold on the boat last night.”
-
-“Not go in Syria before April; always find him bad. 'Member what I say
-when it rain in Cairo?—'This go to be snow in Jerusalem.' It been snow
-there last week, awful storm, nobody go on the road, travelers all stop,
-not get anywhere. So I hunderstand.”
-
-“What is the prospect for landing at Jaffa tomorrow morning?”
-
-“Do' know, be sure. We hope for the better.”
-
-We get away beyond the breakwater, as the sun goes down. The wind
-freshens, and short waves hector the long sea swell, Egypt lies low; it
-is only a line; it fades from view.
-
-
-
-
-
-End of Project Gutenberg's My Winter on the Nile, by Charles Dudley
-Warner
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-Project Gutenberg's My Winter on the Nile, by Charles Dudley Warner
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-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
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-
-Title: My Winter on the Nile
-       Eighteenth Edition
-
-Author: Charles Dudley Warner
-
-Release Date: June 1, 2016 [EBook #52212]
-Last Updated: February 24, 2018
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
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-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY WINTER ON THE NILE ***
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-
-    <div style="height: 8em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h1>
-      MY WINTER ON THE NILE
-    </h1>
-    <h2>
-      By Charles Dudley Warner
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      Eighteenth Edition
-    </h3>
-    <h4>
-      Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company
-    </h4>
-    <h3>
-      1876
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
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-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0012.jpg" alt="0012 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /> <br />
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      TO
-    </h3>
-    <h3>
-      MR. A. C. DUNHAM,
-    </h3>
-    <h3>
-      AND THE
-    </h3>
-    <h3>
-      VOYAGERS ON THE DAHABEËH &ldquo;RIP VAN WINKLE,&rdquo;
-     </h3>
-    <h3>
-      THIS
-    </h3>
-    <h3>
-      IMPERFECT RECORD OF THEIR EXPERIENCE IS
-    </h3>
-    <h3>
-      DEDICATED.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      <br /> <br />
-    </p>
-    <blockquote>
-      <p>
-        O Commander of the Faithful. Egypt is a compound of black earth and
-        green plants, between a pulverized mountain and a red sand. Along the
-        valley descends a river, on which the blessing of the Most High reposes
-        both in the evening and the morning, and which rises and falls with the
-        revolutions of the sun and moon. According to the vicissitudes of the
-        seasons, the face of the country is adorned with a silver wave, a
-        verdant emerald, and the deep yellow of a golden harvest.
-      </p>
-    </blockquote>
-    <blockquote>
-      <p>
-        From Amrou, Conqueror of Egypt, to the Khalif Omar.
-      </p>
-    </blockquote>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <b>CONTENTS</b>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> PREFATORY NOTE. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I.&mdash;AT THE GATES OF THE EAST. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II.&mdash;WITHIN THE PORTALS. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III.&mdash;EGYPT OF TO-DAY. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV.&mdash;CAIRO. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V.&mdash;IN THE BAZAAR. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI.&mdash;MOSQUES AND TOMBS. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII.&mdash;MOSLEM WORSHIP.&mdash;THE CALL
-      TO PRAYER. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII.&mdash;THE PYRAMIDS. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX.&mdash;PREPARATIONS FOR A VOYAGE. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X.&mdash;ON THE NILE. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI.&mdash;PEOPLE ON THE RIVER BANKS. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII.&mdash;SPENDING CHRISTMAS ON THE
-      NILE. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII.&mdash;SIGHTS AND SCENES ON THE
-      RIVER. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV.&mdash;MIDWINTER IN EGYPT. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV.&mdash;AMONG THE RUINS OF THEBES. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI.&mdash;HISTORY IN STONE. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII.&mdash;KARNAK. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII.&mdash;ASCENDING THE RIVER. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX.&mdash;PASSING THE CATARACT OF THE
-      NILE. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX.&mdash;ON THE BORDERS OF THE DESERT.
-      </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI&mdash;ETHIOPIA. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII.&mdash;LIFE IN THE TROPICS. WADY
-      HALFA. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII.&mdash;APPROACHING THE SECOND
-      CATARACT. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV.&mdash;GIANTS IN STONE. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV.&mdash;FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER XXVI.&mdash;MYSTERIOUS PHILÆ. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0027"> CHAPTER XXVII.&mdash;RETURNING. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0028"> CHAPTER XXVIII.&mdash;MODERN FACTS AND ANCIENT
-      MEMORIES. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0029"> CHAPTER XXIX.&mdash;THE FUTURE OF THE MUMMY'S
-      SOUL. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0030"> CHAPTER XXX.&mdash;FAREWELL TO THEBES. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0031"> CHAPTER XXXI.&mdash;LOITERING BY THE WAY. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0032"> CHAPTER XXXII.&mdash;JOTTINGS. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0033"> CHAPTER XXXIII.&mdash;THE KHEDIVE. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0034"> CHAPTER XXXIV.&mdash;THE WOODEN MAN. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0035"> CHAPTER XXXV.&mdash;ON THE WAY HOME. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0036"> CHAPTER XXXVI.&mdash;BY THE RED SEA. </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2HCH0037"> CHAPTER XXXVII.&mdash;&ldquo;EASTWARD HO!&rdquo; </a>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      PREFATORY NOTE.
-    </h2>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;My Winter on the Nile,&rdquo; and its sequel, &ldquo;In the Levant,&rdquo; which record the
-      experiences and observations of an Oriental journey, were both published
-      in 1876; but as this volume was issued only by subscription, it has never
-      reached the large public which is served by the general book trade.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is now republished and placed within the reach of those who have read
-      &ldquo;In the Levant.&rdquo; Advantage has been taken of its reissue to give it a
-      careful revision, which, however, has not essentially changed it. Since it
-      was written the Khedive of so many ambitious projects has given way to his
-      son, Tufik Pasha; but I have let stand what was written of Ismail Pasha
-      for whatever historical value it may possess. In other respects, what was
-      written of the country and the mass of the people in 1876 is true now. The
-      interest of Americans in the land of the oldest civilization has greatly
-      increased within the past few years, and literature relating to the Orient
-      is in more demand than at any previous time.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The brief and incidental allusion in the first chapter to the peculiarity
-      in the construction of the oldest temple at Pæstum&mdash;a peculiarity
-      here for the first time, so far as I can find, described in print&mdash;is
-      worthy the attention of archaeologists. The use of curved lines in this
-      so-called Temple of Neptune is more marked than in the Parthenon, and is
-      the secret of its fascination. The relation of this secret to the
-      irregularities of such mediaeval buildings as the Duomo at Pisa is
-      obvious.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Hartford, October, 1880.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      C. D. W.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      <br /> <br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0020.jpg" alt="0020 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. I.&mdash;AT THE GATES OF THE EAST.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      The Mediterranean&mdash;The East unlike the West&mdash;A World risked for
-      a Woman&mdash;An Unchanging World and a Pickle Sea&mdash;Still an Orient&mdash;Old
-      Fashions&mdash;A Journey without Reasons&mdash;Off for the Orient&mdash;Leaving
-      Naples&mdash;A Shaky Court&mdash;A Deserted District&mdash;Ruins of Pæstum&mdash;Temple
-      of Neptune&mdash;Entrance to Purgatory&mdash;Safety Valves of the World&mdash;Enterprising
-      Natives&mdash;Sunset on the Sea&mdash;Sicily&mdash;Crete&mdash;Our
-      Passengers&mdash;The Hottest place on Record&mdash;An American Tourist&mdash;An
-      Evangelical Dentist&mdash;On a Secret Mission&mdash;The Vanquished
-      Dignitary
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. II.&mdash;WITHIN THE PORTALS.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Africa&mdash;Alexandria&mdash;Strange Contrasts&mdash;A New World&mdash;Nature&mdash;First
-      View of the Orient&mdash;Hotel Europe&mdash;Mixed Nationalities&mdash;The
-      First Backsheesh&mdash;Street Scenes in Alexandria&mdash;Familiar Pictures
-      Idealized&mdash;Cemetery Day&mdash;A Novel Turn Out&mdash;A Moslem
-      Cemetery&mdash;New Terrors for Death&mdash;Pompey's Pillar&mdash;Our First
-      Camel&mdash;Along the Canal&mdash;Departed Glory&mdash;A set of Fine
-      Fellows&mdash;Our Handsome Dragomen&mdash;Bazaars&mdash;Universal Good
-      Humor&mdash;A Continuous Holiday&mdash;Private life in Egypt&mdash;Invisible
-      Blackness&mdash;The Land of Color and the Sun&mdash;A Casino
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. III.&mdash;EGYPT OF TO-DAY.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Railways&mdash;Our Valiant Dragomen&mdash;A Hand-to-Hand Struggle&mdash;Alexandria
-      to Cairo&mdash;Artificial Irrigation&mdash;An Arab Village&mdash;The Nile&mdash;Egyptian
-      Festivals&mdash;Pyramids of Geezeh&mdash;Cairo&mdash;Natural Queries.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. IV.&mdash;CAIRO.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      A Rhapsody&mdash;At Shepherd's&mdash;Hotel life, Egyptian plan&mdash;English
-      Noblemen&mdash;Life in the Streets&mdash;The Valuable Donkey and his
-      Driver&mdash;The &ldquo;swell tiling&rdquo; in Cairo&mdash;A hint for Central Park&mdash;Eunuchs&mdash;&ldquo;Yankee
-      Doodles&rdquo; of Cairo&mdash;A Representative Arab&mdash;Selecting Dragomen&mdash;The
-      Great Business of Egypt&mdash;An Egyptian Market-Place&mdash;A Substitute
-      for Clothes&mdash;Dahabeëhs of the Nile&mdash;A Protracted Negotiation&mdash;Egyptian
-      wiles
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. V.&mdash;ON THE BAZAAR.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Sight Seeing in Cairo&mdash;An Eastern Bazaar&mdash;Courteous Merchants&mdash;The
-      Honored Beggar&mdash;Charity to be Rewarded&mdash;A Moslem Funeral&mdash;The
-      Gold Bazaar&mdash;Shopping for a Necklace&mdash;Conducting a Bride Home&mdash;A
-      Partnership matter&mdash;Early Marriages and Decay&mdash;Longings for
-      Youth
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. VI.&mdash;MOSQUES AND TOMBS.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      The Sirocco&mdash;The Desert&mdash;The Citadel of Cairo&mdash;Scene of the
-      Massacre of the Memlooks&mdash;The World's Verdict&mdash;The Mosque of
-      Mohammed Ali&mdash;Tomb of the Memlook Sultans&mdash;Life out of Death
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. VII.&mdash;MOSLEM WORSHIP&mdash;THE CALL TO PRATER.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      An Enjoyable City&mdash;Definition of Conscience&mdash;&ldquo;Prayer is better
-      than Sleep&rdquo;&mdash;Call of the Muezzin&mdash;Moslems at Prayer&mdash;Interior
-      of a Mosque&mdash;Oriental Architecture&mdash;The Slipper Fitters&mdash;Devotional
-      Washing&mdash;An Inman's Supplications
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. VIII.&mdash;THE PYRAMIDS.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Ancient Sepulchres&mdash;Grave Robbers&mdash;The Poor Old Mummy&mdash;The
-      Oldest Monument in the World&mdash;First View of the Pyramids&mdash;The
-      resident Bedaween&mdash;Ascending the Steps&mdash;Patent Elevators&mdash;A
-      View from the Top&mdash;The Guide's Opinions&mdash;Origin of &ldquo;Murray's
-      Guide Book&rdquo;&mdash;Speculations on the Pyramids&mdash;The Interior&mdash;Absolute
-      Night&mdash;A Taste of Death&mdash;The Sphinx&mdash;Domestic Life in a
-      Tomb&mdash;Souvenirs of Ancient Egypt&mdash;Backsheesh!
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. IX.&mdash;PREPARATIONS FOR A VOYAGE.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      A Weighty Question&mdash;The Seasons Bewitched&mdash;Poetic Dreams
-      Realized&mdash;Egyptian Music&mdash;Public Garden&mdash;A Wonderful Rock&mdash;Its
-      Patrons&mdash;The Playing Band&mdash;Native Love Songs&mdash;The Howling
-      Derweeshes&mdash;An Exciting Performance&mdash;The Shakers put to Shame&mdash;Descendants
-      of the Prophet&mdash;An Ancient Saracenic Home&mdash;The Land of the Elea
-      and the Copt&mdash;Historical Curiosities&mdash;Preparing for our Journey&mdash;Laying
-      in of Medicines and Rockets&mdash;A Determination to be Liberal&mdash;Official
-      life in Egypt&mdash;An Interview with the Bey&mdash;Paying for our Rockets&mdash;A
-      Walking Treasury&mdash;Waiting for Wind
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. X.&mdash;ON THE NILE.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      On Board the &ldquo;Rip Van Winkle&rdquo;&mdash;A Farewell Dinner&mdash;The Three
-      Months Voyage Commenced&mdash;On the Nile&mdash;Our Pennant's Device&mdash;Our
-      Dahabeëh&mdash;Its Officers and Crew&mdash;Types of Egyptian Races&mdash;The
-      Kingdom of the &ldquo;Stick&rdquo;&mdash;The false Pyramid of Maydoon&mdash;A Night on
-      the River&mdash;Curious Crafts&mdash;Boat Races on the Nile&mdash;Native
-      Villages&mdash;Songs of the Sailors&mdash;Incidents of the Day&mdash;The
-      Copts&mdash;The Patriarch&mdash;The Monks of Gebel é Tayr&mdash;Disappointment
-      all Round&mdash;A Royal Luxury&mdash;The Banks of the Nile&mdash;Gum
-      Arabic&mdash;Unfair Reports of us&mdash;Speed of our Dahabeëh&mdash;Egyptian
-      Bread&mdash;Hasheesh-Smoking&mdash;Egyptian Robbers&mdash;Sitting in
-      Darkness&mdash;Agriculture&mdash;Gathering of Taxes&mdash;Successful
-      Voyaging
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XI.&mdash;PEOPLE ON THE RIVER BANK.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Sunday on the Nile&mdash;A Calm&mdash;A Land of Tombs&mdash;A New Divinity&mdash;Burial
-      of a Child&mdash;A Sunday Companion on Shore&mdash;A Philosophical People&mdash;No
-      Sunday Clothes&mdash;The Aristocratic Bedaween&mdash;The Sheykh&mdash;Rare
-      Specimens for the Centennial&mdash;Tracts Needed&mdash;Woman's Rights&mdash;Pigeons
-      and Cranes&mdash;Balmy Winter Nights&mdash;Tracking&mdash;Copying Nature
-      in Dress&mdash;Resort of Crocodiles&mdash;A Hermit's Cave&mdash;Waiting
-      for Nothing&mdash;Crocodile Mummies&mdash;The Boatmen's Song&mdash;Furling
-      Sails&mdash;Life Again&mdash;Pictures on the Nile.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XII.&mdash;SPENDING CHRISTMAS ON THE NILE.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Independence in Spelling&mdash;Asioot&mdash;Christmas Day&mdash;The
-      American Consul&mdash;A Visit to the Pasha&mdash;Conversing by an
-      Interpreter&mdash;The Ghawazees at Home&mdash;Ancient Sculpture&mdash;Bird's
-      Eye View of the Nile&mdash;Our Christmas Dinner&mdash;Our Visitor&mdash;Grand
-      Reception&mdash;The Fire Works&mdash;Christmas Eve on the Nile
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XIII.&mdash;SIGHTS AND SCENES ON THE RIVER.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Ancient and Modern Ruins&mdash;&ldquo;We Pay Toll&mdash;Cold Weather&mdash;Night
-      Sailing&mdash;Farshoot&mdash;A Visit from the Bey&mdash;The Market-Place&mdash;The
-      Sakiyas or Water Wheels&mdash;The Nile is Egypt
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XIV.&mdash;MIDWINTER IN EGYPT.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Midwinter in Egypt&mdash;Slaves of Time&mdash;Where the Water Jars are
-      Made&mdash;Coming to Anchor and how it was Done&mdash;New Years&mdash;&rdquo;
-       Smits&rdquo; Copper Popularity&mdash;Great Strength of the Women&mdash;Conscripts
-      for the Army&mdash;Conscription a Good Thing&mdash;On the Threshold of
-      Thebes
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XV.&mdash;AMONG THE RUINS OF THEBES.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Situation of the City&mdash;Ruins&mdash;Questions&mdash;Luxor&mdash;Ivarnak&mdash;Glorification
-      of the Pharaohs&mdash;Sculptures in Stone&mdash;The Twin Colossi&mdash;Four
-      Hundred Miles in Sixteen Days
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XVI.&mdash;HISTORY IN STONE.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      A Dry City&mdash;A Strange Circumstance&mdash;A Pleasant Residence&mdash;Life
-      on the Dahabeëh&mdash;Illustrious Visitors&mdash;Nose-Rings and Beauty&mdash;Little
-      Fatimeh&mdash;A Mummy Hand and Thoughts upon it&mdash;Plunder of the Tombs&mdash;Exploits
-      of the Great Sesostris&mdash;Gigantic Statues and their Object&mdash;Skill
-      of Ancient Artists&mdash;Criticisms&mdash;Christian Churches and Pagan
-      Temples&mdash;Society&mdash;A Peep into an Ancient Harem&mdash;Statue of
-      Meiùnon&mdash;Mysteries&mdash;Pictures of Heroic Girls&mdash;Women in
-      History
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XVII.&mdash;KARNAK.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      An Egyptian Carriage&mdash;Wonderful Ruins&mdash;The Great Hall of Sethi&mdash;The
-      Largest Obelisk in The World&mdash;A City of Temples and Palaces
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XVIII.&mdash;ASCENDING THE RIVER.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Ascending the River&mdash;An Exciting Boat Race&mdash;Inside a Sugar
-      Factory&mdash;Setting Fire to a Town&mdash;Who Stole the Rockets?&mdash;Striking
-      Contrasts&mdash;A Jail&mdash;The Kodi or Judge&mdash;What we saw at
-      Assouan&mdash;A Gale&mdash;Ruins of Kom Ombos&mdash;Mysterious Movement&mdash;Land
-      of Eternal Leisure
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XIX.&mdash;PASSING THE CATARACT OF THE NILE.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Passing the Cataract of the Nile&mdash;Nubian Hills in Sight&mdash;Island
-      of Elephantine&mdash;Ownership of the Cataract&mdash;Difficulties of the
-      Ascent&mdash;Negotiations for a Passage&mdash;Items about Assouan&mdash;Off
-      for the Cataracts&mdash;Our Cataract Crew&mdash;First Impressions of the
-      Cataract&mdash;In the Stream&mdash;Excitement&mdash;Audacious Swimmers&mdash;Close
-      Steering&mdash;A Comical Orchestra&mdash;The Final Struggle&mdash;Victory&mdash;Above
-      the Rapids&mdash;The Temple of Isis&mdash;Ancient Kings and Modern
-      Conquerors
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XX.&mdash;ON THE BORDERS OF THE DESERT.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Ethiopia&mdash;Relatives of the Ethiopians&mdash;Negro Land&mdash;Ancestry
-      of the Negro&mdash;Conversion Made Easy&mdash;A Land of Negative Blessings&mdash;Cool
-      air from the Desert&mdash;Abd-el-Atti's Opinions&mdash;A Land of Comfort&mdash;Nubian
-      Costumes&mdash;Turning the Tables&mdash;The Great Desert&mdash;Sin, Grease
-      and Taxes
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXI.&mdash;ETHIOPIA.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Primitive Attire&mdash;The Snake Charmer&mdash;A House full of Snakes&mdash;A
-      Writ of Ejectments&mdash;Natives&mdash;The Tomb of Mohammed&mdash;Disasters&mdash;A
-      Dandy Pilate&mdash;Nubian Beauty&mdash;Opening a Baby's Eyes&mdash;A
-      Nubian Pigville
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXII.&mdash;LIFE IN THE TROPICS&mdash;WADY HALFA.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Life in the Tropics&mdash;Wady Haifa&mdash;Capital of Nubia&mdash;The
-      Centre of Fashion&mdash;The Southern Cross&mdash;Castor Oil Plantations&mdash;Justice
-      to a Thief&mdash;Abd-el-Atti's Court&mdash;Mourning for the Dead&mdash;Extreme
-      of our Journey&mdash;A Comical Celebration&mdash;The March of
-      Civilization.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXIII.&mdash;APPROACHING THE SECOND CATARACT.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Two Ways to See It&mdash;Pleasures of Canal Riding&mdash;Bird's Eye View
-      of the Cataracts&mdash;Signs of Wealth&mdash;Wady Haifa&mdash;A Nubian
-      Belle&mdash;Classic Beauty&mdash;A Greek Bride&mdash;Interviewing a
-      Crocodile&mdash;Joking with a Widow&mdash;A Model Village
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXIV.&mdash;GIANTS IN STONE.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      The Colossi of Aboo Simbel, the largest in the World&mdash;Bombast&mdash;Exploits
-      of Remeses II.&mdash;A Mysterious Temple&mdash;Feting Ancient Deities&mdash;Guardians
-      of the Nile&mdash;The Excavated Rock&mdash;The Temple&mdash;A Row of
-      Sacred Monkeys&mdash;Our Last View of The Giants
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXV.&mdash;FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Learning the Language&mdash;Models of Beauty&mdash;Cutting up a Crocodile&mdash;Egyptian
-      Loafers&mdash;A Modern David&mdash;A Present&mdash;Our Menagerie&mdash;The
-      Chameleon&mdash;Woman's Rights&mdash;False Prophets&mdash;Incidents&mdash;The
-      School Master at Home&mdash;Confusion&mdash;Too Much Conversion&mdash;Charity&mdash;Wonderful
-      Birds at Mecca
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXVI.&mdash;MYSTERIOUS PHILÆ.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Leave &ldquo;well enough&rdquo; Alone&mdash;The Myth of Osiris&mdash;The Heights of
-      Biggeh&mdash;Cleopatra's Favorite Spot&mdash;A Legend&mdash;Mr. Fiddle&mdash;Dreamland&mdash;Waiting
-      for a Prince&mdash;An Inland Excursion&mdash;Quarries&mdash;Adieu
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXVII.&mdash;RETURNING
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Downward Run&mdash;Kidnapping a Sheykh&mdash;Blessed with Relatives&mdash;Making
-      the Chute&mdash;Artless Children&mdash;A Model of Integrity&mdash;Justice&mdash;An
-      Accident&mdash;Leaving Nubia&mdash;A Perfect Shame
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXVIII.&mdash;MODERN FACTS AND ANCIENT MEMORIES.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      The Mysterious Pebble&mdash;Ancient Quarries&mdash;Prodigies of Labor&mdash;Humor
-      in Stone&mdash;A Simoon&mdash;Famous Grottoes&mdash;Naughty Attractions&mdash;Bogus
-      Relics&mdash;Antiquity Smith
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXIX.&mdash;THE FUTURE OF THE MUMMY'S SOUL.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Ancient Egyptian Literature&mdash;Mummies&mdash;A Visit to the Tombs&mdash;Disturbing
-      the Dead&mdash;The Funeral Ritual&mdash;Unpleasant Explorations A Mummy in
-      Pledge&mdash;A Desolate Way&mdash;Buried Secrets&mdash;Building for
-      Eternity&mdash;Before the Judgment Seat&mdash;Weighed in the Balance The
-      Habitation of the Dead&mdash;Illuminated&mdash;Accommodations for the
-      Mummy&mdash;The Pharaoh of the Exodus&mdash;A Baby Charon&mdash;Bats
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXX.&mdash;FAREWELL TO THEBES.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Social Festivities&mdash;An Oriental Dinner&mdash;Dancing Girls&mdash;Honored
-      by the Sultan&mdash;The Native Consul&mdash;Finger Feeding&mdash;A Dance&mdash;Ancient
-      Style of Dancing&mdash;The Poetry of Night&mdash;Karnak by Moonlight&mdash;Amusements
-      at Luxor&mdash;Farewell to Thebes
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXXI.&mdash;LOITERING BY THE WAY.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Very Grammatick&rdquo;&mdash;The Lying in Temple&mdash;A Holy Man&mdash;Scarecrows&mdash;Asinine
-      Performers&mdash;Antiquity&mdash;Old Masters&mdash;Profit and Loss&mdash;Hopeless
-      &ldquo;Fellahs&rdquo;&mdash;Lion's Oil&mdash;A Bad Reputation&mdash;An Egyptian Mozart
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXXII.&mdash;JOTTINGS.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Mission School&mdash;Education of Women&mdash;Contrasts&mdash;A Mirage&mdash;Tracks
-      of Successive Ages&mdash;Bathers&mdash;Tombs of the Sacred Bulls&mdash;Religion
-      and Grammar&mdash;Route to Darfoor&mdash;Winter Residence of the Holy
-      Family&mdash;Grottoes&mdash;Mistaken Views&mdash;Dust and Ashes&mdash;Osman
-      Bey&mdash;A Midsummer's Night Dream&mdash;Ruins of Memphis&mdash;Departed
-      Glory&mdash;A Second Visit to the Pyramids of Geezeh&mdash;An Artificial
-      Mother
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXXIII.&mdash;THE KHEDIVE.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Al Gezereh&mdash;Aboo Yusef the Owner&mdash;Cairo Again&mdash;A Question&mdash;The
-      Khedive&mdash;Solomon and the Viceroy&mdash;The Khedive's Family Expenses&mdash;Another
-      Joseph&mdash;Personal Government&mdash;Docks of Cairo&mdash;Raising Mud&mdash;Popular
-      Superstitions&mdash;Leave Taking
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXXIV.&mdash;THE WOODEN MAN.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Visiting a Harem&mdash;A Reception&mdash;The Khedive at Home&mdash;Ladies
-      of the Harem&mdash;Wife of Tufik Pasha&mdash;The Mummy&mdash;The Wooden
-      Man Discoveries of Mariette Bey&mdash;Egypt and Greece Compared&mdash;Learned
-      Opinions
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXXV.&mdash;ON THE WAY HOME.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Leaving our Dahabeeh&mdash;The Baths in Cairo&mdash;Curious Mode of
-      Execution&mdash;The Guzeereh Palace&mdash;Empress Eugenia's Sleeping Room&mdash;Medallion
-      of Benjamin Franklin in Egypt&mdash;Heliopolis&mdash;The Bedaween Bride&mdash;Holy
-      Places&mdash;The Resting Place of the Virgin Mary&mdash;Fashionable Drives&mdash;The
-      Shoobra Palace&mdash;Forbidden Books&mdash;A Glimpse of a Bevy of Ladies&mdash;Uncomfortable
-      Guardians.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXXVI.&mdash;BY THE RED SEA.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Following the Track of the Children of Israel&mdash;Routes to Suez&mdash;Temples&mdash;Where
-      was the Red Sea Crossed?&mdash;In sight of the Bitter Lakes&mdash;Approaching
-      the Red Sea&mdash;Faith&mdash;The Suez Canal&mdash;The Wells of Moses&mdash;A
-      Sentimental Pilgrimage&mdash;Price of one of the Wells&mdash;Miriam of
-      Marah&mdash;Water of the Wells&mdash;Returning to Suez&mdash;A Caravan of
-      Bedaweens&mdash;Lunch Baskets searched by Custom Officers&mdash;The
-      Commerce of the East
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      CHAPT. XXXVII.&mdash;EASTWARD HO.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Leaving Suez&mdash;Ismailia&mdash;The Lotus&mdash;A Miracle&mdash;Egyptian
-      Steamer&mdash;Information Sought&mdash;The Great Highway&mdash;Port Said&mdash;Abd-el-Atti
-      again&mdash;Great Honors Lost&mdash;Farewell to Egypt
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0028.jpg" alt="0028 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER I.&mdash;AT THE GATES OF THE EAST.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE Mediterranean
-      still divides the East from the West. Ages of traffic and intercourse
-      across its waters have not changed this fact; neither the going of armies
-      nor of embassies, Northmen forays nor Saracenic maraudings, Christian
-      crusades nor Turkish invasions, neither the borrowing from Egypt of its
-      philosophy and science, nor the stealing of its precious monuments of
-      antiquity, down to its bones, not all the love-making, slave-trading,
-      war-waging, not all the commerce of four thousand years, by oar and sail
-      and steam, have sufficed to make the East like the West.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Half the world was lost at Actium, they like to say, for the sake of a
-      woman; but it was the half that I am convinced we never shall gain&mdash;for
-      though the Romans did win it they did not keep it long, and they made no
-      impression on it that is not, compared with its own individuality, as
-      stucco to granite. And I suppose there is not now and never will be
-      another woman in the East handsome enough to risk a world for.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There, across the most fascinating and fickle sea in the world&mdash;a
-      feminine sea, inconstant as lovely, all sunshine and tears in a moment,
-      reflecting in its quick mirror in rapid succession the skies of grey and
-      of blue, the weather of Europe and of Africa, a sea of romance and nausea&mdash;lies
-      a world in Everything unlike our own, a world perfectly known yet never
-      familiar and never otherwise than strange to the European and American. I
-      had supposed it otherwise; I had been led to think that modern
-      civilization had more or less transformed the East to its own likeness;
-      that, for instance the railway up the Nile had practically &ldquo;done for&rdquo; that
-      historic stream. They say that if you run a red-hot nail through an
-      orange, the fruit will keep its freshness and remain unchanged a long
-      time. The thrusting of the iron into Egypt may arrest decay, but it does
-      not appear to change the country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is still an Orient, and I believe there would be if it were all
-      canaled, and railwayed, and converted; for I have great faith in habits
-      that have withstood the influence of six or seven thousand years of
-      changing dynasties and religions. Would you like to go a little way with
-      me into this Orient?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The old-fashioned travelers had a formal fashion of setting before the
-      reader the reasons that induced them to take the journey they described;
-      and they not unfrequently made poor health an apology for their
-      wanderings, judging that that excuse would be most readily accepted for
-      their eccentric conduct. &ldquo;Worn out in body and mind we set sail,&rdquo; etc.;
-      and the reader was invited to launch in a sort of funereal bark upon the
-      Mediterranean and accompany an invalid in search of his last
-      resting-place.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There was in fact no reason why we should go to Egypt&mdash;a remark that
-      the reader will notice is made before he has a chance to make it&mdash;and
-      there is no reason why any one indisposed to do so should accompany us. If
-      information is desired, there are whole libraries of excellent books about
-      the land of the Pharaohs, ancient and modern, historical, archaeological,
-      statistical, theoretical, geographical; if amusement is wanted, there are
-      also excellent books, facetious and sentimental. I suppose that volumes
-      enough have been written about Egypt to cover every foot of its arable
-      soil if they were spread out, or to dam the Nile if they were dumped into
-      it, and to cause a drought in either case if they were not all interesting
-      and the reverse of dry. There is therefore no <i>onus</i> upon the
-      traveler in the East to-day to write otherwise than suits his humor; he
-      may describe only what he chooses. With this distinct understanding I
-      should like the reader to go with me through a winter in the Orient. Let
-      us say that we go to escape winter.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the last of November, 1874&mdash;the beginning of what proved to be
-      the bitterest winter ever known in America and Europe, and I doubt not it
-      was the first nip of the return of the rotary glacial period&mdash;that we
-      go on board a little Italian steamer in the harbor of Naples, reaching it
-      in a row-boat and in a cold rain. The deck is wet and dismal; Vesuvius is
-      invisible, and the whole sweep of the bay is hid by a slanting mist. Italy
-      has been in a shiver for a month; snow on the Alban hills and in the
-      Tusculan theatre; Rome was as chilly as a stone tomb with the door left
-      open. Naples is little better; Boston, at any season, is better than
-      Naples&mdash;now.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We steam slowly down the harbor amid dripping ships, losing all sight of
-      villages and the lovely coast; only Capri comes out comely in the haze, an
-      island cut like an antique cameo. Long after dark we see the light on it
-      and also that of the Punta della Campanella opposite, friendly beams
-      following us down the coast. We are off Pæstum,' and I can feel that its
-      noble temple is looming there in the darkness. This ruin is in some sort a
-      door into, an introduction to, the East.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Pæstum has been a deadly marsh for eighteen hundred years, and deserted
-      for almost a thousand. Nettles and unsightly brambles have taken the place
-      of the &ldquo;roses of Pæstum&rdquo; of which the Roman poets sang; but still as a
-      poetic memory, the cyclamen trails among the <i>debris</i> of the old
-      city; and the other day I found violets waiting for a propitious season to
-      bloom. The sea has retired away from the site of the town and broadened
-      the marsh in front of it. There are at Pæstum three Greek temples, called,
-      no one can tell why, the Temple of Neptune, the Basilica, and the Temple
-      of Ceres; remains of the old town wall and some towers; a tumbledown house
-      or two, and a wretched tavern. The whole coast is subject to tremors of
-      the earth, and the few inhabitants hanging about there appear to have had
-      all their bones shaken out of them by the fever and ague.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We went down one raw November morning from Naples, driving from a station
-      on the Calabrian railway, called Battipaglia, about twelve miles over a
-      black marshy plain, relieved only by the bold mountains, on the right and
-      left. This plain is gradually getting reclaimed and cultivated; there is
-      raised on it inferior cotton and some of the vile tobacco which the
-      government monopoly compels the free Italians to smoke, and large
-      olive-orchards have been recently set out. The soil is rich and the
-      country can probably be made habitable again. Now, the few houses are
-      wretched and the few people squalid. Women were pounding stone on the road
-      we traveled, even young girls among them wielding the heavy hammers, and
-      all of them very thinly clad, their one sleazy skirt giving little
-      protection against the keen air. Of course the women were hard-featured
-      and coarse-handed; and both they and the men have the swarthy complexion
-      that may betoken a more Eastern origin. We fancied that they had a
-      brigandish look. Until recently this plain has been a favorite field for
-      brigands, who spied the rich traveler from the height of St. Angelo and
-      pounced upon him if he was unguarded. Now, soldiers are quartered along
-      the road, patrol the country on horseback, and lounge about the ruins at
-      Pæstum. Perhaps they retire to some height for the night, for the district
-      is too unhealthy for an Italian even, whose health may be of no
-      consequence. They say that if even an Englishman, who goes merely to shoot
-      woodcock, sleeps there one night, in the right season, that night will be
-      his last.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We saw the ruins of Pæstum under a cold grey sky, which harmonized with
-      their isolation. We saw them best from the side of the sea, with the
-      snow-sprinkled mountains rising behind for a background. Then they stood
-      out, impressive, majestic, time-defying. In all Europe there are no ruins
-      better worthy the study of the admirer of noble architecture than these.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Temple of Neptune is older than the Parthenon, its Doric sister, at
-      Athens. It was probably built before the Persians of Xerxes occupied the
-      Acropolis and saw from there the flight of their ruined fleet out of the
-      Strait of Salamis. It was built when the Doric had attained the acme of
-      its severe majesty, and it is to-day almost perfect on the exterior. Its
-      material is a coarse travertine which time and the weather have
-      honeycombed, showing the petrifications of plants and shells; but of its
-      thirty-six massive exterior columns not one has fallen, though those on
-      the north side are so worn by age that the once deep fluting is nearly
-      obliterated. You may care to know that these columns which are thirty feet
-      high and seven and a half feet in diameter at the base, taper
-      symmetrically to the capitals, which are the severest Doric.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At first we thought the temple small, and did not even realize its two
-      hundred feet of length, but the longer we looked at it the larger it grew
-      to the eye, until it seemed to expand into gigantic size; and from
-      whatever point it was viewed its harmonious proportions were an increasing
-      delight. The beauty is not in any ornament, for even the pediment is and
-      always was vacant, but in its admirable lines.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The two other temples are fine specimens of Greek architecture, also
-      Doric, pure and without fault, with only a little tendency to depart from
-      severe simplicity in the curve of the capitals, and yet they did not
-      interest us. They are of a period only a little later than the Temple of
-      Neptune, and that model was before their builders, yet they missed the
-      extraordinary, many say almost spiritual beauty of that edifice. We sought
-      the reason, and found it in the fact that there are absolutely no straight
-      lines in the Temple of Neptune. The side rows of columns curve a little
-      out; the end rows curve a little in; at the ends the base line of the
-      columns curves a trifle from the sides to the center, and the line of the
-      architrave does the same. This may bewilder the eye and mislead the
-      judgment as to size and distance, but the effect is more agreeable than
-      almost any other I know in architecture. It is not repeated in the other
-      temples, the builders of which do not seem to have known its secret. Had
-      the Greek colony lost the art of this perfect harmony, in the little time
-      that probably intervened between the erection of these edifices? It was
-      still kept at Athens, as the Temple of Theseus and the Parthenon testify.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Looking from the interior of the temple out at either end, the entrance
-      seems to be wider at the top than at the bottom, an Egyptian effect
-      produced by the setting of the inward and outer columns. This appeared to
-      us like a door through which we looked into Egypt, that mother of all arts
-      and of most of the devices of this now confused world. We were on our way
-      to see the first columns, prototypes of the Doric order, chiselled by man.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The custodian&mdash;there is one, now that twenty centuries of war and
-      rapine and storms have wreaked themselves upon this temple&mdash;would not
-      permit us to take our luncheon into its guarded precincts; on a fragment
-      of the old steps, amid the weeds we drank our red Capri wine; not the
-      usual compound manufactured at Naples, but the last bottle of pure Capri
-      to be found on the island, so help the soul of the landlady at the hotel
-      there; ate one of those imperfectly nourished Italian chicken's orphan
-      birds, owning the pitiful legs with which the <i>table d'hote</i>
-      frequenters in Italy are so familiar, and blessed the government for the
-      care, tardy as it is, of its grandest monument of antiquity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When I looked out of the port-hole of the steamer early in the morning, we
-      were near the volcanic Lipari islands and islets, a group of seventeen
-      altogether; which serve as chimneys and safety-valves to this part of the
-      world. One of the small ones is of recent creation, at least it was heaved
-      up about two thousand years ago, and I fancy that a new one may pop up
-      here any time. From the time of the Trojan war all sorts of races and
-      adventurers have fought for the possession of these coveted islands, and
-      the impartial earthquake has shaken them all off in turn. But for the
-      mist, we should have clearly seen Stromboli, the ever-active volcano, but
-      now we can only say we saw it. We are near it, however, and catch its
-      outline, and listen for the groans of lost souls which the credulous
-      crusaders used to hear issuing from its depths. It was at that time the
-      entrance of purgatory; we read in the guide-book that the crusaders
-      implored the monks of Cluny to intercede for the deliverance of those
-      confined there, and that therefore Odilo of Cluny instituted the
-      observance of All Souls' Day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The climate of Europe still attends us, and our first view of Sicily is
-      through the rain. Clouds hide the coast and obscure the base of Ætna
-      (which is oddly celebrated in America as an assurance against loss by
-      fire); but its wide fields of snow, banked up high above the clouds, gleam
-      as molten silver&mdash;treasure laid up in heaven&mdash;and give us the
-      light of the rosy morning.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Rounding the point of Faro, the <i>locale</i> of Charybdis and Scylla, we
-      come into the harbor of Messina and take shelter behind the long, curved
-      horn of its mole. Whoever shunned the beautiful Scylla was liable to be
-      sucked into the strong tide Charybdis; but the rock has lost its terror
-      for moderns, and the current is no longer dangerous. We get our last dash
-      of rain in this strait, and there is sunny weather and blue sky at the
-      south. The situation of Messina is picturesque; the shores both of
-      Calabria and Sicily are mountainous, precipitous and very rocky; there
-      seems to be no place for vegetation except by terracing. The town is
-      backed by lofty circling mountains, which form a dark setting for its
-      white houses and the string of outlying villages. Mediaeval forts cling to
-      the slopes above it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      No sooner is the anchor down than a fleet of boats surrounds the steamer,
-      and a crowd of noisy men and boys swarms on board, to sell us muscles,
-      oranges, and all sorts of merchandise, from a hair-brush to an
-      under-wrapper. The Sunday is hopelessly broken into fragments in a minute.
-      These lively traders use the English language and its pronouns with great
-      freedom. The boot-black smilingly asks: &ldquo;You black my boot?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The vender of under-garments says: &ldquo;I gif you four franc for dis one. I
-      gif you for dese two a seven franc. No? What you gif?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      A bright orange-boy, we ask, &ldquo;How much a dozen?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Half franc.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Too much.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How much you give? Tast him; he ver good; a sweet orange; you no like,
-      you no buy. Yes, sir. Tak one. This a one, he sweet no more.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And they were sweet no more. They must have been lemons in oranges'
-      clothing. The flattering tongue of that boy and our greed of tropical
-      color made us owners of a lot of them, most of which went overboard before
-      we reached Alexandria, and would make fair lemonade of the streak of water
-      we passed through.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At noon we sail away into the warm south. We have before us the beautiful
-      range of Aspromonte, and the village of Reggio bear which in 1862
-      Garibaldi received one of his wounds, a sort of inconvenient love-pat of
-      fame. The coast is rugged and steep. High up is an isolated Gothic rock,
-      pinnacled and jagged. Close by the shore we can trace the railway track
-      which winds round the point of Italy, and some of the passengers look at
-      it longingly; for though there is clear sky overhead, the sea has on an
-      ungenerous swell; and what is blue sky to a stomach that knows its own
-      bitterness and feels the world sinking away from under it?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are long in sight of Italy, but Sicily still sulks in the clouds and
-      Mount Ætna will not show itself. The night is bright and the weather has
-      become milder; it is the prelude to a day calm and uninteresting. Nature
-      rallies at night, however, and gives us a sunset in a pale gold sky with
-      cloud-islands on the horizon and palm-groves on them. The stars come out
-      in extraordinary profusion and a soft brilliancy unknown in New England,
-      and the sky is of a tender blue&mdash;something delicate and not to be
-      enlarged upon. A sunset is something that no one will accept second-hand.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On the morning of December 1st., we are off Crete; Greece we have left to
-      the north, and are going at ten knots an hour towards great hulking
-      Africa. We sail close to the island and see its long, high barren coast
-      till late in the afternoon. There is no road visible on this side, nor any
-      sign of human habitation, except a couple of shanties perched high up
-      among the rocks. From this point of view, Crete is a mass of naked rock
-      lifted out of the waves. Mount Ida crowns it, snow-capped and gigantic.
-      Just below Crete spring up in our geography the little islands of Gozo and
-      Antigozo, merely vast rocks, with scant patches of low vegetation on the
-      cliffs, a sort of vegetable blush, a few stunted trees on the top of the
-      first, and an appearance of grass which has a reddish color.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The weather is more and more delightful, a balmy atmosphere brooding on a
-      smooth sea. The chill which we carried in our bones from New York to
-      Naples finally melts away. Life ceases to be a mere struggle, and becomes
-      a mild enjoyment. The blue tint of the sky is beyond all previous
-      comparison delicate, like the shade of a silk, fading at the horizon into
-      an exquisite grey or nearly white. We are on deck all day and till late at
-      night, for once enjoying, by the help of an awning, real winter weather
-      with the thermometer at seventy-two degrees.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our passengers are not many, but selected. There are a German baron and
-      his sparkling wife, delightful people, who handle the English language as
-      delicately as if it were glass, and make of it the most <i>naïve</i> and
-      interesting form of speech. They are going to Cairo for the winter, and
-      the young baroness has the longing and curiosity regarding the land of the
-      sun, which is peculiar to the poetical Germans; she has never seen a black
-      man nor a palm-tree. In charge of the captain, there is an Italian woman,
-      whose husband lives in Alexandria, who monopolizes the whole of the
-      ladies' cabin, by a league with the slatternly stewardess, and behaves in
-      a manner to make a state of war and wrath between her and the rest of the
-      passengers. There is nothing bitterer than the hatred of people for each
-      other on shipboard. When I afterwards saw this woman in the streets of
-      Alexandria I had scarcely any wish to shorten her stay upon this earth.
-      There are also two tough-fibered and strong-brained dissenting ministers
-      from Australia, who have come round by the Sandwich Islands and the United
-      States, and are booked for Palestine, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea.
-      Speaking of Aden, which has the reputation of being as hot as
-      Constantinople is wicked, one of them tells the story of an American (the
-      English have a habit of fastening all their dubious anecdotes upon &ldquo;an
-      American&rdquo;) who said that if he owned two places, one in Aden and the other
-      in H&mdash;&mdash;, he would sell the one in Aden. These ministers are
-      distinguished lecturers at home&mdash;a solemn thought, that even the most
-      distant land is subjected to the blessing of the popular lecture.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our own country is well represented, as it usually is abroad, whether by
-      appointment or self-selection. It is said that the oddest people in the
-      world go up the Nile and make the pilgrimage of Palestine. I have even
-      heard that one must be a little cracked who will give a whole winter to
-      high Egypt; but this is doubtless said by those who cannot afford to go.
-      Notwithstanding the peculiarities of so many of those one meets drifting
-      around the East (as eccentric as the English who frequent Italian <i>pensions</i>)
-      it must be admitted that a great many estimable and apparently sane people
-      go up the Nile&mdash;and that such are even found among Cook's &ldquo;personally
-      conducted.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      There is on board an American, or a sort of Irish-American more or less
-      naturalized, from Nebraska, a raw-boned, hard-featured farmer, abroad for
-      a two-years' tour; a man who has no guide-book or literature, except the
-      Bible which he diligently reads. He has spent twenty or thirty years in
-      acquiring and subduing land in the new country, and without any time or
-      taste for reading, there has come with his possessions a desire to see
-      that old world about which he cared nothing before he breathed the
-      vitalizing air of the West. That he knew absolutely nothing of Europe,
-      Asia, or Africa, except the little patch called Palestine, and found a day
-      in Rome too much for a place so run down, was actually none of our
-      business. He was a good patriotic American, and the only wonder was that
-      with his qualification he had not been made consul somewhere.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But a more interesting person, in his way, was a slender, no-blooded,
-      youngish, married man, of the vegetarian and vegetable school, also alone,
-      and bound for the Holy Land, who was sick of the sea and otherwise. He
-      also was without books of travel, and knew nothing of what he was going to
-      see or how to see it. Of what Egypt was he had the dimmest notion, and why
-      we or he or anyone else should go there. What do you go up the Nile for?
-      we asked. The reply was that the Spirit had called him to go through Egypt
-      to Palestine. He had been a dentist, but now he called himself an
-      evangelist. I made the mistake of supposing that he was one of those
-      persons who have a call to go about and convince people that religion is
-      one part milk (skimmed) and three parts water&mdash;harmless, however,
-      unless you see too much of them. Twice is too much. But I gauged him
-      inadequately. He is one of those few who comprehend the future, and,
-      guided wholly by the Spirit and not by any scripture or tradition, his
-      mission is to prepare the world for its impending change. He is <i>en
-      rapport</i> with the vast uneasiness, which I do not know how to name,
-      that pervades all lands. He had felt our war in advance. He now feels a
-      great change in the air; he is illuminated by an inner light that makes
-      him clairvoyant. America is riper than it knows for this change. I tried
-      to have him definitely define it, so that I could write home to my friends
-      and the newspapers and the insurance companies; but I could only get a
-      vague notion that there was about to be an end of armies and navies and
-      police, of all forms of religion, of government, of property, and that
-      universal brotherhood is to set in.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The evangelist had come aboard on an important and rather secret mission;
-      to observe the progress of things in Europe; and to publish his
-      observations in a book. Spiritualized as he was, he had no need of any
-      language except the American; he felt the political and religious
-      atmosphere of all the cities he visited without speaking to any one. When
-      he entered a picture gallery, although he knew nothing of pictures, he saw
-      more than any one else. I suppose he saw more than Mr. Ruskin sees. He
-      told me, among other valuable information, that he found Europe not so
-      well prepared for the great movement as America, but that I would be
-      surprised at the number who were in sympathy with it, especially those in
-      high places in society and in government. The Roman Catholic Church was
-      going to pieces; not that he cared any more for this than for the
-      Presbyterian&mdash;he, personally, took what was good in any church, but
-      he had got beyond them all; he was now only working for the establishment
-      of the truth, and it was because he had more of the truth than others that
-      he could see further.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He expected that America would be surprised when he published his
-      observations. &ldquo;I can give you a little idea,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;of how things are
-      working.&rdquo; This talk was late at night, and by the dim cabin lamp. &ldquo;When I
-      was in Rome, I went to see the head-man of the Pope. I talked with him
-      over an hour, and I found that he knew all about it!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Good gracious! You don't say so!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, sir. And he is in full sympathy. But he dare not say anything. He
-      knows that his church is on its last legs. I told him that I did not care
-      to see the Pope, but if he wanted to meet me, and discuss the
-      infallibility question, I was ready for him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What did the Pope's head-man say to that?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He said that he would see the Pope, and see if he could arrange an
-      interview; and would let me know. I waited a week in Rome, but no notice
-      came. I tell you the Pope don't dare discuss it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Then he didn't see you?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No, sir. But I wrote him a letter from Naples.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Perhaps he won't answer it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, if he doesn't, that is a confession that he can't. He leaves the
-      field. That will satisfy me.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I said I thought he would be satisfied.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Mediterranean enlarges on acquaintance. On the fourth day we are still
-      without sight of Africa, though the industrious screw brings us nearer
-      every moment. We talk of Carthage, and think we can see the color of the
-      Libyan sand in the yellow clouds at night. It is two o'clock on the
-      morning of December the third, when we make the Pharos of Alexandria, and
-      wait for a pilot.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0039.jpg" alt="0039 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0007" id="linkimage-0007"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0040.jpg" alt="0040 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER II.&mdash;WITHIN THE PORTALS.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">E</span>AGERNESS to see
-      Africa brings us on deck at dawn. The low coast is not yet visible.
-      Africa, as we had been taught, lies in heathen darkness. It is the policy
-      of the Egyptian government to make the harbor difficult of access to
-      hostile men-of-war, and we, who are peacefully inclined, cannot come in
-      till daylight, nor then without a pilot.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day breaks beautifully, and the Pharos is set like a star in the
-      bright streak of the East. Before we can distinguish land, we see the
-      so-called Pompey's Pillar and the light-house, the palms, the minarets,
-      and the outline of the domes painted on the straw-color of the sky&mdash;a
-      dream-like picture. The curtain draws up with Eastern leisure&mdash;the
-      sun appears to rise more deliberately in the Orient than elsewhere; the
-      sky grows more brilliant, there are long lines of clouds, golden and
-      crimson, and we seem to be looking miles and miles into an enchanted
-      country. Then ships and boats, a vast number of them, become visible in
-      the harbor, and as the light grows stronger, the city and land lose
-      something of their beauty, but the sky grows more softly fiery till the
-      sun breaks through. The city lies low along the flat coast, and seems at
-      first like a brownish white streak, with fine lines of masts, palm-trees,
-      and minarets above it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The excitement of the arrival in Alexandria and the novelty of everything
-      connected with the landing can never be repeated. In one moment the Orient
-      flashes upon the bewildered traveler; and though he may travel far and see
-      stranger sights, and penetrate the hollow shell of Eastern mystery, he
-      never will see again at once such a complete contrast to all his previous
-      experience. One strange, unfamiliar form takes the place of another so
-      rapidly that there is no time to fix an impression, and everything is so
-      <i>bizarre</i> that the new-comer has no points of comparison. He is
-      launched into a new world, and has no time to adjust the focus of his
-      observation. For myself, I wished the Orient would stand off a little and
-      stand still so that I could try to comprehend it. But it would not; a
-      revolving kaleidoscope never presented more bewildering figures and colors
-      to a child, than the port of Alexandria to us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our first sight of strange dress is that of the pilot and the crew who
-      bring him off&mdash;they are Nubians, he is a swarthy Egyptian. &ldquo;How black
-      they are,&rdquo; says the Baroness; &ldquo;I don't like it.&rdquo; As the pilot steps on
-      deck, in his white turban, loose robe of cotton, and red slippers, he
-      brings the East with him; we pass into the influence of the Moslem spirit.
-      Coming into the harbor we have pointed out to us the batteries, the palace
-      and harem of the Pasha (more curiosity is felt about a harem than about
-      any other building, except perhaps a lunatic asylum), and the new villas
-      along the curve of the shore. It is difficult to see any ingress, on
-      account of the crowd of shipping.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The anchor is not down before we are surrounded by rowboats, six or eight
-      deep on both sides, with a mob of boatmen and guides, all standing up and
-      shouting at us in all the broken languages of three continents. They are
-      soon up the sides and on deck, black, brown, yellow, in turbans, in
-      tarbooshes, in robes of white, blue, brown, in brilliant waist-shawls,
-      slippered, and bare-legged, bare-footed, half-naked, with little on except
-      a pair of cotton drawers and a red fez, eager, big-eyed, pushing, yelping,
-      gesticulating, seizing hold of passengers and baggage, and fighting for
-      the possession of the traveler's goods which seem to him about to be
-      shared among a lot of pirates. I saw a dazed traveler start to land, with
-      some of his traveling-bags in one boat, his trunk in a second, and himself
-      in yet a third, and a <i>commissionaire</i> at each arm attempting to drag
-      him into two others. He evidently couldn't make up his mind, which to
-      take.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have decided upon our hotel, and ask for the <i>commissionaire</i> of
-      it. He appears. In fact there are twenty or thirty of him. The first one
-      is a tall, persuasive, nearly naked Ethiop, who declares that he is the
-      only Simon Pure, and grasps our handbags. Instantly, a fluent,
-      business-like Alexandrian pushes him aside&mdash;&ldquo;I am the <i>commissionaire</i>&rdquo;&mdash;and
-      is about to take possession of us. But a dozen others are of like mind,
-      and Babel begins. We rescue our property, and for ten minutes a lively and
-      most amusing altercation goes on as to who is the representative of the
-      hotel. They all look like pirates from the Barbary coast, instead of
-      guardians of peaceful travelers. Quartering an orange, I stand in the
-      center of an interesting group, engaged in the most lively discussion,
-      pushing, howling and fiery gesticulation. The dispute is finally between
-      two:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I Hotel Europe!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I Hotel Europe; he no hotel.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He my brother, all same me.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He! I never see he before,&rdquo; with a shrug of the utmost contempt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As soon as we select one of them, the tumult subsides, the enemies become
-      friends and cordially join in loading our luggage. In the first five
-      minutes of his stay in Egypt the traveler learns that he is to trust and
-      be served by people who haven't the least idea that lying is not a
-      perfectly legitimate means of attaining any desirable end. And he begins
-      to lose any prejudice he may have in favor of a white complexion and of
-      clothes. In a decent climate he sees how little clothing is needed for
-      comfort, and how much artificial nations are accustomed to put on from
-      false modesty.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We begin to thread our way through a maze of shipping, and hundreds of
-      small boats and barges; the scene is gay and exciting beyond expression.
-      The first sight of the colored, pictured, lounging, waiting Orient is
-      enough to drive an impressionable person wild; so much that is novel and
-      picturesque is crowded into a few minutes; so many colors and flying
-      robes, such a display of bare legs and swarthy figures. We meet flat boats
-      coming down the harbor loaded with laborers, dark, immobile groups in
-      turbans and gowns, squatting on deck in the attitude which is the most
-      characteristic of the East; no one stands or sits&mdash;everybody squats
-      or reposes cross-legged. Soldiers are on the move; smart Turkish officers
-      dart by in light boats with half a dozen rowers; the crew of an English
-      man-of-war pull past; in all directions the swift boats fly, and with
-      their freight of color, it is like the thrusting of quick shuttles, in the
-      weaving of a brilliant carpet, before our eyes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We step on shore at the Custom-House. I have heard travelers complain of
-      the delay in getting through it. I feel that I want to go slowly, that I
-      would like to be all day in getting through&mdash;that I am hurried along
-      like a person who is dragged hastily through a gallery, past striking
-      pictures of which he gets only glimpses. What a group this is on shore;
-      importunate guides, porters, coolies. They seize hold of us, We want to
-      stay and look at them. Did ever any civilized men dress so gaily, so
-      little, or so much in the wrong place? If that fellow would untwist the
-      folds of his gigantic turban he would have cloth enough to clothe himself
-      perfectly. Look! that's an East Indian, that's a Greek, that's a Turk
-      that's a Syrian-Jew? No, he's Egyptian, the crook-nose is not uncommon to
-      Egyptians, that tall round hat is Persian, that one is from Abys&mdash;there
-      they go, we haven't half seen them! We leave our passports at the
-      entrance, and are whisked through into the baggage-room, where our guide
-      pays a noble official three francs for the pleasure of his chance
-      acquaintance; some nearly naked coolie-porters, who bear long cords, carry
-      off our luggage, and before we know it we are in a carriage, and a
-      rascally guide and interpreter&mdash;Heaven knows how he fastened himself
-      upon us in the last five minutes&mdash;is on the box and apparently owns
-      us? (It took us half a day and liberal backsheesh to get rid of the
-      evil-eyed fellow) We have gone only a little distance when half a dozen of
-      the naked coolies rush after us, running by the carriage and laying hold
-      of it, demanding backsheesh. It appears that either the boatman has
-      cheated them, or they think he will, or they havn't had enough. Nobody
-      trusts anybody else, and nobody is ever satisfied with what he gets, in
-      Egypt. These blacks, in their dirty white gowns, swinging their porter's
-      ropes and howling like madmen, pursue us a long way and look as if they
-      would tear us in pieces. But nothing comes of it. We drive to the Place
-      Mehemet Ali, the European square,&mdash;having nothing Oriental about it,
-      a square with an equestrian statue of Mehemet Ali, some trees and a
-      fountain&mdash;surrounded by hotels, bankers' offices and Frank shops.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is not much in Alexandria to look at except the people, and the
-      dirty bazaars. We never before had seen so much nakedness, filth and dirt,
-      so much poverty, and such enjoyment of it, or at least indifference to it.
-      We were forced to strike a new scale of estimating poverty and
-      wretchedness. People are poor in proportion as their wants are not
-      gratified. And here are thousands who have few of the wants that we have,
-      and perhaps less poverty. It is difficult to estimate the poverty of those
-      fortunate children to whom the generous sun gives a warm color for
-      clothing, who have no occupation but to sit in the same, all day, in some
-      noisy and picturesque thoroughfare, and stretch out the hand for the few
-      paras sufficient to buy their food, who drink at the public fountain, wash
-      in the tank of the mosque, sleep in street-corners, and feel sure of their
-      salvation if they know the direction of Mecca. And the Mohammedan religion
-      seems to be a sort of soul-compass, by which the most ignorant believer
-      can always orient himself. The best-dressed Christian may feel certain of
-      one thing, that he is the object of the cool contempt of the most naked,
-      opthalmic, flea-attended, wretched Moslem he meets. The Oriental conceit
-      is a peg above ours&mdash;it is not self-conscious.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a fifteen minutes walk in the streets the stranger finds all the
-      pictures that he remembers in his illustrated books of Eastern life. There
-      is turbaned Ali Baba, seated on the hindquarters of his sorry donkey,
-      swinging his big feet in a constant effort to urge the beast forward;
-      there is the one-eyed calender who may have arrived last night from
-      Bagdad; there is the water-carrier, with a cloth about his loins,
-      staggering under a full goat-skin&mdash;the skin, legs, head, and all the
-      members of the brute distended, so that the man seems to be carrying a
-      drowned and water-soaked animal: there is the veiled sister of Zobeide
-      riding a grey donkey astride, with her knees drawn up, (as all women ride
-      in the East), entirely enveloped in a white garment which covers her head
-      and puffs out about her like a balloon&mdash;all that can be seen of the
-      woman are the toes of her pointed yellow slippers and two black eyes;
-      there is the seller of sherbet, a waterish, feeble, insipid drink,
-      clinking his glasses; and the veiled woman in black, with hungry eyes, is
-      gliding about everywhere. The veil is in two parts, a band about the
-      forehead, and a strip of black which hangs underneath the eyes and
-      terminates in a point at the waist; the two parts are connected by an
-      ornamented cylinder of brass, or silver if the wearer can afford it, two
-      and a half inches long and an inch in diameter. This ugly cylinder between
-      the restless eyes, gives the woman an imprisoned, frightened look. Across
-      the street from the hotel, upon the stone coping of the public square, is
-      squatting hour after hour in the sun, a row of these forlorn creatures in
-      black, impassive and waiting. We are told that they are washerwomen
-      waiting for a job. I never can remove the impression that these women are
-      half stifled behind their veils and the shawls which they draw over the
-      head; when they move their heads, it is like the piteous dumb movement of
-      an uncomplaining animal.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But the impatient reader is waiting for Pompey's Pillar. We drive outside
-      the walls, though a thronged gateway, through streets and among people
-      wretched and picturesque to the last degree. This is the road to the large
-      Moslem cemetery, and to-day is Thursday, the day for visiting the graves.
-      The way is lined with coffee-shops, where men are smoking and playing at
-      draughts; with stands and booths for the sale of fried cakes and
-      confections; and all along, under foot, so that it is difficult not to
-      tread on them, are private markets for the sale of dates, nuts, raisins,
-      wheat, and doora; the bare-legged owner sits on the ground and spreads his
-      dust-covered untempting fare on a straw mat before him. It is more
-      wretched and forlorn outside the gate than within. We are amid heaps of
-      rubbish, small mountains of it, perhaps the ruins of old Alexandria,
-      perhaps only the accumulated sweepings of the city for ages, piles of
-      dust, and broken pottery. Every Egyptian town of any size is surrounded by
-      these&mdash;the refuse of ages of weary civilization.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What a number of old men, of blind men, ragged men&mdash;though rags are
-      no disgrace! What a lot of scrawny old women, lean old hags, some of them
-      without their faces covered&mdash;even the veiled ones you can see are
-      only bags of bones. There is a derweesh, a naked holy man, seated in the
-      dirt by the wall, reading the Koran. He has no book, but he recites the
-      sacred text in a loud voice, swaying his body backwards and forwards. Now
-      and then we see a shrill-voiced, handsome boy also reading the Koran with
-      all his might, and keeping a laughing eye upon the passing world. Here
-      comes a novel turn-out. It is a long truck-wagon drawn by one bony-horse.
-      Upon it are a dozen women, squatting about the edges, facing each other,
-      veiled, in black, silent, jolting along like so many bags of meal. A black
-      imp stands in front, driving. They carry baskets of food and flowers, and
-      are going to the cemetery to spend the day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We pass the cemetery, for the Pillar is on a little hillock overlooking
-      it. Nothing can be drearier than this burying-ground&mdash;unless it may
-      be some other Moslem cemetery. It is an uneven plain of sand, without a
-      spear of grass or a green thing. It is covered thickly with ugly stucco,
-      oven-like tombs, the whole inconceivably shabby and dust covered; the
-      tombs of the men have head-stones to distinguish them from the women. Yet,
-      shabby as all the details of this crumbling cheap place of sepulture are,
-      nothing could be gayer or more festive than the scene before us. Although
-      the women are in the majority, there are enough men and children present,
-      in colored turbans, fezes, and gowns, and shawls of Persian dye, to
-      transform the graveyard into the semblance of a parterre of flowers. About
-      hundreds of the tombs are seated in a circle groups of women, with their
-      food before them, and the flowers laid upon the tomb, wailing and howling
-      in the very excess of dry-eyed grief. Here and there a group has employed
-      a &ldquo;welee&rdquo; or holy man, or a boy, to read the Koran for it&mdash;and these
-      Koran-readers turn an honest para by their vocation. The women spend
-      nearly the entire day in this sympathetic visit to their departed friends&mdash;it
-      is a custom as old as history, and the Egyptians used to build their tombs
-      with a visiting ante-chamber for the accommodation of the living. I should
-      think that the knowledge that such a group of women were to eat their
-      luncheon, wailing and roosting about one's tomb every week, would add a
-      new terror to death.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Pillar, which was no doubt erected by Diocletian to his own honor,
-      after the modest fashion of Romans as well as Egyptians, is in its present
-      surroundings not an object of enthusiasm, though it is almost a hundred
-      feet high, and the monolith shaft was, before age affected it, a fine
-      piece of polished Syenite. It was no doubt a few thousand years older than
-      Diocletian, and a remnant of that oldest civilization; the base and
-      capital he gave it are not worthy of it. Its principal use now is as a
-      surface for the paint-brushes and chisels of distinguished travelers, who
-      have covered it with their precious names. I cannot sufficiently admire
-      the <i>naïveté</i> and self-depreciation of those travelers who paint and
-      cut their names on such monuments, knowing as they must that the first
-      sensible person who reads the same will say, &ldquo;This is an ass.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We drive, still outside the walls, towards the Mahmoodéeh canal, passing
-      amid mounds of rubbish, and getting a view of the desert-like country
-      beyond. And now heaves in sight the unchanged quintessence of Orientalism&mdash;there
-      is our first camel, a camel in use, in his native setting and not in a
-      menagerie. There is a line of them, loaded with building-stones, wearily
-      shambling along. The long bended neck apes humility, but the supercilious
-      nose in the air expresses perfect contempt for all modern life. The
-      contrast of this haughty &ldquo;stuck-up-ativeness&rdquo; (it is necessary to coin
-      this word to express the camel's ancient conceit) with the royal ugliness
-      of the brute, is both awe-inspiring and amusing. No human royal family
-      dare be uglier than the camel. He is a mass of bones, faded tufts, humps,
-      lumps, splay-joints and callosities. His tail is a ridiculous wisp, and a
-      failure as an ornament or a fly-brush. His feet are simply big sponges.
-      For skin covering he has patches of old buffalo robes, faded and with the
-      hair worn off. His voice is more disagreeable than his appearance. With a
-      reputation for patience, he is snappish and vindictive. His endurance is
-      over-rated&mdash;that is to say he dies like a sheep on an expedition of
-      any length, if he is not well fed. His gait moves every muscle like an
-      ague. And yet this ungainly creature carries his head in the air, and
-      regards the world out of his great brown eyes with disdain. The Sphinx is
-      not more placid. He reminds me, I don't know why, of a pyramid. He has a
-      resemblance to a palm-tree. It is impossible to make an Egyptian picture
-      without him. What a Hapsburg lip he has! Ancient, royal? The very poise of
-      his head says plainly, &ldquo;I have come out of the dim past, before history
-      was; the deluge did not touch me; I saw Menes come and go; I helped
-      Shoofoo build the great pyramid; I knew Egypt when it hadn't an obelisk
-      nor a temple; I watched the slow building of the pyramid at Sakkara. Did I
-      not transport the fathers of your race across the desert? There are three
-      of us; the date-palm, the pyramid, and myself. Everything else is modern.
-      Go to!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Along the canal, where lie dahabeëhs that will by and by make their way up
-      the Nile, are some handsome villas, palaces and gardens. This is the
-      favorite drive and promenade. In the gardens, that are open to the public,
-      we find a profusion of tropical trees and flowering shrubs; roses are
-      decaying, but the blossoms of the yellow acacia scent the air; there are
-      Egyptian lilies; the plant with crimson leaves, not native here, grows as
-      high as the arbutilon tree; the red passion-flower is in bloom, and
-      morning-glories cover with their running vine the tall and slender
-      cypresses. The finest tree is the sycamore, with great gnarled trunk, and
-      down-dropping branches. Its fruit, the sycamore fig, grows directly on the
-      branch, without stem. It is an insipid fruit, sawdust-y, but the Arabs
-      like it, and have a saying that he who eats one is sure to return to
-      Egypt. After we had tried to eat one, we thought we should not care to
-      return. The interior was filled with lively little flies; and a priest who
-      was attending a school of boys taking a holiday in the grove, assured us
-      that each fig had to be pierced when it was green, to let the flies out,
-      in order to make it eatable. But the Egyptians eat them, flies and all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The splendors of Alexandria must be sought in books. The traveler will see
-      scarcely any remains of a magnificence which dazzled the world in the
-      beginning of our era. He may like to see the mosque that marks the site of
-      the church of St. Mark, and he may care to look into the Coptic convent
-      whence the Venetians stole the body of the saint, about a thousand years
-      ago. Of course we go to see that wonder of our childhood, Cleopatra's
-      Needles, as the granite obelisks are called that were brought from
-      Alexandria and set up before a temple of Caesar in the time of Tiberius.
-      Only one is standing, the other, mutilated, lies prone beneath the soil.
-      The erect one stands near the shore and in the midst of hovels and
-      incredible filth. The name of the earliest king it bears is that of
-      Thothmes III., the great man of Egypt, whose era of conquest was about
-      1500 years before St. Mark came on his mission to Alexandria.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The city which has had as many vicissitudes as most cities, boasting under
-      the Cæsars a population of half a million, that had decreased to 6,000 in
-      1800, and has now again grown to over two hundred thousand, seems to be at
-      a waiting point; the merchants complain that the Suez Canal has killed its
-      trade. Yet its preeminence for noise, dirt and shabbiness will hardly be
-      disputed; and its bazaars and streets are much more interesting, perhaps
-      because it is the meeting-place of all races, than travelers usually
-      admit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We had scarcely set foot in our hotel when we were saluted and waited for
-      by dragomans of all sorts. They knocked at our doors, they waylaid us in
-      the passages; whenever we emerged from our rooms half a dozen rose up,
-      bowing low; it was like being a small king, with obsequious attendants
-      waiting every motion. They presented their cards, they begged we would
-      step aside privately for a moment and look at the bundle of
-      recommendations they produced; they would not press themselves, but if we
-      desired a dragoman for the Nile they were at our service. They were of all
-      shades of color, except white, and of all degrees of oriental splendor in
-      their costume. There were Egyptians, Nubians, Maltese, Greeks, Syrians.
-      They speak well all the languages of the Levant and of Europe, except the
-      one in which you attempt to converse with them. I never made the
-      acquaintance of so many fine fellows in the same space of time. All of
-      them had the strongest letters of commendation from travelers whom they
-      had served, well-known men of letters and of affairs. Travelers give these
-      endorsements as freely as they sign applications for government
-      appointments at home.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The name of the handsome dragoman who walked with us through the bazaars
-      was, naturally enough, Ahmed Abdallah. He wore the red fez (tarboosh) with
-      a gay kuffia bound about it; an embroidered shirt without collar or
-      cravat; a long shawl of checked and bright-colored Beyrout silk girding
-      the loins, in which was carried his watch and heavy chain; a cloth coat;
-      and baggy silk trousers that would be a gown if they were not split enough
-      to gather about each ankle. The costume is rather Syrian than Egyptian,
-      and very elegant when the materials are fine; but with a suggestion of
-      effeminacy, to Western eyes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The native bazaars, which are better at Cairo, reveal to the traveler, at
-      a glance, the character of the Orient; its cheap tinsel, its squalor, and
-      its occasional richness and gorgeousness. The shops on each side of the
-      narrow street are little more than good-sized wardrobes, with room for
-      shelves of goods in the rear and for the merchant to sit cross-legged in
-      front. There is usually space for a customer to sit with him, and indeed
-      two or three can rest on the edge of the platform. Upon cords stretched
-      across the front hang specimens of the wares for sale. Wooden shutters
-      close the front at night. These little cubbies are not only the places of
-      sale but of manufacture of goods. Everything goes on in the view of all
-      the world. The tailor is stitching, the goldsmith is blowing the bellows
-      of his tiny forge, the saddler is repairing the old donkey-saddles, the
-      shoemaker is cutting red leather, the brazier is hammering, the weaver
-      sits at his little loom with the treadle in the ground&mdash;every trade
-      goes on, adding its own clatter to the uproar.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What impresses us most is the good nature of the throng, under trying
-      circumstances. The street is so narrow that three or four people abreast
-      make a jam, and it is packed with those moving in two opposing currents.
-      Through this mass comes a donkey with a couple of panniers of soil or of
-      bricks, or bundles of scraggly sticks; or a camel surges in, loaded with
-      building-joists or with lime; or a Turkish officer, with a gaily
-      caparisoned horse impatiently stamping; a porter slams along with a heavy
-      box on his back; the water-carrier with his nasty skin rubs through; the
-      vender of sweetmeats finds room for his broad tray; the orange-man pushes
-      his cart into the throng; the Jew auctioneer cries his antique brasses and
-      more antique raiment. Everybody is jostled and pushed and jammed; but
-      everybody is in an imperturbable good humor, for no one is really in a
-      hurry, and whatever is, is as it always has been and will be. And what a
-      cosmopolitan place it is. We meet Turks, Greeks, Copts, Egyptians,
-      Nubians, Syrians, Armenians, Italians; tattered derweeshes, &ldquo;welees&rdquo; or
-      holy Moslems, nearly naked, presenting the appearance of men who have been
-      buried a long time and recently dug up; Greek priests, Jews, Persian
-      Parsees, Algerines, Hindoos, negroes from Darfoor, and flat-nosed blacks
-      from beyond Khartoom.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The traveler has come into a country of holiday which is perpetual. Under
-      this sun and in this air there is nothing to do but to enjoy life and
-      attend to religion five times a day. We look into a mosque; In the cool
-      court is a fountain for washing; the mosque is sweet and quiet, and upon
-      its clean matting a row of Arabs are prostrating themselves in prayer
-      towards the niche that indicates the direction of Mecca. We stroll along
-      the open streets encountering a novelty at every step. Here is a musician
-      a Nubian playing upon a sort of tambour on a frame; a picking, feeble
-      noise he produces, but he is accompanied by the oddest character we have
-      seen yet. This is a stalwart, wild-eyed son of the sand, coal-black, with
-      a great mass of uncombed, disordered hair hanging about his shoulders. His
-      only clothing is a breech-cloth and a round shaving-glass bound upon his
-      forehead; but he has hung about his waist heavy strings of goats' hoofs,
-      and those he shakes, in time to the tambour, by a tremulous motion of his
-      big hips as he minces about. He seems so vastly pleased with himself that
-      I covet knowledge of his language, in order to tell him that he looks like
-      an idiot.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Near the Fort Napoleon, a hill by the harbor, we encounter another scene
-      peculiar to the East. A yellow-skinned, cunning-eyed conjurer has
-      attracted a ring of idlers about him, who squat in the blowing dust, under
-      the blazing sun, and patiently watch his antics. The conjurer himself
-      performs no wonders, but the spectators are a study of color and feature.
-      The costumes are brilliant red, yellow, and white. The complexions exhaust
-      the possibilities of human color. I thought I had seen black people in
-      South Carolina; but I saw a boy just now standing in a doorway who would
-      have been invisible but for his white shirt; and here is a fat negress in
-      a bright yellow gown and kerchief, whose jet face has taken an incredible
-      polish; only the most accomplished boot-black could raise such a shine on
-      a shoe; tranquil enjoyment oozes out of her. The conjurer is assisted by
-      two mites of children, a girl and a boy (no clothing wasted on them), and
-      between the three a great deal of jabber and whacking with cane sticks is
-      going on, but nothing is performed except the taking of a long snake from
-      a bag and tying it round the little girl's neck. Paras are collected,
-      however, and that is the main object of all performances.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A little further on, another group is gathered around a storyteller, who
-      is reeling off one of the endless tales in which the Arab delights;
-      love-adventures, not always the most delicate but none the less enjoyed
-      for that, or the story of some poor lad who has had a wonderful career and
-      finally married the Sultan's daughter. He is accompanied in his narrative
-      by two men thumping upon darabooka drums, in a monotonous, sleepy fashion,
-      quite in accordance however with the everlasting leisure that pervades the
-      air. Walking about are the venders of sweets, and of greasy cakes, who
-      carry tripods on which to rest their brass trays, and who split the air
-      with their cries.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is color, color, that makes all this shifting panorama so fascinating,
-      and hides the nakedness, the squalor, the wretchedness of all this
-      unconcealed poverty; color in flowing garments, color in the shops, color
-      in the sky. We have come to the land of the sun.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At night when we walk around the square we stumble over bundles of rags
-      containing men who are asleep, in all the corners, stretched on doorsteps,
-      laid away on the edge of the sidewalk. Opposite the hotel is a <i>casino</i>,
-      which is more Frank than Egyptian. The musicians are all women and Germans
-      or Bohemians; the waiter-girls are mostly Italian; one of them says she
-      comes from Bohemia, and has been in India, to which she proposes to
-      return. The <i>habitués</i> are mostly young Egyptians in Frank dress
-      except the tarboosh, and Italians, all effeminate fellows. All the world
-      of loose living and wandering meets here. Italian is much spoken. There is
-      little that is Oriental here, except it may be a complaisance toward
-      anything enervating and languidly wicked that Europe has to offer. This
-      cheap concert is, we are told, all the amusement at night that can be
-      offered the traveler, by the once pleasure-loving city of Cleopatra, in
-      the once brilliant Greek capital in which Hypatia was a star.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0053.jpg" alt="0053 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0054.jpg" alt="0054 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER III.&mdash;EGYPT OF TO-DAY.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">E</span>GYPT has excellent
-      railways. There is no reason why it should not have. They are made without
-      difficulty and easily maintained in a land of no frosts; only where they
-      touch the desert an occasional fence is necessary against the drifting
-      sand. The rails are laid, without wooden sleepers, on iron saucers, with
-      connecting bands, and the track is firm and sufficiently elastic. The
-      express train travels the 131 miles to Cairo in about four and a half
-      hours, running with a punctuality, and with Egyptian drivers and
-      conductors too, that is unique in Egypt. The opening scene at the station
-      did not promise expedition or system.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We reach the station three quarters of an hour before the departure of the
-      train, for it requires a longtime&mdash;in Egypt, as everywhere in Europe&mdash;to
-      buy tickets and get baggage weighed. The officials are slower workers than
-      our treasury-clerks. There is a great crowd of foreigners, and the
-      baggage-room is piled with trunks of Americans, 'boxes' of Englishmen, and
-      chests and bundles of all sorts. Behind a high counter in a smaller room
-      stand the scales, the weigher, and the clerks. Piles of trunks are brought
-      in and dumped by the porters, and thrust forward by the servants and
-      dragomans upon the counter, to gain them preference at the scales. No
-      sooner does a dragoman get in his trunk than another is thrust ahead of
-      it, and others are hurled on top, till the whole pile comes down with a
-      crash. There is no system, there are neither officials nor police, and the
-      excited travelers are free to fight it out among themselves. To venture
-      into the <i>mêlée</i> is to risk broken bones, and it is wiser to leave
-      the battle to luck and the dragomans. The noise is something astonishing.
-      A score or two of men are yelling at the top of their voices, screaming,
-      scolding, damning each other in polyglot, gesticulating, jumping up and
-      down, quivering with excitement. This is your Oriental repose! If there
-      were any rule by which passengers could take their turns, all the trunks
-      could be quickly weighed and passed on; but now in the scrimmage not a
-      trunk gets to the scales, and a half hour goes by in which no progress is
-      made and the uproar mounts higher.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Finally, Ahmed, slight and agile, handing me his cane, kuffia and watch,
-      leaps over the heap of trunks on the counter and comes to close quarters
-      with the difficulty. He succeeds in getting two trunks upon the platform
-      of the scales, but a traveler, whose clothes were made in London, tips
-      them off and substitutes his own. The weighers stand patiently waiting the
-      result of the struggle. Ahmed hurls off the stranger's trunk, gives its
-      owner a turn that sends him spinning over the baggage, and at last
-      succeeds in getting our luggage weighed. He emerges from the scrimmage an
-      exhausted man, and we get our seats in the carriage just in time. However,
-      it does not start for half an hour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The reader would like to ride from Alexandria to Cairo, but he won't care
-      to read much about the route. It is our first experience of a country
-      living solely by irrigation&mdash;the occasional winter showers being
-      practically of no importance. We pass along and over the vast shallows of
-      Lake Mareotis, a lake in winter and a marsh in summer, ride between
-      marshes and cotton-fields, and soon strike firmer ground. We are
-      traveling, in short, through a Jersey flat, a land black, fat, and rich,
-      without an elevation, broken only by canals and divided into fields by
-      ditches. Every rod is cultivated, and there are no detached habitations.
-      The prospect cannot be called lively, but it is not without interest;
-      there are ugly buffaloes in the coarse grass, there is the elegant white
-      heron, which travelers insist is the sacred ibis, there are some
-      doleful-looking fellaheen, with donkeys, on the bank of the canal, there
-      is a file of camels, and there are shadoofs. The shadoof is the primitive
-      method of irrigation, and thousands of years have not changed it. Two
-      posts are driven into the bank of the canal, with a cross-piece on top. On
-      this swings a pole with a bucket of leather suspended at one end, which is
-      outweighed by a ball of clay at the other. The fellah stands on the slope
-      of the bank and, dipping the bucket into the water, raises it and pours
-      the fluid into a sluice-way above. If the bank is high, two and sometimes
-      three shadoofs are needed to raise the water to the required level. The
-      labor is prodigiously hard and back-straining, continued as it must be
-      constantly. All the fellaheen we saw were clad in black, though some had a
-      cloth about their loins. The workman usually stands in a sort of a recess
-      in the bank, and his color harmonizes with the dark soil. Any occupation
-      more wearisome and less beneficial to the mind I cannot conceive. To the
-      credit of the Egyptians, the men alone work the shadoof. Women here tug
-      water, grind the corn, and carry about babies, always; but I never saw one
-      pulling at a shadoof pole.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is an Arab village! We need to be twice assured that it is a
-      village. Raised on a slight elevation, so as to escape high water, it is
-      still hardly distinguishable from the land, certainly not in color. All
-      Arab villages look like ruins; this is a compacted collection of shapeless
-      mud-huts, flat-topped and irregularly thrown together. It is an
-      aggregation of dog-kennels, baked in the sun and cracked. However, a clump
-      of palm-trees near it gives it an air of repose, and if it possesses a
-      mosque and a minaret it has a picturesque appearance, if the observer does
-      not go too near. And such are the habitations of nearly all the Egyptians.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sixty-five miles from Alexandria, we cross the Rosetta branch of the Nile,
-      on a fine iron bridge&mdash;even this portion of the Nile is a broad,
-      sprawling river; and we pass through several respectable towns which have
-      an appearance of thrift&mdash;Tanta especially, with its handsome station
-      and a palace of the Khedive. At Tanta is held three times a year a great
-      religious festival and fair, not unlike the old fair of the ancient
-      Egyptians at Bubastis in honor of Diana, with quite as many excesses, and
-      like that, with a gramme of religion to a pound of pleasure. &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; says
-      Herodotus, &ldquo;when they are being conveyed to the city Bubastis, they act as
-      follows:&mdash;for men and women embark together, and great numbers of
-      both sexes in every barge: some of the women have castanets on which they
-      play, and the men play on the flute during the whole voyage; and the rest
-      of the women and men sing and clap their hands together at the same time.&rdquo;
-       And he goes on to say that when they came to any town they moored the
-      barge, and the women chaffed those on shore, and danced with indecent
-      gestures; and that at the festival more wine was consumed than all the
-      rest of the year. The festival at Tanta is in honor of a famous Moslem
-      saint whose tomb is there; but the tomb is scarcely so attractive as the
-      field of the <i>fête</i>, with the story-tellers and the jugglers and
-      booths of dancing girls.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We pass decayed Benha with its groves of Yoosef-Effendi oranges&mdash;the
-      small fruit called Mandarin by foreigners, and preferred by those who like
-      a slight medicinal smell and taste in the orange; and when we are yet
-      twenty miles from Cairo, there in the south-west, visible for a moment and
-      then hidden by the trees, and again in sight, faintly and yet clearly
-      outlined against the blue sky, are two forms, the sight of which gives us
-      a thrill. They stand still in that purple distance in which we have seen
-      them all our lives. Beyond these level fields and these trees of sycamore
-      and date-palm, beyond the Nile, on the desert's edge, with the low Libyan
-      hills falling off behind them, as delicate in form and color as clouds, as
-      enduring as the sky they pierce, the Pyramids of Geezeh! I try to shake
-      off the impression of their solemn antiquity, and imagine how they would
-      strike one if all their mystery were removed. But that is impossible. The
-      imagination always prompts the eye. And yet I believe that standing where
-      they do stand, and in this atmosphere, they are the most impressive of
-      human structures. But the pyramids would be effective, as the obelisk is
-      not, out of Egypt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Trees increase in number; we have villas and gardens; the grey ledges of
-      the Mokattam hills come into view, then the twin slender spires of the
-      Mosque of Mohammed Ali on the citadel promontory, and we are in the modern
-      station of Cairo; and before we take in the situation are ignominiously
-      driven away in a hotel-omnibus. This might happen in Europe. Yes; but
-      then, who are these in white and blue and red, these squatters by the
-      wayside, these smokers in the sun, these turbaned riders on braying
-      donkeys and grumbling dromedaries; what is all this fantastic masquerade
-      in open day? Do people live in these houses? Do women peep from these
-      lattices? Isn't that gowned Arab conscious that he is kneeling and praying
-      out doors? Have we come to a land where all our standards fail and people
-      are not ashamed of their religion?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0058.jpg" alt="0058 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0059.jpg" alt="0059 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER IV.&mdash;CAIRO.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span> CAIRO! Cairo!
-      Masr-el-Kaherah, The Victorious! City of the Caliphs, of Salah-e'-deen, of
-      the Memlooks! Town of mediaeval romance projected into a prosaic age! More
-      Oriental than Damascus, or Samarcand. Vast, sprawling city, with
-      dilapidated Saracenic architecture, pretentious modern barrack-palaces,
-      new villas and gardens, acres of compacted, squalid, unsunned dwellings.
-      Always picturesque, lamentably dirty, and thoroughly captivating.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Shall we rhapsodize over it, or attempt to describe it? Fortunately,
-      writers have sufficiently done both. Let us enjoy it. We are at
-      Shepherd's. It is a caravansary through which the world flows. At its <i>table
-      d'hote</i> are all nations; German princes, English dukes and shopkeepers,
-      Indian officers, American sovereigns; explorers, <i>savants</i>,
-      travelers; they have come for the climate of Cairo, they are going up the
-      Nile, they are going to hunt in Abyssinia, to join an advance military
-      party on the White Nile; they have come from India, from Japan, from
-      Australia, from Europe, from America.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are in the Frank quarter called the Ezbekeëh, which was many years ago
-      a pond during high water, then a garden with a canal round it, and is now
-      built over with European houses and shops, except the square reserved for
-      the public garden. From the old terrace in front of the hotel, where the
-      traveler used to look on trees, he will see now only raw new houses and a
-      street usually crowded with passers and rows of sleepy donkeys and their
-      voluble drivers. The hotel is two stories only, built round a court, damp
-      in rainy or cloudy weather (and it is learning how to rain as high up the
-      Nile as Cairo), and lacking the comforts which invalids require in the
-      winter. It is kept on an ingenious combination of the American and
-      European plans; that is, the traveler pays a fixed sum per day and then
-      gets a bill of particulars, besides, which gives him all the pleasures of
-      the European system. We heard that one would be more Orientally surrounded
-      and better cared for at the Hotel du Nil; and the Khedive, who tries his
-      hand at everything, has set up a New Hotel on the public square; but,
-      somehow, one enters Shepherd's as easy as he goes into a city gate.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They call the house entirely European. But there are pelicans walking
-      about in the tropical garden; on one side is the wall of a harem, a house
-      belonging to the Khedive's mother, a harem with closed shutters, but
-      uninteresting, because there is no one in it, though ostriches are
-      strutting in its paved court; in the rear of the house stretches a great
-      grove of tall date-palms standing in a dusty, <i>débris</i>-strown field&mdash;a
-      lazy wind is always singing through their tops, and a sakiya (a
-      cow-impelled water-wheel) creaks there day and night; we never lock the
-      doors of our rooms; long-gowned attendants are always watching in the
-      passages, and, when we want one, in default of bells, we open the door and
-      clap the hands. All this, with a juggler performing before the house;
-      dragomans and servants and merchants in Oriental costume; the monotonous
-      strumming of an Arab band in a neighboring <i>cafe</i>, bricklayers on the
-      unfinished house opposite us, working in white night-gowns and turbans,
-      who might be mistaken at a distance for female sleepwalkers; and from a
-      minaret not far away, the tenor-voiced muezzins urging us in the most
-      musical invitation ever extended to unbelievers, to come to prayer at
-      daylight&mdash;this cannot be called European.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An end of the dinner-table, however, is occupied by a loud party of young
-      Englishmen, a sprinkling of dukes and earls and those attendants and
-      attentive listeners of the nobility who laugh inordinately when my lord
-      says a good thing, and are encouraged when my lord laughs loudly at a
-      sally of theirs and declares, &ldquo;well, now, that's very good;&rdquo; a party who
-      seem to regard Cairo as beyond the line of civilization and its
-      requirements. They talk loud, roar in laughing, stare at the ladies, and
-      light their cigars before the latter have withdrawn. My comrade notices
-      that they call for champagne before fish; we could overlook anything but
-      that. Some travelers who are annoyed at their boisterousness speak to the
-      landlord about them, without knowing their rank&mdash;supposing that one
-      could always tell an earl by his superior manners. These young
-      representatives of England have demanded that the Khedive shall send them
-      on their hunting-tour in Africa, and he is to do so at considerable cost;
-      and it is said that he pays their hotel bills in Cairo. The desire of the
-      Khedive to stand well with all the European powers makes him an easy prey
-      to any nobleman who does not like to travel in Egypt at his own expense.
-      (It ought to be added that we encountered on the Nile an Englishman of
-      high rank who had declined the Khedive's offer of a free trip).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Cairo is a city of vast distances, especially the new part which is laid
-      out with broad streets, and built up with isolated houses having perhaps a
-      garden or a green court; open squares are devoted to fountains and
-      flower-beds. Into these broad avenues the sun pours, and through them the
-      dust swirls in clouds; everything is covered with it; it imparts its grey
-      tint to the town and sifts everywhere its impalpable powder. No doubt the
-      health of Cairo is greatly improved and epidemics are lessened, by the
-      destruction of the pestilent old houses and by running wide streets
-      through the old quarters of twisting lanes and sunless alleys. But the
-      wide streets are uninteresting, and the sojourner in the city likes to
-      escape out of their glare and dust into the cool and shady recesses of the
-      old town. And he has not far to go to do so. A few minutes walk from the
-      Ezbekeëh brings one into a tangle like the crossing paths of an ants nest,
-      into the very heart of the smell and color of the Orient, among people
-      among shops, in the presence of manners, habits, costumes, occupations,
-      centuries old, into a life in which the western man recognizes nothing
-      familiar.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Cairo, between the Mokattam hill of limestone and the Nile, covers a great
-      deal of ground&mdash;about three square miles&mdash;on which dwell
-      somewhere from a third to a half of a million of people. The traveler
-      cannot see its stock-sights in a fortnight, and though he should be there
-      months he will find something novel in the street-life daily, even though
-      he does not, as Mr. Lane has so admirably done, make a study of the
-      people. And &ldquo;life&rdquo; goes on in the open streets, to an extent which always
-      surprises us, however familiar we may be with Italian habits. People eat,
-      smoke, pray, sleep, carry on all their trades in sight of the passers by&mdash;only
-      into the recesses of the harem and the faces of the women one may not
-      look. And this last mystery and reserve almost outweighs the openness of
-      everything else. One feels as if he were in a masquerade; the part of the
-      world which is really most important&mdash;womankind&mdash;appears to him
-      only in shadow and flitting phantasm. What danger is he in from these
-      wrapped and veiled figures which glide by, shooting him with a dark and
-      perhaps wicked eye; what peril is he in as he slips through these narrow
-      streets with their masked batteries of latticed windows! This Eastern life
-      is all open to the sun; and yet how little of its secrets does the
-      stranger fathom. I seem to feel, always, in an Eastern town, that there is
-      a mask of duplicity and concealment behind which the Orientals live; that
-      they habitually deceive the traveler in his &ldquo;gropings after truth.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The best way of getting about Cairo and its environs is on the donkey. It
-      is cheap and exhilarating. The donkey is easily mounted and easily got off
-      from; not seldom he will weaken in his hind legs and let his rider to the
-      ground&mdash;a sinking operation which destroys your confidence in life
-      itself. Sometimes he stumbles and sends the rider over his head. But the
-      <i>good</i> donkey never does either. He is the best animal, of his size
-      and appearance, living. He has the two qualities of our greatest general,
-      patience and obstinacy. The <i>good</i> donkey is easy as a rocking-chair,
-      sure-footed as a chamois; he can thread any crowd and stand patiently
-      dozing in any noisy thoroughfare for hours. To ride him is only a slight
-      compromise of one's independence in walking. One is so near the ground,
-      and so absent-mindedly can he gaze at what is around him, that he forgets
-      that there is anything under him. When the donkey, in the excitement of
-      company on the open street and stimulated by the whacks and cries of his
-      driver, breaks into the rush of a gallop, there is so much flying of legs
-      and such a general flutter that the rider fancies he is getting over the
-      ground at an awful rate, running a breakneck race; but it does not appear
-      so to an observer. The rider has the feeling of the swift locomotion of
-      the Arab steed without its danger or its expense. Besides, a long-legged
-      man, with a cork hat and a flying linen &ldquo;duster,&rdquo; tearing madly along on
-      an animal as big as a sheep, is an amusing spectacle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The donkey is abused, whacked, beaten till he is raw, saddled so that all
-      the straps gall him, hard-ridden, left for hours to be assailed by the
-      flies in the street, and ridiculed by all men. I wish we could know what
-      sort of an animal centuries of good treatment would have made of him.
-      Something no doubt quite beyond human deserts; as it is, he is simply
-      indispensable in Eastern life. And not seldom he is a pet; he wears
-      jingling bells and silver ornaments around his neck; his hair is shaved in
-      spots to give him a variegated appearance, and his mane and tail are dyed
-      with henna; he has on an embroidered cloth bridle and a handsome saddle,
-      under which is a scarlet cloth worked with gold. The length and silkiness
-      of his ears are signs of his gentle breeding. I could never understand why
-      he is loaded with such an enormous saddle; the pommel of it rising up in
-      front of the rider as big as a half-bushel measure. Perhaps it is thought
-      well to put this mass upon his back so that he will not notice or mind any
-      additional weight.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The donkey's saving quality, in this exacting world, is inertia. And, yet,
-      he is not without ambition. He dislikes to be passed on the road by a
-      fellow; and if one attempts it, he is certain to sheer in ahead of him and
-      shove him off the track. &ldquo;Donkey jealous one anoder,&rdquo; say the drivers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Each donkey has his driver or attendant, without whose presence, behind or
-      at the side, the animal ceases to go forward. These boys, and some of them
-      are men in stature, are the quickest-witted, most importunate,
-      good-natured vagabonds in this world. They make a study of human nature,
-      and accurately measure every traveler the moment he appears. They are
-      agile to do errands, some of them are better guides than the
-      professionals, they can be entrusted with any purchases you may make, they
-      run, carrying their slippers in their hand, all day beside the donkey, and
-      get only a pittance of pay. They are however a jolly, larkish set, always
-      skylarking with each other, and are not unlike the newspaper boys of New
-      York; now and then one of them becomes a trader or a dragoman and makes
-      his fortune.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you prefer a carriage, good vehicles have become plenty of late years,
-      since there are broad streets for driving; and some very handsome
-      equipages are seen, especially towards evening on the Shoobra road, up and
-      down which people ride and drive to be seen and to see, as they do in
-      Central or Hyde parks. It is <i>en règle</i> to have a sais running before
-      the carriage, and it is the &ldquo;swell thing&rdquo; to have two of them. The running
-      sais before a rapidly driven carriage is the prettiest sight in Cairo. He
-      is usually a slender handsome black fellow, probably a Nubian, brilliantly
-      dressed, graceful in every motion, running with perfect ease and able to
-      keep up his pace for hours without apparent fatigue. In the days of narrow
-      streets his services were indispensable to clear the way; and even now he
-      is useful in the frequented ways where every one walks in the middle of
-      the street, and the chattering, chaffing throngs are as heedless of
-      anything coming as they are of the day of judgment. In red tarboosh with
-      long tassel, silk and gold embroidered vest and jacket, colored girdle
-      with ends knotted and hanging at the side, short silk trousers and bare
-      legs, and long staff, gold-tipped, in the hand, as graceful in running as
-      Antinous, they are most elegant appendages to a fashionable turnout. If
-      they could not be naturalized in Central Park, it might fill some of the
-      requirements of luxury to train a patriot from the Green Isle to run
-      before the horses, in knee-breeches, flourishing a shillalah. Faith, I
-      think he would clear the way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Especially do I like to see the sais coming down the wind before a
-      carriage of the royal harem. The outriders are eunuchs, two in front and
-      two behind; they are blacks, dressed in black clothes, European cut,
-      except the tarboosh. They ride fine horses, English fashion, rising in the
-      saddle; they have long limbs, lank bodies, cruel, weak faces, and yet
-      cunning; they are sleek, shiny, emasculated. Having no sex, you might say
-      they have no souls. How can these anomalies have any virtue, since virtue
-      implies the opportunity of its opposite? These semblances of men seem
-      proud enough of their position, however, and of the part they play to
-      their masters, as if they did not know the repugnance they excite. The
-      carriage they attend is covered, but the silken hangings of the glass
-      windows are drawn aside, revealing the white-veiled occupants. They indeed
-      have no constitutional objections to being seen; the thin veil enhances
-      their charms, and the observer who sees their painted faces and bright
-      languishing eyes, no doubt gives them credit for as much beauty as they
-      possess; and as they flash by, I suppose that every one, is convinced that
-      he has seen one of the mysterious Circassian or Georgian beauties.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The minute the traveler shows himself on the hotel terrace, the
-      donkey-boys clamor, and push forward their animals upon the sidewalk; it
-      is no small difficulty to select one out of the tangle; there is noise
-      enough used to fit out an expedition to the desert, and it is not till the
-      dragoman has laid vigorously about him with his stick that the way is
-      clear. Your nationality is known at a glance, and a donkey is instantly
-      named to suit you&mdash;the same one being called, indifferently,
-      &ldquo;Bismarck&rdquo; if you are German, &ldquo;Bonaparte&rdquo; if you are French, and &ldquo;Yankee
-      Doodle&rdquo; if you are American, or &ldquo;Ginger Bob&rdquo; at a venture.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are going to Boulak, the so-called port of Cairo, to select a dahabeëh
-      for the Nile voyage. We are indeed only getting ready for this voyage, and
-      seeing the city by the way. The donkey-boys speak English like natives&mdash;of
-      Egypt. The one running beside me, a handsome boy in a long cotton shirt,
-      is named, royally, Mahmoud Hassan.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Are you the brother of Hassan whom I had yesterday?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No. He, Hassan not my brother; he better, he friend. Breakfast, lunch,
-      supper, all together, all same; all same money. We friends.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Abd-el-Atti, our dragoman, is riding ahead on his grey donkey, and I have
-      no difficulty in following his broad back and short legs, even though his
-      donkey should be lost to sight in the press. He rides as Egyptians do,
-      without stirrups, and uses his heels as spurs. Since Mohammed Abd-el-Atti
-      Effendi first went up the Nile, it is many years ago now, with Mr. Wm. C.
-      Prime, and got his name prominently into the Nile literature, he has grown
-      older, stout, and rich; he is entitled by his position to the distinction
-      of &ldquo;Effendi.&rdquo; He boasts a good family, as good as any; most of his
-      relatives are, and he himself has been, in government employ; but he left
-      it because, as he says, he prefers one master to a thousand. When a boy he
-      went with the embassy of Mohammed Ali to England, and since that time he
-      has traveled extensively as courier in Europe and the Levant and as
-      mail-carrier to India. Mr. Prime described him as having somewhat the
-      complexion and features of the North American Indian; it is true, but he
-      has a shrewd restless eye, and very mobile features, quick to image his
-      good humor or the reverse, breaking into smiles, or clouding over upon his
-      easily aroused suspicion. He is a good study of the Moslem and the real
-      Oriental, a combination of the easy, procrastinating fatalism, and yet
-      with a tindery temper and an activity of body and mind that we do not
-      usually associate with the East. His prejudices are inveterate, and he is
-      an unforgiving enemy and a fast, self-sacrificing friend. Not to be
-      driven, he can always be won by kindness. Fond of money and not forgetting
-      the last piastre due him, he is generous and lavish to a fault. A devout
-      Moslem, he has seen too much of the world not to be liberalized. He knows
-      the Koran and the legendary history of the Arabs, and speaks and writes
-      Arabic above the average. An exceedingly shrewd observer and reader of
-      character, and a mimic of other's peculiarities, he is a good <i>raconteur</i>,
-      in his peculiar English, and capital company. It is, by the way, worth
-      mentioning what sharp observers all these Eastern people become, whose
-      business it is to study and humor the whims and eccentricities of
-      travelers. The western man who thinks that the Eastern people are
-      childlike or <i>effete</i>, will change his mind after a few months
-      acquaintance with the shrewd Egyptians. Abd-el-Atti has a good deal of
-      influence and even authority in his sphere, and although his executive
-      ability is without system, he brings things to pass. Wherever he goes,
-      however, there is a ripple and a noise. He would like to go to Nubia with
-      us this winter, he says, &ldquo;for shange of air.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      So much is necessary concerning the character who is to be our companion
-      for many months. No dragoman is better known in the East; he is the sheykh
-      of the dragomans of Cairo, and by reason of his age and experience he is
-      hailed on the river as the sultan of the Nile. He dresses like an
-      Englishman, except his fez.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The great worry of the voyager in Egypt, from the moment he lands, is
-      about a dragoman; his comfort and pleasure depend very much upon a right
-      selection. The dragoman and the dahabeëh interest him more than the sphinx
-      and the great pyramids. Taking strangers up the Nile seems to be the great
-      business of Egypt, and all the intricacies and tricks of it are slowly
-      learned. Ignorant of the language and of the character of the people, the
-      stranger may well be in a maze of doubt and perplexity. His gorgeously
-      attired dragoman, whose recommendations would fit him to hold combined the
-      offices of President of the American Bible Society and caterer for
-      Delmonico, often turns out to be ignorant of his simplest duties, to have
-      an inhabited but uninhabitable boat, to furnish a meagre table, and to be
-      a sly knave. The traveler will certainly have no peace from the
-      importunity of the dragomans until he makes his choice. One hint can be
-      given: it is always best in a Moslem country to take a Moslem dragoman.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are on our way to Boulak. The sky is full of white light. The air is
-      full of dust; the streets are full of noise color, vivid life and motion.
-      Everything is flowing, free, joyous. Naturally people fall into
-      picturesque groups, forming, separating, shifting like scenes on the
-      stage. Neither the rich silks and brilliant dyes, nor the tattered rags,
-      and browns and greys are out of place; full dress and nakedness are
-      equally <i>en régie</i>. Here is a grave, long-bearded merchant in full
-      turban and silk gown, riding his caparisoned donkey to his shop, followed
-      by his pipe-bearer; here is a half-naked fellah seated on the rear of his
-      sorry-eyed beast, with a basket of greens in front of him; here are a
-      group of women, hunched astride their donkeys, some in white silk and some
-      in black, shapeless in their balloon mantles, peeping at the world over
-      their veils; here a handsome sais runs ahead of a carriage with a fat Turk
-      lolling in it, and scatters the loiterers right and left; there are
-      porters and beggars fast asleep by the roadside, only their heads covered
-      from the sun; there are lines of idlers squatting in all-day leisure by
-      the wall, smoking, or merely waiting for tomorrow.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we get down to Old Boulak the Saturday market is encountered. All
-      Egyptian markets occupy the street or some open place, and whatever is for
-      sale here, is exposed to the dust and the sun; fish, candy, dates, live
-      sheep, doora, beans, all the doubtful and greasy compounds on brass trays
-      which the people eat, nuts, raisins, sugar-cane, cheap jewelry. It is
-      difficult to force a way through the noisy crowd. The donkey-boy cries
-      perpetually, to clear the way, take care, &ldquo;<i>shimalak!</i>&rdquo; to the left,
-      &ldquo;<i>yemenak!</i>&rdquo; to the right, <i>ya! riglak!</i> look out for your left
-      leg, look out for your right leg, make way boy, make way old woman; but we
-      joggle the old woman, and just escape stepping on the children and babies
-      strewn in the street, and tread on the edge of mats spread on the ground,
-      upon which provisions are exposed (to the dust) for sale. In the narrow,
-      shabby streets, with dilapidated old balconies meeting overhead, we
-      encounter loaded camels, donkeys with double panniers, hawkers of
-      vegetables; and dodge through, bewildered by color and stunned by noise.
-      What is it that makes all picturesque? More dirt, shabbiness, and
-      nakedness never were assembled. That fellow who has cut armholes in a sack
-      for holding nuts, and slipped into it for his sole garment, would not make
-      a good figure on Broadway, but he is in place here, and as fitly dressed
-      as anybody. These rascals will wear a bit of old carpet as if it were a
-      king's robe, and go about in a pair of drawers that are all rags and
-      strings, and a coarse towel twisted about the head for turban, with a gay
-      <i>insouciance</i> that is pleasing. In fact, I suppose that a good,
-      well-fitting black or nice brown skin is about as good as a suit of
-      clothes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But O! the wrinkled, flabby-breasted old women, who make a pretence of
-      drawing the shawl over one eye; the naked, big-stomached children with
-      spindle legs, who sit in the sand and never brush away the circle of flies
-      around each gummy eye! The tumble-down houses, kennels in which the family
-      sleep, the poverty of thousands of years, borne as if it were the only lot
-      of life! In spite of all this, there is not, I venture to say, in the
-      world beside, anything so full of color, so gay and <i>bizarre</i> as a
-      street in Cairo. And we are in a squalid suburb.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At the shore of the swift and now falling Nile, at Boulak, are moored,
-      four or five deep, the passenger dahabeëhs, more than a hundred of them,
-      gay with new paint and new carpets, to catch the traveler. There are small
-      and large, old and new (but all looking new); those that were used for
-      freight during the summer and may be full of vermin, and those reserved
-      exclusively for strangers. They can be hired at from sixty pounds to two
-      hundred pounds a month; the English owner of one handsomely furnished
-      wanted seven hundred and fifty pounds for a three-months' voyage. The Nile
-      trip adds luxury to itself every year, and is getting so costly that only
-      Americans will be able to afford it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After hours of search we settle upon a boat that will suit us, a large
-      boat that had only made a short trip, and so new that we are at liberty to
-      christen it; and the bargaining for it begins. That is, the bargaining
-      revolves around that boat, but glances off as we depart in a rage to this
-      or that other, until we appear to me to be hiring half the craft on the
-      river. We appear to come to terms; again and again Abd-el-Atti says,
-      &ldquo;Well, it is finish,&rdquo; but new difficulties arise.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The owners were an odd pair: a tall Arab in soiled gown and turban, named
-      Ahmed Aboo Yoosef, a mild and wary Moslem; and Habib Bagdadli, a furtive
-      little Jew in Frank dress, with a cast in one of his pathetic eyes and a
-      beseeching look, who spoke bad French fluently. Aboo Yoosef was ready to
-      come to terms, but Bagdadli stood out; then Bagdadli acquiesced but Aboo
-      made conditions. Ab-del-Atti alternately coaxed and stormed; he pulled the
-      Arab's beard; and he put his arm round his neck and whispered in his ear.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Come, let us to go, dis Jews make me mad. I can't do anything with dis
-      little Jews.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Our dragoman's greatest abhorrence is a Jew. Where is this one from? I
-      ask.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He from Algiers.&rdquo; The Algerian Jews have a bad reputation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;<i>No, no, monsieur, pas Algiers</i>;&rdquo; cries the little Jew, appealing to
-      me with a pitiful look; &ldquo;I am from Bagdad.&rdquo; In proof of this there was his
-      name&mdash;Habib Bagdadli.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The bargaining goes on, with fine gesticulation, despairing attitudes,
-      tones of anger and of grief, violent protestations and fallings into
-      apathy and dejection. It is Arab against Arab and a Jew thrown in.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I will have this boat, but I not put you out of the way on it;&rdquo; says
-      Abd-el-Atti, and goes at it again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      My sympathies are divided. I can see that the Arab and the Jew will be
-      ruined if they take what we offer. I know that we shall be ruined if we
-      give what they ask. This pathetic-eyed little Jew makes me feel that I am
-      oppressing his race; and yet I am quite certain that he is trying to
-      overreach us. How the bargain is finally struck I know not, but made it
-      seems to be, and clinched by Aboo reluctantly pulling his purse from his
-      bosom and handing Abd-el-Atti a napoleon. That binds the bargain; instead
-      of the hirer paying something, the lessor gives a pledge.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Trouble, however, is not ended. Certain alterations and additions are to
-      be made, and it is nearly two weeks before the evasive couple complete
-      them. The next day they offer us twenty pounds to release them. The pair
-      are always hanging about for some mitigation or for some advance. The
-      gentle Jew, who seems to me friendless, always excites the ire of our
-      dragoman; &ldquo;Here comes dis little Jews,&rdquo; he exclaims as he encounters him
-      in the street, and forces him to go and fulfil some neglected promise.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The boat is of the largest size, and has never been above the Cataract;
-      the owners guarantee that it can go, and there is put in the contract a
-      forfeit of a hundred pounds if it will not. We shall see afterwards how
-      the owners sought to circumvent us. The wiles of the Egyptians are slowly
-      learned by the open-minded stranger.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0012" id="linkimage-0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0071.jpg" alt="0071 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0072.jpg" alt="0072 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER V.&mdash;IN THE BAZAAR.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>UR sight-seeing in
-      Cairo is accomplished under the superintendence of another guide and
-      dragoman, a cheerful, willing, good-natured and careful Moslem, with one
-      eye. He looks exactly like the one-eyed calender of the story; and his
-      good eye has a humorous and inquiring twinkle in it. His name is Hassan,
-      but he prefers to be called Hadji, the name he has taken since he made the
-      pilgrimage to Mecca.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A man who has made the pilgrimage is called &ldquo;the hhâgg,&rdquo; a woman &ldquo;the
-      hhâggeh.&rdquo;&mdash;often spelled and pronounced &ldquo;hadj&rdquo; and &ldquo;hadjee.&rdquo; It seems
-      to be a privilege of travelers to spell Arabic words as they please, and
-      no two writers agree on a single word or name. The Arabs take a new name
-      or discard an old one as they like, and half a dozen favorite names do
-      duty for half the inhabitants. It is rare to meet one who hasn't somewhere
-      about him the name of Mohammed, Ahmed, Ali, Hassan, Hosayn, or Mahmoud.
-      People take a new name as they would a garment that strikes the fancy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You like go bazaar?&rdquo; asks Hadji, after the party is mounted on donkeys in
-      front of the hotel.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, Hadji, go by the way of the Mooskee.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The Mooskee is the best known street in Cairo, and the only one in the old
-      part of the town that the traveler can find unaided. It runs straight, or
-      nearly so, a mile perhaps, into the most densely built quarters, and is
-      broad enough for carriages. A considerable part of it is roofed lightly
-      over with cane or palm slats, through which the sun sifts a little light,
-      and, being watered, it is usually cool and pleasant. It cannot be called a
-      good or even road, but carriages and donkeys pass over it without noise,
-      the wheels making only a smothered sound: you may pass through it many
-      times and not discover that a canal runs underneath it. The lower part of
-      it is occupied by European shops. There are no fine shops in it like those
-      in the Ezbekeëh, and it is not interesting like the bazaars, but it is
-      always crowded. Probably no street in the world offers such a variety of
-      costumes and nationalities, and in no one can be heard more languages. It
-      is the main artery, from which branch off the lesser veins and
-      reticulations leading into the bazaars.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If the Mooskee is crowded, the bazaars are a jam. Different trades and
-      nationalities have separate quarters, articles that are wanted are far
-      apart, and one will of necessity consume a day in making two or three
-      purchases. It is an achievement to find and bargain for a piece of tape.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In one quarter are red slippers, nothing but red slippers, hundreds of
-      shops hung with them, shops in which they are made and sold; the yellow
-      slippers are in another quarter, and by no chance does one merchant keep
-      both kinds. There are the silk bazaars, the gold bazaars, the silver
-      bazaars, the brass, the arms, the antiquity, the cotton, the spice, and
-      the fruit bazaars. In one quarter the merchants and manufacturers are all
-      Egyptians, in another Turks, in another Copts, or Algerines, or Persians,
-      or Armenians, or Greeks, or Syrians, or Jews.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And what is a bazaar? Simply a lane, narrow, straight or crooked, winding,
-      involved, interrupted by a fountain, or a mosque, intersected by other
-      lanes, a <i>congeries</i> of lanes, roofed with matting it may be, on each
-      side of which are the little shops, not much bigger than a dry-goods box
-      or a Saratoga trunk. Frequently there is a story above, with hanging
-      balconies and latticed windows. On the ledge of his shop the merchant, in
-      fine robes of silk and linen, sits cross-legged, probably smoking his
-      chibook. He sits all day sipping coffee and gossipping with his friends,
-      waiting for a customer. At the times of prayer he spreads his
-      prayer-carpet and pursues his devotions in sight of all the world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This Oriental microcosm called a bazaar is the most characteristic thing
-      in the East, and affords most entertainment; in these cool recesses, which
-      the sun only penetrates in glints, is all that is shabby and all that is
-      splendid in this land of violent contrasts. The shops are rude, the
-      passages are unpaved dirt, the matting above hangs in shreds, the
-      unpainted balconies are about to tumble down, the lattice-work is grey
-      with dust; fleas abound; you are jostled by an unsavory throng may be; run
-      against by loaded donkeys; grazed by the dripping goat-skins of the
-      water-carriers; beset by beggars; followed by Jews offering old brasses,
-      old cashmeres, old armor; squeezed against black backs from the Soudan;
-      and stunned by the sing-song cries of a dozen callings. But all this is
-      nothing. Here are the perfumes of Arabia, the colors of Paradise. These
-      narrow streets are streams of glancing color; these shops are more
-      brilliant than any picture&mdash;but in all is a softened harmony, the
-      ancient art of the East.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are sitting at a corner, pricing some pieces of old brass and arms. The
-      merchant sends for tiny cups of coffee and offers cigarettes. He and the
-      dragoman are wrangling about the price of something for which five times
-      its value is asked. Not unlikely it will be sold for less than it is
-      worth, for neither trader nor traveler has any idea of its value. Opposite
-      is a shop where three men sit cross-legged, making cashmere shawls by
-      piecing old bits of India scarfs. Next shop is occupied only by a boy who
-      is reading the Koran in a loud voice, rocking forwards and backwards. A
-      stooping seller of sherbet comes along clinking his glasses. A vender of
-      sweetmeats sets his tray before us. A sorry beggar, a dwarf, beseeches in
-      figurative language.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What does he want, Hadji?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He say him hungry, want piece bread; O, no matter for he.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The dragomans never interpret anything, except by short cuts. What the
-      dwarf is really saying, according to Mr. Lane, is, &ldquo;For the sake of God! O
-      ye charitable. I am seeking from my lord a cake of bread. I am the guest
-      of God and the Prophet.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      As we cannot content him by replying in like strain, &ldquo;God enrich thee,&rdquo; we
-      earn his blessing by a copper or two.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Across the street is an opening into a nest of shops, gaily hung with
-      embroideries from Constantinople, silks from Broussa and Beyrout, stuffs
-      of Damascus; a Persian rug is spread on the mastabah of the shop, swords
-      and inlaid pistols with flint locks shine amid the rich stuffs. Looking
-      down this street, one way, is a long vista of bright color, the street
-      passing under round arches through which I see an old wall painted in red
-      and white squares, upon which the sun falls in a flood of white light. The
-      street in which we are sitting turns abruptly at a little distance, and
-      apparently ends in a high Moorish house, with queer little latticed
-      windows, and balconies, and dusty recesses full of mystery in this half
-      light; and at the corner opposite that, I see part of a public fountain
-      and hear very distinctly the &ldquo;studying&rdquo; of the school over it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The public fountain is one of the best institutions of Cairo as well as
-      one of the most ornamental. On the street it is a rounded Saracenic
-      structure, highly ornamented in carved marble or stucco, and gaily
-      painted, having in front two or three faucets from which the water is
-      drawn. Within is a tank which is replenished by water brought in skins
-      from the Nile. Most of these fountains are charitable foundations, by
-      pious Moslems who leave or set apart a certain sum to ensure the yearly
-      supply of so many skins of water. Charity to the poor is one of the good
-      traits of the Moslems, and the giving of alms and the building of
-      fountains are the works that will be rewarded in Paradise.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These fountains, some of which are very beautiful, are often erected near
-      a mosque. Over them, in a room with a vaulted roof and open to the street
-      by three or four arches with pillars, is usually a boys' school. In this
-      room on the floor sit the master and his scholars. Each pupil has before
-      him his lesson written on a wooden tablet, and this he is reading at the
-      top of his voice, committing it to memory, and swaying incessantly
-      backwards and forwards&mdash;a movement that is supposed to assist the
-      memory. With twenty boys shouting together, the noise is heard above all
-      the clamor of the street. If a boy looks off or stops his recitation, the
-      stick of the schoolmaster sets him going again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The boys learn first the alphabet, then the ninety-nine epithets of God,
-      and then the Koran, chapter by chapter. This is the sum of human knowledge
-      absolutely necessary; if the boy needs writing and arithmetic he learns
-      them from the steelyard weigher in the market; or if he is to enter any of
-      the professions, he has a regular course of study in the Mosque El Ezher,
-      which has thousands of students and is the great University of the East.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sitting in the bazaar for an hour one will see strange sights; wedding and
-      funeral processions are not the least interesting of them. We can never
-      get accustomed to the ungainly camel, thrusting his huge bulk into these
-      narrow limits, and stretching his snake neck from side to side, his dark
-      driver sitting high up in the dusk of the roof on the wooden saddle, and
-      swaying to and fro with the long stride of the beast. The camel ought to
-      be used in funeral processions, but I believe he is not.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We hear now a chanting down the dusky street. Somebody is being carried to
-      his tomb in the desert outside the city. The procession has to squeeze
-      through the crowd. First come a half dozen old men, ragged and half blind,
-      harbingers of death, who move slowly, crying in a whining tone, &ldquo;There is
-      no deity but God; Mohammed is God's apostle; God bless and save him.&rdquo; Then
-      come two or three schoolboys singing in a more lively air verses of a
-      funeral hymn. The bier is borne by friends of the deceased, who are
-      relieved occasionally by casual passengers. On the bier, swathed in
-      grave-clothes, lies the body, with a Cashmere shawl thrown over it. It is
-      followed by female hired mourners, who beat their breasts and howl with
-      shrill and prolonged ululations. The rear is brought up by the female
-      mourners, relations&mdash;a group of a dozen in this case&mdash;whose hair
-      is dishevelled and who are crying and shrieking with a perfect abandonment
-      to the luxury of grief. Passengers in the street stop and say, &ldquo;God is
-      most great,&rdquo; and the women point to the bier and say, &ldquo;I testify that
-      there is no deity but God.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      When the funeral has passed and its incongruous mingling of chanting and
-      shrieking dies away, we turn towards the gold bazaar. All the goldsmiths
-      and silversmiths are Copts; throughout Egypt the working of the precious
-      metals is in their hands. Descended from the ancient Egyptians, or at
-      least having more of the blood of the original race in them than others,
-      they have inherited the traditional skill of the ancient workers in these
-      metals. They reproduce the old jewelry, the barbarous ornaments, and work
-      by the same rude methods, producing sometimes the finest work with the
-      most clumsy tools.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The gold-bazaar is the narrowest passage we have seen. We step down into
-      its twilight from a broader street. It is in fact about three feet wide, a
-      lane with an uneven floor of earth, often slippery. On each side are the
-      little shops, just large enough for the dealer and his iron safe, or for a
-      tiny forge, bellows and anvil. Two people have to make way for each other
-      in squeezing along this alley, and if a donkey comes through he
-      monopolizes the way and the passengers have to climb upon the mastabahs
-      either side. The mastabah is a raised seat of stone or brick, built
-      against the front of the shop and level with its floor, say two feet and a
-      half high and two feet broad. The lower shutter of the shop turns down
-      upon the mastabah and forms a seat upon which a rug is spread. The
-      shopkeeper may sit upon this, or withdraw into his shop to make room for
-      customers, who remove their shoes before drawing up their feet upon the
-      carpet. Sometimes three or four persons will crowd into this box called a
-      shop. The bazaar is a noisy as well as a crowded place, for to the buzz of
-      talk and the cries of the itinerant venders is added the clang of the
-      goldsmiths' hammers; it winds down into the recesses of decaying houses
-      and emerges in another direction.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are to have manufactured a bracelet of gold of a pattern as old as the
-      Pharaohs, and made with the same instruments that the cunning goldsmiths
-      used three thousand years ago. While we are seated and bargaining for the
-      work, the goldsmith unlocks his safe and shows us necklaces, bracelets,
-      anklets, and earrings in the very forms, <i>bizarre</i> but graceful, of
-      the jewelry of which the Israelites spoiled the Egyptian women. We see
-      just such in the Museum at Boulak; though these are not so fine as the
-      magnificent jewelry which Queen Aah-hotep, the mother of Amosis, attempted
-      to carry with her into the under-world, and which the scientific violators
-      of her tomb rescued at Thebes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the shop opposite to us are squeezed in three Egyptian women and a
-      baby, who have come to spend the day in cheapening some bit of jewelry.
-      There is apparently nothing that the Cairo women like so much as shopping&mdash;at
-      least those who are permitted to go out at all&mdash;and they eke out its
-      delights by consuming a day or two in buying one article. These women are
-      taking the trade leisurely, examining slowly and carefully the whole stock
-      of the goldsmith and deliberating on each bead and drop of a necklace,
-      glancing slily at us and the passers-by out of their dark eyes meantime.
-      They have brought cakes of bread for lunch, and the baby is publicly fed
-      as often as he desires. These women have the power of sitting still in one
-      spot for hours, squatting with perfect patience in a posture that would
-      give a western woman the cramp for her lifetime. We are an hour in
-      bargaining with the goldsmith, and are to return late in the afternoon and
-      see the bracelet made before our eyes, for no one is expected to trust his
-      fellow here.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Thus far the gold has only been melted into an ingot, and that with many
-      precautions against fraud. I first count out the napoleons of which the
-      bracelet is to be made. These are weighed. A fire is then kindled in the
-      little forge, the crucible heated, and I drop the napoleons into it, one
-      by one. We all carefully watch the melting to be sure that no gold is
-      spilled in the charcoal and no base metal added. The melted mass is then
-      run into an ingot, and the ingot is weighed against the same number of
-      napoleons that compose it. And I carry away the ingot.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we return the women are still squatting in the shop in the attitude
-      of the morning. They show neither impatience nor weariness; nor does the
-      shopkeeper. The baby is sprawled out in his brown loveliness, and the
-      purchase of a barbarous necklace of beads is about concluded. Our
-      goldsmith now removes his outer garment, revealing his fine gown of
-      striped silk, pushes up his sleeves and prepares for work. His only-tools
-      are a small anvil, a hammer and a pair of pincers. The ingot is heated and
-      hammered, and heated and hammered, until it is drawn out into an even,
-      thick wire. This is then folded in three to the required length, and
-      twisted, till the gold looks like molasses candy; the ends are then
-      hammered together, and the bracelet is bent to its form. Finally it is
-      weighed again and cleaned. If the owner wishes he can have put on it the
-      government stamp. Gold ornaments that are stamped, the goldsmith will take
-      back at any time and give for them their weight in coin, less two per
-      cent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On our way home we encounter a wedding procession; this is the procession
-      conducting the bride to the house of the bridegroom; that to the bath
-      having taken place two days before. The night of the day before going to
-      the bridegroom is called the &ldquo;Night of henna.&rdquo; The bride has an
-      entertainment at her own house, receives presents of money, and has her
-      hands and her feet dyed with henna. The going to the bridegroom is on the
-      eve of either Monday or Friday. These processions we often meet in the
-      streets of Cairo; they wander about circuitously through the town making
-      all the noise and display possible. The procession is a rambling affair
-      and generally attended by a rabble of boys and men.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This one is preceded by half a dozen shabbily dressed musicians beating
-      different sorts of drums and blowing hautboys, each instrument on its own
-      hook; the tune, if there was one, has become discouraged, and the melody
-      has dropped out; thump, pound, squeak, the music is more disorganized than
-      the procession, and draggles on in noisy dissonance like a drunken militia
-      band at the end of a day's &ldquo;general training.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Next come some veiled women in black; and following them are several small
-      virgins in white. The bride walks next, with a woman each side of her to
-      direct her steps. This is necessary, for she is covered from head to feet
-      with a red cashmere shawl hanging from a sort of crown on the the top of
-      her head. She is in appearance, simply a red cone. Over her and on three
-      sides of her, but open in front, is a canopy of pink silk, borne on poles
-      by four men. Behind straggle more musicians, piping and thumping in an
-      independent nonchalance, followed by gleeful boys. One attendant sprinkles
-      rose-water on the spectators, and two or three others seem to have a
-      general direction of the course of the train, and ask backsheesh for it
-      whenever a stranger is met.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The procession gets tired occasionally and sits down in the dust of the
-      road to rest. Sometimes it is accompanied by dancers and other performers
-      to amuse the crowd. I saw one yesterday which had halted by the roadside,
-      all the women except the bride squatting down in patient resignation. In a
-      hollow square of spectators, in front, a male dancer was exhibiting his
-      steps. Holding a wand perpendicularly before him with both hands, he moved
-      backwards and forwards, with a mincing gait, exhibiting neither grace nor
-      agility, but looking around with the most conceited expression I ever saw
-      on a human face. Occasionally he would look down at his legs with the most
-      approving glance, as much as to say, &ldquo;I trust, God being great, that you
-      are taking particular notice of those legs; it seems to me that they
-      couldn't be improved.&rdquo; The fellow enjoyed his dancing if no one else did,
-      and it was impossible to get him to desist and let the procession move on.
-      At last the <i>cortege</i> made a <i>detour</i> round the man who seemed
-      to be so popular with himself, and left him to enjoy his own performance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sometimes the expense of this <i>zeffeh</i>, or bridal procession, is
-      shared by two parties, and I have seen two brides walking under the same
-      canopy, but going to different husbands. The public is not excluded from
-      an interest in these weddings. The house of a bridegroom, near the
-      Mooskee, was illuminated a night or two before the wedding, colored
-      lanterns were hung across the street, and story-tellers were engaged to
-      recite in front of the house. On the night of the marriage there was a
-      crowd which greatly enjoyed the indelicate songs and stories of the hired
-      performers. Late in the evening an old woman appeared at a window and
-      proclaimed that the husband was contented with his wife.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An accompaniment of a bridal procession which we sometimes saw we could
-      not understand. Before the procession proper, walked another, preceded by
-      a man carrying on his head a high wooden cabinet, with four legs, the
-      front covered with pieces of looking-glass and bits of brass; behind him
-      were musicians and attendants, followed by a boy on horseback, dressed
-      richly in clothes too large for him and like a girl's. It turned out to be
-      a parade before circumcision, the friends of the lad having taken
-      advantage of the bridal ceremony of a neighbor to make a display. The
-      wooden case was merely the sign of the barber who walked in the procession
-      and was to perform the operation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I suppose you are married?&rdquo; I ask Hadji when the procession has gone by.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, sir, long time.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And you have never had but one wife?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Have one. He quite nuff for me.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How old was she when you married her?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh, I marry he, when he much girl! I tink he eleven, maybe twelve, not
-      more I tink.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Girls in Egypt are marriageable at ten or eleven, and it is said that if
-      not married before they are fourteen they have an excellent chance of
-      being old maids. Precocious to mature, they are quick to fall away and
-      lose their beauty; the laboring classes especially are ugly and flabby
-      before eighteen. The low mental, not to say physical, condition of
-      Egyptian women is no doubt largely due to these early marriages. The girl
-      is married and is a mother before she has an opportunity to educate
-      herself or to learn the duties of wife or mother, ignorant of how to make
-      a home pleasant and even of housekeeping, and when she is utterly unfit to
-      have the care and training of a child. Ignorant and foolish, and, as Mr.
-      Lane says, passionate, women and mothers can never produce a great race.
-      And the only reform for Egypt that will give it new vitality and a place
-      in the world must begin with the women.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Khedive, who either has foresight or listens to good advice, issued a
-      firman some years ago forbidding the marriage of girls under fifteen. It
-      does not seem to be respected either in city or country; though I believe
-      that it has some influence in the city, and generally girls are not
-      married so young in Cairo as in the country. Yet I heard recently in this
-      city of a man of sixty who took a wife of twelve. As this was not his
-      first wife, it could not be said of him, as it is said of some great
-      geniuses, that he struck twelve the first time.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0082.jpg" alt="0082 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0083.jpg" alt="0083 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER VI.&mdash;MOSQUES AND TOMBS.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HAT we in Cairo
-      like most to do, is to do nothing in the charming winter weather&mdash;to
-      postpone the regular and necessary sight-seeing to that limbo to which the
-      Arabs relegate everything&mdash;<i>bookra</i>, that is, tomorrow. Why not
-      as well go to the Pyramids or to Heliopolis or to the tombs of the
-      Memlooks tomorrow! It is to be the same fair weather; we never plan an
-      excursion, with the proviso, &ldquo;If it does not rain.&rdquo; This calm certainty of
-      a clear sky adds twenty-five per cent, to the value of life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet, there is the Sirocco; that enervating, depressing south wind,
-      when all the sands of the hot desert rise up into the air and envelope
-      everything in grit and gloom. I have been on the Citadel terrace when the
-      city was only dimly outlined in the thick air, and all the horizon and the
-      sky were veiled in dust as if by a black Scotch mist. We once waited three
-      days after we had set a time to visit the Pyramids, for the air to clear.
-      The Sirocco is bad enough in the town, the fine dust penetrates the closed
-      recesses of all apartments; but outside the city it is unbearable. Indeed
-      any wind raises the sand disagreeably; and dust is the great plague of
-      Egypt. The streets of Cairo, except those that are sprinkled, are seldom
-      free from clouds of it. And it is an ancient dust. I suppose the powdered
-      dead of thousands of years are blowing about in the air.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The desert makes itself apparent even in Cairo. Not only is it in the air,
-      but it lies in wait close to the walls and houses, ready to enter at the
-      gates, sifting in through every crevice. Only by constant irrigation can
-      it be driven back. As soon as we pass beyond the compact city eastward, we
-      enter the desert, unless we follow the course of some refreshing canal.
-      The drive upon it is a favorite one on summer nights. I have spoken of the
-      desert as hot; but it is always cool at night; and it is the habit of
-      foreigners who are detained in Cairo in the summer to go every night to
-      the desert to cool off.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The most conspicuous object in Cairo, from all points, is the Citadel,
-      built on a bold spur of the Mokattam range, and the adjoining Mosque of
-      Mohammed Ali in which that savage old reformer is buried. The mosque is
-      rather Turkish than Saracenic, and its two slender minarets are much
-      criticised. You who have been in Constantinople are familiar with the like
-      slight and graceful forms in that city; they certainly are not so rich or
-      elegant as many of the elaborately carved and more robust minarets of
-      Cairo which the genius of the old architects reared in the sun-burst of
-      Saracenic architecture; but they are very picturesque and effective in
-      their position and especially against a poetic evening sky.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When Salah-e'-deen robbed the pyramids to build the Citadel, he doubtless
-      thought he was erecting a fortification that would forever protect his
-      city and be an enduring home for the Sultans of Egypt. But Mohammed Ali
-      made it untenable as a fort by placing a commanding battery on the
-      Mokattam ledge; and now the Citadel (by which I mean all the group of
-      buildings) useless as a fort (except to overawe the city) and abandoned as
-      a palace, is little more than a ghost-walk of former splendors. There are
-      barracks in it; recruits are drilling in its squares; the minister-of-war
-      occupies some of its stately apartments; the American General Stone, the
-      chief officer of the Khedive's army, uses others; in some we find the
-      printing presses and the bureaus of the engineers and the typographical
-      corps; but vast halls and chambers of audience, and suites of apartments
-      of the harem, richly carved and gilded, are now vacant and echo the
-      footsteps of sentries and servitors. And they have the shabby look of most
-      Eastern architecture when its first freshness is gone.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We sat in the room and on the platform where Mohammed Ali sat when the
-      slaughter of the Memlooks was going on; he sat motionless, so it is
-      reported, and gave no other sign of nervousness than the twisting of a
-      piece of paper in his hands. And yet he must have heard the cries under
-      his window, and, of course, the shots of the soldiers on the walls who
-      were executing his orders. We looked down from the balcony into the
-      narrow, walled lane, with its closed gates, in which the five hundred
-      Memlooks were hemmed in and massacred. Think of the nerve of the old Turk,
-      sitting still without changing countenance while five hundred, or more,
-      gallant swash-bucklers were being shot in cool blood under his window!
-      Probably he would not have been so impassive if he had seen one of the
-      devoted band escape by spurring his horse through a break in the wall and
-      take a fearful flying leap upon the rubbish below.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The world agrees to condemn this treacherous and ferocious act of Mohammed
-      Ali and, generally, I believe, to feel grateful to him for it. Never was
-      there a clan of men that needed exterminating so much as the Memlooks.
-      Nothing less would have suited their peculiarities. They were merely a
-      band of robbers, black-mailers, and freebooters, a terror to Egypt.
-      Dislodged from actual power, they were still greatly to be dreaded, and no
-      ruler was safe who did not obey them. The term Memlook means &ldquo;a white male
-      slave,&rdquo; and is still so used. The Memlooks, who originally were mostly
-      Circassian white slaves, climbed from the position of favorites to that of
-      tyrants. They established a long dynasty of sultans, and their tombs
-      yonder at the edge of the desert are among the most beautiful specimens of
-      the Saracenic architecture. Their sovereignty was overthrown by Sultan
-      Selim in 1517, but they remained a powerful and aristocratic band which
-      controlled governors, corrupted even Oriental society by the introduction
-      of monstrous vices, and oppressed the people. I suppose that in the time
-      of the French invasion they may have been joined by bold adventurers of
-      many nations. Egypt could have no security so long as any of them
-      remained. It was doubtless in bad taste for Mohammed Ali to extend a
-      friendly invitation to the Memlooks to visit him, and then murder them
-      when they were caught in his trap; he finally died insane, and perhaps the
-      lunacy was providentially on him at that time.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the Citadel precincts is a hall occupied by the &ldquo;parliament&rdquo; of the
-      Khedive, when it is in session; a parliament whose members are selected by
-      the Viceroy from all over Egypt, in order that he may have information of
-      the state of the country, but a body that has no power and certainly not
-      so much influence in the state as the harem has. But its very assemblage
-      is an innovation in the Orient, and it may lead in time to infinite gab,
-      to election briberies and multitudinous legislation, the accompaniments of
-      the highest civilization. We may yet live to see a member of it rise to
-      enquire into the expenses of the Khedive's numerous family.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The great Mosque of Mohammed Ali is in the best repair and is the least
-      frequented of any in Cairo. Its vast, domed interior, rich in materials
-      and ambitious in design, is impressive, but this, like all other great
-      mosques, strikes the Western man as empty. On the floor are beautiful
-      rugs; a tawdry chandelier hangs in the center, and the great spaces are
-      strung with lanterns. No one was performing ablution at the handsome
-      fountain in the marble-paved court; only a single worshipper was kneeling
-      at prayer in all the edifice. But I heard a bird singing sweetly in the
-      airy height of the dome.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The view from the terrace of the mosque is the finest in Egypt, not
-      perhaps in extent, but certainly in variety and objects of interest; and
-      if the atmosphere and the light are both favorable, it is the most poetic.
-      From it you command not only the city and a long sweep of the Nile, with
-      fields of living green and dark lines of palms, but the ruins and pyramids
-      of slumberous old Memphis, and, amid the yellow sands and backed by the
-      desolate Libyan hills, the dreamy pyramids of Geezeh. We are advised to
-      get this view at sunset, because then the light is soft and all the vast
-      landscape has color. This is good advice so far as the city at our feet is
-      concerned, with its hundreds of minarets and its wide expanse of flat
-      roofs, palm-tops and open squares; there is the best light then also on
-      the purple Mokattam hills; and the tombs of the Memlooks, north of the
-      cemetery, with their fairy domes and exquisite minarets and the
-      encompassing grey desert, the whole bathed in violet light, have a beauty
-      that will linger with one who has once seen them forever. But looking
-      beyond the Nile, you have the sun in your face. I should earnestly entreat
-      the stranger to take this view at sunrise. I never saw it myself at that
-      hour, being always otherwise engaged, but I am certain that the Pyramids
-      and the Libyan desert would wake at early morning in a glow of
-      transcendent beauty.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We drive out the gate or Bab e' Nasr beyond the desolate Moslem cemetery,
-      to go to the tombs of the Circassian Memlook Sultans. We pass round and
-      amid hills of rubbish, dirt, and broken pottery, the dumpings of the city
-      for centuries, and travel a road so sandy that the horses can scarcely
-      drag the heavy carriage through it. The public horses of Cairo are sorry
-      beasts and only need a slight excuse for stopping at any time. There is
-      nothing agreeable about the great Moslem cemetery; it is a field of
-      sand-heaps, thickly dotted with little oven-shaped stucco tombs. They may
-      be pleasanter below ground; for the vault into which the body is put,
-      without a coffin, is high enough to permit its occupant to sit up, which
-      he is obliged to do, whether he is able to sit up or not, the first night
-      of his stay there, in order to answer the questions of two angels who come
-      to examine him on his religious practices and views.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Tombs of the Sultans, which are in the desert, are in fact vast
-      structures,&mdash;tombs and mosques united&mdash;and are built of
-      parti-colored stone. They are remarkable for the beautiful and varied
-      forms of their minarets and for their aërial domes; the latter are covered
-      with the most wonderful arabesque carving and tracing. They stand
-      deserted, with the sand drifting about them, and falling to rapid decay.
-      In the interiors are still traces of exquisite carving and color, but much
-      of the ornamentation, being of stucco on rude wooden frames, only adds to
-      the appearance of decay. The decay of finery is never respectable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not correct, however, to speak of these mosque-tombs as deserted.
-      Into all of them have crept families of the poor or of the vicious. And
-      the business of the occupants, who call themselves guardians, is to
-      extract backsheesh from the visitor. Spinning, knitting, baking, and all
-      the simple household occupations go on in the courts and in the gaunt
-      rooms; one tomb is used as a grist-mill. The women and girls dwelling
-      there go unveiled; they were tattooed slightly upon the chin and the
-      forehead, as most Egyptian women are; some of the younger were pretty,
-      with regular features and handsome dark eyes. Near the mosques are lanes
-      of wretched homes, occupied by as wretched people. The whole mortal
-      neighborhood swarms (life out of death) with children; they are as thick
-      as jars at a pottery factory; they are as numerous as the flies that live
-      on the rims of their eyes and noses; they are as naked, most of them, as
-      when they were born. The distended condition of their stomachs testify
-      that they have plenty to eat, and they tumble about in the dirt, in the
-      full enjoyment of this delicious climate. People can afford to be poor
-      when nature is their friend.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0088.jpg" alt="0088 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0089.jpg" alt="0089 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER VII.&mdash;MOSLEM WORSHIP.&mdash;THE CALL TO PRAYER.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> SHOULD like to go
-      once to an interesting city where there are no sights. That city could be
-      enjoyed; and conscience&mdash;which never leaves any human being in peace
-      until it has nagged him into a perfect condition morally, and keeps
-      punching him about frivolous little details of duty, especially at the
-      waking morning hour&mdash;would not come to insert her thumb among the
-      rosy fingers of the dawn.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps I do not make myself clear about conscience. Conscience is a kind
-      of gastric juice that gnaws upon the very coatings of a person's moral
-      nature, if it has no indigestible sin to feed on. Of course I know that
-      neither conscience nor gastric juice has a thumb. And, to get out of these
-      figures, all I wish to say is, that in Cairo, when the traveler is aware
-      of the glow of the morning stealing into his room, as if the day were
-      really opened gently (not ripped and torn open as it is in our own cold
-      north) by a rosy-fingered maiden, and an atmosphere of sweet leisure
-      prevails, then Conscience suggests remorselessly: &ldquo;To-day you must go to
-      the Pyramids,&rdquo; or, &ldquo;You must take your pleasure in a drive in the Shoobra
-      road,&rdquo; or &ldquo;You must explore dirty Old Cairo and its Coptic churches,&rdquo; or
-      &ldquo;You must visit the mosques, and see the Howling Derweeshes.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But for this Conscience, I think nothing would be so sweet as the coming
-      of an eastern morning. I fancy that the cool wind stirring in the palms is
-      from the pure desert. It may be that these birds, so melodiously singing
-      in the garden, are the small green birds who eat the fruits and drink the
-      waters of Paradise, and in whose crops the souls of martyrs abide until
-      Judgment. As I lie quite still, I hear the call of a muezzin from a
-      minaret not far off, the voice now full and clear and now faint, as he
-      walks around the tower to send his entreaty over the dark roofs of the
-      city. I am not disturbed by this early call to the unconverted, for this
-      is not my religion. With the clamor of morning church bells in Italy it is
-      different; for to one born in New England, Conscience is in the bells.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sometimes at midnight I am dimly conscious of the first call to prayer,
-      which begins solemnly:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Prayer is better than sleep.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But the night calls are not obligatory, and I do not fully wake. The calls
-      during the night are long chants, that of the daytime is much shorter. Mr.
-      Lane renders it thus:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;God is most Great&rdquo; (four times repeated). &ldquo;I testify that there is no
-      deity but God&rdquo; (twice). &ldquo;I testify that Mohammed is God's Apostle&rdquo;
-       (twice). &ldquo;Come to prayer&rdquo; (twice). &ldquo;Come to security&rdquo; (twice). &ldquo;God is
-      most Great&rdquo; (twice). &ldquo;There is no deity but God.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The muezzin whom I hear when the first faint light appears in the east,
-      has a most sonorous and sweet tenor voice, and his chant is exceedingly
-      melodious. In the perfect hush of that hour his voice fills all the air,
-      and might well be mistaken for a sweet entreaty out of heaven. This call
-      is a long one, and is in fact a confession and proclamation as well as a
-      call to prayer. It begins as follows:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;[I extol] the perfection of God, the Existing forever and ever&rdquo; (three
-      times): &ldquo;the perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the
-      Supreme: the perfection of God, the One, the Sole: the perfection of Him
-      who taketh to Himself, in his great dominion, neither female companion nor
-      male partner, nor any like unto Him, nor any that is disobedient, nor any
-      deputy, nor any equal, nor any offspring. His perfection [be extolled]:
-      and exalted be His name. He is a Deity who knew what hath been before it
-      was, and called into existence what hath been; and He is now existing, as
-      He was [at the first]. His perfection [be extolled]: and exalted be His
-      name.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And it ends: &ldquo;O God, bless and save and still beatify the beatified
-      Prophet, our lord Mohammed. And may God, whose name be blessed and
-      exalted, be well pleased with thee, O our lord El-Hassan, and with thee, O
-      our lord El-Hoseyn, and with thee, O Aboo-Farrâg, O Sheykh of the Arabs,
-      and with all the favorites ['.he welees'. of God. Amen.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The mosques of Cairo are more numerous than the churches in Rome; there
-      are about four hundred, many of them in ruins, but nearly all in daily
-      use. The old ones are the more interesting architecturally, but all have a
-      certain attraction. They are always open, they are cool quiet retreats out
-      of the glare of the sun and the noise of the street; they are democratic
-      and as hospitable to the beggar in rags as to the pasha in silk; they
-      offer water for the dusty feet of the pilgrim and a clean mat on which to
-      kneel; and in their hushed walls, with no images to distract the mind and
-      no ritual to rely on, the devout worshipper may feel the presence of the
-      Unseen. At all hours you will see men praying there or reading the Koran,
-      unconscious of any observers. Women I have seen in there occasionally, but
-      rarely, at prayer; still it is not uncommon to see a group of poor women
-      resting in a quiet corner, perhaps sewing or talking in low voices. The
-      outward steps and open courts are refuges for the poor, the friendless,
-      the lazy, and the tired. Especially the old and decaying mosques, do the
-      poor frequent. There about the fountains, the children play, and under the
-      stately colonnades the men sleep and the women knit and sew. These houses
-      of God are for the weary as well as for the pious or the repentant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The mosques are all much alike. We enter by a few or by a flight of steps
-      from the street into a large paved court, open to the sky, and surrounded
-      by colonnades. There is a fountain in the center, a round or octagonal
-      structure of carved stone, usually with a fanciful wooden roof; from
-      faucets in the exterior, water runs into a surrounding stone basin about
-      which the worshippers crouch to perform the ablutions before prayer. At
-      one side of the court is the entrance to the mosque, covered by a curtain.
-      Pushing this aside you are in a spacious room lighted from above, perhaps
-      with a dome, the roof supported by columns rising to elegant arches. You
-      will notice also the peculiar Arabic bracketing-work, called by architects
-      &ldquo;pendentive,&rdquo; fitting the angles and the transitions from the corners
-      below to the dome. In decaying mosques, where the plaster has fallen,
-      revealing the round stick frame-work of this bracketing, the perishable
-      character of Saracenic ornament is apparent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The walls are plain, with the exception of gilded texts from the Koran.
-      Above, on strings extending across the room are little lamps, and very
-      often hundreds of ostrich eggs are suspended. These eggs are almost always
-      seen in Coptic and often in Greek churches. What they signify I do not
-      know, unless the ostrich, which can digest old iron, is a symbol of the
-      credulity that can swallow any tradition. Perhaps her eggs represent the
-      great &ldquo;cosmic egg&rdquo; which modern philosophers are trying to teach (if we
-      may be allowed the expression) their grandmothers to suck.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The stone pavement is covered with matting and perhaps with costly rugs
-      from Persia, Smyrna, and Tunis. The end towards Mecca is raised a foot or
-      so; in it is the prayer niche, towards which all worshippers turn, and
-      near that is the high pulpit with its narrow steps in front; a pulpit of
-      marble carved, or of wood cut in bewildering arabesque, and inlaid with
-      pearl.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The oldest mosque in Cairo is Ahmed ebn e' Tooloon, built in 879 A.D., and
-      on the spot where, according to a tradition (of how high authority I do
-      not know), Abraham was prevented from offering up his son by the
-      appearance of a ram. The modern name of this hill is, indeed,
-      Kalat-el-Kebsh, the Citadel of the Ram. I suppose the tradition is as well
-      based as is the belief of Moslems that it was Ishmael and not Isaac whose
-      life was spared. The center of this mosque is an open court, surrounded by
-      rows of fine columns, five deep on the East side; and what gives it great
-      interest is the fact that the columns all support <i>pointed arches</i>,
-      and exceedingly graceful ones, with a slight curve of the horse-shoe at
-      the base. These arches were constructed about three centuries before the
-      introduction of the pointed arch into Europe; their adoption in Europe was
-      probably one of the results of the Crusades.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In this same court I saw an old Nebk tree, which grows on the spot where
-      the ark of Noah is said to have rested after its voyage. This goes to
-      show, if it goes to show anything, that the Flood was &ldquo;general&rdquo; enough to
-      reach Egypt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The mosque of Sultan Hassan, notwithstanding its ruined and shabby
-      condition, is the finest specimen of pure Arabic architecture in the city;
-      and its lofty and ornamented porch is, I think, as fine as anything of its
-      kind in the world. One may profitably spend hours in the study of its
-      exquisite details. I often found myself in front of it, wondering at the
-      poetic invention and sensitiveness to the beautiful in form, which enabled
-      the builders to reach the same effects that their Gothic successors only
-      produced by the aid of images and suggestions drawn from every department
-      of nature.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We ascend the high steps, pass through some dilapidated parts of the
-      building, which are inhabited, and come to the threshold. Here the Moslem
-      removes his shoes, or street-slippers, and carries them in his hand. Over
-      this sill we may not step, shod as we are. An attendant is ready, however,
-      with big slippers which go on over our shoes. Eager, bright little boys
-      and girls put them on for us, and then attend us in the mosque, keeping a
-      close watch that the slippers are not shuffled off. When one does get off,
-      leaving the unholy shoe to touch the ground, they affect a sort of horror
-      and readjust it with a laugh. Even the children are beginning to feel the
-      general relaxation of bigotry. To-day the heels of my shoes actually touch
-      the floor at every step, a transgression which the little girl who is
-      leading me by the hand points out with a sly shake of the head. The
-      attention of this pretty little girl looks like affection, but I know by
-      sad experience that it means &ldquo;backsheesh.&rdquo; It is depressing to think that
-      her natural, sweet, coquettish ways mean only that. She is fierce if any
-      other girl seeks to do me the least favor, and will not permit my own
-      devotion to her to wander.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The mosque of Sultan Hassan was built in the fourteenth century, and
-      differs from most others. Its great, open court has a square recess on
-      each side, over which is a noble arch; the east one is very spacious, and
-      is the place of prayer. Behind this, in an attached building, is the tomb
-      of Hassan; lights are always burning over it, and on it lies a large copy
-      of the Koran.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we enter, there are only a few at their devotions, though there are
-      several groups enjoying the serenity of the court; picturesque groups, all
-      color and rags! In a far corner an old man is saying his prayers and near
-      him a negro, perhaps a slave, also prostrates himself. At the fountain are
-      three or four men preparing for devotion; and indeed the prayers begin
-      with the washing. The ablution is not a mere form with these soiled
-      laborers&mdash;though it does seem a hopeless task for men of the color of
-      these to scrub themselves. They bathe the head, neck, breast, hands and
-      arms, legs and feet; in fact, they take what might be called a fair bath
-      in any other country. In our sight this is simply a wholesome &ldquo;wash&rdquo;; to
-      them it is both cleanliness and religion, as we know, for Mr. Lane has
-      taught us what that brown man in the blue gown is saying. It may help us
-      to understand his acts if we transcribe a few of his ejaculations.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When he washes his face, he says:&mdash;&ldquo;O God whiten my face with thy
-      light, on the day when thou shalt whiten the faces of thy favorites; and
-      do not blacken my face, on the day when Thou shalt blacken the faces of
-      thine enemies.&rdquo; Washing his right arm, he entreats:&mdash;&ldquo;O God, give me
-      my book in my right hand; and reckon with me with an easy reckoning.&rdquo;
-       Passing his wetted hand over his head under his raised turban, he says:&mdash;&ldquo;O
-      God, cover me with thy mercy, and pour down thy blessing upon me; and
-      shade me under the shadow of thy canopy, on the day when there shall be no
-      shade but its shade.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      One of the most striking entreaties is the prayer upon washing the right
-      foot:&mdash;&ldquo;O God, make firm my feet upon the Sirat, on the day when feet
-      shall slip upon it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Es Sirât&rdquo; is the bridge, which extends over the midst of Hell, finer than
-      a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, over which all must pass, and
-      from which the wicked shall fall into Hell.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In these mosques order and stillness always reign, and the devotions are
-      conducted with the utmost propriety, whether there are single worshippers,
-      or whether the mosque is filled with lines of gowned and turbaned figures
-      prostrating themselves and bowing with one consent. But, much stress as
-      the Moslems lay upon prayer, they say that they do not expect to reach
-      Paradise by that, or by any merit of their own, but only by faith and
-      forgiveness. This is expressed frequently both in prayers and in the
-      sermons on Friday. A sermon by an Imam of a Cairo mosque contains these
-      implorings:&mdash;&ldquo;O God! unloose the captivity of the captives, and annul
-      the debts of the debtors; and make this town to be safe and secure, and
-      blessed with wealth and plenty, and all the towns of the Moslems, O Lord
-      of the beings of the whole earth. And decree safety and health to us and
-      to all travelers, and pilgrims, and warriors, and wanderers, upon thy
-      earth, and upon thy sea, such as are Moslems, O Lord of the beings of the
-      whole world. O Lord, we have acted unjustly towards our own souls, and if
-      Thou do not forgive us and be merciful unto us, we shall surely be of
-      those who perish. I beg of God, the Great, that He may forgive me and you,
-      and all the people of Mohammed, the servants of God.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0095.jpg" alt="0095 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0096.jpg" alt="0096 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER VIII.&mdash;THE PYRAMIDS.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE ancient
-      Egyptians of the Upper Country excavated sepulchres for their great dead
-      in the solid rocks of the mountain; the dwellers in the lower country
-      built a mountain of stone in which to hide the royal mummy. In the
-      necropolis at Thebes there are the vast rock-tombs of the kings; at
-      Sakkara and Geezeh stand the Pyramids. On the upper Nile isolated rocks
-      and mountains cut the sky in pyramidal forms; on the lower Nile the
-      mountain ranges run level along the horizon, and the constructed pyramids
-      relieve the horizontal lines which are otherwise unbroken except by the
-      palms.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The rock-tombs were walled up and their entrances concealed as much as
-      possible, by a natural arrangement of masses of rock; the pyramids were
-      completely encased and the openings perfectly masked. False passages,
-      leading through gorgeously carved and decorated halls and chambers to an
-      empty pit or a blind wall, were hewn in the rock-tombs, simply to mislead
-      the violator of the repose of the dead as to the position of the mummy.
-      The entrance to the pyramids is placed away from the center, and
-      misleading passages run from it, conducting the explorer away from the
-      royal sarcophagus. Rock-tomb and pyramid were for the same purpose, the
-      eternal security of the mummy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That purpose has failed; the burial-place was on too grand a scale, its
-      contents were too tempting. There is no security for any one after death
-      but obscurity; to preserve one's body is to lose it. The bones must be
-      consumed if they would be safe, or else the owner of them must be a
-      patriot and gain a forgotten grave. There is nothing that men so enjoy as
-      digging up the bones of their ancestors. It is doubtful if even the
-      Egyptian plunderers left long undisturbed the great tombs which contained
-      so much treasure; and certainly the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the
-      Saracens, left comparatively little for the scientific grave-robbers of
-      our excellent age. They did, however, leave the tombs, the sarcophagi,
-      most of the sculptures, and a fair share of the preserved dead.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But time made a pretty clean sweep of the mummy and nearly all his
-      personal and real property. The best sculptures of his tomb might legally
-      be considered in the nature of improvements attaching themselves to the
-      realty, but our scientists have hacked them off and carried them away as
-      if they were personal estate. We call the Arabs thieves and ghouls who
-      prowl in the the tombs in search of valuables. But motive is everything;
-      digging up the dead and taking his property, tomb and all, in the name of
-      learning and investigation is respectable and commendable. It comes to the
-      same thing for the mummy, however, this being turned out of house and home
-      in his old age. The deed has its comic aspect, and it seems to me that if
-      a mummy has any humor left in his dried body, he must smile to see what a
-      ludicrous failure were his costly efforts at concealment and repose. For
-      there is a point where frustration of plans may be so sweeping as to be
-      amusing; just as the mummy himself is so ghastly that his aspect is almost
-      funny.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nothing more impresses the mind with the antiquity of Egypt than its vast
-      cemeteries, into which the harvests of the dead have been gathered for so
-      many thousands of years. Of old Memphis, indeed, nothing remains except
-      its necropolis, whose monuments have outlasted the palaces and temples
-      that were the wonder of the world. The magnificence of the city can be
-      estimated by the extent of its burial-ground.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On the west side of the Nile, opposite Cairo, and extending south along
-      the edge of the desert, is a nearly continuous necropolis for fifteen
-      miles. It is marked at intervals by pyramids. At Geezeh are three large
-      and several small ones; at Abooseer are four; at Sakkara are eleven; at
-      Dashoor are four. These all belonged to the necropolis of Memphis. At
-      Geezeh is the largest, that of Cheops or Shoofoo, the third king of the
-      fourth dynasty, reigning at Memphis about 4235 B.C., according to the
-      chronology of Mariette Bey, which every new discovery helps to establish
-      as the most probably correct. This pyramid was about four hundred and
-      eighty feet high, and the length of a side of its base was about seven
-      hundred and sixty-four feet; it is now four hundred and fifty feet high
-      and its base line is seven hundred and forty-six feet. It is big enough
-      yet for any practical purpose. The old pyramid at Sakkara is believed to
-      have been built by Ouenephes, the fourth king of the first dynasty, and to
-      be the <i>oldest monument in the world</i>. Like the mounds of the
-      Chaldeans, it is built in degrees or stages, of which there are five.
-      Degraded now and buried at the base in its own rubbish, it rises only
-      about one hundred and ninety feet above the ground.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a drive of two hours from Cairo to the Pyramids of Geezeh, over a
-      very good road; and we are advised to go by carriage. Hadji is on the seat
-      with the driver, keeping his single twinkling eye active in the service of
-      the howadji. The driver is a polished Nubian, with a white turban and a
-      white gown; feet and legs go bare. You wouldn't call it a stylish turnout
-      for the Bois, but it would be all right if we had a gorgeous sais to
-      attract attention from ourselves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We drive through the wide and dusty streets of the new quarter. The
-      barrack-like palace, on the left of abroad place, is the one in which the
-      Khedive is staying just now, though he may be in another one to-night. The
-      streets are the same animated theater-like scenes of vivid color and
-      picturesque costume and indolent waiting on Providence to which we thought
-      we should never become accustomed, but which are already beginning to lose
-      their novelty. The fellaheen are coming in to market, trudging along
-      behind donkeys and camels loaded with vegetables or freshly cut grass and
-      beans for fodder. Squads of soldiers in white uniform pass; bugle notes
-      are heard from Kasr e' Neel, a barrack of troops on the river. Here, as in
-      Europe, the great business most seriously pursued is the drilling of men
-      to stand straight, handle arms, roll their eyes, march with a thousand
-      legs moving as one, and shoot on sight other human beings who have learned
-      the same tricks. God help us, it is a pitiful thing for civilized people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The banks of the Nile here above Boolak are high and steep. We cross the
-      river on a fine bridge of iron, and drive over the level plain, opposite,
-      on a raised and winding embankment. This is planted on each side with
-      lebbekh and sycamore trees. Part of the way the trees are large and the
-      shade ample; the roots going down into moist ground. Much of the way the
-      trees are small and kept alive by constant watering. On the right, by a
-      noble avenue are approached the gardens and the palace of Gezeereh. We
-      pass by the new summer palace of Geezeh. Other large ones are in process
-      of construction. If the viceroy is measured for a new suit of clothes as
-      often as he orders a new palace, his tailors must be kept busy. Through
-      the trees we see green fields, intersected with ditches, wheat, barley,
-      and beans, the latter broad-sown and growing two to three feet high; here
-      and there are lines of palms, clumps of acacias; peasants are at work or
-      asleep in the shade; there are trains of camels, and men plowing with cows
-      or buffaloes. Leaving the squalid huts that are the remains of once
-      beautiful Geezeh, the embankment strides straight across the level
-      country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there before us, on a rocky platform a hundred feet higher than the
-      meadows, are the pyramids, cutting the stainless blue of the sky with
-      their sharp lines. They master the eye when we are an hour away, and as we
-      approach they seem to recede, neither growing larger nor smaller, but
-      simply withdrawing with a grand reserve.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I suppose there are more &ldquo;emotions&rdquo; afloat about the pyramids than
-      concerning any other artificial' objects. There are enough. It becomes
-      constantly more and more difficult for the ordinary traveler to rise to
-      the height of these accumulated emotions, and it is entirely impossible to
-      say how much the excitement one experiences on drawing near them results
-      from reading and association, and how much is due to these simple forms in
-      such desolate surroundings. But there they stand, enduring standards, and
-      every visitor seems inclined to measure his own height by their vastness,
-      in telling what impression they produce upon <i>him</i>. They have been
-      treated sentimentally, off-handedly, mathematically, solemnly,
-      historically, humorously. They yield to no sort of treatment. They are
-      nothing but piles of stone, and shabby piles at that, and they stand there
-      to astonish people. Mr. Bayard Taylor is entirely right when he says that
-      the pyramids are and will remain unchanged and unapproachably impressive
-      however modern life may surge about them, and though a city should creep
-      about their bases.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps they do not appear so gigantic when the visitor is close to them
-      as he thought they would from their mass at a distance. But if he stands
-      at the base of the great pyramid, and casts his eye along the steps of its
-      enormous side and up the dizzy height where the summit seems to pierce the
-      solid blue, he will not complain of want of size. And if he walks around
-      one, and walks from one to another wading in the loose sand and under a
-      midday sun, his respect for the pyramids will increase every moment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Long before we reach the ascent of the platform we are met by Arab boys
-      and men, sellers of antiquities, and most persistent beggars. The
-      antiquities are images of all sorts, of gods, beasts, and birds, in
-      pottery or in bronze, articles from tombs, bits of mummy-cloth, beads and
-      scarabæi, and Roman copper coins; all of them at least five thousand years
-      old in appearance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our carriage is stuck in the sand, and we walk a quarter of a mile up the
-      platform, attended by a rabble of coaxing, imploring, importunate,
-      half-clad Bedaween. &ldquo;Look a here, you take dis; dis ver much old, he from
-      mummy; see here, I get him in tomb; one shillin; in Cairo you get him one
-      pound; ver sheap. You no like? No anteeka, no money. How much?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;One penny.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; ironically, &ldquo;ket'-ther khâyrak (much obliged). You take him
-      sixpence. Howadji, say, me guide, you want go top pyramid, go inside, go
-      Sphinkee, allée tomba?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Surrounded by an increasing swarm of guides and antiquity-hawkers, and
-      beset with offers, entreaties, and opportunities, we come face to face
-      with the great pyramid. The ground in front of it is piled high with its
-      <i>debris</i>. Upon these rocks, in picturesque attitudes, some in the
-      shade and some in the sun, others of the tribe are waiting the arrival of
-      pyramid climbers; in the intense light their cotton garments and turbans
-      are like white paint, brilliant in the sun, ashy in the shadow. All the
-      shadows are sharp and deep. A dark man leaning on his spear at the corner
-      of the pyramid makes a picture. At a kiosk near by carriages are standing
-      and visitors are taking their lunch. But men, carriages, kiosk, are
-      dwarfed in this great presence. It is, as I said, a shabby pile of stone,
-      and its beauty is only that of mathematical angles; but then it is so big,
-      it casts such a shadow; we all beside it are like the animated lines and
-      dots which represent human beings in the etchings of Callot.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      To be rid of importunities we send for the sheykh of the pyramid tribe.
-      The Bedaween living here have a sort of ownership of these monuments, and
-      very good property they are. The tribe supports itself mainly by tolls
-      levied upon visitors. The sheykh assigns guides and climbers, and receives
-      the pay for their services. This money is divided among the families; but
-      what individuals get as backsheesh or by the sale of antiquities, they
-      keep. They live near by, in huts scarcely distinguishable from the rocks,
-      many of them in vacant tombs, and some have shanties on the borders of the
-      green land. Most of them have the appearance of wretched poverty, and
-      villainous faces abound. But handsome, intelligent faces and finely
-      developed forms are not rare, either.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Sheykh, venerable as Jacob, respectable as a New England deacon, suave
-      and polite as he traditionally should be, wears a scarf of camel's hair
-      and a bright yellow and black kuffia, put on like a hood, fastened about
-      the head by a cord and falling over the shoulders. He apportioned his
-      guides to take us up the pyramid and to accompany us inside. I had already
-      sent for a guide who had been recommended to me in the city, and I found
-      Ali Gobree the frank, manly, intelligent, quiet man I had expected,
-      handsome also, and honesty and sincerity beaming from his countenance. How
-      well-bred he was, and how well he spoke English. Two other men were given
-      me; for the established order is that two shall pull and one shall push
-      the visitor up. And it is easier to submit to the regulation than to
-      attempt to go alone and be followed by an importunate crowd.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am aware that every one who writes of the pyramids is expected to make a
-      scene of the ascent, but if I were to romance I would rather do it in a
-      fresher field. The fact is that the ascent is not difficult, unless the
-      person is very weak in the legs or attempts to carry in front of himself a
-      preposterous stomach. There is no difficulty in going alone; occasionally
-      the climber encounters a step from three to four feet high, but he can
-      always flank it. Of course it is tiresome to go up-stairs, and the great
-      pyramid needs an &ldquo;elevator&rdquo;; but a person may leisurely zig-zag up the
-      side without great fatigue. We went straight up at one corner; the guides
-      insisting on taking me by the hand; the boosting Arab who came behind
-      earned his money by grunting every time we reached a high step, but he
-      didn't lift a pound.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We stopped frequently to look down and to measure with the eye the mass on
-      the surface of which we were like flies. When we were a third of the way
-      up, and turned from the edge to the middle, the height to be climbed
-      seemed as great as when we started. I should think that a giddy person
-      might have unpleasant sensations in looking back along the corner and
-      seeing no resting-place down the sharp edges of the steps short of the
-      bottom, if he should fall. We measure our ascent by the diminishing size
-      of the people below, and by the widening of the prospect. The guides are
-      perfectly civil, they do not threaten to throw us off, nor do they even
-      mention backsheesh. Stopping to pick out shells from the nummulitic
-      limestone blocks or to try our glasses on some distant object, we come
-      easily to the summit in a quarter of an hour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The top, thirty feet square, is strewn with big blocks of stone and has a
-      flag-staff. Here ambitious people sometimes breakfast. Arabs are already
-      here with koollehs of water and antiquities. When the whole party arrives
-      the guides set up a perfunctory cheer; but the attempt to give an air of
-      achievement to our climbing performance and to make it appear that we are
-      the first who have ever accomplished the feat, is a failure. We sit down
-      upon the blocks and look over Egypt, as if we were used to this sort of
-      thing at home.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All that is characteristic of Egypt is in sight; to the west, the Libyan
-      hills and the limitless stretch of yellow desert sand; to the north,
-      desert also and the ruined pyramid of Abooroâsh; to the south, that long
-      necropolis of the desert marked by the pyramids of Abooseér, Sakkarah, and
-      Dashoor; on the east, the Nile and its broad meadows widening into the dim
-      Delta northward, the white line of Cairo under the Mokattam hills, and the
-      grey desert beyond. Egypt is a ribbon of green between two deserts. Canals
-      and lines of trees stripe the green of the foreground; white sails flicker
-      southward along the river, winging their way to Nubia; the citadel and its
-      mosque shine in the sun.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An Arab offers to run down the side of this pyramid, climb the second one,
-      the top of which is still covered with the original casing, and return in
-      a certain incredible number of minutes. We decline, because we don't like
-      to have a half-clad Arab thrust his antics between us and the
-      contemplation of dead yet mighty Egypt. We regret our refusal afterwards,
-      for there is nothing people like to read about so much as feats of this
-      sort. Humanity is more interesting than stones. I am convinced that if
-      Martha Rugg had fallen off the pyramid instead of the rock at Niagara
-      Falls, people would have looked at the spot where she fell, and up at the
-      stairs she came bobbing down, with more interest than at the pyramid
-      itself. Nevertheless, this Arab, or another did, while we were there,
-      climb the second pyramid like a monkey; he looked only a black speck on
-      its side.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That accidents sometimes happen on the pyramids, I gather from the
-      conversation of Hadji, who is full of both information and philosophy
-      to-day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sometime man, he fool, he go up. Man say, 'go this way.' Fool, he say,
-      'let me lone.' Umbrella he took him, threw him off; he dead in hundred
-      pieces.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      As to the selling of Scarabæi to travelers, Hadji inclines to the side of
-      the poor:&mdash;&ldquo;Good one, handsome one,&mdash;one pound. Not good for
-      much&mdash;but what to do? Gentleman he want it; man he want the money.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      For Murray's' Guide-Book he has not more respect than guides usually have
-      who have acted as interpreters in the collection of information for it.
-      For &ldquo;interpret&rdquo; Hadji always says &ldquo;spell.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;When the Murray come here I spell it to the man, the man to Murray and
-      him put it down. He don't know anything before. He told me, what is this?
-      I told him what it is. Something,&rdquo; with a knowing nod, &ldquo;be new after
-      Murray. Look here, Murray very old now.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Hadji understands why the cost of living has gone up so much in Egypt. &ldquo;He
-      was very sheap; now very different, dearer&mdash;because plenty people. I
-      build a house, another people build a house, and another people he build a
-      house. Plenty men to work, make it dear.&rdquo; I have never seen Hadji's
-      dwelling, but it is probably of the style of those that he calls&mdash;when
-      in the street we ask him what a specially shabby mud-wall with a ricketty
-      door in it is&mdash;&ldquo;a brivate house.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      About the Great Pyramid has long waged an archaeological war. Years have
-      been spent in studying it, measuring it inside and outside, drilling holes
-      into it, speculating why this stone is in one position and that in
-      another, and constructing theories about the purpose for which it was
-      built. Books have been written on it, diagrams of all its chambers and
-      passages, with accurate measurements of every stone in them, are printed.
-      If I had control of a restless genius who was dangerous to the peace of
-      society, I would set him at the Great Pyramid, certain that he would have
-      occupation for a lifetime and never come to any useful result. The
-      interior has peculiarities, which distinguish it from all other pyramids;
-      and many think that it was not intended for a sepulchre mainly; but that
-      it was erected for astronomical purposes, or as a witness to the true
-      north, east, south, and west, or to serve as a standard of measure; not
-      only has the passage which descends obliquely three hundred and twenty
-      feet from the opening into the bed-rock, and permits a view of the sky
-      from that depth, some connection with the observation of Sirius and the
-      fixing of the Sothic year; not only is the porphyry sarcophagus that is in
-      the King's Chamber, secure from fluctuations of temperature, a fixed
-      standard of measure; but the positions of various stones in the passages
-      (stones which certainly are stumbling-blocks to everybody who begins to
-      think why they are there) are full of a mystic and even religious
-      signification. It is most restful, however, to the mind to look upon this
-      pyramid as a tomb, and that it was a sepulchre like all the others is the
-      opinion of most scholars.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whatever it was, it is a most unpleasant place to go into. But we wanted
-      one idea of' Cimmerian darkness, and the sensation of being buried alive,
-      and we didn't like to tell a lie when asked if we had been in, and
-      therefore we went. You will not understand where we went without a
-      diagram, and you never will have any idea of it until you go. We, with a
-      guide for each person, light candles, and slide and stumble down an
-      incline; we crawl up an incline; we shuffle along a level passage that
-      seems interminable, backs and knees bent double till both are apparently
-      broken, and the torture of the position is almost unbearable; we get up
-      the Great Gallery, a passage over a hundred and fifty feet long,
-      twenty-eight high, and seven broad, and about as easy to ascend as a
-      logging-sluice, crawl under three or four portcullises, and emerge,
-      dripping with perspiration and covered with dust, into the king's chamber,
-      a room thirty-four feet long, seventeen broad, and nineteen high. It is
-      built of magnificent blocks of syenite, polished and fitted together
-      perfectly, and contains the lidless sarcophagus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If it were anywhere else and decently lighted, it would be a stylish
-      apartment; but with a dozen torches and candles smoking in it and heating
-      it, a lot of perspiring Arabs shouting and kicking up a dust, and the
-      feeling that the weight of the superincumbent mass was upon us, it seemed
-      to me too small and confined even for a tomb. The Arabs thought they ought
-      to cheer here as they did on top; we had difficulty in driving them all
-      out and sending the candles with them, in order that we might enjoy the
-      quiet and blackness of this retired situation. I suppose we had for once
-      absolute night, a room full of the original Night, brother of Chaos, night
-      bottled up for four or five thousand years, the very night in which old
-      Cheops lay in a frightful isolation, with all the portcullises down and
-      the passages sealed with massive stones.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Out of this blackness the eye even by long waiting couldn't get a ray; a
-      cat's eye would be invisible in it. Some scholars think that Cheops never
-      occupied this sarcophagus. I can understand his feeling if he ever came in
-      here alive. I think he may have gone away and put up &ldquo;to let&rdquo; on the door.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We scrambled about a good deal in this mountain, visited the so-called
-      Queen's Chamber, entered by another passage, below the King's, lost all
-      sense of time and of direction, and came out, glad to have seen the
-      wonderful interior, but welcoming the burst of white light and the pure
-      air, as if we were being born again. To remain long in that gulf of
-      mortality is to experience something of the mystery of death.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Ali Gobree had no antiquities to press upon us, but he could show us some
-      choice things in his house, if we would go there. Besides, his house would
-      be a cool place in which to eat our lunch. We walked thither, a quarter of
-      a mile down the sand slope on the edge of the terrace. We had been
-      wondering where the Sphinx was, expecting it to be as conspicuous almost
-      as the Pyramids. Suddenly, turning a sand-hill, we came upon it, the rude
-      lion's body struggling out of the sand, the human head lifted up in that
-      stiff majesty which we all know.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So little of the body is now visible, and the features are so much damaged
-      that it is somewhat difficult to imagine what impression this monstrous
-      union of beast and man once produced, when all the huge proportions stood
-      revealed, and color gave a startling life-likeness to that giant face. It
-      was cut from the rock of the platform; its back was patched with pieces of
-      sandstone to make the <i>contour</i>; its head was solid. It was
-      approached by flights of stairs descending, and on the paved platform
-      where it stood were two small temples; between its paws was a sort of
-      sanctuary, with an altar. Now, only the back, head and neck are above the
-      drifting sand. Traces of the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt which
-      crowned the head are seen on the forehead, but the crown has gone. The
-      kingly beard that hung from the chin has been chipped away. The vast wig&mdash;the
-      false mass of hair that encumbered the shaven heads of the Egyptians,
-      living or dead&mdash;still stands out on either side the head, and adds a
-      certain dignity. In spite of the broken condition of the face, with the
-      nose gone, it has not lost its character. There are the heavy eyebrows,
-      the prominent cheek-bones, the full lips, the poetic chin, the blurred but
-      on-looking eyes. I think the first feeling of the visitor is that the face
-      is marred beyond recognition, but the sweep of the majestic lines soon
-      becomes apparent; it is not difficult to believe that there is a smile on
-      the sweet mouth, and the stony stare of the eyes, once caught, will never
-      be forgotten.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Sphinx, grossly symbolizing the union of physical and intellectual
-      force, and hinting at one of those recondite mysteries which we still like
-      to believe existed in the twilight of mankind, was called Hor-em-Khoo
-      (&ldquo;the Sun in his resting-place&rdquo;), and had divine honors paid to it as a
-      deity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This figure, whatever its purpose, is older than the Pyramid of Cheops. It
-      has sat facing the east, on the edge of this terrace of tombs, expecting
-      the break of day, since a period that is lost in the dimness of tradition.
-      All the achievements of the race, of which we know anything, have been
-      enacted since that figure was carved. It has seen, if its stony eyes could
-      see, all the procession of history file before it. Viewed now at a little
-      distance or with evening shadows on it, its features live again, and it
-      has the calmness, the simple majesty that belong to high art. Old writers
-      say that the face was once sweet and beautiful. How long had that unknown
-      civilization lasted before it produced this art?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Why should the Sphinx face the rising sun? Why does it stand in a
-      necropolis like a sleepy warden of the dead who sleep? Was it indeed the
-      guardian of those many dead, the mighty who slept in pyramids, in
-      rock-hewn tombs, in pits, their bodies ready for any pilgrimage; and does
-      it look to the east expecting the resurrection?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not far from the Sphinx is a marvelous temple of syenite, which the sand
-      almost buries; in a well in one of its chambers was found the splendid
-      red-granite statue of Chephren, the builder of the second pyramid, a piece
-      of art which succeeding ages did not excel. All about the rock plateau are
-      tombs, and in some of them are beautiful sculptures, upon which the
-      coloring is fresh. The scenes depicted are of common life, the occupations
-      and diversions of the people, and are without any religious signification.
-      The admirable sculptures represent no gods and no funeral mysteries; when
-      they were cut the Egyptian theology was evidently not constructed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The residence of our guide is a tomb, two dry chambers in the rock, the
-      entrance closed by a wooden door. The rooms are large enough for tables
-      and chairs; upon the benches where the mummies have lain, are piled
-      antique fragments of all sorts, set off by a grinning skull or a
-      thigh-bone; the floor is covered with fine yellow sand. I don't know how
-      it may have seemed to its first occupant, but we found it an excellent
-      luncheon place, and we could sleep there calmly and securely, when the
-      door was shut against the jackals&mdash;though I believe it has never been
-      objected to a tomb that one couldn't sleep in it. While we sip our coffee
-      Ali brings forth his antique images and scarabæi. These are all genuine,
-      for Ali has certificates from most of the well-known Egyptologists as to
-      his honesty and knowledge of antiquities. We are looking for genuine ones;
-      those offered us at the pyramids were suspicious. We say to Ali:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We should like to get a few good scarabæi; we are entirely ignorant of
-      them; but we were sent to you as an honest man. You select half a dozen
-      that you consider the best, and we will pay you a fair price; if they do
-      not pass muster in Cairo you shall take them back.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;As you are a friend of Mr. Blank,&rdquo; said Ali, evidently pleased with the
-      confidence reposed in him, &ldquo;you shall have the best I have, for about what
-      they cost me.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The Scarabæus is the black beetle that the traveler will constantly see
-      tumbling about in the sand, and rolling up balls of dirt as he does in
-      lands where he has not so sounding a name. He was sacred to the old
-      Egyptians as an emblem of immortality, because he was supposed to have the
-      power of self-production. No mummy went away into the shades of the nether
-      world without one on his breast, with spread-wings attached to it. Usually
-      many scarabæi were buried with the mummy&mdash;several hundreds have been
-      found in one mummy-case. They were cut from all sorts of stones, both
-      precious and common, and made of limestone, or paste, hardened, glazed and
-      baked. Some of them are exquisitely cut, the intaglio on the under side
-      being as clean, true, and polished as Greek work. The devices on them are
-      various; the name of a reigning or a famous king, in the royal oval, is
-      not uncommon, and an authentic scarabæus with a royal name is considered
-      of most value. I saw an insignificant one in soft stone and of a grey
-      color, held at a hundred pounds; it is the second one that has ever been
-      found with the name of Cheops on it. The scarabæi were worn in rings,
-      carried as charms, used as seals; there are large coarse ones of blue
-      pottery which seem to have been invitations to a funeral, by the
-      inscriptions on them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Scarabæus is at once the most significant and portable <i>souvenir</i>
-      of ancient Egypt that the traveler can carry away, and although the supply
-      was large, it could not fill the demand. Consequently antique scarabæi are
-      now manufactured in large quantities at Thebes, and in other places, and
-      distributed very widely over the length of Egypt; the dealers have them
-      with a sprinkling of the genuine; almost every peasant can produce one
-      from his deep pocket; the women wear them in their bosoms.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The traveler up the Nile is pretty sure to be attacked with the fever of
-      buying Scarabæi; he expects to happen upon one of great value, which he
-      will get for a few piastres. It is his intention to do so. The Scarabæus
-      becomes to him the most beautiful and desirable object in the world. He
-      sees something fascinating in its shape, in its hieroglyphics, however
-      ugly it may be to untaught eyes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Ali selected our scarabæi. They did not seem to us exactly the antique
-      gems that we had expected to see, and they did not give a high idea of the
-      old Egyptian art. But they had a mysterious history and meaning; they had
-      shared the repose of a mummy perhaps before Abraham departed from Ur. We
-      paid for them. We paid in gold. We paid Ali for his services as guide. We
-      gave him backsheesh on account of his kindness and intelligence, besides.
-      We said good-bye to his honest face with regret, and hoped to see him
-      again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was not long before we earnestly desired to meet him. He was a most
-      accomplished fellow, and honesty was his best policy. There isn't a more
-      agreeable Bedawee at the Pyramids; and yet Ali is a modern Egyptian, just
-      like his scarabæi, all the same. The traveler who thinks the Egyptians are
-      not nimble-witted and clever is likely to pay for his knowledge to the
-      contrary. An accumulated experience of five thousand years, in one spot,
-      is not for nothing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We depart from the pyramids amid a clamor of importunity; prices have
-      fallen to zero; antiquities old as Pharaoh will be given away;
-      &ldquo;backsheesh, backsheesh, O Howadji;&rdquo; &ldquo;I havn't any bread to <i>mangere</i>,
-      I have six children; what is a piastre for eight persons?&rdquo; They run after
-      us, they hang upon the carriage, they follow us a mile, begging,
-      shrieking, howling, dropping off one by one, swept behind by the weight of
-      a copper thrown to them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The shadows fall to the east; there is a lovely light on the plain; we
-      meet long lines of camels, of donkeys, of fellaheen returning from city
-      and field. All the west is rosy; the pyramids stand in a purple light; the
-      Sphinx casts its shade on the yellow sand; its expectant eyes look beyond
-      the Nile into the mysterious East.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0111.jpg" alt="0111 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER IX.&mdash;PREPARATIONS FOR A VOYAGE.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E are giving our
-      minds to a name for our dahabeëh. The owners have desired us to christen
-      it, and the task is getting heavy. Whatever we are doing; guiding a donkey
-      through the mazes of a bazaar; eating oranges at the noon breakfast;
-      watching the stream of color and fantastic apparel, swaying camels and
-      dashing harem-equipage with running saïses and outriding eunuchs, flowing
-      by the hotel; following a wedding procession in its straggling parade, or
-      strolling vacantly along, knocked, jostled, evaded by a dozen races in a
-      dozen minutes and lost in the whirl, color, excitement of this perpetual
-      masquerade, we are suddenly struck with, &ldquo;what <i>shall</i> we call that
-      boat?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We want a name that is characteristic of the country and expressive of our
-      own feelings, poetic and not sentimental, sensible and not common-place.
-      It seems impossible to suggest a good name that is not already borne by a
-      dahabeëh on the river&mdash;names such as the Lotus, the Ibis, the
-      Gazelle, Cleopatra, Zenobia, names with an Eastern flavor. And we must
-      have not only a name for the boat, but a motto or device for our pennant,
-      or &ldquo;distinguisher flag,&rdquo; as the dragoman calls the narrow fifty feet long
-      strip of bunting that is to stream from the forward yard. We carry at the
-      stern the flag of our country, but we float our individuality in the upper
-      air. If we had been a bridal party we should of course have taken some
-      such device as that of a couple who went up the river under the simple but
-      expressive legend of &ldquo;Nestle-down,&rdquo; written on their banner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What would <i>you</i> name a Nile dahabeëh?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The days go all too rapidly for us to catch the shifting illusions about
-      us. It is not so much what we see of the stated sights that can be
-      described, but it is the atmosphere in which we live that makes the
-      strangeness of our existence. It is as if we had been born into another
-      world. And the climate is as strange as the people, the costumes, the
-      habits, the morals. The calendar is bewitched. December is a mixture of
-      September and July. Alas, yes. There are the night-fogs of September, and
-      the mosquitoes of July. You cannot tell whether the season is going
-      backwards or forwards. But for once you are content to let Providence
-      manage it, at least so long as there is a north wind, and you forget that
-      the sky has any shade other than blue.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the prophecy of the poet is realized. The nights are filled with
-      music, and the cares that infest the day are invariably put off till
-      tomorrow, in this deliciously procrastinating land. Perhaps, however, Mr.
-      Longfellow would not be satisfied with the music; for it seems to be the
-      nasal daughter of Lassitude and Monotony, ancient gods of the East. Two or
-      three strings stretched over a sounding skin and a parchment drum suffice
-      to express the few notes that an Arab musician commands; harmony does not
-      enter into his plan. Yet the people are fond of what they consider music.
-      We hear on all sides at night the picking of strings, the throb of the
-      darabooka and the occasional outburst of a wailing and sentimental strain.
-      Like all barbarous music, this is always minor. When the performers are
-      sailors or common strollers, it is doubtless exactly the same music that
-      delighted the ancient Egyptians; even the instruments are the same, and
-      the method of clapping the hands in accentuation of the music is
-      unchanged.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is a <i>café chantant</i> on one side of the open, tree-grown court
-      of a native hotel, in the Ezbekeëh where one may hear a mongrel music,
-      that is not inexpressive of both the morals and the mixed condition of
-      Cairo to-day. The instruments of the band are European; the tunes played
-      are Egyptian. When the first strain is heard we say that it is strangely
-      wild, a weird and plaintive minor; but that is the whole of it. The strain
-      is repeated over and over again for a half hour, as if it were ground out
-      of a coffee-mill, in an iteration sufficient to drive the listener insane,
-      the dissolute scraping and thumping and barbarous dissonance never
-      changing nor ending. From time to time this is varied with singing, of the
-      nasal, fine-tooth-comb order, with the most extraordinary attempts at
-      shakes and trills, and with all the agony of a moonlit cat on a house-top.
-      All this the grave Arabs and young Egyptian rakes, who sit smoking, accept
-      with entire satisfaction. Later in the evening dancing begins and goes on
-      with the strumming, monotonous music till at least the call for morning
-      prayer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the handsome Ezbekeëh park or garden, where there are shady walks and
-      some fine sycamores and banyans to be seen, a military band plays every
-      afternoon, while the foreigners of both sexes, and Egyptian men promenade.
-      Of course no Egyptian lady or woman of respectability is ever seen in so
-      public a place. In another part of the garden, more retired, a native band
-      is always playing at nightfall. In this sheltered spot, under the lee of
-      some gigantic rock and grotto-work are tables and chairs, and a divan for
-      the band. This rock has water pleasantly running through it, but it must
-      have been struck by somebody besides Moses, for beer is brought out of its
-      cool recesses, as well. Rows of men of all colors and costumes may be seen
-      there, with pipe and mug and coffee cup; and on settees more elevated and
-      next the grotto, are always sitting veiled women, in outer wrappers of
-      black silk, sometimes open enough to show an underskirt of bright color
-      and feet in white slippers. These women call for beer or something
-      stronger, and smoke like the men; they run no risk in being in this
-      publicity, for they have nothing to lose here or elsewhere. Opposite them
-      on a raised divan, not unlike a roomy bedstead, sits the band.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the most disreputable of bands. Nothing in the whole East so
-      expressed to me its fagged-out dissoluteness as this band and its
-      performances. It is a sleepy, nonchalant band, as if it had been awake all
-      the previous night; some of its members are blear-eyed, some have one eye,
-      some have two; they are in turbans, in tarbooshes, in gowns of soiled
-      silk, of blue cotton, of white drilling. It is the feeblest band; and yet
-      it is subject to spurts of bacchantic fervor. Sometimes all the
-      instruments are striving together, and then only one or two dribble the
-      monotonous refrain; but somehow, with all the stoppings to light
-      cigarettes and sip coffee, the tune is kept groaning on, in a minor that
-      is as wild as the desert and suggestive of sin.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The instruments are as African as the music. There is the <i>darabooka</i>,
-      a drum made of an earthen or wooden cylinder with a flaring head, over
-      which is stretched a parchment; the <i>tar</i>, a kind of tambourine; <i>kemengeh</i>,
-      a viol of two strings, with a cocoa-nut sounding-body; the <i>kanoon</i>,
-      an instrument of strings held on the knees, and played with the fingers;
-      the <i>'.od</i>, a sort of guitar with seven double strings; played with a
-      plectrum, a slip of vultures' feather held between the thumb and finger;
-      and the <i>nay</i>, a reed-flute blown at the end.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the midst of the thumbing and scraping, a rakish youth at the end, is
-      liable, at any moment, to throw back his head and break out in a soft
-      womanish voice, which may go no farther than a nasal <i>yah, ah, m-a-r-r</i>,
-      that appears to satisfy his yearnings; or it may expand into a droning
-      song, &ldquo;<i>Ya benat Iskendereeyeh,</i>&rdquo; like that which Mr. Lane renders:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;O ye damsels of Alexandria!
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Your walk over the furniture is alluring:
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Ye wear the Kashmeer shawl with embroidered work,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And your lips are sweet as sugar.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Below the divan sit some idlers or supernumeraries, who, as inclination
-      moves them, mark the rhythm by striking the palms of the hands together,
-      or cry out a prolonged <i>ah-yah</i>, but always in a forgetful,
-      uninterested manner, and then subside into silence, while the picking and
-      throbbing of the demoralized tune goes on. It is the &ldquo;devilish iteration&rdquo;
-       of it, I think, that steals away the senses; this, and some occult
-      immorality in the debased tune, that blots virtue out of the world. Yet
-      there is something comic in these blinking owls of the night, giving
-      sentimental tongue to the poetic imagery of the Eastern love-song&mdash;&ldquo;for
-      a solitary gazelle has taken away my soul&rdquo;:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;The beloved came to me with a vacillating gait;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And her eyelids were the cause of my intoxication.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      I extended my hand to take the cup;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And was intoxicated by her eyes.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      O thou in the rose-colored dress!
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      O thou in the rose-colored dress!
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Beloved of my heart! remain with me.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or he pipes to the &ldquo;dark-complexioned, and with two white roses&rdquo;:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      &ldquo;O damsel! thy silk shirt is worn out, and thine arms have become visible,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And I fear for thee, on account of the blackness of thine eyes.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      I desire to intoxicate myself, and kiss thy cheeks,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And do deeds that Antar did not.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      To all of which the irresponsible chorus, swaying its head, responds <i>O!
-      y-a-a-a-h!</i> And the motley audience sips and smokes; the veiled
-      daughters of sin flash invitation from their kohl-stained eyes; and the
-      cool night comes after the flaring heat of the day; and all things are as
-      they have been for thousands of years. It is time to take you to something
-      religious.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Howling Derweeshes are the most active religionists in the East; I
-      think they spend more force in devotion than the Whirling Derweeshes,
-      though they are probably not more meritorious. They exceed our own western
-      &ldquo;Jumpers,&rdquo; and by contrast make the worship of our dancing Shakers tame
-      and worldly. Of all the physical manifestations of religious feeling there
-      is none more warming than the <i>zikr</i> of these devotees. The
-      derweeshes are not all wanderers, beggars, saints in patched garments and
-      filthy skin; perhaps the most of those who belong to one of the orders
-      pursue some regular occupation; they are fishermen, laborers in the
-      fields, artisans, and water-carriers, and only occasionally join in the
-      ceremonies, processions and <i>zikrs</i> of their faith. I have seen a
-      laborer drop into the ring, take his turn at a <i>zikr</i>, and drop out
-      again, very much as the western man happens in and takes a hand in a &ldquo;free
-      fight,&rdquo; and then retires.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This mosque at which the Howling Derweeshes perform is circular, and large
-      enough to admit a considerable number of spectators, who sit, or stand
-      against the wall. Since the exercise is one of the sights of the
-      metropolis, and strangers are expected, it has a little the air of a
-      dress-parade, and I could not but fear that the devotion lost somewhat of
-      its singleness of purpose. When we enter, about forty men stand in an
-      oblong ring facing each other; the ring is open towards the <i>mehhrab</i>,
-      or niche which marks the direction of Mecca. In the opening stands the
-      Sheykh, to direct the performance; and at his left are seated the
-      musicians.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The derweeshes have divested themselves of turbans, fezes, outer gowns and
-      slippers, which lie in a heap in the middle of the circle, an
-      indistinguishable mass of old clothes, from which when the owners come to
-      draw they cannot fail to get as good as they deposited. The ceremony
-      begins with a little uneasiness on the part of the musical instruments;
-      the sheykh bows his head and brings the palms of his hands together; and
-      the derweeshes, standing close together, with their hands straight at
-      their sides, begin slowly to bow and to sway to the right in a compound
-      motion which is each time extended. The <i>daraboo-ka</i> is beaten softly
-      and the <i>'.od</i> is picked to a slow measure. As the worshippers sway,
-      they chant, <i>La ilaha illa-llah</i> (&ldquo;There is no deity but God&rdquo;) in
-      endless repetition, and imperceptibly quickening the enunciation as they
-      bow more rapidly. The music gets faster, and now and again one of the
-      roguish boys who is thumping the drum breaks out into vocal expression of
-      his piety or of his hilarity. The circle is now under full swing, the
-      bowings are lower and much more rapid, and the ejaculation has become
-      merely <i>Allah, Allah, Allah</i>, with a strong stress on the final
-      syllable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The peculiarities of the individual performers begin to come out. Some
-      only bow and swing in a perfunctory manner; others throw their strength
-      into the performance, and their excitement is evinced by the working of
-      the face and the rolling of the eyes. Many of them have long hair, which
-      has evidently known neither scissors nor comb for years, and is matted and
-      twisted in a hopeless tangle. One of the most conspicuous and the least
-      clad, a hairy man of the desert, is, exactly in apparel and features, like
-      the conventional John the Baptist. His enormous shock of faded brown hair
-      is two feet long and its ends are dyed yellow with henna. When he bends
-      forward his hair sweeps the floor, and when he throws his head back the
-      mass whips over with a <i>swish</i> through the air. The most devout
-      person, however, is a negro, who puts all the fervor of the tropics into
-      his exercise. His ejaculations are rolled out with extraordinary volume,
-      and his black skin shines with moisture; there is, too, in his swaying and
-      bowing, an <i>abandon</i>, a laxity of muscles, and a sort of jerk that
-      belong only to his sympathetic race.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The exercise is every moment growing more rapid, but in regular
-      increments, as the music hastens&mdash;five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen
-      minutes&mdash;until there is a very high pressure on, the revolutions of
-      the cylinder are almost one in two seconds, and the piston moves quicker
-      and quicker. The music, however, is not louder, only more intense, and now
-      and then the reed-flute executes a little obligato, a plaintive strain,
-      that steals into the frenzy like the note of a lost bird, sweet as love
-      and sad as death. The performers are now going so rapidly that they can
-      only ejaculate one syllable, <i>'.ah, 'lah, 'lah</i>, which is aspirated
-      in a hoarse voice every time the head is flung forward to the floor. The
-      hands are now at liberty, and swing with the body, or are held palm to
-      palm before the face. The negro cannot longer contain himself but breaks
-      occasionally into a shrill &ldquo;hoo!&rdquo; He and two or three others have &ldquo;the
-      power,&rdquo; and are not far from an epileptic fit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is a limit, however, to the endurance of the body; the swaying has
-      become so rapid that it is difficult to distinguish faces, and it is
-      impossible for the performers to repeat even a syllable of the name of <i>Allah</i>,
-      all they can do is to push out from the depths of the lungs a vast hoarse
-      aspiration of <i>la-a-h</i>, which becomes finally a gush exactly like the
-      cut-off of a steam engine, short and quick.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The end has nearly come; in vain the cymbals clang, in vain the drum is
-      beaten harder, and the horn calls to quicker work. The limit is reached,
-      and while the reed expresses its plaintive fear, the speed slackens, the
-      steam puffs are slower, and with an irregular <i>hoo!</i> from the colored
-      brother, the circle stands still.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You expect to see them sink down exhausted. Not a bit of it. One or two
-      having had enough of it, take their clothes and withdraw, and their places
-      are filled by others and by some very sensible-looking men, trades-people
-      evidently. After a short rest they go through the same or a similar
-      performance, and so on for an hour and a half, the variations being mainly
-      in the chanting. At the end, each derweesh affectionately embraces the
-      Sheykh, kisses his hand without servility, resumes his garments and
-      quietly withdraws. They seem to have enjoyed the exercise, and certainly
-      they had plenty of it. I should like to know what they think of us, the
-      infidel spectators, who go to look at their religious devotions as if they
-      were a play.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That derweesh beggar in a green turban is by that token a shereef, or
-      descendant of the Prophet. No one but a shereef is allowed to wear the
-      green turban. The shereefs are in all ranks of society, many of them
-      wretched paupers and in the most menial occupations; the title is
-      inherited from either parent and the representatives of the race have
-      become common. Some who are entitled to the green turban wear the white
-      instead, and prefer to be called Sevd (master or lord) instead of Shereef.
-      Such a man is Seyd Sadat, the most conspicous representative of the family
-      of the Prophet in Cairo. His ancestors for a long period were the trustees
-      of the funds of all the great mosques of Cairo, and consequently handled
-      an enormous revenue and enjoyed great power. These millions of income from
-      the property of the mosques the Khedive has diverted to his own purposes
-      by the simple process of making himself their trustee. Thus the secular
-      power interferes every few centuries, in all countries, with the
-      accumulation of property in religious houses. The strict Moslems think
-      with the devout Catholics, that it is an impious interference.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Seyd Sadat lives in the house that his family have occupied for over eight
-      centuries! It is perhaps the best and richest specimen of Saracenic
-      domestic architecture now standing in the East. This house, or collection
-      of houses and disconnected rooms opening upon courts and gardens, is in
-      some portions of it in utter decay; a part, whose elegant arches and
-      marvelous carvings in stone, with elaborate hanging balconies and painted
-      recesses, are still studies of beauty, is used as a stable. The inhabited
-      rooms of the house are tiled two-thirds of the way to the lofty ceilings;
-      the floors are of variegated marbles, and the ceilings are a mass of wood
-      in the most intricate arabesque carving, and painted in colors as softly
-      blended as the hues of an ancient camels' hair shawl. In one of these
-      gorgeous apartments, the furniture of which is not at all in keeping with
-      the decorations (an incongruity which one sees constantly in the East&mdash;shabbiness
-      and splendor are indissolubly married), we are received by the Descendant
-      with all the ceremony of Eastern hospitality. Seated upon the divan raised
-      above the fountain at one end of the apartment, we begin one of those
-      encounters of compliments through an interpreter, out of which the
-      traveler always comes beaten out of sight. The Seyd is a handsome
-      intelligent man of thirty-five, sleek with good living and repose, and a
-      master of Oriental courtesy. His attire is all of silk, the blue color
-      predominating; his only ornament is a heavy gold chain about the neck. We
-      frame long speeches to the Seyd, and he appears to reply with equal
-      verboseness, but what he says or what is said to him we never know. The
-      Eastern dragoman is not averse to talking, but he always interprets in a
-      sort of short-hand that is fatal to conversation. I think the dragomans at
-      such interviews usually translate you into what they think you ought to
-      say, and give you such a reply as they think will be good for you.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Say to his lordship that we thank him for the honor of being permitted to
-      pay our respects to a person so distinguished.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;His excellency (who has been talking two minutes) say you do him too much
-      honor.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We were unwilling to leave Cairo without seeing the residence of so
-      celebrated a family.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;His excellency (who has now got fairly going) feels in deep the visit of
-      strangers so distinguish.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It is a great pleasure also to us to see an Arab house so old and
-      magnificent.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;His excellency (who might have been reciting two chapters of the Koran in
-      the interval) say not to mention it; him sorry it is not more worth you to
-      see.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The attendants bring sherbet in large and costly cups, and chibooks
-      elegantly mounted, and the conversation flounders along. The ladies visit
-      the harem above, and we look about the garden and are shown into room
-      after room, decorated in endless variety and with a festivity of invention
-      and harmony of color which the moderns have lost. The harem turns out to
-      be, like all ordinary harems, I think, only mysterious on the outside. We
-      withdraw with profuse thanks, frittered away through our dragoman, and
-      &ldquo;His excellency say he hope you have pleasant voyage and come safe to your
-      family and your country.&rdquo; About the outer court, and the door where we
-      mount our donkeys, are many idlers in the sun, half beggars, half
-      attendants, all of whom want backsheesh, besides the regular servants who
-      expect a fee in proportion to the &ldquo;distinguish&rdquo; of the visitor. They are
-      probably not unlike the clients of an ancient Roman house, or the
-      retainers of a baronial lord of the middle ages.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If the visitor, however, really desires to see the antiquities of the
-      Christian era, he will ride out to Old Cairo, and mouse about among the
-      immense rubbish heaps that have been piled there since Fostat (as the
-      ancient city was called) was reduced to ashes, more than seven hundred
-      years ago, by a fire which raged nearly two months. There is the ruined
-      mosque of Amer, and there are the quaint old Coptic convents and churches,
-      built about with mud walls, and hidden away amid mounds of rubbish. To
-      these dust-filled lanes and into these mouldering edifices the antiquarian
-      will gladly go. These churches are the land of the flea and the home of
-      the Copt. Anything dingier, darker, dirtier, doesn't exist. To one of
-      them, the Sitt Miriam, Church of Our Lady, we had the greatest difficulty
-      in getting admission. It is up-stairs in one of the towers of the old
-      Roman gateway of Babylon. It is a small church, but it has five aisles and
-      some very rich wood-carving and stone-mosaics. It was cleaner than the
-      others because it was torn to pieces in the process of renovation. In
-      these churches are hung ostrich eggs, as in the mosques, and in many of
-      them are colored marbles, and exquisite mosaics of marble,
-      mother-of-pearl, and glass. Aboo Sirgeh, the one most visited, has a
-      subterranean chapel which is the seat of an historical transaction that
-      may interest some minds. There are two niches in the wall, and in one of
-      them, at the time of the Flight into Egypt, the Virgin Mary rested with
-      the Child, and in the other St. Joseph reposed. That is all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A little further on, by the river bank, opposite the southern end of the
-      island of Rhoda, the Moslems show you the spot where little Moses lay in
-      his little basket, when the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe (for
-      Pharaoh hadn't a bath-tub in his house) and espied him. The women of the
-      Nile do to-day exactly what Pharaoh's daughter and her maidens did, but
-      there are no bulrushes at this place now, and no lad of the promise of
-      Moses is afloat.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      One can never have done with an exploration of Cairo, with digging down
-      into the strata of overlying civilizations, or studying the shifting
-      surface of its Oriental life. Here, in this Old Cairo, was an ancient
-      Egyptian town no doubt; the Romans constructed here massive walls and
-      towers; the followers of St. Mark erected churches; the friends of
-      Mohammed built mosques; and here the mongrel subjects of the Khedive, a
-      mixture of ancient Egyptian, conquering Arabian, subject Nubian, enslaved
-      Soudan, inheritors of all civilizations and appropriators of none, kennel
-      amid these historic ash-heaps, caring neither for their past nor their
-      future. But it is drawing towards the middle of December; there are signs
-      that warn us to be off to the south. It may rain. There are symptoms of
-      chill in the air, especially at night, and the hotel, unwarmed, is
-      cheerless as a barn, when the sun does not shine. Indeed, give Cairo the
-      climate of London in November and everybody would perish in a week. Our
-      preparations drift along. It is always &ldquo;tomorrow.&rdquo; It requires a week to
-      get the new name of the boat printed on a tin. The first day the bargain
-      for it is made; the work is to be finished <i>bookra</i>, tomorrow. Next
-      day the letters are studied. The next the tin is prepared. The next day is
-      Friday or Wednesday or some other day in which repose is required. And the
-      next the workman comes to know what letters the howadji desires to have
-      upon the tin, and how big a sign is required.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Two other necessary articles remain to be procured; rockets and other
-      fire-works to illuminate benighted Egypt, and medicines. As we were not
-      taking along a physician and should find none of those experimenting
-      people on the Nile, I did not see the use of carrying drugs. Besides we
-      were going into the one really salubrious region of the globe. But
-      everybody takes medicines; you must carry medicines. The guide-book gives
-      you a list of absolutely essential, nasty drugs and compounds, more than
-      you would need if you were staying at home in an artificial society, with
-      nothing to do but take them, and a physician in every street.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I bought chunks of drugs, bottles of poisons, bundles of foul smells and
-      bitter tastes. And then they told me that I needed balances to weigh them
-      in. This was too much. I was willing to take along an apothecary's shop on
-      this pleasure excursion; I was not willing to become an apothecary. No, I
-      said, if I am to feed out these nauseous things on the Nile, I will do it
-      generously, according to taste, and like a physician, never stinting the
-      quantity. I would never be mean about giving medicine to other people. And
-      it is not difficult to get up a reputation for generosity on epsom salts,
-      rhubarb and castor oil.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We carried all these drugs on the entreaty of friends and the druggist,
-      who said it would be very unsafe to venture so far without them. But I am
-      glad we had them with us. The knowledge that we had them was a great
-      comfort. To be sure we never experienced a day's illness, and brought them
-      all back, except some doses that I was able to work off upon the crew.
-      There was a gentle black boy, who had been stolen young out of Soudan, to
-      whom it was a pleasure to give the most disagreeable mixtures; he absorbed
-      enormous doses as a lily drinks dew, and they never seemed to harm him.
-      The aboriginal man, whose constitution is not weakened by civilization,
-      can stand a great amount of doctor's stuff. The Nile voyager is earnestly
-      advised to carry a load of drugs with him; but I think we rather overdid
-      the business in castor-oil; for the fact is that the people in Nubia
-      fairly swim in it, and you can cut the cane and suck it whenever you feel
-      like it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      By all means, go drugged on your pleasure voyage. It is such a cheerful
-      prelude to it, to read that you will need blue-pills, calomel, rhubarb,
-      Dover's powder, James's powder, carbolic acid, laudanum, quinine,
-      sulphuric acid, sulphate of zinc, nitrate of silver, ipecacuanha, and
-      blistering plaster. A few simple directions go with these. If you feel a
-      little unwell, take a few blue pills, only about as many as you can hold
-      in your hand; follow these with a little Dover's powder, and then repeat,
-      if you feel worse, as you probably will; when you rally, take a few
-      swallows of castor-oil, and drop into your throat some laudanum; and then,
-      if you are alive, drink a dram of sulphuric acid. The consulting friends
-      then generally add a little rice-water and a teaspoonful of brandy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the opinion of our dragoman it is scarcely reputable to go up the Nile
-      without a store of rockets and other pyrotechnics. Abd-el-Atti should have
-      been born in America. He would enjoy a life that was a continual Fourth of
-      July. He would like his pathway to be illuminated with lights, blue, red,
-      and green, and to blaze with rockets. The supreme moment of his life is
-      when he feels the rocket-stick tearing out of his hand. The common
-      fire-works in the Mooskee he despised; nothing would do but the
-      government-made, which are very good. The passion of some of the Egyptians
-      for fire-arms and gunpowder is partially due to the prohibition. The
-      government strictly forbids the use of guns and pistols and interdicts the
-      importation or selling of powder. On the river a little powder and shot
-      are more valued than money.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We had obtained permission to order some rockets manufactured at the
-      government works, and in due time we went with Abd-el-Atti to the bureau
-      at the citadel to pay for them. The process was attended with all that
-      deliberation which renders life so long and valuable in the East.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We climbed some littered and dusty steps, to a roof terrace upon which
-      opened several apartments, brick and stucco chambers with cement floors,
-      the walls whitewashed, but yellow with time and streaked with dirt. These
-      were government offices, but office furniture was scarce. Men and boys in
-      dilapidated gowns were sitting about on their heels smoking. One of them
-      got up and led the way, and pulling aside a soiled curtain showed us into
-      the presence of a bey, a handsomely dressed Turk, with two gold chains
-      about his neck, squatting on a ragged old divan at one end of the little
-      room; and this divan was absolutely all the furniture that this cheerless
-      closet, which had one window obscured with dust, contained. Two or three
-      officers were waiting to get the bey's signature to papers, and a heap of
-      documents lay beside him, with an inkhorn, on the cushions. Half-clad
-      attendants or petitioners shuffled in and out of the presence of this head
-      of the bureau. Abd-el-Atti produced his papers, but they were not
-      satisfactory, and we were sent elsewhere.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Passing through one shabby room after another, we came into one dimmer,
-      more stained and littered than the others. About the sides of the room
-      upon low divans sat, cross-legged, the clerks. Before each was a shabby
-      wooden desk which served no purpose, however, but to hold piles of equally
-      shabby account books. The windows were thick with dust, the floor was
-      dirty, the desks, books, and clerks were dirty. But the clerks were
-      evidently good fellows, just like those in all government offices&mdash;nothing
-      to do and not pay enough to make them uneasy to be rich. They rolled
-      cigarettes and smoked continually; one or two of them were casting up
-      columns of figures, holding the sheet of paper in the left hand and
-      calling each figure in a loud voice (as if a little doubtful whether the
-      figure would respond to that name); and some of them wrote a little, by
-      way of variety. When they wrote the thin sheet of paper was held in the
-      left hand and the writing done upon the palm (as the Arabs always write);
-      the pen used was a blunt reed and the ink about as thick as tar. The
-      writing resulting from these unfavorable conditions is generally handsome.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our entry and papers were an event in that office, and the documents
-      became the subject of a general conversation. Other public business
-      (except the cigarettes) was suspended, and nearly every clerk gave his
-      opinion on the question, whatever it was. I was given a seat on a rickety
-      divan, coffee was brought in, the clerks rolled cigarettes for me and the
-      business began to open; not that anybody showed any special interest in
-      it, however. On the floor sat two or three boys, eating their dinner of
-      green bean leaves and some harmless mixture of grease and flour; and a
-      cloud of flies settled on them undisturbed. What service the ragged boys
-      rendered to the government I could not determine. Abd-el-Atti was bandying
-      jocularities with the clerks, and directing the conversation now and then
-      upon the rockets.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In course of time a clerk found a scrap of paper, daubed one side of it
-      with Arabic characters, and armed with this we went to another office and
-      got a signature to it. This, with the other documents, we carried to
-      another room much like the first, where the business appeared to take a
-      fresh start; that is, we sat down and talked; and gradually induced one
-      official after another to add a suggestion or a figure or two. Considering
-      that we were merely trying to pay for some rockets that were ready to be
-      delivered to us, it did seem to me that almost a whole day was too much to
-      devote to the affair. But I was mistaken. The afternoon was waning when we
-      went again to the Bey. He was still in his little &ldquo;cubby,&rdquo; and made room
-      for me on the divan. A servant brought coffee. We lighted cigarettes, and,
-      without haste, the bey inked the seal that hung to his gold chain, wet the
-      paper and impressed his name in the proper corner. We were now in a
-      condition to go to the treasury office and pay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I expected to see a guarded room and heavily bolted safes. Instead of this
-      there was no treasury apartment, nor any strong box. But we found the
-      &ldquo;treasury&rdquo; walking about in one of the passages, in the shape of an old
-      Arab in a white turban and faded yellow gown. This personage fished out of
-      his deep breast-pocket a rag of a purse, counted out some change, and put
-      what we paid him into the same receptacle. The Oriental simplicity of the
-      transaction was pleasing. And the money ought to be safe, for one would as
-      soon think of robbing a derweesh as this yellow old man.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The medicine is shipped, the rockets are on board, the crew have been
-      fitted out with cotton drawers, at our expense, (this garment is an
-      addition to the gown they wear), the name of the boat is almost painted,
-      the flags are ready to hoist, and the dahabeëh has been taken from Boulak
-      and is moored above the drawbridge. We only want a north wind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0126.jpg" alt="0126 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0127.jpg" alt="0127 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER X.&mdash;ON THE NILE.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E have taken
-      possession of our dahabeëh, which lies moored under the bank, out of the
-      current, on the west side of the river above the bridge. On the top of the
-      bank are some structures that seem to be only mounds and walls of mud, but
-      they are really &ldquo;brivate houses,&rdquo; and each one has a wooden door, with a
-      wooden lock and key. Here, as at every other rod of the river, where the
-      shore will permit, the inhabitants come to fill their water-jars, to wash
-      clothes, to bathe, or to squat on their heels and wait for the Nile to run
-      dry.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the Nile is running rapidly away. It sweeps under the arches of the
-      bridge like a freshet, with a current of about three miles an hour. Our <i>sandal</i>
-      (the broad clumsy row-boat which we take in tow) is obliged to aim far
-      above its intended landing-place when we cross, and four vigorous rowers
-      cannot prevent its drifting rapidly down stream. The Nile is always in a
-      hurry on its whole length; even when it spreads over flats for miles, it
-      keeps a channel for swift passage. It is the only thing that is in a hurry
-      in Egypt; and the more one sees it the stronger becomes the contrast of
-      this haste with the flat valley through which it flows and the apathetic
-      inhabitants of its banks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We not only have taken possession of our boat, but we have begun
-      housekeeping in it. We have had a farewell dinner-party on board. Our
-      guests, who are foreigners, declare that they did not suppose such a
-      dinner possible in the East; a better could not be expected in Paris. We
-      admit that such dinners are not common in this hungry world out of New
-      York. Even in New York the soup would not have been made of lentils.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have passed a night under a mosquito net, more comfortably than on
-      shore to be sure, but we are anxious to get into motion and change the
-      mosquitoes, the flies, the fleas of Cairo for some less rapacious. It is
-      the seventeenth of December. We are in the bazaars, buying the last
-      things, when, at noon we perceive that the wind has shifted. We hasten on
-      board. Where is the dragoman! &ldquo;Mohammed Effendi Abd-el-Atti goin' bazaar
-      come directly,&rdquo; says the waiter. At half-past two the stout dragoman
-      slides off his donkey and hastens on board with all the speed compatible
-      with short legs, out of breath, but issuing a storm of orders like a
-      belated captain of a seventy-two. He is accompanied by a black boy bearing
-      the name of our dahabeëh, rudely painted on a piece of tin, the paint not
-      yet dry. The dragoman regards it with some pride, and well he may, for it
-      has cost time and trouble. No Arab on the river can pronounce the name,
-      but they all understand its signification when the legend attached to it
-      is related, and having a similar tale in the Koran, they have no objection
-      to sail in a dahabeëh called the RIP VAN WINKLE.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The name has a sort of appropriateness in the present awakening of Egypt
-      to modern life, but exactly what it is we cannot explain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We seat ourselves on deck to watch the start. There is as much noise and
-      confusion as if the boat were on fire. The moment has come to cast off,
-      when it is discovered that two of the crew are absent, no doubt dallying
-      in some coffee-house. We cannot wait, they must catch us as they can. The
-      stake is pulled up; the plank is drawn in; the boat is shoved off from its
-      sand bed with grunting and yah-hoo-ing, some of the crew in the water, and
-      some pushing with poles; the great sail drops down from the yard and the
-      corner is hauled in to a wild chorus, and we take the stream. For a moment
-      it seems as if we should be carried against the bridge; but the sail is
-      large, the wind seizes us, and the three-months' voyage has begun.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are going slowly but steadily, perhaps at the rate of three or four
-      miles an hour, past the receding city, drawing away from the fleet of
-      boats and barges on the shore and the multitudinous life on its banks. It
-      is a scene of color, motion, variety. The river is alive with crafts of
-      all sorts, the shores are vocal with song, laughter, and the unending
-      &ldquo;chaff&rdquo; of a river population. Beyond, the spires and domes of the city
-      are lovely in the afternoon light. The citadel and the minarets gleam like
-      silver against the purple of the Mokattam hills. We pass the long white
-      palace of the Queen-mother; we are abreast the isle of Rhoda, its yellow
-      palace and its ancient Nilometer. In the cove at Geezeh are
-      passenger-dahabeëhs, two flying the American flag, with which we exchange
-      salutes as we go. The people on their decks are trying with a telescope to
-      make out the device on our pennant at the yard-arm. It affords occupation
-      for a great many people at different times during the voyage. Upon a white
-      ground is a full sun, in red; following it in red letters is the legend <i>Post
-      Nubila Phobus</i>; it is the motto on the coat of arms of the City of
-      Hartford. Here it signifies that we four Hartford people, beginning this
-      voyage, exchange the clouds of New England for the sun of Egypt. The flag
-      extends beyond the motto in a bifurcated blue streamer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Flag, streamer and sail take the freshening north wind. A smaller sail is
-      set aft. The reïs crouches on the bow, watching the channel; the
-      steersman, a grave figure, pushes slowly back and forth the long iron
-      handle of the tiller at the stern; the crew, waiting for their supper,
-      which is cooking near the mast, begin to sing, one taking the solo and the
-      others striking in with a minor response; it is not a song but a one-line
-      ejaculation, followed by a sympathetic and barbaric assent in chorus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The shores glide past like that land of the poet's dream where &ldquo;it is
-      always afternoon&rdquo;; reposeful and yet brilliant. The rows of palms, the
-      green fields, the lessening minarets, the groups of idlers in flowing
-      raiment, picturesque in any attitudes they assume, the depth of blue above
-      and the transparent soft air&mdash;can this be a permanent condition, or
-      is it only the scene of a play?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In fact, we are sailing not only away from Europe, away from Cairo, into
-      Egypt and the confines of mysterious Africa; we are sailing into the past.
-      Do you think our voyage is merely a thousand miles on the Nile? We have
-      committed ourselves to a stream that will lead us thousands of years
-      backwards in the ages, into the depths of history. When we loosed from
-      Cairo we let go our hold upon the modern. As we recede, perhaps we shall
-      get a truer perspective, and see more correctly the width of the strip of
-      time which we call &ldquo;our era.&rdquo; There are the pyramids of Geezeh watching
-      our departure, lifting themselves aloft in the evening sky; there are the
-      pyramids of Sakkara, sentinels of that long past into which we go.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a splendid start, for the wind blows steadily and we seem to be
-      flying before it. It is probable that we are making five miles an hour,
-      which is very well against such a current. Our dahabeëh proves to be an
-      excellent sailer, and we have the selfish pleasure of passing boat after
-      boat, with a little ripple of excitement not enough to destroy our placid
-      enjoyment. It is much pleasanter to lift your hat to the travelers on a
-      boat that you are drawing ahead of than it is to those of one that is
-      dropping your boat astern.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Nile voyage is so peculiar, and is, in fact, such a luxurious method
-      of passing a winter, that it may be well to say a little more concerning
-      our boat. It is about one hundred and twenty feet long, and eighteen broad
-      in the center, with a fiat bottom and no keel; consequently it cannot tack
-      or sail contrary to the wind. In the bow is the cook's &ldquo;cubby&rdquo; with the
-      range, open to the weather forward. Behind it stands the mast, some forty
-      feet high, and on the top of it is lashed the slender yard, which is a
-      hundred feet long, and hangs obliquely. The enormous triangular sail
-      stretches the length of the yard and its point is hauled down to the deck.
-      When it is shifted, the rope is let go, leaving the sail flapping, the end
-      of the yard is carried round the mast and the sail is hauled round in the
-      opposite direction, with an amount of pulling, roaring, jabbering, and
-      chorusing, more than would be necessary to change the-course of an
-      American fleet of war. The flat, open forward deck is capable of
-      accommodating six rowers on a side. It is floored over now, for the sweeps
-      are only used in descending.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then comes the cabin, which occupies the greater part of the boat, and
-      makes it rather top-heavy and difficult of management in an adverse wind.
-      First in the cabin are the pantry and dragoman's room; next a large
-      saloon, used for dining, furnished with divans, mirrors, tables, and
-      chairs, and lighted by large windows close together. Next are rows of
-      bedrooms, bathroom etc; a passage between leads to the after or lounging
-      cabin, made comfortable with divans and Eastern rugs. Over the whole cabin
-      runs the deck, which has sofas and chairs and an awning, and is good
-      promenading space. The rear portion of it is devoted to the steersman, who
-      needs plenty of room for the sweep of the long tiller. The steering
-      apparatus is of the rudest. The tiller goes into a stern-post which plays
-      in a hole big enough for four of it, and creakingly turns a rude rudder.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you are familiar with the Egyptian temple you will see that our
-      dahabeëh is built on this plan. If there is no pylon, there is the mast
-      which was always lashed to it. Then comes the dromos of sphinxes, the
-      forward deck, with the crew sitting along the low bulwarks; the first
-      cabin is the hall of columns, or <i>vestibulum</i>; behind it on each side
-      of the passage are various chambers; and then comes the <i>adytum</i> or
-      sanctuary&mdash;the inner cabin. The deck is the flat roof upon which
-      wound the solemn processions; and there is a private stairway to the deck
-      just as there was always an inner passage to the roof from one of the
-      small chambers of the temple.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The boat is manned by a numerous company whose appearance in procession
-      would excite enthusiasm in any American town. Abd-el-Atti has for
-      companion and clerk his nephew, a young Egyptian, (employed in the
-      telegraph office) but in Frank dress, as all government officials are
-      required to be.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The reïs, or captain, is Hassan, Aboo Seyda, a rather stately Arab of
-      sixty years, with a full turban, a long gown of blue cotton, and
-      bare-footed. He walks the deck with an ease and grace that an actor might
-      envy; there is neither stiffness nor strut in it; it is a gait of simple
-      majesty which may be inherited from generations of upright ancestors, but
-      could never be acquired. Hassan is an admirable figure-head to the
-      expedition, but he has no more pluck or authority than an old hen, and was
-      of not much more use on board than a hen would be in a chicken-hatching
-      establishment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Abdel Hady Hassed, the steersman, is a Nubian from the First Cataract,
-      shiny black in color, but with regular and delicate features. I can see
-      him now, with his turban set well back on his head, in a loose,
-      long-sleeved, brown garment, and without stockings or slippers, leaning
-      against his tiller and looking straight ahead with unchanging countenance.
-      His face had the peculiarity, which is sometimes seen, of appearing always
-      to have a smile on it. He was born with that smile; he will die with it.
-      An admirable person, who never showed the least excitement. That man would
-      run us fast on a sand-bank, put us on a rock in plain sight, or let his
-      sail jibe, without changing a muscle of his face, and in the most
-      agreeable and good-natured manner in the world. And he never exhibited the
-      least petulance at his accidents. I hope he will be rewarded for the
-      number of hours he patiently stood at that tiller. The reïs would take the
-      helm when Abdel wanted to say his prayers or to eat his simple meals; but,
-      otherwise, I always found him at his post, late at night or in the early
-      morning, gazing around on Egypt with that same stereotyped expression of
-      pleasure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The cook, Hasaneyn Mahrowan (the last name has an Irish sound, but the
-      first is that of the sacred mosque where is buried the head of the martyr
-      El Hoseyn) is first among his craft, and contrives to produce on his
-      little range in the bow a dinner that would have made Raineses II. a
-      better man. He is always at his post, like the steersman, and no matter
-      what excitement or peril we may be in, Hasaneyn stirs his soup or bastes
-      his chicken with perfect <i>sang froid</i>. The fact is that these
-      Orientals have got a thousand or two thousand years beyond worry, and
-      never feel any responsibility for what others are doing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The waiter, a handsome Cairene, is the perfection of a trained servant,
-      who understands signs better than English. Hoseyn Ali also rejoices in a
-      noble name. Hasan and Hoseyn are, it is well known, the &ldquo;two lords of the
-      youths of the people of Paradise, in Paradise&rdquo;; they were grandsons of the
-      Prophet. Hoseyn was slain at the battle of the Plain of Karbalà. Hoseyn is
-      the most smartly dressed fellow on board. His jacket and trousers are of
-      silk; he wears a gay kuffia about his fez and his waist is girded with a
-      fine Cashmere shawl. The fatal defect in his dress is that the full
-      trowsers do not quite meet the stockings. There is always some point of
-      shabbiness or lack of finish in every Oriental object.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The waiter's lieutenant is an Abyssinian boy who rejoices in the name of
-      Ahman Abdallah (or, &ldquo;Slave of God&rdquo;); and the cook's boy is Gohah ebn
-      Abdallah (&ldquo;His father slave of God&rdquo;). This is the poetical way of putting
-      their condition; they were both slaves of Abd-el-Atti, but now, he says,
-      he has freed them. For Gohah he gave two napoleons when the lad was new.
-      Greater contrast could not be between two colored boys. Ahman is black
-      enough, but his features are regular and well made, he has a bright merry
-      eye, and is quick in all his intuitions, and intellectually faithful to
-      the least particular. He divines the wants of his masters by his quick
-      wit, and never neglects or forgets anything. Gohah is from the Soudan, and
-      a perfect Congo negro in features and texture of skin&mdash;lips
-      protruding and nose absolutely level with his cheeks; as faithful and
-      affectionate as a Newfoundland dog, a mild, gentle boy. What another
-      servant would know through his sharpened interest, Gohah comprehends by
-      his affections.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have described these persons, because they are types of the almost
-      infinite variety of races and tribes in Egypt. Besides these there are
-      fourteen sailors, and no two of the same shade or with similar features.
-      Most of them are of Upper Egypt, and two or three of them are Nubians, but
-      I should say that all are hopelessly mixed in blood. Ahmed, for instance,
-      is a Nubian, and the negro blood comes out in him in his voice and laugh
-      and a certain rolling antic movement of the body. Another sailor has that
-      flush of red under dark in the face which marks the quadroon. The dress of
-      the crew is usually a gown, a pair of drawers, and a turban. Ahmed wears a
-      piece of Turkish toweling round his head. The crew is an incongruous lot
-      altogether; a third of them smoke hasheesh whenever they can get it; they
-      never obey an order without talking about it and suggesting something
-      different; they are all captains in fact; they are rarely quiet,
-      jabbering, or quarreling, or singing, when they are not hauling the sail,
-      hoisting us from a sandbar, or stretched on deck in deep but not noiseless
-      slumber. You cannot but like the good-natured rascals.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An irresponsible, hard-working, jolly, sullen, contradictory lot of big
-      children, who, it is popularly reported, need a <i>koorbag</i> (a whip of
-      hippopotamus hide) to keep them in the way of industry and obedience. It
-      seems to me that a little kindness would do better than a good deal of
-      whip. But the kindness ought to have begun some generations back. The
-      koorbag is the legitimate successor of the stick, and the Egyptians have
-      been ruled by the stick for a period of which history reports not to the
-      contrary. In the sculptures on the earliest tombs, laborers are driven to
-      their tasks with the stick. Sailors on the old Nile boats are menaced with
-      the stick. The overseer in the field swings the stick. Prisoners and
-      slaves are marshalled in line with the stick. The stick is to-day also the
-      one visible and prevalent characteristic of the government of Egypt. And I
-      think that it is a notion among the subject classes, that a beating is now
-      and then good for them. They might feel neglected without it. I cannot
-      find that Egypt was ever governed in any other way than on the old plan of
-      force and fear.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If there is anything that these officers and sailors do not understand, it
-      is the management of a Nile boat. But this is anticipating. Just now all
-      goes as merrily as a colored ball. The night is soft, the moon is half
-      full; the river spreads out in shining shallows; the shores are dim and
-      show lines of feathery palms against the sky; we meet or pass white sails
-      which flash out of the dimness and then vanish; the long line of pyramids
-      of Sakkara is outlined beyond the palms; now there is a light on shore and
-      a voice or the howling of a dog is heard; along the bank by the ruins of
-      old Memphis a jackal runs barking in the moonlight. By half-past nine we
-      are abreast the pyramids of Dashoor. A couple of dahabeëhs are laid up
-      below for the night, and the lights from their rows of cabin windows gleam
-      cheerfully on the water.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We go right on, holding our way deeper and deeper into this enchanted
-      country. The night is simply superb, such a wide horizon, such brilliancy
-      above! Under the night, the boat glides like a phantom ship; it is
-      perfectly steady, and we should not know we were in motion but for the
-      running ripple at the sides. By this lulling sound we sleep, having come,
-      for once in the world, into a country of tranquillity, where nothing need
-      ever be done till tomorrow, for tomorrow is certain to be like to-day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we came on deck at eight o'clock in the morning after &ldquo;flying&rdquo; all
-      night as on birds' wings, we found that we had made thirty-five miles, and
-      were almost abreast of the False Pyramid of Maydoom, so called because it
-      is supposed to be built about a rock; a crumbled pyramid but curiously
-      constructed, and perhaps older than that of Cheops. From a tomb in the
-      necropolis here came the two life-size and striking figures that are in
-      the Boulak Museum at Cairo. The statues, carved in calcareous limestone,
-      represent two exceedingly respectable and intelligent looking persons, who
-      resemble each other enough to be brother and sister; they were probably
-      alive in the third dynasty. They sit up now, with hands on knees, having a
-      bright look on their faces as if they hadn't winked in five thousand
-      years, and were expecting company.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I said we were &ldquo;flying&rdquo; all night. This needs qualification. We went
-      aground three times and spent a good part of the night in getting off. It
-      is the most natural thing in navigation. We are conscious of a slight
-      grating, then a gentle lurch, not enough to disturb a dream, followed,
-      however, by a step on deck, and a jabber of voices forward. The sail is
-      loosed; the poles are taken from the rack and an effort is made to shove
-      off by the use of some muscle and a good deal of chorus; when this fails,
-      the crew jump overboard and we hear them splashing along the side. They
-      put their backs to the boat and lift, with a grunting &ldquo;<i>Euh-h'e, euh-h'e</i>&rdquo;
-       which changes into a rapid &ldquo;halee, halee, halee,&rdquo; as the boat slides off;
-      and the crew scramble on board to haul tight the sail, with an emphatic
-      &ldquo;Yah! Moham<i>med</i>, Yah! Moham<i>med</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We were delayed some hours altogether, we learn. But it was not delay.
-      There can be no delay on this voyage; for there is no one on board who is
-      in any haste. Are we not the temporary owners of this boat, and entirely
-      irresponsible for any accident, so that if it goes down with all on board,
-      and never comes to port, no one can hold us for damages?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day is before us, and not only the day, but, Providence permitting, a
-      winter of days like it. There is nothing to be done, and yet we are too
-      busy to read even the guide-book. There is everything to be seen; it is
-      drifting past us, we are gliding away from it. It is all old and
-      absolutely novel. If this is laziness that is stealing over us, it is of
-      an alert sort. In the East, laziness has the more graceful title of
-      resignation; but we have not come to that condition even; curiosity is
-      constantly excited, and it is a sort of employment to breathe this
-      inspiring air.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are spectators of a pageant that never repeats itself; for although
-      there is a certain monotony in the character of the river and one would
-      think that its narrow strips of arable land would soon be devoid of
-      interest, the scenes are never twice alike. The combinations vary, the
-      desert comes near and recedes, the mountains advance in bold precipices or
-      fall away; the groups of people, villages, trees, are always shifting.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet, in fact, the scenery changes little during the day. There are
-      great reaches of river, rapidly flowing, and wide bends across which we
-      see vessels sailing as if in the meadows. The river is crowded all day
-      with boats, pleasure dahabeëhs, and trading vessels uncouth and
-      picturesque. The passenger dahabëeh is long, handsomely painted, carries
-      an enormous sail on its long yard, has a national flag and a long
-      streamer; and groups of white people sit on deck under the awning; some of
-      them are reading, some sketching, and now and then a man rises and
-      discharges his shot-gun at a flock of birds a half a mile beyond its
-      range.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The boats of African traders are short, high-pooped, and have the rudder
-      stepped out behind. They usually carry no flag, and are dirty and lack
-      paint, but they carry a load that would interest the most <i>blasé</i>
-      European. Those bound up-stream, under full sail, like ourselves, are
-      piled with European boxes and bales, from stem to stern; and on top of the
-      freight, in the midst of the freight, sitting on it, stretched out on it,
-      peeping from it, is another cargo of human beings, men, women and
-      children, black, yellow, clothed in all the hues of heaven and the rags of
-      earth. It is an impassive load that stares at us with incurious, unwinking
-      eyes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The trading boats coming down against the current, are even more strange
-      and barbarous. They are piled with merchandise, but of a different sort.
-      The sails and yards are down, and the long sweeps are in motion, balanced
-      on outriggers, for the forward deck is filled, and the rowers walk on top
-      of the goods as they move the oars to and fro. How black the rowers are!
-      How black everybody on board is! They come suddenly upon us, like those
-      nations we have read of, who sit in great darkness. The rowers are
-      stalwart fellows whose basalt backs shine in the sun as they bend to the
-      oar; in rowing they walk towards the cabin and pull the heavy oars as they
-      step backwards, and every sweep is accompanied by the burst of a refrain
-      in chorus, a wild response to a line that has been chanted by the leader
-      as they stepped forwards. The passengers sit immoveable in the sun and
-      regard us with a calmness and gravity which are only attainable near the
-      equatorial regions, where things approach an equilibrium.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sometimes we count nearly one hundred dahabeëhs in sight, each dipping or
-      veering or turning in the sun its bird-wing sail&mdash;the most graceful
-      in the world. A person with fancies, who is watching them, declares that
-      the triangular sails resemble quills cut at the top for pens, and that the
-      sails, seen over the tongue of land of a long bend ahead, look like a
-      procession of goose quills.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day is warm enough to call out all the birds; flocks of wild geese
-      clang overhead, and companies of them, ranks on ranks, stand on the low
-      sand-dunes; there are pelicans also, motionless in the shallow water near
-      the shore, meditating like a derweesh on one leg, and not caring that the
-      thermometer does mark 740. Little incidents entertain us. We like to pass
-      the Dongola, flying &ldquo;Ohio&rdquo; from its yard, which took advantage of our
-      stopping for milk early in the morning to go by us. We overhaul an English
-      boat and have a mildly exciting race with her till dark, with varying
-      fortune, the boats being nearly a match, and the victory depending upon
-      some trick or skill on the part of the crew. All the party look at us, in
-      a most unsympathetic manner, through goggles, which the English always put
-      on whenever they leave the twilight of England. I do not know that we have
-      any right to complain of this habit of wearing wire eye-screens and
-      goggles; persons who have it mean no harm by it, and their appearance is a
-      source of gratification to others. But I must say that goggles have a
-      different effect in different lights. When we were sailing slowly past the
-      Englishman, the goggles regarded us with a feeble and hopeless look. But
-      when the Englishman was, in turn, drawing ahead of us, the goggles had a
-      glare of &ldquo;Who the devil are you?&rdquo; Of course it was only in the goggles.
-      For I have seen many of these races on the Nile, and passengers always
-      affect an extreme indifference, leaving all demonstrations of interest to
-      the crews of the boats.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The two banks of the river keep all day about the same relative character&mdash;the
-      one sterile, the other rich. On the east, the brown sand licks down almost
-      to the water; there is only a strip of green; there are few trees, and
-      habitations only at long intervals. Only a little distance back are the
-      Mokattam hills, which keep a rarely broken and level sky-line for two
-      hundred and fifty miles south of Cairo.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The west side is a broad valley. The bank is high and continually caving
-      in, like the alluvial bottoms of the Missouri; it is so high that from our
-      deck we can see little of the land. There are always, however, palm-trees
-      in sight, massed in groves, standing in lines, or waving their single
-      tufts in the blue. These are the date-palms, which have no branches on
-      their long poles; each year the old stalks are cut off for fuel, and the
-      trunk, a mass of twisted fibres, comes to have a rough bark, as if the
-      tree had been shingled the wrong way. Stiff in form and with only the
-      single crown of green, I cannot account for its effect of grace and
-      beauty. It is the life of the Nile, as the Nile is life to it. It bears
-      its annual crop of fruit to those who want it, and a crop of taxes for the
-      Khedive. Every palm pays in fact a poll-tax, whether it brings forth dates
-      or not.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Where the bank slopes we can see the springing wheat and barley darkly
-      green; it is sown under the palms even, for no foot of ground is left
-      vacant. All along the banks are shadoofs, at which men in black stand all
-      day raising water, that flows back in regulated streams; for the ground
-      falls slightly away from the height of the bank. At intervals appears a
-      little collection of mud hovels, dumped together without so much plan as
-      you would find in a beaver settlement, but called a village, and having a
-      mud minaret and perhaps a dome. An occasional figure is that of a man
-      plowing with a single ox; it has just the stiff square look of the
-      sculptures in the tombs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now and then where a zig-zag path is cut, or the bank slopes, women are
-      washing clothes in the river, or groups of them are filling their
-      water-jars. They come in files from the villages and we hear their shrill
-      voices in incessant chatter. These country-women are invariably in black
-      or dark brown; they are not veiled, but draw their head shawl over the
-      face as our boat passes. Their long gowns are drawn up, exposing bare feet
-      and legs as they step into the stream. The jars are large and heavy when
-      unfilled, and we marvel how they can raise them to their heads when they
-      are full of water. The woman drags her jar out upon the sand, squats
-      before it, lifts it to her head with her hands, and then rises steadily
-      and walks up the steep bank and over the sand, holding her robe with one
-      hand and steadying the jar with the other, with perfect grace and ease of
-      motion. The strength of limbs required to raise that jar to the head and
-      then rise with it, ought to be calculated by those in our own land who are
-      striving to improve the condition of woman.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are still flying along with the unfailing wind, and the merry progress
-      communicates its spirit to the crew. Before sunset they get out their
-      musical instruments, and squatting in a circle on the forward deck,
-      prepare to enjoy themselves. One thumps and shakes the tambourine, one
-      softly beats with his fingers the darabooka drum, and another rattles
-      castanets. All who are not so employed beat time by a jerking motion of
-      the raised hands, the palms occasionally coming together when the rhythm
-      is properly accented. The leader, who has a very good tenor voice, chants
-      a minor and monotonous love-song to which the others respond, either in
-      applause of the sentiment or in a burst of musical enthusiasm which they
-      cannot contain. Ahmed, the Nubian, whose body is full of Congoism, enters
-      into it with a delightful <i>abandon</i>, swaying from side to side and
-      indulging in an occasional shout, as if he were at a camp-meeting. His
-      ugly and good-natured face beams with satisfaction, an expression that is
-      only slightly impaired by the vacant place where two front teeth ought to
-      shine. The song is rude and barbarous but not without a certain
-      plaintiveness; the song, and scene belong together. In this manner the
-      sailors of the ancient Egyptians amused themselves without doubt; their
-      instruments were the same; thus they sat upon the ground, thus they
-      clapped hands, thus they improvised ejaculations to the absent beloved:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      &ldquo;The night! The night! O thou with sweet hands!
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Holding the dewy peach.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sun goes down, leaving a rosy color in the sky, that changes into an
-      ashes-of-roses color, that gradually fades into the indefinable softness
-      of night punctured with stars.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are booming along all night, under the waxing moon. This is not so much
-      a voyage as a flight, chased by the north wind. The sail is always set,
-      the ripples are running always along the sides, the shores slide by as in
-      a dream; the reïs is at the bow, the smiling steersman is at the helm; if
-      we were enchanted we could not go on more noiselessly. There is something
-      ghostly about this night-voyage through a land so imperfectly defined to
-      the senses but so crowded with history. If only the dead who are buried on
-      these midnight shores were to rise, we should sail through a vast and
-      ghastly concourse packing the valley and stretching away into the desert.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      About midnight I step out of the cabin to look at the night. I stumble
-      over a sleeping Arab. Two sailors, set to hold the sail-rope and let it go
-      in case of a squall of wind, are nodding over it. The night is not at all
-      gloomy or mysterious, but in all the broad sweep of it lovely and full of
-      invitation. We are just passing the English dahabeëh, whose great sail is
-      dark as we approach, and then takes the moon full upon it as we file
-      abreast. She is hugging the bank and as we go by there is a snap. In the
-      morning Abd-el-Atti says that she broke the tip of her yard against the
-      bank. At any rate she lags behind like a crippled bird.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the morning we are in sight of four dahabeëhs, but we overhaul and pass
-      them all. We have contracted a habit of doing it. One of them gets her
-      stern-sprit knocked off as she sheers before us, whereupon the sailors
-      exchange compliments, and our steersman smiles just as he would have done
-      if he had sent the Prussian boat to the bottom. The morning is delicious,
-      not a cloud in the sky, and the thermometer indicating a temperature of
-      56°; this moderates speedily under the sun, but if you expected an
-      enervating climate in the winter on the Nile you will be disappointed; it
-      is on the contrary inspiring.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We pass the considerable town of Golosaneh, not caring very much about it;
-      we have been passing towns and mounds and vestiges of ancient and many
-      times dug-up civilizations, day and night. We cannot bother with every
-      ash-heap described in the guide-book. Benisooef, which has been for
-      thousands of years an enterprising city, we should like to have seen, but
-      we went by in the night. And at night most of these towns are as black as
-      the moon will let them be, lights being very rare. We usually receive from
-      them only the salute of a barking dog. Inland from Golosaneh rises the
-      tall and beautiful minaret of Semaloot, a very pretty sight above the
-      palm-groves; so a church spire might rise out of a Connecticut meadow. At
-      10 o'clock we draw near the cliffs of Gebel e' Tayr, upon the long flat
-      summit of which stands the famous Coptic convent of Sitteh Miriam el Adra,
-      &ldquo;Our Lady Mary the Virgin,&rdquo;&mdash;called also Dayr el Adra.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are very much interested in the Copts, and are glad of the opportunity
-      to see something of the practice of their religion. For the religion is as
-      peculiar as the race. In fact, the more one considers the Copt, the more
-      difficult it is to define him. He is a descendant of the ancient
-      Egyptians, it is admitted, and he retains the cunning of the ancients in
-      working gold and silver; but his blood is crossed with Abyssinian, Nubian,
-      Greek and Arab, until the original is lost, and to-day the representatives
-      of the pure old Egyptian type of the sculptures are found among the
-      Abyssinians and the Noobeh (genuine Nubians) more frequently than among
-      the Copts. The Copt usually wears a black or brown turban or cap; but if
-      he wore a white one it would be difficult to tell him from a Moslem. The
-      Copts universally use Arabic; their ancient language is practically dead,
-      although their liturgy and some of their religious books are written in
-      it. This old language is supposed to be the spoken tongue of the old
-      Egyptians.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The number of Christian Copts in Egypt is small&mdash;but still large
-      enough; they have been persecuted out of existence, or have voluntarily
-      accepted Mohammedanism and married among the faithful. The Copts in
-      religion are seceders from the orthodox church, and their doctrine of the
-      Trinity was condemned by the council of Chalcedon; they consequently hate
-      the Greeks much more than they hate the Moslems. They reckon St. Mark
-      their first patriarch.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Their religious practice is an odd jumble of many others. Most of them
-      practice circumcision. The baptism of infants is held to be necessary; for
-      a child dying unbaptized will be blind in the next life. Their fasts are
-      long and strict; in their prayers they copy both Jews and Moslems, praying
-      often and with endless repetitions. They confess before taking the
-      sacrament; they abstain from swine's flesh, and make pilgrimages to
-      Jerusalem. Like the Moslems they put off their shoes on entering the place
-      of worship, but they do not behave there with the decorum of the Moslem;
-      they stand always in the church and as the service is three or four hours
-      long, beginning often at daybreak, the long staff or crutch upon which
-      they lean is not a useless appendage. The patriarch, who dwells in Cairo,
-      is not, I think, a person to be envied. He must be a monk originally and
-      remain unmarried, and this is a country where marriage is so prevalent.
-      Besides this, he is obliged to wear always a woolen garment next the skin,
-      an irritation in this climate more constant than matrimony. And report
-      says that he lives under rules so rigid that he is obliged to be waked up,
-      if he sleeps, every fifteen minutes. I am inclined to think, however, that
-      this is a polite way of saying that the old man has a habit of dropping
-      off to sleep every quarter of an hour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The cliffs of Gebel e' Tayr are of soft limestone, and seem to be two
-      hundred feet high. In one place a road is cut down to the water, partly by
-      a zig-zag covered gallery in the face of the rock, and this is the usual
-      landing-place for the convent. The convent, which is described as a church
-      under ground, is in the midst of a mud settlement of lay brothers and
-      sisters, and the whole is surrounded by a mud wall. From below it has the
-      appearance of an earthwork fortification. The height commands the river
-      for a long distance up and down, and from it the monks are on the lookout
-      for the dahabeëhs of travelers. It is their habit to plunge into the
-      water, clothed on only with their professions of holiness, swim to the
-      boats, climb on board and demand &ldquo;backsheesh&rdquo; on account of their
-      religion.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is very rough as we approach the cliffs, the waves are high, and the
-      current is running strong. We fear we are to be disappointed, but the
-      monks are superior to wind and waves. While we are yet half a mile off, I
-      see two of them in the water, their black heads under white turbans,
-      bobbing about in the tossing and muddy waves. They make' heroic efforts to
-      reach us; we can hear their voices faintly shouting: <i>Ana Christian, O
-      Howadji</i>, &ldquo;I am a Christian, O! Howadji.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We have no doubt you are exceptional Christians,&rdquo; we shout to them in
-      reply, &ldquo;Why don't you come aboard&mdash;back-s-h-e-e-s-h!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      They are much better swimmers than the average Christian with us. But it
-      is in vain. They are swept by us and away from us like corks on the angry
-      waves, and even their hail of Christian fellowship is lost in the
-      whistling wind. When we are opposite the convent another head is seen
-      bobbing about in the water; he is also swept below us, but three-quarters
-      of a mile down-stream he effects a landing on another dahabeëh. As he
-      climbs into the jolly-boat which is towed behind and stands erect, he
-      resembles a statue in basalt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a great feat to swim in a current so swift as this and lashed by
-      such a wind. I should like to have given these monks something, if only to
-      encourage so robust a religion. But none of them succeeded in getting on
-      board. Nothing happens to us as to other travelers, and we have no
-      opportunity to make the usual remarks upon the degraded appearance of
-      these Coptic monks at Dayr el Adra. So far as I saw them they were very
-      estimable people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At noon we are driving past Minieh with a strong wind. It appears to be&mdash;but
-      if you were to land you would find that it is not&mdash;a handsome town,
-      for it has two or three graceful minarets, and the long white buildings of
-      the sugar-factory, with its tall chimneys, and the palace of the Khedive,
-      stretching along the bank give it an enterprising and cheerful aspect.
-      This new palace of his Highness cost about half a million of dollars, and
-      it is said that he has never passed a night in it. I confess I rather like
-      this; it must be a royal sensation to be able to order houses made like
-      suits of clothes without ever even trying them on. And it is a relief to
-      see a decent building and a garden now and then, on the river.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We go on, however, as if we were running away from the sheriff, for we
-      cannot afford to lose the advantage of such a wind. Along the banks the
-      clover is growing sweet and green as in any New England meadow in May, and
-      donkeys are browsing in it tended by children; a very pleasant sight, to
-      see this ill-used animal for once in clover and trying to bury his long
-      ears in luxury. Patches of water-melon plants are fenced about by low
-      stockades of dried rushes stuck in the sand&mdash;for the soil looks like
-      sand.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This vegetation is not kept alive, however, without constant labor; weeds
-      never grow, it is true, but all green things would speedily wither if the
-      shadoofs were not kept in motion, pouring the Nile into the baked and
-      thirsty soil.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These simple contrivances for irrigation, unchanged since the time of the
-      Pharaohs, have already been described. Here two tiers are required to lift
-      the water to the level of the fields; the first dipping takes it into a
-      canal parallel with the bank, and thence it is raised to the top. Two men
-      are dipping the leathern buckets at each machine, and the constant bending
-      down and lifting up of their dark bodies are fatiguing even to the
-      spectator. Usually in barbarous countries one pities the woman; but I
-      suppose this is a civilized region, for here I pity the men. The women
-      have the easier tasks of washing clothes in the cool stream, or lying in
-      the sand. The women all over the East have an unlimited capacity for
-      sitting motionless all day by a running stream or a pool of water.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the high wind the palm-trees are in constant motion tossing their
-      feather tufts in the air; some of them are blown like an umbrella turned
-      wrong side out, and a grove presents the appearance of crowd of people
-      overtaken by a sudden squall. The acacia tree, which the Arabs call the <i>sont</i>,
-      the acanthus of Strabo (<i>Mimosa Nilotica</i>) begins to be seen with the
-      palm. It is a thorny tree, with small yellow blossoms and bears a pod. But
-      what interests us most is the gum that exudes from its bark; for this is
-      the real Gum Arabic! That Heaven has been kind enough to let us see that
-      mysterious gum manufacturing itself! The Gum Arabic of our childhood!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      How often have I tried to imagine the feelings of a distant and
-      unconverted boy to whom Gum Arabic was as common as spruce gum to a New
-      England lad.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As I said, we go on as if we were evading the law; our daha-beëh seems to
-      have taken the bit in its teeth and is running away with us. We pass
-      everything that sails, and begin to feel no pride in doing so; it is a
-      matter of course. The other dalabeëhs are left behind, some with broken
-      yards. I heard reports afterwards that we broke their yards, and that we
-      even drowned a man. It is not true. We never drowned a man, and never
-      wished to. We were attending to our own affairs. The crew were busy the
-      first day or two of the voyage in cutting up their bread and spreading it
-      on the upper deck to dry&mdash;heaps of it, bushels of it. It is a black
-      bread, made of inferior unbolted wheat, about as heavy as lead, and sour
-      to the uneducated taste. The Egyptians like it, however, and it is said to
-      be very healthful. The men gnaw chunks of it with relish, but it is
-      usually prepared for eating by first soaking it in Nile-water and warming
-      it over a fire, in a big copper dish. Into the &ldquo;stodge&rdquo; thus made is
-      sometimes thrown some &ldquo;greens&rdquo; snatched from the shore. The crew seat
-      themselves about this dish when it is ready, and each one dips his right
-      hand into the mass and claws out a mouthful The dish is always scraped
-      clean. Meat is very rarely had by them, only a few times during the whole
-      voyage; but they vary their diet by eating green beans, lettuce, onions,
-      lentils, and any sort of &ldquo;greens&rdquo; they can lay hands on. The meal is
-      cooked on a little fire built on a pile of stones near the mast. When it
-      is finished they usually gather about the fire for a pull at the
-      &ldquo;hubble-bubble.&rdquo; This is a sort of pipe with a cocoa-nut shell filled with
-      water, through which the smoke passes. Usually a lump of hasheesh is put
-      into the bowl with the tobacco. A puff or two of this mixture is enough;
-      it sets the smoker coughing and conveys a pleasant stupor to his brain.
-      Some of the crew never smoke it, but content themselves with cigarettes.
-      And the cigarettes, they are always rolling up and smoking while they are
-      awake.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The hasheesh-smokers are alternately elated and depressed, and sometimes
-      violent and noisy. A man addicted to the habit is not good for much; the
-      hasheesh destroys his nerves and brain, and finally induces idiocy.
-      Hasheesh intoxication is the most fearful and prevalent vice in Egypt. The
-      government has made many attempts to stop it, but it is too firmly fixed;
-      the use of hasheesh is a temporary refuge from poverty, hunger, and all
-      the ills of life, and appears to have a stronger fascination than any
-      other indulgence. In all the towns one may see the dark little shops where
-      the drug is administered, and generally rows of victims in a stupid doze
-      stretched on the mud benches. Sailors are so addicted to hasheesh that it
-      is almost impossible to make up a decent crew for a dahabeëh.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Late in the afternoon we are passing the famous rock-tombs of Beni Hassan,
-      square holes cut in the face of the cliff, high up. With our glasses we
-      can see paths leading to them over the <i>debris</i> and along the ledges.
-      There are two or three rows of these tombs, on different ledges; they seem
-      to be high, dry, and airy, and I should rather live in them, dead or
-      alive, than in the mud hovels of the fellaheen below. These places of
-      sepulchre are older than those at Thebes, and from the pictures and
-      sculptures in them, more than from any others, the antiquarians have
-      reconstructed the domestic life of the ancient Egyptians. This is a
-      desolate spot now; there is a decayed old mud village below, and a little
-      south of it is the new town; both can barely be distinguished from the
-      brown sand and rock in which and in front of which they stand. This is a
-      good place for thieves, or was before Ibraheem Pasha destroyed these two
-      villages. We are warned that this whole country produces very skillful
-      robbers, who will swim off and glean the valuables from a dahabeëh in a
-      twinkling.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Notwithstanding the stiff breeze the thermometer marks 74°; but both wind
-      and temperature sink with the sun. Before the sun sets, however, we are
-      close under the east bank, and are watching the play of light on a
-      magnificent palm-grove, beneath which stand the huts of the modern village
-      of Sheykh Abâdeh. It adds romance to the loveliness of the scene to know
-      that this is the site of ancient Antinoë, built by the Emperor Adrian. To
-      be sure we didn't know it till this moment, but the traveler warms up to a
-      fact of this kind immediately, and never betrays even to his intimate
-      friends that he is not drawing upon his inexhaustible memory.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;That is the ancient Antinoë, built by Adrian.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Oh, the hypocrisy and deceit of the enthusiastic,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;<i>Is</i> it?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, and handsome Antinous was drowned here in the Nile.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did they recover his body?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Upon the bank there are more camels, dogs, and donkeys than we have seen
-      all day; buffaloes are wallowing in the muddy margin. They are all in
-      repose; the dogs do not bark, and the camels stretch their necks in a sort
-      of undulatory expression of discontent, but do not bleat, or roar, or
-      squawk, or make whatever the unearthly noise which they make is called.
-      The men and the women are crouching in the shelter of their mud walls,
-      with the light of the setting sun upon their dark faces. They draw their
-      wraps closer about them to protect themselves from the north wind, and
-      regard us stolidly and without interest as we go by. And when the light
-      fades, what is there for them? No cheerful lamp, no book, no newspaper.
-      They simply crawl into their kennels and sleep the sleep of &ldquo;inwardness&rdquo;
-       and peace.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Just here the arable land on the east bank is broader than usual, and
-      there was evidently a fine city built on the edge of the desert behind it.
-      The Egyptians always took waste and desert land for dwellings and for
-      burial-places, leaving every foot of soil available for cultivation free.
-      There is evidence all along here of a once much larger population, though
-      I doubt if the east bank of the river was ever much inhabited. The river
-      banks would support many more people than we find here if the land were
-      cultivated with any care. Its fertility, with the annual deposit, is
-      simply inexhaustible, and it is good for two and sometimes three crops a
-      year. But we pass fields now and then that are abandoned, and others that
-      do not yield half what they might. The people are oppressed with taxes and
-      have no inducement to raise more than is absolutely necessary to keep them
-      alive. But I suppose this has always been the case in Egypt. The masters
-      have squeezed the last drop from the people, and anything like an
-      accumulation of capital by the laborers is unknown. The Romans used a long
-      rake, with fine and sharp teeth, and I have no doubt that they scraped the
-      country as clean as the present government does.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The government has a very simple method of adjusting its taxes on land and
-      crops. They are based upon the extent of the inundation. So many feet
-      rise, overflowing such an area, will give such a return in crops; and tax
-      on this product can be laid in advance as accurately as when the crops are
-      harvested. Nature is certain to do her share of the work; there will be no
-      frost, nor any rain to spoil the harvest, nor any freakishness whatever on
-      the part of the weather. If the harvest is not up to the estimate, it is
-      entirely the fault of the laborer, who has inadequately planted or
-      insufficiently watered. In the same manner a tax is laid upon each
-      palm-tree, and if it does not bear fruit, that is not the fault of the
-      government.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There must be some satisfaction in farming on the Nile. You are always
-      certain of the result of your labor. * Whereas, in our country farming is
-      the merest lottery. The season will open too wet or too dry, the seed may
-      rot in the ground, the young plant may be nipped with frost or grow pale
-      for want of rain, the crop runs the alternate hazards of drought or
-      floods, it is wasted by rust or devoured by worms; and, to cap the climax,
-      if the harvest is abundant and of good quality, the price goes down to an
-      unremunerative figure. In Egypt you may scratch the ground, put in the
-      seed, and then go to sleep for three months, in perfect certainty of a
-      good harvest, if only the shadoof and the sakiya are kept in motion.
-    </p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-     * It should be said, however, that the ancient Egyptians
-     found the agricultural conditions beset with some vexations.
-     A papyrus in the British Museum contains a correspondence
-     between Ameneman, the librarian of Rameses II, and his pupil
-     Pentaour, who wrote the celebrated epic upon the exploits of
-     that king on the river Orontes. One of the letters describes
-     the life of the agricultural people:&mdash;&ldquo;Have you ever
-     conceived what sort of life the peasant leads who cultivates
-     the soil? Even before it is ripe, insects destroy part of
-     his harvest.. . Multitudes of rats are in the field; next
-     come invasions of locusts, cattle ravage his harvest,
-     sparrows alight in flocks on his sheaves. If he delays to
-     get in his harvest, robbers come to carry it off with him;
-     his horse dies of fatigue in drawing the plow; the tax-
-     collector arrives in the district, and has with him men
-     armed with sticks, negroes with palm-branches. All say,
-     'Give us of your corn,' and he has no means of escaping
-     their exactions. Next the unfortunate wretch is seized,
-     bound, and carried off by force to work on the canals; his
-     wife is bound, his children are stripped. And at the same
-     time his neighbors have each of them his own trouble.&rdquo;
- </pre>
-    <p>
-      By eight o'clock in the evening, on a falling wind, we are passing Rhoda,
-      whose tall chimneys have been long in sight. Here is one of the largest of
-      the Khedive's sugar-factories, and a new palace which has never been
-      occupied. We are one hundred and eighty-eight miles from Cairo, and have
-      made this distance in two days, a speed for which I suppose history has no
-      parallel; at least our dragoman says that such a run has never been made
-      before at this time of the year, and we are quite willing to believe a
-      statement which reflects so much honor upon ourselves, for choosing such a
-      boat and such a dragoman.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This Nile voyage is nothing, after all; its length has been greatly
-      overestimated. We shall skip up the river and back again before the season
-      is half spent, and have to go somewhere else for the winter. A man feels
-      all-powerful, so long as the wind blows; but let his sails collapse and
-      there is not a more crest-fallen creature. Night and day our sail has been
-      full, and we are puffed up with pride.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At this rate we shall hang out our colored lanterns at Thebes on Christmas
-      night.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0150.jpg" alt="0150 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0151.jpg" alt="0151 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XI.&mdash;PEOPLE ON THE RIVER BANKS.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE morning puts a
-      new face on our affairs. It is Sunday, and the most devout could not
-      desire a quieter day. There is a thick fog on the river, and not breeze
-      enough stirring to show the stripes on our flag; the boat holds its own
-      against the current by a sort of accumulated impulse. During the night we
-      may have made five miles altogether, and now we barely crawl. We have run
-      our race; if we have not come into a haven, we are at a stand-still, and
-      it does not seem now as if we ever should wake up and go on again.
-      However, it is just as well. Why should we be tearing through this sleepy
-      land at the rate of four miles an hour?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The steersman half dozes at the helm; the reïs squats near him watching
-      the flapping sails; the crew are nearly all asleep on the forward deck,
-      with their burnouses drawn over their head and the feet bare, for it is
-      chilly as late as nine o'clock, and the thermometer has dropped to 540.
-      Abd-el-Atti slips his beads uneasily along between his fingers, and
-      remembers that when he said that we would reach Asioot in another day, he
-      forgot to ejaculate; &ldquo;God willing.&rdquo; Yet he rises and greets our coming
-      from the cabin with a willing smile, and a&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Morning sir, morning marm. I hope you enjoyin' you sleep, marm.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Where are we now, Abd-el-Atti?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Not much, marm; this is a place call him Hadji Kandeel. But we do very
-      well; I not to complain.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Do you think we shall have any wind to-day?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I d'know, be sure. The wind come from Lord. Not so?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Hadji Kandeel is in truth only a scattered line of huts, but one lands
-      here to visit the grottoes or rock-tombs of Tel el Amarna. All this
-      country is gaping with tombs apparently; all the cliffs are cut into
-      receptacles for the dead, all along the margin of the desert on each side
-      are old necropolises and moslem cemeteries, in which generation after
-      generation, for almost fabulous periods of time, has been deposited. Here
-      behind Hadji Kandeel are remains of a once vast city built let us say
-      sixteen hundred years before our era, by Amunoph IV., a wayward king of
-      the eighteenth dynasty, and made the capital of Egypt. In the grottoes of
-      Tel el Amârna were deposited this king and his court and favorites, and
-      his immediate successors&mdash;all the splendor of them sealed up there
-      and forgotten. This king forsook the worship of the gods of Thebes, and
-      set up that of a Semitic deity, Aten, a radiating disk, a sun with rays
-      terminating in human hands. It was his mother who led him into this, and
-      she was not an Egyptian; neither are the features of the persons
-      sculptured in the grottoes Egyptian.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Thus all along the stream of Egyptian history cross currents are coming
-      in, alien sovereigns and foreign task-masters; and great breaks appear, as
-      if one full civilization had run its course of centuries, and decay had
-      come, and then ruin, and then a new start and a fresh career.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Early this morning, when we were close in to the west bank, I heard
-      measured chanting, and saw a procession of men and women coming across the
-      field. The men bore on a rude bier the body of a child. They came straight
-      on to the bank, and then turned by the flank with military precision and
-      marched upstream to the place where a clumsy country ferry-boat had just
-      landed. The chant of the men, as they walked, was deep-voiced and solemn,
-      and I could hear in it frequently repeated the name of Mohammed. The women
-      in straggling file followed, like a sort of ill-omened birds in black, and
-      the noise they made, a kind of wail, was exactly like the cackle of wild
-      geese. Indeed before I saw the procession I thought that some geese were
-      flying overhead.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The body was laid on the ground and four men kneeled upon the bank as if
-      in prayer. The boat meantime was unloading, men, women and children
-      scrambling over the sides into the shallow water, and the donkeys, urged
-      with blows, jumping after them. When they were all out the funeral took
-      possession of the boat, and was slowly wafted across, as dismal a going to
-      a funeral as if this were the real river of death. When the mourners had
-      landed we saw them walking under the palm-trees, to the distant
-      burial-place in the desert, with a certain solemn dignity, and the
-      chanting and wailing were borne to us very distinctly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is nearly a dead calm all day, and our progress might be imperceptible
-      to an eye naked, and certainly it must be so to the eyes of these natives
-      which are full of flies. It grows warm, however, and is a summer
-      temperature when we go ashore in the afternoon on a tour of exploration.
-      We have for attendant, Ahmed, who carries a big stick as a defence against
-      dogs. Ahmed does not differ much in appearance from a wild barbarian, his
-      lack of a complete set of front teeth alone preventing him from looking
-      fierce. A towel is twisted about his head, feet and legs are bare, and he
-      wears a blue cotton robe with full sleeves longer than his arms, gathered
-      at the waist by a piece of rope, and falling only to the knees. A nice
-      person to go walking with on the Holy Sabbath.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The whole land is green with young wheat, but the soil is baked and
-      cracked three or four inches deep, even close to the shore where the water
-      has only receded two or three days ago. The land stretches for several
-      miles, perfectly level and every foot green and smiling, back to the
-      desert hills. Sprinkled over this expanse, which is only interrupted by
-      ditches and slight dykes upon which the people walk from village to
-      village, are frequent small groves of palms. Each grove is the nucleus of
-      a little settlement, a half dozen sun-baked habitations, where people,
-      donkeys, pigeons, and smaller sorts of animated nature live together in
-      dirty amity. The general plan of building is to erect a circular wall of
-      clay six or seven feet high, which dries, hardens, and cracks in the sun.
-      This is the Oriental court. In side this and built against the wall is a
-      low mud-hut with a wooden door, and perhaps here and there are two similar
-      huts, or half a dozen, according to the size of the family. In these
-      hovels the floor is of smooth earth, there is a low bedstead or some
-      matting laid in one corner, but scarcely any other furniture, except some
-      earthen jars holding doora or dried fruit, and a few cooking utensils. A
-      people who never sit, except on their heels, do not need chairs, and those
-      who wear at once all the clothes they possess need no closets or
-      wardrobes. I looked at first for a place where they could keep their
-      &ldquo;Sunday clothes&rdquo; and &ldquo;nice things,&rdquo; but this philosophical people do not
-      have anything that is too good for daily use. It is nevertheless true that
-      there is no hope of a people who do not have &ldquo;Sunday clothes.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The inhabitants did not, however, appear conscious of any such want. They
-      were lounging about or squatting in the dust in picturesque idleness; the
-      children under twelve years often without clothes and not ashamed, and the
-      women wearing no veils. The women are coming and going with the heavy
-      water-jars, or sitting on the ground, sorting doora and preparing it for
-      cooking; not prepossessing certainly, in their black or dingy brown gowns
-      and shawls of cotton. Children abound. In all the fields men are at work,
-      picking up the ground with a rude hoe shaped like an adze. Tobacco plants
-      have just been set out, and water-melons carefully shaded from the sun by
-      little tents of rushes. These men are all Fellaheen, coarsely and scantily
-      clad in brown cotton gowns, open at the breast. They are not bad figures,
-      better than the women, but there is a hopeless acceptance of the portion
-      of slaves in their bearing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We encountered a very different race further from the river, where we came
-      upon an encampment of Bedaween, or desert Arabs, who hold themselves as
-      much above the Fellaheen as the poor white trash used to consider itself
-      above the negroes in our Southern States. They pretend to keep their blood
-      pure by intermarrying only in desert tribes, and perhaps it is pure; so, I
-      suppose, the Gipsies are pure blood enough, but one would not like them
-      for neighbors. These Bedaween, according to their wandering and predatory
-      habit, have dropped down here from the desert to feed their little flock
-      of black sheep and give their lean donkeys a bite of grass. Their tents
-      are merely strips of coarse brown cloth, probably camel's hair, like
-      sacking, stretched horizontally over sticks driven into the sand, so as to
-      form a cover from the sun and a protection from the north wind. Underneath
-      them are heaps of rags, matting, old clothes, blankets, mingled with
-      cooking-utensils and the nameless broken assortment that beggars usually
-      lug about with them. Hens and lambs are at home there, and dogs, a small,
-      tawny wolfish breed, abound. The Arabs are worthy of their dwellings, a
-      dirty, thievish lot to look at, but, as I said, no doubt of pure blood,
-      and having all the virtues for which these nomads have been celebrated
-      since the time when Jacob judiciously increased his flock at the expense
-      of Laban.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A half-naked boy of twelve years escorts us to the bank of the canal near
-      which the tents are pitched, and we are met by the sheykh of the tribe, a
-      more venerable and courtly person than the rest of these pure-blood
-      masqueraders in rags, but not a whit less dirty. The fellaheen had paid no
-      attention to us; this sheykh looked upon himself as one of the proprietors
-      of this world, and bound to extend the hospitalities of this portion of it
-      to strangers. He received us with a certain formality. When two Moslems
-      meet there is no end to their formal salutation and complimentary
-      speeches, which may continue as long as their stock of religious
-      expressions holds out. The usual first greeting is <i>Es-salaam, aleykoom</i>,
-      &ldquo;peace be on you,&rdquo; to which the reply is <i>Aleykoom es-saalam</i>, &ldquo;on
-      you be peace.&rdquo; It is said that persons of another religion, however,
-      should never make use of this salutation to a Moslem, and that the latter
-      should not and will not return it. But we were overflowing with charity
-      and had no bigotry, and went through Egypt salaaming right and left,
-      sometimes getting no reply and sometimes a return, to our &ldquo;peace be on
-      you,&rdquo; of <i>Wa-aleykoom</i>, &ldquo;and on you.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The salutations by gesture are as varied as those by speech When
-      Abd-el-Atti walked in Cairo with us, he constantly varied his gestures
-      according to the rank of the people we met. To an inferior he tossed a
-      free salaam; an equal he saluted by touching with his right hand in one
-      rapid motion his breast, lips, and head; to a superior he made the same
-      motion except that his hand first made a dip down to his knees; and when
-      he met a person of high rank the hand scooped down to the ground before it
-      passed up to the head.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I flung a cheerful <i>salaam</i> at the sheykh and gave him the Oriental
-      salute, which he returned. We then shook hands, and the sheykh kissed his
-      after touching mine, a token of friendship which I didn't know enough to
-      imitate, not having been brought up to kiss my own hand.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Anglais or Français?&rdquo; asked the sheykh.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;Americans.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; he ejaculated, throwing back his head with an aspiration of relief,
-      &ldquo;Melicans; <i>tyeb</i> (good).&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      A ring of inquisitive Arabs gathered about us and were specially
-      interested in studying the features and costume of one of our party; the
-      women standing further off and remaining closely veiled kept their eyes
-      fixed on her. The sheykh invited us to sit and have coffee, but the
-      surroundings were not tempting to the appetite and we parted with profuse
-      salutations. I had it in mind to invite him to our American centennial; I
-      should like to set him off against some of our dirty red brethren of the
-      prairies. I thought that if I could transport these Bedaween, tents,
-      children, lank, veiled women, donkeys, and all to the centennial grounds
-      they would add a most interesting (if unpleasant) feature. But, then, I
-      reflected, what is a centennial to this Bedawee whose ancestors were as
-      highly civilized as he is when ours were wading about the fens with the
-      Angles or burrowing in German forests. Besides, the Bedawee would be at a
-      disadvantage when away from the desert, or the bank of this Nile whose
-      unceasing flow symbolizes his tribal longevity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we walk along through the lush-fields which the despised Fellaheen are
-      irritating into a fair yield of food, we are perplexed with the query,
-      what is the use of the Bedaween in this world? They produce nothing. To be
-      sure they occupy a portion of the earth that no one else would inhabit;
-      they dwell on the desert. But there is no need of any one dwelling on the
-      desert, especially as they have to come from it to levy contributions on
-      industrious folds in order to live. At this stage of the inquiry, the
-      philosopher asks, what is the use of any one living?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As no one could answer this, we waded the water where it was shallow and
-      crossed to a long island, such as the Nile frequently leaves in its
-      sprawling course. This island was green from end to end, and inhabited
-      more thickly than the main-land. We attracted a good deal of attention
-      from the mud-villages, and much anxiety was shown lest we should walk
-      across the wheat-fields. We expected that the dahabeëh would come on and
-      take us off, but its streamer did not advance, and we were obliged to
-      rewade the shallow channel and walk back to the starting-place. There was
-      a Sunday calm in the scene. At the rosy sunset the broad river shone like
-      a mirror and the air was soft as June. How strong is habit. Work was going
-      on as usual, and there could have been no consent of sky, earth, and
-      people, to keep Sunday, yet there seemed to be the Sunday spell upon the
-      landscape. I suspect that people here have got into the way of keeping all
-      the days. The most striking way in which an American can keep Sunday on
-      the Nile is by not going gunning, not even taking a &ldquo;flyer&rdquo; at a hawk from
-      the deck of the dahabeëh. There is a chance for a tract on this subject.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Let no one get the impression that we are idling away our time, because we
-      are on Monday morning exactly where we were on Sunday morning. We have
-      concluded to &ldquo;keep&rdquo; another day. There is not a breath of wind to scatter
-      the haze, thermometer has gone down, and the sun's rays are feeble. This
-      is not our fault, and I will not conceal the adverse circumstances in
-      order to give you a false impression of the Nile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are moored against the bank. The dragoman has gone on shore to shoot
-      pigeons and buy vegetables. Our turkeys, which live in cages on the
-      stern-deck, have gone ashore and are strutting up and down the sand; their
-      gobble is a home sound and recalls New England. Women, as usual, singly
-      and in groups, come to the river to fill their heavy water-jars. There is
-      a row of men and boys on the edge of the bank. Behind are two camels yoked
-      wide apart drawing a plow. Our crew chaff the shore people. The cook says
-      to a girl, &ldquo;You would make me a good wife; we will take you along.&rdquo; Men,
-      squatting on the bank say, &ldquo;Take her along, she is of no use.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Girl retorts, &ldquo;You are not of more use than animals, you sit idle all day,
-      while I bring water and grind the corn.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      One is glad to see this assertion of the rights of women in this region
-      where nobody has any rights; and if we had a tract we would leave it with
-      her. Some good might be done by travelers if they would distribute biscuit
-      along the Nile, stamped in Arabic with the words, &ldquo;Man ought to do half
-      the work,&rdquo; or, &ldquo;Sisters rise!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      In the afternoon we explore a large extent of country, my companion
-      carrying a shot-gun for doves. These doves are in fact wild pigeons, a
-      small and beautiful pearly-grey bird. They live on the tops of the houses
-      in nests formed for them by the insertion of tiles or earthen pots in the
-      mud-walls. Many houses have an upper story of this sort on purpose for the
-      doves; and a collection of mere mud-cabins so ornamented is a picturesque
-      sight, under a palm-grove. Great flocks of these birds are flying about,
-      and the shooting is permitted, away from the houses.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We make efforts to get near the wild geese and the cranes, great numbers
-      of which are sunning themselves on the sandbanks, but these birds know
-      exactly the range of a gun, and fly at the right moment. A row of cranes
-      will sometimes trifle with our feelings. The one nearest will let us
-      approach almost within range before he lifts his huge wings and sails over
-      the river, the next one will wait for us to come a few steps further
-      before he flies, and so on until the sand-spit is deserted of these
-      long-legged useless birds. Hawks are flying about the shore and great
-      greyish crows, or ravens, come over the fields and light on the margin of
-      sand&mdash;a most gentlemanly looking bird, who is under a queer necessity
-      of giving one hop before he can raise himself in flight. Small birds, like
-      sand-pipers, are flitting about the bank. The most beautiful creature,
-      however, is a brown bird, his wing marked with white, long bill, head
-      erect and adorned with a high tuft, as elegant as the blue-jay; the
-      natives call it the crocodile's guide.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We cross vast fields of wheat and of beans, the Arab &ldquo;fool,&rdquo; which are
-      sown broadcast, interspersed now and then with a melon-patch. Villages,
-      such as they are, are frequent; one of them has a mosque, the only one we
-      have seen recently. The water for ablution is outside, in a brick tank
-      sunk in the ground. A row of men are sitting on their heels in front of
-      the mosque, smoking; some of them in white gowns, and fine-looking men. I
-      hope there is some saving merit in this universal act of sitting on the
-      heels, the soles of the feet flat on the ground; it is not an easy thing
-      for a Christian to do, as he will find out by trying.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Toward night a steamboat flying the star and crescent of Egypt, with
-      passengers on board, some of &ldquo;Cook's personally conducted,&rdquo; goes
-      thundering down stream, filling the air with smoke and frightening the
-      geese, who fly before it in vast clouds. I didn't suppose there were so
-      many geese in the world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Truth requires it to be said that on Tuesday morning the dahabeëh holds
-      about the position it reached on Sunday morning; we begin to think we are
-      doing well not to lose anything in this rapid current. The day is warm and
-      cloudy, the wind is from the east and then from the south-east, exactly
-      the direction we must go. It is in fact a sirocco, and fills one with
-      languor, which is better than being frost-bitten at home. The evening,
-      with the cabin windows all open, is like one of those soft nights which
-      come at the close of sultry northern days, in which there is a dewy
-      freshness. This is the sort of winter that we ought to cultivate.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      During the day we attempt tracking two or three times, but with little
-      success; the wind is so strong that the boat is continually blown ashore.
-      Tracking is not very hard for the passengers and gives them an opportunity
-      to study the bank and the people on it close at hand. A long cable
-      fastened on the forward deck is carried ashore, and to the far end ten or
-      twelve sailors attach themselves at intervals by short ropes which press
-      across the breast. Leaning in a slant line away from the river, they walk
-      at a snail's pace, a file of parti-colored raiment and glistening legs;
-      occasionally bursting into a snatch of a song, they slowly pull the bark
-      along. But obstructions to progress are many. A spit of sand will project
-      itself, followed by deepwater, through which the men will have to wade in
-      order to bring the boat round; occasionally the rope must be passed round
-      trees which overhang the caving bank; and often freight-boats, tied to the
-      shore, must be passed. The leisure with which the line is carried outside
-      another boat is amusing even in this land of deliberation. The groups on
-      these boats sit impassive and look at us with a kind of curiosity that has
-      none of our eagerness in it. The well-bred indifferent &ldquo;stare&rdquo; of these
-      people, which is not exactly brazen and yet has no element of emotion in
-      it, would make the fortune of a young fellow in a London season. The
-      Nubian boatmen who are tracking the freight-dahabeëh appear to have left
-      their clothes in Cairo; they flop in and out of the water, they haul the
-      rope along the bank, without consciousness apparently that any spectators
-      are within miles; and the shore-life goes on all the same, men sit on the
-      banks, women come constantly to fill their jars, these crews stripped to
-      their toil excite no more attention than the occasional fish jumping out
-      of the Nile. The habit seems to be general of minding one's own business.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At early morning another funeral crossed the river to a desolate
-      burial-place in the sand, the women wailing the whole distance of the
-      march; and the noise was more than before like the clang of wild geese.
-      These women have inherited the Oriental art of &ldquo;lifting up the voice,&rdquo; and
-      it adds not a little to the weirdness of this ululation and screeching to
-      think that for thousands of years the dead have been buried along this
-      valley with exactly the same feminine tenderness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These women wear black; all the countrywomen we have seen are dressed in
-      sombre gowns and shawls of black or deep blue-black; none of them have a
-      speck of color in their raiment, not a bit of ribbon nor a bright
-      kerchief, nor any relief to the dullness of their apparel. And yet they
-      need not fear to make themselves too attractive. The men have all the
-      colors that are worn; though the Fellaheen as a rule wear brownish
-      garments, blue and white are not uncommon, and a white turban or a red
-      fez, or a silk belt about the waist gives variety and agreeable relief to
-      the costumes. In this these people imitate that nature which we affect to
-      admire, but outrage constantly. They imitate the birds. The male birds
-      have all the gay plumage; the feathers of the females are sober and quiet,
-      as befits their domestic position. And it must be admitted that men need
-      the aid of gay dress more than women.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next morning when the sun shows over the eastern desert, the sailors
-      are tracking, hauling the boat slowly along an ox-bow in the river, until
-      at length the sail can catch the light west wind which sprang up with the
-      dawn. When we feel that, the men scramble aboard, and the dahabeëh, like a
-      duck that has been loitering in an eddy for days, becomes instinct with
-      life and flies away to the cliffs opposite, the bluffs called Gebel
-      Aboofayda, part of the Mokattam range that here rises precipitously from
-      the river and overhangs it for ten or twelve miles. I think these
-      limestone ledges are two or three hundred feet high. The face is scarred
-      by the slow wearing of ages, and worn into holes and caves innumerable.
-      Immense numbers of cranes are perched on the narrow ledges of the cliff,
-      and flocks of them are circling in front of it, apparently having nests
-      there. As numerous also as swallows in a sand-bank is a species of duck
-      called the diver; they float in troops on the stream, or wheel about the
-      roosting cranes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is a spot famed for its sudden gusts of wind which sometimes flop
-      over the brink and overturn boats. It also is the resort of the crocodile,
-      which seldom if ever comes lower down the Nile now. But the crocodile is
-      evidently shy of exhibiting himself, and we scan the patches of sand at
-      the foot of the rocks with our glasses for a long time in vain. The animal
-      dislikes the puffing, swashing steamboats, and the rifle-balls that
-      passing travelers pester him with. At last we see a scaly log six or eight
-      feet long close to the water under the rock. By the aid of the glass it
-      turns out to be a crocodile. He is asleep, and too far off to notice at
-      all the volley of shot with which we salute him. It is a great thing to <i>say</i>
-      you saw a crocodile. It isn't much to <i>see</i> one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet the scaly beast is an interesting and appropriate feature in such
-      a landscape,# and the expectation of seeing a crocodile adds to your
-      enjoyment. On our left are these impressive cliffs; on the right is a
-      level island. Half-naked boys and girls are tending small flocks of black
-      sheep on it. Abd-el-Atti raises his gun as if he would shoot the children
-      and cries out to them, &ldquo;lift up your arm,&rdquo; words that the crocodile hunter
-      uses when he is near enough to fire, and wants to attract the attention of
-      the beast so that it will raise its fore-paw to move off, and give the
-      sportsman a chance at the vulnerable spot. The children understand the
-      allusion and run laughing away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Groups of people are squatting on the ground, doing nothing, waiting for
-      nothing, expecting nothing; buffaloes and cattle are feeding on the thin
-      grass, and camels are kneeling near in stately indifference; women in
-      blue-black robes come&mdash;the everlasting sight&mdash;to draw water. The
-      whole passes in a dumb show. The hot sun bathes all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We pass next the late residence of a hermit, a Moslem &ldquo;welee&rdquo; or holy man.
-      On a broad ledge of the cliff, some thirty feet above the water, is a hut
-      built of stone and plaster and whitewashed, about twelve feet high, the
-      roof rounded like an Esquimau snow-hut and with a knob at the top. Here
-      the good man lived, isolated from the world, fed by the charity of
-      passers-by, and meditating on his own holiness. Below him, out of the
-      rock, with apparently no better means of support than he had, grows an
-      acacia-tree, now in yellow blossoms. Perhaps the saint chewed the
-      gum-arabic that oozed from it. Just above, on the river, is a slight strip
-      of soil, where he used to raise a few cucumbers and other cooling
-      vegetables. The farm, which is no larger than two bed blankets, is
-      deserted now. The saint died, and is buried in his house, in a hole
-      excavated in the rock, so that his condition is little changed, his house
-      being his tomb, and the Nile still soothing his slumber.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But if it is easy to turn a house into a tomb it is still easier to turn a
-      tomb into a house. Here are two square-cut tombs in the rock, of which a
-      family has taken possession, the original occupants probably having moved
-      out hundreds of years ago. Smoke is issuing from one of them, and a
-      sorry-looking woman is pulling dead grass among the rocks for fuel. There
-      seems to be no inducement for any one to live in this barren spot, but
-      probably rent is low. A little girl seven or eight years old comes down
-      and walks along the bank, keeping up with the boat, incited of course by
-      the universal expectation of backsheesh. She has on a head-veil, covering
-      the back of the head and neck and a single shirt of brown rags hanging in
-      strings. I throw her an apple, a fruit she has probably never seen, which
-      she picks up and carries until she joined is by an elder sister, to whom
-      she shows it. Neither seems to know what it is. The elder smells it,
-      sticks her teeth into it, and then takes a bite. The little one tastes,
-      and they eat it in alternate bites, growing more and more eager for fair
-      bites as the process goes on.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Near the southern end of the cliffs of Gebel Aboofayda are the
-      crocodile-mummy pits which Mr. Prime explored; caverns in which are
-      stacked up mummied crocodiles and lizards by the thousands. We shall not
-      go nearer to them. I dislike mummies; I loathe crocodiles; I have no
-      fondness for pits. What could be more unpleasant than the three combined!
-      To crawl on one's stomach through crevices and hewn passages in the rock,
-      in order to carry a torch into a stifling chamber, packed with mummies and
-      cloths soaked in bitumen, is an exploit that we willingly leave to
-      Egyptologists. If one takes a little pains, he can find enough unpleasant
-      things above ground.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It requires all our skill to work the boat round the bend above these
-      cliffs; we are every minute about to go aground on a sand-bar, or jibe the
-      sail, or turn about. Heaven only knows how we ever get on at all, with all
-      the crew giving orders and no one obeying. But by five o'clock we are at
-      the large market-town of Manfaloot, which has half a dozen minarets and is
-      sheltered by a magnificent palm-grove. You seem to be approaching an
-      earthly paradise; and one can keep up the illusion if he does not go
-      ashore. And yet this is a spot that ought to interest the traveler, for
-      here Lot is said to have spent a portion of the years of his exile, after
-      the accident to his wife.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At sunset old Abo Arab comes limping along the bank with a tin pail,
-      having succeeded at length in overtaking the boat; and in reply to the
-      question, where he has been asleep all day, pulls out from his bosom nine
-      small fish as a peace-offering. He was put off at sunrise to get milk for
-      breakfast. What a happy-go-lucky country it is.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After sundown, the crew, who have worked hard all day, on and off,
-      tacking, poling, and shifting sail, get their supper round an open fire on
-      deck, take each some whiffs from the &ldquo;hubble-bubble,&rdquo; and, as we sail out
-      over the broad, smooth water, sing a rude and plaintive melody to the
-      subdued thump of the darabooka. Towards dark, as we are about to tie up,
-      the wind, which had failed, rises, and we voyage on, the waves rippling
-      against the sides in a delicious lullaby. The air is soft, the moon is
-      full and peeps out from the light clouds which obscure the sky and prevent
-      dew.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The dragoman asleep on the cabin deck, the reïs crouched, attentive of the
-      course, near him, part of the sailors grouped about the bow in low chat,
-      and part asleep in the shadow of the sail, we voyage along under the wide
-      night, still to the south and warmer skies, and seem to be sailing through
-      an enchanted land.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Put not your trust in breezes. The morning finds us still a dozen miles
-      from Asioot where we desire to celebrate Christmas; we just move with
-      sails up, and the crew poling. The head-man chants a line or throws out a
-      word, and the rest come in with a chorus, as they walk along, bending the
-      shoulder to the pole. The leader&mdash;the &ldquo;shanty man&rdquo; the English
-      sailors call their leader, from the French <i>chanter</i> I suppose&mdash;ejaculates
-      a phrase, sometimes prolonging it, or dwelling on it with a variation,
-      like &ldquo;O! Mohammed!&rdquo; or &ldquo;O! Howadji!&rdquo; or some scraps from a love-song, and
-      the men strike in in chorus: &ldquo;Hâ Yàlësah, hâ Yâlësah,&rdquo; a response that the
-      boatmen have used for hundreds of years.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We sail leisurely past a large mud-village dropped in a splendid grove of
-      palms and acacias. The scene is very poetical before details are
-      inspected, and the groves, we think, ought to be the home of refinement
-      and luxury. Men are building a boat under the long arcade of trees, women
-      are stooping with the eternal water-jars which do not appear to retain
-      fluid any better than the sieves of the Danaïdes, and naked children run
-      along the bank crying &ldquo;Backsheesh, O Howadji.&rdquo; Our shot-gun brings down a
-      pigeon-hawk close to the shore. A boy plunges in and gets it, handing it
-      to us on deck from the bank, but not relinquishing his hold with one hand
-      until he feels the half-piastre in the other. So early is distrust planted
-      in the human breast.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Getting away from this idyllic scene, which has not a single resemblance
-      to any civilized town, we work our way up to El Hamra late in the
-      afternoon. This is the landing-place for Asioot; the city itself is a
-      couple of miles inland, and could be reached by a canal at high water. We
-      have come again into an active world, and there are evidences that this is
-      a busy place. New boats are on the stocks, and there is a forge for making
-      some sort of machinery. So much life has not been met with since we left
-      Cairo. The furling our great sail is a fine sight as we round in to the
-      bank, the sailors crawling out on the slender, hundred-feet-long yard,
-      like monkeys, and drawing up the hanging slack with both feet and hands.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is long since we have seen so many or so gaily dressed people as are
-      moving on shore; a procession of camels passes along; crowds of donkeys
-      are pushed down to the boat by their noisy drivers; old women come to sell
-      eggs, and white grease that pretends to be butter, and one of them pulls
-      some live pigeons from a bag. We lie at the mud-bank, and classes of
-      half-clad children, squatting in the sand, study us. Two other dahabeëhs
-      are moored near us, their passengers sitting under the awning and
-      indolently observing the novel scene, book in hand, after the manner of
-      Nile voyagers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These are the pictures constantly recurring on the river, only they are
-      never the same in grouping or color, and they never weary one. It is
-      wonderful, indeed, how satisfying the Nile is in itself and how little
-      effort travelers make for the society of each other. Boats pass or meet
-      and exchange salutes, but with little more effusion than if they were on
-      the Thames. Nothing afloat is so much like a private house as a dahabeëh,
-      and I should think, by what we hear, that sociability decreases on the
-      Nile with increase of travel and luxury.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0166.jpg" alt="0166 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0167.jpg" alt="0167 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XII.&mdash;SPENDING CHRISTMAS ON THE NILE.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">P</span>ROBABLY this
-      present writer has the distinction of being the only one who has written
-      about the Nile and has not invented a new way of spelling the name of the
-      town whose many minarets and brown roofs are visible over the meadows.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is written Asioot, Asyoot, Asiüt, Ssout, Siôout, Osyoot, Osioot,
-      O'Sioôt, Siüt, Sioot, O'siout, Si-ôôt, Siout, Syouth, and so on,
-      indefinitely. People take the liberty to spell names as they sound to
-      them, and there is consequently a pleasing variety in the names of all
-      places, persons, and things in Egypt; and when we add to the many ways of
-      spelling an Arabic word, the French the German, and the English
-      translation or equivalent, you are in a hopeless jumble of nomenclature.
-      The only course is to strike out boldly and spell everything as it seems
-      good in your eyes, and differently in different moods. Even the name of
-      the Prophet takes on half a dozen forms; there are not only ninety-nine
-      names of the attributes of God, but I presume there are ninety-nine ways
-      of spelling each of them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This Asioot has always been a place of importance. It was of old called
-      Lycopolis, its divinity being the wolf or the wolf-headed god; and in a
-      rock-mountain behind the town were not only cut the tombs of the
-      inhabitants, but there were deposited the mummies of the sacred wolves.
-      About these no one in Asioot knows or cares much, to day. It is a city of
-      twenty-five thousand people, with a good many thriving Copt Christians;
-      the terminus, to day, of the railway, and the point of arrival and
-      departure of the caravans to and from Darfoor&mdash;a desert march of a
-      month. Here are made the best clay pipe-bowls in Egypt, and a great
-      variety of ornamented dishes and vases in clay, which the traveler buys
-      and doesn't know what to do with. The artisans also work up elephants'
-      tusks and ostrich feathers into a variety of &ldquo;notions.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Christmas day opens warm and with an air of festivity. Great palm-branches
-      are planted along the bank and form an arbor over the gang-plank. The
-      cabin is set with them, in gothic arches over windows and doors, with
-      yellow oranges at the apex. The forward and saloon decks are completely
-      embowered in palms, which also run up the masts and spars. The crew have
-      entered with zeal into the decoration, and in the early morning
-      transformed the boat into a floating bower of greenery; the effect is
-      Oriental, but it is difficult to believe that this is really Christmas
-      day. The weather is not right, for one thing. It is singularly pleasant,
-      in fact like summer. We miss the usual snow and ice and the hurtling of
-      savage winds that bring suffering to the poor and make charity
-      meritorious. Besides, the Moslems are celebrating the day for us and, I
-      fear, regarding it simply as an occasion of backsheesh. The sailors are
-      very quick to understand so much of our religion as is profitable to
-      themselves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In such weather as this it would be possible for &ldquo;shepherds to watch their
-      flocks by night.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Early in the day we have a visit from Wasef el Khyat, the American consul
-      here for many years, a Copt and a native of Asioot, who speaks only
-      Arabic; he is accompanied by one of his sons, who was educated at the
-      American college in Beyrout. So far does that excellent institution send
-      its light; scattered rays to be sure, but it is from it and such schools
-      that the East is getting the real impetus of civilization.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I do not know what the consul at Asioot does for America, but our flag is
-      of great service to him, protecting his property from the exactions of his
-      own government. Wasef is consequently very polite to all Americans, and
-      while he sipped coffee and puffed cigars in our cabin he smiled
-      unutterable things. This is the pleasantest kind of intercourse in a warm
-      climate, where a puff and an occasional smile will pass for profuse
-      expressions of social enjoyment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His excellency Shakirr Pasha, the governor of this large and rich
-      province, has sent word that he is about to put carriages and donkeys at
-      our disposal, but this probably meant that the consul would do it; and the
-      consul has done it. The carriage awaits us on the bank. It is a high,
-      paneled, venerable ark, that moves with trembling dignity; and we choose
-      the donkeys as less pretentious and less liable to come to pieces. This is
-      no doubt the only carriage between Cairo and Kartoom, and its appearance
-      is regarded as an event.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our first visit is paid to the Pasha, who has been only a few days in his
-      province, and has not yet transferred his harem from Cairo. We are
-      received with distinguished ceremony, to the lively satisfaction of
-      Abd-el-Atti, whose face beams like the morning, in bringing together such
-      &ldquo;distinguish&rdquo; people as his friend the Pasha, and travelers in his charge.
-      The Pasha is a courtly Turk, of most elegant manners, and the simplicity
-      of high breeding, a man of the world and one of the ablest governors in
-      Egypt. The room into which we are ushered, through a dirty alley and a
-      mud-wall court is hardly in keeping with the social stilts on which we are
-      all walking. In our own less favored land, it would answer very well for a
-      shed or an out-house to store beans in, or for a &ldquo;reception room&rdquo; for
-      sheep; a narrow oblong apartment, covered with a flat roof of palm logs,
-      with a couple of dirty little windows high up, the once whitewashed walls
-      stained variously, the cheap divans soiled.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The hospitality of this gorgeous <i>salon</i> was offered us with
-      effusion, and we sat down and exchanged compliments as if we had been in a
-      palace. I am convinced that there is nothing like the Oriental
-      imagination. An attendant (and the servants were in keeping with the
-      premises) brought in <i>fingans</i> of coffee. The servant presents the
-      cup in his right hand, holding the bottom of the silver receptacle in his
-      thumb and finger; he takes it away empty with both hands, placing the left
-      under and the right on top of it. These formalities are universal and
-      all-important. Before taking it you ought to make the salutation, by
-      touching breast, lips, and forehead, with the right hand&mdash;an
-      acknowledgment not to the servant but to the master. Cigars are then
-      handed round, for it is getting to be considered on the Nile that cigars
-      are more &ldquo;swell&rdquo; than pipes; more's the pity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The exchange of compliments meantime went on, and on the part of the Pasha
-      with a fineness, adroitness, and readiness that showed the practice of a
-      lifetime in social fence. He surpassed our most daring invention with a
-      smiling ease, and topped all our extravagances with an art that made our
-      pool efforts appear clumsy. And what the effect would have been if we
-      could have understood the flowery Arabic I can only guess; nor can we ever
-      know how many flowers of his own the dragoman cast in.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;His excellency say that he feel the honor of your visit.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Say to his excellency that although we are only spending one day in his
-      beautiful capital, we could not forego the-pleasure of paying our respects
-      to his excellency.&rdquo; This sentence is built by the critic, and strikes us
-      all favorably.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;His excellency himself not been here many days, and sorry he not know you
-      coming, to make some preparations to receive you.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Thank his excellency for the palms that decorate our boat.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;They are nothing, nothing, he say not mention it; the dahabeëh look very
-      different now if the Nile last summer had not wash away all his
-      flower-garden. His excellency say, how you enjoyed your voyage?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It has been very pleasant; only for a day or two we have wanted wind.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Your misfortune, his excellency say, his pleasure; it give him the
-      opportunity of your society. But he say if you want wind he sorry no wind;
-      it cause him to suffer that you not come here sooner.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Will his excellency dine with us to-day?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He say he think it too much honor.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Assure his excellency that we feel that the honor is conferred by him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And he consents to come. After we have taken our leave, the invitation is
-      extended to the consul, who is riding with us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The way to the town is along a winding, shabby embankment, raised above
-      high water, and shaded with sycamore-trees. It is lively with people on
-      foot and on donkeys, in more colored and richer dress than that worn by
-      country-people; the fields are green, the clover is springing luxuriantly,
-      and spite of the wrecks of unburned-brick houses, left gaping by the last
-      flood, and spite of the general untidiness of everything, the ride is
-      enjoyable. I don't know why it is that an irrigated country never is
-      pleasing on close inspection, neither is an irrigated garden. Both need to
-      be seen from a little distance, which conceals the rawness of the
-      alternately dry and soaked soil, the frequent thinness of vegetation, the
-      unkempt swampy appearance of the lowest levels, and the painful whiteness
-      of paths never wet and the dustiness of trees unwashed by rain. There is
-      no Egyptian landscape or village that is neat, on near inspection.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Asioot has a better entrance than most towns, through an old gateway into
-      the square (which is the court of the palace); and the town has extensive
-      bazaars and some large dwellings. But as we ride through it, we are always
-      hemmed in by mud-walls, twisting through narrow alleys, encountering dirt
-      and poverty at every step. We pass through the quarter of the Ghawâzees,
-      who, since their banishment from Cairo, form little colonies in all the
-      large Nile towns. There are the dancing-women whom travelers are so
-      desirous of seeing; the finest-looking women and the most abandoned
-      courtesans, says Mr. Lane, in Egypt. In showy dresses of bright yellow and
-      red, adorned with a profusion of silver-gilt necklaces, earrings, and
-      bracelets, they sit at the doors of their hovels in idle expectation. If
-      these happen to be the finest-looking women in Egypt, the others are wise
-      in keeping their veils on.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Outside the town we find a very pretty cemetery of the Egyptian style,
-      staring white tombs, each dead person resting under his own private little
-      stucco oven. Near it is encamped a caravan just in from Darfoor, bringing
-      cinnamon, gum-arabic, tusks, and ostrich feathers. The camels are worn
-      with the journey; their drivers have a fierce and free air in striking
-      contrast with the bearing of the fellaheen. Their noses are straight,
-      their black hair is long and shaggy, their garment is a single piece of
-      coarse brown cloth; they have the wildness of the desert.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The soft limestone ledge back of the town is honeycombed with grottoes and
-      tombs; rising in tiers from the bottom to the top. Some of them have
-      merely square-cut entrances into a chamber of moderate size, in some part
-      of which, or in a passage beyond, is a pit cut ten or twenty feet deep in
-      the rock, like a grave, for the mummy. One of them has a magnificent
-      entrance through a doorway over thirty feet high and fifteen deep; upon
-      the jambs are gigantic figures cut in the rock. Some of the chambers are
-      vast and were once pillared, and may have served for dwellings. These
-      excavations are very old. The hieroglyphics and figures on the walls are
-      not in relief on the stone, but cut in at the outer edge and left in a
-      gradual swell in the center&mdash;an <i>intaglio relievato</i>. The
-      drawing is generally spirited, and the figures show knowledge of form and
-      artistic skill. It is wonderful that such purely conventional figures, the
-      head almost always in profile and the shoulders square to the front, can
-      be so expressive. On one wall is a body of infantry marching, with the
-      long pointed shields mentioned by Xenophon in describing Egyptian troops.
-      Everywhere are birds, gracefully drawn and true to species, and upon some
-      of them the blue color is fresh. A ceiling of one grotto is wrought in
-      ornamental squares&mdash;a &ldquo;Greek pattern,&rdquo; executed long before the time
-      of the Greeks. Here we find two figures with the full face turned towards
-      us, instead of the usual profile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These tombs have served for a variety of purposes. As long as the original
-      occupants rested here, no doubt their friends came and feasted and were
-      mournfully merry in these sightly chambers overlooking the Nile. Long
-      after they were turned out, Christian hermits nested in them, during that
-      extraordinary period of superstition when men thought they could best
-      secure their salvation by living like wild beasts in the deserts of
-      Africa. Here one John of Lycopolis had his den, in which he stayed fifty
-      years, without ever opening the door or seeing the face of a woman. At
-      least, he enjoyed that reputation. Later, persecuted Christians dwelt in
-      these tombs, and after them have come wanderers, and jackals, and
-      houseless Arabs. I think I should rather live here than in Asioot; the
-      tombs are cleaner and better built than the houses of the town, and there
-      is good air here and no danger of floods.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we are on the top of the bluff, the desert in broken ridges is behind
-      us. The view is one of the best of the usual views from hills near the
-      Nile, the elements of which are similar; the spectator has Egypt in all
-      its variety at his feet. The valley here is broad, and we look a long
-      distance up and down the river. The Nile twists and turns in its bed like
-      one of the chimerical serpents sculptured in the chambers of the dead;
-      canals wander from it through the plain; and groves of palms and lines of
-      sycamores contrast their green with that of the fields. All this level
-      expanse is now covered with wheat, barley and thick clover, and the green
-      has a vividness that we have never seen in vegetation before. This owes
-      somewhat to the brown contrast near at hand and something maybe to the
-      atmosphere, but I think the growing grain has a lustre unknown to other
-      lands. This smiling picture is enclosed by the savage frame of the desert,
-      gaunt ridges of rocky hills, drifts of stones, and yellow sand that sends
-      its hot tongues in long darts into the plain. At the foot of the mountain
-      lies Asioot brown as the mud of the Nile, a city built of sun-dried
-      bricks, but presenting a singular and not unpleasing appearance on account
-      of the dozen white stone minarets, some of them worked like lace, which
-      spring out of it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The consul's home is one of the best in the city, but outside it shows
-      only a mud-wall like the meanest. Within is a paved court, and offices
-      about it; the rooms above are large, many-windowed, darkened with blinds,
-      and not unlike those of a plain house in America. The furniture is
-      European mainly, and ugly, and of course out of place in Africa. We see
-      only the male members of the family. Confectionery and coffee are served
-      and some champagne, that must have been made by the Peninsular and
-      Oriental Steamship Company; their champagne is well known in the Levant,
-      and there is no known decoction that is like it. In my judgment, if it is
-      proposed to introduce Christianity and that kind of wine into Egypt, the
-      country would better be left as it is.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      During our call the consul presents us fly-whisks with ivory handles, and
-      gives the ladies beautiful fans of ostrich feathers mounted in ivory.
-      These presents may have been due to a broad hint from the Pasha, who said
-      to the consul at our interview in the morning:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I should not like to have these distinguished strangers go away without
-      some remembrance of Asioot. I have not been here long; what is there to
-      get for them?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;O, your excellency, I will attend to that,&rdquo; said the consul.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the evening, with the dahabeëh beautifully decorated and hung with
-      colored lanterns, upon the deck, which, shut in with canvas and spread
-      with Turkish rugs, was a fine reception-room, we awaited our guests, as if
-      we had been accustomed to this sort of thing in America from our infancy,
-      and as if we usually celebrated Christmas outdoors, fans in hand, with
-      fire-works. A stand for the exhibition of fireworks had been erected on
-      shore. The Pasha was received as he stepped on board, with three rockets,
-      (that being, I suppose, the number of his official &ldquo;tails,&rdquo;) which flew up
-      into the sky and scattered their bursting bombs of color amid the stars,
-      announcing to the English dahabeëhs, the two steamboats and the town of
-      Asioot, that the governor of the richest province in Egypt was about to
-      eat his dinner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The dinner was one of those perfections that one likes to speak of only in
-      confidential moments to dear friends. It wanted nothing either in number
-      of courses or in variety, in meats, in confections, in pyramids of
-      gorgeous construction, in fruits and flowers. There was something touching
-      about the lamb roasted whole, reclining his head on his own shoulder.
-      There was something tender about the turkey. There was a terrible moment
-      when the plum-pudding was borne in on fire, as if it had been a present
-      from the devil himself. The Pasha regarded it with distrust, and declined,
-      like a wise man, to eat flame. I fear that the English have fairly
-      introduced this dreadful dish into the Orient, and that the natives have
-      come to think that all foreigners are Molochs who can best be pleased by
-      offering up to them its indigestible ball set on fire of H. It is a
-      fearful spectacle to see this heathen people offering this incense to a
-      foreign idol, in the subserviency which will sacrifice even religion to
-      backsheesh.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The conversation during dinner is mostly an exchange of compliments, in
-      the art of which the Pasha is a master, displaying in it a wit, a variety
-      of resource and a courtliness that make the game a very entertaining one.
-      The Arabic language gives full play to this sort of social <i>espièglerie</i>,
-      and lends a delicacy to encounters of compliment which the English
-      language does not admit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Coffee and pipes are served on deck, and the fire-works begin to tear and
-      astonish the night. The Khedive certainly employs very good pyrotechnists,
-      and the display by Abd-el-Atti and his equally excited helpers although
-      simple is brilliant. The intense delight that the soaring and bursting of
-      a rocket give to Abd-el-Atti is expressed in unconscious and unrestrained
-      demonstration. He might be himself in flames but he would watch the flight
-      of the rushing stream of fire, jumping up and down in his anxiety for it
-      to burst:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;There! there! that's&mdash;a he, hooray!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Every time one bursts, scattering its colored stars, the crew, led by the
-      dragoman, cheer, &ldquo;Heep, heep, hooray! heep, heep, hooray!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      A whirligig spins upon the river, spouting balls of fire, and the crew
-      come in with a &ldquo;Heep, heep, hooray! heep, heep, hooray!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The steamer, which has a Belgian prince on board, illuminates, and salutes
-      with shot-guns. In the midst of a fusillade of rockets and Roman candles,
-      the crew develop a new accomplishment. Drilled by the indomitable master
-      of ceremonies, they attempt the first line of that distinctively American
-      melody,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;We won't go home till morning.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They really catch the air, and make a bubble, bubble of sounds, like
-      automata, that somewhat resembles the words. Probably they think that it
-      is our national anthem, or perhaps a Christmas hymn. No doubt,
-      &ldquo;won't-go-home-till-morning&rdquo; sort of Americans have been up the river
-      before us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The show is not over when the Pasha pleads an engagement to take a cup of
-      tea with the Belgian prince, and asks permission to retire. He expresses
-      his anguish at leaving us, and he will not depart if we say &ldquo;no.&rdquo; Of
-      course, our anguish in letting the Pasha go exceeds his suffering in
-      going, but we sacrifice ourselves to the demand of his station, and permit
-      him to depart. At the foot of the cabin stairs he begs us to go no
-      further, insisting that we do him too much honor to come so far.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The soft night grows more brilliant. Abd-el-Atti and his minions are still
-      blazing away. The consul declares that Asioot in all his life has never
-      experienced a night like this. We express ourselves as humbly thankful in
-      being the instruments of giving Asioot (which is asleep there two miles
-      off) such an &ldquo;eye-opener.&rdquo; (This remark has a finer sound when translated
-      into Arabic.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The spectacle closes by a voyage out upon the swift river in the sandal.
-      We take Roman candles, blue, red, and green lights and floaters which
-      Abd-el-Atti lets off, while the crew hoarsely roar, &ldquo;We won't go home till
-      morning,&rdquo; and mingle &ldquo;Heep, heep, hooray,&rdquo; with &ldquo;Hà Yàlësah, hâ Yâlësah.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The long range of lights on the steamers, the flashing lines and pyramids
-      of colors on our own dahabeëh, the soft June-like night, the moon coming
-      up in fleecy clouds, the broad Nile sparkling under so many fires, kindled
-      on earth and in the sky, made a scene unique, and as beautiful as any that
-      the Arabian Nights suggest.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      To end all, there was a hubbub on shore among the crew, caused by one of
-      them who was crazy with hasheesh, and threatened to murder the reïs and
-      dragoman, if he was not permitted to go on board. It could be demonstrated
-      that he was less likely to slay them if he did not come on board, and he
-      was therefore sent to the governor's lock-up, with a fair prospect of
-      going into the Khedive's army. We left him behind, and about one o'clock
-      in the morning stole away up the river with a gentle and growing breeze.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Net result of pleasure:&mdash;one man in jail, and Abd-el-Atti's wrist so
-      seriously burned by the fire-works, that he has no use of his arm for
-      weeks. But, &ldquo;'twas a glorious victory.&rdquo; For a Christmas, however, it was a
-      little too much like the Fourth of July.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0027" id="linkimage-0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0177.jpg" alt="0177 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0028" id="linkimage-0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0178.jpg" alt="0178 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XIII.&mdash;SIGHTS AND SCENES ON THE RIVER.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>S 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 &ldquo;ancient&rdquo; 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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, &ldquo;Roman!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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
-      <i>fiabellum</i> of Pharaoh.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 &ldquo;dese fellow care for nothing
-      but smoke hasheesh,&rdquo; 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;&ldquo;Thank you&rdquo;&mdash;which
-      was no doubt the long palaver.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;bold-looking jades, who come out and stare at us with a more
-      than masculine impudence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 &ldquo;not like you.&rdquo; The feeling is
-      mutual, though it is discouraging to our pride to be despised by such
-      barbarous half-clad folk.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We find also the <i>sont</i> 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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:&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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, &ldquo;Come to prayer!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The sleepers, waking, answer, &ldquo;God is great, and Mohammed is his prophet.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      They then get up and set the sail. This is what it is to carry religion
-      into daily life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0029" id="linkimage-0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0185.jpg" alt="0185 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0030" id="linkimage-0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0186.jpg" alt="0186 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XIV.&mdash;MIDWINTER IN EGYPT.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HETHER 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The period of the precession of the equinoxes was regarded as <i>one day</i>
-      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 <i>hours</i>
-      or &ldquo;sars,&rdquo; each one of 3,600 years; each of these hours into six &ldquo;ners,&rdquo;
-       of 600 years; and the &ldquo;ner&rdquo; into ten &ldquo;sosses&rdquo; or cosmic <i>minutes</i>, of
-      600 years. And thus, as we reckon sixty seconds to a minute, our ordinary
-      year was a <i>second</i> 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 <i>laisser aller</i> 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 <i>loss</i> of time by my watch, to set me back into the
-      age of Thothmes III.&mdash;a very good age to be in. We are living now by
-      great cosmic periods, and have little care for minute divisions of time.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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, &ldquo;O Mohamm<i>ed</i>&rdquo;
-       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:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;Allah, Allah!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And in response,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      &ldquo;O Mohammed!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;God forgive us!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      &ldquo;O Mohammed!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;God is most great!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      &ldquo;O Mohammed!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;El Hoseyn!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      &ldquo;O Mohammed!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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:&mdash;he has on a single coarse brown garment, through which
-      his tawny skin shows in spots, and he squats in the sand.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There was an American this year on the river, by the name of Smith&mdash;not
-      that I class the coming of Smith as a disaster&mdash;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, &ldquo;Smit, Smit.&rdquo; There has been no one
-      in Egypt since Cambyses who has made so much stir as Smit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;a singular sight in a Moslem country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Leaving this scene of a woe over which it is easy to be philosophical&mdash;the
-      raw recruits, in good spirits, munching black bread on the barge while the
-      women howl on shore&mdash;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 &ldquo;Allah&rdquo; and &ldquo;Mohammed.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      No. We are not going on, but fast to the bottom, near the shore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Good morning!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The words were English, the speaker was one of two eager Arabs, who had
-      suddenly appeared at our side.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Good morning. O, yes. Me guide Goorna.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What is Goorna?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes. Temp de Goorna. Come bime by.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What is Goorna?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Plenty. I go you. You want buy any <i>antiques?</i> Come bime by.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Do you live in Goorna?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;All same. Memnonium, Goorna, I show all gentlemens. Me guide. Antiques! O
-      plenty. Come bime by.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Can you get us a mummy, a real one, in the original package, that hasn't
-      been opened?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You like. Come plenty mummy. Used be. Not now. You like, I get. Come bime
-      by, <i>bookra.</i>&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0031" id="linkimage-0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0196.jpg" alt="0196 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0032" id="linkimage-0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0197.jpg" alt="0197 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XV.&mdash;AMONG THE RUINS OF THEBES.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">Y</span>OU 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 <i>depot</i> 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&mdash;was
-      abandoned to a sensuous luxury rivaling that of Rome in her days of
-      greatest wealth and least virtue in man or woman.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We shall have to give up, at the outset, the notion of Homer's
-      &ldquo;hundred-gated Thebes.&rdquo; 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We started for Koorneh across a luxuriant wheat-field, but soon struck the
-      desert and the <i>debris</i> 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&mdash;if one forgets London
-      and Paris and New York.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;as one would
-      cut off the tops of a handful of radishes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is a vein of &ldquo;Big Injun&rdquo; 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0033" id="linkimage-0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0203.jpg" alt="0203 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0034" id="linkimage-0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0200.jpg" alt="02004 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XVI.&mdash;HISTORY IN STONE.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>T NEVER rains at
-      Thebes; you begin with that fact. But everybody is anxious to have it
-      rain, so that he can say, &ldquo;It rained when I was at Thebes, for the first
-      time in four thousand years.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It has not rained for four thousand years, and the evidence of this is
-      that no representation of rain is found in any of the sculptures on
-      temples or monuments; and all Egyptologists know that what is not found
-      thus represented has had no existence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      To-day, it rained for the first time in four thousand years The
-      circumstances were these. We were crossing at sunset from the west side to
-      the island, in a nasty little ferry, built like a canal-barge, its depths
-      being full of all uncleanliness and smell&mdash;donkeys, peasants, and
-      camels using it for crossing. (The getting of a camel in and out of such a
-      deep trough is a work of time and considerable pounding and roaring of
-      beast and men.) The boat was propelled by two half-clad, handsome,
-      laughing Egyptian boys, who rowed with some crooked limbs of trees, and
-      sang &ldquo;Hà! Yâlesah,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Yah! Mohammed&rdquo; as they stood and pulled the
-      unwieldy oars.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We were standing, above the reek, on a loose platform of sticks at the
-      stern, when my comrade said, &ldquo;It rains, I think I felt a drop on my hand.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It can't be,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;it has not rained here in four thousand years;&rdquo;
-       and I extended my hand. I felt nothing. And yet I could not swear that a
-      drop or two did not fall into the river.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It had that appearance, nearly. And we have seen no flies skipping on the
-      Nile at this season.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the sculpture we remember that the king is often represented extending
-      his hand. He would not put it out for nothing, for everything done
-      anciently in Egypt, every scratch on a rock, has a deep and profound
-      meaning. Pharaoh is in the attitude of fearing that it is going to rain.
-      Perhaps it did rain last night. At any rate, there were light clouds over
-      the sky.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The morning opens with a cool west wind, which increases and whirls the
-      sand in great clouds over the Libyan side of the river, and envelopes
-      Luxor in its dry storm. Luxor is for the most part a collection of
-      miserable mud-hovels on a low ridge, with the half-buried temple for a
-      nucleus, and a few houses of a better sort along the bank, from which
-      float the consular flags.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The inhabitants of Luxor live upon the winter travelers. Sometimes a dozen
-      or twenty gay dahabeëhs and several steamboats are moored here, and the
-      town assumes the appearance of a fashionable watering-place. It is the
-      best place on the river on the whole, considering its attractions for
-      scholars and sightseers, to spend the winter, and I have no doubt it would
-      be a great resort if it had any accommodations for visitors. But it has
-      not; the stranger must live in his boat. There is not indeed in the whole
-      land of Egypt above Cairo such a thing as an inn; scarcely a refuge where
-      a clean Christian, who wishes to keep clean, can pass a night, unless it
-      be in the house of some governor or a palace of the Khedive. The
-      perfection of the world's climate in winter is, to be sure, higher up, in
-      Nubia; but that of Thebes is good enough for people accustomed to Europe
-      and New England. With steamboats making regular trips and a railroad
-      crawling up the river, there is certain to be the Rameses Hotel at Thebes
-      before long, and its rival a Thothmes House; together with the Mummy
-      Restaurant, and the Scarabæus Saloon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You need two or three weeks to see properly the ruins of Thebes, though
-      Cook's &ldquo;personally conducted tourists&rdquo; do it in four days, and have a <i>soiree</i>
-      of the dancing-girls besides. The region to be traveled over is not only
-      vast (Strabo says the city was nine miles long) but it is exceedingly
-      difficult getting about, and fatiguing, if haste is necessary. Crossing
-      the swift Nile in a sandal takes time; you must wade or be carried over
-      shallows to the island beach; there is a weary walk or ride over this;
-      another stream is to be crossed, and then begins the work of the day. You
-      set out with a cavalcade of mules, servants, water-carriers, and a retinue
-      of hungry, begging Arabs, over the fields and through the desert to the
-      temples and tombs. The distances are long, the sand is glaring, the
-      incandescent sun is reflected in hot waves from the burning Libyan chain.
-      It requires hours to master the plan of a vast temple in its ruins, and
-      days to follow out the story of the wonderful people who built it, in its
-      marvelous sculptures&mdash;acres of inside and outside walls of picture
-      cut in stone.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps the easiest way of passing the time in an ancient ruin was that of
-      two Americans, who used to spread their rugs in some shady court, and sit
-      there, drinking brandy and champagne all day, letting the ancient
-      civilization gradually reconstruct itself in their brains.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Life on the dahabeëh is much as usual; in fact, we are only waiting a
-      favorable wind to pursue our voyage, expecting to see Thebes
-      satisfactorily on our return. Of the inhabitants and social life of Luxor,
-      we shall have more to say by and by. We have daily a <i>levee</i> of
-      idlers on the bank, who spend twilight hours in watching the boat; we are
-      visited by sharp-eyed dealers in antiquities, who pull out strings of
-      scarabæi from their bosoms, or cautiously produce from under their gowns a
-      sculptured tablet, or a stone image, or some articles from a mummy-case&mdash;<i>antiques</i>
-      really as good as new. Abd-el-Atti sits on the forward-deck cheapening the
-      poor chickens with old women, and surrounded by an admiring group of Arab
-      friends, who sit all day smoking and sipping coffee, and kept in a lively
-      enjoyment by his interminable <i>facetiae</i> and <i>badinage</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our most illustrious visitors are the American consul, Ali Effendi Noorad,
-      and the English consul, Mustapha Aga. Ali is a well-featured,
-      bronze-complexioned Arab of good family (I think of the Ababdehs), whose
-      brother is Sheykh of a tribe at Karnak.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He cannot speak English, but he has a pleasanter smile than any other
-      American consul I know. Mustapha, now very old and well known to all Nile
-      travelers, is a venerable wise man of the East, a most suave, courtly
-      Arab, plausible, and soft of speech; under his bushy eyebrows one sees
-      eyes that are keen and yet glazed with a film of secrecy; the sort of eye
-      that you cannot look into, but which you have no doubt looks into you.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Mustapha, as I said, built his house between two columns of the temple of
-      Luxor. These magnificent columns, with flaring lotus capitals, are
-      half-buried in sand, and the whole area is so built in and over by Arab
-      habitations that little of the once extensive and splendid structure can
-      be seen. Indeed, the visitor will do well to be content with the
-      well-known poetic view of the columns from the river. The elegant obelisk,
-      whose mate is in Paris, must however be seen, as well as the statues of
-      Rameses II. sitting behind it up to their necks in sand&mdash;as if a
-      sitz-bath had been prescribed. I went one day into the interior of the
-      huts, in order to look at some of the sculptures, especially that of a
-      king's chariot which is shaded by a parasol&mdash;an article which we
-      invented three or four thousand years after the Egyptians, who first used
-      it, had gone to the shades where parasols are useless. I was sorry that I
-      went. The private house I entered was a mud enclosure with a creaky wooden
-      door. Opening this I found myself in what appeared to be a private
-      hen-yard, where babies, chickens, old women, straw, flies, and dust,
-      mingled with the odors of antiquity; about this were the rooms in which
-      the family sleep&mdash;mere dog-kennels. Two of the women had nose-rings
-      put through the right nostril, hoops of gold two or three inches across. I
-      cannot say that a nose-ring adds to a woman's beauty, but if I had to
-      manage a harem of these sharp-tongued creatures I should want rings in
-      their noses&mdash;it would need only a slight pull of the cord in the ring
-      to cause the woman to cry, in Oriental language, &ldquo;where thou goest, I will
-      go.&rdquo; The parasol sculpture was half-covered by the mud-wall and the oven;
-      but there was Pharaoh visible, riding on in glory through all this
-      squalor. The Pharaohs and priests never let one of the common people set
-      foot inside these superb temples; and there is a sort of base satisfaction
-      now! in seeing the ignorant and oppressed living in their palaces, and
-      letting the hens roost on Pharaoh's sun-shade. But it was difficult to
-      make picturesque the inside of this temple-palace, even with all the
-      flowing rags of its occupants.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We spend a day in a preliminary visit to the Memnonium and the vast ruins
-      known as those of Medeenet Hâboo. Among our attendants over the plain are
-      half a dozen little girls, bright, smiling lasses, who salute us with a
-      cheery &ldquo;Good morning,&rdquo; and devote themselves to us the whole day. Each one
-      carries on her head a light, thin water-<i>koolleh</i>, that would hold
-      about a quart, balancing it perfectly as she runs along. I have seen mere
-      infants carrying very small <i>koollehs</i>, beginning thus young to learn
-      the art of walking with the large ones, which is to be the chief business
-      of their lives.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      One of the girls, who says her name is Fatimeh (the name of the Prophet's
-      favorite daughter is in great request), is very pretty, and may be ten or
-      eleven years old, not far from the marriageable age. She has black hair,
-      large, soft, black eyes, the lids stained with kohl, dazzling white teeth
-      and a sweet smile. She wears cheap earrings, a necklace of beads and
-      metal, and a slight ring on one hand; her finger-nails and the palms of
-      her little hands are stained with henna. For dress she has a sort of shawl
-      used as a head-veil, and an ample outer-garment, a mantle of dark-blue
-      cotton, ornamented down the front seams with colored beads&mdash;a
-      coquettish touch that connects her with her sisters of the ancient <i>régime</i>
-      who seem to have used the cylindrical blue bead even more profusely than
-      ladies now-a-day the jet &ldquo;bugles,&rdquo; in dress trimming. I fear the pretty
-      heathen is beginning to be aware of her attractions.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The girls run patiently beside us or wait for us at the temples all day,
-      bruising their feet on the stony ways, getting nothing to eat unless we
-      give them something, chatting cheerfully, smiling at us and using their
-      little stock of English to gain our good will, constantly ready with their
-      <i>koollehs</i>, and say nothing of backsheesh until they are about to
-      leave us at night and go to their homes. But when they begin to ask, and
-      get a copper or two, they beg with a mixture of pathos and anxiety and a
-      use of the pronouns that is irresistible.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You tired. Plenty backsheesh for little girl. Yes.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Why don't you give us backsheesh? We are tired too,&rdquo; we reply.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes. Me give you backsheesh you tired all day.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Fatimeh only uses her eyes, conscious already of her power. They are
-      satisfied with a piastre; which the dragoman says is too much, and enough
-      to spoil them. But, after all, five cents is not a magnificent gift, from
-      a stranger who has come five thousand miles, to a little girl in the heart
-      of Africa, who has lighted up the desert a whole day with her charming
-      smiles!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The donkey-boy pulls the strings of pathos for his backsheesh, having no
-      beauty to use; he says, &ldquo;Father and mother <i>all</i> dead.&rdquo; Seems to have
-      belonged to a harem.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Before we can gain space or quiet either to examine or enjoy a temple, we
-      have to free ourselves of a crowd of adhesive men, boys, and girls, who
-      press upon us their curiosities, relics of the dead, whose only value is
-      their antiquity. The price of these relics is of course wholly &ldquo;fancy,&rdquo;
-       and I presume that Thebes, where the influence of the antique is most
-      strong, is the best market in the world for these trifles; and that
-      however cheaply they may be bought here, they fetch a better price than
-      they would elsewhere.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I suppose if I were to stand in Broadway and offer passers-by such a
-      mummy's hand as this which is now pressed upon my notice, I could scarcely
-      give it away. This hand has been &ldquo;doctored&rdquo; to sell; the present owner has
-      re-wrapped its bitumen-soaked flesh in mummy-cloth, and partially
-      concealed three rings on the fingers. Of course the hand is old and the
-      cheap rings are new. It is pleasant to think of these merchants in dried
-      flesh prowling about among the dead, selecting a limb here and there that
-      they think will decorate well, and tricking out with cheap jewelry these
-      mortal fragments. This hand, which the rascal has chosen, is small, and
-      may have been a source of pride to its owner long ago; somebody else may
-      have been fond of it, though even he&mdash;the lover&mdash;would not care
-      to hold it long now. A pretty little hand; I suppose it has in its better
-      days given many a caress and love-pat, and many a slap in the face;
-      belonged to one of the people, or it would not have been found in a common
-      mummy-pit; perhaps the hand of a sweet water-bearer like Fatimeh, perhaps
-      of some slave-girl whose fatal beauty threw her into the drag-net that the
-      Pharaohs occasionally cast along the Upper Nile&mdash;slave-hunting raids
-      that appear on the monuments as great military achievements. This hand,
-      naked, supple, dimpled, henna-tipped, may have been offered for nothing
-      once; there are wanted for it four piastres now, rings and all. A dear
-      little hand!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Great quantities of antique beads are offered us in strings, to one end of
-      which is usually tied a small image of Osiris, or the winged sun, or the
-      scarabæus with wings. The inexhaustible supply of these beads and images
-      leads many to think that they are manufactured to suit the demand. But it
-      is not so. Their blue is of a shade that is not produced now-a-days. And,
-      besides, there is no need to manufacture what exists in the mummy-pits in
-      such abundance. The beads and bugles are of glass; they were much used for
-      necklaces and are found covering the breasts of mummies, woven in a
-      network of various patterns, like old bead purses. The vivid blue color
-      was given by copper.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The little blue images of Osiris which are so abundant are also genuine.
-      They are of porcelain, a sort of porcelain-glass, a sand-paste, glazed,
-      colored blue, and baked. They are found in great quantities in all tombs;
-      and it was the Egyptian practice to thickly strew with them the ground
-      upon which the foundations and floors of temples were laid. These images
-      found in tombs are more properly figures of the dead under the form of
-      Osiris, and the hieroglyphics on them sometimes give the name and quality
-      of the departed. They are in fact a sort of &ldquo;p.p. c.&rdquo; visiting-card, which
-      the mummy has left for future ages. The Egyptians succeeded in handing
-      themselves down to posterity; but the manner in which posterity has
-      received them is not encouraging to us to salt ourselves down for another
-      age.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Memnonium, or more properly Rameseum, since it was built by Rameses
-      II., and covered with his deeds, writ in stone, gives you even in its
-      ruins a very good idea of one of the most symmetrical of Egyptian temples;
-      the vast columns of its great hall attest its magnificence, while the
-      elaboration of its sculpture, wanting the classic purity of the earlier
-      work found in the tombs of Geezeh and Sakkara, speaks of a time when art
-      was greatly stimulated by royal patronage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was the practice of the Pharaohs when they came to the throne to make
-      one or more military expeditions of conquest and plunder, slay as many
-      enemies as possible (all people being considered &ldquo;enemies&rdquo; who did not pay
-      tribute), cut as wide a swarth of desolation over the earth as they were
-      able, loot the cities, drag into captivity the pleasing women, and return
-      laden with treasure and slaves and the evidences of enlarged dominion.
-      Then they spent the remainder of their virtuous days in erecting huge
-      temples and chiseling their exploits on them. This is, in a word, the
-      history of the Pharaohs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I think that Rameses II., who was the handsomest and most conceited
-      swell of them all, was not so particular about doing the deeds as he was
-      about recording them. He could not have done much else in his long reign
-      than erect the temples, carve the hieroglyphics, and set up the statues of
-      himself, which proclaim his fame. He literally spread himself all over
-      Egypt, and must have kept the whole country busy, quarrying, and building,
-      and carving for his glorification. That he did a tenth of the deeds he is
-      represented performing, no one believes now; and I take a vindictive
-      pleasure in abusing him. By some historic fatality he got the name of the
-      Great Sesostris, and was by tradition credited with the exploits of
-      Thothmes III., the greatest of the Pharaohs, a real hero and statesman,
-      during whose reign it was no boast to say that Egypt &ldquo;placed her frontier
-      where it pleased herself,&rdquo; and with those of his father Sethi I., a
-      usurper in the line, but a great soldier.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      However, this Rameses did not have good luck with his gigantic statues; I
-      do not know one that is not shattered, defaced, or thrown down. This one
-      at the Rameseum is only a wreck of gigantic fragments. It was a monolith
-      of syenite, and if it was the largest statue in Egypt, as it is said, it
-      must have been over sixty feet high. The arithmeticians say that it
-      weighed about eight hundred and eighty-seven tons, having a solid content
-      of three times the largest obelisk in the world, that at Karnak. These
-      figures convey no idea to my mind. When a stone man is as big as a
-      four-story house, I cease to grasp him. I climbed upon the arm of this
-      Rameses, and found his name cut deeply in the hard granite, the cutting
-      polished to the very bottom like the finest intaglio. The polishing alone
-      of this great mass must have been an incredible labor. How was it moved
-      from its quarry in Assouan, a hundred and thirty miles distant? And how
-      was it broken into the thousand fragments in which it lies? An earthquake
-      would not do it. There are no marks of drilling or the use of an explosive
-      material. But if Cambyses broke it&mdash;and Cambyses must have been
-      remembered in Egypt as Napoleon I. is in Italy, the one for smashing, the
-      other for stealing&mdash;he had something as destructive as
-      nitro-glycerine.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Rameses II. impressed into his service not only art but literature. One of
-      his achievements depicted here is his victory over the Khitas (Hittites),
-      an Asiatic tribe; the king is in the single-handed act of driving the
-      enemy over the river Orontes,&mdash;a bluish streak meandering down the
-      wall. This scene is the subject of a famous poem, known as the Poem of
-      Pentaour, which is carved in hieroglyphics at Karnak and at Luxor. The
-      battle is very spiritedly depicted here. On the walls are many side-scenes
-      and acts characteristic of the age and the people. The booty from the
-      enemy is collected in a heap; and the quantity of gold is indicated by the
-      size of a bag of it which is breaking the back of an ass; a soldier is
-      pulling the beard of his prisoner, and another is beating his captives,
-      after the brutal manner of the Egyptians.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The temples at Medeenet Haboo are to me as interesting as those at Karnak.
-      There are two; the smaller one is of various ages; but its oldest portions
-      were built by Amun-noo-het, the sister of Thothmes, the woman who has left
-      more monuments of her vigor than any other in history, and, woman-like,
-      the monuments are filial offerings, and not erections to her own
-      greatness; the larger temple is the work of Rameses III. The more you
-      visit it, the more you will be impressed with the splendor of its courts,
-      halls and columns, and you may spend days in the study of its sculptures
-      without exhausting them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Along these high-columned halls stalk vast processions, armies going to
-      battle, conquerors in triumphal entry, priests and soldiers bearing
-      sacrifices, and rows of stone deities of the Egyptian pantheon receiving
-      them in a divine indifference. Again the battle rages, the chariots drive
-      furiously, arrows fill the air, the foot-troops press forward with their
-      big spears and long shields, and the king is slaying the chief, who
-      tumbles from his car. The alarm has spread to the country beyond; the
-      terrified inhabitants are in flight; a woman, such is the detail, is seen
-      to snatch her baby and run into the woods, leaving her pot of broth
-      cooking on the fire.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The carving in this temple is often very deep, cut in four or five inches
-      in the syenite, and beautifully polished to the bottom, as if done with
-      emery. The colors that once gave each figure its character, are still
-      fresh, red, green, blue, and black. The ceilings of some of the chambers
-      yet represent the blue and star-sprinkled sky. How surpassingly brilliant
-      these must have been once! We see how much the figure owed to color, when
-      the color designated the different nationalities, the enemies or the
-      captives, the shade of their skin, hair, beard and garments. We recognize,
-      even, textures of cloth, and the spotted leopard-skins worn by the
-      priests. How gay are the birds of varied plumage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is considerable variety in sculpture here, but, after all an endless
-      repetition on wall after wall, in chamber after chamber of the same royal
-      persons, gods, goddesses, and priests. There is nothing on earth so
-      tiresome as a row of stone gods, in whom I doubt if anybody ever sincerely
-      believed, standing to receive the offerings of a Turveydrop of a king.
-      Occasionally the gods take turn about, and pour oil on the head of a king,
-      at his coronation, and with this is usually the very pretty device of four
-      birds flying to the four quarters of the globe to announce the event. But
-      whatever the scene, warlike or religious, it is for the glorification of
-      Pharaoh, all the same. He is commonly represented of gigantic size, and
-      all the other human figures about him are small in comparison. It must
-      have kept the Pharaoh in a constantly inflated condition, to walk these
-      halls and behold, on all sides, his extraordinary apotheosis. But the
-      Pharaoh was not only king but high priest, and the divine representative
-      on earth, and about to become, in a peculiar sense, Osiris himself, at his
-      death.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Egyptians would have saved us much trouble if they had introduced
-      perspective into these pictures. It is difficult to feel that a pond of
-      water, a tree and a house, one above the other on a wall, are intended to
-      be on the same level. We have to accustom ourselves to figures always in
-      profile, with the eye cut in full as if seen in front, and both shoulders
-      showing. The hands of prisoners are tied behind them, but this is shown by
-      bringing both elbows, with no sort of respect for the man's anatomy, round
-      to the side, toward us, yet it is wonderful what character and vivacity
-      they gave to their figures, and how by simple profile they represent
-      nationalities and races, Ethiops, Nubians, Jews, Assyrians, Europeans.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These temples are inlaid and overlaid and surrounded with heaps of
-      rubbish, and the <i>débris</i> of ancient and modern mud and unbaked-brick
-      dwellings; part of the great pillars are entirely covered. The Christians
-      once occupied the temples, and there are remains of a church, and a large
-      church, in one of the vast courts, built of materials at hand, but gone to
-      ruin more complete than the structure around it. The early Christians
-      hewed away the beautiful images of Osiris from the pillars (an Osiride
-      pillar is one upon one side of which, and the length of it, is cut in full
-      relief, only attached at the back, a figure of Osiris), and covered the
-      hieroglyphics and sculptures with plaster. They defaced these temples as
-      the Reformers hacked and whitewashed the cathedrals of Germany. And
-      sometimes the plaster which was meant to cover forever from sight the
-      images of a mysterious religion, has defeated the intentions of the
-      plasterers, by preserving, to an age that has no fear of stone gods, the
-      ancient pictures, sharp in outline and fresh in color.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is indeed marvelous that so much has been preserved, considering what a
-      destructive creature man is, and how it pleases his ignoble soul to
-      destroy the works of his forerunners on the earth. The earthquake has
-      shaken up Egypt time and again, but Cambyses was worse; he was an
-      earthquake with malice and purpose, and left little standing that he had
-      leisure to overturn. The ancient Christians spent a great deal of time in
-      rubbing out the deep-cut hieroglyphics, chiseling away the heads of
-      strange gods, covering the pictures of ancient ceremonies and sacrifices,
-      and painting on the walls their own rude conceptions of holy persons and
-      miraculous occurrences. And then the Moslems came, hating all images and
-      pictorial representations alike, and scraped away or battered with bullets
-      the work of pagans and Christians.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is much discussion whether these so-called temples were not palaces
-      and royal residences as well as religious edifices. Doubtless many of them
-      served a double purpose; the great pylons and propylons having rooms in
-      which men might have lived, who did not know what a comfortable house is.
-      Certainly no palaces of the Pharaohs have been discovered in Egypt, if
-      these temples are not palaces in part; and it is not to be supposed that
-      the Pharaoh dwelt in a mud-house with a palm-roof, like a common mortal.
-      He was the religious as well as the civil head, Pope and Cæsar in one, and
-      it is natural that he should have dwelt in the temple precincts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The pyramidal towers of the great temple of Medeenet Haboo are thought to
-      be the remains of the palace of Rameses III. Here indeed the Egyptologists
-      point out his harem and the private apartments, when the favored of
-      Amun-Re unbent himself from his usual occupation of seizing a bunch of
-      captives by the hair and slashing off their heads at a blow, in the
-      society of his women and the domestic enjoyments of a family man. Here we
-      get an insight into the private life of the awful monarch, and are able to
-      penetrate the mysteries of his retirement. It is from such sculptures as
-      one finds here that scholars have been able to rehabilitate old Egyptian
-      society and tell us not only what the Egyptians did but what they were
-      thinking about. The scholar, to whom we are most indebted for the
-      reconstruction of the ancient life of the Egyptians, Sir Gardner
-      Wilkinson, is able not only to describe to us a <i>soirée</i>, from
-      paintings in tombs at Thebes, but to tell us what the company talked about
-      and what their emotions were. &ldquo;In the meantime,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;the
-      conversation became animated,&rdquo; (as it sometimes does at parties) &ldquo;and the
-      ladies fluently discussed the question of dress,&rdquo; &ldquo;the maker of an earring
-      and the shop where it was purchased was anxiously inquired.&rdquo; On one
-      occasion when the guests were in &ldquo;raptures of admiration&rdquo; over something,
-      an awkward youth overturned a pedestal, creating great confusion and
-      frightening the women, who screamed; however, no one was hurt, and harmony
-      being restored, &ldquo;the incident afforded fresh matter for conversation, to
-      be related in full details to their friends when they returned home.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      This is very wonderful art, and proves that the Egyptians excelled all who
-      came after them in the use of the chisel and brush; since they could not
-      only represent in a drawing on the wall of a tomb the gaiety of an evening
-      party and the subject of its conversation, but could make the picture
-      convey as well the talk of the guests to their friends after they returned
-      home!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We had read a good deal about the harem of Rameses III., and it was
-      naturally the first object of our search at Medeenet Haboo. At the first
-      visit we could not find it, and all our expectation of his sweet domestic
-      life was unrealized. It was in vain that we read over the description:&mdash;&ldquo;Here
-      the king is attended by his harem, some of whom present him with flowers,
-      or wave before him fans and flabella; and a favorite is caressed, or
-      invited to divert his leisure hours with a game of draughts.&rdquo; We climbed
-      everywhere, and looked into every room, but the king and his harem were
-      not visible. And yet the pictures, upon which has been built all this fair
-      fabric of the domestic life of Rameses, must exist somewhere in these two
-      pyramidal towers. And what a gallery of delights it must be, we thought.
-      The king attended by his harem!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Upon a subsequent visit, we insisted that the guide should take us into
-      this harem. That was not possible, but he would show it to us. We climbed
-      a broken wall, from the top of which we could look up, through a window,
-      into a small apartment in the tower. The room might be ten feet by twelve
-      in size, probably smaller. There was no way of getting to it by any
-      interior stairway or by any exterior one, that we could see, and I have no
-      doubt that if Pharaoh lived there he climbed up by a ladder and pulled his
-      harem up after him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But the pictures on the walls, which we made out by the help of an
-      opera-glass, prove this to have been one of the private apartments, they
-      say. There are only two pictures, only one, in fact, not defaced; but as
-      these are the only examples of the interior decoration of an ancient royal
-      palace in all Egypt, it is well to make the most of them. They are both
-      drawn in spirited outlines and are very graceful, the profile faces having
-      a Greek beauty. In one Rameses III., of colossal size, is represented
-      seated on an elegant <i>fauteuil</i>, with his feet on a stool. He wears
-      the royal crown, a necklace, and sandals. Before him stands a lady of his
-      harem, clad in a high crown of lotus-stems, a slight necklace, and sandals
-      turned up like skates. It must be remembered that the weather was usually
-      very warm in Thebes, especially on this side the river. The lady is
-      holding up a lotus-flower, but it is very far from the royal nose, and
-      indeed she stands so far off, that the king has to stretch out his arm to
-      chuck her under the chin. The Pharaoh's beautiful face preserves its
-      immortal calm, and the &ldquo;favorite is caressed&rdquo; in accordance with the
-      chastest requirements of high art.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the other picture, the Pharaoh is seated as before, but he is playing
-      at draughts. In his left hand he holds some men, and his right is extended
-      lifting a piece from the draughtboard. His antagonist has been
-      unfortunate. Her legs are all gone; her head has disappeared. There remain
-      of this &ldquo;favorite&rdquo; only the outline of part of the body, the right arm and
-      the hand which lifts a piece, and a suggestion of the left arm extended at
-      full length and pushing a lotus-bud close to the king's nose. It is an
-      exhibition of man's selfishness-The poor woman is not only compelled to
-      entertain the despot at the game, but she must regale his fastidious and
-      scornful nose at the same time; it must have been very tiresome to keep
-      the left hand thus extended through a whole game. What a passion the
-      Egyptians had for the heavy perfume of this flower. They are smelling it
-      in all their pictures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We climbed afterwards, by means of a heap of rubbish, into a room similar
-      to this one, in the other tower, where we saw remains of the same
-      sculpture. It was like the Egyptians to repeat that picture five hundred
-      times in the same palace.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The two Colossi stand half a mile east of the temple of Medeenet Haboo,
-      and perhaps are the survivors of like figures which lined an avenue to
-      another temple. One of them is better known to fame than any other ancient
-      statue, and rests its reputation on the most shadowy basis. In a line with
-      these statues are the remains of other colossi of nearly the same size,
-      buried in the alluvial deposit. These figures both represent Amunoph III.
-      (about 1500 or 1600 b. c.); they are seated; and on either side of the
-      legs of the king, and attached to the throne, are the statues of his
-      mother and daughter, little women, eighteen feet high. The colossi are
-      fifty feet high without the bases, and must have stood sixty feet in the
-      air before the Nile soil covered the desert on which they were erected.
-      The pedestal is a solid stone thirty-three feet long.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Both were monoliths. The southern one is still one piece, but shockingly
-      mutilated. The northern one is the famous Vocal Statue of Memnon; though
-      why it is called of Memnon and why &ldquo;vocal&rdquo; is not easily explained. It was
-      broken into fragments either by some marauder, or by an earthquake at the
-      beginning of our era, and built up from the waist by blocks of stone, in
-      the time of the Roman occupation, during the reign of Septimius Severus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There was a tradition&mdash;perhaps it was only the tradition of a
-      tradition&mdash;that it used to sing every morning at sunrise. No mention
-      is made of this singing property, however, until after it was overthrown;
-      and its singing ceased to be heard after the Roman Emperor put it into the
-      state in which we now see it. It has been assumed that it used to sing,
-      and many theories have been invented to explain its vocal method. Very
-      likely the original report of this prodigy was a Greek or Roman fable; and
-      the noise may have been produced by a trick for Hadrian's benefit (who is
-      said to have heard it) in order to keep up the reputation of the statue.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Amunoph III. (or Amenôphis, or Amen-hotep&mdash;he never knew how to spell
-      his name) was a tremendous slasher-about over the territories of other
-      people; there is an inscription down at Samneh (above the second cataract)
-      which says that he brought, in one expedition, out of Soudan, seven
-      hundred and forty negro prisoners, half of whom were women and children.
-      On the records which this modest man made, he is &ldquo;Lord of both worlds,
-      absolute master, Son of the Sun.&rdquo; He is Horus, the strong bull. &ldquo;He
-      marches and victory is gained, like Horus, son of Isis, like the Sun in
-      heaven.&rdquo; He also built almost as extensively as Rameses II; he covered
-      both banks of the Nile with splendid monuments; his structures are found
-      from Ethiopia to the Sinaitic peninsula. He set up his image in this
-      Colossus, the statue which the Greeks and Romans called Memnon, the fame
-      of which took such possession of the imagination of poets and historians.
-      They heard, or said they heard, Memnon, the Ethiopian, one of the
-      defenders of Troy, each morning saluting his mother, Aurora.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If this sound was heard, scientists think it was produced by the action of
-      the sun's rays upon dew fallen in the crevices of the broken figure.
-      Others think the sound was produced by a priest who sat concealed in the
-      lap of the figure and struck a metallic stone. And the cavity and the
-      metallic stone exist there now. Of course the stone was put in there and
-      the cavity left, when the statue was repaired, it having been a monolith.
-      And as the sound was never heard before the statue was broken nor after it
-      was repaired, the noise was not produced by the metallic stone. And if I
-      am required to believe that the statue sang with his head off, I begin to
-      doubt altogether. I incline to think that we have here only one of those
-      beautiful myths in which the Greeks and Romans loved to clothe the distant
-      and the gigantic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      One of the means of accounting for a sound which may never have been
-      heard, is that the priests produced it in order to strike with awe the
-      people. Now, the Egyptian priests never cared anything about the people,
-      and wouldn't have taken the trouble; indeed, in the old times &ldquo;people&rdquo;
-       wouldn't have been allowed anywhere within such a sacred inclosure as this
-      in which the Colossus stood. And, besides, the priest could not have got
-      into the cavity mentioned. When the statue was a monolith, it would puzzle
-      him to get in; and there is no stairway or steps by which he could ascend
-      now. We sent an Arab up, who scaled the broken fragments with extreme
-      difficulty, and struck the stone. The noise produced was like that made by
-      striking the metallic stones we find in the desert,&mdash;not a resonance
-      to be heard far.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So that I doubt that there was any singing at sunrise by the so-called
-      Memnon (which was Amunoph), and I doubt that it was a priestly device.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This Amunoph family, whose acquaintance we have been obliged to make, cut
-      a wide swath in their day; they had eccentricities, and there are told a
-      great many stories about them, which might interest you if you could
-      believe that the Amunophs were as real as the Hapsburgs and the Stuarts
-      and the Grants.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Amunoph I. (or Amen-hotep) was the successor of Amosis (or Ahmes) who
-      expelled the Shepherds, and even pursued them into Canaan and knocked
-      their walled-towns about their heads. Amunoph I. subdued the Shasu or
-      Bedaween of the desert between Egypt and Syria, as much as those
-      hereditary robbers were ever subdued. This was in the seventeenth century
-      b. c. This king also made a naval expedition up the Nile into Ethiopia,
-      and it is said that he took captive there the &ldquo;chief of the mountaineers.&rdquo;
-       Probably then, he went into Abyssinia, and did not discover the real
-      source of the Nile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The fourth Amunoph went conquering in Asia, as his predecessors had done,
-      for nations did not stay conquered in those days. He was followed by his
-      seven daughters in chariots of war. These heroic girls fought, with their
-      father, and may be seen now, in pictures, gently driving their
-      chariot-wheels over the crushed Asiatics. When Amunoph IV. came home and
-      turned his attention to religion, he made lively work with the Egyptian
-      pantheon. This had grown into vast proportions from the time of Menes, and
-      Amunoph did not attempt to improve it or reform it; he simply set it
-      aside, and established a new religion. He it was who abandoned Thebes and
-      built Tel-el-Amarna, and there set up the worship of a single god, Aten,
-      represented by the sun's disc. He shut up the old temples, effaced the
-      images of the ancient gods, and persecuted mercilessly their worshippers
-      throughout the empire.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He was prompted to all this by his mother, for he himself was little
-      better than an imbecile. It was from his mother that he took his foreign
-      religion as he did his foreign blood, for there was nothing of the
-      Egyptian type in his face. His mother, Queen Taia, wife of Amunoph III.,
-      had light hair, blue eyes and rosy cheeks, the characteristics of northern
-      women. She was not of royal family, and not Egyptian; but the child of a
-      foreign family then living in the Delta, and probably the king married her
-      for her beauty and cleverness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      M. Lenormant thinks she was a Hebrew. That people were then very numerous
-      in the Delta, where they lived unmolested keeping their own religion, a
-      very much corrupted and materialized monotheism. Queen Taia has the
-      complexion and features of the Hebrews&mdash;I don't mean of the Jews who
-      are now dispersed over the continents. Lenormant credits the Hebrews,
-      through the Queen Taia, with the overthrow of the Pharaonic religion and
-      the establishment of the monotheism of Amunoph IV.&mdash;a worship that
-      had many external likenesses to the Hebrew forms. At Tel-el-Amarna we see,
-      among the utensils of the worship of Aten, the Israelitish &ldquo;Table of
-      Shew-bread.&rdquo; It is also noticed that the persecution of the Hebrews
-      coincides with the termination of the religious revolution introduced by
-      the son of Taia.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whenever a pretty woman of talent comes into history she makes mischief.
-      The episode of Queen Taia is however a great relief to the granite-faced
-      monotony of the conservative Pharaohs. Women rulers and regents always
-      make the world lively for the time being&mdash;and it took in this case
-      two or three generations to repair the damages. Smashing things and
-      repairing damages&mdash;that is history.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      History starts up from every foot of this Theban plain, piled four or five
-      deep with civilizations. These temples are engulfed in rubbish; what the
-      Persians and the earthquake spared, Copts and Arabs for centuries have
-      overlaid with their crumbling habitations. It requires a large draft upon
-      the imagination to reinstate the edifices that once covered this vast
-      waste; but we are impressed with the size of the city, when we see the
-      long distances that the remaining temples are apart, and the evidence, in
-      broken columns, statues, and great hewn blocks of stone shouldering out of
-      the sand, of others perhaps as large.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0035" id="linkimage-0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0222.jpg" alt="0222 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0036" id="linkimage-0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0223.jpg" alt="0223 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XVII.&mdash;KARNAK.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE WEATHER is
-      almost unsettled. There was actually a dash of rain against the cabin
-      window last night&mdash;over before you could prepare an affidavit to the
-      fact&mdash;and today is cold, more or less cloudy with a drop, only a
-      drop, of rain occasionally. Besides, the wind is in the south-west and the
-      sand flies. We cannot sail, and decide to visit Karnak, in spite of the
-      entreaty of the hand-book to leave this, as the crown of all sight-seeing,
-      until we have climbed up to its greatness over all the lesser ruins.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps this is wise; but I think I should advise a friend to go at once
-      to Karnak and outrageously astonish himself, while his mind is fresh, and
-      before he becomes at all sated with ruins or familiar with other vast and
-      exceedingly impressive edifices. They are certain to dull a little his
-      impression of Karnak even &ldquo;Madam&mdash;&rdquo; it is Abd-el-Atti who comes in,
-      rubbing his hands&mdash;&ldquo;your carriage stops the way.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Carriage?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, ma'am, I just make him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The carriage was an arm-chair slung between two pushing-poles; between
-      each end of them was harnessed a surly diminutive donkey who seemed to
-      feel his degradation. Each donkey required a driver; Ahmed, with his
-      sleeves rolled up and armed with a big club, walked beside, to steady the
-      swaying chair, and to beat the boys when their donkeys took a fancy to lie
-      down; and a cloud of interested Arabs hovered about it, running with it,
-      adding to the noise, dust, and picturesqueness of our cavalcade.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On the outskirts of the mud-cabins we pass through the weekly market, a
-      motley assemblage of country-folks and produce, camels, donkeys, and
-      sheep. It is close by the Ghawazee quarter, where is a colony of a hundred
-      or more of these dancing-girls. They are always conspicuous among Egyptian
-      women by their greater comeliness and gay apparel. They wear red and
-      yellow gowns, many tinkling ornaments of silver and gold, and their eyes
-      are heavily darkened with kohl. I don't know what it is in this kohl, that
-      it gives woman such a wicked and dangerous aspect. They come out to ask
-      for backsheesh in a brazen but probably intended to be a seductive manner;
-      they are bold, but some of them rather well-looking. They claim to be an
-      unmixed race of ancient lineage; but I suspect their blood is no purer
-      than their morals. There is not much in Egypt that is <i>not</i>
-      hopelessly mixed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Of the mile-and-a-half avenue of Sphinxes that once connected Luxor with
-      Karnak, we see no trace until we are near the latter. The country is open
-      and beautiful with green wheat, palms, and sycamores. Great Karnak does
-      not show itself until we are close upon it; its vast extent is hidden by
-      the remains of the wall of circuit, by the exterior temples and pylons. It
-      is not until we have passed beyond the great&mdash;but called small&mdash;temple
-      of Rameses III., at the north entrance, and climbed the pyramidal tower to
-      the west of the Great Hall, that we begin to comprehend the magnitude of
-      these ruins, and that only days of wandering over them and of study would
-      give us their gigantic plan.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Karnak is not a temple, but a city rather; a city of temples, palaces,
-      obelisks, colossal statues, It is, like a city, a growth of many
-      centuries. It is not a conception or the execution of a purpose; it is the
-      not always harmonious accretion of time and wealth and vanity. Of the
-      slowness of its growth some idea may be gained from the fact that the
-      hieroglyphics on one face of one of its obelisks were cut two hundred and
-      fifty years after those on the opposite face. So long ago were both
-      chiseled, however, they are alike venerable to us. I shouldn't lose my
-      temper with a man who differed with me only a thousand years about the
-      date of any event in Egypt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They were working at this mass of edifices, sacred or profane, all the way
-      from Osirtasen I. down to Alexander II.; that is from about 3064 B. c.
-      according to Mariette (Bunsen, 2781, Wilkinson, 2080,&mdash;it doesn't
-      matter) to only a short time before our era. There was a modest beginning
-      in the plain but chaste temple of Osirtasen; but each king sought to outdo
-      his predecessor until Sethi I. forever distanced rivalry in building the
-      Great Hall. And after him it is useless for anyone else to attempt
-      greatness by piling up stones. The length of the temples, pylons, and
-      obelisks, <i>en</i> suite from west to east, is 1180 feet; but there are
-      other outlying and gigantic ruins; I suppose it is fully a mile and a half
-      round the wall of circuit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is nothing in the world of architecture like the Great Hall; nothing
-      so massive, so surprising, and, for me, at least, so crushingly
-      oppressive. What monstrous columns! And how thickly they are crowded
-      together! Their array is always compared to a forest. The comparison is
-      apt in some respects; but how free, uplifting is a forest, how it expands
-      into the blue air, and lifts the soul with it. A piece of architecture is
-      to be judged, I suppose, by the effect it produces. It is not simply that
-      this hall is pagan in its impression; it misses the highest architectural
-      effect by reason of its unrelieved heaviness. It is wonderful; it was a
-      prodigious achievement to build so many big columns.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The setting of enormous columns so close together that you can only see a
-      few of them at one point of view is the architecture of the Great Hall.
-      Upon these, big stones are put for a roof. There is no reason why this
-      might not have been repeated over an acre of ground. Neither from within
-      nor from without can you see the extent of the hall. * The best view of it
-      is down the center aisle, formed by the largest columns; and as these have
-      height as well as bulk, and the sky is now seen above them, the effect is
-      of the highest majesty. This hall was dimly lighted by windows in the
-      clerestory, the frames of which exhibit a freedom of device and grace of
-      carving worthy of a Gothic cathedral. These columns, all richly
-      sculptured, are laid up in blocks of stone of half the diameter, the
-      joints broken. If the Egyptians had dared to use the arch, the principle
-      of which they knew, in this building, so that the columns could have stood
-      wide apart and still upheld the roof, the sight of the interior would have
-      been almost too much for the human mind. The spectator would have been
-      exalted, not crushed by it.
-    </p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-     * The Great Hall measures one hundred and seventy feet by
-     three hundred and twenty-nine; in this space stand one
-     hundred and thirty-four columns; twelve of these, forming
-     the central avenue of one hundred and seventy feet, are
-     sixty-two feet high, without plinth and abacus, and eleven
-     feet six inches in diameter; the other one hundred and
-     twenty-two columns are forty-two feet five inches in height
-     and about nine feet in diameter. The great columns stand
-     only fifteen or sixteen feet apart.
-</pre>
-    <p>
-      Not far off is the obelisk which Amunoo-het erected to the memory of her
-      father. I am not sure but it will stand long after The Hall of Sethi is a
-      mass of ruins; for already is the water sapping the foundations of the
-      latter, some of the columns lean like reeling drunken men, and one day,
-      with crash after crash, these giants will totter, and the blocks of stone
-      of which they are built will make another of those shapeless heaps to
-      which sooner or later our solidest works come. The red granite shaft of
-      the faithful daughter lifts itself ninety-two feet into the air, and is
-      the most beautiful as it is the largest obelisk ever raised.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sanctuary of red granite was once very rich and beautiful; the high
-      polish of its walls and the remains of its exquisite carving, no less than
-      the colors that still remain, attest that. The sanctuary is a heap of
-      ruins, thanks to that ancient Shaker, Cambyses, but the sculptures in one
-      of the chambers are the most beautiful we have seen; the colors, red,
-      blue, and green are still brilliant, the ceiling is spangled with stars on
-      a blue firmament. Considering the hardness of this beautiful syenite and
-      the difficulty of working it, I think this is the most admirable piece of
-      work in Thebes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It may be said of some of the sculptures here, especially of the very
-      spirited designs and intelligent execution of those of the Great Hall,
-      that they are superior to those on the other side of the river. And yet
-      there is endless theological reiteration here; there are dreary miles of
-      the same gods in the same attitudes; and you cannot call all of them
-      respectable gods. The longer the religion endured the more conventional
-      and repetitious its representations became. The sculptors came to have a
-      traditional habit of doing certain scenes and groups in a certain way; and
-      the want of life and faith in them becomes very evident in the sculptures
-      of the Ptolemaic period.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In this vast area you may spend days and not exhaust the objects worth
-      examination. On one of our last visits we found near the sacred lake very
-      striking colossal statues which we had never seen before.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When this city of temples and palaces, the favorite royal residence, was
-      entire and connected with Luxor by the avenue of sphinxes, and the great
-      edifices and statues on the west side of the river were standing, this
-      broad basin of the Nile, enclosed by the circle of rose-colored limestone
-      mountains, which were themselves perforated with vast tombs, must have
-      been what its splendid fame reports, when it could send to war twenty
-      thousand chariots. But, I wonder whether the city, aside from its
-      conspicuous temples and attached palaces, was one of mud-hovels, like
-      those of most peoples of antiquity, and of the modern Egyptians.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0037" id="linkimage-0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0227.jpg" alt="0227 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0038" id="linkimage-0038"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      alt="228 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XVIII.&mdash;ASCENDING THE RIVER.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E resume our
-      voyage on the sixth of January, but we leave a hostage at Luxor as we did
-      at Asioot. This is a sailor who became drunk and turbulent last night on
-      hasheesh, and was sent to the governor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We found him this morning with a heavy chain round his neck and tied to a
-      stake in one corner of the court-yard of the house where the governor has
-      his office. I think he might have pulled up the stake and run away; but I
-      believe it is not considered right here for a prisoner to escape. The
-      common people are so subdued that they wilt, when authority puts its heavy
-      hand on them. Near the sailor was a mud-kennel into which he could crawl
-      if he liked. This is the jail of Luxor. Justice is summary here. This
-      sailor is confined without judge or jury and will be kept till he refunds
-      his advance wages, since he was discharged from the boat as a dangerous
-      man.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sailors dread the lock-up, for they may be forced into the army as the
-      only way out of it; they would much prefer the stick. They are used to the
-      stick; four thousand years of Egyptians have been accustomed to the stick.
-      A beating they do not mind much, or at least are not humiliated by it as
-      another race would be. But neither the prospect of the jail nor the stick
-      will wean them from hasheesh, which is the curse of Egypt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We spread our sails to a light breeze and depart in company with two other
-      dahabeëhs, one English (the <i>Philæ</i>) and one American (the <i>Dongela</i>).
-      Africa and weeks of leisure and sunny skies are before us. We loiter along
-      in company, in friendly company one may say, now passing a boat and now
-      falling behind, like three ducks coquetting in a swift current. We are
-      none of us in a hurry, we are indifferent to progress, our minds are calm
-      and our worst passions not excited. We do not appear to be going rapidly,
-      I sometimes doubt if we are going forward at all, but it gradually becomes
-      apparent that we are in the midst of a race!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Everything in this world is relative. I can imagine a fearfully exciting
-      match of mud-turtles on a straight track. Think of the agony, prolonged,
-      that the owner of the slow turtle would suffer! We are evidently in for
-      it; and a race like this, that lasts all day, will tire out the hardiest
-      sportsman.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The <i>Rip Van Winkle</i> is the largest boat and happens to have the
-      lead; but the <i>Philo</i>, a very graceful, gay boat, is crawling up to
-      us; the <i>Dongola</i> also seems to feel a breeze that we have not. We
-      want a strong wind&mdash;the <i>Rip Van Winkle</i> does not wake up in a
-      mild air. As we desire, it freshens a little, the big sail swells, and the
-      ripples are louder at the bow. Unfortunately there is breeze enough for
-      three, and the other vessels shake themselves out like ducks about to fly.
-      It is a pretty sight just now; the spread of three great bird-wing sails,
-      the long gaily-painted cabins and decks, the sweeping yards and the
-      national colors and variegated streamers flying!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They are gaining on us; the <i>Philae</i> gets inside, and taking our
-      wind, for a moment, creeps ahead, and attempts to sheer across our bow to
-      force us into the swifter current; the <i>Dongola</i> sails in at the same
-      time, and a jam and collision appear inevitable. A storm of language
-      bursts out of each boat; men run to stern and bow, to ward off intruders
-      or to disengage an entangled spar; all the crew, sailors, reises, and
-      dragomans are in the most active vociferation. But the <i>Philae</i>.
-      sails out of the coil, the <i>Dongola</i> draws ahead at the risk of going
-      into the bank, and our crew seize the punt-poles and have active work to
-      prevent going fast on a sand-bar to leeward.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But the prosperity of the wicked is short. The wind falls flat. Instantly
-      our men are tumbling into the water and carrying the rope ashore to track.
-      The lines are all out, and the men are attempting to haul us round a deep
-      bend. The steersmen keep the head of the vessels off shore, and the strain
-      on the trackers is tremendous. The cables flop along the bank and scrape
-      over the shadoofs, raking down a stake now and then, and bring out from
-      their holes the half-naked, protesting proprietors, who get angry and
-      gesticulate,&mdash;as if they had anything to do with our race!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The men cannot hold the cable any longer; one by one they are forced to
-      let go, at the risk of being drawn down the crumbling bank, and the cable
-      splashes into the water. The sailors run ahead and come down upon a
-      sand-spit; there are puffs of wind in our sail, and we appear to have made
-      a point, when the men wade on board and haul in the rope. The <i>Dongola</i>
-      is close upon us; the <i>Philae</i> has lost by keeping too far out in the
-      current. Oh, for a wind!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Instead of a wind, there is a bland smile in the quiet sky. Why, O
-      children, do you hasten? Have not Nile sailors been doing this for four
-      thousand years? The boats begin to yaw about. Poles are got out. We are
-      all in danger of going aground; we are all striving to get the inside
-      track at yonder point; we are in danger of collision; we are most of all
-      in danger of being left behind. The crews are crazy with excitement; as
-      they hurriedly walk the deck, rapidly shifting their poles in the shallow
-      water, calling upon Yàlësah in quicker and quicker respirations, &ldquo;Hâ
-      Yâlësah,&rdquo; &ldquo;Hâ Yàlësah,&rdquo; as they run to change the sail at the least
-      indication of a stray breeze, as they see first one dahabeëh and then the
-      other crawling ahead, the contest assumes a serious aspect, and their
-      cries are stronger and more barbaric.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The <i>Philæ</i> gets inside again and takes the bank. We are all
-      tracking, when we come to the point, beyond which is a deep bay. If we had
-      wind we should sail straight across; the distance round the bay is much
-      greater&mdash;but then we can track along the bank; there is deep water
-      close under the bank and there is deep water in mid-river. The <i>Philæ</i>
-      stands away into the river, barely holding its own in the light zephyr.
-      The <i>Dongola</i> tries to follow the <i>Philæ</i>, but swings round, and
-      her crew take to the poles. Our plan appears to be more brilliant. Our men
-      take the cable out upon a sand-bank in the stream and attempt to tow us
-      along the center channel. All goes well. We gain on the Philæ and pass it.
-      We see the Dongola behind, struggling in the shallows. But the sand-bank
-      is a failure. The men begin to go from it into deeper water; it is up to
-      their knees, it reaches our &ldquo;drawers,&rdquo; which we bought for the crew; it
-      comes to the waist, their shoulders are going under. It is useless; the
-      cable is let go, and the men rush back to the sand-bar. There they are.
-      Our cable is trailing down-stream; we have lost our crew, and the wind is
-      just coming up. While we are sending the sandal to rescue our mariners,
-      the <i>Philae</i> sails away, and the <i>Dongola</i> shows her stern.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The travelers on the three boats, during all this contest, are sitting on
-      the warm, sunny decks, with a pretence of books, opera-glasses in hand;
-      apparently regarding the scene with indifference, but no doubt, underneath
-      this mask, longing to &ldquo;lick&rdquo; the other boats.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After all, we come to Erment (which is eight miles from Luxor) not far
-      apart. The race is not to the swift. There is no swift on the Nile. But I
-      do not know how there could be a more exciting race of eight miles a day!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At Erment is a large sugar-factory belonging to the Khedive; and a
-      governor lives here in a big house and harem. The house has an extensive
-      garden laid out by old Mohammed Ali, and a plantation of oranges, Yusef
-      Effendis, apples, apricots, peaches, lemons, pomegranates, and limes. The
-      plantation shows that fruit will grow on the Upper Nile, if one will take
-      the trouble to set out and water the trees. But we see none. The high Nile
-      here last September so completely washed out the garden that we can get
-      neither flowers nor vegetables. And some people like the rapidly-grown
-      watery vegetables that grow along the Nile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our dragoman wanted some of the good, unrefined loaf-sugar from the
-      factory here, and I went with him to see how business is transacted. We
-      had difficulty in finding any office or place of sale about the
-      establishment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But a good-natured dwarf, who seemed to spring out of the ground on our
-      landing, led us through courts and amid dilapidated warehouses to a gate,
-      in which sat an Arab in mixed costume. Within the gate hung a pair of
-      steelyards, and on one side was a bench. The gate, the man, the steelyards
-      and the bench constituted an office. Beyond was an avenue, having low
-      enclosures on each side, that with broken pillars and walls of brick
-      looked very much like Pompeii; in a shallow bin was a great heap of
-      barley, thrashed, and safe and dry in the open air.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The indifferent man in the gate sent for a slow boy, who, in his own time,
-      came, bearing a key, a stick an inch square and a foot long, with four
-      short iron spikes stuck in one side near the end. He led us up a dirty
-      brick stairway outside a building, and inserting the key in a wooden lock
-      to match (both lock and key are unchanged since the Pharaohs) let us into
-      a long, low room, like an old sail-loft full of dust, packages of
-      sugar-paper and old account-books. When the shutters were opened we found
-      at one end a few papers of sugar, which we bought, and our own sailor
-      carried down to the steelyards. The indifferent man condescended to weigh
-      the sugar, and took the pay: but he lazily handed the money to the boy,
-      who sauntered off with it. Naturally, you wouldn't trust that boy; but
-      there was an indescribable sense of the worthlessness of time and of money
-      and of all trade, about this transaction, that precluded the possibility
-      of the smartness of theft.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next day the race is resumed, with little wind and a good deal of
-      tracking; we pass the <i>Dongola</i> and are neck-and-neck with the <i>Philæ</i>
-      till afternoon, when we bid her good-bye; and yet not with unmixed
-      pleasure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a pleasure to pass a boat and leave her toiling after; but the
-      pleasure only lasts while she is in sight. If I had my way, we should
-      constantly overhaul boats and pass them, and so go up the stream in
-      continual triumph. It is only the cold consciousness of duty performed
-      that sustains us, when we have no spectators of our progress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We go on serenely. Hailing a crossing ferry-boat, loaded with squatting,
-      turbaned tatterdemalion Arabs, the dragoman cries, &ldquo;<i>Salaam aleykoom</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The reply is, &ldquo;<i>Salaam</i>; peace be with you; may God meet you in the
-      way; may God receive you to himself.&rdquo; The Old Testament style.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      While we were loitering along by Mutâneh&mdash;where there is a
-      sugar-factory, and an irrigating steam-pump&mdash;trying to count the
-      string of camels, hundreds of them moving along the bank against the
-      sunset&mdash;camels that bring the cane to be ground&mdash;and our crew
-      were eating supper, I am sorry to say that the <i>Philæ</i> poled ahead of
-      us, and went on to Esneh. But something happened at Esneh.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was dark when we arrived at that prosperous town, and, of course,
-      Abd-el-Atti, who would like to have us go blazing through Egypt like
-      Cambyses, sent up a rocket. Its fiery serpent tore the black night above
-      us, exploded in a hundred colored stars, and then dropped its stick into
-      the water. Splendid rockets! The only decent rockets to be had in Egypt
-      are those made by the government; and Abd-el-Atti was the only dragoman
-      who had been thoughtful enough to make interest with the authorities and
-      procure government rockets. Hence our proud position on the river. We had
-      no firman, and the Khedive did not pay our expenses, but the Viceroy
-      himself couldn't out-rocket us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As soon as we had come to shore and tied up, an operation taking some time
-      in the darkness, we had a visit from the governor, a friend of our
-      dragoman; but this visit was urgent and scarcely friendly. An attempt had
-      been made to set the town on fire! A rocket from an arriving boat had been
-      thrown into the town, set fire to the straw on top of one of the houses
-      and&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did it spread?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No, but it might. Allah be praised, it was put out. But the town might
-      have been burned down. What a way is this, to go along the Nile firing the
-      towns at night?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Twasn't our rocket. Ours exploded in the air and fell into the river.
-      Did the other boat, did the <i>Philæ</i> send up a rocket when she
-      arrived?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes. There was another rocket.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Dat's it, dat's it,&rdquo; says Abd-el-Atti. &ldquo;Why you no go on board the <i>Philæ</i>
-      and not come here?&rdquo; And then he added to us, as if struck by a new idea,
-      &ldquo;Where the <i>Philæ</i> get dat rocket? I think he have no rocket before.
-      Not send any up Christmas in Asioot, not send any up in Luxor. I think
-      these very strange. Not so?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What kind of rocket was it, that burnt the town?&rdquo; we ask the governor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I have it.&rdquo; The governor ran to the cabin door and called. A servant
-      brought in the exploded missile. It was a large-sized rocket, like our
-      own; twice as large as the rockets that are not made by the government,
-      and which travelers usually carry.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Seems like our stick,&rdquo; cries Abd-el-Atti, getting excited. He examined
-      the sheath with great care. We all gathered round the cabin lamp to look
-      at the fatal barrel. It had a mark on it, something in Arabic. Abd-el-Atti
-      turned it sideways and upside down, in an effort to get at the meaning of
-      the writing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;That is government; make 'em by the government; no doubt,&rdquo; he says,
-      standing off and becoming solemn. &ldquo;Dat rocket been stole. Looks like our
-      rocket.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Abd-el-Atti flies out, and there is a commotion outside. &ldquo;Who has been
-      stealing rockets and sell 'em to that dragoman?&rdquo; Boxes are opened. Rockets
-      are brought in and compared. The exploded one has the same mark as ours,
-      it is the same size.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A new anxiety dawns upon Abd-el-Atti. What if the <i>Philæ</i> has
-      government rockets? Our distinction is then gone. No It can't be. &ldquo;I know
-      what every dragoman do in Cairo. <i>He</i> can't get dese rocket. Nobody
-      get 'em dis year 'cept us.&rdquo; Abd-el-Atti is for probing the affair to the
-      bottom. Perhaps the hasheesh-eating sailor we discharged at Luxor stole
-      some of our rockets and sold them, and thus they came into possession of
-      the dragoman of the <i>Philæ</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The young governor, however, has had enough of it. He begins to see a
-      great deal of vexation to himself, and a row with an English and an
-      American dahabeëh and with natives besides. Let it drop, he says. The
-      governor sits on the divan smoking a cigar. He is accompanied by a Greek
-      friend, a merchant of the place. When the governor's cigar goes out, in
-      his distraction, the Greek takes it, and re-lights it, puffing it till it
-      is well enflamed, and then handing it again to the governor. This is a
-      custom of the East. The servant often &ldquo;starts&rdquo; the cigarette for his
-      master.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh, let it go,&rdquo; says the governor, appealing to us: &ldquo;It is finish now. It
-      was no damage done.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But it might,&rdquo; cries Abd-el-Atti, &ldquo;it might burn the town,&rdquo; taking now
-      the <i>rôle</i> which the governor had dropped.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But you are not to blame. It is not you have done it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Then why you come to me, why you come to us wid de rocket? Why you no go
-      to the <i>Philo?</i> Yes. You know that we, nobody else on the river got
-      government rockets. This government rocket&mdash;look the mark,&rdquo; seizing
-      the exploded one and a new one, and bringing the ends of both so near the
-      lamp that we all fear an explosion. &ldquo;There is something underhands here.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But it's all right now.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How it's all right? Story go back to Cairo; <i>Rip Van Winkle</i> been
-      gone set fire to Esneh. Whose rockets? Government rockets. Nobody have
-      government rockets 'cept Abd-el-Atti.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      A terrific confab goes on in the cabin for nearly an hour between the
-      dragoman, the governor, and the Greek; a lively entertainment and
-      exhibition of character which we have no desire to curtail. The governor
-      is a young, bright, presentable fellow, in Frank dress, who for liveliness
-      of talk and gesture would pass for an Italian.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When the governor has departed, our reïs comes in and presents us a
-      high-toned &ldquo;certificate&rdquo; from the gentleman on board the <i>Philo</i>.&mdash;he
-      has learned from our reïs, steersman and some sailors (who are in a panic)
-      that they are all to be hauled before the governor and punished on a
-      charge of stealing rockets and selling them to his dragoman. He certifies
-      that he bought his own rockets in the Mooskee; that his dragoman was with
-      him when he bought them; and that our men are innocent. The certificate
-      further certifies that our conduct toward our crew is unjustifiable and an
-      unheard of cruelty!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Here was a <i>casus belli!</i> Foreign powers had intervened. The right of
-      search and seizure was again asserted; the war of 1812 was about to be
-      renewed. Our cruelty unheard of? We should think so. All the rest of it
-      was unheard of also. We hadn't the slightest intention of punishing
-      anybody or hauling anybody before the governor. When Abd-el-Atti hears the
-      certificate, he shakes his head:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Buy 'em like this in the Mooskee? Not be. Not find government rockets in
-      any shop in the Mooskee. Something underhands by that dragoman!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Not wishing to light the flames of war in Africa, we immediately took
-      servants and lanterns and called on the English Man-of-War. The Man-of-War
-      had gone to bed. It was nine o'clock.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What for he send a certificate and go to bed?&rdquo; Abd-el-Atti wants to know.
-      &ldquo;I not like the looks of it.&rdquo; He began to be suspicious of all the world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the morning the gentleman returned our call. He did not know or care
-      whose rocket set fire to the town. Couldn't hurt these towns much to burn
-      them; small loss if all were burned. The governor had called on him to say
-      that no damage was done. Our dragoman had, however, no right to accuse his
-      of buying stolen rockets. His were bought in Cairo, etc., etc. And the
-      matter dropped amicably and without bloodshed. But Abd-el-Atti's
-      suspicions widened as he thought it over:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What for de Governor come to me? What for he not go to dat boat what fire
-      de rocket? What for de Governor come been call on me wid a rocket? The
-      Governor never come been call on me wid a rocket before!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is customary for all boats which are going above the first cataract to
-      stop at Esneh twenty-four hours to bake bread for the crew; frequently
-      they are detained longer, for the wheat has to be bought, ground in one of
-      the little ox-power mills, mixed and baked; and the crew hire a mill and
-      oven for the time being and perform the labor. We had sent sailors ahead
-      to bake the bread, and it was ready in the morning; but we stayed over.,
-      according to immemorial custom. The sailors are entitled to a holiday, and
-      they like to take it where there are plenty of coffee-houses and a large
-      colony of Ghawazee girls.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Esneh is not a bad specimen of an Egyptian town. There is a temple here,
-      of which only the magnificent portico has been excavated; the remainder
-      lies under the town. We descend some thirty feet to get to the floor of
-      the portico,&mdash;to such a depth has it been covered. And it is a modern
-      temple, after all, of the period of the Roman occupation. We find here the
-      cartouches of the Cæsars. The columns are elegant and covered with very
-      good sculpture; each of the twenty-five has a different capital, and some
-      are developed into a hint of the Corinthian and the composite. The rigid
-      constraints of the Egyptian art are beginning to give way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The work in the period of the Romans differs much from the ancient; it is
-      less simple, more ornamented and debased. The hieroglyphics are not so
-      carefully and nicely cut. The figures are not so free in drawing, and not
-      so good as the old, except that they show more anatomical knowledge, and
-      begin to exhibit a little thought of perspective. The later artists
-      attempt to work out more details in the figure, to show muscles and
-      various members in more particularity. Some of the forms and faces have
-      much beauty, but most of them declare a decline of art, or perhaps an
-      attempt to reconcile the old style with new knowledge, and consequent
-      failure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We called on the governor. He was absent at the mosque, but his servant
-      gave us coffee. The Oriental magnificence of the gubernatorial residence
-      would impress the most faithless traveler. The entrance was through a yard
-      that would be a fair hen-yard (for common fowl) at home, and the small
-      apartment into which we were shown might serve for a stable; but it had a
-      divan, some carpets and chairs, and three small windows. Its roof was
-      flat, made of rough split palm-trees covered with palm-leaves. The
-      governor's lady lives somewhere in the rear of this apartment of the
-      ruler, in a low mud-house, of which we saw the outside only.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Passing near the government house, we stopped in to see the new levy of
-      soldiers, which amounts to some four hundred from this province. Men are
-      taken between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, and although less than
-      three per cent, of those liable are seized, the draft makes a tremendous
-      excitement all along the river. In some places the bazaars are closed and
-      there is a general panic as if pestilence had broken out.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Outside the government house, and by the river bank, are women, squatting
-      in the sand, black figures of woe and dirt, bewailing their relations
-      taken away. In one mud-hovel there is so much howling and vocal grief that
-      we think at first a funeral is in progress. We are permitted to look into
-      the lock-up where the recruits are detained waiting transportation down
-      the river. A hundred or two fellaheen, of the average as to nakedness and
-      squalor of raiment, are crowded into a long room with a dirt floor, and
-      among them are many with heavy chains on their ankles. These latter are
-      murderers and thieves, awaiting trial or further punishment. It is in fact
-      the jail, and the soldiers are forced into this companionship until their
-      departure. One would say this is a bad nursery for patriots.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The court of justice is in the anteroom of this prison; and the two ought
-      to be near together. The Kadi, or judge, sits cross-legged on the ground,
-      and others squat around him, among them a scribe. When we enter, we are
-      given seats on a mat near the judge, and offered coffee and pipes. This is
-      something like a court of justice, sociable and friendly. It is impossible
-      to tell who is prisoner, who are witnesses, and who are spectators. All
-      are talking together, the prisoner (who is pointed out) louder than any
-      other, the spectators all joining in with the witnesses. The prisoner is
-      allowed to &ldquo;talk back,&rdquo; which must be a satisfaction to him. When the
-      hubbub subsides, the judge pronounces sentence; and probably he does as
-      well as an ordinary jury.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The remainder of this town is not sightly. In fact I do not suppose that
-      six thousand people could live in one dirtier, dustier, of more wretched
-      houses; rows of unclean, shriveled women, with unclean babies, their eyes
-      plastered with flies, sitting along the lanes called streets; plenty of
-      men and boys in no better case as to clothing; but the men are physically
-      superior to the women. In fact we see no comely women except the
-      Ghawazees. Upon the provisions, the grain, the sweet-cakes exposed for
-      sale on the ground, flies settle so that all look black.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our next run is to Assouan. Let us sketch it rapidly, and indicate by a
-      touch the panorama it unrolled for us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 <i>Philæ</i> 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The following morning (Sunday) is cold, but we are off early as if nothing
-      had happened, and run rapidly against the current&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 &ldquo;first bell&rdquo; is about to ring in
-      Christian countries.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Above Kom Ombos we come to a little village in a palm-grove&mdash;a scene
-      out of the depths of Africa,&mdash;such as you have often seen in pictures&mdash;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?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;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;&mdash;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?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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,&mdash;better at any rate than the groan of the
-      sakiyas.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is everywhere a sort of Sabbath calm&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0039" id="linkimage-0039"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0244.jpg" alt="0244 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0040" id="linkimage-0040"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0245.jpg" alt="0245 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XIX.&mdash;PASSING THE CATARACT OF THE NILE.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>T 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&mdash;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,&mdash;what tropical freights are
-      these for the imagination!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 <i>débris</i> 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;it may be only
-      a piastre or two&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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: &ldquo;This boat is
-      very large; it is too long to go up the cataract.&rdquo; 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:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But you took up General McClellan's boat, and that is large.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Very true, Effendi; but why the howadji no come when Genel Clemen come,
-      ten days ago?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We chose to come now.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Such a long boat never went up. Why you no come two months ago when the
-      river was high?&rdquo; This sort of talk goes on for half an hour. Then the
-      other sheykh speaks:&mdash;&ldquo;What is the use of talking all this stuff to
-      Mohammed Abd-el-Atti Effendi; he knows all about it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;That is true. We will go.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, it is 'finish',&rdquo; says Abd-el-Atti.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 &ldquo;Nubian costumes&rdquo; for women&mdash;a string with leather
-      fringe depending to tie about the loins&mdash;suggestions of a tropical
-      life under the old dispensation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;to warm outwardly and inwardly the natives of the
-      Soudan&mdash;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&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 &ldquo;Hâ! Yâlêsah. Hâ! Yâlêsah!&rdquo; 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.
-    </p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-     * 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, &ldquo;Ha!
-     Yalesah!&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;Ha! Yale-sah&rdquo; (as I catch it)
-     is only a corruption of &ldquo;Halee!'.esà <i>Seyyidnà Eesà</i>&rdquo; is the
-     Moslem name for &ldquo;Our Lord Jesus.&rdquo;
- </pre>
-    <p>
-      The first thing the Nubians want is something to eat&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not at all what we have expected. In appearence this is a cataract
-      without any falls and scarcely any rapids. A person brought up on Niagara
-      or Montmorency feels himself trifled with here. The fishermen in the
-      mountain streams of America has come upon many a scene that resembles this&mdash;a
-      river-bed strewn with boulders. Only, this is on a grand scale. We had
-      been led to expect at least high precipices, walls of lofty rock, between
-      which we should sail in the midst of raging rapids and falls; and that
-      there would be hundreds of savages on the rocks above dragging our boat
-      with cables, and occasionally plunging into the torrent in order to carry
-      a life-line to the top of some seagirt rock. All of this we did not see;
-      but yet we have more respect for the cataract before we get through it
-      than when it first came in sight.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What we see immediately before us is a basin, it may be a quarter of a
-      mile, it may be half a mile broad, and two miles long; a wild expanse of
-      broken granite rocks and boulders strewn hap-hazard, some of them showing
-      the red of the syenite and others black and polished and shining in the
-      sun; a field of rocks, none of them high, of fantastic shapes; and through
-      this field the river breaks in a hundred twisting passages and chutes, all
-      apparently small, but the water in them is foaming and leaping and
-      flashing white; and the air begins to be pervaded by the multitudinous
-      roar of rapids. On the east, the side of the land-passage between Assouan
-      and Philæ, were high and jagged rocks in odd forms, now and then a
-      palm-tree, and here and there a mud-village. On the west the basin of the
-      cataract is hemmed in by the desert hills, and the yellow Libyan sand
-      drifts over them in shining waves and rifts, which in some lights have the
-      almost maroon color that we see in Gerome's pictures. To the south is an
-      impassable barrier of granite and sand&mdash;mountains of them&mdash;beyond
-      the glistening fields of rocks and water through which we are to find our
-      way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The difficulty of this navigation is not one cataract to be overcome by
-      one heroic effort, but a hundred little cataracts or swift tortuous
-      sluiceways, which are much more formidable when we get into them than they
-      are when seen at a distance. The dahabeëhs which attempt to wind through
-      them are in constant danger of having holes knocked in their hulls by the
-      rocks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The wind is strong, and we are sailing swiftly on. It is im possible to
-      tell which one of the half-dozen equally uninviting channels we are to
-      take. We guess, and of course point out the wrong one. We approach, with
-      sails still set, a narrow passage through which the water pours in what is
-      a very respectable torrent; but it is not a straight passage, it has a
-      bend in it; if we get through it, we must make a sharp turn to the left or
-      run upon a ridge of rocks, and even then we shall be in a boiling surge;
-      and if we fail to make head against the current we shall go whirling down
-      the caldron, bumping on the rocks&mdash;not a pleasant thing for a
-      dahabeëh one hundred and twenty feet long with a cabin in it as large as a
-      hotel. The passage of a boat of this size is evidently an event of some
-      interest to the cataract people, for we see groups of them watching us
-      from the rocks, and following along the shore. And we think that seeing
-      our boat go up from the shore might be the best way of seeing it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We draw slowly in, the boat trembling at the entrance of the swift water;
-      it enters, nosing the current, feeling the tug of the sail, and hesitates.
-      Oh, for a strong puff of wind! There are five watchful men at the helm;
-      there is a moment's silence, and the boat still hesitates. At this
-      critical instant, while we hold our breath, a naked man, whose name I am
-      sorry I cannot give to an admiring American public, appears on the bow
-      with a rope in his teeth; he plunges in and makes for the nearest rock. He
-      swims hand over hand, swinging his arms from the shoulders out of water
-      and striking them forward splashing along like a sidewheeler&mdash;the
-      common way of swimming in the heavy water of the Nile. Two other black
-      figures follow him and the rope is made fast to the point of the rock. We
-      have something to hold us against the stream.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now a terrible tumult arises on board the boat which is seen to be
-      covered with men; one gang is hauling on the rope to draw the great sail
-      close to its work; another gang is hauling on the rope attached to the
-      rock, and both are singing that wild chanting chorus without which no
-      Egyptian sailors pull an ounce or lift a pound; the men who are not
-      pulling are shouting and giving orders; the Sheykhs, on the upper deck
-      where we sit with American serenity exaggerated amid the Babel, are
-      jumping up and down in a frenzy of excitement, screaming and
-      gesticulating. We hold our own; we gain a little; we pull forward where
-      the danger of a smash against the rocks is increased. More men appear on
-      the rocks, whom we take to be spectators of our passage. No; they lay hold
-      of the rope. With the additional help we still tremble in the jaws of the
-      pass. I walk aft, and the stern is almost upon the rocks; it grazes them;
-      but in the nick of time the bow swings round, we turn short off into an
-      eddy; the great wing of a sail is let go, and our cat-like sailors are
-      aloft, crawling along the slender yard, which is a hundred feet in length,
-      and furling the tugging canvas. We breathe more freely, for the first
-      danger is over. The first gate is passed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In this lull there is a confab with the Sheykhs. We are at the island of
-      Sehâyl, and have accomplished what is usually the first day's journey of
-      boats. It would be in harmony with the Oriental habit to stop here for the
-      remainder of the day and the night. But our dragoman has in mind to
-      accomplish, if not the impossible, what is synonymous with it in the East,
-      the unusual. The result of the inflammatory stump-speeches on both sides
-      is that two or three gold pieces are passed into the pliant hand of the
-      head Sheykh, and he sends for another Sheykh and more men.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For some time we have been attended by increasing processions of men and
-      boys on shore; they cheered us as we passed the first rapid; they came out
-      from the villages, from the crevices of the rocks, their blue and white
-      gowns flowing in the wind, and make a sort of holiday of our passage. Less
-      conspicuous at first are those without gowns&mdash;they are hardly
-      distinguishable from the black rocks amid which they move. As we lie here,
-      with the rising roar of the rapids in our ears, we can see no further
-      opening for our passage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we are preparing to go on. Ropes are carried out forward over the
-      rocks. More men appear, to aid us. We said there were fifty. We count
-      seventy; we count eighty; there are at least ninety. They come up by a
-      sort of magic. From whence are they, these black forms: They seem to grow
-      out of the rocks at the wave of the Sheykh's hand; they are of the same
-      color, shining men of granite. The swimmers and divers are simply smooth
-      statues hewn out of the syenite or the basalt. They are not unbaked clay
-      like the rest of us. One expects to see them disappear like stones when
-      they jump into the water. The mode of our navigation is to draw the boat
-      along, hugged close to the shore rocks, so closely that the current cannot
-      get full hold of it, and thus to work it round the bends.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are crawling slowly on in this manner, clinging to the rocks, when
-      unexpectedly a passage opens to the left. The water before us runs like a
-      mill-race. If we enter it, nothing would seem to be able to hold the boat
-      from dashing down amidst the breakers. But the bow is hardly let to feel
-      the current before it is pulled short round, and we are swinging in the
-      swift stream. Before we know it we are in the anxiety of another tug.
-      Suppose the rope should break! In an instant the black swimmers are
-      overboard striking out for the rocks; two ropes are sent out, and secured;
-      and, the gangs hauling on them, we are working inch by inch through,
-      everybody on board trembling with excitement. We look at our watches; it
-      seems only fifteen minutes since we left Assouan; it is an hour and a
-      quarter. Do we gain in the chute? It is difficult to say; the boat hangs
-      back and strains at the cables; but just as we are in the pinch of doubt,
-      the big sail unfurls its wing with exciting suddenness, a strong gust
-      catches it, we feel the lift, and creep upward, amid an infernal din of
-      singing and shouting and calling on the Prophet from the gangs who haul in
-      the sail-rope, who tug at the cables attached to the rocks, who are
-      pulling at the hawsers on the shore. We forge ahead and are about to dash
-      into a boiling caldron before us, from which there appears to be no
-      escape, when a skillful turn of the great creaking helm once more throws
-      us to the left, and we are again in an eddy with the stream whirling by
-      us, and the sail is let go and is furled.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The place where we lie is barely long enough to admit our boat; its stern
-      just clears the rocks, its bow is aground on hard sand. The number of men
-      and boys on the rocks has increased; it is over one hundred, it is one
-      hundred and thirty; on a re-count it is one hundred and fifty. An anchor
-      is now carried out to hold us in position when we make a new start; more
-      ropes are taken to the shore, two hitched to the bow and one to the stern.
-      Straight before us is a narrow passage through which the water comes in
-      foaming ridges with extraordinary rapidity. It seems to be our way; but of
-      course it is not. We are to turn the corner sharply, before reaching it;
-      what will happen then we shall see.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is a slight lull in the excitement, while the extra hawsers are got
-      out and preparations are made for the next struggle. The sheykhs light
-      their long pipes, and squatting on deck gravely wait. The men who have
-      tobacco roll up cigarettes and smoke them. The swimmers come on board for
-      reinforcement. The poor fellows are shivering as if they had an ague fit.
-      The Nile may be friendly, though it does not offer a warm bath at this
-      time of the year, but when they come out of it naked on the rocks the cold
-      north wind sets their white teeth chartering. The dragoman brings out a
-      bottle of brandy. It is none of your ordinary brandy, but must have cost
-      over a dollar a gallon, and would burn a hole in a new piece of cotton
-      cloth. He pours out a tumblerful of it, and offers it to one of the
-      granite men. The granite man pours it down his throat in one flow, without
-      moving an eye-winker, and holds the glass out for another. His throat must
-      be lined with zinc. A second tumblerful follows the first. It is like
-      pouring liquor into a brazen image.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I said there was a lull, but this is only in contrast to the preceding
-      fury. There is still noise enough, over and above the roar of the waters,
-      in the preparations going forward, the din of a hundred people screaming
-      together, each one giving orders, and elaborating his opinion by a
-      rhetorical use of his hands. The waiting crowd scattered over the rocks
-      disposes itself picturesquely, as an Arab crowd always does, and probably
-      cannot help doing, in its blue and white gowns and white turbans. In the
-      midst of these preparations, and unmindful of any excitement or contusion,
-      a Sheykh, standing upon a little square of sand amid the rocks, and so
-      close to the deck of the boat that we can hear his &ldquo;Allâhoo Akbar&rdquo; (God is
-      most Great), begins his kneelings and prostrations towards Mecca, and
-      continues at his prayers, as undisturbed and as unregarded as if he were
-      in a mosque, and wholly oblivious of the babel around him. So common has
-      religion become in this land of its origin! Here is a half-clad Sheykh of
-      the desert stopping, in the midst of his contract to take the howadji up
-      the cataract, to raise his forefinger and say, &ldquo;I testify that there is no
-      deity but God; and I testify that Mohammed is his servant and his
-      apostle.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Judging by the eye, the double turn we have next to make is too short to
-      admit our long hull. It does not seem possible that we can squeeze
-      through; but we try. We first swing out and take the current as if we were
-      going straight up the rapids. We are held by two ropes from the stern,
-      while by four ropes from the bow, three on the left shore and one on an
-      islet to the right, the cataract people are tugging to draw us up. As we
-      watch almost breathless the strain on the ropes, look! there is a man in
-      the tumultuous rapid before us swiftly coming down as if to his
-      destruction. Another one follows, and then another, till there are half a
-      dozen men and boys in this jeopardy, this situation of certain death to
-      anybody not made of cork. And the singular thing about it is that the men
-      are seated upright, sliding down the shining water like a boy, who has no
-      respect for his trowsers, down a snow-bank. As they dash past us, we see
-      that each man is seated on a round log about five feet long; some of them
-      sit upright with their legs on the log, displaying the soles of their
-      feet, keeping the equilibrium with their hands. These are smooth slimy
-      logs that a white man would find it difficult to sit on if they were on
-      shore, and in this water they would turn with him only once&mdash;the log
-      would go one way and the man another. But these fellows are in no fear of
-      the rocks below; they easily guide their barks out of the rushing floods,
-      through the whirlpools and eddies, into the slack shore-water in the rear
-      of the boat, and stand up like men and demand backsheesh. These logs are
-      popular ferry-boats in the Upper Nile; I have seen a woman crossing the
-      river on one, her clothes in a basket and the basket on her head&mdash;and
-      the Nile is nowhere an easy stream to swim.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Far ahead of us the cataract people are seen in lines and groups,
-      half-hidden by the rocks, pulling and stumbling along; black figures are
-      scattered along lifting the ropes over the jagged stones, and freeing them
-      so that we shall not be drawn back, as we slowly advance; and severe as
-      their toil is, it is not enough to keep them warm when the chilly wind
-      strikes them. They get bruised on the rocks also, and have time to show us
-      their barked shins and request backsheesh. An Egyptian is never too busy
-      or too much in peril to forget to prefer that request at the sight of a
-      traveler. When we turn into the double twist I spoke of above, the bow
-      goes sideways upon a rock, and the stern is not yet free. The punt-poles
-      are brought into requisition; half the men are in the water; there is
-      poling and pushing and grunting, heaving, and &ldquo;Yah Mohammed, Yah Mohammed&rdquo;
-       with all which noise and outlay of brute strength, the boat moves a little
-      on and still is held close in hand. The current runs very swiftly We have
-      to turn almost by a right angle to the left and then by the same angle to
-      the right; and the question is whether the boat is not too long to turn in
-      the space. We just scrape along the rocks, the current growing every
-      moment stronger, and at length get far enough to let the stern swing. I
-      run back to see if it will go free. It is a close fit. The stern is clear;
-      but if our boat had been four or five feet longer, her voyage would have
-      ended then and there. There is now before us a straight pull up the
-      swiftest and narrowest rapid we have thus far encountered.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our sandal&mdash;the row-boat belonging to the dahabeëh, that becomes a
-      felucca when a mast is stepped into it&mdash;which has accompanied us
-      fitfully during the passage, appearing here and there tossing about amid
-      the rocks, and aiding occasionally in the transport of ropes and men to
-      one rock and another, now turns away to seek a less difficult passage. The
-      rocks all about us are low, from three feet to ten feet high. We have one
-      rope out ahead, fastened to a rock, upon which stand a gang of men,
-      pulling. There is a row of men in the water under the left side of the
-      boat, heaving at her with their broad backs, to prevent her smashing on
-      the rocks. But our main dragging force is in the two long lines of men
-      attached to the ropes on the left shore. They stretch out ahead of us so
-      far that it needs an opera-glass to discover whether the leaders are
-      pulling or only soldiering. These two long struggling lines are led and
-      directed by a new figure who appears upon this operatic scene. It is a
-      comical Sheykh, who stands upon a high rock at one side and lines out the
-      catch-lines of a working refrain, while the gangs howl and haul, in a
-      surging chorus. Nothing could be wilder or more ludicrous, in the midst of
-      this roar of rapids and strain of cordage. The Sheykh holds a long staff
-      which he swings like the baton of the leader of an orchestra, quite
-      unconscious of the odd figure he cuts against the blue sky. He grows more
-      and more excited, he swings his arms, he shrieks, but always in tune and
-      in time with the hauling and the wilder chorus of the cataract men, he
-      lifts up his right leg, he lifts up his left leg, he is in the very
-      ecstasy of the musical conductor, displaying his white teeth, and raising
-      first one leg and then the other in a delirious swinging motion, all the
-      more picturesque on account of his flowing blue robe and his loose white
-      cotton drawers. He lifts his leg with a gigantic pull, which is enough in
-      itself to draw the boat onward, and every time he lifts it, the boat gains
-      on the current. Surely such an orchestra and such a leader was never seen
-      before. For the orchestra is scattered over half an acre of ground,
-      swaying and pulling and singing in rhythmic show, and there is a high wind
-      and a blue sky, and rocks and foaming torrents, and an African village
-      with palms in the background, amid the <i>debris</i> of the great
-      convulsion of nature which has resulted in this chaos. Slowly we creep up
-      against the stiff boiling stream, the good Moslems on deck muttering
-      prayers and telling their beads, and finally make the turn and pass the
-      worst eddies; and as we swing round into an ox-bow channel to the right,
-      the big sail is again let out and hauled in, and with cheers we float on
-      some rods and come into a quiet shelter, a stage beyond the journey
-      usually made the first day. It is now three o'clock.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have come to the real cataract, to the stiffest pull and the most
-      dangerous passage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A small freight dahabeëh obstructs the way, and while this is being hauled
-      ahead, we prepare for the final struggle. The chief cataract is called Bab
-      (gate) Aboo Rabbia, from one of Mohammed Ali's captains who some years ago
-      vowed that he would take his dahabeëh up it with his own crew and without
-      aid from the cataract people. He lost his boat. It is also sometimes
-      called Bab Inglese from a young Englishman, named Cave, who attempted to
-      swim down it early one morning, in imitation of the Nubian swimmers, and
-      was drawn into the whirlpools, and not found for days after. For this last
-      struggle, in addition to the other ropes, an enormous cable is bent on,
-      not tied to the bow, but twisted round the cross-beams of the forward
-      deck, and carried out over the rocks. From the shelter where we lie we are
-      to push out and take the current at a sharp angle. The water of this main
-      cataract sucks down from both sides above through a channel perhaps one
-      hundred feet wide, very rapid and with considerable fall, and with such
-      force as to raise a ridge in the middle. To pull up this hill of water is
-      the tug; if the ropes let go we shall be dashed into a hundred pieces on
-      the rocks below and be swallowed in the whirlpools. It would not be a
-      sufficient compensation for this fate to have this rapid hereafter take
-      our name.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The preparations are leisurely made, the lines are laid along the rocks
-      and the men are distributed. The fastenings are carefully examined. Then
-      we begin to move. There are now four conductors of this gigantic orchestra
-      (the employment of which as a musical novelty I respectfully recommend to
-      the next Boston Jubilee), each posted on a high rock, and waving a stick
-      with a white rag tied to it. It is now four o'clock. An hour has been
-      consumed in raising the curtain for the last act. We are now carefully
-      under way along the rocks which are almost within reach, held tight by the
-      side ropes, but pushed off and slowly urged along by a line of half-naked
-      fellows under the left side, whose backs are against the boat and whose
-      feet walk along the perpendicular ledge. It would take only a sag of the
-      boat, apparently, to crush them. It does not need our eyes to tell us when
-      the bow of the boat noses the swift water. Our sandal has meantime carried
-      a line to a rock on the opposite side of the channel, and our sailors haul
-      on this and draw us ahead. But we are held firmly by the shore lines. The
-      boat is never suffered, as I said, to get an inch the advantage, but is
-      always held tight in hand.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we appear at the foot of the rapid, men come riding down it on logs as
-      before, a sort of horseback feat in the boiling water, steering themselves
-      round the eddies and landing below us. One of them swims round to the rock
-      where a line is tied, and looses it as we pass; another, sitting on the
-      slippery stick and showing the white soles of his black feet, paddles
-      himself about amid the whirlpools. We move so slowly that we have time to
-      enjoy all these details, to admire the deep yellow of the Libyan sand
-      drifted over the rocks at the right, and to cheer a sandal bearing the
-      American flag which is at this moment shooting the rapids in another
-      channel beyond us, tossed about like a cork. We see the meteor flag
-      flashing out, we lose it behind the rocks, and catch it again appearing
-      below. &ldquo;Oh star spang&rdquo;&mdash;but our own orchestra is in full swing again.
-      The comical Sheykh begins to swing his arms and his stick back and forth
-      in an increasing measure, until his whole body is drawn into the vortex of
-      his enthusiasm, and one leg after the other, by a sort of rhythmic hitch,
-      goes up displaying the white and baggy cotton drawers. The other three
-      conductors join in, and a deafening chorus from two hundred men goes up
-      along the ropes, while we creep slowly on amid the suppressed excitement
-      of those on board who anxiously watch the straining cables, and with a
-      running fire of &ldquo;backsheesh, backsheesh,&rdquo; from the boys on the rocks close
-      at hand. The cable holds; the boat nags and jerks at it in vain; through
-      all the roar and rush we go on, lifted I think perceptibly every time the
-      sheykh lifts his leg.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At the right moment the sail is again shaken down; and the boat at once
-      feels it. It is worth five hundred men. The ropes slacken; we are going by
-      the wind against the current; haste is made to unbend the cable; line
-      after line is let go until we are held by one alone; the crowd thins out,
-      dropping away with no warning and before we know that the play is played
-      out, the cataract people have lost all interest in it and are scattering
-      over the black rocks to their homes. A few stop to cheer; the chief
-      conductor is last seen on a rock, swinging the white rag, hurrahing and
-      salaaming in grinning exultation; the last line is cast off, and we round
-      the point and come into smooth but swift water, and glide into a calm
-      mind. The noise, the struggle, the tense strain, the uproar of men and
-      waves for four hours are all behind; and hours of keener excitement and
-      enjoyment we have rarely known. At 12.20 we left Assouan; at 4.45 we swung
-      round the rocky bend above the last and greatest rapid. I write these
-      figures, for they will be not without a melancholy interest to those who
-      have spent two or three days or a week in making this passage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Turning away from the ragged mountains of granite which obstruct the
-      straight course of the river, we sail by Mahatta, a little village of
-      Nubians, a port where the trading and freight boats plying between the
-      First and Second Cataract load and unload. There is a forest of masts and
-      spars along the shore which is piled with merchandise, and dotted with
-      sunlit figures squatting in the sand as if waiting for the goods to
-      tranship themselves. With the sunlight slanting on our full sail, we glide
-      into the shadow of high rocks, and enter, with the suddenness of a first
-      discovery, into a deep winding river, the waters of which are dark and
-      smooth, between lofty walls of granite. These historic masses, which have
-      seen pass so many splendid processions and boastful expeditions of
-      conquest in what seems to us the twilight of the world, and which excited
-      the wonder of Father Herodotus only the other day, almost in our own time
-      (for the Greeks belong to us and not to antiquity as it now unfolds
-      itself), are piled in strange shapes, tottling rock upon rock, built up
-      grotesquely, now in likeness of an animal, or the gigantic profile of a
-      human face, or temple walls and castle towers and battlements. We wind
-      through this solemn highway, and suddenly, in the very gateway, Philæ! The
-      lovely! Philæ, the most sentimental ruin in Egypt. There are the great
-      pylon of the temple of Isis, the long colonnades of pillars, the beautiful
-      square temple, with lofty columns and elongated capitals, misnamed
-      Pharaoh's bed. The little oblong island, something like twelve hundred
-      feet long, banded all round by an artificial wall, an island of rock
-      completely covered with ruins, is set like the stone of a ring, with a
-      circle of blue water about it, in the clasp of higher encircling granite
-      peaks and ledges. On the left bank, as we turn to pass to the east of the
-      island, is a gigantic rock which some persons have imagined was a colossus
-      once, perhaps in pre-Adamic times, but which now has no resemblance to
-      human shape, except in a breast and left arm. Some Pharaoh cut his
-      cartouche on the back&mdash;a sort of postage-stamp to pass the image
-      along down the ages. The Pharaohs were ostentatious; they cut their names
-      wherever they could find a conspicuous and smooth place.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      While we are looking, distracted with novelty at every turn and excited by
-      a grandeur and loveliness opening upon us every moment, we have come into
-      a quiet haven, shut in on all sides by broken ramparts,&mdash;alone with
-      this island of temples. The sun is about to set, and its level light comes
-      to us through the columns, and still gilds with red and yellow gold the
-      Libyan sand sifted over the cliffs. We moor at once to a sand-bank which
-      has formed under the broken walls, and at once step on shore. We climb to
-      the top of the temple walls; we walk on the stone roof; we glance into the
-      temple on the roof, where is sculptured the resurrection of Osiris. This
-      cannot be called an old temple. It is a creation of the Ptolemies, though
-      it doubtless replaced an older edifice. The temple of Isis was not begun
-      more than three centuries before our era. Not all of these structures were
-      finished&mdash;the priests must have been still carving on their walls
-      these multitudes of sculptures, when Christ began his mission; and more
-      than four centuries after that the mysterious rites of Isis were still
-      celebrated in these dark chambers. It is silent and dead enough here now;
-      and there lives nowhere upon the earth any man who can even conceive the
-      state of mind that gave those rites vitality. Even Egypt has changed its
-      superstitions.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Peace has come upon the earth after the strain of the last few hours. We
-      can scarcely hear the roar of the rapids, in the beating of which we had
-      been. The sun goes, leaving a changing yellow and faint orange on the
-      horizon. Above in the west is the crescent moon; and now all the sky
-      thereabout is rosy, even to the zenith, a delicate and yet deep color,
-      like that of the blush-rose&mdash;a transparent color that glows. A little
-      later we see from our boat the young moon through the columns of the
-      lesser temple. The January night is clear and perfectly dry; no dew is
-      falling&mdash;no dew ever falls here&mdash;and the multiplied stars burn
-      with uncommon lustre. When everything else is still, we hear the roar of
-      the rapids coming steadily on the night breeze, sighing through the old
-      and yet modern palace-temples of the <i>parvenu</i> Ptolemies, and of
-      Cleopatra&mdash;a new race of conquerors and pleasure-hunters, who in vain
-      copied the magnificent works of the ancient Pharaohs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Here on a pylon gate, General Dessaix has recorded the fact that in
-      February (Ventose) in the seventh year of the Republic, General Bonaparte
-      being then in possession of Lower Egypt he pursued to this spot the
-      retreating Memlooks. Egyptian kings, Ethiopian usurpers, Persians, Greeks,
-      Romans, Nectanebo, Cambyses, Ptolemy, Philadelphus, Cleopatra and her
-      Roman lovers, Dessaix,&mdash;these are all shades now.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0041" id="linkimage-0041"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0264.jpg" alt="0264 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0042" id="linkimage-0042"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0265.jpg" alt="0265 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XX.&mdash;ON THE BORDERS OF THE DESERT.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>N PASSING the
-      First Cataract of the Nile we pass an ancient boundary line; we go from
-      the Egypt of old to the Ethiopia of old; we go from the Egypt proper of
-      to-day, into Nubia. We find a different country, a different river; the
-      people are of another race; they have a different language. We have left
-      the mild, lazy, gentle fellaheen&mdash;a mixed lot, but in general of
-      Arabic blood&mdash;and come to Barâbra, whose district extends from Philæ
-      to the Second Cataract, a freer, manlier, sturdier people altogether.
-      There are two tribes of them, the Kendos and the Nooba; each has its own
-      language.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Philæ was always the real boundary line, though the Pharaohs pushed their
-      frontier now and again, down towards the Equator, and built temples and
-      set up their images, as at Aboo Simbel, as at Samneh, and raked the south
-      land for slaves and ivory, concubines and gold. But the Ethiopians turned
-      the tables now and again, and conquered Egypt, and reigned in the palaces
-      of the Pharaohs, taking that title even, and making their names dreaded as
-      far as Judea and Assyria.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Ethiopians were cousins indeed of the old Egyptians, and of the
-      Canaanites, for they were descendants of Cush, as the Egyptians were of
-      Mizriam, and the Canaanites were of Canaan; three of the sons of Ham. The
-      Cushites, or Ethiops, although so much withdrawn from the theater of
-      history, have done their share of fighting&mdash;the main business of man
-      hitherto. Besides quarrels with their own brethren, they had often the
-      attentions of the two chief descendants of Shem,&mdash;the Jews and the
-      Arabs; and after Mohammed's coming, the Arabs descended into Nubia and
-      forced the inhabitants into their religion at the point of the sword. Even
-      the sons of Japhet must have their crack at these children of the
-      &ldquo;Sun-burned.&rdquo; It was a Roman prefect who, to avenge an attack on Svene by
-      a warlike woman, penetrated as far south as El Berkel (of the present
-      day), and overthrew Candace the Queen of the Ethiopians in Napata, her
-      capital; the large city, also called Meroë, of which Herodotus heard such
-      wonders.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Beyond Ethiopia lies the vast, black cloud of Negroland. These negroes,
-      with the crisp, woolly hair, did not descend from anybody, according to
-      the last reports; neither from Shem, Ham nor Japhet. They have no part in
-      the royal house of Noah. They are left out in the heat. They are the
-      puzzle of ethnologists, the mystery of mankind. They are the real
-      aristocracy of the world, their origin being lost in the twilight of time;
-      no one else can trace his descent so far back and come to nothing. M.
-      Lenormant says the black races have no tradition of the Deluge. They
-      appear to have been passed over altogether, then. Where were they hidden?
-      When we first know Central Africa they are there. Where did they come
-      from? The great effort of ethnologists is to get them dry-shod round the
-      Deluge, since derivation from Noah is denied them. History has no
-      information how they came into Africa. It seems to me that, in history,
-      whenever we hear of the occupation of a new land, there is found in it a
-      primitive race, to be driven out or subdued. The country of the primitive
-      negro is the only one that has never invited the occupation of a more
-      powerful race. But the negro blood, by means of slavery, has been
-      extensively distributed throughout the Eastern world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These reflections did not occur to us the morning we left Philæ. It was
-      too early. In fact, the sun was just gilding &ldquo;Pharaoh's bed,&rdquo; as the
-      beautiful little Ptolemaic temple is called, when we spread sail and, in
-      the shadow of the broken crags and savage rocks, began to glide out of the
-      jaws of this wild pass. At early morning everything has the air of
-      adventure. It was as if we were discoverers, about to come into a new
-      African kingdom at each turn in the swift stream.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      One must see, he carnot imagine, the havoc and destruction hereabout, the
-      grotesque and gigantic fragments of rock, the islands of rock, the
-      precipices of rock, made by the torrent when it broke through here. One of
-      these islands is Biggeh&mdash;all rocks, not enough soft spot on it to set
-      a hen. The rocks are piled up into the blue sky; from their summit we get
-      the best view of Philæ&mdash;the jewel set in this rim of stone.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Above Philæ we pass the tomb of a holy man, high on the hill, and
-      underneath it, clinging to the slope, the oldest mosque in Nubia, the
-      Mosque of Belal, falling now into ruin, but the minaret shows in color no
-      sign of great age. How should it in this climate, where you might leave a
-      pair of white gloves upon the rocks for a year, and expect to find them
-      unsoiled.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How old do you suppose that mosque is Abd-el-Atti?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I tink about twelve hundred years old. Him been built by the Friends of
-      our prophet when they come up here to make the people believe.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I like this euphuism. &ldquo;But,&rdquo; we ask, &ldquo;suppose they didn't believe, what
-      then?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;When thim believe, all right; when thim not believe, do away wid 'em.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But they might believe something else, if not what Mohammed believed.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, what our Prophet say? Mohammed, he say, find him anybody believe in
-      God, not to touch him; find him anybody believe in the Christ, not to
-      touch him; find him anybody believe in Moses, not to touch him; find him
-      believe in the prophets, not to touch him; find him believe in bit wood,
-      piece stone, do way wid him. Not so? Men worship something wood, stone, I
-      can't tell&mdash;I tink dis is nothing.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Abd-el-Atti always says the &ldquo;Friends&rdquo; of Mohammed, never followers or
-      disciples. It is a pleasant word, and reminds us of our native land.
-      Mohammed had the good sense that our politicians have. When he wanted
-      anything, a city taken, a new strip of territory added, a &ldquo;third term,&rdquo; or
-      any trifle, he &ldquo;put himself in the hands of his friends.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The Friends were successful in this region. While the remote Abyssinians
-      retained Christianity, the Nubians all became Moslems, and so remain to
-      this day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You think, then, Abd-el-Atti, that the Nubians believed?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Thim 'bliged. But I tink these fellows, all of 'em, Musselmens as far as
-      the throat; it don't go lower down.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The story is that this mosque was built by one of Mohammed's captains
-      after the great battle here with the Infidels&mdash;the Nubians. Those who
-      fell in the fight, it is also only tradition, were buried in the cemetery
-      near Assouan, and they are martyrs: to this day the Moslems who pass that
-      way take off their slippers and shoes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After the battle, as the corpses of the slain lay in indistinguishable
-      heaps, it was impossible to tell who were martyrs and who were
-      unbelievers. Mohammed therefore ordered that they should bury as Moslems
-      all those who had large feet, and pleasant faces, with the mark of prayer
-      on the forehead. The bodies of the others were burned as infidels.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we sweep along, the mountains are still high on either side, and the
-      strips of verdure are very slight. On the east bank, great patches of
-      yellow sand, yellow as gold, and yet reddish in some lights, catch the
-      sun.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I think it is the finest morning I ever saw, for clearness and dryness.
-      The thermometer indicates only 60°, and yet it is not too cool. The air is
-      like wine. The sky is absolutely cloudless, and of wonderful clarity. Here
-      is a perfectly pure and sweet atmosphere. After a little, the wind
-      freshens, and it is somewhat cold on deck, but the sky is like sapphire;
-      let the wind blow for a month, it will raise no cloud, nor any film of it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Everything is wanting in Nubia that would contribute to the discomfort of
-      a winter residence:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It never rains;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is never any dew above Philæ;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are no flies;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are no fleas;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are no bugs, nor any insects whatever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The attempt to introduce fleas into Nubia by means of dahabeëhs has been a
-      failure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In fact there is very little animal life; scarcely any birds are seen;
-      fowls of all sorts are rare. There are gazelles, however, and desert
-      hares, and chameleons. Our chameleons nearly starved for want of flies.
-      There are big crocodiles and large lizards.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a bend a few miles above Philæ is a whirlpool called Shaymtel Wah, from
-      which is supposed to be a channel communicating under the mountain to the
-      Great Oasis one hundred miles distant. The popular belief in these
-      subterranean communications is very common throughout the East. The holy
-      well, Zem-Zem, at Mecca, has a connection with a spring at El Gebel in
-      Syria. I suppose that is perfectly well known. Abd-el-Atti has tasted the
-      waters of both; and they are exactly alike; besides, did he not know of a
-      pilgrim who lost his drinking-cup in Zem-Zem and recovered it in El Gebel.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This Nubia is to be sure but a river with a colored border, but I should
-      like to make it seem real to you and not a mere country of the
-      imagination. People find room to live here; life goes on after a fashion,
-      and every mile there are evidences of a mighty civilization and a great
-      power which left its record in gigantic works. There was a time, before
-      the barriers broke away at Silsilis, when this land was inundated by the
-      annual rise; the Nile may have perpetually expanded above here into a
-      lake, as Herodotus reports.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We sail between low ridges of rocky hills, with narrow banks of green and
-      a few palms, but occasionally there is a village of square mud-houses. At
-      Gertassee, boldly standing out on a rocky platform, are some beautiful
-      columns, the remains of a temple built in the Roman time. The wind is
-      strong and rather colder with the turn of noon; the nearer we come to the
-      tropics the colder it becomes. The explanation is that we get nothing but
-      desert winds; and the desert is cool at this season; that is, it breeds at
-      night cool air, although one does not complain of its frigidity who walks
-      over it at midday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After passing Tafa, a pretty-looking village in the palms, which boasts
-      ruins both pagan and Christian, we come to rapids and scenery almost as
-      wild and lovely as that at Philæ. The river narrows, there are granite
-      rocks and black boulders in the stream; we sail for a couple of miles in
-      swift and deep water, between high cliffs, and by lofty rocky islands&mdash;not
-      without leafage and some cultivation, and through a series of rapids, not
-      difficult but lively. And so we go cheerily on, through savage nature and
-      gaunt ruins of forgotten history; past Kalâbshe, where are remains of the
-      largest temple in Nubia; past Bayt el Wellee&mdash;&ldquo;the house of the
-      saint&rdquo;&mdash;where Rameses II. hewed a beautiful temple out of the rock;
-      past Gerf Hossdyn, where Rameses II. hewed a still larger temple out of
-      the rock and covered it with his achievements, pictures in which he
-      appears twelve feet high, and slaying small enemies as a husbandman
-      threshes wheat with a flail. I should like to see an ancient stone wall in
-      Egypt, where this Barnum of antiquity wasn't advertising himself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We leave him flailing the unfortunate; at eight in the evening we are
-      still going on, first by the light of the crescent moon, and then by
-      starlight, which is like a pale moonlight, so many and lustrous are the
-      stars; and last, about eleven o'clock we go aground, and stop a little
-      below Dakkeh, or seventy-one miles from Philæ, that being our modest run
-      for the day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Dakkeh, by daylight, reveals itself as a small mud-village attached to a
-      large temple. You would not expect to find a temple here, but its great
-      pylon looms over the town and it is worth at least a visit. To see such a
-      structure in America we would travel a thousand miles; the traveler on the
-      Nile debates whether he will go ashore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The bank is lined with the natives who have something to sell, eggs, milk,
-      butter in little greasy &ldquo;pats,&rdquo; and a sheep. The men are, as to features
-      and complexion, rather Arabic than Nubian. The women have the high
-      cheek-bones and broad faces of our Indian squaws, whom they resemble in a
-      general way. The little girls who wear the Nubian costume (a belt with
-      fringe) and strings of beads, are not so bad; some of them well formed.
-      The morning is cool and the women all wear some outer garment, so that the
-      Nubian costume is not seen in its simplicity, except as it is worn by
-      children. I doubt if it is at any season. So far as we have observed the
-      Nubian women they are as modest in their dress as their Egyptian sisters.
-      Perhaps ugliness and modesty are sisters in their country. All the women
-      and girls have their hair braided in a sort of plait in front, and heavily
-      soaked with grease, so that it looks as if they had on a wig or a frontlet
-      of leather; it hangs in small, hard, greasy curls, like leathern thongs,
-      down each side. The hair appears never to be undone&mdash;only freshly
-      greased every morning. Nose-rings and earrings abound.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This handsome temple was began by Ergamenes, an Ethiopian king ruling at
-      Meroë, at the time of the second Ptolemy, during the Greek period; and it
-      was added to both by Ptolemies and Cæsars. This Nubia would seem to have
-      been in possession of Ethiopians and Egyptians turn and turn about, and,
-      both having the same religion, the temples prospered.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Ergamenes has gained a reputation by a change he made in his religion, as
-      it was practiced in Meroë. When the priests thought a king had reigned
-      long enough it was their custom to send him notice that the gods had
-      ordered him to die; and the king, who would rather die than commit an
-      impiety, used to die. But Ergamenes tried another method, which he found
-      worked just as well; he assembled all the priests, and slew them&mdash;a
-      very sensible thing on his part.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You would expect such a man to build a good temple. The sculptures are
-      very well executed, whether they are of his time, or owe their inspiration
-      to Berenice and Cleopatra; they show greater freedom and variety than
-      those of most temples; the figures of lion, monkeys, cows, and other
-      animals are excellent; and there is a picture of a man playing on a
-      musical instrument, a frame with strings stretched over it, played like a
-      harp but not harp shaped&mdash;the like of which is seen nowhere else. The
-      temple has the appearance of a fortification as well as a place of
-      worship. The towers of the propylon are ascended by interior flights of
-      stairs, and have, one above the other, four good-sized chambers. The
-      stairways and the rooms are lighted by slits in the wall about an inch in
-      diameter on the outside; but cut with a slant from the interior through
-      some five feet of solid stone. These windows are exactly like those in
-      European towers, and one might easily imagine himself in a Middle Age
-      fortification. The illusion is heightened by the remains of Christian
-      paintings on the walls, fresh in color, and in style very like those of
-      the earliest Christian art in Italian churches. In the temple we are
-      attended by a Nubian with a long and threatening spear, such as the people
-      like to carry here; the owner does not care for blood, however; he only
-      wants a little backsheesh.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Beyond Dakkeh the country opens finely; the mountains fall back, and we
-      look a long distance over the desert on each side, the banks having only a
-      few rods of green. Far off in the desert on either hand and in front, are
-      sharp pyramidal mountains, in ranges, in groups, the resemblance to
-      pyramids being very striking. The atmosphere as to purity is
-      extraordinary. Simply to inspire it is a delight for which one may well
-      travel thousands of miles.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We pass small patches of the castor-oil plant, and of a reddish-stemmed
-      bush, bearing the Indian <i>bendigo</i>, Arabic <i>bahima</i>, the fruit a
-      sort of bean in appearance and about as palatable. The castor-oil is much
-      used by the women as a hair-dressing, but they are not fastidious; they
-      use something else if oil is wanting. The demand for butter for this
-      purpose raised the price of it enormously this morning at Dakkeh.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the afternoon, waiting for wind, we walk ashore and out upon the naked
-      desert&mdash;the desert which is broken only by an occasional oasis, from
-      the Atlantic to the Red Sea; it has a basis of limestone, strewn with sand
-      like gold-dust, and a <i>detritus</i> of stone as if it had been scorched
-      by fire and worn by water. There is a great pleasure in strolling over
-      this pure waste blown by the free air. We visit a Nubian village, and buy
-      some spurious scarabæi off the necks of the ladies of the town&mdash;alas,
-      for rural simplicity! But these women are not only sharp, they respect
-      themselves sufficiently to dress modestly and even draw their shawls over
-      their faces. The children take the world as they find it, as to clothes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The night here, there being no moisture in the air is as brilliant as the
-      day; I have never seen the moon and stars so clear elsewhere. These are
-      the evenings that invite to long pipes and long stories. Abd-el-Atti opens
-      his budget from time to time, as we sit on deck and while the time with
-      anecdotes and marvels out of old Arab chronicles, spiced with his own
-      ready wit and singular English. Most of them are too long for these pages;
-      but here is an anecdote which, whether true or not illustrates the
-      character of old Mohammed Ali:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Mohammed Ali sent one of his captains, name of Walee Kasheef, to Derr,
-      capital of Nubia (you see it by and by, very fashionable place, like I see
-      'em in Hydee Park, what you call Rotten Row). Walee when he come there,
-      see the women, their hair all twisted up and stuck together with grease
-      and castor-oil, and their bodies covered with it. He called the sheykhs
-      together and made them present of soap, and told them to make the women
-      clean the hair and wash themselves, and make themselves fit for prayer. It
-      was in accordin' to the Moslem religion so to do.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The Nubians they not like this part of our religion, they not like it at
-      all. They send the sheykhs down to have conversation with Mohammed Ali,
-      who been stop at Esneh. They complain of what Walee done. Mohammed send
-      for Walee, and say, 'What this you been done in Nubia?' 'Nothing, your
-      highness, 'cept trying to make the Nubians conform to the religion.'
-      'Well,' says old Mohammed, 'I not send you up there as a priest; I send
-      you up to get a little money. Don't you trouble the Nubians. We don't care
-      if they go to Gennéh or Gehennem, if you get the money.'.rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      So the Nubians were left in sin and grease, and taxed accordingly. And at
-      this day the taxes are even heavier. Every date-palm and every sakiya is
-      taxed. A sakiya sometimes pays three pounds a year, when there is not a
-      piece of fertile land for it to water three rods square.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0043" id="linkimage-0043"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0274.jpg" alt="0274 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXI&mdash;ETHIOPIA.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>T IS a sparkling
-      morning at Wady Saboda; we have the desert and some of its high, scarred,
-      and sandy pyramidal peaks close to us, but as is usual where a wady, or
-      valley, comes to the river, there is more cultivated land. We see very
-      little of the temple of Rameses II. in this &ldquo;Valley of the Lions,&rdquo; nor of
-      the sphinxes in front of it. The desert sand has blown over it and over it
-      in drifts like snow, so that we walk over the buried sanctuary, greatly to
-      our delight. It is a pleasure to find one <i>adytum</i> into which we
-      cannot go and see this Rameses pretending to make offerings, but really,
-      as usual, offering to show himself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At the village under the ledges, many of the houses are of stone, and the
-      sheykh has a pretentious stone enclosure with little in it, all to
-      himself. Shadoofs are active along the bank, and considerable crops of
-      wheat, beans, and corn are well forward. We stop to talk with a
-      bright-looking Arab, who employs men to work his shadoofs, and lives here
-      in an enclosure of cornstalks, with a cornstalk kennel in one corner,
-      where he and his family sleep. There is nothing pretentious about this
-      establishment, but the owner is evidently a man of wealth, and, indeed, he
-      has the bearing of a shrewd Yankee. He owns a camel, two donkeys, several
-      calves and two cows, and two young Nubian girls for wives, black as coal
-      and greased, but rather pleasant-faced. He has also two good guns&mdash;appears
-      to have duplicates of nearly everything. Out of the cornstalk shanty his
-      wives bring some handsome rugs for us to sit on.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Arab accompanies us on our walk, as a sort of host of the country, and
-      we are soon joined by others, black fellows; some of them carry the long
-      flint-lock musket, for which they seem to have no powder; and all wear a
-      knife in a sheath on the left arm; but they are as peaceable friendly folk
-      as you would care to meet, and simple-minded. I show the Arab my
-      field-glass, an object new to his experience. He looks through it, as I
-      direct, and is an astonished man, making motions with his hand, to
-      indicate how the distant objects are drawn towards him, laughing with a
-      soft and childlike delight, and then lowering the glass, looks at it, and
-      cries, &ldquo;Bismillah! Bismillah,&rdquo; an ejaculation of wonder, and also intended
-      to divert any misfortune from coming upon him on account of his indulgence
-      in this pleasure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He soon gets the use of the glass and looks beyond the river and all
-      about, as if he were discovering objects unknown to him before. The others
-      all take a turn at it, and are equally astonished and delighted. But when
-      I cause them to look through the large end at a dog near by, and they see
-      him remove far off in the desert, their astonishment is complete. My
-      comrade's watch interested them nearly as much, although they knew its
-      use; they could never get enough of its ticking and of looking at its
-      works, and they concluded that the owner of it must be a Pasha.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The men at work dress in the slight manner of the ancient Egyptians; the
-      women, however, wear garments covering them, and not seldom hide the face
-      at our approach. But the material of their dress is not always of the best
-      quality; an old piece of sacking makes a very good garment for a Nubian
-      woman. Most of them wear some trinkets, beads or bits of silver or
-      carnelian round the neck, and heavy bracelets of horn. The boys have not
-      yet come into their clothing, but the girls wear the leathern belt and
-      fringe adorned with shells.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The people have little, but they are not poor. It may be that this
-      cornstalk house of our friend is only his winter residence, while his
-      shadoof is most active, and that he has another establishment in town.
-      There are too many sakiyas in operation for this region to be anything but
-      prosperous, apparently. They are going all night as we sail along, and the
-      screaming is weird enough in the stillness. I should think that a prisoner
-      was being tortured every eighth of a mile on the bank. We are never out of
-      hearing of their shrieks. But the cry is not exactly that of pain; it is
-      rather a song than a cry, with an impish squeak in it, and a monotonous
-      iteration of one idea, like all the songs here. It always repeats one
-      sentence, which sounds like <i>Iskander logheh-n-e-e-e-n</i>&mdash;whatever
-      it is in Arabic; and there is of course a story about it. The king,
-      Alexander, had concealed under his hair two horns. Unable to keep the
-      secret to himself he told it in confidence to the sakiya; the sakiya
-      couldn't hold the news, but shrieked out, &ldquo;Alexander has two horns,&rdquo; and
-      the other sakiyas got it; and the scandal went the length of the Nile, and
-      never can be hushed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Arabs personify everything, and are as full of superstitions as the
-      Scotch; peoples who have nothing in common except it may be that the
-      extreme predestinationism of the one approaches the fatalism of the other&mdash;begetting
-      in both a superstitious habit, which a similar cause produced in the
-      Greeks. From talking of the sakiya we wander into stories illustrative of
-      the credulity and superstition of the Egyptians. Charms and incantations
-      are relied on for expelling diseases and warding off dangers. The
-      snake-charmer is a person still in considerable request in towns and
-      cities. Here in Nubia there is no need of his offices, for there are no
-      snakes; but in Lower Egypt, where snakes are common, the mud-walls and
-      dirt-floors of the houses permit them to come in and be at home with the
-      family. Even in Cairo, where the houses are of brick, snakes are much
-      feared, and the house that is reputed to have snakes in it cannot be
-      rented. It will stand vacant like an old mansion occupied by a ghost in a
-      Christian country. The snake-charmers take advantage of this popular fear.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Once upon a time when Abd-el-Atti was absent from the city, a
-      snake-charmer came to his house, and told his sister that he divined that
-      there were snakes in the house. &ldquo;My sister,&rdquo; the story goes on, &ldquo;never see
-      any snake to house, but she woman, and much 'fraid of snakes, and believe
-      what him say. She told the charmer to call out the snakes. He set to work
-      his mumble, his conjor&mdash;('.xorcism'. yes, dat's it, exorcism 'em, and
-      bring out a snake. She paid him one dollar.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Then the conjuror say, 'This the wife; the husband still in the house and
-      make great trouble if he not got out.'.rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He want him one pound for get the husband out, and my sister give it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;When I come home I find my sister very sick, very sick indeed, and I say
-      what is it? She tell me the story that the house was full of snakes and
-      she had a man call them out, but the fright make her long time ill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I said, you have done very well to get the snakes out, what could we do
-      with a house full of the nasty things? And I said, I must get them out of
-      another house I have&mdash;house I let him since to machinery.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Machinery? For what kind of machinery! Steam-engines?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No, misheenary&mdash;have a school in it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh, missionary.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, let 'em have it for bout three hundred francs less than I get
-      before. I think the school good for Cairo. I send for the snake-charmer,
-      and I say I have 'nother house I think has snakes in it, and I ask him to
-      divine and see. He comes back and says, my house is full of snakes, but he
-      can charm them out.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I say, good, I will pay you well. We appointed early next morning for the
-      operation, and I agreed to meet the charmer at my house. I take with me
-      big black fellow I have in the house, strong like a bull. When we get
-      there I find the charmer there in front of the house and ready to begin.
-      But I propose that we go in the house, it might make disturbance to the
-      neighborhood to call so many serpents out into the street. We go in, and I
-      sav, tell me the room of the most snakes. The charmer say, and as soon as
-      we go in there, I make him sign the black fellow and he throw the charmer
-      on the ground, and we tie him with a rope. We find in his bosom thirteen
-      snakes and scorpions. I tell him I had no idea there were so many snakes
-      in my house. Then I had the fellow before the Kadi; he had to pay back all
-      the money he got from my sister and went to prison. But,&rdquo; added
-      Abd-el-Atti, &ldquo;the doctor did not pay back the money for my sister's
-      illness.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Alexandria was the scene of another snake story. The owner of a house
-      there had for tenants an Italian and his wife, whose lease had expired,
-      but who would not vacate the premises. He therefore hired a snake-charmer
-      to go to the house one day when the family were out, and leave snakes in
-      two of the rooms. When the lady returned and found a snake in one room she
-      fled into another, but there another serpent raised his head and hissed at
-      her. She was dreadfully frightened, and sent for the charmer, and had the
-      snakes called out but she declared that she wouldn't occupy such a house
-      another minute. And the family moved out that day of their own accord. A
-      novel writ of ejectment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the morning we touched bottom as to cold weather, the thermometer at
-      sunrise going down to 47° it did, indeed, as we heard afterwards, go below
-      40° at Wady Haifa the next morning, but the days were sure to be warm
-      enough. The morning is perfectly calm, and the depth of the blueness of
-      the sky, especially as seen over the yellow desert sand and the blackened
-      surface of the sandstone hills, is extraordinary. An artist's
-      representation of this color would be certain to be called an
-      exaggeration. The skies of Lower Egypt are absolutely pale in comparison.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Since we have been in the tropics, the quality of the sky has been the
-      same day and night&mdash;sometimes a turquoise blue, such as on rare days
-      we get in America through a break in the clouds, but exquisitely delicate
-      for all its depth. We passed the Tropic of Cancer in the night, somewhere
-      about Dendodr, and did not see it. I did not know, till afterwards, that
-      there had been any trouble about it. But it seems that it has been moved
-      from Assouan, where Strabo put it and some modern atlases still place it,
-      southward, to a point just below the ruins of the temple of Dendoor, where
-      Osiris and Isis were worshipped. Probably the temple, which is thought to
-      be of the time of Augustus and consequently is little respected by any
-      antiquarian, was not built with any reference to the Tropic of Cancer; but
-      the point of the turning of the sun might well have been marked by a
-      temple to the mysterious deity who personified the sun and who was slain
-      and rose again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our walk on shore to-day reminded us of a rugged path in Switzerland.
-      Before we come to Kalkeh (which is of no account, except that it is in the
-      great bend below Korosko) the hills of sandstone draw close to the east
-      bank, in some places in sheer precipices, in others leaving a strip of
-      sloping sand. Along the cliff is a narrow donkey-path, which travel for
-      thousands of years has worn deep; and we ascend along it high above the
-      river. Wherever at the foot of the precipices there was a chance to grow a
-      handful of beans or a hill of corn, we found the ground occupied. In one
-      of these lonely recesses we made the acquaintance of an Arab family.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Walking rapidly, I saw something in the path, and held my foot just in
-      time to avoid stepping upon a naked brown baby, rather black than brown,
-      as a baby might be who spent his time outdoors in the sun without any
-      umbrella.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;By Jorge! a nice plumpee little chile,&rdquo; cried Abd-el-Atti, who is fond of
-      children, and picks up and shoulders the boy, who shews no signs of fear
-      and likes the ride.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We come soon upon his parents. The man was sitting on a rock smoking a
-      pipe. The woman, dry and withered, was picking some green leaves and
-      blossoms, of which she would presently make a sort of <i>purée</i>, that
-      appears to be a great part of the food of these people. They had three
-      children. Their farm was a small piece of the sloping bank, and was in
-      appearance exactly like a section of sandy railroad embankment grown to
-      weeds. They had a few beans and some squash or pumpkin vines, and there
-      were remains of a few hills of doora which had been harvested.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      While the dragoman talked with the family, I climbed up to their dwelling,
-      in a ravine in the rocks. The house was of the simplest architecture&mdash;a
-      circular stone enclosure, so loosely laid up that you could anywhere put
-      your hand through it. Over a segment of this was laid some cornstalks, and
-      under these the piece of matting was spread for the bed. That matting was
-      the only furniture of the house. All their clothes the family had on them,
-      and those were none too many&mdash;they didn't hold out to the boy. And
-      the mercury goes down to 470 these mornings! Before the opening of this
-      shelter, was a place for a fire against the rocks, and a saucepan,
-      water-jar, and some broken bottles The only attraction about this is its
-      simplicity. Probably this is the country-place of the proprietor, where he
-      retires for &ldquo;shange of air&rdquo; during the season when his crops are maturing,
-      and then moves into town under the palm-trees during the heat of summer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Talking about Mohammed (we are still walking by the shore) I found that
-      Abd-el-Atti had never heard the legend of the miraculous suspension of the
-      Prophet's coffin between heaven and earth; no Moslem ever believed any
-      such thing; no Moslem ever heard of it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Then there isn't any tradition or notion of that sort among Moslems?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No, sir. Who said it?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh, it's often alluded to in English literature&mdash;by Mr-Carlyle for
-      one, I think.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What for him say that? I tink he must put something in his book to make
-      it sell. How could it? Every year since Mohammed died, pilgrims been make
-      to his grave, where he buried in the ground; shawl every year carried to
-      cover it; always buried in that place. No Moslem tink that.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Once a good man, a Walee of Fez, a friend of the Prophet, was visited by
-      a vision and by the spirit of the Prophet, and he was gecited (excited) to
-      go to Mecca and see him. When he was come near in the way, a messenger
-      from the Prophet came to the Walee, and told him not to come any nearer;
-      that he should die and be buried in the spot where he then was. And it was
-      so. His tomb you see it there now before you come to Mecca.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;When Mohammed was asked the reason why he would not permit the Walee to
-      come to his tomb to see him, he said that the Walee was a great friend of
-      his, and if he came to his tomb he should feel bound to rise and see him;
-      and he ought not to do that, for the time of the world was not yet fully
-      come; if he rose from his tomb, it would be finish, the world would be at
-      an end. Therefore he was 'bliged to refuse his friend.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Nobody doubt he buried in the ground. But Ali, different. Ali, the
-      son-in-law of Mohammed (married his daughter Fat'meh, his sons Hasan and
-      Hoseyn,) died in Medineh. When he died, he ordered that he should be put
-      in a coffin, and said that in the morning there would come from the desert
-      a man with a dromedary; that his coffin should be bound upon the back of
-      the dromedary, and let go. In the morning, as was foretold, the man
-      appeared, leading a dromedary; his head was veiled except his eyes. The
-      coffin was bound upon the back of the beast, and the three went away into
-      the desert; and no man ever saw either of them more, or knows, to this
-      day, where Ali is buried. Whether it was a man or an angel with the
-      dromedary, God knows!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Getting round the great bend at Korosko and Amada is the most vexatious
-      and difficult part of the Nile navigation. The distance is only about
-      eight miles, but the river takes a freak here to run south-south-east, and
-      as the wind here is usually north-north-west, the boat has both wind and
-      current against it. But this is not all; it is impossible to track on the
-      west bank on account of the shallows and sandbars, and the channel on the
-      east side is beset with dangerous rocks. We thought ourselves fortunate in
-      making these eight miles in two days, and one of them was a very exciting
-      day. The danger was in stranding the dahabeëh on the rocks, and being
-      compelled to leave her; and our big boat was handled with great
-      difficulty.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Traders and travelers going to the Upper Nile leave the river at Korosko.
-      Here begins the direct desert route&mdash;as utterly waste, barren and
-      fatiguing as any in Africa&mdash;to Aboo Hamed, Sennaar and Kartoom. The
-      town lies behind a fringe of palms on the river, and backed by high and
-      savage desert mountains.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we pass we see on the high bank piles of merchandise and the white
-      tents of the caravans.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is still the region of slavery. Most of the Arabs, poor as they
-      appear, own one or two slaves, got from Sennaar or Darfoor&mdash;though
-      called generally Nubians. We came across a Sennaar girl to day of perhaps
-      ten years of age, hoeing alone in the field. The poor creature, whose
-      ideas were as scant as her clothing, had only a sort of animal
-      intelligence; she could speak a little Arabic, however (much more than we
-      could&mdash;speaking of intelligence!) and said she did not dare come with
-      us for fear her mistress would beat her. The slave trade is, however,
-      greatly curtailed by the expeditions of the Khedive. The bright Abyssinian
-      boy, Ahmed, whom we have on board, was brought from his home across the
-      Red Sea by way of Mecca. This is one of the ways by which a few slaves
-      still sift into Cairo.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are working along in sight of Korosko all day. Just above it, on some
-      rocks in the channel, lies a handsome dahabeëh belonging to a party of
-      English gentlemen, which went on a week ago; touched upon concealed rocks
-      in the evening as the crew were tracking, was swung further on by the
-      current, and now lies high and almost dry, the Nile falling daily, in a
-      position where she must wait for the rise next summer. The boat is
-      entirely uninjured and no doubt might have been got off the first day, if
-      there had only been mechanical skill in the crew. The governor at Derr
-      sent down one hundred and fifty men, who hauled and heaved at it two or
-      three days, with no effect. Half a dozen Yankees, with a couple of
-      jack-screws, and probably with only logs for rollers, would have set it
-      afloat. The disaster is exceedingly annoying to the gentlemen, who have,
-      however, procured a smaller boat from Wady Haifa in which to continue
-      their voyage. We are several hours in getting past these two boats, and
-      accomplish it not without a tangling of rigging, scraping off of paint,
-      smashing of deck rails, and the expenditure of a whole dictionary of
-      Arabic. Our Arabs never see but one thing at a time. If they are getting
-      the bow free, the stay-ropes and stern must take care of themselves. If,
-      by simple heedlessness, we are letting the yard of another boat rip into
-      our rigging, God wills it. While we are in this confusion and excitement,
-      the dahabeëh of General McClellan and half a dozen in company, sweep down
-      past us, going with wind and current.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a bright and delicious Sunday morning that we are still tracking
-      above Korosko. To-day is the day the pilgrims to Mecca spend upon the
-      mountain of Arafat. Tomorrow they sacrifice; our crew will celebrate it by
-      killing a sheep and eating it&mdash;and it is difficult to see where the
-      sacrifice comes in for them. The Moslems along this shore lost their
-      reckoning, mistook the day, and sacrificed yesterday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not the only thing, however, that keeps this place in our memory.
-      We saw here a pretty woman. Considering her dress, hair, the manner in
-      which she had been brought up, and her looks, a tolerably pretty woman; a
-      raving beauty in comparison with her comrades. She has a slight cast, in
-      one eye, that only shows for a moment occasionally and then disappears. If
-      these feeble tributary lines ever meet that eye, I beg her to know that,
-      by reason of her slight visual defect, she is like a revolving light, all
-      the more brilliant when she flashes out.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We lost time this morning, were whirled about in eddies and drifted on
-      sandbars, owing to contradictory opinions among our navigators, none of
-      whom seem to have the least sconce. They generally agree, however, not to
-      do anything that the pilot orders. Our pilot from Philæ to Wady Haifa and
-      back, is a Barâbra, and one of the reises of the Cataract, a fellow very
-      tall, and thin as a hop-pole, with a withered face and a high forehead.
-      His garments a white cotton nightgown without sleeves, a brown over-gown
-      with flowing sleeves, both reaching to the ankles, and a white turban. He
-      is barefooted and barelegged, and, in his many excursions into the river
-      to explore sandbars, I have noticed a hole where he has stuck his knee
-      through his nightgown. His stature and his whole bearing have in them
-      something, I know not what, of the theatrical air of the Orient.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He had a quarrel to day with the crew, for the reason mentioned above, in
-      which he was no doubt quite right, a quarrel conducted as usual with an
-      extraordinary expense of words and vituperation. In his inflamed remarks,
-      he at length threw out doubts about the mother of one of the crew, and
-      probably got something back that enraged him still more. While the wrangle
-      went on, the crew had gathered about their mess-dish on the forward deck,
-      squatting in a circle round it, and dipping out great mouthfuls of the <i>puree</i>
-      with the right hand. The pilot paced the upper deck, and his voice, which
-      is like that of many waters, was lifted up in louder and louder
-      lamentations, as the other party grew more quiet and were occupied with
-      their dinner&mdash;throwing him a loose taunt now and then, followed by a
-      chorus of laughter. He strode back and forth, swinging his arms, and
-      declaring that he would leave the boat, that he would not stay where he
-      was so treated, that he would cast himself into the river.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;When you do, you'd better leave your clothes behind,&rdquo; suggested
-      Abd-el-Atti.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Upon this cruel sarcasm he was unable to contain himself longer. He strode
-      up and down, raised high his voice, and tore his hair and rent his
-      garments&mdash;the supreme act of Oriental desperation. I had often read
-      of this performance, both in the Scriptures and in other Oriental
-      writings, but I had never seen it before. The manner in which he tore his
-      hair and rent his garments was as follows, to wit:&mdash;He almost
-      entirely unrolled his turban, doing it with an air of perfect
-      recklessness; and then he carefully wound it again round his
-      smoothly-shaven head. That stood for tearing his hair. He then swung his
-      long arms aloft, lifted up his garment above his head, and with desperate
-      force, appeared to be about to rend it in twain. But he never started a
-      seam nor broke a thread. The nightgown wouldn't have stood much nonsense.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the midst of his most passionate outburst, he went forward and filled
-      his pipe, and then returned to his tearing and rending and his
-      lamentations. The picture of a strong man in grief is always touching.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The country along here is very pretty, the curved shore for miles being a
-      continual palm-grove, and having a considerable strip of soil which the
-      sakiya irrigation makes very productive. Beyond this rise mountains of
-      rocks in ledges; and when we climb them we see only a waste desert of rock
-      strewn with loose shale and, further inland, black hills of sandstone,
-      which thickly cover the country all the way to the Red Sea.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Under the ledges are the habitations of the people, square enclosures of
-      stone and clay of considerable size, with interior courts and kennels. One
-      of them&mdash;the only sign of luxury we have seen in Nubia&mdash;had a
-      porch in front of it covered with palm boughs. The men are well-made and
-      rather prepossessing in appearance, and some of them well-dressed&mdash;they
-      had no doubt made the voyage to Cairo; the women are hideous without
-      exception. It is no pleasure to speak thus continually of woman; and I am
-      sometimes tempted to say that I see here the brown and bewitching maids,
-      with the eyes of the gazelle and the form of the houri, which gladden the
-      sight of more fortunate voyagers through this idle land; but when I think
-      of the heavy amount of misrepresentation that would be necessary to give
-      any one of these creatures a reputation for good looks abroad, I shrink
-      from the undertaking.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They are decently covered with black cotton mantles, which they make a
-      show of drawing over the face; but they are perhaps wild rather than
-      modest, and have a sort of animal shyness. Their heads are sights to
-      behold. The hair is all braided in strings, long at the sides and cut off
-      in front, after the style adopted now-a-days for children (and women) in
-      civilized countries, and copied from the young princes, prisoners in the
-      Tower. Each round strand of hair hasa dab of clay on the end of it. The
-      whole is drenched with castor-oil, and when the sun shines on it, it is as
-      pleasant to one sense as to another. They have flattish noses, high
-      cheek-bones, and always splendid teeth; and they all, young girls as well
-      as old women, hold tobacco in their under lip and squirt out the juice
-      with placid and scientific accuracy. They wear two or three strings of
-      trumpery beads and necklaces, bracelets of horn and of greasy leather, and
-      occasionally a finger-ring or two. Nose-rings they wear if they have them;
-      if not, they keep the bore open for one by inserting a kernel of doora.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In going back to the boat we met a party of twenty or thirty of these
-      attractive creatures, who were returning from burying a boy of the
-      village. They came striding over the sand, chattering in shrill and savage
-      tones. Grief was not so weighty on them that they forgot to demand
-      backsheesh, and (unrestrained by the men in the town) their clamor for it
-      was like the cawing of crows; and their noise, when they received little
-      from us, was worse. The tender and loving woman, stricken in grief by
-      death, is, in these regions, when denied backsheesh, an enraged, squawking
-      bird of prey. They left us with scorn in their eyes and abuse on their
-      tongues.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At a place below Korosko we saw a singular custom, in which the women
-      appeared to better advantage. A whole troop of women, thirty or forty of
-      them, accompanied by children, came in a rambling procession down to the
-      Nile, and brought a baby just forty days old. We thought at first that
-      they were about to dip the infant into Father Nile, as an introduction to
-      the fountain of all the blessings of Egypt. Instead of this, however, they
-      sat down on the bank, took kohl and daubed it in the little fellow's eyes.
-      They perform this ceremony by the Nile when the boy is forty days old, and
-      they do it that he may have a fortunate life. Kohl seems to enlarge the
-      pupil, and doubtless it is intended to open the boy's eyes early.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At one of the little settlements to-day the men were very hospitable, and
-      brought us out plates (straw) of sweet dried dates. Those that we did not
-      eat, the sailor with us stuffed into his pocket; our sailors never let a
-      chance of provender slip, and would, so far as capacity &ldquo;to live on the
-      country&rdquo; goes, make good soldiers. The Nubian dates are called the best in
-      Egypt. They are longer than the dates of the Delta, but hard and quite
-      dry. They take the place of coffee here in the complimentary hospitality.
-      Whenever a native invites you to take &ldquo;coffee,&rdquo; and you accept, he will
-      bring you a plate of dates and probably a plate of popped doora, like our
-      popped corn. Coffee seems not to be in use here; even the governors
-      entertain us with dates and popped corn.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are working up the river slowly enough to make the acquaintance of
-      every man, woman, and child on the banks; and a precious lot of
-      acquaintances we shall have. I have no desire to force them upon the
-      public, but it is only by these details that I can hope to give you any
-      idea of the Nubian life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We stop at night. The moon-and-starlight is something superb. From the
-      high bank under which we are moored, the broad river, the desert opposite,
-      and the mountains, appear in a remote African calm&mdash;a calm only
-      broken by the shriek of the sakiyas which pierce the air above and below
-      us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the sakiya near us, covered with netting to keep off the north wind, is
-      a little boy, patient and black, seated on the pole of the wheel, urging
-      the lean cattle round and round. The little chap is alone and at some
-      distance from the village, and this must be for him lonesome work. The
-      moonlight, through the chinks of the palm-leaf, touches tenderly his
-      pathetic figure, when we look in at the opening, and his small voice
-      utters the one word of Egypt&mdash;&ldquo;backsheesh.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Attracted by a light&mdash;a rare thing in a habitation here&mdash;we walk
-      over to the village. At the end of the high enclosure of a dwelling there
-      is a blaze of fire, which is fed by doora-stalks, and about it squat five
-      women, chattering; the fire lights up their black faces and hair shining
-      with the castor-oil. Four of them are young; and one is old and skinny,
-      and with only a piece of sacking for all clothing. Their husbands are away
-      in Cairo, or up the river with a trading dahabeëh (so they tell our
-      guide); and these poor creatures are left here (it may be for years it may
-      be forever) to dig their own living out of the ground. It is quite the
-      fashion husbands have in this country; but the women are attached to their
-      homes; they have no desire to go elsewhere. And I have no doubt that in
-      Cairo they would pine for the free and simple life of Nubia.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These women all want backsheesh, and no doubt will quarrel over the
-      division of the few piastres they have from us. Being such women as I have
-      described, and using tobacco as has been sufficiently described also,
-      crouching about these embers, this group composes as barbaric a picture as
-      one can anywhere see. I need not have gone so far to set such a miserable
-      group; I could have found one as wretched in Pigville (every city has its
-      Pigville)? Yes, but this is characteristic of the country. These people
-      are as good as anybody here. (We have been careful to associate only with
-      the first families.) These women have necklaces and bracelets, and rings
-      in their ears, just like any women, and rings in the hair, twisted in with
-      the clay and castor-oil. And in Pigville one would not have the range of
-      savage rocks, which tower above these huts, whence the jackals, wolves,
-      and gazelles come down to the river, nor the row of palms, nor the Nile,
-      and the sands beyond, yellow in the moonlight.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0044" id="linkimage-0044"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0288.jpg" alt="0288 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0045" id="linkimage-0045"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0289.jpg" alt="0289 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXII.&mdash;LIFE IN THE TROPICS. WADY HALFA.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>URS is the crew to
-      witch the world with noble seamanship. It is like a first-class orchestra,
-      in which all the performers are artists. Ours are all captains. The reïs
-      is merely an elder brother. The pilot is not heeded at all. With so many
-      intentions on board, it is an hourly miracle that we get on at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are approaching the capital of Nubia, trying to get round a sharp bend
-      in the river, with wind adverse, current rapid, sandbars on all sides.
-      Most of the crew are in the water ahead, trying to haul us round the point
-      of a sand-spit on which the stream foams, and then swirls in an eddy
-      below. I can see now the Pilot, the long Pilot, who has gone in to feel
-      about for deep water, in his white nightgown, his shaven head, denuded of
-      its turban, shining in the sun, standing in two feet of water, throwing
-      his arms wildly above his head, screaming entreaties, warnings, commands,
-      imprecations upon the sailors in the river and the commanders on the boat.
-      I can see the crew, waist deep, slacking the rope which they have out
-      ahead, stopping to discuss the situation. I can see the sedate reïs on the
-      bow arguing with the raving pilot, the steersman, with his eternal smile,
-      calmly regarding the peril, and the boat swinging helplessly about and
-      going upon the shoals. &ldquo;Stupids,&rdquo; mutters Abd-el-Atti, who is telling his
-      beads rapidly, as he always does in exciting situations.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When at length we pass the point, we catch the breeze so suddenly and go
-      away with it, that there is no time for the men to get on board, and they
-      are obliged to scamper back over the sand-spits to the shore and make a
-      race of it to meet us at Derr. We can see them running in file, dodging
-      along under the palms by the shore, stopping to grab occasionally a squash
-      or a handful of beans for the pot.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The capital of Nubia is the New York of this region, not so large, nor so
-      well laid out, nor so handsomely built, but the centre of fashion and the
-      residence of the <i>ton</i>. The governor lives in a whitewashed house,
-      and there is a Sycamore here eight hundred years old, which is I suppose
-      older than the Stuyvesant Pear in New York. The houses are not perched up
-      in the air like tenement buildings for the poor, but aristocratically keep
-      to the ground in one-story rooms; and they are beautifully moulded of a
-      tough clay. The whole town lies under a palm-grove. The elegance of the
-      capital, however, is not in its buildings, but in its women; the ladies
-      who come to the the river to fill their jars are arrayed in the height of
-      the mode. Their hair is twisted and clayed and castoroiled, but, besides
-      this and other garments, they wear an outer robe of black which sweeps the
-      ground for a yard behind, and gives them the grace and dignity that
-      court-robes always give. You will scarcely see longer skirts on Broadway
-      or in a Paris <i>salon</i>. I have, myself, no doubt that the Broadway
-      fashions came from Derr, all except the chignons. Here the ladies wear
-      their own hair.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Making no landing in this town so dangerous to one susceptible to the
-      charms of fashion, we went on, and stopped at night near Ibreem, a lofty
-      precipice, or range of precipices, the southern hill crowned with ruins
-      and fortifications which were last occupied by the Memlooks, half a
-      century and more ago. The night blazed with beauty; the broad river was a
-      smooth mirror, in which the mountains and the scintillating hosts of
-      heaven were reflected. And we saw a phenomenon which I have never seen
-      elsewhere. Not only were the rocky ledges reproduced in a perfect
-      definition of outline, but even in the varieties of shade, in black and
-      reddish-brown color.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps it needs the affidavits of all the party to the more surprising
-      fact, that we were all on deck next morning before five o'clock, to see
-      the Southern Cross. The moon had set, and these famous stars of the
-      southern sky flashed color and brilliancy like enormous diamonds. &ldquo;Other
-      worlds than ours&rdquo;? I should think so! All these myriads of burning orbs
-      only to illuminate our dahabeëh and a handful of Nubians, who are asleep!
-      The Southern Cross lay just above the horizon and not far from other stars
-      of the first quality. There are I believe only three stars of the first
-      magnitude and one of the second, in this constellation, and they form, in
-      fact, not a cross but an irregular quadrilateral. It needs a vivid
-      imagination and the aid of small stars to get even a semblance of a cross
-      out of it. But if you add to it, as we did, for the foot of the cross, a
-      brilliant in a neighboring constellation, you have a noble cross.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This constellation is not so fine as Orion, and for all we saw, we would
-      not exchange our northern sky for the southern; but this morning we had a
-      rare combination. The Morning Star was blazing in the east; and the Great
-      Bear (who has been nightly sinking lower and lower, until he dips below
-      the horizon) having climbed high up above the Pole in the night, filled
-      the northern sky with light. In this lucid atmosphere the whole heavens
-      from north to south seemed to be crowded with stars of the first size.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      During the morning we walked on the west bank through a castor-oil
-      plantation; many of the plants were good-sized trees, with boles two and a
-      half to three inches through, and apparently twenty-five feet high. They
-      were growing in the yellow sand which had been irrigated by sakiyas, but
-      was then dry, and some of the plants were wilting. We picked up the ripe
-      seeds and broke off some of the fat branches; and there was not water
-      enough in the Nile to wash away the odor afterwards.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Walking back over the great sand-plain towards the range of desert
-      mountains, we came to an artificial mound&mdash;an ash-heap, in fact&mdash;fifty
-      or sixty feet high. At its base is a habitation of several compartments,
-      formed by sticking the stalks of castor-oil plants into the ground, with a
-      roof of the same. Here we found several women with very neat dabs of clay
-      on the ends of their hair-twists, and a profusion of necklaces, rings in
-      the hair and other ornaments&mdash;among them, scraps of gold. The women
-      were hospitable, rather modest than shy, and set before us plates of dried
-      dates; and no one said &ldquo;backsheesh.&rdquo; A better class of people than those
-      below, and more purely Nubian.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It would perhaps pay to dig open this mound. Near it are three small
-      oases, watered by sakiyas, which draw from wells that are not more than
-      twenty feet deep. The water is clear as crystal but not cool. These are
-      ancient Egyptian wells, which have been re-opened within a few years; and
-      the ash-mound is no doubt the <i>débris</i> of a village and an old
-      Egyptian settlement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At night we are a dozen miles from Aboo Simbel (Ipsamboul), the wind&mdash;which
-      usually in the winter blows with great and steady force from the north in
-      this part of the river&mdash;having taken a fancy to let us see the
-      country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A morning walk takes us over a rocky desert; the broken shale is
-      distributed as evenly over the sand as if the whole had once been under
-      water, and the shale were a dried mud, cracked in the sun. The miserable
-      dwellings of the natives are under the ledges back of the strip of arable
-      land. The women are shy and wild as hawks, but in the mode; they wear a
-      profusion of glass beads and trail their robes in the dust.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is near this village that we have an opportunity to execute justice. As
-      the crew were tracking, and lifting the rope over a sakiya, the hindmost
-      sailor saw a sheath-knife on the bank, and thrust it into his pocket as he
-      walked on. In five minutes the owner of the knife discovered the robbery,
-      and came to the boat to complain. The sailor denied having the knife, but
-      upon threat of a flogging gave it up. The incident, however, aroused the
-      town, men and women came forth discussing it in a high key, and some
-      foolish fellows threatened to stone our boat. Abd-el-Atti replied that he
-      would stop and give them a chance to do it. Thereupon they apologized; and
-      as there was no wind, the dragoman asked leave to stop and do justice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A court was organized on shore. Abd-el-Atti sat down on a lump of earth,
-      grasping a marline-spike, the crew squatted in a circle in the high beans,
-      and the culprit was arraigned. The owner testified to his knife, a woman
-      swore she saw the sailor take it, Abd-el-Atti pronounced sentence, and
-      rose to execute it with his stake. The thief was thrown upon the ground
-      and held by two sailors. Abd-el-Atti, resolute and solemn as an
-      executioner, raised the club and brought it down with a tremendous whack&mdash;not
-      however upon the back of the victim, he had at that instant squirmed out
-      of the way. This conduct greatly enraged the minister of justice, who
-      thereupon came at his object with fury, and would no doubt have hit him if
-      the criminal had not got up and ran, screaming, with the sailors and
-      Abd-el-Atti after him. The ground was rough, the legs of Abd-el-Atti are
-      not long and his wind is short. The fellow was caught, and escaped again
-      and again, but the punishment was a mere scrimmage; whenever Abd-el-Atti,
-      in the confusion, could get a chance to strike he did so, but generally
-      hit the ground, sometimes the fellow's gown and perhaps once or twice the
-      man inside, but never to his injury. He roared all the while, that he was
-      no thief, and seemed a good deal more hurt by the charge that he was, than
-      by the stick. The beating was, in short, only a farce laughable from
-      beginning to end, and not a bad sample of Egyptian justice. And it
-      satisfied everybody.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Having put ourselves thus on friendly relations with this village, one of
-      the inhabitants brought down to the boat a letter for the dragoman to
-      interpret. It had been received two weeks before from Alexandria, but no
-      one had been able to read it until our boat stopped here. Fortunately we
-      had the above little difficulty here. The contents of the letter gave the
-      village employment for a month. It brought news of the death of two
-      inhabitants of the place, who were living as servants in Alexandria, one
-      of them a man eighty years old and his son aged sixty.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I never saw grief spread so fast and so suddenly as it did with the
-      uncorking of this vial of bad news. Instantly a lamentation and wild
-      mourning began in all the settlement. It wasn't ten minutes before the
-      village was buried in grief. And, in an incredible short space of time,
-      the news had spread up and down the river, and the grief-stricken began to
-      arrive from other places. Where they came from, I have no idea; it did not
-      seem that we had passed so many women in a week as we saw now They poured
-      in from all along the shore, long strings of them, striding over the sand,
-      throwing up their garments, casting dust on their heads (and all of it
-      stuck), howling, flocking like wild geese to a rendezvous, and filling the
-      air with their clang. They were arriving for an hour or two.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The men took no part in this active demonstration. They were seated
-      gravely before the house in which the bereaved relatives gathered; and
-      there I found Abd-el-Atti, seated also, and holding forth upon the
-      inevitable coming of death, and saying that there was nothing to be
-      regretted in this case, for the time of these men had come. If it hadn't
-      come, they wouldn't have died. Not so?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The women crowded into the enclosure and began mourning in a vigorous
-      manner. The chief ones grouping themselves in an irregular ring, cried
-      aloud: &ldquo;O that he had died here!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;O that I had seen his face when he died;&rdquo; repeating these lamentations
-      over and over again, throwing up the arms, and then the legs in a kind of
-      barbaric dance as they lamented, and uttering long and shrill ululations
-      at the end of each sentence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      To-day they kill a calf and feast, and tomorrow the lamentations and the
-      African dance will go on, and continue for a week. These people are all
-      feeling. It is a heathen and not a Moslem custom however; and whether it
-      is of negro origin or of ancient Egyptian I do not know, but probably the
-      latter. The ancient Egyptian women are depicted in the tombs mourning in
-      this manner; and no doubt the Jews also so bewailed, when they &ldquo;lifted up
-      their voices&rdquo; and cast dust on their heads, as we saw these Nubians do. It
-      is an unselfish pleasure to an Eastern woman to &ldquo;lift up the voice.&rdquo; The
-      heavy part of the mourning comes upon the women, who appear to enjoy it.
-      It is their chief occupation, after the carrying of water and the grinding
-      of doora, and probably was so with the old race; these people certainly
-      keep the ancient customs; they dress the hair, for one thing, very much as
-      the Egyptians did, even to the castor-oil.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At this village, as in others in Nubia, the old women are the
-      corn-grinders. These wasted skeletons sit on the ground before a stone
-      with a hollow in it; in this they bruise the doora with a smaller stone;
-      the flour is then moistened and rubbed to a paste. The girls and younger
-      women, a great part of the time, are idling about in their finery. But,
-      then, they have the babies and the water to bring; and it must be owned
-      that some of them work in the field&mdash;grubbing grass and stuff for
-      &ldquo;greens&rdquo; and for fuel, more than the men. The men do the heavy work of
-      irrigation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we cannot stay to mourn with those who mourn a week in this style; and
-      in the evening, when a strong breeze springs up, we spread our sail and
-      go, in the &ldquo;daylight of the moon,&rdquo; flying up the river, by black and weird
-      shores; and before midnight pass lonesome Aboo Simbel, whose colossi sit
-      in the moonlight with the impassive mien they have held for so many ages.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the morning, with an easy wind, we are on the last stage of our
-      journey. We are almost at the limit of dahabeëh navigation. The country is
-      less interesting than it was below. The river is very broad, and we look
-      far over the desert on each side. The strip of cultivated soil is narrow
-      and now and again disappears altogether. To the east are seen, since we
-      passed Aboo Simbel, the pyramid hills, some with truncated tops, scattered
-      without plan over the desert. It requires no stretch of fancy to think
-      that these mathematically built hills are pyramids erected by races
-      anterior to Menes, and that all this waste that they dot is a necropolis
-      of that forgotten people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sailors celebrate the finishing of the journey by a ceremony of state
-      and dignity. The chief actor is Farrag, the wit of the crew. Suddenly he
-      appears as the Governor of Wady Haifa, with horns on his head, face
-      painted, a long beard, hair sprinkled with flour, and dressed in shaggy
-      sheepskin. He has come on board to collect his taxes. He opens his court,
-      with the sailors about him, holding a long marline spike which he pretends
-      to smoke as a chibook. His imitation of the town dignitaries along the
-      river is very comical, and his remarks are greeted with roars of laughter.
-      One of the crew acts as his bailiff and summons all the officers and
-      servants of the boat before him, who are thrown down upon the deck and
-      bastinadoed, and released on payment of backsheesh. The travelers also
-      have to go before the court and pay a fine for passing through the
-      Governor's country. The Governor is treated with great deference till the
-      end of the farce, when one of his attendants sets fire to his beard, and
-      another puts him out with a bucket of water.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      'The end of our journey is very much like the end of everything else&mdash;there
-      is very little in it. When we follow anything to its utmost we are certain
-      to be disappointed&mdash;simply because it is the nature of things to
-      taper down to a point. I suspect it must always be so with the traveler,
-      and that the farther he penetrates into any semi-savage continent, the
-      meaner and ruder will he find the conditions of life. When we come to the
-      end, ought we not to expect the end?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have come a thousand miles not surely to see Wady Haifa but to see the
-      thousand miles. And yet Wady Haifa, figuring as it does on the map, the
-      gate of the great Second Cataract, the head of navigation, the destination
-      of so many eager travelers, a point of arrival and departure of caravans,
-      might be a little less insignificant than it is. There is the thick growth
-      of palm-trees under which the town lies, and beyond it, several miles, on
-      the opposite, west bank, is the cliff of Aboosir, which looks down upon
-      the cataract; but for this noble landmark, this dominating rock, the
-      traveler could not feel that he had arrived anywhere, and would be so
-      weakened by the shock of arriving nowhere at the end of so long a journey
-      (as a man is by striking a blow in the air) that he would scarcely have
-      strength to turn back.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At the time of our arrival, however, Wady Haifa has some extra life. An
-      expedition of the government is about to start for Darfoor. When we moor
-      at the east bank, we see on the west bank the white tents of a military
-      encampment set in right lines on the yellow sand; near them the government
-      storehouse and telegraph-office, and in front a mounted howitzer and a
-      Gatling gun. No contrast could be stronger. Here is Wady Halfah, in the
-      doze of an African town, a collection of mud-huts under the trees,
-      listless, apathetic, sitting at the door of a vast region, without either
-      purpose or ambition. There, yonder, is a piece of life out of our restless
-      age. There are the tents, the guns, the instruments, the soldiers and
-      servants of a new order of things for Africa. We hear the trumpet call to
-      drill. The flag which is planted in the sand in front of the commander's
-      tent is to be borne to the equator.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But this is not a military expedition. It is a corps of scientific
-      observation, simply. Since the Sultan of Darfoor is slain and the
-      Khedive's troops have occupied his capital, and formally attached that
-      empire to Egypt, it is necessary to know something of its extent,
-      resources, and people, concerning all of which we have only the uncertain
-      reports of traders. It is thought by some that the annexation of Darfoor
-      adds five millions to the population of the Khedive's growing empire. In
-      order that he may know what he has conquered, he has sent out exploring
-      expeditions, of which this is one. It is under command of Purdy Bey
-      assisted by Lieutenant-Colonel Mason, two young American officers of the
-      Khedive, who fought on opposite sides in our civil war. They are provided
-      with instruments for making all sorts of observations, and are to report
-      upon the people and the physical character and capacity of the country.
-      They expect to be absent three years, and after surveying Darfoor, will
-      strike southward still, and perhaps contribute something to the solution
-      of the Nile problem. For escort they have a hundred soldiers only, but a
-      large train of camels and intendants. In its purpose it is an expedition
-      that any civilized ruler might be honored for setting on foot. It is a
-      brave overture of civilization to barbarism. The nations are daily drawing
-      nearer together. As we sit in the telegraph-office here, messages are
-      flashed from Cairo to Kartoom.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0046" id="linkimage-0046"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0298.jpg" alt="0298 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXIII.&mdash;APPROACHING THE SECOND CATARACT.
-    </h2>
-    <p>
-      THERE are two ways of going to see the Second Cataract and the cliff of
-      Aboosir, which is about six miles above Wady Haifa; one is by small boat,
-      the other by dromedary over the desert. We chose the latter, and the
-      American officers gave us a mount and their company also. Their camp
-      presented a lively scene when we crossed over to it in the morning. They
-      had by requisition pressed into their service three or four hundred
-      camels, and were trying to select out of the lot half a dozen fit to ride.
-      The camels were, in fact, mostly burden camels and not trained to the
-      riding-saddle; besides, half of them were poor, miserable rucks of bones,
-      half-starved to death; for the Arabs, whose business it had been to feed
-      them, had stolen the government supplies. An expedition which started
-      south two weeks ago lost more than a hundred camels, from starvation,
-      before it reached Semneh, thirty-five miles up the river. They had become
-      so weak, that they wilted and died on the first hard march. For his size
-      and knotty appearance, the camel is the most disappointing of beasts. He
-      is a sheep as to endurance. As to temper, he is vindictive.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Authorities differ in regard to the distinction between the camel and the
-      dromedary. Some say that there are no camels in Egypt, that they are all
-      dromedaries, having one hump; and that the true camel is the Bactrian,
-      which has two humps. It is customary here, however, to call those camels
-      which are beasts of burden, and those dromedaries which are trained to
-      ride; the distinction being that between the cart-horse and the
-      saddle-horse.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The camel-drivers, who are as wild Arabs as you will meet anywhere, select
-      a promising beast and drag him to the tent. He is reluctant to come; he
-      rebels against the saddle; he roars all the time it is being secured on
-      him, and when he is forced to kneel, not seldom he breaks away from his
-      keepers and shambles off into the desert. The camel does this always; and
-      every morning on a inarch he receives his load only after a struggle. The
-      noise of the drivers is little less than the roar of the beasts, and with
-      their long hair, shaggy breasts, and bare legs they are not less barbarous
-      in appearance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Mounting the camel is not difficult, but it has some sweet surprises for
-      the novice. The camel lies upon the ground with all his legs shut up under
-      him like a jackknife. You seat yourself in the broad saddle, and cross
-      your legs in front of the pommel. Before you are ready, something like a
-      private earthquake begins under you. The camel raises his hindquarters
-      suddenly, and throws you over upon his neck; and, before you recover from
-      that he straightens up his knees and gives you a jerk over his tail; and,
-      while you are not at all certain what has happened, he begins to move off
-      with that dislocated walk which sets you into a see-saw motion, a waving
-      backwards and forwards in the capacious saddle. Not having a hinged back
-      fit for this movement, you lash the beast with your koorbâsh to make him
-      change his gait. He is nothing loth to do it, and at once starts into a
-      high trot which sends you a foot into the air at every step, bobs you from
-      side to side, drives your backbone into your brain, and makes castanets of
-      your teeth. Capital exercise. When you have enough of it, you pull up, and
-      humbly enquire what is the heathen method of riding a dromedary.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is simple enough. Shake the loose halter-rope (he has neither bridle
-      nor bit) against his neck as you swing the whip, and the animal at once
-      swings into an easy pace; that is, a pretty easy pace, like that of a
-      rocking-horse. But everything depends upon the camel. I happened to mount
-      one that it was a pleasure to ride, after I brought him to the proper gait
-      We sailed along over the smooth sand, with level keel, and (though the
-      expression is not nautical) on cushioned feet. But it is hard work for the
-      camel, this constant planting of his spongy feet in the yielding sand.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our way lay over the waste and rolling desert (the track of the southern
-      caravans,) at some little distance from the river; and I suppose six miles
-      of this travel are as good as a hundred. The sun was blazing hot, the
-      yellow sand glowed in it, and the far distance of like sand and bristling
-      ledges of black rock shimmered in waves of heat. No tree, no blade of
-      grass, nothing but blue sky bending over a sterile land. Yet, how sweet
-      was the air, how pure the breath of the desert, how charged with electric
-      life the rays of the sun!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The rock Aboosir, the <i>ultima Thule</i> of pleasure-travel on the Nile,
-      is a sheer precipice of perhaps two to three hundred feet above the Nile;
-      but this is high enough to make it one of the most extensive lookouts in
-      Egypt. More desert can be seen here than from almost anywhere else. The
-      Second Cataract is spread out beneath us. It is less a &ldquo;fall&rdquo; even than
-      the First. The river is from a half mile to a mile in breadth and for a
-      distance of some five miles is strewn with trap-rock, boulders and
-      shattered fragments, through which the Nile swiftly forces itself in a
-      hundred channels. There are no falls of any noticeable height. Here, on
-      the flat rock, where we eat our luncheon, a cool breeze blows from the
-      north. Here on this eagle's perch, commanding a horizon of desert and
-      river for a hundred miles, fond visitors have carved their immortal names,
-      following an instinct of ambition that is well-nigh universal, in the
-      belief no doubt that the name will have for us who come after all the
-      significance it has in the eyes of him who carved it. But I cannot recall
-      a single name I read there; I am sorry that I cannot, for it seems a
-      pitiful and cruel thing to leave them there in their remote obscurity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this rock we look with longing to the southward, into vast Africa,
-      over a land we may not further travel, which we shall probably never see
-      again; or the far horizon the blue peaks of Dongola are visible, and
-      beyond these we know are the ruins of Meroë, that ancient city, the
-      capital of that Ethiopian Queen, Candace, whose dark face is lighted up by
-      a momentary gleam from the Scriptures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On the beach at Wady Haifa are half a dozen trading-vessels, loaded with
-      African merchandise for Cairo, and in the early morning there is a great
-      hubbub among the merchants and the caravan owners. A sudden dispute arises
-      among a large group around the ferry-boat, and there ensues that excited
-      war, or movement, which always threatens to come to violence in the East
-      but never does; Niagaras of talk are poured out; the ebb and flow of the
-      parti-colored crowd, and the violent and not ungraceful gestures make a
-      singular picture.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Bales of merchandise are piled on shore, cases of brandy and cottons from
-      England, to keep the natives of Soudan warm inside and out; Greek
-      merchants splendid in silk attire, are lounging amid their goods, slowly
-      bargaining for their transportation. Groups of camels are kneeling on the
-      sand with their Bedaween drivers. These latter are of the Bisharee Arabs,
-      and free sons of the desert. They wear no turban, and their only garment
-      is a long strip of brown cotton thrown over the shoulder so as to leave
-      the right arm free, and then wound about the waist and loins. The black
-      hair is worn long, braided in strands which shine with oil, and put behind
-      the ears. This sign of effeminacy is contradicted by their fine, athletic
-      figures; by a bold, strong eye, and a straight, resolute nose.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Wady Haifa (<i>wady</i> is valley, and <i>Haifa</i> is a sort of coarse
-      grass) has a post-office and a mosque, but no bazaar, nor any center of
-      attraction. Its mud-houses are stretched along the shore for a mile and a
-      half, and run back into the valley, under the lovely palm-grove; but there
-      are no streets and no roads through the deep sand. There is occasionally a
-      sign of wealth in an extensive house, that is, one consisting of several
-      enclosed courts and apartments within one large mud-wall; and in one we
-      saw a garden, watered by a sakiya, and two latticed windows in a second
-      story looking on it, as if some one had a harem here which was handsome
-      enough to seclude..
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We called on the Kadi, the judicial officer of this district, whose house
-      is a specimen of the best, and as good as is needed in this land of the
-      sun. On one side of an open enclosure is his harem; in the other is the
-      reception-room where he holds court. This is a mud-hut, with nothing
-      whatever in it except some straw mats. The Kadi sent for rugs, and we sat
-      on the mud-bench outside, while attendants brought us dates, popped-corn,
-      and even coffee; and then they squatted in a row in front of us and stared
-      at us, as we did at them. The ladies went into the harem, and made the
-      acquaintance of the judge's one wife and his dirty children. Not without
-      cordiality and courtesy of manner these people; but how simple are the
-      terms of life here; and what a thoroughly African picture this is, the
-      mud-huts, the sand, the palms, the black-skinned groups.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The women here are modestly clad, but most of them frightfully ugly and
-      castor-oily; yet we chanced upon two handsome girls, or rather married
-      women, of fifteen or sixteen. One of them had regular features and a very
-      pretty expression, and evidently knew she was a beauty, for she sat apart
-      on the ground, keeping her head covered most of the time, and did not join
-      the women who thronged about us to look with wonder at the costume of our
-      ladies and to beg for backsheesh. She was loaded with necklaces, bracelets
-      of horn and ivory, and had a ring on every finger. There was in her manner
-      something of scorn and resentment at our intrusion; she no doubt had her
-      circle of admirers and was queen in it. Who are these pale creatures who
-      come to stare at my charms? Have they no dark pretty women in their own
-      land? And she might well have asked, what would she do&mdash;a beauty of
-      New York city, let us say&mdash;when she sat combing her hair on the
-      marble doorsteps of her father's palace in Madison Square, if a lot of
-      savage, impolite Nubians, should come and stand in a row in front of her
-      and stare?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The only shops here are the temporary booths of traders, birds of passage
-      to or from the equatorial region. Many of them have pitched their gay
-      tents under the trees, making the scene still more like a fair or an
-      encampment for the night. In some are displayed European finery and
-      trumpery, manufactured for Africa, calico in striking colors, glass beads
-      and cotton cloth; others are coffee-shops, where men are playing at a sort
-      of draughts&mdash;the checker-board being holes made in the sand and the
-      men pebbles. At the door of a pretty tent stood a young and handsome
-      Syrian merchant, who cordially invited us in, and pressed upon us the
-      hospitality of his house. He was on his way to Darfoor, and might remain
-      there two or three years, trading with the natives. We learned this by the
-      interpretation of his girl-wife, who spoke a little barbarous French. He
-      had married her only recently, and this was their bridal tour, we
-      inferred. Into what risks and perils was this pretty woman going? She was
-      Greek, from one of the islands, and had the <i>naïvete</i> and freshness
-      of both youth and ignorance. Her fair complexion was touched by the sun
-      and ruddy with health. Her blue eyes danced with the pleasure of living.
-      She wore her hair natural, with neither oil nor ornament, but cut short
-      and pushed behind the ears. For dress she had a simple calico gown of pale
-      yellow, cut high in the waist, <i>à la Grecque</i>, the prettiest costume
-      women ever assumed. After our long regimen of the hideous women of the
-      Nile, plastered with dirt, soaked in oil, and hung with tawdry ornaments,
-      it may be imagined how welcome was this vision of a woman, handsome,
-      natural and clean, with neither the shyness of an animal nor the
-      brazenness of a Ghawazee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our hospitable entertainers hastened to set before us what they had; a
-      bottle of Maraschino was opened, very good European cigars were produced,
-      and a plate of pistachio nuts, to eat with the cordial. The artless Greek
-      beauty cracked the nuts for us with her shining teeth, laughing all the
-      while; urging us to eat, and opening her eyes in wonder that we would not
-      eat more, and would not carry away more. It must be confessed that we had
-      not much conversation, but we made it up in constant smiling, and ate our
-      pistachios and sipped our cordial in great glee. What indeed could we have
-      done more with words, or how have passed a happier hour? We perfectly
-      understood each other; we drank each other's healths; we were civilized
-      beings, met by chance in a barbarous place; we were glad to meet, and we
-      parted in the highest opinion of each other, with gay salaams, and not in
-      tears. What fate I wonder had these handsome and adventurous merchants
-      among the savages of Darfoor and Kordofan?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The face of our black boy, Gohah, was shining with pleasure when we walked
-      away, and he said with enthusiasm, pointing to the tent, &ldquo;<i>Sitt tyeb,
-      quéi-is</i>.&rdquo; Accustomed as he was to the African beauties of Soudan, I do
-      not wonder that Gohah thought this &ldquo;lady&rdquo; both &ldquo;good&rdquo; and &ldquo;beautiful.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We have seen Wady Haifa. The expedition to Darfoor is packing up to begin
-      its desert march in the morning. Our dahabeëh has been transformed and
-      shorn of a great part of its beauty. We are to see no more the great
-      bird-wing sail. The long yard has been taken down and is slung above us
-      the whole length of the deck. The twelve big sweeps are put in place; the
-      boards of the forward deck are taken up, so that the Lowers will have
-      place for their feet as they sit on the beams. They sit fronting the
-      cabin, and rise up and take a step forward at each stroke, settling slowly
-      back to their seats. On the mast is rigged the short stern-yard and sail,
-      to be rarely spread. Hereafter we are to float, and drift, and whirl, and
-      try going with the current and against the wind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At ten o'clock of a moonlight night, a night of summer heat, we swing off,
-      the rowers splashing their clumsy oars and setting up a shout and chorus
-      in minor, that sound very much like a wail, and would be quite appropriate
-      if they were ferrymen of the Styx. We float a few miles, and then go
-      aground and go to bed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next day we have the same unchanging sky, the same groaning and
-      creaking of the sakiyas, and in addition the irregular splashing of the
-      great sweeps as we slide down the river. Two crocodiles have the
-      carelessness to show themselves on a sand-island, one a monstrous beast,
-      whose size is magnified every time we think how his great back sunk into
-      the water when our sandal was yet beyond rifle-shot. Of course he did not
-      know that we carried only a shot-gun and intended only to amuse him, or he
-      would not have been in such haste.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The wind is adverse, we gain little either by oars or by the current, and
-      at length take to the shore, where something novel always rewards us. This
-      time we explore some Roman ruins, with round arches of unburned bricks,
-      and find in them also the unmistakable sign of Roman occupation, the burnt
-      bricks&mdash;those thin slabs, eleven inches long, five wide, and two
-      thick, which, were a favorite form with them, bricks burnt for eternity,
-      and scattered all over the East wherever the Roman legions went.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Beyond these is a village, not a deserted village, but probably the
-      laziest in the world. Men, and women for the most part too, were lounging
-      about and in the houses, squatting in the dust, in absolute indolence,
-      except that the women, all of them, were suckling their babies, and
-      occasionally one of them was spinning a little cotton-thread on a spindle
-      whirled in the hand. The men are more cleanly than the women, in every
-      respect in better condition, some of them bright, fine-looking fellows.
-      One of them showed us through his house, which was one of the finest in
-      the place, and he was not a little proud of it. It was a large mud-wall
-      enclosure. Entering by a rude door we came into an open space, from which
-      opened several doors, irregular breaks in the wall, closed by shackling
-      doors of wood. Stepping over the sill and stooping, we entered the
-      living-rooms. First, is the kitchen; the roof of this is the sky&mdash;you
-      are always liable to find yourself outdoors in these houses&mdash;and the
-      fire for cooking is built in one corner. Passing through another hole in
-      the wall we come to a sleeping-room, where were some jars of dates and
-      doora, and a mat spread in one corner to lie on. Nothing but an
-      earth-floor, and dust and grime everywhere. A crowd of tittering girls
-      were flitting about, peeping at us from doorways, and diving into them
-      with shrill screams, like frightened rabbits, if we approached.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Abd-el-Atti raises a great laugh by twisting a piastre into the front lock
-      of hair of the ugliest hag there, calling her his wife, and drawing her
-      arm under his to take her to the boat. It is an immense joke. The old lady
-      is a widow and successfully conceals her reluctance. The tying the piece
-      of silver in the hair is a sign of marriage. All the married women wear a
-      piastre or some scale of silver on the forehead; the widows leave off this
-      ornament from the twist; the young girls show, by the hair plain, except
-      always the clay dabs, that they are in the market. The simplicity of these
-      people is noticeable. I saw a woman seated on the ground, in dust three
-      inches thick, leaning against the mud-bank in front of the house, having
-      in her lap a naked baby; on the bank sat another woman, braiding the hair
-      of the first, wetting it with muddy water, and working into it sand, clay,
-      and tufts of dead hair. What a way to spend Sunday!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is, on the whole, a model village. The people appear to have nothing,
-      and perhaps they want nothing. They do nothing, and I suppose they would
-      thank no one for coming to increase their wants and set them to work.
-      Nature is their friend.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I wonder what the staple of conversation of these people is, since the
-      weather offers nothing, being always the same, and always fine.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A day and a night and a day we fight adverse winds, and make no headway.
-      One day we lie at Farras, a place of no consequence, but having, almost as
-      a matter of course, ruins of the time of the Romans and the name Rameses
-      II. cut on a rock. In a Roman wall we find a drain-tile exactly like those
-      we use now. In the evening, after moon-rise, we drop down to Aboo Simbel.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0047" id="linkimage-0047"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0306.jpg" alt="0306 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0048" id="linkimage-0048"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0307.jpg" alt="0307 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXIV.&mdash;GIANTS IN STONE.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HEN daylight came
-      the Colossi of Aboo Simbel (or Ipsambool) were looking into our windows;
-      greeting the sunrise as they have done every morning for three thousand
-      five hundred years; and keeping guard still over the approach to the
-      temple, whose gods are no longer anywhere recognized, whose religion
-      disappeared from the earth two thousand years ago:&mdash;vast images,
-      making an eternity of time in their silent waiting.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The river here runs through an unmitigated desert. On the east the sand is
-      brown, on the west the sand is yellow; that is the only variety. There is
-      no vegetation, there are no habitations, there is no path on the shore,
-      there are no footsteps on the sand, no one comes to break the spell of
-      silence. To find such a monument of ancient power and art as this temple
-      in such a solitude enhances the visitor's wonder and surprise. The
-      Pyramids, Thebes, and Aboo Simbel are the three wonders of Egypt. But the
-      great temple of Aboo Simbel is unique. It satisfies the mind. It is
-      complete in itself, it is the projection of one creative impulse of
-      genius. Other temples are growths, they have additions, afterthoughts, we
-      can see in them the workings of many minds and many periods. This is a
-      complete thought, struck out, you would say, at a heat.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In order to justify this opinion, I may be permitted a little detail
-      concerning this temple, which impressed us all as much as anything in
-      Egypt. There are two temples here, both close to the shore, both cut in
-      the mountain of rock which here almost overhangs the stream. We need not
-      delay to speak of the smaller one, although it would be wonderful, if it
-      were not for the presence of the larger. Between the two was a rocky
-      gorge. This is now nearly filled up, to the depth of a hundred feet, by
-      the yellow sand that has drifted and still drifts over from the level of
-      the desert hills above.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This sand, which drifts exactly like snow, lies in ridges like snow, and
-      lies loose and sliding under the feet or packs hard like snow, once
-      covered the façade of the big temple altogether, and now hides a portion
-      of it. The entrance to the temple was first cleared away in 1817 by
-      Belzoni and his party, whose gang of laborers worked eight hours a day for
-      two weeks with the thermometer at 1120 to 1160 Fahrenheit in the shade&mdash;an
-      almost incredible endurance when you consider what the heat must have been
-      in the sun beating upon this dazzling wall of sand in front of them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The rock in which the temple is excavated was cut back a considerable
-      distance, but in this cutting the great masses were left which were to be
-      fashioned into the four figures. The façade thus made, to which these
-      statues are attached, is about one hundred feet high. The statues are
-      seated on thrones with no intervening screens, and, when first seen, have
-      the appearance of images in front of and detached from the rock of which
-      they form a part. The statues are all tolerably perfect, except one, the
-      head of which is broken and lies in masses at its feet; and at the time of
-      our visit the sand covered the two northernmost to the knees. The door of
-      entrance, over which is a hawk-headed figure of Re, the titular divinity,
-      is twenty feet high. Above the colossi, and as a frieze over the curve of
-      the cornice, is a row of monkeys, (there were twenty-one originally, but
-      some are split away), like a company of negro minstrels, sitting and
-      holding up their hands in the most comical manner. Perhaps the Egyptians,
-      like the mediaeval cathedral builders, had a liking for grotesque effects
-      in architecture; but they may have intended nothing comic here, for the
-      monkey had sacred functions; he was an emblem of Thoth, the scribe of the
-      under-world, who recorded the judgments of Osiris.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These colossi are the largest in the world *; they are at least fifteen
-      feet higher than the wonders of Thebes, but it is not their size
-      principally that makes their attraction. As works of art they are worthy
-      of study. Seated, with hands on knees, in that eternal, traditional
-      rigidity of Egyptian sculpture, nevertheless the grandeur of the head and
-      the noble beauty of the face take them out of the category of mechanical
-      works. The figures represent Rameses II. and the features are of the type
-      which has come down to us as the perfection of Egyptian beauty.
-    </p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-     * The following are some of the measurements of one of these
-     giants:&mdash;height of figure sixty-six feet; pedestal on which
-     it sits, ten; leg from knee to heel, twenty; great toe, one
-     and a half feet thick; ear, three feet, five inches long;
-     fore-finger, three feet; from inner side of elbow-joint to
-     end of middle finger, fifteen feet.
-</pre>
-    <p>
-      I climbed up into the lap of one of the statues; it is there only that you
-      can get an adequate idea of the size of the body. What a roomy lap! Nearly
-      ten feet between the wrists that rest upon the legs! I sat comfortably in
-      the navel of the statue, as in a niche, and mused on the passing of the
-      nations. To these massive figures the years go by like the stream. With
-      impassive, serious features, unchanged in expression in thousands of
-      years, they sit listening always to the flowing of the unending Nile, that
-      fills all the air and takes away from that awful silence which would else
-      be painfully felt in this solitude.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The interior of this temple is in keeping with its introduction. You enter
-      a grand hall supported by eight massive Osiride columns, about twenty-two
-      feet high as we estimated them. They are figures of Rameses become Osiris&mdash;to
-      be absorbed into Osiris is the end of all the transmigrations of the
-      blessed soul. The expression of the faces of such of these statues as are
-      uninjured, is that of immortal youth&mdash;a beauty that has in it the
-      promise of immortality. The sides of this hall are covered with fine
-      sculptures, mainly devoted to the exploits of Rameses II.; and here is
-      found again, cut in the stone the long Poem of the poet Pentaour,
-      celebrating the single-handed exploit of Rameses against the Khitas on the
-      river Orontes. It relates that the king, whom his troops dared not follow,
-      charged with his chariot alone into the ranks of the enemy and rode
-      through them again and again, and slew them by hundreds. Rameses at that
-      time was only twenty-three; it was his first great campaign. Pursuing the
-      enemy, he overtook them in advance of his troops, and, rejecting the
-      councils of his officers, began the fight at once. &ldquo;The footmen and the
-      horsemen then,&rdquo; says the poet (the translator is M. de Rouge), &ldquo;recoiled
-      before the enemy who were masters of Kadesh, on the left bank of the
-      Orontes.... Then his majesty, in the pride of his strength, rising up like
-      the god Mauth, put on his fighting dress. Completely armed, he looked like
-      Baal in the hour of his might. Urging on his chariot, he pushed into the
-      army of the vile Khitas; he was alone, no one was with him. He was
-      surrounded by 2,500 chariots, and the swiftest of the warriors of the vile
-      Khitas, and of the numerous nations who accompanied them, threw themselves
-      in his way.... Each chariot bore three men, and the king had with him
-      neither princes nor generals, nor his captains of archers nor of
-      chariots.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Then Rameses calls upon Amun; he reminds him of the obelisk he has raised
-      to him, the bulls he has slain for him:&mdash;&ldquo;Thee, I invoke, O my
-      Father! I am in the midst of a host of strangers, and no man is with me.
-      My archers and horsemen have abandoned me; when I cried to them, none of
-      them has heard, when I called for help. But I prefer Amun to thousands of
-      millions of archers, to millions of horsemen, to millions of young heroes
-      all assembled together. The designs of men are nothing, Amun overrules
-      them.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Needless to say the prayer was heard, the king rode slashing through the
-      ranks of opposing chariots, slaying, and putting to rout the host.
-      Whatever basis of fact the poem may have had in an incident of battle or
-      in the result of one engagement, it was like one of Napoleon's bulletins
-      from Egypt. The Khitas were not subdued and, not many years after, they
-      drove the Egyptians out of their land and from nearly all Palestine,
-      forcing them, out of all their conquests, into the valley of the Nile
-      itself. During the long reign of this Rameses, the power of Egypt steadily
-      declined, while luxury increased and the nation was exhausted in building
-      the enormous monuments which the king projected. The close of his
-      pretentious reign has been aptly compared to that of Louis XIV.&mdash;a
-      time of decadence; in both cases the great fabric was ripe for disaster.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But Rameses liked the poem of Pentaour. It is about as long as a book of
-      the Iliad, but the stone-cutters of his reign must have known it by heart.
-      He kept them carving it and illustrating it all his life, on every wall he
-      built where there was room for the story. He never, it would seem, could
-      get enough of it. He killed those vile Khitas a hundred times; he pursued
-      them over all the stone walls in his kingdom. The story is told here at
-      Ipsambool; it is carved in the Rameseum; the poem is graved on Luxor and
-      Karnak.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Out of this great hall open eight other chambers, all more or less
-      sculptured, some of them covered with well-drawn figures on which the
-      color is still vivid. Two of these rooms are long and very narrow, with a
-      bench running round the walls, the front of which is cut out so as to
-      imitate seats with short pillars. In one are square niches, a foot deep,
-      cut in the wall. The sculptures in one are unfinished, the hieroglyphics
-      and figures drawn in black but not cut&mdash;some event having called off
-      the artists and left their work incomplete We seem to be present at the
-      execution of these designs, and so fresh are the colors ot those finished,
-      that it seems it must have been only yesterday that the workman laid down
-      the brush. (A small chamber in the rock outside the temple, which was only
-      opened in 1874, is wonderful in the vividness of its colors; we see there
-      better than anywhere else the colors of vestments.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These chambers are not the least mysterious portion of this temple. They
-      are in absolute darkness, and have no chance of ventilation. By what light
-      was this elaborate carving executed? If people ever assembled in them, and
-      sat on these benches, when lights were burning, how could they breathe? If
-      they were not used, why should they have been so decorated? They would
-      serve very well for the awful mysteries of the Odd Fellows. Perhaps they
-      were used by the Free Masons in Solomon's time.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Beyond the great hall is a transverse hall (having two small chambers off
-      from it) with four square pillars, and from this a corridor leads to the
-      adytum. Here, behind an altar of stone, sit four marred gods, facing the
-      outer door, two hundred feet from it. They sit in a twilight that is
-      only-brightened by rays that find their way in at the distant door; but at
-      morning they can see, from the depth of their mountain cavern, the rising
-      sun.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We climbed, up the yielding sand-drifts, to the top of the precipice in
-      which the temple is excavated, and walked back to a higher ridge. The view
-      from there is perhaps the best desert view on the Nile, more extensive and
-      varied than that of Aboosir. It is a wide sweep of desolation. Up and down
-      the river we see vast plains of sand and groups of black hills; to the
-      west and north the Libyan desert extends with no limit to a horizon
-      fringed with sharp peaks, like aiguilles of the Alps, that have an exact
-      resemblance to a forest.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At night, we give the ancient deities a sort of Fourth of July, and
-      illuminate the temple with colored lights. A blue-light burns upon the
-      altar in the adytum before the four gods, who may seem in their penetralia
-      to receive again the worship to which they were accustomed three thousand
-      years ago. A green flame in the great hall brings out mysteriously the
-      features of the gigantic Osiride, and revives the midnight glow of the
-      ancient ceremonies. In the glare of torches and colored lights on the
-      outside, the colossi loom in their gigantic proportions and cast grotesque
-      shadows.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Imagine this temple as it appeared to a stranger initiated into the
-      mysteries of the religion of the Pharaohs&mdash;a <i>cultus</i> in which
-      the mathematical secrets of the Pyramid and the Sphinx, art and
-      architecture, were wrapped in the same concealment with the problem of the
-      destiny of the soul; when the colors on these processions of gods and
-      heroes, upon these wars and pilgrimages sculptured in large on the walls,
-      were all brilliant; when these chambers were gorgeously furnished, when
-      the heavy doors that then hung in every passage, separating the different
-      halls and apartments, only swung open to admit the neophyte to new and
-      deeper mysteries, to halls blazing with light, where he stood in the
-      presence of these appalling figures, and of hosts of priests and acolytes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The temple of Aboo Simbel was built early in the reign of Rameses II.,
-      when art, under the impulse of his vigorous predecessors was in its
-      flower, and before the visible decadence which befel it later under a
-      royal patronage and &ldquo;protection,&rdquo; and in the demand for a wholesale
-      production, which always reduces any art to mechanical conditions. It
-      seemed to us about the finest single conception in Egypt. It must have
-      been a genius of rare order and daring who evoked in this solid mountain a
-      work of such grandeur and harmony of proportion, and then executed it
-      without a mistake. The first blow on the exterior, that began to reveal
-      the Colossi, was struck with the same certainty and precision as that
-      which brought into being the gods who are seated before the altar in the
-      depth of the mountain. A bolder idea was never more successfully wrought
-      out.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our last view of this wonder was by moonlight and by sunrise. We arose and
-      went forth over the sand-bank at five o'clock. Venus blazed as never
-      before. The Southern Cross was paling in the moonlight. The moon, in its
-      last half, hung over the south-west corner of the temple rock, and threw a
-      heavy shadow across a portion of the sitting figures. In this dimness of
-      the half-light their proportions were supernatural. Details were lost.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These might be giants of pre-historic times, or the old fabled gods of
-      antediluvian eras, outlined largely and majestically, groping their way
-      out of the hills.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Above them was the illimitable, purplish blue of the sky. The Moon, one of
-      the goddesses of the temple, withdrew more and more before the coming of
-      Re, the sun-god to whom the temple is dedicated, until she cast no shadow
-      on the façade. The temple, even the interior, caught the first glow of the
-      reddening east. The light came, as it always comes at dawn, in visible
-      waves, and these passed over the features of the Colossi, wave after wave,
-      slowly brightening them into life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the interior the first flush was better than the light of many torches,
-      and the Osiride figures were revealed in their hiding-places. At the
-      spring equinox the sun strikes squarely in, two hundred feet, upon the
-      faces of the sitting figures in the <i>adytum</i>. That is their annual
-      salute! Now it only sent its light to them; but it made rosy the Osiride
-      faces on one side of the great hall.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The morning was chilly, and we sat on a sand-drift, wrapped up against the
-      cutting wind, watching the marvellous revelation. The dawn seemed to
-      ripple down the gigantic faces of the figures outside, and to touch their
-      stony calm with something like a smile of gladness; it almost gave them
-      motion, and we would hardly have felt surprised to see them arise and
-      stretch their weary limbs, cramped by ages of inaction, and sing and shout
-      at the coming of the sun-god. But they moved not, the strengthening light
-      only revealed their stony impassiveness; and when the sun, rapidly
-      clearing the eastern hills of the desert, gilded first the row of grinning
-      monkeys, and then the light crept slowly down over faces and forms to the
-      very feet, the old heathen helplessness stood confessed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And when the sun swung free in the sky, we silently drew away and left the
-      temple and the guardians alone and unmoved. We called the reis and the
-      crew; the boat was turned to the current, the great sweeps dipped into the
-      water, and we continued our voyage down the eternal river, which still
-      sings and flows in this lonely desert place, where sit the most gigantic
-      figures man ever made.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0049" id="linkimage-0049"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0314.jpg" alt="0314 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0050" id="linkimage-0050"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0315.jpg" alt="0315 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXV.&mdash;FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E HAVE been
-      learning the language. The language consists merely of <i>tyeb</i>. With
-      <i>tyeb</i> in its various accents and inflections, you can carry on an
-      extended conversation. I have heard two Arabs talking for a half hour, in
-      which one of them used no word for reply or response except <i>tyeb</i>
-      &ldquo;good.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <i>Tyeb</i> is used for assent, agreement, approval, admiration, both
-      interrogatively and affectionately. It does the duty of the Yankee &ldquo;all
-      right&rdquo; and the vulgarism &ldquo;that's so&rdquo; combined; it has as many meanings as
-      the Italian <i>va bene</i>, or the German <i>So!</i> or the English girl's
-      yes! yes? ye-e-s, ye-e-as? yes (short), 'n ye-e-es in doubt and really a
-      negative&mdash;ex.:&mdash;&ldquo;How lovely Blanche looks to-night!&rdquo; &ldquo;'n
-      ye-e-es.&rdquo; You may hear two untutored Americans talking, and one of them,
-      through a long interchange of views will utter nothing except, &ldquo;that's
-      so,&rdquo; &ldquo;that's so?&rdquo; &ldquo;<i>that's</i> so,&rdquo; &ldquo;that's <i>so</i>.&rdquo; I think two
-      Arabs meeting could come to a perfect understanding with:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tyeb?'
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tyeb.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tyeb!&rdquo; (both together).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tyeb?&rdquo; (showing something).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tyeb&rdquo; (emphatically, in admiration).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tyeb&rdquo; (in approval of the other's admiration).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tyeb Ketér&rdquo; (&ldquo;good, much&rdquo;).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tyeb Keter?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tyeb.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tyeb.&rdquo; (together, in ratification of all that has been said).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I say <i>tyeb</i> in my satisfaction with you; you say <i>tyeb</i> in
-      pleasure at my satisfaction; I say <i>tyeb</i> in my pleasure at your
-      pleasure. The servant says <i>tyeb</i> when you give him an order; you say
-      <i>tyeb</i> upon his comprehending it. The Arabic is the richest of
-      languages. I believe there are three hundred names for earth, a hundred
-      for lion, and so on. But the vocabulary of the common people is
-      exceedingly limited. Our sailors talk all day with the aid of a very few
-      words.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we have got beyond <i>tyeb</i>. We can say <i>eiwa</i> (&ldquo;yes&rdquo;)&mdash;or
-      <i>nam</i>, when we wish to be elegant&mdash;and <i>la</i> (&ldquo;no&rdquo;). The
-      universal negative in Nubia, however, is simpler than this&mdash;it is a
-      cluck of the tongue in the left check and a slight upward jerk of the
-      head. This cluck and jerk makes &ldquo;no,&rdquo; from which there is no appeal. If
-      you ask a Nubian the price of anything&mdash;<i>be-kam dee?</i>&mdash;and
-      he should answer <i>khamsa</i> (&ldquo;five&rdquo;), and you should offer <i>thelata</i>
-      (&ldquo;three&rdquo;), and he should <i>kch</i> and jerk up his head, you might know
-      the trade was hopeless; because the <i>kch</i> expresses indifference as
-      well as a negative. The best thing you could do would be to say <i>bookra</i>
-      (&ldquo;to-morrow&rdquo;), and go away&mdash;meaning in fact to put off the purchase
-      forever, as the Nubian very well knows when he politely adds, <i>tyeb</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But there are two other words necessary to be mastered before the
-      traveller can say he knows Arabic. To the constant call for &ldquo;backsheesh&rdquo;
-       and the obstructing rabble of beggars and children, you must be able to
-      say <i>mafeesh</i> (&ldquo;nothing&rdquo;), and <i>im'shee</i> (&ldquo;getaway,&rdquo; &ldquo;clear
-      out,&rdquo; &ldquo;scat.&rdquo;) It is my experience that this <i>im'shee</i> is the most
-      necessary word in Egypt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We do nothing all day but drift, or try to drift, against the north wind,
-      not making a mile an hour, constantly turning about, floating from one
-      side of the river to the other. It is impossible to row, for the steersman
-      cannot keep the boat's bow to the current.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is something exceedingly tedious, even to a lazy and resigned man,
-      in this perpetual drifting hither and thither. To float, however slowly,
-      straight down the current, would be quite another thing. To go sideways,
-      to go stern first, to waltz around so that you never can tell which bank
-      of the river you are looking at, or which way you are going, or what the
-      points of the compass are, is confusing and unpleasant. It is the one
-      serious annoyance of a dahabeëh voyage. If it is calm, we go on
-      delightfully with oars and current; if there is a southerly breeze we
-      travel rapidly, and in the most charming way in the world. But our
-      high-cabined boats are helpless monsters in this wind, which continually
-      blows; we are worse than becalmed, we are badgered.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      However, we might be in a worse winter country, and one less entertaining.
-      We have just drifted in sight of a dahabeëh, with the English flag, tied
-      up to the bank. On the shore is a picturesque crowd; an awning is
-      stretched over high poles; men are busy at something under it&mdash;on the
-      rock near sits a group of white people under umbrellas. What can it be?
-      Are they repairing a broken yard? Are they holding a court over some
-      thief? Are they performing some mystic ceremony? We take the sandal and go
-      to investigate.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An English gentleman has shot two crocodiles, and his people are skinning
-      them, stuffing the skin, and scraping the flesh from the bones, preparing
-      the skeletons for a museum. Horrible creatures they are, even in this
-      butchered condition. The largest is twelve feet long; that is called a big
-      crocodile here; but last winter the gentleman killed one that was
-      seventeen feet long; that was a monster.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the stomach of one of these he found two pairs of bracelets, such as
-      are worn by Nubian children, two &ldquo;cunning&rdquo; little leathern bracelets
-      ornamented with shells&mdash;a most useless ornament for a crocodile. The
-      animal is becoming more and more shy every year, and it is very difficult
-      to get a shot at one. They come out in the night, looking for bracelets.
-      One night we nearly lost Ahmed, one of our black boys; he had gone down
-      upon the rudder, when an enquiring crocodile came along and made a snap at
-      him&mdash;when the boy climbed on deck he looked white even by starlight.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The invulnerability of the crocodile hide is exaggerated. One of these had
-      two bullet-holes in his back. His slayer says he has repeatedly put
-      bullets through the hide on the back.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we came away we declined steaks, but the owner gave us some eggs, so
-      that we might raise our own crocodiles.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Gradually we drift out of this almost utterly sterile country, and come to
-      long strips of palm-groves, and to sakiyas innumerable, shrieking on the
-      shore every few hundred feet. We have time to visit a considerable
-      village, and see the women at their other occupation (besides lamentation)
-      braiding each other's hair; sitting on the ground, sometimes two at a
-      head, patiently twisting odds and ends of loose hair into the snaky
-      braids, and muddling the whole with sand, water, and clay, preparatory to
-      the oil. A few women are spinning with a hand-spindle and producing very
-      good cotton-thread. All appear to have time on their hands. And what a
-      busy place this must be in summer, when the heat is like that of an oven!
-      The men loaf about like the women, and probably do even less. Those at
-      work are mostly slaves, boys and girls in the slightest clothing; and even
-      these do a great deal of &ldquo;standing round.&rdquo; Wooden hoes are used.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The desert over which we walked beyond the town was very different from
-      the Libyan with its drifts and drifts of yellow sand. We went over
-      swelling undulations (like our rolling prairies), cut by considerable
-      depressions, of sandstone with a light sand cover but all strewn with
-      shale or shingle. This black shale is sometimes seen adhering like a layer
-      of glazing to the coarse rock; and, though a part of the rock, it has the
-      queer appearance of having been a deposit solidified upon it and
-      subsequently broken off. On the tops of these hills we found everywhere
-      holes scooped out by the natives in search of nitre; the holes showed
-      evidence, in dried mud, of the recent presence of water.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We descended into a deep gorge, in which the rocks were broken squarely
-      down the face, exhibiting strata of red, white, and variegated sandstone;
-      the gorge was a Wady that ran far back into the country among the
-      mountains; we followed it down to a belt of <i>sunt</i> acacias and palms
-      on the river. This wady was full of rocks, like a mountain stream at home;
-      a great torrent running long in it, had worn the rocks into fantastic
-      shapes, cutting punch-bowls and the like, and water had recently dried in
-      the hollows. But it had not rained on the river.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This morning we are awakened by loud talking and wrangling on deck, that
-      sounds like a Paris revolution. We have only stopped for milk! The
-      forenoon we spend among the fashionable ladies of Derr, the capital of
-      Nubia, studying the modes, in order that we may carry home the latest.
-      This is an aristocratic place. One of the eight-hundred-years-old sycamore
-      trees, of which we made mention, is still vigorous and was bearing the
-      sycamore fig. The other is in front of a grand mud-house with latticed
-      windows, the residence of the Kashefs of Sultan Selim whose descendants
-      still occupy it, and, though shorn of authority, are said to be proud of
-      their Turkish origin. One of them, Hassan Kashef, an old man in the memory
-      of our dragoman, so old that he had to lift up his eyelids with his finger
-      when he wanted to see, died only a few years ago. This patriarch had
-      seventy-two wives as his modest portion in this world; and as the Koran
-      allows only four, there was some difficulty in settling the good man's
-      estate. The matter was referred to the Khedive, but he wisely refused to
-      interfere. When the executor came to divide the property among the
-      surviving children, he found one hundred and five to share the
-      inheritance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The old fellow had many other patriarchal ways. On his death-bed he left a
-      legacy of both good and evil wishes, requests to reward this friend, and
-      to &ldquo;serve out&rdquo; that enemy, quite in the ancient style, and in the Oriental
-      style, recalling the last recorded words of King David, whose expiring
-      breath was an expression of a wish for vengeance upon one of his enemies,
-      whom he had sworn not to kill. It reads now as if it might have been
-      spoken by a Bedawee sheykh to his family only yesterday:&mdash;&ldquo;And,
-      behold, thou hast with thee Shimei the son of Gera, a Benjamite of
-      Bahurim, which cursed me with a grievous curse in the day when I went to
-      Mahanaim; but he came down to meet me at Jordan, and I sware to him by the
-      Lord, saying, I will not put thee to death with the sword. Now therefore
-      hold him not guiltless: for thou art a wise man, and knowest what thou
-      oughtest to do unto him; but his hoar head bring thou down to the grave
-      with blood. So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of
-      David.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We call at the sand-covered temple at A'mada, and crawl into it; a very
-      neat little affair, with fresh color and fine sculptures, and as old as
-      the time of Osirtasen III. (the date of the obelisk of Heliopolis, of the
-      Tombs of Beni Hassan, say about fifteen hundred years before Rameses II.);
-      and then sail quickly down to Korosko, passing over in an hour or so a
-      distance that required a day and a half on the ascent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At Korosko there are caravans in from Kartoom; the camel-drivers wear
-      monstrous silver rings, made in the interior, the crown an inch high and
-      set with blood-stone. I bought from the neck of a pretty little boy a
-      silver &ldquo;charm,&rdquo; a flat plate with the name of Allah engraved on it.
-      Neither the boy nor the charm had been washed since they came into being.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The caravan had brought one interesting piece of freight, which had just
-      been sent down the river. It was the <i>head</i> of the Sultan of Darfoor,
-      preserved in spirits, and forwarded to the Khedive as a present. This was
-      to certify that the Sultan was really killed, when Darfoor was captured by
-      the army of the Viceroy; though I do not know that there is any bounty on
-      the heads of African Sultans. It is an odd gift to send to a ruler who
-      wears the European dress and speaks French, and whose chief military
-      officers are Americans.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The desolate hills behind Korosko rise a thousand feet, and we climbed one
-      of the peaks to have a glimpse of the desert route and the country towards
-      Kartoom. I suppose a more savage landscape does not exist. The peak of
-      black disintegrated rocks on which we stood was the first of an assemblage
-      of such as far as we could see south; the whole horizon was cut by these
-      sharp peaks; and through these thickly clustering hills the caravan trail
-      made its way in sand and powdered dust. Shut in from the breeze, it must
-      be a hard road to travel, even with a winter sun multiplying its rays from
-      all these hot rocks; in the summer it would be frightful. But on these
-      summits, or on any desert swell, the air is an absolute elixir of life; it
-      has a quality of lightness but not the rarity that makes respiration
-      difficult.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At a village below Korosko we had an exhibition of the manner of fighting
-      with the long Nubian war-spear and the big round shield made of
-      hippopotamus-hide. The men jumped about and uttered frightening cries, and
-      displayed more agility than fight, the object being evidently to terrify
-      by a threatening aspect; but the scene was as barbarous as any we see in
-      African pictures. Here also was a pretty woman (pretty for her) with
-      beautiful eyes, who wore a heavy nose-ring of gold, which she said she put
-      on to make her face beautiful; nevertheless she would sell the ring for
-      nine dollars and a half. The people along here will sell anything they
-      have, ornaments, charms to protect them from the evil-eye,&mdash;they will
-      part with anything for money. At this village we took on a crocodile ten
-      feet long, which had been recently killed, and lashed it to the horizontal
-      yard. It was Abd-el-Atti's desire to present it to a friend in Cairo, and
-      perhaps he was not reluctant, when we should be below the cataract, to
-      have it take the appearance, in the eyes of spectators, of having been
-      killed by some one on this boat.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We obtained above Korosko one of the most beautiful animals in the world&mdash;a
-      young gazelle&mdash;to add to our growing menagerie; which consists of a
-      tame duck, who never gets away when his leg is tied; a timid desert hare,
-      who has lived for a long time in a tin box in the cabin, trembling like an
-      aspen leaf night and day; and a chameleon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The chameleon ought to have a chapter to himself. We have reason to think
-      that he has the soul of some transmigrating Egyptian. He is the most
-      uncanny beast. We have made him a study, and find very little good in him.
-      His changeableness of color is not his worst quality. He has the nature of
-      a spy, and he is sullen and snappish besides. We discovered that his color
-      is not a purely physical manifestation, but that it depends upon his state
-      of mind, upon his temper. When everything is serene, he is green as a May
-      morning, but anger changes him instantly for the worse. It is however true
-      that he takes his color mainly from the substance upon which he dwells,
-      not from what he eats; for he eats flies and allows them to make no
-      impression on his exterior. When he was taken off an acacia-tree, this
-      chameleon was of the bright-green color of the leaves. Brought into our
-      cabin, his usual resting-place was on the reddish maroon window curtains,
-      and his green changed muddily into the color of the woollen. When angry,
-      he would become mottled with dark spots, and have a thick cloudy color.
-      This was the range of his changes of complexion; it is not enough (is it?)
-      to give him his exaggerated reputation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I confess that I almost hated him, and perhaps cannot do him justice. He
-      is a crawling creature at best, and his mode of getting about is
-      disagreeable; his feet have the power of clinging to the slightest
-      roughness, and he can climb anywhere; his feet are like hands; besides,
-      his long tail is like another hand; it is prehensile like the monkey's. He
-      feels his way along very carefully, taking a turn with his tail about some
-      support, when he is passing a chasm, and not letting go until his feet are
-      firmly fixed on something else. And, then, the way he uses his eye is
-      odious. His eye-balls are stuck upon the end of protuberances on his head,
-      which protuberances work like ball-and-socket joints&mdash;as if you had
-      your eye on the end of your finger. When he wants to examine anything, he
-      never turns his head; he simply swivels his eye round and brings it to
-      bear on the object. Pretending to live in cold isolation on the top of a
-      window curtain, he is always making clammy excursions round the cabin, and
-      is sometimes found in our bed-chambers. You wouldn't like to feel his cold
-      tail dragging over you in the night.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The first question every morning, when we come to breakfast, is,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Where is that chameleon?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He might be under the table, you know, or on the cushions, and you might
-      sit on him. Commonly he conceals his body behind the curtain, and just
-      lifts his head above the roller. There he sits, spying us, gyrating his
-      evil eye upon us, and never stirring his head; he takes the color of the
-      curtain so nearly that we could not see him if it was not for that swivel
-      eye. It is then that he appears malign, and has the aspect of a wise but
-      ill-disposed Egyptian whose soul has had ill luck in getting into any
-      respectable bodies for three or four thousand years. He lives upon
-      nothing,&mdash;you would think he had been raised in a French <i>pension</i>.
-      Few flies happen his way; and, perhaps he is torpid out of the sun so much
-      of the time, he is not active to catch those that come. I carried him a
-      big one the other day, and he repaid my kindness by snapping my finger.
-      And I am his only friend.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Alas, the desert hare, whom we have fed with corn, and greens, and tried
-      to breed courage in for a long time, died this morning at an early hour;
-      either he was chilled out of the world by the cold air on deck, or he died
-      of palpitation of the heart; for he was always in a flutter of fear, his
-      heart going like a trip-hammer, when anyone approached him. He only rarely
-      elevated his long silky ears in a serene enjoyment of society. His tail
-      was too short, but he was, nevertheless, an animal to become attached to.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Speaking of Hassan Kashef's violation of the Moslem law, in taking more
-      than four wives, is it generally known that the women in Mohammed's time
-      endeavored also to have the privileges of men? Forty women who had cooked
-      for the soldiers who were fighting the infidels and had done great service
-      in the campaign, were asked by the Prophet to name their reward. The chief
-      lady, who was put forward to prefer the request of the others, asked that
-      as men were permitted four wives women might be allowed to have four
-      husbands. The Prophet gave them a plain reason for refusing their
-      petition, and it has never been renewed. The legend shows that long ago
-      women protested against their disabilities.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The strong north wind, with coolish weather, continues. On Sunday we are
-      nowhere in particular, and climb a high sandstone peak, and sit in the
-      shelter of a rock, where wandering men have often come to rest. It is a
-      wild, desert place, and there is that in the atmosphere of the day which
-      leads to talk of the end of the world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Like many other Moslems, Abd-el-Atti thinks that these are the last days,
-      bad enough days, and that the end draws near. We have misunderstood what
-      Mr. Lane says about Christ coming to &ldquo;judge&rdquo; the world. The Moslems
-      believe that Christ, who never died, but was taken up into heaven away
-      from the Jews,&mdash;a person in his likeness being crucified in his
-      stead,&mdash;will come to rule, to establish the Moslem religion and a
-      reign of justice (the Millenium); and that after this period Christ will
-      die, and be buried in Medineh, not far from Mohammed. Then the world will
-      end, and Azrael, the angel of death, will be left alone on the earth for
-      forty days. He will go to and fro, and find no one; all will be in their
-      graves. Then Christ and Mohammed and all the dead will rise. But the Lord
-      God will be the final judge of all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, there have been many false prophets. A man came before Haroun e'
-      Rasheed pretending to be a prophet.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'What proof have you that you are one? What miracle can you do?'.rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Anything you like.'.rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Christ, on whom be peace, raised men from the dead.'.rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'So will I.' This took place before the king and the chief-justice. 'Let
-      the head of the chief-justice be cut off,' said the pretended prophet,
-      'and I will restore him to life.'.rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Oh,' cried the chief-justice, 'I believe that the man is a real prophet.
-      Anyone who does not believe can have his head cut off, and try it.'.rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;A woman also claimed to be a prophetess. 'But,' said the Khalif Haroun e'
-      Rasheed, 'Mohammed declared that he was the last man who should be a
-      prophet.'.rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'He didn't say that a <i>woman</i> shouldn't be,' the woman she answer.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The people vary in manners and habits here from village to village, much
-      more than we supposed they would. Walking this morning for a couple of
-      miles through the two villages of Maharraka&mdash;rude huts scattered
-      under palm-trees&mdash;we find the inhabitants, partly Arab, partly
-      Barabra, and many negro slaves, more barbaric than any we have seen; boys
-      and girls, till the marriageable age, in a state of nature, women neither
-      so shy nor so careful about covering themselves with clothing as in other
-      places, and the slaves wretchedly provided for. The heads of the young
-      children are shaved in streaks, with long tufts of hair left; the women
-      are loaded with tawdry necklaces, and many of them, poor as they are,
-      sport heavy hoops of gold in the nose, and wear massive silver bracelets.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The slaves, blacks and mulattoes, were in appearance like those seen
-      formerly in our southern cotton-fields. I recall a picture, in abolition
-      times, representing a colored man standing alone, and holding up his arms,
-      in a manner beseeching the white man, passing by, to free him. To-day I
-      saw the picture realized. A very black man, standing nearly naked in the
-      midst of a bean-field, raised up both his arms, and cried aloud to us as
-      we went by. The attitude had all the old pathos in it. As the poor fellow
-      threw up his arms in a wild despair, he cried &ldquo;Backsheesh, backsheesh, O!
-      howadji!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      For the first time we found the crops in danger. The country was overrun
-      with reddish-brown locusts, which settled in clouds upon every green
-      thing; and the people in vain attempted to frighten them from their scant
-      strip of grain. They are not, however, useless. The attractive women
-      caught some, and, pulling off the wings and legs, offered them to us to
-      eat. They said locusts were good; and I suppose they are such as John the
-      Baptist ate. We are not Baptists.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we go down the river we take in two or three temples a day, besides
-      these ruins of humanity in the village,&mdash;-Dakkeh, Gerf Hossâyn,
-      Dendoor. It is easy to get enough of these second-class temples. That at
-      Gerf Hossâyn is hewn in the rock, and is in general arrangement like
-      Ipsambool&mdash;it was also made by Rameses II.&mdash;but is in all
-      respects inferior, and lacks the Colossi. I saw sitting in the <i>adytum</i>
-      four figures whom I took to be Athos, Parthos, Aramis, and D'Artignan&mdash;though
-      this edifice was built long before the day of the &ldquo;Three Guardsmen.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The people in the village below have such a bad reputation that the
-      dragoman in great fright sent sailors after us, when he found we were
-      strolling through the country alone. We have seen no natives so well off
-      in cattle, sheep, and cooking-utensils, or in nose-rings, beads, and
-      knives; they are, however, a wild, noisy tribe, and the whole village
-      followed us for a mile, hooting for backsheesh. The girls wear a nose-ring
-      and a girdle; the boys have no rings or girdles. The men are fierce and
-      jealous of their wives, perhaps with reason, stabbing and throwing them
-      into the river on suspicion, if they are caught talking with another man.
-      So they say. At this village we saw pits dug in the sand (like those
-      described in the Old Testament), in which cattle, sheep and goats were
-      folded; it being cheaper to dig a pit than to build a stone fence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At Kalâbshee are two temples, ruins on a sufficiently large scale to be
-      imposing; sculptures varied in character and beautifully colored;
-      propylons with narrow staircases, and concealed rooms, and deep windows
-      bespeaking their use as fortifications and dungeons as well as temples;
-      and columns of interest to the architect; especially two, fluted (time of
-      Rameses II.) with square projecting abacus like the Doric, but with broad
-      bases. The inhabitants are the most pestilent on the river, crowding their
-      curiosities upon us, and clamoring for money. They have for sale
-      gazelle-horns, and the henna (which grows here), in the form of a green
-      powder.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      However, Kalâbshee has educational facilities. I saw there a boys' school
-      in full operation. In the open air, but in the sheltering angle of a house
-      near the ruins, sat on the ground the schoolmaster. Behind him leaned his
-      gun against the wall; before him lay an open Koran; and in his hand he
-      held a thin palm rod with which he enforced education. He was dictating
-      sentences from the book to a scrap of a scholar, a boy who sat on the
-      ground, with an inkhorn beside him, and wrote the sentences on a board
-      slate, repeating the words in aloud voice as he wrote. Nearby was another
-      urchin, seated before a slate leaning against the angle of of the wall,
-      committing the writing on it to memory, in a loud voice also. When he
-      looked off the stick reminded him to attend to his slate. I do not know
-      whether he calls this a private or a public school.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Quitting these inhospitable savages as speedily as we can, upon the
-      springing up of a south wind, we are going down stream at a spanking rate,
-      leaving a rival dahabeëh, belonging to an English lord, behind, when the
-      adversary puts it into the head of our pilot to steer across the river,
-      and our prosperous career is suddenly arrested on a sandbar. We are fast,
-      and the English boat, keeping in the channel, shows us her rudder and
-      disappears round the bend.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Extraordinary confusion follows; the crew are in the water, they are on
-      deck, the anchor is got out, there are as many opinions, as people, and no
-      one obeys. The long pilot is a spectacle, after he has been wading about
-      in the stream and comes on deck. His gown is off and his turban also; his
-      head is shaved; his drawers are in tatters like lace-work. He strides up
-      and down beating his breast, his bare poll shining in the sun like a
-      billiard ball. We are on the sand nearly four hours, and the accident,
-      causing us to lose this wind, loses us, it so happens, three days. By dark
-      we tie up near the most excruciating Sakiya in the world. It is suggested
-      to go on shore and buy the property and close it out. But the boy who is
-      driving will neither sell nor stop his cattle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At Gertassee we have more ruins and we pass a beautiful, single column,
-      conspicuous for a long distance over the desert, as fine as the once
-      &ldquo;nameless column&rdquo; in the Roman forum, These temples, or places of worship,
-      are on the whole depressing. There was no lack of religious privileges if
-      frequency of religious edifices gave them. But the people evidently had no
-      part in the ceremonies, and went never into these dark chambers, which are
-      now inhabited by bats. The old religion does not commend itself to me. Of
-      what use would be one of these temples on Asylum Hill, in Hartford, and
-      how would the Rev. Mr. Twichell busy himself in its dark recesses, I
-      wonder, even with the help of the deacons and the committee? The Gothic is
-      quite enough for us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This morning&mdash;we have now entered upon the month of February&mdash;for
-      the first time in Nubia, we have early a slight haze, a thin veil of it;
-      and passing between shores rocky and high and among granite breakers, we
-      are reminded of the Hudson river on a June morning. A strong north wind,
-      however, comes soon to puff away this illusion, and it blows so hard that
-      we are actually driven up-stream.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The people and villages under the crumbling granite ledges that this delay
-      enables us to see, are the least promising we have encountered; women and
-      children are more nearly barbarians in dress and manners; for the women, a
-      single strip of brown cotton, worn <i>à la</i> Bedawee, leaving free the
-      legs, the right arm and breast, is a common dress. And yet, some of these
-      women are not without beauty. One pretty girl sitting on a rock, the sun
-      glistening on the castor-oil of her hair, asked for backsheesh in a sweet
-      voice, her eyes sparkling with merriment. A flower blooming in vain in
-      this desert!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Is it a question of &ldquo;converting&rdquo; these people? Certainly, nothing but the
-      religion of the New Testament, put in practice here, bringing in its
-      train, industry, self-respect, and a desire to know, can awaken the higher
-      nature, and lift these creatures into a respectable womanhood. But the
-      task is more difficult than it would be with remote tribes in Central
-      Africa. These people have been converted over and over again. They have
-      had all sorts of religions during the last few thousand years, and they
-      remain essentially the same. They once had the old Egyptian faith,
-      whatever it was; and subsequently they varied that with the Greek and
-      Roman shades of heathenism. They then accepted the early Christianity, as
-      the Abyssinians did, and had, for hundreds of years, opportunity of
-      Christian worship, when there were Christian churches all along the Nile
-      from Alexander to Meroë, and holy hermits in every eligible cave and tomb.
-      And then came Mohammed's friends, giving them the choice of belief or
-      martyrdom, and they embraced the religion of Mecca as cordially as any
-      other.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They have remained essentially unchanged through all their changes. This
-      hopelessness of their condition is in the fact that in all the shiftings
-      of religions and of dynasties, the women have continued to soak their hair
-      in castor-oil. The fashion is as old as the Nile world. Many people look
-      upon castor-oil as an excellent remedy. I should like to know what it has
-      done for Africa.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At Dabod is an interesting ruin, and a man sits there in front of his
-      house, weaving, confident that no rain will come to spoil his yarn. He
-      sits and works the treadle of his loom in a hole in the ground, the thread
-      being stretched out twenty or thirty feet on the wall before him. It is
-      the only industry of the village, and a group of natives are looking on.
-      The poor weaver asks backsheesh, and when I tell him I have nothing
-      smaller than an English sovereign, he says he can change it!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Here we find also a sort of Holly-Tree Inn, a house for charitable
-      entertainment, such as is often seen in Moslem villages. It is a square
-      mud-structure, entered by two doors, and contains two long rooms with
-      communicating openings. The dirt-floors are cleanly swept and fresh mats
-      are laid down at intervals. Any stranger or weary traveler, passing by, is
-      welcome to come in and rest or pass the night, to have a cup of coffee and
-      some bread. There are two cleanly dressed attendants, and one of them is
-      making coffee, within, over a handful of fire, in a tiny coffee-pot. In
-      front, in the sun, on neat mats, sit half a dozen turbaned men, perhaps
-      tired wanderers and pilgrims in this world, who have turned aside to rest
-      for an hour, for a day, or for a week. They appear to have been there
-      forever. The establishment is maintained by a rich man of the place; but
-      signs of an abode of wealth we failed to discover in any of the
-      mud-enclosures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we are under way again, we express surprise at finding here such an
-      excellent charity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You no think the Lord he take care for his own?&rdquo; says Abd-el-Atti. &ldquo;When
-      the kin' [king] of Abyssinia go to 'stroy the Kaabeh in Mecca&rdquo;&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you ever see the Kaabeh?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Many times. Plenty times I been in Mecca.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;In what part of the Kaabeh is the Black Stone?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;So. The Kaabeh is a building like a cube, about, I think him, thirty feet
-      high, built in the middle of the mosque at Mecca. It was built by Abraham,
-      of white marble. In the outside the east wall, near the corner, 'bout so
-      (four feet) high you find him, the Black Stone, put there by Abraham, call
-      him <i>haggeh el ashad</i>, the lucky, the fortunate stone. It is opposite
-      the sunrise. Where Abraham get him? God knows. If any one sick, he touch
-      this stone, be made so well as he was. So I <i>hun</i>derstand. The Kaabeh
-      is in the centre of the earth, and has fronts to the four quarters of the
-      globe, Asia, Hindia, Egypt, all places, toward which the Moslem kneel in
-      prayer. Near the Kaabeh is the well, the sacred well Zem-Zem, has clear
-      water, beautiful, so lifely. One time a year, in the month before Ramadan,
-      Zem-Zem spouts up high in the air, and people come to drink of it. When
-      Hagar left Ishmael, to look for water, being very thirsty, the little
-      fellow scratched with his fingers in the sand, and a spring of water
-      rushed up; this is the well Zem-Zem. I told you the same water is in the
-      spring in Syria, El Gebel; I find him just the same; come under the earth
-      from Zem-Zem.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;When the kin' of Abyssinia, who not believe, what you call infidel, like
-      that Englishman, yes, Mr. Buckle, I see him in Sinai and Petra&mdash;very
-      wise man, know a great deal, very nice gentleman, I like him very much,
-      but I think he not believe&mdash;when the kin' of Abyssinia came with all
-      his great army and his elephants to fight against Mecca, and to 'stroy the
-      Kaabeh as well the same time to carry off all the cattle of the people,
-      then the people they say, 'the cattle are ours, but the Kaabeh is the
-      Lord's, and he will have care over it; the Kaabeh is not ours.' There was
-      one of the elephants of the kin' of Abyssinia, the name of Mahmoud, and he
-      was very wise, more wise than anybody else. When he came in sight of
-      Mecca, he turned back and went the other way, and not all the spears and
-      darts of the soldiers could stop him. The others went on. Then the Lord
-      sent out of the hell very small birds, with very little stones, taken out
-      of hell, in their claws, no larger than mustard seeds; and the birds
-      dropped these on the heads of the soldiers that rode on the elephants&mdash;generally
-      three or four on an elephant. The little seeds went right down through the
-      men and through the elephants, and killed them, and by this the army was
-      'stroyed.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;When the kin', after that, come into the mosque, some power outside
-      himself made him to bow down in respect to the Kaabeh. He went away and
-      did not touch it. And it stands there the same now.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0051" id="linkimage-0051"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0331.jpg" alt="0331 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXVI.&mdash;MYSTERIOUS PHILÆ.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E are on deck
-      early to see the approach to Philæ, which is through a gateway of high
-      rocks. The scenery is like parts of the Rhine; and as we come in sight of
-      the old mosque perched on the hillside, and the round tomb on the pinnacle
-      above, it is very like the Rhine, with castle ruins. The ragged and rock
-      island of Biggeh rises before us and seems to stop the way, but, at a turn
-      in the river, the little temple, with its conspicuous columns, then the
-      pylon of the great temple, and at length the mass of ruins, that cover the
-      little island of Philæ, open on the view.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the narrows we meet the fleet of government boats conveying the
-      engineer expedition going up to begin the railway from Wady Haifa to
-      Berber. Abd-el-Atti does not like the prospect of Egypt running deeper and
-      deeper in debt, with no good to come of it, he says; he believes that the
-      Khedive is acting under the advice of England, which is entirely selfish
-      and only desires a short way to India, in case the French should shut the
-      Suez Canal against them (his view is a very good example of a Moslem's
-      comprehension of affairs). Also thinking, with all Moslems, that it is
-      best to leave the world and its people as the Lord has created and placed
-      them, he replied to an enquiry about his opinion of the railroad, with
-      this story of Jonah:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;When the prophet Jonah came out of the whale and sat down on the bank to
-      dry under a tree (I have seen the tree) in Syria, there was a blind man
-      sitting near by, who begged the prophet to give him sight. Then Jonah
-      asked the Lord for help and the blind man was let to see. The man was
-      eating dates at the same time, and the first thing he did when he got his
-      eyes open was to snap the hard seeds at Jonah, who you know was very
-      tender from being so long in the whale. Jonah was stung on his skin, and
-      bruised by the stones, and he cry out, 'O! Lord, how is this?' And the
-      Lord said, 'Jonah, you not satisfied to leave things as I placed 'em; and
-      now you must suffer for it'.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      One muses and dreams at Philæ, and does not readily arouse himself to the
-      necessity of exploring and comprehending the marvels and the beauties that
-      insensibly lead him into sentimental reveries. If ever the spirit of
-      beauty haunted a spot, it is this. Whatever was harsh in the granite
-      ledges, or too sharp in the granite walls, whatever is repellant in the
-      memory concerning the uses of these temples of a monstrous theogony, all
-      is softened now by time, all asperities are worn away; nature and art grow
-      lovely together in a gentle decay, sunk in a repose too beautiful to be
-      sad. Nowhere else in Egypt has the grim mystery of the Egyptians <i>cultus</i>
-      softened into so harmless a memory.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The oval island contains perhaps a hundred acres. It is a rock, with only
-      a patch or two of green, and a few scattered palms, just enough to give it
-      a lonely, poetic, and not a fruitful aspect, and, as has been said, is
-      walled all round from the water's edge. Covered with ruins, the principal
-      are those of the temple of Isis. Beginning at the southern end of the
-      island, where a flight of steps led up to it, it stretches along, with a
-      curved and broadening colonnade, giant pylons, great courts and covered
-      temples. It is impossible to imagine a structure or series of structures,
-      more irregular in the lines or capricious in the forms. The architects
-      gave free play to their fancy, and we find here the fertility and variety,
-      if not the grotesqueness of imagination of the mediaeval cathedral
-      builders. The capitals of the columns of the colonnade are sculptured in
-      rich variety; the walls of the west cloister are covered with fine
-      carvings, the color on them still fresh and delicate; and the ornamental
-      designs are as beautiful and artistic as the finest Greek work, which some
-      of it suggests: as rich as the most lovely Moorish patterns, many of which
-      seem to have been copied from these living creations&mdash;-diamond-work,
-      birds, exquisite medallions of flowers, and sphinxes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Without seeing this mass of buildings, you can have no notion of the labor
-      expended in decorating them. All the surfaces of the gigantic pylons, of
-      the walls and courts, exterior and interior, are covered with finely and
-      carefully cut figures and hieroglyphics, and a great deal of the work is
-      minute and delicate chiselling. You are lost in wonder if you attempt to
-      estimate the time and the number of workmen necessary to accomplish all
-      this. It seems incredible that men could ever have had patience or leisure
-      for it. A great portion of the figures, within and without, have been,
-      with much painstaking, defaced; probably it was done by the early
-      Christians, and this is the only impress they have left of their
-      domination in this region.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The most interesting sculptures, however, at Philæ are those in a small
-      chamber, or mortuary chapel, on the roof of the main temple, touching the
-      most sacred mystery of the Egyptian religion, the death and resurrection
-      of Osiris. This myth, which took many fantastic forms, was no doubt that
-      forbidden topic upon which Herodotus was not at liberty to speak. It was
-      the growth of a period in the Egyptian theology when the original
-      revelation of one God grew weak and began to disappear under a monstrous
-      symbolism. It is possible that the priests, who held their religious
-      philosophy a profound secret from the vulgar (whose religion was simply a
-      gross worship of symbols), never relinquished the belief expressed in
-      their sacred texts, which say of God &ldquo;that He is the sole generator in
-      heaven and earth, and that He has not been begotten.... That He is the
-      only living and true God, who was begotten by Himself.... He who has
-      existed from the beginning.... who has made all things and was not Himself
-      made.&rdquo; It is possible that they may have held to this and still kept in
-      the purity of its first conception the myth of the manifestation of
-      Osiris, however fantastic the myth subsequently became in mythology and in
-      the popular worship.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Osiris, the personification of the sun, the life-giving, came upon the
-      earth to benefit men, and one of his titles was the &ldquo;manifester of good
-      and truth.&rdquo; He was slain in a conflict with Set the spirit of evil and
-      darkness; he was buried; he was raised from the dead by the prayers of his
-      wife, Isis; he became the judge of the dead; he was not only the
-      life-giving but the saving deity; &ldquo;himself the first raised from the dead,
-      he assisted to raise those who were justified, after having aided them to
-      overcome all their trials.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But whatever the priests and the initiated believed, this myth is here
-      symbolized in the baldest forms. We have the mummy of Osiris passing
-      through its interment and the successive stages of the under-world; then
-      his body is dismembered and scattered, and finally the limbs and organs
-      are reassembled and joined together, and the resurrection takes place
-      before our eyes. It reminds one of a pantomime of the Ravels, who used to
-      chop up the body of a comrade and then put him together again as good as
-      new, with the <i>insouciance</i> of beings who lived in a world where such
-      transactions were common. This whole temple indeed, would be a royal place
-      for the tricks of a conjurer or the delusions of a troop of stage wizards.
-      It is full of dark chambers and secret passages, some of them in the walls
-      and some subterranean, the entrances to which are only disclosed by
-      removing a close-fitting stone.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The great pylons, ascended by internal stairways, have habitable chambers
-      in each story, lighted by deep slits of windows, and are like palace
-      fortresses. The view from the summit of one of them is fascinating, but
-      almost grim; that is, your surroundings are huge masses of granite
-      mountains and islands, only relieved by some patches of green and a few
-      palms on the east shore. But time has so worn and fashioned the stones of
-      the overtopping crags, and the color of the red granite is so warm, and
-      the <i>contours</i> are so softened that under the brilliant sky the view
-      is mellowed and highly poetical, and ought not to be called grim.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This little island, gay with its gorgeously colored walls, graceful
-      colonnades, garden-roofs and spreading terraces, set in its rim of swift
-      water, protected by these granite fortresses, bent over by this sky, must
-      have been a dear and sacred place to the worshippers of Isis and Osiris,
-      and we scarcely wonder that the celebration of their rites was continued
-      so long in our era. We do not need, in order to feel the romance of the
-      place, to know that it was a favorite spot with Cleopatra, and that she
-      moored her silken-sailed dahabeëh on the sandbank where ours now lies.
-      Perhaps she was not a person of romantic nature. There is a portrait of
-      her here (the authenticity of which rests upon I know not what authority)
-      stiffly cut in the stone, in which she appears to be a resolute woman with
-      full sensual lips and a determined chin. Her hair is put up in decent
-      simplicity. But I half think that she herself was like her other Egyptian
-      sisters and made her silken locks to shine with the juice of the
-      castor-oil plant. But what were these mysteries in which she took part,
-      and what was this worship, conducted in these dark and secret chambers? It
-      was veiled from all vulgar eyes; probably the people were scarcely allowed
-      to set foot upon the sacred island.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sunday morning was fresh and cool, with fleecy clouds, light and
-      summer-like. Instead of Sabbath bells, when I rose late, I heard the wild
-      chant of a crew rowing a dahabeëh down the echoing channel. And I wondered
-      how church bells, rung on the top of these pylons, would sound
-      reverberating among these granite rocks and boulders. We climbed, during
-      the afternoon, to the summit of the island of Biggeh, which overshadows
-      Philæ, and is a most fantastic pile of crags. You can best understand this
-      region by supposing that a gigantic internal explosion lifted the granite
-      strata into the air, and that the fragments fell hap-hazard. This Biggeh
-      might have been piled up by the giants who attempted to scale heaven, when
-      Zeus blasted them and their work with his launched lightning.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this summit, we have in view the broken, rock-strewn field called the
-      Cataract, and all the extraordinary islands of rock above, that almost dam
-      the river; there, over Philæ, on the north shore, is the barrack-like
-      Austrian Mission, and neat it the railway that runs through the desert
-      waste, round the hills of the Cataract, to Assouan. These vast piled-up
-      fragments and splintered ledges, here and all about us, although of raw
-      granite and syenite, are all disintegrating and crumbling into fine atoms.
-      It is this decay that softens the hardness of the outlines, and harmonizes
-      with the ruins below. Wild as the convulsion was that caused this
-      fantastic wreck, the scene is not without a certain peace now, as we sit
-      here this Sunday afternoon, on a high crag, looking down upon the pagan
-      temples, which resist the tooth of time almost as well as the masses of
-      granite rock that are in position and in form their sentinels.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Opposite, on the hill, is the mosque, and the plastered dome of the
-      sheykh's tomb, with its prayer-niche, a quiet and commanding place of
-      repose. The mosque looks down upon the ever-flowing Nile, upon the granite
-      desolation, upon the decaying temple of Isis,&mdash;converted once into a
-      temple of the true God, and now merely the marvel of the traveler. The
-      mosque itself, representative of the latest religion, is falling to ruin.
-      What will come next? What will come to break up this civilized barbarism?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Abd-el-Atti, why do you suppose the Lord permitted the old heathen to
-      have such a lovely place as this Philæ for the practice of their
-      superstitions?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Do' know, be sure. Once there was a stranger, I reckon him travel without
-      any dragoman, come to the tent of the prophet Abraham, and ask for food
-      and lodging; he was a kind of infidel, not believe in God, not to believe
-      in anything but a bit of stone. And Abraham was very angry, and sent him
-      away without any dinner. Then the Lord, when he saw it, scolded Abraham.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'But,' says Abraham, 'the man is an infidel, and does not believe in
-      Thee.'
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Well,' the Lord he answer to Abraham, 'he has lived in my world all his
-      life, and I have suffered him, and taken care of him, and prospered him,
-      and borne his infidelity; and you could not give him a dinner, or shelter
-      for one night in your house!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Then Abraham ran after the infidel, and called him back, and told him all
-      that the Lord he say. And the infidel when he heard it, answer, 'If the
-      Lord says that, I believe in Him; and I believe that you are a prophet.'.rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And do you think, Abd-el-Atti, that men have been more tolerant, the
-      Friends of Mohammed, for instance, since then?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Men pretty nearly always the same; I see 'em all 'bout alike. I read in
-      our books a little, what you call 'em?&mdash;yes, anecdote, how a Moslem
-      'ulama, and a Christian priest, and a Jewish rabbi, were in a place
-      together, and had some conversation, and they agreed to tell what each
-      would like best to happen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The priest he began:&mdash;'I should like,' says he, 'as many Moslems to
-      die as there are animals sacrificed by them on the day of sacrifice.'
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'And I,' says the 'ulama, 'would like to see put out of the way so many
-      Christians as they eat eggs on Easter.'
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Now it is your turn, says they both to the rabbi:&mdash;'Well, I should
-      like you both to have your wishes.' I think the Jew have the best of it.
-      Not so?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The night is soft and still, and envelopes Philæ in a summer warmth. The
-      stars crowd the blue-black sky with scintillant points, obtrusive and
-      blazing in startling nearness; they are all repeated in the darker blue of
-      the smooth river, where lie also, perfectly outlined, the heavy shadows of
-      the granite masses. Upon the silence suddenly breaks the notes of a
-      cornet, from a dahabeëh moored above us, in pulsations, however, rather to
-      emphasize than to break the hush of the night.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Eh! that's Mr. Fiddle,&rdquo; cries Abd-el-Atti, whose musical nomenclature is
-      not very extensive, &ldquo;that's a him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Once on a moonless night in Upper Nubia, as we lay tied to the bank, under
-      the shadow of the palms, there had swept past us, flashing into sight an
-      instant and then gone in the darkness, an upward-bound dahabeëh, from the
-      deck of which a cornet-à-piston flung out, in salute, the lively notes of
-      a popular American air. The player (whom the dragoman could never call by
-      any name but &ldquo;Mr. Fiddle&rdquo;) as we came to know later, was an Irish
-      gentleman, Anglicized and Americanized, and indeed cosmopolitan, who has a
-      fancy for going about the world and awaking here and there remote and
-      commonly undisturbed echoes with his favorite brass horn. I daresay that
-      moonlight voyagers on the Hudson have heard its notes dropping down from
-      the Highlands; it has stirred the air of every land on the globe except
-      India; our own Sierras have responded to its invitations, and Mount Sinai
-      itself has echoed its strains. There is a prejudice against the cornet,
-      that it is not exactly a family instrument; and not more suited to assist
-      in morning and evening devotions than the violin, which a young clergyman,
-      whom I knew, was endeavoring to learn, in order to play it, gently, at
-      family prayers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This traveled cornet, however, begins to play, with deliberate pauses
-      between the bars, the notes of that glorious hymn, &ldquo;How firm a foundation
-      ye saints of the Lord,&rdquo; following it with the Prayer from Der Freischutz,
-      and that, again, with some familiar Scotch airs (a transition perfectly
-      natural in home-circles on Sunday evening), every note of which, leisurely
-      floating out into the night, is sent back in distant echoes. Nothing can
-      be lovelier than the scene,&mdash;the tropical night, the sentimental
-      island, the shadows of columns and crags, the mysterious presence of a
-      brooding past,&mdash;and nothing can be sweeter than these dulcet,
-      lingering, re-echoing strains, which are the music of our faith, of
-      civilization, of home. From these old temples did never come, in the days
-      of the flute and the darabooka, such melodies. And do the spirits of Isis
-      and Osiris, and of Berenice, Cleopatra, and Antoninus, who worshipped them
-      here, listen, and know perhaps that a purer and better spirit has come
-      into the world?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the midst of this echoing melody, a little boat, its sail noiselessly
-      furled, its gunwales crowded with gowned and white-turbaned Nubians,
-      glides out of the shadow and comes alongside, as silently as a ferry-boat
-      of the under-world bearing the robed figures of the departed, and the
-      venerable Reis of the Cataract steps on board, with <i>es-salam 'aleykum</i>;
-      and the negotiation for shooting the rapids in the morning begins.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The reïs is a Nubian of grave aspect, of a complexion many shades darker
-      than would have been needed to disqualify its possessor to enjoy civil
-      rights in our country a few years ago, and with watchful and shrewd black
-      eyes which have an occasional gleam of humor; his robe is mingled black
-      and white, his turban is a fine camels-hair shawl; his legs are bare, but
-      he wears pointed red-morocco slippers. There is a long confab between him
-      and the dragoman, over pipes and coffee, about the down trip. It seems
-      that there is a dahabeëh at Assouan, carrying the English Prince Arthur
-      and a Moslem Prince, which has been waiting for ten days the whim of the
-      royal scion, to make the ascent. Meantime no other boat can go up or down.
-      The cataract business is at a standstill. The government has given orders
-      that no other boat shall get in the way; and many travelers' boats have
-      been detained from one to two weeks; some of them have turned back,
-      without seeing Nubia, unable to spend any longer time in a vexatious
-      uncertainty. The prince has signified his intention of coming up the
-      Cataract tomorrow morning, and consequently we cannot go down, although
-      the descending channel is not the same as the ascending. A considerable
-      fleet of boats is now at each end of the cataract, powerless to move.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The cataract people express great dissatisfaction at this interference in
-      their concerns by the government, which does not pay them as much as the
-      ordinary traveler does for passing the cataract. And yet they have their
-      own sly and mysterious method of dealing with boats that is not less
-      annoying than the government favoritism. They will very seldom take a
-      dahabeëh through in a day; they have delight in detaining it in the rapids
-      and showing their authority.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When, at length, the Reis comes into the cabin, to pay us a visit of
-      courtesy, he is perfect in dignity and good-breeding, in spite of his bare
-      legs; and enters into a discourse of the situation with spirit and
-      intelligence. In reply to a remark, that, in America we are not obliged to
-      wait for princes, his eyes sparkle, as he answers, with much vivacity of
-      manner, &ldquo;You quite right. In Egypt we are in a mess. Egypt is a ewe sheep
-      from which every year they shear the wool close off; the milk that should
-      go the lamb they drink; and when the poor old thing dies, they give the
-      carcass to the people&mdash;the skin they cut up among themselves. This
-      season,&rdquo; he goes on, &ldquo;is to the cataracts like what the pilgrimage is to
-      Mecca and to Jerusalem&mdash;the time when to make the money from the
-      traveler. And when the princes they come, crowding the traveler to one
-      side, and the government makes everything done for them for nothing, and
-      pays only one dollar for a turkey for which the traveler pays two, 'bliges
-      the people to sell their provisions at its own price,&rdquo;&mdash;the sheykh
-      stopped.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The Reis, then, Abd-el-Atti, doesn't fancy this method of doing
-      business?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No, him say he not like it at all.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And the Reis kindled up, &ldquo;You may call the Prince anything you like, you
-      may call him king; but the real Sultan is the man who pays his money and
-      does not come here at the cost of the government. Great beggars some of
-      these big nobility; all the great people want the Viceroyal to do 'em
-      charity and take 'em up the Nile, into Abyssinia, I don't know where all.
-      I think the greatest beggars always those who can best afford to pay.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      With this philosophical remark the old Sheykh concludes a long harangue,
-      the substance of which is given above, and takes his leave with a hundred
-      complimentary speeches.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Forced to wait, we employed Monday advantageously in exploring the
-      land-route to Assouan, going by Mahatta, where the trading-boats lie and
-      piles of merchandise lumber the shore. It is a considerable village, and
-      full of most persistent beggars and curiosity venders. The road, sandy and
-      dusty, winds through hills of granite boulders&mdash;a hot and desolate
-      though not deserted highway, for strings of camels, with merchandise, were
-      in sight the whole distance. We passed through the ancient cemetery,
-      outside of Assouan, a dreary field of sand and rocks, the leaning
-      grave-stones covered with inscriptions in old Arabic, (or Cufic), where
-      are said to rest the martyred friends of the prophet who perished in the
-      first battle with the infidels above Philæ.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Returning, we made a <i>detour</i> to the famous syenite quarries, the
-      openings of several of which are still visible. They were worked from the
-      sides and not in pits, and offer little to interest the ordinary
-      sight-seer. Yet we like to see where the old workmen chipped away at the
-      rocks; there are frequent marks of the square holes that they drilled, in
-      order to split off the stone with wet wedges of wood. The great obelisk
-      which lies in the quarry, half covered by sand, is unfinished; it is
-      tapered from the base to its tip, ninety-eight feet, but it was doubtless,
-      as the marks indicate, to be worked down to the size of the big obelisk at
-      Karnak; the part which is exposed measures ten to eleven feet square. It
-      lies behind ledges of rock, and it could only have been removed by cutting
-      away the enormous mass in front of it or by hoisting it over. The
-      suggestion of Mr. Wilkinson that it was to be floated out by a canal, does
-      not commend itself to one standing on the ground.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We came back by the long road, the ancient traveled way, along which, on
-      the boulders, are rudely-cut sculptures and hieroglyphics, mere
-      scratchings on the stone, but recording the passage of kings and armies as
-      long ago as the twelfth dynasty. Nearly all the way from Assouan to Philæ
-      are remains of a huge wall of unburnt bricks, ten to fifteen feet broad
-      and probably fifteen to twenty feet high, winding along the valley and
-      over the low ridges. An apparently more unnecessary wall does not exist;
-      it is said by people here to have been thrown up by the Moslems as a
-      protection against the Nubians when they first traversed this desert; but
-      it is no doubt Roman. There are indications that the Nile once poured its
-      main flood through this opening.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We emerge not far from the south end of the railway track, and at the
-      deserted Austrian Mission. A few Nubian families live in huts on the bank
-      of the stream. Among the bright-eyed young ladies, with shining hair, who
-      entreat backsheesh, while we are waiting for our sandal, is the daughter
-      of our up-river pilot. We should have had a higher opinion of his dignity
-      and rank if we had not seen his house and his family.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After sunset the dahabeëhs of the Prince came up and were received with
-      salutes by the waiting boats, which the royal craft did not return. Why
-      the dragoman of the arriving dahabeëh came to ours with the Prince's
-      request, as he said, for our cards, we were not informed; we certainly
-      intended no offence by the salute; it was, on the part of the other boats,
-      a natural expression of pleasure that the royal boat was at last out of
-      the way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At dark we loose from lovely Philæ, in order to drop down to Mahatta and
-      take our station for running the cataract in the morning. As we draw out
-      from the little fleet of boats, Irish, Hungarian, American, English,
-      rockets and blue lights illumine the night, and we go off in a blaze of
-      glory. Regardless of the Presence, the Irish gentleman responds on his
-      cornet with the Star-Spangled Banner, the martial strains of which echo
-      from all the hills.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a moment, the lights are out, the dahabeëhs disappear and the
-      enchanting island is lost to sight. We are gliding down the swift and
-      winding channel, through granite walls, under the shadow of giant
-      boulders, immersed in the gloom of a night which the stars do not
-      penetrate. There is no sound save the regular, chopping fall of the heavy
-      sweeps, which steady the timorous boat, and are the only sign, breaking
-      the oppressive silence, that we are not a phantom ship in a world of
-      shades. It is a short but ghostly voyage, and we see at length with a sigh
-      of relief the lines of masts and spars in the port of Mahatta. Working the
-      boat through the crowd that lie there we moor for the night, with the roar
-      of the cataract in our ears.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0052" id="linkimage-0052"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0342.jpg" alt="0342 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0053" id="linkimage-0053"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0343.jpg" alt="0343 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0027" id="link2HCH0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXVII.&mdash;RETURNING.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E ARE on deck
-      before sunrise, a film is over the sky and a light breeze blows out our
-      streamer&mdash;a bad omen for the passage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The downward run of the Cataract is always made in the early morning, that
-      being the time when there is least likely to be any wind. And a calm is
-      considered absolutely necessary to the safety of the boat. The north wind,
-      which helps the passage up, would be fatal going down. The boat runs with
-      the current, and any exterior disturbance would whirl her about and cast
-      her upon the rocks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If we are going this morning, we have no time to lose, for it is easy to
-      see that this breeze, which is now uncertainly dallying with our colors,
-      will before long strengthen. The Cataract people begin to arrive; there is
-      already a blue and white row of them squatting on the bank above us,
-      drawing their cotton robes about them, for the morning is a trifle chilly.
-      They come loitering along the bank and sit down as if they were merely
-      spectators, and had no interest in the performance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sun comes, and scatters the cloud-films; as the sun rises we are ready
-      to go; everything has been made snug and fast above and below; and the
-      breeze has subsided entirely. We ought to take instant advantage of the
-      calm; seconds count now. But we wait for the Reis of the Cataract, the
-      head reïs, without whose consent no move can be made. It is the sly old
-      sheykh with whom we have already negociated, and he has his reasons for
-      delaying. By priority of arrival at Philæ our boat is entitled to be first
-      taken down; but the dragoman of another boat has been crossing the palms
-      of the guileless patriarch with gold pieces, and he has agreed to give the
-      other boat the preference. It is not probable that the virtuous sheykh
-      ever intended to do so, but he must make some show of keeping his bargain.
-      He would like to postpone our voyage, and take the chances of another day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But here he comes, mounted on a donkey, in state, wrapped about the head
-      and neck in his cashmere, and with a train of attendants&mdash;the
-      imperturbable, shrewd old man. He halts a moment on the high bank, looks
-      up at our pennant, mutters something about &ldquo;wind, not good day, no safe,&rdquo;
-       and is coolly about to ride by.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our dragoman in an instant is at his side, and with half-jocular but firm
-      persistence, invites him to dismount. It is in vain that the sheykh
-      invents excuse after excuse for going on. There is a neighbor in the
-      village whose child is dead, and he must visit him. The consolation,
-      Abd-el-Atti thinks, can be postponed an hour or two, Allah is all
-      merciful. He is chilly, his fingers are cold, he will just ride to the
-      next house and warm his hands, and by that time we can tell whether it is
-      to be a good morning; Abd-el-Atti is sure that he can warm his fingers
-      much better on our boat, in fact he can get warm all through there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I'll warm him if he won't come.&rdquo; continues the dragoman, turning to us;
-      &ldquo;if I let him go by, the old rascal, he slip down to Assouan, and that
-      become the last of him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Before the patriarch knows exactly what has happened, or the other
-      dragoman can hinder, he is gently hustled down the steep bank aboard our
-      boat. There is a brief palaver, and then he is seated, with a big bowl of
-      coffee and bread; we are still waiting, but it is evident that the
-      decisive nod has been given. The complexion of affairs has changed!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The people are called from the shore; before we interpret rightly their
-      lazy stir, they are swarming on board. The men are getting their places on
-      the benches at the oars&mdash;three stout fellows at each oar; it looks
-      like &ldquo;business.&rdquo; The three principal reïses are on board; there are at
-      least a dozen steersmen; several heads of families are present, and a
-      dozen boys. More than seventy-five men have invaded us&mdash;and they may
-      all be needed to get ropes ashore in case of accident. This unusual swarm
-      of men and the assistance of so many sheykhs, these extra precautions,
-      denote either fear, or a desire to impress us with the magnitude of the
-      undertaking. The head reïs shakes his head at the boat and mutters, &ldquo;much
-      big.&rdquo; We have aboard almost every skillful pilot of the rapids.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Cataract flag, two bands of red and yellow with the name of &ldquo;Allah&rdquo;
-       worked on it in white, is set up by the cabin stairs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is a great deal of talking, some confusion, and a little
-      nervousness. Our dragoman cheerfully says, &ldquo;we will hope for the better,&rdquo;
-       as the beads pass through his fingers. The reïses are audibly muttering
-      their prayers. The pilots begin to strip to their work. A bright boy of
-      twelve years, squat on deck by the tiller, is loudly and rapidly reciting
-      the Koran.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At the last moment, the most venerable reïs of the cataract comes on
-      board, as a great favor to us. He has long been superannuated, his hair is
-      white, his eye-sight is dim, but when he is on board all will go well.
-      Given a conspicous seat in a chair on the cabin deck, he begins at once
-      prayers for our safe passage. This sheykh is very distinguished, tracing
-      his ancestry back beyond the days of Abraham; his family is very large&mdash;seven
-      hundred is the number of his relations; this seems to be a favorite
-      number; Ali Moorad at Luxor has also seven hundred relations. The sheykh
-      is treated with great deference; he seems to have had something to do with
-      designing the cataract, and opening it to the public.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The last rope is hauled in; the crowd on shore cheer; our rowers dip the
-      oars, and in a moment we are sweeping along in the stiff current, avoiding
-      the boulders on either side. We go swiftly. Everybody is muttering prayers
-      now; two venerable reïses seated on a box in front of the rudder increase
-      the speed of their devotions; and the boy chants the Koran with a freer
-      swing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our route down is not the same as it was up. We pass the head of the chief
-      rapid&mdash;in which we struggle&mdash;into which it would need only a
-      wink of the helm to turn us&mdash;and sweep away to the west side; and
-      even appear to go a little out of our way to run near a precipice of rock.
-      A party of ladies and gentlemen who have come down from their dahabeëh
-      above, to see us make the chûte, are standing on the summit, and wave
-      handkerchiefs and hats as we rush by.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Before us, we can see the great rapids&mdash;a down-hill prospect. The
-      passage is narrow, and so crowded is the hurrying water that there is a
-      ridge down the centre. On this ridge, which is broken and also curved, we
-      are to go. If it were straight, it would be more attractive, but it curves
-      short to the right near the bottom of the rapid, and, if we do not turn
-      sharp with it, we shall dash against the rocks ahead, where the waves
-      strike in curling foam. All will depend upon the skill and strength of the
-      steersmen, and the sheer at the exact instant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is not long to think of it, however, and no possibility now of
-      evading the trial. Before we know it, the nose of the boat is in the
-      rapid, which flings it up in the air; the next second we are tossed on the
-      waves. The bow dips, and a heavy wave deluges the cook's domain; we ship a
-      tun or two of water, the dragoman, who stands forward, is wet to his
-      breast; but the boat shakes it off and rises again, tossed like an
-      egg-shell. It is glorious. The boat obeys her helm admirably, as the
-      half-dozen pilots, throwing their weight upon the tiller, skillfully veer
-      it slightly or give it a broad sweep.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a matter of only three or four minutes, but they are minutes of
-      intense excitement. In the midst of them, the reïs of our boat, who has no
-      command now and no responsibility, and is usually imperturbably calm,
-      becomes completely unmanned by the strain upon his nerves, and breaks
-      forth into convulsive shouting, tears and perspiration running down his
-      cheeks. He has &ldquo;the power,&rdquo; and would have hysterics if he were not a man.
-      A half-dozen people fly to his rescue, snatch off his turban, hold his
-      hands, mop his face, and try to call him out of his panic. By the time he
-      is somewhat composed, we have shunned the rocks and made the turn, and are
-      floating in smoother but still swift water. The reises shake hands and
-      come to us with salaams and congratulations. The chief pilot desires to
-      put my fez on his own head in token of great joy and amity. The boy stops
-      shouting the Koran, the prayers cease, the beads are put up. It is only
-      when we are in a tight place that it is necessary to call upon the name of
-      the Lord vigorously.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You need not have feared,&rdquo; says a reïs of the Cataract to ours, pointing
-      to the name on the red and yellow flag, &ldquo;Allah would bring us through.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      That there was no danger in this passage we cannot affirm. The dahabeëhs
-      that we left at Mahatta, ready to go down, and which might have been
-      brought through that morning, were detained four or five days upon the
-      whim of the reises. Of the two that came first, one escaped with a slight
-      knock against the rocks, and the other was dashed on them, her bottom
-      staved in, and half filled with water immediately. Fortunately, she was
-      fast on the rock; the passengers, luggage, and stores were got ashore; and
-      after some days the boat was rescued and repaired.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For a mile below this chûte we have rapid going, rocks to shun, short
-      turns to make, and quite uncertainty enough to keep us on the <i>qui vive</i>,
-      and finally, another lesser rapid, where there is infinitely more noise by
-      the crew, but less danger from the river than above.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we approach the last rapid, a woman appears in the swift stream,
-      swimming by the help of a log&mdash;that being the handy ferry-boat of the
-      country; her clothes are all in a big basket, and the basket is secured on
-      her head. The sandal, which is making its way down a side channel, with
-      our sheep on board, is signalled to take this lady of the lake in, and
-      land her on the opposite shore. These sheep of ours, though much tossed
-      about, seem to enjoy the voyage and look about upon the raging scene with
-      that indifference which comes of high breeding. They are black, but that
-      was not to their prejudice in their Nubian home. They are comely animals
-      in life, and in death are the best mutton in the East; it is said that
-      they are fed on dates, and that this diet imparts to their flesh its sweet
-      flavor. I think their excellence is quite as much due to the splendid air
-      they breathe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      While we are watching the manoeuvring of the boat, the woman swims to a
-      place where she can securely lodge her precious log in the rocks and touch
-      bottom with her feet. The boat follows her and steadies itself against the
-      same rocks, about which the swift current is swirling. The water is up to
-      the woman's neck, and the problem seems to be to get the clothes out of
-      the basket which is on her head, and put them on, and not wet the clothes.
-      It is the old myth of Venus rising from the sea, but under changed
-      conditions, and in the face of modern sensitiveness. How it was
-      accomplished, I cannot say, but when I look again the aquatic Venus is
-      seated in the sandal, clothed, dry, and placid.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We were an hour passing the rapids, the last part of the time with a
-      strong wind against us; if it had risen sooner we should have had serious
-      trouble. As it was, it took another hour with three men at each oar, to
-      work down to Assouan through the tortuous channel, which is full of rocks
-      and whirlpools, The men at each bank of oars belonged to different tribes,
-      and they fell into a rivalry of rowing, which resulted in an immense
-      amount of splashing, spurting, yelling, chorusing, and calling on the
-      Prophet. When the contest became hot, the oars were all at sixes and
-      sevens, and in fact the rowing gave way to vituperation and a general
-      scrimmage. Once, in one of the most ticklish places in the rapids, the
-      rowers had fallen to quarrelling, and the boat would have gone to smash,
-      if the reïs had not rushed in and laid about him with a stick. These
-      artless children of the sun! However we came down to our landing in good
-      form, exchanging salutes with the fleet of boats waiting to make the
-      ascent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At once four boats, making a gallant show with their spread wings, sailed
-      past us, bound up the cataract. The passengers fired salutes, waved their
-      handkerchiefs, and exhibited the exultation they felt in being at last
-      under way for Philæ; and well they might, for some of them had been
-      waiting here fifteen days.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But alas for their brief prosperity. The head reïs was not with them; that
-      autocrat was still upon our deck, leisurely stowing away coffee, eggs,
-      cold meat, and whatever provisions were brought him, with the calmness of
-      one who has a good conscience. As the dahabeëhs swept by he shook his head
-      and murmured, &ldquo;not much go.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And they did &ldquo;not much go.&rdquo; They stopped indeed, and lay all day at the
-      first gate, and all night. The next morning, two dahabeëhs, carrying
-      persons of rank, passed up, and were given the preference, leaving the
-      first-comers still in the rapids; and two days after, they were in
-      mid-passage, and kept day after day in the roar and desolation of the
-      cataract, at the pleasure of its owners. The only resource they had was to
-      write indignant letters of remonstrance to the governor at Assouan.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This passage of the cataract is a mysterious business, the secrets of
-      which are only mastered by patient study. Why the reises should desire to
-      make it so vexatious is the prime mystery. The traveler who reaches
-      Assouan often finds himself entangled in an invisible web of restraints.
-      There is no opposition to his going on; on the contrary the governor, the
-      reises, and everyone overflow with courtesy and helpfulness. But, somehow,
-      he does not go on, he is played with from day to day. The old sheykh,
-      before he took his affectionate leave of us that morning, let out the
-      reason of the momentary hesitation he had exhibited in agreeing to take
-      our boat up the cataract when we arrived. The excellent owners, honest
-      Aboo Yoosef and the plaintive little Jew of Bagdad, had sent him a bribe
-      of a whole piece of cotton cloth, and some money to induce him to prevent
-      our passage. He was not to refuse, not by any means, for in that case the
-      owners would have been liable to us for the hundred pounds forfeit named
-      in the contract in case the boat could not be taken up; but he was to
-      amuse us, and encourage us, and delay us, on various pretexts, so long
-      that we should tire out and freely choose not to go any farther.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The integrity of the reïs was proof against the seduction of this bribe;
-      he appropriated it, and then earned the heavy fee for carrying us up, in
-      addition. I can add nothing by way of eulogium upon this clever old man,
-      whose virtue enabled him to withstand so much temptation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We lay for two days at the island Elephantine, opposite Assouan, and have
-      ample time to explore its two miserable villages, and to wander over the
-      heaps on heaps, the <i>débris</i> of so many successive civilizations. All
-      day long, women and children are clambering over these mounds of ashes,
-      pottery, bricks, and fragments of stone, unearthing coins, images, beads,
-      and bits of antiquity, which the strangers buy. There is nothing else on
-      the island. These indistinguishable mounds are almost the sole evidence of
-      the successive occupation of ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Ethiopians,
-      Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, and conquering Arabs. But the grey
-      island has an indefinable charm. The northern end is green with wheat and
-      palms; but if it were absolutely naked, its fine granite outlines would be
-      attractive under this splendid sky. The days are lovely, and the nights
-      enchanting. Nothing more poetic could be imagined than the silvery reaches
-      of river at night, with their fringed islands and shores, the stars and
-      the new moon, the uplifted rocks, and the town reflected in the stream.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Of Assouan itself, its palm-groves and dirty huddle of dwellings, we have
-      quite enough in a day. Curiosity leads us to visit the jail, and we find
-      there, by chance, one of our sailors, who is locked up for
-      insubordination, and our venerable reïs keeping him company, for being
-      inefficient in authority over his crew. In front of the jail, under the
-      shade of two large acacia trees, the governor has placed his divan and
-      holds his <i>levées</i> in the open air, transacting business, and
-      entertaining his visitors with coffee and cigars. His excellency is a very
-      &ldquo;smartish,&rdquo; big black fellow, not a negro nor a Nubian exactly, but an
-      Ababdeh, from a tribe of desert Arabs; a man of some aptitude for affairs
-      and with very little palaver. The jail has an outer guard-room, furnished
-      with divans and open at both ends, and used as a court of justice. A not
-      formidable door leads to the first room, which is some twenty feet square;
-      and here, seated upon the ground with some thirty others, we are surprised
-      to recognize our reïs. The respectable old incapable was greatly
-      humiliated by the indignity. Although he was speedily released, his
-      incarceration was a mistake; it seemed to break his spirit, and he was
-      sullen and uncheerful ever afterwards. His companions were in for trivial
-      offences: most of them for not paying the government taxes, or for debt to
-      the Khedive, as the phrase was. In an adjoining, smaller room, were the
-      great criminals, the thieves and murderers. Three murderers were chained
-      together by enormous iron cables attached to collars about their necks,
-      and their wrists were clamped in small wooden stocks. In this company were
-      five decent-looking men, who were also bound together by heavy chains from
-      neck to neck; we were told that these were the brothers of men who had run
-      away from the draft, and that they would be held until their relations
-      surrendered themselves. They all sat glumly on the ground. The jail does
-      not differ in comfort from the ordinary houses; and the men are led out
-      once a day for fresh air; we saw the murderers taking an airing, and
-      exercise also in lugging their ponderous irons.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We departed from Assouan early in the morning, with water and wind
-      favorable for a prosperous day. At seven o'clock our worthy steersman
-      stranded us on a rock. It was a little difficult to do it, for he had to
-      go out of his way and to leave the broad and plainly staked-out channel.
-      But he did it very neatly. The rock was a dozen feet out of water, and he
-      laid the boat, without injury, on the shelving upper side of it, so that
-      the current would constantly wash it further on, and the falling river
-      would desert it. The steersman was born in Assouan and knows every rock
-      and current here, even in the dark. This accident no doubt happened out of
-      sympathy with the indignity to the reïs. That able commander is curled up
-      on the deck ill, and no doubt felt greatly grieved when he felt the
-      grating of the bottom upon the rock; but he was not too ill to exchange
-      glances with the serene and ever-smiling steersman. Three hours after the
-      stranding, our crew have succeeded in working us a little further on than
-      we were at first, and are still busy; surely there are in all history no
-      such navigators as these.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is with some regret that we leave, or are trying to leave, Nubia, both
-      on account of its climate and its people. The men, various sorts of Arabs
-      as well as the Nubians, are better material than the fellaheen below,
-      finer looking, with more spirit and pride, more independence and
-      self-respect. They are also more barbarous; they carry knives and heavy
-      sticks universally, and guns if they can get them, and in many places have
-      the reputation of being quarrelsome, turbulent, and thieves. But we have
-      rarely received other than courteous treatment from them. Some of the
-      youngest women are quite pretty, or would be but for the enormous nose and
-      ear rings, the twisted hair and the oil; the old women are all
-      unnecessarily ugly. The children are apt to be what might be called free
-      in apparel, except that the girls wear fringe, but the women are as modest
-      in dress and manner as those of Egypt. That the highest morality
-      invariably prevails, however, one cannot affirm, notwithstanding the
-      privilege of husbands, which we are assured is sometimes exercised, of
-      disposing of a wife (by means of the knife and the river) who may have
-      merely incurred suspicion by talking privately with another man. This
-      process is evidently not frequent, for women are plenty, and we saw no
-      bodies in the river.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But our chief regret at quitting Nubia is on account of the climate. It is
-      incomparably the finest winter climate I have ever known; it is nearly
-      perfect. The air is always elastic and inspiring; the days are full of
-      sun; the nights are cool and refreshing; the absolute dryness seems to
-      counteract the danger from changes of temperature. You may do there what
-      you cannot in any place in Europe in the winter&mdash;get warm. You may
-      also, there, have repose without languor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We went on the rock at seven and got off at two. The governor of Assouan
-      was asked for help and he sent down a couple of boat-loads of men, who
-      lifted us off by main strength and the power of their lungs. We drifted
-      on, but at sunset we were not out of sight of the mosque of Assouan.
-      Strolling ashore, we found a broad and rich plain, large palm-groves and
-      wheat-fields, and a swarming population&mdash;in striking contrast to the
-      country above the Cataract. The character of the people is wholly
-      different; the women are neither so oily, nor have they the wild shyness
-      of the Nubians; they mind their own business and belong to a more
-      civilized society; slaves, negroes as black as night, abound in the
-      fields. Some of the large wheat-fields are wholly enclosed by substantial
-      unburnt brick walls, ten feet high.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Early in the evening, our serene steersman puts us hard aground again on a
-      sandbar. I suppose it was another accident. The wife and children of the
-      steersman live at a little town opposite the shoal upon which we have so
-      conveniently landed, and I suppose the poor fellow wanted an opportunity
-      to visit them. He was not permitted leave of absence while the boat lay at
-      Assouan, and now the dragoman says that, so far as he is concerned, the
-      permission shall not be given from here, although the village is almost in
-      sight; the steersman ought to be punished for his conduct, and he must
-      wait till he comes up next year before he can see his wife and children.
-      It seems a hard case, to separate a man from his family in this manner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I think it's a perfect shame,&rdquo; cries Madame, when she hears of it, &ldquo;not
-      to see his family for a year!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But one of his sons is on board, you know, as a sailor. And the steersman
-      spent most of his time with his wife the boy's mother, when we were at
-      Assouan.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I thought you said his wife lived opposite here?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, but this is a newer one, a younger one; that is his old wife, in
-      Assouan.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The poor fellow has another in Cairo.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He has wives, I daresay, at proper distances along the Nile, and whenever
-      he wants to spend an hour or two with his family, he runs us aground.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I don't care to hear anything more about him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The Moslem religion is admirably suited to the poor mariner, and
-      especially to the sailor on the Nile through a country that is all length
-      and no width.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0054" id="linkimage-0054"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0354.jpg" alt="0354 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0028" id="link2HCH0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXVIII.&mdash;MODERN FACTS AND ANCIENT MEMORIES.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>N a high bluff
-      stands the tottering temple of Kom Ombos conspicuous from a distance, and
-      commanding a dreary waste of desert. Its gigantic columns are of the
-      Ptolemaic time, and the capitals show either Greek influence or the
-      relaxation of the Egyptian hieratic restraint.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The temple is double, with two entrances and parallel suites of
-      apartments, a happy idea of the builders, impartially to split the
-      difference between good and evil; one side is devoted to the worship of
-      Horus, the embodiment of the principle of Light, and the other to that of
-      Savak, the crocodile-headed god of Darkness. I fear that the latter had
-      here the more worshippers; his title was Lord of Ombos, and the fear of
-      him spread like night. On the sand-bank, opposite, the once-favored
-      crocodiles still lounge in the sun, with a sharp eye out for the rifle of
-      the foreigner, and, no doubt, wonder at the murderous spirit which has
-      come into the world to supplant the peaceful heathenism.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These ruins are an example of the jealousy with which the hierarchy
-      guarded their temples from popular intrusion. The sacred precincts were
-      enclosed by a thick and high brick wall, which must have concealed the
-      temple from view except on the river side; so formidable was this wall,
-      that although the edifice stands upon an eminence, it lies in a basin
-      formed by the ruins of the enclosure. The sun beating in it at noon
-      converted it into a reverberating furnace&mdash;a heat sufficient to melt
-      any image not of stone, and not to be endured by persons who do not
-      believe in Savak.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We walked a long time on the broad desert below Ombos, over sand as hard
-      as a sea-beach pounded by the waves, looking for the bed of pebbles
-      mentioned in the handbook, and found it a couple of miles below. In the
-      soft bank an enormous mass of pebbles has been deposited, and is annually
-      added to&mdash;sweepings of the Nubian deserts, flints and agates, bits of
-      syenite from Assouan, and colored stones in great variety. There is a
-      tradition that a sailor once found a valuable diamond here, and it seems
-      always possible that one may pick some precious jewel out of the sand.
-      Some of the desert pebbles, polished by ages of sand-blasts, are very
-      beautiful.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Every day when I walk upon the smooth desert away from the river, I look
-      for colored stones, pebbles, flints, chalcedonies, and agates. And I
-      expect to find, some day, the <i>ewige</i> pebble, the stone translucent,
-      more beautiful than any in the world&mdash;perhaps, the lost seal of
-      Solomon, dropped by some wandering Bedawee. I remind myself of one
-      looking, always in the desert, for the pearl of great price, which all the
-      markets and jewelers of the world wait for. It seems possible, here under
-      this serene sky, on this expanse of sand, which has been trodden for
-      thousands of years by all the Oriental people in turn, by caravans, by
-      merchants and warriors and wanderers, swept by so many geologic floods and
-      catastrophes, to find it. I never tire of looking, and curiously examine
-      every bit of translucent and variegated flint that sparkles in the sand. I
-      almost hope, when I find it, that it will not be cut by hand of man, but
-      that it will be changeable in color, and be fashioned in a cunning manner
-      by nature herself. Unless, indeed, it should be, as I said, the talismanic
-      ring of Solomon, which is known to be somewhere in the world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the early morning we have drifted down to Silsilis, one of the most
-      interesting localities on the Nile. The difference in the level of the
-      land above and below and the character of the rocky passage at Silsilis
-      teach that the first cataract was here before the sandstone dam wore away
-      and transferred it to Assouan. Marks have been vainly sought here for the
-      former height of the Nile above; and we were interested in examining the
-      upper strata of rocks laid bare in the quarries. At a height of perhaps
-      sixty feet from the floor of a quarry, we saw <i>between</i> two strata of
-      sandstone a layer of other material that had exactly the appearance of the
-      deposits of the Nile which so closely resemble rock along the shore. Upon
-      reaching it we found that it was friable and, in fact, a sort of hardened
-      earth. Analysis would show whether it is a Nile deposit, and might
-      contribute something to the solution of the date of the catastrophe here.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The interest at Silsilis is in these vast sandstone quarries, and very
-      little in the excavated grottoes and rock-temples on the west shore, with
-      their defaced and smoke-obscured images. Indeed, nothing in Egypt, not
-      even the temples and pyramids, has given us such an idea of the immense
-      labor the Egyptians expended in building, as these vast excavations in the
-      rock. We have wondered before where all the stone came from that we have
-      seen piled up in buildings and heaped in miles of ruins; we wonder now
-      what use could have been made of all the stone quarried from these hills.
-      But we remember that it was not removed in a century, nor in ten
-      centuries, but that for great periods of a thousand years workmen were
-      hewing here, and that much of the stone transported and scattered over
-      Egypt has sunk into the soil out of sight.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are half a dozen of these enormous quarries close together, each of
-      which has its communication with the river. The method of working was
-      this:&mdash;a narrow passage was cut in from the river several hundred
-      feet into the mountain, or until the best-working stone was reached, and
-      then the excavation was broadened out without limit. We followed one of
-      these passages, the sides of which are evenly-cut rock, the height of the
-      hill. At length we came into an open area, like a vast cathedral in the
-      mountain, except that it wanted both pillars and roof. The floor was
-      smooth, the sides were from fifty to seventy-five feet high, and all
-      perpendicular, and as even as if dressed down with chisel and hammer. This
-      was their general character, but in some of them steps were left in the
-      wall and platforms, showing perfectly the manner of working. The quarrymen
-      worked from the top down perpendicularly, stage by stage. We saw one of
-      these platforms, a third of the distance from the top, the only means of
-      reaching which was by nicks cut in the face of the rock, in which one
-      might plant his feet and swing down by a rope. There was no sign of
-      splitting by drilling or by the the use of plugs, or of any explosive
-      material. The walls of the quarries are all cut down in fine lines that
-      run from top to bottom slantingly and parallel. These lines have every
-      inch or two round cavities, as if the stone had been bored by some
-      flexible instrument that turned in its progress. The workmen seem to have
-      cut out the stone always of the shape and size they wanted to use; if it
-      was for a statue, the place from which it came in the quarry is rounded,
-      showing the <i>contour</i> of the figure taken. They took out every stone
-      by the most patient labor. Whether it was square or round, they cut all
-      about it a channel four to five inches wide, and then separated it from
-      the mass underneath by a like broad cut. Nothing was split away; all was
-      carefully chiseled out, apparently by small tools. Abandoned work,
-      unfinished, plainly shows this. The ages and the amount of labor required
-      to hew out such enormous quantities of stone are heightened in our
-      thought, by the recognition of this slow process. And what hells these
-      quarries must have been for the workmen, exposed to the blaze of a sun
-      intensified by the glaring reflection from the light-colored rock, and
-      stifled for want of air. They have left the marks of their unending task
-      in these little chiselings on the face of the sandstone walls. Here and
-      there some one has rudely sketched a figure or outlined a hieroglyphic. At
-      intervals places are cut in the rock through which ropes could be passed,
-      and these are worn deeply, showing the use of ropes, and no doubt of
-      derricks, in handling the stones.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These quarries are as deserted now as the temples which were taken from
-      them; but nowhere else in Egypt was I more impressed with the duration,
-      the patience, the greatness of the race that accomplished such prodigies
-      of labor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The grottoes, as I said, did not detain us; they are common
-      calling-places, where sailors and wanderers often light fires at night and
-      where our crew slept during the heat of this day, We saw there nothing
-      more remarkable than the repeated figure of the boy Horus taking
-      nourishment from the breast of his mother, which provoked the irreverent
-      remark of a voyager that Horus was more fortunate than his dragoman had
-      been in finding milk in this stony region.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Creeping on, often aground and always expecting to be, the weather growing
-      warmer as we went north, we reached Edfoo. It was Sunday, and the
-      temperature was like that of a July day, a south wind and the mercury at
-      85°.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In this condition of affairs it was not unpleasant to find a temple,
-      entire, clean, perfectly excavated, and a cool retreat from the glare of
-      the sun. It was not unlike entering a cathedral. The door by which we were
-      admitted was closed and guarded; we were alone; and we experienced
-      something of the sentiment of the sanctuary, that hush and cool serenity
-      which is sometimes mistaken for religion, in the presence of
-      ecclesiastical architecture.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Although this is a Ptolemaic temple, it is, by reason of its nearly
-      perfect condition, the best example for study. The propylon which is two
-      hundred and fifty feet high and one hundred and fifteen long, contains
-      many spacious chambers, and confirms our idea that these portions of the
-      temples were residences. The roof is something enormous, being composed of
-      blocks of stone, three feet thick, by twelve wide, and twenty-two long.
-      Upon this roof are other chambers. As we wandered through the vast
-      pillared courts, many chambers and curious passages, peered into the
-      secret ways and underground and intermural alleys, and emerged upon the
-      roof, we thought what a magnificent edifice it must have been for the
-      gorgeous processions of the old worship, which are sculptured on the
-      walls.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But outside this temple and only a few feet from it is a stone wall of
-      circuit, higher than the roof of the temple itself. Like every inch of the
-      temple walls, this wall outside and inside is covered with sculptures,
-      scenes in river life, showing a free fancy and now and then a dash of
-      humor; as, when a rhinoceros is made to tow a boat&mdash;recalling the
-      western sportiveness of David Crockett with the alligator. Not only did
-      this wall conceal the temple from the vulgar gaze, but outside it was
-      again an <i>enciente</i> of unbaked brick, effectually excluding and
-      removing to a safe distance all the populace. Mariette Bey is of the
-      opinion that all the imposing ceremonies of the old ritual had no
-      witnesses except the privileged ones of the temple; and that no one except
-      the king could enter the <i>adytum</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It seems to us also that the King, who was high priest and King, lived in
-      these palace-temples, the pylons of which served him for fortresses as
-      well as residences. We find no ruins of palaces in Egypt, and it seems not
-      reasonable that the king who had all the riches of the land at his command
-      would have lived in a hut of mud.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From the summit of this pylon we had an extensive view of the Nile and the
-      fields of ripening wheat. A glance into the squalid town was not so
-      agreeable. I know it would be a severe test of any village if it were
-      unroofed and one could behold its varied domestic life. We may from such a
-      sight as this have some conception of the appearance of this world to the
-      angels looking down. Our view was into filthy courts and roofless
-      enclosures, in which were sorry women and unclad children, sitting in the
-      dirt; where old people, emaciated and feeble, and men and women ill of
-      some wasting disease, lay stretched upon the ground, uncared for, stifled
-      by the heat and swarmed upon of flies.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The heated day lapsed into a delicious evening, a half-moon over head, the
-      water glassy, the shores fringed with palms, the air soft. As we came to
-      El Kab, where we stopped, a carawan was whistling on the opposite shore&mdash;a
-      long, shrill whistle like that of a mocking-bird. If we had known, it was
-      a warning to us that the placid appearances of the night were deceitful,
-      and that violence was masked under this smiling aspect. The barometer
-      indeed had been falling rapidly for two days. We were about to have our
-      first experience of what may be called a simoon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Towards nine o'clock, and suddenly, the wind began to blow from the north,
-      like one of our gusts in summer, proceeding a thunderstorm. The boat took
-      the alarm at once and endeavored to fly, swinging to the wind and tugging
-      at her moorings. With great difficulty she was secured by strong cables
-      fore and aft anchored in the sand, but she trembled and shook and rattled,
-      and the wind whistled through the rigging as if we had been on the
-      Atlantic&mdash;any boat loose upon the river that night must have gone to
-      inevitable wreck. It became at once dark, and yet it was a ghastly
-      darkness; the air was full of fine sand that obscured the sky, except
-      directly overhead, where there were the ghost of a wan moon and some
-      spectral stars. Looking upon the river, it was like a Connecticut fog&mdash;but
-      a sand fog; and the river itself roared, and high waves ran against the
-      current. When we stepped from the boat, eyes, nose, and mouth were
-      instantly choked with sand, and it was almost impossible to stand. The
-      wind increased, and rocked the boat like a storm at sea; for three hours
-      it blew with much violence, and in fact did not spend itself in the whole
-      night.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The worser storm, God be merciful,&rdquo; says Abd-el-Atti, &ldquo;ever I saw in
-      Egypt.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      When it somewhat abated, the dragoman recognized a divine beneficence in
-      it; &ldquo;It show that God 'member us.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a beautiful belief of devout Moslems that personal afflictions and
-      illnesses are tokens of a heavenly care. Often when our dragoman has been
-      ill, he has congratulated himself that God was remembering him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Not so? A friend of me in Cairo was never in his life ill, never any
-      pain, toothache, headache, nothing. Always well. He begin to have fear
-      that something should happen, mebbe God forgot him. One day I meet him in
-      the Mooskee very much pleased; all right now, he been broke him the arm;
-      God 'member him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      During the gale we had a good specimen of Arab character. When it was at
-      its height, and many things about the attacked vessel needed looking
-      after, securing and tightening, most of the sailors rolled themselves up,
-      drawing their heads into their burnouses, and went sound asleep. The
-      after-sail was blown loose and flapping in the wind; our reïs sat
-      composedly looking at it, never stirring from his haunches, and let the
-      canvas whip to rags; finally a couple of men were aroused, and secured the
-      shreds. The Nile crew is a marvel of helplessness in an emergency; and
-      considering the dangers of the river to these top-heavy boats, it is a
-      wonder that any accomplish the voyage in safety. There is no more
-      discipline on board than in a district-school meeting at home. The boat
-      might as well be run by ballot.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was almost a relief to have an unpleasant day to talk about. The
-      forenoon was like a mixed fall and spring day in New England, strong wind,
-      flying clouds, but the air full of sand instead of snow; there was even a
-      drop of rain, and we heard a peal or two of feeble thunder&mdash;evidently
-      an article not readily manufactured in this country; but the afternoon
-      settled back into the old pleasantness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Of the objects of interest at Eilethyas I will mention only two, the
-      famous grottoes, and a small temple of Amunoph III., not often visited. It
-      stands between two and three miles from the river, in a desolate valley,
-      down which the Bisharee Arabs used to come on marauding excursions. What
-      freak placed it in this remote solitude? It contains only one room, a few
-      paces square, and is, in fact, only a chapel, but it is full of capital
-      pieces of sculptures of a good period of art. The architect will find here
-      four pillars, which clearly suggest the Doric style. They are
-      fourteen-sided, but one of the planes is broader than the others and has a
-      raised tablet of sculptures which terminate above in a face, said to be
-      that of Lucina, to whom the temple is dedicated, but resembling the
-      cow-headed Isis. These pillars, with the sculptures on one side finished
-      at the top with a head, may have suggested the Osiride pillars.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The grottoes are tombs in the sandstone mountain, of the time of the
-      eighteenth dynasty, which began some thirty-five hundred years ago. Two of
-      them have remarkable sculptures, the coloring of which is still fresh; and
-      I wish to speak of them a little, because it is from them (and some of the
-      same character) that Egyptologists have largely reconstructed for us the
-      common life of the ancient Egyptians. Although the work is somewhat rude,
-      it has a certain veracity of execution which is pleasing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We assume this tomb to have been that of a man of wealth. This is the
-      ante-chamber; the mummy was deposited in a pit let into a small excavation
-      in the rear. On one wall are sculptured agricultural scenes: plowing,
-      sowing, reaping wheat and pulling doora (the color indicates the kind of
-      grain), hatcheling the latter, while oxen are treading out the wheat, and
-      the song of the threshers encouraging the oxen is written in hieroglyphics
-      above; the winnowing and storing of the grain; in a line under these, the
-      various domestic animals of the deceased are brought forward to a scribe,
-      who enumerates them and notes the numbers on a roll of papyrus. There are
-      river-scenes:&mdash;grain is loaded into freight-boats; pleasure-dahabeëhs
-      are on the stream, gaily painted, with one square sail amidship, rowers
-      along the sides, and windows in the cabin; one has a horse and chariot on
-      board, the reïs stands at the bow, the overseer, kurbash in hand, is
-      threatening the crew, a sailor is falling overboard. Men are gathering
-      grapes, and treading out the wine with their feet; others are catching
-      fish and birds in nets, and dressing and curing them. At the end of this
-      wall, offerings are made to Osiris. In one compartment a man is seated
-      holding a boy on his lap.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On the opposite wall are two large figures, supposed to be the occupant of
-      the tomb and his wife, seated on a <i>fauteuil</i>; men and women, in two
-      separate lines, facing the large figures, are seated, one leg bent under
-      them, each smelling a lotus flower. In the rear, men are killing and
-      cutting up animals as if preparing for a feast. To the leg of the <i>fauteuil</i>
-      is tied a monkey; and Mr. Wilkinson says that it was customary at
-      entertainments for the hosts to have a &ldquo;favorite monkey&rdquo; tied to the leg
-      of the chair. Notwithstanding the appearance of the monkey here in that
-      position, I do not suppose that he would say that an ordinary
-      entertainment is represented here. For, although there are preparations
-      for a feast, there is a priest standing between the friends and the
-      principal personages, making offerings, and the monkey may be present in
-      his character of emblem of Thoth. It seems to be a funeral and not a
-      festive representation. The pictures apparently tell the story of the life
-      of the deceased and his occupations, and represent the mourning at his
-      tomb. In other grottoes, where the married pair are seated as here, the
-      arm of the woman on the shoulder of the man, and the &ldquo;favorite monkey&rdquo;
-       tied to the chair, friends are present in the act of mourning, throwing
-      dust on their heads, and accompanied by musicians; and the mummy is drawn
-      on a sledge to the tomb, a priest standing on the front, and a person
-      pouring oil on the ground that the runners may slip easily.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The setting sun strikes into these chambers, so carefully prepared for
-      people of rank of whom not a pinch of dust now remains, and lights them up
-      with a certain cheer and hope. We cannot make anything melancholy out of a
-      tomb so high and with such a lovely prospect from its front door. The
-      former occupants are unknown, but not more unknown than the peasants we
-      see on the fields below, still at the tasks depicted in these sculptures.
-      Thirty-five hundred years is not so very long ago! Slowly we pick our way
-      down the hill and regain our floating home; and, bidding farewell forever
-      to El Kab, drift down in the twilight. In the morning we are at Esneh.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In Esneh the sound of the grinding is never low. The town is full of
-      primitive ox-power mills in which the wheat is ground, and there are
-      always dahabeëhs staying here for the crew to bake their bread. Having
-      already had one day of Esneh we are tired of it, for it is exactly like
-      all other Egyptian towns of its size: we know all the possible
-      combinations of mud-hovels, crooked lanes, stifling dust, nakedness,
-      squalor. We are so accustomed to picking our way in the street amid women
-      and children sprawling in the dirt, that the scene has lost its
-      strangeness; it is even difficult to remember that in other countries
-      women usually keep indoors and sit on chairs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The town is not without liveliness It is half Copt, and beggars demand
-      backsheesh on the ground that they are Christians, and have a common
-      interest with us. We wander through the bazaars where there is nothing to
-      buy and into the market-place, always the most interesting study in an
-      unknown city. The same wheat lies on the ground in heaps; the same roots
-      and short stalks of the doora are tied in bundles and sold for fuel, and
-      cakes of dried manure for the like use; people are lying about in the sun
-      in all picturesque attitudes, some curled up and some on their backs fast
-      asleep; more are squating before little heaps of corn or beans or some
-      wilted &ldquo;greens,&rdquo; or dried tobacco-leaves and pipe-bowls; children swarm
-      and tumble about everywhere; donkeys and camels pick their way through the
-      groups.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I spent half an hour in teaching a handsome young Copt how to pronounce
-      English words in his Arabic-English primer. He was very eager to learn and
-      very grateful for assistance. We had a large and admiring crowd about us,
-      who laughed at every successful and still more at every unsuccessful
-      attempt on the part of the pupil, and repeated the English words
-      themselves when they could catch the sound,&mdash;an exceedingly
-      good-natured lot of idlers. We found the people altogether pleasant, some
-      in the ingrained habit of begging, quick to take a joke and easily
-      excited. While I had my scholar, a <i>fantasia</i> of music on two
-      tambourines was performed for the amusement of my comrade, which had also
-      its ring of spectators watching the effect of the monotonous thumping,
-      upon the grave howadji; he was seated upon the mastabah of a shop, with
-      all formality, and enjoyed all the honors of the entertainment, as was
-      proper, since he bore the entire expense alone,&mdash;about five cents.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The coffee-shops of Esneh are many, some respectable and others decidedly
-      otherwise. The former are the least attractive, being merely long and
-      dingy mud-apartments, in which the visitors usually sit on the floor and
-      play at draughts. The coffee-houses near the river have porticoes and
-      pleasant terraces in front, and look not unlike some picturesque Swiss or
-      Italian wine-shops. The attraction there seems to be the Ghawazees or
-      dancing-girls, of whom there is a large colony here, the colony consisting
-      of a tribe. All the family act as procurers for the young women, who are
-      usually married. Their dress is an extraordinary combination of stripes
-      and colors, red and yellow being favorites, which harmonize well with
-      their dark, often black, skins, and eyes heavily shaded with kohl. I
-      suppose it must be admitted, in spite of their total want of any womanly
-      charm of modesty, that they are the finest-looking women in Egypt, though
-      many of them are ugly; they certainly are of a different type from the
-      Egyptians, though not of a pure type; they boast that they have preserved
-      themselves without admixture with other peoples or tribes from a very
-      remote period; one thing is certain, their profession is as old as history
-      and their antiquity may entitle them to be considered an aristocracy of
-      vice. They say that their race is allied in origin to that of the people
-      called gypsies, with whom many of their customs are common. The men are
-      tinkers, blacksmiths, or musicians, and the women are the ruling element
-      in the band; the husband is subject to the wife. But whatever their
-      origin, it is admitted that their dance is the same as that with which the
-      dancing-women amused the Pharaohs, the same that the Phoenicians carried
-      to Gades and which Juvenal describes, and, Mr. Lane thinks, the same by
-      which the daughter of Herodias danced off the head of John the Baptist.
-      Modified here and there, it is the immemorial dance of the Orient.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Esneh has other attractions for the sailors of the Nile; there are the
-      mahsheshehs, or shops where hasheesh is smoked; an attendant brings the
-      &ldquo;hubble-bubble&rdquo; to the guests who are lolling on the mastabah; they inhale
-      their portion, and then lie down in a stupor, which is at every experiment
-      one remove nearer idiocy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Still drifting, giving us an opportunity to be on shore all the morning.
-      We visit the sugar establishment at Mutâneh, and walk along the high bank
-      under the shade of the acacias for a couple of miles below it. Nothing
-      could be lovelier in this sparkling morning&mdash;the silver-grey range of
-      mountains across the river and the level smiling land on our left. This is
-      one of the Viceroy's possessions, bought of one of his relations at a
-      price fixed by his highness. There are ten thousand acres of arable land,
-      of which some fifteen hundred is in sugar-cane, and the rest in grain. The
-      whole is watered by a steam-pump, which sends a vast stream of water
-      inland, giving life to the broad fields and the extensive groves, as well
-      as to a village the minaret of which we can see. It is a noble estate.
-      Near the factory are a palace and garden, somewhat in decay, as is usual
-      in this country, but able to offer us roses and lemons.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The works are large, modern, with improved machinery for crushing and
-      boiling, and apparently well managed; there is said to be one of the
-      sixteen sugar-factories of the Khedive which pays expenses; perhaps this
-      is the one. A great quantity of rum is distilled from the refuse. The vast
-      field in the rear, enclosed by a whitewashed wall, presented a lively
-      appearance, with camels bringing in the cane and unloading it and
-      arranging it upon the endless trough for the crushers. In the factory, the
-      workmen wear little clothing and are driven to their task; all the
-      overseers march among them kurbash in hand; the sight of the black fellows
-      treading about in the crystallized sugar, while putting it up in sacks,
-      would decide a fastidious person to take her tea unsweetened.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next morning we pass Erment without calling, satisfied to take the
-      word of others that you may see there a portrait of Cleopatra; and by noon
-      come to our old mooring-place at Luxor, and add ours to the painted
-      dalabeëhs lounging in this idle and gay resort.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      During the day we enjoyed only one novel sensation. We ate of the ripe
-      fruit ot the dôm-palm. It tastes and smells like stale gingerbread, made
-      of sawdust instead of flour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I do not know how long one could stay contentedly at Thebes; certainly a
-      winter, if only to breathe the inspiring air, to bask in the sun, to gaze,
-      never sated, upon plains and soft mountains which climate and association
-      clothe with hues of beauty and romance, to yield for once to a leisure
-      that is here rebuked by no person and by no urgency of affairs; perhaps
-      for years, if one seriously attempted a study of antiquities.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The habit of leisure is at least two thousand years old here; at any rate,
-      we fell into it without the least desire to resist its spell. This is one
-      of the eddies of the world in which the modern hurry is unfelt. If it were
-      not for the coughing steamboats and the occasional glimpse one has of a
-      whisking file of Cook's tourists, Thebes would be entirely serene, and an
-      admirable place of retirement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It has a reputation, however, for a dubious sort of industry. All along
-      the river from Geezeh to Assouan, whenever a spurious scarabæus or a bogus
-      image turned up, we would hear, &ldquo;Yes, make 'em in Luxor.&rdquo; As we drew near
-      to this great mart of antiquities, the specification became more personal&mdash;&ldquo;Can't
-      tell edzacly whether that make by Mr. Smith or by that Moslem in Goorneh,
-      over the other side.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The person named is well known to all Nile voyagers as Antiquity Smith,
-      and he has, though I cannot say that he enjoys, the reputation hinted at
-      above. How much of it is due to the enmity of rival dealers in relics of
-      the dead, I do not know; but it must be evident to anyone that the very
-      clever forgeries of antiquities, which one sees, could only be produced by
-      skillful and practiced workmen. We had some curiosity to see a man who has
-      made the American name so familiar the length of the Nile, for Mr. Smith
-      is a citizen of the United States. For seventeen years he has been a
-      voluntary exile here, and most of the time the only foreigner resident in
-      the place; long enough to give him a good title to the occupation of any
-      grotto he may choose.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In appearance Mr. Smith is somewhat like a superannuated agent of the
-      tract society, of the long, thin, shrewd, learned Yankee type. Few men
-      have enjoyed his advantages for sharpening the wits. Born in Connecticut,
-      reared in New Jersey, trained for seventeen years among the Arabs and
-      antiquity-mongers of this region, the sharpest in the Orient, he ought to
-      have not only the learning attached to the best-wrapped mummy, but to be
-      able to read the hieroglyphics on the most inscrutable human face among
-      the living.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Mr. Smith lives on the outskirts of the village, in a house, surrounded by
-      a garden, which is a kind of museum of the property, not to say the bones,
-      of the early Egyptians.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You seem to be retired from society here Mr. Smith,&rdquo; we ventured to say.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, for eight months of the year, I see nobody, literally nobody. It is
-      only during the winter that strangers come here.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Isn't it lonesome?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;A little, but you get used to it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What do you do during the hottest months?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;As near nothing as possible.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How hot is it?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sometimes the thermometer goes to 120° Fahrenheit. It stays a long time
-      at 100°. The worst of it is that the nights are almost as hot as the
-      days.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How do you exist?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I keep very quiet, don't write, don't read anything that requires the
-      least thought. Seldom go out, never in the daytime. In the early morning I
-      sit a while on the verandah, and about ten o'clock get into a big
-      bath-tub, which I have on the ground-floor, and stay in it nearly all day,
-      reading some very mild novel, and smoking the weakest tobacco. In the
-      evening I find it rather cooler outside the house than in. A white man
-      can't do anything here in the summer.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I did not say it to Mr. Smith, but I should scarcely like to live in a
-      country where one is obliged to be in water half the year, like a pelican.
-      We can have, however, from his experience some idea what this basin must
-      have been in summer, when its area was a crowded city, upon which the sun,
-      reverberated from the incandescent limestone hills, beat in unceasing
-      fervor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0055" id="linkimage-0055"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0368.jpg" alt="0368 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0056" id="linkimage-0056"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0369.jpg" alt="0369 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0029" id="link2HCH0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXIX.&mdash;THE FUTURE OF THE MUMMY'S SOUL.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> SHOULD like to
-      give you a conception, however faint, of the Tombs of the ancient
-      Egyptians, for in them is to be found the innermost secret of the
-      character, the belief, the immortal expectation of that accomplished and
-      wise people. A barren description of these places of sepulchre would be of
-      small service to you, for the key would be wanting, and you would be
-      simply confused by a mass of details and measurements, which convey no
-      definite idea to a person who does not see them with his own eyes. I
-      should not indeed be warranted in attempting to say anything about these
-      great Tombs at Thebes, which are so completely described in many learned
-      volumes, did I not have the hope that some readers, who have never had
-      access to the works referred to will be glad to know something of that
-      which most engaged the educated Egyptian mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      No doubt the most obvious and immediate interest of the Tombs of old
-      Egypt, is in the sculptures that depict so minutely the life of the
-      people, represent all their occupations and associations, are, in fact,
-      their domestic and social history written in stone. But it is not of this
-      that I wish to speak here; I want to write a word upon the tombs and what
-      they contain, in their relation to the future life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A study of the tombs of the different epochs, chronologically pursued,
-      would show, I think, pretty accurately, the growth of the Egyptian
-      theology, its development, or rather its departure from the primitive
-      revelation of one God, into the monstrosities of its final mixture of
-      coarse polytheistic idolatry and the vaguest pantheism. These two extremes
-      are represented by the beautiful places of sepulchre of the fourth and
-      fifth dynasties at Geezeh and Memphis, in which all the sculptures relate
-      to the life of the deceased and no deities are represented; and the tombs
-      of the twenty-fourth dynasty at Thebes which are so largely covered with
-      the gods and symbols of a religion become wholly fantastic. It was in the
-      twenty-sixth dynasty (just before the conquest of Egypt by the Persians)
-      that the Funeral Ritual received its final revision and additions&mdash;the
-      sacred chart of the dead which had grown, paragraph by paragraph, and
-      chapter by chapter, from its brief and simple form in the earliest times.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Egyptians had a considerable, and also a rich literature, judging by
-      the specimens of it preserved and by the value set upon it by classical
-      writers; in which no department of writing was unrepresented. The works
-      which would seem of most value to the Greeks were doubtless those on
-      agriculture, astronomy, and geometry; the Egyptians wrote also on
-      medicine, but the science was empirical then as it is now. They had an
-      enormous bulk of historical literature, both in verse and prose, probably
-      as semifabulous and voluminous as the thousand great volumes of Chinese
-      history. They did not lack, either, in the department of <i>belles lettres</i>;
-      there were poets, poor devils no doubt who were compelled to celebrate in
-      grandiose strains achievements they did not believe; and essayists and
-      letter-writers, graceful, philosophic, humorous. Nor was the field of
-      fiction unoccupied; some of their lesser fables and romances have been
-      preserved; they are however of a religious character, myths of doctrine,
-      and it is safe to say different from our Sunday-School tales. The story of
-      Cinderella was a religious myth. No one has yet been fortunate enough to
-      find an Egyptian novel, and we may suppose that the <i>quid-nunes</i>, the
-      critics of Thebes, were all the time calling upon the writers of that day
-      to make an effort and produce The Great Egyptian Novel.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The most important part, however, of the literature of Egypt was the
-      religious, and of that we have, in the Ritual or Book of the Dead,
-      probably the most valuable portion. It will be necessary to refer to this
-      more at length. A copy of the Funeral Ritual, or &ldquo;The Book of the
-      Manifestation to Light&rdquo; as it was entitled, or some portion of it&mdash;probably
-      according to the rank or wealth of the deceased, was deposited with every
-      mummy. In this point of view, as this document was supposed to be of
-      infinite service, a person's wealth would aid him in the next world; but
-      there came a point in the peregrination of every soul where absolute
-      democracy was reached, and every man stood for judgment on his character.
-      There was a foreshadowing of this even in the ceremonies of the burial.
-      When the mummy, after the lapse of the seventy days of mourning, was taken
-      by the friends to the sacred lake of the nome (district), across which it
-      must be transported in the boat of Charon before it could be deposited in
-      the tomb, it was subjected to an ordeal. Forty-two judges were assembled
-      on the shore of the lake, and if anyone accused the deceased, and could
-      prove that he led an evil life, he was denied burial. Even kings were
-      subjected to this trial, and those who had been wicked, in the judgment of
-      their people, were refused the honors of sepulchre. Cases were probably
-      rare where one would dare to accuse even a dead Pharaoh.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Debts would sometimes keep a man out of his tomb, both because he was
-      wrong in being in debt, and because his tomb was mortgaged. For it was
-      permitted a man to mortgage not only his family tomb but the mummy of his
-      father,&mdash;a kind of mortmain security that could not run away, but a
-      ghastly pledge to hold. A man's tomb, it would seem, was accounted his
-      chief possession; as the one he was longest to use. It was prepared at an
-      expense never squandered on his habitation in life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You may see as many tombs as you like at Thebes, you may spend weeks
-      underground roaming about in vast chambers or burrowing in zig-zag
-      tunnels, until the upper-world shall seem to you only a passing show; but
-      you will find little, here or elsewhere, after the Tombs of the Kings, to
-      awaken your keenest interest; and the exploration of a very few of these
-      will suffice to satisfy you. We visited these gigantic masoleums twice; it
-      is not an easy trip to them, for they are situated in wild ravines or
-      gorges that lie beyond the western mountains which circle the plain and
-      ruins of Thebes. They can be reached by a footpath over the crest of the
-      ridge behind Medeenet Haboo; the ancient and usual road to them is up a
-      valley that opens from the north.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The first time we tried the footpath, riding over the blooming valley and
-      leaving our donkeys at the foot of the ascent. I do not know how high this
-      mountain backbone may be, but it is not a pleasant one to scale. The path
-      winds, but it is steep; the sun blazes on it; every step is in pulverized
-      limestone, that seems to have been calcined by the intense heat, and rises
-      in irritating powder; the mountain-side is white, chalky, glaring,
-      reflecting the solar rays with blinding brilliancy, and not a breath of
-      air comes to temper the furnace temperature. On the summit however there
-      was a delicious breeze, and we stood long looking over the great basin,
-      upon the temples, the villages, the verdant areas of grain, the patches of
-      desert, all harmonized by the wonderful light, and the purple eastern
-      hills&mdash;a view unsurpassed. The descent to the other side was steeper
-      than the ascent, and wound by precipices, on narrow ledges, round sharp
-      turns, through jagged gorges, amid rocks striken with the ashy hue of
-      death, into the bottoms of intersecting ravines, a region scarred,
-      blasted, scorched, a grey Gehenna, more desolate than imagination ever
-      conceived.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Another day we rode to it up the valley from the river, some three miles.
-      It is a winding, narrow valley, little more than the bed of a torrent; but
-      as we advanced windings became shorter, the sides higher, fantastic
-      precipices of limestone frowned on us, and there was evidence of a made
-      road and of rocks cut away to broaden it. The scene is wilder, more
-      freakishly savage, as we go on, and knowing that it is a funereal way and
-      that only, and that it leads to graves and to nothing else, our procession
-      imperceptibly took on the sombre character of an expedition after death,
-      relieved by I know not what that is droll in the impish forms of the
-      crags, and the reaction of our natures against this unnecessary
-      accumulation of grim desolation. The sun overhead was like a dish from
-      which poured liquid heat, I could feel the waves, I thought I could see it
-      running in streams down the crumbling ashy slopes; but it was not
-      unendurable, for the air was pure and elastic and we had no sense of
-      weariness; indeed, now and then a puff of desert air suddenly greeted us
-      as we turned a corner. The slender strip of sky seen above the grey
-      limestone was of astonishing depth and color&mdash;a purple, almost like a
-      night sky, but of unimpeachable delicacy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Up this strange road were borne in solemn state, as the author of Job may
-      have seen, &ldquo;<i>the kings and counsellors of the earth, which built
-      desolate places for themselves</i>;&rdquo; the journey was a fitting prelude to
-      an entry into the depths of these frightful hills. It must have been an
-      awful march, awful in its errand, awful in the desolation of the way: and,
-      in the heat of summer, a mummy passing this way might have melted down in
-      his <i>cercueil</i> before he could reach his cool retreat.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we come to the end of the road, we see no tombs. There are paths
-      winding in several directions, round projecting ridges and shoulders of
-      powdered rock, but one might pass through here and not know he was in a
-      cemetery. Above the rubbish here and there we see, when they are pointed
-      out, holes in the rock. We climb one of these heaps, and behold the
-      entrance, maybe half-filled up, of one of the great tombs. This entrance
-      may have been laid open so as to disclose a portal cut in the face of the
-      rock and a smoothed space in front. Originally the tomb was not only
-      walled up and sealed, but rocks were tumbled down over it, so as to
-      restore that spot in the hill to its natural appearance. The chief object
-      of every tomb was to conceal the mummy from intrusion forever. All sorts
-      of misleading devices were resorted to for this purpose.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Twenty-five tombs (of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties) have been
-      opened in this locality, but some of them belonged to princes and other
-      high functionaries; in a valley west of this are tombs of the eighteenth
-      dynasty, and in still another gorge are the tombs of the queens. These
-      tombs all differ in plan, in extent, in decoration; they are alike in not
-      having, as many others elsewhere have, an exterior chamber where friends
-      could assemble to mourn; you enter all these tombs by passing through an
-      insignificant opening, by an inclined passage, directly into the heart of
-      the mountain, and there they open into various halls chambers, and
-      grottoes. One of them, that of Sethi I., into whose furthermost and most
-      splendid halls Belzoni broke his way, extends horizontally four hundred
-      and seventy feet into the hill, and descends to a depth of one hundred and
-      eighty feet below the opening. The line of direction of the excavation is
-      often changed, and the continuation skillfully masked, so that the
-      explorer may be baffled. You come by several descents and passages,
-      through grand chambers and halls, to a hall vast in size and magnificently
-      decorated; here is a pit, here is the granite sarcophagus; here is the
-      fitting resting-place of the royal mummy. But it never occupied this
-      sarcophagus. Somewhere in this hall is a concealed passage. It was by
-      breaking through a wall of solid masonry in such a room, smoothly stuccoed
-      and elaborately painted with a continuation of the scenes on the
-      side-walls, that Belzoni discovered the magnificent apartment beyond, and
-      at last a chamber that was never finished, where one still sees the first
-      draughts of the figures for sculpture on the wall, and gets an idea of the
-      bold freedom of the old draughtsmen, in the long, graceful lines, made at
-      a stroke by the Egyptian artists. Were these inner chambers so elaborately
-      concealed, by walls and stucco and painting, <i>after</i> the royal mummy
-      was somewhere hidden in them? Or was the mummy deposited in some obscure
-      lateral pit, and was it the fancy of the king himself merely to make these
-      splendid and highly decorated inner apartments private?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not uncommon to find rooms in the tombs unfinished. The excavation
-      of the tomb was began when the king began to reign; it was a work of many
-      years and might happen to be unfinished at his death. He might himself
-      become so enamoured of his enterprise and his ideas might expand in regard
-      to his requirements, as those of builders always do, that death would find
-      him still excavating and decorating. I can imagine that if one thought he
-      were building a house for eternity&mdash;or cycles beyond human
-      computation,&mdash;he would, up to his last moment, desire to add to it
-      new beauties and conveniences. And he must have had a certain humorous
-      satisfaction in his architectural tricks, for putting posterity on a false
-      scent about his remains.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It would not be in human nature to leave undisturbed tombs containing so
-      much treasure as was buried with a rich or royal mummy. The Greeks walked
-      through all these sepulchres; they had already been rifled by the
-      Persians; it is not unlikely that some of them had been ransacked by
-      Egyptians, who could appreciate jewelry and fine-work in gold as much as
-      we do that found by M. Mariette on the cold person of Queen Aah-hotep.
-      This dainty lady might have begun to flatter herself, having escaped
-      through so many ages of pillage, that danger was over, but she had not
-      counted upon there coming an age of science. It is believed that she was
-      the mother of Amosis, who expelled the Shepherds, and the wife of Kamés,
-      who long ago went to his elements. After a repose here at Thebes, not far
-      from the temple of Koorneh, of about thirty-five hundred years, Science
-      one day cried,&mdash;&ldquo;Aah-hotep of Drah-Aboo-l-neggah! we want you for an
-      Exposition of the industries of all nations at Paris; put on your best
-      things and come forth.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I suppose that there is no one living who would not like to be the first
-      to break into an Egyptian tomb (and there are doubtless still some
-      undisturbed in this valley), to look upon its glowing paintings before the
-      air had impaired a tint, and to discover a sweet and sleeping princess,
-      simply encrusted in gems, and cunning work in gold, of priceless value&mdash;in
-      order that he might add something to our knowledge of ancient art!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But the government prohibits all excavations by private persons. You are
-      permitted, indeed, to go to the common pits and carry off an armful of
-      mummies, if you like; but there is no pleasure in the disturbance of this
-      sort of mummy; he may perhaps be a late Roman; he has no history, no real
-      antiquity, and probably not a scarabæus of any value about him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we pass out of the glare of the sun and descend the incline down
-      which the mummy went, we feel as if we had begun his awful journey. On the
-      walls are sculptured the ceremonies and liturgies of the dead, the
-      grotesque monsters of the under-world, which will meet him and assail him
-      on his pilgrimage, the deities friendly and unfriendly, the tremendous
-      scenes of cycles of transmigration. Other sculptures there are; to be
-      sure, and in some tombs these latter predominate, in which astronomy,
-      agriculture, and domestic life are depicted. In one chamber are exhibited
-      trades, in another the kitchen, in another arms, in another the gay boats
-      and navigation of the Nile, in another all the vanities of elegant
-      house-furniture. But all these only emphasize the fact that we are passing
-      into another world, and one of the grimmest realities. We come at length,
-      whatever other wonders or beauties may detain us, to the king, the royal
-      mummy, in the presence of the deities, standing before Osiris, Athor,
-      Phtah, Isis, Horus, Anubis, and Nofre-Atmoo.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Somewhere in this vast and dark mausoleum the mummy has been deposited; he
-      has with him the roll of the Funeral Ritual; the sacred scarabæus is on
-      his breast; in one chamber bread and wine are set out; his bearers
-      withdraw, the tomb is closed, sealed, all trace of its entrance effaced.
-      The mummy begins his pilgrimage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Ritual * describes all the series of pilgrimages of the soul in the
-      lower-world; it contains the hymns, prayers, and formula for all funeral
-      ceremonies and the worship of the dead; it embodies the philosophy and
-      religion of Egypt; the basis of it is the immortality of the soul, that is
-      of the souls of the justified, but a clear notion of the soul's
-      personality apart from the body it does not give.
-    </p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-     *  Lenormant's Epitome.
-</pre>
-    <p>
-      The book opens with a grand dialogue, at the moment of death, in which the
-      deceased, invoking the god of the lower-world, asks entrance to his
-      domain; a chorus of glorified souls interposes for him; the priest
-      implores the divine clemency; Osiris responds, granting permission, and
-      the soul enters Kar-Neter, the land of the dead; and then renews his
-      invocations. Upon his entry he is dazzled by the splendor of the sun
-      (which is Osiris) in this subterranean region, and sings to it a
-      magnificent hymn.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The second part traces the journeys of the soul. Without knowledge, he
-      would fail, and finally be rejected at the tribunal.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Knowledge is in Egyptian <i>sbo</i>, that is, &ldquo;food in plenty,&rdquo; knowledge
-      and food are identified in the Ritual; &ldquo;the knowledge of religious truths
-      is the mysterious nourishment that the soul must carry with it to sustain
-      it in its journeys and trials.&rdquo; This necessary preliminary knowledge is
-      found in the statement of the Egyptian faith in the Ritual; other
-      information is given him from time to time on his journey. But although
-      his body is wrapped up, and his soul instructed, he cannot move, he has
-      not the use of his limbs; and he prays to be restored to his faculties
-      that he may be able to walk, speak, eat, fight; the prayer granted, he
-      holds his scarabæus over his head, as a passport, and enters Hades.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His way is at once beset by formidable obstacles; monsters, servants of
-      Typhon, assail him; slimy reptiles, crocodiles, serpents seek to devour
-      him; he begins a series of desperate combats, in which the hero and his
-      enemies hurl long and insulting speeches at each other. Out of these
-      combats he comes victorious, and sings songs of triumph; and after rest
-      and refreshment from the Tree of Life, given him by the goddess Nu, he
-      begins a dialogue with the personification of the divine Light, who
-      instructs him, explaining the sublime mysteries of nature. Guided by this
-      new Light, he advances, and enters into a series of transformations,
-      identifying himself with the noblest divine symbols: he becomes a hawk, an
-      angel, a lotus, the god Ptah, a heron, etc.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Up to this time the deceased has been only a shade, an <i>eidolon</i>, the
-      simulacrum of the appearance of his body. He now takes his body, which is
-      needed for the rest of the journey; it was necessary therefore that it
-      should be perfectly preserved by the embalming process. He goes on to new
-      trials and dangers, to new knowledge, to severer examinations of his
-      competence: he shuns wiles and delusions; he sails down a subterranean
-      river and comes to the Elysian Fields, in fact, to a reproduction of Egypt
-      with its camels and its industries, when the soul engages in agriculture,
-      sowing and reaping divine fruit for the bread of knowledge which he needs
-      now more than ever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At length he comes to the last and severest trial, to the judgment-hall
-      where Osiris awaits him, seated on his throne, accompanied by the
-      forty-two assessors of the dead. Here his knowledge is put to the test;
-      here he must give an account of his whole life. He goes on to justify
-      himself by declaring at first, negatively, the crimes that he has not
-      committed. &ldquo;I have not blasphemed,&rdquo; he says in the Ritual; &ldquo;I have not
-      stolen; I have not smitten men privily; I have not treated any person with
-      cruelty; I have not stirred up trouble; I have not been idle; I have not
-      been intoxicated; I have not made unjust commandmants; I have shown no
-      improper curiosity; I have not allowed my mouth to tell secrets; I have
-      not wounded anyone; I have not put anyone in fear; I have not slandered
-      anyone; I have not let envy gnaw my heart; I have spoken evil neither of
-      the king nor of my father; I have not falsely accused anyone; I have not
-      withheld milk from the mouths of sucklings; I have not practiced any
-      shameful crime; I have not calumniated a slave to his master.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The deceased then speaks of the good he has done in his lifetime; and the
-      positive declarations rise to a higher morality than the negative; among
-      them is this wonderful sentence:&mdash;&ldquo;<i>I have given food to the
-      hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothes to the naked</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The heart of the deceased, who is now called Osiris, is then weighed in
-      the balance against &ldquo;truth,&rdquo; and (if he is just) is not found wanting; the
-      forty-two assessors decide that his knowledge is sufficient, the god
-      Osiris gives sentence of justification, Thoth (the Hermes of the Greeks,
-      the conductor of souls, the scribe of Osiris, and also the personification
-      of literature or letters) records it, and the soul enters into bliss.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a chamber at Dayr el Medeeneh you may see this judgment-scene. Osiris
-      is seated on his throne waiting the introduction of souls into Amenti; the
-      child Harpocrates, with his finger on his lip, sits upon his crook; behind
-      are the forty-two assessors. The deceased humbly approaches; Thoth
-      presents his good deeds written upon papyrus; they are weighed in the
-      balance against an ostrich-feather, the symbol of truth; on the beam sits
-      a monkey, the emblem of Thoth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The same conceit of weighing the soul in judgment-scenes was common to the
-      mediaeval church; it is very quaintly represented in a fresco in the porch
-      of the church of St. Lawrence at Rome.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sometimes the balance tipped the wrong way; in the tomb of Rameses VI. is
-      sculptured a wicked soul, unjustified, retiring from the presence of
-      Osiris in the ignoble form of a pig.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The justified soul retired into bliss. What was this bliss? The third part
-      of the Ritual is obscure. The deceased is Osiris, identified with the sun,
-      traversing with him, and as him, the various houses of heaven; afterwards
-      he seems to pass into an identification with all the deities of the
-      pantheon. This is a poetical flight. The justified soul was absorbed into
-      the intelligence from which it emanated. For the wicked, there was
-      annihilation; they were destroyed, decapitated by the evil powers. In
-      these tombs you will see pictures of beheadings at the block, of
-      dismembered bodies.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It would seem that in some cases the souls of the wicked returned to the
-      earth and entered unclean animals. We always had a suspicion, a mere idle
-      fancy, that the chameleon, which we had on our boat, which had a knowing
-      and wicked eye, had been somebody.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The visitor's first astonishment here is to find such vast and rich tombs,
-      underground temples in fact, in a region so unutterably desolate, remote
-      from men, to be reached only by a painful pilgrimage. He is bewildered by
-      the variety and beauty of the decorations, the grace and freedom of art,
-      the minute finish of birds and flowers, the immortal loveliness of faces
-      here and there; and he cannot understand that all this was not made for
-      exhibition, that it was never intended to be seen, that it was not seen
-      except by the workmen and the funeral attendants, and that it was then
-      sealed away from human eyes forever. Think of the years of labor expended,
-      the treasure lavished in all this gorgeous creation, which was not for men
-      to see! Has human nature changed? Expensive monuments and mausoleums are
-      built now as they have been in all the Christian era; but they are never
-      concealed from the public view. I cannot account for these extraordinary
-      excavations, not even for one at the Assaseef, which extends over an acre
-      and a quarter of ground, upon an ostentation of wealth, for they were all
-      closed from inspection, and the very entrances masked. The builders must
-      have believed in the mysteries of the under-world, or they would not have
-      expended so much in enduring representations of them; they must have
-      believed also that the soul had need of such a royal abode. Did they have
-      the thought that money lavished in this pious labor would benefit the
-      soul, as much as now-a-days legacies bequeathed to missions and charities?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On our second visit to these tombs we noticed many details that had
-      escaped us before. I found sculptured a cross of equal arms, three or four
-      inches long, among other sacred symbols. We were struck by the peculiar
-      whiteness of the light, the sort of chalkiness of the sunshine as we saw
-      it falling across the entrance of a tomb from which we were coming, and by
-      the lightness of the shadows. We illuminated some of the interiors,
-      lighting up the vast sculptured and painted halls and corniced chambers,
-      to get the <i>tout ensemble</i> of colors and figures. The colors came out
-      with startling vividness on the stuccoed, white walls, and it needed no
-      imagination, amidst these awful and <i>bizarre</i> images and fantastic
-      scenes, to feel that we were in a real underworld. And all this was
-      created for darkness!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But these chambers could neither have been cut nor decorated without
-      light, and bright light. The effect of the rich ceiling and sides could
-      not have been obtained without strong light. I believe that these rooms,
-      as well as the dark and decorated chambers in the temples, must have been
-      brilliantly illuminated on occasion; the one at the imposing funeral
-      ceremonies, the other at the temple services. What light was used? The
-      sculptures give us no information. But the light must have been not only a
-      very brilliant but a pure flame, for these colors were fresh and unsullied
-      when the tombs were opened. However these chambers were lighted, some
-      illuminating substance was used that produced no smoke, nor formed any gas
-      that could soil the whiteness of the painted lotus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In one of these brilliant apartments, which is finished with a carved and
-      painted cornice, and would serve for a drawing-room with the addition of
-      some furniture, we almost had a feeling of comfort and domesticity&mdash;as
-      long as the illumination lasted. When that flashed but, and we were left
-      in that thick darkness of the grave which one can feel gathering itself in
-      folds about him, and which the twinkling candles in our hands punctured
-      but did not scatter, and we groped our way, able to see only a step ahead
-      and to examine only a yard square of wall at a time, there was something
-      terrible in this subterranean seclusion. And yet, this tomb was intended
-      as the place of abode of the deceased owner during the long ages before
-      soul and body, united, should be received into bliss; here were buried
-      with him no doubt some portions of his property, at least jewels and
-      personal ornaments of value; here were pictured his possessions and his
-      occupations while on earth; here were his gods, visibly cut in stone; here
-      were spread out, in various symbols and condensed writing, the precepts of
-      profound wisdom and the liturgies of the book of the dead. If at any time
-      he could have awakened (as no doubt he supposed he should), and got rid of
-      his heavy granite sarcophagus (if his body ever lay in it) and removed the
-      myrrh and pitch from his person, he would have found himself in a most
-      spacious and gay mansion, of which the only needs were food, light, and
-      air.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      While remembering, however, the grotesque conception the Egyptians had of
-      the next world, it seems to me that the decorators of these tombs often
-      let their imaginations run riot, and that not every fantastic device has a
-      deep signification. Take the elongated figures on the ceiling, stretching
-      fifty feet across, the legs bent down one side and the head the other; or
-      such a picture as this:&mdash;a sacred boat having a crocodile on the
-      deck, on the back of the crocodile a human head, out of the head a long
-      stick protruding which bears on its end the crown of lower Egypt; or this
-      conceit:&mdash;a small boat ascending a cataract, bearing a huge beetle
-      (scarabæus) having a ram's head, and sitting on each side of it a bird
-      with a human head. I think much of this work is pure fancy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In these tombs the snake plays a great part, the snake purely, coiled or
-      extended, carried in processions his length borne on the shoulders of
-      scores of priests, crawling along the walls in hideous convolutions; and,
-      again, the snake with two, three, and four heads, with two and six feet;
-      the snake with wings; the snake coiled about the statues of the gods,
-      about the images of the mummies, and in short everywhere. The snake is the
-      most conspicuous figure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The monkey is also numerous, and always pleasing; I think he is the comic
-      element of hell, though perhaps gravely meant. He squats about the
-      lower-world of the heathen, and gives it an almost cheerful and <i>debonnair</i>
-      aspect. It is certainly refreshing to meet his self-possessed, grave, and
-      yet friendly face amid all the serpents, crocodiles, hybrids, and
-      chimerical monsters of the Egyptian under-world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Conspicuous in ceremonies represented in the tombs and in the temples is
-      the sacred boat or <i>ark</i>, reminding one always, in its form and use
-      and the sacredness attached to it, of the Jewish Ark of the Covenant. The
-      arks contain the sacred emblems, and sometimes the beetle of the sun,
-      overshadowed by the wings of the goddess of Thmei or Truth, which suggest
-      the cherubim of the Jews. Mr. Wilkinson notices the fact, also, that
-      Thmei, the name of the goddess who was worshipped under the double
-      character of Truth and Justice, is the origin of the Hebrew <i>Thummim</i>&mdash;a
-      word implying &ldquo;truth&rdquo;; this Thummim (a symbol perfectly comprehensible now
-      that we know its origin) which was worn only by the high priest of the
-      Jews, was, like the Egyptian figure, which the archjudge put on when he
-      sat at the trial of a case, studded with precious stones of various
-      colors.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Before we left the valley we entered the tomb of Menephtah (or
-      Merenphtah), and I broke off a bit of crumbling limestone from the inner
-      cave as a memento of the Pharaoh of the Exodus. I used to suppose that
-      this Pharaoh was drowned in the Red Sea; but he could not have been if he
-      was buried here; and here certainly is his tomb. It is the opinion of
-      scholars that Menephtah long survived the Exodus. There is nothing to
-      conflict with this in the Biblical description of the disaster to the
-      Egyptians. It says that all Pharaoh's host was drowned, but it does not
-      say that the king was drowned; if he had been, so important a fact, it is
-      likely, would have been emphasized. Joseph came into Egypt during the
-      reign of one of the usurping Shepherd Kings, Apepi probably. Their seat of
-      empire was at Tanis, where their tombs have been discovered. The
-      Israelites were settled in that part of the Delta. After some generations
-      the Shepherds were expelled, and the ancient Egyptian race of kings was
-      reinstated in the dominion of all Egypt. This is probably the meaning of
-      the passage, &ldquo;now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not
-      Joseph.&rdquo; The narrative of the Exodus seems to require that the Pharaoh
-      should be at Memphis. The kings of the nineteenth dynasty, to which
-      Menephtah belonged, had the seat of their empire at Thebes; he alone of
-      that dynasty established his court at Memphis. But it was natural that he
-      should build his tomb at Thebes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We went again and again to the temples on the west side and to the tombs
-      there. I never wearied of the fresh morning ride across the green plain,
-      saluting the battered Colossi as we passed under them, and galloping
-      (don't, please, remember that we were mounted on donkeys) out upon the
-      desert. Not all the crowd of loping Arabs with glittering eyes and lying
-      tongues, who attended us, offering their dead merchandise, could put me
-      out of humor. Besides, there were always slender, pretty, and cheerful
-      little girls running beside us with their water-koollehs. And may I never
-      forget the baby Charon on the vile ferry-boat that sets us over one of the
-      narrow streams. He is the cunningest specimen of a boy in Africa. His
-      small brothers pole the boat, but he is steersman, and stands aft pushing
-      about the tiller, which is level with his head. He is a mere baby as to
-      stature, and is in fact only four years old, but he is a perfect beauty,
-      even to the ivory teeth which his engaging smile discloses. And such
-      self-possession and self-respect. He is a man of business, and minds his
-      helm, &ldquo;the dear little scrap,&rdquo; say the ladies. When we give him some
-      evidently unexpected coppers, his eyes and whole face beam with pleasure,
-      and in the sweetest voice he says, <i>Ket'ther khdyrak, keteer</i> (&ldquo;Thank
-      you very much indeed&rdquo;).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I yield myself to, but cannot account for the fascination of this vast
-      field of desolation, this waste of crumbled limestone, gouged into ravines
-      and hills, honeycombed with tombs and mummy-pits, strewn with the bones of
-      ancient temples, brightened by the glow of sunshine on elegant colonnades
-      and sculptured walls, saddened by the mud-hovels of the fellaheen. The
-      dust is abundant, and the glare of the sun reflected from the high, white
-      precipices behind is something unendurable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Of the tombs of the Assaseef, we went far into none, except that of the
-      priest Petamunoph, the one which occupies, with its many chambers and
-      passages, an acre and a quarter of underground. It was beautifully carved
-      and painted throughout, but the inscriptions are mostly illegible now, and
-      so fouled by bats as to be uninteresting. Our guide said truly, &ldquo;bats not
-      too much good for 'scriptions.&rdquo; In truth, the place smells horribly of
-      bats,&mdash;an odor that will come back to you with sickening freshness
-      days after,&mdash;and a strong stomach is required for the exploration.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Even the chambers of some of the temples here were used in later times as
-      receptacles for mummies. The novel and most interesting temple of Dayr el
-      Bahree did not escape this indignity. It was built by Amun-noo-het, or
-      Hatasoo as we more familiarly call her, and like everything else that this
-      spirited woman did it bears the stamp of originality and genius. The
-      structure rises up the side of the mountain in terraces, temple above
-      temple, and is of a most graceful architecture; its varied and brilliant
-      sculptures must be referred to a good period of art. Walls that have
-      recently been laid bare shine with extraordinary vividness of color. The
-      last chambers in the rock are entered by arched doorways, but the arch is
-      in appearance, not in principle. Its structure is peculiar. Square stones
-      were laid up on each side, the one above lapping over the one beneath
-      until the last two met at the top; the interior corners were then cut
-      away, leaving a perfect round arch; but there is no lateral support or
-      keystone. In these interior rooms were depths on depths of mummy-wrappings
-      and bones, and a sickening odor of dissolution.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are no tombs better known than those of Sheykh el Koorneh, for it is
-      in them that so much was discovered revealing the private life, the
-      trades, the varied pursuits of the Egyptians. We entered those called the
-      most interesting, but they are so smoked, and the paintings are so
-      defaced, that we had small satisfaction in them. Some of them are full of
-      mummy-cloths and skeletons, and smell of mortality, to that degree that it
-      needs all the wind of the desert to take the scent of death out of our
-      nostrils.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All this plain and its mounds and hills are dug over and pawed out for
-      remnants of the dead, scarabæi, beads, images, trinkets sacred and
-      profane. It is the custom of some travelers to descend into the horrible
-      and common mummy-pits, treading about among the dead, and bring up in
-      their arms the body of some man, or some woman, who may have been, for
-      aught the traveler knows, not a respectable person. I confess to an
-      uncontrollable aversion to all of them, however well preserved they are.
-      The present generation here (I was daily beset by an Arab who wanted
-      always to sell mean arm or a foot, from whose eager, glittering eyes I
-      seemed to see a ghoul looking out,) lives by plundering the dead. A
-      singular comment upon our age and upon the futile hope of security for the
-      body after death, even in the strongest house of rock.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Old Petamunoph, with whom be peace, builded better than he knew; he
-      excavated a vast hotel for bats. Perhaps he changed into bats himself in
-      the course of his transmigrations, and in this state is only able to see
-      dimly, as bats do, and to comprehend only partially, as an old Egyptian
-      might, our modern civilization.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0057" id="linkimage-0057"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0386.jpg" alt="0386 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0030" id="link2HCH0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXX.&mdash;FAREWELL TO THEBES.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>OCIAL life at
-      Thebes, in the season, is subject to peculiar conditions. For one thing,
-      you suspect a commercial element in it. Back of all the politeness of
-      native consuls and resident effendis, you see spread out a collection of
-      antiques, veritable belongings of the ancient Egyptians, the furniture of
-      their tombs, the ornaments they wore when they began their last and most
-      solemn journey, the very scarabæus, cut on the back in the likeness of the
-      mysterious eye of Osiris, which the mummy held over his head when he
-      entered the ominously silent land of Kar-Neter, the intaglio seal which he
-      always used for his signature, the &ldquo;charms&rdquo; that he wore at his
-      guard-chain, the necklaces of his wife, the rings and bracelets of his
-      daughter.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These are very precious things, but you may have them&mdash;such is the
-      softening influence of friendship&mdash;for a trifle of coined gold, a
-      mere trifle, considering their value and the impossibility of replacing
-      them. What are two, five, even ten pounds for a genuine bronze figure of
-      Isis, for a sacred cat, for a bit of stone, wrought four thousand years
-      ago by an artist into the likeness of the immortal beetle, carved
-      exquisitely with the name of the Pharaoh of that epoch, a bit of stone
-      that some Egyptian wore at his chain during his life and which was laid
-      upon his breast when he was wrapped up for eternity. Here in Thebes, where
-      the most important personage is the mummy and the Egyptian past is the
-      only real and marketable article, there comes to be an extraordinary value
-      attached to these trinkets of mortality. But when the traveler gets away,
-      out of this charmed circle of enthusiasm for antiquity, away from this
-      fictitious market in sentiment, among the cold people of the world who
-      know not Joseph, and only half believe in Potiphar, and think the little
-      blue images of Osiris ugly, and the me my-beads trash, and who never heard
-      of the scarabæus, when, I say, he comes with his load of <i>antiques</i>
-      into this air of scepticism, he finds that he has invested in a property
-      no longer generally current, objects of <i>vertu</i> for which Egypt is
-      actually the best market. And if he finds, as he may, that a good part of
-      his purchases are only counterfeits of the antique, manufactured and
-      doctored to give them an appearance of age, he experiences a sinking of
-      the heart mingled with a lively admiration of the adroitness of the smooth
-      and courtly Arabs of Luxor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Social life is so peculiar in the absence of the sex that is thought to
-      add a charm to it in other parts of the world. We receive visits or
-      ceremony or of friendship from the chief citizens of the village, we
-      entertain them at dinner, but they are never accompanied by their wives or
-      daughters; we call at their houses and are <i>feted</i> in turn, but the
-      light of the harem never appears. Dahabeëhs of all nations are arriving
-      and departing, there are always several moored before the town, some of
-      them are certain to have lovely passengers, and the polite Arabs are not
-      insensible to the charm of their society: there is much visiting
-      constantly on the boats; but when it is returned at the houses of the
-      natives, at an evening entertainment, the only female society offered is
-      that of the dancing-girls.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Of course, when there is so much lingual difficulty in intercourse, the
-      demonstrations of civility must be mainly overt, and in fact they are
-      mostly illuminations and &ldquo;fantasies.&rdquo; Almost every boat once in the course
-      of its stay, and usually upon some natal day or in honor of some arrival,
-      will be beautifully illuminated and display fireworks. No sight is
-      prettier than a dahabeëh strung along its decks and along its masts and
-      yards with many colored lanterns. The people of Luxor respond with
-      illuminations in the houses, to which they add barbarous music and the
-      kicking and posturing of the Ghawazees. In this consists the gaiety of the
-      Luxor season.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps we reached the high-water mark of this gaiety in an entertainment
-      given us by Ali Moorad Effendi, the American consular agent, in return for
-      a dinner on the dahabeëh. Ali is of good Bedawee blood; and has relations
-      at Karnak enough to fill an opera-house, we esteemed him one of the most
-      trustworthy Arabs in the country, and he takes great pains and pleasure in
-      performing all the duties of his post, which are principally civilities to
-      American travelers. The entertainment consisted of a dinner and a
-      'fantasia.' It was understood that it was to be a dinner in Arab style.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We go at sunset when all the broad surface of the Nile is like an opal in
-      the reflected light. The consul's house is near the bank of the river, and
-      is built against the hill so that we climb two or three narrow stairways
-      before we get to the top of it. The landing-places of the stairways are
-      terraces overlooking the river; and the word terrace has such a grand air
-      that it is impossible to describe this house without making it appear
-      better than it is. The consul comes down to the bank to receive us; we
-      scramble up its crumbling face. We ascend a stairway to the long consular
-      reception-room, where we sit for half an hour, during which coffee is
-      served and we get the last of the glowing sunset from the windows.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are then taken across a little terrace, up another flight of steps, to
-      the main house, which is seen to consist of a broad hall with small rooms
-      on each side. No other members of the consul's family appear, and,
-      regarding Arab etiquette, we make no inquiry for them. We could not commit
-      a greater breach of good-breeding than to ask after the health of any
-      members of the harem. Into one of the little rooms we are shown for
-      dinner. It is very small, only large enough to contain a divan and a round
-      table capable of seating eight persons. The only ornaments of the room are
-      an American flag, and a hand-mirror hung too high for anyone to see
-      herself in it. The round table is of metal, hammered out and turned at the
-      edge,&mdash;a little barrier that prevents anything rolling off. At each
-      place are a napkin and a piece of bread&mdash;no plate or knives or forks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Deference is so far paid to European prejudice that we sit in chairs, but
-      I confess that when I am to eat with my fingers I prefer to sit on the
-      ground&mdash;the position in a chair is too formal for what is to follow.
-      When we are seated, a servant brings water in a basin and ewer, and a
-      towel, and we wash our right hands&mdash;the left hand is not to be used.
-      Soup is first served. The dish is placed in the middle of the table, and
-      we are given spoons with which each one dips in, and eats rapidly or
-      slowly according to habit; but there is necessarily some deliberation
-      about it, for we cannot all dip at once. The soup is excellent, and we
-      praise it, to the great delight of our host, who shows his handsome teeth
-      and says <i>tyeb</i> all that we have hitherto said was <i>tyeb</i>, we
-      now add <i>kateér</i>. More smiles; and claret is brought in&mdash;another
-      concession to foreign tastes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After the soup, we rely upon our fingers, under the instructions of Ali
-      and an Arab guest. The dinner consists of many courses, each article
-      served separately, but sometimes placed upon the table in three or four
-      dishes for the convenience of the convive in reaching it. There are meats
-      and vegetables of all sorts procurable, fish, beef, mutton, veal,
-      chickens, turkeys, quails and other small birds, pease, beans, salad, and
-      some compositions which defied such analysis as one could make with his
-      thumb and finger. Our host prided himself upon having a Turkish artist in
-      the kitchen, and the cooking was really good and toothsome, even to the
-      pastry and sweetmeats; <i>we</i> did not accuse him of making the
-      champagne.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no difficulty in getting at the meats; we tear off strips,
-      mutually assisting each other in pulling them asunder; but there is more
-      trouble about such dishes as pease and a <i>purée</i> of something. One
-      hesitates to make a scoop of his four fingers, and plunge in; and then it
-      is disappointing to an unskilled person to see how few peas he can convey
-      to his mouth at a time. I sequester and keep by me the breast-bone of a
-      chicken, which makes an excellent scoop for small vegetables and gravies,
-      and I am doing very well with it, until there is a universal protest
-      against the unfairness of the device.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our host praises everything himself in the utmost simplicity, and urges us
-      to partake of each dish; he is continually picking out nice bits from the
-      dish and conveying them to the mouth of his nearest guest. My friend who
-      sits next to All, ought to be grateful for this delicate attention, but I
-      fear he is not. The fact is that Ali, by some accident, in fishing,
-      hunting, or war, has lost the tip of the index finger of his right hand,
-      the very hand that conveys the delicacies to my friend's mouth. And he
-      told me afterwards, that he felt each time he was fed that he had
-      swallowed that piece of the consul's finger.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      During the feast there is music by performers in the adjoining hall, music
-      in minor, barbaric strains insisted on with the monotonous <i>nonchalance</i>
-      of the Orient, and calculated, I should say, to excite a person to
-      ferocity, and to make feeding with his fingers a vent to his aroused and
-      savage passions. At the end of the courses water is brought for us to lave
-      our hands, and coffee and chibooks are served.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Dinner very nice, very fine,&rdquo; says Ali, speaking the common thought which
-      most hosts are too conventional to utter.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;A splendid dinner, O! consul; I have never seen such an one in America.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The Ghawazees have meantime arrived; we hear a burst of singing
-      occasionally with the wail of the instruments. The dancing is to be in the
-      narrow hall of the house, which is lighted as well as a room can be with
-      so many dusky faces in it. At the far end are seated on the floor the
-      musicians, with two stringed instruments, a tambourine and a darabooka.
-      That which answers for a violin has two strings of horsehair, stretched
-      over a cocoanut-shell; the bowstring, which is tightened by the hand as it
-      is drawn, is of horsehair. The music is certainly exciting, harassing,
-      plaintive, complaining; the very monotony of it would drive one wild in
-      time. Behind the musicians is a dark cloud of turbaned servants and
-      various privileged retainers of the house. In front of the musicians sit
-      the Ghawazees, six girls, and an old women with parchment skin and
-      twinkling eyes, who has been a famous dancer in her day. They are waiting
-      a little wearily, and from time to time one of them throws out the note or
-      two of a song, as if the music were beginning to work in her veins. The
-      spectators are grouped at the entrance of the hall and seated on chairs
-      down each side, leaving but a narrow space for the dancers between; and
-      there are dusky faces peering in at the door.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Before the dance begins we have an opportunity to see what these Ghawazees
-      are like, a race which prides itself upon preserving a pure blood for
-      thousands of years, and upon an ancestry that has always followed the most
-      disreputable profession. These girls are aged say from sixteen to twenty;
-      one appears much older and looks exactly like an Indian squaw, but,
-      strange to say, her profile is also exactly that of Rameses as we see it
-      in the sculptures. The leading dancer is dressed in a flaring gown of red
-      and figured silk, a costly Syrian dress; she is fat, rather comely, but
-      coarsely uninteresting, although she is said to have on more jewelry than
-      any other dancing-girl in Egypt; her abundant black hair is worn long and
-      in strands thickly hung with gold coins; her breast is covered with
-      necklaces of gold-work and coins; and a mass of heavy twinkling silver
-      ornaments hangs about her waist. A third dancer is in an almost equally
-      striking gown of yellow, and wears also much coin; she is a Pharaonic
-      beauty, with a soft skin and the real Oriental eye and profile. The
-      dresses of all are plainly cut, and straight-waisted, like an ordinary
-      calico gown of a milkmaid. They wear no shawls or any other Oriental
-      wrappings, and dance in their stocking-feet.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At a turn in the music, the girl in red and the girl in yellow stand up;
-      for an instant they raise their castanets till the time of the music is
-      caught, and then start forward, with less of languor and a more skipping
-      movement than we expected; and they are not ungraceful as they come
-      rapidly down the hall, throwing the arms aloft and the feet forward, to
-      the rattle of the castanets. These latter are small convex pieces of
-      brass, held between the thumb and finger, which have a click like the
-      rattle of the snake. In mid-advance they stop, face each other, <i>chassée</i>,
-      retire, and again come further forward, stop, and the peculiar portion of
-      the dance begins, which is not dancing at all, but a quivering, undulating
-      motion given to the body, as the girl stands with feet planted wide apart.
-      The feet are still, the head scarcely stirs, except with an almost
-      imperceptible snakelike movement, but the muscles of the body to the hips
-      quiver in time to the monotonous music, in muscular thrills, in waves
-      running down, and at intervals extending below the waist. Sometimes one
-      side of the body quivers while the other is perfectly still, and then the
-      whole frame, for a second, shares in the ague. It is certainly an
-      astonishing muscular performance, but you could not call it either
-      graceful or pleasing. Some people see in the intention of the dance a deep
-      symbolic meaning, something about the Old Serpent of the Nile, with its
-      gliding, quivering movement and its fatal fascination. Others see in it
-      only the common old Snake that was in Eden. I suppose in fact that it is
-      the old and universal Oriental dance, the chief attraction of which never
-      was its modesty.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After standing for a brief space, with the body throbbing and quivering,
-      the castanets all the time held above the head in sympathetic throbs, the
-      dancers start forward, face each other, pass, pirouette, and take some
-      dancing steps, retire, advance and repeat the earthquake performance. This
-      is kept up a long time, and with wonderful endurance, without change of
-      figure; but sometimes the movements are more rapid, when the music
-      hastens, and more passion is shown. But five minutes of it is as good as
-      an hour. Evidently the dance is nothing except with a master, with an
-      actress who shall abandon herself to the tide of feeling which the music
-      suggests and throw herself into the full passion of it; who knows how to
-      tell a story by pantomime, and to depict the woes of love and despair. All
-      this needs grace, beauty, and genius. Few dancing-girls have either. An
-      old resident of Luxor complains that the dancing is not at all what it was
-      twenty years ago, that the old fire and art seem to be lost.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The old hag, sitting there on the floor, was asked to exhibit the ancient
-      style; she consented, and danced marvelously for a time, but the
-      performance became in the end too shameful to be witnessed.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I fancy that if the dance has gained anything in propriety, which is hard
-      to believe, it has lost in spirit. It might be passionate, dramatic,
-      tragic. But it needs genius to make it anything more than a suggestive and
-      repulsive vulgarity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      During the intervals, the girls sing to the music; the singing is very
-      wild and barbaric. The song is in praise of the Night, a love-song
-      consisting of repeated epithets:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;O the Night! nothing is so lovely as the Night!
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      O my heart! O my soul! O my liver!
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      My love he passed my door, and saw me not;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      O the night! How lovely is the Night!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The strain is minor, and there is a wail in the voices which stridently
-      chant to the twanging strings. Is it only the echo of ages of sin in those
-      despairing voices? How melancholy it all becomes! The girl in yellow, she
-      of the oblong eyes, straight nose and high type of Oriental beauty, dances
-      down alone; she is slender, she has the charm of grace, her eyes never
-      wander to the spectators. Is there in her soul any faint contempt for
-      herself or for the part she plays? Or is the historic consciousness of the
-      antiquity of both her profession and her sin strong enough to throw yet
-      the lights of illusion over such a performance? Evidently the fat girl in
-      red is a prey to no such misgiving, as she comes bouncing down the line,
-      and flings herself into her ague fit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Look out, the hippopotamus!&rdquo; cries Abd-el-Atti, &ldquo;I 'fraid she kick me.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      While the dance goes on, pipes, coffee, and brandy are frequently passed;
-      the dancers swallow the brandy readily. The house is illuminated, and the
-      entertainment ends with a few rockets from the terrace. This is a
-      full-blown &ldquo;fantasia.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      As the night is still young and the moon is full, we decide to efface, as
-      much as may be, the vulgarities of modern Egypt, by a vision of the
-      ancient, and taking donkeys we ride to Karnak.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For myself I prefer day to night, and abounding sunshine to the most
-      generous moonlight; there is always some disappointment in the night
-      effect in ruins, under the most favorable conditions. But I have great
-      deference to that poetic yearning for half-light, which leads one to grope
-      about in the heavy night-shadows of a stately temple; there is no bird
-      more worthy of respect than the round-eyed attendant of Pallas-Athene.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And it cannot be denied that there is something mysterious and almost
-      ghostly in our silent night ride. For once, our attendants fall into the
-      spirit of the adventure, keep silent, and are only shades at our side. Not
-      a word or a blow is heard as we emerge from the dark lanes of Luxor and
-      come out into the yellow light of the plain; the light seems strong and
-      yet the plain is spectral, small objects become gigantic, and although the
-      valley is flooded in radiance, the end of our small procession is lost in
-      dimness. Nothing is real, all things take fantastic forms, and all
-      proportions are changed. One moves as in a sort of spell, and it is this
-      unreality which becomes painful. The old Egyptians had need of little
-      imagination to conjure up the phantasmagoria of the under-world; it is
-      this without the sun.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So far as we can see it, the great mass of stone is impressive as we
-      approach&mdash;I suspect because we know how vast and solid it is; and the
-      pylons never seemed so gigantic before. We do our best to get into a
-      proper frame of mind, by wandering apart, and losing ourselves in the
-      heavy shadows. And for moments we succeed. It would have been the shame of
-      our lives not to have seen Karnak by moonlight. The Great Hall, with its
-      enormous columns planted close together, it is more difficult to see by
-      night than by day, but such glimpses as we have of it, the silver light
-      slanting through the stone forest and the heavy shadows, are profoundly
-      impressive. I climb upon a tottering pylon where I can see over the
-      indistinct field and chaos of stone, and look down into the weird and
-      half-illumined Hall of Columns. In this isolated situation I am beginning
-      to fall into the classical meditation of Marius at Carthage, when another
-      party of visitors arrives, and their donkeys, meeting our donkeys in the
-      center of the Great Hall, begin (it is their donkeys that begin) such a
-      braying as never was heard before; the challenge is promptly responded to,
-      and a duet ensues and is continued and runs into a chorus, so hideous, so
-      unsanctified, so wretchedly attuned, and out of harmony with history,
-      romance, and religion, that sentiment takes wings with silence and flies
-      from the spot.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We can pick up again only some scattered fragments of emotion by wandering
-      alone in the remotest nooks. But we can go nowhere that an Arab, silent
-      and gowned, does not glide from behind a pillar or step out of the shade,
-      staff in hand, and stealthily accompany us. Even the donkey-boys have
-      cultivated their sensibilities by association with other nocturnal
-      pilgrims, and encourage our gush of feeling by remarking in a low voice,
-      &ldquo;Karnak very good.&rdquo; One of them, who had apparently attended only the most
-      refined and appreciative, keeps repeating at each point of view,
-      &ldquo;Exquisite!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      As I am lingering behind the company a shadow glides up to me in the gloom
-      of the great columns, with &ldquo;good evening&rdquo;; and, when I reply, it draws
-      nearer, and, in confidential tones, whispers, as if it knew that the
-      moonlight visit was different from that by day, &ldquo;Backsheesh.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      There is never wanting something to do at Luxor, if all the excursions
-      were made. There is always an exchange of courtesies between dahabeëhs,
-      calls are made and dinners given. In the matter of visits the naval
-      etiquette prevails, and the last comer makes the first call. But if you do
-      not care for the society of travelers, you can at least make one of the
-      picturesque idlers on the bank; you may chance to see a display of Arab
-      horsemanship; you may be entertained by some new device of the
-      curiosity-mongers; and there always remain the &ldquo;collections&rdquo; of the
-      dealers to examine. One of the best of them is that of the German consul,
-      who rejoices in the odd name of Todrous Paulos, which reappears in his son
-      as Moharb Todrous; a Copt who enjoys the reputation among Moslems of a
-      trustworthy man&mdash;which probably means that a larger proportion of his
-      antiquities are genuine than of theirs. If one were disposed to moralize
-      there is abundant field for it here in Luxor. I wonder if there is an
-      insatiable demoralization connected with the dealing in antiquities, and
-      especially in the relics of the departed. When a person, as a business,
-      obtains his merchandise from the unresisting clutch of the dead, in
-      violation of the firman of his ruler, does he add to his wickedness by
-      manufacturing imitations and selling them as real? And what of the
-      traveler who encourages both trades by buying?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      One night the venerable Mustapha Aga gave a grand entertainment, in honor
-      of his reception of a firman from the Sultan, who sent him a decoration of
-      diamonds set in silver. Nothing in a Moslem's eyes could exceed the honor
-      of this recognition by the Khalif, the successor of the Prophet. It was an
-      occasion of religious as well as of social demonstration of gratitude.
-      There was service, with the reading of the Koran in the mosque, for the
-      faithful only; there was a slaughter of sheep with a distribution of the
-      mutton among the poor; and there was a fantasia at the residence of
-      Mustapha (the house built into the columns of the temple of Luxor), to
-      which everybody was bidden. There had been an arrival of Cook's
-      Excursionists by steamboat, and there must have been as many as two
-      hundred foreigners at the entertainment in the course of the evening.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The way before the house was arched with palms and hung with colored
-      lanterns; bands of sailors from the dahabeëhs sat in front, strumming the
-      darabooka and chanting their wild refrains; crowds of Arabs squatted in
-      the light of the illumination and filled the steps and the doorway. Within
-      were feasting, music, and dancing, in Oriental abandon. In the hall, which
-      was lined with spectators, was to be seen the stiff-legged sprawling-about
-      and quivering of the Ghawazees, to the barbarous tum-tum, thump-thump, of
-      the musicians; in each side-room also dancing was extemporized, until the
-      house was pervaded with the monotonous vulgarity, which was more
-      pronounced than at the house of Ali.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the midst of these strange festivities, the grave Mustapha received
-      congratulations upon his newly conferred honor, with the air of a man who
-      was responding to it in the finest Oriental style. Nothing grander than
-      this entertainment could be conceived in Luxor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Let us try to look at it also with Oriental eyes. How fatal it would be to
-      it <i>not</i> to look at it with Oriental eyes, we can conceive by
-      transferring the scene to New York. A citizen, from one of the oldest
-      families, has received from the President, let us suppose, the decoration
-      of the Grand Order of Inspector of Consulates. In order to do honor to the
-      occasion, he throws open his residence on Gramercy Park, procures a lot of
-      sailors to sit on his steps and sing nautical ditties, and drafts a score
-      of girls from Centre-street to entertain his guests with a style of
-      dancing which could not be worse if it had three thousand years of
-      antiquity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I prefer not to regard this Luxor entertainment in such a light; and
-      although we hasten from it as soon as we can with civility, I am haunted
-      for a long time afterwards by I know not what there was in it of fantastic
-      and barbaric fascination.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The last afternoon at Luxor we give to a long walk to Karnak and beyond,
-      through the wheat and barley fields now vocal with the songs of birds. We
-      do not, however, reach the conspicuous pillars of a temple on the desert
-      far to the northeast; but, returning, climb the wall of circuit and look
-      our last upon these fascinating ruins. From this point the relative
-      vastness of the Great Hall is apparent. The view this afternoon is
-      certainly one of the most beautiful in the world. You know already the
-      elements of it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Late at night, after a parting dinner of ceremony, and with a pang of
-      regret, although we are in bed, the dahabeëh is loosed from Luxor and we
-      quietly drop down below old Thebes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0058" id="linkimage-0058"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0397.jpg" alt="0397 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0059" id="linkimage-0059"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0398.jpg" alt="0398 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0031" id="link2HCH0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXXI.&mdash;LOITERING BY THE WAY.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E ARE at home
-      again. Our little world, which has been somewhat disturbed by the gaiety
-      of Thebes, and is already as weary of tombs as of temples and of the whole
-      incubus of Egyptian civilization, readjusts itself and settles into its
-      usual placid enjoyment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have now two gazelles on board, and a most disagreeable lizard, nearly
-      three feet long; I dislike the way his legs are set on his sides; I
-      dislike his tail, which is a fat continuation of his body; and the &ldquo;feel&rdquo;
-       of his cold, creeping flesh is worse than his appearance; he is
-      exceedingly active, darting rapidly about in every direction to the end of
-      his rope. The gazelles chase each other about the deck, frolicking in the
-      sun, and their eyes express as much tenderness and affection as any eyes
-      can, set like theirs. If they were mounted in a woman's head, and properly
-      shaded with long lashes, she would be the most dangerous being in
-      existence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Somehow there is a little change in the atmosphere of the dahabeëh. The
-      jester of the crew, who kept them alternately laughing and grumbling,
-      singing and quarreling, turbulent with hasheesh or sulky for want of it,
-      was left in jail at Assouan. The reïs has never recovered the injury to
-      his dignity inflicted by his brief incarceration, and gives us no more a
-      cheerful good-morning. The steersman smiles still, with the fixed look of
-      enjoyment that his face assumed when it first came into the world, but he
-      is listless; I think he has struck a section of the river in which there
-      is a dearth of his wives; he has complained that his feet were cold in the
-      fresh mornings, but the stockings we gave him he does not wear, and
-      probably is reserving for a dress occasion. Abd-el-Atti meditates
-      seriously upon a misunderstanding with one of his old friends at Luxor; he
-      likes to tell us about the diplomatic and sarcastic letter he addressed
-      him on leaving; &ldquo;I wrote it,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;very grammatick, the meaning of
-      him very deep; I think he feel it.&rdquo; There is no language like the Arabic
-      for the delivery of courtly sarcasm, in soft words, at which no offence
-      can be taken,&mdash;for administering a smart slap in the face, so to say,
-      with a feather.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a ravishing sort of day, a slight haze, warm but life-giving air,
-      and we row a little and sail a little down the broadening river, by the
-      palms, and the wheat-fields growing yellow, and the soft chain of Libyan
-      hills,&mdash;the very <i>dolce far niente</i> of life. Other dahabeëhs
-      accompany us, and we hear the choruses of their crews responding to ours.
-      From the shore comes the hum of labor and of idleness, men at the
-      shadoofs, women at the shore for water; there are flocks of white herons
-      and spoonbills on the sandbars; we glide past villages with picturesque
-      pigeon-houses; a ferry-boat ever and anon puts across, a low black scow,
-      its sides banked up with clay, a sail all patches and tatters, and crowded
-      in it three or four donkeys and a group of shawled women and turbaned men,
-      silent and sombre. The country through which we walk, towards night, is a
-      vast plain of wheat, irrigated by canals, with villages in all directions;
-      the peasants are shabbily dressed, as if taxes ate up all their labor, but
-      they do not beg.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The city of Keneh, to which we come next morning, is the nearest point of
-      the Nile to the Red Sea, the desert route to Kosseir being only one
-      hundred and twenty miles; it is the Neapolis of which Herodotus speaks,
-      near which was the great city of Chemmis, that had a temple dedicated to
-      Perseus. The Chemmitæ declared that this demi-god often appeared to them
-      on earth, and that he was descended from citizens of their country who had
-      sailed into Greece; there if no doubt that Perseus came here when he made
-      the expedition into Libya to bring the Gorgon's head.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Keneh is now a thriving city, full of evidences of wealth, and of
-      well-dressed people, and there are handsome houses and bazaars like those
-      of Cairo. From time immemorial it has been famous for its <i>koollehs</i>,
-      which are made of a fine clay found only in this vicinity, of which ware
-      is manufactured almost as thin as paper. The process of making them has
-      not changed since the potters of the Pharaohs' time. The potters of to-day
-      are very skillful at the wheel. A small mass of moistened clay, mixed with
-      sifted ashes of halfeh-grass and kneaded like bread, is placed upon a
-      round plate of wood which whirls by a treadle. As it revolves the workman
-      with his hands fashions the clay into vessels of all shapes, graceful and
-      delicate, with a sleight of hand that is wonderful. He makes a koolleh, or
-      a drinking-cup, or a vase with a slender neck, in a few seconds,
-      fashioning it as truly as if it were cast in a mould. It was like magic to
-      see the fragile forms grow in his hands. We sat for a long time in one of
-      the cool rooms where two or three potters were at work, shaded from the
-      sun by palm-branches, which let the light flicker upon the earth-floor,
-      upon the freshly made vessels and the spinning wheels of the turbaned
-      workmen, whose deft fingers wrought out unceasingly these beautiful shapes
-      from the revolving clay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At the house of the English consul we have coffee; he afterwards lunches
-      with us and insists, but in vain, that we stay and be entertained by a
-      Ghawazee dance in the evening. It is a kind of amusement of which a very
-      little satisfies one. At his house, Prince Arthur and his suite were also
-      calling; a slender, pleasant appearing young gentleman, not noticeable
-      anywhere and with a face of no special force, but bearing the family
-      likeness. As we have had occasion to remark more than once, Princes are so
-      plenty on the Nile this year as to be a burden to the officials,&mdash;especially
-      German princes, who, however, do not count any more. The private,
-      unostentatious traveler, who asks no favor of the Khedive, is becoming
-      almost a rarity. I hear the natives complain that almost all the
-      Englishmen of rank who come to Egypt, beg, or shall we say accept?
-      substantial favors of the Khedive. The nobility appear to have a new
-      rendering of <i>noblesse oblige</i>. This is rather humiliating to us
-      Americans, who are, after all, almost blood-relations of the English; and
-      besides, we are often taken for <i>Inglese</i>, in villages where few
-      strangers go. It cannot be said that all Americans are modest, unassuming
-      travelers; but we are glad to record a point or two in their favor:&mdash;they
-      pay their way, and they do not appear to cut and paint their names upon
-      the ruins in such numbers as travelers from other countries; the French
-      are the greatest offenders in this respect, and the Germans next.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We cross the river in the afternoon and ride to the temple of Athor or
-      Venus at Denderah. This temple, although of late construction, is
-      considered one of the most important in Egypt. But it is incomplete,
-      smaller, and less satisfactory than that at Edfoo. The architecture of the
-      portico and succeeding hall is on the whole noble, but the columns are
-      thick and ungraceful, and the sculptures are clumsy and unartistic. The
-      myth of the Egyptian Avenues is worked out everywhere with the elaboration
-      of a later Greek temple. On the ceiling of several rooms her gigantic
-      figure is bent round three sides, and from a globe in her lap rays proceed
-      in the vivifying influence of which trees are made to grow.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Everywhere in the temple are subterranean and intramural passages,
-      entrance to which is only had by a narrow aperture, once closed by a
-      stone. For what were these perfectly dark alleys intended? Processions
-      could not move in them, and if they were merely used for concealing
-      valuables, why should their inner sides have been covered with such
-      elaborate sculptures?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The most interesting thing at Denderah is the small temple of Osiris,
-      which is called the &ldquo;lying-in temple,&rdquo; the subjects of sculptures being
-      the mystical conception, birth, and babyhood of Osiris. You might think
-      from the pictures on the walls, of babes at nurse and babes in arms, that
-      you had obtruded into one of the institutions of charity called a Day
-      Nursery. We are glad to find here, carved in large, the image of the
-      four-headed ugly little creature we have been calling Typhon, the spirit
-      of evil; and to learn that it is not Typhon but is the god Bes, a jolly
-      promoter of merriment and dancing. His appearance is very much against
-      him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Mariette Bey makes the great mystery of the <i>adytum</i> of the large
-      temple, which the king alone could enter, the golden <i>sistrum</i> which
-      was kept there. The <i>sistrum</i> was the mysterious emblem of Venus; it
-      is sculptured everywhere in this building&mdash;although it is one of the
-      sacred symbols found in all temples. This sacred instrument <i>par
-      excellence</i> of the Egyptians played as important a part in their
-      worship, says Mr. Wilkinson, as the tinkling bell in Roman Catholic
-      services. The great privilege of holding it was accorded to queens, and
-      ladies of rank who were devoted to the service of the deity. The <i>sistrum</i>
-      is a strip of gold, or bronze, bent in a long loop, and the ends, coming
-      together, are fastened in an ornamented handle. Through the loop bars are
-      run upon which are rings, and when the instrument is shaken the rings move
-      to and fro. Upon the sides of the handle were sometimes carved the faces
-      of Isis and of Nephthys, the sister goddesses, representing the beginning
-      and the end.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a little startling to find, when we get at the inner secret of the
-      Egyptian religion, that it is a rattle! But it is the symbol of eternal
-      agitation, without which there is no life. And the Egyptians profoundly
-      knew this great secret of the universe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We pass next day, quietly, to the exhibition of a religious devotion which
-      is trying to get on without any <i>sistrum</i> or any agitation whatever.
-      Towards sunset, below How, we come to a place where a holy man, called
-      Sheykh Saleem, roosts forever on a sloping bank, with a rich country
-      behind him; beyond, on the plain, hundreds of men and boys are at work
-      throwing up an embankment against the next inundation; but he does not
-      heed them. The holy man is stark naked and sits upon his haunches, his
-      head, a shock of yellow hair, upon his knees. He is of that sickly,
-      whitey-black color which such holy skin as his gets by long exposure.
-      Before him on the bank is a row of large water-jars; behind him is a
-      little kennel of mud, into which he can crawl if it ever occurs to him to
-      go to bed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      About him, seated on the ground, is a group of his admirers. Boys run
-      after us along the bank begging backsheesh for Sheykh Saleem. A crowd of
-      hangers-on, we are told, always surround him, and live on the charity that
-      his piety evokes from the faithful. His own wants are few. He spend his
-      life in this attitude principally, contemplating the sand between his
-      knees. He has sat here for forty years.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      People pass and repass, camels swing by him, the sun shines, a breeze as
-      of summer moves the wheat behind him and our great barque, with its gay
-      flags and a dozen rowers rowing in time, sweeps before him, but he does
-      not raise his head. Perhaps he has found the secret of perfect happiness.
-      But his example cannot be widely imitated. There are not many climates in
-      the world in which a man can enjoy such a religion out of doors at all
-      seasons of the year.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We row on and by sundown are opposite Farshoot and its sugar-factories;
-      the river broadens into a lake, shut in to the north by limestone hills
-      rosy in this light, and it is perfectly still at this hour. But for the
-      palms against the sky, and the cries of men at the shadoofs, and the
-      clumsy native boats with their freight of immobile figures, this might be
-      a glassy lake in the remote Adirondack forest, especially when the light
-      has so much diminished that the mountains no longer appear naked.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next morning as we were loitering along, wishing for a breeze to take
-      us quickly to Bellianeh, that we might spend the day in visiting old
-      Abydus, a beautiful wind suddenly arose according to our desire.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You always have good fortune,&rdquo; says the dragoman.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I thought you didn't believe in luck?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Not to call him luck. You think the wind to blow 'thout the Lord know
-      it?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We approach Bellianeh under such fine headway that we fall almost into the
-      opposite murmuring, that this helpful breeze should come just when we were
-      obliged to stop and lose the benefit. We half incline to go on, and leave
-      Abydus in its ashes, but the absurdity of making a journey of seven
-      thousand miles and then passing near to, but unseen, the spot most sacred
-      to the old Egyptians, flashes upon us, and we meekly land. But our
-      inclination to go on was not so absurd as it seems; the mind is so
-      constituted that it can contain only a certain amount of old ruins, and we
-      were getting a mental indigestion of them. Loathing is perhaps too strong
-      a word to use in regard to a piece of sculpture, but I think that a sight
-      at this time, of Rameses II. in his favorite attitude of slicing off the
-      heads of a lot of small captives, would have made us sick.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      By eleven o'clock we were mounted for the ride of eight miles, and it may
-      give some idea of the speed of the donkey under compulsion, to say that we
-      made the distance in an hour and forty minutes. The sun was hot, the wind
-      fresh, the dust considerable,&mdash;a fine sandy powder that, before
-      night, penetrated clothes and skin. Nevertheless, the ride was charming.
-      The way lay through a plain extending for many miles in every direction,
-      every foot of it green with barley (of which here and there a spot was
-      ripening), with clover, with the rank, dark Egyptian bean. The air was
-      sweet, and filled with songs of the birds that glanced over the fields or
-      poised in air on even wing like the lark. Through the vast, unfenced
-      fields were narrow well-beaten roads in all directions, upon which men
-      women, and children, usually poorly and scantily clad, donkeys and camels,
-      were coming and going. There was the hum of voices everywhere, the
-      occasional agonized blast of the donkey and the caravan bleat of the
-      camel. It often seems to us that the more rich and broad the fields and
-      the more abundant the life, the more squalor among the people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We had noticed, at little distances apart in the plain, mounds of dirt
-      five or six feet high. Upon each of these stood a solitary figure, usually
-      a naked boy&mdash;a bronze image set up above the green.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What are these?&rdquo; we ask.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What you call scarecrows, to frighten the birds; see that chile throw
-      dirt at 'em!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;They look like sentries; do the people here steal?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Everybody help himself, if nobody watch him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      At length we reach the dust-swept village of Arâbat, on the edge of the
-      desert, near the ruins of the ancient Thinis (or Abvdus), the so-called
-      cradle of the Egyptian monarchy. They have recently been excavated. I
-      cannot think that this ancient and most important city was originally so
-      far from the Nile; in the day of its glory the river must have run near
-      it. Here was the seat of the first Egyptian dynasty, five thousand and
-      four years before Christ, according to the chronology of Mariette Bey. I
-      find no difficulty in accepting the five thousand but I am puzzled about
-      the <i>four</i> years. It makes Menes four years older than he is
-      generally supposed to have been. It is the accuracy of the date that sets
-      one pondering. Menes, the first-known Egyptian king, and the founder of
-      Memphis, was born here. If he established his dynasty here six thousand
-      eight hundred and seventy-nine years ago, he must have been born some time
-      before that date; and to be a ruler he must have been of noble parents,
-      and no doubt received a good education. I should like to know what sort of
-      a place, as to art, say, and literature, and architecture, Thinis was
-      seven thousand and four years ago. It is chiefly sand-heaps now.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not only was Menes born here, in the grey dawn of history, but Osiris, the
-      manifestation of Light on earth, was buried here in the greyer dawn of a
-      mythic period. His tomb was venerated by the Pharaonic worshippers as the
-      Holy Sepulchre is by Christians, and for many ages. It was the last desire
-      of the rich and noble Egyptians to be buried at Thinis, in order that they
-      might lie in the same grave with Osiris; and bodies were brought here from
-      all parts of Egypt to rest in the sacred earth. Their tombs were heaped up
-      one above another, about the grave of the god. There are thousands of
-      mounds here, clustering thickly about a larger mound; and, by digging, M.
-      Mariette hopes to find the reputed tomb of Osiris. An enclosure of crude
-      brick marks the supposed site of this supposed most ancient city of Egypt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From these prehistoric ashes, it is like going from Rome to Peoria, to
-      pass to a temple built so late as the time of Sethi I., only about
-      thirty-three hundred years ago. It has been nearly all excavated and it is
-      worth a long ride to see it. Its plan differs from that of all other
-      temples, and its varied sculpture ranks with the best of temple carving;
-      nowhere else have we found more life and grace of action in the figures
-      and more expressive features; in number of singular emblems and devices,
-      and in their careful and beautiful cutting, and brilliant coloring, the
-      temple is unsurpassed. The non-stereotyped plan of the temple beguiled us
-      into a hearty enjoyment of it. Its numerous columns are pure Egyptian of
-      the best style&mdash;lotus capitals; and it contains some excellent
-      specimens of the Doric column, or of its original, rather. The famous
-      original tablet of kings, seventy-six, from Menes to Sethi, a partial copy
-      of which is in the British Museum, has been re-covered with sand for its
-      preservation. This must have been one of the finest of the old temples. We
-      find here the novelty of vaulted roofs, formed by a singular method. The
-      roof stones are not laid flat, as elsewhere, but on edge, and the roof,
-      thus having sufficient thickness, is hollowed out on the under side, and
-      the arch is decorated with stars and other devices. Of course, there is a
-      temple of Rameses II., next door to this one, but it exists now only in
-      its magnificent foundations.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We rode back through the village of Arâbat in a whirlwind of dust, amid
-      cries of &ldquo;backsheesh,&rdquo; hailed from every door and pursued by yelling
-      children. One boy, clad in the loose gown that passes for a wardrobe in
-      these parts, in order to earn his money, threw a summersault before us,
-      and, in a flash, turned completely out of his clothes, like a new-made
-      Adam! Nothing was ever more neatly done; except it may have been a feat of
-      my donkey a moment afterwards, executed perhaps in rivalry of the boy.
-      Pretending to stumble, he went on his head, and threw a summersault also.
-      When I went back to look for him, his head was doubled under his body so
-      that he had to be helped up.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we returned we found six other dahabeëhs moored near ours. Out of the
-      seven, six carried the American flag&mdash;one of them in union with the
-      German&mdash;and the seventh was English. The American flags largely
-      outnumber all others on the Nile this year; in fact Americans and various
-      kinds of Princes appear to be monopolizing this stream. A German, who
-      shares a boat with Americans, drops in for a talk. It is wonderful how
-      much more space in the world every German needs, now that there is a
-      Germany. Our visitor expresses the belief that the Germans and the
-      Americans are to share the dominion of the world between them. I suppose
-      that this means that we are to be permitted to dwell on our present
-      possessions in peace, if we don't make faces; but one cannot contemplate
-      the extinction of all the other powers without regret.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Of course we have outstayed the south wind; the next morning we are slowly
-      drifting against the north wind. As I look from the window before
-      breakfast, a Nubian trader floats past, and on the bow deck is crouched a
-      handsome young lion, honest of face and free of glance, little dreaming of
-      the miserable menagerie life before him. There are two lions and a
-      leopard, and a cargo of cinnamon, senna, elephants' tusks, and
-      ostrich-feathers, on board; all Central Africa seems to float beside us,
-      and the coal-black crew do not lessen the barbaric impression.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is after dark when we reach Girgeh, and are guided to our moorage by
-      the lights of other dahabeëhs. All that we see of this decayed but once
-      capital town, are four minarets, two of them surrounding picturesque ruins
-      and some slender columns of a mosque, the remainder of the building having
-      been washed into the river. As we land, a muezzin sings the evening call
-      to prayer in a sweet, high tenor voice; and it sounds like a welcome.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Decayed, did we say of Girgeh? What is not decayed, or decaying, or
-      shifting, on this aggressive river? How age laps back on age and one
-      religion shuffles another out of sight. In the hazy morning we are passing
-      Menshéëh, the site of an old town that once was not inferior to Memphis;
-      and then we come to Ekhmeem&mdash;ancient Panopolis. You never heard of
-      it? A Roman visitor called it the oldest city of all Egypt; it was in fact
-      founded by Ekhmeem, the son of Misraim, the offspring of Cush, the son of
-      Ham. There you are, almost personally present at the Deluge. Below here
-      are two Coptic convents, probably later than the time of the Empress
-      Helena. On the shore are walking some Coptic Christians, but they are in
-      no way superior in appearance to other natives; a woman, whom we hail,
-      makes the sign of the cross, and then demands backsheesh.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We had some curiosity to visit a town of such honorable foundation. We
-      found in it fine mosques and elegant minarets, of a good Saracenic epoch.
-      Upon the lofty stone top of one sat an eagle, who looked down upon us
-      unscared; the mosque was ruinous and the door closed, but through the
-      windows we could see the gaily decorated ceiling; the whole was in the
-      sort of decay that the traveler learns to think Moslemism itself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We made a pretence of searching for the remains of a temple of Pan,&mdash;though
-      we probably care less for Pan than we do for Rameses. Making known our
-      wants, several polite gentlemen in turbans, offered to show us the way&mdash;the
-      gentlemen in these towns seem to have no other occupation than to sit on
-      the ground and smoke the chibook&mdash;and we were attended by a
-      procession, beyond the walls, to the cemetery. There, in a hollow, we saw
-      a few large stones, some of them showing marks of cutting. This was the
-      temple spoken of in the hand-book. Our hosts then insisted upon dragging
-      us half a mile further through the dust of the cemetery mounds, in the
-      glare of the sun, and showed us a stone half buried, with a few
-      hieroglyphics on one end. Never were people so polite. A grave man here
-      joined us, and proposed to show us some <i>quei-is antéeka</i> (&ldquo;beautiful
-      antiquities&rdquo;); and we followed this obliging person half over town; and
-      finally, in the court of a private house, he pointed to the torso of a
-      blue granite statue. All this was done out of pure hospitality; the people
-      could not have been more attentive if they had had something really worth
-      seeing. The town has handsome, spacious coffee-houses and shops, and an
-      appearance of Oriental luxury.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The men looked at us in wondering query, as if demanding what we wanted.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 &ldquo;old masters.&rdquo;
-       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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;a kind of dishonesty that seems to be ingrained in
-      the Eastern economy. The Khedive loses both ways:&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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 (<i>limon</i>) of
-      the overflowing Nile will repair all wastes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;we
-      have had occasion to say before that the hens lay ridiculously small eggs&mdash;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&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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,&mdash;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&mdash;&ldquo;Isn't
-      it a beauty?&rdquo; 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&mdash;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&mdash;the plume of truth in
-      beauty's bonnet.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;a beast whose enormous strength is only
-      made a snow of, like that of Samson; and pretty silver-work from Soudan.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What is this beautiful tawny skin, upon which I am sitting?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Lion's; she was the mother of one of the young lions out yonder. And
-      this,&rdquo; continued the trader, drawing something from the corner, &ldquo;is her
-      skull.&rdquo; 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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What's that thick stuff in a bottle there behind you?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;That's lion's oil, some of <i>her</i> oil.&rdquo; Unhappy family, the mother
-      skinned and boiled, the offspring dragged into slavery.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And is that another bottle of it?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;<i>Mais</i>, no; you don't get a lion every day for oil; that is
-      ostrich-oil. This is good for rheumatism.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;the dull glare of
-      animality.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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,&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;an instrument of two short
-      reeds, each with four holes, bound together, and played like a clarionet.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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&mdash;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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      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.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0060" id="linkimage-0060"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0417.jpg" alt="0417 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0032" id="link2HCH0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXXII.&mdash;JOTTINGS.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">L</span>ETTING our
-      dahabeëh drift on in the morning, we spend the day at Assiout, intending
-      to overtake it by a short cut across the oxbow which the river makes here.
-      We saw in the city two examples, very unlike, of the new activity in
-      Egypt. One related to education, the other to the physical development of
-      the country and to conquest.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After paying out respects to the consul, we were conducted by his two sons
-      to the Presbyterian Mission-School. These young men were educated at the
-      American College in Beyrout. Nearly everywhere we have been in the East,
-      we have found a graduate of this school, that is as much as to say, a
-      person intelligent and anxious and able to aid in the regeneration of his
-      country. It would not be easy to overestimate the services that this one
-      liberal institution of learning is doing in the Orient.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The mission-school was under the charge of the Rev. Dr. John Hogg and his
-      wife (both Scotch), with two women-teachers, and several native
-      assistants. We were surprised to find an establishment of about one
-      hundred and twenty scholars, of whom over twenty were girls. Of course the
-      majority of the students were in the primary studies, and some were very
-      young; but there were classes in advanced mathematics, in logic, history,
-      English, etc. The Arab young men have a fondness for logic and
-      metaphysics, and develop easily an inherited subtlety in such studies. The
-      text-books in use are Arabic, and that is the medium of teaching.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The students come from all parts of Upper Egypt, and are almost all the
-      children of Protestant parents, and they are, with an occasional
-      exception, supported by their parents, who pay at least their board while
-      they are at school. There were few Moslems among them, I think only one
-      Moslem girl. I am bound to say that the boys and young men in their close
-      rooms did not present an attractive appearance; an ill-assorted assembly,
-      with the stamp of physical inferiority and dullness&mdash;an effect
-      partially due to their scant and shabby apparel, for some of them had
-      bright, intelligent faces.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The school for girls, small as it is, impressed us as one of the most
-      hopeful things in Egypt. I have no confidence in any scheme for the
-      regeneration of the country, in any development if agriculture, or
-      extension of territory, or even in education, that does not reach woman
-      and radically change her and her position. It is not enough to say that
-      the harem system is a curse to the East: woman herself is everywhere
-      degraded. Until she becomes totally different from what she now is, I am
-      not sure but the Arab is right in saying that the harem is a necessity:
-      the woman is secluded in it (and in the vast majority of harems there is
-      only one wife) and has a watch set over her, because she cannot be
-      trusted. One hears that Cairo is full of intrigue, in spite of locked
-      doors and eunuchs. The large towns are worse than the country; but I have
-      heard it said that woman is the evil and plague of Egypt&mdash;though I
-      don't know how the country could go on without her. Sweeping
-      generalizations are dangerous, but it is said that the sole education of
-      most Egyptian women is in arts to stimulate the passion of men. In the
-      idleness of the most luxurious harem, in the grim poverty of the lowest
-      cabin, woman is simply an animal.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What can you expect of her? She is literally uneducated, untrained in
-      every respect. She knows no more of domestic economy than she does of
-      books, and she is no more fitted to make a house attractive or a room tidy
-      than she is to hold an intelligent conversation. Married when she is yet a
-      child, to person she may have never seen, and a mother at an age when she
-      should be in school, there is no opportunity for her to become anything
-      better than she is.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A primary intention in this school is to fit the girls to become good
-      wives, who can set an example of tidy homes economically managed, in which
-      there shall be something of social life and intelligent companionship
-      between husband and wife. The girls are taught the common branches,
-      sewing, cooking, and housekeeping&mdash;as there is opportunity for
-      learning it in the family of the missionaries. This house of Dr. Hogg's,
-      with its books, music, civilized <i>menage</i>, is a school in itself, and
-      the girl who has access to it for three or four years will not be content
-      with the inconvenience, the barren squalor of her parental hovel; for it
-      is quite as much ignorance as poverty that produces miserable homes. Some
-      of the girls now here expect to become teachers; some will marry young men
-      who are also at this school. Such an institution would be of incalculable
-      service if it did nothing else than postpone the marriage of women a few
-      years. This school is a small seed in Egypt, but it is, I believe, the
-      germ of a social revolution. It is, I think, the only one in Upper Egypt.
-      There is a mission school of similar character in Cairo, and the Khedive
-      also has undertaken schools for the education of girls.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the last room we came to the highest class, a dozen girls, some of them
-      mere children in appearence, but all of marriageable age. I asked the age
-      of one pretty child, who showed uncommon brightness in her exercises.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;She is twelve,&rdquo; said the superintendent, &ldquo;and no doubt would be married,
-      if she were not here. The girls become marriageable from eleven years, and
-      occasionally they marry younger; if one is not married at fifteen she is
-      in danger of remaining single.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Do the Moslems oppose your school?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The heads of the religion endeavor to prevent Moslem children coming to
-      it; we have had considerable trouble; but generally the mothers would like
-      to have their girls taught here, they become better daughters and more
-      useful at home.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Can you see that you gain here?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Little by little. The mission has been a wonderful success. I have been
-      in Egypt eighteen years; since the ten years that we have been at Assiout,
-      we have planted, in various towns in Upper Egypt, ten churches.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What do do you think is your greatest difficulty?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, perhaps the Arabic language.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The labor of mastering it?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Not that exactly, although it is an unending study. Arabic is an
-      exceedingly rich language, as you know&mdash;a tongue that has often a
-      hundred words for one simple object has almost infinite capabilities for
-      expressing shades of meaning. To know Arabic grammatically is the work of
-      a lifetime. A man says, when he has given a long life to it, that he knows
-      a little Arabic. My Moslem teacher here, who was as learned an Arab as I
-      ever knew, never would hear me in a grammatical lesson upon any passage he
-      had not carefully studied beforehand. He begged me to excuse him, one
-      morning, from hearing me (I think we were reading from the Koran) because
-      he had not had time to go over the portion to be read. Still, the
-      difficulty of which I speak, is that Arabic and the Moslem religion are
-      one and the same thing, in the minds of the faithful. To know Arabic is to
-      learn the Koran, and that is the learning of a learned Arab. He never gets
-      to the end of the deep religious meaning hidden in the grammatical
-      intricacies. Religion and grammar thus become one.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I suppose that is what our dragoman means, when he is reading me
-      something out of the Koran, and comes to a passage that he calls too
-      deep.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes. There is room for endless differences of opinion in the rendering of
-      almost any passage, and the disagreement is important, because it becomes
-      a religious difference. I had an example of the unity of the language and
-      the religion in the Moslem mind. When I came here the learned thought I
-      must be a Moslem because I knew the grammatical Arabic; they could not
-      conceive how else I should know it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      When we called upon his excellency, Shakeer Pasha, the square in front of
-      his office and the streets leading to it were so covered with sitting
-      figures that it was difficulty to make a way amidst them. There was an
-      unusual assembly of some sort, but its purport we could not guess. It was
-      hardly in the nature of a popular convention, although its members sat at
-      their ease, smoking, and a babel of talk arose. Nowhere else in Egypt have
-      I seen so many fine and even white-looking men gathered together. The
-      center of every group was a clerk, with inkhorn and reed, going over
-      columns of figures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The governor's quarters were a good specimen of Oriental style and
-      shabbiness; spacious whitewashed apartments, with dirty faded curtains.
-      But we were received with a politeness that would have befitted a palace,
-      and with the cordial ease of old friends. The Pasha was heartbroken that
-      we had not notified him of our coming, and that now our time would not
-      permit us to stay and accept a dinner&mdash;had we not promised to do so
-      on our return? He would send couriers and recall our boat, he would detain
-      us by force. Allowing for all the exaggeration of Oriental phraseology, it
-      appeared only too probable that the Pasha would die if we did not stay to
-      dinner and spend the night. But we did not.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This great concourse? Oh, they were sheykhs and head men of all the
-      villages in the country round, whom he had summoned to arrange for the
-      purchase of dromedaries. The government has issued orders for the purchase
-      of a large number, which it wants to send to Darfour. The Khedive is
-      making a great effort to open the route to Darfour (twenty-eight days by
-      camel) to regular and safe travel, and to establish stations on the road.
-      That immense and almost unknown territory will thus be brought within the
-      commercial world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      During our call we were served with a new beverage in place of coffee; it
-      was a hot and sweetened tea of cinnamon, and very delicious.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On our return to the river, we passed the new railway station building
-      which is to be a handsome edifice of white limestone. Men women, and
-      children are impressed to labor on it, and, an intelligent Copt told us,
-      without pay. Very young girls were the mortar-carriers, and as they walked
-      to and fro, with small boxes on their heads, they sang, the precocious
-      children, an Arab love-song;&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;He passed by my door, he did not speak to me.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have seen little girls, quite as small as these, forced to load coal
-      upon the steamers, and beaten and cuffed by the overseers. It is a hard
-      country for women. They have only a year or two of time, in which
-      all-powerful nature and the wooing sun sing within them the songs of love,
-      then a few years of married slavery, and then ugliness, old age, and hard
-      work.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I do not know a more melancholy subject of reflection than the condition,
-      the lives of these women we have been seeing for three months. They have
-      neither any social nor any religious life. If there were nothing else to
-      condemn the system of Mohammed, this is sufficient. I know what splendors
-      of art it has produced, what achievements in war, what benefits to
-      literature and science in the dark ages of Europe. But all the culture of
-      a race that in its men has borne accomplished scholars, warriors, and
-      artists, has never touched the women. The condition of woman in the Orient
-      is the conclusive verdict against the religion of the Prophet.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I will not contrast that condition with the highest; I will not compare a
-      collection of Egyptian women, assembled for any purpose, a funeral or a
-      wedding, with a society of American ladies in consultation upon some work
-      of charity, nor with an English drawing-room. I chanced once to be present
-      at a representation of Verdi's Grand Mass, in Venice, when all the world
-      of fashion, of beauty, of intelligence, assisted. The <i>coup d'oil</i>
-      was brilliant. Upon the stage, half a hundred of the chorus-singers were
-      ladies. The leading solo-singers were ladies. I remember the freshness,
-      the beauty even, the vivacity, the gay decency of the toilet, of that
-      group of women who contributed their full share in a most intelligent and
-      at times profoundly pathetic rendering of the Mass. I recall the
-      sympathetic audience, largely composed of women, the quick response to a
-      noble strain nobly sung, the cheers, the tears even which were not wanting
-      in answer to the solemn appeal, in fine, the highly civilized
-      sensitiveness to the best product of religious art. Think of some such
-      scene as that, and of the women of an European civilization; and then
-      behold the women who are the product of this,&mdash;the sad, dark fringe
-      of water-drawers and baby-carriers, for eight hundred miles along the
-      Nile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have a row in the sandal of nine miles before we overtake our dahabeëh,
-      which the wind still baffles. However, we slip along under the cover of
-      darkness, for, at dawn, I hear the muezzin calling to prayer at Manfaloot,
-      trying in vain to impress a believing but drowsy world, that prayer is
-      better than sleep. This is said to be the place where Lot passed the
-      period of his exile. Near here, also, the Holy Family sojourned when it
-      spent a winter in Egypt. (The Moslems have appropriated and localized
-      everything in our Scriptures which is picturesque, and they plant our
-      Biblical characters where it is convenient). It is a very pretty town,
-      with minarets and gardens.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It surprises us to experience such cool weather towards the middle of
-      March; at nine in the morning the thermometer marks 550; the north wind is
-      cold, but otherwise the day is royal. Having nothing better to do we climb
-      the cliffs of Gebel Aboofeyda, at least a thousand feet above the river;
-      for ten miles it presents a bold precipice, unscalable except at
-      intervals. We find our way up a ravine. The rocks' <i>surface</i> in the
-      river and the ravine are worn exactly as the sea wears rock, honeycombed
-      by the action of water, and excavated into veritable sea-caves near the
-      summit. The limestone is rich in fossil shells.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The plain on top presented a singular appearance. It was strewn with small
-      boulders, many of them round and as shapely as cannon-balls, all formed no
-      doubt before the invention of the conical missiles. While we were amusing
-      ourselves with the thousand fantastic freaks of nature in hardened clay,
-      two sinister Arabs approached us from behind and cut off our retreat. One
-      was armed with a long gun and the other with a portentous spear. We
-      saluted them in the most friendly manner, and hoped that they would pass
-      on: but, no, they attached themselves to us. I tried to think of cases of
-      travelers followed into the desert on the Nile and murdered, but none
-      occurred to me. There seemed to be no danger from the gun so long as we
-      kept near its owner, for the length of it would prevent his bringing it
-      into action close at hand. The spear appeared to be the more effective
-      weapon of the two; it was so, for I soon ascertained that the gun was not
-      loaded and that its bearer had neither powder nor balls. It turned out
-      that this was a detachment of the local guard, sent out to protect us; it
-      would have been a formidable party in case of an attack.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Continuing our walk over the stone-clad and desolate swells, it suddenly
-      occurred to us that we had become so accustomed to this sort of
-      desert-walking, with no green or growing thing in sight, that it had
-      ceased to seem strange to us. It gave us something like a start,
-      therefore, shortly after, to see, away to the right, blue water forming
-      islands out of the hill-tops along the horizon; there was an appearance of
-      verdure about the edge of the water, and dark clouds sailed over it. There
-      was, however, when we looked steadily, about the whole landscape a shimmer
-      and a shadowy look that taught us to know that it was a <i>mirage</i>, the
-      rich Nile valley below us, with the blue water, the green fields, the
-      black lines of palms, was dimly mirrored in the sky and thrown upon the
-      desert hills in the distance. We stood where we could compare the original
-      picture with the blurred copy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Making our way down the face of the cliff, along some ledges, we came upon
-      many grottoes and mummy-pits cut in the rock, all without sculptures,
-      except one; this had on one side an arched niche and pilasters from which
-      the arch sprung. The vault of the niche had been plastered and painted,
-      and a Greek cross was chiseled in each pilaster; but underneath the
-      plaster the rock was in ornamental squares, lozenges and curves in
-      Saracenic style, although it may have been ancient Egyptian. How one
-      religion has whitewashed, and lived on the remains of another here; the
-      tombs of one age become the temples of another and the dwellings of a
-      third. On these ledges, and on the desert above, we found bits of pottery.
-      Wherever we have wandered, however far into the desert from the river, we
-      never get beyond the limit of broken pottery; and this evidence of man's
-      presence everywhere, on the most barren of these high or low plains of
-      stone and sand, speak of age and of human occupation as clearly as the
-      temples and monuments. There is no virgin foot of desert even; all is worn
-      and used. Human feet have trodden it in every direction for ages. Even on
-      high peaks where the eagles sit, men have piled stones and made shelters,
-      perhaps lookouts for enemies, it may be five hundred, it may be three
-      thousand years ago. There is nowhere in Egypt a virgin spot.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      By moonlight we are creeping under the frowning cliffs of Aboofeyda, and
-      voyage on all night in a buccaneerish fashion; and next day sail by Hadji
-      Kandeel, where travelers disembark for Tel el Amarna. The remains of a
-      once vast city strew the plain, but we only survey it through a
-      field-glass. What, we sometimes say in our more modern moments, is one
-      spot more than another? The whole valley is a sepulchre of dead
-      civilizations; its inhabitants were stowed away, tier on tier, shelf on
-      shelf, in these ledges.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      However, respect for age sent us in the afternoon to the grottoes on the
-      north side of the cliff of Sheykh Said. This whole curved range, away
-      round to the remains of Antinoë, is full of tombs. Some that we visited
-      are large and would be very comfortable dwellings; they had been used for
-      Christian churches, having been plastered and painted. Traces of one
-      painting remain&mdash;trees and a comical donkey, probably part of the
-      story of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. We found in one the
-      ovals of Cheops, the builder of the great pyramid, and much good sculpture
-      in the best old manner&mdash;agricultural scenes, musicians, dancers,
-      beautifully cut, with careful details and also with spirit. This is very
-      old work, and, even abused as it has been, it is as good as any the
-      traveler will find in Egypt. This tomb no doubt goes back to the fourth
-      dynasty, and its drawing of animals, cows, birds, and fish is better than
-      we usually see later. In a net in which fish are taken, many kinds are
-      represented, and so faithfully that the species are recognizable; in a
-      marsh is seen a hippopotamus, full of life and viciousness, drawn with his
-      mouth stretched asunder wide enough to serve for a menagerie show-bill.
-      There are some curious false doors and architectural ornaments, like those
-      of the same epoch in the tombs at the pyramids.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At night we were at Rhoda, where is one of the largest of the Khedive's
-      sugar-factories; and the next morning at Beni Hassan, famed, next to
-      Thebes, for its grottoes, which have preserved to us, in painted scenes,
-      so much of the old Egyptian life. Whoever has seen pictures of these old
-      paintings and read the vast amount of description and inferences
-      concerning the old Egyptian life, based upon them, must be disappointed
-      when he sees them to-day. In the first place they are only painted, not
-      cut, and in this respect are inferior to those in the grottoes of Sheykh
-      Saïd; in the second place, they are so defaced, as to be with difficulty
-      deciphered, especially those depicting the trades.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Some of the grottoes are large&mdash;sixty feet by forty feet; fine
-      apartments in the rock, high and well lighted by the portal.
-      Architecturally, no tombs are more interesting; some of the ceilings are
-      vaulted, in three sections; they are supported by fluted pillars some like
-      the Doric, and some in the beautiful lotus style; the pillars have
-      architraves; and there are some elaborately wrought false doorways. And
-      all this goes to show that, however ancient these tombs are, they imitated
-      stone buildings already existing in a highly developed architecture.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Essentially the same subjects are represented in all the tombs; these are
-      the trades, occupations, amusements of the people. Men are blowing glass,
-      working in gold, breaking flax, tending herds (even doctoring animals that
-      are ill), chiseling statues, painting, turning the potter's wheel; the
-      barber shaves his customer; two men play at draughts; the games most in
-      favor are wrestling and throwing balls, and in the latter women play. But
-      what one specially admires is the honesty of the decorators, which
-      conceals nothing from posterity; the punishment of the bastinado is again
-      and again represented, and even women are subject to it; but respect was
-      shown for sex; the women was not cast upon the ground, she kneels and
-      takes the flagellation on her shoulders.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We saw in these tombs no horses among the many animals; we have never seen
-      the horse in any sculptures except harnessed in a war-chariot; &ldquo;the horse
-      and his rider&rdquo; do not appear.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is a scene here which was the subject of a singular mistake, that
-      illustrates the needless zeal of early explorers to find in everything in
-      Egypt confirmation of the Old Testament narrative. A procession, painted
-      on the wall, now known to represent the advent of an Asiatic tribe into
-      Egypt, perhaps the Shepherds, in a remote period, was declared to
-      represent the arrival of Joseph's brethren. The tomb, however, was made
-      several centuries before the advent of Joseph himself. And even if it were
-      of later date than the event named, we should not expect to find in it a
-      record of an occurrence of such little significance at that time. We ought
-      not to be surprised at the absence in Egypt of traces of the Israelitish
-      sojourn, and we should not be, if we looked at the event from the Egyptian
-      point of view and not from ours. In a view of the great drama of the
-      ancient world in the awful Egyptian perspective, the Jewish episode is
-      relegated to its proper proportion in secular history. The whole Jewish
-      history, as a worldly phenomenon, occupies its narrow limits. The
-      incalculable effect upon desert tribes of a long sojourn in a highly
-      civilized state, the subsequent development of law and of a literature
-      unsurpassed in after times, and the final flower into Christianity,&mdash;it
-      is in the light of all this that we read the smallest incident of Jewish
-      history, and are in the habit of magnifying its contemporary relations. It
-      was the slenderest thread in the days of Egyptian puissance. In the
-      ancient atmosphere of Egypt, events purely historical fall into their
-      proper proportions. Many people have an idea that the ancient world
-      revolved round the Jews, and even hold it as a sort of religious faith.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is difficult to believe that the race we see here are descendants of
-      the active, inventive, joyous people who painted their life upon these
-      tombs. As we lie all the afternoon before a little village opposite Beni
-      Hassan I wonder for the hundredth time what it is that saves such
-      miserable places from seeming to us as vile as the most wretched abodes of
-      poverty in our own land. Is it because, with an ever-cheerful sun and a
-      porous soil, this village is not so filthy as a like abode of misery would
-      be with us? Is it that the imagination invests the foreign and the Orient
-      with its own hues; or is it that our reading, prepossessing our minds,
-      gives the lie to all our senses? I cannot understand why we are not more
-      disgusted with such a scene as this. Not to weary you with a repetition of
-      scenes sufficiently familiar, let us put the life of the Egyptian fellah,
-      as it appears at the moment, into a paragraph.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Here is a jumble of small mud-hovels, many of them only roofed with
-      cornstalks, thrown together without so much order as a beaver would use in
-      building a village, distinguishable only from dog-kennels in that they
-      have wooden doors&mdash;not distinguishable from them when the door is
-      open and a figure is seen in the aperture. Nowhere any comfort or
-      cleanliness, except that sometimes the inner kennel, of which the woman
-      guards the key, will have its floor swept and clean matting in one corner.
-      The court about which there are two or three of these kennels, serves the
-      family for all purposes; there the fire for cooking is built, there are
-      the water-jars, and the stone for grinding corn; there the chickens and
-      the dogs are; there crouch in the dirt women and men, the women spinning,
-      making bread, or nursing children, the men in vacant idleness. While the
-      women stir about and go for water, the men will sit still all day long.
-      The amount of sitting down here in Egypt is inconceivable; you might
-      almost call it the feature of the country. No one in the village knows
-      anything, either of religion or of the world; no one has any plans; no one
-      exhibits any interest in anything; can any of them have any hopes? From
-      this life nearly everything but the animal is eliminated. Children, and
-      pretty children, swarm, tumbling about everywhere; besides, nearly every
-      woman has one in her arms.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We ought not to be vexed at this constant north wind which baffles us, for
-      they say it is necessary to the proper filling out of the wheat heads. The
-      boat drifts about all day in a mile square, having passed the morning on a
-      sand-spit where the stupidity and laziness of the crew placed it; and we
-      have leisure to explore the large town of Minieh, which lies prettily
-      along the river. Here is a costly palace, which I believe has never been
-      occupied by the Khedive, and a garden attached, less slovenly in condition
-      than those of country palaces usually are. The sugar-factory is furnished
-      with much costly machinery, which could not have been bought for less than
-      half a million of dollars. Many of the private houses give evidences of
-      wealth in their highly ornamented doorways and Moorish arches, but the
-      mass of the town is of the usual sort here&mdash;tortuous lanes in which
-      weary hundreds of people sit in dirt, poverty, and resignation. We met in
-      the street and in the shops many coal-black Nubians and negroes, smartly
-      dressed in the recent European style, having an impudent air, who seemed
-      to be persons of wealth and consideration here. In the course of our
-      wanderings I came to a large public building, built in galleries about an
-      open court, and unwittingly in my examination of it, stumbled into the
-      apartment of the Governor, Osman Bey, who was giving audience to all
-      comers. Justice is still administered in patriarchal style; the door is
-      open to all; rich and poor were crowding in, presenting petitions and
-      papers of all sorts, and among them a woman preferred a request. Whether
-      justice was really done did not appear, but Oriental hospitality is at
-      least unfailing. Before I could withdraw, having discovered my blunder,
-      the governor welcomed me with all politeness and gave me a seat beside
-      him. We smiled at each other in Arabic and American, and came to a perfect
-      understanding on coffee and cigarettes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The next morning we are slowly passing the Copt convent of Gebel e' Tayr,
-      and expecting the appearance of the swimming Christians. There is a good
-      opportunity to board us, but no one appears. Perhaps because it is Sunday
-      and these Christians do not swim on Sunday. No. We learn from a thinly
-      clad and melancholy person who is regarding us from the rocks that the
-      Khedive has forbidden this disagreeable exhibition of muscular
-      Christianity. It was quite time. But thus, one by one, the attractions of
-      the Nile vanish.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What a Sunday! But not an exceptional day. &ldquo;Oh dear,&rdquo; says madame, in a
-      tone of injury, &ldquo;here's another fine day!&rdquo; Although the north wind is
-      strong, the air is soft, caressing, elastic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      More and more is forced upon us the contrast of the scenery of Upper and
-      Lower Egypt. Here it is not simply that the river is wider and the
-      mountains more removed and the arable land broader; the lines are all
-      straight and horizontal, the mountain-ranges are level-topped, parallel to
-      the flat prairies&mdash;at sunset a low level of white limestone hills in
-      the east looked exactly like a long line of fence whitewashed. In Upper
-      Egypt, as we have said, the plains roll, the hills are broken, there are
-      pyramidal mountains, and evidences of upheaval and disorder. But these
-      wide sweeping and majestic lines have their charm; the sunsets and
-      sunrises are in some respects finer than in Nubia; the tints are not so
-      delicate, the colors not so pure, but the moister atmosphere and clouds
-      make them more brilliant and various. The dawn, like the after-glow, is
-      long; the sky burns half round with rose and pink, the color mounts high
-      up. The sunsets are beyond praise, and always surprise. Last night the
-      reflection in the east was of a color unseen before&mdash;almost a purple
-      below and a rose above; and the west glowed for an hour in changing tints.
-      The night was not less beautiful&mdash;we have a certain comfort in
-      contrasting both with March in New England. It was summer; the Nile slept,
-      the moon half-full, let the stars show; and as we glided swiftly down, the
-      oars rising and falling to the murmured chorus of the rowers, there were
-      deep shadows under the banks, and the stately palms, sentinelling the vast
-      plain of moonlight over which we passed,&mdash;the great silence of an
-      Egyptian night&mdash;seemed to remove us all into dreamland. The land was
-      still, except for the creak of an occasional shadoof worked by some wise
-      man who thinks it easier to draw water in the night than in the heat of
-      the day, or an aroused wolfish dog, or a solitary bird piping on the
-      shore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Thus we go, thus we stay, in the delicious weather, encouraged now and
-      again by a puff of southern wind, but held back from our destination by
-      some mysterious angel of delay. But one day the wind comes, the sail is
-      distended, the bow points downstream, and we move at the dizzy rate of
-      five miles an hour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a day of incomparable beauty. We see very little labor along the
-      Nile; the crops are maturing. But the whole population comes to the river,
-      to bathe, to sit in the shallows, to sit on the bank. All the afternoon we
-      pass groups, men, women, children, motionless, the picture of idleness.
-      There they are, hour after hour, in the sun. Women, coming for water, put
-      down their jars, and bathe and frolic in the grateful stream. In some
-      distant reaches of the river there are rows of women along the shore,
-      exactly like the birds which stand in the shallow places or sun themselves
-      on the sand. There are more than twenty miles of bathers, of all sexes and
-      ages.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When at last we come to a long sand-reef, dotted with storks, cranes and
-      pelicans, the critic says he is glad to see something with feathers on it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are in full tide of success and puffed up with confidence: it is
-      perfectly easy to descend the Nile. All the latter part of the afternoon
-      we are studying the False Pyramid of Maydoom, that structure, older than
-      Cheops, built, like all the primitive monuments, in degrees, as the Tower
-      of Babel was, as the Chaldean temples were. It lifts up, miles away from
-      the river, only a broken mass from the <i>debris</i> at its base. We leave
-      it behind. We shall be at Bedreshayn, for Memphis, before daylight. As we
-      turn in, the critic says, &ldquo;We've got the thing in our own hands now.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Alas! the Lord reached down and took it out. The wind chopped suddenly,
-      and blew a gale from the north. At breakfast time we were waltzing round
-      opposite the pyramids of Dashoor, liable to go aground on islands and
-      sandbars, and unable to make the land. Determined not to lose the day, we
-      anchored, took the sandal, had a long pull, against the gale, to
-      Bedreshayn, and mounted donkeys for the ruins of ancient Memphis.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When Herodotus visited Memphis, probably about four hundred and fifty
-      years before Christ, it was a great city. He makes special mention of its
-      temple of Vulcan, whose priests gave him a circumstantial account of the
-      building of the city by Menes, the first Pharaoh. Four hundred years
-      later, Diodorus found it magnificent; about the beginning of the Christian
-      era, Strabo says it was next in size to Alexandria. Although at the end of
-      the twelfth century it had been systematically despoiled to build Cairo,
-      an Arab traveler says that, &ldquo;its ruins occupy a space half a day's journey
-      every way,&rdquo; and that its wonders could not be described. Temples, palaces,
-      gardens, villas, acres of common dwellings&mdash;the city covered this
-      vast plain with its splendor and its squalor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The traveler now needs a guide to discover a vestige, a stone here and
-      there, of this once most magnificent capital. Here came Moses and Aaron,
-      from the Israelitish settlement in the Delta, from Zoan (Tanis) probably,
-      to beg Menephtah to let the Jews depart; here were performed the miracles
-      of the Exodus. This is the Biblical Noph, against which burned the wrath
-      of the prophets. &ldquo;No (Heliopolis, or On) shall be rent asunder, and Noph
-      shall have distresses daily.&rdquo; The decree <i>was</i> &ldquo;published in Noph&rdquo;:&mdash;&ldquo;Noph
-      shall be waste and desolate without an inhabitant;&rdquo; &ldquo;I will cause their
-      images to cease out of Noph.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The images have ceased, the temples have either been removed or have
-      disappeared under the deposits of inundations; you would ride over old
-      Memphis without knowing it, but the inhabitants have returned to this
-      fertile and exuberant plain. It is only in the long range of pyramids and
-      the great necropolis in the desert that you can find old Memphis.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The superabundant life of the region encountered us at once. At Bedreshayn
-      is a ferry, and its boats were thronged, chiefly by women, coming and
-      going, and always with a load of grain or other produce on the head. We
-      rode round the town on an elevated dyke, lined with palms, and wound
-      onward over a flat, rich with wheat and barley, to Mitrahenny, a little
-      village in a splendid palm-grove. This marks the central spot of the ruins
-      of old Memphis. Here are some mounds, here are found fragments of statues
-      and cut stones, which are preserved in a temporary shelter. And here,
-      lying on its side, in a hollow from which the water was just subsiding, is
-      a polished colossal statue of Rameses II.&mdash;the Pharaoh who left more
-      monuments of less achievements than any other &ldquo;swell&rdquo; of antiquity. The
-      face is handsome, as all his statues are, and is probably conventionalized
-      like our pictures of George Washington, or Napoleon's busts of himself. I
-      confess to a feeling of perfect satisfaction at seeing his finely chiseled
-      nose rooting in the mud.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This&mdash;some mounds, some fragments of stone, and the statue,&mdash;was
-      all we saw of Memphis. But I should like to have spent a day in this
-      lovely grove, which was carpeted with the only turf I saw in Egypt;
-      reclining upon the old mounds in the shade, and pretending to think of
-      Menes and Moses and Menephtah; and of Rhampsinitus, the king who
-      &ldquo;descended alive into the place which the Greeks call Hades, and there
-      played at dice with Ceres, and sometimes won, and other times lost,&rdquo; and
-      of the treasure-house he built here; and whether, as Herodotus believed,
-      Helen, the beautiful cause of the Iliad, really once dwelt in a palace
-      here, and whether Homer ever recited his epic in these streets.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We go on over the still rich plain to the village of Sakkarah&mdash;chiefly
-      babies and small children. The cheerful life of this prairie fills us with
-      delight&mdash;flocks of sheep, herds of buffaloes, trains of dromedaries,
-      hundreds of laborers of both sexes in the fields, children skylarking
-      about; on every path are women, always with a basket on the head, their
-      blue cotton gown (the only article of dress except a head-shawl,) open in
-      front, blowing back so as to show their figures as they walk.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we reach the desert we are in the presence of death&mdash;perhaps the
-      most mournful sight on this earth is a necropolis in the desert, savage,
-      sand-drifted, plundered, all its mounds dug over and over. We ride along
-      at the bases of the pyramids. I stop at one, climb over the <i>débris</i>
-      at its base, and break off a fragment of stone. The pyramid is of
-      crumbling limestone, and, built in stages or degrees, like that of
-      Maydoom; it is slowly becoming an unsightly heap. And it is time. This is
-      believed to be the oldest structure in the world, except the Tower of
-      Babel. It seems to have been the sepulchre of Keken, a king of the second
-      dynasty. At this period hieroglyphic writing was developed, but the
-      construction and ornamentation of the doorway of the pyramid exhibit art
-      in its infancy. This would seem to show that the Egyptians did not
-      emigrate from Asia with the developed and highly perfected art found in
-      the sculptures of the tombs of the fourth, fifth, and sixth dynasties, as
-      some have supposed, but that there was a growth, which was arrested later.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But no inference in regard to old Egypt is safe; a discovery tomorrow may
-      upset it. Statues recently found, representing persons living in the third
-      dynasty, present a different type of race from that shown in statues of
-      the fourth and fifth dynasties. So that, in that period in which one might
-      infer a growth of art, there may have been a change of the dominating
-      race.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The first great work of Mariette Bey in Egypt&mdash;and it is a monument
-      of his sagacity, enthusiasm, and determination, was the unearthing, in
-      this waste of Memphis, the lost Serapeum and the Apis Mausoleum, the tombs
-      of the sacred bulls. The remains of the temple are again covered with
-      sand; but the visitor can explore the Mausoluem. He can walk, taper in
-      hand, through endless galleries, hewn in the rock, passing between rows of
-      gigantic granite sarcophagi, in which once rested the mummies of the
-      sacred bulls. Living, the bull was daintily fed&mdash;the Nile water
-      unfiltered was thought to be too fattening for him&mdash;and devotedly
-      worshipped; and dying, he was entombed in a sepulchre as magnificent as
-      that of kings, and his adorers lined the walls of his tomb with votive
-      offerings. It is partly from these stelæ, or slabs with inscriptions, that
-      Mariette Bey has added so much to our knowledge of Egyptian history.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Near the Serapeum is perhaps the most elegant tomb in Egypt, the tomb of
-      Tih, who lived in the fifth dynasty, some time later than Cheops, but when
-      hippopotami abounded in the river in front of his farm, Although Tih was a
-      priest, he was a gentleman of elegant tastes, an agriculturist, a
-      sportsman. He had a model farm, as you may see by the buildings and by the
-      thousand details of good management here carved. His tomb does him great
-      credit. In all the work of later times there is nothing so good as this
-      sculpture, so free, so varied, so beautiful; it promises everything. Tih
-      even had, what we do not expect in people of that early time, humor; you
-      are sure of it from some of the pictures here. He must have taken delight
-      in decorating his tomb, and have spent, altogether, some pleasant years in
-      it before he occupied it finally; so that he had become accustomed to
-      staying here.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But his rule was despotic, it was that of the &ldquo;stick.&rdquo; Egyptians have
-      never changed in this respect, as we have remarked before. They are now,
-      as then, under the despotism of some notion of governance&mdash;divine or
-      human&mdash;despotic and fateful. The &ldquo;stick&rdquo; is as old as the monarchy;
-      it appears in these tombs; as to day, nobody then worked or paid taxes
-      without its application.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sudden arrest of Egyptian art was also forced upon us next day, in a
-      second visit to the pyramids of Geezeh. We spent most of the day in the
-      tombs there. In some of them we saw the ovals of all the kings of the
-      fourth dynasty, many of them perfect and fresh in color. As to drawing,
-      cutting, variety, liveliness of attitude and color, there is nothing
-      better, little so good, in tombs of recent date. We find almost every
-      secular subject in the early tombs that is seen in the latest. In
-      thousands of years, the Egyptians scarcely changed or made any progress.
-      The figures of men and animals are better executed in these old tombs than
-      in the later. Again, these tombs are free from the endless repetitions of
-      gods and of offerings to them. The life of the people represented is more
-      natural, less superstitious; common events are naively portrayed, with the
-      humorous unconsciousness of a simple age; art has thought it not unworthy
-      its skill to represent the fact in one tomb, that men acted as midwives to
-      cows, in the dawn of history.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      While we lay at Geezeh we visited one of the chicken-hatching
-      establishments for which the Egyptians have been famous from a remote
-      period. It was a very unpretending affair, in a dirty suburb of the town.
-      We were admitted into a low mud-building, and into a passage with ovens on
-      each side. In these ovens the eggs are spread upon mats, and the necessary
-      fire is made underneath. The temperature is at 100° to 108° Fahrenheit.
-      Each oven has a hole in the center, through which the naked attendant
-      crawls to turn the eggs from time to time. The process requires usually
-      twenty-one days, but some eggs hatch on the twentieth. The eggs are
-      supplied by the peasants who usually receive, without charge, half as many
-      chickens as they bring eggs. About one third of the eggs do not hatch. The
-      hatching is only performed about three months in the year, during the
-      spring.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the passage, before one of the ovens, was a heap of soft chickens,
-      perhaps half a bushel, which the attendant scraped together whenever they
-      attempted to toddle off. We had the pleasure of taking up some handfuls of
-      them. We also looked into the ovens, where there was a stir of life, and
-      were permitted to hold some eggs while the occupants kicked off the shell.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I don't know that a plan will ever be invented by which eggs, as well as
-      chickens, will be produced without the intervention of the hen. If one
-      could be, it would leave the hen so much more time to scratch&mdash;it
-      would relieve her from domestic cares so that she could take part in
-      public affairs. The hen in Egypt is only partially emancipated, But since
-      she is relieved from setting, I do not know that she is any better hen.
-      She lays very small eggs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This ends what I have to say about the hen. We have come to Cairo, and the
-      world is again before us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0061" id="linkimage-0061"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0436.jpg" alt="0436 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0062" id="linkimage-0062"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0437.jpg" alt="0437 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0033" id="link2HCH0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXXIII.&mdash;THE KHEDIVE.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HAT excitement
-      there is in adjacency to a great city! To hear its inarticulate hum, to
-      feel the thrill of its myriads, the magnetism of a vast society! How the
-      pulse quickens at the mere sight of multitudes of buildings, and the
-      overhanging haze of smoke and dust that covers a little from the sight of
-      the angels the great human struggle and folly. How impatient one is to
-      dive into the ocean of his fellows.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The stir of life has multiplied every hour in the past two days. The river
-      swarms with boats, the banks are vocal with labor, traffic, merriment.
-      This morning early we are dropping down past huge casernes full of
-      soldiers&mdash;the bank is lined with them, thousands of them, bathing and
-      washing their clothes, their gabble filling the air. We see again the
-      lofty mosque of Mohamed Ali, the citadel of Salàdin, the forest of
-      minarets above the brown roofs of the town. We pass the isle of Rhoda and
-      the ample palaces of the Queen-Mother. We moor at Gezereh amid a great
-      shoal of dahabeëhs, returned from High Egypt, deserted of their
-      passengers, flags down, blinds closed&mdash;a spectacle to fill one with
-      melancholy that so much pleasure is over.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The dahabeëhs usually discharge their passengers at Gezereh, above the
-      bridge. If the boat goes below with baggage it is subject to a port-duty,
-      as if it were a traveler,&mdash;besides the tax for passing the
-      draw-bridge. We decide to remain some days on our boat, because it is
-      comfortable, and because we want to postpone the dreaded breaking up of
-      housekeeping, packing up our scattered effects, and moving. Having
-      obtained permission to moor at the government dock below Kasr-el-Nil, we
-      drop down there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The first person to greet us there is Aboo Yusef, the owner. Behind him
-      comes Habib Bagdadli, the little Jew partner. There is always that in his
-      mien which says, &ldquo;I was really born in Bagdad, but I know you still think
-      I am a Jew from Algiers. No, gentlemens, you wrong a man to whom
-      reputation is everything.&rdquo; But he is glad to see his boat safe; he
-      expresses as much pleasure as one can throw from an eye with a cast in it.
-      Aboo Yusef is radiant. He is attired gorgeously, in a new suit, from fresh
-      turban to red slippers, on the profits of the voyage. His robe is silk,
-      his sash is cashmere. He overflows with complimentary speech.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Allah be praised, I see you safe.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We have reason to be grateful.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And that you had a good journey.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;A perfect journey.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We have been made desolate by your absence; thank God, you have enjoyed
-      the winter.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I suppose you are glad to see the boat back safe also?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;That is nothing, not to mention it, I not think of it; the return of the
-      boat safe, that is nothing. I only think that you are safe. But it is a
-      good boat. You will say it is the first-class of boats? And she goes up
-      the cataract all right. Did I not say she go up the cataract? Abd-el-Atti
-      he bear me witness.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You did. You said so. Habib said so also. Was there any report here in
-      Cairo that we could not go up.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Mashallah. Such news. The boat was lost in the cataract; the reïs was
-      drowned. For the loss of the boat I did not care; only if you were safe.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you hear that the cataract reises objected to take us up?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What rascals! They always make the traveler some trouble. But, Allah
-      forgive us all, the head reïs is dead. Not so, Abd-el-Atti?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What, the old reïs that we said good-bye to only a little while ago at
-      Assouan?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Him dead,&rdquo; says Abd-el-Atti. &ldquo;I have this morning some conversation with
-      a tradin' boat from the Cataract. Him dead shortly after we leave.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that one of these tough
-      old Bedaween could die in the ordinary manner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But alas his spirit was too powerful for his frame. We have not in this
-      case the consolation of feeling that his loss is our gain; for there are
-      plenty more like him at the First Cataract. He took money from Aboo Yusef
-      for <i>not</i> taking us up the Cataract, and he took money from us <i>for</i>
-      taking us up. His account is balanced. He was an impartial man. Peace to
-      his colored ashes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Aboo Yusef and the little Jew took leave with increased demonstrations of
-      affection, and repeated again and again their joy that we had ascended the
-      Cataract and returned safe. The Jew, as I said, had a furtive look, but
-      Aboo is open as the day. He is an Arab you would trust. I can scarcely
-      believe that it was he and his partner who sent the bribe to the reïs of
-      the Cataract to prevent our going up.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As we ride to town through the new part, the city looks exceedingly bright
-      and attractive; the streets are very broad; the handsome square houses&mdash;ornamented
-      villas, with balconies, pillared piazzas, painted with lively figures and
-      in <i>bizarre</i> patterns&mdash;stand behind walls overgrown with the
-      convolvulus, and in the midst of gardens; plats in the center of open
-      spaces and at the angles of streets are gay with flowers in bloom&mdash;chiefly
-      scarlet geraniums. The town wears a spring aspect, and would be altogether
-      bright but for the dust which overlays everything, houses, streets,
-      foliage. No amount of irrigation can brighten the dust-powdered trees.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When we came to Cairo last fall, fresh from European cities, it seemed
-      very shabby. Now that we come from Upper Egypt, with our eyes trained to
-      eight hundred miles of mud-hovels, Cairo is magnificent. But it is Cairo.
-      There are just as many people squatting in the dust of the highways as
-      when we last saw them, and they have the air of not having moved in three
-      months. We ride to Shepherd's Hotel; there are twenty dragomans for every
-      tourist who wants to go to Syria, there is the usual hurry of arrival and
-      departure, and no one to be found; we call at the consul's: it is not his
-      hour; we ride through the blindest ways to the bankers, in the Rosetti
-      Gardens (don't imagine there is any garden there), they do no business
-      from twelve to three. It is impossible to accomplish anything in Cairo
-      without calm delay. And, falling into the mode, we find ourselves
-      sauntering through one of the most picturesque quarters, the bazaar of
-      Khan Khaléel, feasting the eye on the Oriental splendors of silks,
-      embroidered stuffs, stiff with gold and silver, sown with pearls, antique
-      Persian brasses, old arms of the followers of Saladin. How cool, how quiet
-      it is. All the noises are soft. Noises enough there are, a babel of
-      traffic, jostling, pushing, clamoring; and yet we have a sense of quiet in
-      it all. There is no rudeness, no angularity, no glare of sun. At times you
-      feel an underflow of silence. I know no place so convenient for meditation
-      as the recesses of these intricate bazaars. Their unlikeness to the
-      streets of other cities is mainly in the absence of any hard pavement.
-      From the moment you come into the Mooskee, you strike a silent way, no
-      noise of wheels or hoofs, nor footfalls of the crowd. It is this absence
-      of footfall-patter which is always heard in our streets, that gives us the
-      impression here of the underflow of silence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Returning through the Ezbekeëh Park and through the new streets, we are
-      glad we are not to judge the manhood of Egypt by the Young Egypt we meet
-      here, nor the future of Egypt by the dissolute idlers of Cairo and
-      Alexandria. From Cairo to Wady Halfeh we have seen men physically well
-      developed, fine specimens of their race, and better in Nubia than in Egypt
-      Proper; but these youths are feeble, and of unclean appearance, even in
-      their smart European dress. They are not unlike the effeminate and gilded
-      youth of Italy that one sees in the cities, or Parisians of the same
-      class. Egypt, which needed a different importation, has added most of the
-      vices of Europe to its own; it is noticeable that the Italians, who
-      emigrate elsewhere little, come here in great numbers, and men and women
-      alike take kindly to this loose feebleness. French as well as Italians
-      adapt themselves easily to Eastern dissoluteness. The French have never
-      shown in any part of the globe any prejudice against a mingling of races.
-      The mixture here of the youths of the Latin races and the worn-out
-      Orientals, who are a little polished by a lacquer of European vice, is not
-      a good omen for Egypt. Happily such youths are feeble and, I trust, not to
-      be found outside the two large cities.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The great question in Egypt, among foreigners and observers (there <i>is</i>
-      no great question among the common people), is about the Khedive, Ismail
-      Pasha, his policy and his real intentions with regard to the country. You
-      will hear three distinct opinions; one from devout Moslems, another from
-      the English, and a third from the Americans. The strict and conservative
-      Moslems like none of the changes and innovations, and express not too much
-      confidence in the Khedive's religion. He has bought pictures and statues
-      for his palaces, he has marble images of himself, he has set up an
-      equestrian statue in the street; all this is contrary to the religion. He
-      introduces European manners and costumes, every government <i>employé</i>
-      is obliged to wear European dress, except the tarboosh. What does he want
-      with such a great army; why are the taxes so high, and growing higher
-      every day?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      With the Americans in Cairo, as a rule, the Khedive is popular; they
-      sympathize with his ambition, and think that he has the good of Egypt at
-      heart; almost uniformly they defend him. The English, generally, distrust
-      the Khedive and criticise his every movement. Scarcely ever have I heard
-      Englishmen speak well of the Khedive and his policy. They express a want
-      of confidence in the sincerity of his efforts to suppress the slave-trade,
-      for one thing. How much the fact that American officers are preferred in
-      the Khedive's service has to do with the English and the American
-      estimate, I do not know; the Americans are naturally preferred over all
-      others, for in case of a European complication over Egypt they would have
-      no entangling alliances.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Americans point to what has actually been accomplished by the present
-      Viceroy, the radical improvements in the direction of a better
-      civilization, improvements which already change the aspect of Egypt to the
-      most casual observer. There are the railroads, which intersect the Delta
-      in all directions, and extend over two hundred and fifty miles up the
-      Nile, and the adventurous iron track which is now following the line of
-      the telegraph to distant Kartoom. There are the canals, the Sweet-Water
-      that runs from Cairo and makes life on the Isthmus possible, and the
-      network of irrigating canals and system of ditches, which have not only
-      transformed the Delta, but have changed its climate, increasing enormously
-      the rainfall. No one who has not seen it can have any conception of the
-      magnitude of this irrigation by canals which all draw water from the Nile,
-      nor of the immense number of laborers necessary to keep the canals in
-      repair. Talk of the old Pharaohs, and their magnificent canals, projected
-      or constructed, and their vaunted expeditions of conquest into Central
-      Africa! Their achievements, take them all together, are not comparable to
-      the marvels the Khedive is producing under our own eyes, in spite of a
-      people ignorant, superstitious, reluctant. He does not simply make raids
-      into Africa: he occupies vast territories, he has absolutely stopped the
-      Nile slave-trade, he has converted the great slave-traders into his
-      allies, by making it more their interest to develope legitimate commerce
-      than to deal in flesh and blood; he has permanently opened a region twice
-      as large as Egypt to commercial intercourse; he sends explorers and
-      scientific expeditions into the heart of Africa. It is true that he wastes
-      money, that he is robbed and cheated by his servants, but he perseveres,
-      and behold the results. Egypt is waking out of its sleep, it is annexing
-      territory, and population by millions, it is becoming a power. And Ismail
-      Pasha is the center and spring of the whole movement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Look at Cairo! Since the introduction of gas, the opening of broad
-      streets, the tearing down of some of the worst rookeries, the admission of
-      sun and air, Cairo is exempt from the old epidemics, the general health is
-      improved, and even that scourge, ophthalmia, has diminished. You know his
-      decree forbidding early marriages; you know he has established and
-      encourages schools for girls; you see what General Stone is doing in the
-      education of the common soldiers, and in his training of those who show
-      any aptitude in engineering, draughting, and the scientific
-      accomplishments of the military profession.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Thus the warmest admirers of the Khedive speak. His despotism, which is
-      now the most absolute in the world, perhaps, and least disputed, is
-      referred to as a &ldquo;personal government.&rdquo; And it is difficult to see how
-      under present circumstances it could be anything else. There is absolutely
-      in Egypt no material for anything else. The Khedive has annually summoned
-      for several years, a sort of parliament of the chief men of Egypt, for
-      information and consultation. At first it was difficult to induce the
-      members to say a word, to give any information or utter an opinion. It is
-      a new thing in a despotic government, the shadow even of a parliament.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An English gentleman in Cairo, and a very intelligent man, gives the
-      Khedive credit for nothing but a selfish desire to enrich himself, to
-      establish his own family, and to enjoy the traditional pleasures of the
-      Orient.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But he is suppressing the slave-trade.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He is trying to make England believe so. Slaves still come to Cairo; not
-      so many down the Nile, but by the desert. I found a slave-den in some
-      desert tombs once over the other side the river; horrible treatment of
-      women and children; a caravan came from Darfour by way of Assiout.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But that route is cut off by the capture of Darfour.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, you'll see; slaves will come if they are wanted. Why, look at the
-      Khedive's harem!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He hasn't so many wives as Solomon, who had seven hundred; the Khedive
-      has only four.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, but he has more concubines; Solomon kept only three hundred, the
-      Khedive has four hundred and fifty, and perhaps nearer five hundred. Some
-      of them are beautiful Circassians for whom it is said he paid as much as
-      £2000 and even £3000 sterling.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I suppose that is an outside price.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Of course, but think of the cost of keeping them. Then, each of his four
-      wives has her separate palace and establishment. Rather an expensive
-      family.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Almost as costly as the royal family of England.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;That's another affair; to say nothing of the difference of income. The
-      five hundred, more or less, concubines are under the charge of the
-      Queen-mother, but they have <i>carte blanche</i> in indulgence in jewels,
-      dress, and all that. They wear the most costly Paris modes. They spend
-      enormous sums in pearls and diamonds. They have their palaces refurnished
-      whenever the whim seizes them, re-decorated in European style. Where does
-      the money come from? You can see that Egypt is taxed to death. I heard
-      to-day that the Khedive was paying seventeen per cent, for money, money
-      borrowed to pay the interest on his private debts. What does he do with
-      the money he raises?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Spends a good deal of it on his improvements, canals, railroads, on his
-      army.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I think he runs in debt for his improvements. Look again at his family.
-      He has something like forty palaces, costing from one half-million to a
-      million dollars each; some of them, which he built, he has never occupied,
-      many of them are empty, many of those of his predecessors, which would
-      lodge a thousand people, are going to decay; and yet he is building new
-      ones all the time. There are two or three in process of erection on the
-      road to the pyramids.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Perhaps they are for his sons or for his high officers? Victor Emanuel,
-      whose treasury is in somewhat the condition of the Khedive's, has a palace
-      in every city of Italy, and yet he builds more.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;If the Khedive is building for his children, I give it up. He has
-      somewhere between twenty and thirty acknowledged children. But he does
-      give away palaces and houses. When he has done with a pretty slave, he may
-      give her, with a palace or a fine house here in town, to a favorite
-      officer. I can show you houses here that were taken away from their
-      owners, at a price fixed by the Khedive and not by the owner, because the
-      Viceroy wanted them to give away with one or another of his concubines.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I suppose that is Oriental custom.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I thought you Americans defended the Khedive on account of his
-      progressive spirit.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He is a man who is accomplishing wonders, trammelled as he is by usages
-      thousands of years old, which appear monstrous to us, but are to him as
-      natural as any other Oriental condition. Yet I confess that he stands in
-      very contradictory lights. If he knew it, he could do the greatest service
-      to Egypt by abolishing his harem of concubines, converting it into&mdash;I
-      don't know what&mdash;a convent, or a boarding-school, or a milliner's
-      shop, or an establishment for canning fruit&mdash;and then set the example
-      of living, openly, with one wife.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Wait till he does. And you talk about the condition of Egypt! Every
-      palm-tree, and every sakiya is taxed, and the tax has doubled within a few
-      years. The taxes are now from one pound and a half to three pounds an acre
-      on all lands not owned by him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;In many cases, I know this is not a high tax (compared with taxes
-      elsewhere) considering the yield of the land, and the enormous cost of the
-      irrigating canals.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It is high for such managers as the fellahs. But they will not have to
-      complain long. The Khedive is getting into his own hands all the lands of
-      Egypt. He owns I think a third of it now, and probably half of it is in
-      his family; and this is much the better land.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;History repeats itself in Egypt. He is following the example of Joseph
-      who, you know, taking advantage of the famine, wrung all the land, except
-      that in possession of the priests, from the people, and made it over to
-      Pharaoh; by Joseph's management the king owned, before the famine was
-      over, not only all the land, but all the money, all the cattle, and all
-      the people of Egypt. And he let the land to them for a fifth of its
-      increase.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I don't know that it is any better because Egypt is used to it. Joseph
-      was a Jew. The Khedive pretends to be influenced by the highest motives,
-      the elevation of the condition of the people, the regeneration of Egypt.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I think he is sincerely trying to improve Egypt and the Egyptians. Of
-      course a despot, reared in Oriental prejudices, is slow to see that you
-      can't make a nation except by making men; that you can't make a rich
-      nation unless individuals have free scope to accumulate property. I
-      confess that the chief complaint I heard up the river was, that no one
-      dared to show that he had any money, or to engage in extensive business,
-      for fear he would be 'squeezed.'.rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;So he would be. The Khedive has some sixteen sugar-factories, worked by
-      forced labor, very poorly paid. They ought to be very profitable.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;They are not.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, he wants more money, at any rate. I have just heard that he is
-      resorting to a forced loan, in the form of bonds. A land-owner is required
-      to buy them in the proportion of one dollar and a half for each acre he
-      owns; and he is to receive seven per cent, interest on the bonds. In Cairo
-      a person is required to take these bonds in a certain proportion on his
-      personal property. And it is said that the bonds are not transferable, and
-      that they will be worthless to the heirs. I heard of this new dodge from a
-      Copt.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I suppose the Khedive's friends would say that he is trying to change
-      Egypt in a day, whereas it is the work of generations.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      When we returned to the dahabeëh we had a specimen of &ldquo;personal
-      government.&rdquo; Abd-el-Atti was standing on the deck, slipping his beads, and
-      looking down.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What has happened?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ahman, been took him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Who took him?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Police, been grab him first time he go 'shore, and lock him up.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What had he been doing?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Nothing he been done; I send him uptown of errand; police catch him right
-      out there.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What for?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Take him down to Soudan to work; the vice-royal he issue an order for the
-      police to catch all the black fellows in Cairo, and take 'em to the
-      Soudan, down to Gondokora for what I know, to work the land there.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But Ahman is our servant; he can't be seized.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh, I know, Ahman belong to me, he was my slave till I give him liberty;
-      I go to get him out directly. These people know me, I get him off.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But if you had no influence with the police, Ahman would be dragged off
-      to Soudan to work in a cotton or rice field?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Lots of black fellows like him sent off. But I get him back, don't you
-      have worry. What the vice-royal to do with my servant&mdash;I don't care
-      if he Kin' of Constantinople!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Sure enough, early in the evening the handsome Abyssinian boy came back,
-      none the worse, except for a thorough scare, eyes and teeth shining, and
-      bursting into his usual hearty laugh upon allusion to his capture.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Police <i>tyeb?</i>&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;<i>Moosh-tyeb</i>&rdquo; (&ldquo;bad&rdquo;), with an explosion of merriment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The boy hadn't given himself much uneasiness, for he regards his master as
-      his Providence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are moored at the dock and below the lock of the Sweet-Water Canal
-      which runs to Ismailia. A dredge-boat lies in the entrance, and we have an
-      opportunity of seeing how government labor is performed; we can understand
-      why it is that so many laborers are needed, and that the great present
-      want of Egypt is stout and willing arms.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the entrance of the canal and in front of the lock is a flat-boat upon
-      which are fifteen men. They have two iron scoops, which would hold about a
-      gallon each; to each is attached a long pole and a rope. Two men jab the
-      pole down and hold the pot on the bottom, while half a dozen pull
-      leisurely on the rope, with a &ldquo;<i>yah-sah</i>&rdquo; or other chorus, and haul
-      in the load; when it comes up, a man scrapes out the mud with his hand,
-      sometimes not getting more than two quarts. It is very restful to watch
-      their unexhausting toil. It takes several minutes to capture a pot of
-      sand. There are fifteen men at this spoon-work, but one scoop is only kept
-      going at a time. After it is emptied, the men stop and look about,
-      converse a little, and get ready for another effort, standing meantime in
-      liquid mud, ankle deep. When they have rested, over goes the scoop again,
-      and the men stand to the rope, and pull feebly, but only at intervals,
-      that is when they sing the response to the line of the leader. The
-      programme of singing and pulling is something like this:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Salee ah nadd (voice of the leader).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yalee, halee (chorus, pull altogether).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Salee ah nadd.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yalee, halee (pull).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Salee ah nadd.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yalee, halee (pull).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the outcome of three or four minutes of hauling and noise enough to
-      raise a ton, is about a quart of mud!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The river panorama is always varied and entertaining, and we are of a
-      divided mind between a lazy inclination to sit here and watch the busy
-      idleness of the population, or address ourselves to the much that still
-      remains to be seen in Cairo. I ought to speak, however, of an American
-      sensation on the river. This is a little steam-yacht&mdash;fifty feet long
-      by seven and a half broad&mdash;which we saw up the Nile, where it
-      attracted more attention along the banks than anything else this season. I
-      call it American, because it carries the American flag and is owned by a
-      New-York art student, Mr. Anderson, and an English-American, Mr. Medler;
-      but the yacht was built in London, and shipped on a large steamboat to
-      Alexandria. It is the first steam-vessel, I believe, carrying anything
-      except Egyptian (or Turkish) colors that has ever been permitted to ascend
-      the Nile. We took a trip on it one fine morning up to Helwân, and enjoyed
-      the animation of its saucy speed. When put to its best, it makes eighteen
-      miles an hour; but life would not be as long on it as it is on a dahabeëh.
-      At Helwân are some hot sulphur-springs, famous and much resorted to in the
-      days of the Pharaohs, and just now becoming fashionable again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Our days pass we can hardly say how, while we wait for the proper season
-      for Syria, and regard the invincible obstacles that debar us from the
-      longed-for desert journey to Sinai and Arabia Petra. The bazaars are
-      always a refuge from the heat, a never-failing entertainment. We spend
-      hours in lounging through them. We lunch at the shops of the sweatmeat
-      makers, on bread, pistachio-nuts, conserve of roses, I know not what, and
-      Nile-water, with fingans of coffee fetched hot and creamy from the shop
-      near by. We give a copper to an occasional beggar: for beggars are few in
-      the street, and these are either blind or very poor, or derweeshes; and to
-      all these, being regarded as Allah's poor, the Moslems give cheerfully,
-      for charity is a part of their religion. We like also to stand at the
-      doors of the artisans. There is a street where all the workmen are still
-      making the old flint-lock guns and pistols, and the firearms with the
-      flaring blunderbuss muzzles, as if the object was to scatter the charge,
-      and hit a great many people but to kill none. I think the peace society
-      would do well to encourage this kind of gun. There are shops also where a
-      man sits before a heap of flint-chalk, chipping the stone with a flat iron
-      mallet, and forming the flints for the antiquated locks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We happen to come often in our wanderings, the distinction being a matter
-      of luck, upon a very interesting old city-gate of one of the quarters. The
-      gate itself is a wooden one of two leaves, crossed with iron bands
-      fastened with heavy spikes, and not remarkable except as an illustration
-      of one of the popular superstitions of the Arabs. The wood is driven full
-      of nails, bits of rags flutter on it, and human teeth are crowded under
-      the iron bands. It is believed that if a person afflicted with headache
-      will drive a nail into this door he will never have the headache again.
-      Other ills are relieved by other offerings, bits of rag, teeth, etc. It
-      would seem to be a pretty sure cure for toothache to leave the tooth in
-      this gate. The Arabs are called the most superstitious of peoples, they
-      wear charms against the evil-eye (&ldquo;charm from the eye of girl, sharper
-      than a spike; charm from the eye of boy, more painful than a whip&rdquo;), and
-      they have a thousand absurd practices. Yet we can match most of them in
-      Christian communities.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      How patiently all the people work, and wait. Complaints are rare. The only
-      reproof I ever received was from a donkey-boy, whom I had kept waiting
-      late one evening at the Hotel Nil. When I roused him from his sleep on the
-      ground, he asked, with an accent of weariness, &ldquo;how much clock you got?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      By the twenty-third day of March it is getting warm; the thermometer is
-      81°. It is not simply the heat, but the Khâmaseen, the south wind, the
-      smoky air, the dust in the city, the languor. To-day it rained a few
-      drops, and looked threatening, just as it does in a hot summer day at
-      home. The outskirts of Cairo are enveloped in dust, and the heat begins to
-      simmer over the palaces and gardens. The travelers are leaving. The sharp
-      traders, Jews from Bagdad, Syrians, Jews from Constantinople, Greeks,
-      Armenians from Damascus, all sorts, are packing up their goods, in order
-      to meet the traveler and fleece him again in Jerusalem, in Beyrout, in
-      Damascus, in Smyrna, on the Golden Horn. In the outskirts, especially on
-      the open grounds by the canal, are the coffee-booths and dance-shanties&mdash;rows
-      of the disreputable. The life, always out of doors even in the winter, is
-      now more flamboyantly displayed in these open and verandahed dwellings;
-      there is a yielding to the relaxation of summer. We hear at night, as we
-      sit on the deck of our dahabeëh, the throbbing of the darabookah-drum and
-      the monotonous song of the dissolute ones.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0063" id="linkimage-0063"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0450.jpg" alt="0450 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0064" id="linkimage-0064"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0451.jpg" alt="0451 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0034" id="link2HCH0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXXIV.&mdash;THE WOODEN MAN.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE Khedive and his
-      court, if it may be so called, are not hedged in by any formidable
-      barriers; but there are peculiarities of etiquette. When his Highness
-      gives a grand ball and public reception, of course only the male members
-      of his household are present, only the men of the Egyptian society; it
-      would in fact be a male assembly but for the foreign ladies visiting or
-      residing in the city. Of course there cannot be any such thing as
-      &ldquo;society&rdquo; under such circumstances; and as there are no women to regulate
-      the ball invitations, the assembly is &ldquo;mixed.&rdquo; There is no such thing as
-      reciprocity with the Arabs and Turks; they are willing to meet the wives
-      or the female friends of all foreigners; they never show their own.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If a lady visiting Cairo wishes to visit one of the royal harems, it is
-      necessary that her husband or some gentleman of her party, should first be
-      presented to the Khedive. After this ceremony, notice is received through
-      the chamberlain of the Viceroy that the lady will be received on such a
-      day and hour, in a palace named, by her Highness So So. Which Highness?
-      That you can never tell before the notice is received. It is a matter of
-      royal convenience at the time. In a family so large and varied as that of
-      the Khedive, you can only be presented to a fragment of it. You may be
-      received by one of his wives; it may please the Queen, mother, who is in
-      charge of his largest harem, to do the honors or the wife of the
-      heir-apparent, or of one of the younger sons, may open her doors to you. I
-      suppose it is a good deal a matter of whim with the inmates of the harem;
-      sometimes they are tired of seeing strangers and of dressing for them.
-      Usually they are eager to break the monotony of their lives with a visit
-      that promises to show them a new costume. There is only one condition made
-      as to the dress of the lady who is to be received at a royal harem; she
-      must not wear black, there is a superstition connected with a black dress,
-      it puts the inmates of the harem in low spirits. Gentlemen presented to
-      the Khedive wear the usual evening dress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Khedive's winter-residence is the Palace of Abdeen, not far from the
-      Ezbekeëh, and it was there that Dr. Lamborn and myself were presented to
-      his highness by Mr. Beardsley, our consul-general. Nothing regal could be
-      more simple or less ceremonious. We arrived at the door at the moment
-      fixed, for the Khedive is a man of promptness and I imagine has his entire
-      day parcelled out in engagements. We first entered a spacious
-      entrance-hall, from which a broad stairway leads to the first story; here
-      were thirty or forty janizaries, gentlemen-in-waiting, and eunuchs,
-      standing motionless, at the sides, and guarding the approach to the
-      stairway, in reception attitudes. Here we were received by an attendant
-      who conducted us to a room on the left, where we were introduced to the
-      chamberlain, and deposited our outer coats and hats. The chamberlain then
-      led us to the foot of the stairs, but accompanied us no further; we
-      ascended to the first landing, and turning to another broad stairway saw
-      the Khedive awaiting us at the head of it. He was unattended; indeed we
-      saw no officer or servant on this floor. The furniture above and below was
-      European, except the rich, thick carpets of Turkey and Persia.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His Highness, who wore a dress altogether European except the fez,
-      received us cordially, shaking hands and speaking with simplicity, as a
-      private gentleman might, and, wasting no time in Oriental compliments, led
-      the way to a small reception-room furnished in blue satin. We were seated
-      together in a corner of the apartment, and an animated talk at once began.
-      Dr. Lamborn's special errand was to ascertain whether Egypt would be
-      represented in our Centennial, about which the Khedive was well informed.
-      The conversation then passed to the material condition of Egypt, the
-      development of its resources, its canals and railroads, and especially the
-      new road into Soudan, and the opening of Darfour. The Khedive listened
-      attentively to any practical information, either about railroads,
-      factories, or agriculture, that my companion was able to give him, and had
-      the air of a man eager to seize any idea that might be for the advancement
-      of Egypt; when he himself spoke, it was with vivacity, shrewdness, and
-      good sense. And he is not without a gleam of humor now and then,&mdash;a
-      very hopeful quality in a sovereign and especially in an Oriental ruler.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Khedive, in short, is a person to inspire confidence; he appears to be
-      an able, energetic man of affairs, quick and resolute; there is not the
-      slightest stiffness or &ldquo;divine right&rdquo; pretence in his manner. He is short,
-      perhaps five feet seven or eight inches in height, and stout. He has a
-      well-proportioned, solid head, good features, light complexion, and a
-      heavy, strong jaw, which his closely-trimmed beard does not conceal. I am
-      not sure that the penetration of his glance does not gain a little from a
-      slight defect in one eye&mdash;the result of ophthalmia in his boyhood.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When the interview had lasted about fifteen minutes, the Khedive ended it
-      by rising; at the head of the stairs we shook hands and exchanged the
-      proper speeches; at the bottom of the first flight we turned and bowed,
-      his highness still standing and bowing, and then we saw him no more. As we
-      passed out an order had come from above which set the whole household in a
-      flurry of preparation, a running hither and thither as for speedy
-      departure&mdash;the sort of haste that is mingled with fear, as for the
-      command of a power that will not brook an instant's delay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Exaggerated notions are current about harems and harem-receptions, notions
-      born partly of the seclusion of the female portion of the household in the
-      East. Of course the majority of harems in Egypt are simply the apartment
-      of the one wife and her children. The lady who enters one of them pays an
-      ordinary call, and finds no mystery whatever. If there is more than one
-      wife, a privileged visitor, able to converse with the inmates, might find
-      some skeletons behind the screened windows. It is also true that a foreign
-      lady may enter one of the royal harems and be received with scarcely more
-      ceremony than would attend an ordinary call at home. The receptions at
-      which there is great display, at which crowds of beautiful or ugly slaves
-      line the apartments, at which there is music and dancing by almehs, an
-      endless service of sweets and pipes and coffee, and a dozen changes of
-      dress by the hostess during the ceremony, are not frequent, are for some
-      special occasion, the celebration of a marriage, or the entertainment of a
-      visitor of high rank. One who expects, upon a royal invitation to the
-      harem, to wander into the populous dove-cote of the Khedive, where
-      languish the beauties of Asia, the sisters from the Gardens of Gul, pining
-      for a new robe of the mode from Paris, will be most cruelly disappointed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But a harem remains a harem, in the imagination. The ladies went one day
-      to the house&mdash;I suppose it is a harem&mdash;of Hussein, the waiter
-      who has served us with unremitting fidelity and cleverness. The house was
-      one of the ordinary sort of unburnt brick, very humble, but perfectly tidy
-      and bright. The secret of its cheerfulness was in a nice, cheery, happy
-      little wife, who made a home for Hussein such as it was a pleasure to see
-      in Egypt. They had four children, the eldest a daughter, twelve years old
-      and very good-mannered and pretty. As she was of marriageable age, her
-      parents were beginning to think of settling her in life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What a nice girl she is, Hussein,&rdquo; says Madame.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes'm,&rdquo; says Hussein, waving his hands in his usual struggle with the
-      English language, and uttering the longest speech ever heard from him in
-      that tongue, but still speaking as if about something at table, &ldquo;yes'm;
-      good man have it; bad man, drinkin' man, smokin' man, eatin' man not have
-      it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I will describe briefly two royal presentations, one to the favorite wife
-      of the Khedive, the other to the wife of Mohammed Tufik Pasha, the eldest
-      son and heir-apparent, according to the late revolution in the rules of
-      descent. French, the court language, is spoken not only by the Khedive but
-      by all the ladies of his family who receive foreigners. The lady who was
-      presented to the Khedive's wife, after passing the usual guard of eunuchs
-      in the palace, was escorted through a long suite of showy apartments. In
-      each one she was introduced to a maid of honor who escorted her to the
-      next, each lady-in-waiting being more richly attired than her predecessor,
-      and the lady was always thinking that <i>now</i> this one must be the
-      princess herself. Female slaves were in every room, and a great number of
-      them waited in the hall where the princess received her visitor. She was a
-      strikingly handsome woman, dressed in pink satin and encrusted with
-      diamonds. The conversation consisted chiefly of the most exaggerated and
-      barefaced compliments on both sides, both as to articles of apparel and
-      personal appearance. Coffee, cigarettes, and sweets without end, in cups
-      of gold set with precious stones, were served by the female slaves. The
-      wife was evidently delighted with the impression made by her beauty, her
-      jewels, and her rich dress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The wife of Tufik Pasha received at one of the palaces in the suburbs. At
-      the door eunuchs were in waiting to conduct the visitors up the flight of
-      marble steps, and to deliver them to female slaves in waiting. Passing up
-      several broad stairways, they were ushered into a grand reception-hall
-      furnished in European style, except the divans. Only a few servants were
-      in attendance, and they were white female slaves. The princess is <i>petite</i>,
-      pretty, intelligent, and attractive. She received her visitors with entire
-      simplicity, and without ceremony, as a lady would receive callers in
-      America. The conversation ran on the opera, the travel on the Nile, and
-      topics of the town. Coffee and cigarettes were offered, and the sensible
-      interview ended like an occidental visit. It is a little disenchanting,
-      all this adoption of European customs; but the wife of Tufik Pasha should
-      ask him to go a little further, and send all the eunuchs out of the
-      palace.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We had believed that summer was come. But we learned that March in Cairo
-      is, like the same month the world over, treacherous. The morning of the
-      twenty-sixth was cold, the thermometer 60°. A north wind began to blow,
-      and by afternoon increased to a gale, such as had not been known here for
-      years. The town was enveloped in a whirlwind of sand; everything loose was
-      shaking and flying; it was impossible to see one's way, and people
-      scudding about the streets with their heads drawn under their robes
-      continually dashed into each other. The sun was wholly hidden. From our
-      boat we could see only a few rods over the turbulent river. The air was so
-      thick with sand, that it had the appearance of a yellow canvas. The desert
-      had invaded the air&mdash;that was all. The effect of the light through
-      this was extremely weird; not like a dark day of clouds and storm in New
-      England, but a pale, yellowish, greenish, phantasmagoric light, which
-      seemed to presage calamity. Such a light as may be at the Judgment Day.
-      Cairo friends who dined with us said they had never seen such a day in
-      Egypt. Dahabeëhs were torn from their moorings; trees were blown down in
-      the Ezbekëeh Gardens.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We spent the day, as we had spent other days, in the Museum of Antiquities
-      at Boulak. This wonderful collection, which is the work of Mariette Bey,
-      had a thousand times more interest for us now than before we made the Nile
-      voyage and acquired some knowledge of ancient Egypt through its monuments.
-      Everything that we saw had meaning&mdash;statues, mummy-cases, images,
-      scarabæi, seals, stelae, gold jewelry, and the simple articles in domestic
-      use.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It must be confessed that to a person uninformed about Egypt and
-      unaccustomed to its ancient art, there is nothing in the world so dreary
-      as a collection of its antiquities. The endless repetition of designs, the
-      unyielding rigidity of forms, the hideous mingling of the human and the
-      bestial, the dead formality, are insufferably wearisome. The mummy is
-      thoroughly disagreeable. You can easily hate him and all his belongings;
-      there is an air of infinite conceit about him; I feel it in the exclusive
-      box in which he stands, in the smirk of his face painted on his case. I
-      wonder if it is the perkishness of immortality&mdash;as if his race alone
-      were immortal. His very calmness, like that of so many of the statues he
-      made, is an offensive contempt. It is no doubt unreasonable, but as a
-      living person I resent this intrusion of a preserved dead person into our
-      warm times,&mdash;an appearance anachronistic and repellant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But as an illustration of Egyptian customs, art, and history, the Boulak
-      museum is almost a fascinating place. True it is not so rich in many
-      respects as some European collections of Egyptian antiquities, but it has
-      some objects that are unique; for instance, the jewels of Queen Aah-hotep,
-      a few statues, and some stelæ, which furnish the most important
-      information.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not the place, had I the knowledge, to enter upon any discussion
-      of the antiquity of these monuments or of Egyptian chronology. I believe I
-      am not mistaken, however, in saying that the discoveries of Mariette Bey
-      tend strongly to establish the credit of the long undervalued list of
-      Egyptian sovereigns made by Manetho, and that many Oriental scholars agree
-      with the director of this museum that the date of the first Egyptian
-      dynasty is about five thousand years before the Christian era. But the
-      almost startling thought presented by this collection is not in the
-      antiquity of some of these objects, but in the long civilization anterior
-      to their production, and which must have been necessary to the growth of
-      the art here exhibited.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It could not have been a barbarous people who produced, for instance,
-      these life-like images found at Maydoom, statues of a prince and princess
-      who lived under the ancient king Snéfrou, the last sovereign of the third
-      dynasty, and the predecessor of Cheops. At no epoch, says M. Mariette, did
-      Egypt produce portraits more speaking, though they want the breadth of
-      style of the statue in wood&mdash;of which more anon. But it is as much in
-      an ethnographic as an art view that these statues are important. If the
-      Egyptian race at that epoch was of the type offered by these portraits, it
-      resembled in nothing the race which inhabited the north of Egypt not many
-      years after Snéfrou. To comprehend the problem here presented we have only
-      to compare the features of these statues with those of others in this
-      collection belonging to the fourth and fifth dynasties.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The best work of art in the Museum is the statue of Chephron, the builder
-      of the second pyramid. &ldquo;The epoch of Chephron,&rdquo; says M. Mariette,
-      &ldquo;corresponding to the third reign of the fourth dynasty of Manetho, our
-      statue is not less than six thousand years old.&rdquo; It is a life-size sitting
-      figure, executed in red granite. We admire its tranquil majesty, we marvel
-      at the close study of nature in the moulding of the breast and limbs, we
-      confess the skill that could produce an effect so fine in such intractable
-      material. It seems as if Egyptian art were about to burst its trammels.
-      But it never did; it never exceeded this cleverness; on the contrary it
-      constantly fell away from it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The most interesting statue to us, and perhaps the oldest image in Egypt,
-      and, if so, in the world, is the Wooden Man, which was found at Memphis.
-      This image, one metre and ten centimetres high, stands erect, holding a
-      staff. The figure is full of life, the <i>pose</i> expresses vigor,
-      action, pride, the head, round in form, indicates intellect. The eyes are
-      crystal, in a setting of bronze, giving a startling look of life to the
-      regard. It is no doubt a portrait. &ldquo;There is nothing more striking,&rdquo; says
-      its discoverer, &ldquo;than this image, in a manner living, of a person who has
-      been dead six thousand years.&rdquo; He must have been a man of mark, and a
-      citizen of a state well-civilized; this is not the portrait of a
-      barbarian, nor was it carved by a rude artist. Few artists, I think, have
-      lived since, who could impart more vitality to wood.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if the date assigned to this statue is correct, sculpture in Egypt
-      attained its maximum of development six thousand years ago. This
-      conclusion will be resisted by many, and on different grounds. I heard a
-      clergyman of the Church of England say to his comrade, as they were
-      looking at this figure:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's all nonsense; six thousand years! It couldn't be. That's before the
-      creation of man.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the other, irreverently, &ldquo;perhaps this was the model.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      This museum is for the historian, the archaeologist, not for the artist,
-      except in his study of the history of art. What Egypt had to impart to the
-      world of art was given thousands of years ago&mdash;intimations,
-      suggestions, outlines that, in freer circumstances, expanded into works of
-      immortal beauty. The highest beauty, that last touch of genius, that
-      creative inspiration which is genius and not mere talent, Egyptian art
-      never attained. It achieved wonders; they are all mediocre wonders;
-      miracles of talent. The architecture profoundly impresses, almost crushes
-      one; it never touches the highest in the soul, it never charms, it never
-      satisfies.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The total impression upon myself of this ancient architecture and this
-      plastic art is a melancholy one. And I think this is not altogether due to
-      its monotony. The Egyptian art is said to be <i>sui generis</i>; it has a
-      character that is instantly recognized; whenever and wherever we see a
-      specimen of it, we say without fear of mistake, &ldquo;that is Egyptian.&rdquo; We are
-      as sure of it as we are of a piece of Greek work of the best age, perhaps
-      surer. Is Egyptian art, then, elevated to the dignity of a type, of
-      itself? Is it so to be studied, as something which has flowered into a
-      perfection of its kind? I know we are accustomed to look at it as if it
-      were, and to set it apart; in short, I have heard it judged absolutely, as
-      if it were a rule to itself. I cannot bring myself so to look at it. All
-      art is one. We recognize peculiarities of an age or of a people; but there
-      is only one absolute standard; to that touchstone all must come.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It seems to me then that the melancholy impression produced by Egyptian
-      art is not alone from its monotony, its rigidity, its stiff formality, but
-      it is because we recognize in it an arrested development. It is archaic.
-      The peculiarity of it is that it always remained archaic. We have seen
-      specimens of the earliest Etruscan figure-drawing, Gen. Cesnola found in
-      Cyprus Phoenician work, and we have statues of an earlier period of Greek
-      sculpture, all of which more or less resemble Egyptian art. The latter are
-      the beginnings of a consummate development. Egypt stopped at the
-      beginnings. And we have the sad spectacle of an archaic art, not growing,
-      but elaborated into a fixed type and adhered to as if it were perfection.
-      In some of the figures I have spoken of in this museum, you can find that
-      art was about to emancipate itself. In all later works you see no such
-      effort, no such tendency, no such hope. It had been abandoned. By and by
-      impulse died out entirely. For thousands of years the Egyptians worked at
-      perfecting the mediocre. Many attribute this remote and total repression
-      to religious influence. Something of the same sort may be seen in the
-      paintings of saints in the Greek chambers of the East to-day; the type of
-      which is that of the Byzantine period. Are we to attribute a like arrest
-      of development in China to the same cause?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a theory very plausibly sustained, that the art of a people is the
-      flower of its civilization, the final expression of the conditions of its
-      growth and its character. In reading Mr. Taine's ingenious observations
-      upon art in the Netherlands and art in Greece, we are ready to assent to
-      the theory. It may be the general law of a free development in national
-      life and in art. If it is, then it is not disturbed by the example of
-      Egypt. Egyptian art is not the expression of the natural character, for
-      its art was never developed. The Egyptians were a joyous race, given to
-      mirth, to the dance, to entertainments, to the charms of society, a people
-      rather gay than grave; they lived in the open air, in the most friendly
-      climate in the world. The sculptures in the early tombs represent their
-      life&mdash;an existence full of gaiety, grace, humor. This natural
-      character is not expressed in the sombre temples, nor in their symbolic
-      carvings, nor in these serious, rigid statues, whose calm faces look
-      straight on as if into eternity. This art may express the religion of the
-      priestly caste; when it had attained the power to portray the rigid
-      expectation of immortality, the inscrutable repose of the Sphinx, it was
-      arrested there, and never allowed in any respect to change its formality.
-      And I cannot but believe that if it had been free, Egyptian art would have
-      budded and bloomed into a grace of form in harmony with the character of
-      the climate and the people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is true that the architecture of Egypt was freer than its sculptures,
-      but the whole of it together is not worth one edifice like the Greek
-      temple at Pæstum. And to end, by what may seem a sweeping statement, I
-      have had more pleasure from a bit of Greek work&mdash;an intaglio, or a
-      coin of the best period, or the sculptures on a broken entablature&mdash;than
-      from anything that Egypt ever produced in art.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0065" id="linkimage-0065"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0461.jpg" alt="0461 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0035" id="link2HCH0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXXV.&mdash;ON THE WAY HOME.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">F</span>OR two days after
-      the sand-storm, it gives us pleasure to write, the weather was cold, raw,
-      thoroughly unpleasant, resembling dear New England quite enough to make
-      one homesick. As late as the twenty-eighth of March, this was. The fact
-      may be a comfort to those who dwell in a region where winter takes a fresh
-      hold in March.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We broke up our establishment on the dahabeëh and moved to the hotel,
-      abandoning I know not how many curiosities, antiquities and specimens, the
-      possession of which had once seemed to us of the last importance. I shall
-      spare you the scene at parting with our crew. It would have been very
-      touching, but for the backsheesh. Some of them were faithful fellows to
-      whom we were attached; some of them were graceless scamps. But they all
-      received backsheesh. That is always the way. It was clearly understood
-      that we should reward only the deserving, and we had again and again
-      resolved not to give a piastre to certain ones of the crew. But, at the
-      end, the obdurate howadji always softens; and the Egyptians know that he
-      will. Egypt is full of good-for-nothings who have not only received
-      presents but certificates of character from travelers whom they have
-      disobliged for three months. There was, however, some discrimination in
-      this case; backsheesh was distributed with some regard to good conduct; at
-      the formal judgment on deck, Abd-el-Atti acted the part of Thoth in
-      weighing out the portions, and my friend took the <i>rôle</i> of Osiris,
-      receiving, vicariously for all of us, the kisses on his hand of the
-      grateful crew. I shall not be misunderstood in saying that the faithful
-      Soudan boy, Gohah, would have felt just as much grief in bidding us
-      good-bye if he had not received a penny (the rest of the crew would have
-      been inconsolable in like case); his service was always marked by an
-      affectionate devotion without any thought of reward. He must have had a
-      magnanimous soul to forgive us for the doses we gave him when he was ill
-      during the voyage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are waiting in Cairo professedly for the weather to become settled and
-      pleasant in Syria&mdash;which does not happen, one year with another, till
-      after the first of April; but we are contented, for the novelties of the
-      town are inexhaustible, and we are never weary of its animation and
-      picturesque movement. I suppose I should be held in low estimation if I
-      said nothing concerning the baths of Cairo. It is expected of every
-      traveler that he will describe them, or one at least&mdash;one is usually
-      sufficient. Indeed when I have read these descriptions, I have wondered
-      how the writers lived to tell their story. When a person has been for
-      hours roasted and stifled, and had all his bones broken, you could not
-      reasonably expect him to write so powerfully of the bath as many travelers
-      write who are so treated. I think these bath descriptions are among the
-      marvels of Oriental literature; Mr. Longfellow says of the Roman Catholic
-      system, that it is a religion of the deepest dungeons and the highest
-      towers; the Oriental bath (in literature) is like this; the unwashed
-      infidel is first plunged in a gulf of dark despair, and then he is
-      elevated to a physical bliss that is ecstatic. The story is too long at
-      each end.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I had experience of several different baths in Cairo, and I invariably
-      found them less vigorous, that is milder in treatment, than the Turkish
-      baths of New York or of Germany. With the Orientals the bath is a luxury,
-      a thing to be enjoyed, and not an affair of extreme shocks and brutal
-      surprises. In the bath itself there is never the excessive heat that I
-      have experienced in such baths in New York, nor the sudden change of
-      temperature in water, nor the vigorous manipulation. The Cairo bath, in my
-      experience, is gentle, moderate, enjoyable. The heat of the rooms is never
-      excessive, the air is very moist, and water flows abundantly over the
-      marble floors; the attendants are apt to be too lazy to maltreat the
-      bather, and perhaps err in gentleness. You are never roasted in a dry air
-      and then plunged suddenly into cold water. I do not wonder that the
-      Orientals are fond of their bath. The baths abound, for men and for women,
-      and the natives pay a very small sum for the privilege of using them.
-      Women make up parties, and spend a good part of the day in a bath; having
-      an entertainment there sometimes, and a frolic. It is said that mothers
-      sometimes choose wives for their sons from girls they see at the baths.
-      Some of them are used by men in the forenoon and by women in the
-      afternoon, and I have seen a great crowd of veiled women waiting at the
-      door at noon. There must be over seventy-five of these public baths in
-      Cairo.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As the harem had not yet gone over to the Gezeereh palace, we took the
-      opportunity to visit it. This palace was built by the Khedive, on what was
-      the island of Gezeereh, when a branch of the Nile was suffered to run to
-      the west of its present area. The ground is now the seat of gardens, and
-      of the most interesting botanical and horticultural experiments on the
-      part of the Khedive, under charge of competent scientific men. A botanist
-      or an arboriculturist would find material in the nurseries for long study.
-      I was chiefly interested (since I half believe in the malevolence of some
-      plants) in a sort of murderous East Indian cane, which grows about fifteen
-      to twenty feet high, and so rapidly that (we were told) it attains its
-      growth in a day or two. At any rate, it thrusts up its stalks so
-      vigorously and rapidly that Indian tyrants have employed it to execute
-      criminals. The victim is bound to the ground over a bed of this cane at
-      night, and in the morning it has grown up through his body. We need such a
-      vengeful vegetable as this in our country, to plant round the edges of our
-      city gardens.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The grounds about the palace are prettily, but formally laid out in
-      flower-gardens, with fountains and a kiosk in the style of the Alhambra.
-      Near by is a hot-house, with one of the best collections of orchids in the
-      world; and not far off is the zoological garden, containing a menagerie of
-      African birds and beasts, very well arranged and said to be nearly
-      complete.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The palace is a square building of iron and stucco, the light pillars and
-      piazzas painted in Saracenic designs and Persian colors, but the whole
-      rather dingy, and beginning to be shabby. Inside it is at once a showy and
-      a comfortable palace, and much better than we expected to see in Egypt;
-      the carpenter and mason work are, however, badly done, as if the Khedive
-      had been swindled by sharp Europeans; it is full of rich and costly
-      furniture. The rooms are large and effective, and we saw a good deal of
-      splendor in hangings and curtains, especially in the apartments fitted up
-      for the occupation of the Empress Eugénie. It is wonderful, by the way,
-      with what interest people look at a bed in which an Empress has slept; and
-      we may add awe, for it is usually a broad, high and awful place of repose.
-      Scattered about the rooms are, in defiance of the Prophet's religion,
-      several paintings, all inferior, and a few busts (some of the Khedive) and
-      other pieces of statuary. The place of honor is given to an American
-      subject, although the group was executed by an Italian artist. It stands
-      upon the first landing of the great staircase. An impish-looking young
-      Jupiter is seated on top of a chimney, below which is the suggestion of a
-      house-roof. Above his head is the point of a lightning-rod. The celestial
-      electrician is discharging a bolt into the rod, which is supposed to pass
-      harmless over the roof below. Upon the pedestal is a medallion, the head
-      of Benjamin Franklin, and encircling it, the legend:&mdash;<i>Eripuit
-      coelo fulmen. 1790</i>. The group looks better than you would imagine from
-      the description.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Beyond the garden is the harem-building, which was undergoing a thorough
-      renovation and refurnishing, in the most gaudy French style&mdash;such
-      being the wish of the ladies who occupy it. They are eager to discard the
-      beautiful Moorish designs which once covered the walls and to substitute
-      French decoration. The dormitory portions consist of passages with rooms
-      on each side, very much like a young ladies' boarding-school; the rooms
-      are large enough to accommodate three or four occupants. While we were
-      leisurely strolling through the house, we noticed a great flurry and
-      scurry in the building, and the attendants came to us in a panic, and made
-      desperate efforts to hurry us out of the building by a side-entrance,
-      giving signs of woe and destruction to themselves if we did not flee. The
-      Khedive had arrived, on horseback, and unexpectedly, to inspect his
-      domestic hearths.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We rode, one sparkling morning, after a night of heavy rain, to
-      Heliopolis; there was no mud, however, the rain having served to beat the
-      sand firm. Heliopolis is the On of the Bible, and in the time of
-      Herodotus, its inhabitants were esteemed the most learned in history of
-      all the Egyptians. The father-in-law of Joseph was a priest there, and
-      there Moses and Plato both learned wisdom. The road is excellent and
-      planted most of the distance with acacia trees; there are extensive
-      gardens on either hand, plantations of trees, broad fields under
-      cultivation, and all the way the air was full of the odor of flowers,
-      blossoms of lemon and orange. In luxuriance and riant vegetation, it
-      seemed an Oriental paradise. And the whole of this beautiful land of
-      verdure, covered now with plantations so valuable, was a sand-desert as
-      late as 1869. The water of the Nile alone has changed the desert into a
-      garden.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On the way we passed the race-course belonging to the Khedive, an
-      observatory, and the old palace of Abbas Pasha, now in process of
-      demolition, the foundations being bad, like his own. It is said that the
-      favorite wife of this hated tyrant, who was a Bedawee girl of rank, always
-      preferred to live on the desert, and in a tent rather than a palace. Here
-      at any rate, on the sand, lived Abbas Pasha, in hourly fear of
-      assassination by his enemies. It was not difficult to conjure up the
-      cowering figure, hiding in the recesses of this lonely palace, listening
-      for the sound of horses' hoofs coming on the city road, and ready to mount
-      a swift dromedary, which was kept saddled night and day in the stable, and
-      flee into the desert lor Bedaween protection.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At Mataréëh, we turned into a garden to visit the famous Sycamore tree,
-      under which the Virgin sat to rest, in the time of the flight of the Holy
-      Family. It is a large, scrubby-looking tree, probably two hundred years
-      old. I wonder that it does not give up the ghost, for every inch of its
-      bark, even to the small limbs, is cut with names. The Copt, who owns it,
-      to prevent its destruction, has put a fence about it; and that also is
-      covered all over. I looked in vain for the name of &ldquo;Joseph&rdquo;; but could
-      find it neither on the fence nor on the tree.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At Heliopolis one can work up any number of reflections; but all he can
-      see is the obelisk, which is sunken somewhat in the ground. It is more
-      correct, however, to say that the ground about it, and the whole site of
-      the former town and Temple of the Sun, have risen many feet since the
-      beginning of the Christian Era. This is the oldest obelisk in Egypt, and
-      bears the <i>cartouche</i> of Amenemhe I., the successor of Osirtasen I.&mdash;about
-      three thousand b. c., according to Mariette; Wilkinson and Mariette are
-      only one thousand years apart, on this date of this monument. The wasps or
-      bees have filled up the lettering on one side, and given it the appearance
-      of being plastered with mud. There was no place for us to sit down and
-      meditate, and having stood, surrounded by a swarm of the latest children
-      of the sun, and looked at the remains as long as etiquette required,
-      without a single historical tremor, we mounted and rode joyfully city-ward
-      between the lemon hedges.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In this Spring-time, late in the afternoon, the fashionable drive out the
-      Shoobra road, under the arches of sycamore trees, is more thronged than in
-      winter even. Handsome carriages appear and now and then a pair of blooded
-      Arab horses. There are two lines of vehicles extending for a mile or so,
-      the one going out and the other returning, and the round of the promenade
-      continues long enough for everybody to see everybody. Conspicuous always
-      are the neat two-horse cabriolets, lined with gay silks and belonging to
-      the royal harem; outriders are in advance, and eunuchs behind, and within
-      each are two fair and painted Circassians, shining in their thin white
-      veils, looking from the windows, eager to see the world, and not averse to
-      be seen by it. The veil has become with them, as it is in Constantinople,
-      a mere pretext and a heightener of beauty. We saw by chance one day some
-      of these birds of paradise abroad in the Shoobra Garden&mdash;and live to
-      speak of it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Shoobra palace and its harem, hidden by a high wall, were built by
-      Mohammed Ali; he also laid out the celebrated garden; and the
-      establishment was in his day no doubt the handsomest in the East. The
-      garden is still rich in rare trees, fruit-trees native and exotic, shrubs,
-      and flowers, but fallen into a too-common Oriental decay. Instead of
-      keeping up this fine place the Khedive builds a new one. These Oriental
-      despots erect costly and showy palaces, in a manner that invites decay,
-      and their successors build new ones, as people get new suits of clothes
-      instead of wearing the garments of their fathers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the midst of the garden is a singular summer-palace, built upon
-      terraces and hidden by trees; but the great attraction is the immense
-      Kiosk, the most characteristic Oriental building I have seen, and a very
-      good specimen of the costly and yet cheap magnificence of the Orient. It
-      is a large square pavilion, the center of which is a little lake, but
-      large enough for boats, and it has an orchestral platform in the middle;
-      the verandah about this is supported on marble pillars and has a
-      highly-decorated ceiling; carvings in marble abound; and in the corners
-      are apartments decorated in the height of barbaric splendor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The pipes are still in place which conveyed gas to every corner and
-      outline of this bizarre edifice. I should like to have seen it illuminated
-      on a summer night when the air was heavy with the garden perfumes. I
-      should like to have seen it then thronged with the dark-eyed girls of the
-      North, in their fleecy splendors of drapery, sailing like water-nymphs in
-      these fairy boats, flashing their diamonds in the mirror of this pool,
-      dancing down the marble floor to the music of soft drums and flutes that
-      beat from the orchestral platform hidden by the water-lilies. Such a
-      vision is not permitted to an infidel. But on such a night old Mohammed
-      Ali might have been excused if he thought he was already in El Genneh, in
-      the company of the girls of Paradise, &ldquo;whose eyes will be very large and
-      entirely black, and whose stature will be proportioned to that of the men,
-      which will be the height of a tall palm-tree,&rdquo; or about sixty feet and
-      that he was entertained in &ldquo;a tent erected for him of pearls, jacinths,
-      and emeralds, of a very large extent.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      While we were lounging in this place of melancholy gaiety, which in the
-      sunlight bears something the aspect of a tawdry watering-place when the
-      season is over, several harem carriages drove to the entrance: but the
-      eunuchs seeing that unbelievers were in the kiosk would not permit the
-      ladies to descend, and the <i>cortege</i> went on and disappeared in the
-      shrubbery. The attendants invited us to leave. While we were still near
-      the kiosk the carriages came round again, and the ladies began to alight.
-      The attendants in the garden were now quite beside themselves, and
-      endeavored to keep our eyes from beholding, and to hustle us down a
-      side-path.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was in vain that we said to them that we were not afraid, that we were
-      accustomed to see ladies walk in gardens, and that it couldn't possibly
-      harm us. They persisted in misunderstanding us, and piteously begged us to
-      turn away and flee. The ladies were already out of the carriages, veils
-      withdrawn, and beginning to enjoy rural life in the garden. They seemed to
-      have no more fear than we. The horses of the out-riders were led down our
-      path; superb animals, and we stopped to admire them. The harem ladies,
-      rather over-dressed for a promenade, were in full attire of soft silks,
-      blue and pink, in delicate shades, and really made a pretty appearance
-      amid the green. It seemed impossible that it could be wrong to look at
-      them. The attendants couldn't deny that the horses were beautiful, but
-      they regarded our admiration of them as inopportune. They seemed to fear
-      we might look under, or over, or around the horses, towards that forbidden
-      sight by the kiosk. It was useless for us to enquire the age and the breed
-      of the horses. Our efforts to gain information only added to the agony of
-      the gardeners. They wrung their hands, they tried to face us about, they
-      ran hither and thither, and it was not till we were out of sight of the
-      odalisques that they recovered any calmness and began to cull flowers for
-      us, and to produce some Yusef Effendis, as a sign of amity and willingness
-      to accept a few piastres.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The last day of March has come. It is time to depart. Even the harem will
-      soon be going out of town. We have remained in the city long enough to
-      imbibe its atmosphere; not long enough to wear out its strangeness, nor to
-      become familiar with all objects of interest. And we pack our trunks with
-      reluctance, in the belief that we are leaving the most thoroughly Oriental
-      and interesting city in all the East.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0066" id="linkimage-0066"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0469.jpg" alt="0469 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0067" id="linkimage-0067"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0470.jpg" alt="0470 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0036" id="link2HCH0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXXVI.&mdash;BY THE RED SEA.
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> GENTLEMAN started
-      from Cairo a few days before us, with the avowed purpose of following in
-      the track of the Children of Israel and viewing the exact point where they
-      crossed the Red Sea. I have no doubt that he was successful. So many
-      routes have been laid out for the Children across the Isthmus, that one
-      can scarcely fail to fall into one of them. Our purpose was merely to see
-      Suez and the famous Sea, and the great canal of M. Lesseps; not doubting,
-      however, that when we looked over the ground we should decide where the
-      Exodus must have taken place.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The old direct railway to Suez is abandoned; the present route is by
-      Zagazeeg and Ismailia&mdash;a tedious journey, requiring a day. The ride
-      is wearisome, for the country is flat and presents nothing new to one
-      familiar with Egyptian landscapes. The first part of the journey is,
-      however, enlivened by the company of the canal of Fresh Water, and by the
-      bright verdure of the plain which the canal produces. And this luxuriant
-      vegetation continues until you come to the still unreclaimed desert of the
-      Land of Goshen. Now that water can be supplied it only needs people to
-      make this Land as fat as it was in the days of the Israelites.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Some twenty miles from Cairo we pass near the so-called Mound of the Jew,
-      believed to be the ruins of the city of Orion and the temple built by the
-      high priest Onias in the reign of Ptolemy Philometer and Cleopatra, as
-      described by Josephus. The temple was after the style of that at
-      Jerusalem. This Jewish settlement was made upon old Egyptian ruins; in
-      1870 the remains of a splendid temple of the time of Rameses II. were laid
-      open. The special interest to Biblical scholars of this Jewish colony
-      here, which multiplied itself and spread over considerable territory, is
-      that its establishment fulfilled a prophesy of Isaiah (xix, 19, etc.); and
-      Onias urged this prophesy, in his letter to the Ptolemy, asking permission
-      to purge the remains of the heathen temple in the name of Heliopolis and
-      to erect there a temple to Almighty God. Ptolemy and Cleopatra replied
-      that they wondered Onias should desire to build a temple in a place so
-      unclean and so full of sacred animals, but since Isaiah foretold it, he
-      had leave to do so. We saw nothing of this ancient and once flourishing
-      seat of Jewish enterprise, save some sharp mounds in the distance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor did we see more of the more famous city of Bubastis, where was the
-      temple to Pasht, the cat or lioness-headed deity (whom Herodotus called
-      Diana), the avenger of crimes. According to Herodotus, all the cats of
-      Egypt were embalmed and buried in Bubastis. This city was the residence of
-      the Pharaoh Sheshonk I. (the Shishak of the Bible) who sacked Jerusalem,
-      and it was at that time the capital of Egypt. It was from here, on the
-      Bubastic (or Pelusiac) branch of the Nile, that the ancient canal was dug
-      to connect with the Heroôpolite Gulf (now the Bitter Lakes), the
-      northernmost arm of the Red Sea at that date; and the city was then, by
-      that fresh-water canal, on the water-way between the Red Sea and the
-      Mediterranean. But before the Christian era the Red Sea had retired to
-      about its present limit (the Bitter Lakes being cut off from it), and the
-      Bubastic branch of the Nile was nearly dried up. Bubastis and all this
-      region are now fed by the canal which leaves the Nile at Cairo and runs to
-      Ismailia, and thence to Suez. It is a startling thought that all this
-      portion of the Delta, east, and south, and the Isthmus depend for life
-      upon the keeper of the gate of the canal at Cairo. If we were to leave the
-      train here and stumble about in the mounds of Bubastis, we should find
-      only fragments of walls, blocks of granite, and a few sculptures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At the Zagazeeg station, where there is a junction with the Alexandria and
-      Cairo main line, we wait some time, and find very pleasant the garden and
-      the picturesque refreshment-house in which our minds are suddenly diverted
-      from ancient Egypt by a large display of East Indian and Japanese
-      curiosities on sale.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this we follow, substantially, the route of the canal, running by
-      villages and fertile districts, and again on the desert's edge. We come
-      upon no traces of the Israelites until we reach Masamah, which is supposed
-      to be the site of Rameses, one of the treasure-cities mentioned in the
-      Bible, and the probable starting-point of the Jews in their flight. This
-      is about the center of the Land of Goshen, and Rameses may have been the
-      chief city of the district.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If I knew exactly the route the Israelites took, I should not dare to
-      disclose it; for this has become, I do not know why, a tender subject. But
-      it seems to me that if the Jews were assembled here from the Delta for a
-      start, a very natural way of exit would have been down the Wadee to the
-      head of the Heroopolite Gulf, the route of the present and the ancient
-      canal. And if it should be ascertained beyond a doubt that Sethi I. built
-      as well as planned such a canal, the argument of probability would be
-      greatly strengthened that Moses led his vast host along the canal. Any
-      dragoman to-day, desiring to cross the Isthmus and be beyond pursuit as
-      soon as possible, supposing the condition of the country now as it was at
-      the time of the Exodus, would strike for the shortest line. And it is
-      reasonable to suppose that Moses would lead his charge to a point where
-      the crossing of the sea, or one of its arms, was more feasible than it is
-      anywhere below Suez; unless we are to start with the supposition that
-      Moses expected a miracle, and led the Jews to a spot where, apparently,
-      escape for them was hopeless if the Egyptian pursued. It is believed that
-      at the time of the Exodus there was a communication between the Red Sea
-      and the Bitter Lakes&mdash;formerly called Heroopolite Gulf&mdash;which it
-      was the effort of many rulers to keep open by a canal. Very anciently, it
-      is evident, the Red Sea extended to and included these lakes; and it is
-      not improbable that, in the time of Moses, the water was, by certain
-      winds, forced up to the north into these lakes: and again, that, crossings
-      could easily be made, the wind being favorable, at several points between
-      what is now Suez and the head of the Bitter Lakes. Many scholars make
-      Cha-loof, about twelve miles above Suez the point of passage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We only touch the outskirts of Ismailia in going on to Suez. Below, we
-      pass the extensive plantation and garden of the Khedive, in which he has
-      over fifty thousand young trees in a nursery. This spot would be absolute
-      desert but for the Nile-water let in upon it. All day our astonishment has
-      increased at the irrigation projects of the Viceroy, and his herculean
-      efforts to reclaim a vast land of desert; the enlarging of the Sweet-Water
-      Canal, and the gigantic experiments in arboriculture and agriculture.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We noticed that the Egyptian laborers at work with the wheelbarrows
-      (instead of the baskets formerly used by them) on the enlargement of the
-      canal, were under French contractors, for the most part. The men are paid
-      from a franc to a franc and a quarter per day; but they told us that it
-      was very difficult to get laborers, so many men being drafted for the
-      army.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At dark we come in sight of the Bitter Lakes, through which the canal is
-      dredged; we can see vessels of various sorts and steamers moving across
-      them in one line; and we see nothing more until we reach Suez. The train
-      stops &ldquo;at nowhere,&rdquo; in the sand, outside the town. It is the only train of
-      the day, but there are neither carriages nor donkeys in waiting. There is
-      an air about the station of not caring whether anyone comes or not. We
-      walk a mile to the hotel, which stands close to the sea, with nothing but
-      a person's good sense to prevent his walking off the platform into the
-      water. In the night the water looked like the sand, and it was only by
-      accident that we did not step off into it; however, it turned out to be
-      only a couple of feet deep.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The hotel, which I suppose is rather Indian than Egyptian, is built round
-      a pleasant court; corridors and latticed doors are suggestive of hot
-      nights; the servants and waiters are all Hindoos; we have come suddenly in
-      contact with another type of Oriental life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Coming down from Ismailia, a friend who was with us had no ticket. It was
-      a case beyond the conductor's experience; he utterly refused backsheesh
-      and he insisted on having a ticket. At last he accepted ten francs and
-      went away. Looking in the official guide we found that the fare was nine
-      francs and a quarter. The conductor, thinking he had opened a guileless
-      source of supply, soon returned and demanded two francs more. My friend
-      countermined him by asking the return of the seventy-five centimes
-      overpaid. An amusing pantomime ensued. At length the conductor lowered his
-      demand to one franc, and, not getting that, he begged for backsheesh. I
-      was sorry to have my high ideal of a railway-conductor, formed in America,
-      lowered in this manner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We are impatient above all things for a sight of the Red Sea. But in the
-      brilliant starlight, all that appears is smooth water and a soft picture
-      of vessels at anchor or aground looming up in the night. Suez, seen by
-      early daylight, is a scattered city of some ten thousand inhabitants, too
-      modern and too cheap in its buildings to be interesting. There is only a
-      little section of it, where we find native bazaars, twisting streets,
-      overhanging balconies, and latticed windows. It lies on a sand peninsula,
-      and the sand-drifts close all about it, ready to lick it up, if the canal
-      of fresh water should fail.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The only elevation near is a large mound, which may be the site of the
-      fort of ancient Clysma, or Gholzim as it was afterwards called&mdash;the
-      city believed to be the predecessor of Suez. Upon this mound an American
-      has built, and presented to the Khedive, a sort of <i>châlet</i> of wood&mdash;the
-      whole transported from America ready-made, one of those white, painfully
-      unpicturesque things with two little gables at the end, for which our
-      country is justly distinguished. Cheap. But then it is of wood, and wood
-      is one of the dearest things in Egypt. I only hope the fashion of it may
-      not spread in this land of grace.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a delightful morning, the wind west and fresh. From this hillock we
-      commanded one of the most interesting prospects in the world. We looked
-      over the whole desert-flat on which lies the little town, and which is
-      pierced by an arm of the Gulf that narrows into the Suez canal; we looked
-      upon two miles of curved causeway which runs down to the docks and the
-      anchoring place of the steam-vessels&mdash;there cluster the dry-docks,
-      the dredges, the canal-offices, and just beyond the shipping lay; in the
-      distance we saw the Red Sea, like a long lake, deep-green or deep-blue,
-      according to the light, and very sparkling; to the right was the reddish
-      limestone range called Gebel Attâka&mdash;a continuation of the Mokattam;
-      on the left there was a great sweep of desert, and far off&mdash;one
-      hundred and twenty miles as the crow flies&mdash;the broken Sinai range of
-      mountains, in which we tried to believe we could distinguish the sacred
-      peak itself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I asked an intelligent railway official, a Moslem, who acted as guide that
-      morning, &ldquo;What is the local opinion as to the place where the Children of
-      Israel crossed over?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The French,&rdquo; he replied, &ldquo;are trying to make it out that it was at
-      Chaloof, about twenty miles above here, where there is little water. But
-      we think it was at a point twenty miles below here; we must put it there,
-      or there wouldn't be any miracle. You see that point, away to the right?
-      That's the spot. There is a wady comes down the side.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But where do the Christians think the crossing was?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh, here at Suez; there, about at this end of Gebel Attâka.&rdquo; The Moslems'
-      faith in the miraculous deliverance is disturbed by no speculations.
-      Instead of trying to explain the miracle by the use of natural causes, and
-      seeking for a crossing where the water might at one time have been heaped
-      and at another forced away by the winds, their only care is to fix the
-      passage where the miracle would be most striking.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      After breakfast and preparations to visit Moses' Well, we rode down the
-      causeway to the made land where the docks are. The earth dumped here by
-      the dredging-machines (and which now forms solid building ground), is full
-      of a great variety of small sea-shells; the walls that enclose it are of
-      rocks conglomerate of shells. The ground all about gives evidence of salt
-      we found shallow pools evaporated so that a thick crust of excellent salt
-      had formed on the bottom and at the sides. The water in them was of a
-      decidedly rosy color, caused by some infusorial growth. The name, Red Sea,
-      however, has nothing to do with this appearance, I believe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We looked at the pretty houses and gardens, the dry-dock and the shops,
-      and the world-famous dredges, without which the Suez Canal would very
-      likely never have been finished. These enormous machines have arms or
-      ducts, an iron spout of semi-elliptical form, two hundred and thirty feet
-      long, by means of which the dredger working in the center of the channel
-      could discharge its contents over the bank. One of them removed, on an
-      average, eighty thousand cubit yards of soil a month. A faint idea may be
-      had of this gigantic work by the amount of excavation here, done by the
-      dredgers, in one month,&mdash;two million seven hundred and sixty-three
-      thousand cubic yards. M. de Lesseps says that if this soil were &ldquo;laid out
-      between the Arc de Triomphe and the Place de la Concorde, it would cover
-      the entire length and breadth of the Champs Elysées, a distance equal to a
-      mile and a quarter, and reach to the top of the trees on either side.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      At the pier our felucca met us and we embarked and sailed into the mouth
-      of the canal. The channel leading to it is not wide, and is buoyed at
-      short intervals. The mouth of the canal is about nine hundred feet wide
-      and twenty-seven deep, * and it is guarded on the east by a long stone
-      mole projected from the Asiatic shore. There is considerable ebb and flow
-      of the tide in this part of the canal and as far as the Bitter Lakes,
-      where it is nearly all lost in the expanse, being only slightly felt at
-      Lake Timsah, from which point there is a slight uniform current to the
-      Mediterranean.
-    </p>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-     * Total length of Canal, 100 miles. Width of water-line,
-     where banks are low, 328 feet; in deep cuttings, 190; width
-     at base, 2; depth, 26.
-</pre>
-    <p>
-      From the canal entrance we saw great ships and steamboats in the distance,
-      across the desert, and apparently sailing in the desert; but we did not
-      follow them; we turned, and crossed to the Asiatic shore. We had brought
-      donkeys with us, and were soon mounted for a scrambling gallop of an hour
-      and a half, down the coast, over level and hard sand, to Moses' Well. The
-      air was delicious and the ride exhilarating. I tried to get from our
-      pleasant Arab guide, who had a habit of closing one eye, what he thought
-      of the place of the passage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Where did the Children of Israel cross?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Over dat mountain.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, but where did they cross the Sea?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You know Moses?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, I know Moses. Where did he cross?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; closing his eye very tight, &ldquo;him long time ago, not now. He cross
-      way down there, can't see him from here.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      On the way we passed the white tents of the Quarantine Station, on our
-      right by the shore, where the caravan of Mecca pilgrims had been detained.
-      We hoped to see it: but it had just set out on its desert march further
-      inland. It was seen from Suez all day, straggling along in detachments,
-      and at night camped about two miles north of the town. However, we found a
-      dozen or two of the pilgrims, dirty, ragged, burned by the sun, and
-      hungry, lying outside the enclosure at the wells.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Wells of Moses (or <i>Ain Moosa</i>, &ldquo;Moses' Well,&rdquo; in the Arabic) are
-      distant a mile or more from the low shore, and our first warning of
-      nearness to them was the appearance of some palms in a sandy depression.
-      The attempt at vegetation is rather sickly, and the spot is but a desolate
-      one. It is the beginning of the route to Mount Sinai, however, and is no
-      doubt a very welcome sight to returning pilgrims. Contrast is everything;
-      it is contrast with its surroundings that has given Damascus its renown.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are half a dozen of these wells, three of which are some fifteen to
-      twenty feet across, and are in size and appearance very respectable
-      frog-ponds. One of them is walled with masonry, evidently ancient, and two
-      shadoofs draw water from it for the garden, an enclosure of an acre,
-      fenced with palm-matting. It contains some palms and shrubs and a few
-      vegetables. Here also is a half-deserted house, that may once have been a
-      hotel and is now a miserable trattoria without beds. It is in charge of an
-      Arab who lives in a hut at the other side of the garden, with his wife and
-      a person who bore the unmistakable signs of being a mother-in-law. The
-      Arab made coffee for us, and furnished us a table, on which we spread our
-      luncheon under the verandah. He also gave us Nile-water which had been
-      brought from Suez in a cask on camel-back; and his whole charge was only
-      one bob (a shilling) each. I mention the charge, because it is
-      disenchanting in a spot of so much romance to pay for your entertainment
-      in &ldquo;bobs.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We had come, upon what I may truly call a sentimental pilgrimage, on
-      account of Moses and the Children of Israel. If they crossed over from
-      Mount Attâka yonder, then this might be the very spot where Miriam sang
-      the song of triumph. If they crossed at Chaloof, twenty miles above, as it
-      is more probable they did, then this might be the Marah whose bitter
-      waters Moses sweetened for the time being; the Arabs have a tradition that
-      Moses brought up water here by striking the ground with his stick. At all
-      events, the name of Moses is forever attached to this oasis, and it did
-      not seem exactly right that the best well should be owned by an Arab who
-      makes it the means of accumulating bobs. One room of the house was
-      occupied by three Jews, traders, who establish themselves here a part of
-      the year in order to buy, from the Bedaween, turquoise and antiquities
-      which are found at Mount Sinai. I saw them sorting over a peck of rough
-      and inferior turquoise, which would speedily be forwarded to
-      Constantinople, Paris, and London. One of them sold me a small intaglio,
-      which was no doubt of old Greek workmanship, and which he swore was picked
-      up at Mount Sinai. There is nothing I long more to know, sometimes, than
-      the history of wandering coins and intaglios which we see in the Orient.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not easy to reckon the value of a tradition, nor of a traditional
-      spot like this in which all the world feels a certain proprietorship. It
-      seemed to us, however, that it would be worth while to own this famous
-      Asiatic well; and we asked the owner what he would take for it. He offered
-      to sell the ranche for one hundred and fifty guineas; this, however, would
-      not include the camel,&mdash;for that he wanted ten pounds in addition;
-      but it did include a young gazelle, two goats, a brownish-yellow dog, and
-      a cat the color of the sand. And it also comprised, in the plantation, a
-      few palms, some junipers, of the Biblical sort, the acacia or &ldquo;shittah&rdquo;
-       tree of the Bible, and, best of all, the large shrub called the tamarisk,
-      which exudes during two months in the year a sweet gummy substance that
-      was the &ldquo;manna&rdquo; of the Israelites.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Mother-in-law wore a veil, a string of silver-gilt imitation coins,
-      several large silver bracelets, and a necklace upon which was sewed a
-      string of small Arabic gold coins. As this person more than anyone else
-      there represented Miriam,&mdash;not being too young,&mdash;we persuaded
-      her to sell us some of the coins as mementoes of our visit. We could not
-      determine, as I said, whether this spot is associated with Miriam or
-      whether it is the Marah of bitter waters; consequently it was difficult to
-      say what our emotions should be. However, we decided to let them be
-      expressed by the inscription that a Frenchman had written on a wall of the
-      house, which reads:&mdash;<i>Le cour me palpitait comme un amant qui
-      revoit sa bien aimée</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are three other wells enclosed, but unwalled, the largest of which&mdash;and
-      it has near it a sort of <i>loggia</i> or open shed where some dirty
-      pilgrims were reposing&mdash;is an unsightly pond full of a green growth
-      of algæ. In this enclosure, which contains two or three acres, are three
-      smaller wells, or natural springs, as they all are, and a considerable
-      thicket of palms and tamarisks. The larger well is the stronger in taste
-      and most bitter, containing more magnesia. The water in all is flat and
-      unpleasant, and not enlivened by carbonic acid gas, although we saw
-      bubbles coming to the surface constantly. If the spring we first visited
-      could be aerated, it would not be worse to drink than many waters that are
-      sought after. The donkeys liked it; but a donkey likes any thing. About
-      these feeble plantations the sand drifts from all directions, and it would
-      soon cover them but for the protecting fence. The way towards Sinai winds
-      through shifting sand-mounds, and is not inviting.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The desert over which we return is dotted frequently with tufts of a
-      flat-leafed, pale-green plant, which seem to thrive without moisture; and
-      in the distance this vegetation presents an appearance of large shrub
-      growth, greatly relieving the barrenness of the sand-plain. We had some
-      fine effects of mirage, blue lakes and hazy banks, as of streams afar off.
-      When we reached an elevation that commanded a view of the indistinct Sinai
-      range, we asked the guide to point out to us the &ldquo;rosy peaks of Mount
-      Sinai&rdquo; which Murray sees from Suez when he is there. The guide refused to
-      believe that you can see a rosy peak one hundred and twenty miles through
-      the air, and confirmed the assertion of the inhabitants of Suez that Mount
-      Sinai cannot be seen from there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      On our return we overtook a caravan of Bedaween returning from the holy
-      mount, armed with long rifles, spears, and huge swords, swinging along on
-      their dromedaries,&mdash;a Colt's revolver would put the whole lot of
-      braggarts to flight. One of them was a splendid specimen of manhood, and
-      we had a chance to study his graceful carriage, as he ran besides us all
-      the way; he had the traditional free air, a fine face and well-developed
-      limbs, and his picturesque dress of light-blue and buff, somewhat in rags,
-      added to his attractions. It is some solace to the traveler to call these
-      fellows beggars, since he is all the time conscious that their natural
-      grand manner contrasts so strongly with the uncouthness of his more recent
-      and western civilization.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Coming back into Suez, from this journey to another continent, we were
-      stopped by two customs-officers, who insisted upon searching our
-      lunch-basket, to see if we were attempting to smuggle anything from Asia.
-      We told the guide to give the representative of his Highness, with our
-      compliments, a hard-boiled egg.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Suez itself has not many attractions. But we are much impressed at the
-      hotel by the grave Hindoo waiters, who serve at table in a close-fitting
-      habit, like the present extremely narrow gown worn by ladies, and
-      ludicrous to our eyes accustomed to the flowing robes of the Arabs. They
-      wear also, while waiting, broad-brimmed, white, cork hats, slightly turned
-      up at the rim. It is like being waited on by serious genii. These men also
-      act as chambermaids. Their costume is Bengalee, and would not be at all
-      &ldquo;style&rdquo; in Bombay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Suez is reputed a healthful place, enjoying both sea and desert air, free
-      from malaria, and even in summer the heat is tempered. This is what the
-      natives say. The English landlady admits that it is very pleasant in
-      winter, but the summer is intensely hot, especially when the Khamseen, or
-      south wind, blows&mdash;always three days at a time&mdash;it is hardly
-      endurable; the thermometer stands at 110° to 1140 in the shaded halls of
-      the hotel round the court. It is unsafe for foreigners to stay here more
-      than two years at a time; they are certain to have a fever or some disease
-      of the liver.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The town is very much depressed now, and has been ever since the opening
-      of the canal. The great railway business fell off at once, all freight
-      going by water. Hundreds of merchants, shippers and forwarders are out of
-      employment. We hear the Khedive much blamed for his part in the canal, and
-      people here believe that he regrets it. Egypt, they say, is ruined by this
-      loss of trade; Suez is killed; Alexandria is ruined beyond reparation,
-      business there is entirely stagnant. What a builder and a destroyer of
-      cities has been the fluctuation of the course of the East India commerce!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0068" id="linkimage-0068"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0481.jpg" alt="0481] \ [illustration: 0482 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2HCH0037" id="link2HCH0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHAPTER XXXVII.&mdash;&ldquo;EASTWARD HO!&rdquo;
-     </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E left Suez at
-      eight in the morning by rail, and reached Ismailia in four hours, the fare&mdash;to
-      do justice to the conductor already named&mdash;being fourteen francs. A
-      part of the way the Bitter Lakes are visible, and we can see where the
-      canal channel is staked out through them. Next we encountered the
-      Fresh-Water Canal, and came in view of Lake Timsah, through which the Suez
-      canal also flows. This was no doubt once a fresh-water lake, fed by water
-      taken from the Nile at Bubastis.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Ismailia is a surprise, no matter how much you have heard of it. True, it
-      has something the appearance of a rectangular streeted town dropped,
-      ready-made, at a railway station on a western prairie; but Ismailia was
-      dropped by people of good taste. In 1860 there was nothing here but desert
-      sand, not a drop of water, not a spear of vegetation. To-day you walk into
-      a pretty village, of three or four thousand inhabitants, smiling with
-      verdure. Trees grow along the walks; little gardens bloom by every
-      cottage. Fronting the quay Mohammed Ali, which extends along the broad
-      Fresh-Water Canal, are the best residences, and many of them have better
-      gardens than you can find elsewhere, with few exceptions, in Egypt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The first house we were shown was that which had most interest for us&mdash;the
-      Swiss-like châlet of M. de Lesseps; a summerish, cheerful box, furnished
-      simply, but adorned with many Oriental curiosities. The garden which
-      surrounds it is rich in native and exotic plants, flowers and fruits. On
-      this quay are two or three barn-like, unfurnished palaces built hastily
-      and cheaply by the Khedive for the entertainment of guests. The finest
-      garden, however, and as interesting as any we saw in the East, is that
-      belonging to M. Pierre, who has charge of the waterworks. In this garden
-      can be found almost all varieties of European and Egyptian flowers;
-      strawberries were just ripening. We made inquiry here, as we had done
-      throughout Egypt, for the lotus, the favorite flower of the old Egyptians,
-      the sacred symbol, the mythic plant, the feeding upon which lulls the
-      conscience, destroys ambition, dulls the memory of all unpleasant things,
-      enervates the will, and soothes one in a sensuous enjoyment of the day to
-      which there is no tomorrow. It seems to have disappeared from Egypt with
-      the papyrus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The lotus of the poets I fear never existed, not even in Egypt. The lotus
-      represented so frequently in the sculptures, is a water-plant, the <i>Nymphaea
-      lutea</i>, and is I suppose the plant that was once common. The poor used
-      its bulb for food in times of scarcity. The Indian lotus, or <i>Nelumbium</i>,
-      is not seen in the sculptures, though Latin writers say it existed in
-      Egypt. It may have been this that had the lethean properties; although the
-      modern eaters and smokers of Indian hemp appear to be the legitimate
-      descendants of the lotus-eaters of the poets. However, the lotus whose
-      stalks and buds gave character to a distinct architectural style, we
-      enquired for in vain on the Nile. If it still grows there it would
-      scarcely be visible above water in the winter. But M. Pierre has what he
-      supposes to be the ancient lotus-plant; and his wife gave us seeds of it
-      in the seed-vessel&mdash;a large flat-topped funnel-shaped receptacle,
-      exactly the shape of the sprinkler of a watering-pot. Perhaps this is the
-      plant that Herodotus calls a lily like a rose, the fruit of which is
-      contained in a separate pod, that springs up from the root in form very
-      like a wasp's nest; in this are many berries fit to be eaten.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The garden adjoins the water-works, in which two powerful pumping-engines
-      raise the sweet water into a stand-pipe, and send it forward in iron pipes
-      fifty miles along the Suez Canal to Port Said, at which port there is a
-      reservoir that will hold three days' supply. This stream of fresh water is
-      the sole dependence of Port Said and all the intervening country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We rode out over the desert on an excellent road, lined with sickly
-      acacias growing in the watered ditches, to station No 6 on the canal. The
-      way lies along Lake Timsah. Upon a considerable elevation, called the
-      Heights of El Guisr, is built a <i>château</i> for the Khedive; and from
-      this you get an extensive view of the desert, of Lake Timsah and the
-      Bitter Lakes. Below us was the deep cutting of the Canal. El Guisr is the
-      highest point in the Isthmus, an elevated plateau six miles across and
-      some sixty-five feet above the level of the sea. The famous gardens that
-      flourished here during the progress of the excavation have entirely
-      disappeared with the cessation of the water from Ismailia. While we were
-      there an East India bound steamboat moved slowly up the canal, creating,
-      of course, waves along the banks, but washing them very little, for the
-      speed is limited to five miles an hour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Although the back streets of Ismailia are crude and unpicturesque, the
-      whole effect of the town is pleasing; and it enjoys a climate that must
-      commend it to invalids. It is dry, free from dust, and even in summer not
-      too warm, for there is a breeze from the lakes by day, and the nights are
-      always cooled by the desert air. Sea-bathing can be enjoyed there the year
-      round. It ought to be a wholesome spot, for there is nothing in sight
-      around it but sand and salt-water. The invalid who should go there would
-      probably die shortly of ennui, but he would escape the death expected from
-      his disease. But Ismailia is well worth seeing. The miracle wrought here
-      by a slender stream of water from the distant Nile, is worthy the
-      consideration of those who have the solution of the problem of making
-      fertile our western sand-deserts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We ate at Suez and Ismailia what we had not tasted for several months&mdash;excellent
-      fish. The fish of the Nile are nearly as good as a New-England sucker,
-      grown in a muddy mill-pond. I saw fishermen angling in the salt canal at
-      Ismailia, and the fish are good the whole length of it; they are of
-      excellent quality even in the Bitter Lakes, which are much salter than the
-      Mediterranean&mdash;in fact the bottom of these lakes is encrusted with
-      salt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We took passage towards evening on the daily Egyptian pocket-boat for Port
-      Said&mdash;a puffing little cigar-box of a vessel, hardly fifty feet long.
-      The only accommodation for passengers was in the forward cabin, which is
-      about the size of an omnibus, and into it were crammed twenty passengers,
-      Greeks, Jews, Koorlanders, English clergymen, and American travelers, and
-      the surly Egyptian mail-agent, who occupied a great deal of room, and
-      insisted on having the windows closed. Some of us tried perching on the
-      scrap of a deck, hanging our legs over the side; but it was bitterly cold
-      and a strong wind drove us below. In the cabin the air was utterly vile;
-      and when we succeeded in opening the hatchway for a moment, the draught
-      chilled us to the bones.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I do not mean to complain of all this; but I want it to appear that
-      sailing on the Suez Canal, especially at night, is not a
-      pleasure-excursion. It might be more endurable by day; but I do not know.
-      In the hours we had of daylight, I became excessively weary of looking at
-      the steep sand-slopes between which we sailed, and of hoping that every
-      turn would bring us to a spot where we could see over the bank.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At eight o'clock we stopped at Katanah for supper, and I climbed the bank
-      to see if I could obtain any information about the Children of Israel.
-      They are said to have crossed here. This is the highest point of the low
-      hills which separate Lake Menzaleh from the interior lakes. Along this
-      ridge is still the caravan-route between Egypt and Syria; it has been, for
-      ages unnumbered, the great highway of commerce and of conquest. This way
-      Thothmes III., the greatest of the Pharaohs and the real Sesostris, led
-      his legions into Asia; and this way Cambyses came to repay the visit with
-      interest.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was so dark that I could see little, but I had a historic sense of all
-      this stir and movement, of the passage of armies laden with spoils, and of
-      caravans from Nineveh and Damascus. And, although it was my first visit to
-      the place, it seemed strange to see here a restaurant, and waiters
-      hurrying about, and travelers snatching a hasty meal in the night on this
-      wind-blown sand-hill. And to feel that the stream of travel is no more
-      along this divide but across it! By the half-light I could distinguish
-      some Bedaween loitering about; their little caravan had camped here, for
-      they find it very convenient to draw water from the iron pipes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was quite dark when we presently sailed into Lake Menzaleh, and we
-      could see little. I only know that we held a straight course through it
-      for some thirty miles to Port Said. In the daytime you can see a dreary
-      expanse of morass and lake, a few little islands clad with tamarisks, and
-      flocks of aquatic birds floating in the water or drawn up on the
-      sand-spits in martial array&mdash;the white spoonbill, the scarlet
-      flamingo, the pink pelican. It was one o'clock in the morning when we saw
-      the Pharos of Port Said and sailed into the basin, amid many lights.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Port Said was made out of nothing, and it is pretty good. A town of eight
-      to ten thousand inhabitants, with docks, quays, squares, streets, shops,
-      mosques, hospitals, public buildings; in front of our hotel is a garden
-      and public square; all this fed by the iron pipe and the pump at Ismailia&mdash;without
-      this there is no fresh water nearer than Damietta. It is a shabby city,
-      and just now has the over-done appearance of one of our own western town
-      inflations. But its history is a record of one of the most astonishing
-      achievements of any age. Before there could be any town here it was
-      necessary to build a standpoint for it with a dredging machine.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Along this coast from Damietta to the gulf of Pelusium, where once emptied
-      the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, is a narrow strip of sand, separating the
-      Mediterranean from Lake Menzaleh; a high sea often breaks over it. It
-      would have saved much in distance to have carried the canal to the
-      Pelusium gulf, but the Mediterranean is shallow there many miles from
-      shore. The spot on which Port Said now stands was selected for the
-      entrance of the canal, because it was here that the land can be best
-      approached&mdash;the Mediterranean having sufficient depth at only two
-      miles from the shore. Here therefore, the dredgers began to work. The lake
-      was dredged for interior basins; the strip of sand was cut through; the
-      outer harbor was dredged; and the dredgings made the land for the town.
-      Artificial stone was then manufactured on the spot, and of this the long
-      walls, running out into the sea and protecting the harbor, the quays, and
-      the lighthouses were built. We saw enormous blocks of this composite of
-      sand and hydraulic lime, which weigh twenty-five tons each.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is impossible not to respect a city built by such heroic labor as this;
-      but we saw enough of it in half a day. The shops are many, and the signs
-      are in many languages, Greek being most frequent. I was pleased to read an
-      honest one in English&mdash;&ldquo;Blood-Letting and Tooth-picking.&rdquo; I have no
-      doubt they all would take your blood. In the streets are vagabonds,
-      adventurers, merchants, travelers, of all nations; and yet you would not
-      call the streets picturesque. Everything is strangely modernized and made
-      uninteresting. There is, besides, no sense of permanence here. The traders
-      appear to occupy their shops as if they were booths for the day. It is a
-      place of transit; a spot of sand amid the waters. I have never been in any
-      locality that seemed to me so nearly nowhere. A spot for an African bird
-      to light on a moment on his way to Asia. But the world flows through here.
-      Here lie the great vessels in the Eastern trade; all the Mediterranean
-      steamers call here.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Erymanthe is taking in her last freight, and it is time for us to go
-      on board. Abd-el-Atti has arrived with the baggage from Cairo. He has the
-      air of one with an important errand. In the hotels, on the street, in the
-      steamer, his manner is that of one who precedes an imposing embassy. He
-      likes state. If he had been born under the Pharaohs he would have been the
-      bearer of the flabellum before the king; and he would have carried it
-      majestically, with perhaps a humorous twinkle in his eye for some comrade
-      by the way. Ahman Abdallah, the faithful, is with him. He it was who made
-      and brought us the early morning coffee to-day,&mdash;recalling the peace
-      of those days on the Nile which now are in the dim past. It is ages ago
-      since we were hunting in the ruins of Abydus for the tomb of Osiris. It
-      was in another life, that delicious winter in Nubia, those weeks following
-      weeks, free from care and from all the restlessness of this driving age.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I shouldn't wonder if you were right, Abd-el-Atti, in not wanting to
-      start for Syria sooner. It was very cold on the boat last night.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Not go in Syria before April; always find him bad. 'Member what I say
-      when it rain in Cairo?&mdash;'This go to be snow in Jerusalem.' It been
-      snow there last week, awful storm, nobody go on the road, travelers all
-      stop, not get anywhere. So I hunderstand.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What is the prospect for landing at Jaffa tomorrow morning?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Do' know, be sure. We hope for the better.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We get away beyond the breakwater, as the sun goes down. The wind
-      freshens, and short waves hector the long sea swell, Egypt lies low; it is
-      only a line; it fades from view.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0069" id="linkimage-0069"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0488.jpg" alt="0488 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0488.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <div style="height: 6em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
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-  <head>

-    <title>

-      My Winter on the Nile, by Charles Dudley Warner

-    </title>

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-<pre>

-

-Project Gutenberg's My Winter on the Nile, by Charles Dudley Warner

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of

-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at

-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have

-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

-

-

-

-Title: My Winter on the Nile

-       Eighteenth Edition

-

-Author: Charles Dudley Warner

-

-Release Date: June 1, 2016 [EBook #52212]

-Last Updated: February 24, 2018

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: UTF-8

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY WINTER ON THE NILE ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by David Widger from page images generously

-provided by the Internet Archive

-

-

-

-

-

-

-</pre>

-

-    <div style="height: 8em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h1>

-      MY WINTER ON THE NILE

-    </h1>

-    <h2>

-      By Charles Dudley Warner

-    </h2>

-    <h3>

-      Eighteenth Edition

-    </h3>

-    <h4>

-      Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company

-    </h4>

-    <h3>

-      1876

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0001.jpg" alt="0001 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0011.jpg" alt="0011 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0012.jpg" alt="0012 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /> <br />

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      TO

-    </h3>

-    <h3>

-      MR. A. C. DUNHAM,

-    </h3>

-    <h3>

-      AND THE

-    </h3>

-    <h3>

-      VOYAGERS ON THE DAHABEËH &ldquo;RIP VAN WINKLE,&rdquo;

-     </h3>

-    <h3>

-      THIS

-    </h3>

-    <h3>

-      IMPERFECT RECORD OF THEIR EXPERIENCE IS

-    </h3>

-    <h3>

-      DEDICATED.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      <br /> <br />

-    </p>

-    <blockquote>

-      <p>

-        O Commander of the Faithful. Egypt is a compound of black earth and

-        green plants, between a pulverized mountain and a red sand. Along the

-        valley descends a river, on which the blessing of the Most High reposes

-        both in the evening and the morning, and which rises and falls with the

-        revolutions of the sun and moon. According to the vicissitudes of the

-        seasons, the face of the country is adorned with a silver wave, a

-        verdant emerald, and the deep yellow of a golden harvest.

-      </p>

-    </blockquote>

-    <blockquote>

-      <p>

-        From Amrou, Conqueror of Egypt, to the Khalif Omar.

-      </p>

-    </blockquote>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <b>CONTENTS</b>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> PREFATORY NOTE. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I.&mdash;AT THE GATES OF THE EAST. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II.&mdash;WITHIN THE PORTALS. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III.&mdash;EGYPT OF TO-DAY. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV.&mdash;CAIRO. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V.&mdash;IN THE BAZAAR. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI.&mdash;MOSQUES AND TOMBS. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII.&mdash;MOSLEM WORSHIP.&mdash;THE CALL

-      TO PRAYER. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII.&mdash;THE PYRAMIDS. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX.&mdash;PREPARATIONS FOR A VOYAGE. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X.&mdash;ON THE NILE. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI.&mdash;PEOPLE ON THE RIVER BANKS. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII.&mdash;SPENDING CHRISTMAS ON THE

-      NILE. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII.&mdash;SIGHTS AND SCENES ON THE

-      RIVER. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV.&mdash;MIDWINTER IN EGYPT. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV.&mdash;AMONG THE RUINS OF THEBES. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI.&mdash;HISTORY IN STONE. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII.&mdash;KARNAK. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII.&mdash;ASCENDING THE RIVER. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX.&mdash;PASSING THE CATARACT OF THE

-      NILE. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX.&mdash;ON THE BORDERS OF THE DESERT.

-      </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI&mdash;ETHIOPIA. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII.&mdash;LIFE IN THE TROPICS. WADY

-      HALFA. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII.&mdash;APPROACHING THE SECOND

-      CATARACT. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV.&mdash;GIANTS IN STONE. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV.&mdash;FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER XXVI.&mdash;MYSTERIOUS PHILÆ. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0027"> CHAPTER XXVII.&mdash;RETURNING. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0028"> CHAPTER XXVIII.&mdash;MODERN FACTS AND ANCIENT

-      MEMORIES. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0029"> CHAPTER XXIX.&mdash;THE FUTURE OF THE MUMMY'S

-      SOUL. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0030"> CHAPTER XXX.&mdash;FAREWELL TO THEBES. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0031"> CHAPTER XXXI.&mdash;LOITERING BY THE WAY. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0032"> CHAPTER XXXII.&mdash;JOTTINGS. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0033"> CHAPTER XXXIII.&mdash;THE KHEDIVE. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0034"> CHAPTER XXXIV.&mdash;THE WOODEN MAN. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0035"> CHAPTER XXXV.&mdash;ON THE WAY HOME. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0036"> CHAPTER XXXVI.&mdash;BY THE RED SEA. </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2HCH0037"> CHAPTER XXXVII.&mdash;&ldquo;EASTWARD HO!&rdquo; </a>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      PREFATORY NOTE.

-    </h2>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;My Winter on the Nile,&rdquo; and its sequel, &ldquo;In the Levant,&rdquo; which record the

-      experiences and observations of an Oriental journey, were both published

-      in 1876; but as this volume was issued only by subscription, it has never

-      reached the large public which is served by the general book trade.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is now republished and placed within the reach of those who have read

-      &ldquo;In the Levant.&rdquo; Advantage has been taken of its reissue to give it a

-      careful revision, which, however, has not essentially changed it. Since it

-      was written the Khedive of so many ambitious projects has given way to his

-      son, Tufik Pasha; but I have let stand what was written of Ismail Pasha

-      for whatever historical value it may possess. In other respects, what was

-      written of the country and the mass of the people in 1876 is true now. The

-      interest of Americans in the land of the oldest civilization has greatly

-      increased within the past few years, and literature relating to the Orient

-      is in more demand than at any previous time.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The brief and incidental allusion in the first chapter to the peculiarity

-      in the construction of the oldest temple at Pæstum&mdash;a peculiarity

-      here for the first time, so far as I can find, described in print&mdash;is

-      worthy the attention of archaeologists. The use of curved lines in this

-      so-called Temple of Neptune is more marked than in the Parthenon, and is

-      the secret of its fascination. The relation of this secret to the

-      irregularities of such mediaeval buildings as the Duomo at Pisa is

-      obvious.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Hartford, October, 1880.

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      C. D. W.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      <br /> <br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0020.jpg" alt="0020 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. I.&mdash;AT THE GATES OF THE EAST.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      The Mediterranean&mdash;The East unlike the West&mdash;A World risked for

-      a Woman&mdash;An Unchanging World and a Pickle Sea&mdash;Still an Orient&mdash;Old

-      Fashions&mdash;A Journey without Reasons&mdash;Off for the Orient&mdash;Leaving

-      Naples&mdash;A Shaky Court&mdash;A Deserted District&mdash;Ruins of Pæstum&mdash;Temple

-      of Neptune&mdash;Entrance to Purgatory&mdash;Safety Valves of the World&mdash;Enterprising

-      Natives&mdash;Sunset on the Sea&mdash;Sicily&mdash;Crete&mdash;Our

-      Passengers&mdash;The Hottest place on Record&mdash;An American Tourist&mdash;An

-      Evangelical Dentist&mdash;On a Secret Mission&mdash;The Vanquished

-      Dignitary

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. II.&mdash;WITHIN THE PORTALS.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Africa&mdash;Alexandria&mdash;Strange Contrasts&mdash;A New World&mdash;Nature&mdash;First

-      View of the Orient&mdash;Hotel Europe&mdash;Mixed Nationalities&mdash;The

-      First Backsheesh&mdash;Street Scenes in Alexandria&mdash;Familiar Pictures

-      Idealized&mdash;Cemetery Day&mdash;A Novel Turn Out&mdash;A Moslem

-      Cemetery&mdash;New Terrors for Death&mdash;Pompey's Pillar&mdash;Our First

-      Camel&mdash;Along the Canal&mdash;Departed Glory&mdash;A set of Fine

-      Fellows&mdash;Our Handsome Dragomen&mdash;Bazaars&mdash;Universal Good

-      Humor&mdash;A Continuous Holiday&mdash;Private life in Egypt&mdash;Invisible

-      Blackness&mdash;The Land of Color and the Sun&mdash;A Casino

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. III.&mdash;EGYPT OF TO-DAY.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Railways&mdash;Our Valiant Dragomen&mdash;A Hand-to-Hand Struggle&mdash;Alexandria

-      to Cairo&mdash;Artificial Irrigation&mdash;An Arab Village&mdash;The Nile&mdash;Egyptian

-      Festivals&mdash;Pyramids of Geezeh&mdash;Cairo&mdash;Natural Queries.

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. IV.&mdash;CAIRO.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      A Rhapsody&mdash;At Shepherd's&mdash;Hotel life, Egyptian plan&mdash;English

-      Noblemen&mdash;Life in the Streets&mdash;The Valuable Donkey and his

-      Driver&mdash;The &ldquo;swell tiling&rdquo; in Cairo&mdash;A hint for Central Park&mdash;Eunuchs&mdash;&ldquo;Yankee

-      Doodles&rdquo; of Cairo&mdash;A Representative Arab&mdash;Selecting Dragomen&mdash;The

-      Great Business of Egypt&mdash;An Egyptian Market-Place&mdash;A Substitute

-      for Clothes&mdash;Dahabeëhs of the Nile&mdash;A Protracted Negotiation&mdash;Egyptian

-      wiles

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. V.&mdash;ON THE BAZAAR.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Sight Seeing in Cairo&mdash;An Eastern Bazaar&mdash;Courteous Merchants&mdash;The

-      Honored Beggar&mdash;Charity to be Rewarded&mdash;A Moslem Funeral&mdash;The

-      Gold Bazaar&mdash;Shopping for a Necklace&mdash;Conducting a Bride Home&mdash;A

-      Partnership matter&mdash;Early Marriages and Decay&mdash;Longings for

-      Youth

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. VI.&mdash;MOSQUES AND TOMBS.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      The Sirocco&mdash;The Desert&mdash;The Citadel of Cairo&mdash;Scene of the

-      Massacre of the Memlooks&mdash;The World's Verdict&mdash;The Mosque of

-      Mohammed Ali&mdash;Tomb of the Memlook Sultans&mdash;Life out of Death

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. VII.&mdash;MOSLEM WORSHIP&mdash;THE CALL TO PRATER.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      An Enjoyable City&mdash;Definition of Conscience&mdash;&ldquo;Prayer is better

-      than Sleep&rdquo;&mdash;Call of the Muezzin&mdash;Moslems at Prayer&mdash;Interior

-      of a Mosque&mdash;Oriental Architecture&mdash;The Slipper Fitters&mdash;Devotional

-      Washing&mdash;An Inman's Supplications

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. VIII.&mdash;THE PYRAMIDS.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Ancient Sepulchres&mdash;Grave Robbers&mdash;The Poor Old Mummy&mdash;The

-      Oldest Monument in the World&mdash;First View of the Pyramids&mdash;The

-      resident Bedaween&mdash;Ascending the Steps&mdash;Patent Elevators&mdash;A

-      View from the Top&mdash;The Guide's Opinions&mdash;Origin of &ldquo;Murray's

-      Guide Book&rdquo;&mdash;Speculations on the Pyramids&mdash;The Interior&mdash;Absolute

-      Night&mdash;A Taste of Death&mdash;The Sphinx&mdash;Domestic Life in a

-      Tomb&mdash;Souvenirs of Ancient Egypt&mdash;Backsheesh!

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. IX.&mdash;PREPARATIONS FOR A VOYAGE.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      A Weighty Question&mdash;The Seasons Bewitched&mdash;Poetic Dreams

-      Realized&mdash;Egyptian Music&mdash;Public Garden&mdash;A Wonderful Rock&mdash;Its

-      Patrons&mdash;The Playing Band&mdash;Native Love Songs&mdash;The Howling

-      Derweeshes&mdash;An Exciting Performance&mdash;The Shakers put to Shame&mdash;Descendants

-      of the Prophet&mdash;An Ancient Saracenic Home&mdash;The Land of the Elea

-      and the Copt&mdash;Historical Curiosities&mdash;Preparing for our Journey&mdash;Laying

-      in of Medicines and Rockets&mdash;A Determination to be Liberal&mdash;Official

-      life in Egypt&mdash;An Interview with the Bey&mdash;Paying for our Rockets&mdash;A

-      Walking Treasury&mdash;Waiting for Wind

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. X.&mdash;ON THE NILE.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      On Board the &ldquo;Rip Van Winkle&rdquo;&mdash;A Farewell Dinner&mdash;The Three

-      Months Voyage Commenced&mdash;On the Nile&mdash;Our Pennant's Device&mdash;Our

-      Dahabeëh&mdash;Its Officers and Crew&mdash;Types of Egyptian Races&mdash;The

-      Kingdom of the &ldquo;Stick&rdquo;&mdash;The false Pyramid of Maydoon&mdash;A Night on

-      the River&mdash;Curious Crafts&mdash;Boat Races on the Nile&mdash;Native

-      Villages&mdash;Songs of the Sailors&mdash;Incidents of the Day&mdash;The

-      Copts&mdash;The Patriarch&mdash;The Monks of Gebel é Tayr&mdash;Disappointment

-      all Round&mdash;A Royal Luxury&mdash;The Banks of the Nile&mdash;Gum

-      Arabic&mdash;Unfair Reports of us&mdash;Speed of our Dahabeëh&mdash;Egyptian

-      Bread&mdash;Hasheesh-Smoking&mdash;Egyptian Robbers&mdash;Sitting in

-      Darkness&mdash;Agriculture&mdash;Gathering of Taxes&mdash;Successful

-      Voyaging

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XI.&mdash;PEOPLE ON THE RIVER BANK.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Sunday on the Nile&mdash;A Calm&mdash;A Land of Tombs&mdash;A New Divinity&mdash;Burial

-      of a Child&mdash;A Sunday Companion on Shore&mdash;A Philosophical People&mdash;No

-      Sunday Clothes&mdash;The Aristocratic Bedaween&mdash;The Sheykh&mdash;Rare

-      Specimens for the Centennial&mdash;Tracts Needed&mdash;Woman's Rights&mdash;Pigeons

-      and Cranes&mdash;Balmy Winter Nights&mdash;Tracking&mdash;Copying Nature

-      in Dress&mdash;Resort of Crocodiles&mdash;A Hermit's Cave&mdash;Waiting

-      for Nothing&mdash;Crocodile Mummies&mdash;The Boatmen's Song&mdash;Furling

-      Sails&mdash;Life Again&mdash;Pictures on the Nile.

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XII.&mdash;SPENDING CHRISTMAS ON THE NILE.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Independence in Spelling&mdash;Asioot&mdash;Christmas Day&mdash;The

-      American Consul&mdash;A Visit to the Pasha&mdash;Conversing by an

-      Interpreter&mdash;The Ghawazees at Home&mdash;Ancient Sculpture&mdash;Bird's

-      Eye View of the Nile&mdash;Our Christmas Dinner&mdash;Our Visitor&mdash;Grand

-      Reception&mdash;The Fire Works&mdash;Christmas Eve on the Nile

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XIII.&mdash;SIGHTS AND SCENES ON THE RIVER.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Ancient and Modern Ruins&mdash;&ldquo;We Pay Toll&mdash;Cold Weather&mdash;Night

-      Sailing&mdash;Farshoot&mdash;A Visit from the Bey&mdash;The Market-Place&mdash;The

-      Sakiyas or Water Wheels&mdash;The Nile is Egypt

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XIV.&mdash;MIDWINTER IN EGYPT.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Midwinter in Egypt&mdash;Slaves of Time&mdash;Where the Water Jars are

-      Made&mdash;Coming to Anchor and how it was Done&mdash;New Years&mdash;&rdquo;

-       Smits&rdquo; Copper Popularity&mdash;Great Strength of the Women&mdash;Conscripts

-      for the Army&mdash;Conscription a Good Thing&mdash;On the Threshold of

-      Thebes

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XV.&mdash;AMONG THE RUINS OF THEBES.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Situation of the City&mdash;Ruins&mdash;Questions&mdash;Luxor&mdash;Ivarnak&mdash;Glorification

-      of the Pharaohs&mdash;Sculptures in Stone&mdash;The Twin Colossi&mdash;Four

-      Hundred Miles in Sixteen Days

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XVI.&mdash;HISTORY IN STONE.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      A Dry City&mdash;A Strange Circumstance&mdash;A Pleasant Residence&mdash;Life

-      on the Dahabeëh&mdash;Illustrious Visitors&mdash;Nose-Rings and Beauty&mdash;Little

-      Fatimeh&mdash;A Mummy Hand and Thoughts upon it&mdash;Plunder of the Tombs&mdash;Exploits

-      of the Great Sesostris&mdash;Gigantic Statues and their Object&mdash;Skill

-      of Ancient Artists&mdash;Criticisms&mdash;Christian Churches and Pagan

-      Temples&mdash;Society&mdash;A Peep into an Ancient Harem&mdash;Statue of

-      Meiùnon&mdash;Mysteries&mdash;Pictures of Heroic Girls&mdash;Women in

-      History

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XVII.&mdash;KARNAK.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      An Egyptian Carriage&mdash;Wonderful Ruins&mdash;The Great Hall of Sethi&mdash;The

-      Largest Obelisk in The World&mdash;A City of Temples and Palaces

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XVIII.&mdash;ASCENDING THE RIVER.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Ascending the River&mdash;An Exciting Boat Race&mdash;Inside a Sugar

-      Factory&mdash;Setting Fire to a Town&mdash;Who Stole the Rockets?&mdash;Striking

-      Contrasts&mdash;A Jail&mdash;The Kodi or Judge&mdash;What we saw at

-      Assouan&mdash;A Gale&mdash;Ruins of Kom Ombos&mdash;Mysterious Movement&mdash;Land

-      of Eternal Leisure

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XIX.&mdash;PASSING THE CATARACT OF THE NILE.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Passing the Cataract of the Nile&mdash;Nubian Hills in Sight&mdash;Island

-      of Elephantine&mdash;Ownership of the Cataract&mdash;Difficulties of the

-      Ascent&mdash;Negotiations for a Passage&mdash;Items about Assouan&mdash;Off

-      for the Cataracts&mdash;Our Cataract Crew&mdash;First Impressions of the

-      Cataract&mdash;In the Stream&mdash;Excitement&mdash;Audacious Swimmers&mdash;Close

-      Steering&mdash;A Comical Orchestra&mdash;The Final Struggle&mdash;Victory&mdash;Above

-      the Rapids&mdash;The Temple of Isis&mdash;Ancient Kings and Modern

-      Conquerors

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XX.&mdash;ON THE BORDERS OF THE DESERT.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Ethiopia&mdash;Relatives of the Ethiopians&mdash;Negro Land&mdash;Ancestry

-      of the Negro&mdash;Conversion Made Easy&mdash;A Land of Negative Blessings&mdash;Cool

-      air from the Desert&mdash;Abd-el-Atti's Opinions&mdash;A Land of Comfort&mdash;Nubian

-      Costumes&mdash;Turning the Tables&mdash;The Great Desert&mdash;Sin, Grease

-      and Taxes

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXI.&mdash;ETHIOPIA.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Primitive Attire&mdash;The Snake Charmer&mdash;A House full of Snakes&mdash;A

-      Writ of Ejectments&mdash;Natives&mdash;The Tomb of Mohammed&mdash;Disasters&mdash;A

-      Dandy Pilate&mdash;Nubian Beauty&mdash;Opening a Baby's Eyes&mdash;A

-      Nubian Pigville

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXII.&mdash;LIFE IN THE TROPICS&mdash;WADY HALFA.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Life in the Tropics&mdash;Wady Haifa&mdash;Capital of Nubia&mdash;The

-      Centre of Fashion&mdash;The Southern Cross&mdash;Castor Oil Plantations&mdash;Justice

-      to a Thief&mdash;Abd-el-Atti's Court&mdash;Mourning for the Dead&mdash;Extreme

-      of our Journey&mdash;A Comical Celebration&mdash;The March of

-      Civilization.

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXIII.&mdash;APPROACHING THE SECOND CATARACT.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Two Ways to See It&mdash;Pleasures of Canal Riding&mdash;Bird's Eye View

-      of the Cataracts&mdash;Signs of Wealth&mdash;Wady Haifa&mdash;A Nubian

-      Belle&mdash;Classic Beauty&mdash;A Greek Bride&mdash;Interviewing a

-      Crocodile&mdash;Joking with a Widow&mdash;A Model Village

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXIV.&mdash;GIANTS IN STONE.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      The Colossi of Aboo Simbel, the largest in the World&mdash;Bombast&mdash;Exploits

-      of Remeses II.&mdash;A Mysterious Temple&mdash;Feting Ancient Deities&mdash;Guardians

-      of the Nile&mdash;The Excavated Rock&mdash;The Temple&mdash;A Row of

-      Sacred Monkeys&mdash;Our Last View of The Giants

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXV.&mdash;FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Learning the Language&mdash;Models of Beauty&mdash;Cutting up a Crocodile&mdash;Egyptian

-      Loafers&mdash;A Modern David&mdash;A Present&mdash;Our Menagerie&mdash;The

-      Chameleon&mdash;Woman's Rights&mdash;False Prophets&mdash;Incidents&mdash;The

-      School Master at Home&mdash;Confusion&mdash;Too Much Conversion&mdash;Charity&mdash;Wonderful

-      Birds at Mecca

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXVI.&mdash;MYSTERIOUS PHILÆ.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Leave &ldquo;well enough&rdquo; Alone&mdash;The Myth of Osiris&mdash;The Heights of

-      Biggeh&mdash;Cleopatra's Favorite Spot&mdash;A Legend&mdash;Mr. Fiddle&mdash;Dreamland&mdash;Waiting

-      for a Prince&mdash;An Inland Excursion&mdash;Quarries&mdash;Adieu

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXVII.&mdash;RETURNING

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Downward Run&mdash;Kidnapping a Sheykh&mdash;Blessed with Relatives&mdash;Making

-      the Chute&mdash;Artless Children&mdash;A Model of Integrity&mdash;Justice&mdash;An

-      Accident&mdash;Leaving Nubia&mdash;A Perfect Shame

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXVIII.&mdash;MODERN FACTS AND ANCIENT MEMORIES.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      The Mysterious Pebble&mdash;Ancient Quarries&mdash;Prodigies of Labor&mdash;Humor

-      in Stone&mdash;A Simoon&mdash;Famous Grottoes&mdash;Naughty Attractions&mdash;Bogus

-      Relics&mdash;Antiquity Smith

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXIX.&mdash;THE FUTURE OF THE MUMMY'S SOUL.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Ancient Egyptian Literature&mdash;Mummies&mdash;A Visit to the Tombs&mdash;Disturbing

-      the Dead&mdash;The Funeral Ritual&mdash;Unpleasant Explorations A Mummy in

-      Pledge&mdash;A Desolate Way&mdash;Buried Secrets&mdash;Building for

-      Eternity&mdash;Before the Judgment Seat&mdash;Weighed in the Balance The

-      Habitation of the Dead&mdash;Illuminated&mdash;Accommodations for the

-      Mummy&mdash;The Pharaoh of the Exodus&mdash;A Baby Charon&mdash;Bats

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXX.&mdash;FAREWELL TO THEBES.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Social Festivities&mdash;An Oriental Dinner&mdash;Dancing Girls&mdash;Honored

-      by the Sultan&mdash;The Native Consul&mdash;Finger Feeding&mdash;A Dance&mdash;Ancient

-      Style of Dancing&mdash;The Poetry of Night&mdash;Karnak by Moonlight&mdash;Amusements

-      at Luxor&mdash;Farewell to Thebes

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXXI.&mdash;LOITERING BY THE WAY.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very Grammatick&rdquo;&mdash;The Lying in Temple&mdash;A Holy Man&mdash;Scarecrows&mdash;Asinine

-      Performers&mdash;Antiquity&mdash;Old Masters&mdash;Profit and Loss&mdash;Hopeless

-      &ldquo;Fellahs&rdquo;&mdash;Lion's Oil&mdash;A Bad Reputation&mdash;An Egyptian Mozart

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXXII.&mdash;JOTTINGS.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Mission School&mdash;Education of Women&mdash;Contrasts&mdash;A Mirage&mdash;Tracks

-      of Successive Ages&mdash;Bathers&mdash;Tombs of the Sacred Bulls&mdash;Religion

-      and Grammar&mdash;Route to Darfoor&mdash;Winter Residence of the Holy

-      Family&mdash;Grottoes&mdash;Mistaken Views&mdash;Dust and Ashes&mdash;Osman

-      Bey&mdash;A Midsummer's Night Dream&mdash;Ruins of Memphis&mdash;Departed

-      Glory&mdash;A Second Visit to the Pyramids of Geezeh&mdash;An Artificial

-      Mother

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXXIII.&mdash;THE KHEDIVE.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Al Gezereh&mdash;Aboo Yusef the Owner&mdash;Cairo Again&mdash;A Question&mdash;The

-      Khedive&mdash;Solomon and the Viceroy&mdash;The Khedive's Family Expenses&mdash;Another

-      Joseph&mdash;Personal Government&mdash;Docks of Cairo&mdash;Raising Mud&mdash;Popular

-      Superstitions&mdash;Leave Taking

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXXIV.&mdash;THE WOODEN MAN.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Visiting a Harem&mdash;A Reception&mdash;The Khedive at Home&mdash;Ladies

-      of the Harem&mdash;Wife of Tufik Pasha&mdash;The Mummy&mdash;The Wooden

-      Man Discoveries of Mariette Bey&mdash;Egypt and Greece Compared&mdash;Learned

-      Opinions

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXXV.&mdash;ON THE WAY HOME.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Leaving our Dahabeeh&mdash;The Baths in Cairo&mdash;Curious Mode of

-      Execution&mdash;The Guzeereh Palace&mdash;Empress Eugenia's Sleeping Room&mdash;Medallion

-      of Benjamin Franklin in Egypt&mdash;Heliopolis&mdash;The Bedaween Bride&mdash;Holy

-      Places&mdash;The Resting Place of the Virgin Mary&mdash;Fashionable Drives&mdash;The

-      Shoobra Palace&mdash;Forbidden Books&mdash;A Glimpse of a Bevy of Ladies&mdash;Uncomfortable

-      Guardians.

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXXVI.&mdash;BY THE RED SEA.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Following the Track of the Children of Israel&mdash;Routes to Suez&mdash;Temples&mdash;Where

-      was the Red Sea Crossed?&mdash;In sight of the Bitter Lakes&mdash;Approaching

-      the Red Sea&mdash;Faith&mdash;The Suez Canal&mdash;The Wells of Moses&mdash;A

-      Sentimental Pilgrimage&mdash;Price of one of the Wells&mdash;Miriam of

-      Marah&mdash;Water of the Wells&mdash;Returning to Suez&mdash;A Caravan of

-      Bedaweens&mdash;Lunch Baskets searched by Custom Officers&mdash;The

-      Commerce of the East

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      CHAPT. XXXVII.&mdash;EASTWARD HO.

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      Leaving Suez&mdash;Ismailia&mdash;The Lotus&mdash;A Miracle&mdash;Egyptian

-      Steamer&mdash;Information Sought&mdash;The Great Highway&mdash;Port Said&mdash;Abd-el-Atti

-      again&mdash;Great Honors Lost&mdash;Farewell to Egypt

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0028.jpg" alt="0028 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER I.&mdash;AT THE GATES OF THE EAST.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE Mediterranean

-      still divides the East from the West. Ages of traffic and intercourse

-      across its waters have not changed this fact; neither the going of armies

-      nor of embassies, Northmen forays nor Saracenic maraudings, Christian

-      crusades nor Turkish invasions, neither the borrowing from Egypt of its

-      philosophy and science, nor the stealing of its precious monuments of

-      antiquity, down to its bones, not all the love-making, slave-trading,

-      war-waging, not all the commerce of four thousand years, by oar and sail

-      and steam, have sufficed to make the East like the West.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Half the world was lost at Actium, they like to say, for the sake of a

-      woman; but it was the half that I am convinced we never shall gain&mdash;for

-      though the Romans did win it they did not keep it long, and they made no

-      impression on it that is not, compared with its own individuality, as

-      stucco to granite. And I suppose there is not now and never will be

-      another woman in the East handsome enough to risk a world for.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There, across the most fascinating and fickle sea in the world&mdash;a

-      feminine sea, inconstant as lovely, all sunshine and tears in a moment,

-      reflecting in its quick mirror in rapid succession the skies of grey and

-      of blue, the weather of Europe and of Africa, a sea of romance and nausea&mdash;lies

-      a world in Everything unlike our own, a world perfectly known yet never

-      familiar and never otherwise than strange to the European and American. I

-      had supposed it otherwise; I had been led to think that modern

-      civilization had more or less transformed the East to its own likeness;

-      that, for instance the railway up the Nile had practically &ldquo;done for&rdquo; that

-      historic stream. They say that if you run a red-hot nail through an

-      orange, the fruit will keep its freshness and remain unchanged a long

-      time. The thrusting of the iron into Egypt may arrest decay, but it does

-      not appear to change the country.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is still an Orient, and I believe there would be if it were all

-      canaled, and railwayed, and converted; for I have great faith in habits

-      that have withstood the influence of six or seven thousand years of

-      changing dynasties and religions. Would you like to go a little way with

-      me into this Orient?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The old-fashioned travelers had a formal fashion of setting before the

-      reader the reasons that induced them to take the journey they described;

-      and they not unfrequently made poor health an apology for their

-      wanderings, judging that that excuse would be most readily accepted for

-      their eccentric conduct. &ldquo;Worn out in body and mind we set sail,&rdquo; etc.;

-      and the reader was invited to launch in a sort of funereal bark upon the

-      Mediterranean and accompany an invalid in search of his last

-      resting-place.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There was in fact no reason why we should go to Egypt&mdash;a remark that

-      the reader will notice is made before he has a chance to make it&mdash;and

-      there is no reason why any one indisposed to do so should accompany us. If

-      information is desired, there are whole libraries of excellent books about

-      the land of the Pharaohs, ancient and modern, historical, archaeological,

-      statistical, theoretical, geographical; if amusement is wanted, there are

-      also excellent books, facetious and sentimental. I suppose that volumes

-      enough have been written about Egypt to cover every foot of its arable

-      soil if they were spread out, or to dam the Nile if they were dumped into

-      it, and to cause a drought in either case if they were not all interesting

-      and the reverse of dry. There is therefore no <i>onus</i> upon the

-      traveler in the East to-day to write otherwise than suits his humor; he

-      may describe only what he chooses. With this distinct understanding I

-      should like the reader to go with me through a winter in the Orient. Let

-      us say that we go to escape winter.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is the last of November, 1874&mdash;the beginning of what proved to be

-      the bitterest winter ever known in America and Europe, and I doubt not it

-      was the first nip of the return of the rotary glacial period&mdash;that we

-      go on board a little Italian steamer in the harbor of Naples, reaching it

-      in a row-boat and in a cold rain. The deck is wet and dismal; Vesuvius is

-      invisible, and the whole sweep of the bay is hid by a slanting mist. Italy

-      has been in a shiver for a month; snow on the Alban hills and in the

-      Tusculan theatre; Rome was as chilly as a stone tomb with the door left

-      open. Naples is little better; Boston, at any season, is better than

-      Naples&mdash;now.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We steam slowly down the harbor amid dripping ships, losing all sight of

-      villages and the lovely coast; only Capri comes out comely in the haze, an

-      island cut like an antique cameo. Long after dark we see the light on it

-      and also that of the Punta della Campanella opposite, friendly beams

-      following us down the coast. We are off Pæstum,' and I can feel that its

-      noble temple is looming there in the darkness. This ruin is in some sort a

-      door into, an introduction to, the East.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Pæstum has been a deadly marsh for eighteen hundred years, and deserted

-      for almost a thousand. Nettles and unsightly brambles have taken the place

-      of the &ldquo;roses of Pæstum&rdquo; of which the Roman poets sang; but still as a

-      poetic memory, the cyclamen trails among the <i>debris</i> of the old

-      city; and the other day I found violets waiting for a propitious season to

-      bloom. The sea has retired away from the site of the town and broadened

-      the marsh in front of it. There are at Pæstum three Greek temples, called,

-      no one can tell why, the Temple of Neptune, the Basilica, and the Temple

-      of Ceres; remains of the old town wall and some towers; a tumbledown house

-      or two, and a wretched tavern. The whole coast is subject to tremors of

-      the earth, and the few inhabitants hanging about there appear to have had

-      all their bones shaken out of them by the fever and ague.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We went down one raw November morning from Naples, driving from a station

-      on the Calabrian railway, called Battipaglia, about twelve miles over a

-      black marshy plain, relieved only by the bold mountains, on the right and

-      left. This plain is gradually getting reclaimed and cultivated; there is

-      raised on it inferior cotton and some of the vile tobacco which the

-      government monopoly compels the free Italians to smoke, and large

-      olive-orchards have been recently set out. The soil is rich and the

-      country can probably be made habitable again. Now, the few houses are

-      wretched and the few people squalid. Women were pounding stone on the road

-      we traveled, even young girls among them wielding the heavy hammers, and

-      all of them very thinly clad, their one sleazy skirt giving little

-      protection against the keen air. Of course the women were hard-featured

-      and coarse-handed; and both they and the men have the swarthy complexion

-      that may betoken a more Eastern origin. We fancied that they had a

-      brigandish look. Until recently this plain has been a favorite field for

-      brigands, who spied the rich traveler from the height of St. Angelo and

-      pounced upon him if he was unguarded. Now, soldiers are quartered along

-      the road, patrol the country on horseback, and lounge about the ruins at

-      Pæstum. Perhaps they retire to some height for the night, for the district

-      is too unhealthy for an Italian even, whose health may be of no

-      consequence. They say that if even an Englishman, who goes merely to shoot

-      woodcock, sleeps there one night, in the right season, that night will be

-      his last.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We saw the ruins of Pæstum under a cold grey sky, which harmonized with

-      their isolation. We saw them best from the side of the sea, with the

-      snow-sprinkled mountains rising behind for a background. Then they stood

-      out, impressive, majestic, time-defying. In all Europe there are no ruins

-      better worthy the study of the admirer of noble architecture than these.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Temple of Neptune is older than the Parthenon, its Doric sister, at

-      Athens. It was probably built before the Persians of Xerxes occupied the

-      Acropolis and saw from there the flight of their ruined fleet out of the

-      Strait of Salamis. It was built when the Doric had attained the acme of

-      its severe majesty, and it is to-day almost perfect on the exterior. Its

-      material is a coarse travertine which time and the weather have

-      honeycombed, showing the petrifications of plants and shells; but of its

-      thirty-six massive exterior columns not one has fallen, though those on

-      the north side are so worn by age that the once deep fluting is nearly

-      obliterated. You may care to know that these columns which are thirty feet

-      high and seven and a half feet in diameter at the base, taper

-      symmetrically to the capitals, which are the severest Doric.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At first we thought the temple small, and did not even realize its two

-      hundred feet of length, but the longer we looked at it the larger it grew

-      to the eye, until it seemed to expand into gigantic size; and from

-      whatever point it was viewed its harmonious proportions were an increasing

-      delight. The beauty is not in any ornament, for even the pediment is and

-      always was vacant, but in its admirable lines.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The two other temples are fine specimens of Greek architecture, also

-      Doric, pure and without fault, with only a little tendency to depart from

-      severe simplicity in the curve of the capitals, and yet they did not

-      interest us. They are of a period only a little later than the Temple of

-      Neptune, and that model was before their builders, yet they missed the

-      extraordinary, many say almost spiritual beauty of that edifice. We sought

-      the reason, and found it in the fact that there are absolutely no straight

-      lines in the Temple of Neptune. The side rows of columns curve a little

-      out; the end rows curve a little in; at the ends the base line of the

-      columns curves a trifle from the sides to the center, and the line of the

-      architrave does the same. This may bewilder the eye and mislead the

-      judgment as to size and distance, but the effect is more agreeable than

-      almost any other I know in architecture. It is not repeated in the other

-      temples, the builders of which do not seem to have known its secret. Had

-      the Greek colony lost the art of this perfect harmony, in the little time

-      that probably intervened between the erection of these edifices? It was

-      still kept at Athens, as the Temple of Theseus and the Parthenon testify.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Looking from the interior of the temple out at either end, the entrance

-      seems to be wider at the top than at the bottom, an Egyptian effect

-      produced by the setting of the inward and outer columns. This appeared to

-      us like a door through which we looked into Egypt, that mother of all arts

-      and of most of the devices of this now confused world. We were on our way

-      to see the first columns, prototypes of the Doric order, chiselled by man.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The custodian&mdash;there is one, now that twenty centuries of war and

-      rapine and storms have wreaked themselves upon this temple&mdash;would not

-      permit us to take our luncheon into its guarded precincts; on a fragment

-      of the old steps, amid the weeds we drank our red Capri wine; not the

-      usual compound manufactured at Naples, but the last bottle of pure Capri

-      to be found on the island, so help the soul of the landlady at the hotel

-      there; ate one of those imperfectly nourished Italian chicken's orphan

-      birds, owning the pitiful legs with which the <i>table d'hote</i>

-      frequenters in Italy are so familiar, and blessed the government for the

-      care, tardy as it is, of its grandest monument of antiquity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When I looked out of the port-hole of the steamer early in the morning, we

-      were near the volcanic Lipari islands and islets, a group of seventeen

-      altogether; which serve as chimneys and safety-valves to this part of the

-      world. One of the small ones is of recent creation, at least it was heaved

-      up about two thousand years ago, and I fancy that a new one may pop up

-      here any time. From the time of the Trojan war all sorts of races and

-      adventurers have fought for the possession of these coveted islands, and

-      the impartial earthquake has shaken them all off in turn. But for the

-      mist, we should have clearly seen Stromboli, the ever-active volcano, but

-      now we can only say we saw it. We are near it, however, and catch its

-      outline, and listen for the groans of lost souls which the credulous

-      crusaders used to hear issuing from its depths. It was at that time the

-      entrance of purgatory; we read in the guide-book that the crusaders

-      implored the monks of Cluny to intercede for the deliverance of those

-      confined there, and that therefore Odilo of Cluny instituted the

-      observance of All Souls' Day.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The climate of Europe still attends us, and our first view of Sicily is

-      through the rain. Clouds hide the coast and obscure the base of Ætna

-      (which is oddly celebrated in America as an assurance against loss by

-      fire); but its wide fields of snow, banked up high above the clouds, gleam

-      as molten silver&mdash;treasure laid up in heaven&mdash;and give us the

-      light of the rosy morning.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Rounding the point of Faro, the <i>locale</i> of Charybdis and Scylla, we

-      come into the harbor of Messina and take shelter behind the long, curved

-      horn of its mole. Whoever shunned the beautiful Scylla was liable to be

-      sucked into the strong tide Charybdis; but the rock has lost its terror

-      for moderns, and the current is no longer dangerous. We get our last dash

-      of rain in this strait, and there is sunny weather and blue sky at the

-      south. The situation of Messina is picturesque; the shores both of

-      Calabria and Sicily are mountainous, precipitous and very rocky; there

-      seems to be no place for vegetation except by terracing. The town is

-      backed by lofty circling mountains, which form a dark setting for its

-      white houses and the string of outlying villages. Mediaeval forts cling to

-      the slopes above it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      No sooner is the anchor down than a fleet of boats surrounds the steamer,

-      and a crowd of noisy men and boys swarms on board, to sell us muscles,

-      oranges, and all sorts of merchandise, from a hair-brush to an

-      under-wrapper. The Sunday is hopelessly broken into fragments in a minute.

-      These lively traders use the English language and its pronouns with great

-      freedom. The boot-black smilingly asks: &ldquo;You black my boot?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The vender of under-garments says: &ldquo;I gif you four franc for dis one. I

-      gif you for dese two a seven franc. No? What you gif?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      A bright orange-boy, we ask, &ldquo;How much a dozen?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Half franc.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Too much.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How much you give? Tast him; he ver good; a sweet orange; you no like,

-      you no buy. Yes, sir. Tak one. This a one, he sweet no more.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      And they were sweet no more. They must have been lemons in oranges'

-      clothing. The flattering tongue of that boy and our greed of tropical

-      color made us owners of a lot of them, most of which went overboard before

-      we reached Alexandria, and would make fair lemonade of the streak of water

-      we passed through.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At noon we sail away into the warm south. We have before us the beautiful

-      range of Aspromonte, and the village of Reggio bear which in 1862

-      Garibaldi received one of his wounds, a sort of inconvenient love-pat of

-      fame. The coast is rugged and steep. High up is an isolated Gothic rock,

-      pinnacled and jagged. Close by the shore we can trace the railway track

-      which winds round the point of Italy, and some of the passengers look at

-      it longingly; for though there is clear sky overhead, the sea has on an

-      ungenerous swell; and what is blue sky to a stomach that knows its own

-      bitterness and feels the world sinking away from under it?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are long in sight of Italy, but Sicily still sulks in the clouds and

-      Mount Ætna will not show itself. The night is bright and the weather has

-      become milder; it is the prelude to a day calm and uninteresting. Nature

-      rallies at night, however, and gives us a sunset in a pale gold sky with

-      cloud-islands on the horizon and palm-groves on them. The stars come out

-      in extraordinary profusion and a soft brilliancy unknown in New England,

-      and the sky is of a tender blue&mdash;something delicate and not to be

-      enlarged upon. A sunset is something that no one will accept second-hand.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On the morning of December 1st., we are off Crete; Greece we have left to

-      the north, and are going at ten knots an hour towards great hulking

-      Africa. We sail close to the island and see its long, high barren coast

-      till late in the afternoon. There is no road visible on this side, nor any

-      sign of human habitation, except a couple of shanties perched high up

-      among the rocks. From this point of view, Crete is a mass of naked rock

-      lifted out of the waves. Mount Ida crowns it, snow-capped and gigantic.

-      Just below Crete spring up in our geography the little islands of Gozo and

-      Antigozo, merely vast rocks, with scant patches of low vegetation on the

-      cliffs, a sort of vegetable blush, a few stunted trees on the top of the

-      first, and an appearance of grass which has a reddish color.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The weather is more and more delightful, a balmy atmosphere brooding on a

-      smooth sea. The chill which we carried in our bones from New York to

-      Naples finally melts away. Life ceases to be a mere struggle, and becomes

-      a mild enjoyment. The blue tint of the sky is beyond all previous

-      comparison delicate, like the shade of a silk, fading at the horizon into

-      an exquisite grey or nearly white. We are on deck all day and till late at

-      night, for once enjoying, by the help of an awning, real winter weather

-      with the thermometer at seventy-two degrees.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our passengers are not many, but selected. There are a German baron and

-      his sparkling wife, delightful people, who handle the English language as

-      delicately as if it were glass, and make of it the most <i>naïve</i> and

-      interesting form of speech. They are going to Cairo for the winter, and

-      the young baroness has the longing and curiosity regarding the land of the

-      sun, which is peculiar to the poetical Germans; she has never seen a black

-      man nor a palm-tree. In charge of the captain, there is an Italian woman,

-      whose husband lives in Alexandria, who monopolizes the whole of the

-      ladies' cabin, by a league with the slatternly stewardess, and behaves in

-      a manner to make a state of war and wrath between her and the rest of the

-      passengers. There is nothing bitterer than the hatred of people for each

-      other on shipboard. When I afterwards saw this woman in the streets of

-      Alexandria I had scarcely any wish to shorten her stay upon this earth.

-      There are also two tough-fibered and strong-brained dissenting ministers

-      from Australia, who have come round by the Sandwich Islands and the United

-      States, and are booked for Palestine, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea.

-      Speaking of Aden, which has the reputation of being as hot as

-      Constantinople is wicked, one of them tells the story of an American (the

-      English have a habit of fastening all their dubious anecdotes upon &ldquo;an

-      American&rdquo;) who said that if he owned two places, one in Aden and the other

-      in H&mdash;&mdash;, he would sell the one in Aden. These ministers are

-      distinguished lecturers at home&mdash;a solemn thought, that even the most

-      distant land is subjected to the blessing of the popular lecture.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our own country is well represented, as it usually is abroad, whether by

-      appointment or self-selection. It is said that the oddest people in the

-      world go up the Nile and make the pilgrimage of Palestine. I have even

-      heard that one must be a little cracked who will give a whole winter to

-      high Egypt; but this is doubtless said by those who cannot afford to go.

-      Notwithstanding the peculiarities of so many of those one meets drifting

-      around the East (as eccentric as the English who frequent Italian <i>pensions</i>)

-      it must be admitted that a great many estimable and apparently sane people

-      go up the Nile&mdash;and that such are even found among Cook's &ldquo;personally

-      conducted.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      There is on board an American, or a sort of Irish-American more or less

-      naturalized, from Nebraska, a raw-boned, hard-featured farmer, abroad for

-      a two-years' tour; a man who has no guide-book or literature, except the

-      Bible which he diligently reads. He has spent twenty or thirty years in

-      acquiring and subduing land in the new country, and without any time or

-      taste for reading, there has come with his possessions a desire to see

-      that old world about which he cared nothing before he breathed the

-      vitalizing air of the West. That he knew absolutely nothing of Europe,

-      Asia, or Africa, except the little patch called Palestine, and found a day

-      in Rome too much for a place so run down, was actually none of our

-      business. He was a good patriotic American, and the only wonder was that

-      with his qualification he had not been made consul somewhere.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But a more interesting person, in his way, was a slender, no-blooded,

-      youngish, married man, of the vegetarian and vegetable school, also alone,

-      and bound for the Holy Land, who was sick of the sea and otherwise. He

-      also was without books of travel, and knew nothing of what he was going to

-      see or how to see it. Of what Egypt was he had the dimmest notion, and why

-      we or he or anyone else should go there. What do you go up the Nile for?

-      we asked. The reply was that the Spirit had called him to go through Egypt

-      to Palestine. He had been a dentist, but now he called himself an

-      evangelist. I made the mistake of supposing that he was one of those

-      persons who have a call to go about and convince people that religion is

-      one part milk (skimmed) and three parts water&mdash;harmless, however,

-      unless you see too much of them. Twice is too much. But I gauged him

-      inadequately. He is one of those few who comprehend the future, and,

-      guided wholly by the Spirit and not by any scripture or tradition, his

-      mission is to prepare the world for its impending change. He is <i>en

-      rapport</i> with the vast uneasiness, which I do not know how to name,

-      that pervades all lands. He had felt our war in advance. He now feels a

-      great change in the air; he is illuminated by an inner light that makes

-      him clairvoyant. America is riper than it knows for this change. I tried

-      to have him definitely define it, so that I could write home to my friends

-      and the newspapers and the insurance companies; but I could only get a

-      vague notion that there was about to be an end of armies and navies and

-      police, of all forms of religion, of government, of property, and that

-      universal brotherhood is to set in.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The evangelist had come aboard on an important and rather secret mission;

-      to observe the progress of things in Europe; and to publish his

-      observations in a book. Spiritualized as he was, he had no need of any

-      language except the American; he felt the political and religious

-      atmosphere of all the cities he visited without speaking to any one. When

-      he entered a picture gallery, although he knew nothing of pictures, he saw

-      more than any one else. I suppose he saw more than Mr. Ruskin sees. He

-      told me, among other valuable information, that he found Europe not so

-      well prepared for the great movement as America, but that I would be

-      surprised at the number who were in sympathy with it, especially those in

-      high places in society and in government. The Roman Catholic Church was

-      going to pieces; not that he cared any more for this than for the

-      Presbyterian&mdash;he, personally, took what was good in any church, but

-      he had got beyond them all; he was now only working for the establishment

-      of the truth, and it was because he had more of the truth than others that

-      he could see further.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He expected that America would be surprised when he published his

-      observations. &ldquo;I can give you a little idea,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;of how things are

-      working.&rdquo; This talk was late at night, and by the dim cabin lamp. &ldquo;When I

-      was in Rome, I went to see the head-man of the Pope. I talked with him

-      over an hour, and I found that he knew all about it!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good gracious! You don't say so!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, sir. And he is in full sympathy. But he dare not say anything. He

-      knows that his church is on its last legs. I told him that I did not care

-      to see the Pope, but if he wanted to meet me, and discuss the

-      infallibility question, I was ready for him.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What did the Pope's head-man say to that?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He said that he would see the Pope, and see if he could arrange an

-      interview; and would let me know. I waited a week in Rome, but no notice

-      came. I tell you the Pope don't dare discuss it.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then he didn't see you?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, sir. But I wrote him a letter from Naples.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perhaps he won't answer it.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, if he doesn't, that is a confession that he can't. He leaves the

-      field. That will satisfy me.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      I said I thought he would be satisfied.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Mediterranean enlarges on acquaintance. On the fourth day we are still

-      without sight of Africa, though the industrious screw brings us nearer

-      every moment. We talk of Carthage, and think we can see the color of the

-      Libyan sand in the yellow clouds at night. It is two o'clock on the

-      morning of December the third, when we make the Pharos of Alexandria, and

-      wait for a pilot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0039.jpg" alt="0039 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0007" id="linkimage-0007"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0040.jpg" alt="0040 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER II.&mdash;WITHIN THE PORTALS.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">E</span>AGERNESS to see

-      Africa brings us on deck at dawn. The low coast is not yet visible.

-      Africa, as we had been taught, lies in heathen darkness. It is the policy

-      of the Egyptian government to make the harbor difficult of access to

-      hostile men-of-war, and we, who are peacefully inclined, cannot come in

-      till daylight, nor then without a pilot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The day breaks beautifully, and the Pharos is set like a star in the

-      bright streak of the East. Before we can distinguish land, we see the

-      so-called Pompey's Pillar and the light-house, the palms, the minarets,

-      and the outline of the domes painted on the straw-color of the sky&mdash;a

-      dream-like picture. The curtain draws up with Eastern leisure&mdash;the

-      sun appears to rise more deliberately in the Orient than elsewhere; the

-      sky grows more brilliant, there are long lines of clouds, golden and

-      crimson, and we seem to be looking miles and miles into an enchanted

-      country. Then ships and boats, a vast number of them, become visible in

-      the harbor, and as the light grows stronger, the city and land lose

-      something of their beauty, but the sky grows more softly fiery till the

-      sun breaks through. The city lies low along the flat coast, and seems at

-      first like a brownish white streak, with fine lines of masts, palm-trees,

-      and minarets above it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The excitement of the arrival in Alexandria and the novelty of everything

-      connected with the landing can never be repeated. In one moment the Orient

-      flashes upon the bewildered traveler; and though he may travel far and see

-      stranger sights, and penetrate the hollow shell of Eastern mystery, he

-      never will see again at once such a complete contrast to all his previous

-      experience. One strange, unfamiliar form takes the place of another so

-      rapidly that there is no time to fix an impression, and everything is so

-      <i>bizarre</i> that the new-comer has no points of comparison. He is

-      launched into a new world, and has no time to adjust the focus of his

-      observation. For myself, I wished the Orient would stand off a little and

-      stand still so that I could try to comprehend it. But it would not; a

-      revolving kaleidoscope never presented more bewildering figures and colors

-      to a child, than the port of Alexandria to us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our first sight of strange dress is that of the pilot and the crew who

-      bring him off&mdash;they are Nubians, he is a swarthy Egyptian. &ldquo;How black

-      they are,&rdquo; says the Baroness; &ldquo;I don't like it.&rdquo; As the pilot steps on

-      deck, in his white turban, loose robe of cotton, and red slippers, he

-      brings the East with him; we pass into the influence of the Moslem spirit.

-      Coming into the harbor we have pointed out to us the batteries, the palace

-      and harem of the Pasha (more curiosity is felt about a harem than about

-      any other building, except perhaps a lunatic asylum), and the new villas

-      along the curve of the shore. It is difficult to see any ingress, on

-      account of the crowd of shipping.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The anchor is not down before we are surrounded by rowboats, six or eight

-      deep on both sides, with a mob of boatmen and guides, all standing up and

-      shouting at us in all the broken languages of three continents. They are

-      soon up the sides and on deck, black, brown, yellow, in turbans, in

-      tarbooshes, in robes of white, blue, brown, in brilliant waist-shawls,

-      slippered, and bare-legged, bare-footed, half-naked, with little on except

-      a pair of cotton drawers and a red fez, eager, big-eyed, pushing, yelping,

-      gesticulating, seizing hold of passengers and baggage, and fighting for

-      the possession of the traveler's goods which seem to him about to be

-      shared among a lot of pirates. I saw a dazed traveler start to land, with

-      some of his traveling-bags in one boat, his trunk in a second, and himself

-      in yet a third, and a <i>commissionaire</i> at each arm attempting to drag

-      him into two others. He evidently couldn't make up his mind, which to

-      take.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We have decided upon our hotel, and ask for the <i>commissionaire</i> of

-      it. He appears. In fact there are twenty or thirty of him. The first one

-      is a tall, persuasive, nearly naked Ethiop, who declares that he is the

-      only Simon Pure, and grasps our handbags. Instantly, a fluent,

-      business-like Alexandrian pushes him aside&mdash;&ldquo;I am the <i>commissionaire</i>&rdquo;&mdash;and

-      is about to take possession of us. But a dozen others are of like mind,

-      and Babel begins. We rescue our property, and for ten minutes a lively and

-      most amusing altercation goes on as to who is the representative of the

-      hotel. They all look like pirates from the Barbary coast, instead of

-      guardians of peaceful travelers. Quartering an orange, I stand in the

-      center of an interesting group, engaged in the most lively discussion,

-      pushing, howling and fiery gesticulation. The dispute is finally between

-      two:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I Hotel Europe!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I Hotel Europe; he no hotel.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He my brother, all same me.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He! I never see he before,&rdquo; with a shrug of the utmost contempt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As soon as we select one of them, the tumult subsides, the enemies become

-      friends and cordially join in loading our luggage. In the first five

-      minutes of his stay in Egypt the traveler learns that he is to trust and

-      be served by people who haven't the least idea that lying is not a

-      perfectly legitimate means of attaining any desirable end. And he begins

-      to lose any prejudice he may have in favor of a white complexion and of

-      clothes. In a decent climate he sees how little clothing is needed for

-      comfort, and how much artificial nations are accustomed to put on from

-      false modesty.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We begin to thread our way through a maze of shipping, and hundreds of

-      small boats and barges; the scene is gay and exciting beyond expression.

-      The first sight of the colored, pictured, lounging, waiting Orient is

-      enough to drive an impressionable person wild; so much that is novel and

-      picturesque is crowded into a few minutes; so many colors and flying

-      robes, such a display of bare legs and swarthy figures. We meet flat boats

-      coming down the harbor loaded with laborers, dark, immobile groups in

-      turbans and gowns, squatting on deck in the attitude which is the most

-      characteristic of the East; no one stands or sits&mdash;everybody squats

-      or reposes cross-legged. Soldiers are on the move; smart Turkish officers

-      dart by in light boats with half a dozen rowers; the crew of an English

-      man-of-war pull past; in all directions the swift boats fly, and with

-      their freight of color, it is like the thrusting of quick shuttles, in the

-      weaving of a brilliant carpet, before our eyes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We step on shore at the Custom-House. I have heard travelers complain of

-      the delay in getting through it. I feel that I want to go slowly, that I

-      would like to be all day in getting through&mdash;that I am hurried along

-      like a person who is dragged hastily through a gallery, past striking

-      pictures of which he gets only glimpses. What a group this is on shore;

-      importunate guides, porters, coolies. They seize hold of us, We want to

-      stay and look at them. Did ever any civilized men dress so gaily, so

-      little, or so much in the wrong place? If that fellow would untwist the

-      folds of his gigantic turban he would have cloth enough to clothe himself

-      perfectly. Look! that's an East Indian, that's a Greek, that's a Turk

-      that's a Syrian-Jew? No, he's Egyptian, the crook-nose is not uncommon to

-      Egyptians, that tall round hat is Persian, that one is from Abys&mdash;there

-      they go, we haven't half seen them! We leave our passports at the

-      entrance, and are whisked through into the baggage-room, where our guide

-      pays a noble official three francs for the pleasure of his chance

-      acquaintance; some nearly naked coolie-porters, who bear long cords, carry

-      off our luggage, and before we know it we are in a carriage, and a

-      rascally guide and interpreter&mdash;Heaven knows how he fastened himself

-      upon us in the last five minutes&mdash;is on the box and apparently owns

-      us? (It took us half a day and liberal backsheesh to get rid of the

-      evil-eyed fellow) We have gone only a little distance when half a dozen of

-      the naked coolies rush after us, running by the carriage and laying hold

-      of it, demanding backsheesh. It appears that either the boatman has

-      cheated them, or they think he will, or they havn't had enough. Nobody

-      trusts anybody else, and nobody is ever satisfied with what he gets, in

-      Egypt. These blacks, in their dirty white gowns, swinging their porter's

-      ropes and howling like madmen, pursue us a long way and look as if they

-      would tear us in pieces. But nothing comes of it. We drive to the Place

-      Mehemet Ali, the European square,&mdash;having nothing Oriental about it,

-      a square with an equestrian statue of Mehemet Ali, some trees and a

-      fountain&mdash;surrounded by hotels, bankers' offices and Frank shops.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is not much in Alexandria to look at except the people, and the

-      dirty bazaars. We never before had seen so much nakedness, filth and dirt,

-      so much poverty, and such enjoyment of it, or at least indifference to it.

-      We were forced to strike a new scale of estimating poverty and

-      wretchedness. People are poor in proportion as their wants are not

-      gratified. And here are thousands who have few of the wants that we have,

-      and perhaps less poverty. It is difficult to estimate the poverty of those

-      fortunate children to whom the generous sun gives a warm color for

-      clothing, who have no occupation but to sit in the same, all day, in some

-      noisy and picturesque thoroughfare, and stretch out the hand for the few

-      paras sufficient to buy their food, who drink at the public fountain, wash

-      in the tank of the mosque, sleep in street-corners, and feel sure of their

-      salvation if they know the direction of Mecca. And the Mohammedan religion

-      seems to be a sort of soul-compass, by which the most ignorant believer

-      can always orient himself. The best-dressed Christian may feel certain of

-      one thing, that he is the object of the cool contempt of the most naked,

-      opthalmic, flea-attended, wretched Moslem he meets. The Oriental conceit

-      is a peg above ours&mdash;it is not self-conscious.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In a fifteen minutes walk in the streets the stranger finds all the

-      pictures that he remembers in his illustrated books of Eastern life. There

-      is turbaned Ali Baba, seated on the hindquarters of his sorry donkey,

-      swinging his big feet in a constant effort to urge the beast forward;

-      there is the one-eyed calender who may have arrived last night from

-      Bagdad; there is the water-carrier, with a cloth about his loins,

-      staggering under a full goat-skin&mdash;the skin, legs, head, and all the

-      members of the brute distended, so that the man seems to be carrying a

-      drowned and water-soaked animal: there is the veiled sister of Zobeide

-      riding a grey donkey astride, with her knees drawn up, (as all women ride

-      in the East), entirely enveloped in a white garment which covers her head

-      and puffs out about her like a balloon&mdash;all that can be seen of the

-      woman are the toes of her pointed yellow slippers and two black eyes;

-      there is the seller of sherbet, a waterish, feeble, insipid drink,

-      clinking his glasses; and the veiled woman in black, with hungry eyes, is

-      gliding about everywhere. The veil is in two parts, a band about the

-      forehead, and a strip of black which hangs underneath the eyes and

-      terminates in a point at the waist; the two parts are connected by an

-      ornamented cylinder of brass, or silver if the wearer can afford it, two

-      and a half inches long and an inch in diameter. This ugly cylinder between

-      the restless eyes, gives the woman an imprisoned, frightened look. Across

-      the street from the hotel, upon the stone coping of the public square, is

-      squatting hour after hour in the sun, a row of these forlorn creatures in

-      black, impassive and waiting. We are told that they are washerwomen

-      waiting for a job. I never can remove the impression that these women are

-      half stifled behind their veils and the shawls which they draw over the

-      head; when they move their heads, it is like the piteous dumb movement of

-      an uncomplaining animal.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But the impatient reader is waiting for Pompey's Pillar. We drive outside

-      the walls, though a thronged gateway, through streets and among people

-      wretched and picturesque to the last degree. This is the road to the large

-      Moslem cemetery, and to-day is Thursday, the day for visiting the graves.

-      The way is lined with coffee-shops, where men are smoking and playing at

-      draughts; with stands and booths for the sale of fried cakes and

-      confections; and all along, under foot, so that it is difficult not to

-      tread on them, are private markets for the sale of dates, nuts, raisins,

-      wheat, and doora; the bare-legged owner sits on the ground and spreads his

-      dust-covered untempting fare on a straw mat before him. It is more

-      wretched and forlorn outside the gate than within. We are amid heaps of

-      rubbish, small mountains of it, perhaps the ruins of old Alexandria,

-      perhaps only the accumulated sweepings of the city for ages, piles of

-      dust, and broken pottery. Every Egyptian town of any size is surrounded by

-      these&mdash;the refuse of ages of weary civilization.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      What a number of old men, of blind men, ragged men&mdash;though rags are

-      no disgrace! What a lot of scrawny old women, lean old hags, some of them

-      without their faces covered&mdash;even the veiled ones you can see are

-      only bags of bones. There is a derweesh, a naked holy man, seated in the

-      dirt by the wall, reading the Koran. He has no book, but he recites the

-      sacred text in a loud voice, swaying his body backwards and forwards. Now

-      and then we see a shrill-voiced, handsome boy also reading the Koran with

-      all his might, and keeping a laughing eye upon the passing world. Here

-      comes a novel turn-out. It is a long truck-wagon drawn by one bony-horse.

-      Upon it are a dozen women, squatting about the edges, facing each other,

-      veiled, in black, silent, jolting along like so many bags of meal. A black

-      imp stands in front, driving. They carry baskets of food and flowers, and

-      are going to the cemetery to spend the day.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We pass the cemetery, for the Pillar is on a little hillock overlooking

-      it. Nothing can be drearier than this burying-ground&mdash;unless it may

-      be some other Moslem cemetery. It is an uneven plain of sand, without a

-      spear of grass or a green thing. It is covered thickly with ugly stucco,

-      oven-like tombs, the whole inconceivably shabby and dust covered; the

-      tombs of the men have head-stones to distinguish them from the women. Yet,

-      shabby as all the details of this crumbling cheap place of sepulture are,

-      nothing could be gayer or more festive than the scene before us. Although

-      the women are in the majority, there are enough men and children present,

-      in colored turbans, fezes, and gowns, and shawls of Persian dye, to

-      transform the graveyard into the semblance of a parterre of flowers. About

-      hundreds of the tombs are seated in a circle groups of women, with their

-      food before them, and the flowers laid upon the tomb, wailing and howling

-      in the very excess of dry-eyed grief. Here and there a group has employed

-      a &ldquo;welee&rdquo; or holy man, or a boy, to read the Koran for it&mdash;and these

-      Koran-readers turn an honest para by their vocation. The women spend

-      nearly the entire day in this sympathetic visit to their departed friends&mdash;it

-      is a custom as old as history, and the Egyptians used to build their tombs

-      with a visiting ante-chamber for the accommodation of the living. I should

-      think that the knowledge that such a group of women were to eat their

-      luncheon, wailing and roosting about one's tomb every week, would add a

-      new terror to death.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Pillar, which was no doubt erected by Diocletian to his own honor,

-      after the modest fashion of Romans as well as Egyptians, is in its present

-      surroundings not an object of enthusiasm, though it is almost a hundred

-      feet high, and the monolith shaft was, before age affected it, a fine

-      piece of polished Syenite. It was no doubt a few thousand years older than

-      Diocletian, and a remnant of that oldest civilization; the base and

-      capital he gave it are not worthy of it. Its principal use now is as a

-      surface for the paint-brushes and chisels of distinguished travelers, who

-      have covered it with their precious names. I cannot sufficiently admire

-      the <i>naïveté</i> and self-depreciation of those travelers who paint and

-      cut their names on such monuments, knowing as they must that the first

-      sensible person who reads the same will say, &ldquo;This is an ass.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We drive, still outside the walls, towards the Mahmoodéeh canal, passing

-      amid mounds of rubbish, and getting a view of the desert-like country

-      beyond. And now heaves in sight the unchanged quintessence of Orientalism&mdash;there

-      is our first camel, a camel in use, in his native setting and not in a

-      menagerie. There is a line of them, loaded with building-stones, wearily

-      shambling along. The long bended neck apes humility, but the supercilious

-      nose in the air expresses perfect contempt for all modern life. The

-      contrast of this haughty &ldquo;stuck-up-ativeness&rdquo; (it is necessary to coin

-      this word to express the camel's ancient conceit) with the royal ugliness

-      of the brute, is both awe-inspiring and amusing. No human royal family

-      dare be uglier than the camel. He is a mass of bones, faded tufts, humps,

-      lumps, splay-joints and callosities. His tail is a ridiculous wisp, and a

-      failure as an ornament or a fly-brush. His feet are simply big sponges.

-      For skin covering he has patches of old buffalo robes, faded and with the

-      hair worn off. His voice is more disagreeable than his appearance. With a

-      reputation for patience, he is snappish and vindictive. His endurance is

-      over-rated&mdash;that is to say he dies like a sheep on an expedition of

-      any length, if he is not well fed. His gait moves every muscle like an

-      ague. And yet this ungainly creature carries his head in the air, and

-      regards the world out of his great brown eyes with disdain. The Sphinx is

-      not more placid. He reminds me, I don't know why, of a pyramid. He has a

-      resemblance to a palm-tree. It is impossible to make an Egyptian picture

-      without him. What a Hapsburg lip he has! Ancient, royal? The very poise of

-      his head says plainly, &ldquo;I have come out of the dim past, before history

-      was; the deluge did not touch me; I saw Menes come and go; I helped

-      Shoofoo build the great pyramid; I knew Egypt when it hadn't an obelisk

-      nor a temple; I watched the slow building of the pyramid at Sakkara. Did I

-      not transport the fathers of your race across the desert? There are three

-      of us; the date-palm, the pyramid, and myself. Everything else is modern.

-      Go to!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Along the canal, where lie dahabeëhs that will by and by make their way up

-      the Nile, are some handsome villas, palaces and gardens. This is the

-      favorite drive and promenade. In the gardens, that are open to the public,

-      we find a profusion of tropical trees and flowering shrubs; roses are

-      decaying, but the blossoms of the yellow acacia scent the air; there are

-      Egyptian lilies; the plant with crimson leaves, not native here, grows as

-      high as the arbutilon tree; the red passion-flower is in bloom, and

-      morning-glories cover with their running vine the tall and slender

-      cypresses. The finest tree is the sycamore, with great gnarled trunk, and

-      down-dropping branches. Its fruit, the sycamore fig, grows directly on the

-      branch, without stem. It is an insipid fruit, sawdust-y, but the Arabs

-      like it, and have a saying that he who eats one is sure to return to

-      Egypt. After we had tried to eat one, we thought we should not care to

-      return. The interior was filled with lively little flies; and a priest who

-      was attending a school of boys taking a holiday in the grove, assured us

-      that each fig had to be pierced when it was green, to let the flies out,

-      in order to make it eatable. But the Egyptians eat them, flies and all.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The splendors of Alexandria must be sought in books. The traveler will see

-      scarcely any remains of a magnificence which dazzled the world in the

-      beginning of our era. He may like to see the mosque that marks the site of

-      the church of St. Mark, and he may care to look into the Coptic convent

-      whence the Venetians stole the body of the saint, about a thousand years

-      ago. Of course we go to see that wonder of our childhood, Cleopatra's

-      Needles, as the granite obelisks are called that were brought from

-      Alexandria and set up before a temple of Caesar in the time of Tiberius.

-      Only one is standing, the other, mutilated, lies prone beneath the soil.

-      The erect one stands near the shore and in the midst of hovels and

-      incredible filth. The name of the earliest king it bears is that of

-      Thothmes III., the great man of Egypt, whose era of conquest was about

-      1500 years before St. Mark came on his mission to Alexandria.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The city which has had as many vicissitudes as most cities, boasting under

-      the Cæsars a population of half a million, that had decreased to 6,000 in

-      1800, and has now again grown to over two hundred thousand, seems to be at

-      a waiting point; the merchants complain that the Suez Canal has killed its

-      trade. Yet its preeminence for noise, dirt and shabbiness will hardly be

-      disputed; and its bazaars and streets are much more interesting, perhaps

-      because it is the meeting-place of all races, than travelers usually

-      admit.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We had scarcely set foot in our hotel when we were saluted and waited for

-      by dragomans of all sorts. They knocked at our doors, they waylaid us in

-      the passages; whenever we emerged from our rooms half a dozen rose up,

-      bowing low; it was like being a small king, with obsequious attendants

-      waiting every motion. They presented their cards, they begged we would

-      step aside privately for a moment and look at the bundle of

-      recommendations they produced; they would not press themselves, but if we

-      desired a dragoman for the Nile they were at our service. They were of all

-      shades of color, except white, and of all degrees of oriental splendor in

-      their costume. There were Egyptians, Nubians, Maltese, Greeks, Syrians.

-      They speak well all the languages of the Levant and of Europe, except the

-      one in which you attempt to converse with them. I never made the

-      acquaintance of so many fine fellows in the same space of time. All of

-      them had the strongest letters of commendation from travelers whom they

-      had served, well-known men of letters and of affairs. Travelers give these

-      endorsements as freely as they sign applications for government

-      appointments at home.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The name of the handsome dragoman who walked with us through the bazaars

-      was, naturally enough, Ahmed Abdallah. He wore the red fez (tarboosh) with

-      a gay kuffia bound about it; an embroidered shirt without collar or

-      cravat; a long shawl of checked and bright-colored Beyrout silk girding

-      the loins, in which was carried his watch and heavy chain; a cloth coat;

-      and baggy silk trousers that would be a gown if they were not split enough

-      to gather about each ankle. The costume is rather Syrian than Egyptian,

-      and very elegant when the materials are fine; but with a suggestion of

-      effeminacy, to Western eyes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The native bazaars, which are better at Cairo, reveal to the traveler, at

-      a glance, the character of the Orient; its cheap tinsel, its squalor, and

-      its occasional richness and gorgeousness. The shops on each side of the

-      narrow street are little more than good-sized wardrobes, with room for

-      shelves of goods in the rear and for the merchant to sit cross-legged in

-      front. There is usually space for a customer to sit with him, and indeed

-      two or three can rest on the edge of the platform. Upon cords stretched

-      across the front hang specimens of the wares for sale. Wooden shutters

-      close the front at night. These little cubbies are not only the places of

-      sale but of manufacture of goods. Everything goes on in the view of all

-      the world. The tailor is stitching, the goldsmith is blowing the bellows

-      of his tiny forge, the saddler is repairing the old donkey-saddles, the

-      shoemaker is cutting red leather, the brazier is hammering, the weaver

-      sits at his little loom with the treadle in the ground&mdash;every trade

-      goes on, adding its own clatter to the uproar.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      What impresses us most is the good nature of the throng, under trying

-      circumstances. The street is so narrow that three or four people abreast

-      make a jam, and it is packed with those moving in two opposing currents.

-      Through this mass comes a donkey with a couple of panniers of soil or of

-      bricks, or bundles of scraggly sticks; or a camel surges in, loaded with

-      building-joists or with lime; or a Turkish officer, with a gaily

-      caparisoned horse impatiently stamping; a porter slams along with a heavy

-      box on his back; the water-carrier with his nasty skin rubs through; the

-      vender of sweetmeats finds room for his broad tray; the orange-man pushes

-      his cart into the throng; the Jew auctioneer cries his antique brasses and

-      more antique raiment. Everybody is jostled and pushed and jammed; but

-      everybody is in an imperturbable good humor, for no one is really in a

-      hurry, and whatever is, is as it always has been and will be. And what a

-      cosmopolitan place it is. We meet Turks, Greeks, Copts, Egyptians,

-      Nubians, Syrians, Armenians, Italians; tattered derweeshes, &ldquo;welees&rdquo; or

-      holy Moslems, nearly naked, presenting the appearance of men who have been

-      buried a long time and recently dug up; Greek priests, Jews, Persian

-      Parsees, Algerines, Hindoos, negroes from Darfoor, and flat-nosed blacks

-      from beyond Khartoom.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The traveler has come into a country of holiday which is perpetual. Under

-      this sun and in this air there is nothing to do but to enjoy life and

-      attend to religion five times a day. We look into a mosque; In the cool

-      court is a fountain for washing; the mosque is sweet and quiet, and upon

-      its clean matting a row of Arabs are prostrating themselves in prayer

-      towards the niche that indicates the direction of Mecca. We stroll along

-      the open streets encountering a novelty at every step. Here is a musician

-      a Nubian playing upon a sort of tambour on a frame; a picking, feeble

-      noise he produces, but he is accompanied by the oddest character we have

-      seen yet. This is a stalwart, wild-eyed son of the sand, coal-black, with

-      a great mass of uncombed, disordered hair hanging about his shoulders. His

-      only clothing is a breech-cloth and a round shaving-glass bound upon his

-      forehead; but he has hung about his waist heavy strings of goats' hoofs,

-      and those he shakes, in time to the tambour, by a tremulous motion of his

-      big hips as he minces about. He seems so vastly pleased with himself that

-      I covet knowledge of his language, in order to tell him that he looks like

-      an idiot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Near the Fort Napoleon, a hill by the harbor, we encounter another scene

-      peculiar to the East. A yellow-skinned, cunning-eyed conjurer has

-      attracted a ring of idlers about him, who squat in the blowing dust, under

-      the blazing sun, and patiently watch his antics. The conjurer himself

-      performs no wonders, but the spectators are a study of color and feature.

-      The costumes are brilliant red, yellow, and white. The complexions exhaust

-      the possibilities of human color. I thought I had seen black people in

-      South Carolina; but I saw a boy just now standing in a doorway who would

-      have been invisible but for his white shirt; and here is a fat negress in

-      a bright yellow gown and kerchief, whose jet face has taken an incredible

-      polish; only the most accomplished boot-black could raise such a shine on

-      a shoe; tranquil enjoyment oozes out of her. The conjurer is assisted by

-      two mites of children, a girl and a boy (no clothing wasted on them), and

-      between the three a great deal of jabber and whacking with cane sticks is

-      going on, but nothing is performed except the taking of a long snake from

-      a bag and tying it round the little girl's neck. Paras are collected,

-      however, and that is the main object of all performances.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A little further on, another group is gathered around a storyteller, who

-      is reeling off one of the endless tales in which the Arab delights;

-      love-adventures, not always the most delicate but none the less enjoyed

-      for that, or the story of some poor lad who has had a wonderful career and

-      finally married the Sultan's daughter. He is accompanied in his narrative

-      by two men thumping upon darabooka drums, in a monotonous, sleepy fashion,

-      quite in accordance however with the everlasting leisure that pervades the

-      air. Walking about are the venders of sweets, and of greasy cakes, who

-      carry tripods on which to rest their brass trays, and who split the air

-      with their cries.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is color, color, that makes all this shifting panorama so fascinating,

-      and hides the nakedness, the squalor, the wretchedness of all this

-      unconcealed poverty; color in flowing garments, color in the shops, color

-      in the sky. We have come to the land of the sun.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At night when we walk around the square we stumble over bundles of rags

-      containing men who are asleep, in all the corners, stretched on doorsteps,

-      laid away on the edge of the sidewalk. Opposite the hotel is a <i>casino</i>,

-      which is more Frank than Egyptian. The musicians are all women and Germans

-      or Bohemians; the waiter-girls are mostly Italian; one of them says she

-      comes from Bohemia, and has been in India, to which she proposes to

-      return. The <i>habitués</i> are mostly young Egyptians in Frank dress

-      except the tarboosh, and Italians, all effeminate fellows. All the world

-      of loose living and wandering meets here. Italian is much spoken. There is

-      little that is Oriental here, except it may be a complaisance toward

-      anything enervating and languidly wicked that Europe has to offer. This

-      cheap concert is, we are told, all the amusement at night that can be

-      offered the traveler, by the once pleasure-loving city of Cleopatra, in

-      the once brilliant Greek capital in which Hypatia was a star.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0053.jpg" alt="0053 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0054.jpg" alt="0054 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER III.&mdash;EGYPT OF TO-DAY.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">E</span>GYPT has excellent

-      railways. There is no reason why it should not have. They are made without

-      difficulty and easily maintained in a land of no frosts; only where they

-      touch the desert an occasional fence is necessary against the drifting

-      sand. The rails are laid, without wooden sleepers, on iron saucers, with

-      connecting bands, and the track is firm and sufficiently elastic. The

-      express train travels the 131 miles to Cairo in about four and a half

-      hours, running with a punctuality, and with Egyptian drivers and

-      conductors too, that is unique in Egypt. The opening scene at the station

-      did not promise expedition or system.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We reach the station three quarters of an hour before the departure of the

-      train, for it requires a longtime&mdash;in Egypt, as everywhere in Europe&mdash;to

-      buy tickets and get baggage weighed. The officials are slower workers than

-      our treasury-clerks. There is a great crowd of foreigners, and the

-      baggage-room is piled with trunks of Americans, 'boxes' of Englishmen, and

-      chests and bundles of all sorts. Behind a high counter in a smaller room

-      stand the scales, the weigher, and the clerks. Piles of trunks are brought

-      in and dumped by the porters, and thrust forward by the servants and

-      dragomans upon the counter, to gain them preference at the scales. No

-      sooner does a dragoman get in his trunk than another is thrust ahead of

-      it, and others are hurled on top, till the whole pile comes down with a

-      crash. There is no system, there are neither officials nor police, and the

-      excited travelers are free to fight it out among themselves. To venture

-      into the <i>mêlée</i> is to risk broken bones, and it is wiser to leave

-      the battle to luck and the dragomans. The noise is something astonishing.

-      A score or two of men are yelling at the top of their voices, screaming,

-      scolding, damning each other in polyglot, gesticulating, jumping up and

-      down, quivering with excitement. This is your Oriental repose! If there

-      were any rule by which passengers could take their turns, all the trunks

-      could be quickly weighed and passed on; but now in the scrimmage not a

-      trunk gets to the scales, and a half hour goes by in which no progress is

-      made and the uproar mounts higher.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Finally, Ahmed, slight and agile, handing me his cane, kuffia and watch,

-      leaps over the heap of trunks on the counter and comes to close quarters

-      with the difficulty. He succeeds in getting two trunks upon the platform

-      of the scales, but a traveler, whose clothes were made in London, tips

-      them off and substitutes his own. The weighers stand patiently waiting the

-      result of the struggle. Ahmed hurls off the stranger's trunk, gives its

-      owner a turn that sends him spinning over the baggage, and at last

-      succeeds in getting our luggage weighed. He emerges from the scrimmage an

-      exhausted man, and we get our seats in the carriage just in time. However,

-      it does not start for half an hour.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The reader would like to ride from Alexandria to Cairo, but he won't care

-      to read much about the route. It is our first experience of a country

-      living solely by irrigation&mdash;the occasional winter showers being

-      practically of no importance. We pass along and over the vast shallows of

-      Lake Mareotis, a lake in winter and a marsh in summer, ride between

-      marshes and cotton-fields, and soon strike firmer ground. We are

-      traveling, in short, through a Jersey flat, a land black, fat, and rich,

-      without an elevation, broken only by canals and divided into fields by

-      ditches. Every rod is cultivated, and there are no detached habitations.

-      The prospect cannot be called lively, but it is not without interest;

-      there are ugly buffaloes in the coarse grass, there is the elegant white

-      heron, which travelers insist is the sacred ibis, there are some

-      doleful-looking fellaheen, with donkeys, on the bank of the canal, there

-      is a file of camels, and there are shadoofs. The shadoof is the primitive

-      method of irrigation, and thousands of years have not changed it. Two

-      posts are driven into the bank of the canal, with a cross-piece on top. On

-      this swings a pole with a bucket of leather suspended at one end, which is

-      outweighed by a ball of clay at the other. The fellah stands on the slope

-      of the bank and, dipping the bucket into the water, raises it and pours

-      the fluid into a sluice-way above. If the bank is high, two and sometimes

-      three shadoofs are needed to raise the water to the required level. The

-      labor is prodigiously hard and back-straining, continued as it must be

-      constantly. All the fellaheen we saw were clad in black, though some had a

-      cloth about their loins. The workman usually stands in a sort of a recess

-      in the bank, and his color harmonizes with the dark soil. Any occupation

-      more wearisome and less beneficial to the mind I cannot conceive. To the

-      credit of the Egyptians, the men alone work the shadoof. Women here tug

-      water, grind the corn, and carry about babies, always; but I never saw one

-      pulling at a shadoof pole.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is an Arab village! We need to be twice assured that it is a

-      village. Raised on a slight elevation, so as to escape high water, it is

-      still hardly distinguishable from the land, certainly not in color. All

-      Arab villages look like ruins; this is a compacted collection of shapeless

-      mud-huts, flat-topped and irregularly thrown together. It is an

-      aggregation of dog-kennels, baked in the sun and cracked. However, a clump

-      of palm-trees near it gives it an air of repose, and if it possesses a

-      mosque and a minaret it has a picturesque appearance, if the observer does

-      not go too near. And such are the habitations of nearly all the Egyptians.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Sixty-five miles from Alexandria, we cross the Rosetta branch of the Nile,

-      on a fine iron bridge&mdash;even this portion of the Nile is a broad,

-      sprawling river; and we pass through several respectable towns which have

-      an appearance of thrift&mdash;Tanta especially, with its handsome station

-      and a palace of the Khedive. At Tanta is held three times a year a great

-      religious festival and fair, not unlike the old fair of the ancient

-      Egyptians at Bubastis in honor of Diana, with quite as many excesses, and

-      like that, with a gramme of religion to a pound of pleasure. &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; says

-      Herodotus, &ldquo;when they are being conveyed to the city Bubastis, they act as

-      follows:&mdash;for men and women embark together, and great numbers of

-      both sexes in every barge: some of the women have castanets on which they

-      play, and the men play on the flute during the whole voyage; and the rest

-      of the women and men sing and clap their hands together at the same time.&rdquo;

-       And he goes on to say that when they came to any town they moored the

-      barge, and the women chaffed those on shore, and danced with indecent

-      gestures; and that at the festival more wine was consumed than all the

-      rest of the year. The festival at Tanta is in honor of a famous Moslem

-      saint whose tomb is there; but the tomb is scarcely so attractive as the

-      field of the <i>fête</i>, with the story-tellers and the jugglers and

-      booths of dancing girls.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We pass decayed Benha with its groves of Yoosef-Effendi oranges&mdash;the

-      small fruit called Mandarin by foreigners, and preferred by those who like

-      a slight medicinal smell and taste in the orange; and when we are yet

-      twenty miles from Cairo, there in the south-west, visible for a moment and

-      then hidden by the trees, and again in sight, faintly and yet clearly

-      outlined against the blue sky, are two forms, the sight of which gives us

-      a thrill. They stand still in that purple distance in which we have seen

-      them all our lives. Beyond these level fields and these trees of sycamore

-      and date-palm, beyond the Nile, on the desert's edge, with the low Libyan

-      hills falling off behind them, as delicate in form and color as clouds, as

-      enduring as the sky they pierce, the Pyramids of Geezeh! I try to shake

-      off the impression of their solemn antiquity, and imagine how they would

-      strike one if all their mystery were removed. But that is impossible. The

-      imagination always prompts the eye. And yet I believe that standing where

-      they do stand, and in this atmosphere, they are the most impressive of

-      human structures. But the pyramids would be effective, as the obelisk is

-      not, out of Egypt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Trees increase in number; we have villas and gardens; the grey ledges of

-      the Mokattam hills come into view, then the twin slender spires of the

-      Mosque of Mohammed Ali on the citadel promontory, and we are in the modern

-      station of Cairo; and before we take in the situation are ignominiously

-      driven away in a hotel-omnibus. This might happen in Europe. Yes; but

-      then, who are these in white and blue and red, these squatters by the

-      wayside, these smokers in the sun, these turbaned riders on braying

-      donkeys and grumbling dromedaries; what is all this fantastic masquerade

-      in open day? Do people live in these houses? Do women peep from these

-      lattices? Isn't that gowned Arab conscious that he is kneeling and praying

-      out doors? Have we come to a land where all our standards fail and people

-      are not ashamed of their religion?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0058.jpg" alt="0058 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0059.jpg" alt="0059 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER IV.&mdash;CAIRO.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span> CAIRO! Cairo!

-      Masr-el-Kaherah, The Victorious! City of the Caliphs, of Salah-e'-deen, of

-      the Memlooks! Town of mediaeval romance projected into a prosaic age! More

-      Oriental than Damascus, or Samarcand. Vast, sprawling city, with

-      dilapidated Saracenic architecture, pretentious modern barrack-palaces,

-      new villas and gardens, acres of compacted, squalid, unsunned dwellings.

-      Always picturesque, lamentably dirty, and thoroughly captivating.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Shall we rhapsodize over it, or attempt to describe it? Fortunately,

-      writers have sufficiently done both. Let us enjoy it. We are at

-      Shepherd's. It is a caravansary through which the world flows. At its <i>table

-      d'hote</i> are all nations; German princes, English dukes and shopkeepers,

-      Indian officers, American sovereigns; explorers, <i>savants</i>,

-      travelers; they have come for the climate of Cairo, they are going up the

-      Nile, they are going to hunt in Abyssinia, to join an advance military

-      party on the White Nile; they have come from India, from Japan, from

-      Australia, from Europe, from America.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are in the Frank quarter called the Ezbekeëh, which was many years ago

-      a pond during high water, then a garden with a canal round it, and is now

-      built over with European houses and shops, except the square reserved for

-      the public garden. From the old terrace in front of the hotel, where the

-      traveler used to look on trees, he will see now only raw new houses and a

-      street usually crowded with passers and rows of sleepy donkeys and their

-      voluble drivers. The hotel is two stories only, built round a court, damp

-      in rainy or cloudy weather (and it is learning how to rain as high up the

-      Nile as Cairo), and lacking the comforts which invalids require in the

-      winter. It is kept on an ingenious combination of the American and

-      European plans; that is, the traveler pays a fixed sum per day and then

-      gets a bill of particulars, besides, which gives him all the pleasures of

-      the European system. We heard that one would be more Orientally surrounded

-      and better cared for at the Hotel du Nil; and the Khedive, who tries his

-      hand at everything, has set up a New Hotel on the public square; but,

-      somehow, one enters Shepherd's as easy as he goes into a city gate.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      They call the house entirely European. But there are pelicans walking

-      about in the tropical garden; on one side is the wall of a harem, a house

-      belonging to the Khedive's mother, a harem with closed shutters, but

-      uninteresting, because there is no one in it, though ostriches are

-      strutting in its paved court; in the rear of the house stretches a great

-      grove of tall date-palms standing in a dusty, <i>débris</i>-strown field&mdash;a

-      lazy wind is always singing through their tops, and a sakiya (a

-      cow-impelled water-wheel) creaks there day and night; we never lock the

-      doors of our rooms; long-gowned attendants are always watching in the

-      passages, and, when we want one, in default of bells, we open the door and

-      clap the hands. All this, with a juggler performing before the house;

-      dragomans and servants and merchants in Oriental costume; the monotonous

-      strumming of an Arab band in a neighboring <i>cafe</i>, bricklayers on the

-      unfinished house opposite us, working in white night-gowns and turbans,

-      who might be mistaken at a distance for female sleepwalkers; and from a

-      minaret not far away, the tenor-voiced muezzins urging us in the most

-      musical invitation ever extended to unbelievers, to come to prayer at

-      daylight&mdash;this cannot be called European.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An end of the dinner-table, however, is occupied by a loud party of young

-      Englishmen, a sprinkling of dukes and earls and those attendants and

-      attentive listeners of the nobility who laugh inordinately when my lord

-      says a good thing, and are encouraged when my lord laughs loudly at a

-      sally of theirs and declares, &ldquo;well, now, that's very good;&rdquo; a party who

-      seem to regard Cairo as beyond the line of civilization and its

-      requirements. They talk loud, roar in laughing, stare at the ladies, and

-      light their cigars before the latter have withdrawn. My comrade notices

-      that they call for champagne before fish; we could overlook anything but

-      that. Some travelers who are annoyed at their boisterousness speak to the

-      landlord about them, without knowing their rank&mdash;supposing that one

-      could always tell an earl by his superior manners. These young

-      representatives of England have demanded that the Khedive shall send them

-      on their hunting-tour in Africa, and he is to do so at considerable cost;

-      and it is said that he pays their hotel bills in Cairo. The desire of the

-      Khedive to stand well with all the European powers makes him an easy prey

-      to any nobleman who does not like to travel in Egypt at his own expense.

-      (It ought to be added that we encountered on the Nile an Englishman of

-      high rank who had declined the Khedive's offer of a free trip).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Cairo is a city of vast distances, especially the new part which is laid

-      out with broad streets, and built up with isolated houses having perhaps a

-      garden or a green court; open squares are devoted to fountains and

-      flower-beds. Into these broad avenues the sun pours, and through them the

-      dust swirls in clouds; everything is covered with it; it imparts its grey

-      tint to the town and sifts everywhere its impalpable powder. No doubt the

-      health of Cairo is greatly improved and epidemics are lessened, by the

-      destruction of the pestilent old houses and by running wide streets

-      through the old quarters of twisting lanes and sunless alleys. But the

-      wide streets are uninteresting, and the sojourner in the city likes to

-      escape out of their glare and dust into the cool and shady recesses of the

-      old town. And he has not far to go to do so. A few minutes walk from the

-      Ezbekeëh brings one into a tangle like the crossing paths of an ants nest,

-      into the very heart of the smell and color of the Orient, among people

-      among shops, in the presence of manners, habits, costumes, occupations,

-      centuries old, into a life in which the western man recognizes nothing

-      familiar.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Cairo, between the Mokattam hill of limestone and the Nile, covers a great

-      deal of ground&mdash;about three square miles&mdash;on which dwell

-      somewhere from a third to a half of a million of people. The traveler

-      cannot see its stock-sights in a fortnight, and though he should be there

-      months he will find something novel in the street-life daily, even though

-      he does not, as Mr. Lane has so admirably done, make a study of the

-      people. And &ldquo;life&rdquo; goes on in the open streets, to an extent which always

-      surprises us, however familiar we may be with Italian habits. People eat,

-      smoke, pray, sleep, carry on all their trades in sight of the passers by&mdash;only

-      into the recesses of the harem and the faces of the women one may not

-      look. And this last mystery and reserve almost outweighs the openness of

-      everything else. One feels as if he were in a masquerade; the part of the

-      world which is really most important&mdash;womankind&mdash;appears to him

-      only in shadow and flitting phantasm. What danger is he in from these

-      wrapped and veiled figures which glide by, shooting him with a dark and

-      perhaps wicked eye; what peril is he in as he slips through these narrow

-      streets with their masked batteries of latticed windows! This Eastern life

-      is all open to the sun; and yet how little of its secrets does the

-      stranger fathom. I seem to feel, always, in an Eastern town, that there is

-      a mask of duplicity and concealment behind which the Orientals live; that

-      they habitually deceive the traveler in his &ldquo;gropings after truth.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The best way of getting about Cairo and its environs is on the donkey. It

-      is cheap and exhilarating. The donkey is easily mounted and easily got off

-      from; not seldom he will weaken in his hind legs and let his rider to the

-      ground&mdash;a sinking operation which destroys your confidence in life

-      itself. Sometimes he stumbles and sends the rider over his head. But the

-      <i>good</i> donkey never does either. He is the best animal, of his size

-      and appearance, living. He has the two qualities of our greatest general,

-      patience and obstinacy. The <i>good</i> donkey is easy as a rocking-chair,

-      sure-footed as a chamois; he can thread any crowd and stand patiently

-      dozing in any noisy thoroughfare for hours. To ride him is only a slight

-      compromise of one's independence in walking. One is so near the ground,

-      and so absent-mindedly can he gaze at what is around him, that he forgets

-      that there is anything under him. When the donkey, in the excitement of

-      company on the open street and stimulated by the whacks and cries of his

-      driver, breaks into the rush of a gallop, there is so much flying of legs

-      and such a general flutter that the rider fancies he is getting over the

-      ground at an awful rate, running a breakneck race; but it does not appear

-      so to an observer. The rider has the feeling of the swift locomotion of

-      the Arab steed without its danger or its expense. Besides, a long-legged

-      man, with a cork hat and a flying linen &ldquo;duster,&rdquo; tearing madly along on

-      an animal as big as a sheep, is an amusing spectacle.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The donkey is abused, whacked, beaten till he is raw, saddled so that all

-      the straps gall him, hard-ridden, left for hours to be assailed by the

-      flies in the street, and ridiculed by all men. I wish we could know what

-      sort of an animal centuries of good treatment would have made of him.

-      Something no doubt quite beyond human deserts; as it is, he is simply

-      indispensable in Eastern life. And not seldom he is a pet; he wears

-      jingling bells and silver ornaments around his neck; his hair is shaved in

-      spots to give him a variegated appearance, and his mane and tail are dyed

-      with henna; he has on an embroidered cloth bridle and a handsome saddle,

-      under which is a scarlet cloth worked with gold. The length and silkiness

-      of his ears are signs of his gentle breeding. I could never understand why

-      he is loaded with such an enormous saddle; the pommel of it rising up in

-      front of the rider as big as a half-bushel measure. Perhaps it is thought

-      well to put this mass upon his back so that he will not notice or mind any

-      additional weight.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The donkey's saving quality, in this exacting world, is inertia. And, yet,

-      he is not without ambition. He dislikes to be passed on the road by a

-      fellow; and if one attempts it, he is certain to sheer in ahead of him and

-      shove him off the track. &ldquo;Donkey jealous one anoder,&rdquo; say the drivers.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Each donkey has his driver or attendant, without whose presence, behind or

-      at the side, the animal ceases to go forward. These boys, and some of them

-      are men in stature, are the quickest-witted, most importunate,

-      good-natured vagabonds in this world. They make a study of human nature,

-      and accurately measure every traveler the moment he appears. They are

-      agile to do errands, some of them are better guides than the

-      professionals, they can be entrusted with any purchases you may make, they

-      run, carrying their slippers in their hand, all day beside the donkey, and

-      get only a pittance of pay. They are however a jolly, larkish set, always

-      skylarking with each other, and are not unlike the newspaper boys of New

-      York; now and then one of them becomes a trader or a dragoman and makes

-      his fortune.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If you prefer a carriage, good vehicles have become plenty of late years,

-      since there are broad streets for driving; and some very handsome

-      equipages are seen, especially towards evening on the Shoobra road, up and

-      down which people ride and drive to be seen and to see, as they do in

-      Central or Hyde parks. It is <i>en règle</i> to have a sais running before

-      the carriage, and it is the &ldquo;swell thing&rdquo; to have two of them. The running

-      sais before a rapidly driven carriage is the prettiest sight in Cairo. He

-      is usually a slender handsome black fellow, probably a Nubian, brilliantly

-      dressed, graceful in every motion, running with perfect ease and able to

-      keep up his pace for hours without apparent fatigue. In the days of narrow

-      streets his services were indispensable to clear the way; and even now he

-      is useful in the frequented ways where every one walks in the middle of

-      the street, and the chattering, chaffing throngs are as heedless of

-      anything coming as they are of the day of judgment. In red tarboosh with

-      long tassel, silk and gold embroidered vest and jacket, colored girdle

-      with ends knotted and hanging at the side, short silk trousers and bare

-      legs, and long staff, gold-tipped, in the hand, as graceful in running as

-      Antinous, they are most elegant appendages to a fashionable turnout. If

-      they could not be naturalized in Central Park, it might fill some of the

-      requirements of luxury to train a patriot from the Green Isle to run

-      before the horses, in knee-breeches, flourishing a shillalah. Faith, I

-      think he would clear the way.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Especially do I like to see the sais coming down the wind before a

-      carriage of the royal harem. The outriders are eunuchs, two in front and

-      two behind; they are blacks, dressed in black clothes, European cut,

-      except the tarboosh. They ride fine horses, English fashion, rising in the

-      saddle; they have long limbs, lank bodies, cruel, weak faces, and yet

-      cunning; they are sleek, shiny, emasculated. Having no sex, you might say

-      they have no souls. How can these anomalies have any virtue, since virtue

-      implies the opportunity of its opposite? These semblances of men seem

-      proud enough of their position, however, and of the part they play to

-      their masters, as if they did not know the repugnance they excite. The

-      carriage they attend is covered, but the silken hangings of the glass

-      windows are drawn aside, revealing the white-veiled occupants. They indeed

-      have no constitutional objections to being seen; the thin veil enhances

-      their charms, and the observer who sees their painted faces and bright

-      languishing eyes, no doubt gives them credit for as much beauty as they

-      possess; and as they flash by, I suppose that every one, is convinced that

-      he has seen one of the mysterious Circassian or Georgian beauties.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The minute the traveler shows himself on the hotel terrace, the

-      donkey-boys clamor, and push forward their animals upon the sidewalk; it

-      is no small difficulty to select one out of the tangle; there is noise

-      enough used to fit out an expedition to the desert, and it is not till the

-      dragoman has laid vigorously about him with his stick that the way is

-      clear. Your nationality is known at a glance, and a donkey is instantly

-      named to suit you&mdash;the same one being called, indifferently,

-      &ldquo;Bismarck&rdquo; if you are German, &ldquo;Bonaparte&rdquo; if you are French, and &ldquo;Yankee

-      Doodle&rdquo; if you are American, or &ldquo;Ginger Bob&rdquo; at a venture.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are going to Boulak, the so-called port of Cairo, to select a dahabeëh

-      for the Nile voyage. We are indeed only getting ready for this voyage, and

-      seeing the city by the way. The donkey-boys speak English like natives&mdash;of

-      Egypt. The one running beside me, a handsome boy in a long cotton shirt,

-      is named, royally, Mahmoud Hassan.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are you the brother of Hassan whom I had yesterday?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. He, Hassan not my brother; he better, he friend. Breakfast, lunch,

-      supper, all together, all same; all same money. We friends.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Abd-el-Atti, our dragoman, is riding ahead on his grey donkey, and I have

-      no difficulty in following his broad back and short legs, even though his

-      donkey should be lost to sight in the press. He rides as Egyptians do,

-      without stirrups, and uses his heels as spurs. Since Mohammed Abd-el-Atti

-      Effendi first went up the Nile, it is many years ago now, with Mr. Wm. C.

-      Prime, and got his name prominently into the Nile literature, he has grown

-      older, stout, and rich; he is entitled by his position to the distinction

-      of &ldquo;Effendi.&rdquo; He boasts a good family, as good as any; most of his

-      relatives are, and he himself has been, in government employ; but he left

-      it because, as he says, he prefers one master to a thousand. When a boy he

-      went with the embassy of Mohammed Ali to England, and since that time he

-      has traveled extensively as courier in Europe and the Levant and as

-      mail-carrier to India. Mr. Prime described him as having somewhat the

-      complexion and features of the North American Indian; it is true, but he

-      has a shrewd restless eye, and very mobile features, quick to image his

-      good humor or the reverse, breaking into smiles, or clouding over upon his

-      easily aroused suspicion. He is a good study of the Moslem and the real

-      Oriental, a combination of the easy, procrastinating fatalism, and yet

-      with a tindery temper and an activity of body and mind that we do not

-      usually associate with the East. His prejudices are inveterate, and he is

-      an unforgiving enemy and a fast, self-sacrificing friend. Not to be

-      driven, he can always be won by kindness. Fond of money and not forgetting

-      the last piastre due him, he is generous and lavish to a fault. A devout

-      Moslem, he has seen too much of the world not to be liberalized. He knows

-      the Koran and the legendary history of the Arabs, and speaks and writes

-      Arabic above the average. An exceedingly shrewd observer and reader of

-      character, and a mimic of other's peculiarities, he is a good <i>raconteur</i>,

-      in his peculiar English, and capital company. It is, by the way, worth

-      mentioning what sharp observers all these Eastern people become, whose

-      business it is to study and humor the whims and eccentricities of

-      travelers. The western man who thinks that the Eastern people are

-      childlike or <i>effete</i>, will change his mind after a few months

-      acquaintance with the shrewd Egyptians. Abd-el-Atti has a good deal of

-      influence and even authority in his sphere, and although his executive

-      ability is without system, he brings things to pass. Wherever he goes,

-      however, there is a ripple and a noise. He would like to go to Nubia with

-      us this winter, he says, &ldquo;for shange of air.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      So much is necessary concerning the character who is to be our companion

-      for many months. No dragoman is better known in the East; he is the sheykh

-      of the dragomans of Cairo, and by reason of his age and experience he is

-      hailed on the river as the sultan of the Nile. He dresses like an

-      Englishman, except his fez.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The great worry of the voyager in Egypt, from the moment he lands, is

-      about a dragoman; his comfort and pleasure depend very much upon a right

-      selection. The dragoman and the dahabeëh interest him more than the sphinx

-      and the great pyramids. Taking strangers up the Nile seems to be the great

-      business of Egypt, and all the intricacies and tricks of it are slowly

-      learned. Ignorant of the language and of the character of the people, the

-      stranger may well be in a maze of doubt and perplexity. His gorgeously

-      attired dragoman, whose recommendations would fit him to hold combined the

-      offices of President of the American Bible Society and caterer for

-      Delmonico, often turns out to be ignorant of his simplest duties, to have

-      an inhabited but uninhabitable boat, to furnish a meagre table, and to be

-      a sly knave. The traveler will certainly have no peace from the

-      importunity of the dragomans until he makes his choice. One hint can be

-      given: it is always best in a Moslem country to take a Moslem dragoman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are on our way to Boulak. The sky is full of white light. The air is

-      full of dust; the streets are full of noise color, vivid life and motion.

-      Everything is flowing, free, joyous. Naturally people fall into

-      picturesque groups, forming, separating, shifting like scenes on the

-      stage. Neither the rich silks and brilliant dyes, nor the tattered rags,

-      and browns and greys are out of place; full dress and nakedness are

-      equally <i>en régie</i>. Here is a grave, long-bearded merchant in full

-      turban and silk gown, riding his caparisoned donkey to his shop, followed

-      by his pipe-bearer; here is a half-naked fellah seated on the rear of his

-      sorry-eyed beast, with a basket of greens in front of him; here are a

-      group of women, hunched astride their donkeys, some in white silk and some

-      in black, shapeless in their balloon mantles, peeping at the world over

-      their veils; here a handsome sais runs ahead of a carriage with a fat Turk

-      lolling in it, and scatters the loiterers right and left; there are

-      porters and beggars fast asleep by the roadside, only their heads covered

-      from the sun; there are lines of idlers squatting in all-day leisure by

-      the wall, smoking, or merely waiting for tomorrow.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we get down to Old Boulak the Saturday market is encountered. All

-      Egyptian markets occupy the street or some open place, and whatever is for

-      sale here, is exposed to the dust and the sun; fish, candy, dates, live

-      sheep, doora, beans, all the doubtful and greasy compounds on brass trays

-      which the people eat, nuts, raisins, sugar-cane, cheap jewelry. It is

-      difficult to force a way through the noisy crowd. The donkey-boy cries

-      perpetually, to clear the way, take care, &ldquo;<i>shimalak!</i>&rdquo; to the left,

-      &ldquo;<i>yemenak!</i>&rdquo; to the right, <i>ya! riglak!</i> look out for your left

-      leg, look out for your right leg, make way boy, make way old woman; but we

-      joggle the old woman, and just escape stepping on the children and babies

-      strewn in the street, and tread on the edge of mats spread on the ground,

-      upon which provisions are exposed (to the dust) for sale. In the narrow,

-      shabby streets, with dilapidated old balconies meeting overhead, we

-      encounter loaded camels, donkeys with double panniers, hawkers of

-      vegetables; and dodge through, bewildered by color and stunned by noise.

-      What is it that makes all picturesque? More dirt, shabbiness, and

-      nakedness never were assembled. That fellow who has cut armholes in a sack

-      for holding nuts, and slipped into it for his sole garment, would not make

-      a good figure on Broadway, but he is in place here, and as fitly dressed

-      as anybody. These rascals will wear a bit of old carpet as if it were a

-      king's robe, and go about in a pair of drawers that are all rags and

-      strings, and a coarse towel twisted about the head for turban, with a gay

-      <i>insouciance</i> that is pleasing. In fact, I suppose that a good,

-      well-fitting black or nice brown skin is about as good as a suit of

-      clothes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But O! the wrinkled, flabby-breasted old women, who make a pretence of

-      drawing the shawl over one eye; the naked, big-stomached children with

-      spindle legs, who sit in the sand and never brush away the circle of flies

-      around each gummy eye! The tumble-down houses, kennels in which the family

-      sleep, the poverty of thousands of years, borne as if it were the only lot

-      of life! In spite of all this, there is not, I venture to say, in the

-      world beside, anything so full of color, so gay and <i>bizarre</i> as a

-      street in Cairo. And we are in a squalid suburb.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At the shore of the swift and now falling Nile, at Boulak, are moored,

-      four or five deep, the passenger dahabeëhs, more than a hundred of them,

-      gay with new paint and new carpets, to catch the traveler. There are small

-      and large, old and new (but all looking new); those that were used for

-      freight during the summer and may be full of vermin, and those reserved

-      exclusively for strangers. They can be hired at from sixty pounds to two

-      hundred pounds a month; the English owner of one handsomely furnished

-      wanted seven hundred and fifty pounds for a three-months' voyage. The Nile

-      trip adds luxury to itself every year, and is getting so costly that only

-      Americans will be able to afford it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After hours of search we settle upon a boat that will suit us, a large

-      boat that had only made a short trip, and so new that we are at liberty to

-      christen it; and the bargaining for it begins. That is, the bargaining

-      revolves around that boat, but glances off as we depart in a rage to this

-      or that other, until we appear to me to be hiring half the craft on the

-      river. We appear to come to terms; again and again Abd-el-Atti says,

-      &ldquo;Well, it is finish,&rdquo; but new difficulties arise.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The owners were an odd pair: a tall Arab in soiled gown and turban, named

-      Ahmed Aboo Yoosef, a mild and wary Moslem; and Habib Bagdadli, a furtive

-      little Jew in Frank dress, with a cast in one of his pathetic eyes and a

-      beseeching look, who spoke bad French fluently. Aboo Yoosef was ready to

-      come to terms, but Bagdadli stood out; then Bagdadli acquiesced but Aboo

-      made conditions. Ab-del-Atti alternately coaxed and stormed; he pulled the

-      Arab's beard; and he put his arm round his neck and whispered in his ear.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Come, let us to go, dis Jews make me mad. I can't do anything with dis

-      little Jews.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Our dragoman's greatest abhorrence is a Jew. Where is this one from? I

-      ask.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He from Algiers.&rdquo; The Algerian Jews have a bad reputation.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;<i>No, no, monsieur, pas Algiers</i>;&rdquo; cries the little Jew, appealing to

-      me with a pitiful look; &ldquo;I am from Bagdad.&rdquo; In proof of this there was his

-      name&mdash;Habib Bagdadli.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The bargaining goes on, with fine gesticulation, despairing attitudes,

-      tones of anger and of grief, violent protestations and fallings into

-      apathy and dejection. It is Arab against Arab and a Jew thrown in.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I will have this boat, but I not put you out of the way on it;&rdquo; says

-      Abd-el-Atti, and goes at it again.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      My sympathies are divided. I can see that the Arab and the Jew will be

-      ruined if they take what we offer. I know that we shall be ruined if we

-      give what they ask. This pathetic-eyed little Jew makes me feel that I am

-      oppressing his race; and yet I am quite certain that he is trying to

-      overreach us. How the bargain is finally struck I know not, but made it

-      seems to be, and clinched by Aboo reluctantly pulling his purse from his

-      bosom and handing Abd-el-Atti a napoleon. That binds the bargain; instead

-      of the hirer paying something, the lessor gives a pledge.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Trouble, however, is not ended. Certain alterations and additions are to

-      be made, and it is nearly two weeks before the evasive couple complete

-      them. The next day they offer us twenty pounds to release them. The pair

-      are always hanging about for some mitigation or for some advance. The

-      gentle Jew, who seems to me friendless, always excites the ire of our

-      dragoman; &ldquo;Here comes dis little Jews,&rdquo; he exclaims as he encounters him

-      in the street, and forces him to go and fulfil some neglected promise.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The boat is of the largest size, and has never been above the Cataract;

-      the owners guarantee that it can go, and there is put in the contract a

-      forfeit of a hundred pounds if it will not. We shall see afterwards how

-      the owners sought to circumvent us. The wiles of the Egyptians are slowly

-      learned by the open-minded stranger.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0012" id="linkimage-0012"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0071.jpg" alt="0071 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0072.jpg" alt="0072 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER V.&mdash;IN THE BAZAAR.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>UR sight-seeing in

-      Cairo is accomplished under the superintendence of another guide and

-      dragoman, a cheerful, willing, good-natured and careful Moslem, with one

-      eye. He looks exactly like the one-eyed calender of the story; and his

-      good eye has a humorous and inquiring twinkle in it. His name is Hassan,

-      but he prefers to be called Hadji, the name he has taken since he made the

-      pilgrimage to Mecca.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A man who has made the pilgrimage is called &ldquo;the hhâgg,&rdquo; a woman &ldquo;the

-      hhâggeh.&rdquo;&mdash;often spelled and pronounced &ldquo;hadj&rdquo; and &ldquo;hadjee.&rdquo; It seems

-      to be a privilege of travelers to spell Arabic words as they please, and

-      no two writers agree on a single word or name. The Arabs take a new name

-      or discard an old one as they like, and half a dozen favorite names do

-      duty for half the inhabitants. It is rare to meet one who hasn't somewhere

-      about him the name of Mohammed, Ahmed, Ali, Hassan, Hosayn, or Mahmoud.

-      People take a new name as they would a garment that strikes the fancy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You like go bazaar?&rdquo; asks Hadji, after the party is mounted on donkeys in

-      front of the hotel.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, Hadji, go by the way of the Mooskee.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The Mooskee is the best known street in Cairo, and the only one in the old

-      part of the town that the traveler can find unaided. It runs straight, or

-      nearly so, a mile perhaps, into the most densely built quarters, and is

-      broad enough for carriages. A considerable part of it is roofed lightly

-      over with cane or palm slats, through which the sun sifts a little light,

-      and, being watered, it is usually cool and pleasant. It cannot be called a

-      good or even road, but carriages and donkeys pass over it without noise,

-      the wheels making only a smothered sound: you may pass through it many

-      times and not discover that a canal runs underneath it. The lower part of

-      it is occupied by European shops. There are no fine shops in it like those

-      in the Ezbekeëh, and it is not interesting like the bazaars, but it is

-      always crowded. Probably no street in the world offers such a variety of

-      costumes and nationalities, and in no one can be heard more languages. It

-      is the main artery, from which branch off the lesser veins and

-      reticulations leading into the bazaars.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If the Mooskee is crowded, the bazaars are a jam. Different trades and

-      nationalities have separate quarters, articles that are wanted are far

-      apart, and one will of necessity consume a day in making two or three

-      purchases. It is an achievement to find and bargain for a piece of tape.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In one quarter are red slippers, nothing but red slippers, hundreds of

-      shops hung with them, shops in which they are made and sold; the yellow

-      slippers are in another quarter, and by no chance does one merchant keep

-      both kinds. There are the silk bazaars, the gold bazaars, the silver

-      bazaars, the brass, the arms, the antiquity, the cotton, the spice, and

-      the fruit bazaars. In one quarter the merchants and manufacturers are all

-      Egyptians, in another Turks, in another Copts, or Algerines, or Persians,

-      or Armenians, or Greeks, or Syrians, or Jews.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And what is a bazaar? Simply a lane, narrow, straight or crooked, winding,

-      involved, interrupted by a fountain, or a mosque, intersected by other

-      lanes, a <i>congeries</i> of lanes, roofed with matting it may be, on each

-      side of which are the little shops, not much bigger than a dry-goods box

-      or a Saratoga trunk. Frequently there is a story above, with hanging

-      balconies and latticed windows. On the ledge of his shop the merchant, in

-      fine robes of silk and linen, sits cross-legged, probably smoking his

-      chibook. He sits all day sipping coffee and gossipping with his friends,

-      waiting for a customer. At the times of prayer he spreads his

-      prayer-carpet and pursues his devotions in sight of all the world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This Oriental microcosm called a bazaar is the most characteristic thing

-      in the East, and affords most entertainment; in these cool recesses, which

-      the sun only penetrates in glints, is all that is shabby and all that is

-      splendid in this land of violent contrasts. The shops are rude, the

-      passages are unpaved dirt, the matting above hangs in shreds, the

-      unpainted balconies are about to tumble down, the lattice-work is grey

-      with dust; fleas abound; you are jostled by an unsavory throng may be; run

-      against by loaded donkeys; grazed by the dripping goat-skins of the

-      water-carriers; beset by beggars; followed by Jews offering old brasses,

-      old cashmeres, old armor; squeezed against black backs from the Soudan;

-      and stunned by the sing-song cries of a dozen callings. But all this is

-      nothing. Here are the perfumes of Arabia, the colors of Paradise. These

-      narrow streets are streams of glancing color; these shops are more

-      brilliant than any picture&mdash;but in all is a softened harmony, the

-      ancient art of the East.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are sitting at a corner, pricing some pieces of old brass and arms. The

-      merchant sends for tiny cups of coffee and offers cigarettes. He and the

-      dragoman are wrangling about the price of something for which five times

-      its value is asked. Not unlikely it will be sold for less than it is

-      worth, for neither trader nor traveler has any idea of its value. Opposite

-      is a shop where three men sit cross-legged, making cashmere shawls by

-      piecing old bits of India scarfs. Next shop is occupied only by a boy who

-      is reading the Koran in a loud voice, rocking forwards and backwards. A

-      stooping seller of sherbet comes along clinking his glasses. A vender of

-      sweetmeats sets his tray before us. A sorry beggar, a dwarf, beseeches in

-      figurative language.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What does he want, Hadji?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He say him hungry, want piece bread; O, no matter for he.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The dragomans never interpret anything, except by short cuts. What the

-      dwarf is really saying, according to Mr. Lane, is, &ldquo;For the sake of God! O

-      ye charitable. I am seeking from my lord a cake of bread. I am the guest

-      of God and the Prophet.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      As we cannot content him by replying in like strain, &ldquo;God enrich thee,&rdquo; we

-      earn his blessing by a copper or two.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Across the street is an opening into a nest of shops, gaily hung with

-      embroideries from Constantinople, silks from Broussa and Beyrout, stuffs

-      of Damascus; a Persian rug is spread on the mastabah of the shop, swords

-      and inlaid pistols with flint locks shine amid the rich stuffs. Looking

-      down this street, one way, is a long vista of bright color, the street

-      passing under round arches through which I see an old wall painted in red

-      and white squares, upon which the sun falls in a flood of white light. The

-      street in which we are sitting turns abruptly at a little distance, and

-      apparently ends in a high Moorish house, with queer little latticed

-      windows, and balconies, and dusty recesses full of mystery in this half

-      light; and at the corner opposite that, I see part of a public fountain

-      and hear very distinctly the &ldquo;studying&rdquo; of the school over it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The public fountain is one of the best institutions of Cairo as well as

-      one of the most ornamental. On the street it is a rounded Saracenic

-      structure, highly ornamented in carved marble or stucco, and gaily

-      painted, having in front two or three faucets from which the water is

-      drawn. Within is a tank which is replenished by water brought in skins

-      from the Nile. Most of these fountains are charitable foundations, by

-      pious Moslems who leave or set apart a certain sum to ensure the yearly

-      supply of so many skins of water. Charity to the poor is one of the good

-      traits of the Moslems, and the giving of alms and the building of

-      fountains are the works that will be rewarded in Paradise.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These fountains, some of which are very beautiful, are often erected near

-      a mosque. Over them, in a room with a vaulted roof and open to the street

-      by three or four arches with pillars, is usually a boys' school. In this

-      room on the floor sit the master and his scholars. Each pupil has before

-      him his lesson written on a wooden tablet, and this he is reading at the

-      top of his voice, committing it to memory, and swaying incessantly

-      backwards and forwards&mdash;a movement that is supposed to assist the

-      memory. With twenty boys shouting together, the noise is heard above all

-      the clamor of the street. If a boy looks off or stops his recitation, the

-      stick of the schoolmaster sets him going again.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The boys learn first the alphabet, then the ninety-nine epithets of God,

-      and then the Koran, chapter by chapter. This is the sum of human knowledge

-      absolutely necessary; if the boy needs writing and arithmetic he learns

-      them from the steelyard weigher in the market; or if he is to enter any of

-      the professions, he has a regular course of study in the Mosque El Ezher,

-      which has thousands of students and is the great University of the East.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Sitting in the bazaar for an hour one will see strange sights; wedding and

-      funeral processions are not the least interesting of them. We can never

-      get accustomed to the ungainly camel, thrusting his huge bulk into these

-      narrow limits, and stretching his snake neck from side to side, his dark

-      driver sitting high up in the dusk of the roof on the wooden saddle, and

-      swaying to and fro with the long stride of the beast. The camel ought to

-      be used in funeral processions, but I believe he is not.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We hear now a chanting down the dusky street. Somebody is being carried to

-      his tomb in the desert outside the city. The procession has to squeeze

-      through the crowd. First come a half dozen old men, ragged and half blind,

-      harbingers of death, who move slowly, crying in a whining tone, &ldquo;There is

-      no deity but God; Mohammed is God's apostle; God bless and save him.&rdquo; Then

-      come two or three schoolboys singing in a more lively air verses of a

-      funeral hymn. The bier is borne by friends of the deceased, who are

-      relieved occasionally by casual passengers. On the bier, swathed in

-      grave-clothes, lies the body, with a Cashmere shawl thrown over it. It is

-      followed by female hired mourners, who beat their breasts and howl with

-      shrill and prolonged ululations. The rear is brought up by the female

-      mourners, relations&mdash;a group of a dozen in this case&mdash;whose hair

-      is dishevelled and who are crying and shrieking with a perfect abandonment

-      to the luxury of grief. Passengers in the street stop and say, &ldquo;God is

-      most great,&rdquo; and the women point to the bier and say, &ldquo;I testify that

-      there is no deity but God.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      When the funeral has passed and its incongruous mingling of chanting and

-      shrieking dies away, we turn towards the gold bazaar. All the goldsmiths

-      and silversmiths are Copts; throughout Egypt the working of the precious

-      metals is in their hands. Descended from the ancient Egyptians, or at

-      least having more of the blood of the original race in them than others,

-      they have inherited the traditional skill of the ancient workers in these

-      metals. They reproduce the old jewelry, the barbarous ornaments, and work

-      by the same rude methods, producing sometimes the finest work with the

-      most clumsy tools.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The gold-bazaar is the narrowest passage we have seen. We step down into

-      its twilight from a broader street. It is in fact about three feet wide, a

-      lane with an uneven floor of earth, often slippery. On each side are the

-      little shops, just large enough for the dealer and his iron safe, or for a

-      tiny forge, bellows and anvil. Two people have to make way for each other

-      in squeezing along this alley, and if a donkey comes through he

-      monopolizes the way and the passengers have to climb upon the mastabahs

-      either side. The mastabah is a raised seat of stone or brick, built

-      against the front of the shop and level with its floor, say two feet and a

-      half high and two feet broad. The lower shutter of the shop turns down

-      upon the mastabah and forms a seat upon which a rug is spread. The

-      shopkeeper may sit upon this, or withdraw into his shop to make room for

-      customers, who remove their shoes before drawing up their feet upon the

-      carpet. Sometimes three or four persons will crowd into this box called a

-      shop. The bazaar is a noisy as well as a crowded place, for to the buzz of

-      talk and the cries of the itinerant venders is added the clang of the

-      goldsmiths' hammers; it winds down into the recesses of decaying houses

-      and emerges in another direction.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are to have manufactured a bracelet of gold of a pattern as old as the

-      Pharaohs, and made with the same instruments that the cunning goldsmiths

-      used three thousand years ago. While we are seated and bargaining for the

-      work, the goldsmith unlocks his safe and shows us necklaces, bracelets,

-      anklets, and earrings in the very forms, <i>bizarre</i> but graceful, of

-      the jewelry of which the Israelites spoiled the Egyptian women. We see

-      just such in the Museum at Boulak; though these are not so fine as the

-      magnificent jewelry which Queen Aah-hotep, the mother of Amosis, attempted

-      to carry with her into the under-world, and which the scientific violators

-      of her tomb rescued at Thebes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the shop opposite to us are squeezed in three Egyptian women and a

-      baby, who have come to spend the day in cheapening some bit of jewelry.

-      There is apparently nothing that the Cairo women like so much as shopping&mdash;at

-      least those who are permitted to go out at all&mdash;and they eke out its

-      delights by consuming a day or two in buying one article. These women are

-      taking the trade leisurely, examining slowly and carefully the whole stock

-      of the goldsmith and deliberating on each bead and drop of a necklace,

-      glancing slily at us and the passers-by out of their dark eyes meantime.

-      They have brought cakes of bread for lunch, and the baby is publicly fed

-      as often as he desires. These women have the power of sitting still in one

-      spot for hours, squatting with perfect patience in a posture that would

-      give a western woman the cramp for her lifetime. We are an hour in

-      bargaining with the goldsmith, and are to return late in the afternoon and

-      see the bracelet made before our eyes, for no one is expected to trust his

-      fellow here.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Thus far the gold has only been melted into an ingot, and that with many

-      precautions against fraud. I first count out the napoleons of which the

-      bracelet is to be made. These are weighed. A fire is then kindled in the

-      little forge, the crucible heated, and I drop the napoleons into it, one

-      by one. We all carefully watch the melting to be sure that no gold is

-      spilled in the charcoal and no base metal added. The melted mass is then

-      run into an ingot, and the ingot is weighed against the same number of

-      napoleons that compose it. And I carry away the ingot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we return the women are still squatting in the shop in the attitude

-      of the morning. They show neither impatience nor weariness; nor does the

-      shopkeeper. The baby is sprawled out in his brown loveliness, and the

-      purchase of a barbarous necklace of beads is about concluded. Our

-      goldsmith now removes his outer garment, revealing his fine gown of

-      striped silk, pushes up his sleeves and prepares for work. His only-tools

-      are a small anvil, a hammer and a pair of pincers. The ingot is heated and

-      hammered, and heated and hammered, until it is drawn out into an even,

-      thick wire. This is then folded in three to the required length, and

-      twisted, till the gold looks like molasses candy; the ends are then

-      hammered together, and the bracelet is bent to its form. Finally it is

-      weighed again and cleaned. If the owner wishes he can have put on it the

-      government stamp. Gold ornaments that are stamped, the goldsmith will take

-      back at any time and give for them their weight in coin, less two per

-      cent.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On our way home we encounter a wedding procession; this is the procession

-      conducting the bride to the house of the bridegroom; that to the bath

-      having taken place two days before. The night of the day before going to

-      the bridegroom is called the &ldquo;Night of henna.&rdquo; The bride has an

-      entertainment at her own house, receives presents of money, and has her

-      hands and her feet dyed with henna. The going to the bridegroom is on the

-      eve of either Monday or Friday. These processions we often meet in the

-      streets of Cairo; they wander about circuitously through the town making

-      all the noise and display possible. The procession is a rambling affair

-      and generally attended by a rabble of boys and men.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This one is preceded by half a dozen shabbily dressed musicians beating

-      different sorts of drums and blowing hautboys, each instrument on its own

-      hook; the tune, if there was one, has become discouraged, and the melody

-      has dropped out; thump, pound, squeak, the music is more disorganized than

-      the procession, and draggles on in noisy dissonance like a drunken militia

-      band at the end of a day's &ldquo;general training.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Next come some veiled women in black; and following them are several small

-      virgins in white. The bride walks next, with a woman each side of her to

-      direct her steps. This is necessary, for she is covered from head to feet

-      with a red cashmere shawl hanging from a sort of crown on the the top of

-      her head. She is in appearance, simply a red cone. Over her and on three

-      sides of her, but open in front, is a canopy of pink silk, borne on poles

-      by four men. Behind straggle more musicians, piping and thumping in an

-      independent nonchalance, followed by gleeful boys. One attendant sprinkles

-      rose-water on the spectators, and two or three others seem to have a

-      general direction of the course of the train, and ask backsheesh for it

-      whenever a stranger is met.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The procession gets tired occasionally and sits down in the dust of the

-      road to rest. Sometimes it is accompanied by dancers and other performers

-      to amuse the crowd. I saw one yesterday which had halted by the roadside,

-      all the women except the bride squatting down in patient resignation. In a

-      hollow square of spectators, in front, a male dancer was exhibiting his

-      steps. Holding a wand perpendicularly before him with both hands, he moved

-      backwards and forwards, with a mincing gait, exhibiting neither grace nor

-      agility, but looking around with the most conceited expression I ever saw

-      on a human face. Occasionally he would look down at his legs with the most

-      approving glance, as much as to say, &ldquo;I trust, God being great, that you

-      are taking particular notice of those legs; it seems to me that they

-      couldn't be improved.&rdquo; The fellow enjoyed his dancing if no one else did,

-      and it was impossible to get him to desist and let the procession move on.

-      At last the <i>cortege</i> made a <i>detour</i> round the man who seemed

-      to be so popular with himself, and left him to enjoy his own performance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Sometimes the expense of this <i>zeffeh</i>, or bridal procession, is

-      shared by two parties, and I have seen two brides walking under the same

-      canopy, but going to different husbands. The public is not excluded from

-      an interest in these weddings. The house of a bridegroom, near the

-      Mooskee, was illuminated a night or two before the wedding, colored

-      lanterns were hung across the street, and story-tellers were engaged to

-      recite in front of the house. On the night of the marriage there was a

-      crowd which greatly enjoyed the indelicate songs and stories of the hired

-      performers. Late in the evening an old woman appeared at a window and

-      proclaimed that the husband was contented with his wife.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An accompaniment of a bridal procession which we sometimes saw we could

-      not understand. Before the procession proper, walked another, preceded by

-      a man carrying on his head a high wooden cabinet, with four legs, the

-      front covered with pieces of looking-glass and bits of brass; behind him

-      were musicians and attendants, followed by a boy on horseback, dressed

-      richly in clothes too large for him and like a girl's. It turned out to be

-      a parade before circumcision, the friends of the lad having taken

-      advantage of the bridal ceremony of a neighbor to make a display. The

-      wooden case was merely the sign of the barber who walked in the procession

-      and was to perform the operation.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose you are married?&rdquo; I ask Hadji when the procession has gone by.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, sir, long time.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And you have never had but one wife?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Have one. He quite nuff for me.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How old was she when you married her?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, I marry he, when he much girl! I tink he eleven, maybe twelve, not

-      more I tink.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Girls in Egypt are marriageable at ten or eleven, and it is said that if

-      not married before they are fourteen they have an excellent chance of

-      being old maids. Precocious to mature, they are quick to fall away and

-      lose their beauty; the laboring classes especially are ugly and flabby

-      before eighteen. The low mental, not to say physical, condition of

-      Egyptian women is no doubt largely due to these early marriages. The girl

-      is married and is a mother before she has an opportunity to educate

-      herself or to learn the duties of wife or mother, ignorant of how to make

-      a home pleasant and even of housekeeping, and when she is utterly unfit to

-      have the care and training of a child. Ignorant and foolish, and, as Mr.

-      Lane says, passionate, women and mothers can never produce a great race.

-      And the only reform for Egypt that will give it new vitality and a place

-      in the world must begin with the women.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Khedive, who either has foresight or listens to good advice, issued a

-      firman some years ago forbidding the marriage of girls under fifteen. It

-      does not seem to be respected either in city or country; though I believe

-      that it has some influence in the city, and generally girls are not

-      married so young in Cairo as in the country. Yet I heard recently in this

-      city of a man of sixty who took a wife of twelve. As this was not his

-      first wife, it could not be said of him, as it is said of some great

-      geniuses, that he struck twelve the first time.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0082.jpg" alt="0082 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0083.jpg" alt="0083 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER VI.&mdash;MOSQUES AND TOMBS.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HAT we in Cairo

-      like most to do, is to do nothing in the charming winter weather&mdash;to

-      postpone the regular and necessary sight-seeing to that limbo to which the

-      Arabs relegate everything&mdash;<i>bookra</i>, that is, tomorrow. Why not

-      as well go to the Pyramids or to Heliopolis or to the tombs of the

-      Memlooks tomorrow! It is to be the same fair weather; we never plan an

-      excursion, with the proviso, &ldquo;If it does not rain.&rdquo; This calm certainty of

-      a clear sky adds twenty-five per cent, to the value of life.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And yet, there is the Sirocco; that enervating, depressing south wind,

-      when all the sands of the hot desert rise up into the air and envelope

-      everything in grit and gloom. I have been on the Citadel terrace when the

-      city was only dimly outlined in the thick air, and all the horizon and the

-      sky were veiled in dust as if by a black Scotch mist. We once waited three

-      days after we had set a time to visit the Pyramids, for the air to clear.

-      The Sirocco is bad enough in the town, the fine dust penetrates the closed

-      recesses of all apartments; but outside the city it is unbearable. Indeed

-      any wind raises the sand disagreeably; and dust is the great plague of

-      Egypt. The streets of Cairo, except those that are sprinkled, are seldom

-      free from clouds of it. And it is an ancient dust. I suppose the powdered

-      dead of thousands of years are blowing about in the air.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The desert makes itself apparent even in Cairo. Not only is it in the air,

-      but it lies in wait close to the walls and houses, ready to enter at the

-      gates, sifting in through every crevice. Only by constant irrigation can

-      it be driven back. As soon as we pass beyond the compact city eastward, we

-      enter the desert, unless we follow the course of some refreshing canal.

-      The drive upon it is a favorite one on summer nights. I have spoken of the

-      desert as hot; but it is always cool at night; and it is the habit of

-      foreigners who are detained in Cairo in the summer to go every night to

-      the desert to cool off.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The most conspicuous object in Cairo, from all points, is the Citadel,

-      built on a bold spur of the Mokattam range, and the adjoining Mosque of

-      Mohammed Ali in which that savage old reformer is buried. The mosque is

-      rather Turkish than Saracenic, and its two slender minarets are much

-      criticised. You who have been in Constantinople are familiar with the like

-      slight and graceful forms in that city; they certainly are not so rich or

-      elegant as many of the elaborately carved and more robust minarets of

-      Cairo which the genius of the old architects reared in the sun-burst of

-      Saracenic architecture; but they are very picturesque and effective in

-      their position and especially against a poetic evening sky.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When Salah-e'-deen robbed the pyramids to build the Citadel, he doubtless

-      thought he was erecting a fortification that would forever protect his

-      city and be an enduring home for the Sultans of Egypt. But Mohammed Ali

-      made it untenable as a fort by placing a commanding battery on the

-      Mokattam ledge; and now the Citadel (by which I mean all the group of

-      buildings) useless as a fort (except to overawe the city) and abandoned as

-      a palace, is little more than a ghost-walk of former splendors. There are

-      barracks in it; recruits are drilling in its squares; the minister-of-war

-      occupies some of its stately apartments; the American General Stone, the

-      chief officer of the Khedive's army, uses others; in some we find the

-      printing presses and the bureaus of the engineers and the typographical

-      corps; but vast halls and chambers of audience, and suites of apartments

-      of the harem, richly carved and gilded, are now vacant and echo the

-      footsteps of sentries and servitors. And they have the shabby look of most

-      Eastern architecture when its first freshness is gone.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We sat in the room and on the platform where Mohammed Ali sat when the

-      slaughter of the Memlooks was going on; he sat motionless, so it is

-      reported, and gave no other sign of nervousness than the twisting of a

-      piece of paper in his hands. And yet he must have heard the cries under

-      his window, and, of course, the shots of the soldiers on the walls who

-      were executing his orders. We looked down from the balcony into the

-      narrow, walled lane, with its closed gates, in which the five hundred

-      Memlooks were hemmed in and massacred. Think of the nerve of the old Turk,

-      sitting still without changing countenance while five hundred, or more,

-      gallant swash-bucklers were being shot in cool blood under his window!

-      Probably he would not have been so impassive if he had seen one of the

-      devoted band escape by spurring his horse through a break in the wall and

-      take a fearful flying leap upon the rubbish below.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The world agrees to condemn this treacherous and ferocious act of Mohammed

-      Ali and, generally, I believe, to feel grateful to him for it. Never was

-      there a clan of men that needed exterminating so much as the Memlooks.

-      Nothing less would have suited their peculiarities. They were merely a

-      band of robbers, black-mailers, and freebooters, a terror to Egypt.

-      Dislodged from actual power, they were still greatly to be dreaded, and no

-      ruler was safe who did not obey them. The term Memlook means &ldquo;a white male

-      slave,&rdquo; and is still so used. The Memlooks, who originally were mostly

-      Circassian white slaves, climbed from the position of favorites to that of

-      tyrants. They established a long dynasty of sultans, and their tombs

-      yonder at the edge of the desert are among the most beautiful specimens of

-      the Saracenic architecture. Their sovereignty was overthrown by Sultan

-      Selim in 1517, but they remained a powerful and aristocratic band which

-      controlled governors, corrupted even Oriental society by the introduction

-      of monstrous vices, and oppressed the people. I suppose that in the time

-      of the French invasion they may have been joined by bold adventurers of

-      many nations. Egypt could have no security so long as any of them

-      remained. It was doubtless in bad taste for Mohammed Ali to extend a

-      friendly invitation to the Memlooks to visit him, and then murder them

-      when they were caught in his trap; he finally died insane, and perhaps the

-      lunacy was providentially on him at that time.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the Citadel precincts is a hall occupied by the &ldquo;parliament&rdquo; of the

-      Khedive, when it is in session; a parliament whose members are selected by

-      the Viceroy from all over Egypt, in order that he may have information of

-      the state of the country, but a body that has no power and certainly not

-      so much influence in the state as the harem has. But its very assemblage

-      is an innovation in the Orient, and it may lead in time to infinite gab,

-      to election briberies and multitudinous legislation, the accompaniments of

-      the highest civilization. We may yet live to see a member of it rise to

-      enquire into the expenses of the Khedive's numerous family.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The great Mosque of Mohammed Ali is in the best repair and is the least

-      frequented of any in Cairo. Its vast, domed interior, rich in materials

-      and ambitious in design, is impressive, but this, like all other great

-      mosques, strikes the Western man as empty. On the floor are beautiful

-      rugs; a tawdry chandelier hangs in the center, and the great spaces are

-      strung with lanterns. No one was performing ablution at the handsome

-      fountain in the marble-paved court; only a single worshipper was kneeling

-      at prayer in all the edifice. But I heard a bird singing sweetly in the

-      airy height of the dome.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The view from the terrace of the mosque is the finest in Egypt, not

-      perhaps in extent, but certainly in variety and objects of interest; and

-      if the atmosphere and the light are both favorable, it is the most poetic.

-      From it you command not only the city and a long sweep of the Nile, with

-      fields of living green and dark lines of palms, but the ruins and pyramids

-      of slumberous old Memphis, and, amid the yellow sands and backed by the

-      desolate Libyan hills, the dreamy pyramids of Geezeh. We are advised to

-      get this view at sunset, because then the light is soft and all the vast

-      landscape has color. This is good advice so far as the city at our feet is

-      concerned, with its hundreds of minarets and its wide expanse of flat

-      roofs, palm-tops and open squares; there is the best light then also on

-      the purple Mokattam hills; and the tombs of the Memlooks, north of the

-      cemetery, with their fairy domes and exquisite minarets and the

-      encompassing grey desert, the whole bathed in violet light, have a beauty

-      that will linger with one who has once seen them forever. But looking

-      beyond the Nile, you have the sun in your face. I should earnestly entreat

-      the stranger to take this view at sunrise. I never saw it myself at that

-      hour, being always otherwise engaged, but I am certain that the Pyramids

-      and the Libyan desert would wake at early morning in a glow of

-      transcendent beauty.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We drive out the gate or Bab e' Nasr beyond the desolate Moslem cemetery,

-      to go to the tombs of the Circassian Memlook Sultans. We pass round and

-      amid hills of rubbish, dirt, and broken pottery, the dumpings of the city

-      for centuries, and travel a road so sandy that the horses can scarcely

-      drag the heavy carriage through it. The public horses of Cairo are sorry

-      beasts and only need a slight excuse for stopping at any time. There is

-      nothing agreeable about the great Moslem cemetery; it is a field of

-      sand-heaps, thickly dotted with little oven-shaped stucco tombs. They may

-      be pleasanter below ground; for the vault into which the body is put,

-      without a coffin, is high enough to permit its occupant to sit up, which

-      he is obliged to do, whether he is able to sit up or not, the first night

-      of his stay there, in order to answer the questions of two angels who come

-      to examine him on his religious practices and views.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Tombs of the Sultans, which are in the desert, are in fact vast

-      structures,&mdash;tombs and mosques united&mdash;and are built of

-      parti-colored stone. They are remarkable for the beautiful and varied

-      forms of their minarets and for their aërial domes; the latter are covered

-      with the most wonderful arabesque carving and tracing. They stand

-      deserted, with the sand drifting about them, and falling to rapid decay.

-      In the interiors are still traces of exquisite carving and color, but much

-      of the ornamentation, being of stucco on rude wooden frames, only adds to

-      the appearance of decay. The decay of finery is never respectable.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is not correct, however, to speak of these mosque-tombs as deserted.

-      Into all of them have crept families of the poor or of the vicious. And

-      the business of the occupants, who call themselves guardians, is to

-      extract backsheesh from the visitor. Spinning, knitting, baking, and all

-      the simple household occupations go on in the courts and in the gaunt

-      rooms; one tomb is used as a grist-mill. The women and girls dwelling

-      there go unveiled; they were tattooed slightly upon the chin and the

-      forehead, as most Egyptian women are; some of the younger were pretty,

-      with regular features and handsome dark eyes. Near the mosques are lanes

-      of wretched homes, occupied by as wretched people. The whole mortal

-      neighborhood swarms (life out of death) with children; they are as thick

-      as jars at a pottery factory; they are as numerous as the flies that live

-      on the rims of their eyes and noses; they are as naked, most of them, as

-      when they were born. The distended condition of their stomachs testify

-      that they have plenty to eat, and they tumble about in the dirt, in the

-      full enjoyment of this delicious climate. People can afford to be poor

-      when nature is their friend.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0088.jpg" alt="0088 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0089.jpg" alt="0089 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER VII.&mdash;MOSLEM WORSHIP.&mdash;THE CALL TO PRAYER.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> SHOULD like to go

-      once to an interesting city where there are no sights. That city could be

-      enjoyed; and conscience&mdash;which never leaves any human being in peace

-      until it has nagged him into a perfect condition morally, and keeps

-      punching him about frivolous little details of duty, especially at the

-      waking morning hour&mdash;would not come to insert her thumb among the

-      rosy fingers of the dawn.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Perhaps I do not make myself clear about conscience. Conscience is a kind

-      of gastric juice that gnaws upon the very coatings of a person's moral

-      nature, if it has no indigestible sin to feed on. Of course I know that

-      neither conscience nor gastric juice has a thumb. And, to get out of these

-      figures, all I wish to say is, that in Cairo, when the traveler is aware

-      of the glow of the morning stealing into his room, as if the day were

-      really opened gently (not ripped and torn open as it is in our own cold

-      north) by a rosy-fingered maiden, and an atmosphere of sweet leisure

-      prevails, then Conscience suggests remorselessly: &ldquo;To-day you must go to

-      the Pyramids,&rdquo; or, &ldquo;You must take your pleasure in a drive in the Shoobra

-      road,&rdquo; or &ldquo;You must explore dirty Old Cairo and its Coptic churches,&rdquo; or

-      &ldquo;You must visit the mosques, and see the Howling Derweeshes.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      But for this Conscience, I think nothing would be so sweet as the coming

-      of an eastern morning. I fancy that the cool wind stirring in the palms is

-      from the pure desert. It may be that these birds, so melodiously singing

-      in the garden, are the small green birds who eat the fruits and drink the

-      waters of Paradise, and in whose crops the souls of martyrs abide until

-      Judgment. As I lie quite still, I hear the call of a muezzin from a

-      minaret not far off, the voice now full and clear and now faint, as he

-      walks around the tower to send his entreaty over the dark roofs of the

-      city. I am not disturbed by this early call to the unconverted, for this

-      is not my religion. With the clamor of morning church bells in Italy it is

-      different; for to one born in New England, Conscience is in the bells.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Sometimes at midnight I am dimly conscious of the first call to prayer,

-      which begins solemnly:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Prayer is better than sleep.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      But the night calls are not obligatory, and I do not fully wake. The calls

-      during the night are long chants, that of the daytime is much shorter. Mr.

-      Lane renders it thus:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;God is most Great&rdquo; (four times repeated). &ldquo;I testify that there is no

-      deity but God&rdquo; (twice). &ldquo;I testify that Mohammed is God's Apostle&rdquo;

-       (twice). &ldquo;Come to prayer&rdquo; (twice). &ldquo;Come to security&rdquo; (twice). &ldquo;God is

-      most Great&rdquo; (twice). &ldquo;There is no deity but God.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The muezzin whom I hear when the first faint light appears in the east,

-      has a most sonorous and sweet tenor voice, and his chant is exceedingly

-      melodious. In the perfect hush of that hour his voice fills all the air,

-      and might well be mistaken for a sweet entreaty out of heaven. This call

-      is a long one, and is in fact a confession and proclamation as well as a

-      call to prayer. It begins as follows:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;[I extol] the perfection of God, the Existing forever and ever&rdquo; (three

-      times): &ldquo;the perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the

-      Supreme: the perfection of God, the One, the Sole: the perfection of Him

-      who taketh to Himself, in his great dominion, neither female companion nor

-      male partner, nor any like unto Him, nor any that is disobedient, nor any

-      deputy, nor any equal, nor any offspring. His perfection [be extolled]:

-      and exalted be His name. He is a Deity who knew what hath been before it

-      was, and called into existence what hath been; and He is now existing, as

-      He was [at the first]. His perfection [be extolled]: and exalted be His

-      name.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      And it ends: &ldquo;O God, bless and save and still beatify the beatified

-      Prophet, our lord Mohammed. And may God, whose name be blessed and

-      exalted, be well pleased with thee, O our lord El-Hassan, and with thee, O

-      our lord El-Hoseyn, and with thee, O Aboo-Farrâg, O Sheykh of the Arabs,

-      and with all the favorites ['.he welees'. of God. Amen.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The mosques of Cairo are more numerous than the churches in Rome; there

-      are about four hundred, many of them in ruins, but nearly all in daily

-      use. The old ones are the more interesting architecturally, but all have a

-      certain attraction. They are always open, they are cool quiet retreats out

-      of the glare of the sun and the noise of the street; they are democratic

-      and as hospitable to the beggar in rags as to the pasha in silk; they

-      offer water for the dusty feet of the pilgrim and a clean mat on which to

-      kneel; and in their hushed walls, with no images to distract the mind and

-      no ritual to rely on, the devout worshipper may feel the presence of the

-      Unseen. At all hours you will see men praying there or reading the Koran,

-      unconscious of any observers. Women I have seen in there occasionally, but

-      rarely, at prayer; still it is not uncommon to see a group of poor women

-      resting in a quiet corner, perhaps sewing or talking in low voices. The

-      outward steps and open courts are refuges for the poor, the friendless,

-      the lazy, and the tired. Especially the old and decaying mosques, do the

-      poor frequent. There about the fountains, the children play, and under the

-      stately colonnades the men sleep and the women knit and sew. These houses

-      of God are for the weary as well as for the pious or the repentant.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The mosques are all much alike. We enter by a few or by a flight of steps

-      from the street into a large paved court, open to the sky, and surrounded

-      by colonnades. There is a fountain in the center, a round or octagonal

-      structure of carved stone, usually with a fanciful wooden roof; from

-      faucets in the exterior, water runs into a surrounding stone basin about

-      which the worshippers crouch to perform the ablutions before prayer. At

-      one side of the court is the entrance to the mosque, covered by a curtain.

-      Pushing this aside you are in a spacious room lighted from above, perhaps

-      with a dome, the roof supported by columns rising to elegant arches. You

-      will notice also the peculiar Arabic bracketing-work, called by architects

-      &ldquo;pendentive,&rdquo; fitting the angles and the transitions from the corners

-      below to the dome. In decaying mosques, where the plaster has fallen,

-      revealing the round stick frame-work of this bracketing, the perishable

-      character of Saracenic ornament is apparent.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The walls are plain, with the exception of gilded texts from the Koran.

-      Above, on strings extending across the room are little lamps, and very

-      often hundreds of ostrich eggs are suspended. These eggs are almost always

-      seen in Coptic and often in Greek churches. What they signify I do not

-      know, unless the ostrich, which can digest old iron, is a symbol of the

-      credulity that can swallow any tradition. Perhaps her eggs represent the

-      great &ldquo;cosmic egg&rdquo; which modern philosophers are trying to teach (if we

-      may be allowed the expression) their grandmothers to suck.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The stone pavement is covered with matting and perhaps with costly rugs

-      from Persia, Smyrna, and Tunis. The end towards Mecca is raised a foot or

-      so; in it is the prayer niche, towards which all worshippers turn, and

-      near that is the high pulpit with its narrow steps in front; a pulpit of

-      marble carved, or of wood cut in bewildering arabesque, and inlaid with

-      pearl.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The oldest mosque in Cairo is Ahmed ebn e' Tooloon, built in 879 A.D., and

-      on the spot where, according to a tradition (of how high authority I do

-      not know), Abraham was prevented from offering up his son by the

-      appearance of a ram. The modern name of this hill is, indeed,

-      Kalat-el-Kebsh, the Citadel of the Ram. I suppose the tradition is as well

-      based as is the belief of Moslems that it was Ishmael and not Isaac whose

-      life was spared. The center of this mosque is an open court, surrounded by

-      rows of fine columns, five deep on the East side; and what gives it great

-      interest is the fact that the columns all support <i>pointed arches</i>,

-      and exceedingly graceful ones, with a slight curve of the horse-shoe at

-      the base. These arches were constructed about three centuries before the

-      introduction of the pointed arch into Europe; their adoption in Europe was

-      probably one of the results of the Crusades.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In this same court I saw an old Nebk tree, which grows on the spot where

-      the ark of Noah is said to have rested after its voyage. This goes to

-      show, if it goes to show anything, that the Flood was &ldquo;general&rdquo; enough to

-      reach Egypt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The mosque of Sultan Hassan, notwithstanding its ruined and shabby

-      condition, is the finest specimen of pure Arabic architecture in the city;

-      and its lofty and ornamented porch is, I think, as fine as anything of its

-      kind in the world. One may profitably spend hours in the study of its

-      exquisite details. I often found myself in front of it, wondering at the

-      poetic invention and sensitiveness to the beautiful in form, which enabled

-      the builders to reach the same effects that their Gothic successors only

-      produced by the aid of images and suggestions drawn from every department

-      of nature.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We ascend the high steps, pass through some dilapidated parts of the

-      building, which are inhabited, and come to the threshold. Here the Moslem

-      removes his shoes, or street-slippers, and carries them in his hand. Over

-      this sill we may not step, shod as we are. An attendant is ready, however,

-      with big slippers which go on over our shoes. Eager, bright little boys

-      and girls put them on for us, and then attend us in the mosque, keeping a

-      close watch that the slippers are not shuffled off. When one does get off,

-      leaving the unholy shoe to touch the ground, they affect a sort of horror

-      and readjust it with a laugh. Even the children are beginning to feel the

-      general relaxation of bigotry. To-day the heels of my shoes actually touch

-      the floor at every step, a transgression which the little girl who is

-      leading me by the hand points out with a sly shake of the head. The

-      attention of this pretty little girl looks like affection, but I know by

-      sad experience that it means &ldquo;backsheesh.&rdquo; It is depressing to think that

-      her natural, sweet, coquettish ways mean only that. She is fierce if any

-      other girl seeks to do me the least favor, and will not permit my own

-      devotion to her to wander.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The mosque of Sultan Hassan was built in the fourteenth century, and

-      differs from most others. Its great, open court has a square recess on

-      each side, over which is a noble arch; the east one is very spacious, and

-      is the place of prayer. Behind this, in an attached building, is the tomb

-      of Hassan; lights are always burning over it, and on it lies a large copy

-      of the Koran.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we enter, there are only a few at their devotions, though there are

-      several groups enjoying the serenity of the court; picturesque groups, all

-      color and rags! In a far corner an old man is saying his prayers and near

-      him a negro, perhaps a slave, also prostrates himself. At the fountain are

-      three or four men preparing for devotion; and indeed the prayers begin

-      with the washing. The ablution is not a mere form with these soiled

-      laborers&mdash;though it does seem a hopeless task for men of the color of

-      these to scrub themselves. They bathe the head, neck, breast, hands and

-      arms, legs and feet; in fact, they take what might be called a fair bath

-      in any other country. In our sight this is simply a wholesome &ldquo;wash&rdquo;; to

-      them it is both cleanliness and religion, as we know, for Mr. Lane has

-      taught us what that brown man in the blue gown is saying. It may help us

-      to understand his acts if we transcribe a few of his ejaculations.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When he washes his face, he says:&mdash;&ldquo;O God whiten my face with thy

-      light, on the day when thou shalt whiten the faces of thy favorites; and

-      do not blacken my face, on the day when Thou shalt blacken the faces of

-      thine enemies.&rdquo; Washing his right arm, he entreats:&mdash;&ldquo;O God, give me

-      my book in my right hand; and reckon with me with an easy reckoning.&rdquo;

-       Passing his wetted hand over his head under his raised turban, he says:&mdash;&ldquo;O

-      God, cover me with thy mercy, and pour down thy blessing upon me; and

-      shade me under the shadow of thy canopy, on the day when there shall be no

-      shade but its shade.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      One of the most striking entreaties is the prayer upon washing the right

-      foot:&mdash;&ldquo;O God, make firm my feet upon the Sirat, on the day when feet

-      shall slip upon it.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Es Sirât&rdquo; is the bridge, which extends over the midst of Hell, finer than

-      a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, over which all must pass, and

-      from which the wicked shall fall into Hell.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In these mosques order and stillness always reign, and the devotions are

-      conducted with the utmost propriety, whether there are single worshippers,

-      or whether the mosque is filled with lines of gowned and turbaned figures

-      prostrating themselves and bowing with one consent. But, much stress as

-      the Moslems lay upon prayer, they say that they do not expect to reach

-      Paradise by that, or by any merit of their own, but only by faith and

-      forgiveness. This is expressed frequently both in prayers and in the

-      sermons on Friday. A sermon by an Imam of a Cairo mosque contains these

-      implorings:&mdash;&ldquo;O God! unloose the captivity of the captives, and annul

-      the debts of the debtors; and make this town to be safe and secure, and

-      blessed with wealth and plenty, and all the towns of the Moslems, O Lord

-      of the beings of the whole earth. And decree safety and health to us and

-      to all travelers, and pilgrims, and warriors, and wanderers, upon thy

-      earth, and upon thy sea, such as are Moslems, O Lord of the beings of the

-      whole world. O Lord, we have acted unjustly towards our own souls, and if

-      Thou do not forgive us and be merciful unto us, we shall surely be of

-      those who perish. I beg of God, the Great, that He may forgive me and you,

-      and all the people of Mohammed, the servants of God.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0095.jpg" alt="0095 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0096.jpg" alt="0096 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER VIII.&mdash;THE PYRAMIDS.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE ancient

-      Egyptians of the Upper Country excavated sepulchres for their great dead

-      in the solid rocks of the mountain; the dwellers in the lower country

-      built a mountain of stone in which to hide the royal mummy. In the

-      necropolis at Thebes there are the vast rock-tombs of the kings; at

-      Sakkara and Geezeh stand the Pyramids. On the upper Nile isolated rocks

-      and mountains cut the sky in pyramidal forms; on the lower Nile the

-      mountain ranges run level along the horizon, and the constructed pyramids

-      relieve the horizontal lines which are otherwise unbroken except by the

-      palms.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The rock-tombs were walled up and their entrances concealed as much as

-      possible, by a natural arrangement of masses of rock; the pyramids were

-      completely encased and the openings perfectly masked. False passages,

-      leading through gorgeously carved and decorated halls and chambers to an

-      empty pit or a blind wall, were hewn in the rock-tombs, simply to mislead

-      the violator of the repose of the dead as to the position of the mummy.

-      The entrance to the pyramids is placed away from the center, and

-      misleading passages run from it, conducting the explorer away from the

-      royal sarcophagus. Rock-tomb and pyramid were for the same purpose, the

-      eternal security of the mummy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      That purpose has failed; the burial-place was on too grand a scale, its

-      contents were too tempting. There is no security for any one after death

-      but obscurity; to preserve one's body is to lose it. The bones must be

-      consumed if they would be safe, or else the owner of them must be a

-      patriot and gain a forgotten grave. There is nothing that men so enjoy as

-      digging up the bones of their ancestors. It is doubtful if even the

-      Egyptian plunderers left long undisturbed the great tombs which contained

-      so much treasure; and certainly the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the

-      Saracens, left comparatively little for the scientific grave-robbers of

-      our excellent age. They did, however, leave the tombs, the sarcophagi,

-      most of the sculptures, and a fair share of the preserved dead.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But time made a pretty clean sweep of the mummy and nearly all his

-      personal and real property. The best sculptures of his tomb might legally

-      be considered in the nature of improvements attaching themselves to the

-      realty, but our scientists have hacked them off and carried them away as

-      if they were personal estate. We call the Arabs thieves and ghouls who

-      prowl in the the tombs in search of valuables. But motive is everything;

-      digging up the dead and taking his property, tomb and all, in the name of

-      learning and investigation is respectable and commendable. It comes to the

-      same thing for the mummy, however, this being turned out of house and home

-      in his old age. The deed has its comic aspect, and it seems to me that if

-      a mummy has any humor left in his dried body, he must smile to see what a

-      ludicrous failure were his costly efforts at concealment and repose. For

-      there is a point where frustration of plans may be so sweeping as to be

-      amusing; just as the mummy himself is so ghastly that his aspect is almost

-      funny.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Nothing more impresses the mind with the antiquity of Egypt than its vast

-      cemeteries, into which the harvests of the dead have been gathered for so

-      many thousands of years. Of old Memphis, indeed, nothing remains except

-      its necropolis, whose monuments have outlasted the palaces and temples

-      that were the wonder of the world. The magnificence of the city can be

-      estimated by the extent of its burial-ground.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On the west side of the Nile, opposite Cairo, and extending south along

-      the edge of the desert, is a nearly continuous necropolis for fifteen

-      miles. It is marked at intervals by pyramids. At Geezeh are three large

-      and several small ones; at Abooseer are four; at Sakkara are eleven; at

-      Dashoor are four. These all belonged to the necropolis of Memphis. At

-      Geezeh is the largest, that of Cheops or Shoofoo, the third king of the

-      fourth dynasty, reigning at Memphis about 4235 B.C., according to the

-      chronology of Mariette Bey, which every new discovery helps to establish

-      as the most probably correct. This pyramid was about four hundred and

-      eighty feet high, and the length of a side of its base was about seven

-      hundred and sixty-four feet; it is now four hundred and fifty feet high

-      and its base line is seven hundred and forty-six feet. It is big enough

-      yet for any practical purpose. The old pyramid at Sakkara is believed to

-      have been built by Ouenephes, the fourth king of the first dynasty, and to

-      be the <i>oldest monument in the world</i>. Like the mounds of the

-      Chaldeans, it is built in degrees or stages, of which there are five.

-      Degraded now and buried at the base in its own rubbish, it rises only

-      about one hundred and ninety feet above the ground.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a drive of two hours from Cairo to the Pyramids of Geezeh, over a

-      very good road; and we are advised to go by carriage. Hadji is on the seat

-      with the driver, keeping his single twinkling eye active in the service of

-      the howadji. The driver is a polished Nubian, with a white turban and a

-      white gown; feet and legs go bare. You wouldn't call it a stylish turnout

-      for the Bois, but it would be all right if we had a gorgeous sais to

-      attract attention from ourselves.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We drive through the wide and dusty streets of the new quarter. The

-      barrack-like palace, on the left of abroad place, is the one in which the

-      Khedive is staying just now, though he may be in another one to-night. The

-      streets are the same animated theater-like scenes of vivid color and

-      picturesque costume and indolent waiting on Providence to which we thought

-      we should never become accustomed, but which are already beginning to lose

-      their novelty. The fellaheen are coming in to market, trudging along

-      behind donkeys and camels loaded with vegetables or freshly cut grass and

-      beans for fodder. Squads of soldiers in white uniform pass; bugle notes

-      are heard from Kasr e' Neel, a barrack of troops on the river. Here, as in

-      Europe, the great business most seriously pursued is the drilling of men

-      to stand straight, handle arms, roll their eyes, march with a thousand

-      legs moving as one, and shoot on sight other human beings who have learned

-      the same tricks. God help us, it is a pitiful thing for civilized people.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The banks of the Nile here above Boolak are high and steep. We cross the

-      river on a fine bridge of iron, and drive over the level plain, opposite,

-      on a raised and winding embankment. This is planted on each side with

-      lebbekh and sycamore trees. Part of the way the trees are large and the

-      shade ample; the roots going down into moist ground. Much of the way the

-      trees are small and kept alive by constant watering. On the right, by a

-      noble avenue are approached the gardens and the palace of Gezeereh. We

-      pass by the new summer palace of Geezeh. Other large ones are in process

-      of construction. If the viceroy is measured for a new suit of clothes as

-      often as he orders a new palace, his tailors must be kept busy. Through

-      the trees we see green fields, intersected with ditches, wheat, barley,

-      and beans, the latter broad-sown and growing two to three feet high; here

-      and there are lines of palms, clumps of acacias; peasants are at work or

-      asleep in the shade; there are trains of camels, and men plowing with cows

-      or buffaloes. Leaving the squalid huts that are the remains of once

-      beautiful Geezeh, the embankment strides straight across the level

-      country.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And there before us, on a rocky platform a hundred feet higher than the

-      meadows, are the pyramids, cutting the stainless blue of the sky with

-      their sharp lines. They master the eye when we are an hour away, and as we

-      approach they seem to recede, neither growing larger nor smaller, but

-      simply withdrawing with a grand reserve.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I suppose there are more &ldquo;emotions&rdquo; afloat about the pyramids than

-      concerning any other artificial' objects. There are enough. It becomes

-      constantly more and more difficult for the ordinary traveler to rise to

-      the height of these accumulated emotions, and it is entirely impossible to

-      say how much the excitement one experiences on drawing near them results

-      from reading and association, and how much is due to these simple forms in

-      such desolate surroundings. But there they stand, enduring standards, and

-      every visitor seems inclined to measure his own height by their vastness,

-      in telling what impression they produce upon <i>him</i>. They have been

-      treated sentimentally, off-handedly, mathematically, solemnly,

-      historically, humorously. They yield to no sort of treatment. They are

-      nothing but piles of stone, and shabby piles at that, and they stand there

-      to astonish people. Mr. Bayard Taylor is entirely right when he says that

-      the pyramids are and will remain unchanged and unapproachably impressive

-      however modern life may surge about them, and though a city should creep

-      about their bases.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Perhaps they do not appear so gigantic when the visitor is close to them

-      as he thought they would from their mass at a distance. But if he stands

-      at the base of the great pyramid, and casts his eye along the steps of its

-      enormous side and up the dizzy height where the summit seems to pierce the

-      solid blue, he will not complain of want of size. And if he walks around

-      one, and walks from one to another wading in the loose sand and under a

-      midday sun, his respect for the pyramids will increase every moment.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Long before we reach the ascent of the platform we are met by Arab boys

-      and men, sellers of antiquities, and most persistent beggars. The

-      antiquities are images of all sorts, of gods, beasts, and birds, in

-      pottery or in bronze, articles from tombs, bits of mummy-cloth, beads and

-      scarabæi, and Roman copper coins; all of them at least five thousand years

-      old in appearance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our carriage is stuck in the sand, and we walk a quarter of a mile up the

-      platform, attended by a rabble of coaxing, imploring, importunate,

-      half-clad Bedaween. &ldquo;Look a here, you take dis; dis ver much old, he from

-      mummy; see here, I get him in tomb; one shillin; in Cairo you get him one

-      pound; ver sheap. You no like? No anteeka, no money. How much?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One penny.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; ironically, &ldquo;ket'-ther khâyrak (much obliged). You take him

-      sixpence. Howadji, say, me guide, you want go top pyramid, go inside, go

-      Sphinkee, allée tomba?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Surrounded by an increasing swarm of guides and antiquity-hawkers, and

-      beset with offers, entreaties, and opportunities, we come face to face

-      with the great pyramid. The ground in front of it is piled high with its

-      <i>debris</i>. Upon these rocks, in picturesque attitudes, some in the

-      shade and some in the sun, others of the tribe are waiting the arrival of

-      pyramid climbers; in the intense light their cotton garments and turbans

-      are like white paint, brilliant in the sun, ashy in the shadow. All the

-      shadows are sharp and deep. A dark man leaning on his spear at the corner

-      of the pyramid makes a picture. At a kiosk near by carriages are standing

-      and visitors are taking their lunch. But men, carriages, kiosk, are

-      dwarfed in this great presence. It is, as I said, a shabby pile of stone,

-      and its beauty is only that of mathematical angles; but then it is so big,

-      it casts such a shadow; we all beside it are like the animated lines and

-      dots which represent human beings in the etchings of Callot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      To be rid of importunities we send for the sheykh of the pyramid tribe.

-      The Bedaween living here have a sort of ownership of these monuments, and

-      very good property they are. The tribe supports itself mainly by tolls

-      levied upon visitors. The sheykh assigns guides and climbers, and receives

-      the pay for their services. This money is divided among the families; but

-      what individuals get as backsheesh or by the sale of antiquities, they

-      keep. They live near by, in huts scarcely distinguishable from the rocks,

-      many of them in vacant tombs, and some have shanties on the borders of the

-      green land. Most of them have the appearance of wretched poverty, and

-      villainous faces abound. But handsome, intelligent faces and finely

-      developed forms are not rare, either.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Sheykh, venerable as Jacob, respectable as a New England deacon, suave

-      and polite as he traditionally should be, wears a scarf of camel's hair

-      and a bright yellow and black kuffia, put on like a hood, fastened about

-      the head by a cord and falling over the shoulders. He apportioned his

-      guides to take us up the pyramid and to accompany us inside. I had already

-      sent for a guide who had been recommended to me in the city, and I found

-      Ali Gobree the frank, manly, intelligent, quiet man I had expected,

-      handsome also, and honesty and sincerity beaming from his countenance. How

-      well-bred he was, and how well he spoke English. Two other men were given

-      me; for the established order is that two shall pull and one shall push

-      the visitor up. And it is easier to submit to the regulation than to

-      attempt to go alone and be followed by an importunate crowd.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I am aware that every one who writes of the pyramids is expected to make a

-      scene of the ascent, but if I were to romance I would rather do it in a

-      fresher field. The fact is that the ascent is not difficult, unless the

-      person is very weak in the legs or attempts to carry in front of himself a

-      preposterous stomach. There is no difficulty in going alone; occasionally

-      the climber encounters a step from three to four feet high, but he can

-      always flank it. Of course it is tiresome to go up-stairs, and the great

-      pyramid needs an &ldquo;elevator&rdquo;; but a person may leisurely zig-zag up the

-      side without great fatigue. We went straight up at one corner; the guides

-      insisting on taking me by the hand; the boosting Arab who came behind

-      earned his money by grunting every time we reached a high step, but he

-      didn't lift a pound.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We stopped frequently to look down and to measure with the eye the mass on

-      the surface of which we were like flies. When we were a third of the way

-      up, and turned from the edge to the middle, the height to be climbed

-      seemed as great as when we started. I should think that a giddy person

-      might have unpleasant sensations in looking back along the corner and

-      seeing no resting-place down the sharp edges of the steps short of the

-      bottom, if he should fall. We measure our ascent by the diminishing size

-      of the people below, and by the widening of the prospect. The guides are

-      perfectly civil, they do not threaten to throw us off, nor do they even

-      mention backsheesh. Stopping to pick out shells from the nummulitic

-      limestone blocks or to try our glasses on some distant object, we come

-      easily to the summit in a quarter of an hour.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The top, thirty feet square, is strewn with big blocks of stone and has a

-      flag-staff. Here ambitious people sometimes breakfast. Arabs are already

-      here with koollehs of water and antiquities. When the whole party arrives

-      the guides set up a perfunctory cheer; but the attempt to give an air of

-      achievement to our climbing performance and to make it appear that we are

-      the first who have ever accomplished the feat, is a failure. We sit down

-      upon the blocks and look over Egypt, as if we were used to this sort of

-      thing at home.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      All that is characteristic of Egypt is in sight; to the west, the Libyan

-      hills and the limitless stretch of yellow desert sand; to the north,

-      desert also and the ruined pyramid of Abooroâsh; to the south, that long

-      necropolis of the desert marked by the pyramids of Abooseér, Sakkarah, and

-      Dashoor; on the east, the Nile and its broad meadows widening into the dim

-      Delta northward, the white line of Cairo under the Mokattam hills, and the

-      grey desert beyond. Egypt is a ribbon of green between two deserts. Canals

-      and lines of trees stripe the green of the foreground; white sails flicker

-      southward along the river, winging their way to Nubia; the citadel and its

-      mosque shine in the sun.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An Arab offers to run down the side of this pyramid, climb the second one,

-      the top of which is still covered with the original casing, and return in

-      a certain incredible number of minutes. We decline, because we don't like

-      to have a half-clad Arab thrust his antics between us and the

-      contemplation of dead yet mighty Egypt. We regret our refusal afterwards,

-      for there is nothing people like to read about so much as feats of this

-      sort. Humanity is more interesting than stones. I am convinced that if

-      Martha Rugg had fallen off the pyramid instead of the rock at Niagara

-      Falls, people would have looked at the spot where she fell, and up at the

-      stairs she came bobbing down, with more interest than at the pyramid

-      itself. Nevertheless, this Arab, or another did, while we were there,

-      climb the second pyramid like a monkey; he looked only a black speck on

-      its side.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      That accidents sometimes happen on the pyramids, I gather from the

-      conversation of Hadji, who is full of both information and philosophy

-      to-day.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sometime man, he fool, he go up. Man say, 'go this way.' Fool, he say,

-      'let me lone.' Umbrella he took him, threw him off; he dead in hundred

-      pieces.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      As to the selling of Scarabæi to travelers, Hadji inclines to the side of

-      the poor:&mdash;&ldquo;Good one, handsome one,&mdash;one pound. Not good for

-      much&mdash;but what to do? Gentleman he want it; man he want the money.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      For Murray's' Guide-Book he has not more respect than guides usually have

-      who have acted as interpreters in the collection of information for it.

-      For &ldquo;interpret&rdquo; Hadji always says &ldquo;spell.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When the Murray come here I spell it to the man, the man to Murray and

-      him put it down. He don't know anything before. He told me, what is this?

-      I told him what it is. Something,&rdquo; with a knowing nod, &ldquo;be new after

-      Murray. Look here, Murray very old now.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Hadji understands why the cost of living has gone up so much in Egypt. &ldquo;He

-      was very sheap; now very different, dearer&mdash;because plenty people. I

-      build a house, another people build a house, and another people he build a

-      house. Plenty men to work, make it dear.&rdquo; I have never seen Hadji's

-      dwelling, but it is probably of the style of those that he calls&mdash;when

-      in the street we ask him what a specially shabby mud-wall with a ricketty

-      door in it is&mdash;&ldquo;a brivate house.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      About the Great Pyramid has long waged an archaeological war. Years have

-      been spent in studying it, measuring it inside and outside, drilling holes

-      into it, speculating why this stone is in one position and that in

-      another, and constructing theories about the purpose for which it was

-      built. Books have been written on it, diagrams of all its chambers and

-      passages, with accurate measurements of every stone in them, are printed.

-      If I had control of a restless genius who was dangerous to the peace of

-      society, I would set him at the Great Pyramid, certain that he would have

-      occupation for a lifetime and never come to any useful result. The

-      interior has peculiarities, which distinguish it from all other pyramids;

-      and many think that it was not intended for a sepulchre mainly; but that

-      it was erected for astronomical purposes, or as a witness to the true

-      north, east, south, and west, or to serve as a standard of measure; not

-      only has the passage which descends obliquely three hundred and twenty

-      feet from the opening into the bed-rock, and permits a view of the sky

-      from that depth, some connection with the observation of Sirius and the

-      fixing of the Sothic year; not only is the porphyry sarcophagus that is in

-      the King's Chamber, secure from fluctuations of temperature, a fixed

-      standard of measure; but the positions of various stones in the passages

-      (stones which certainly are stumbling-blocks to everybody who begins to

-      think why they are there) are full of a mystic and even religious

-      signification. It is most restful, however, to the mind to look upon this

-      pyramid as a tomb, and that it was a sepulchre like all the others is the

-      opinion of most scholars.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Whatever it was, it is a most unpleasant place to go into. But we wanted

-      one idea of' Cimmerian darkness, and the sensation of being buried alive,

-      and we didn't like to tell a lie when asked if we had been in, and

-      therefore we went. You will not understand where we went without a

-      diagram, and you never will have any idea of it until you go. We, with a

-      guide for each person, light candles, and slide and stumble down an

-      incline; we crawl up an incline; we shuffle along a level passage that

-      seems interminable, backs and knees bent double till both are apparently

-      broken, and the torture of the position is almost unbearable; we get up

-      the Great Gallery, a passage over a hundred and fifty feet long,

-      twenty-eight high, and seven broad, and about as easy to ascend as a

-      logging-sluice, crawl under three or four portcullises, and emerge,

-      dripping with perspiration and covered with dust, into the king's chamber,

-      a room thirty-four feet long, seventeen broad, and nineteen high. It is

-      built of magnificent blocks of syenite, polished and fitted together

-      perfectly, and contains the lidless sarcophagus.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If it were anywhere else and decently lighted, it would be a stylish

-      apartment; but with a dozen torches and candles smoking in it and heating

-      it, a lot of perspiring Arabs shouting and kicking up a dust, and the

-      feeling that the weight of the superincumbent mass was upon us, it seemed

-      to me too small and confined even for a tomb. The Arabs thought they ought

-      to cheer here as they did on top; we had difficulty in driving them all

-      out and sending the candles with them, in order that we might enjoy the

-      quiet and blackness of this retired situation. I suppose we had for once

-      absolute night, a room full of the original Night, brother of Chaos, night

-      bottled up for four or five thousand years, the very night in which old

-      Cheops lay in a frightful isolation, with all the portcullises down and

-      the passages sealed with massive stones.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Out of this blackness the eye even by long waiting couldn't get a ray; a

-      cat's eye would be invisible in it. Some scholars think that Cheops never

-      occupied this sarcophagus. I can understand his feeling if he ever came in

-      here alive. I think he may have gone away and put up &ldquo;to let&rdquo; on the door.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We scrambled about a good deal in this mountain, visited the so-called

-      Queen's Chamber, entered by another passage, below the King's, lost all

-      sense of time and of direction, and came out, glad to have seen the

-      wonderful interior, but welcoming the burst of white light and the pure

-      air, as if we were being born again. To remain long in that gulf of

-      mortality is to experience something of the mystery of death.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Ali Gobree had no antiquities to press upon us, but he could show us some

-      choice things in his house, if we would go there. Besides, his house would

-      be a cool place in which to eat our lunch. We walked thither, a quarter of

-      a mile down the sand slope on the edge of the terrace. We had been

-      wondering where the Sphinx was, expecting it to be as conspicuous almost

-      as the Pyramids. Suddenly, turning a sand-hill, we came upon it, the rude

-      lion's body struggling out of the sand, the human head lifted up in that

-      stiff majesty which we all know.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      So little of the body is now visible, and the features are so much damaged

-      that it is somewhat difficult to imagine what impression this monstrous

-      union of beast and man once produced, when all the huge proportions stood

-      revealed, and color gave a startling life-likeness to that giant face. It

-      was cut from the rock of the platform; its back was patched with pieces of

-      sandstone to make the <i>contour</i>; its head was solid. It was

-      approached by flights of stairs descending, and on the paved platform

-      where it stood were two small temples; between its paws was a sort of

-      sanctuary, with an altar. Now, only the back, head and neck are above the

-      drifting sand. Traces of the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt which

-      crowned the head are seen on the forehead, but the crown has gone. The

-      kingly beard that hung from the chin has been chipped away. The vast wig&mdash;the

-      false mass of hair that encumbered the shaven heads of the Egyptians,

-      living or dead&mdash;still stands out on either side the head, and adds a

-      certain dignity. In spite of the broken condition of the face, with the

-      nose gone, it has not lost its character. There are the heavy eyebrows,

-      the prominent cheek-bones, the full lips, the poetic chin, the blurred but

-      on-looking eyes. I think the first feeling of the visitor is that the face

-      is marred beyond recognition, but the sweep of the majestic lines soon

-      becomes apparent; it is not difficult to believe that there is a smile on

-      the sweet mouth, and the stony stare of the eyes, once caught, will never

-      be forgotten.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Sphinx, grossly symbolizing the union of physical and intellectual

-      force, and hinting at one of those recondite mysteries which we still like

-      to believe existed in the twilight of mankind, was called Hor-em-Khoo

-      (&ldquo;the Sun in his resting-place&rdquo;), and had divine honors paid to it as a

-      deity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This figure, whatever its purpose, is older than the Pyramid of Cheops. It

-      has sat facing the east, on the edge of this terrace of tombs, expecting

-      the break of day, since a period that is lost in the dimness of tradition.

-      All the achievements of the race, of which we know anything, have been

-      enacted since that figure was carved. It has seen, if its stony eyes could

-      see, all the procession of history file before it. Viewed now at a little

-      distance or with evening shadows on it, its features live again, and it

-      has the calmness, the simple majesty that belong to high art. Old writers

-      say that the face was once sweet and beautiful. How long had that unknown

-      civilization lasted before it produced this art?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Why should the Sphinx face the rising sun? Why does it stand in a

-      necropolis like a sleepy warden of the dead who sleep? Was it indeed the

-      guardian of those many dead, the mighty who slept in pyramids, in

-      rock-hewn tombs, in pits, their bodies ready for any pilgrimage; and does

-      it look to the east expecting the resurrection?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Not far from the Sphinx is a marvelous temple of syenite, which the sand

-      almost buries; in a well in one of its chambers was found the splendid

-      red-granite statue of Chephren, the builder of the second pyramid, a piece

-      of art which succeeding ages did not excel. All about the rock plateau are

-      tombs, and in some of them are beautiful sculptures, upon which the

-      coloring is fresh. The scenes depicted are of common life, the occupations

-      and diversions of the people, and are without any religious signification.

-      The admirable sculptures represent no gods and no funeral mysteries; when

-      they were cut the Egyptian theology was evidently not constructed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The residence of our guide is a tomb, two dry chambers in the rock, the

-      entrance closed by a wooden door. The rooms are large enough for tables

-      and chairs; upon the benches where the mummies have lain, are piled

-      antique fragments of all sorts, set off by a grinning skull or a

-      thigh-bone; the floor is covered with fine yellow sand. I don't know how

-      it may have seemed to its first occupant, but we found it an excellent

-      luncheon place, and we could sleep there calmly and securely, when the

-      door was shut against the jackals&mdash;though I believe it has never been

-      objected to a tomb that one couldn't sleep in it. While we sip our coffee

-      Ali brings forth his antique images and scarabæi. These are all genuine,

-      for Ali has certificates from most of the well-known Egyptologists as to

-      his honesty and knowledge of antiquities. We are looking for genuine ones;

-      those offered us at the pyramids were suspicious. We say to Ali:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We should like to get a few good scarabæi; we are entirely ignorant of

-      them; but we were sent to you as an honest man. You select half a dozen

-      that you consider the best, and we will pay you a fair price; if they do

-      not pass muster in Cairo you shall take them back.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;As you are a friend of Mr. Blank,&rdquo; said Ali, evidently pleased with the

-      confidence reposed in him, &ldquo;you shall have the best I have, for about what

-      they cost me.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The Scarabæus is the black beetle that the traveler will constantly see

-      tumbling about in the sand, and rolling up balls of dirt as he does in

-      lands where he has not so sounding a name. He was sacred to the old

-      Egyptians as an emblem of immortality, because he was supposed to have the

-      power of self-production. No mummy went away into the shades of the nether

-      world without one on his breast, with spread-wings attached to it. Usually

-      many scarabæi were buried with the mummy&mdash;several hundreds have been

-      found in one mummy-case. They were cut from all sorts of stones, both

-      precious and common, and made of limestone, or paste, hardened, glazed and

-      baked. Some of them are exquisitely cut, the intaglio on the under side

-      being as clean, true, and polished as Greek work. The devices on them are

-      various; the name of a reigning or a famous king, in the royal oval, is

-      not uncommon, and an authentic scarabæus with a royal name is considered

-      of most value. I saw an insignificant one in soft stone and of a grey

-      color, held at a hundred pounds; it is the second one that has ever been

-      found with the name of Cheops on it. The scarabæi were worn in rings,

-      carried as charms, used as seals; there are large coarse ones of blue

-      pottery which seem to have been invitations to a funeral, by the

-      inscriptions on them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Scarabæus is at once the most significant and portable <i>souvenir</i>

-      of ancient Egypt that the traveler can carry away, and although the supply

-      was large, it could not fill the demand. Consequently antique scarabæi are

-      now manufactured in large quantities at Thebes, and in other places, and

-      distributed very widely over the length of Egypt; the dealers have them

-      with a sprinkling of the genuine; almost every peasant can produce one

-      from his deep pocket; the women wear them in their bosoms.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The traveler up the Nile is pretty sure to be attacked with the fever of

-      buying Scarabæi; he expects to happen upon one of great value, which he

-      will get for a few piastres. It is his intention to do so. The Scarabæus

-      becomes to him the most beautiful and desirable object in the world. He

-      sees something fascinating in its shape, in its hieroglyphics, however

-      ugly it may be to untaught eyes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Ali selected our scarabæi. They did not seem to us exactly the antique

-      gems that we had expected to see, and they did not give a high idea of the

-      old Egyptian art. But they had a mysterious history and meaning; they had

-      shared the repose of a mummy perhaps before Abraham departed from Ur. We

-      paid for them. We paid in gold. We paid Ali for his services as guide. We

-      gave him backsheesh on account of his kindness and intelligence, besides.

-      We said good-bye to his honest face with regret, and hoped to see him

-      again.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was not long before we earnestly desired to meet him. He was a most

-      accomplished fellow, and honesty was his best policy. There isn't a more

-      agreeable Bedawee at the Pyramids; and yet Ali is a modern Egyptian, just

-      like his scarabæi, all the same. The traveler who thinks the Egyptians are

-      not nimble-witted and clever is likely to pay for his knowledge to the

-      contrary. An accumulated experience of five thousand years, in one spot,

-      is not for nothing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We depart from the pyramids amid a clamor of importunity; prices have

-      fallen to zero; antiquities old as Pharaoh will be given away;

-      &ldquo;backsheesh, backsheesh, O Howadji;&rdquo; &ldquo;I havn't any bread to <i>mangere</i>,

-      I have six children; what is a piastre for eight persons?&rdquo; They run after

-      us, they hang upon the carriage, they follow us a mile, begging,

-      shrieking, howling, dropping off one by one, swept behind by the weight of

-      a copper thrown to them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The shadows fall to the east; there is a lovely light on the plain; we

-      meet long lines of camels, of donkeys, of fellaheen returning from city

-      and field. All the west is rosy; the pyramids stand in a purple light; the

-      Sphinx casts its shade on the yellow sand; its expectant eyes look beyond

-      the Nile into the mysterious East.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0111.jpg" alt="0111 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER IX.&mdash;PREPARATIONS FOR A VOYAGE.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E are giving our

-      minds to a name for our dahabeëh. The owners have desired us to christen

-      it, and the task is getting heavy. Whatever we are doing; guiding a donkey

-      through the mazes of a bazaar; eating oranges at the noon breakfast;

-      watching the stream of color and fantastic apparel, swaying camels and

-      dashing harem-equipage with running saïses and outriding eunuchs, flowing

-      by the hotel; following a wedding procession in its straggling parade, or

-      strolling vacantly along, knocked, jostled, evaded by a dozen races in a

-      dozen minutes and lost in the whirl, color, excitement of this perpetual

-      masquerade, we are suddenly struck with, &ldquo;what <i>shall</i> we call that

-      boat?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We want a name that is characteristic of the country and expressive of our

-      own feelings, poetic and not sentimental, sensible and not common-place.

-      It seems impossible to suggest a good name that is not already borne by a

-      dahabeëh on the river&mdash;names such as the Lotus, the Ibis, the

-      Gazelle, Cleopatra, Zenobia, names with an Eastern flavor. And we must

-      have not only a name for the boat, but a motto or device for our pennant,

-      or &ldquo;distinguisher flag,&rdquo; as the dragoman calls the narrow fifty feet long

-      strip of bunting that is to stream from the forward yard. We carry at the

-      stern the flag of our country, but we float our individuality in the upper

-      air. If we had been a bridal party we should of course have taken some

-      such device as that of a couple who went up the river under the simple but

-      expressive legend of &ldquo;Nestle-down,&rdquo; written on their banner.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      What would <i>you</i> name a Nile dahabeëh?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The days go all too rapidly for us to catch the shifting illusions about

-      us. It is not so much what we see of the stated sights that can be

-      described, but it is the atmosphere in which we live that makes the

-      strangeness of our existence. It is as if we had been born into another

-      world. And the climate is as strange as the people, the costumes, the

-      habits, the morals. The calendar is bewitched. December is a mixture of

-      September and July. Alas, yes. There are the night-fogs of September, and

-      the mosquitoes of July. You cannot tell whether the season is going

-      backwards or forwards. But for once you are content to let Providence

-      manage it, at least so long as there is a north wind, and you forget that

-      the sky has any shade other than blue.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And the prophecy of the poet is realized. The nights are filled with

-      music, and the cares that infest the day are invariably put off till

-      tomorrow, in this deliciously procrastinating land. Perhaps, however, Mr.

-      Longfellow would not be satisfied with the music; for it seems to be the

-      nasal daughter of Lassitude and Monotony, ancient gods of the East. Two or

-      three strings stretched over a sounding skin and a parchment drum suffice

-      to express the few notes that an Arab musician commands; harmony does not

-      enter into his plan. Yet the people are fond of what they consider music.

-      We hear on all sides at night the picking of strings, the throb of the

-      darabooka and the occasional outburst of a wailing and sentimental strain.

-      Like all barbarous music, this is always minor. When the performers are

-      sailors or common strollers, it is doubtless exactly the same music that

-      delighted the ancient Egyptians; even the instruments are the same, and

-      the method of clapping the hands in accentuation of the music is

-      unchanged.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is a <i>café chantant</i> on one side of the open, tree-grown court

-      of a native hotel, in the Ezbekeëh where one may hear a mongrel music,

-      that is not inexpressive of both the morals and the mixed condition of

-      Cairo to-day. The instruments of the band are European; the tunes played

-      are Egyptian. When the first strain is heard we say that it is strangely

-      wild, a weird and plaintive minor; but that is the whole of it. The strain

-      is repeated over and over again for a half hour, as if it were ground out

-      of a coffee-mill, in an iteration sufficient to drive the listener insane,

-      the dissolute scraping and thumping and barbarous dissonance never

-      changing nor ending. From time to time this is varied with singing, of the

-      nasal, fine-tooth-comb order, with the most extraordinary attempts at

-      shakes and trills, and with all the agony of a moonlit cat on a house-top.

-      All this the grave Arabs and young Egyptian rakes, who sit smoking, accept

-      with entire satisfaction. Later in the evening dancing begins and goes on

-      with the strumming, monotonous music till at least the call for morning

-      prayer.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the handsome Ezbekeëh park or garden, where there are shady walks and

-      some fine sycamores and banyans to be seen, a military band plays every

-      afternoon, while the foreigners of both sexes, and Egyptian men promenade.

-      Of course no Egyptian lady or woman of respectability is ever seen in so

-      public a place. In another part of the garden, more retired, a native band

-      is always playing at nightfall. In this sheltered spot, under the lee of

-      some gigantic rock and grotto-work are tables and chairs, and a divan for

-      the band. This rock has water pleasantly running through it, but it must

-      have been struck by somebody besides Moses, for beer is brought out of its

-      cool recesses, as well. Rows of men of all colors and costumes may be seen

-      there, with pipe and mug and coffee cup; and on settees more elevated and

-      next the grotto, are always sitting veiled women, in outer wrappers of

-      black silk, sometimes open enough to show an underskirt of bright color

-      and feet in white slippers. These women call for beer or something

-      stronger, and smoke like the men; they run no risk in being in this

-      publicity, for they have nothing to lose here or elsewhere. Opposite them

-      on a raised divan, not unlike a roomy bedstead, sits the band.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is the most disreputable of bands. Nothing in the whole East so

-      expressed to me its fagged-out dissoluteness as this band and its

-      performances. It is a sleepy, nonchalant band, as if it had been awake all

-      the previous night; some of its members are blear-eyed, some have one eye,

-      some have two; they are in turbans, in tarbooshes, in gowns of soiled

-      silk, of blue cotton, of white drilling. It is the feeblest band; and yet

-      it is subject to spurts of bacchantic fervor. Sometimes all the

-      instruments are striving together, and then only one or two dribble the

-      monotonous refrain; but somehow, with all the stoppings to light

-      cigarettes and sip coffee, the tune is kept groaning on, in a minor that

-      is as wild as the desert and suggestive of sin.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The instruments are as African as the music. There is the <i>darabooka</i>,

-      a drum made of an earthen or wooden cylinder with a flaring head, over

-      which is stretched a parchment; the <i>tar</i>, a kind of tambourine; <i>kemengeh</i>,

-      a viol of two strings, with a cocoa-nut sounding-body; the <i>kanoon</i>,

-      an instrument of strings held on the knees, and played with the fingers;

-      the <i>'.od</i>, a sort of guitar with seven double strings; played with a

-      plectrum, a slip of vultures' feather held between the thumb and finger;

-      and the <i>nay</i>, a reed-flute blown at the end.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the midst of the thumbing and scraping, a rakish youth at the end, is

-      liable, at any moment, to throw back his head and break out in a soft

-      womanish voice, which may go no farther than a nasal <i>yah, ah, m-a-r-r</i>,

-      that appears to satisfy his yearnings; or it may expand into a droning

-      song, &ldquo;<i>Ya benat Iskendereeyeh,</i>&rdquo; like that which Mr. Lane renders:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      &ldquo;O ye damsels of Alexandria!

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      Your walk over the furniture is alluring:

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      Ye wear the Kashmeer shawl with embroidered work,

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      And your lips are sweet as sugar.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Below the divan sit some idlers or supernumeraries, who, as inclination

-      moves them, mark the rhythm by striking the palms of the hands together,

-      or cry out a prolonged <i>ah-yah</i>, but always in a forgetful,

-      uninterested manner, and then subside into silence, while the picking and

-      throbbing of the demoralized tune goes on. It is the &ldquo;devilish iteration&rdquo;

-       of it, I think, that steals away the senses; this, and some occult

-      immorality in the debased tune, that blots virtue out of the world. Yet

-      there is something comic in these blinking owls of the night, giving

-      sentimental tongue to the poetic imagery of the Eastern love-song&mdash;&ldquo;for

-      a solitary gazelle has taken away my soul&rdquo;:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      &ldquo;The beloved came to me with a vacillating gait;

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      And her eyelids were the cause of my intoxication.

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      I extended my hand to take the cup;

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      And was intoxicated by her eyes.

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      O thou in the rose-colored dress!

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      O thou in the rose-colored dress!

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      Beloved of my heart! remain with me.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Or he pipes to the &ldquo;dark-complexioned, and with two white roses&rdquo;:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent10">

-      &ldquo;O damsel! thy silk shirt is worn out, and thine arms have become visible,

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      And I fear for thee, on account of the blackness of thine eyes.

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      I desire to intoxicate myself, and kiss thy cheeks,

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      And do deeds that Antar did not.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      To all of which the irresponsible chorus, swaying its head, responds <i>O!

-      y-a-a-a-h!</i> And the motley audience sips and smokes; the veiled

-      daughters of sin flash invitation from their kohl-stained eyes; and the

-      cool night comes after the flaring heat of the day; and all things are as

-      they have been for thousands of years. It is time to take you to something

-      religious.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Howling Derweeshes are the most active religionists in the East; I

-      think they spend more force in devotion than the Whirling Derweeshes,

-      though they are probably not more meritorious. They exceed our own western

-      &ldquo;Jumpers,&rdquo; and by contrast make the worship of our dancing Shakers tame

-      and worldly. Of all the physical manifestations of religious feeling there

-      is none more warming than the <i>zikr</i> of these devotees. The

-      derweeshes are not all wanderers, beggars, saints in patched garments and

-      filthy skin; perhaps the most of those who belong to one of the orders

-      pursue some regular occupation; they are fishermen, laborers in the

-      fields, artisans, and water-carriers, and only occasionally join in the

-      ceremonies, processions and <i>zikrs</i> of their faith. I have seen a

-      laborer drop into the ring, take his turn at a <i>zikr</i>, and drop out

-      again, very much as the western man happens in and takes a hand in a &ldquo;free

-      fight,&rdquo; and then retires.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This mosque at which the Howling Derweeshes perform is circular, and large

-      enough to admit a considerable number of spectators, who sit, or stand

-      against the wall. Since the exercise is one of the sights of the

-      metropolis, and strangers are expected, it has a little the air of a

-      dress-parade, and I could not but fear that the devotion lost somewhat of

-      its singleness of purpose. When we enter, about forty men stand in an

-      oblong ring facing each other; the ring is open towards the <i>mehhrab</i>,

-      or niche which marks the direction of Mecca. In the opening stands the

-      Sheykh, to direct the performance; and at his left are seated the

-      musicians.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The derweeshes have divested themselves of turbans, fezes, outer gowns and

-      slippers, which lie in a heap in the middle of the circle, an

-      indistinguishable mass of old clothes, from which when the owners come to

-      draw they cannot fail to get as good as they deposited. The ceremony

-      begins with a little uneasiness on the part of the musical instruments;

-      the sheykh bows his head and brings the palms of his hands together; and

-      the derweeshes, standing close together, with their hands straight at

-      their sides, begin slowly to bow and to sway to the right in a compound

-      motion which is each time extended. The <i>daraboo-ka</i> is beaten softly

-      and the <i>'.od</i> is picked to a slow measure. As the worshippers sway,

-      they chant, <i>La ilaha illa-llah</i> (&ldquo;There is no deity but God&rdquo;) in

-      endless repetition, and imperceptibly quickening the enunciation as they

-      bow more rapidly. The music gets faster, and now and again one of the

-      roguish boys who is thumping the drum breaks out into vocal expression of

-      his piety or of his hilarity. The circle is now under full swing, the

-      bowings are lower and much more rapid, and the ejaculation has become

-      merely <i>Allah, Allah, Allah</i>, with a strong stress on the final

-      syllable.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The peculiarities of the individual performers begin to come out. Some

-      only bow and swing in a perfunctory manner; others throw their strength

-      into the performance, and their excitement is evinced by the working of

-      the face and the rolling of the eyes. Many of them have long hair, which

-      has evidently known neither scissors nor comb for years, and is matted and

-      twisted in a hopeless tangle. One of the most conspicuous and the least

-      clad, a hairy man of the desert, is, exactly in apparel and features, like

-      the conventional John the Baptist. His enormous shock of faded brown hair

-      is two feet long and its ends are dyed yellow with henna. When he bends

-      forward his hair sweeps the floor, and when he throws his head back the

-      mass whips over with a <i>swish</i> through the air. The most devout

-      person, however, is a negro, who puts all the fervor of the tropics into

-      his exercise. His ejaculations are rolled out with extraordinary volume,

-      and his black skin shines with moisture; there is, too, in his swaying and

-      bowing, an <i>abandon</i>, a laxity of muscles, and a sort of jerk that

-      belong only to his sympathetic race.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The exercise is every moment growing more rapid, but in regular

-      increments, as the music hastens&mdash;five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen

-      minutes&mdash;until there is a very high pressure on, the revolutions of

-      the cylinder are almost one in two seconds, and the piston moves quicker

-      and quicker. The music, however, is not louder, only more intense, and now

-      and then the reed-flute executes a little obligato, a plaintive strain,

-      that steals into the frenzy like the note of a lost bird, sweet as love

-      and sad as death. The performers are now going so rapidly that they can

-      only ejaculate one syllable, <i>'.ah, 'lah, 'lah</i>, which is aspirated

-      in a hoarse voice every time the head is flung forward to the floor. The

-      hands are now at liberty, and swing with the body, or are held palm to

-      palm before the face. The negro cannot longer contain himself but breaks

-      occasionally into a shrill &ldquo;hoo!&rdquo; He and two or three others have &ldquo;the

-      power,&rdquo; and are not far from an epileptic fit.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is a limit, however, to the endurance of the body; the swaying has

-      become so rapid that it is difficult to distinguish faces, and it is

-      impossible for the performers to repeat even a syllable of the name of <i>Allah</i>,

-      all they can do is to push out from the depths of the lungs a vast hoarse

-      aspiration of <i>la-a-h</i>, which becomes finally a gush exactly like the

-      cut-off of a steam engine, short and quick.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The end has nearly come; in vain the cymbals clang, in vain the drum is

-      beaten harder, and the horn calls to quicker work. The limit is reached,

-      and while the reed expresses its plaintive fear, the speed slackens, the

-      steam puffs are slower, and with an irregular <i>hoo!</i> from the colored

-      brother, the circle stands still.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      You expect to see them sink down exhausted. Not a bit of it. One or two

-      having had enough of it, take their clothes and withdraw, and their places

-      are filled by others and by some very sensible-looking men, trades-people

-      evidently. After a short rest they go through the same or a similar

-      performance, and so on for an hour and a half, the variations being mainly

-      in the chanting. At the end, each derweesh affectionately embraces the

-      Sheykh, kisses his hand without servility, resumes his garments and

-      quietly withdraws. They seem to have enjoyed the exercise, and certainly

-      they had plenty of it. I should like to know what they think of us, the

-      infidel spectators, who go to look at their religious devotions as if they

-      were a play.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      That derweesh beggar in a green turban is by that token a shereef, or

-      descendant of the Prophet. No one but a shereef is allowed to wear the

-      green turban. The shereefs are in all ranks of society, many of them

-      wretched paupers and in the most menial occupations; the title is

-      inherited from either parent and the representatives of the race have

-      become common. Some who are entitled to the green turban wear the white

-      instead, and prefer to be called Sevd (master or lord) instead of Shereef.

-      Such a man is Seyd Sadat, the most conspicous representative of the family

-      of the Prophet in Cairo. His ancestors for a long period were the trustees

-      of the funds of all the great mosques of Cairo, and consequently handled

-      an enormous revenue and enjoyed great power. These millions of income from

-      the property of the mosques the Khedive has diverted to his own purposes

-      by the simple process of making himself their trustee. Thus the secular

-      power interferes every few centuries, in all countries, with the

-      accumulation of property in religious houses. The strict Moslems think

-      with the devout Catholics, that it is an impious interference.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Seyd Sadat lives in the house that his family have occupied for over eight

-      centuries! It is perhaps the best and richest specimen of Saracenic

-      domestic architecture now standing in the East. This house, or collection

-      of houses and disconnected rooms opening upon courts and gardens, is in

-      some portions of it in utter decay; a part, whose elegant arches and

-      marvelous carvings in stone, with elaborate hanging balconies and painted

-      recesses, are still studies of beauty, is used as a stable. The inhabited

-      rooms of the house are tiled two-thirds of the way to the lofty ceilings;

-      the floors are of variegated marbles, and the ceilings are a mass of wood

-      in the most intricate arabesque carving, and painted in colors as softly

-      blended as the hues of an ancient camels' hair shawl. In one of these

-      gorgeous apartments, the furniture of which is not at all in keeping with

-      the decorations (an incongruity which one sees constantly in the East&mdash;shabbiness

-      and splendor are indissolubly married), we are received by the Descendant

-      with all the ceremony of Eastern hospitality. Seated upon the divan raised

-      above the fountain at one end of the apartment, we begin one of those

-      encounters of compliments through an interpreter, out of which the

-      traveler always comes beaten out of sight. The Seyd is a handsome

-      intelligent man of thirty-five, sleek with good living and repose, and a

-      master of Oriental courtesy. His attire is all of silk, the blue color

-      predominating; his only ornament is a heavy gold chain about the neck. We

-      frame long speeches to the Seyd, and he appears to reply with equal

-      verboseness, but what he says or what is said to him we never know. The

-      Eastern dragoman is not averse to talking, but he always interprets in a

-      sort of short-hand that is fatal to conversation. I think the dragomans at

-      such interviews usually translate you into what they think you ought to

-      say, and give you such a reply as they think will be good for you.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Say to his lordship that we thank him for the honor of being permitted to

-      pay our respects to a person so distinguished.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;His excellency (who has been talking two minutes) say you do him too much

-      honor.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We were unwilling to leave Cairo without seeing the residence of so

-      celebrated a family.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;His excellency (who has now got fairly going) feels in deep the visit of

-      strangers so distinguish.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It is a great pleasure also to us to see an Arab house so old and

-      magnificent.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;His excellency (who might have been reciting two chapters of the Koran in

-      the interval) say not to mention it; him sorry it is not more worth you to

-      see.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The attendants bring sherbet in large and costly cups, and chibooks

-      elegantly mounted, and the conversation flounders along. The ladies visit

-      the harem above, and we look about the garden and are shown into room

-      after room, decorated in endless variety and with a festivity of invention

-      and harmony of color which the moderns have lost. The harem turns out to

-      be, like all ordinary harems, I think, only mysterious on the outside. We

-      withdraw with profuse thanks, frittered away through our dragoman, and

-      &ldquo;His excellency say he hope you have pleasant voyage and come safe to your

-      family and your country.&rdquo; About the outer court, and the door where we

-      mount our donkeys, are many idlers in the sun, half beggars, half

-      attendants, all of whom want backsheesh, besides the regular servants who

-      expect a fee in proportion to the &ldquo;distinguish&rdquo; of the visitor. They are

-      probably not unlike the clients of an ancient Roman house, or the

-      retainers of a baronial lord of the middle ages.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If the visitor, however, really desires to see the antiquities of the

-      Christian era, he will ride out to Old Cairo, and mouse about among the

-      immense rubbish heaps that have been piled there since Fostat (as the

-      ancient city was called) was reduced to ashes, more than seven hundred

-      years ago, by a fire which raged nearly two months. There is the ruined

-      mosque of Amer, and there are the quaint old Coptic convents and churches,

-      built about with mud walls, and hidden away amid mounds of rubbish. To

-      these dust-filled lanes and into these mouldering edifices the antiquarian

-      will gladly go. These churches are the land of the flea and the home of

-      the Copt. Anything dingier, darker, dirtier, doesn't exist. To one of

-      them, the Sitt Miriam, Church of Our Lady, we had the greatest difficulty

-      in getting admission. It is up-stairs in one of the towers of the old

-      Roman gateway of Babylon. It is a small church, but it has five aisles and

-      some very rich wood-carving and stone-mosaics. It was cleaner than the

-      others because it was torn to pieces in the process of renovation. In

-      these churches are hung ostrich eggs, as in the mosques, and in many of

-      them are colored marbles, and exquisite mosaics of marble,

-      mother-of-pearl, and glass. Aboo Sirgeh, the one most visited, has a

-      subterranean chapel which is the seat of an historical transaction that

-      may interest some minds. There are two niches in the wall, and in one of

-      them, at the time of the Flight into Egypt, the Virgin Mary rested with

-      the Child, and in the other St. Joseph reposed. That is all.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A little further on, by the river bank, opposite the southern end of the

-      island of Rhoda, the Moslems show you the spot where little Moses lay in

-      his little basket, when the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe (for

-      Pharaoh hadn't a bath-tub in his house) and espied him. The women of the

-      Nile do to-day exactly what Pharaoh's daughter and her maidens did, but

-      there are no bulrushes at this place now, and no lad of the promise of

-      Moses is afloat.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      One can never have done with an exploration of Cairo, with digging down

-      into the strata of overlying civilizations, or studying the shifting

-      surface of its Oriental life. Here, in this Old Cairo, was an ancient

-      Egyptian town no doubt; the Romans constructed here massive walls and

-      towers; the followers of St. Mark erected churches; the friends of

-      Mohammed built mosques; and here the mongrel subjects of the Khedive, a

-      mixture of ancient Egyptian, conquering Arabian, subject Nubian, enslaved

-      Soudan, inheritors of all civilizations and appropriators of none, kennel

-      amid these historic ash-heaps, caring neither for their past nor their

-      future. But it is drawing towards the middle of December; there are signs

-      that warn us to be off to the south. It may rain. There are symptoms of

-      chill in the air, especially at night, and the hotel, unwarmed, is

-      cheerless as a barn, when the sun does not shine. Indeed, give Cairo the

-      climate of London in November and everybody would perish in a week. Our

-      preparations drift along. It is always &ldquo;tomorrow.&rdquo; It requires a week to

-      get the new name of the boat printed on a tin. The first day the bargain

-      for it is made; the work is to be finished <i>bookra</i>, tomorrow. Next

-      day the letters are studied. The next the tin is prepared. The next day is

-      Friday or Wednesday or some other day in which repose is required. And the

-      next the workman comes to know what letters the howadji desires to have

-      upon the tin, and how big a sign is required.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Two other necessary articles remain to be procured; rockets and other

-      fire-works to illuminate benighted Egypt, and medicines. As we were not

-      taking along a physician and should find none of those experimenting

-      people on the Nile, I did not see the use of carrying drugs. Besides we

-      were going into the one really salubrious region of the globe. But

-      everybody takes medicines; you must carry medicines. The guide-book gives

-      you a list of absolutely essential, nasty drugs and compounds, more than

-      you would need if you were staying at home in an artificial society, with

-      nothing to do but take them, and a physician in every street.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I bought chunks of drugs, bottles of poisons, bundles of foul smells and

-      bitter tastes. And then they told me that I needed balances to weigh them

-      in. This was too much. I was willing to take along an apothecary's shop on

-      this pleasure excursion; I was not willing to become an apothecary. No, I

-      said, if I am to feed out these nauseous things on the Nile, I will do it

-      generously, according to taste, and like a physician, never stinting the

-      quantity. I would never be mean about giving medicine to other people. And

-      it is not difficult to get up a reputation for generosity on epsom salts,

-      rhubarb and castor oil.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We carried all these drugs on the entreaty of friends and the druggist,

-      who said it would be very unsafe to venture so far without them. But I am

-      glad we had them with us. The knowledge that we had them was a great

-      comfort. To be sure we never experienced a day's illness, and brought them

-      all back, except some doses that I was able to work off upon the crew.

-      There was a gentle black boy, who had been stolen young out of Soudan, to

-      whom it was a pleasure to give the most disagreeable mixtures; he absorbed

-      enormous doses as a lily drinks dew, and they never seemed to harm him.

-      The aboriginal man, whose constitution is not weakened by civilization,

-      can stand a great amount of doctor's stuff. The Nile voyager is earnestly

-      advised to carry a load of drugs with him; but I think we rather overdid

-      the business in castor-oil; for the fact is that the people in Nubia

-      fairly swim in it, and you can cut the cane and suck it whenever you feel

-      like it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      By all means, go drugged on your pleasure voyage. It is such a cheerful

-      prelude to it, to read that you will need blue-pills, calomel, rhubarb,

-      Dover's powder, James's powder, carbolic acid, laudanum, quinine,

-      sulphuric acid, sulphate of zinc, nitrate of silver, ipecacuanha, and

-      blistering plaster. A few simple directions go with these. If you feel a

-      little unwell, take a few blue pills, only about as many as you can hold

-      in your hand; follow these with a little Dover's powder, and then repeat,

-      if you feel worse, as you probably will; when you rally, take a few

-      swallows of castor-oil, and drop into your throat some laudanum; and then,

-      if you are alive, drink a dram of sulphuric acid. The consulting friends

-      then generally add a little rice-water and a teaspoonful of brandy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the opinion of our dragoman it is scarcely reputable to go up the Nile

-      without a store of rockets and other pyrotechnics. Abd-el-Atti should have

-      been born in America. He would enjoy a life that was a continual Fourth of

-      July. He would like his pathway to be illuminated with lights, blue, red,

-      and green, and to blaze with rockets. The supreme moment of his life is

-      when he feels the rocket-stick tearing out of his hand. The common

-      fire-works in the Mooskee he despised; nothing would do but the

-      government-made, which are very good. The passion of some of the Egyptians

-      for fire-arms and gunpowder is partially due to the prohibition. The

-      government strictly forbids the use of guns and pistols and interdicts the

-      importation or selling of powder. On the river a little powder and shot

-      are more valued than money.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We had obtained permission to order some rockets manufactured at the

-      government works, and in due time we went with Abd-el-Atti to the bureau

-      at the citadel to pay for them. The process was attended with all that

-      deliberation which renders life so long and valuable in the East.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We climbed some littered and dusty steps, to a roof terrace upon which

-      opened several apartments, brick and stucco chambers with cement floors,

-      the walls whitewashed, but yellow with time and streaked with dirt. These

-      were government offices, but office furniture was scarce. Men and boys in

-      dilapidated gowns were sitting about on their heels smoking. One of them

-      got up and led the way, and pulling aside a soiled curtain showed us into

-      the presence of a bey, a handsomely dressed Turk, with two gold chains

-      about his neck, squatting on a ragged old divan at one end of the little

-      room; and this divan was absolutely all the furniture that this cheerless

-      closet, which had one window obscured with dust, contained. Two or three

-      officers were waiting to get the bey's signature to papers, and a heap of

-      documents lay beside him, with an inkhorn, on the cushions. Half-clad

-      attendants or petitioners shuffled in and out of the presence of this head

-      of the bureau. Abd-el-Atti produced his papers, but they were not

-      satisfactory, and we were sent elsewhere.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Passing through one shabby room after another, we came into one dimmer,

-      more stained and littered than the others. About the sides of the room

-      upon low divans sat, cross-legged, the clerks. Before each was a shabby

-      wooden desk which served no purpose, however, but to hold piles of equally

-      shabby account books. The windows were thick with dust, the floor was

-      dirty, the desks, books, and clerks were dirty. But the clerks were

-      evidently good fellows, just like those in all government offices&mdash;nothing

-      to do and not pay enough to make them uneasy to be rich. They rolled

-      cigarettes and smoked continually; one or two of them were casting up

-      columns of figures, holding the sheet of paper in the left hand and

-      calling each figure in a loud voice (as if a little doubtful whether the

-      figure would respond to that name); and some of them wrote a little, by

-      way of variety. When they wrote the thin sheet of paper was held in the

-      left hand and the writing done upon the palm (as the Arabs always write);

-      the pen used was a blunt reed and the ink about as thick as tar. The

-      writing resulting from these unfavorable conditions is generally handsome.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our entry and papers were an event in that office, and the documents

-      became the subject of a general conversation. Other public business

-      (except the cigarettes) was suspended, and nearly every clerk gave his

-      opinion on the question, whatever it was. I was given a seat on a rickety

-      divan, coffee was brought in, the clerks rolled cigarettes for me and the

-      business began to open; not that anybody showed any special interest in

-      it, however. On the floor sat two or three boys, eating their dinner of

-      green bean leaves and some harmless mixture of grease and flour; and a

-      cloud of flies settled on them undisturbed. What service the ragged boys

-      rendered to the government I could not determine. Abd-el-Atti was bandying

-      jocularities with the clerks, and directing the conversation now and then

-      upon the rockets.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In course of time a clerk found a scrap of paper, daubed one side of it

-      with Arabic characters, and armed with this we went to another office and

-      got a signature to it. This, with the other documents, we carried to

-      another room much like the first, where the business appeared to take a

-      fresh start; that is, we sat down and talked; and gradually induced one

-      official after another to add a suggestion or a figure or two. Considering

-      that we were merely trying to pay for some rockets that were ready to be

-      delivered to us, it did seem to me that almost a whole day was too much to

-      devote to the affair. But I was mistaken. The afternoon was waning when we

-      went again to the Bey. He was still in his little &ldquo;cubby,&rdquo; and made room

-      for me on the divan. A servant brought coffee. We lighted cigarettes, and,

-      without haste, the bey inked the seal that hung to his gold chain, wet the

-      paper and impressed his name in the proper corner. We were now in a

-      condition to go to the treasury office and pay.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I expected to see a guarded room and heavily bolted safes. Instead of this

-      there was no treasury apartment, nor any strong box. But we found the

-      &ldquo;treasury&rdquo; walking about in one of the passages, in the shape of an old

-      Arab in a white turban and faded yellow gown. This personage fished out of

-      his deep breast-pocket a rag of a purse, counted out some change, and put

-      what we paid him into the same receptacle. The Oriental simplicity of the

-      transaction was pleasing. And the money ought to be safe, for one would as

-      soon think of robbing a derweesh as this yellow old man.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The medicine is shipped, the rockets are on board, the crew have been

-      fitted out with cotton drawers, at our expense, (this garment is an

-      addition to the gown they wear), the name of the boat is almost painted,

-      the flags are ready to hoist, and the dahabeëh has been taken from Boulak

-      and is moored above the drawbridge. We only want a north wind.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0126.jpg" alt="0126 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0127.jpg" alt="0127 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER X.&mdash;ON THE NILE.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E have taken

-      possession of our dahabeëh, which lies moored under the bank, out of the

-      current, on the west side of the river above the bridge. On the top of the

-      bank are some structures that seem to be only mounds and walls of mud, but

-      they are really &ldquo;brivate houses,&rdquo; and each one has a wooden door, with a

-      wooden lock and key. Here, as at every other rod of the river, where the

-      shore will permit, the inhabitants come to fill their water-jars, to wash

-      clothes, to bathe, or to squat on their heels and wait for the Nile to run

-      dry.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And the Nile is running rapidly away. It sweeps under the arches of the

-      bridge like a freshet, with a current of about three miles an hour. Our <i>sandal</i>

-      (the broad clumsy row-boat which we take in tow) is obliged to aim far

-      above its intended landing-place when we cross, and four vigorous rowers

-      cannot prevent its drifting rapidly down stream. The Nile is always in a

-      hurry on its whole length; even when it spreads over flats for miles, it

-      keeps a channel for swift passage. It is the only thing that is in a hurry

-      in Egypt; and the more one sees it the stronger becomes the contrast of

-      this haste with the flat valley through which it flows and the apathetic

-      inhabitants of its banks.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We not only have taken possession of our boat, but we have begun

-      housekeeping in it. We have had a farewell dinner-party on board. Our

-      guests, who are foreigners, declare that they did not suppose such a

-      dinner possible in the East; a better could not be expected in Paris. We

-      admit that such dinners are not common in this hungry world out of New

-      York. Even in New York the soup would not have been made of lentils.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We have passed a night under a mosquito net, more comfortably than on

-      shore to be sure, but we are anxious to get into motion and change the

-      mosquitoes, the flies, the fleas of Cairo for some less rapacious. It is

-      the seventeenth of December. We are in the bazaars, buying the last

-      things, when, at noon we perceive that the wind has shifted. We hasten on

-      board. Where is the dragoman! &ldquo;Mohammed Effendi Abd-el-Atti goin' bazaar

-      come directly,&rdquo; says the waiter. At half-past two the stout dragoman

-      slides off his donkey and hastens on board with all the speed compatible

-      with short legs, out of breath, but issuing a storm of orders like a

-      belated captain of a seventy-two. He is accompanied by a black boy bearing

-      the name of our dahabeëh, rudely painted on a piece of tin, the paint not

-      yet dry. The dragoman regards it with some pride, and well he may, for it

-      has cost time and trouble. No Arab on the river can pronounce the name,

-      but they all understand its signification when the legend attached to it

-      is related, and having a similar tale in the Koran, they have no objection

-      to sail in a dahabeëh called the RIP VAN WINKLE.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The name has a sort of appropriateness in the present awakening of Egypt

-      to modern life, but exactly what it is we cannot explain.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We seat ourselves on deck to watch the start. There is as much noise and

-      confusion as if the boat were on fire. The moment has come to cast off,

-      when it is discovered that two of the crew are absent, no doubt dallying

-      in some coffee-house. We cannot wait, they must catch us as they can. The

-      stake is pulled up; the plank is drawn in; the boat is shoved off from its

-      sand bed with grunting and yah-hoo-ing, some of the crew in the water, and

-      some pushing with poles; the great sail drops down from the yard and the

-      corner is hauled in to a wild chorus, and we take the stream. For a moment

-      it seems as if we should be carried against the bridge; but the sail is

-      large, the wind seizes us, and the three-months' voyage has begun.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are going slowly but steadily, perhaps at the rate of three or four

-      miles an hour, past the receding city, drawing away from the fleet of

-      boats and barges on the shore and the multitudinous life on its banks. It

-      is a scene of color, motion, variety. The river is alive with crafts of

-      all sorts, the shores are vocal with song, laughter, and the unending

-      &ldquo;chaff&rdquo; of a river population. Beyond, the spires and domes of the city

-      are lovely in the afternoon light. The citadel and the minarets gleam like

-      silver against the purple of the Mokattam hills. We pass the long white

-      palace of the Queen-mother; we are abreast the isle of Rhoda, its yellow

-      palace and its ancient Nilometer. In the cove at Geezeh are

-      passenger-dahabeëhs, two flying the American flag, with which we exchange

-      salutes as we go. The people on their decks are trying with a telescope to

-      make out the device on our pennant at the yard-arm. It affords occupation

-      for a great many people at different times during the voyage. Upon a white

-      ground is a full sun, in red; following it in red letters is the legend <i>Post

-      Nubila Phobus</i>; it is the motto on the coat of arms of the City of

-      Hartford. Here it signifies that we four Hartford people, beginning this

-      voyage, exchange the clouds of New England for the sun of Egypt. The flag

-      extends beyond the motto in a bifurcated blue streamer.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Flag, streamer and sail take the freshening north wind. A smaller sail is

-      set aft. The reïs crouches on the bow, watching the channel; the

-      steersman, a grave figure, pushes slowly back and forth the long iron

-      handle of the tiller at the stern; the crew, waiting for their supper,

-      which is cooking near the mast, begin to sing, one taking the solo and the

-      others striking in with a minor response; it is not a song but a one-line

-      ejaculation, followed by a sympathetic and barbaric assent in chorus.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The shores glide past like that land of the poet's dream where &ldquo;it is

-      always afternoon&rdquo;; reposeful and yet brilliant. The rows of palms, the

-      green fields, the lessening minarets, the groups of idlers in flowing

-      raiment, picturesque in any attitudes they assume, the depth of blue above

-      and the transparent soft air&mdash;can this be a permanent condition, or

-      is it only the scene of a play?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In fact, we are sailing not only away from Europe, away from Cairo, into

-      Egypt and the confines of mysterious Africa; we are sailing into the past.

-      Do you think our voyage is merely a thousand miles on the Nile? We have

-      committed ourselves to a stream that will lead us thousands of years

-      backwards in the ages, into the depths of history. When we loosed from

-      Cairo we let go our hold upon the modern. As we recede, perhaps we shall

-      get a truer perspective, and see more correctly the width of the strip of

-      time which we call &ldquo;our era.&rdquo; There are the pyramids of Geezeh watching

-      our departure, lifting themselves aloft in the evening sky; there are the

-      pyramids of Sakkara, sentinels of that long past into which we go.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a splendid start, for the wind blows steadily and we seem to be

-      flying before it. It is probable that we are making five miles an hour,

-      which is very well against such a current. Our dahabeëh proves to be an

-      excellent sailer, and we have the selfish pleasure of passing boat after

-      boat, with a little ripple of excitement not enough to destroy our placid

-      enjoyment. It is much pleasanter to lift your hat to the travelers on a

-      boat that you are drawing ahead of than it is to those of one that is

-      dropping your boat astern.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Nile voyage is so peculiar, and is, in fact, such a luxurious method

-      of passing a winter, that it may be well to say a little more concerning

-      our boat. It is about one hundred and twenty feet long, and eighteen broad

-      in the center, with a fiat bottom and no keel; consequently it cannot tack

-      or sail contrary to the wind. In the bow is the cook's &ldquo;cubby&rdquo; with the

-      range, open to the weather forward. Behind it stands the mast, some forty

-      feet high, and on the top of it is lashed the slender yard, which is a

-      hundred feet long, and hangs obliquely. The enormous triangular sail

-      stretches the length of the yard and its point is hauled down to the deck.

-      When it is shifted, the rope is let go, leaving the sail flapping, the end

-      of the yard is carried round the mast and the sail is hauled round in the

-      opposite direction, with an amount of pulling, roaring, jabbering, and

-      chorusing, more than would be necessary to change the-course of an

-      American fleet of war. The flat, open forward deck is capable of

-      accommodating six rowers on a side. It is floored over now, for the sweeps

-      are only used in descending.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Then comes the cabin, which occupies the greater part of the boat, and

-      makes it rather top-heavy and difficult of management in an adverse wind.

-      First in the cabin are the pantry and dragoman's room; next a large

-      saloon, used for dining, furnished with divans, mirrors, tables, and

-      chairs, and lighted by large windows close together. Next are rows of

-      bedrooms, bathroom etc; a passage between leads to the after or lounging

-      cabin, made comfortable with divans and Eastern rugs. Over the whole cabin

-      runs the deck, which has sofas and chairs and an awning, and is good

-      promenading space. The rear portion of it is devoted to the steersman, who

-      needs plenty of room for the sweep of the long tiller. The steering

-      apparatus is of the rudest. The tiller goes into a stern-post which plays

-      in a hole big enough for four of it, and creakingly turns a rude rudder.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If you are familiar with the Egyptian temple you will see that our

-      dahabeëh is built on this plan. If there is no pylon, there is the mast

-      which was always lashed to it. Then comes the dromos of sphinxes, the

-      forward deck, with the crew sitting along the low bulwarks; the first

-      cabin is the hall of columns, or <i>vestibulum</i>; behind it on each side

-      of the passage are various chambers; and then comes the <i>adytum</i> or

-      sanctuary&mdash;the inner cabin. The deck is the flat roof upon which

-      wound the solemn processions; and there is a private stairway to the deck

-      just as there was always an inner passage to the roof from one of the

-      small chambers of the temple.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The boat is manned by a numerous company whose appearance in procession

-      would excite enthusiasm in any American town. Abd-el-Atti has for

-      companion and clerk his nephew, a young Egyptian, (employed in the

-      telegraph office) but in Frank dress, as all government officials are

-      required to be.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The reïs, or captain, is Hassan, Aboo Seyda, a rather stately Arab of

-      sixty years, with a full turban, a long gown of blue cotton, and

-      bare-footed. He walks the deck with an ease and grace that an actor might

-      envy; there is neither stiffness nor strut in it; it is a gait of simple

-      majesty which may be inherited from generations of upright ancestors, but

-      could never be acquired. Hassan is an admirable figure-head to the

-      expedition, but he has no more pluck or authority than an old hen, and was

-      of not much more use on board than a hen would be in a chicken-hatching

-      establishment.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Abdel Hady Hassed, the steersman, is a Nubian from the First Cataract,

-      shiny black in color, but with regular and delicate features. I can see

-      him now, with his turban set well back on his head, in a loose,

-      long-sleeved, brown garment, and without stockings or slippers, leaning

-      against his tiller and looking straight ahead with unchanging countenance.

-      His face had the peculiarity, which is sometimes seen, of appearing always

-      to have a smile on it. He was born with that smile; he will die with it.

-      An admirable person, who never showed the least excitement. That man would

-      run us fast on a sand-bank, put us on a rock in plain sight, or let his

-      sail jibe, without changing a muscle of his face, and in the most

-      agreeable and good-natured manner in the world. And he never exhibited the

-      least petulance at his accidents. I hope he will be rewarded for the

-      number of hours he patiently stood at that tiller. The reïs would take the

-      helm when Abdel wanted to say his prayers or to eat his simple meals; but,

-      otherwise, I always found him at his post, late at night or in the early

-      morning, gazing around on Egypt with that same stereotyped expression of

-      pleasure.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The cook, Hasaneyn Mahrowan (the last name has an Irish sound, but the

-      first is that of the sacred mosque where is buried the head of the martyr

-      El Hoseyn) is first among his craft, and contrives to produce on his

-      little range in the bow a dinner that would have made Raineses II. a

-      better man. He is always at his post, like the steersman, and no matter

-      what excitement or peril we may be in, Hasaneyn stirs his soup or bastes

-      his chicken with perfect <i>sang froid</i>. The fact is that these

-      Orientals have got a thousand or two thousand years beyond worry, and

-      never feel any responsibility for what others are doing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The waiter, a handsome Cairene, is the perfection of a trained servant,

-      who understands signs better than English. Hoseyn Ali also rejoices in a

-      noble name. Hasan and Hoseyn are, it is well known, the &ldquo;two lords of the

-      youths of the people of Paradise, in Paradise&rdquo;; they were grandsons of the

-      Prophet. Hoseyn was slain at the battle of the Plain of Karbalà. Hoseyn is

-      the most smartly dressed fellow on board. His jacket and trousers are of

-      silk; he wears a gay kuffia about his fez and his waist is girded with a

-      fine Cashmere shawl. The fatal defect in his dress is that the full

-      trowsers do not quite meet the stockings. There is always some point of

-      shabbiness or lack of finish in every Oriental object.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The waiter's lieutenant is an Abyssinian boy who rejoices in the name of

-      Ahman Abdallah (or, &ldquo;Slave of God&rdquo;); and the cook's boy is Gohah ebn

-      Abdallah (&ldquo;His father slave of God&rdquo;). This is the poetical way of putting

-      their condition; they were both slaves of Abd-el-Atti, but now, he says,

-      he has freed them. For Gohah he gave two napoleons when the lad was new.

-      Greater contrast could not be between two colored boys. Ahman is black

-      enough, but his features are regular and well made, he has a bright merry

-      eye, and is quick in all his intuitions, and intellectually faithful to

-      the least particular. He divines the wants of his masters by his quick

-      wit, and never neglects or forgets anything. Gohah is from the Soudan, and

-      a perfect Congo negro in features and texture of skin&mdash;lips

-      protruding and nose absolutely level with his cheeks; as faithful and

-      affectionate as a Newfoundland dog, a mild, gentle boy. What another

-      servant would know through his sharpened interest, Gohah comprehends by

-      his affections.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I have described these persons, because they are types of the almost

-      infinite variety of races and tribes in Egypt. Besides these there are

-      fourteen sailors, and no two of the same shade or with similar features.

-      Most of them are of Upper Egypt, and two or three of them are Nubians, but

-      I should say that all are hopelessly mixed in blood. Ahmed, for instance,

-      is a Nubian, and the negro blood comes out in him in his voice and laugh

-      and a certain rolling antic movement of the body. Another sailor has that

-      flush of red under dark in the face which marks the quadroon. The dress of

-      the crew is usually a gown, a pair of drawers, and a turban. Ahmed wears a

-      piece of Turkish toweling round his head. The crew is an incongruous lot

-      altogether; a third of them smoke hasheesh whenever they can get it; they

-      never obey an order without talking about it and suggesting something

-      different; they are all captains in fact; they are rarely quiet,

-      jabbering, or quarreling, or singing, when they are not hauling the sail,

-      hoisting us from a sandbar, or stretched on deck in deep but not noiseless

-      slumber. You cannot but like the good-natured rascals.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An irresponsible, hard-working, jolly, sullen, contradictory lot of big

-      children, who, it is popularly reported, need a <i>koorbag</i> (a whip of

-      hippopotamus hide) to keep them in the way of industry and obedience. It

-      seems to me that a little kindness would do better than a good deal of

-      whip. But the kindness ought to have begun some generations back. The

-      koorbag is the legitimate successor of the stick, and the Egyptians have

-      been ruled by the stick for a period of which history reports not to the

-      contrary. In the sculptures on the earliest tombs, laborers are driven to

-      their tasks with the stick. Sailors on the old Nile boats are menaced with

-      the stick. The overseer in the field swings the stick. Prisoners and

-      slaves are marshalled in line with the stick. The stick is to-day also the

-      one visible and prevalent characteristic of the government of Egypt. And I

-      think that it is a notion among the subject classes, that a beating is now

-      and then good for them. They might feel neglected without it. I cannot

-      find that Egypt was ever governed in any other way than on the old plan of

-      force and fear.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If there is anything that these officers and sailors do not understand, it

-      is the management of a Nile boat. But this is anticipating. Just now all

-      goes as merrily as a colored ball. The night is soft, the moon is half

-      full; the river spreads out in shining shallows; the shores are dim and

-      show lines of feathery palms against the sky; we meet or pass white sails

-      which flash out of the dimness and then vanish; the long line of pyramids

-      of Sakkara is outlined beyond the palms; now there is a light on shore and

-      a voice or the howling of a dog is heard; along the bank by the ruins of

-      old Memphis a jackal runs barking in the moonlight. By half-past nine we

-      are abreast the pyramids of Dashoor. A couple of dahabeëhs are laid up

-      below for the night, and the lights from their rows of cabin windows gleam

-      cheerfully on the water.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We go right on, holding our way deeper and deeper into this enchanted

-      country. The night is simply superb, such a wide horizon, such brilliancy

-      above! Under the night, the boat glides like a phantom ship; it is

-      perfectly steady, and we should not know we were in motion but for the

-      running ripple at the sides. By this lulling sound we sleep, having come,

-      for once in the world, into a country of tranquillity, where nothing need

-      ever be done till tomorrow, for tomorrow is certain to be like to-day.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we came on deck at eight o'clock in the morning after &ldquo;flying&rdquo; all

-      night as on birds' wings, we found that we had made thirty-five miles, and

-      were almost abreast of the False Pyramid of Maydoom, so called because it

-      is supposed to be built about a rock; a crumbled pyramid but curiously

-      constructed, and perhaps older than that of Cheops. From a tomb in the

-      necropolis here came the two life-size and striking figures that are in

-      the Boulak Museum at Cairo. The statues, carved in calcareous limestone,

-      represent two exceedingly respectable and intelligent looking persons, who

-      resemble each other enough to be brother and sister; they were probably

-      alive in the third dynasty. They sit up now, with hands on knees, having a

-      bright look on their faces as if they hadn't winked in five thousand

-      years, and were expecting company.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I said we were &ldquo;flying&rdquo; all night. This needs qualification. We went

-      aground three times and spent a good part of the night in getting off. It

-      is the most natural thing in navigation. We are conscious of a slight

-      grating, then a gentle lurch, not enough to disturb a dream, followed,

-      however, by a step on deck, and a jabber of voices forward. The sail is

-      loosed; the poles are taken from the rack and an effort is made to shove

-      off by the use of some muscle and a good deal of chorus; when this fails,

-      the crew jump overboard and we hear them splashing along the side. They

-      put their backs to the boat and lift, with a grunting &ldquo;<i>Euh-h'e, euh-h'e</i>&rdquo;

-       which changes into a rapid &ldquo;halee, halee, halee,&rdquo; as the boat slides off;

-      and the crew scramble on board to haul tight the sail, with an emphatic

-      &ldquo;Yah! Moham<i>med</i>, Yah! Moham<i>med</i>.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We were delayed some hours altogether, we learn. But it was not delay.

-      There can be no delay on this voyage; for there is no one on board who is

-      in any haste. Are we not the temporary owners of this boat, and entirely

-      irresponsible for any accident, so that if it goes down with all on board,

-      and never comes to port, no one can hold us for damages?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The day is before us, and not only the day, but, Providence permitting, a

-      winter of days like it. There is nothing to be done, and yet we are too

-      busy to read even the guide-book. There is everything to be seen; it is

-      drifting past us, we are gliding away from it. It is all old and

-      absolutely novel. If this is laziness that is stealing over us, it is of

-      an alert sort. In the East, laziness has the more graceful title of

-      resignation; but we have not come to that condition even; curiosity is

-      constantly excited, and it is a sort of employment to breathe this

-      inspiring air.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are spectators of a pageant that never repeats itself; for although

-      there is a certain monotony in the character of the river and one would

-      think that its narrow strips of arable land would soon be devoid of

-      interest, the scenes are never twice alike. The combinations vary, the

-      desert comes near and recedes, the mountains advance in bold precipices or

-      fall away; the groups of people, villages, trees, are always shifting.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And yet, in fact, the scenery changes little during the day. There are

-      great reaches of river, rapidly flowing, and wide bends across which we

-      see vessels sailing as if in the meadows. The river is crowded all day

-      with boats, pleasure dahabeëhs, and trading vessels uncouth and

-      picturesque. The passenger dahabëeh is long, handsomely painted, carries

-      an enormous sail on its long yard, has a national flag and a long

-      streamer; and groups of white people sit on deck under the awning; some of

-      them are reading, some sketching, and now and then a man rises and

-      discharges his shot-gun at a flock of birds a half a mile beyond its

-      range.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The boats of African traders are short, high-pooped, and have the rudder

-      stepped out behind. They usually carry no flag, and are dirty and lack

-      paint, but they carry a load that would interest the most <i>blasé</i>

-      European. Those bound up-stream, under full sail, like ourselves, are

-      piled with European boxes and bales, from stem to stern; and on top of the

-      freight, in the midst of the freight, sitting on it, stretched out on it,

-      peeping from it, is another cargo of human beings, men, women and

-      children, black, yellow, clothed in all the hues of heaven and the rags of

-      earth. It is an impassive load that stares at us with incurious, unwinking

-      eyes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The trading boats coming down against the current, are even more strange

-      and barbarous. They are piled with merchandise, but of a different sort.

-      The sails and yards are down, and the long sweeps are in motion, balanced

-      on outriggers, for the forward deck is filled, and the rowers walk on top

-      of the goods as they move the oars to and fro. How black the rowers are!

-      How black everybody on board is! They come suddenly upon us, like those

-      nations we have read of, who sit in great darkness. The rowers are

-      stalwart fellows whose basalt backs shine in the sun as they bend to the

-      oar; in rowing they walk towards the cabin and pull the heavy oars as they

-      step backwards, and every sweep is accompanied by the burst of a refrain

-      in chorus, a wild response to a line that has been chanted by the leader

-      as they stepped forwards. The passengers sit immoveable in the sun and

-      regard us with a calmness and gravity which are only attainable near the

-      equatorial regions, where things approach an equilibrium.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Sometimes we count nearly one hundred dahabeëhs in sight, each dipping or

-      veering or turning in the sun its bird-wing sail&mdash;the most graceful

-      in the world. A person with fancies, who is watching them, declares that

-      the triangular sails resemble quills cut at the top for pens, and that the

-      sails, seen over the tongue of land of a long bend ahead, look like a

-      procession of goose quills.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The day is warm enough to call out all the birds; flocks of wild geese

-      clang overhead, and companies of them, ranks on ranks, stand on the low

-      sand-dunes; there are pelicans also, motionless in the shallow water near

-      the shore, meditating like a derweesh on one leg, and not caring that the

-      thermometer does mark 740. Little incidents entertain us. We like to pass

-      the Dongola, flying &ldquo;Ohio&rdquo; from its yard, which took advantage of our

-      stopping for milk early in the morning to go by us. We overhaul an English

-      boat and have a mildly exciting race with her till dark, with varying

-      fortune, the boats being nearly a match, and the victory depending upon

-      some trick or skill on the part of the crew. All the party look at us, in

-      a most unsympathetic manner, through goggles, which the English always put

-      on whenever they leave the twilight of England. I do not know that we have

-      any right to complain of this habit of wearing wire eye-screens and

-      goggles; persons who have it mean no harm by it, and their appearance is a

-      source of gratification to others. But I must say that goggles have a

-      different effect in different lights. When we were sailing slowly past the

-      Englishman, the goggles regarded us with a feeble and hopeless look. But

-      when the Englishman was, in turn, drawing ahead of us, the goggles had a

-      glare of &ldquo;Who the devil are you?&rdquo; Of course it was only in the goggles.

-      For I have seen many of these races on the Nile, and passengers always

-      affect an extreme indifference, leaving all demonstrations of interest to

-      the crews of the boats.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The two banks of the river keep all day about the same relative character&mdash;the

-      one sterile, the other rich. On the east, the brown sand licks down almost

-      to the water; there is only a strip of green; there are few trees, and

-      habitations only at long intervals. Only a little distance back are the

-      Mokattam hills, which keep a rarely broken and level sky-line for two

-      hundred and fifty miles south of Cairo.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The west side is a broad valley. The bank is high and continually caving

-      in, like the alluvial bottoms of the Missouri; it is so high that from our

-      deck we can see little of the land. There are always, however, palm-trees

-      in sight, massed in groves, standing in lines, or waving their single

-      tufts in the blue. These are the date-palms, which have no branches on

-      their long poles; each year the old stalks are cut off for fuel, and the

-      trunk, a mass of twisted fibres, comes to have a rough bark, as if the

-      tree had been shingled the wrong way. Stiff in form and with only the

-      single crown of green, I cannot account for its effect of grace and

-      beauty. It is the life of the Nile, as the Nile is life to it. It bears

-      its annual crop of fruit to those who want it, and a crop of taxes for the

-      Khedive. Every palm pays in fact a poll-tax, whether it brings forth dates

-      or not.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Where the bank slopes we can see the springing wheat and barley darkly

-      green; it is sown under the palms even, for no foot of ground is left

-      vacant. All along the banks are shadoofs, at which men in black stand all

-      day raising water, that flows back in regulated streams; for the ground

-      falls slightly away from the height of the bank. At intervals appears a

-      little collection of mud hovels, dumped together without so much plan as

-      you would find in a beaver settlement, but called a village, and having a

-      mud minaret and perhaps a dome. An occasional figure is that of a man

-      plowing with a single ox; it has just the stiff square look of the

-      sculptures in the tombs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Now and then where a zig-zag path is cut, or the bank slopes, women are

-      washing clothes in the river, or groups of them are filling their

-      water-jars. They come in files from the villages and we hear their shrill

-      voices in incessant chatter. These country-women are invariably in black

-      or dark brown; they are not veiled, but draw their head shawl over the

-      face as our boat passes. Their long gowns are drawn up, exposing bare feet

-      and legs as they step into the stream. The jars are large and heavy when

-      unfilled, and we marvel how they can raise them to their heads when they

-      are full of water. The woman drags her jar out upon the sand, squats

-      before it, lifts it to her head with her hands, and then rises steadily

-      and walks up the steep bank and over the sand, holding her robe with one

-      hand and steadying the jar with the other, with perfect grace and ease of

-      motion. The strength of limbs required to raise that jar to the head and

-      then rise with it, ought to be calculated by those in our own land who are

-      striving to improve the condition of woman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are still flying along with the unfailing wind, and the merry progress

-      communicates its spirit to the crew. Before sunset they get out their

-      musical instruments, and squatting in a circle on the forward deck,

-      prepare to enjoy themselves. One thumps and shakes the tambourine, one

-      softly beats with his fingers the darabooka drum, and another rattles

-      castanets. All who are not so employed beat time by a jerking motion of

-      the raised hands, the palms occasionally coming together when the rhythm

-      is properly accented. The leader, who has a very good tenor voice, chants

-      a minor and monotonous love-song to which the others respond, either in

-      applause of the sentiment or in a burst of musical enthusiasm which they

-      cannot contain. Ahmed, the Nubian, whose body is full of Congoism, enters

-      into it with a delightful <i>abandon</i>, swaying from side to side and

-      indulging in an occasional shout, as if he were at a camp-meeting. His

-      ugly and good-natured face beams with satisfaction, an expression that is

-      only slightly impaired by the vacant place where two front teeth ought to

-      shine. The song is rude and barbarous but not without a certain

-      plaintiveness; the song, and scene belong together. In this manner the

-      sailors of the ancient Egyptians amused themselves without doubt; their

-      instruments were the same; thus they sat upon the ground, thus they

-      clapped hands, thus they improvised ejaculations to the absent beloved:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent10">

-      &ldquo;The night! The night! O thou with sweet hands!

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      Holding the dewy peach.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The sun goes down, leaving a rosy color in the sky, that changes into an

-      ashes-of-roses color, that gradually fades into the indefinable softness

-      of night punctured with stars.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are booming along all night, under the waxing moon. This is not so much

-      a voyage as a flight, chased by the north wind. The sail is always set,

-      the ripples are running always along the sides, the shores slide by as in

-      a dream; the reïs is at the bow, the smiling steersman is at the helm; if

-      we were enchanted we could not go on more noiselessly. There is something

-      ghostly about this night-voyage through a land so imperfectly defined to

-      the senses but so crowded with history. If only the dead who are buried on

-      these midnight shores were to rise, we should sail through a vast and

-      ghastly concourse packing the valley and stretching away into the desert.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      About midnight I step out of the cabin to look at the night. I stumble

-      over a sleeping Arab. Two sailors, set to hold the sail-rope and let it go

-      in case of a squall of wind, are nodding over it. The night is not at all

-      gloomy or mysterious, but in all the broad sweep of it lovely and full of

-      invitation. We are just passing the English dahabeëh, whose great sail is

-      dark as we approach, and then takes the moon full upon it as we file

-      abreast. She is hugging the bank and as we go by there is a snap. In the

-      morning Abd-el-Atti says that she broke the tip of her yard against the

-      bank. At any rate she lags behind like a crippled bird.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the morning we are in sight of four dahabeëhs, but we overhaul and pass

-      them all. We have contracted a habit of doing it. One of them gets her

-      stern-sprit knocked off as she sheers before us, whereupon the sailors

-      exchange compliments, and our steersman smiles just as he would have done

-      if he had sent the Prussian boat to the bottom. The morning is delicious,

-      not a cloud in the sky, and the thermometer indicating a temperature of

-      56°; this moderates speedily under the sun, but if you expected an

-      enervating climate in the winter on the Nile you will be disappointed; it

-      is on the contrary inspiring.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We pass the considerable town of Golosaneh, not caring very much about it;

-      we have been passing towns and mounds and vestiges of ancient and many

-      times dug-up civilizations, day and night. We cannot bother with every

-      ash-heap described in the guide-book. Benisooef, which has been for

-      thousands of years an enterprising city, we should like to have seen, but

-      we went by in the night. And at night most of these towns are as black as

-      the moon will let them be, lights being very rare. We usually receive from

-      them only the salute of a barking dog. Inland from Golosaneh rises the

-      tall and beautiful minaret of Semaloot, a very pretty sight above the

-      palm-groves; so a church spire might rise out of a Connecticut meadow. At

-      10 o'clock we draw near the cliffs of Gebel e' Tayr, upon the long flat

-      summit of which stands the famous Coptic convent of Sitteh Miriam el Adra,

-      &ldquo;Our Lady Mary the Virgin,&rdquo;&mdash;called also Dayr el Adra.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are very much interested in the Copts, and are glad of the opportunity

-      to see something of the practice of their religion. For the religion is as

-      peculiar as the race. In fact, the more one considers the Copt, the more

-      difficult it is to define him. He is a descendant of the ancient

-      Egyptians, it is admitted, and he retains the cunning of the ancients in

-      working gold and silver; but his blood is crossed with Abyssinian, Nubian,

-      Greek and Arab, until the original is lost, and to-day the representatives

-      of the pure old Egyptian type of the sculptures are found among the

-      Abyssinians and the Noobeh (genuine Nubians) more frequently than among

-      the Copts. The Copt usually wears a black or brown turban or cap; but if

-      he wore a white one it would be difficult to tell him from a Moslem. The

-      Copts universally use Arabic; their ancient language is practically dead,

-      although their liturgy and some of their religious books are written in

-      it. This old language is supposed to be the spoken tongue of the old

-      Egyptians.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The number of Christian Copts in Egypt is small&mdash;but still large

-      enough; they have been persecuted out of existence, or have voluntarily

-      accepted Mohammedanism and married among the faithful. The Copts in

-      religion are seceders from the orthodox church, and their doctrine of the

-      Trinity was condemned by the council of Chalcedon; they consequently hate

-      the Greeks much more than they hate the Moslems. They reckon St. Mark

-      their first patriarch.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Their religious practice is an odd jumble of many others. Most of them

-      practice circumcision. The baptism of infants is held to be necessary; for

-      a child dying unbaptized will be blind in the next life. Their fasts are

-      long and strict; in their prayers they copy both Jews and Moslems, praying

-      often and with endless repetitions. They confess before taking the

-      sacrament; they abstain from swine's flesh, and make pilgrimages to

-      Jerusalem. Like the Moslems they put off their shoes on entering the place

-      of worship, but they do not behave there with the decorum of the Moslem;

-      they stand always in the church and as the service is three or four hours

-      long, beginning often at daybreak, the long staff or crutch upon which

-      they lean is not a useless appendage. The patriarch, who dwells in Cairo,

-      is not, I think, a person to be envied. He must be a monk originally and

-      remain unmarried, and this is a country where marriage is so prevalent.

-      Besides this, he is obliged to wear always a woolen garment next the skin,

-      an irritation in this climate more constant than matrimony. And report

-      says that he lives under rules so rigid that he is obliged to be waked up,

-      if he sleeps, every fifteen minutes. I am inclined to think, however, that

-      this is a polite way of saying that the old man has a habit of dropping

-      off to sleep every quarter of an hour.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The cliffs of Gebel e' Tayr are of soft limestone, and seem to be two

-      hundred feet high. In one place a road is cut down to the water, partly by

-      a zig-zag covered gallery in the face of the rock, and this is the usual

-      landing-place for the convent. The convent, which is described as a church

-      under ground, is in the midst of a mud settlement of lay brothers and

-      sisters, and the whole is surrounded by a mud wall. From below it has the

-      appearance of an earthwork fortification. The height commands the river

-      for a long distance up and down, and from it the monks are on the lookout

-      for the dahabeëhs of travelers. It is their habit to plunge into the

-      water, clothed on only with their professions of holiness, swim to the

-      boats, climb on board and demand &ldquo;backsheesh&rdquo; on account of their

-      religion.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is very rough as we approach the cliffs, the waves are high, and the

-      current is running strong. We fear we are to be disappointed, but the

-      monks are superior to wind and waves. While we are yet half a mile off, I

-      see two of them in the water, their black heads under white turbans,

-      bobbing about in the tossing and muddy waves. They make' heroic efforts to

-      reach us; we can hear their voices faintly shouting: <i>Ana Christian, O

-      Howadji</i>, &ldquo;I am a Christian, O! Howadji.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We have no doubt you are exceptional Christians,&rdquo; we shout to them in

-      reply, &ldquo;Why don't you come aboard&mdash;back-s-h-e-e-s-h!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      They are much better swimmers than the average Christian with us. But it

-      is in vain. They are swept by us and away from us like corks on the angry

-      waves, and even their hail of Christian fellowship is lost in the

-      whistling wind. When we are opposite the convent another head is seen

-      bobbing about in the water; he is also swept below us, but three-quarters

-      of a mile down-stream he effects a landing on another dahabeëh. As he

-      climbs into the jolly-boat which is towed behind and stands erect, he

-      resembles a statue in basalt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a great feat to swim in a current so swift as this and lashed by

-      such a wind. I should like to have given these monks something, if only to

-      encourage so robust a religion. But none of them succeeded in getting on

-      board. Nothing happens to us as to other travelers, and we have no

-      opportunity to make the usual remarks upon the degraded appearance of

-      these Coptic monks at Dayr el Adra. So far as I saw them they were very

-      estimable people.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At noon we are driving past Minieh with a strong wind. It appears to be&mdash;but

-      if you were to land you would find that it is not&mdash;a handsome town,

-      for it has two or three graceful minarets, and the long white buildings of

-      the sugar-factory, with its tall chimneys, and the palace of the Khedive,

-      stretching along the bank give it an enterprising and cheerful aspect.

-      This new palace of his Highness cost about half a million of dollars, and

-      it is said that he has never passed a night in it. I confess I rather like

-      this; it must be a royal sensation to be able to order houses made like

-      suits of clothes without ever even trying them on. And it is a relief to

-      see a decent building and a garden now and then, on the river.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We go on, however, as if we were running away from the sheriff, for we

-      cannot afford to lose the advantage of such a wind. Along the banks the

-      clover is growing sweet and green as in any New England meadow in May, and

-      donkeys are browsing in it tended by children; a very pleasant sight, to

-      see this ill-used animal for once in clover and trying to bury his long

-      ears in luxury. Patches of water-melon plants are fenced about by low

-      stockades of dried rushes stuck in the sand&mdash;for the soil looks like

-      sand.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This vegetation is not kept alive, however, without constant labor; weeds

-      never grow, it is true, but all green things would speedily wither if the

-      shadoofs were not kept in motion, pouring the Nile into the baked and

-      thirsty soil.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These simple contrivances for irrigation, unchanged since the time of the

-      Pharaohs, have already been described. Here two tiers are required to lift

-      the water to the level of the fields; the first dipping takes it into a

-      canal parallel with the bank, and thence it is raised to the top. Two men

-      are dipping the leathern buckets at each machine, and the constant bending

-      down and lifting up of their dark bodies are fatiguing even to the

-      spectator. Usually in barbarous countries one pities the woman; but I

-      suppose this is a civilized region, for here I pity the men. The women

-      have the easier tasks of washing clothes in the cool stream, or lying in

-      the sand. The women all over the East have an unlimited capacity for

-      sitting motionless all day by a running stream or a pool of water.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the high wind the palm-trees are in constant motion tossing their

-      feather tufts in the air; some of them are blown like an umbrella turned

-      wrong side out, and a grove presents the appearance of crowd of people

-      overtaken by a sudden squall. The acacia tree, which the Arabs call the <i>sont</i>,

-      the acanthus of Strabo (<i>Mimosa Nilotica</i>) begins to be seen with the

-      palm. It is a thorny tree, with small yellow blossoms and bears a pod. But

-      what interests us most is the gum that exudes from its bark; for this is

-      the real Gum Arabic! That Heaven has been kind enough to let us see that

-      mysterious gum manufacturing itself! The Gum Arabic of our childhood!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      How often have I tried to imagine the feelings of a distant and

-      unconverted boy to whom Gum Arabic was as common as spruce gum to a New

-      England lad.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As I said, we go on as if we were evading the law; our daha-beëh seems to

-      have taken the bit in its teeth and is running away with us. We pass

-      everything that sails, and begin to feel no pride in doing so; it is a

-      matter of course. The other dalabeëhs are left behind, some with broken

-      yards. I heard reports afterwards that we broke their yards, and that we

-      even drowned a man. It is not true. We never drowned a man, and never

-      wished to. We were attending to our own affairs. The crew were busy the

-      first day or two of the voyage in cutting up their bread and spreading it

-      on the upper deck to dry&mdash;heaps of it, bushels of it. It is a black

-      bread, made of inferior unbolted wheat, about as heavy as lead, and sour

-      to the uneducated taste. The Egyptians like it, however, and it is said to

-      be very healthful. The men gnaw chunks of it with relish, but it is

-      usually prepared for eating by first soaking it in Nile-water and warming

-      it over a fire, in a big copper dish. Into the &ldquo;stodge&rdquo; thus made is

-      sometimes thrown some &ldquo;greens&rdquo; snatched from the shore. The crew seat

-      themselves about this dish when it is ready, and each one dips his right

-      hand into the mass and claws out a mouthful The dish is always scraped

-      clean. Meat is very rarely had by them, only a few times during the whole

-      voyage; but they vary their diet by eating green beans, lettuce, onions,

-      lentils, and any sort of &ldquo;greens&rdquo; they can lay hands on. The meal is

-      cooked on a little fire built on a pile of stones near the mast. When it

-      is finished they usually gather about the fire for a pull at the

-      &ldquo;hubble-bubble.&rdquo; This is a sort of pipe with a cocoa-nut shell filled with

-      water, through which the smoke passes. Usually a lump of hasheesh is put

-      into the bowl with the tobacco. A puff or two of this mixture is enough;

-      it sets the smoker coughing and conveys a pleasant stupor to his brain.

-      Some of the crew never smoke it, but content themselves with cigarettes.

-      And the cigarettes, they are always rolling up and smoking while they are

-      awake.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The hasheesh-smokers are alternately elated and depressed, and sometimes

-      violent and noisy. A man addicted to the habit is not good for much; the

-      hasheesh destroys his nerves and brain, and finally induces idiocy.

-      Hasheesh intoxication is the most fearful and prevalent vice in Egypt. The

-      government has made many attempts to stop it, but it is too firmly fixed;

-      the use of hasheesh is a temporary refuge from poverty, hunger, and all

-      the ills of life, and appears to have a stronger fascination than any

-      other indulgence. In all the towns one may see the dark little shops where

-      the drug is administered, and generally rows of victims in a stupid doze

-      stretched on the mud benches. Sailors are so addicted to hasheesh that it

-      is almost impossible to make up a decent crew for a dahabeëh.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Late in the afternoon we are passing the famous rock-tombs of Beni Hassan,

-      square holes cut in the face of the cliff, high up. With our glasses we

-      can see paths leading to them over the <i>debris</i> and along the ledges.

-      There are two or three rows of these tombs, on different ledges; they seem

-      to be high, dry, and airy, and I should rather live in them, dead or

-      alive, than in the mud hovels of the fellaheen below. These places of

-      sepulchre are older than those at Thebes, and from the pictures and

-      sculptures in them, more than from any others, the antiquarians have

-      reconstructed the domestic life of the ancient Egyptians. This is a

-      desolate spot now; there is a decayed old mud village below, and a little

-      south of it is the new town; both can barely be distinguished from the

-      brown sand and rock in which and in front of which they stand. This is a

-      good place for thieves, or was before Ibraheem Pasha destroyed these two

-      villages. We are warned that this whole country produces very skillful

-      robbers, who will swim off and glean the valuables from a dahabeëh in a

-      twinkling.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Notwithstanding the stiff breeze the thermometer marks 74°; but both wind

-      and temperature sink with the sun. Before the sun sets, however, we are

-      close under the east bank, and are watching the play of light on a

-      magnificent palm-grove, beneath which stand the huts of the modern village

-      of Sheykh Abâdeh. It adds romance to the loveliness of the scene to know

-      that this is the site of ancient Antinoë, built by the Emperor Adrian. To

-      be sure we didn't know it till this moment, but the traveler warms up to a

-      fact of this kind immediately, and never betrays even to his intimate

-      friends that he is not drawing upon his inexhaustible memory.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is the ancient Antinoë, built by Adrian.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Oh, the hypocrisy and deceit of the enthusiastic,

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;<i>Is</i> it?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, and handsome Antinous was drowned here in the Nile.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did they recover his body?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Upon the bank there are more camels, dogs, and donkeys than we have seen

-      all day; buffaloes are wallowing in the muddy margin. They are all in

-      repose; the dogs do not bark, and the camels stretch their necks in a sort

-      of undulatory expression of discontent, but do not bleat, or roar, or

-      squawk, or make whatever the unearthly noise which they make is called.

-      The men and the women are crouching in the shelter of their mud walls,

-      with the light of the setting sun upon their dark faces. They draw their

-      wraps closer about them to protect themselves from the north wind, and

-      regard us stolidly and without interest as we go by. And when the light

-      fades, what is there for them? No cheerful lamp, no book, no newspaper.

-      They simply crawl into their kennels and sleep the sleep of &ldquo;inwardness&rdquo;

-       and peace.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Just here the arable land on the east bank is broader than usual, and

-      there was evidently a fine city built on the edge of the desert behind it.

-      The Egyptians always took waste and desert land for dwellings and for

-      burial-places, leaving every foot of soil available for cultivation free.

-      There is evidence all along here of a once much larger population, though

-      I doubt if the east bank of the river was ever much inhabited. The river

-      banks would support many more people than we find here if the land were

-      cultivated with any care. Its fertility, with the annual deposit, is

-      simply inexhaustible, and it is good for two and sometimes three crops a

-      year. But we pass fields now and then that are abandoned, and others that

-      do not yield half what they might. The people are oppressed with taxes and

-      have no inducement to raise more than is absolutely necessary to keep them

-      alive. But I suppose this has always been the case in Egypt. The masters

-      have squeezed the last drop from the people, and anything like an

-      accumulation of capital by the laborers is unknown. The Romans used a long

-      rake, with fine and sharp teeth, and I have no doubt that they scraped the

-      country as clean as the present government does.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The government has a very simple method of adjusting its taxes on land and

-      crops. They are based upon the extent of the inundation. So many feet

-      rise, overflowing such an area, will give such a return in crops; and tax

-      on this product can be laid in advance as accurately as when the crops are

-      harvested. Nature is certain to do her share of the work; there will be no

-      frost, nor any rain to spoil the harvest, nor any freakishness whatever on

-      the part of the weather. If the harvest is not up to the estimate, it is

-      entirely the fault of the laborer, who has inadequately planted or

-      insufficiently watered. In the same manner a tax is laid upon each

-      palm-tree, and if it does not bear fruit, that is not the fault of the

-      government.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There must be some satisfaction in farming on the Nile. You are always

-      certain of the result of your labor. * Whereas, in our country farming is

-      the merest lottery. The season will open too wet or too dry, the seed may

-      rot in the ground, the young plant may be nipped with frost or grow pale

-      for want of rain, the crop runs the alternate hazards of drought or

-      floods, it is wasted by rust or devoured by worms; and, to cap the climax,

-      if the harvest is abundant and of good quality, the price goes down to an

-      unremunerative figure. In Egypt you may scratch the ground, put in the

-      seed, and then go to sleep for three months, in perfect certainty of a

-      good harvest, if only the shadoof and the sakiya are kept in motion.

-    </p>

-<pre xml:space="preserve">

-     * It should be said, however, that the ancient Egyptians

-     found the agricultural conditions beset with some vexations.

-     A papyrus in the British Museum contains a correspondence

-     between Ameneman, the librarian of Rameses II, and his pupil

-     Pentaour, who wrote the celebrated epic upon the exploits of

-     that king on the river Orontes. One of the letters describes

-     the life of the agricultural people:&mdash;&ldquo;Have you ever

-     conceived what sort of life the peasant leads who cultivates

-     the soil? Even before it is ripe, insects destroy part of

-     his harvest.. . Multitudes of rats are in the field; next

-     come invasions of locusts, cattle ravage his harvest,

-     sparrows alight in flocks on his sheaves. If he delays to

-     get in his harvest, robbers come to carry it off with him;

-     his horse dies of fatigue in drawing the plow; the tax-

-     collector arrives in the district, and has with him men

-     armed with sticks, negroes with palm-branches. All say,

-     'Give us of your corn,' and he has no means of escaping

-     their exactions. Next the unfortunate wretch is seized,

-     bound, and carried off by force to work on the canals; his

-     wife is bound, his children are stripped. And at the same

-     time his neighbors have each of them his own trouble.&rdquo;

- </pre>

-    <p>

-      By eight o'clock in the evening, on a falling wind, we are passing Rhoda,

-      whose tall chimneys have been long in sight. Here is one of the largest of

-      the Khedive's sugar-factories, and a new palace which has never been

-      occupied. We are one hundred and eighty-eight miles from Cairo, and have

-      made this distance in two days, a speed for which I suppose history has no

-      parallel; at least our dragoman says that such a run has never been made

-      before at this time of the year, and we are quite willing to believe a

-      statement which reflects so much honor upon ourselves, for choosing such a

-      boat and such a dragoman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This Nile voyage is nothing, after all; its length has been greatly

-      overestimated. We shall skip up the river and back again before the season

-      is half spent, and have to go somewhere else for the winter. A man feels

-      all-powerful, so long as the wind blows; but let his sails collapse and

-      there is not a more crest-fallen creature. Night and day our sail has been

-      full, and we are puffed up with pride.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At this rate we shall hang out our colored lanterns at Thebes on Christmas

-      night.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0150.jpg" alt="0150 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0151.jpg" alt="0151 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XI.&mdash;PEOPLE ON THE RIVER BANKS.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE morning puts a

-      new face on our affairs. It is Sunday, and the most devout could not

-      desire a quieter day. There is a thick fog on the river, and not breeze

-      enough stirring to show the stripes on our flag; the boat holds its own

-      against the current by a sort of accumulated impulse. During the night we

-      may have made five miles altogether, and now we barely crawl. We have run

-      our race; if we have not come into a haven, we are at a stand-still, and

-      it does not seem now as if we ever should wake up and go on again.

-      However, it is just as well. Why should we be tearing through this sleepy

-      land at the rate of four miles an hour?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The steersman half dozes at the helm; the reïs squats near him watching

-      the flapping sails; the crew are nearly all asleep on the forward deck,

-      with their burnouses drawn over their head and the feet bare, for it is

-      chilly as late as nine o'clock, and the thermometer has dropped to 540.

-      Abd-el-Atti slips his beads uneasily along between his fingers, and

-      remembers that when he said that we would reach Asioot in another day, he

-      forgot to ejaculate; &ldquo;God willing.&rdquo; Yet he rises and greets our coming

-      from the cabin with a willing smile, and a&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Morning sir, morning marm. I hope you enjoyin' you sleep, marm.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Where are we now, Abd-el-Atti?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not much, marm; this is a place call him Hadji Kandeel. But we do very

-      well; I not to complain.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you think we shall have any wind to-day?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I d'know, be sure. The wind come from Lord. Not so?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Hadji Kandeel is in truth only a scattered line of huts, but one lands

-      here to visit the grottoes or rock-tombs of Tel el Amarna. All this

-      country is gaping with tombs apparently; all the cliffs are cut into

-      receptacles for the dead, all along the margin of the desert on each side

-      are old necropolises and moslem cemeteries, in which generation after

-      generation, for almost fabulous periods of time, has been deposited. Here

-      behind Hadji Kandeel are remains of a once vast city built let us say

-      sixteen hundred years before our era, by Amunoph IV., a wayward king of

-      the eighteenth dynasty, and made the capital of Egypt. In the grottoes of

-      Tel el Amârna were deposited this king and his court and favorites, and

-      his immediate successors&mdash;all the splendor of them sealed up there

-      and forgotten. This king forsook the worship of the gods of Thebes, and

-      set up that of a Semitic deity, Aten, a radiating disk, a sun with rays

-      terminating in human hands. It was his mother who led him into this, and

-      she was not an Egyptian; neither are the features of the persons

-      sculptured in the grottoes Egyptian.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Thus all along the stream of Egyptian history cross currents are coming

-      in, alien sovereigns and foreign task-masters; and great breaks appear, as

-      if one full civilization had run its course of centuries, and decay had

-      come, and then ruin, and then a new start and a fresh career.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Early this morning, when we were close in to the west bank, I heard

-      measured chanting, and saw a procession of men and women coming across the

-      field. The men bore on a rude bier the body of a child. They came straight

-      on to the bank, and then turned by the flank with military precision and

-      marched upstream to the place where a clumsy country ferry-boat had just

-      landed. The chant of the men, as they walked, was deep-voiced and solemn,

-      and I could hear in it frequently repeated the name of Mohammed. The women

-      in straggling file followed, like a sort of ill-omened birds in black, and

-      the noise they made, a kind of wail, was exactly like the cackle of wild

-      geese. Indeed before I saw the procession I thought that some geese were

-      flying overhead.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The body was laid on the ground and four men kneeled upon the bank as if

-      in prayer. The boat meantime was unloading, men, women and children

-      scrambling over the sides into the shallow water, and the donkeys, urged

-      with blows, jumping after them. When they were all out the funeral took

-      possession of the boat, and was slowly wafted across, as dismal a going to

-      a funeral as if this were the real river of death. When the mourners had

-      landed we saw them walking under the palm-trees, to the distant

-      burial-place in the desert, with a certain solemn dignity, and the

-      chanting and wailing were borne to us very distinctly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is nearly a dead calm all day, and our progress might be imperceptible

-      to an eye naked, and certainly it must be so to the eyes of these natives

-      which are full of flies. It grows warm, however, and is a summer

-      temperature when we go ashore in the afternoon on a tour of exploration.

-      We have for attendant, Ahmed, who carries a big stick as a defence against

-      dogs. Ahmed does not differ much in appearance from a wild barbarian, his

-      lack of a complete set of front teeth alone preventing him from looking

-      fierce. A towel is twisted about his head, feet and legs are bare, and he

-      wears a blue cotton robe with full sleeves longer than his arms, gathered

-      at the waist by a piece of rope, and falling only to the knees. A nice

-      person to go walking with on the Holy Sabbath.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The whole land is green with young wheat, but the soil is baked and

-      cracked three or four inches deep, even close to the shore where the water

-      has only receded two or three days ago. The land stretches for several

-      miles, perfectly level and every foot green and smiling, back to the

-      desert hills. Sprinkled over this expanse, which is only interrupted by

-      ditches and slight dykes upon which the people walk from village to

-      village, are frequent small groves of palms. Each grove is the nucleus of

-      a little settlement, a half dozen sun-baked habitations, where people,

-      donkeys, pigeons, and smaller sorts of animated nature live together in

-      dirty amity. The general plan of building is to erect a circular wall of

-      clay six or seven feet high, which dries, hardens, and cracks in the sun.

-      This is the Oriental court. In side this and built against the wall is a

-      low mud-hut with a wooden door, and perhaps here and there are two similar

-      huts, or half a dozen, according to the size of the family. In these

-      hovels the floor is of smooth earth, there is a low bedstead or some

-      matting laid in one corner, but scarcely any other furniture, except some

-      earthen jars holding doora or dried fruit, and a few cooking utensils. A

-      people who never sit, except on their heels, do not need chairs, and those

-      who wear at once all the clothes they possess need no closets or

-      wardrobes. I looked at first for a place where they could keep their

-      &ldquo;Sunday clothes&rdquo; and &ldquo;nice things,&rdquo; but this philosophical people do not

-      have anything that is too good for daily use. It is nevertheless true that

-      there is no hope of a people who do not have &ldquo;Sunday clothes.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The inhabitants did not, however, appear conscious of any such want. They

-      were lounging about or squatting in the dust in picturesque idleness; the

-      children under twelve years often without clothes and not ashamed, and the

-      women wearing no veils. The women are coming and going with the heavy

-      water-jars, or sitting on the ground, sorting doora and preparing it for

-      cooking; not prepossessing certainly, in their black or dingy brown gowns

-      and shawls of cotton. Children abound. In all the fields men are at work,

-      picking up the ground with a rude hoe shaped like an adze. Tobacco plants

-      have just been set out, and water-melons carefully shaded from the sun by

-      little tents of rushes. These men are all Fellaheen, coarsely and scantily

-      clad in brown cotton gowns, open at the breast. They are not bad figures,

-      better than the women, but there is a hopeless acceptance of the portion

-      of slaves in their bearing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We encountered a very different race further from the river, where we came

-      upon an encampment of Bedaween, or desert Arabs, who hold themselves as

-      much above the Fellaheen as the poor white trash used to consider itself

-      above the negroes in our Southern States. They pretend to keep their blood

-      pure by intermarrying only in desert tribes, and perhaps it is pure; so, I

-      suppose, the Gipsies are pure blood enough, but one would not like them

-      for neighbors. These Bedaween, according to their wandering and predatory

-      habit, have dropped down here from the desert to feed their little flock

-      of black sheep and give their lean donkeys a bite of grass. Their tents

-      are merely strips of coarse brown cloth, probably camel's hair, like

-      sacking, stretched horizontally over sticks driven into the sand, so as to

-      form a cover from the sun and a protection from the north wind. Underneath

-      them are heaps of rags, matting, old clothes, blankets, mingled with

-      cooking-utensils and the nameless broken assortment that beggars usually

-      lug about with them. Hens and lambs are at home there, and dogs, a small,

-      tawny wolfish breed, abound. The Arabs are worthy of their dwellings, a

-      dirty, thievish lot to look at, but, as I said, no doubt of pure blood,

-      and having all the virtues for which these nomads have been celebrated

-      since the time when Jacob judiciously increased his flock at the expense

-      of Laban.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A half-naked boy of twelve years escorts us to the bank of the canal near

-      which the tents are pitched, and we are met by the sheykh of the tribe, a

-      more venerable and courtly person than the rest of these pure-blood

-      masqueraders in rags, but not a whit less dirty. The fellaheen had paid no

-      attention to us; this sheykh looked upon himself as one of the proprietors

-      of this world, and bound to extend the hospitalities of this portion of it

-      to strangers. He received us with a certain formality. When two Moslems

-      meet there is no end to their formal salutation and complimentary

-      speeches, which may continue as long as their stock of religious

-      expressions holds out. The usual first greeting is <i>Es-salaam, aleykoom</i>,

-      &ldquo;peace be on you,&rdquo; to which the reply is <i>Aleykoom es-saalam</i>, &ldquo;on

-      you be peace.&rdquo; It is said that persons of another religion, however,

-      should never make use of this salutation to a Moslem, and that the latter

-      should not and will not return it. But we were overflowing with charity

-      and had no bigotry, and went through Egypt salaaming right and left,

-      sometimes getting no reply and sometimes a return, to our &ldquo;peace be on

-      you,&rdquo; of <i>Wa-aleykoom</i>, &ldquo;and on you.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The salutations by gesture are as varied as those by speech When

-      Abd-el-Atti walked in Cairo with us, he constantly varied his gestures

-      according to the rank of the people we met. To an inferior he tossed a

-      free salaam; an equal he saluted by touching with his right hand in one

-      rapid motion his breast, lips, and head; to a superior he made the same

-      motion except that his hand first made a dip down to his knees; and when

-      he met a person of high rank the hand scooped down to the ground before it

-      passed up to the head.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I flung a cheerful <i>salaam</i> at the sheykh and gave him the Oriental

-      salute, which he returned. We then shook hands, and the sheykh kissed his

-      after touching mine, a token of friendship which I didn't know enough to

-      imitate, not having been brought up to kiss my own hand.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Anglais or Français?&rdquo; asked the sheykh.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;Americans.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; he ejaculated, throwing back his head with an aspiration of relief,

-      &ldquo;Melicans; <i>tyeb</i> (good).&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      A ring of inquisitive Arabs gathered about us and were specially

-      interested in studying the features and costume of one of our party; the

-      women standing further off and remaining closely veiled kept their eyes

-      fixed on her. The sheykh invited us to sit and have coffee, but the

-      surroundings were not tempting to the appetite and we parted with profuse

-      salutations. I had it in mind to invite him to our American centennial; I

-      should like to set him off against some of our dirty red brethren of the

-      prairies. I thought that if I could transport these Bedaween, tents,

-      children, lank, veiled women, donkeys, and all to the centennial grounds

-      they would add a most interesting (if unpleasant) feature. But, then, I

-      reflected, what is a centennial to this Bedawee whose ancestors were as

-      highly civilized as he is when ours were wading about the fens with the

-      Angles or burrowing in German forests. Besides, the Bedawee would be at a

-      disadvantage when away from the desert, or the bank of this Nile whose

-      unceasing flow symbolizes his tribal longevity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we walk along through the lush-fields which the despised Fellaheen are

-      irritating into a fair yield of food, we are perplexed with the query,

-      what is the use of the Bedaween in this world? They produce nothing. To be

-      sure they occupy a portion of the earth that no one else would inhabit;

-      they dwell on the desert. But there is no need of any one dwelling on the

-      desert, especially as they have to come from it to levy contributions on

-      industrious folds in order to live. At this stage of the inquiry, the

-      philosopher asks, what is the use of any one living?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As no one could answer this, we waded the water where it was shallow and

-      crossed to a long island, such as the Nile frequently leaves in its

-      sprawling course. This island was green from end to end, and inhabited

-      more thickly than the main-land. We attracted a good deal of attention

-      from the mud-villages, and much anxiety was shown lest we should walk

-      across the wheat-fields. We expected that the dahabeëh would come on and

-      take us off, but its streamer did not advance, and we were obliged to

-      rewade the shallow channel and walk back to the starting-place. There was

-      a Sunday calm in the scene. At the rosy sunset the broad river shone like

-      a mirror and the air was soft as June. How strong is habit. Work was going

-      on as usual, and there could have been no consent of sky, earth, and

-      people, to keep Sunday, yet there seemed to be the Sunday spell upon the

-      landscape. I suspect that people here have got into the way of keeping all

-      the days. The most striking way in which an American can keep Sunday on

-      the Nile is by not going gunning, not even taking a &ldquo;flyer&rdquo; at a hawk from

-      the deck of the dahabeëh. There is a chance for a tract on this subject.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Let no one get the impression that we are idling away our time, because we

-      are on Monday morning exactly where we were on Sunday morning. We have

-      concluded to &ldquo;keep&rdquo; another day. There is not a breath of wind to scatter

-      the haze, thermometer has gone down, and the sun's rays are feeble. This

-      is not our fault, and I will not conceal the adverse circumstances in

-      order to give you a false impression of the Nile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are moored against the bank. The dragoman has gone on shore to shoot

-      pigeons and buy vegetables. Our turkeys, which live in cages on the

-      stern-deck, have gone ashore and are strutting up and down the sand; their

-      gobble is a home sound and recalls New England. Women, as usual, singly

-      and in groups, come to the river to fill their heavy water-jars. There is

-      a row of men and boys on the edge of the bank. Behind are two camels yoked

-      wide apart drawing a plow. Our crew chaff the shore people. The cook says

-      to a girl, &ldquo;You would make me a good wife; we will take you along.&rdquo; Men,

-      squatting on the bank say, &ldquo;Take her along, she is of no use.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Girl retorts, &ldquo;You are not of more use than animals, you sit idle all day,

-      while I bring water and grind the corn.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      One is glad to see this assertion of the rights of women in this region

-      where nobody has any rights; and if we had a tract we would leave it with

-      her. Some good might be done by travelers if they would distribute biscuit

-      along the Nile, stamped in Arabic with the words, &ldquo;Man ought to do half

-      the work,&rdquo; or, &ldquo;Sisters rise!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      In the afternoon we explore a large extent of country, my companion

-      carrying a shot-gun for doves. These doves are in fact wild pigeons, a

-      small and beautiful pearly-grey bird. They live on the tops of the houses

-      in nests formed for them by the insertion of tiles or earthen pots in the

-      mud-walls. Many houses have an upper story of this sort on purpose for the

-      doves; and a collection of mere mud-cabins so ornamented is a picturesque

-      sight, under a palm-grove. Great flocks of these birds are flying about,

-      and the shooting is permitted, away from the houses.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We make efforts to get near the wild geese and the cranes, great numbers

-      of which are sunning themselves on the sandbanks, but these birds know

-      exactly the range of a gun, and fly at the right moment. A row of cranes

-      will sometimes trifle with our feelings. The one nearest will let us

-      approach almost within range before he lifts his huge wings and sails over

-      the river, the next one will wait for us to come a few steps further

-      before he flies, and so on until the sand-spit is deserted of these

-      long-legged useless birds. Hawks are flying about the shore and great

-      greyish crows, or ravens, come over the fields and light on the margin of

-      sand&mdash;a most gentlemanly looking bird, who is under a queer necessity

-      of giving one hop before he can raise himself in flight. Small birds, like

-      sand-pipers, are flitting about the bank. The most beautiful creature,

-      however, is a brown bird, his wing marked with white, long bill, head

-      erect and adorned with a high tuft, as elegant as the blue-jay; the

-      natives call it the crocodile's guide.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We cross vast fields of wheat and of beans, the Arab &ldquo;fool,&rdquo; which are

-      sown broadcast, interspersed now and then with a melon-patch. Villages,

-      such as they are, are frequent; one of them has a mosque, the only one we

-      have seen recently. The water for ablution is outside, in a brick tank

-      sunk in the ground. A row of men are sitting on their heels in front of

-      the mosque, smoking; some of them in white gowns, and fine-looking men. I

-      hope there is some saving merit in this universal act of sitting on the

-      heels, the soles of the feet flat on the ground; it is not an easy thing

-      for a Christian to do, as he will find out by trying.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Toward night a steamboat flying the star and crescent of Egypt, with

-      passengers on board, some of &ldquo;Cook's personally conducted,&rdquo; goes

-      thundering down stream, filling the air with smoke and frightening the

-      geese, who fly before it in vast clouds. I didn't suppose there were so

-      many geese in the world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Truth requires it to be said that on Tuesday morning the dahabeëh holds

-      about the position it reached on Sunday morning; we begin to think we are

-      doing well not to lose anything in this rapid current. The day is warm and

-      cloudy, the wind is from the east and then from the south-east, exactly

-      the direction we must go. It is in fact a sirocco, and fills one with

-      languor, which is better than being frost-bitten at home. The evening,

-      with the cabin windows all open, is like one of those soft nights which

-      come at the close of sultry northern days, in which there is a dewy

-      freshness. This is the sort of winter that we ought to cultivate.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      During the day we attempt tracking two or three times, but with little

-      success; the wind is so strong that the boat is continually blown ashore.

-      Tracking is not very hard for the passengers and gives them an opportunity

-      to study the bank and the people on it close at hand. A long cable

-      fastened on the forward deck is carried ashore, and to the far end ten or

-      twelve sailors attach themselves at intervals by short ropes which press

-      across the breast. Leaning in a slant line away from the river, they walk

-      at a snail's pace, a file of parti-colored raiment and glistening legs;

-      occasionally bursting into a snatch of a song, they slowly pull the bark

-      along. But obstructions to progress are many. A spit of sand will project

-      itself, followed by deepwater, through which the men will have to wade in

-      order to bring the boat round; occasionally the rope must be passed round

-      trees which overhang the caving bank; and often freight-boats, tied to the

-      shore, must be passed. The leisure with which the line is carried outside

-      another boat is amusing even in this land of deliberation. The groups on

-      these boats sit impassive and look at us with a kind of curiosity that has

-      none of our eagerness in it. The well-bred indifferent &ldquo;stare&rdquo; of these

-      people, which is not exactly brazen and yet has no element of emotion in

-      it, would make the fortune of a young fellow in a London season. The

-      Nubian boatmen who are tracking the freight-dahabeëh appear to have left

-      their clothes in Cairo; they flop in and out of the water, they haul the

-      rope along the bank, without consciousness apparently that any spectators

-      are within miles; and the shore-life goes on all the same, men sit on the

-      banks, women come constantly to fill their jars, these crews stripped to

-      their toil excite no more attention than the occasional fish jumping out

-      of the Nile. The habit seems to be general of minding one's own business.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At early morning another funeral crossed the river to a desolate

-      burial-place in the sand, the women wailing the whole distance of the

-      march; and the noise was more than before like the clang of wild geese.

-      These women have inherited the Oriental art of &ldquo;lifting up the voice,&rdquo; and

-      it adds not a little to the weirdness of this ululation and screeching to

-      think that for thousands of years the dead have been buried along this

-      valley with exactly the same feminine tenderness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These women wear black; all the countrywomen we have seen are dressed in

-      sombre gowns and shawls of black or deep blue-black; none of them have a

-      speck of color in their raiment, not a bit of ribbon nor a bright

-      kerchief, nor any relief to the dullness of their apparel. And yet they

-      need not fear to make themselves too attractive. The men have all the

-      colors that are worn; though the Fellaheen as a rule wear brownish

-      garments, blue and white are not uncommon, and a white turban or a red

-      fez, or a silk belt about the waist gives variety and agreeable relief to

-      the costumes. In this these people imitate that nature which we affect to

-      admire, but outrage constantly. They imitate the birds. The male birds

-      have all the gay plumage; the feathers of the females are sober and quiet,

-      as befits their domestic position. And it must be admitted that men need

-      the aid of gay dress more than women.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next morning when the sun shows over the eastern desert, the sailors

-      are tracking, hauling the boat slowly along an ox-bow in the river, until

-      at length the sail can catch the light west wind which sprang up with the

-      dawn. When we feel that, the men scramble aboard, and the dahabeëh, like a

-      duck that has been loitering in an eddy for days, becomes instinct with

-      life and flies away to the cliffs opposite, the bluffs called Gebel

-      Aboofayda, part of the Mokattam range that here rises precipitously from

-      the river and overhangs it for ten or twelve miles. I think these

-      limestone ledges are two or three hundred feet high. The face is scarred

-      by the slow wearing of ages, and worn into holes and caves innumerable.

-      Immense numbers of cranes are perched on the narrow ledges of the cliff,

-      and flocks of them are circling in front of it, apparently having nests

-      there. As numerous also as swallows in a sand-bank is a species of duck

-      called the diver; they float in troops on the stream, or wheel about the

-      roosting cranes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This is a spot famed for its sudden gusts of wind which sometimes flop

-      over the brink and overturn boats. It also is the resort of the crocodile,

-      which seldom if ever comes lower down the Nile now. But the crocodile is

-      evidently shy of exhibiting himself, and we scan the patches of sand at

-      the foot of the rocks with our glasses for a long time in vain. The animal

-      dislikes the puffing, swashing steamboats, and the rifle-balls that

-      passing travelers pester him with. At last we see a scaly log six or eight

-      feet long close to the water under the rock. By the aid of the glass it

-      turns out to be a crocodile. He is asleep, and too far off to notice at

-      all the volley of shot with which we salute him. It is a great thing to <i>say</i>

-      you saw a crocodile. It isn't much to <i>see</i> one.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And yet the scaly beast is an interesting and appropriate feature in such

-      a landscape,# and the expectation of seeing a crocodile adds to your

-      enjoyment. On our left are these impressive cliffs; on the right is a

-      level island. Half-naked boys and girls are tending small flocks of black

-      sheep on it. Abd-el-Atti raises his gun as if he would shoot the children

-      and cries out to them, &ldquo;lift up your arm,&rdquo; words that the crocodile hunter

-      uses when he is near enough to fire, and wants to attract the attention of

-      the beast so that it will raise its fore-paw to move off, and give the

-      sportsman a chance at the vulnerable spot. The children understand the

-      allusion and run laughing away.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Groups of people are squatting on the ground, doing nothing, waiting for

-      nothing, expecting nothing; buffaloes and cattle are feeding on the thin

-      grass, and camels are kneeling near in stately indifference; women in

-      blue-black robes come&mdash;the everlasting sight&mdash;to draw water. The

-      whole passes in a dumb show. The hot sun bathes all.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We pass next the late residence of a hermit, a Moslem &ldquo;welee&rdquo; or holy man.

-      On a broad ledge of the cliff, some thirty feet above the water, is a hut

-      built of stone and plaster and whitewashed, about twelve feet high, the

-      roof rounded like an Esquimau snow-hut and with a knob at the top. Here

-      the good man lived, isolated from the world, fed by the charity of

-      passers-by, and meditating on his own holiness. Below him, out of the

-      rock, with apparently no better means of support than he had, grows an

-      acacia-tree, now in yellow blossoms. Perhaps the saint chewed the

-      gum-arabic that oozed from it. Just above, on the river, is a slight strip

-      of soil, where he used to raise a few cucumbers and other cooling

-      vegetables. The farm, which is no larger than two bed blankets, is

-      deserted now. The saint died, and is buried in his house, in a hole

-      excavated in the rock, so that his condition is little changed, his house

-      being his tomb, and the Nile still soothing his slumber.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But if it is easy to turn a house into a tomb it is still easier to turn a

-      tomb into a house. Here are two square-cut tombs in the rock, of which a

-      family has taken possession, the original occupants probably having moved

-      out hundreds of years ago. Smoke is issuing from one of them, and a

-      sorry-looking woman is pulling dead grass among the rocks for fuel. There

-      seems to be no inducement for any one to live in this barren spot, but

-      probably rent is low. A little girl seven or eight years old comes down

-      and walks along the bank, keeping up with the boat, incited of course by

-      the universal expectation of backsheesh. She has on a head-veil, covering

-      the back of the head and neck and a single shirt of brown rags hanging in

-      strings. I throw her an apple, a fruit she has probably never seen, which

-      she picks up and carries until she joined is by an elder sister, to whom

-      she shows it. Neither seems to know what it is. The elder smells it,

-      sticks her teeth into it, and then takes a bite. The little one tastes,

-      and they eat it in alternate bites, growing more and more eager for fair

-      bites as the process goes on.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Near the southern end of the cliffs of Gebel Aboofayda are the

-      crocodile-mummy pits which Mr. Prime explored; caverns in which are

-      stacked up mummied crocodiles and lizards by the thousands. We shall not

-      go nearer to them. I dislike mummies; I loathe crocodiles; I have no

-      fondness for pits. What could be more unpleasant than the three combined!

-      To crawl on one's stomach through crevices and hewn passages in the rock,

-      in order to carry a torch into a stifling chamber, packed with mummies and

-      cloths soaked in bitumen, is an exploit that we willingly leave to

-      Egyptologists. If one takes a little pains, he can find enough unpleasant

-      things above ground.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It requires all our skill to work the boat round the bend above these

-      cliffs; we are every minute about to go aground on a sand-bar, or jibe the

-      sail, or turn about. Heaven only knows how we ever get on at all, with all

-      the crew giving orders and no one obeying. But by five o'clock we are at

-      the large market-town of Manfaloot, which has half a dozen minarets and is

-      sheltered by a magnificent palm-grove. You seem to be approaching an

-      earthly paradise; and one can keep up the illusion if he does not go

-      ashore. And yet this is a spot that ought to interest the traveler, for

-      here Lot is said to have spent a portion of the years of his exile, after

-      the accident to his wife.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At sunset old Abo Arab comes limping along the bank with a tin pail,

-      having succeeded at length in overtaking the boat; and in reply to the

-      question, where he has been asleep all day, pulls out from his bosom nine

-      small fish as a peace-offering. He was put off at sunrise to get milk for

-      breakfast. What a happy-go-lucky country it is.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After sundown, the crew, who have worked hard all day, on and off,

-      tacking, poling, and shifting sail, get their supper round an open fire on

-      deck, take each some whiffs from the &ldquo;hubble-bubble,&rdquo; and, as we sail out

-      over the broad, smooth water, sing a rude and plaintive melody to the

-      subdued thump of the darabooka. Towards dark, as we are about to tie up,

-      the wind, which had failed, rises, and we voyage on, the waves rippling

-      against the sides in a delicious lullaby. The air is soft, the moon is

-      full and peeps out from the light clouds which obscure the sky and prevent

-      dew.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The dragoman asleep on the cabin deck, the reïs crouched, attentive of the

-      course, near him, part of the sailors grouped about the bow in low chat,

-      and part asleep in the shadow of the sail, we voyage along under the wide

-      night, still to the south and warmer skies, and seem to be sailing through

-      an enchanted land.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Put not your trust in breezes. The morning finds us still a dozen miles

-      from Asioot where we desire to celebrate Christmas; we just move with

-      sails up, and the crew poling. The head-man chants a line or throws out a

-      word, and the rest come in with a chorus, as they walk along, bending the

-      shoulder to the pole. The leader&mdash;the &ldquo;shanty man&rdquo; the English

-      sailors call their leader, from the French <i>chanter</i> I suppose&mdash;ejaculates

-      a phrase, sometimes prolonging it, or dwelling on it with a variation,

-      like &ldquo;O! Mohammed!&rdquo; or &ldquo;O! Howadji!&rdquo; or some scraps from a love-song, and

-      the men strike in in chorus: &ldquo;Hâ Yàlësah, hâ Yâlësah,&rdquo; a response that the

-      boatmen have used for hundreds of years.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We sail leisurely past a large mud-village dropped in a splendid grove of

-      palms and acacias. The scene is very poetical before details are

-      inspected, and the groves, we think, ought to be the home of refinement

-      and luxury. Men are building a boat under the long arcade of trees, women

-      are stooping with the eternal water-jars which do not appear to retain

-      fluid any better than the sieves of the Danaïdes, and naked children run

-      along the bank crying &ldquo;Backsheesh, O Howadji.&rdquo; Our shot-gun brings down a

-      pigeon-hawk close to the shore. A boy plunges in and gets it, handing it

-      to us on deck from the bank, but not relinquishing his hold with one hand

-      until he feels the half-piastre in the other. So early is distrust planted

-      in the human breast.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Getting away from this idyllic scene, which has not a single resemblance

-      to any civilized town, we work our way up to El Hamra late in the

-      afternoon. This is the landing-place for Asioot; the city itself is a

-      couple of miles inland, and could be reached by a canal at high water. We

-      have come again into an active world, and there are evidences that this is

-      a busy place. New boats are on the stocks, and there is a forge for making

-      some sort of machinery. So much life has not been met with since we left

-      Cairo. The furling our great sail is a fine sight as we round in to the

-      bank, the sailors crawling out on the slender, hundred-feet-long yard,

-      like monkeys, and drawing up the hanging slack with both feet and hands.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is long since we have seen so many or so gaily dressed people as are

-      moving on shore; a procession of camels passes along; crowds of donkeys

-      are pushed down to the boat by their noisy drivers; old women come to sell

-      eggs, and white grease that pretends to be butter, and one of them pulls

-      some live pigeons from a bag. We lie at the mud-bank, and classes of

-      half-clad children, squatting in the sand, study us. Two other dahabeëhs

-      are moored near us, their passengers sitting under the awning and

-      indolently observing the novel scene, book in hand, after the manner of

-      Nile voyagers.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These are the pictures constantly recurring on the river, only they are

-      never the same in grouping or color, and they never weary one. It is

-      wonderful, indeed, how satisfying the Nile is in itself and how little

-      effort travelers make for the society of each other. Boats pass or meet

-      and exchange salutes, but with little more effusion than if they were on

-      the Thames. Nothing afloat is so much like a private house as a dahabeëh,

-      and I should think, by what we hear, that sociability decreases on the

-      Nile with increase of travel and luxury.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0166.jpg" alt="0166 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0167.jpg" alt="0167 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XII.&mdash;SPENDING CHRISTMAS ON THE NILE.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">P</span>ROBABLY this

-      present writer has the distinction of being the only one who has written

-      about the Nile and has not invented a new way of spelling the name of the

-      town whose many minarets and brown roofs are visible over the meadows.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is written Asioot, Asyoot, Asiüt, Ssout, Siôout, Osyoot, Osioot,

-      O'Sioôt, Siüt, Sioot, O'siout, Si-ôôt, Siout, Syouth, and so on,

-      indefinitely. People take the liberty to spell names as they sound to

-      them, and there is consequently a pleasing variety in the names of all

-      places, persons, and things in Egypt; and when we add to the many ways of

-      spelling an Arabic word, the French the German, and the English

-      translation or equivalent, you are in a hopeless jumble of nomenclature.

-      The only course is to strike out boldly and spell everything as it seems

-      good in your eyes, and differently in different moods. Even the name of

-      the Prophet takes on half a dozen forms; there are not only ninety-nine

-      names of the attributes of God, but I presume there are ninety-nine ways

-      of spelling each of them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This Asioot has always been a place of importance. It was of old called

-      Lycopolis, its divinity being the wolf or the wolf-headed god; and in a

-      rock-mountain behind the town were not only cut the tombs of the

-      inhabitants, but there were deposited the mummies of the sacred wolves.

-      About these no one in Asioot knows or cares much, to day. It is a city of

-      twenty-five thousand people, with a good many thriving Copt Christians;

-      the terminus, to day, of the railway, and the point of arrival and

-      departure of the caravans to and from Darfoor&mdash;a desert march of a

-      month. Here are made the best clay pipe-bowls in Egypt, and a great

-      variety of ornamented dishes and vases in clay, which the traveler buys

-      and doesn't know what to do with. The artisans also work up elephants'

-      tusks and ostrich feathers into a variety of &ldquo;notions.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Christmas day opens warm and with an air of festivity. Great palm-branches

-      are planted along the bank and form an arbor over the gang-plank. The

-      cabin is set with them, in gothic arches over windows and doors, with

-      yellow oranges at the apex. The forward and saloon decks are completely

-      embowered in palms, which also run up the masts and spars. The crew have

-      entered with zeal into the decoration, and in the early morning

-      transformed the boat into a floating bower of greenery; the effect is

-      Oriental, but it is difficult to believe that this is really Christmas

-      day. The weather is not right, for one thing. It is singularly pleasant,

-      in fact like summer. We miss the usual snow and ice and the hurtling of

-      savage winds that bring suffering to the poor and make charity

-      meritorious. Besides, the Moslems are celebrating the day for us and, I

-      fear, regarding it simply as an occasion of backsheesh. The sailors are

-      very quick to understand so much of our religion as is profitable to

-      themselves.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In such weather as this it would be possible for &ldquo;shepherds to watch their

-      flocks by night.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Early in the day we have a visit from Wasef el Khyat, the American consul

-      here for many years, a Copt and a native of Asioot, who speaks only

-      Arabic; he is accompanied by one of his sons, who was educated at the

-      American college in Beyrout. So far does that excellent institution send

-      its light; scattered rays to be sure, but it is from it and such schools

-      that the East is getting the real impetus of civilization.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I do not know what the consul at Asioot does for America, but our flag is

-      of great service to him, protecting his property from the exactions of his

-      own government. Wasef is consequently very polite to all Americans, and

-      while he sipped coffee and puffed cigars in our cabin he smiled

-      unutterable things. This is the pleasantest kind of intercourse in a warm

-      climate, where a puff and an occasional smile will pass for profuse

-      expressions of social enjoyment.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      His excellency Shakirr Pasha, the governor of this large and rich

-      province, has sent word that he is about to put carriages and donkeys at

-      our disposal, but this probably meant that the consul would do it; and the

-      consul has done it. The carriage awaits us on the bank. It is a high,

-      paneled, venerable ark, that moves with trembling dignity; and we choose

-      the donkeys as less pretentious and less liable to come to pieces. This is

-      no doubt the only carriage between Cairo and Kartoom, and its appearance

-      is regarded as an event.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our first visit is paid to the Pasha, who has been only a few days in his

-      province, and has not yet transferred his harem from Cairo. We are

-      received with distinguished ceremony, to the lively satisfaction of

-      Abd-el-Atti, whose face beams like the morning, in bringing together such

-      &ldquo;distinguish&rdquo; people as his friend the Pasha, and travelers in his charge.

-      The Pasha is a courtly Turk, of most elegant manners, and the simplicity

-      of high breeding, a man of the world and one of the ablest governors in

-      Egypt. The room into which we are ushered, through a dirty alley and a

-      mud-wall court is hardly in keeping with the social stilts on which we are

-      all walking. In our own less favored land, it would answer very well for a

-      shed or an out-house to store beans in, or for a &ldquo;reception room&rdquo; for

-      sheep; a narrow oblong apartment, covered with a flat roof of palm logs,

-      with a couple of dirty little windows high up, the once whitewashed walls

-      stained variously, the cheap divans soiled.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The hospitality of this gorgeous <i>salon</i> was offered us with

-      effusion, and we sat down and exchanged compliments as if we had been in a

-      palace. I am convinced that there is nothing like the Oriental

-      imagination. An attendant (and the servants were in keeping with the

-      premises) brought in <i>fingans</i> of coffee. The servant presents the

-      cup in his right hand, holding the bottom of the silver receptacle in his

-      thumb and finger; he takes it away empty with both hands, placing the left

-      under and the right on top of it. These formalities are universal and

-      all-important. Before taking it you ought to make the salutation, by

-      touching breast, lips, and forehead, with the right hand&mdash;an

-      acknowledgment not to the servant but to the master. Cigars are then

-      handed round, for it is getting to be considered on the Nile that cigars

-      are more &ldquo;swell&rdquo; than pipes; more's the pity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The exchange of compliments meantime went on, and on the part of the Pasha

-      with a fineness, adroitness, and readiness that showed the practice of a

-      lifetime in social fence. He surpassed our most daring invention with a

-      smiling ease, and topped all our extravagances with an art that made our

-      pool efforts appear clumsy. And what the effect would have been if we

-      could have understood the flowery Arabic I can only guess; nor can we ever

-      know how many flowers of his own the dragoman cast in.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;His excellency say that he feel the honor of your visit.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Say to his excellency that although we are only spending one day in his

-      beautiful capital, we could not forego the-pleasure of paying our respects

-      to his excellency.&rdquo; This sentence is built by the critic, and strikes us

-      all favorably.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;His excellency himself not been here many days, and sorry he not know you

-      coming, to make some preparations to receive you.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Thank his excellency for the palms that decorate our boat.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They are nothing, nothing, he say not mention it; the dahabeëh look very

-      different now if the Nile last summer had not wash away all his

-      flower-garden. His excellency say, how you enjoyed your voyage?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It has been very pleasant; only for a day or two we have wanted wind.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Your misfortune, his excellency say, his pleasure; it give him the

-      opportunity of your society. But he say if you want wind he sorry no wind;

-      it cause him to suffer that you not come here sooner.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Will his excellency dine with us to-day?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He say he think it too much honor.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Assure his excellency that we feel that the honor is conferred by him.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      And he consents to come. After we have taken our leave, the invitation is

-      extended to the consul, who is riding with us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The way to the town is along a winding, shabby embankment, raised above

-      high water, and shaded with sycamore-trees. It is lively with people on

-      foot and on donkeys, in more colored and richer dress than that worn by

-      country-people; the fields are green, the clover is springing luxuriantly,

-      and spite of the wrecks of unburned-brick houses, left gaping by the last

-      flood, and spite of the general untidiness of everything, the ride is

-      enjoyable. I don't know why it is that an irrigated country never is

-      pleasing on close inspection, neither is an irrigated garden. Both need to

-      be seen from a little distance, which conceals the rawness of the

-      alternately dry and soaked soil, the frequent thinness of vegetation, the

-      unkempt swampy appearance of the lowest levels, and the painful whiteness

-      of paths never wet and the dustiness of trees unwashed by rain. There is

-      no Egyptian landscape or village that is neat, on near inspection.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Asioot has a better entrance than most towns, through an old gateway into

-      the square (which is the court of the palace); and the town has extensive

-      bazaars and some large dwellings. But as we ride through it, we are always

-      hemmed in by mud-walls, twisting through narrow alleys, encountering dirt

-      and poverty at every step. We pass through the quarter of the Ghawâzees,

-      who, since their banishment from Cairo, form little colonies in all the

-      large Nile towns. There are the dancing-women whom travelers are so

-      desirous of seeing; the finest-looking women and the most abandoned

-      courtesans, says Mr. Lane, in Egypt. In showy dresses of bright yellow and

-      red, adorned with a profusion of silver-gilt necklaces, earrings, and

-      bracelets, they sit at the doors of their hovels in idle expectation. If

-      these happen to be the finest-looking women in Egypt, the others are wise

-      in keeping their veils on.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Outside the town we find a very pretty cemetery of the Egyptian style,

-      staring white tombs, each dead person resting under his own private little

-      stucco oven. Near it is encamped a caravan just in from Darfoor, bringing

-      cinnamon, gum-arabic, tusks, and ostrich feathers. The camels are worn

-      with the journey; their drivers have a fierce and free air in striking

-      contrast with the bearing of the fellaheen. Their noses are straight,

-      their black hair is long and shaggy, their garment is a single piece of

-      coarse brown cloth; they have the wildness of the desert.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The soft limestone ledge back of the town is honeycombed with grottoes and

-      tombs; rising in tiers from the bottom to the top. Some of them have

-      merely square-cut entrances into a chamber of moderate size, in some part

-      of which, or in a passage beyond, is a pit cut ten or twenty feet deep in

-      the rock, like a grave, for the mummy. One of them has a magnificent

-      entrance through a doorway over thirty feet high and fifteen deep; upon

-      the jambs are gigantic figures cut in the rock. Some of the chambers are

-      vast and were once pillared, and may have served for dwellings. These

-      excavations are very old. The hieroglyphics and figures on the walls are

-      not in relief on the stone, but cut in at the outer edge and left in a

-      gradual swell in the center&mdash;an <i>intaglio relievato</i>. The

-      drawing is generally spirited, and the figures show knowledge of form and

-      artistic skill. It is wonderful that such purely conventional figures, the

-      head almost always in profile and the shoulders square to the front, can

-      be so expressive. On one wall is a body of infantry marching, with the

-      long pointed shields mentioned by Xenophon in describing Egyptian troops.

-      Everywhere are birds, gracefully drawn and true to species, and upon some

-      of them the blue color is fresh. A ceiling of one grotto is wrought in

-      ornamental squares&mdash;a &ldquo;Greek pattern,&rdquo; executed long before the time

-      of the Greeks. Here we find two figures with the full face turned towards

-      us, instead of the usual profile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These tombs have served for a variety of purposes. As long as the original

-      occupants rested here, no doubt their friends came and feasted and were

-      mournfully merry in these sightly chambers overlooking the Nile. Long

-      after they were turned out, Christian hermits nested in them, during that

-      extraordinary period of superstition when men thought they could best

-      secure their salvation by living like wild beasts in the deserts of

-      Africa. Here one John of Lycopolis had his den, in which he stayed fifty

-      years, without ever opening the door or seeing the face of a woman. At

-      least, he enjoyed that reputation. Later, persecuted Christians dwelt in

-      these tombs, and after them have come wanderers, and jackals, and

-      houseless Arabs. I think I should rather live here than in Asioot; the

-      tombs are cleaner and better built than the houses of the town, and there

-      is good air here and no danger of floods.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we are on the top of the bluff, the desert in broken ridges is behind

-      us. The view is one of the best of the usual views from hills near the

-      Nile, the elements of which are similar; the spectator has Egypt in all

-      its variety at his feet. The valley here is broad, and we look a long

-      distance up and down the river. The Nile twists and turns in its bed like

-      one of the chimerical serpents sculptured in the chambers of the dead;

-      canals wander from it through the plain; and groves of palms and lines of

-      sycamores contrast their green with that of the fields. All this level

-      expanse is now covered with wheat, barley and thick clover, and the green

-      has a vividness that we have never seen in vegetation before. This owes

-      somewhat to the brown contrast near at hand and something maybe to the

-      atmosphere, but I think the growing grain has a lustre unknown to other

-      lands. This smiling picture is enclosed by the savage frame of the desert,

-      gaunt ridges of rocky hills, drifts of stones, and yellow sand that sends

-      its hot tongues in long darts into the plain. At the foot of the mountain

-      lies Asioot brown as the mud of the Nile, a city built of sun-dried

-      bricks, but presenting a singular and not unpleasing appearance on account

-      of the dozen white stone minarets, some of them worked like lace, which

-      spring out of it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The consul's home is one of the best in the city, but outside it shows

-      only a mud-wall like the meanest. Within is a paved court, and offices

-      about it; the rooms above are large, many-windowed, darkened with blinds,

-      and not unlike those of a plain house in America. The furniture is

-      European mainly, and ugly, and of course out of place in Africa. We see

-      only the male members of the family. Confectionery and coffee are served

-      and some champagne, that must have been made by the Peninsular and

-      Oriental Steamship Company; their champagne is well known in the Levant,

-      and there is no known decoction that is like it. In my judgment, if it is

-      proposed to introduce Christianity and that kind of wine into Egypt, the

-      country would better be left as it is.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      During our call the consul presents us fly-whisks with ivory handles, and

-      gives the ladies beautiful fans of ostrich feathers mounted in ivory.

-      These presents may have been due to a broad hint from the Pasha, who said

-      to the consul at our interview in the morning:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I should not like to have these distinguished strangers go away without

-      some remembrance of Asioot. I have not been here long; what is there to

-      get for them?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;O, your excellency, I will attend to that,&rdquo; said the consul.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the evening, with the dahabeëh beautifully decorated and hung with

-      colored lanterns, upon the deck, which, shut in with canvas and spread

-      with Turkish rugs, was a fine reception-room, we awaited our guests, as if

-      we had been accustomed to this sort of thing in America from our infancy,

-      and as if we usually celebrated Christmas outdoors, fans in hand, with

-      fire-works. A stand for the exhibition of fireworks had been erected on

-      shore. The Pasha was received as he stepped on board, with three rockets,

-      (that being, I suppose, the number of his official &ldquo;tails,&rdquo;) which flew up

-      into the sky and scattered their bursting bombs of color amid the stars,

-      announcing to the English dahabeëhs, the two steamboats and the town of

-      Asioot, that the governor of the richest province in Egypt was about to

-      eat his dinner.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The dinner was one of those perfections that one likes to speak of only in

-      confidential moments to dear friends. It wanted nothing either in number

-      of courses or in variety, in meats, in confections, in pyramids of

-      gorgeous construction, in fruits and flowers. There was something touching

-      about the lamb roasted whole, reclining his head on his own shoulder.

-      There was something tender about the turkey. There was a terrible moment

-      when the plum-pudding was borne in on fire, as if it had been a present

-      from the devil himself. The Pasha regarded it with distrust, and declined,

-      like a wise man, to eat flame. I fear that the English have fairly

-      introduced this dreadful dish into the Orient, and that the natives have

-      come to think that all foreigners are Molochs who can best be pleased by

-      offering up to them its indigestible ball set on fire of H. It is a

-      fearful spectacle to see this heathen people offering this incense to a

-      foreign idol, in the subserviency which will sacrifice even religion to

-      backsheesh.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The conversation during dinner is mostly an exchange of compliments, in

-      the art of which the Pasha is a master, displaying in it a wit, a variety

-      of resource and a courtliness that make the game a very entertaining one.

-      The Arabic language gives full play to this sort of social <i>espièglerie</i>,

-      and lends a delicacy to encounters of compliment which the English

-      language does not admit.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Coffee and pipes are served on deck, and the fire-works begin to tear and

-      astonish the night. The Khedive certainly employs very good pyrotechnists,

-      and the display by Abd-el-Atti and his equally excited helpers although

-      simple is brilliant. The intense delight that the soaring and bursting of

-      a rocket give to Abd-el-Atti is expressed in unconscious and unrestrained

-      demonstration. He might be himself in flames but he would watch the flight

-      of the rushing stream of fire, jumping up and down in his anxiety for it

-      to burst:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There! there! that's&mdash;a he, hooray!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Every time one bursts, scattering its colored stars, the crew, led by the

-      dragoman, cheer, &ldquo;Heep, heep, hooray! heep, heep, hooray!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      A whirligig spins upon the river, spouting balls of fire, and the crew

-      come in with a &ldquo;Heep, heep, hooray! heep, heep, hooray!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The steamer, which has a Belgian prince on board, illuminates, and salutes

-      with shot-guns. In the midst of a fusillade of rockets and Roman candles,

-      the crew develop a new accomplishment. Drilled by the indomitable master

-      of ceremonies, they attempt the first line of that distinctively American

-      melody,

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      &ldquo;We won't go home till morning.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      They really catch the air, and make a bubble, bubble of sounds, like

-      automata, that somewhat resembles the words. Probably they think that it

-      is our national anthem, or perhaps a Christmas hymn. No doubt,

-      &ldquo;won't-go-home-till-morning&rdquo; sort of Americans have been up the river

-      before us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The show is not over when the Pasha pleads an engagement to take a cup of

-      tea with the Belgian prince, and asks permission to retire. He expresses

-      his anguish at leaving us, and he will not depart if we say &ldquo;no.&rdquo; Of

-      course, our anguish in letting the Pasha go exceeds his suffering in

-      going, but we sacrifice ourselves to the demand of his station, and permit

-      him to depart. At the foot of the cabin stairs he begs us to go no

-      further, insisting that we do him too much honor to come so far.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The soft night grows more brilliant. Abd-el-Atti and his minions are still

-      blazing away. The consul declares that Asioot in all his life has never

-      experienced a night like this. We express ourselves as humbly thankful in

-      being the instruments of giving Asioot (which is asleep there two miles

-      off) such an &ldquo;eye-opener.&rdquo; (This remark has a finer sound when translated

-      into Arabic.)

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The spectacle closes by a voyage out upon the swift river in the sandal.

-      We take Roman candles, blue, red, and green lights and floaters which

-      Abd-el-Atti lets off, while the crew hoarsely roar, &ldquo;We won't go home till

-      morning,&rdquo; and mingle &ldquo;Heep, heep, hooray,&rdquo; with &ldquo;Hà Yàlësah, hâ Yâlësah.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The long range of lights on the steamers, the flashing lines and pyramids

-      of colors on our own dahabeëh, the soft June-like night, the moon coming

-      up in fleecy clouds, the broad Nile sparkling under so many fires, kindled

-      on earth and in the sky, made a scene unique, and as beautiful as any that

-      the Arabian Nights suggest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      To end all, there was a hubbub on shore among the crew, caused by one of

-      them who was crazy with hasheesh, and threatened to murder the reïs and

-      dragoman, if he was not permitted to go on board. It could be demonstrated

-      that he was less likely to slay them if he did not come on board, and he

-      was therefore sent to the governor's lock-up, with a fair prospect of

-      going into the Khedive's army. We left him behind, and about one o'clock

-      in the morning stole away up the river with a gentle and growing breeze.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Net result of pleasure:&mdash;one man in jail, and Abd-el-Atti's wrist so

-      seriously burned by the fire-works, that he has no use of his arm for

-      weeks. But, &ldquo;'twas a glorious victory.&rdquo; For a Christmas, however, it was a

-      little too much like the Fourth of July.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0027" id="linkimage-0027"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0177.jpg" alt="0177 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0028" id="linkimage-0028"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0178.jpg" alt="0178 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XIII.&mdash;SIGHTS AND SCENES ON THE RIVER.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>S 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 &ldquo;ancient&rdquo; 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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, &ldquo;Roman!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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

-      <i>fiabellum</i> of Pharaoh.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 &ldquo;dese fellow care for nothing

-      but smoke hasheesh,&rdquo; 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;&ldquo;Thank you&rdquo;&mdash;which

-      was no doubt the long palaver.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;bold-looking jades, who come out and stare at us with a more

-      than masculine impudence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 &ldquo;not like you.&rdquo; The feeling is

-      mutual, though it is discouraging to our pride to be despised by such

-      barbarous half-clad folk.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We find also the <i>sont</i> 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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:&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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, &ldquo;Come to prayer!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The sleepers, waking, answer, &ldquo;God is great, and Mohammed is his prophet.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      They then get up and set the sail. This is what it is to carry religion

-      into daily life.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0029" id="linkimage-0029"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0185.jpg" alt="0185 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0030" id="linkimage-0030"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0186.jpg" alt="0186 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XIV.&mdash;MIDWINTER IN EGYPT.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HETHER 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The period of the precession of the equinoxes was regarded as <i>one day</i>

-      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 <i>hours</i>

-      or &ldquo;sars,&rdquo; each one of 3,600 years; each of these hours into six &ldquo;ners,&rdquo;

-       of 600 years; and the &ldquo;ner&rdquo; into ten &ldquo;sosses&rdquo; or cosmic <i>minutes</i>, of

-      600 years. And thus, as we reckon sixty seconds to a minute, our ordinary

-      year was a <i>second</i> 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 <i>laisser aller</i> 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 <i>loss</i> of time by my watch, to set me back into the

-      age of Thothmes III.&mdash;a very good age to be in. We are living now by

-      great cosmic periods, and have little care for minute divisions of time.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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, &ldquo;O Mohamm<i>ed</i>&rdquo;

-       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:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      &ldquo;Allah, Allah!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      And in response,

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent30">

-      &ldquo;O Mohammed!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      &ldquo;God forgive us!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p class="indent30">

-      &ldquo;O Mohammed!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      &ldquo;God is most great!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p class="indent30">

-      &ldquo;O Mohammed!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      &ldquo;El Hoseyn!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p class="indent30">

-      &ldquo;O Mohammed!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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:&mdash;he has on a single coarse brown garment, through which

-      his tawny skin shows in spots, and he squats in the sand.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There was an American this year on the river, by the name of Smith&mdash;not

-      that I class the coming of Smith as a disaster&mdash;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, &ldquo;Smit, Smit.&rdquo; There has been no one

-      in Egypt since Cambyses who has made so much stir as Smit.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;a singular sight in a Moslem country.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Leaving this scene of a woe over which it is easy to be philosophical&mdash;the

-      raw recruits, in good spirits, munching black bread on the barge while the

-      women howl on shore&mdash;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 &ldquo;Allah&rdquo; and &ldquo;Mohammed.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      No. We are not going on, but fast to the bottom, near the shore.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good morning!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The words were English, the speaker was one of two eager Arabs, who had

-      suddenly appeared at our side.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good morning. O, yes. Me guide Goorna.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is Goorna?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. Temp de Goorna. Come bime by.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is Goorna?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Plenty. I go you. You want buy any <i>antiques?</i> Come bime by.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you live in Goorna?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All same. Memnonium, Goorna, I show all gentlemens. Me guide. Antiques! O

-      plenty. Come bime by.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Can you get us a mummy, a real one, in the original package, that hasn't

-      been opened?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You like. Come plenty mummy. Used be. Not now. You like, I get. Come bime

-      by, <i>bookra.</i>&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0031" id="linkimage-0031"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0196.jpg" alt="0196 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0032" id="linkimage-0032"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0197.jpg" alt="0197 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XV.&mdash;AMONG THE RUINS OF THEBES.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">Y</span>OU 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 <i>depot</i> 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&mdash;was

-      abandoned to a sensuous luxury rivaling that of Rome in her days of

-      greatest wealth and least virtue in man or woman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We shall have to give up, at the outset, the notion of Homer's

-      &ldquo;hundred-gated Thebes.&rdquo; 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We started for Koorneh across a luxuriant wheat-field, but soon struck the

-      desert and the <i>debris</i> 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&mdash;if one forgets London

-      and Paris and New York.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;as one would

-      cut off the tops of a handful of radishes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is a vein of &ldquo;Big Injun&rdquo; 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0033" id="linkimage-0033"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0203.jpg" alt="0203 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0034" id="linkimage-0034"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0200.jpg" alt="02004 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XVI.&mdash;HISTORY IN STONE.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>T NEVER rains at

-      Thebes; you begin with that fact. But everybody is anxious to have it

-      rain, so that he can say, &ldquo;It rained when I was at Thebes, for the first

-      time in four thousand years.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      It has not rained for four thousand years, and the evidence of this is

-      that no representation of rain is found in any of the sculptures on

-      temples or monuments; and all Egyptologists know that what is not found

-      thus represented has had no existence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      To-day, it rained for the first time in four thousand years The

-      circumstances were these. We were crossing at sunset from the west side to

-      the island, in a nasty little ferry, built like a canal-barge, its depths

-      being full of all uncleanliness and smell&mdash;donkeys, peasants, and

-      camels using it for crossing. (The getting of a camel in and out of such a

-      deep trough is a work of time and considerable pounding and roaring of

-      beast and men.) The boat was propelled by two half-clad, handsome,

-      laughing Egyptian boys, who rowed with some crooked limbs of trees, and

-      sang &ldquo;Hà! Yâlesah,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Yah! Mohammed&rdquo; as they stood and pulled the

-      unwieldy oars.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We were standing, above the reek, on a loose platform of sticks at the

-      stern, when my comrade said, &ldquo;It rains, I think I felt a drop on my hand.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It can't be,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;it has not rained here in four thousand years;&rdquo;

-       and I extended my hand. I felt nothing. And yet I could not swear that a

-      drop or two did not fall into the river.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It had that appearance, nearly. And we have seen no flies skipping on the

-      Nile at this season.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the sculpture we remember that the king is often represented extending

-      his hand. He would not put it out for nothing, for everything done

-      anciently in Egypt, every scratch on a rock, has a deep and profound

-      meaning. Pharaoh is in the attitude of fearing that it is going to rain.

-      Perhaps it did rain last night. At any rate, there were light clouds over

-      the sky.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The morning opens with a cool west wind, which increases and whirls the

-      sand in great clouds over the Libyan side of the river, and envelopes

-      Luxor in its dry storm. Luxor is for the most part a collection of

-      miserable mud-hovels on a low ridge, with the half-buried temple for a

-      nucleus, and a few houses of a better sort along the bank, from which

-      float the consular flags.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The inhabitants of Luxor live upon the winter travelers. Sometimes a dozen

-      or twenty gay dahabeëhs and several steamboats are moored here, and the

-      town assumes the appearance of a fashionable watering-place. It is the

-      best place on the river on the whole, considering its attractions for

-      scholars and sightseers, to spend the winter, and I have no doubt it would

-      be a great resort if it had any accommodations for visitors. But it has

-      not; the stranger must live in his boat. There is not indeed in the whole

-      land of Egypt above Cairo such a thing as an inn; scarcely a refuge where

-      a clean Christian, who wishes to keep clean, can pass a night, unless it

-      be in the house of some governor or a palace of the Khedive. The

-      perfection of the world's climate in winter is, to be sure, higher up, in

-      Nubia; but that of Thebes is good enough for people accustomed to Europe

-      and New England. With steamboats making regular trips and a railroad

-      crawling up the river, there is certain to be the Rameses Hotel at Thebes

-      before long, and its rival a Thothmes House; together with the Mummy

-      Restaurant, and the Scarabæus Saloon.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      You need two or three weeks to see properly the ruins of Thebes, though

-      Cook's &ldquo;personally conducted tourists&rdquo; do it in four days, and have a <i>soiree</i>

-      of the dancing-girls besides. The region to be traveled over is not only

-      vast (Strabo says the city was nine miles long) but it is exceedingly

-      difficult getting about, and fatiguing, if haste is necessary. Crossing

-      the swift Nile in a sandal takes time; you must wade or be carried over

-      shallows to the island beach; there is a weary walk or ride over this;

-      another stream is to be crossed, and then begins the work of the day. You

-      set out with a cavalcade of mules, servants, water-carriers, and a retinue

-      of hungry, begging Arabs, over the fields and through the desert to the

-      temples and tombs. The distances are long, the sand is glaring, the

-      incandescent sun is reflected in hot waves from the burning Libyan chain.

-      It requires hours to master the plan of a vast temple in its ruins, and

-      days to follow out the story of the wonderful people who built it, in its

-      marvelous sculptures&mdash;acres of inside and outside walls of picture

-      cut in stone.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Perhaps the easiest way of passing the time in an ancient ruin was that of

-      two Americans, who used to spread their rugs in some shady court, and sit

-      there, drinking brandy and champagne all day, letting the ancient

-      civilization gradually reconstruct itself in their brains.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Life on the dahabeëh is much as usual; in fact, we are only waiting a

-      favorable wind to pursue our voyage, expecting to see Thebes

-      satisfactorily on our return. Of the inhabitants and social life of Luxor,

-      we shall have more to say by and by. We have daily a <i>levee</i> of

-      idlers on the bank, who spend twilight hours in watching the boat; we are

-      visited by sharp-eyed dealers in antiquities, who pull out strings of

-      scarabæi from their bosoms, or cautiously produce from under their gowns a

-      sculptured tablet, or a stone image, or some articles from a mummy-case&mdash;<i>antiques</i>

-      really as good as new. Abd-el-Atti sits on the forward-deck cheapening the

-      poor chickens with old women, and surrounded by an admiring group of Arab

-      friends, who sit all day smoking and sipping coffee, and kept in a lively

-      enjoyment by his interminable <i>facetiae</i> and <i>badinage</i>.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our most illustrious visitors are the American consul, Ali Effendi Noorad,

-      and the English consul, Mustapha Aga. Ali is a well-featured,

-      bronze-complexioned Arab of good family (I think of the Ababdehs), whose

-      brother is Sheykh of a tribe at Karnak.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He cannot speak English, but he has a pleasanter smile than any other

-      American consul I know. Mustapha, now very old and well known to all Nile

-      travelers, is a venerable wise man of the East, a most suave, courtly

-      Arab, plausible, and soft of speech; under his bushy eyebrows one sees

-      eyes that are keen and yet glazed with a film of secrecy; the sort of eye

-      that you cannot look into, but which you have no doubt looks into you.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mustapha, as I said, built his house between two columns of the temple of

-      Luxor. These magnificent columns, with flaring lotus capitals, are

-      half-buried in sand, and the whole area is so built in and over by Arab

-      habitations that little of the once extensive and splendid structure can

-      be seen. Indeed, the visitor will do well to be content with the

-      well-known poetic view of the columns from the river. The elegant obelisk,

-      whose mate is in Paris, must however be seen, as well as the statues of

-      Rameses II. sitting behind it up to their necks in sand&mdash;as if a

-      sitz-bath had been prescribed. I went one day into the interior of the

-      huts, in order to look at some of the sculptures, especially that of a

-      king's chariot which is shaded by a parasol&mdash;an article which we

-      invented three or four thousand years after the Egyptians, who first used

-      it, had gone to the shades where parasols are useless. I was sorry that I

-      went. The private house I entered was a mud enclosure with a creaky wooden

-      door. Opening this I found myself in what appeared to be a private

-      hen-yard, where babies, chickens, old women, straw, flies, and dust,

-      mingled with the odors of antiquity; about this were the rooms in which

-      the family sleep&mdash;mere dog-kennels. Two of the women had nose-rings

-      put through the right nostril, hoops of gold two or three inches across. I

-      cannot say that a nose-ring adds to a woman's beauty, but if I had to

-      manage a harem of these sharp-tongued creatures I should want rings in

-      their noses&mdash;it would need only a slight pull of the cord in the ring

-      to cause the woman to cry, in Oriental language, &ldquo;where thou goest, I will

-      go.&rdquo; The parasol sculpture was half-covered by the mud-wall and the oven;

-      but there was Pharaoh visible, riding on in glory through all this

-      squalor. The Pharaohs and priests never let one of the common people set

-      foot inside these superb temples; and there is a sort of base satisfaction

-      now! in seeing the ignorant and oppressed living in their palaces, and

-      letting the hens roost on Pharaoh's sun-shade. But it was difficult to

-      make picturesque the inside of this temple-palace, even with all the

-      flowing rags of its occupants.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We spend a day in a preliminary visit to the Memnonium and the vast ruins

-      known as those of Medeenet Hâboo. Among our attendants over the plain are

-      half a dozen little girls, bright, smiling lasses, who salute us with a

-      cheery &ldquo;Good morning,&rdquo; and devote themselves to us the whole day. Each one

-      carries on her head a light, thin water-<i>koolleh</i>, that would hold

-      about a quart, balancing it perfectly as she runs along. I have seen mere

-      infants carrying very small <i>koollehs</i>, beginning thus young to learn

-      the art of walking with the large ones, which is to be the chief business

-      of their lives.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      One of the girls, who says her name is Fatimeh (the name of the Prophet's

-      favorite daughter is in great request), is very pretty, and may be ten or

-      eleven years old, not far from the marriageable age. She has black hair,

-      large, soft, black eyes, the lids stained with kohl, dazzling white teeth

-      and a sweet smile. She wears cheap earrings, a necklace of beads and

-      metal, and a slight ring on one hand; her finger-nails and the palms of

-      her little hands are stained with henna. For dress she has a sort of shawl

-      used as a head-veil, and an ample outer-garment, a mantle of dark-blue

-      cotton, ornamented down the front seams with colored beads&mdash;a

-      coquettish touch that connects her with her sisters of the ancient <i>régime</i>

-      who seem to have used the cylindrical blue bead even more profusely than

-      ladies now-a-day the jet &ldquo;bugles,&rdquo; in dress trimming. I fear the pretty

-      heathen is beginning to be aware of her attractions.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The girls run patiently beside us or wait for us at the temples all day,

-      bruising their feet on the stony ways, getting nothing to eat unless we

-      give them something, chatting cheerfully, smiling at us and using their

-      little stock of English to gain our good will, constantly ready with their

-      <i>koollehs</i>, and say nothing of backsheesh until they are about to

-      leave us at night and go to their homes. But when they begin to ask, and

-      get a copper or two, they beg with a mixture of pathos and anxiety and a

-      use of the pronouns that is irresistible.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You tired. Plenty backsheesh for little girl. Yes.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why don't you give us backsheesh? We are tired too,&rdquo; we reply.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. Me give you backsheesh you tired all day.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Fatimeh only uses her eyes, conscious already of her power. They are

-      satisfied with a piastre; which the dragoman says is too much, and enough

-      to spoil them. But, after all, five cents is not a magnificent gift, from

-      a stranger who has come five thousand miles, to a little girl in the heart

-      of Africa, who has lighted up the desert a whole day with her charming

-      smiles!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The donkey-boy pulls the strings of pathos for his backsheesh, having no

-      beauty to use; he says, &ldquo;Father and mother <i>all</i> dead.&rdquo; Seems to have

-      belonged to a harem.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Before we can gain space or quiet either to examine or enjoy a temple, we

-      have to free ourselves of a crowd of adhesive men, boys, and girls, who

-      press upon us their curiosities, relics of the dead, whose only value is

-      their antiquity. The price of these relics is of course wholly &ldquo;fancy,&rdquo;

-       and I presume that Thebes, where the influence of the antique is most

-      strong, is the best market in the world for these trifles; and that

-      however cheaply they may be bought here, they fetch a better price than

-      they would elsewhere.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I suppose if I were to stand in Broadway and offer passers-by such a

-      mummy's hand as this which is now pressed upon my notice, I could scarcely

-      give it away. This hand has been &ldquo;doctored&rdquo; to sell; the present owner has

-      re-wrapped its bitumen-soaked flesh in mummy-cloth, and partially

-      concealed three rings on the fingers. Of course the hand is old and the

-      cheap rings are new. It is pleasant to think of these merchants in dried

-      flesh prowling about among the dead, selecting a limb here and there that

-      they think will decorate well, and tricking out with cheap jewelry these

-      mortal fragments. This hand, which the rascal has chosen, is small, and

-      may have been a source of pride to its owner long ago; somebody else may

-      have been fond of it, though even he&mdash;the lover&mdash;would not care

-      to hold it long now. A pretty little hand; I suppose it has in its better

-      days given many a caress and love-pat, and many a slap in the face;

-      belonged to one of the people, or it would not have been found in a common

-      mummy-pit; perhaps the hand of a sweet water-bearer like Fatimeh, perhaps

-      of some slave-girl whose fatal beauty threw her into the drag-net that the

-      Pharaohs occasionally cast along the Upper Nile&mdash;slave-hunting raids

-      that appear on the monuments as great military achievements. This hand,

-      naked, supple, dimpled, henna-tipped, may have been offered for nothing

-      once; there are wanted for it four piastres now, rings and all. A dear

-      little hand!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Great quantities of antique beads are offered us in strings, to one end of

-      which is usually tied a small image of Osiris, or the winged sun, or the

-      scarabæus with wings. The inexhaustible supply of these beads and images

-      leads many to think that they are manufactured to suit the demand. But it

-      is not so. Their blue is of a shade that is not produced now-a-days. And,

-      besides, there is no need to manufacture what exists in the mummy-pits in

-      such abundance. The beads and bugles are of glass; they were much used for

-      necklaces and are found covering the breasts of mummies, woven in a

-      network of various patterns, like old bead purses. The vivid blue color

-      was given by copper.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The little blue images of Osiris which are so abundant are also genuine.

-      They are of porcelain, a sort of porcelain-glass, a sand-paste, glazed,

-      colored blue, and baked. They are found in great quantities in all tombs;

-      and it was the Egyptian practice to thickly strew with them the ground

-      upon which the foundations and floors of temples were laid. These images

-      found in tombs are more properly figures of the dead under the form of

-      Osiris, and the hieroglyphics on them sometimes give the name and quality

-      of the departed. They are in fact a sort of &ldquo;p.p. c.&rdquo; visiting-card, which

-      the mummy has left for future ages. The Egyptians succeeded in handing

-      themselves down to posterity; but the manner in which posterity has

-      received them is not encouraging to us to salt ourselves down for another

-      age.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Memnonium, or more properly Rameseum, since it was built by Rameses

-      II., and covered with his deeds, writ in stone, gives you even in its

-      ruins a very good idea of one of the most symmetrical of Egyptian temples;

-      the vast columns of its great hall attest its magnificence, while the

-      elaboration of its sculpture, wanting the classic purity of the earlier

-      work found in the tombs of Geezeh and Sakkara, speaks of a time when art

-      was greatly stimulated by royal patronage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was the practice of the Pharaohs when they came to the throne to make

-      one or more military expeditions of conquest and plunder, slay as many

-      enemies as possible (all people being considered &ldquo;enemies&rdquo; who did not pay

-      tribute), cut as wide a swarth of desolation over the earth as they were

-      able, loot the cities, drag into captivity the pleasing women, and return

-      laden with treasure and slaves and the evidences of enlarged dominion.

-      Then they spent the remainder of their virtuous days in erecting huge

-      temples and chiseling their exploits on them. This is, in a word, the

-      history of the Pharaohs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But I think that Rameses II., who was the handsomest and most conceited

-      swell of them all, was not so particular about doing the deeds as he was

-      about recording them. He could not have done much else in his long reign

-      than erect the temples, carve the hieroglyphics, and set up the statues of

-      himself, which proclaim his fame. He literally spread himself all over

-      Egypt, and must have kept the whole country busy, quarrying, and building,

-      and carving for his glorification. That he did a tenth of the deeds he is

-      represented performing, no one believes now; and I take a vindictive

-      pleasure in abusing him. By some historic fatality he got the name of the

-      Great Sesostris, and was by tradition credited with the exploits of

-      Thothmes III., the greatest of the Pharaohs, a real hero and statesman,

-      during whose reign it was no boast to say that Egypt &ldquo;placed her frontier

-      where it pleased herself,&rdquo; and with those of his father Sethi I., a

-      usurper in the line, but a great soldier.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      However, this Rameses did not have good luck with his gigantic statues; I

-      do not know one that is not shattered, defaced, or thrown down. This one

-      at the Rameseum is only a wreck of gigantic fragments. It was a monolith

-      of syenite, and if it was the largest statue in Egypt, as it is said, it

-      must have been over sixty feet high. The arithmeticians say that it

-      weighed about eight hundred and eighty-seven tons, having a solid content

-      of three times the largest obelisk in the world, that at Karnak. These

-      figures convey no idea to my mind. When a stone man is as big as a

-      four-story house, I cease to grasp him. I climbed upon the arm of this

-      Rameses, and found his name cut deeply in the hard granite, the cutting

-      polished to the very bottom like the finest intaglio. The polishing alone

-      of this great mass must have been an incredible labor. How was it moved

-      from its quarry in Assouan, a hundred and thirty miles distant? And how

-      was it broken into the thousand fragments in which it lies? An earthquake

-      would not do it. There are no marks of drilling or the use of an explosive

-      material. But if Cambyses broke it&mdash;and Cambyses must have been

-      remembered in Egypt as Napoleon I. is in Italy, the one for smashing, the

-      other for stealing&mdash;he had something as destructive as

-      nitro-glycerine.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Rameses II. impressed into his service not only art but literature. One of

-      his achievements depicted here is his victory over the Khitas (Hittites),

-      an Asiatic tribe; the king is in the single-handed act of driving the

-      enemy over the river Orontes,&mdash;a bluish streak meandering down the

-      wall. This scene is the subject of a famous poem, known as the Poem of

-      Pentaour, which is carved in hieroglyphics at Karnak and at Luxor. The

-      battle is very spiritedly depicted here. On the walls are many side-scenes

-      and acts characteristic of the age and the people. The booty from the

-      enemy is collected in a heap; and the quantity of gold is indicated by the

-      size of a bag of it which is breaking the back of an ass; a soldier is

-      pulling the beard of his prisoner, and another is beating his captives,

-      after the brutal manner of the Egyptians.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The temples at Medeenet Haboo are to me as interesting as those at Karnak.

-      There are two; the smaller one is of various ages; but its oldest portions

-      were built by Amun-noo-het, the sister of Thothmes, the woman who has left

-      more monuments of her vigor than any other in history, and, woman-like,

-      the monuments are filial offerings, and not erections to her own

-      greatness; the larger temple is the work of Rameses III. The more you

-      visit it, the more you will be impressed with the splendor of its courts,

-      halls and columns, and you may spend days in the study of its sculptures

-      without exhausting them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Along these high-columned halls stalk vast processions, armies going to

-      battle, conquerors in triumphal entry, priests and soldiers bearing

-      sacrifices, and rows of stone deities of the Egyptian pantheon receiving

-      them in a divine indifference. Again the battle rages, the chariots drive

-      furiously, arrows fill the air, the foot-troops press forward with their

-      big spears and long shields, and the king is slaying the chief, who

-      tumbles from his car. The alarm has spread to the country beyond; the

-      terrified inhabitants are in flight; a woman, such is the detail, is seen

-      to snatch her baby and run into the woods, leaving her pot of broth

-      cooking on the fire.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The carving in this temple is often very deep, cut in four or five inches

-      in the syenite, and beautifully polished to the bottom, as if done with

-      emery. The colors that once gave each figure its character, are still

-      fresh, red, green, blue, and black. The ceilings of some of the chambers

-      yet represent the blue and star-sprinkled sky. How surpassingly brilliant

-      these must have been once! We see how much the figure owed to color, when

-      the color designated the different nationalities, the enemies or the

-      captives, the shade of their skin, hair, beard and garments. We recognize,

-      even, textures of cloth, and the spotted leopard-skins worn by the

-      priests. How gay are the birds of varied plumage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is considerable variety in sculpture here, but, after all an endless

-      repetition on wall after wall, in chamber after chamber of the same royal

-      persons, gods, goddesses, and priests. There is nothing on earth so

-      tiresome as a row of stone gods, in whom I doubt if anybody ever sincerely

-      believed, standing to receive the offerings of a Turveydrop of a king.

-      Occasionally the gods take turn about, and pour oil on the head of a king,

-      at his coronation, and with this is usually the very pretty device of four

-      birds flying to the four quarters of the globe to announce the event. But

-      whatever the scene, warlike or religious, it is for the glorification of

-      Pharaoh, all the same. He is commonly represented of gigantic size, and

-      all the other human figures about him are small in comparison. It must

-      have kept the Pharaoh in a constantly inflated condition, to walk these

-      halls and behold, on all sides, his extraordinary apotheosis. But the

-      Pharaoh was not only king but high priest, and the divine representative

-      on earth, and about to become, in a peculiar sense, Osiris himself, at his

-      death.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Egyptians would have saved us much trouble if they had introduced

-      perspective into these pictures. It is difficult to feel that a pond of

-      water, a tree and a house, one above the other on a wall, are intended to

-      be on the same level. We have to accustom ourselves to figures always in

-      profile, with the eye cut in full as if seen in front, and both shoulders

-      showing. The hands of prisoners are tied behind them, but this is shown by

-      bringing both elbows, with no sort of respect for the man's anatomy, round

-      to the side, toward us, yet it is wonderful what character and vivacity

-      they gave to their figures, and how by simple profile they represent

-      nationalities and races, Ethiops, Nubians, Jews, Assyrians, Europeans.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These temples are inlaid and overlaid and surrounded with heaps of

-      rubbish, and the <i>débris</i> of ancient and modern mud and unbaked-brick

-      dwellings; part of the great pillars are entirely covered. The Christians

-      once occupied the temples, and there are remains of a church, and a large

-      church, in one of the vast courts, built of materials at hand, but gone to

-      ruin more complete than the structure around it. The early Christians

-      hewed away the beautiful images of Osiris from the pillars (an Osiride

-      pillar is one upon one side of which, and the length of it, is cut in full

-      relief, only attached at the back, a figure of Osiris), and covered the

-      hieroglyphics and sculptures with plaster. They defaced these temples as

-      the Reformers hacked and whitewashed the cathedrals of Germany. And

-      sometimes the plaster which was meant to cover forever from sight the

-      images of a mysterious religion, has defeated the intentions of the

-      plasterers, by preserving, to an age that has no fear of stone gods, the

-      ancient pictures, sharp in outline and fresh in color.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is indeed marvelous that so much has been preserved, considering what a

-      destructive creature man is, and how it pleases his ignoble soul to

-      destroy the works of his forerunners on the earth. The earthquake has

-      shaken up Egypt time and again, but Cambyses was worse; he was an

-      earthquake with malice and purpose, and left little standing that he had

-      leisure to overturn. The ancient Christians spent a great deal of time in

-      rubbing out the deep-cut hieroglyphics, chiseling away the heads of

-      strange gods, covering the pictures of ancient ceremonies and sacrifices,

-      and painting on the walls their own rude conceptions of holy persons and

-      miraculous occurrences. And then the Moslems came, hating all images and

-      pictorial representations alike, and scraped away or battered with bullets

-      the work of pagans and Christians.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is much discussion whether these so-called temples were not palaces

-      and royal residences as well as religious edifices. Doubtless many of them

-      served a double purpose; the great pylons and propylons having rooms in

-      which men might have lived, who did not know what a comfortable house is.

-      Certainly no palaces of the Pharaohs have been discovered in Egypt, if

-      these temples are not palaces in part; and it is not to be supposed that

-      the Pharaoh dwelt in a mud-house with a palm-roof, like a common mortal.

-      He was the religious as well as the civil head, Pope and Cæsar in one, and

-      it is natural that he should have dwelt in the temple precincts.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The pyramidal towers of the great temple of Medeenet Haboo are thought to

-      be the remains of the palace of Rameses III. Here indeed the Egyptologists

-      point out his harem and the private apartments, when the favored of

-      Amun-Re unbent himself from his usual occupation of seizing a bunch of

-      captives by the hair and slashing off their heads at a blow, in the

-      society of his women and the domestic enjoyments of a family man. Here we

-      get an insight into the private life of the awful monarch, and are able to

-      penetrate the mysteries of his retirement. It is from such sculptures as

-      one finds here that scholars have been able to rehabilitate old Egyptian

-      society and tell us not only what the Egyptians did but what they were

-      thinking about. The scholar, to whom we are most indebted for the

-      reconstruction of the ancient life of the Egyptians, Sir Gardner

-      Wilkinson, is able not only to describe to us a <i>soirée</i>, from

-      paintings in tombs at Thebes, but to tell us what the company talked about

-      and what their emotions were. &ldquo;In the meantime,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;the

-      conversation became animated,&rdquo; (as it sometimes does at parties) &ldquo;and the

-      ladies fluently discussed the question of dress,&rdquo; &ldquo;the maker of an earring

-      and the shop where it was purchased was anxiously inquired.&rdquo; On one

-      occasion when the guests were in &ldquo;raptures of admiration&rdquo; over something,

-      an awkward youth overturned a pedestal, creating great confusion and

-      frightening the women, who screamed; however, no one was hurt, and harmony

-      being restored, &ldquo;the incident afforded fresh matter for conversation, to

-      be related in full details to their friends when they returned home.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      This is very wonderful art, and proves that the Egyptians excelled all who

-      came after them in the use of the chisel and brush; since they could not

-      only represent in a drawing on the wall of a tomb the gaiety of an evening

-      party and the subject of its conversation, but could make the picture

-      convey as well the talk of the guests to their friends after they returned

-      home!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We had read a good deal about the harem of Rameses III., and it was

-      naturally the first object of our search at Medeenet Haboo. At the first

-      visit we could not find it, and all our expectation of his sweet domestic

-      life was unrealized. It was in vain that we read over the description:&mdash;&ldquo;Here

-      the king is attended by his harem, some of whom present him with flowers,

-      or wave before him fans and flabella; and a favorite is caressed, or

-      invited to divert his leisure hours with a game of draughts.&rdquo; We climbed

-      everywhere, and looked into every room, but the king and his harem were

-      not visible. And yet the pictures, upon which has been built all this fair

-      fabric of the domestic life of Rameses, must exist somewhere in these two

-      pyramidal towers. And what a gallery of delights it must be, we thought.

-      The king attended by his harem!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Upon a subsequent visit, we insisted that the guide should take us into

-      this harem. That was not possible, but he would show it to us. We climbed

-      a broken wall, from the top of which we could look up, through a window,

-      into a small apartment in the tower. The room might be ten feet by twelve

-      in size, probably smaller. There was no way of getting to it by any

-      interior stairway or by any exterior one, that we could see, and I have no

-      doubt that if Pharaoh lived there he climbed up by a ladder and pulled his

-      harem up after him.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But the pictures on the walls, which we made out by the help of an

-      opera-glass, prove this to have been one of the private apartments, they

-      say. There are only two pictures, only one, in fact, not defaced; but as

-      these are the only examples of the interior decoration of an ancient royal

-      palace in all Egypt, it is well to make the most of them. They are both

-      drawn in spirited outlines and are very graceful, the profile faces having

-      a Greek beauty. In one Rameses III., of colossal size, is represented

-      seated on an elegant <i>fauteuil</i>, with his feet on a stool. He wears

-      the royal crown, a necklace, and sandals. Before him stands a lady of his

-      harem, clad in a high crown of lotus-stems, a slight necklace, and sandals

-      turned up like skates. It must be remembered that the weather was usually

-      very warm in Thebes, especially on this side the river. The lady is

-      holding up a lotus-flower, but it is very far from the royal nose, and

-      indeed she stands so far off, that the king has to stretch out his arm to

-      chuck her under the chin. The Pharaoh's beautiful face preserves its

-      immortal calm, and the &ldquo;favorite is caressed&rdquo; in accordance with the

-      chastest requirements of high art.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the other picture, the Pharaoh is seated as before, but he is playing

-      at draughts. In his left hand he holds some men, and his right is extended

-      lifting a piece from the draughtboard. His antagonist has been

-      unfortunate. Her legs are all gone; her head has disappeared. There remain

-      of this &ldquo;favorite&rdquo; only the outline of part of the body, the right arm and

-      the hand which lifts a piece, and a suggestion of the left arm extended at

-      full length and pushing a lotus-bud close to the king's nose. It is an

-      exhibition of man's selfishness-The poor woman is not only compelled to

-      entertain the despot at the game, but she must regale his fastidious and

-      scornful nose at the same time; it must have been very tiresome to keep

-      the left hand thus extended through a whole game. What a passion the

-      Egyptians had for the heavy perfume of this flower. They are smelling it

-      in all their pictures.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We climbed afterwards, by means of a heap of rubbish, into a room similar

-      to this one, in the other tower, where we saw remains of the same

-      sculpture. It was like the Egyptians to repeat that picture five hundred

-      times in the same palace.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The two Colossi stand half a mile east of the temple of Medeenet Haboo,

-      and perhaps are the survivors of like figures which lined an avenue to

-      another temple. One of them is better known to fame than any other ancient

-      statue, and rests its reputation on the most shadowy basis. In a line with

-      these statues are the remains of other colossi of nearly the same size,

-      buried in the alluvial deposit. These figures both represent Amunoph III.

-      (about 1500 or 1600 b. c.); they are seated; and on either side of the

-      legs of the king, and attached to the throne, are the statues of his

-      mother and daughter, little women, eighteen feet high. The colossi are

-      fifty feet high without the bases, and must have stood sixty feet in the

-      air before the Nile soil covered the desert on which they were erected.

-      The pedestal is a solid stone thirty-three feet long.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Both were monoliths. The southern one is still one piece, but shockingly

-      mutilated. The northern one is the famous Vocal Statue of Memnon; though

-      why it is called of Memnon and why &ldquo;vocal&rdquo; is not easily explained. It was

-      broken into fragments either by some marauder, or by an earthquake at the

-      beginning of our era, and built up from the waist by blocks of stone, in

-      the time of the Roman occupation, during the reign of Septimius Severus.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There was a tradition&mdash;perhaps it was only the tradition of a

-      tradition&mdash;that it used to sing every morning at sunrise. No mention

-      is made of this singing property, however, until after it was overthrown;

-      and its singing ceased to be heard after the Roman Emperor put it into the

-      state in which we now see it. It has been assumed that it used to sing,

-      and many theories have been invented to explain its vocal method. Very

-      likely the original report of this prodigy was a Greek or Roman fable; and

-      the noise may have been produced by a trick for Hadrian's benefit (who is

-      said to have heard it) in order to keep up the reputation of the statue.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Amunoph III. (or Amenôphis, or Amen-hotep&mdash;he never knew how to spell

-      his name) was a tremendous slasher-about over the territories of other

-      people; there is an inscription down at Samneh (above the second cataract)

-      which says that he brought, in one expedition, out of Soudan, seven

-      hundred and forty negro prisoners, half of whom were women and children.

-      On the records which this modest man made, he is &ldquo;Lord of both worlds,

-      absolute master, Son of the Sun.&rdquo; He is Horus, the strong bull. &ldquo;He

-      marches and victory is gained, like Horus, son of Isis, like the Sun in

-      heaven.&rdquo; He also built almost as extensively as Rameses II; he covered

-      both banks of the Nile with splendid monuments; his structures are found

-      from Ethiopia to the Sinaitic peninsula. He set up his image in this

-      Colossus, the statue which the Greeks and Romans called Memnon, the fame

-      of which took such possession of the imagination of poets and historians.

-      They heard, or said they heard, Memnon, the Ethiopian, one of the

-      defenders of Troy, each morning saluting his mother, Aurora.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If this sound was heard, scientists think it was produced by the action of

-      the sun's rays upon dew fallen in the crevices of the broken figure.

-      Others think the sound was produced by a priest who sat concealed in the

-      lap of the figure and struck a metallic stone. And the cavity and the

-      metallic stone exist there now. Of course the stone was put in there and

-      the cavity left, when the statue was repaired, it having been a monolith.

-      And as the sound was never heard before the statue was broken nor after it

-      was repaired, the noise was not produced by the metallic stone. And if I

-      am required to believe that the statue sang with his head off, I begin to

-      doubt altogether. I incline to think that we have here only one of those

-      beautiful myths in which the Greeks and Romans loved to clothe the distant

-      and the gigantic.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      One of the means of accounting for a sound which may never have been

-      heard, is that the priests produced it in order to strike with awe the

-      people. Now, the Egyptian priests never cared anything about the people,

-      and wouldn't have taken the trouble; indeed, in the old times &ldquo;people&rdquo;

-       wouldn't have been allowed anywhere within such a sacred inclosure as this

-      in which the Colossus stood. And, besides, the priest could not have got

-      into the cavity mentioned. When the statue was a monolith, it would puzzle

-      him to get in; and there is no stairway or steps by which he could ascend

-      now. We sent an Arab up, who scaled the broken fragments with extreme

-      difficulty, and struck the stone. The noise produced was like that made by

-      striking the metallic stones we find in the desert,&mdash;not a resonance

-      to be heard far.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      So that I doubt that there was any singing at sunrise by the so-called

-      Memnon (which was Amunoph), and I doubt that it was a priestly device.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This Amunoph family, whose acquaintance we have been obliged to make, cut

-      a wide swath in their day; they had eccentricities, and there are told a

-      great many stories about them, which might interest you if you could

-      believe that the Amunophs were as real as the Hapsburgs and the Stuarts

-      and the Grants.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Amunoph I. (or Amen-hotep) was the successor of Amosis (or Ahmes) who

-      expelled the Shepherds, and even pursued them into Canaan and knocked

-      their walled-towns about their heads. Amunoph I. subdued the Shasu or

-      Bedaween of the desert between Egypt and Syria, as much as those

-      hereditary robbers were ever subdued. This was in the seventeenth century

-      b. c. This king also made a naval expedition up the Nile into Ethiopia,

-      and it is said that he took captive there the &ldquo;chief of the mountaineers.&rdquo;

-       Probably then, he went into Abyssinia, and did not discover the real

-      source of the Nile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The fourth Amunoph went conquering in Asia, as his predecessors had done,

-      for nations did not stay conquered in those days. He was followed by his

-      seven daughters in chariots of war. These heroic girls fought, with their

-      father, and may be seen now, in pictures, gently driving their

-      chariot-wheels over the crushed Asiatics. When Amunoph IV. came home and

-      turned his attention to religion, he made lively work with the Egyptian

-      pantheon. This had grown into vast proportions from the time of Menes, and

-      Amunoph did not attempt to improve it or reform it; he simply set it

-      aside, and established a new religion. He it was who abandoned Thebes and

-      built Tel-el-Amarna, and there set up the worship of a single god, Aten,

-      represented by the sun's disc. He shut up the old temples, effaced the

-      images of the ancient gods, and persecuted mercilessly their worshippers

-      throughout the empire.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He was prompted to all this by his mother, for he himself was little

-      better than an imbecile. It was from his mother that he took his foreign

-      religion as he did his foreign blood, for there was nothing of the

-      Egyptian type in his face. His mother, Queen Taia, wife of Amunoph III.,

-      had light hair, blue eyes and rosy cheeks, the characteristics of northern

-      women. She was not of royal family, and not Egyptian; but the child of a

-      foreign family then living in the Delta, and probably the king married her

-      for her beauty and cleverness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      M. Lenormant thinks she was a Hebrew. That people were then very numerous

-      in the Delta, where they lived unmolested keeping their own religion, a

-      very much corrupted and materialized monotheism. Queen Taia has the

-      complexion and features of the Hebrews&mdash;I don't mean of the Jews who

-      are now dispersed over the continents. Lenormant credits the Hebrews,

-      through the Queen Taia, with the overthrow of the Pharaonic religion and

-      the establishment of the monotheism of Amunoph IV.&mdash;a worship that

-      had many external likenesses to the Hebrew forms. At Tel-el-Amarna we see,

-      among the utensils of the worship of Aten, the Israelitish &ldquo;Table of

-      Shew-bread.&rdquo; It is also noticed that the persecution of the Hebrews

-      coincides with the termination of the religious revolution introduced by

-      the son of Taia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Whenever a pretty woman of talent comes into history she makes mischief.

-      The episode of Queen Taia is however a great relief to the granite-faced

-      monotony of the conservative Pharaohs. Women rulers and regents always

-      make the world lively for the time being&mdash;and it took in this case

-      two or three generations to repair the damages. Smashing things and

-      repairing damages&mdash;that is history.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      History starts up from every foot of this Theban plain, piled four or five

-      deep with civilizations. These temples are engulfed in rubbish; what the

-      Persians and the earthquake spared, Copts and Arabs for centuries have

-      overlaid with their crumbling habitations. It requires a large draft upon

-      the imagination to reinstate the edifices that once covered this vast

-      waste; but we are impressed with the size of the city, when we see the

-      long distances that the remaining temples are apart, and the evidence, in

-      broken columns, statues, and great hewn blocks of stone shouldering out of

-      the sand, of others perhaps as large.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0035" id="linkimage-0035"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0222.jpg" alt="0222 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0036" id="linkimage-0036"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0223.jpg" alt="0223 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XVII.&mdash;KARNAK.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE WEATHER is

-      almost unsettled. There was actually a dash of rain against the cabin

-      window last night&mdash;over before you could prepare an affidavit to the

-      fact&mdash;and today is cold, more or less cloudy with a drop, only a

-      drop, of rain occasionally. Besides, the wind is in the south-west and the

-      sand flies. We cannot sail, and decide to visit Karnak, in spite of the

-      entreaty of the hand-book to leave this, as the crown of all sight-seeing,

-      until we have climbed up to its greatness over all the lesser ruins.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Perhaps this is wise; but I think I should advise a friend to go at once

-      to Karnak and outrageously astonish himself, while his mind is fresh, and

-      before he becomes at all sated with ruins or familiar with other vast and

-      exceedingly impressive edifices. They are certain to dull a little his

-      impression of Karnak even &ldquo;Madam&mdash;&rdquo; it is Abd-el-Atti who comes in,

-      rubbing his hands&mdash;&ldquo;your carriage stops the way.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Carriage?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, ma'am, I just make him.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The carriage was an arm-chair slung between two pushing-poles; between

-      each end of them was harnessed a surly diminutive donkey who seemed to

-      feel his degradation. Each donkey required a driver; Ahmed, with his

-      sleeves rolled up and armed with a big club, walked beside, to steady the

-      swaying chair, and to beat the boys when their donkeys took a fancy to lie

-      down; and a cloud of interested Arabs hovered about it, running with it,

-      adding to the noise, dust, and picturesqueness of our cavalcade.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On the outskirts of the mud-cabins we pass through the weekly market, a

-      motley assemblage of country-folks and produce, camels, donkeys, and

-      sheep. It is close by the Ghawazee quarter, where is a colony of a hundred

-      or more of these dancing-girls. They are always conspicuous among Egyptian

-      women by their greater comeliness and gay apparel. They wear red and

-      yellow gowns, many tinkling ornaments of silver and gold, and their eyes

-      are heavily darkened with kohl. I don't know what it is in this kohl, that

-      it gives woman such a wicked and dangerous aspect. They come out to ask

-      for backsheesh in a brazen but probably intended to be a seductive manner;

-      they are bold, but some of them rather well-looking. They claim to be an

-      unmixed race of ancient lineage; but I suspect their blood is no purer

-      than their morals. There is not much in Egypt that is <i>not</i>

-      hopelessly mixed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Of the mile-and-a-half avenue of Sphinxes that once connected Luxor with

-      Karnak, we see no trace until we are near the latter. The country is open

-      and beautiful with green wheat, palms, and sycamores. Great Karnak does

-      not show itself until we are close upon it; its vast extent is hidden by

-      the remains of the wall of circuit, by the exterior temples and pylons. It

-      is not until we have passed beyond the great&mdash;but called small&mdash;temple

-      of Rameses III., at the north entrance, and climbed the pyramidal tower to

-      the west of the Great Hall, that we begin to comprehend the magnitude of

-      these ruins, and that only days of wandering over them and of study would

-      give us their gigantic plan.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Karnak is not a temple, but a city rather; a city of temples, palaces,

-      obelisks, colossal statues, It is, like a city, a growth of many

-      centuries. It is not a conception or the execution of a purpose; it is the

-      not always harmonious accretion of time and wealth and vanity. Of the

-      slowness of its growth some idea may be gained from the fact that the

-      hieroglyphics on one face of one of its obelisks were cut two hundred and

-      fifty years after those on the opposite face. So long ago were both

-      chiseled, however, they are alike venerable to us. I shouldn't lose my

-      temper with a man who differed with me only a thousand years about the

-      date of any event in Egypt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      They were working at this mass of edifices, sacred or profane, all the way

-      from Osirtasen I. down to Alexander II.; that is from about 3064 B. c.

-      according to Mariette (Bunsen, 2781, Wilkinson, 2080,&mdash;it doesn't

-      matter) to only a short time before our era. There was a modest beginning

-      in the plain but chaste temple of Osirtasen; but each king sought to outdo

-      his predecessor until Sethi I. forever distanced rivalry in building the

-      Great Hall. And after him it is useless for anyone else to attempt

-      greatness by piling up stones. The length of the temples, pylons, and

-      obelisks, <i>en</i> suite from west to east, is 1180 feet; but there are

-      other outlying and gigantic ruins; I suppose it is fully a mile and a half

-      round the wall of circuit.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is nothing in the world of architecture like the Great Hall; nothing

-      so massive, so surprising, and, for me, at least, so crushingly

-      oppressive. What monstrous columns! And how thickly they are crowded

-      together! Their array is always compared to a forest. The comparison is

-      apt in some respects; but how free, uplifting is a forest, how it expands

-      into the blue air, and lifts the soul with it. A piece of architecture is

-      to be judged, I suppose, by the effect it produces. It is not simply that

-      this hall is pagan in its impression; it misses the highest architectural

-      effect by reason of its unrelieved heaviness. It is wonderful; it was a

-      prodigious achievement to build so many big columns.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The setting of enormous columns so close together that you can only see a

-      few of them at one point of view is the architecture of the Great Hall.

-      Upon these, big stones are put for a roof. There is no reason why this

-      might not have been repeated over an acre of ground. Neither from within

-      nor from without can you see the extent of the hall. * The best view of it

-      is down the center aisle, formed by the largest columns; and as these have

-      height as well as bulk, and the sky is now seen above them, the effect is

-      of the highest majesty. This hall was dimly lighted by windows in the

-      clerestory, the frames of which exhibit a freedom of device and grace of

-      carving worthy of a Gothic cathedral. These columns, all richly

-      sculptured, are laid up in blocks of stone of half the diameter, the

-      joints broken. If the Egyptians had dared to use the arch, the principle

-      of which they knew, in this building, so that the columns could have stood

-      wide apart and still upheld the roof, the sight of the interior would have

-      been almost too much for the human mind. The spectator would have been

-      exalted, not crushed by it.

-    </p>

-<pre xml:space="preserve">

-     * The Great Hall measures one hundred and seventy feet by

-     three hundred and twenty-nine; in this space stand one

-     hundred and thirty-four columns; twelve of these, forming

-     the central avenue of one hundred and seventy feet, are

-     sixty-two feet high, without plinth and abacus, and eleven

-     feet six inches in diameter; the other one hundred and

-     twenty-two columns are forty-two feet five inches in height

-     and about nine feet in diameter. The great columns stand

-     only fifteen or sixteen feet apart.

-</pre>

-    <p>

-      Not far off is the obelisk which Amunoo-het erected to the memory of her

-      father. I am not sure but it will stand long after The Hall of Sethi is a

-      mass of ruins; for already is the water sapping the foundations of the

-      latter, some of the columns lean like reeling drunken men, and one day,

-      with crash after crash, these giants will totter, and the blocks of stone

-      of which they are built will make another of those shapeless heaps to

-      which sooner or later our solidest works come. The red granite shaft of

-      the faithful daughter lifts itself ninety-two feet into the air, and is

-      the most beautiful as it is the largest obelisk ever raised.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The sanctuary of red granite was once very rich and beautiful; the high

-      polish of its walls and the remains of its exquisite carving, no less than

-      the colors that still remain, attest that. The sanctuary is a heap of

-      ruins, thanks to that ancient Shaker, Cambyses, but the sculptures in one

-      of the chambers are the most beautiful we have seen; the colors, red,

-      blue, and green are still brilliant, the ceiling is spangled with stars on

-      a blue firmament. Considering the hardness of this beautiful syenite and

-      the difficulty of working it, I think this is the most admirable piece of

-      work in Thebes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It may be said of some of the sculptures here, especially of the very

-      spirited designs and intelligent execution of those of the Great Hall,

-      that they are superior to those on the other side of the river. And yet

-      there is endless theological reiteration here; there are dreary miles of

-      the same gods in the same attitudes; and you cannot call all of them

-      respectable gods. The longer the religion endured the more conventional

-      and repetitious its representations became. The sculptors came to have a

-      traditional habit of doing certain scenes and groups in a certain way; and

-      the want of life and faith in them becomes very evident in the sculptures

-      of the Ptolemaic period.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In this vast area you may spend days and not exhaust the objects worth

-      examination. On one of our last visits we found near the sacred lake very

-      striking colossal statues which we had never seen before.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When this city of temples and palaces, the favorite royal residence, was

-      entire and connected with Luxor by the avenue of sphinxes, and the great

-      edifices and statues on the west side of the river were standing, this

-      broad basin of the Nile, enclosed by the circle of rose-colored limestone

-      mountains, which were themselves perforated with vast tombs, must have

-      been what its splendid fame reports, when it could send to war twenty

-      thousand chariots. But, I wonder whether the city, aside from its

-      conspicuous temples and attached palaces, was one of mud-hovels, like

-      those of most peoples of antiquity, and of the modern Egyptians.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0037" id="linkimage-0037"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0227.jpg" alt="0227 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0038" id="linkimage-0038"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      alt="228 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XVIII.&mdash;ASCENDING THE RIVER.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E resume our

-      voyage on the sixth of January, but we leave a hostage at Luxor as we did

-      at Asioot. This is a sailor who became drunk and turbulent last night on

-      hasheesh, and was sent to the governor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We found him this morning with a heavy chain round his neck and tied to a

-      stake in one corner of the court-yard of the house where the governor has

-      his office. I think he might have pulled up the stake and run away; but I

-      believe it is not considered right here for a prisoner to escape. The

-      common people are so subdued that they wilt, when authority puts its heavy

-      hand on them. Near the sailor was a mud-kennel into which he could crawl

-      if he liked. This is the jail of Luxor. Justice is summary here. This

-      sailor is confined without judge or jury and will be kept till he refunds

-      his advance wages, since he was discharged from the boat as a dangerous

-      man.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The sailors dread the lock-up, for they may be forced into the army as the

-      only way out of it; they would much prefer the stick. They are used to the

-      stick; four thousand years of Egyptians have been accustomed to the stick.

-      A beating they do not mind much, or at least are not humiliated by it as

-      another race would be. But neither the prospect of the jail nor the stick

-      will wean them from hasheesh, which is the curse of Egypt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We spread our sails to a light breeze and depart in company with two other

-      dahabeëhs, one English (the <i>Philæ</i>) and one American (the <i>Dongela</i>).

-      Africa and weeks of leisure and sunny skies are before us. We loiter along

-      in company, in friendly company one may say, now passing a boat and now

-      falling behind, like three ducks coquetting in a swift current. We are

-      none of us in a hurry, we are indifferent to progress, our minds are calm

-      and our worst passions not excited. We do not appear to be going rapidly,

-      I sometimes doubt if we are going forward at all, but it gradually becomes

-      apparent that we are in the midst of a race!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Everything in this world is relative. I can imagine a fearfully exciting

-      match of mud-turtles on a straight track. Think of the agony, prolonged,

-      that the owner of the slow turtle would suffer! We are evidently in for

-      it; and a race like this, that lasts all day, will tire out the hardiest

-      sportsman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The <i>Rip Van Winkle</i> is the largest boat and happens to have the

-      lead; but the <i>Philo</i>, a very graceful, gay boat, is crawling up to

-      us; the <i>Dongola</i> also seems to feel a breeze that we have not. We

-      want a strong wind&mdash;the <i>Rip Van Winkle</i> does not wake up in a

-      mild air. As we desire, it freshens a little, the big sail swells, and the

-      ripples are louder at the bow. Unfortunately there is breeze enough for

-      three, and the other vessels shake themselves out like ducks about to fly.

-      It is a pretty sight just now; the spread of three great bird-wing sails,

-      the long gaily-painted cabins and decks, the sweeping yards and the

-      national colors and variegated streamers flying!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      They are gaining on us; the <i>Philae</i> gets inside, and taking our

-      wind, for a moment, creeps ahead, and attempts to sheer across our bow to

-      force us into the swifter current; the <i>Dongola</i> sails in at the same

-      time, and a jam and collision appear inevitable. A storm of language

-      bursts out of each boat; men run to stern and bow, to ward off intruders

-      or to disengage an entangled spar; all the crew, sailors, reises, and

-      dragomans are in the most active vociferation. But the <i>Philae</i>.

-      sails out of the coil, the <i>Dongola</i> draws ahead at the risk of going

-      into the bank, and our crew seize the punt-poles and have active work to

-      prevent going fast on a sand-bar to leeward.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But the prosperity of the wicked is short. The wind falls flat. Instantly

-      our men are tumbling into the water and carrying the rope ashore to track.

-      The lines are all out, and the men are attempting to haul us round a deep

-      bend. The steersmen keep the head of the vessels off shore, and the strain

-      on the trackers is tremendous. The cables flop along the bank and scrape

-      over the shadoofs, raking down a stake now and then, and bring out from

-      their holes the half-naked, protesting proprietors, who get angry and

-      gesticulate,&mdash;as if they had anything to do with our race!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The men cannot hold the cable any longer; one by one they are forced to

-      let go, at the risk of being drawn down the crumbling bank, and the cable

-      splashes into the water. The sailors run ahead and come down upon a

-      sand-spit; there are puffs of wind in our sail, and we appear to have made

-      a point, when the men wade on board and haul in the rope. The <i>Dongola</i>

-      is close upon us; the <i>Philae</i> has lost by keeping too far out in the

-      current. Oh, for a wind!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Instead of a wind, there is a bland smile in the quiet sky. Why, O

-      children, do you hasten? Have not Nile sailors been doing this for four

-      thousand years? The boats begin to yaw about. Poles are got out. We are

-      all in danger of going aground; we are all striving to get the inside

-      track at yonder point; we are in danger of collision; we are most of all

-      in danger of being left behind. The crews are crazy with excitement; as

-      they hurriedly walk the deck, rapidly shifting their poles in the shallow

-      water, calling upon Yàlësah in quicker and quicker respirations, &ldquo;Hâ

-      Yâlësah,&rdquo; &ldquo;Hâ Yàlësah,&rdquo; as they run to change the sail at the least

-      indication of a stray breeze, as they see first one dahabeëh and then the

-      other crawling ahead, the contest assumes a serious aspect, and their

-      cries are stronger and more barbaric.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The <i>Philæ</i> gets inside again and takes the bank. We are all

-      tracking, when we come to the point, beyond which is a deep bay. If we had

-      wind we should sail straight across; the distance round the bay is much

-      greater&mdash;but then we can track along the bank; there is deep water

-      close under the bank and there is deep water in mid-river. The <i>Philæ</i>

-      stands away into the river, barely holding its own in the light zephyr.

-      The <i>Dongola</i> tries to follow the <i>Philæ</i>, but swings round, and

-      her crew take to the poles. Our plan appears to be more brilliant. Our men

-      take the cable out upon a sand-bank in the stream and attempt to tow us

-      along the center channel. All goes well. We gain on the Philæ and pass it.

-      We see the Dongola behind, struggling in the shallows. But the sand-bank

-      is a failure. The men begin to go from it into deeper water; it is up to

-      their knees, it reaches our &ldquo;drawers,&rdquo; which we bought for the crew; it

-      comes to the waist, their shoulders are going under. It is useless; the

-      cable is let go, and the men rush back to the sand-bar. There they are.

-      Our cable is trailing down-stream; we have lost our crew, and the wind is

-      just coming up. While we are sending the sandal to rescue our mariners,

-      the <i>Philae</i> sails away, and the <i>Dongola</i> shows her stern.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The travelers on the three boats, during all this contest, are sitting on

-      the warm, sunny decks, with a pretence of books, opera-glasses in hand;

-      apparently regarding the scene with indifference, but no doubt, underneath

-      this mask, longing to &ldquo;lick&rdquo; the other boats.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After all, we come to Erment (which is eight miles from Luxor) not far

-      apart. The race is not to the swift. There is no swift on the Nile. But I

-      do not know how there could be a more exciting race of eight miles a day!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At Erment is a large sugar-factory belonging to the Khedive; and a

-      governor lives here in a big house and harem. The house has an extensive

-      garden laid out by old Mohammed Ali, and a plantation of oranges, Yusef

-      Effendis, apples, apricots, peaches, lemons, pomegranates, and limes. The

-      plantation shows that fruit will grow on the Upper Nile, if one will take

-      the trouble to set out and water the trees. But we see none. The high Nile

-      here last September so completely washed out the garden that we can get

-      neither flowers nor vegetables. And some people like the rapidly-grown

-      watery vegetables that grow along the Nile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our dragoman wanted some of the good, unrefined loaf-sugar from the

-      factory here, and I went with him to see how business is transacted. We

-      had difficulty in finding any office or place of sale about the

-      establishment.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But a good-natured dwarf, who seemed to spring out of the ground on our

-      landing, led us through courts and amid dilapidated warehouses to a gate,

-      in which sat an Arab in mixed costume. Within the gate hung a pair of

-      steelyards, and on one side was a bench. The gate, the man, the steelyards

-      and the bench constituted an office. Beyond was an avenue, having low

-      enclosures on each side, that with broken pillars and walls of brick

-      looked very much like Pompeii; in a shallow bin was a great heap of

-      barley, thrashed, and safe and dry in the open air.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The indifferent man in the gate sent for a slow boy, who, in his own time,

-      came, bearing a key, a stick an inch square and a foot long, with four

-      short iron spikes stuck in one side near the end. He led us up a dirty

-      brick stairway outside a building, and inserting the key in a wooden lock

-      to match (both lock and key are unchanged since the Pharaohs) let us into

-      a long, low room, like an old sail-loft full of dust, packages of

-      sugar-paper and old account-books. When the shutters were opened we found

-      at one end a few papers of sugar, which we bought, and our own sailor

-      carried down to the steelyards. The indifferent man condescended to weigh

-      the sugar, and took the pay: but he lazily handed the money to the boy,

-      who sauntered off with it. Naturally, you wouldn't trust that boy; but

-      there was an indescribable sense of the worthlessness of time and of money

-      and of all trade, about this transaction, that precluded the possibility

-      of the smartness of theft.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next day the race is resumed, with little wind and a good deal of

-      tracking; we pass the <i>Dongola</i> and are neck-and-neck with the <i>Philæ</i>

-      till afternoon, when we bid her good-bye; and yet not with unmixed

-      pleasure.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a pleasure to pass a boat and leave her toiling after; but the

-      pleasure only lasts while she is in sight. If I had my way, we should

-      constantly overhaul boats and pass them, and so go up the stream in

-      continual triumph. It is only the cold consciousness of duty performed

-      that sustains us, when we have no spectators of our progress.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We go on serenely. Hailing a crossing ferry-boat, loaded with squatting,

-      turbaned tatterdemalion Arabs, the dragoman cries, &ldquo;<i>Salaam aleykoom</i>.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The reply is, &ldquo;<i>Salaam</i>; peace be with you; may God meet you in the

-      way; may God receive you to himself.&rdquo; The Old Testament style.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      While we were loitering along by Mutâneh&mdash;where there is a

-      sugar-factory, and an irrigating steam-pump&mdash;trying to count the

-      string of camels, hundreds of them moving along the bank against the

-      sunset&mdash;camels that bring the cane to be ground&mdash;and our crew

-      were eating supper, I am sorry to say that the <i>Philæ</i> poled ahead of

-      us, and went on to Esneh. But something happened at Esneh.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was dark when we arrived at that prosperous town, and, of course,

-      Abd-el-Atti, who would like to have us go blazing through Egypt like

-      Cambyses, sent up a rocket. Its fiery serpent tore the black night above

-      us, exploded in a hundred colored stars, and then dropped its stick into

-      the water. Splendid rockets! The only decent rockets to be had in Egypt

-      are those made by the government; and Abd-el-Atti was the only dragoman

-      who had been thoughtful enough to make interest with the authorities and

-      procure government rockets. Hence our proud position on the river. We had

-      no firman, and the Khedive did not pay our expenses, but the Viceroy

-      himself couldn't out-rocket us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As soon as we had come to shore and tied up, an operation taking some time

-      in the darkness, we had a visit from the governor, a friend of our

-      dragoman; but this visit was urgent and scarcely friendly. An attempt had

-      been made to set the town on fire! A rocket from an arriving boat had been

-      thrown into the town, set fire to the straw on top of one of the houses

-      and&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did it spread?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, but it might. Allah be praised, it was put out. But the town might

-      have been burned down. What a way is this, to go along the Nile firing the

-      towns at night?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;'Twasn't our rocket. Ours exploded in the air and fell into the river.

-      Did the other boat, did the <i>Philæ</i> send up a rocket when she

-      arrived?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. There was another rocket.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dat's it, dat's it,&rdquo; says Abd-el-Atti. &ldquo;Why you no go on board the <i>Philæ</i>

-      and not come here?&rdquo; And then he added to us, as if struck by a new idea,

-      &ldquo;Where the <i>Philæ</i> get dat rocket? I think he have no rocket before.

-      Not send any up Christmas in Asioot, not send any up in Luxor. I think

-      these very strange. Not so?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What kind of rocket was it, that burnt the town?&rdquo; we ask the governor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I have it.&rdquo; The governor ran to the cabin door and called. A servant

-      brought in the exploded missile. It was a large-sized rocket, like our

-      own; twice as large as the rockets that are not made by the government,

-      and which travelers usually carry.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Seems like our stick,&rdquo; cries Abd-el-Atti, getting excited. He examined

-      the sheath with great care. We all gathered round the cabin lamp to look

-      at the fatal barrel. It had a mark on it, something in Arabic. Abd-el-Atti

-      turned it sideways and upside down, in an effort to get at the meaning of

-      the writing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is government; make 'em by the government; no doubt,&rdquo; he says,

-      standing off and becoming solemn. &ldquo;Dat rocket been stole. Looks like our

-      rocket.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Abd-el-Atti flies out, and there is a commotion outside. &ldquo;Who has been

-      stealing rockets and sell 'em to that dragoman?&rdquo; Boxes are opened. Rockets

-      are brought in and compared. The exploded one has the same mark as ours,

-      it is the same size.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A new anxiety dawns upon Abd-el-Atti. What if the <i>Philæ</i> has

-      government rockets? Our distinction is then gone. No It can't be. &ldquo;I know

-      what every dragoman do in Cairo. <i>He</i> can't get dese rocket. Nobody

-      get 'em dis year 'cept us.&rdquo; Abd-el-Atti is for probing the affair to the

-      bottom. Perhaps the hasheesh-eating sailor we discharged at Luxor stole

-      some of our rockets and sold them, and thus they came into possession of

-      the dragoman of the <i>Philæ</i>.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The young governor, however, has had enough of it. He begins to see a

-      great deal of vexation to himself, and a row with an English and an

-      American dahabeëh and with natives besides. Let it drop, he says. The

-      governor sits on the divan smoking a cigar. He is accompanied by a Greek

-      friend, a merchant of the place. When the governor's cigar goes out, in

-      his distraction, the Greek takes it, and re-lights it, puffing it till it

-      is well enflamed, and then handing it again to the governor. This is a

-      custom of the East. The servant often &ldquo;starts&rdquo; the cigarette for his

-      master.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, let it go,&rdquo; says the governor, appealing to us: &ldquo;It is finish now. It

-      was no damage done.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But it might,&rdquo; cries Abd-el-Atti, &ldquo;it might burn the town,&rdquo; taking now

-      the <i>rôle</i> which the governor had dropped.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But you are not to blame. It is not you have done it.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then why you come to me, why you come to us wid de rocket? Why you no go

-      to the <i>Philo?</i> Yes. You know that we, nobody else on the river got

-      government rockets. This government rocket&mdash;look the mark,&rdquo; seizing

-      the exploded one and a new one, and bringing the ends of both so near the

-      lamp that we all fear an explosion. &ldquo;There is something underhands here.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But it's all right now.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How it's all right? Story go back to Cairo; <i>Rip Van Winkle</i> been

-      gone set fire to Esneh. Whose rockets? Government rockets. Nobody have

-      government rockets 'cept Abd-el-Atti.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      A terrific confab goes on in the cabin for nearly an hour between the

-      dragoman, the governor, and the Greek; a lively entertainment and

-      exhibition of character which we have no desire to curtail. The governor

-      is a young, bright, presentable fellow, in Frank dress, who for liveliness

-      of talk and gesture would pass for an Italian.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When the governor has departed, our reïs comes in and presents us a

-      high-toned &ldquo;certificate&rdquo; from the gentleman on board the <i>Philo</i>.&mdash;he

-      has learned from our reïs, steersman and some sailors (who are in a panic)

-      that they are all to be hauled before the governor and punished on a

-      charge of stealing rockets and selling them to his dragoman. He certifies

-      that he bought his own rockets in the Mooskee; that his dragoman was with

-      him when he bought them; and that our men are innocent. The certificate

-      further certifies that our conduct toward our crew is unjustifiable and an

-      unheard of cruelty!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Here was a <i>casus belli!</i> Foreign powers had intervened. The right of

-      search and seizure was again asserted; the war of 1812 was about to be

-      renewed. Our cruelty unheard of? We should think so. All the rest of it

-      was unheard of also. We hadn't the slightest intention of punishing

-      anybody or hauling anybody before the governor. When Abd-el-Atti hears the

-      certificate, he shakes his head:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Buy 'em like this in the Mooskee? Not be. Not find government rockets in

-      any shop in the Mooskee. Something underhands by that dragoman!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Not wishing to light the flames of war in Africa, we immediately took

-      servants and lanterns and called on the English Man-of-War. The Man-of-War

-      had gone to bed. It was nine o'clock.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What for he send a certificate and go to bed?&rdquo; Abd-el-Atti wants to know.

-      &ldquo;I not like the looks of it.&rdquo; He began to be suspicious of all the world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the morning the gentleman returned our call. He did not know or care

-      whose rocket set fire to the town. Couldn't hurt these towns much to burn

-      them; small loss if all were burned. The governor had called on him to say

-      that no damage was done. Our dragoman had, however, no right to accuse his

-      of buying stolen rockets. His were bought in Cairo, etc., etc. And the

-      matter dropped amicably and without bloodshed. But Abd-el-Atti's

-      suspicions widened as he thought it over:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What for de Governor come to me? What for he not go to dat boat what fire

-      de rocket? What for de Governor come been call on me wid a rocket? The

-      Governor never come been call on me wid a rocket before!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      It is customary for all boats which are going above the first cataract to

-      stop at Esneh twenty-four hours to bake bread for the crew; frequently

-      they are detained longer, for the wheat has to be bought, ground in one of

-      the little ox-power mills, mixed and baked; and the crew hire a mill and

-      oven for the time being and perform the labor. We had sent sailors ahead

-      to bake the bread, and it was ready in the morning; but we stayed over.,

-      according to immemorial custom. The sailors are entitled to a holiday, and

-      they like to take it where there are plenty of coffee-houses and a large

-      colony of Ghawazee girls.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Esneh is not a bad specimen of an Egyptian town. There is a temple here,

-      of which only the magnificent portico has been excavated; the remainder

-      lies under the town. We descend some thirty feet to get to the floor of

-      the portico,&mdash;to such a depth has it been covered. And it is a modern

-      temple, after all, of the period of the Roman occupation. We find here the

-      cartouches of the Cæsars. The columns are elegant and covered with very

-      good sculpture; each of the twenty-five has a different capital, and some

-      are developed into a hint of the Corinthian and the composite. The rigid

-      constraints of the Egyptian art are beginning to give way.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The work in the period of the Romans differs much from the ancient; it is

-      less simple, more ornamented and debased. The hieroglyphics are not so

-      carefully and nicely cut. The figures are not so free in drawing, and not

-      so good as the old, except that they show more anatomical knowledge, and

-      begin to exhibit a little thought of perspective. The later artists

-      attempt to work out more details in the figure, to show muscles and

-      various members in more particularity. Some of the forms and faces have

-      much beauty, but most of them declare a decline of art, or perhaps an

-      attempt to reconcile the old style with new knowledge, and consequent

-      failure.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We called on the governor. He was absent at the mosque, but his servant

-      gave us coffee. The Oriental magnificence of the gubernatorial residence

-      would impress the most faithless traveler. The entrance was through a yard

-      that would be a fair hen-yard (for common fowl) at home, and the small

-      apartment into which we were shown might serve for a stable; but it had a

-      divan, some carpets and chairs, and three small windows. Its roof was

-      flat, made of rough split palm-trees covered with palm-leaves. The

-      governor's lady lives somewhere in the rear of this apartment of the

-      ruler, in a low mud-house, of which we saw the outside only.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Passing near the government house, we stopped in to see the new levy of

-      soldiers, which amounts to some four hundred from this province. Men are

-      taken between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, and although less than

-      three per cent, of those liable are seized, the draft makes a tremendous

-      excitement all along the river. In some places the bazaars are closed and

-      there is a general panic as if pestilence had broken out.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Outside the government house, and by the river bank, are women, squatting

-      in the sand, black figures of woe and dirt, bewailing their relations

-      taken away. In one mud-hovel there is so much howling and vocal grief that

-      we think at first a funeral is in progress. We are permitted to look into

-      the lock-up where the recruits are detained waiting transportation down

-      the river. A hundred or two fellaheen, of the average as to nakedness and

-      squalor of raiment, are crowded into a long room with a dirt floor, and

-      among them are many with heavy chains on their ankles. These latter are

-      murderers and thieves, awaiting trial or further punishment. It is in fact

-      the jail, and the soldiers are forced into this companionship until their

-      departure. One would say this is a bad nursery for patriots.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The court of justice is in the anteroom of this prison; and the two ought

-      to be near together. The Kadi, or judge, sits cross-legged on the ground,

-      and others squat around him, among them a scribe. When we enter, we are

-      given seats on a mat near the judge, and offered coffee and pipes. This is

-      something like a court of justice, sociable and friendly. It is impossible

-      to tell who is prisoner, who are witnesses, and who are spectators. All

-      are talking together, the prisoner (who is pointed out) louder than any

-      other, the spectators all joining in with the witnesses. The prisoner is

-      allowed to &ldquo;talk back,&rdquo; which must be a satisfaction to him. When the

-      hubbub subsides, the judge pronounces sentence; and probably he does as

-      well as an ordinary jury.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The remainder of this town is not sightly. In fact I do not suppose that

-      six thousand people could live in one dirtier, dustier, of more wretched

-      houses; rows of unclean, shriveled women, with unclean babies, their eyes

-      plastered with flies, sitting along the lanes called streets; plenty of

-      men and boys in no better case as to clothing; but the men are physically

-      superior to the women. In fact we see no comely women except the

-      Ghawazees. Upon the provisions, the grain, the sweet-cakes exposed for

-      sale on the ground, flies settle so that all look black.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our next run is to Assouan. Let us sketch it rapidly, and indicate by a

-      touch the panorama it unrolled for us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 <i>Philæ</i> 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The following morning (Sunday) is cold, but we are off early as if nothing

-      had happened, and run rapidly against the current&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 &ldquo;first bell&rdquo; is about to ring in

-      Christian countries.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Above Kom Ombos we come to a little village in a palm-grove&mdash;a scene

-      out of the depths of Africa,&mdash;such as you have often seen in pictures&mdash;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?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;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;&mdash;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?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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,&mdash;better at any rate than the groan of the

-      sakiyas.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is everywhere a sort of Sabbath calm&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0039" id="linkimage-0039"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0244.jpg" alt="0244 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0040" id="linkimage-0040"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0245.jpg" alt="0245 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XIX.&mdash;PASSING THE CATARACT OF THE NILE.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>T 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&mdash;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,&mdash;what tropical freights are

-      these for the imagination!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 <i>débris</i> 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;it may be only

-      a piastre or two&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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: &ldquo;This boat is

-      very large; it is too long to go up the cataract.&rdquo; 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:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But you took up General McClellan's boat, and that is large.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very true, Effendi; but why the howadji no come when Genel Clemen come,

-      ten days ago?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We chose to come now.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Such a long boat never went up. Why you no come two months ago when the

-      river was high?&rdquo; This sort of talk goes on for half an hour. Then the

-      other sheykh speaks:&mdash;&ldquo;What is the use of talking all this stuff to

-      Mohammed Abd-el-Atti Effendi; he knows all about it.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is true. We will go.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, it is 'finish',&rdquo; says Abd-el-Atti.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 &ldquo;Nubian costumes&rdquo; for women&mdash;a string with leather

-      fringe depending to tie about the loins&mdash;suggestions of a tropical

-      life under the old dispensation.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;to warm outwardly and inwardly the natives of the

-      Soudan&mdash;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&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 &ldquo;Hâ! Yâlêsah. Hâ! Yâlêsah!&rdquo; 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.

-    </p>

-<pre xml:space="preserve">

-     * 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, &ldquo;Ha!

-     Yalesah!&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;Ha! Yale-sah&rdquo; (as I catch it)

-     is only a corruption of &ldquo;Halee!'.esà <i>Seyyidnà Eesà</i>&rdquo; is the

-     Moslem name for &ldquo;Our Lord Jesus.&rdquo;

- </pre>

-    <p>

-      The first thing the Nubians want is something to eat&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is not at all what we have expected. In appearence this is a cataract

-      without any falls and scarcely any rapids. A person brought up on Niagara

-      or Montmorency feels himself trifled with here. The fishermen in the

-      mountain streams of America has come upon many a scene that resembles this&mdash;a

-      river-bed strewn with boulders. Only, this is on a grand scale. We had

-      been led to expect at least high precipices, walls of lofty rock, between

-      which we should sail in the midst of raging rapids and falls; and that

-      there would be hundreds of savages on the rocks above dragging our boat

-      with cables, and occasionally plunging into the torrent in order to carry

-      a life-line to the top of some seagirt rock. All of this we did not see;

-      but yet we have more respect for the cataract before we get through it

-      than when it first came in sight.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      What we see immediately before us is a basin, it may be a quarter of a

-      mile, it may be half a mile broad, and two miles long; a wild expanse of

-      broken granite rocks and boulders strewn hap-hazard, some of them showing

-      the red of the syenite and others black and polished and shining in the

-      sun; a field of rocks, none of them high, of fantastic shapes; and through

-      this field the river breaks in a hundred twisting passages and chutes, all

-      apparently small, but the water in them is foaming and leaping and

-      flashing white; and the air begins to be pervaded by the multitudinous

-      roar of rapids. On the east, the side of the land-passage between Assouan

-      and Philæ, were high and jagged rocks in odd forms, now and then a

-      palm-tree, and here and there a mud-village. On the west the basin of the

-      cataract is hemmed in by the desert hills, and the yellow Libyan sand

-      drifts over them in shining waves and rifts, which in some lights have the

-      almost maroon color that we see in Gerome's pictures. To the south is an

-      impassable barrier of granite and sand&mdash;mountains of them&mdash;beyond

-      the glistening fields of rocks and water through which we are to find our

-      way.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The difficulty of this navigation is not one cataract to be overcome by

-      one heroic effort, but a hundred little cataracts or swift tortuous

-      sluiceways, which are much more formidable when we get into them than they

-      are when seen at a distance. The dahabeëhs which attempt to wind through

-      them are in constant danger of having holes knocked in their hulls by the

-      rocks.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The wind is strong, and we are sailing swiftly on. It is im possible to

-      tell which one of the half-dozen equally uninviting channels we are to

-      take. We guess, and of course point out the wrong one. We approach, with

-      sails still set, a narrow passage through which the water pours in what is

-      a very respectable torrent; but it is not a straight passage, it has a

-      bend in it; if we get through it, we must make a sharp turn to the left or

-      run upon a ridge of rocks, and even then we shall be in a boiling surge;

-      and if we fail to make head against the current we shall go whirling down

-      the caldron, bumping on the rocks&mdash;not a pleasant thing for a

-      dahabeëh one hundred and twenty feet long with a cabin in it as large as a

-      hotel. The passage of a boat of this size is evidently an event of some

-      interest to the cataract people, for we see groups of them watching us

-      from the rocks, and following along the shore. And we think that seeing

-      our boat go up from the shore might be the best way of seeing it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We draw slowly in, the boat trembling at the entrance of the swift water;

-      it enters, nosing the current, feeling the tug of the sail, and hesitates.

-      Oh, for a strong puff of wind! There are five watchful men at the helm;

-      there is a moment's silence, and the boat still hesitates. At this

-      critical instant, while we hold our breath, a naked man, whose name I am

-      sorry I cannot give to an admiring American public, appears on the bow

-      with a rope in his teeth; he plunges in and makes for the nearest rock. He

-      swims hand over hand, swinging his arms from the shoulders out of water

-      and striking them forward splashing along like a sidewheeler&mdash;the

-      common way of swimming in the heavy water of the Nile. Two other black

-      figures follow him and the rope is made fast to the point of the rock. We

-      have something to hold us against the stream.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And now a terrible tumult arises on board the boat which is seen to be

-      covered with men; one gang is hauling on the rope to draw the great sail

-      close to its work; another gang is hauling on the rope attached to the

-      rock, and both are singing that wild chanting chorus without which no

-      Egyptian sailors pull an ounce or lift a pound; the men who are not

-      pulling are shouting and giving orders; the Sheykhs, on the upper deck

-      where we sit with American serenity exaggerated amid the Babel, are

-      jumping up and down in a frenzy of excitement, screaming and

-      gesticulating. We hold our own; we gain a little; we pull forward where

-      the danger of a smash against the rocks is increased. More men appear on

-      the rocks, whom we take to be spectators of our passage. No; they lay hold

-      of the rope. With the additional help we still tremble in the jaws of the

-      pass. I walk aft, and the stern is almost upon the rocks; it grazes them;

-      but in the nick of time the bow swings round, we turn short off into an

-      eddy; the great wing of a sail is let go, and our cat-like sailors are

-      aloft, crawling along the slender yard, which is a hundred feet in length,

-      and furling the tugging canvas. We breathe more freely, for the first

-      danger is over. The first gate is passed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In this lull there is a confab with the Sheykhs. We are at the island of

-      Sehâyl, and have accomplished what is usually the first day's journey of

-      boats. It would be in harmony with the Oriental habit to stop here for the

-      remainder of the day and the night. But our dragoman has in mind to

-      accomplish, if not the impossible, what is synonymous with it in the East,

-      the unusual. The result of the inflammatory stump-speeches on both sides

-      is that two or three gold pieces are passed into the pliant hand of the

-      head Sheykh, and he sends for another Sheykh and more men.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      For some time we have been attended by increasing processions of men and

-      boys on shore; they cheered us as we passed the first rapid; they came out

-      from the villages, from the crevices of the rocks, their blue and white

-      gowns flowing in the wind, and make a sort of holiday of our passage. Less

-      conspicuous at first are those without gowns&mdash;they are hardly

-      distinguishable from the black rocks amid which they move. As we lie here,

-      with the rising roar of the rapids in our ears, we can see no further

-      opening for our passage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But we are preparing to go on. Ropes are carried out forward over the

-      rocks. More men appear, to aid us. We said there were fifty. We count

-      seventy; we count eighty; there are at least ninety. They come up by a

-      sort of magic. From whence are they, these black forms: They seem to grow

-      out of the rocks at the wave of the Sheykh's hand; they are of the same

-      color, shining men of granite. The swimmers and divers are simply smooth

-      statues hewn out of the syenite or the basalt. They are not unbaked clay

-      like the rest of us. One expects to see them disappear like stones when

-      they jump into the water. The mode of our navigation is to draw the boat

-      along, hugged close to the shore rocks, so closely that the current cannot

-      get full hold of it, and thus to work it round the bends.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are crawling slowly on in this manner, clinging to the rocks, when

-      unexpectedly a passage opens to the left. The water before us runs like a

-      mill-race. If we enter it, nothing would seem to be able to hold the boat

-      from dashing down amidst the breakers. But the bow is hardly let to feel

-      the current before it is pulled short round, and we are swinging in the

-      swift stream. Before we know it we are in the anxiety of another tug.

-      Suppose the rope should break! In an instant the black swimmers are

-      overboard striking out for the rocks; two ropes are sent out, and secured;

-      and, the gangs hauling on them, we are working inch by inch through,

-      everybody on board trembling with excitement. We look at our watches; it

-      seems only fifteen minutes since we left Assouan; it is an hour and a

-      quarter. Do we gain in the chute? It is difficult to say; the boat hangs

-      back and strains at the cables; but just as we are in the pinch of doubt,

-      the big sail unfurls its wing with exciting suddenness, a strong gust

-      catches it, we feel the lift, and creep upward, amid an infernal din of

-      singing and shouting and calling on the Prophet from the gangs who haul in

-      the sail-rope, who tug at the cables attached to the rocks, who are

-      pulling at the hawsers on the shore. We forge ahead and are about to dash

-      into a boiling caldron before us, from which there appears to be no

-      escape, when a skillful turn of the great creaking helm once more throws

-      us to the left, and we are again in an eddy with the stream whirling by

-      us, and the sail is let go and is furled.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The place where we lie is barely long enough to admit our boat; its stern

-      just clears the rocks, its bow is aground on hard sand. The number of men

-      and boys on the rocks has increased; it is over one hundred, it is one

-      hundred and thirty; on a re-count it is one hundred and fifty. An anchor

-      is now carried out to hold us in position when we make a new start; more

-      ropes are taken to the shore, two hitched to the bow and one to the stern.

-      Straight before us is a narrow passage through which the water comes in

-      foaming ridges with extraordinary rapidity. It seems to be our way; but of

-      course it is not. We are to turn the corner sharply, before reaching it;

-      what will happen then we shall see.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is a slight lull in the excitement, while the extra hawsers are got

-      out and preparations are made for the next struggle. The sheykhs light

-      their long pipes, and squatting on deck gravely wait. The men who have

-      tobacco roll up cigarettes and smoke them. The swimmers come on board for

-      reinforcement. The poor fellows are shivering as if they had an ague fit.

-      The Nile may be friendly, though it does not offer a warm bath at this

-      time of the year, but when they come out of it naked on the rocks the cold

-      north wind sets their white teeth chartering. The dragoman brings out a

-      bottle of brandy. It is none of your ordinary brandy, but must have cost

-      over a dollar a gallon, and would burn a hole in a new piece of cotton

-      cloth. He pours out a tumblerful of it, and offers it to one of the

-      granite men. The granite man pours it down his throat in one flow, without

-      moving an eye-winker, and holds the glass out for another. His throat must

-      be lined with zinc. A second tumblerful follows the first. It is like

-      pouring liquor into a brazen image.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I said there was a lull, but this is only in contrast to the preceding

-      fury. There is still noise enough, over and above the roar of the waters,

-      in the preparations going forward, the din of a hundred people screaming

-      together, each one giving orders, and elaborating his opinion by a

-      rhetorical use of his hands. The waiting crowd scattered over the rocks

-      disposes itself picturesquely, as an Arab crowd always does, and probably

-      cannot help doing, in its blue and white gowns and white turbans. In the

-      midst of these preparations, and unmindful of any excitement or contusion,

-      a Sheykh, standing upon a little square of sand amid the rocks, and so

-      close to the deck of the boat that we can hear his &ldquo;Allâhoo Akbar&rdquo; (God is

-      most Great), begins his kneelings and prostrations towards Mecca, and

-      continues at his prayers, as undisturbed and as unregarded as if he were

-      in a mosque, and wholly oblivious of the babel around him. So common has

-      religion become in this land of its origin! Here is a half-clad Sheykh of

-      the desert stopping, in the midst of his contract to take the howadji up

-      the cataract, to raise his forefinger and say, &ldquo;I testify that there is no

-      deity but God; and I testify that Mohammed is his servant and his

-      apostle.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Judging by the eye, the double turn we have next to make is too short to

-      admit our long hull. It does not seem possible that we can squeeze

-      through; but we try. We first swing out and take the current as if we were

-      going straight up the rapids. We are held by two ropes from the stern,

-      while by four ropes from the bow, three on the left shore and one on an

-      islet to the right, the cataract people are tugging to draw us up. As we

-      watch almost breathless the strain on the ropes, look! there is a man in

-      the tumultuous rapid before us swiftly coming down as if to his

-      destruction. Another one follows, and then another, till there are half a

-      dozen men and boys in this jeopardy, this situation of certain death to

-      anybody not made of cork. And the singular thing about it is that the men

-      are seated upright, sliding down the shining water like a boy, who has no

-      respect for his trowsers, down a snow-bank. As they dash past us, we see

-      that each man is seated on a round log about five feet long; some of them

-      sit upright with their legs on the log, displaying the soles of their

-      feet, keeping the equilibrium with their hands. These are smooth slimy

-      logs that a white man would find it difficult to sit on if they were on

-      shore, and in this water they would turn with him only once&mdash;the log

-      would go one way and the man another. But these fellows are in no fear of

-      the rocks below; they easily guide their barks out of the rushing floods,

-      through the whirlpools and eddies, into the slack shore-water in the rear

-      of the boat, and stand up like men and demand backsheesh. These logs are

-      popular ferry-boats in the Upper Nile; I have seen a woman crossing the

-      river on one, her clothes in a basket and the basket on her head&mdash;and

-      the Nile is nowhere an easy stream to swim.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Far ahead of us the cataract people are seen in lines and groups,

-      half-hidden by the rocks, pulling and stumbling along; black figures are

-      scattered along lifting the ropes over the jagged stones, and freeing them

-      so that we shall not be drawn back, as we slowly advance; and severe as

-      their toil is, it is not enough to keep them warm when the chilly wind

-      strikes them. They get bruised on the rocks also, and have time to show us

-      their barked shins and request backsheesh. An Egyptian is never too busy

-      or too much in peril to forget to prefer that request at the sight of a

-      traveler. When we turn into the double twist I spoke of above, the bow

-      goes sideways upon a rock, and the stern is not yet free. The punt-poles

-      are brought into requisition; half the men are in the water; there is

-      poling and pushing and grunting, heaving, and &ldquo;Yah Mohammed, Yah Mohammed&rdquo;

-       with all which noise and outlay of brute strength, the boat moves a little

-      on and still is held close in hand. The current runs very swiftly We have

-      to turn almost by a right angle to the left and then by the same angle to

-      the right; and the question is whether the boat is not too long to turn in

-      the space. We just scrape along the rocks, the current growing every

-      moment stronger, and at length get far enough to let the stern swing. I

-      run back to see if it will go free. It is a close fit. The stern is clear;

-      but if our boat had been four or five feet longer, her voyage would have

-      ended then and there. There is now before us a straight pull up the

-      swiftest and narrowest rapid we have thus far encountered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our sandal&mdash;the row-boat belonging to the dahabeëh, that becomes a

-      felucca when a mast is stepped into it&mdash;which has accompanied us

-      fitfully during the passage, appearing here and there tossing about amid

-      the rocks, and aiding occasionally in the transport of ropes and men to

-      one rock and another, now turns away to seek a less difficult passage. The

-      rocks all about us are low, from three feet to ten feet high. We have one

-      rope out ahead, fastened to a rock, upon which stand a gang of men,

-      pulling. There is a row of men in the water under the left side of the

-      boat, heaving at her with their broad backs, to prevent her smashing on

-      the rocks. But our main dragging force is in the two long lines of men

-      attached to the ropes on the left shore. They stretch out ahead of us so

-      far that it needs an opera-glass to discover whether the leaders are

-      pulling or only soldiering. These two long struggling lines are led and

-      directed by a new figure who appears upon this operatic scene. It is a

-      comical Sheykh, who stands upon a high rock at one side and lines out the

-      catch-lines of a working refrain, while the gangs howl and haul, in a

-      surging chorus. Nothing could be wilder or more ludicrous, in the midst of

-      this roar of rapids and strain of cordage. The Sheykh holds a long staff

-      which he swings like the baton of the leader of an orchestra, quite

-      unconscious of the odd figure he cuts against the blue sky. He grows more

-      and more excited, he swings his arms, he shrieks, but always in tune and

-      in time with the hauling and the wilder chorus of the cataract men, he

-      lifts up his right leg, he lifts up his left leg, he is in the very

-      ecstasy of the musical conductor, displaying his white teeth, and raising

-      first one leg and then the other in a delirious swinging motion, all the

-      more picturesque on account of his flowing blue robe and his loose white

-      cotton drawers. He lifts his leg with a gigantic pull, which is enough in

-      itself to draw the boat onward, and every time he lifts it, the boat gains

-      on the current. Surely such an orchestra and such a leader was never seen

-      before. For the orchestra is scattered over half an acre of ground,

-      swaying and pulling and singing in rhythmic show, and there is a high wind

-      and a blue sky, and rocks and foaming torrents, and an African village

-      with palms in the background, amid the <i>debris</i> of the great

-      convulsion of nature which has resulted in this chaos. Slowly we creep up

-      against the stiff boiling stream, the good Moslems on deck muttering

-      prayers and telling their beads, and finally make the turn and pass the

-      worst eddies; and as we swing round into an ox-bow channel to the right,

-      the big sail is again let out and hauled in, and with cheers we float on

-      some rods and come into a quiet shelter, a stage beyond the journey

-      usually made the first day. It is now three o'clock.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We have come to the real cataract, to the stiffest pull and the most

-      dangerous passage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A small freight dahabeëh obstructs the way, and while this is being hauled

-      ahead, we prepare for the final struggle. The chief cataract is called Bab

-      (gate) Aboo Rabbia, from one of Mohammed Ali's captains who some years ago

-      vowed that he would take his dahabeëh up it with his own crew and without

-      aid from the cataract people. He lost his boat. It is also sometimes

-      called Bab Inglese from a young Englishman, named Cave, who attempted to

-      swim down it early one morning, in imitation of the Nubian swimmers, and

-      was drawn into the whirlpools, and not found for days after. For this last

-      struggle, in addition to the other ropes, an enormous cable is bent on,

-      not tied to the bow, but twisted round the cross-beams of the forward

-      deck, and carried out over the rocks. From the shelter where we lie we are

-      to push out and take the current at a sharp angle. The water of this main

-      cataract sucks down from both sides above through a channel perhaps one

-      hundred feet wide, very rapid and with considerable fall, and with such

-      force as to raise a ridge in the middle. To pull up this hill of water is

-      the tug; if the ropes let go we shall be dashed into a hundred pieces on

-      the rocks below and be swallowed in the whirlpools. It would not be a

-      sufficient compensation for this fate to have this rapid hereafter take

-      our name.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The preparations are leisurely made, the lines are laid along the rocks

-      and the men are distributed. The fastenings are carefully examined. Then

-      we begin to move. There are now four conductors of this gigantic orchestra

-      (the employment of which as a musical novelty I respectfully recommend to

-      the next Boston Jubilee), each posted on a high rock, and waving a stick

-      with a white rag tied to it. It is now four o'clock. An hour has been

-      consumed in raising the curtain for the last act. We are now carefully

-      under way along the rocks which are almost within reach, held tight by the

-      side ropes, but pushed off and slowly urged along by a line of half-naked

-      fellows under the left side, whose backs are against the boat and whose

-      feet walk along the perpendicular ledge. It would take only a sag of the

-      boat, apparently, to crush them. It does not need our eyes to tell us when

-      the bow of the boat noses the swift water. Our sandal has meantime carried

-      a line to a rock on the opposite side of the channel, and our sailors haul

-      on this and draw us ahead. But we are held firmly by the shore lines. The

-      boat is never suffered, as I said, to get an inch the advantage, but is

-      always held tight in hand.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we appear at the foot of the rapid, men come riding down it on logs as

-      before, a sort of horseback feat in the boiling water, steering themselves

-      round the eddies and landing below us. One of them swims round to the rock

-      where a line is tied, and looses it as we pass; another, sitting on the

-      slippery stick and showing the white soles of his black feet, paddles

-      himself about amid the whirlpools. We move so slowly that we have time to

-      enjoy all these details, to admire the deep yellow of the Libyan sand

-      drifted over the rocks at the right, and to cheer a sandal bearing the

-      American flag which is at this moment shooting the rapids in another

-      channel beyond us, tossed about like a cork. We see the meteor flag

-      flashing out, we lose it behind the rocks, and catch it again appearing

-      below. &ldquo;Oh star spang&rdquo;&mdash;but our own orchestra is in full swing again.

-      The comical Sheykh begins to swing his arms and his stick back and forth

-      in an increasing measure, until his whole body is drawn into the vortex of

-      his enthusiasm, and one leg after the other, by a sort of rhythmic hitch,

-      goes up displaying the white and baggy cotton drawers. The other three

-      conductors join in, and a deafening chorus from two hundred men goes up

-      along the ropes, while we creep slowly on amid the suppressed excitement

-      of those on board who anxiously watch the straining cables, and with a

-      running fire of &ldquo;backsheesh, backsheesh,&rdquo; from the boys on the rocks close

-      at hand. The cable holds; the boat nags and jerks at it in vain; through

-      all the roar and rush we go on, lifted I think perceptibly every time the

-      sheykh lifts his leg.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At the right moment the sail is again shaken down; and the boat at once

-      feels it. It is worth five hundred men. The ropes slacken; we are going by

-      the wind against the current; haste is made to unbend the cable; line

-      after line is let go until we are held by one alone; the crowd thins out,

-      dropping away with no warning and before we know that the play is played

-      out, the cataract people have lost all interest in it and are scattering

-      over the black rocks to their homes. A few stop to cheer; the chief

-      conductor is last seen on a rock, swinging the white rag, hurrahing and

-      salaaming in grinning exultation; the last line is cast off, and we round

-      the point and come into smooth but swift water, and glide into a calm

-      mind. The noise, the struggle, the tense strain, the uproar of men and

-      waves for four hours are all behind; and hours of keener excitement and

-      enjoyment we have rarely known. At 12.20 we left Assouan; at 4.45 we swung

-      round the rocky bend above the last and greatest rapid. I write these

-      figures, for they will be not without a melancholy interest to those who

-      have spent two or three days or a week in making this passage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Turning away from the ragged mountains of granite which obstruct the

-      straight course of the river, we sail by Mahatta, a little village of

-      Nubians, a port where the trading and freight boats plying between the

-      First and Second Cataract load and unload. There is a forest of masts and

-      spars along the shore which is piled with merchandise, and dotted with

-      sunlit figures squatting in the sand as if waiting for the goods to

-      tranship themselves. With the sunlight slanting on our full sail, we glide

-      into the shadow of high rocks, and enter, with the suddenness of a first

-      discovery, into a deep winding river, the waters of which are dark and

-      smooth, between lofty walls of granite. These historic masses, which have

-      seen pass so many splendid processions and boastful expeditions of

-      conquest in what seems to us the twilight of the world, and which excited

-      the wonder of Father Herodotus only the other day, almost in our own time

-      (for the Greeks belong to us and not to antiquity as it now unfolds

-      itself), are piled in strange shapes, tottling rock upon rock, built up

-      grotesquely, now in likeness of an animal, or the gigantic profile of a

-      human face, or temple walls and castle towers and battlements. We wind

-      through this solemn highway, and suddenly, in the very gateway, Philæ! The

-      lovely! Philæ, the most sentimental ruin in Egypt. There are the great

-      pylon of the temple of Isis, the long colonnades of pillars, the beautiful

-      square temple, with lofty columns and elongated capitals, misnamed

-      Pharaoh's bed. The little oblong island, something like twelve hundred

-      feet long, banded all round by an artificial wall, an island of rock

-      completely covered with ruins, is set like the stone of a ring, with a

-      circle of blue water about it, in the clasp of higher encircling granite

-      peaks and ledges. On the left bank, as we turn to pass to the east of the

-      island, is a gigantic rock which some persons have imagined was a colossus

-      once, perhaps in pre-Adamic times, but which now has no resemblance to

-      human shape, except in a breast and left arm. Some Pharaoh cut his

-      cartouche on the back&mdash;a sort of postage-stamp to pass the image

-      along down the ages. The Pharaohs were ostentatious; they cut their names

-      wherever they could find a conspicuous and smooth place.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      While we are looking, distracted with novelty at every turn and excited by

-      a grandeur and loveliness opening upon us every moment, we have come into

-      a quiet haven, shut in on all sides by broken ramparts,&mdash;alone with

-      this island of temples. The sun is about to set, and its level light comes

-      to us through the columns, and still gilds with red and yellow gold the

-      Libyan sand sifted over the cliffs. We moor at once to a sand-bank which

-      has formed under the broken walls, and at once step on shore. We climb to

-      the top of the temple walls; we walk on the stone roof; we glance into the

-      temple on the roof, where is sculptured the resurrection of Osiris. This

-      cannot be called an old temple. It is a creation of the Ptolemies, though

-      it doubtless replaced an older edifice. The temple of Isis was not begun

-      more than three centuries before our era. Not all of these structures were

-      finished&mdash;the priests must have been still carving on their walls

-      these multitudes of sculptures, when Christ began his mission; and more

-      than four centuries after that the mysterious rites of Isis were still

-      celebrated in these dark chambers. It is silent and dead enough here now;

-      and there lives nowhere upon the earth any man who can even conceive the

-      state of mind that gave those rites vitality. Even Egypt has changed its

-      superstitions.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Peace has come upon the earth after the strain of the last few hours. We

-      can scarcely hear the roar of the rapids, in the beating of which we had

-      been. The sun goes, leaving a changing yellow and faint orange on the

-      horizon. Above in the west is the crescent moon; and now all the sky

-      thereabout is rosy, even to the zenith, a delicate and yet deep color,

-      like that of the blush-rose&mdash;a transparent color that glows. A little

-      later we see from our boat the young moon through the columns of the

-      lesser temple. The January night is clear and perfectly dry; no dew is

-      falling&mdash;no dew ever falls here&mdash;and the multiplied stars burn

-      with uncommon lustre. When everything else is still, we hear the roar of

-      the rapids coming steadily on the night breeze, sighing through the old

-      and yet modern palace-temples of the <i>parvenu</i> Ptolemies, and of

-      Cleopatra&mdash;a new race of conquerors and pleasure-hunters, who in vain

-      copied the magnificent works of the ancient Pharaohs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Here on a pylon gate, General Dessaix has recorded the fact that in

-      February (Ventose) in the seventh year of the Republic, General Bonaparte

-      being then in possession of Lower Egypt he pursued to this spot the

-      retreating Memlooks. Egyptian kings, Ethiopian usurpers, Persians, Greeks,

-      Romans, Nectanebo, Cambyses, Ptolemy, Philadelphus, Cleopatra and her

-      Roman lovers, Dessaix,&mdash;these are all shades now.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0041" id="linkimage-0041"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0264.jpg" alt="0264 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0042" id="linkimage-0042"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0265.jpg" alt="0265 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XX.&mdash;ON THE BORDERS OF THE DESERT.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>N PASSING the

-      First Cataract of the Nile we pass an ancient boundary line; we go from

-      the Egypt of old to the Ethiopia of old; we go from the Egypt proper of

-      to-day, into Nubia. We find a different country, a different river; the

-      people are of another race; they have a different language. We have left

-      the mild, lazy, gentle fellaheen&mdash;a mixed lot, but in general of

-      Arabic blood&mdash;and come to Barâbra, whose district extends from Philæ

-      to the Second Cataract, a freer, manlier, sturdier people altogether.

-      There are two tribes of them, the Kendos and the Nooba; each has its own

-      language.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Philæ was always the real boundary line, though the Pharaohs pushed their

-      frontier now and again, down towards the Equator, and built temples and

-      set up their images, as at Aboo Simbel, as at Samneh, and raked the south

-      land for slaves and ivory, concubines and gold. But the Ethiopians turned

-      the tables now and again, and conquered Egypt, and reigned in the palaces

-      of the Pharaohs, taking that title even, and making their names dreaded as

-      far as Judea and Assyria.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Ethiopians were cousins indeed of the old Egyptians, and of the

-      Canaanites, for they were descendants of Cush, as the Egyptians were of

-      Mizriam, and the Canaanites were of Canaan; three of the sons of Ham. The

-      Cushites, or Ethiops, although so much withdrawn from the theater of

-      history, have done their share of fighting&mdash;the main business of man

-      hitherto. Besides quarrels with their own brethren, they had often the

-      attentions of the two chief descendants of Shem,&mdash;the Jews and the

-      Arabs; and after Mohammed's coming, the Arabs descended into Nubia and

-      forced the inhabitants into their religion at the point of the sword. Even

-      the sons of Japhet must have their crack at these children of the

-      &ldquo;Sun-burned.&rdquo; It was a Roman prefect who, to avenge an attack on Svene by

-      a warlike woman, penetrated as far south as El Berkel (of the present

-      day), and overthrew Candace the Queen of the Ethiopians in Napata, her

-      capital; the large city, also called Meroë, of which Herodotus heard such

-      wonders.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Beyond Ethiopia lies the vast, black cloud of Negroland. These negroes,

-      with the crisp, woolly hair, did not descend from anybody, according to

-      the last reports; neither from Shem, Ham nor Japhet. They have no part in

-      the royal house of Noah. They are left out in the heat. They are the

-      puzzle of ethnologists, the mystery of mankind. They are the real

-      aristocracy of the world, their origin being lost in the twilight of time;

-      no one else can trace his descent so far back and come to nothing. M.

-      Lenormant says the black races have no tradition of the Deluge. They

-      appear to have been passed over altogether, then. Where were they hidden?

-      When we first know Central Africa they are there. Where did they come

-      from? The great effort of ethnologists is to get them dry-shod round the

-      Deluge, since derivation from Noah is denied them. History has no

-      information how they came into Africa. It seems to me that, in history,

-      whenever we hear of the occupation of a new land, there is found in it a

-      primitive race, to be driven out or subdued. The country of the primitive

-      negro is the only one that has never invited the occupation of a more

-      powerful race. But the negro blood, by means of slavery, has been

-      extensively distributed throughout the Eastern world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These reflections did not occur to us the morning we left Philæ. It was

-      too early. In fact, the sun was just gilding &ldquo;Pharaoh's bed,&rdquo; as the

-      beautiful little Ptolemaic temple is called, when we spread sail and, in

-      the shadow of the broken crags and savage rocks, began to glide out of the

-      jaws of this wild pass. At early morning everything has the air of

-      adventure. It was as if we were discoverers, about to come into a new

-      African kingdom at each turn in the swift stream.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      One must see, he carnot imagine, the havoc and destruction hereabout, the

-      grotesque and gigantic fragments of rock, the islands of rock, the

-      precipices of rock, made by the torrent when it broke through here. One of

-      these islands is Biggeh&mdash;all rocks, not enough soft spot on it to set

-      a hen. The rocks are piled up into the blue sky; from their summit we get

-      the best view of Philæ&mdash;the jewel set in this rim of stone.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Above Philæ we pass the tomb of a holy man, high on the hill, and

-      underneath it, clinging to the slope, the oldest mosque in Nubia, the

-      Mosque of Belal, falling now into ruin, but the minaret shows in color no

-      sign of great age. How should it in this climate, where you might leave a

-      pair of white gloves upon the rocks for a year, and expect to find them

-      unsoiled.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How old do you suppose that mosque is Abd-el-Atti?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I tink about twelve hundred years old. Him been built by the Friends of

-      our prophet when they come up here to make the people believe.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      I like this euphuism. &ldquo;But,&rdquo; we ask, &ldquo;suppose they didn't believe, what

-      then?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When thim believe, all right; when thim not believe, do away wid 'em.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But they might believe something else, if not what Mohammed believed.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, what our Prophet say? Mohammed, he say, find him anybody believe in

-      God, not to touch him; find him anybody believe in the Christ, not to

-      touch him; find him anybody believe in Moses, not to touch him; find him

-      believe in the prophets, not to touch him; find him believe in bit wood,

-      piece stone, do way wid him. Not so? Men worship something wood, stone, I

-      can't tell&mdash;I tink dis is nothing.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Abd-el-Atti always says the &ldquo;Friends&rdquo; of Mohammed, never followers or

-      disciples. It is a pleasant word, and reminds us of our native land.

-      Mohammed had the good sense that our politicians have. When he wanted

-      anything, a city taken, a new strip of territory added, a &ldquo;third term,&rdquo; or

-      any trifle, he &ldquo;put himself in the hands of his friends.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The Friends were successful in this region. While the remote Abyssinians

-      retained Christianity, the Nubians all became Moslems, and so remain to

-      this day.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You think, then, Abd-el-Atti, that the Nubians believed?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Thim 'bliged. But I tink these fellows, all of 'em, Musselmens as far as

-      the throat; it don't go lower down.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The story is that this mosque was built by one of Mohammed's captains

-      after the great battle here with the Infidels&mdash;the Nubians. Those who

-      fell in the fight, it is also only tradition, were buried in the cemetery

-      near Assouan, and they are martyrs: to this day the Moslems who pass that

-      way take off their slippers and shoes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After the battle, as the corpses of the slain lay in indistinguishable

-      heaps, it was impossible to tell who were martyrs and who were

-      unbelievers. Mohammed therefore ordered that they should bury as Moslems

-      all those who had large feet, and pleasant faces, with the mark of prayer

-      on the forehead. The bodies of the others were burned as infidels.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we sweep along, the mountains are still high on either side, and the

-      strips of verdure are very slight. On the east bank, great patches of

-      yellow sand, yellow as gold, and yet reddish in some lights, catch the

-      sun.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I think it is the finest morning I ever saw, for clearness and dryness.

-      The thermometer indicates only 60°, and yet it is not too cool. The air is

-      like wine. The sky is absolutely cloudless, and of wonderful clarity. Here

-      is a perfectly pure and sweet atmosphere. After a little, the wind

-      freshens, and it is somewhat cold on deck, but the sky is like sapphire;

-      let the wind blow for a month, it will raise no cloud, nor any film of it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Everything is wanting in Nubia that would contribute to the discomfort of

-      a winter residence:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It never rains;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is never any dew above Philæ;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There are no flies;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There are no fleas;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There are no bugs, nor any insects whatever.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The attempt to introduce fleas into Nubia by means of dahabeëhs has been a

-      failure.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In fact there is very little animal life; scarcely any birds are seen;

-      fowls of all sorts are rare. There are gazelles, however, and desert

-      hares, and chameleons. Our chameleons nearly starved for want of flies.

-      There are big crocodiles and large lizards.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In a bend a few miles above Philæ is a whirlpool called Shaymtel Wah, from

-      which is supposed to be a channel communicating under the mountain to the

-      Great Oasis one hundred miles distant. The popular belief in these

-      subterranean communications is very common throughout the East. The holy

-      well, Zem-Zem, at Mecca, has a connection with a spring at El Gebel in

-      Syria. I suppose that is perfectly well known. Abd-el-Atti has tasted the

-      waters of both; and they are exactly alike; besides, did he not know of a

-      pilgrim who lost his drinking-cup in Zem-Zem and recovered it in El Gebel.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This Nubia is to be sure but a river with a colored border, but I should

-      like to make it seem real to you and not a mere country of the

-      imagination. People find room to live here; life goes on after a fashion,

-      and every mile there are evidences of a mighty civilization and a great

-      power which left its record in gigantic works. There was a time, before

-      the barriers broke away at Silsilis, when this land was inundated by the

-      annual rise; the Nile may have perpetually expanded above here into a

-      lake, as Herodotus reports.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We sail between low ridges of rocky hills, with narrow banks of green and

-      a few palms, but occasionally there is a village of square mud-houses. At

-      Gertassee, boldly standing out on a rocky platform, are some beautiful

-      columns, the remains of a temple built in the Roman time. The wind is

-      strong and rather colder with the turn of noon; the nearer we come to the

-      tropics the colder it becomes. The explanation is that we get nothing but

-      desert winds; and the desert is cool at this season; that is, it breeds at

-      night cool air, although one does not complain of its frigidity who walks

-      over it at midday.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After passing Tafa, a pretty-looking village in the palms, which boasts

-      ruins both pagan and Christian, we come to rapids and scenery almost as

-      wild and lovely as that at Philæ. The river narrows, there are granite

-      rocks and black boulders in the stream; we sail for a couple of miles in

-      swift and deep water, between high cliffs, and by lofty rocky islands&mdash;not

-      without leafage and some cultivation, and through a series of rapids, not

-      difficult but lively. And so we go cheerily on, through savage nature and

-      gaunt ruins of forgotten history; past Kalâbshe, where are remains of the

-      largest temple in Nubia; past Bayt el Wellee&mdash;&ldquo;the house of the

-      saint&rdquo;&mdash;where Rameses II. hewed a beautiful temple out of the rock;

-      past Gerf Hossdyn, where Rameses II. hewed a still larger temple out of

-      the rock and covered it with his achievements, pictures in which he

-      appears twelve feet high, and slaying small enemies as a husbandman

-      threshes wheat with a flail. I should like to see an ancient stone wall in

-      Egypt, where this Barnum of antiquity wasn't advertising himself.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We leave him flailing the unfortunate; at eight in the evening we are

-      still going on, first by the light of the crescent moon, and then by

-      starlight, which is like a pale moonlight, so many and lustrous are the

-      stars; and last, about eleven o'clock we go aground, and stop a little

-      below Dakkeh, or seventy-one miles from Philæ, that being our modest run

-      for the day.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dakkeh, by daylight, reveals itself as a small mud-village attached to a

-      large temple. You would not expect to find a temple here, but its great

-      pylon looms over the town and it is worth at least a visit. To see such a

-      structure in America we would travel a thousand miles; the traveler on the

-      Nile debates whether he will go ashore.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The bank is lined with the natives who have something to sell, eggs, milk,

-      butter in little greasy &ldquo;pats,&rdquo; and a sheep. The men are, as to features

-      and complexion, rather Arabic than Nubian. The women have the high

-      cheek-bones and broad faces of our Indian squaws, whom they resemble in a

-      general way. The little girls who wear the Nubian costume (a belt with

-      fringe) and strings of beads, are not so bad; some of them well formed.

-      The morning is cool and the women all wear some outer garment, so that the

-      Nubian costume is not seen in its simplicity, except as it is worn by

-      children. I doubt if it is at any season. So far as we have observed the

-      Nubian women they are as modest in their dress as their Egyptian sisters.

-      Perhaps ugliness and modesty are sisters in their country. All the women

-      and girls have their hair braided in a sort of plait in front, and heavily

-      soaked with grease, so that it looks as if they had on a wig or a frontlet

-      of leather; it hangs in small, hard, greasy curls, like leathern thongs,

-      down each side. The hair appears never to be undone&mdash;only freshly

-      greased every morning. Nose-rings and earrings abound.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This handsome temple was began by Ergamenes, an Ethiopian king ruling at

-      Meroë, at the time of the second Ptolemy, during the Greek period; and it

-      was added to both by Ptolemies and Cæsars. This Nubia would seem to have

-      been in possession of Ethiopians and Egyptians turn and turn about, and,

-      both having the same religion, the temples prospered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Ergamenes has gained a reputation by a change he made in his religion, as

-      it was practiced in Meroë. When the priests thought a king had reigned

-      long enough it was their custom to send him notice that the gods had

-      ordered him to die; and the king, who would rather die than commit an

-      impiety, used to die. But Ergamenes tried another method, which he found

-      worked just as well; he assembled all the priests, and slew them&mdash;a

-      very sensible thing on his part.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      You would expect such a man to build a good temple. The sculptures are

-      very well executed, whether they are of his time, or owe their inspiration

-      to Berenice and Cleopatra; they show greater freedom and variety than

-      those of most temples; the figures of lion, monkeys, cows, and other

-      animals are excellent; and there is a picture of a man playing on a

-      musical instrument, a frame with strings stretched over it, played like a

-      harp but not harp shaped&mdash;the like of which is seen nowhere else. The

-      temple has the appearance of a fortification as well as a place of

-      worship. The towers of the propylon are ascended by interior flights of

-      stairs, and have, one above the other, four good-sized chambers. The

-      stairways and the rooms are lighted by slits in the wall about an inch in

-      diameter on the outside; but cut with a slant from the interior through

-      some five feet of solid stone. These windows are exactly like those in

-      European towers, and one might easily imagine himself in a Middle Age

-      fortification. The illusion is heightened by the remains of Christian

-      paintings on the walls, fresh in color, and in style very like those of

-      the earliest Christian art in Italian churches. In the temple we are

-      attended by a Nubian with a long and threatening spear, such as the people

-      like to carry here; the owner does not care for blood, however; he only

-      wants a little backsheesh.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Beyond Dakkeh the country opens finely; the mountains fall back, and we

-      look a long distance over the desert on each side, the banks having only a

-      few rods of green. Far off in the desert on either hand and in front, are

-      sharp pyramidal mountains, in ranges, in groups, the resemblance to

-      pyramids being very striking. The atmosphere as to purity is

-      extraordinary. Simply to inspire it is a delight for which one may well

-      travel thousands of miles.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We pass small patches of the castor-oil plant, and of a reddish-stemmed

-      bush, bearing the Indian <i>bendigo</i>, Arabic <i>bahima</i>, the fruit a

-      sort of bean in appearance and about as palatable. The castor-oil is much

-      used by the women as a hair-dressing, but they are not fastidious; they

-      use something else if oil is wanting. The demand for butter for this

-      purpose raised the price of it enormously this morning at Dakkeh.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the afternoon, waiting for wind, we walk ashore and out upon the naked

-      desert&mdash;the desert which is broken only by an occasional oasis, from

-      the Atlantic to the Red Sea; it has a basis of limestone, strewn with sand

-      like gold-dust, and a <i>detritus</i> of stone as if it had been scorched

-      by fire and worn by water. There is a great pleasure in strolling over

-      this pure waste blown by the free air. We visit a Nubian village, and buy

-      some spurious scarabæi off the necks of the ladies of the town&mdash;alas,

-      for rural simplicity! But these women are not only sharp, they respect

-      themselves sufficiently to dress modestly and even draw their shawls over

-      their faces. The children take the world as they find it, as to clothes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The night here, there being no moisture in the air is as brilliant as the

-      day; I have never seen the moon and stars so clear elsewhere. These are

-      the evenings that invite to long pipes and long stories. Abd-el-Atti opens

-      his budget from time to time, as we sit on deck and while the time with

-      anecdotes and marvels out of old Arab chronicles, spiced with his own

-      ready wit and singular English. Most of them are too long for these pages;

-      but here is an anecdote which, whether true or not illustrates the

-      character of old Mohammed Ali:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Mohammed Ali sent one of his captains, name of Walee Kasheef, to Derr,

-      capital of Nubia (you see it by and by, very fashionable place, like I see

-      'em in Hydee Park, what you call Rotten Row). Walee when he come there,

-      see the women, their hair all twisted up and stuck together with grease

-      and castor-oil, and their bodies covered with it. He called the sheykhs

-      together and made them present of soap, and told them to make the women

-      clean the hair and wash themselves, and make themselves fit for prayer. It

-      was in accordin' to the Moslem religion so to do.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The Nubians they not like this part of our religion, they not like it at

-      all. They send the sheykhs down to have conversation with Mohammed Ali,

-      who been stop at Esneh. They complain of what Walee done. Mohammed send

-      for Walee, and say, 'What this you been done in Nubia?' 'Nothing, your

-      highness, 'cept trying to make the Nubians conform to the religion.'

-      'Well,' says old Mohammed, 'I not send you up there as a priest; I send

-      you up to get a little money. Don't you trouble the Nubians. We don't care

-      if they go to Gennéh or Gehennem, if you get the money.'.rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      So the Nubians were left in sin and grease, and taxed accordingly. And at

-      this day the taxes are even heavier. Every date-palm and every sakiya is

-      taxed. A sakiya sometimes pays three pounds a year, when there is not a

-      piece of fertile land for it to water three rods square.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0043" id="linkimage-0043"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0274.jpg" alt="0274 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXI&mdash;ETHIOPIA.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>T IS a sparkling

-      morning at Wady Saboda; we have the desert and some of its high, scarred,

-      and sandy pyramidal peaks close to us, but as is usual where a wady, or

-      valley, comes to the river, there is more cultivated land. We see very

-      little of the temple of Rameses II. in this &ldquo;Valley of the Lions,&rdquo; nor of

-      the sphinxes in front of it. The desert sand has blown over it and over it

-      in drifts like snow, so that we walk over the buried sanctuary, greatly to

-      our delight. It is a pleasure to find one <i>adytum</i> into which we

-      cannot go and see this Rameses pretending to make offerings, but really,

-      as usual, offering to show himself.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At the village under the ledges, many of the houses are of stone, and the

-      sheykh has a pretentious stone enclosure with little in it, all to

-      himself. Shadoofs are active along the bank, and considerable crops of

-      wheat, beans, and corn are well forward. We stop to talk with a

-      bright-looking Arab, who employs men to work his shadoofs, and lives here

-      in an enclosure of cornstalks, with a cornstalk kennel in one corner,

-      where he and his family sleep. There is nothing pretentious about this

-      establishment, but the owner is evidently a man of wealth, and, indeed, he

-      has the bearing of a shrewd Yankee. He owns a camel, two donkeys, several

-      calves and two cows, and two young Nubian girls for wives, black as coal

-      and greased, but rather pleasant-faced. He has also two good guns&mdash;appears

-      to have duplicates of nearly everything. Out of the cornstalk shanty his

-      wives bring some handsome rugs for us to sit on.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Arab accompanies us on our walk, as a sort of host of the country, and

-      we are soon joined by others, black fellows; some of them carry the long

-      flint-lock musket, for which they seem to have no powder; and all wear a

-      knife in a sheath on the left arm; but they are as peaceable friendly folk

-      as you would care to meet, and simple-minded. I show the Arab my

-      field-glass, an object new to his experience. He looks through it, as I

-      direct, and is an astonished man, making motions with his hand, to

-      indicate how the distant objects are drawn towards him, laughing with a

-      soft and childlike delight, and then lowering the glass, looks at it, and

-      cries, &ldquo;Bismillah! Bismillah,&rdquo; an ejaculation of wonder, and also intended

-      to divert any misfortune from coming upon him on account of his indulgence

-      in this pleasure.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He soon gets the use of the glass and looks beyond the river and all

-      about, as if he were discovering objects unknown to him before. The others

-      all take a turn at it, and are equally astonished and delighted. But when

-      I cause them to look through the large end at a dog near by, and they see

-      him remove far off in the desert, their astonishment is complete. My

-      comrade's watch interested them nearly as much, although they knew its

-      use; they could never get enough of its ticking and of looking at its

-      works, and they concluded that the owner of it must be a Pasha.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The men at work dress in the slight manner of the ancient Egyptians; the

-      women, however, wear garments covering them, and not seldom hide the face

-      at our approach. But the material of their dress is not always of the best

-      quality; an old piece of sacking makes a very good garment for a Nubian

-      woman. Most of them wear some trinkets, beads or bits of silver or

-      carnelian round the neck, and heavy bracelets of horn. The boys have not

-      yet come into their clothing, but the girls wear the leathern belt and

-      fringe adorned with shells.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The people have little, but they are not poor. It may be that this

-      cornstalk house of our friend is only his winter residence, while his

-      shadoof is most active, and that he has another establishment in town.

-      There are too many sakiyas in operation for this region to be anything but

-      prosperous, apparently. They are going all night as we sail along, and the

-      screaming is weird enough in the stillness. I should think that a prisoner

-      was being tortured every eighth of a mile on the bank. We are never out of

-      hearing of their shrieks. But the cry is not exactly that of pain; it is

-      rather a song than a cry, with an impish squeak in it, and a monotonous

-      iteration of one idea, like all the songs here. It always repeats one

-      sentence, which sounds like <i>Iskander logheh-n-e-e-e-n</i>&mdash;whatever

-      it is in Arabic; and there is of course a story about it. The king,

-      Alexander, had concealed under his hair two horns. Unable to keep the

-      secret to himself he told it in confidence to the sakiya; the sakiya

-      couldn't hold the news, but shrieked out, &ldquo;Alexander has two horns,&rdquo; and

-      the other sakiyas got it; and the scandal went the length of the Nile, and

-      never can be hushed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Arabs personify everything, and are as full of superstitions as the

-      Scotch; peoples who have nothing in common except it may be that the

-      extreme predestinationism of the one approaches the fatalism of the other&mdash;begetting

-      in both a superstitious habit, which a similar cause produced in the

-      Greeks. From talking of the sakiya we wander into stories illustrative of

-      the credulity and superstition of the Egyptians. Charms and incantations

-      are relied on for expelling diseases and warding off dangers. The

-      snake-charmer is a person still in considerable request in towns and

-      cities. Here in Nubia there is no need of his offices, for there are no

-      snakes; but in Lower Egypt, where snakes are common, the mud-walls and

-      dirt-floors of the houses permit them to come in and be at home with the

-      family. Even in Cairo, where the houses are of brick, snakes are much

-      feared, and the house that is reputed to have snakes in it cannot be

-      rented. It will stand vacant like an old mansion occupied by a ghost in a

-      Christian country. The snake-charmers take advantage of this popular fear.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Once upon a time when Abd-el-Atti was absent from the city, a

-      snake-charmer came to his house, and told his sister that he divined that

-      there were snakes in the house. &ldquo;My sister,&rdquo; the story goes on, &ldquo;never see

-      any snake to house, but she woman, and much 'fraid of snakes, and believe

-      what him say. She told the charmer to call out the snakes. He set to work

-      his mumble, his conjor&mdash;('.xorcism'. yes, dat's it, exorcism 'em, and

-      bring out a snake. She paid him one dollar.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then the conjuror say, 'This the wife; the husband still in the house and

-      make great trouble if he not got out.'.rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He want him one pound for get the husband out, and my sister give it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When I come home I find my sister very sick, very sick indeed, and I say

-      what is it? She tell me the story that the house was full of snakes and

-      she had a man call them out, but the fright make her long time ill.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I said, you have done very well to get the snakes out, what could we do

-      with a house full of the nasty things? And I said, I must get them out of

-      another house I have&mdash;house I let him since to machinery.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Machinery? For what kind of machinery! Steam-engines?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, misheenary&mdash;have a school in it.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, missionary.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, let 'em have it for bout three hundred francs less than I get

-      before. I think the school good for Cairo. I send for the snake-charmer,

-      and I say I have 'nother house I think has snakes in it, and I ask him to

-      divine and see. He comes back and says, my house is full of snakes, but he

-      can charm them out.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I say, good, I will pay you well. We appointed early next morning for the

-      operation, and I agreed to meet the charmer at my house. I take with me

-      big black fellow I have in the house, strong like a bull. When we get

-      there I find the charmer there in front of the house and ready to begin.

-      But I propose that we go in the house, it might make disturbance to the

-      neighborhood to call so many serpents out into the street. We go in, and I

-      sav, tell me the room of the most snakes. The charmer say, and as soon as

-      we go in there, I make him sign the black fellow and he throw the charmer

-      on the ground, and we tie him with a rope. We find in his bosom thirteen

-      snakes and scorpions. I tell him I had no idea there were so many snakes

-      in my house. Then I had the fellow before the Kadi; he had to pay back all

-      the money he got from my sister and went to prison. But,&rdquo; added

-      Abd-el-Atti, &ldquo;the doctor did not pay back the money for my sister's

-      illness.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Alexandria was the scene of another snake story. The owner of a house

-      there had for tenants an Italian and his wife, whose lease had expired,

-      but who would not vacate the premises. He therefore hired a snake-charmer

-      to go to the house one day when the family were out, and leave snakes in

-      two of the rooms. When the lady returned and found a snake in one room she

-      fled into another, but there another serpent raised his head and hissed at

-      her. She was dreadfully frightened, and sent for the charmer, and had the

-      snakes called out but she declared that she wouldn't occupy such a house

-      another minute. And the family moved out that day of their own accord. A

-      novel writ of ejectment.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the morning we touched bottom as to cold weather, the thermometer at

-      sunrise going down to 47° it did, indeed, as we heard afterwards, go below

-      40° at Wady Haifa the next morning, but the days were sure to be warm

-      enough. The morning is perfectly calm, and the depth of the blueness of

-      the sky, especially as seen over the yellow desert sand and the blackened

-      surface of the sandstone hills, is extraordinary. An artist's

-      representation of this color would be certain to be called an

-      exaggeration. The skies of Lower Egypt are absolutely pale in comparison.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Since we have been in the tropics, the quality of the sky has been the

-      same day and night&mdash;sometimes a turquoise blue, such as on rare days

-      we get in America through a break in the clouds, but exquisitely delicate

-      for all its depth. We passed the Tropic of Cancer in the night, somewhere

-      about Dendodr, and did not see it. I did not know, till afterwards, that

-      there had been any trouble about it. But it seems that it has been moved

-      from Assouan, where Strabo put it and some modern atlases still place it,

-      southward, to a point just below the ruins of the temple of Dendoor, where

-      Osiris and Isis were worshipped. Probably the temple, which is thought to

-      be of the time of Augustus and consequently is little respected by any

-      antiquarian, was not built with any reference to the Tropic of Cancer; but

-      the point of the turning of the sun might well have been marked by a

-      temple to the mysterious deity who personified the sun and who was slain

-      and rose again.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our walk on shore to-day reminded us of a rugged path in Switzerland.

-      Before we come to Kalkeh (which is of no account, except that it is in the

-      great bend below Korosko) the hills of sandstone draw close to the east

-      bank, in some places in sheer precipices, in others leaving a strip of

-      sloping sand. Along the cliff is a narrow donkey-path, which travel for

-      thousands of years has worn deep; and we ascend along it high above the

-      river. Wherever at the foot of the precipices there was a chance to grow a

-      handful of beans or a hill of corn, we found the ground occupied. In one

-      of these lonely recesses we made the acquaintance of an Arab family.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Walking rapidly, I saw something in the path, and held my foot just in

-      time to avoid stepping upon a naked brown baby, rather black than brown,

-      as a baby might be who spent his time outdoors in the sun without any

-      umbrella.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;By Jorge! a nice plumpee little chile,&rdquo; cried Abd-el-Atti, who is fond of

-      children, and picks up and shoulders the boy, who shews no signs of fear

-      and likes the ride.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We come soon upon his parents. The man was sitting on a rock smoking a

-      pipe. The woman, dry and withered, was picking some green leaves and

-      blossoms, of which she would presently make a sort of <i>purée</i>, that

-      appears to be a great part of the food of these people. They had three

-      children. Their farm was a small piece of the sloping bank, and was in

-      appearance exactly like a section of sandy railroad embankment grown to

-      weeds. They had a few beans and some squash or pumpkin vines, and there

-      were remains of a few hills of doora which had been harvested.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      While the dragoman talked with the family, I climbed up to their dwelling,

-      in a ravine in the rocks. The house was of the simplest architecture&mdash;a

-      circular stone enclosure, so loosely laid up that you could anywhere put

-      your hand through it. Over a segment of this was laid some cornstalks, and

-      under these the piece of matting was spread for the bed. That matting was

-      the only furniture of the house. All their clothes the family had on them,

-      and those were none too many&mdash;they didn't hold out to the boy. And

-      the mercury goes down to 470 these mornings! Before the opening of this

-      shelter, was a place for a fire against the rocks, and a saucepan,

-      water-jar, and some broken bottles The only attraction about this is its

-      simplicity. Probably this is the country-place of the proprietor, where he

-      retires for &ldquo;shange of air&rdquo; during the season when his crops are maturing,

-      and then moves into town under the palm-trees during the heat of summer.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Talking about Mohammed (we are still walking by the shore) I found that

-      Abd-el-Atti had never heard the legend of the miraculous suspension of the

-      Prophet's coffin between heaven and earth; no Moslem ever believed any

-      such thing; no Moslem ever heard of it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then there isn't any tradition or notion of that sort among Moslems?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, sir. Who said it?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, it's often alluded to in English literature&mdash;by Mr-Carlyle for

-      one, I think.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What for him say that? I tink he must put something in his book to make

-      it sell. How could it? Every year since Mohammed died, pilgrims been make

-      to his grave, where he buried in the ground; shawl every year carried to

-      cover it; always buried in that place. No Moslem tink that.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Once a good man, a Walee of Fez, a friend of the Prophet, was visited by

-      a vision and by the spirit of the Prophet, and he was gecited (excited) to

-      go to Mecca and see him. When he was come near in the way, a messenger

-      from the Prophet came to the Walee, and told him not to come any nearer;

-      that he should die and be buried in the spot where he then was. And it was

-      so. His tomb you see it there now before you come to Mecca.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When Mohammed was asked the reason why he would not permit the Walee to

-      come to his tomb to see him, he said that the Walee was a great friend of

-      his, and if he came to his tomb he should feel bound to rise and see him;

-      and he ought not to do that, for the time of the world was not yet fully

-      come; if he rose from his tomb, it would be finish, the world would be at

-      an end. Therefore he was 'bliged to refuse his friend.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nobody doubt he buried in the ground. But Ali, different. Ali, the

-      son-in-law of Mohammed (married his daughter Fat'meh, his sons Hasan and

-      Hoseyn,) died in Medineh. When he died, he ordered that he should be put

-      in a coffin, and said that in the morning there would come from the desert

-      a man with a dromedary; that his coffin should be bound upon the back of

-      the dromedary, and let go. In the morning, as was foretold, the man

-      appeared, leading a dromedary; his head was veiled except his eyes. The

-      coffin was bound upon the back of the beast, and the three went away into

-      the desert; and no man ever saw either of them more, or knows, to this

-      day, where Ali is buried. Whether it was a man or an angel with the

-      dromedary, God knows!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Getting round the great bend at Korosko and Amada is the most vexatious

-      and difficult part of the Nile navigation. The distance is only about

-      eight miles, but the river takes a freak here to run south-south-east, and

-      as the wind here is usually north-north-west, the boat has both wind and

-      current against it. But this is not all; it is impossible to track on the

-      west bank on account of the shallows and sandbars, and the channel on the

-      east side is beset with dangerous rocks. We thought ourselves fortunate in

-      making these eight miles in two days, and one of them was a very exciting

-      day. The danger was in stranding the dahabeëh on the rocks, and being

-      compelled to leave her; and our big boat was handled with great

-      difficulty.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Traders and travelers going to the Upper Nile leave the river at Korosko.

-      Here begins the direct desert route&mdash;as utterly waste, barren and

-      fatiguing as any in Africa&mdash;to Aboo Hamed, Sennaar and Kartoom. The

-      town lies behind a fringe of palms on the river, and backed by high and

-      savage desert mountains.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we pass we see on the high bank piles of merchandise and the white

-      tents of the caravans.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This is still the region of slavery. Most of the Arabs, poor as they

-      appear, own one or two slaves, got from Sennaar or Darfoor&mdash;though

-      called generally Nubians. We came across a Sennaar girl to day of perhaps

-      ten years of age, hoeing alone in the field. The poor creature, whose

-      ideas were as scant as her clothing, had only a sort of animal

-      intelligence; she could speak a little Arabic, however (much more than we

-      could&mdash;speaking of intelligence!) and said she did not dare come with

-      us for fear her mistress would beat her. The slave trade is, however,

-      greatly curtailed by the expeditions of the Khedive. The bright Abyssinian

-      boy, Ahmed, whom we have on board, was brought from his home across the

-      Red Sea by way of Mecca. This is one of the ways by which a few slaves

-      still sift into Cairo.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are working along in sight of Korosko all day. Just above it, on some

-      rocks in the channel, lies a handsome dahabeëh belonging to a party of

-      English gentlemen, which went on a week ago; touched upon concealed rocks

-      in the evening as the crew were tracking, was swung further on by the

-      current, and now lies high and almost dry, the Nile falling daily, in a

-      position where she must wait for the rise next summer. The boat is

-      entirely uninjured and no doubt might have been got off the first day, if

-      there had only been mechanical skill in the crew. The governor at Derr

-      sent down one hundred and fifty men, who hauled and heaved at it two or

-      three days, with no effect. Half a dozen Yankees, with a couple of

-      jack-screws, and probably with only logs for rollers, would have set it

-      afloat. The disaster is exceedingly annoying to the gentlemen, who have,

-      however, procured a smaller boat from Wady Haifa in which to continue

-      their voyage. We are several hours in getting past these two boats, and

-      accomplish it not without a tangling of rigging, scraping off of paint,

-      smashing of deck rails, and the expenditure of a whole dictionary of

-      Arabic. Our Arabs never see but one thing at a time. If they are getting

-      the bow free, the stay-ropes and stern must take care of themselves. If,

-      by simple heedlessness, we are letting the yard of another boat rip into

-      our rigging, God wills it. While we are in this confusion and excitement,

-      the dahabeëh of General McClellan and half a dozen in company, sweep down

-      past us, going with wind and current.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a bright and delicious Sunday morning that we are still tracking

-      above Korosko. To-day is the day the pilgrims to Mecca spend upon the

-      mountain of Arafat. Tomorrow they sacrifice; our crew will celebrate it by

-      killing a sheep and eating it&mdash;and it is difficult to see where the

-      sacrifice comes in for them. The Moslems along this shore lost their

-      reckoning, mistook the day, and sacrificed yesterday.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This is not the only thing, however, that keeps this place in our memory.

-      We saw here a pretty woman. Considering her dress, hair, the manner in

-      which she had been brought up, and her looks, a tolerably pretty woman; a

-      raving beauty in comparison with her comrades. She has a slight cast, in

-      one eye, that only shows for a moment occasionally and then disappears. If

-      these feeble tributary lines ever meet that eye, I beg her to know that,

-      by reason of her slight visual defect, she is like a revolving light, all

-      the more brilliant when she flashes out.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We lost time this morning, were whirled about in eddies and drifted on

-      sandbars, owing to contradictory opinions among our navigators, none of

-      whom seem to have the least sconce. They generally agree, however, not to

-      do anything that the pilot orders. Our pilot from Philæ to Wady Haifa and

-      back, is a Barâbra, and one of the reises of the Cataract, a fellow very

-      tall, and thin as a hop-pole, with a withered face and a high forehead.

-      His garments a white cotton nightgown without sleeves, a brown over-gown

-      with flowing sleeves, both reaching to the ankles, and a white turban. He

-      is barefooted and barelegged, and, in his many excursions into the river

-      to explore sandbars, I have noticed a hole where he has stuck his knee

-      through his nightgown. His stature and his whole bearing have in them

-      something, I know not what, of the theatrical air of the Orient.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He had a quarrel to day with the crew, for the reason mentioned above, in

-      which he was no doubt quite right, a quarrel conducted as usual with an

-      extraordinary expense of words and vituperation. In his inflamed remarks,

-      he at length threw out doubts about the mother of one of the crew, and

-      probably got something back that enraged him still more. While the wrangle

-      went on, the crew had gathered about their mess-dish on the forward deck,

-      squatting in a circle round it, and dipping out great mouthfuls of the <i>puree</i>

-      with the right hand. The pilot paced the upper deck, and his voice, which

-      is like that of many waters, was lifted up in louder and louder

-      lamentations, as the other party grew more quiet and were occupied with

-      their dinner&mdash;throwing him a loose taunt now and then, followed by a

-      chorus of laughter. He strode back and forth, swinging his arms, and

-      declaring that he would leave the boat, that he would not stay where he

-      was so treated, that he would cast himself into the river.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When you do, you'd better leave your clothes behind,&rdquo; suggested

-      Abd-el-Atti.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Upon this cruel sarcasm he was unable to contain himself longer. He strode

-      up and down, raised high his voice, and tore his hair and rent his

-      garments&mdash;the supreme act of Oriental desperation. I had often read

-      of this performance, both in the Scriptures and in other Oriental

-      writings, but I had never seen it before. The manner in which he tore his

-      hair and rent his garments was as follows, to wit:&mdash;He almost

-      entirely unrolled his turban, doing it with an air of perfect

-      recklessness; and then he carefully wound it again round his

-      smoothly-shaven head. That stood for tearing his hair. He then swung his

-      long arms aloft, lifted up his garment above his head, and with desperate

-      force, appeared to be about to rend it in twain. But he never started a

-      seam nor broke a thread. The nightgown wouldn't have stood much nonsense.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the midst of his most passionate outburst, he went forward and filled

-      his pipe, and then returned to his tearing and rending and his

-      lamentations. The picture of a strong man in grief is always touching.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The country along here is very pretty, the curved shore for miles being a

-      continual palm-grove, and having a considerable strip of soil which the

-      sakiya irrigation makes very productive. Beyond this rise mountains of

-      rocks in ledges; and when we climb them we see only a waste desert of rock

-      strewn with loose shale and, further inland, black hills of sandstone,

-      which thickly cover the country all the way to the Red Sea.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Under the ledges are the habitations of the people, square enclosures of

-      stone and clay of considerable size, with interior courts and kennels. One

-      of them&mdash;the only sign of luxury we have seen in Nubia&mdash;had a

-      porch in front of it covered with palm boughs. The men are well-made and

-      rather prepossessing in appearance, and some of them well-dressed&mdash;they

-      had no doubt made the voyage to Cairo; the women are hideous without

-      exception. It is no pleasure to speak thus continually of woman; and I am

-      sometimes tempted to say that I see here the brown and bewitching maids,

-      with the eyes of the gazelle and the form of the houri, which gladden the

-      sight of more fortunate voyagers through this idle land; but when I think

-      of the heavy amount of misrepresentation that would be necessary to give

-      any one of these creatures a reputation for good looks abroad, I shrink

-      from the undertaking.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      They are decently covered with black cotton mantles, which they make a

-      show of drawing over the face; but they are perhaps wild rather than

-      modest, and have a sort of animal shyness. Their heads are sights to

-      behold. The hair is all braided in strings, long at the sides and cut off

-      in front, after the style adopted now-a-days for children (and women) in

-      civilized countries, and copied from the young princes, prisoners in the

-      Tower. Each round strand of hair hasa dab of clay on the end of it. The

-      whole is drenched with castor-oil, and when the sun shines on it, it is as

-      pleasant to one sense as to another. They have flattish noses, high

-      cheek-bones, and always splendid teeth; and they all, young girls as well

-      as old women, hold tobacco in their under lip and squirt out the juice

-      with placid and scientific accuracy. They wear two or three strings of

-      trumpery beads and necklaces, bracelets of horn and of greasy leather, and

-      occasionally a finger-ring or two. Nose-rings they wear if they have them;

-      if not, they keep the bore open for one by inserting a kernel of doora.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In going back to the boat we met a party of twenty or thirty of these

-      attractive creatures, who were returning from burying a boy of the

-      village. They came striding over the sand, chattering in shrill and savage

-      tones. Grief was not so weighty on them that they forgot to demand

-      backsheesh, and (unrestrained by the men in the town) their clamor for it

-      was like the cawing of crows; and their noise, when they received little

-      from us, was worse. The tender and loving woman, stricken in grief by

-      death, is, in these regions, when denied backsheesh, an enraged, squawking

-      bird of prey. They left us with scorn in their eyes and abuse on their

-      tongues.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At a place below Korosko we saw a singular custom, in which the women

-      appeared to better advantage. A whole troop of women, thirty or forty of

-      them, accompanied by children, came in a rambling procession down to the

-      Nile, and brought a baby just forty days old. We thought at first that

-      they were about to dip the infant into Father Nile, as an introduction to

-      the fountain of all the blessings of Egypt. Instead of this, however, they

-      sat down on the bank, took kohl and daubed it in the little fellow's eyes.

-      They perform this ceremony by the Nile when the boy is forty days old, and

-      they do it that he may have a fortunate life. Kohl seems to enlarge the

-      pupil, and doubtless it is intended to open the boy's eyes early.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At one of the little settlements to-day the men were very hospitable, and

-      brought us out plates (straw) of sweet dried dates. Those that we did not

-      eat, the sailor with us stuffed into his pocket; our sailors never let a

-      chance of provender slip, and would, so far as capacity &ldquo;to live on the

-      country&rdquo; goes, make good soldiers. The Nubian dates are called the best in

-      Egypt. They are longer than the dates of the Delta, but hard and quite

-      dry. They take the place of coffee here in the complimentary hospitality.

-      Whenever a native invites you to take &ldquo;coffee,&rdquo; and you accept, he will

-      bring you a plate of dates and probably a plate of popped doora, like our

-      popped corn. Coffee seems not to be in use here; even the governors

-      entertain us with dates and popped corn.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are working up the river slowly enough to make the acquaintance of

-      every man, woman, and child on the banks; and a precious lot of

-      acquaintances we shall have. I have no desire to force them upon the

-      public, but it is only by these details that I can hope to give you any

-      idea of the Nubian life.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We stop at night. The moon-and-starlight is something superb. From the

-      high bank under which we are moored, the broad river, the desert opposite,

-      and the mountains, appear in a remote African calm&mdash;a calm only

-      broken by the shriek of the sakiyas which pierce the air above and below

-      us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the sakiya near us, covered with netting to keep off the north wind, is

-      a little boy, patient and black, seated on the pole of the wheel, urging

-      the lean cattle round and round. The little chap is alone and at some

-      distance from the village, and this must be for him lonesome work. The

-      moonlight, through the chinks of the palm-leaf, touches tenderly his

-      pathetic figure, when we look in at the opening, and his small voice

-      utters the one word of Egypt&mdash;&ldquo;backsheesh.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Attracted by a light&mdash;a rare thing in a habitation here&mdash;we walk

-      over to the village. At the end of the high enclosure of a dwelling there

-      is a blaze of fire, which is fed by doora-stalks, and about it squat five

-      women, chattering; the fire lights up their black faces and hair shining

-      with the castor-oil. Four of them are young; and one is old and skinny,

-      and with only a piece of sacking for all clothing. Their husbands are away

-      in Cairo, or up the river with a trading dahabeëh (so they tell our

-      guide); and these poor creatures are left here (it may be for years it may

-      be forever) to dig their own living out of the ground. It is quite the

-      fashion husbands have in this country; but the women are attached to their

-      homes; they have no desire to go elsewhere. And I have no doubt that in

-      Cairo they would pine for the free and simple life of Nubia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These women all want backsheesh, and no doubt will quarrel over the

-      division of the few piastres they have from us. Being such women as I have

-      described, and using tobacco as has been sufficiently described also,

-      crouching about these embers, this group composes as barbaric a picture as

-      one can anywhere see. I need not have gone so far to set such a miserable

-      group; I could have found one as wretched in Pigville (every city has its

-      Pigville)? Yes, but this is characteristic of the country. These people

-      are as good as anybody here. (We have been careful to associate only with

-      the first families.) These women have necklaces and bracelets, and rings

-      in their ears, just like any women, and rings in the hair, twisted in with

-      the clay and castor-oil. And in Pigville one would not have the range of

-      savage rocks, which tower above these huts, whence the jackals, wolves,

-      and gazelles come down to the river, nor the row of palms, nor the Nile,

-      and the sands beyond, yellow in the moonlight.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0044" id="linkimage-0044"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0288.jpg" alt="0288 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0045" id="linkimage-0045"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0289.jpg" alt="0289 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXII.&mdash;LIFE IN THE TROPICS. WADY HALFA.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>URS is the crew to

-      witch the world with noble seamanship. It is like a first-class orchestra,

-      in which all the performers are artists. Ours are all captains. The reïs

-      is merely an elder brother. The pilot is not heeded at all. With so many

-      intentions on board, it is an hourly miracle that we get on at all.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are approaching the capital of Nubia, trying to get round a sharp bend

-      in the river, with wind adverse, current rapid, sandbars on all sides.

-      Most of the crew are in the water ahead, trying to haul us round the point

-      of a sand-spit on which the stream foams, and then swirls in an eddy

-      below. I can see now the Pilot, the long Pilot, who has gone in to feel

-      about for deep water, in his white nightgown, his shaven head, denuded of

-      its turban, shining in the sun, standing in two feet of water, throwing

-      his arms wildly above his head, screaming entreaties, warnings, commands,

-      imprecations upon the sailors in the river and the commanders on the boat.

-      I can see the crew, waist deep, slacking the rope which they have out

-      ahead, stopping to discuss the situation. I can see the sedate reïs on the

-      bow arguing with the raving pilot, the steersman, with his eternal smile,

-      calmly regarding the peril, and the boat swinging helplessly about and

-      going upon the shoals. &ldquo;Stupids,&rdquo; mutters Abd-el-Atti, who is telling his

-      beads rapidly, as he always does in exciting situations.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When at length we pass the point, we catch the breeze so suddenly and go

-      away with it, that there is no time for the men to get on board, and they

-      are obliged to scamper back over the sand-spits to the shore and make a

-      race of it to meet us at Derr. We can see them running in file, dodging

-      along under the palms by the shore, stopping to grab occasionally a squash

-      or a handful of beans for the pot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The capital of Nubia is the New York of this region, not so large, nor so

-      well laid out, nor so handsomely built, but the centre of fashion and the

-      residence of the <i>ton</i>. The governor lives in a whitewashed house,

-      and there is a Sycamore here eight hundred years old, which is I suppose

-      older than the Stuyvesant Pear in New York. The houses are not perched up

-      in the air like tenement buildings for the poor, but aristocratically keep

-      to the ground in one-story rooms; and they are beautifully moulded of a

-      tough clay. The whole town lies under a palm-grove. The elegance of the

-      capital, however, is not in its buildings, but in its women; the ladies

-      who come to the the river to fill their jars are arrayed in the height of

-      the mode. Their hair is twisted and clayed and castoroiled, but, besides

-      this and other garments, they wear an outer robe of black which sweeps the

-      ground for a yard behind, and gives them the grace and dignity that

-      court-robes always give. You will scarcely see longer skirts on Broadway

-      or in a Paris <i>salon</i>. I have, myself, no doubt that the Broadway

-      fashions came from Derr, all except the chignons. Here the ladies wear

-      their own hair.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Making no landing in this town so dangerous to one susceptible to the

-      charms of fashion, we went on, and stopped at night near Ibreem, a lofty

-      precipice, or range of precipices, the southern hill crowned with ruins

-      and fortifications which were last occupied by the Memlooks, half a

-      century and more ago. The night blazed with beauty; the broad river was a

-      smooth mirror, in which the mountains and the scintillating hosts of

-      heaven were reflected. And we saw a phenomenon which I have never seen

-      elsewhere. Not only were the rocky ledges reproduced in a perfect

-      definition of outline, but even in the varieties of shade, in black and

-      reddish-brown color.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Perhaps it needs the affidavits of all the party to the more surprising

-      fact, that we were all on deck next morning before five o'clock, to see

-      the Southern Cross. The moon had set, and these famous stars of the

-      southern sky flashed color and brilliancy like enormous diamonds. &ldquo;Other

-      worlds than ours&rdquo;? I should think so! All these myriads of burning orbs

-      only to illuminate our dahabeëh and a handful of Nubians, who are asleep!

-      The Southern Cross lay just above the horizon and not far from other stars

-      of the first quality. There are I believe only three stars of the first

-      magnitude and one of the second, in this constellation, and they form, in

-      fact, not a cross but an irregular quadrilateral. It needs a vivid

-      imagination and the aid of small stars to get even a semblance of a cross

-      out of it. But if you add to it, as we did, for the foot of the cross, a

-      brilliant in a neighboring constellation, you have a noble cross.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This constellation is not so fine as Orion, and for all we saw, we would

-      not exchange our northern sky for the southern; but this morning we had a

-      rare combination. The Morning Star was blazing in the east; and the Great

-      Bear (who has been nightly sinking lower and lower, until he dips below

-      the horizon) having climbed high up above the Pole in the night, filled

-      the northern sky with light. In this lucid atmosphere the whole heavens

-      from north to south seemed to be crowded with stars of the first size.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      During the morning we walked on the west bank through a castor-oil

-      plantation; many of the plants were good-sized trees, with boles two and a

-      half to three inches through, and apparently twenty-five feet high. They

-      were growing in the yellow sand which had been irrigated by sakiyas, but

-      was then dry, and some of the plants were wilting. We picked up the ripe

-      seeds and broke off some of the fat branches; and there was not water

-      enough in the Nile to wash away the odor afterwards.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Walking back over the great sand-plain towards the range of desert

-      mountains, we came to an artificial mound&mdash;an ash-heap, in fact&mdash;fifty

-      or sixty feet high. At its base is a habitation of several compartments,

-      formed by sticking the stalks of castor-oil plants into the ground, with a

-      roof of the same. Here we found several women with very neat dabs of clay

-      on the ends of their hair-twists, and a profusion of necklaces, rings in

-      the hair and other ornaments&mdash;among them, scraps of gold. The women

-      were hospitable, rather modest than shy, and set before us plates of dried

-      dates; and no one said &ldquo;backsheesh.&rdquo; A better class of people than those

-      below, and more purely Nubian.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It would perhaps pay to dig open this mound. Near it are three small

-      oases, watered by sakiyas, which draw from wells that are not more than

-      twenty feet deep. The water is clear as crystal but not cool. These are

-      ancient Egyptian wells, which have been re-opened within a few years; and

-      the ash-mound is no doubt the <i>débris</i> of a village and an old

-      Egyptian settlement.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At night we are a dozen miles from Aboo Simbel (Ipsamboul), the wind&mdash;which

-      usually in the winter blows with great and steady force from the north in

-      this part of the river&mdash;having taken a fancy to let us see the

-      country.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A morning walk takes us over a rocky desert; the broken shale is

-      distributed as evenly over the sand as if the whole had once been under

-      water, and the shale were a dried mud, cracked in the sun. The miserable

-      dwellings of the natives are under the ledges back of the strip of arable

-      land. The women are shy and wild as hawks, but in the mode; they wear a

-      profusion of glass beads and trail their robes in the dust.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is near this village that we have an opportunity to execute justice. As

-      the crew were tracking, and lifting the rope over a sakiya, the hindmost

-      sailor saw a sheath-knife on the bank, and thrust it into his pocket as he

-      walked on. In five minutes the owner of the knife discovered the robbery,

-      and came to the boat to complain. The sailor denied having the knife, but

-      upon threat of a flogging gave it up. The incident, however, aroused the

-      town, men and women came forth discussing it in a high key, and some

-      foolish fellows threatened to stone our boat. Abd-el-Atti replied that he

-      would stop and give them a chance to do it. Thereupon they apologized; and

-      as there was no wind, the dragoman asked leave to stop and do justice.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A court was organized on shore. Abd-el-Atti sat down on a lump of earth,

-      grasping a marline-spike, the crew squatted in a circle in the high beans,

-      and the culprit was arraigned. The owner testified to his knife, a woman

-      swore she saw the sailor take it, Abd-el-Atti pronounced sentence, and

-      rose to execute it with his stake. The thief was thrown upon the ground

-      and held by two sailors. Abd-el-Atti, resolute and solemn as an

-      executioner, raised the club and brought it down with a tremendous whack&mdash;not

-      however upon the back of the victim, he had at that instant squirmed out

-      of the way. This conduct greatly enraged the minister of justice, who

-      thereupon came at his object with fury, and would no doubt have hit him if

-      the criminal had not got up and ran, screaming, with the sailors and

-      Abd-el-Atti after him. The ground was rough, the legs of Abd-el-Atti are

-      not long and his wind is short. The fellow was caught, and escaped again

-      and again, but the punishment was a mere scrimmage; whenever Abd-el-Atti,

-      in the confusion, could get a chance to strike he did so, but generally

-      hit the ground, sometimes the fellow's gown and perhaps once or twice the

-      man inside, but never to his injury. He roared all the while, that he was

-      no thief, and seemed a good deal more hurt by the charge that he was, than

-      by the stick. The beating was, in short, only a farce laughable from

-      beginning to end, and not a bad sample of Egyptian justice. And it

-      satisfied everybody.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Having put ourselves thus on friendly relations with this village, one of

-      the inhabitants brought down to the boat a letter for the dragoman to

-      interpret. It had been received two weeks before from Alexandria, but no

-      one had been able to read it until our boat stopped here. Fortunately we

-      had the above little difficulty here. The contents of the letter gave the

-      village employment for a month. It brought news of the death of two

-      inhabitants of the place, who were living as servants in Alexandria, one

-      of them a man eighty years old and his son aged sixty.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I never saw grief spread so fast and so suddenly as it did with the

-      uncorking of this vial of bad news. Instantly a lamentation and wild

-      mourning began in all the settlement. It wasn't ten minutes before the

-      village was buried in grief. And, in an incredible short space of time,

-      the news had spread up and down the river, and the grief-stricken began to

-      arrive from other places. Where they came from, I have no idea; it did not

-      seem that we had passed so many women in a week as we saw now They poured

-      in from all along the shore, long strings of them, striding over the sand,

-      throwing up their garments, casting dust on their heads (and all of it

-      stuck), howling, flocking like wild geese to a rendezvous, and filling the

-      air with their clang. They were arriving for an hour or two.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The men took no part in this active demonstration. They were seated

-      gravely before the house in which the bereaved relatives gathered; and

-      there I found Abd-el-Atti, seated also, and holding forth upon the

-      inevitable coming of death, and saying that there was nothing to be

-      regretted in this case, for the time of these men had come. If it hadn't

-      come, they wouldn't have died. Not so?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The women crowded into the enclosure and began mourning in a vigorous

-      manner. The chief ones grouping themselves in an irregular ring, cried

-      aloud: &ldquo;O that he had died here!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;O that I had seen his face when he died;&rdquo; repeating these lamentations

-      over and over again, throwing up the arms, and then the legs in a kind of

-      barbaric dance as they lamented, and uttering long and shrill ululations

-      at the end of each sentence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      To-day they kill a calf and feast, and tomorrow the lamentations and the

-      African dance will go on, and continue for a week. These people are all

-      feeling. It is a heathen and not a Moslem custom however; and whether it

-      is of negro origin or of ancient Egyptian I do not know, but probably the

-      latter. The ancient Egyptian women are depicted in the tombs mourning in

-      this manner; and no doubt the Jews also so bewailed, when they &ldquo;lifted up

-      their voices&rdquo; and cast dust on their heads, as we saw these Nubians do. It

-      is an unselfish pleasure to an Eastern woman to &ldquo;lift up the voice.&rdquo; The

-      heavy part of the mourning comes upon the women, who appear to enjoy it.

-      It is their chief occupation, after the carrying of water and the grinding

-      of doora, and probably was so with the old race; these people certainly

-      keep the ancient customs; they dress the hair, for one thing, very much as

-      the Egyptians did, even to the castor-oil.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At this village, as in others in Nubia, the old women are the

-      corn-grinders. These wasted skeletons sit on the ground before a stone

-      with a hollow in it; in this they bruise the doora with a smaller stone;

-      the flour is then moistened and rubbed to a paste. The girls and younger

-      women, a great part of the time, are idling about in their finery. But,

-      then, they have the babies and the water to bring; and it must be owned

-      that some of them work in the field&mdash;grubbing grass and stuff for

-      &ldquo;greens&rdquo; and for fuel, more than the men. The men do the heavy work of

-      irrigation.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But we cannot stay to mourn with those who mourn a week in this style; and

-      in the evening, when a strong breeze springs up, we spread our sail and

-      go, in the &ldquo;daylight of the moon,&rdquo; flying up the river, by black and weird

-      shores; and before midnight pass lonesome Aboo Simbel, whose colossi sit

-      in the moonlight with the impassive mien they have held for so many ages.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the morning, with an easy wind, we are on the last stage of our

-      journey. We are almost at the limit of dahabeëh navigation. The country is

-      less interesting than it was below. The river is very broad, and we look

-      far over the desert on each side. The strip of cultivated soil is narrow

-      and now and again disappears altogether. To the east are seen, since we

-      passed Aboo Simbel, the pyramid hills, some with truncated tops, scattered

-      without plan over the desert. It requires no stretch of fancy to think

-      that these mathematically built hills are pyramids erected by races

-      anterior to Menes, and that all this waste that they dot is a necropolis

-      of that forgotten people.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The sailors celebrate the finishing of the journey by a ceremony of state

-      and dignity. The chief actor is Farrag, the wit of the crew. Suddenly he

-      appears as the Governor of Wady Haifa, with horns on his head, face

-      painted, a long beard, hair sprinkled with flour, and dressed in shaggy

-      sheepskin. He has come on board to collect his taxes. He opens his court,

-      with the sailors about him, holding a long marline spike which he pretends

-      to smoke as a chibook. His imitation of the town dignitaries along the

-      river is very comical, and his remarks are greeted with roars of laughter.

-      One of the crew acts as his bailiff and summons all the officers and

-      servants of the boat before him, who are thrown down upon the deck and

-      bastinadoed, and released on payment of backsheesh. The travelers also

-      have to go before the court and pay a fine for passing through the

-      Governor's country. The Governor is treated with great deference till the

-      end of the farce, when one of his attendants sets fire to his beard, and

-      another puts him out with a bucket of water.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      'The end of our journey is very much like the end of everything else&mdash;there

-      is very little in it. When we follow anything to its utmost we are certain

-      to be disappointed&mdash;simply because it is the nature of things to

-      taper down to a point. I suspect it must always be so with the traveler,

-      and that the farther he penetrates into any semi-savage continent, the

-      meaner and ruder will he find the conditions of life. When we come to the

-      end, ought we not to expect the end?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We have come a thousand miles not surely to see Wady Haifa but to see the

-      thousand miles. And yet Wady Haifa, figuring as it does on the map, the

-      gate of the great Second Cataract, the head of navigation, the destination

-      of so many eager travelers, a point of arrival and departure of caravans,

-      might be a little less insignificant than it is. There is the thick growth

-      of palm-trees under which the town lies, and beyond it, several miles, on

-      the opposite, west bank, is the cliff of Aboosir, which looks down upon

-      the cataract; but for this noble landmark, this dominating rock, the

-      traveler could not feel that he had arrived anywhere, and would be so

-      weakened by the shock of arriving nowhere at the end of so long a journey

-      (as a man is by striking a blow in the air) that he would scarcely have

-      strength to turn back.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At the time of our arrival, however, Wady Haifa has some extra life. An

-      expedition of the government is about to start for Darfoor. When we moor

-      at the east bank, we see on the west bank the white tents of a military

-      encampment set in right lines on the yellow sand; near them the government

-      storehouse and telegraph-office, and in front a mounted howitzer and a

-      Gatling gun. No contrast could be stronger. Here is Wady Halfah, in the

-      doze of an African town, a collection of mud-huts under the trees,

-      listless, apathetic, sitting at the door of a vast region, without either

-      purpose or ambition. There, yonder, is a piece of life out of our restless

-      age. There are the tents, the guns, the instruments, the soldiers and

-      servants of a new order of things for Africa. We hear the trumpet call to

-      drill. The flag which is planted in the sand in front of the commander's

-      tent is to be borne to the equator.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But this is not a military expedition. It is a corps of scientific

-      observation, simply. Since the Sultan of Darfoor is slain and the

-      Khedive's troops have occupied his capital, and formally attached that

-      empire to Egypt, it is necessary to know something of its extent,

-      resources, and people, concerning all of which we have only the uncertain

-      reports of traders. It is thought by some that the annexation of Darfoor

-      adds five millions to the population of the Khedive's growing empire. In

-      order that he may know what he has conquered, he has sent out exploring

-      expeditions, of which this is one. It is under command of Purdy Bey

-      assisted by Lieutenant-Colonel Mason, two young American officers of the

-      Khedive, who fought on opposite sides in our civil war. They are provided

-      with instruments for making all sorts of observations, and are to report

-      upon the people and the physical character and capacity of the country.

-      They expect to be absent three years, and after surveying Darfoor, will

-      strike southward still, and perhaps contribute something to the solution

-      of the Nile problem. For escort they have a hundred soldiers only, but a

-      large train of camels and intendants. In its purpose it is an expedition

-      that any civilized ruler might be honored for setting on foot. It is a

-      brave overture of civilization to barbarism. The nations are daily drawing

-      nearer together. As we sit in the telegraph-office here, messages are

-      flashed from Cairo to Kartoom.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0046" id="linkimage-0046"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0298.jpg" alt="0298 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXIII.&mdash;APPROACHING THE SECOND CATARACT.

-    </h2>

-    <p>

-      THERE are two ways of going to see the Second Cataract and the cliff of

-      Aboosir, which is about six miles above Wady Haifa; one is by small boat,

-      the other by dromedary over the desert. We chose the latter, and the

-      American officers gave us a mount and their company also. Their camp

-      presented a lively scene when we crossed over to it in the morning. They

-      had by requisition pressed into their service three or four hundred

-      camels, and were trying to select out of the lot half a dozen fit to ride.

-      The camels were, in fact, mostly burden camels and not trained to the

-      riding-saddle; besides, half of them were poor, miserable rucks of bones,

-      half-starved to death; for the Arabs, whose business it had been to feed

-      them, had stolen the government supplies. An expedition which started

-      south two weeks ago lost more than a hundred camels, from starvation,

-      before it reached Semneh, thirty-five miles up the river. They had become

-      so weak, that they wilted and died on the first hard march. For his size

-      and knotty appearance, the camel is the most disappointing of beasts. He

-      is a sheep as to endurance. As to temper, he is vindictive.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Authorities differ in regard to the distinction between the camel and the

-      dromedary. Some say that there are no camels in Egypt, that they are all

-      dromedaries, having one hump; and that the true camel is the Bactrian,

-      which has two humps. It is customary here, however, to call those camels

-      which are beasts of burden, and those dromedaries which are trained to

-      ride; the distinction being that between the cart-horse and the

-      saddle-horse.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The camel-drivers, who are as wild Arabs as you will meet anywhere, select

-      a promising beast and drag him to the tent. He is reluctant to come; he

-      rebels against the saddle; he roars all the time it is being secured on

-      him, and when he is forced to kneel, not seldom he breaks away from his

-      keepers and shambles off into the desert. The camel does this always; and

-      every morning on a inarch he receives his load only after a struggle. The

-      noise of the drivers is little less than the roar of the beasts, and with

-      their long hair, shaggy breasts, and bare legs they are not less barbarous

-      in appearance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mounting the camel is not difficult, but it has some sweet surprises for

-      the novice. The camel lies upon the ground with all his legs shut up under

-      him like a jackknife. You seat yourself in the broad saddle, and cross

-      your legs in front of the pommel. Before you are ready, something like a

-      private earthquake begins under you. The camel raises his hindquarters

-      suddenly, and throws you over upon his neck; and, before you recover from

-      that he straightens up his knees and gives you a jerk over his tail; and,

-      while you are not at all certain what has happened, he begins to move off

-      with that dislocated walk which sets you into a see-saw motion, a waving

-      backwards and forwards in the capacious saddle. Not having a hinged back

-      fit for this movement, you lash the beast with your koorbâsh to make him

-      change his gait. He is nothing loth to do it, and at once starts into a

-      high trot which sends you a foot into the air at every step, bobs you from

-      side to side, drives your backbone into your brain, and makes castanets of

-      your teeth. Capital exercise. When you have enough of it, you pull up, and

-      humbly enquire what is the heathen method of riding a dromedary.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is simple enough. Shake the loose halter-rope (he has neither bridle

-      nor bit) against his neck as you swing the whip, and the animal at once

-      swings into an easy pace; that is, a pretty easy pace, like that of a

-      rocking-horse. But everything depends upon the camel. I happened to mount

-      one that it was a pleasure to ride, after I brought him to the proper gait

-      We sailed along over the smooth sand, with level keel, and (though the

-      expression is not nautical) on cushioned feet. But it is hard work for the

-      camel, this constant planting of his spongy feet in the yielding sand.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our way lay over the waste and rolling desert (the track of the southern

-      caravans,) at some little distance from the river; and I suppose six miles

-      of this travel are as good as a hundred. The sun was blazing hot, the

-      yellow sand glowed in it, and the far distance of like sand and bristling

-      ledges of black rock shimmered in waves of heat. No tree, no blade of

-      grass, nothing but blue sky bending over a sterile land. Yet, how sweet

-      was the air, how pure the breath of the desert, how charged with electric

-      life the rays of the sun!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The rock Aboosir, the <i>ultima Thule</i> of pleasure-travel on the Nile,

-      is a sheer precipice of perhaps two to three hundred feet above the Nile;

-      but this is high enough to make it one of the most extensive lookouts in

-      Egypt. More desert can be seen here than from almost anywhere else. The

-      Second Cataract is spread out beneath us. It is less a &ldquo;fall&rdquo; even than

-      the First. The river is from a half mile to a mile in breadth and for a

-      distance of some five miles is strewn with trap-rock, boulders and

-      shattered fragments, through which the Nile swiftly forces itself in a

-      hundred channels. There are no falls of any noticeable height. Here, on

-      the flat rock, where we eat our luncheon, a cool breeze blows from the

-      north. Here on this eagle's perch, commanding a horizon of desert and

-      river for a hundred miles, fond visitors have carved their immortal names,

-      following an instinct of ambition that is well-nigh universal, in the

-      belief no doubt that the name will have for us who come after all the

-      significance it has in the eyes of him who carved it. But I cannot recall

-      a single name I read there; I am sorry that I cannot, for it seems a

-      pitiful and cruel thing to leave them there in their remote obscurity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      From this rock we look with longing to the southward, into vast Africa,

-      over a land we may not further travel, which we shall probably never see

-      again; or the far horizon the blue peaks of Dongola are visible, and

-      beyond these we know are the ruins of Meroë, that ancient city, the

-      capital of that Ethiopian Queen, Candace, whose dark face is lighted up by

-      a momentary gleam from the Scriptures.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On the beach at Wady Haifa are half a dozen trading-vessels, loaded with

-      African merchandise for Cairo, and in the early morning there is a great

-      hubbub among the merchants and the caravan owners. A sudden dispute arises

-      among a large group around the ferry-boat, and there ensues that excited

-      war, or movement, which always threatens to come to violence in the East

-      but never does; Niagaras of talk are poured out; the ebb and flow of the

-      parti-colored crowd, and the violent and not ungraceful gestures make a

-      singular picture.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Bales of merchandise are piled on shore, cases of brandy and cottons from

-      England, to keep the natives of Soudan warm inside and out; Greek

-      merchants splendid in silk attire, are lounging amid their goods, slowly

-      bargaining for their transportation. Groups of camels are kneeling on the

-      sand with their Bedaween drivers. These latter are of the Bisharee Arabs,

-      and free sons of the desert. They wear no turban, and their only garment

-      is a long strip of brown cotton thrown over the shoulder so as to leave

-      the right arm free, and then wound about the waist and loins. The black

-      hair is worn long, braided in strands which shine with oil, and put behind

-      the ears. This sign of effeminacy is contradicted by their fine, athletic

-      figures; by a bold, strong eye, and a straight, resolute nose.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Wady Haifa (<i>wady</i> is valley, and <i>Haifa</i> is a sort of coarse

-      grass) has a post-office and a mosque, but no bazaar, nor any center of

-      attraction. Its mud-houses are stretched along the shore for a mile and a

-      half, and run back into the valley, under the lovely palm-grove; but there

-      are no streets and no roads through the deep sand. There is occasionally a

-      sign of wealth in an extensive house, that is, one consisting of several

-      enclosed courts and apartments within one large mud-wall; and in one we

-      saw a garden, watered by a sakiya, and two latticed windows in a second

-      story looking on it, as if some one had a harem here which was handsome

-      enough to seclude..

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We called on the Kadi, the judicial officer of this district, whose house

-      is a specimen of the best, and as good as is needed in this land of the

-      sun. On one side of an open enclosure is his harem; in the other is the

-      reception-room where he holds court. This is a mud-hut, with nothing

-      whatever in it except some straw mats. The Kadi sent for rugs, and we sat

-      on the mud-bench outside, while attendants brought us dates, popped-corn,

-      and even coffee; and then they squatted in a row in front of us and stared

-      at us, as we did at them. The ladies went into the harem, and made the

-      acquaintance of the judge's one wife and his dirty children. Not without

-      cordiality and courtesy of manner these people; but how simple are the

-      terms of life here; and what a thoroughly African picture this is, the

-      mud-huts, the sand, the palms, the black-skinned groups.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The women here are modestly clad, but most of them frightfully ugly and

-      castor-oily; yet we chanced upon two handsome girls, or rather married

-      women, of fifteen or sixteen. One of them had regular features and a very

-      pretty expression, and evidently knew she was a beauty, for she sat apart

-      on the ground, keeping her head covered most of the time, and did not join

-      the women who thronged about us to look with wonder at the costume of our

-      ladies and to beg for backsheesh. She was loaded with necklaces, bracelets

-      of horn and ivory, and had a ring on every finger. There was in her manner

-      something of scorn and resentment at our intrusion; she no doubt had her

-      circle of admirers and was queen in it. Who are these pale creatures who

-      come to stare at my charms? Have they no dark pretty women in their own

-      land? And she might well have asked, what would she do&mdash;a beauty of

-      New York city, let us say&mdash;when she sat combing her hair on the

-      marble doorsteps of her father's palace in Madison Square, if a lot of

-      savage, impolite Nubians, should come and stand in a row in front of her

-      and stare?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The only shops here are the temporary booths of traders, birds of passage

-      to or from the equatorial region. Many of them have pitched their gay

-      tents under the trees, making the scene still more like a fair or an

-      encampment for the night. In some are displayed European finery and

-      trumpery, manufactured for Africa, calico in striking colors, glass beads

-      and cotton cloth; others are coffee-shops, where men are playing at a sort

-      of draughts&mdash;the checker-board being holes made in the sand and the

-      men pebbles. At the door of a pretty tent stood a young and handsome

-      Syrian merchant, who cordially invited us in, and pressed upon us the

-      hospitality of his house. He was on his way to Darfoor, and might remain

-      there two or three years, trading with the natives. We learned this by the

-      interpretation of his girl-wife, who spoke a little barbarous French. He

-      had married her only recently, and this was their bridal tour, we

-      inferred. Into what risks and perils was this pretty woman going? She was

-      Greek, from one of the islands, and had the <i>naïvete</i> and freshness

-      of both youth and ignorance. Her fair complexion was touched by the sun

-      and ruddy with health. Her blue eyes danced with the pleasure of living.

-      She wore her hair natural, with neither oil nor ornament, but cut short

-      and pushed behind the ears. For dress she had a simple calico gown of pale

-      yellow, cut high in the waist, <i>à la Grecque</i>, the prettiest costume

-      women ever assumed. After our long regimen of the hideous women of the

-      Nile, plastered with dirt, soaked in oil, and hung with tawdry ornaments,

-      it may be imagined how welcome was this vision of a woman, handsome,

-      natural and clean, with neither the shyness of an animal nor the

-      brazenness of a Ghawazee.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our hospitable entertainers hastened to set before us what they had; a

-      bottle of Maraschino was opened, very good European cigars were produced,

-      and a plate of pistachio nuts, to eat with the cordial. The artless Greek

-      beauty cracked the nuts for us with her shining teeth, laughing all the

-      while; urging us to eat, and opening her eyes in wonder that we would not

-      eat more, and would not carry away more. It must be confessed that we had

-      not much conversation, but we made it up in constant smiling, and ate our

-      pistachios and sipped our cordial in great glee. What indeed could we have

-      done more with words, or how have passed a happier hour? We perfectly

-      understood each other; we drank each other's healths; we were civilized

-      beings, met by chance in a barbarous place; we were glad to meet, and we

-      parted in the highest opinion of each other, with gay salaams, and not in

-      tears. What fate I wonder had these handsome and adventurous merchants

-      among the savages of Darfoor and Kordofan?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The face of our black boy, Gohah, was shining with pleasure when we walked

-      away, and he said with enthusiasm, pointing to the tent, &ldquo;<i>Sitt tyeb,

-      quéi-is</i>.&rdquo; Accustomed as he was to the African beauties of Soudan, I do

-      not wonder that Gohah thought this &ldquo;lady&rdquo; both &ldquo;good&rdquo; and &ldquo;beautiful.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We have seen Wady Haifa. The expedition to Darfoor is packing up to begin

-      its desert march in the morning. Our dahabeëh has been transformed and

-      shorn of a great part of its beauty. We are to see no more the great

-      bird-wing sail. The long yard has been taken down and is slung above us

-      the whole length of the deck. The twelve big sweeps are put in place; the

-      boards of the forward deck are taken up, so that the Lowers will have

-      place for their feet as they sit on the beams. They sit fronting the

-      cabin, and rise up and take a step forward at each stroke, settling slowly

-      back to their seats. On the mast is rigged the short stern-yard and sail,

-      to be rarely spread. Hereafter we are to float, and drift, and whirl, and

-      try going with the current and against the wind.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At ten o'clock of a moonlight night, a night of summer heat, we swing off,

-      the rowers splashing their clumsy oars and setting up a shout and chorus

-      in minor, that sound very much like a wail, and would be quite appropriate

-      if they were ferrymen of the Styx. We float a few miles, and then go

-      aground and go to bed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next day we have the same unchanging sky, the same groaning and

-      creaking of the sakiyas, and in addition the irregular splashing of the

-      great sweeps as we slide down the river. Two crocodiles have the

-      carelessness to show themselves on a sand-island, one a monstrous beast,

-      whose size is magnified every time we think how his great back sunk into

-      the water when our sandal was yet beyond rifle-shot. Of course he did not

-      know that we carried only a shot-gun and intended only to amuse him, or he

-      would not have been in such haste.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The wind is adverse, we gain little either by oars or by the current, and

-      at length take to the shore, where something novel always rewards us. This

-      time we explore some Roman ruins, with round arches of unburned bricks,

-      and find in them also the unmistakable sign of Roman occupation, the burnt

-      bricks&mdash;those thin slabs, eleven inches long, five wide, and two

-      thick, which, were a favorite form with them, bricks burnt for eternity,

-      and scattered all over the East wherever the Roman legions went.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Beyond these is a village, not a deserted village, but probably the

-      laziest in the world. Men, and women for the most part too, were lounging

-      about and in the houses, squatting in the dust, in absolute indolence,

-      except that the women, all of them, were suckling their babies, and

-      occasionally one of them was spinning a little cotton-thread on a spindle

-      whirled in the hand. The men are more cleanly than the women, in every

-      respect in better condition, some of them bright, fine-looking fellows.

-      One of them showed us through his house, which was one of the finest in

-      the place, and he was not a little proud of it. It was a large mud-wall

-      enclosure. Entering by a rude door we came into an open space, from which

-      opened several doors, irregular breaks in the wall, closed by shackling

-      doors of wood. Stepping over the sill and stooping, we entered the

-      living-rooms. First, is the kitchen; the roof of this is the sky&mdash;you

-      are always liable to find yourself outdoors in these houses&mdash;and the

-      fire for cooking is built in one corner. Passing through another hole in

-      the wall we come to a sleeping-room, where were some jars of dates and

-      doora, and a mat spread in one corner to lie on. Nothing but an

-      earth-floor, and dust and grime everywhere. A crowd of tittering girls

-      were flitting about, peeping at us from doorways, and diving into them

-      with shrill screams, like frightened rabbits, if we approached.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Abd-el-Atti raises a great laugh by twisting a piastre into the front lock

-      of hair of the ugliest hag there, calling her his wife, and drawing her

-      arm under his to take her to the boat. It is an immense joke. The old lady

-      is a widow and successfully conceals her reluctance. The tying the piece

-      of silver in the hair is a sign of marriage. All the married women wear a

-      piastre or some scale of silver on the forehead; the widows leave off this

-      ornament from the twist; the young girls show, by the hair plain, except

-      always the clay dabs, that they are in the market. The simplicity of these

-      people is noticeable. I saw a woman seated on the ground, in dust three

-      inches thick, leaning against the mud-bank in front of the house, having

-      in her lap a naked baby; on the bank sat another woman, braiding the hair

-      of the first, wetting it with muddy water, and working into it sand, clay,

-      and tufts of dead hair. What a way to spend Sunday!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This is, on the whole, a model village. The people appear to have nothing,

-      and perhaps they want nothing. They do nothing, and I suppose they would

-      thank no one for coming to increase their wants and set them to work.

-      Nature is their friend.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I wonder what the staple of conversation of these people is, since the

-      weather offers nothing, being always the same, and always fine.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A day and a night and a day we fight adverse winds, and make no headway.

-      One day we lie at Farras, a place of no consequence, but having, almost as

-      a matter of course, ruins of the time of the Romans and the name Rameses

-      II. cut on a rock. In a Roman wall we find a drain-tile exactly like those

-      we use now. In the evening, after moon-rise, we drop down to Aboo Simbel.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0047" id="linkimage-0047"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0306.jpg" alt="0306 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0048" id="linkimage-0048"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0307.jpg" alt="0307 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXIV.&mdash;GIANTS IN STONE.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HEN daylight came

-      the Colossi of Aboo Simbel (or Ipsambool) were looking into our windows;

-      greeting the sunrise as they have done every morning for three thousand

-      five hundred years; and keeping guard still over the approach to the

-      temple, whose gods are no longer anywhere recognized, whose religion

-      disappeared from the earth two thousand years ago:&mdash;vast images,

-      making an eternity of time in their silent waiting.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The river here runs through an unmitigated desert. On the east the sand is

-      brown, on the west the sand is yellow; that is the only variety. There is

-      no vegetation, there are no habitations, there is no path on the shore,

-      there are no footsteps on the sand, no one comes to break the spell of

-      silence. To find such a monument of ancient power and art as this temple

-      in such a solitude enhances the visitor's wonder and surprise. The

-      Pyramids, Thebes, and Aboo Simbel are the three wonders of Egypt. But the

-      great temple of Aboo Simbel is unique. It satisfies the mind. It is

-      complete in itself, it is the projection of one creative impulse of

-      genius. Other temples are growths, they have additions, afterthoughts, we

-      can see in them the workings of many minds and many periods. This is a

-      complete thought, struck out, you would say, at a heat.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In order to justify this opinion, I may be permitted a little detail

-      concerning this temple, which impressed us all as much as anything in

-      Egypt. There are two temples here, both close to the shore, both cut in

-      the mountain of rock which here almost overhangs the stream. We need not

-      delay to speak of the smaller one, although it would be wonderful, if it

-      were not for the presence of the larger. Between the two was a rocky

-      gorge. This is now nearly filled up, to the depth of a hundred feet, by

-      the yellow sand that has drifted and still drifts over from the level of

-      the desert hills above.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This sand, which drifts exactly like snow, lies in ridges like snow, and

-      lies loose and sliding under the feet or packs hard like snow, once

-      covered the façade of the big temple altogether, and now hides a portion

-      of it. The entrance to the temple was first cleared away in 1817 by

-      Belzoni and his party, whose gang of laborers worked eight hours a day for

-      two weeks with the thermometer at 1120 to 1160 Fahrenheit in the shade&mdash;an

-      almost incredible endurance when you consider what the heat must have been

-      in the sun beating upon this dazzling wall of sand in front of them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The rock in which the temple is excavated was cut back a considerable

-      distance, but in this cutting the great masses were left which were to be

-      fashioned into the four figures. The façade thus made, to which these

-      statues are attached, is about one hundred feet high. The statues are

-      seated on thrones with no intervening screens, and, when first seen, have

-      the appearance of images in front of and detached from the rock of which

-      they form a part. The statues are all tolerably perfect, except one, the

-      head of which is broken and lies in masses at its feet; and at the time of

-      our visit the sand covered the two northernmost to the knees. The door of

-      entrance, over which is a hawk-headed figure of Re, the titular divinity,

-      is twenty feet high. Above the colossi, and as a frieze over the curve of

-      the cornice, is a row of monkeys, (there were twenty-one originally, but

-      some are split away), like a company of negro minstrels, sitting and

-      holding up their hands in the most comical manner. Perhaps the Egyptians,

-      like the mediaeval cathedral builders, had a liking for grotesque effects

-      in architecture; but they may have intended nothing comic here, for the

-      monkey had sacred functions; he was an emblem of Thoth, the scribe of the

-      under-world, who recorded the judgments of Osiris.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These colossi are the largest in the world *; they are at least fifteen

-      feet higher than the wonders of Thebes, but it is not their size

-      principally that makes their attraction. As works of art they are worthy

-      of study. Seated, with hands on knees, in that eternal, traditional

-      rigidity of Egyptian sculpture, nevertheless the grandeur of the head and

-      the noble beauty of the face take them out of the category of mechanical

-      works. The figures represent Rameses II. and the features are of the type

-      which has come down to us as the perfection of Egyptian beauty.

-    </p>

-<pre xml:space="preserve">

-     * The following are some of the measurements of one of these

-     giants:&mdash;height of figure sixty-six feet; pedestal on which

-     it sits, ten; leg from knee to heel, twenty; great toe, one

-     and a half feet thick; ear, three feet, five inches long;

-     fore-finger, three feet; from inner side of elbow-joint to

-     end of middle finger, fifteen feet.

-</pre>

-    <p>

-      I climbed up into the lap of one of the statues; it is there only that you

-      can get an adequate idea of the size of the body. What a roomy lap! Nearly

-      ten feet between the wrists that rest upon the legs! I sat comfortably in

-      the navel of the statue, as in a niche, and mused on the passing of the

-      nations. To these massive figures the years go by like the stream. With

-      impassive, serious features, unchanged in expression in thousands of

-      years, they sit listening always to the flowing of the unending Nile, that

-      fills all the air and takes away from that awful silence which would else

-      be painfully felt in this solitude.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The interior of this temple is in keeping with its introduction. You enter

-      a grand hall supported by eight massive Osiride columns, about twenty-two

-      feet high as we estimated them. They are figures of Rameses become Osiris&mdash;to

-      be absorbed into Osiris is the end of all the transmigrations of the

-      blessed soul. The expression of the faces of such of these statues as are

-      uninjured, is that of immortal youth&mdash;a beauty that has in it the

-      promise of immortality. The sides of this hall are covered with fine

-      sculptures, mainly devoted to the exploits of Rameses II.; and here is

-      found again, cut in the stone the long Poem of the poet Pentaour,

-      celebrating the single-handed exploit of Rameses against the Khitas on the

-      river Orontes. It relates that the king, whom his troops dared not follow,

-      charged with his chariot alone into the ranks of the enemy and rode

-      through them again and again, and slew them by hundreds. Rameses at that

-      time was only twenty-three; it was his first great campaign. Pursuing the

-      enemy, he overtook them in advance of his troops, and, rejecting the

-      councils of his officers, began the fight at once. &ldquo;The footmen and the

-      horsemen then,&rdquo; says the poet (the translator is M. de Rouge), &ldquo;recoiled

-      before the enemy who were masters of Kadesh, on the left bank of the

-      Orontes.... Then his majesty, in the pride of his strength, rising up like

-      the god Mauth, put on his fighting dress. Completely armed, he looked like

-      Baal in the hour of his might. Urging on his chariot, he pushed into the

-      army of the vile Khitas; he was alone, no one was with him. He was

-      surrounded by 2,500 chariots, and the swiftest of the warriors of the vile

-      Khitas, and of the numerous nations who accompanied them, threw themselves

-      in his way.... Each chariot bore three men, and the king had with him

-      neither princes nor generals, nor his captains of archers nor of

-      chariots.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Then Rameses calls upon Amun; he reminds him of the obelisk he has raised

-      to him, the bulls he has slain for him:&mdash;&ldquo;Thee, I invoke, O my

-      Father! I am in the midst of a host of strangers, and no man is with me.

-      My archers and horsemen have abandoned me; when I cried to them, none of

-      them has heard, when I called for help. But I prefer Amun to thousands of

-      millions of archers, to millions of horsemen, to millions of young heroes

-      all assembled together. The designs of men are nothing, Amun overrules

-      them.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Needless to say the prayer was heard, the king rode slashing through the

-      ranks of opposing chariots, slaying, and putting to rout the host.

-      Whatever basis of fact the poem may have had in an incident of battle or

-      in the result of one engagement, it was like one of Napoleon's bulletins

-      from Egypt. The Khitas were not subdued and, not many years after, they

-      drove the Egyptians out of their land and from nearly all Palestine,

-      forcing them, out of all their conquests, into the valley of the Nile

-      itself. During the long reign of this Rameses, the power of Egypt steadily

-      declined, while luxury increased and the nation was exhausted in building

-      the enormous monuments which the king projected. The close of his

-      pretentious reign has been aptly compared to that of Louis XIV.&mdash;a

-      time of decadence; in both cases the great fabric was ripe for disaster.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But Rameses liked the poem of Pentaour. It is about as long as a book of

-      the Iliad, but the stone-cutters of his reign must have known it by heart.

-      He kept them carving it and illustrating it all his life, on every wall he

-      built where there was room for the story. He never, it would seem, could

-      get enough of it. He killed those vile Khitas a hundred times; he pursued

-      them over all the stone walls in his kingdom. The story is told here at

-      Ipsambool; it is carved in the Rameseum; the poem is graved on Luxor and

-      Karnak.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Out of this great hall open eight other chambers, all more or less

-      sculptured, some of them covered with well-drawn figures on which the

-      color is still vivid. Two of these rooms are long and very narrow, with a

-      bench running round the walls, the front of which is cut out so as to

-      imitate seats with short pillars. In one are square niches, a foot deep,

-      cut in the wall. The sculptures in one are unfinished, the hieroglyphics

-      and figures drawn in black but not cut&mdash;some event having called off

-      the artists and left their work incomplete We seem to be present at the

-      execution of these designs, and so fresh are the colors ot those finished,

-      that it seems it must have been only yesterday that the workman laid down

-      the brush. (A small chamber in the rock outside the temple, which was only

-      opened in 1874, is wonderful in the vividness of its colors; we see there

-      better than anywhere else the colors of vestments.)

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These chambers are not the least mysterious portion of this temple. They

-      are in absolute darkness, and have no chance of ventilation. By what light

-      was this elaborate carving executed? If people ever assembled in them, and

-      sat on these benches, when lights were burning, how could they breathe? If

-      they were not used, why should they have been so decorated? They would

-      serve very well for the awful mysteries of the Odd Fellows. Perhaps they

-      were used by the Free Masons in Solomon's time.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Beyond the great hall is a transverse hall (having two small chambers off

-      from it) with four square pillars, and from this a corridor leads to the

-      adytum. Here, behind an altar of stone, sit four marred gods, facing the

-      outer door, two hundred feet from it. They sit in a twilight that is

-      only-brightened by rays that find their way in at the distant door; but at

-      morning they can see, from the depth of their mountain cavern, the rising

-      sun.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We climbed, up the yielding sand-drifts, to the top of the precipice in

-      which the temple is excavated, and walked back to a higher ridge. The view

-      from there is perhaps the best desert view on the Nile, more extensive and

-      varied than that of Aboosir. It is a wide sweep of desolation. Up and down

-      the river we see vast plains of sand and groups of black hills; to the

-      west and north the Libyan desert extends with no limit to a horizon

-      fringed with sharp peaks, like aiguilles of the Alps, that have an exact

-      resemblance to a forest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At night, we give the ancient deities a sort of Fourth of July, and

-      illuminate the temple with colored lights. A blue-light burns upon the

-      altar in the adytum before the four gods, who may seem in their penetralia

-      to receive again the worship to which they were accustomed three thousand

-      years ago. A green flame in the great hall brings out mysteriously the

-      features of the gigantic Osiride, and revives the midnight glow of the

-      ancient ceremonies. In the glare of torches and colored lights on the

-      outside, the colossi loom in their gigantic proportions and cast grotesque

-      shadows.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Imagine this temple as it appeared to a stranger initiated into the

-      mysteries of the religion of the Pharaohs&mdash;a <i>cultus</i> in which

-      the mathematical secrets of the Pyramid and the Sphinx, art and

-      architecture, were wrapped in the same concealment with the problem of the

-      destiny of the soul; when the colors on these processions of gods and

-      heroes, upon these wars and pilgrimages sculptured in large on the walls,

-      were all brilliant; when these chambers were gorgeously furnished, when

-      the heavy doors that then hung in every passage, separating the different

-      halls and apartments, only swung open to admit the neophyte to new and

-      deeper mysteries, to halls blazing with light, where he stood in the

-      presence of these appalling figures, and of hosts of priests and acolytes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The temple of Aboo Simbel was built early in the reign of Rameses II.,

-      when art, under the impulse of his vigorous predecessors was in its

-      flower, and before the visible decadence which befel it later under a

-      royal patronage and &ldquo;protection,&rdquo; and in the demand for a wholesale

-      production, which always reduces any art to mechanical conditions. It

-      seemed to us about the finest single conception in Egypt. It must have

-      been a genius of rare order and daring who evoked in this solid mountain a

-      work of such grandeur and harmony of proportion, and then executed it

-      without a mistake. The first blow on the exterior, that began to reveal

-      the Colossi, was struck with the same certainty and precision as that

-      which brought into being the gods who are seated before the altar in the

-      depth of the mountain. A bolder idea was never more successfully wrought

-      out.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our last view of this wonder was by moonlight and by sunrise. We arose and

-      went forth over the sand-bank at five o'clock. Venus blazed as never

-      before. The Southern Cross was paling in the moonlight. The moon, in its

-      last half, hung over the south-west corner of the temple rock, and threw a

-      heavy shadow across a portion of the sitting figures. In this dimness of

-      the half-light their proportions were supernatural. Details were lost.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These might be giants of pre-historic times, or the old fabled gods of

-      antediluvian eras, outlined largely and majestically, groping their way

-      out of the hills.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Above them was the illimitable, purplish blue of the sky. The Moon, one of

-      the goddesses of the temple, withdrew more and more before the coming of

-      Re, the sun-god to whom the temple is dedicated, until she cast no shadow

-      on the façade. The temple, even the interior, caught the first glow of the

-      reddening east. The light came, as it always comes at dawn, in visible

-      waves, and these passed over the features of the Colossi, wave after wave,

-      slowly brightening them into life.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the interior the first flush was better than the light of many torches,

-      and the Osiride figures were revealed in their hiding-places. At the

-      spring equinox the sun strikes squarely in, two hundred feet, upon the

-      faces of the sitting figures in the <i>adytum</i>. That is their annual

-      salute! Now it only sent its light to them; but it made rosy the Osiride

-      faces on one side of the great hall.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The morning was chilly, and we sat on a sand-drift, wrapped up against the

-      cutting wind, watching the marvellous revelation. The dawn seemed to

-      ripple down the gigantic faces of the figures outside, and to touch their

-      stony calm with something like a smile of gladness; it almost gave them

-      motion, and we would hardly have felt surprised to see them arise and

-      stretch their weary limbs, cramped by ages of inaction, and sing and shout

-      at the coming of the sun-god. But they moved not, the strengthening light

-      only revealed their stony impassiveness; and when the sun, rapidly

-      clearing the eastern hills of the desert, gilded first the row of grinning

-      monkeys, and then the light crept slowly down over faces and forms to the

-      very feet, the old heathen helplessness stood confessed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And when the sun swung free in the sky, we silently drew away and left the

-      temple and the guardians alone and unmoved. We called the reis and the

-      crew; the boat was turned to the current, the great sweeps dipped into the

-      water, and we continued our voyage down the eternal river, which still

-      sings and flows in this lonely desert place, where sit the most gigantic

-      figures man ever made.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0049" id="linkimage-0049"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0314.jpg" alt="0314 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0050" id="linkimage-0050"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0315.jpg" alt="0315 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXV.&mdash;FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E HAVE been

-      learning the language. The language consists merely of <i>tyeb</i>. With

-      <i>tyeb</i> in its various accents and inflections, you can carry on an

-      extended conversation. I have heard two Arabs talking for a half hour, in

-      which one of them used no word for reply or response except <i>tyeb</i>

-      &ldquo;good.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <i>Tyeb</i> is used for assent, agreement, approval, admiration, both

-      interrogatively and affectionately. It does the duty of the Yankee &ldquo;all

-      right&rdquo; and the vulgarism &ldquo;that's so&rdquo; combined; it has as many meanings as

-      the Italian <i>va bene</i>, or the German <i>So!</i> or the English girl's

-      yes! yes? ye-e-s, ye-e-as? yes (short), 'n ye-e-es in doubt and really a

-      negative&mdash;ex.:&mdash;&ldquo;How lovely Blanche looks to-night!&rdquo; &ldquo;'n

-      ye-e-es.&rdquo; You may hear two untutored Americans talking, and one of them,

-      through a long interchange of views will utter nothing except, &ldquo;that's

-      so,&rdquo; &ldquo;that's so?&rdquo; &ldquo;<i>that's</i> so,&rdquo; &ldquo;that's <i>so</i>.&rdquo; I think two

-      Arabs meeting could come to a perfect understanding with:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tyeb?'

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tyeb.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tyeb!&rdquo; (both together).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tyeb?&rdquo; (showing something).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tyeb&rdquo; (emphatically, in admiration).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tyeb&rdquo; (in approval of the other's admiration).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tyeb Ketér&rdquo; (&ldquo;good, much&rdquo;).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tyeb Keter?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tyeb.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tyeb.&rdquo; (together, in ratification of all that has been said).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I say <i>tyeb</i> in my satisfaction with you; you say <i>tyeb</i> in

-      pleasure at my satisfaction; I say <i>tyeb</i> in my pleasure at your

-      pleasure. The servant says <i>tyeb</i> when you give him an order; you say

-      <i>tyeb</i> upon his comprehending it. The Arabic is the richest of

-      languages. I believe there are three hundred names for earth, a hundred

-      for lion, and so on. But the vocabulary of the common people is

-      exceedingly limited. Our sailors talk all day with the aid of a very few

-      words.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But we have got beyond <i>tyeb</i>. We can say <i>eiwa</i> (&ldquo;yes&rdquo;)&mdash;or

-      <i>nam</i>, when we wish to be elegant&mdash;and <i>la</i> (&ldquo;no&rdquo;). The

-      universal negative in Nubia, however, is simpler than this&mdash;it is a

-      cluck of the tongue in the left check and a slight upward jerk of the

-      head. This cluck and jerk makes &ldquo;no,&rdquo; from which there is no appeal. If

-      you ask a Nubian the price of anything&mdash;<i>be-kam dee?</i>&mdash;and

-      he should answer <i>khamsa</i> (&ldquo;five&rdquo;), and you should offer <i>thelata</i>

-      (&ldquo;three&rdquo;), and he should <i>kch</i> and jerk up his head, you might know

-      the trade was hopeless; because the <i>kch</i> expresses indifference as

-      well as a negative. The best thing you could do would be to say <i>bookra</i>

-      (&ldquo;to-morrow&rdquo;), and go away&mdash;meaning in fact to put off the purchase

-      forever, as the Nubian very well knows when he politely adds, <i>tyeb</i>.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But there are two other words necessary to be mastered before the

-      traveller can say he knows Arabic. To the constant call for &ldquo;backsheesh&rdquo;

-       and the obstructing rabble of beggars and children, you must be able to

-      say <i>mafeesh</i> (&ldquo;nothing&rdquo;), and <i>im'shee</i> (&ldquo;getaway,&rdquo; &ldquo;clear

-      out,&rdquo; &ldquo;scat.&rdquo;) It is my experience that this <i>im'shee</i> is the most

-      necessary word in Egypt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We do nothing all day but drift, or try to drift, against the north wind,

-      not making a mile an hour, constantly turning about, floating from one

-      side of the river to the other. It is impossible to row, for the steersman

-      cannot keep the boat's bow to the current.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is something exceedingly tedious, even to a lazy and resigned man,

-      in this perpetual drifting hither and thither. To float, however slowly,

-      straight down the current, would be quite another thing. To go sideways,

-      to go stern first, to waltz around so that you never can tell which bank

-      of the river you are looking at, or which way you are going, or what the

-      points of the compass are, is confusing and unpleasant. It is the one

-      serious annoyance of a dahabeëh voyage. If it is calm, we go on

-      delightfully with oars and current; if there is a southerly breeze we

-      travel rapidly, and in the most charming way in the world. But our

-      high-cabined boats are helpless monsters in this wind, which continually

-      blows; we are worse than becalmed, we are badgered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      However, we might be in a worse winter country, and one less entertaining.

-      We have just drifted in sight of a dahabeëh, with the English flag, tied

-      up to the bank. On the shore is a picturesque crowd; an awning is

-      stretched over high poles; men are busy at something under it&mdash;on the

-      rock near sits a group of white people under umbrellas. What can it be?

-      Are they repairing a broken yard? Are they holding a court over some

-      thief? Are they performing some mystic ceremony? We take the sandal and go

-      to investigate.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An English gentleman has shot two crocodiles, and his people are skinning

-      them, stuffing the skin, and scraping the flesh from the bones, preparing

-      the skeletons for a museum. Horrible creatures they are, even in this

-      butchered condition. The largest is twelve feet long; that is called a big

-      crocodile here; but last winter the gentleman killed one that was

-      seventeen feet long; that was a monster.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the stomach of one of these he found two pairs of bracelets, such as

-      are worn by Nubian children, two &ldquo;cunning&rdquo; little leathern bracelets

-      ornamented with shells&mdash;a most useless ornament for a crocodile. The

-      animal is becoming more and more shy every year, and it is very difficult

-      to get a shot at one. They come out in the night, looking for bracelets.

-      One night we nearly lost Ahmed, one of our black boys; he had gone down

-      upon the rudder, when an enquiring crocodile came along and made a snap at

-      him&mdash;when the boy climbed on deck he looked white even by starlight.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The invulnerability of the crocodile hide is exaggerated. One of these had

-      two bullet-holes in his back. His slayer says he has repeatedly put

-      bullets through the hide on the back.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we came away we declined steaks, but the owner gave us some eggs, so

-      that we might raise our own crocodiles.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Gradually we drift out of this almost utterly sterile country, and come to

-      long strips of palm-groves, and to sakiyas innumerable, shrieking on the

-      shore every few hundred feet. We have time to visit a considerable

-      village, and see the women at their other occupation (besides lamentation)

-      braiding each other's hair; sitting on the ground, sometimes two at a

-      head, patiently twisting odds and ends of loose hair into the snaky

-      braids, and muddling the whole with sand, water, and clay, preparatory to

-      the oil. A few women are spinning with a hand-spindle and producing very

-      good cotton-thread. All appear to have time on their hands. And what a

-      busy place this must be in summer, when the heat is like that of an oven!

-      The men loaf about like the women, and probably do even less. Those at

-      work are mostly slaves, boys and girls in the slightest clothing; and even

-      these do a great deal of &ldquo;standing round.&rdquo; Wooden hoes are used.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The desert over which we walked beyond the town was very different from

-      the Libyan with its drifts and drifts of yellow sand. We went over

-      swelling undulations (like our rolling prairies), cut by considerable

-      depressions, of sandstone with a light sand cover but all strewn with

-      shale or shingle. This black shale is sometimes seen adhering like a layer

-      of glazing to the coarse rock; and, though a part of the rock, it has the

-      queer appearance of having been a deposit solidified upon it and

-      subsequently broken off. On the tops of these hills we found everywhere

-      holes scooped out by the natives in search of nitre; the holes showed

-      evidence, in dried mud, of the recent presence of water.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We descended into a deep gorge, in which the rocks were broken squarely

-      down the face, exhibiting strata of red, white, and variegated sandstone;

-      the gorge was a Wady that ran far back into the country among the

-      mountains; we followed it down to a belt of <i>sunt</i> acacias and palms

-      on the river. This wady was full of rocks, like a mountain stream at home;

-      a great torrent running long in it, had worn the rocks into fantastic

-      shapes, cutting punch-bowls and the like, and water had recently dried in

-      the hollows. But it had not rained on the river.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This morning we are awakened by loud talking and wrangling on deck, that

-      sounds like a Paris revolution. We have only stopped for milk! The

-      forenoon we spend among the fashionable ladies of Derr, the capital of

-      Nubia, studying the modes, in order that we may carry home the latest.

-      This is an aristocratic place. One of the eight-hundred-years-old sycamore

-      trees, of which we made mention, is still vigorous and was bearing the

-      sycamore fig. The other is in front of a grand mud-house with latticed

-      windows, the residence of the Kashefs of Sultan Selim whose descendants

-      still occupy it, and, though shorn of authority, are said to be proud of

-      their Turkish origin. One of them, Hassan Kashef, an old man in the memory

-      of our dragoman, so old that he had to lift up his eyelids with his finger

-      when he wanted to see, died only a few years ago. This patriarch had

-      seventy-two wives as his modest portion in this world; and as the Koran

-      allows only four, there was some difficulty in settling the good man's

-      estate. The matter was referred to the Khedive, but he wisely refused to

-      interfere. When the executor came to divide the property among the

-      surviving children, he found one hundred and five to share the

-      inheritance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The old fellow had many other patriarchal ways. On his death-bed he left a

-      legacy of both good and evil wishes, requests to reward this friend, and

-      to &ldquo;serve out&rdquo; that enemy, quite in the ancient style, and in the Oriental

-      style, recalling the last recorded words of King David, whose expiring

-      breath was an expression of a wish for vengeance upon one of his enemies,

-      whom he had sworn not to kill. It reads now as if it might have been

-      spoken by a Bedawee sheykh to his family only yesterday:&mdash;&ldquo;And,

-      behold, thou hast with thee Shimei the son of Gera, a Benjamite of

-      Bahurim, which cursed me with a grievous curse in the day when I went to

-      Mahanaim; but he came down to meet me at Jordan, and I sware to him by the

-      Lord, saying, I will not put thee to death with the sword. Now therefore

-      hold him not guiltless: for thou art a wise man, and knowest what thou

-      oughtest to do unto him; but his hoar head bring thou down to the grave

-      with blood. So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of

-      David.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We call at the sand-covered temple at A'mada, and crawl into it; a very

-      neat little affair, with fresh color and fine sculptures, and as old as

-      the time of Osirtasen III. (the date of the obelisk of Heliopolis, of the

-      Tombs of Beni Hassan, say about fifteen hundred years before Rameses II.);

-      and then sail quickly down to Korosko, passing over in an hour or so a

-      distance that required a day and a half on the ascent.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At Korosko there are caravans in from Kartoom; the camel-drivers wear

-      monstrous silver rings, made in the interior, the crown an inch high and

-      set with blood-stone. I bought from the neck of a pretty little boy a

-      silver &ldquo;charm,&rdquo; a flat plate with the name of Allah engraved on it.

-      Neither the boy nor the charm had been washed since they came into being.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The caravan had brought one interesting piece of freight, which had just

-      been sent down the river. It was the <i>head</i> of the Sultan of Darfoor,

-      preserved in spirits, and forwarded to the Khedive as a present. This was

-      to certify that the Sultan was really killed, when Darfoor was captured by

-      the army of the Viceroy; though I do not know that there is any bounty on

-      the heads of African Sultans. It is an odd gift to send to a ruler who

-      wears the European dress and speaks French, and whose chief military

-      officers are Americans.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The desolate hills behind Korosko rise a thousand feet, and we climbed one

-      of the peaks to have a glimpse of the desert route and the country towards

-      Kartoom. I suppose a more savage landscape does not exist. The peak of

-      black disintegrated rocks on which we stood was the first of an assemblage

-      of such as far as we could see south; the whole horizon was cut by these

-      sharp peaks; and through these thickly clustering hills the caravan trail

-      made its way in sand and powdered dust. Shut in from the breeze, it must

-      be a hard road to travel, even with a winter sun multiplying its rays from

-      all these hot rocks; in the summer it would be frightful. But on these

-      summits, or on any desert swell, the air is an absolute elixir of life; it

-      has a quality of lightness but not the rarity that makes respiration

-      difficult.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At a village below Korosko we had an exhibition of the manner of fighting

-      with the long Nubian war-spear and the big round shield made of

-      hippopotamus-hide. The men jumped about and uttered frightening cries, and

-      displayed more agility than fight, the object being evidently to terrify

-      by a threatening aspect; but the scene was as barbarous as any we see in

-      African pictures. Here also was a pretty woman (pretty for her) with

-      beautiful eyes, who wore a heavy nose-ring of gold, which she said she put

-      on to make her face beautiful; nevertheless she would sell the ring for

-      nine dollars and a half. The people along here will sell anything they

-      have, ornaments, charms to protect them from the evil-eye,&mdash;they will

-      part with anything for money. At this village we took on a crocodile ten

-      feet long, which had been recently killed, and lashed it to the horizontal

-      yard. It was Abd-el-Atti's desire to present it to a friend in Cairo, and

-      perhaps he was not reluctant, when we should be below the cataract, to

-      have it take the appearance, in the eyes of spectators, of having been

-      killed by some one on this boat.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We obtained above Korosko one of the most beautiful animals in the world&mdash;a

-      young gazelle&mdash;to add to our growing menagerie; which consists of a

-      tame duck, who never gets away when his leg is tied; a timid desert hare,

-      who has lived for a long time in a tin box in the cabin, trembling like an

-      aspen leaf night and day; and a chameleon.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The chameleon ought to have a chapter to himself. We have reason to think

-      that he has the soul of some transmigrating Egyptian. He is the most

-      uncanny beast. We have made him a study, and find very little good in him.

-      His changeableness of color is not his worst quality. He has the nature of

-      a spy, and he is sullen and snappish besides. We discovered that his color

-      is not a purely physical manifestation, but that it depends upon his state

-      of mind, upon his temper. When everything is serene, he is green as a May

-      morning, but anger changes him instantly for the worse. It is however true

-      that he takes his color mainly from the substance upon which he dwells,

-      not from what he eats; for he eats flies and allows them to make no

-      impression on his exterior. When he was taken off an acacia-tree, this

-      chameleon was of the bright-green color of the leaves. Brought into our

-      cabin, his usual resting-place was on the reddish maroon window curtains,

-      and his green changed muddily into the color of the woollen. When angry,

-      he would become mottled with dark spots, and have a thick cloudy color.

-      This was the range of his changes of complexion; it is not enough (is it?)

-      to give him his exaggerated reputation.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I confess that I almost hated him, and perhaps cannot do him justice. He

-      is a crawling creature at best, and his mode of getting about is

-      disagreeable; his feet have the power of clinging to the slightest

-      roughness, and he can climb anywhere; his feet are like hands; besides,

-      his long tail is like another hand; it is prehensile like the monkey's. He

-      feels his way along very carefully, taking a turn with his tail about some

-      support, when he is passing a chasm, and not letting go until his feet are

-      firmly fixed on something else. And, then, the way he uses his eye is

-      odious. His eye-balls are stuck upon the end of protuberances on his head,

-      which protuberances work like ball-and-socket joints&mdash;as if you had

-      your eye on the end of your finger. When he wants to examine anything, he

-      never turns his head; he simply swivels his eye round and brings it to

-      bear on the object. Pretending to live in cold isolation on the top of a

-      window curtain, he is always making clammy excursions round the cabin, and

-      is sometimes found in our bed-chambers. You wouldn't like to feel his cold

-      tail dragging over you in the night.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The first question every morning, when we come to breakfast, is,

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Where is that chameleon?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      He might be under the table, you know, or on the cushions, and you might

-      sit on him. Commonly he conceals his body behind the curtain, and just

-      lifts his head above the roller. There he sits, spying us, gyrating his

-      evil eye upon us, and never stirring his head; he takes the color of the

-      curtain so nearly that we could not see him if it was not for that swivel

-      eye. It is then that he appears malign, and has the aspect of a wise but

-      ill-disposed Egyptian whose soul has had ill luck in getting into any

-      respectable bodies for three or four thousand years. He lives upon

-      nothing,&mdash;you would think he had been raised in a French <i>pension</i>.

-      Few flies happen his way; and, perhaps he is torpid out of the sun so much

-      of the time, he is not active to catch those that come. I carried him a

-      big one the other day, and he repaid my kindness by snapping my finger.

-      And I am his only friend.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Alas, the desert hare, whom we have fed with corn, and greens, and tried

-      to breed courage in for a long time, died this morning at an early hour;

-      either he was chilled out of the world by the cold air on deck, or he died

-      of palpitation of the heart; for he was always in a flutter of fear, his

-      heart going like a trip-hammer, when anyone approached him. He only rarely

-      elevated his long silky ears in a serene enjoyment of society. His tail

-      was too short, but he was, nevertheless, an animal to become attached to.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Speaking of Hassan Kashef's violation of the Moslem law, in taking more

-      than four wives, is it generally known that the women in Mohammed's time

-      endeavored also to have the privileges of men? Forty women who had cooked

-      for the soldiers who were fighting the infidels and had done great service

-      in the campaign, were asked by the Prophet to name their reward. The chief

-      lady, who was put forward to prefer the request of the others, asked that

-      as men were permitted four wives women might be allowed to have four

-      husbands. The Prophet gave them a plain reason for refusing their

-      petition, and it has never been renewed. The legend shows that long ago

-      women protested against their disabilities.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The strong north wind, with coolish weather, continues. On Sunday we are

-      nowhere in particular, and climb a high sandstone peak, and sit in the

-      shelter of a rock, where wandering men have often come to rest. It is a

-      wild, desert place, and there is that in the atmosphere of the day which

-      leads to talk of the end of the world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Like many other Moslems, Abd-el-Atti thinks that these are the last days,

-      bad enough days, and that the end draws near. We have misunderstood what

-      Mr. Lane says about Christ coming to &ldquo;judge&rdquo; the world. The Moslems

-      believe that Christ, who never died, but was taken up into heaven away

-      from the Jews,&mdash;a person in his likeness being crucified in his

-      stead,&mdash;will come to rule, to establish the Moslem religion and a

-      reign of justice (the Millenium); and that after this period Christ will

-      die, and be buried in Medineh, not far from Mohammed. Then the world will

-      end, and Azrael, the angel of death, will be left alone on the earth for

-      forty days. He will go to and fro, and find no one; all will be in their

-      graves. Then Christ and Mohammed and all the dead will rise. But the Lord

-      God will be the final judge of all.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, there have been many false prophets. A man came before Haroun e'

-      Rasheed pretending to be a prophet.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;'What proof have you that you are one? What miracle can you do?'.rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;'Anything you like.'.rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;'Christ, on whom be peace, raised men from the dead.'.rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;'So will I.' This took place before the king and the chief-justice. 'Let

-      the head of the chief-justice be cut off,' said the pretended prophet,

-      'and I will restore him to life.'.rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;'Oh,' cried the chief-justice, 'I believe that the man is a real prophet.

-      Anyone who does not believe can have his head cut off, and try it.'.rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A woman also claimed to be a prophetess. 'But,' said the Khalif Haroun e'

-      Rasheed, 'Mohammed declared that he was the last man who should be a

-      prophet.'.rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;'He didn't say that a <i>woman</i> shouldn't be,' the woman she answer.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The people vary in manners and habits here from village to village, much

-      more than we supposed they would. Walking this morning for a couple of

-      miles through the two villages of Maharraka&mdash;rude huts scattered

-      under palm-trees&mdash;we find the inhabitants, partly Arab, partly

-      Barabra, and many negro slaves, more barbaric than any we have seen; boys

-      and girls, till the marriageable age, in a state of nature, women neither

-      so shy nor so careful about covering themselves with clothing as in other

-      places, and the slaves wretchedly provided for. The heads of the young

-      children are shaved in streaks, with long tufts of hair left; the women

-      are loaded with tawdry necklaces, and many of them, poor as they are,

-      sport heavy hoops of gold in the nose, and wear massive silver bracelets.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The slaves, blacks and mulattoes, were in appearance like those seen

-      formerly in our southern cotton-fields. I recall a picture, in abolition

-      times, representing a colored man standing alone, and holding up his arms,

-      in a manner beseeching the white man, passing by, to free him. To-day I

-      saw the picture realized. A very black man, standing nearly naked in the

-      midst of a bean-field, raised up both his arms, and cried aloud to us as

-      we went by. The attitude had all the old pathos in it. As the poor fellow

-      threw up his arms in a wild despair, he cried &ldquo;Backsheesh, backsheesh, O!

-      howadji!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      For the first time we found the crops in danger. The country was overrun

-      with reddish-brown locusts, which settled in clouds upon every green

-      thing; and the people in vain attempted to frighten them from their scant

-      strip of grain. They are not, however, useless. The attractive women

-      caught some, and, pulling off the wings and legs, offered them to us to

-      eat. They said locusts were good; and I suppose they are such as John the

-      Baptist ate. We are not Baptists.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we go down the river we take in two or three temples a day, besides

-      these ruins of humanity in the village,&mdash;-Dakkeh, Gerf Hossâyn,

-      Dendoor. It is easy to get enough of these second-class temples. That at

-      Gerf Hossâyn is hewn in the rock, and is in general arrangement like

-      Ipsambool&mdash;it was also made by Rameses II.&mdash;but is in all

-      respects inferior, and lacks the Colossi. I saw sitting in the <i>adytum</i>

-      four figures whom I took to be Athos, Parthos, Aramis, and D'Artignan&mdash;though

-      this edifice was built long before the day of the &ldquo;Three Guardsmen.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The people in the village below have such a bad reputation that the

-      dragoman in great fright sent sailors after us, when he found we were

-      strolling through the country alone. We have seen no natives so well off

-      in cattle, sheep, and cooking-utensils, or in nose-rings, beads, and

-      knives; they are, however, a wild, noisy tribe, and the whole village

-      followed us for a mile, hooting for backsheesh. The girls wear a nose-ring

-      and a girdle; the boys have no rings or girdles. The men are fierce and

-      jealous of their wives, perhaps with reason, stabbing and throwing them

-      into the river on suspicion, if they are caught talking with another man.

-      So they say. At this village we saw pits dug in the sand (like those

-      described in the Old Testament), in which cattle, sheep and goats were

-      folded; it being cheaper to dig a pit than to build a stone fence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At Kalâbshee are two temples, ruins on a sufficiently large scale to be

-      imposing; sculptures varied in character and beautifully colored;

-      propylons with narrow staircases, and concealed rooms, and deep windows

-      bespeaking their use as fortifications and dungeons as well as temples;

-      and columns of interest to the architect; especially two, fluted (time of

-      Rameses II.) with square projecting abacus like the Doric, but with broad

-      bases. The inhabitants are the most pestilent on the river, crowding their

-      curiosities upon us, and clamoring for money. They have for sale

-      gazelle-horns, and the henna (which grows here), in the form of a green

-      powder.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      However, Kalâbshee has educational facilities. I saw there a boys' school

-      in full operation. In the open air, but in the sheltering angle of a house

-      near the ruins, sat on the ground the schoolmaster. Behind him leaned his

-      gun against the wall; before him lay an open Koran; and in his hand he

-      held a thin palm rod with which he enforced education. He was dictating

-      sentences from the book to a scrap of a scholar, a boy who sat on the

-      ground, with an inkhorn beside him, and wrote the sentences on a board

-      slate, repeating the words in aloud voice as he wrote. Nearby was another

-      urchin, seated before a slate leaning against the angle of of the wall,

-      committing the writing on it to memory, in a loud voice also. When he

-      looked off the stick reminded him to attend to his slate. I do not know

-      whether he calls this a private or a public school.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Quitting these inhospitable savages as speedily as we can, upon the

-      springing up of a south wind, we are going down stream at a spanking rate,

-      leaving a rival dahabeëh, belonging to an English lord, behind, when the

-      adversary puts it into the head of our pilot to steer across the river,

-      and our prosperous career is suddenly arrested on a sandbar. We are fast,

-      and the English boat, keeping in the channel, shows us her rudder and

-      disappears round the bend.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Extraordinary confusion follows; the crew are in the water, they are on

-      deck, the anchor is got out, there are as many opinions, as people, and no

-      one obeys. The long pilot is a spectacle, after he has been wading about

-      in the stream and comes on deck. His gown is off and his turban also; his

-      head is shaved; his drawers are in tatters like lace-work. He strides up

-      and down beating his breast, his bare poll shining in the sun like a

-      billiard ball. We are on the sand nearly four hours, and the accident,

-      causing us to lose this wind, loses us, it so happens, three days. By dark

-      we tie up near the most excruciating Sakiya in the world. It is suggested

-      to go on shore and buy the property and close it out. But the boy who is

-      driving will neither sell nor stop his cattle.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At Gertassee we have more ruins and we pass a beautiful, single column,

-      conspicuous for a long distance over the desert, as fine as the once

-      &ldquo;nameless column&rdquo; in the Roman forum, These temples, or places of worship,

-      are on the whole depressing. There was no lack of religious privileges if

-      frequency of religious edifices gave them. But the people evidently had no

-      part in the ceremonies, and went never into these dark chambers, which are

-      now inhabited by bats. The old religion does not commend itself to me. Of

-      what use would be one of these temples on Asylum Hill, in Hartford, and

-      how would the Rev. Mr. Twichell busy himself in its dark recesses, I

-      wonder, even with the help of the deacons and the committee? The Gothic is

-      quite enough for us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This morning&mdash;we have now entered upon the month of February&mdash;for

-      the first time in Nubia, we have early a slight haze, a thin veil of it;

-      and passing between shores rocky and high and among granite breakers, we

-      are reminded of the Hudson river on a June morning. A strong north wind,

-      however, comes soon to puff away this illusion, and it blows so hard that

-      we are actually driven up-stream.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The people and villages under the crumbling granite ledges that this delay

-      enables us to see, are the least promising we have encountered; women and

-      children are more nearly barbarians in dress and manners; for the women, a

-      single strip of brown cotton, worn <i>à la</i> Bedawee, leaving free the

-      legs, the right arm and breast, is a common dress. And yet, some of these

-      women are not without beauty. One pretty girl sitting on a rock, the sun

-      glistening on the castor-oil of her hair, asked for backsheesh in a sweet

-      voice, her eyes sparkling with merriment. A flower blooming in vain in

-      this desert!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Is it a question of &ldquo;converting&rdquo; these people? Certainly, nothing but the

-      religion of the New Testament, put in practice here, bringing in its

-      train, industry, self-respect, and a desire to know, can awaken the higher

-      nature, and lift these creatures into a respectable womanhood. But the

-      task is more difficult than it would be with remote tribes in Central

-      Africa. These people have been converted over and over again. They have

-      had all sorts of religions during the last few thousand years, and they

-      remain essentially the same. They once had the old Egyptian faith,

-      whatever it was; and subsequently they varied that with the Greek and

-      Roman shades of heathenism. They then accepted the early Christianity, as

-      the Abyssinians did, and had, for hundreds of years, opportunity of

-      Christian worship, when there were Christian churches all along the Nile

-      from Alexander to Meroë, and holy hermits in every eligible cave and tomb.

-      And then came Mohammed's friends, giving them the choice of belief or

-      martyrdom, and they embraced the religion of Mecca as cordially as any

-      other.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      They have remained essentially unchanged through all their changes. This

-      hopelessness of their condition is in the fact that in all the shiftings

-      of religions and of dynasties, the women have continued to soak their hair

-      in castor-oil. The fashion is as old as the Nile world. Many people look

-      upon castor-oil as an excellent remedy. I should like to know what it has

-      done for Africa.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At Dabod is an interesting ruin, and a man sits there in front of his

-      house, weaving, confident that no rain will come to spoil his yarn. He

-      sits and works the treadle of his loom in a hole in the ground, the thread

-      being stretched out twenty or thirty feet on the wall before him. It is

-      the only industry of the village, and a group of natives are looking on.

-      The poor weaver asks backsheesh, and when I tell him I have nothing

-      smaller than an English sovereign, he says he can change it!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Here we find also a sort of Holly-Tree Inn, a house for charitable

-      entertainment, such as is often seen in Moslem villages. It is a square

-      mud-structure, entered by two doors, and contains two long rooms with

-      communicating openings. The dirt-floors are cleanly swept and fresh mats

-      are laid down at intervals. Any stranger or weary traveler, passing by, is

-      welcome to come in and rest or pass the night, to have a cup of coffee and

-      some bread. There are two cleanly dressed attendants, and one of them is

-      making coffee, within, over a handful of fire, in a tiny coffee-pot. In

-      front, in the sun, on neat mats, sit half a dozen turbaned men, perhaps

-      tired wanderers and pilgrims in this world, who have turned aside to rest

-      for an hour, for a day, or for a week. They appear to have been there

-      forever. The establishment is maintained by a rich man of the place; but

-      signs of an abode of wealth we failed to discover in any of the

-      mud-enclosures.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we are under way again, we express surprise at finding here such an

-      excellent charity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You no think the Lord he take care for his own?&rdquo; says Abd-el-Atti. &ldquo;When

-      the kin' [king] of Abyssinia go to 'stroy the Kaabeh in Mecca&rdquo;&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did you ever see the Kaabeh?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Many times. Plenty times I been in Mecca.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In what part of the Kaabeh is the Black Stone?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So. The Kaabeh is a building like a cube, about, I think him, thirty feet

-      high, built in the middle of the mosque at Mecca. It was built by Abraham,

-      of white marble. In the outside the east wall, near the corner, 'bout so

-      (four feet) high you find him, the Black Stone, put there by Abraham, call

-      him <i>haggeh el ashad</i>, the lucky, the fortunate stone. It is opposite

-      the sunrise. Where Abraham get him? God knows. If any one sick, he touch

-      this stone, be made so well as he was. So I <i>hun</i>derstand. The Kaabeh

-      is in the centre of the earth, and has fronts to the four quarters of the

-      globe, Asia, Hindia, Egypt, all places, toward which the Moslem kneel in

-      prayer. Near the Kaabeh is the well, the sacred well Zem-Zem, has clear

-      water, beautiful, so lifely. One time a year, in the month before Ramadan,

-      Zem-Zem spouts up high in the air, and people come to drink of it. When

-      Hagar left Ishmael, to look for water, being very thirsty, the little

-      fellow scratched with his fingers in the sand, and a spring of water

-      rushed up; this is the well Zem-Zem. I told you the same water is in the

-      spring in Syria, El Gebel; I find him just the same; come under the earth

-      from Zem-Zem.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When the kin' of Abyssinia, who not believe, what you call infidel, like

-      that Englishman, yes, Mr. Buckle, I see him in Sinai and Petra&mdash;very

-      wise man, know a great deal, very nice gentleman, I like him very much,

-      but I think he not believe&mdash;when the kin' of Abyssinia came with all

-      his great army and his elephants to fight against Mecca, and to 'stroy the

-      Kaabeh as well the same time to carry off all the cattle of the people,

-      then the people they say, 'the cattle are ours, but the Kaabeh is the

-      Lord's, and he will have care over it; the Kaabeh is not ours.' There was

-      one of the elephants of the kin' of Abyssinia, the name of Mahmoud, and he

-      was very wise, more wise than anybody else. When he came in sight of

-      Mecca, he turned back and went the other way, and not all the spears and

-      darts of the soldiers could stop him. The others went on. Then the Lord

-      sent out of the hell very small birds, with very little stones, taken out

-      of hell, in their claws, no larger than mustard seeds; and the birds

-      dropped these on the heads of the soldiers that rode on the elephants&mdash;generally

-      three or four on an elephant. The little seeds went right down through the

-      men and through the elephants, and killed them, and by this the army was

-      'stroyed.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When the kin', after that, come into the mosque, some power outside

-      himself made him to bow down in respect to the Kaabeh. He went away and

-      did not touch it. And it stands there the same now.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0051" id="linkimage-0051"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0331.jpg" alt="0331 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXVI.&mdash;MYSTERIOUS PHILÆ.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E are on deck

-      early to see the approach to Philæ, which is through a gateway of high

-      rocks. The scenery is like parts of the Rhine; and as we come in sight of

-      the old mosque perched on the hillside, and the round tomb on the pinnacle

-      above, it is very like the Rhine, with castle ruins. The ragged and rock

-      island of Biggeh rises before us and seems to stop the way, but, at a turn

-      in the river, the little temple, with its conspicuous columns, then the

-      pylon of the great temple, and at length the mass of ruins, that cover the

-      little island of Philæ, open on the view.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the narrows we meet the fleet of government boats conveying the

-      engineer expedition going up to begin the railway from Wady Haifa to

-      Berber. Abd-el-Atti does not like the prospect of Egypt running deeper and

-      deeper in debt, with no good to come of it, he says; he believes that the

-      Khedive is acting under the advice of England, which is entirely selfish

-      and only desires a short way to India, in case the French should shut the

-      Suez Canal against them (his view is a very good example of a Moslem's

-      comprehension of affairs). Also thinking, with all Moslems, that it is

-      best to leave the world and its people as the Lord has created and placed

-      them, he replied to an enquiry about his opinion of the railroad, with

-      this story of Jonah:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When the prophet Jonah came out of the whale and sat down on the bank to

-      dry under a tree (I have seen the tree) in Syria, there was a blind man

-      sitting near by, who begged the prophet to give him sight. Then Jonah

-      asked the Lord for help and the blind man was let to see. The man was

-      eating dates at the same time, and the first thing he did when he got his

-      eyes open was to snap the hard seeds at Jonah, who you know was very

-      tender from being so long in the whale. Jonah was stung on his skin, and

-      bruised by the stones, and he cry out, 'O! Lord, how is this?' And the

-      Lord said, 'Jonah, you not satisfied to leave things as I placed 'em; and

-      now you must suffer for it'.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      One muses and dreams at Philæ, and does not readily arouse himself to the

-      necessity of exploring and comprehending the marvels and the beauties that

-      insensibly lead him into sentimental reveries. If ever the spirit of

-      beauty haunted a spot, it is this. Whatever was harsh in the granite

-      ledges, or too sharp in the granite walls, whatever is repellant in the

-      memory concerning the uses of these temples of a monstrous theogony, all

-      is softened now by time, all asperities are worn away; nature and art grow

-      lovely together in a gentle decay, sunk in a repose too beautiful to be

-      sad. Nowhere else in Egypt has the grim mystery of the Egyptians <i>cultus</i>

-      softened into so harmless a memory.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The oval island contains perhaps a hundred acres. It is a rock, with only

-      a patch or two of green, and a few scattered palms, just enough to give it

-      a lonely, poetic, and not a fruitful aspect, and, as has been said, is

-      walled all round from the water's edge. Covered with ruins, the principal

-      are those of the temple of Isis. Beginning at the southern end of the

-      island, where a flight of steps led up to it, it stretches along, with a

-      curved and broadening colonnade, giant pylons, great courts and covered

-      temples. It is impossible to imagine a structure or series of structures,

-      more irregular in the lines or capricious in the forms. The architects

-      gave free play to their fancy, and we find here the fertility and variety,

-      if not the grotesqueness of imagination of the mediaeval cathedral

-      builders. The capitals of the columns of the colonnade are sculptured in

-      rich variety; the walls of the west cloister are covered with fine

-      carvings, the color on them still fresh and delicate; and the ornamental

-      designs are as beautiful and artistic as the finest Greek work, which some

-      of it suggests: as rich as the most lovely Moorish patterns, many of which

-      seem to have been copied from these living creations&mdash;-diamond-work,

-      birds, exquisite medallions of flowers, and sphinxes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Without seeing this mass of buildings, you can have no notion of the labor

-      expended in decorating them. All the surfaces of the gigantic pylons, of

-      the walls and courts, exterior and interior, are covered with finely and

-      carefully cut figures and hieroglyphics, and a great deal of the work is

-      minute and delicate chiselling. You are lost in wonder if you attempt to

-      estimate the time and the number of workmen necessary to accomplish all

-      this. It seems incredible that men could ever have had patience or leisure

-      for it. A great portion of the figures, within and without, have been,

-      with much painstaking, defaced; probably it was done by the early

-      Christians, and this is the only impress they have left of their

-      domination in this region.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The most interesting sculptures, however, at Philæ are those in a small

-      chamber, or mortuary chapel, on the roof of the main temple, touching the

-      most sacred mystery of the Egyptian religion, the death and resurrection

-      of Osiris. This myth, which took many fantastic forms, was no doubt that

-      forbidden topic upon which Herodotus was not at liberty to speak. It was

-      the growth of a period in the Egyptian theology when the original

-      revelation of one God grew weak and began to disappear under a monstrous

-      symbolism. It is possible that the priests, who held their religious

-      philosophy a profound secret from the vulgar (whose religion was simply a

-      gross worship of symbols), never relinquished the belief expressed in

-      their sacred texts, which say of God &ldquo;that He is the sole generator in

-      heaven and earth, and that He has not been begotten.... That He is the

-      only living and true God, who was begotten by Himself.... He who has

-      existed from the beginning.... who has made all things and was not Himself

-      made.&rdquo; It is possible that they may have held to this and still kept in

-      the purity of its first conception the myth of the manifestation of

-      Osiris, however fantastic the myth subsequently became in mythology and in

-      the popular worship.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Osiris, the personification of the sun, the life-giving, came upon the

-      earth to benefit men, and one of his titles was the &ldquo;manifester of good

-      and truth.&rdquo; He was slain in a conflict with Set the spirit of evil and

-      darkness; he was buried; he was raised from the dead by the prayers of his

-      wife, Isis; he became the judge of the dead; he was not only the

-      life-giving but the saving deity; &ldquo;himself the first raised from the dead,

-      he assisted to raise those who were justified, after having aided them to

-      overcome all their trials.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      But whatever the priests and the initiated believed, this myth is here

-      symbolized in the baldest forms. We have the mummy of Osiris passing

-      through its interment and the successive stages of the under-world; then

-      his body is dismembered and scattered, and finally the limbs and organs

-      are reassembled and joined together, and the resurrection takes place

-      before our eyes. It reminds one of a pantomime of the Ravels, who used to

-      chop up the body of a comrade and then put him together again as good as

-      new, with the <i>insouciance</i> of beings who lived in a world where such

-      transactions were common. This whole temple indeed, would be a royal place

-      for the tricks of a conjurer or the delusions of a troop of stage wizards.

-      It is full of dark chambers and secret passages, some of them in the walls

-      and some subterranean, the entrances to which are only disclosed by

-      removing a close-fitting stone.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The great pylons, ascended by internal stairways, have habitable chambers

-      in each story, lighted by deep slits of windows, and are like palace

-      fortresses. The view from the summit of one of them is fascinating, but

-      almost grim; that is, your surroundings are huge masses of granite

-      mountains and islands, only relieved by some patches of green and a few

-      palms on the east shore. But time has so worn and fashioned the stones of

-      the overtopping crags, and the color of the red granite is so warm, and

-      the <i>contours</i> are so softened that under the brilliant sky the view

-      is mellowed and highly poetical, and ought not to be called grim.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This little island, gay with its gorgeously colored walls, graceful

-      colonnades, garden-roofs and spreading terraces, set in its rim of swift

-      water, protected by these granite fortresses, bent over by this sky, must

-      have been a dear and sacred place to the worshippers of Isis and Osiris,

-      and we scarcely wonder that the celebration of their rites was continued

-      so long in our era. We do not need, in order to feel the romance of the

-      place, to know that it was a favorite spot with Cleopatra, and that she

-      moored her silken-sailed dahabeëh on the sandbank where ours now lies.

-      Perhaps she was not a person of romantic nature. There is a portrait of

-      her here (the authenticity of which rests upon I know not what authority)

-      stiffly cut in the stone, in which she appears to be a resolute woman with

-      full sensual lips and a determined chin. Her hair is put up in decent

-      simplicity. But I half think that she herself was like her other Egyptian

-      sisters and made her silken locks to shine with the juice of the

-      castor-oil plant. But what were these mysteries in which she took part,

-      and what was this worship, conducted in these dark and secret chambers? It

-      was veiled from all vulgar eyes; probably the people were scarcely allowed

-      to set foot upon the sacred island.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Sunday morning was fresh and cool, with fleecy clouds, light and

-      summer-like. Instead of Sabbath bells, when I rose late, I heard the wild

-      chant of a crew rowing a dahabeëh down the echoing channel. And I wondered

-      how church bells, rung on the top of these pylons, would sound

-      reverberating among these granite rocks and boulders. We climbed, during

-      the afternoon, to the summit of the island of Biggeh, which overshadows

-      Philæ, and is a most fantastic pile of crags. You can best understand this

-      region by supposing that a gigantic internal explosion lifted the granite

-      strata into the air, and that the fragments fell hap-hazard. This Biggeh

-      might have been piled up by the giants who attempted to scale heaven, when

-      Zeus blasted them and their work with his launched lightning.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      From this summit, we have in view the broken, rock-strewn field called the

-      Cataract, and all the extraordinary islands of rock above, that almost dam

-      the river; there, over Philæ, on the north shore, is the barrack-like

-      Austrian Mission, and neat it the railway that runs through the desert

-      waste, round the hills of the Cataract, to Assouan. These vast piled-up

-      fragments and splintered ledges, here and all about us, although of raw

-      granite and syenite, are all disintegrating and crumbling into fine atoms.

-      It is this decay that softens the hardness of the outlines, and harmonizes

-      with the ruins below. Wild as the convulsion was that caused this

-      fantastic wreck, the scene is not without a certain peace now, as we sit

-      here this Sunday afternoon, on a high crag, looking down upon the pagan

-      temples, which resist the tooth of time almost as well as the masses of

-      granite rock that are in position and in form their sentinels.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Opposite, on the hill, is the mosque, and the plastered dome of the

-      sheykh's tomb, with its prayer-niche, a quiet and commanding place of

-      repose. The mosque looks down upon the ever-flowing Nile, upon the granite

-      desolation, upon the decaying temple of Isis,&mdash;converted once into a

-      temple of the true God, and now merely the marvel of the traveler. The

-      mosque itself, representative of the latest religion, is falling to ruin.

-      What will come next? What will come to break up this civilized barbarism?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Abd-el-Atti, why do you suppose the Lord permitted the old heathen to

-      have such a lovely place as this Philæ for the practice of their

-      superstitions?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do' know, be sure. Once there was a stranger, I reckon him travel without

-      any dragoman, come to the tent of the prophet Abraham, and ask for food

-      and lodging; he was a kind of infidel, not believe in God, not to believe

-      in anything but a bit of stone. And Abraham was very angry, and sent him

-      away without any dinner. Then the Lord, when he saw it, scolded Abraham.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;'But,' says Abraham, 'the man is an infidel, and does not believe in

-      Thee.'

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;'Well,' the Lord he answer to Abraham, 'he has lived in my world all his

-      life, and I have suffered him, and taken care of him, and prospered him,

-      and borne his infidelity; and you could not give him a dinner, or shelter

-      for one night in your house!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then Abraham ran after the infidel, and called him back, and told him all

-      that the Lord he say. And the infidel when he heard it, answer, 'If the

-      Lord says that, I believe in Him; and I believe that you are a prophet.'.rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And do you think, Abd-el-Atti, that men have been more tolerant, the

-      Friends of Mohammed, for instance, since then?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Men pretty nearly always the same; I see 'em all 'bout alike. I read in

-      our books a little, what you call 'em?&mdash;yes, anecdote, how a Moslem

-      'ulama, and a Christian priest, and a Jewish rabbi, were in a place

-      together, and had some conversation, and they agreed to tell what each

-      would like best to happen.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The priest he began:&mdash;'I should like,' says he, 'as many Moslems to

-      die as there are animals sacrificed by them on the day of sacrifice.'

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;'And I,' says the 'ulama, 'would like to see put out of the way so many

-      Christians as they eat eggs on Easter.'

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now it is your turn, says they both to the rabbi:&mdash;'Well, I should

-      like you both to have your wishes.' I think the Jew have the best of it.

-      Not so?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The night is soft and still, and envelopes Philæ in a summer warmth. The

-      stars crowd the blue-black sky with scintillant points, obtrusive and

-      blazing in startling nearness; they are all repeated in the darker blue of

-      the smooth river, where lie also, perfectly outlined, the heavy shadows of

-      the granite masses. Upon the silence suddenly breaks the notes of a

-      cornet, from a dahabeëh moored above us, in pulsations, however, rather to

-      emphasize than to break the hush of the night.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Eh! that's Mr. Fiddle,&rdquo; cries Abd-el-Atti, whose musical nomenclature is

-      not very extensive, &ldquo;that's a him.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Once on a moonless night in Upper Nubia, as we lay tied to the bank, under

-      the shadow of the palms, there had swept past us, flashing into sight an

-      instant and then gone in the darkness, an upward-bound dahabeëh, from the

-      deck of which a cornet-à-piston flung out, in salute, the lively notes of

-      a popular American air. The player (whom the dragoman could never call by

-      any name but &ldquo;Mr. Fiddle&rdquo;) as we came to know later, was an Irish

-      gentleman, Anglicized and Americanized, and indeed cosmopolitan, who has a

-      fancy for going about the world and awaking here and there remote and

-      commonly undisturbed echoes with his favorite brass horn. I daresay that

-      moonlight voyagers on the Hudson have heard its notes dropping down from

-      the Highlands; it has stirred the air of every land on the globe except

-      India; our own Sierras have responded to its invitations, and Mount Sinai

-      itself has echoed its strains. There is a prejudice against the cornet,

-      that it is not exactly a family instrument; and not more suited to assist

-      in morning and evening devotions than the violin, which a young clergyman,

-      whom I knew, was endeavoring to learn, in order to play it, gently, at

-      family prayers.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This traveled cornet, however, begins to play, with deliberate pauses

-      between the bars, the notes of that glorious hymn, &ldquo;How firm a foundation

-      ye saints of the Lord,&rdquo; following it with the Prayer from Der Freischutz,

-      and that, again, with some familiar Scotch airs (a transition perfectly

-      natural in home-circles on Sunday evening), every note of which, leisurely

-      floating out into the night, is sent back in distant echoes. Nothing can

-      be lovelier than the scene,&mdash;the tropical night, the sentimental

-      island, the shadows of columns and crags, the mysterious presence of a

-      brooding past,&mdash;and nothing can be sweeter than these dulcet,

-      lingering, re-echoing strains, which are the music of our faith, of

-      civilization, of home. From these old temples did never come, in the days

-      of the flute and the darabooka, such melodies. And do the spirits of Isis

-      and Osiris, and of Berenice, Cleopatra, and Antoninus, who worshipped them

-      here, listen, and know perhaps that a purer and better spirit has come

-      into the world?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the midst of this echoing melody, a little boat, its sail noiselessly

-      furled, its gunwales crowded with gowned and white-turbaned Nubians,

-      glides out of the shadow and comes alongside, as silently as a ferry-boat

-      of the under-world bearing the robed figures of the departed, and the

-      venerable Reis of the Cataract steps on board, with <i>es-salam 'aleykum</i>;

-      and the negotiation for shooting the rapids in the morning begins.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The reïs is a Nubian of grave aspect, of a complexion many shades darker

-      than would have been needed to disqualify its possessor to enjoy civil

-      rights in our country a few years ago, and with watchful and shrewd black

-      eyes which have an occasional gleam of humor; his robe is mingled black

-      and white, his turban is a fine camels-hair shawl; his legs are bare, but

-      he wears pointed red-morocco slippers. There is a long confab between him

-      and the dragoman, over pipes and coffee, about the down trip. It seems

-      that there is a dahabeëh at Assouan, carrying the English Prince Arthur

-      and a Moslem Prince, which has been waiting for ten days the whim of the

-      royal scion, to make the ascent. Meantime no other boat can go up or down.

-      The cataract business is at a standstill. The government has given orders

-      that no other boat shall get in the way; and many travelers' boats have

-      been detained from one to two weeks; some of them have turned back,

-      without seeing Nubia, unable to spend any longer time in a vexatious

-      uncertainty. The prince has signified his intention of coming up the

-      Cataract tomorrow morning, and consequently we cannot go down, although

-      the descending channel is not the same as the ascending. A considerable

-      fleet of boats is now at each end of the cataract, powerless to move.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The cataract people express great dissatisfaction at this interference in

-      their concerns by the government, which does not pay them as much as the

-      ordinary traveler does for passing the cataract. And yet they have their

-      own sly and mysterious method of dealing with boats that is not less

-      annoying than the government favoritism. They will very seldom take a

-      dahabeëh through in a day; they have delight in detaining it in the rapids

-      and showing their authority.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When, at length, the Reis comes into the cabin, to pay us a visit of

-      courtesy, he is perfect in dignity and good-breeding, in spite of his bare

-      legs; and enters into a discourse of the situation with spirit and

-      intelligence. In reply to a remark, that, in America we are not obliged to

-      wait for princes, his eyes sparkle, as he answers, with much vivacity of

-      manner, &ldquo;You quite right. In Egypt we are in a mess. Egypt is a ewe sheep

-      from which every year they shear the wool close off; the milk that should

-      go the lamb they drink; and when the poor old thing dies, they give the

-      carcass to the people&mdash;the skin they cut up among themselves. This

-      season,&rdquo; he goes on, &ldquo;is to the cataracts like what the pilgrimage is to

-      Mecca and to Jerusalem&mdash;the time when to make the money from the

-      traveler. And when the princes they come, crowding the traveler to one

-      side, and the government makes everything done for them for nothing, and

-      pays only one dollar for a turkey for which the traveler pays two, 'bliges

-      the people to sell their provisions at its own price,&rdquo;&mdash;the sheykh

-      stopped.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The Reis, then, Abd-el-Atti, doesn't fancy this method of doing

-      business?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, him say he not like it at all.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      And the Reis kindled up, &ldquo;You may call the Prince anything you like, you

-      may call him king; but the real Sultan is the man who pays his money and

-      does not come here at the cost of the government. Great beggars some of

-      these big nobility; all the great people want the Viceroyal to do 'em

-      charity and take 'em up the Nile, into Abyssinia, I don't know where all.

-      I think the greatest beggars always those who can best afford to pay.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      With this philosophical remark the old Sheykh concludes a long harangue,

-      the substance of which is given above, and takes his leave with a hundred

-      complimentary speeches.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Forced to wait, we employed Monday advantageously in exploring the

-      land-route to Assouan, going by Mahatta, where the trading-boats lie and

-      piles of merchandise lumber the shore. It is a considerable village, and

-      full of most persistent beggars and curiosity venders. The road, sandy and

-      dusty, winds through hills of granite boulders&mdash;a hot and desolate

-      though not deserted highway, for strings of camels, with merchandise, were

-      in sight the whole distance. We passed through the ancient cemetery,

-      outside of Assouan, a dreary field of sand and rocks, the leaning

-      grave-stones covered with inscriptions in old Arabic, (or Cufic), where

-      are said to rest the martyred friends of the prophet who perished in the

-      first battle with the infidels above Philæ.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Returning, we made a <i>detour</i> to the famous syenite quarries, the

-      openings of several of which are still visible. They were worked from the

-      sides and not in pits, and offer little to interest the ordinary

-      sight-seer. Yet we like to see where the old workmen chipped away at the

-      rocks; there are frequent marks of the square holes that they drilled, in

-      order to split off the stone with wet wedges of wood. The great obelisk

-      which lies in the quarry, half covered by sand, is unfinished; it is

-      tapered from the base to its tip, ninety-eight feet, but it was doubtless,

-      as the marks indicate, to be worked down to the size of the big obelisk at

-      Karnak; the part which is exposed measures ten to eleven feet square. It

-      lies behind ledges of rock, and it could only have been removed by cutting

-      away the enormous mass in front of it or by hoisting it over. The

-      suggestion of Mr. Wilkinson that it was to be floated out by a canal, does

-      not commend itself to one standing on the ground.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We came back by the long road, the ancient traveled way, along which, on

-      the boulders, are rudely-cut sculptures and hieroglyphics, mere

-      scratchings on the stone, but recording the passage of kings and armies as

-      long ago as the twelfth dynasty. Nearly all the way from Assouan to Philæ

-      are remains of a huge wall of unburnt bricks, ten to fifteen feet broad

-      and probably fifteen to twenty feet high, winding along the valley and

-      over the low ridges. An apparently more unnecessary wall does not exist;

-      it is said by people here to have been thrown up by the Moslems as a

-      protection against the Nubians when they first traversed this desert; but

-      it is no doubt Roman. There are indications that the Nile once poured its

-      main flood through this opening.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We emerge not far from the south end of the railway track, and at the

-      deserted Austrian Mission. A few Nubian families live in huts on the bank

-      of the stream. Among the bright-eyed young ladies, with shining hair, who

-      entreat backsheesh, while we are waiting for our sandal, is the daughter

-      of our up-river pilot. We should have had a higher opinion of his dignity

-      and rank if we had not seen his house and his family.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After sunset the dahabeëhs of the Prince came up and were received with

-      salutes by the waiting boats, which the royal craft did not return. Why

-      the dragoman of the arriving dahabeëh came to ours with the Prince's

-      request, as he said, for our cards, we were not informed; we certainly

-      intended no offence by the salute; it was, on the part of the other boats,

-      a natural expression of pleasure that the royal boat was at last out of

-      the way.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At dark we loose from lovely Philæ, in order to drop down to Mahatta and

-      take our station for running the cataract in the morning. As we draw out

-      from the little fleet of boats, Irish, Hungarian, American, English,

-      rockets and blue lights illumine the night, and we go off in a blaze of

-      glory. Regardless of the Presence, the Irish gentleman responds on his

-      cornet with the Star-Spangled Banner, the martial strains of which echo

-      from all the hills.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In a moment, the lights are out, the dahabeëhs disappear and the

-      enchanting island is lost to sight. We are gliding down the swift and

-      winding channel, through granite walls, under the shadow of giant

-      boulders, immersed in the gloom of a night which the stars do not

-      penetrate. There is no sound save the regular, chopping fall of the heavy

-      sweeps, which steady the timorous boat, and are the only sign, breaking

-      the oppressive silence, that we are not a phantom ship in a world of

-      shades. It is a short but ghostly voyage, and we see at length with a sigh

-      of relief the lines of masts and spars in the port of Mahatta. Working the

-      boat through the crowd that lie there we moor for the night, with the roar

-      of the cataract in our ears.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0052" id="linkimage-0052"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0342.jpg" alt="0342 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0053" id="linkimage-0053"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0343.jpg" alt="0343 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0027" id="link2HCH0027"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXVII.&mdash;RETURNING.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E ARE on deck

-      before sunrise, a film is over the sky and a light breeze blows out our

-      streamer&mdash;a bad omen for the passage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The downward run of the Cataract is always made in the early morning, that

-      being the time when there is least likely to be any wind. And a calm is

-      considered absolutely necessary to the safety of the boat. The north wind,

-      which helps the passage up, would be fatal going down. The boat runs with

-      the current, and any exterior disturbance would whirl her about and cast

-      her upon the rocks.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If we are going this morning, we have no time to lose, for it is easy to

-      see that this breeze, which is now uncertainly dallying with our colors,

-      will before long strengthen. The Cataract people begin to arrive; there is

-      already a blue and white row of them squatting on the bank above us,

-      drawing their cotton robes about them, for the morning is a trifle chilly.

-      They come loitering along the bank and sit down as if they were merely

-      spectators, and had no interest in the performance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The sun comes, and scatters the cloud-films; as the sun rises we are ready

-      to go; everything has been made snug and fast above and below; and the

-      breeze has subsided entirely. We ought to take instant advantage of the

-      calm; seconds count now. But we wait for the Reis of the Cataract, the

-      head reïs, without whose consent no move can be made. It is the sly old

-      sheykh with whom we have already negociated, and he has his reasons for

-      delaying. By priority of arrival at Philæ our boat is entitled to be first

-      taken down; but the dragoman of another boat has been crossing the palms

-      of the guileless patriarch with gold pieces, and he has agreed to give the

-      other boat the preference. It is not probable that the virtuous sheykh

-      ever intended to do so, but he must make some show of keeping his bargain.

-      He would like to postpone our voyage, and take the chances of another day.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But here he comes, mounted on a donkey, in state, wrapped about the head

-      and neck in his cashmere, and with a train of attendants&mdash;the

-      imperturbable, shrewd old man. He halts a moment on the high bank, looks

-      up at our pennant, mutters something about &ldquo;wind, not good day, no safe,&rdquo;

-       and is coolly about to ride by.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our dragoman in an instant is at his side, and with half-jocular but firm

-      persistence, invites him to dismount. It is in vain that the sheykh

-      invents excuse after excuse for going on. There is a neighbor in the

-      village whose child is dead, and he must visit him. The consolation,

-      Abd-el-Atti thinks, can be postponed an hour or two, Allah is all

-      merciful. He is chilly, his fingers are cold, he will just ride to the

-      next house and warm his hands, and by that time we can tell whether it is

-      to be a good morning; Abd-el-Atti is sure that he can warm his fingers

-      much better on our boat, in fact he can get warm all through there.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I'll warm him if he won't come.&rdquo; continues the dragoman, turning to us;

-      &ldquo;if I let him go by, the old rascal, he slip down to Assouan, and that

-      become the last of him.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Before the patriarch knows exactly what has happened, or the other

-      dragoman can hinder, he is gently hustled down the steep bank aboard our

-      boat. There is a brief palaver, and then he is seated, with a big bowl of

-      coffee and bread; we are still waiting, but it is evident that the

-      decisive nod has been given. The complexion of affairs has changed!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The people are called from the shore; before we interpret rightly their

-      lazy stir, they are swarming on board. The men are getting their places on

-      the benches at the oars&mdash;three stout fellows at each oar; it looks

-      like &ldquo;business.&rdquo; The three principal reïses are on board; there are at

-      least a dozen steersmen; several heads of families are present, and a

-      dozen boys. More than seventy-five men have invaded us&mdash;and they may

-      all be needed to get ropes ashore in case of accident. This unusual swarm

-      of men and the assistance of so many sheykhs, these extra precautions,

-      denote either fear, or a desire to impress us with the magnitude of the

-      undertaking. The head reïs shakes his head at the boat and mutters, &ldquo;much

-      big.&rdquo; We have aboard almost every skillful pilot of the rapids.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Cataract flag, two bands of red and yellow with the name of &ldquo;Allah&rdquo;

-       worked on it in white, is set up by the cabin stairs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is a great deal of talking, some confusion, and a little

-      nervousness. Our dragoman cheerfully says, &ldquo;we will hope for the better,&rdquo;

-       as the beads pass through his fingers. The reïses are audibly muttering

-      their prayers. The pilots begin to strip to their work. A bright boy of

-      twelve years, squat on deck by the tiller, is loudly and rapidly reciting

-      the Koran.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At the last moment, the most venerable reïs of the cataract comes on

-      board, as a great favor to us. He has long been superannuated, his hair is

-      white, his eye-sight is dim, but when he is on board all will go well.

-      Given a conspicous seat in a chair on the cabin deck, he begins at once

-      prayers for our safe passage. This sheykh is very distinguished, tracing

-      his ancestry back beyond the days of Abraham; his family is very large&mdash;seven

-      hundred is the number of his relations; this seems to be a favorite

-      number; Ali Moorad at Luxor has also seven hundred relations. The sheykh

-      is treated with great deference; he seems to have had something to do with

-      designing the cataract, and opening it to the public.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The last rope is hauled in; the crowd on shore cheer; our rowers dip the

-      oars, and in a moment we are sweeping along in the stiff current, avoiding

-      the boulders on either side. We go swiftly. Everybody is muttering prayers

-      now; two venerable reïses seated on a box in front of the rudder increase

-      the speed of their devotions; and the boy chants the Koran with a freer

-      swing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our route down is not the same as it was up. We pass the head of the chief

-      rapid&mdash;in which we struggle&mdash;into which it would need only a

-      wink of the helm to turn us&mdash;and sweep away to the west side; and

-      even appear to go a little out of our way to run near a precipice of rock.

-      A party of ladies and gentlemen who have come down from their dahabeëh

-      above, to see us make the chûte, are standing on the summit, and wave

-      handkerchiefs and hats as we rush by.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Before us, we can see the great rapids&mdash;a down-hill prospect. The

-      passage is narrow, and so crowded is the hurrying water that there is a

-      ridge down the centre. On this ridge, which is broken and also curved, we

-      are to go. If it were straight, it would be more attractive, but it curves

-      short to the right near the bottom of the rapid, and, if we do not turn

-      sharp with it, we shall dash against the rocks ahead, where the waves

-      strike in curling foam. All will depend upon the skill and strength of the

-      steersmen, and the sheer at the exact instant.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is not long to think of it, however, and no possibility now of

-      evading the trial. Before we know it, the nose of the boat is in the

-      rapid, which flings it up in the air; the next second we are tossed on the

-      waves. The bow dips, and a heavy wave deluges the cook's domain; we ship a

-      tun or two of water, the dragoman, who stands forward, is wet to his

-      breast; but the boat shakes it off and rises again, tossed like an

-      egg-shell. It is glorious. The boat obeys her helm admirably, as the

-      half-dozen pilots, throwing their weight upon the tiller, skillfully veer

-      it slightly or give it a broad sweep.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a matter of only three or four minutes, but they are minutes of

-      intense excitement. In the midst of them, the reïs of our boat, who has no

-      command now and no responsibility, and is usually imperturbably calm,

-      becomes completely unmanned by the strain upon his nerves, and breaks

-      forth into convulsive shouting, tears and perspiration running down his

-      cheeks. He has &ldquo;the power,&rdquo; and would have hysterics if he were not a man.

-      A half-dozen people fly to his rescue, snatch off his turban, hold his

-      hands, mop his face, and try to call him out of his panic. By the time he

-      is somewhat composed, we have shunned the rocks and made the turn, and are

-      floating in smoother but still swift water. The reises shake hands and

-      come to us with salaams and congratulations. The chief pilot desires to

-      put my fez on his own head in token of great joy and amity. The boy stops

-      shouting the Koran, the prayers cease, the beads are put up. It is only

-      when we are in a tight place that it is necessary to call upon the name of

-      the Lord vigorously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You need not have feared,&rdquo; says a reïs of the Cataract to ours, pointing

-      to the name on the red and yellow flag, &ldquo;Allah would bring us through.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      That there was no danger in this passage we cannot affirm. The dahabeëhs

-      that we left at Mahatta, ready to go down, and which might have been

-      brought through that morning, were detained four or five days upon the

-      whim of the reises. Of the two that came first, one escaped with a slight

-      knock against the rocks, and the other was dashed on them, her bottom

-      staved in, and half filled with water immediately. Fortunately, she was

-      fast on the rock; the passengers, luggage, and stores were got ashore; and

-      after some days the boat was rescued and repaired.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      For a mile below this chûte we have rapid going, rocks to shun, short

-      turns to make, and quite uncertainty enough to keep us on the <i>qui vive</i>,

-      and finally, another lesser rapid, where there is infinitely more noise by

-      the crew, but less danger from the river than above.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we approach the last rapid, a woman appears in the swift stream,

-      swimming by the help of a log&mdash;that being the handy ferry-boat of the

-      country; her clothes are all in a big basket, and the basket is secured on

-      her head. The sandal, which is making its way down a side channel, with

-      our sheep on board, is signalled to take this lady of the lake in, and

-      land her on the opposite shore. These sheep of ours, though much tossed

-      about, seem to enjoy the voyage and look about upon the raging scene with

-      that indifference which comes of high breeding. They are black, but that

-      was not to their prejudice in their Nubian home. They are comely animals

-      in life, and in death are the best mutton in the East; it is said that

-      they are fed on dates, and that this diet imparts to their flesh its sweet

-      flavor. I think their excellence is quite as much due to the splendid air

-      they breathe.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      While we are watching the manoeuvring of the boat, the woman swims to a

-      place where she can securely lodge her precious log in the rocks and touch

-      bottom with her feet. The boat follows her and steadies itself against the

-      same rocks, about which the swift current is swirling. The water is up to

-      the woman's neck, and the problem seems to be to get the clothes out of

-      the basket which is on her head, and put them on, and not wet the clothes.

-      It is the old myth of Venus rising from the sea, but under changed

-      conditions, and in the face of modern sensitiveness. How it was

-      accomplished, I cannot say, but when I look again the aquatic Venus is

-      seated in the sandal, clothed, dry, and placid.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We were an hour passing the rapids, the last part of the time with a

-      strong wind against us; if it had risen sooner we should have had serious

-      trouble. As it was, it took another hour with three men at each oar, to

-      work down to Assouan through the tortuous channel, which is full of rocks

-      and whirlpools, The men at each bank of oars belonged to different tribes,

-      and they fell into a rivalry of rowing, which resulted in an immense

-      amount of splashing, spurting, yelling, chorusing, and calling on the

-      Prophet. When the contest became hot, the oars were all at sixes and

-      sevens, and in fact the rowing gave way to vituperation and a general

-      scrimmage. Once, in one of the most ticklish places in the rapids, the

-      rowers had fallen to quarrelling, and the boat would have gone to smash,

-      if the reïs had not rushed in and laid about him with a stick. These

-      artless children of the sun! However we came down to our landing in good

-      form, exchanging salutes with the fleet of boats waiting to make the

-      ascent.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At once four boats, making a gallant show with their spread wings, sailed

-      past us, bound up the cataract. The passengers fired salutes, waved their

-      handkerchiefs, and exhibited the exultation they felt in being at last

-      under way for Philæ; and well they might, for some of them had been

-      waiting here fifteen days.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But alas for their brief prosperity. The head reïs was not with them; that

-      autocrat was still upon our deck, leisurely stowing away coffee, eggs,

-      cold meat, and whatever provisions were brought him, with the calmness of

-      one who has a good conscience. As the dahabeëhs swept by he shook his head

-      and murmured, &ldquo;not much go.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      And they did &ldquo;not much go.&rdquo; They stopped indeed, and lay all day at the

-      first gate, and all night. The next morning, two dahabeëhs, carrying

-      persons of rank, passed up, and were given the preference, leaving the

-      first-comers still in the rapids; and two days after, they were in

-      mid-passage, and kept day after day in the roar and desolation of the

-      cataract, at the pleasure of its owners. The only resource they had was to

-      write indignant letters of remonstrance to the governor at Assouan.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This passage of the cataract is a mysterious business, the secrets of

-      which are only mastered by patient study. Why the reises should desire to

-      make it so vexatious is the prime mystery. The traveler who reaches

-      Assouan often finds himself entangled in an invisible web of restraints.

-      There is no opposition to his going on; on the contrary the governor, the

-      reises, and everyone overflow with courtesy and helpfulness. But, somehow,

-      he does not go on, he is played with from day to day. The old sheykh,

-      before he took his affectionate leave of us that morning, let out the

-      reason of the momentary hesitation he had exhibited in agreeing to take

-      our boat up the cataract when we arrived. The excellent owners, honest

-      Aboo Yoosef and the plaintive little Jew of Bagdad, had sent him a bribe

-      of a whole piece of cotton cloth, and some money to induce him to prevent

-      our passage. He was not to refuse, not by any means, for in that case the

-      owners would have been liable to us for the hundred pounds forfeit named

-      in the contract in case the boat could not be taken up; but he was to

-      amuse us, and encourage us, and delay us, on various pretexts, so long

-      that we should tire out and freely choose not to go any farther.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The integrity of the reïs was proof against the seduction of this bribe;

-      he appropriated it, and then earned the heavy fee for carrying us up, in

-      addition. I can add nothing by way of eulogium upon this clever old man,

-      whose virtue enabled him to withstand so much temptation.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We lay for two days at the island Elephantine, opposite Assouan, and have

-      ample time to explore its two miserable villages, and to wander over the

-      heaps on heaps, the <i>débris</i> of so many successive civilizations. All

-      day long, women and children are clambering over these mounds of ashes,

-      pottery, bricks, and fragments of stone, unearthing coins, images, beads,

-      and bits of antiquity, which the strangers buy. There is nothing else on

-      the island. These indistinguishable mounds are almost the sole evidence of

-      the successive occupation of ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Ethiopians,

-      Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, and conquering Arabs. But the grey

-      island has an indefinable charm. The northern end is green with wheat and

-      palms; but if it were absolutely naked, its fine granite outlines would be

-      attractive under this splendid sky. The days are lovely, and the nights

-      enchanting. Nothing more poetic could be imagined than the silvery reaches

-      of river at night, with their fringed islands and shores, the stars and

-      the new moon, the uplifted rocks, and the town reflected in the stream.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Of Assouan itself, its palm-groves and dirty huddle of dwellings, we have

-      quite enough in a day. Curiosity leads us to visit the jail, and we find

-      there, by chance, one of our sailors, who is locked up for

-      insubordination, and our venerable reïs keeping him company, for being

-      inefficient in authority over his crew. In front of the jail, under the

-      shade of two large acacia trees, the governor has placed his divan and

-      holds his <i>levées</i> in the open air, transacting business, and

-      entertaining his visitors with coffee and cigars. His excellency is a very

-      &ldquo;smartish,&rdquo; big black fellow, not a negro nor a Nubian exactly, but an

-      Ababdeh, from a tribe of desert Arabs; a man of some aptitude for affairs

-      and with very little palaver. The jail has an outer guard-room, furnished

-      with divans and open at both ends, and used as a court of justice. A not

-      formidable door leads to the first room, which is some twenty feet square;

-      and here, seated upon the ground with some thirty others, we are surprised

-      to recognize our reïs. The respectable old incapable was greatly

-      humiliated by the indignity. Although he was speedily released, his

-      incarceration was a mistake; it seemed to break his spirit, and he was

-      sullen and uncheerful ever afterwards. His companions were in for trivial

-      offences: most of them for not paying the government taxes, or for debt to

-      the Khedive, as the phrase was. In an adjoining, smaller room, were the

-      great criminals, the thieves and murderers. Three murderers were chained

-      together by enormous iron cables attached to collars about their necks,

-      and their wrists were clamped in small wooden stocks. In this company were

-      five decent-looking men, who were also bound together by heavy chains from

-      neck to neck; we were told that these were the brothers of men who had run

-      away from the draft, and that they would be held until their relations

-      surrendered themselves. They all sat glumly on the ground. The jail does

-      not differ in comfort from the ordinary houses; and the men are led out

-      once a day for fresh air; we saw the murderers taking an airing, and

-      exercise also in lugging their ponderous irons.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We departed from Assouan early in the morning, with water and wind

-      favorable for a prosperous day. At seven o'clock our worthy steersman

-      stranded us on a rock. It was a little difficult to do it, for he had to

-      go out of his way and to leave the broad and plainly staked-out channel.

-      But he did it very neatly. The rock was a dozen feet out of water, and he

-      laid the boat, without injury, on the shelving upper side of it, so that

-      the current would constantly wash it further on, and the falling river

-      would desert it. The steersman was born in Assouan and knows every rock

-      and current here, even in the dark. This accident no doubt happened out of

-      sympathy with the indignity to the reïs. That able commander is curled up

-      on the deck ill, and no doubt felt greatly grieved when he felt the

-      grating of the bottom upon the rock; but he was not too ill to exchange

-      glances with the serene and ever-smiling steersman. Three hours after the

-      stranding, our crew have succeeded in working us a little further on than

-      we were at first, and are still busy; surely there are in all history no

-      such navigators as these.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is with some regret that we leave, or are trying to leave, Nubia, both

-      on account of its climate and its people. The men, various sorts of Arabs

-      as well as the Nubians, are better material than the fellaheen below,

-      finer looking, with more spirit and pride, more independence and

-      self-respect. They are also more barbarous; they carry knives and heavy

-      sticks universally, and guns if they can get them, and in many places have

-      the reputation of being quarrelsome, turbulent, and thieves. But we have

-      rarely received other than courteous treatment from them. Some of the

-      youngest women are quite pretty, or would be but for the enormous nose and

-      ear rings, the twisted hair and the oil; the old women are all

-      unnecessarily ugly. The children are apt to be what might be called free

-      in apparel, except that the girls wear fringe, but the women are as modest

-      in dress and manner as those of Egypt. That the highest morality

-      invariably prevails, however, one cannot affirm, notwithstanding the

-      privilege of husbands, which we are assured is sometimes exercised, of

-      disposing of a wife (by means of the knife and the river) who may have

-      merely incurred suspicion by talking privately with another man. This

-      process is evidently not frequent, for women are plenty, and we saw no

-      bodies in the river.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But our chief regret at quitting Nubia is on account of the climate. It is

-      incomparably the finest winter climate I have ever known; it is nearly

-      perfect. The air is always elastic and inspiring; the days are full of

-      sun; the nights are cool and refreshing; the absolute dryness seems to

-      counteract the danger from changes of temperature. You may do there what

-      you cannot in any place in Europe in the winter&mdash;get warm. You may

-      also, there, have repose without languor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We went on the rock at seven and got off at two. The governor of Assouan

-      was asked for help and he sent down a couple of boat-loads of men, who

-      lifted us off by main strength and the power of their lungs. We drifted

-      on, but at sunset we were not out of sight of the mosque of Assouan.

-      Strolling ashore, we found a broad and rich plain, large palm-groves and

-      wheat-fields, and a swarming population&mdash;in striking contrast to the

-      country above the Cataract. The character of the people is wholly

-      different; the women are neither so oily, nor have they the wild shyness

-      of the Nubians; they mind their own business and belong to a more

-      civilized society; slaves, negroes as black as night, abound in the

-      fields. Some of the large wheat-fields are wholly enclosed by substantial

-      unburnt brick walls, ten feet high.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Early in the evening, our serene steersman puts us hard aground again on a

-      sandbar. I suppose it was another accident. The wife and children of the

-      steersman live at a little town opposite the shoal upon which we have so

-      conveniently landed, and I suppose the poor fellow wanted an opportunity

-      to visit them. He was not permitted leave of absence while the boat lay at

-      Assouan, and now the dragoman says that, so far as he is concerned, the

-      permission shall not be given from here, although the village is almost in

-      sight; the steersman ought to be punished for his conduct, and he must

-      wait till he comes up next year before he can see his wife and children.

-      It seems a hard case, to separate a man from his family in this manner.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I think it's a perfect shame,&rdquo; cries Madame, when she hears of it, &ldquo;not

-      to see his family for a year!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But one of his sons is on board, you know, as a sailor. And the steersman

-      spent most of his time with his wife the boy's mother, when we were at

-      Assouan.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I thought you said his wife lived opposite here?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, but this is a newer one, a younger one; that is his old wife, in

-      Assouan.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The poor fellow has another in Cairo.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He has wives, I daresay, at proper distances along the Nile, and whenever

-      he wants to spend an hour or two with his family, he runs us aground.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don't care to hear anything more about him.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The Moslem religion is admirably suited to the poor mariner, and

-      especially to the sailor on the Nile through a country that is all length

-      and no width.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0054" id="linkimage-0054"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0354.jpg" alt="0354 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0028" id="link2HCH0028"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXVIII.&mdash;MODERN FACTS AND ANCIENT MEMORIES.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>N a high bluff

-      stands the tottering temple of Kom Ombos conspicuous from a distance, and

-      commanding a dreary waste of desert. Its gigantic columns are of the

-      Ptolemaic time, and the capitals show either Greek influence or the

-      relaxation of the Egyptian hieratic restraint.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The temple is double, with two entrances and parallel suites of

-      apartments, a happy idea of the builders, impartially to split the

-      difference between good and evil; one side is devoted to the worship of

-      Horus, the embodiment of the principle of Light, and the other to that of

-      Savak, the crocodile-headed god of Darkness. I fear that the latter had

-      here the more worshippers; his title was Lord of Ombos, and the fear of

-      him spread like night. On the sand-bank, opposite, the once-favored

-      crocodiles still lounge in the sun, with a sharp eye out for the rifle of

-      the foreigner, and, no doubt, wonder at the murderous spirit which has

-      come into the world to supplant the peaceful heathenism.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These ruins are an example of the jealousy with which the hierarchy

-      guarded their temples from popular intrusion. The sacred precincts were

-      enclosed by a thick and high brick wall, which must have concealed the

-      temple from view except on the river side; so formidable was this wall,

-      that although the edifice stands upon an eminence, it lies in a basin

-      formed by the ruins of the enclosure. The sun beating in it at noon

-      converted it into a reverberating furnace&mdash;a heat sufficient to melt

-      any image not of stone, and not to be endured by persons who do not

-      believe in Savak.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We walked a long time on the broad desert below Ombos, over sand as hard

-      as a sea-beach pounded by the waves, looking for the bed of pebbles

-      mentioned in the handbook, and found it a couple of miles below. In the

-      soft bank an enormous mass of pebbles has been deposited, and is annually

-      added to&mdash;sweepings of the Nubian deserts, flints and agates, bits of

-      syenite from Assouan, and colored stones in great variety. There is a

-      tradition that a sailor once found a valuable diamond here, and it seems

-      always possible that one may pick some precious jewel out of the sand.

-      Some of the desert pebbles, polished by ages of sand-blasts, are very

-      beautiful.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Every day when I walk upon the smooth desert away from the river, I look

-      for colored stones, pebbles, flints, chalcedonies, and agates. And I

-      expect to find, some day, the <i>ewige</i> pebble, the stone translucent,

-      more beautiful than any in the world&mdash;perhaps, the lost seal of

-      Solomon, dropped by some wandering Bedawee. I remind myself of one

-      looking, always in the desert, for the pearl of great price, which all the

-      markets and jewelers of the world wait for. It seems possible, here under

-      this serene sky, on this expanse of sand, which has been trodden for

-      thousands of years by all the Oriental people in turn, by caravans, by

-      merchants and warriors and wanderers, swept by so many geologic floods and

-      catastrophes, to find it. I never tire of looking, and curiously examine

-      every bit of translucent and variegated flint that sparkles in the sand. I

-      almost hope, when I find it, that it will not be cut by hand of man, but

-      that it will be changeable in color, and be fashioned in a cunning manner

-      by nature herself. Unless, indeed, it should be, as I said, the talismanic

-      ring of Solomon, which is known to be somewhere in the world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the early morning we have drifted down to Silsilis, one of the most

-      interesting localities on the Nile. The difference in the level of the

-      land above and below and the character of the rocky passage at Silsilis

-      teach that the first cataract was here before the sandstone dam wore away

-      and transferred it to Assouan. Marks have been vainly sought here for the

-      former height of the Nile above; and we were interested in examining the

-      upper strata of rocks laid bare in the quarries. At a height of perhaps

-      sixty feet from the floor of a quarry, we saw <i>between</i> two strata of

-      sandstone a layer of other material that had exactly the appearance of the

-      deposits of the Nile which so closely resemble rock along the shore. Upon

-      reaching it we found that it was friable and, in fact, a sort of hardened

-      earth. Analysis would show whether it is a Nile deposit, and might

-      contribute something to the solution of the date of the catastrophe here.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The interest at Silsilis is in these vast sandstone quarries, and very

-      little in the excavated grottoes and rock-temples on the west shore, with

-      their defaced and smoke-obscured images. Indeed, nothing in Egypt, not

-      even the temples and pyramids, has given us such an idea of the immense

-      labor the Egyptians expended in building, as these vast excavations in the

-      rock. We have wondered before where all the stone came from that we have

-      seen piled up in buildings and heaped in miles of ruins; we wonder now

-      what use could have been made of all the stone quarried from these hills.

-      But we remember that it was not removed in a century, nor in ten

-      centuries, but that for great periods of a thousand years workmen were

-      hewing here, and that much of the stone transported and scattered over

-      Egypt has sunk into the soil out of sight.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There are half a dozen of these enormous quarries close together, each of

-      which has its communication with the river. The method of working was

-      this:&mdash;a narrow passage was cut in from the river several hundred

-      feet into the mountain, or until the best-working stone was reached, and

-      then the excavation was broadened out without limit. We followed one of

-      these passages, the sides of which are evenly-cut rock, the height of the

-      hill. At length we came into an open area, like a vast cathedral in the

-      mountain, except that it wanted both pillars and roof. The floor was

-      smooth, the sides were from fifty to seventy-five feet high, and all

-      perpendicular, and as even as if dressed down with chisel and hammer. This

-      was their general character, but in some of them steps were left in the

-      wall and platforms, showing perfectly the manner of working. The quarrymen

-      worked from the top down perpendicularly, stage by stage. We saw one of

-      these platforms, a third of the distance from the top, the only means of

-      reaching which was by nicks cut in the face of the rock, in which one

-      might plant his feet and swing down by a rope. There was no sign of

-      splitting by drilling or by the the use of plugs, or of any explosive

-      material. The walls of the quarries are all cut down in fine lines that

-      run from top to bottom slantingly and parallel. These lines have every

-      inch or two round cavities, as if the stone had been bored by some

-      flexible instrument that turned in its progress. The workmen seem to have

-      cut out the stone always of the shape and size they wanted to use; if it

-      was for a statue, the place from which it came in the quarry is rounded,

-      showing the <i>contour</i> of the figure taken. They took out every stone

-      by the most patient labor. Whether it was square or round, they cut all

-      about it a channel four to five inches wide, and then separated it from

-      the mass underneath by a like broad cut. Nothing was split away; all was

-      carefully chiseled out, apparently by small tools. Abandoned work,

-      unfinished, plainly shows this. The ages and the amount of labor required

-      to hew out such enormous quantities of stone are heightened in our

-      thought, by the recognition of this slow process. And what hells these

-      quarries must have been for the workmen, exposed to the blaze of a sun

-      intensified by the glaring reflection from the light-colored rock, and

-      stifled for want of air. They have left the marks of their unending task

-      in these little chiselings on the face of the sandstone walls. Here and

-      there some one has rudely sketched a figure or outlined a hieroglyphic. At

-      intervals places are cut in the rock through which ropes could be passed,

-      and these are worn deeply, showing the use of ropes, and no doubt of

-      derricks, in handling the stones.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These quarries are as deserted now as the temples which were taken from

-      them; but nowhere else in Egypt was I more impressed with the duration,

-      the patience, the greatness of the race that accomplished such prodigies

-      of labor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The grottoes, as I said, did not detain us; they are common

-      calling-places, where sailors and wanderers often light fires at night and

-      where our crew slept during the heat of this day, We saw there nothing

-      more remarkable than the repeated figure of the boy Horus taking

-      nourishment from the breast of his mother, which provoked the irreverent

-      remark of a voyager that Horus was more fortunate than his dragoman had

-      been in finding milk in this stony region.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Creeping on, often aground and always expecting to be, the weather growing

-      warmer as we went north, we reached Edfoo. It was Sunday, and the

-      temperature was like that of a July day, a south wind and the mercury at

-      85°.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In this condition of affairs it was not unpleasant to find a temple,

-      entire, clean, perfectly excavated, and a cool retreat from the glare of

-      the sun. It was not unlike entering a cathedral. The door by which we were

-      admitted was closed and guarded; we were alone; and we experienced

-      something of the sentiment of the sanctuary, that hush and cool serenity

-      which is sometimes mistaken for religion, in the presence of

-      ecclesiastical architecture.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Although this is a Ptolemaic temple, it is, by reason of its nearly

-      perfect condition, the best example for study. The propylon which is two

-      hundred and fifty feet high and one hundred and fifteen long, contains

-      many spacious chambers, and confirms our idea that these portions of the

-      temples were residences. The roof is something enormous, being composed of

-      blocks of stone, three feet thick, by twelve wide, and twenty-two long.

-      Upon this roof are other chambers. As we wandered through the vast

-      pillared courts, many chambers and curious passages, peered into the

-      secret ways and underground and intermural alleys, and emerged upon the

-      roof, we thought what a magnificent edifice it must have been for the

-      gorgeous processions of the old worship, which are sculptured on the

-      walls.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But outside this temple and only a few feet from it is a stone wall of

-      circuit, higher than the roof of the temple itself. Like every inch of the

-      temple walls, this wall outside and inside is covered with sculptures,

-      scenes in river life, showing a free fancy and now and then a dash of

-      humor; as, when a rhinoceros is made to tow a boat&mdash;recalling the

-      western sportiveness of David Crockett with the alligator. Not only did

-      this wall conceal the temple from the vulgar gaze, but outside it was

-      again an <i>enciente</i> of unbaked brick, effectually excluding and

-      removing to a safe distance all the populace. Mariette Bey is of the

-      opinion that all the imposing ceremonies of the old ritual had no

-      witnesses except the privileged ones of the temple; and that no one except

-      the king could enter the <i>adytum</i>.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It seems to us also that the King, who was high priest and King, lived in

-      these palace-temples, the pylons of which served him for fortresses as

-      well as residences. We find no ruins of palaces in Egypt, and it seems not

-      reasonable that the king who had all the riches of the land at his command

-      would have lived in a hut of mud.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      From the summit of this pylon we had an extensive view of the Nile and the

-      fields of ripening wheat. A glance into the squalid town was not so

-      agreeable. I know it would be a severe test of any village if it were

-      unroofed and one could behold its varied domestic life. We may from such a

-      sight as this have some conception of the appearance of this world to the

-      angels looking down. Our view was into filthy courts and roofless

-      enclosures, in which were sorry women and unclad children, sitting in the

-      dirt; where old people, emaciated and feeble, and men and women ill of

-      some wasting disease, lay stretched upon the ground, uncared for, stifled

-      by the heat and swarmed upon of flies.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The heated day lapsed into a delicious evening, a half-moon over head, the

-      water glassy, the shores fringed with palms, the air soft. As we came to

-      El Kab, where we stopped, a carawan was whistling on the opposite shore&mdash;a

-      long, shrill whistle like that of a mocking-bird. If we had known, it was

-      a warning to us that the placid appearances of the night were deceitful,

-      and that violence was masked under this smiling aspect. The barometer

-      indeed had been falling rapidly for two days. We were about to have our

-      first experience of what may be called a simoon.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Towards nine o'clock, and suddenly, the wind began to blow from the north,

-      like one of our gusts in summer, proceeding a thunderstorm. The boat took

-      the alarm at once and endeavored to fly, swinging to the wind and tugging

-      at her moorings. With great difficulty she was secured by strong cables

-      fore and aft anchored in the sand, but she trembled and shook and rattled,

-      and the wind whistled through the rigging as if we had been on the

-      Atlantic&mdash;any boat loose upon the river that night must have gone to

-      inevitable wreck. It became at once dark, and yet it was a ghastly

-      darkness; the air was full of fine sand that obscured the sky, except

-      directly overhead, where there were the ghost of a wan moon and some

-      spectral stars. Looking upon the river, it was like a Connecticut fog&mdash;but

-      a sand fog; and the river itself roared, and high waves ran against the

-      current. When we stepped from the boat, eyes, nose, and mouth were

-      instantly choked with sand, and it was almost impossible to stand. The

-      wind increased, and rocked the boat like a storm at sea; for three hours

-      it blew with much violence, and in fact did not spend itself in the whole

-      night.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The worser storm, God be merciful,&rdquo; says Abd-el-Atti, &ldquo;ever I saw in

-      Egypt.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      When it somewhat abated, the dragoman recognized a divine beneficence in

-      it; &ldquo;It show that God 'member us.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a beautiful belief of devout Moslems that personal afflictions and

-      illnesses are tokens of a heavenly care. Often when our dragoman has been

-      ill, he has congratulated himself that God was remembering him.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not so? A friend of me in Cairo was never in his life ill, never any

-      pain, toothache, headache, nothing. Always well. He begin to have fear

-      that something should happen, mebbe God forgot him. One day I meet him in

-      the Mooskee very much pleased; all right now, he been broke him the arm;

-      God 'member him.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      During the gale we had a good specimen of Arab character. When it was at

-      its height, and many things about the attacked vessel needed looking

-      after, securing and tightening, most of the sailors rolled themselves up,

-      drawing their heads into their burnouses, and went sound asleep. The

-      after-sail was blown loose and flapping in the wind; our reïs sat

-      composedly looking at it, never stirring from his haunches, and let the

-      canvas whip to rags; finally a couple of men were aroused, and secured the

-      shreds. The Nile crew is a marvel of helplessness in an emergency; and

-      considering the dangers of the river to these top-heavy boats, it is a

-      wonder that any accomplish the voyage in safety. There is no more

-      discipline on board than in a district-school meeting at home. The boat

-      might as well be run by ballot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was almost a relief to have an unpleasant day to talk about. The

-      forenoon was like a mixed fall and spring day in New England, strong wind,

-      flying clouds, but the air full of sand instead of snow; there was even a

-      drop of rain, and we heard a peal or two of feeble thunder&mdash;evidently

-      an article not readily manufactured in this country; but the afternoon

-      settled back into the old pleasantness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Of the objects of interest at Eilethyas I will mention only two, the

-      famous grottoes, and a small temple of Amunoph III., not often visited. It

-      stands between two and three miles from the river, in a desolate valley,

-      down which the Bisharee Arabs used to come on marauding excursions. What

-      freak placed it in this remote solitude? It contains only one room, a few

-      paces square, and is, in fact, only a chapel, but it is full of capital

-      pieces of sculptures of a good period of art. The architect will find here

-      four pillars, which clearly suggest the Doric style. They are

-      fourteen-sided, but one of the planes is broader than the others and has a

-      raised tablet of sculptures which terminate above in a face, said to be

-      that of Lucina, to whom the temple is dedicated, but resembling the

-      cow-headed Isis. These pillars, with the sculptures on one side finished

-      at the top with a head, may have suggested the Osiride pillars.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The grottoes are tombs in the sandstone mountain, of the time of the

-      eighteenth dynasty, which began some thirty-five hundred years ago. Two of

-      them have remarkable sculptures, the coloring of which is still fresh; and

-      I wish to speak of them a little, because it is from them (and some of the

-      same character) that Egyptologists have largely reconstructed for us the

-      common life of the ancient Egyptians. Although the work is somewhat rude,

-      it has a certain veracity of execution which is pleasing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We assume this tomb to have been that of a man of wealth. This is the

-      ante-chamber; the mummy was deposited in a pit let into a small excavation

-      in the rear. On one wall are sculptured agricultural scenes: plowing,

-      sowing, reaping wheat and pulling doora (the color indicates the kind of

-      grain), hatcheling the latter, while oxen are treading out the wheat, and

-      the song of the threshers encouraging the oxen is written in hieroglyphics

-      above; the winnowing and storing of the grain; in a line under these, the

-      various domestic animals of the deceased are brought forward to a scribe,

-      who enumerates them and notes the numbers on a roll of papyrus. There are

-      river-scenes:&mdash;grain is loaded into freight-boats; pleasure-dahabeëhs

-      are on the stream, gaily painted, with one square sail amidship, rowers

-      along the sides, and windows in the cabin; one has a horse and chariot on

-      board, the reïs stands at the bow, the overseer, kurbash in hand, is

-      threatening the crew, a sailor is falling overboard. Men are gathering

-      grapes, and treading out the wine with their feet; others are catching

-      fish and birds in nets, and dressing and curing them. At the end of this

-      wall, offerings are made to Osiris. In one compartment a man is seated

-      holding a boy on his lap.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On the opposite wall are two large figures, supposed to be the occupant of

-      the tomb and his wife, seated on a <i>fauteuil</i>; men and women, in two

-      separate lines, facing the large figures, are seated, one leg bent under

-      them, each smelling a lotus flower. In the rear, men are killing and

-      cutting up animals as if preparing for a feast. To the leg of the <i>fauteuil</i>

-      is tied a monkey; and Mr. Wilkinson says that it was customary at

-      entertainments for the hosts to have a &ldquo;favorite monkey&rdquo; tied to the leg

-      of the chair. Notwithstanding the appearance of the monkey here in that

-      position, I do not suppose that he would say that an ordinary

-      entertainment is represented here. For, although there are preparations

-      for a feast, there is a priest standing between the friends and the

-      principal personages, making offerings, and the monkey may be present in

-      his character of emblem of Thoth. It seems to be a funeral and not a

-      festive representation. The pictures apparently tell the story of the life

-      of the deceased and his occupations, and represent the mourning at his

-      tomb. In other grottoes, where the married pair are seated as here, the

-      arm of the woman on the shoulder of the man, and the &ldquo;favorite monkey&rdquo;

-       tied to the chair, friends are present in the act of mourning, throwing

-      dust on their heads, and accompanied by musicians; and the mummy is drawn

-      on a sledge to the tomb, a priest standing on the front, and a person

-      pouring oil on the ground that the runners may slip easily.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The setting sun strikes into these chambers, so carefully prepared for

-      people of rank of whom not a pinch of dust now remains, and lights them up

-      with a certain cheer and hope. We cannot make anything melancholy out of a

-      tomb so high and with such a lovely prospect from its front door. The

-      former occupants are unknown, but not more unknown than the peasants we

-      see on the fields below, still at the tasks depicted in these sculptures.

-      Thirty-five hundred years is not so very long ago! Slowly we pick our way

-      down the hill and regain our floating home; and, bidding farewell forever

-      to El Kab, drift down in the twilight. In the morning we are at Esneh.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In Esneh the sound of the grinding is never low. The town is full of

-      primitive ox-power mills in which the wheat is ground, and there are

-      always dahabeëhs staying here for the crew to bake their bread. Having

-      already had one day of Esneh we are tired of it, for it is exactly like

-      all other Egyptian towns of its size: we know all the possible

-      combinations of mud-hovels, crooked lanes, stifling dust, nakedness,

-      squalor. We are so accustomed to picking our way in the street amid women

-      and children sprawling in the dirt, that the scene has lost its

-      strangeness; it is even difficult to remember that in other countries

-      women usually keep indoors and sit on chairs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The town is not without liveliness It is half Copt, and beggars demand

-      backsheesh on the ground that they are Christians, and have a common

-      interest with us. We wander through the bazaars where there is nothing to

-      buy and into the market-place, always the most interesting study in an

-      unknown city. The same wheat lies on the ground in heaps; the same roots

-      and short stalks of the doora are tied in bundles and sold for fuel, and

-      cakes of dried manure for the like use; people are lying about in the sun

-      in all picturesque attitudes, some curled up and some on their backs fast

-      asleep; more are squating before little heaps of corn or beans or some

-      wilted &ldquo;greens,&rdquo; or dried tobacco-leaves and pipe-bowls; children swarm

-      and tumble about everywhere; donkeys and camels pick their way through the

-      groups.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I spent half an hour in teaching a handsome young Copt how to pronounce

-      English words in his Arabic-English primer. He was very eager to learn and

-      very grateful for assistance. We had a large and admiring crowd about us,

-      who laughed at every successful and still more at every unsuccessful

-      attempt on the part of the pupil, and repeated the English words

-      themselves when they could catch the sound,&mdash;an exceedingly

-      good-natured lot of idlers. We found the people altogether pleasant, some

-      in the ingrained habit of begging, quick to take a joke and easily

-      excited. While I had my scholar, a <i>fantasia</i> of music on two

-      tambourines was performed for the amusement of my comrade, which had also

-      its ring of spectators watching the effect of the monotonous thumping,

-      upon the grave howadji; he was seated upon the mastabah of a shop, with

-      all formality, and enjoyed all the honors of the entertainment, as was

-      proper, since he bore the entire expense alone,&mdash;about five cents.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The coffee-shops of Esneh are many, some respectable and others decidedly

-      otherwise. The former are the least attractive, being merely long and

-      dingy mud-apartments, in which the visitors usually sit on the floor and

-      play at draughts. The coffee-houses near the river have porticoes and

-      pleasant terraces in front, and look not unlike some picturesque Swiss or

-      Italian wine-shops. The attraction there seems to be the Ghawazees or

-      dancing-girls, of whom there is a large colony here, the colony consisting

-      of a tribe. All the family act as procurers for the young women, who are

-      usually married. Their dress is an extraordinary combination of stripes

-      and colors, red and yellow being favorites, which harmonize well with

-      their dark, often black, skins, and eyes heavily shaded with kohl. I

-      suppose it must be admitted, in spite of their total want of any womanly

-      charm of modesty, that they are the finest-looking women in Egypt, though

-      many of them are ugly; they certainly are of a different type from the

-      Egyptians, though not of a pure type; they boast that they have preserved

-      themselves without admixture with other peoples or tribes from a very

-      remote period; one thing is certain, their profession is as old as history

-      and their antiquity may entitle them to be considered an aristocracy of

-      vice. They say that their race is allied in origin to that of the people

-      called gypsies, with whom many of their customs are common. The men are

-      tinkers, blacksmiths, or musicians, and the women are the ruling element

-      in the band; the husband is subject to the wife. But whatever their

-      origin, it is admitted that their dance is the same as that with which the

-      dancing-women amused the Pharaohs, the same that the Phoenicians carried

-      to Gades and which Juvenal describes, and, Mr. Lane thinks, the same by

-      which the daughter of Herodias danced off the head of John the Baptist.

-      Modified here and there, it is the immemorial dance of the Orient.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Esneh has other attractions for the sailors of the Nile; there are the

-      mahsheshehs, or shops where hasheesh is smoked; an attendant brings the

-      &ldquo;hubble-bubble&rdquo; to the guests who are lolling on the mastabah; they inhale

-      their portion, and then lie down in a stupor, which is at every experiment

-      one remove nearer idiocy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Still drifting, giving us an opportunity to be on shore all the morning.

-      We visit the sugar establishment at Mutâneh, and walk along the high bank

-      under the shade of the acacias for a couple of miles below it. Nothing

-      could be lovelier in this sparkling morning&mdash;the silver-grey range of

-      mountains across the river and the level smiling land on our left. This is

-      one of the Viceroy's possessions, bought of one of his relations at a

-      price fixed by his highness. There are ten thousand acres of arable land,

-      of which some fifteen hundred is in sugar-cane, and the rest in grain. The

-      whole is watered by a steam-pump, which sends a vast stream of water

-      inland, giving life to the broad fields and the extensive groves, as well

-      as to a village the minaret of which we can see. It is a noble estate.

-      Near the factory are a palace and garden, somewhat in decay, as is usual

-      in this country, but able to offer us roses and lemons.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The works are large, modern, with improved machinery for crushing and

-      boiling, and apparently well managed; there is said to be one of the

-      sixteen sugar-factories of the Khedive which pays expenses; perhaps this

-      is the one. A great quantity of rum is distilled from the refuse. The vast

-      field in the rear, enclosed by a whitewashed wall, presented a lively

-      appearance, with camels bringing in the cane and unloading it and

-      arranging it upon the endless trough for the crushers. In the factory, the

-      workmen wear little clothing and are driven to their task; all the

-      overseers march among them kurbash in hand; the sight of the black fellows

-      treading about in the crystallized sugar, while putting it up in sacks,

-      would decide a fastidious person to take her tea unsweetened.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next morning we pass Erment without calling, satisfied to take the

-      word of others that you may see there a portrait of Cleopatra; and by noon

-      come to our old mooring-place at Luxor, and add ours to the painted

-      dalabeëhs lounging in this idle and gay resort.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      During the day we enjoyed only one novel sensation. We ate of the ripe

-      fruit ot the dôm-palm. It tastes and smells like stale gingerbread, made

-      of sawdust instead of flour.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I do not know how long one could stay contentedly at Thebes; certainly a

-      winter, if only to breathe the inspiring air, to bask in the sun, to gaze,

-      never sated, upon plains and soft mountains which climate and association

-      clothe with hues of beauty and romance, to yield for once to a leisure

-      that is here rebuked by no person and by no urgency of affairs; perhaps

-      for years, if one seriously attempted a study of antiquities.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The habit of leisure is at least two thousand years old here; at any rate,

-      we fell into it without the least desire to resist its spell. This is one

-      of the eddies of the world in which the modern hurry is unfelt. If it were

-      not for the coughing steamboats and the occasional glimpse one has of a

-      whisking file of Cook's tourists, Thebes would be entirely serene, and an

-      admirable place of retirement.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It has a reputation, however, for a dubious sort of industry. All along

-      the river from Geezeh to Assouan, whenever a spurious scarabæus or a bogus

-      image turned up, we would hear, &ldquo;Yes, make 'em in Luxor.&rdquo; As we drew near

-      to this great mart of antiquities, the specification became more personal&mdash;&ldquo;Can't

-      tell edzacly whether that make by Mr. Smith or by that Moslem in Goorneh,

-      over the other side.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The person named is well known to all Nile voyagers as Antiquity Smith,

-      and he has, though I cannot say that he enjoys, the reputation hinted at

-      above. How much of it is due to the enmity of rival dealers in relics of

-      the dead, I do not know; but it must be evident to anyone that the very

-      clever forgeries of antiquities, which one sees, could only be produced by

-      skillful and practiced workmen. We had some curiosity to see a man who has

-      made the American name so familiar the length of the Nile, for Mr. Smith

-      is a citizen of the United States. For seventeen years he has been a

-      voluntary exile here, and most of the time the only foreigner resident in

-      the place; long enough to give him a good title to the occupation of any

-      grotto he may choose.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In appearance Mr. Smith is somewhat like a superannuated agent of the

-      tract society, of the long, thin, shrewd, learned Yankee type. Few men

-      have enjoyed his advantages for sharpening the wits. Born in Connecticut,

-      reared in New Jersey, trained for seventeen years among the Arabs and

-      antiquity-mongers of this region, the sharpest in the Orient, he ought to

-      have not only the learning attached to the best-wrapped mummy, but to be

-      able to read the hieroglyphics on the most inscrutable human face among

-      the living.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Smith lives on the outskirts of the village, in a house, surrounded by

-      a garden, which is a kind of museum of the property, not to say the bones,

-      of the early Egyptians.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You seem to be retired from society here Mr. Smith,&rdquo; we ventured to say.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, for eight months of the year, I see nobody, literally nobody. It is

-      only during the winter that strangers come here.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Isn't it lonesome?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A little, but you get used to it.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What do you do during the hottest months?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;As near nothing as possible.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How hot is it?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sometimes the thermometer goes to 120° Fahrenheit. It stays a long time

-      at 100°. The worst of it is that the nights are almost as hot as the

-      days.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How do you exist?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I keep very quiet, don't write, don't read anything that requires the

-      least thought. Seldom go out, never in the daytime. In the early morning I

-      sit a while on the verandah, and about ten o'clock get into a big

-      bath-tub, which I have on the ground-floor, and stay in it nearly all day,

-      reading some very mild novel, and smoking the weakest tobacco. In the

-      evening I find it rather cooler outside the house than in. A white man

-      can't do anything here in the summer.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      I did not say it to Mr. Smith, but I should scarcely like to live in a

-      country where one is obliged to be in water half the year, like a pelican.

-      We can have, however, from his experience some idea what this basin must

-      have been in summer, when its area was a crowded city, upon which the sun,

-      reverberated from the incandescent limestone hills, beat in unceasing

-      fervor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0055" id="linkimage-0055"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0368.jpg" alt="0368 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0056" id="linkimage-0056"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0369.jpg" alt="0369 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0029" id="link2HCH0029"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXIX.&mdash;THE FUTURE OF THE MUMMY'S SOUL.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> SHOULD like to

-      give you a conception, however faint, of the Tombs of the ancient

-      Egyptians, for in them is to be found the innermost secret of the

-      character, the belief, the immortal expectation of that accomplished and

-      wise people. A barren description of these places of sepulchre would be of

-      small service to you, for the key would be wanting, and you would be

-      simply confused by a mass of details and measurements, which convey no

-      definite idea to a person who does not see them with his own eyes. I

-      should not indeed be warranted in attempting to say anything about these

-      great Tombs at Thebes, which are so completely described in many learned

-      volumes, did I not have the hope that some readers, who have never had

-      access to the works referred to will be glad to know something of that

-      which most engaged the educated Egyptian mind.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      No doubt the most obvious and immediate interest of the Tombs of old

-      Egypt, is in the sculptures that depict so minutely the life of the

-      people, represent all their occupations and associations, are, in fact,

-      their domestic and social history written in stone. But it is not of this

-      that I wish to speak here; I want to write a word upon the tombs and what

-      they contain, in their relation to the future life.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A study of the tombs of the different epochs, chronologically pursued,

-      would show, I think, pretty accurately, the growth of the Egyptian

-      theology, its development, or rather its departure from the primitive

-      revelation of one God, into the monstrosities of its final mixture of

-      coarse polytheistic idolatry and the vaguest pantheism. These two extremes

-      are represented by the beautiful places of sepulchre of the fourth and

-      fifth dynasties at Geezeh and Memphis, in which all the sculptures relate

-      to the life of the deceased and no deities are represented; and the tombs

-      of the twenty-fourth dynasty at Thebes which are so largely covered with

-      the gods and symbols of a religion become wholly fantastic. It was in the

-      twenty-sixth dynasty (just before the conquest of Egypt by the Persians)

-      that the Funeral Ritual received its final revision and additions&mdash;the

-      sacred chart of the dead which had grown, paragraph by paragraph, and

-      chapter by chapter, from its brief and simple form in the earliest times.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Egyptians had a considerable, and also a rich literature, judging by

-      the specimens of it preserved and by the value set upon it by classical

-      writers; in which no department of writing was unrepresented. The works

-      which would seem of most value to the Greeks were doubtless those on

-      agriculture, astronomy, and geometry; the Egyptians wrote also on

-      medicine, but the science was empirical then as it is now. They had an

-      enormous bulk of historical literature, both in verse and prose, probably

-      as semifabulous and voluminous as the thousand great volumes of Chinese

-      history. They did not lack, either, in the department of <i>belles lettres</i>;

-      there were poets, poor devils no doubt who were compelled to celebrate in

-      grandiose strains achievements they did not believe; and essayists and

-      letter-writers, graceful, philosophic, humorous. Nor was the field of

-      fiction unoccupied; some of their lesser fables and romances have been

-      preserved; they are however of a religious character, myths of doctrine,

-      and it is safe to say different from our Sunday-School tales. The story of

-      Cinderella was a religious myth. No one has yet been fortunate enough to

-      find an Egyptian novel, and we may suppose that the <i>quid-nunes</i>, the

-      critics of Thebes, were all the time calling upon the writers of that day

-      to make an effort and produce The Great Egyptian Novel.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The most important part, however, of the literature of Egypt was the

-      religious, and of that we have, in the Ritual or Book of the Dead,

-      probably the most valuable portion. It will be necessary to refer to this

-      more at length. A copy of the Funeral Ritual, or &ldquo;The Book of the

-      Manifestation to Light&rdquo; as it was entitled, or some portion of it&mdash;probably

-      according to the rank or wealth of the deceased, was deposited with every

-      mummy. In this point of view, as this document was supposed to be of

-      infinite service, a person's wealth would aid him in the next world; but

-      there came a point in the peregrination of every soul where absolute

-      democracy was reached, and every man stood for judgment on his character.

-      There was a foreshadowing of this even in the ceremonies of the burial.

-      When the mummy, after the lapse of the seventy days of mourning, was taken

-      by the friends to the sacred lake of the nome (district), across which it

-      must be transported in the boat of Charon before it could be deposited in

-      the tomb, it was subjected to an ordeal. Forty-two judges were assembled

-      on the shore of the lake, and if anyone accused the deceased, and could

-      prove that he led an evil life, he was denied burial. Even kings were

-      subjected to this trial, and those who had been wicked, in the judgment of

-      their people, were refused the honors of sepulchre. Cases were probably

-      rare where one would dare to accuse even a dead Pharaoh.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Debts would sometimes keep a man out of his tomb, both because he was

-      wrong in being in debt, and because his tomb was mortgaged. For it was

-      permitted a man to mortgage not only his family tomb but the mummy of his

-      father,&mdash;a kind of mortmain security that could not run away, but a

-      ghastly pledge to hold. A man's tomb, it would seem, was accounted his

-      chief possession; as the one he was longest to use. It was prepared at an

-      expense never squandered on his habitation in life.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      You may see as many tombs as you like at Thebes, you may spend weeks

-      underground roaming about in vast chambers or burrowing in zig-zag

-      tunnels, until the upper-world shall seem to you only a passing show; but

-      you will find little, here or elsewhere, after the Tombs of the Kings, to

-      awaken your keenest interest; and the exploration of a very few of these

-      will suffice to satisfy you. We visited these gigantic masoleums twice; it

-      is not an easy trip to them, for they are situated in wild ravines or

-      gorges that lie beyond the western mountains which circle the plain and

-      ruins of Thebes. They can be reached by a footpath over the crest of the

-      ridge behind Medeenet Haboo; the ancient and usual road to them is up a

-      valley that opens from the north.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The first time we tried the footpath, riding over the blooming valley and

-      leaving our donkeys at the foot of the ascent. I do not know how high this

-      mountain backbone may be, but it is not a pleasant one to scale. The path

-      winds, but it is steep; the sun blazes on it; every step is in pulverized

-      limestone, that seems to have been calcined by the intense heat, and rises

-      in irritating powder; the mountain-side is white, chalky, glaring,

-      reflecting the solar rays with blinding brilliancy, and not a breath of

-      air comes to temper the furnace temperature. On the summit however there

-      was a delicious breeze, and we stood long looking over the great basin,

-      upon the temples, the villages, the verdant areas of grain, the patches of

-      desert, all harmonized by the wonderful light, and the purple eastern

-      hills&mdash;a view unsurpassed. The descent to the other side was steeper

-      than the ascent, and wound by precipices, on narrow ledges, round sharp

-      turns, through jagged gorges, amid rocks striken with the ashy hue of

-      death, into the bottoms of intersecting ravines, a region scarred,

-      blasted, scorched, a grey Gehenna, more desolate than imagination ever

-      conceived.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Another day we rode to it up the valley from the river, some three miles.

-      It is a winding, narrow valley, little more than the bed of a torrent; but

-      as we advanced windings became shorter, the sides higher, fantastic

-      precipices of limestone frowned on us, and there was evidence of a made

-      road and of rocks cut away to broaden it. The scene is wilder, more

-      freakishly savage, as we go on, and knowing that it is a funereal way and

-      that only, and that it leads to graves and to nothing else, our procession

-      imperceptibly took on the sombre character of an expedition after death,

-      relieved by I know not what that is droll in the impish forms of the

-      crags, and the reaction of our natures against this unnecessary

-      accumulation of grim desolation. The sun overhead was like a dish from

-      which poured liquid heat, I could feel the waves, I thought I could see it

-      running in streams down the crumbling ashy slopes; but it was not

-      unendurable, for the air was pure and elastic and we had no sense of

-      weariness; indeed, now and then a puff of desert air suddenly greeted us

-      as we turned a corner. The slender strip of sky seen above the grey

-      limestone was of astonishing depth and color&mdash;a purple, almost like a

-      night sky, but of unimpeachable delicacy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Up this strange road were borne in solemn state, as the author of Job may

-      have seen, &ldquo;<i>the kings and counsellors of the earth, which built

-      desolate places for themselves</i>;&rdquo; the journey was a fitting prelude to

-      an entry into the depths of these frightful hills. It must have been an

-      awful march, awful in its errand, awful in the desolation of the way: and,

-      in the heat of summer, a mummy passing this way might have melted down in

-      his <i>cercueil</i> before he could reach his cool retreat.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we come to the end of the road, we see no tombs. There are paths

-      winding in several directions, round projecting ridges and shoulders of

-      powdered rock, but one might pass through here and not know he was in a

-      cemetery. Above the rubbish here and there we see, when they are pointed

-      out, holes in the rock. We climb one of these heaps, and behold the

-      entrance, maybe half-filled up, of one of the great tombs. This entrance

-      may have been laid open so as to disclose a portal cut in the face of the

-      rock and a smoothed space in front. Originally the tomb was not only

-      walled up and sealed, but rocks were tumbled down over it, so as to

-      restore that spot in the hill to its natural appearance. The chief object

-      of every tomb was to conceal the mummy from intrusion forever. All sorts

-      of misleading devices were resorted to for this purpose.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Twenty-five tombs (of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties) have been

-      opened in this locality, but some of them belonged to princes and other

-      high functionaries; in a valley west of this are tombs of the eighteenth

-      dynasty, and in still another gorge are the tombs of the queens. These

-      tombs all differ in plan, in extent, in decoration; they are alike in not

-      having, as many others elsewhere have, an exterior chamber where friends

-      could assemble to mourn; you enter all these tombs by passing through an

-      insignificant opening, by an inclined passage, directly into the heart of

-      the mountain, and there they open into various halls chambers, and

-      grottoes. One of them, that of Sethi I., into whose furthermost and most

-      splendid halls Belzoni broke his way, extends horizontally four hundred

-      and seventy feet into the hill, and descends to a depth of one hundred and

-      eighty feet below the opening. The line of direction of the excavation is

-      often changed, and the continuation skillfully masked, so that the

-      explorer may be baffled. You come by several descents and passages,

-      through grand chambers and halls, to a hall vast in size and magnificently

-      decorated; here is a pit, here is the granite sarcophagus; here is the

-      fitting resting-place of the royal mummy. But it never occupied this

-      sarcophagus. Somewhere in this hall is a concealed passage. It was by

-      breaking through a wall of solid masonry in such a room, smoothly stuccoed

-      and elaborately painted with a continuation of the scenes on the

-      side-walls, that Belzoni discovered the magnificent apartment beyond, and

-      at last a chamber that was never finished, where one still sees the first

-      draughts of the figures for sculpture on the wall, and gets an idea of the

-      bold freedom of the old draughtsmen, in the long, graceful lines, made at

-      a stroke by the Egyptian artists. Were these inner chambers so elaborately

-      concealed, by walls and stucco and painting, <i>after</i> the royal mummy

-      was somewhere hidden in them? Or was the mummy deposited in some obscure

-      lateral pit, and was it the fancy of the king himself merely to make these

-      splendid and highly decorated inner apartments private?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is not uncommon to find rooms in the tombs unfinished. The excavation

-      of the tomb was began when the king began to reign; it was a work of many

-      years and might happen to be unfinished at his death. He might himself

-      become so enamoured of his enterprise and his ideas might expand in regard

-      to his requirements, as those of builders always do, that death would find

-      him still excavating and decorating. I can imagine that if one thought he

-      were building a house for eternity&mdash;or cycles beyond human

-      computation,&mdash;he would, up to his last moment, desire to add to it

-      new beauties and conveniences. And he must have had a certain humorous

-      satisfaction in his architectural tricks, for putting posterity on a false

-      scent about his remains.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It would not be in human nature to leave undisturbed tombs containing so

-      much treasure as was buried with a rich or royal mummy. The Greeks walked

-      through all these sepulchres; they had already been rifled by the

-      Persians; it is not unlikely that some of them had been ransacked by

-      Egyptians, who could appreciate jewelry and fine-work in gold as much as

-      we do that found by M. Mariette on the cold person of Queen Aah-hotep.

-      This dainty lady might have begun to flatter herself, having escaped

-      through so many ages of pillage, that danger was over, but she had not

-      counted upon there coming an age of science. It is believed that she was

-      the mother of Amosis, who expelled the Shepherds, and the wife of Kamés,

-      who long ago went to his elements. After a repose here at Thebes, not far

-      from the temple of Koorneh, of about thirty-five hundred years, Science

-      one day cried,&mdash;&ldquo;Aah-hotep of Drah-Aboo-l-neggah! we want you for an

-      Exposition of the industries of all nations at Paris; put on your best

-      things and come forth.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      I suppose that there is no one living who would not like to be the first

-      to break into an Egyptian tomb (and there are doubtless still some

-      undisturbed in this valley), to look upon its glowing paintings before the

-      air had impaired a tint, and to discover a sweet and sleeping princess,

-      simply encrusted in gems, and cunning work in gold, of priceless value&mdash;in

-      order that he might add something to our knowledge of ancient art!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But the government prohibits all excavations by private persons. You are

-      permitted, indeed, to go to the common pits and carry off an armful of

-      mummies, if you like; but there is no pleasure in the disturbance of this

-      sort of mummy; he may perhaps be a late Roman; he has no history, no real

-      antiquity, and probably not a scarabæus of any value about him.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we pass out of the glare of the sun and descend the incline down

-      which the mummy went, we feel as if we had begun his awful journey. On the

-      walls are sculptured the ceremonies and liturgies of the dead, the

-      grotesque monsters of the under-world, which will meet him and assail him

-      on his pilgrimage, the deities friendly and unfriendly, the tremendous

-      scenes of cycles of transmigration. Other sculptures there are; to be

-      sure, and in some tombs these latter predominate, in which astronomy,

-      agriculture, and domestic life are depicted. In one chamber are exhibited

-      trades, in another the kitchen, in another arms, in another the gay boats

-      and navigation of the Nile, in another all the vanities of elegant

-      house-furniture. But all these only emphasize the fact that we are passing

-      into another world, and one of the grimmest realities. We come at length,

-      whatever other wonders or beauties may detain us, to the king, the royal

-      mummy, in the presence of the deities, standing before Osiris, Athor,

-      Phtah, Isis, Horus, Anubis, and Nofre-Atmoo.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Somewhere in this vast and dark mausoleum the mummy has been deposited; he

-      has with him the roll of the Funeral Ritual; the sacred scarabæus is on

-      his breast; in one chamber bread and wine are set out; his bearers

-      withdraw, the tomb is closed, sealed, all trace of its entrance effaced.

-      The mummy begins his pilgrimage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Ritual * describes all the series of pilgrimages of the soul in the

-      lower-world; it contains the hymns, prayers, and formula for all funeral

-      ceremonies and the worship of the dead; it embodies the philosophy and

-      religion of Egypt; the basis of it is the immortality of the soul, that is

-      of the souls of the justified, but a clear notion of the soul's

-      personality apart from the body it does not give.

-    </p>

-<pre xml:space="preserve">

-     *  Lenormant's Epitome.

-</pre>

-    <p>

-      The book opens with a grand dialogue, at the moment of death, in which the

-      deceased, invoking the god of the lower-world, asks entrance to his

-      domain; a chorus of glorified souls interposes for him; the priest

-      implores the divine clemency; Osiris responds, granting permission, and

-      the soul enters Kar-Neter, the land of the dead; and then renews his

-      invocations. Upon his entry he is dazzled by the splendor of the sun

-      (which is Osiris) in this subterranean region, and sings to it a

-      magnificent hymn.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The second part traces the journeys of the soul. Without knowledge, he

-      would fail, and finally be rejected at the tribunal.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Knowledge is in Egyptian <i>sbo</i>, that is, &ldquo;food in plenty,&rdquo; knowledge

-      and food are identified in the Ritual; &ldquo;the knowledge of religious truths

-      is the mysterious nourishment that the soul must carry with it to sustain

-      it in its journeys and trials.&rdquo; This necessary preliminary knowledge is

-      found in the statement of the Egyptian faith in the Ritual; other

-      information is given him from time to time on his journey. But although

-      his body is wrapped up, and his soul instructed, he cannot move, he has

-      not the use of his limbs; and he prays to be restored to his faculties

-      that he may be able to walk, speak, eat, fight; the prayer granted, he

-      holds his scarabæus over his head, as a passport, and enters Hades.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      His way is at once beset by formidable obstacles; monsters, servants of

-      Typhon, assail him; slimy reptiles, crocodiles, serpents seek to devour

-      him; he begins a series of desperate combats, in which the hero and his

-      enemies hurl long and insulting speeches at each other. Out of these

-      combats he comes victorious, and sings songs of triumph; and after rest

-      and refreshment from the Tree of Life, given him by the goddess Nu, he

-      begins a dialogue with the personification of the divine Light, who

-      instructs him, explaining the sublime mysteries of nature. Guided by this

-      new Light, he advances, and enters into a series of transformations,

-      identifying himself with the noblest divine symbols: he becomes a hawk, an

-      angel, a lotus, the god Ptah, a heron, etc.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Up to this time the deceased has been only a shade, an <i>eidolon</i>, the

-      simulacrum of the appearance of his body. He now takes his body, which is

-      needed for the rest of the journey; it was necessary therefore that it

-      should be perfectly preserved by the embalming process. He goes on to new

-      trials and dangers, to new knowledge, to severer examinations of his

-      competence: he shuns wiles and delusions; he sails down a subterranean

-      river and comes to the Elysian Fields, in fact, to a reproduction of Egypt

-      with its camels and its industries, when the soul engages in agriculture,

-      sowing and reaping divine fruit for the bread of knowledge which he needs

-      now more than ever.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At length he comes to the last and severest trial, to the judgment-hall

-      where Osiris awaits him, seated on his throne, accompanied by the

-      forty-two assessors of the dead. Here his knowledge is put to the test;

-      here he must give an account of his whole life. He goes on to justify

-      himself by declaring at first, negatively, the crimes that he has not

-      committed. &ldquo;I have not blasphemed,&rdquo; he says in the Ritual; &ldquo;I have not

-      stolen; I have not smitten men privily; I have not treated any person with

-      cruelty; I have not stirred up trouble; I have not been idle; I have not

-      been intoxicated; I have not made unjust commandmants; I have shown no

-      improper curiosity; I have not allowed my mouth to tell secrets; I have

-      not wounded anyone; I have not put anyone in fear; I have not slandered

-      anyone; I have not let envy gnaw my heart; I have spoken evil neither of

-      the king nor of my father; I have not falsely accused anyone; I have not

-      withheld milk from the mouths of sucklings; I have not practiced any

-      shameful crime; I have not calumniated a slave to his master.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The deceased then speaks of the good he has done in his lifetime; and the

-      positive declarations rise to a higher morality than the negative; among

-      them is this wonderful sentence:&mdash;&ldquo;<i>I have given food to the

-      hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothes to the naked</i>.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The heart of the deceased, who is now called Osiris, is then weighed in

-      the balance against &ldquo;truth,&rdquo; and (if he is just) is not found wanting; the

-      forty-two assessors decide that his knowledge is sufficient, the god

-      Osiris gives sentence of justification, Thoth (the Hermes of the Greeks,

-      the conductor of souls, the scribe of Osiris, and also the personification

-      of literature or letters) records it, and the soul enters into bliss.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In a chamber at Dayr el Medeeneh you may see this judgment-scene. Osiris

-      is seated on his throne waiting the introduction of souls into Amenti; the

-      child Harpocrates, with his finger on his lip, sits upon his crook; behind

-      are the forty-two assessors. The deceased humbly approaches; Thoth

-      presents his good deeds written upon papyrus; they are weighed in the

-      balance against an ostrich-feather, the symbol of truth; on the beam sits

-      a monkey, the emblem of Thoth.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The same conceit of weighing the soul in judgment-scenes was common to the

-      mediaeval church; it is very quaintly represented in a fresco in the porch

-      of the church of St. Lawrence at Rome.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Sometimes the balance tipped the wrong way; in the tomb of Rameses VI. is

-      sculptured a wicked soul, unjustified, retiring from the presence of

-      Osiris in the ignoble form of a pig.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The justified soul retired into bliss. What was this bliss? The third part

-      of the Ritual is obscure. The deceased is Osiris, identified with the sun,

-      traversing with him, and as him, the various houses of heaven; afterwards

-      he seems to pass into an identification with all the deities of the

-      pantheon. This is a poetical flight. The justified soul was absorbed into

-      the intelligence from which it emanated. For the wicked, there was

-      annihilation; they were destroyed, decapitated by the evil powers. In

-      these tombs you will see pictures of beheadings at the block, of

-      dismembered bodies.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It would seem that in some cases the souls of the wicked returned to the

-      earth and entered unclean animals. We always had a suspicion, a mere idle

-      fancy, that the chameleon, which we had on our boat, which had a knowing

-      and wicked eye, had been somebody.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The visitor's first astonishment here is to find such vast and rich tombs,

-      underground temples in fact, in a region so unutterably desolate, remote

-      from men, to be reached only by a painful pilgrimage. He is bewildered by

-      the variety and beauty of the decorations, the grace and freedom of art,

-      the minute finish of birds and flowers, the immortal loveliness of faces

-      here and there; and he cannot understand that all this was not made for

-      exhibition, that it was never intended to be seen, that it was not seen

-      except by the workmen and the funeral attendants, and that it was then

-      sealed away from human eyes forever. Think of the years of labor expended,

-      the treasure lavished in all this gorgeous creation, which was not for men

-      to see! Has human nature changed? Expensive monuments and mausoleums are

-      built now as they have been in all the Christian era; but they are never

-      concealed from the public view. I cannot account for these extraordinary

-      excavations, not even for one at the Assaseef, which extends over an acre

-      and a quarter of ground, upon an ostentation of wealth, for they were all

-      closed from inspection, and the very entrances masked. The builders must

-      have believed in the mysteries of the under-world, or they would not have

-      expended so much in enduring representations of them; they must have

-      believed also that the soul had need of such a royal abode. Did they have

-      the thought that money lavished in this pious labor would benefit the

-      soul, as much as now-a-days legacies bequeathed to missions and charities?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On our second visit to these tombs we noticed many details that had

-      escaped us before. I found sculptured a cross of equal arms, three or four

-      inches long, among other sacred symbols. We were struck by the peculiar

-      whiteness of the light, the sort of chalkiness of the sunshine as we saw

-      it falling across the entrance of a tomb from which we were coming, and by

-      the lightness of the shadows. We illuminated some of the interiors,

-      lighting up the vast sculptured and painted halls and corniced chambers,

-      to get the <i>tout ensemble</i> of colors and figures. The colors came out

-      with startling vividness on the stuccoed, white walls, and it needed no

-      imagination, amidst these awful and <i>bizarre</i> images and fantastic

-      scenes, to feel that we were in a real underworld. And all this was

-      created for darkness!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But these chambers could neither have been cut nor decorated without

-      light, and bright light. The effect of the rich ceiling and sides could

-      not have been obtained without strong light. I believe that these rooms,

-      as well as the dark and decorated chambers in the temples, must have been

-      brilliantly illuminated on occasion; the one at the imposing funeral

-      ceremonies, the other at the temple services. What light was used? The

-      sculptures give us no information. But the light must have been not only a

-      very brilliant but a pure flame, for these colors were fresh and unsullied

-      when the tombs were opened. However these chambers were lighted, some

-      illuminating substance was used that produced no smoke, nor formed any gas

-      that could soil the whiteness of the painted lotus.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In one of these brilliant apartments, which is finished with a carved and

-      painted cornice, and would serve for a drawing-room with the addition of

-      some furniture, we almost had a feeling of comfort and domesticity&mdash;as

-      long as the illumination lasted. When that flashed but, and we were left

-      in that thick darkness of the grave which one can feel gathering itself in

-      folds about him, and which the twinkling candles in our hands punctured

-      but did not scatter, and we groped our way, able to see only a step ahead

-      and to examine only a yard square of wall at a time, there was something

-      terrible in this subterranean seclusion. And yet, this tomb was intended

-      as the place of abode of the deceased owner during the long ages before

-      soul and body, united, should be received into bliss; here were buried

-      with him no doubt some portions of his property, at least jewels and

-      personal ornaments of value; here were pictured his possessions and his

-      occupations while on earth; here were his gods, visibly cut in stone; here

-      were spread out, in various symbols and condensed writing, the precepts of

-      profound wisdom and the liturgies of the book of the dead. If at any time

-      he could have awakened (as no doubt he supposed he should), and got rid of

-      his heavy granite sarcophagus (if his body ever lay in it) and removed the

-      myrrh and pitch from his person, he would have found himself in a most

-      spacious and gay mansion, of which the only needs were food, light, and

-      air.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      While remembering, however, the grotesque conception the Egyptians had of

-      the next world, it seems to me that the decorators of these tombs often

-      let their imaginations run riot, and that not every fantastic device has a

-      deep signification. Take the elongated figures on the ceiling, stretching

-      fifty feet across, the legs bent down one side and the head the other; or

-      such a picture as this:&mdash;a sacred boat having a crocodile on the

-      deck, on the back of the crocodile a human head, out of the head a long

-      stick protruding which bears on its end the crown of lower Egypt; or this

-      conceit:&mdash;a small boat ascending a cataract, bearing a huge beetle

-      (scarabæus) having a ram's head, and sitting on each side of it a bird

-      with a human head. I think much of this work is pure fancy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In these tombs the snake plays a great part, the snake purely, coiled or

-      extended, carried in processions his length borne on the shoulders of

-      scores of priests, crawling along the walls in hideous convolutions; and,

-      again, the snake with two, three, and four heads, with two and six feet;

-      the snake with wings; the snake coiled about the statues of the gods,

-      about the images of the mummies, and in short everywhere. The snake is the

-      most conspicuous figure.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The monkey is also numerous, and always pleasing; I think he is the comic

-      element of hell, though perhaps gravely meant. He squats about the

-      lower-world of the heathen, and gives it an almost cheerful and <i>debonnair</i>

-      aspect. It is certainly refreshing to meet his self-possessed, grave, and

-      yet friendly face amid all the serpents, crocodiles, hybrids, and

-      chimerical monsters of the Egyptian under-world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Conspicuous in ceremonies represented in the tombs and in the temples is

-      the sacred boat or <i>ark</i>, reminding one always, in its form and use

-      and the sacredness attached to it, of the Jewish Ark of the Covenant. The

-      arks contain the sacred emblems, and sometimes the beetle of the sun,

-      overshadowed by the wings of the goddess of Thmei or Truth, which suggest

-      the cherubim of the Jews. Mr. Wilkinson notices the fact, also, that

-      Thmei, the name of the goddess who was worshipped under the double

-      character of Truth and Justice, is the origin of the Hebrew <i>Thummim</i>&mdash;a

-      word implying &ldquo;truth&rdquo;; this Thummim (a symbol perfectly comprehensible now

-      that we know its origin) which was worn only by the high priest of the

-      Jews, was, like the Egyptian figure, which the archjudge put on when he

-      sat at the trial of a case, studded with precious stones of various

-      colors.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Before we left the valley we entered the tomb of Menephtah (or

-      Merenphtah), and I broke off a bit of crumbling limestone from the inner

-      cave as a memento of the Pharaoh of the Exodus. I used to suppose that

-      this Pharaoh was drowned in the Red Sea; but he could not have been if he

-      was buried here; and here certainly is his tomb. It is the opinion of

-      scholars that Menephtah long survived the Exodus. There is nothing to

-      conflict with this in the Biblical description of the disaster to the

-      Egyptians. It says that all Pharaoh's host was drowned, but it does not

-      say that the king was drowned; if he had been, so important a fact, it is

-      likely, would have been emphasized. Joseph came into Egypt during the

-      reign of one of the usurping Shepherd Kings, Apepi probably. Their seat of

-      empire was at Tanis, where their tombs have been discovered. The

-      Israelites were settled in that part of the Delta. After some generations

-      the Shepherds were expelled, and the ancient Egyptian race of kings was

-      reinstated in the dominion of all Egypt. This is probably the meaning of

-      the passage, &ldquo;now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not

-      Joseph.&rdquo; The narrative of the Exodus seems to require that the Pharaoh

-      should be at Memphis. The kings of the nineteenth dynasty, to which

-      Menephtah belonged, had the seat of their empire at Thebes; he alone of

-      that dynasty established his court at Memphis. But it was natural that he

-      should build his tomb at Thebes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We went again and again to the temples on the west side and to the tombs

-      there. I never wearied of the fresh morning ride across the green plain,

-      saluting the battered Colossi as we passed under them, and galloping

-      (don't, please, remember that we were mounted on donkeys) out upon the

-      desert. Not all the crowd of loping Arabs with glittering eyes and lying

-      tongues, who attended us, offering their dead merchandise, could put me

-      out of humor. Besides, there were always slender, pretty, and cheerful

-      little girls running beside us with their water-koollehs. And may I never

-      forget the baby Charon on the vile ferry-boat that sets us over one of the

-      narrow streams. He is the cunningest specimen of a boy in Africa. His

-      small brothers pole the boat, but he is steersman, and stands aft pushing

-      about the tiller, which is level with his head. He is a mere baby as to

-      stature, and is in fact only four years old, but he is a perfect beauty,

-      even to the ivory teeth which his engaging smile discloses. And such

-      self-possession and self-respect. He is a man of business, and minds his

-      helm, &ldquo;the dear little scrap,&rdquo; say the ladies. When we give him some

-      evidently unexpected coppers, his eyes and whole face beam with pleasure,

-      and in the sweetest voice he says, <i>Ket'ther khdyrak, keteer</i> (&ldquo;Thank

-      you very much indeed&rdquo;).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I yield myself to, but cannot account for the fascination of this vast

-      field of desolation, this waste of crumbled limestone, gouged into ravines

-      and hills, honeycombed with tombs and mummy-pits, strewn with the bones of

-      ancient temples, brightened by the glow of sunshine on elegant colonnades

-      and sculptured walls, saddened by the mud-hovels of the fellaheen. The

-      dust is abundant, and the glare of the sun reflected from the high, white

-      precipices behind is something unendurable.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Of the tombs of the Assaseef, we went far into none, except that of the

-      priest Petamunoph, the one which occupies, with its many chambers and

-      passages, an acre and a quarter of underground. It was beautifully carved

-      and painted throughout, but the inscriptions are mostly illegible now, and

-      so fouled by bats as to be uninteresting. Our guide said truly, &ldquo;bats not

-      too much good for 'scriptions.&rdquo; In truth, the place smells horribly of

-      bats,&mdash;an odor that will come back to you with sickening freshness

-      days after,&mdash;and a strong stomach is required for the exploration.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Even the chambers of some of the temples here were used in later times as

-      receptacles for mummies. The novel and most interesting temple of Dayr el

-      Bahree did not escape this indignity. It was built by Amun-noo-het, or

-      Hatasoo as we more familiarly call her, and like everything else that this

-      spirited woman did it bears the stamp of originality and genius. The

-      structure rises up the side of the mountain in terraces, temple above

-      temple, and is of a most graceful architecture; its varied and brilliant

-      sculptures must be referred to a good period of art. Walls that have

-      recently been laid bare shine with extraordinary vividness of color. The

-      last chambers in the rock are entered by arched doorways, but the arch is

-      in appearance, not in principle. Its structure is peculiar. Square stones

-      were laid up on each side, the one above lapping over the one beneath

-      until the last two met at the top; the interior corners were then cut

-      away, leaving a perfect round arch; but there is no lateral support or

-      keystone. In these interior rooms were depths on depths of mummy-wrappings

-      and bones, and a sickening odor of dissolution.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There are no tombs better known than those of Sheykh el Koorneh, for it is

-      in them that so much was discovered revealing the private life, the

-      trades, the varied pursuits of the Egyptians. We entered those called the

-      most interesting, but they are so smoked, and the paintings are so

-      defaced, that we had small satisfaction in them. Some of them are full of

-      mummy-cloths and skeletons, and smell of mortality, to that degree that it

-      needs all the wind of the desert to take the scent of death out of our

-      nostrils.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      All this plain and its mounds and hills are dug over and pawed out for

-      remnants of the dead, scarabæi, beads, images, trinkets sacred and

-      profane. It is the custom of some travelers to descend into the horrible

-      and common mummy-pits, treading about among the dead, and bring up in

-      their arms the body of some man, or some woman, who may have been, for

-      aught the traveler knows, not a respectable person. I confess to an

-      uncontrollable aversion to all of them, however well preserved they are.

-      The present generation here (I was daily beset by an Arab who wanted

-      always to sell mean arm or a foot, from whose eager, glittering eyes I

-      seemed to see a ghoul looking out,) lives by plundering the dead. A

-      singular comment upon our age and upon the futile hope of security for the

-      body after death, even in the strongest house of rock.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Old Petamunoph, with whom be peace, builded better than he knew; he

-      excavated a vast hotel for bats. Perhaps he changed into bats himself in

-      the course of his transmigrations, and in this state is only able to see

-      dimly, as bats do, and to comprehend only partially, as an old Egyptian

-      might, our modern civilization.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0057" id="linkimage-0057"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0386.jpg" alt="0386 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0030" id="link2HCH0030"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXX.&mdash;FAREWELL TO THEBES.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>OCIAL life at

-      Thebes, in the season, is subject to peculiar conditions. For one thing,

-      you suspect a commercial element in it. Back of all the politeness of

-      native consuls and resident effendis, you see spread out a collection of

-      antiques, veritable belongings of the ancient Egyptians, the furniture of

-      their tombs, the ornaments they wore when they began their last and most

-      solemn journey, the very scarabæus, cut on the back in the likeness of the

-      mysterious eye of Osiris, which the mummy held over his head when he

-      entered the ominously silent land of Kar-Neter, the intaglio seal which he

-      always used for his signature, the &ldquo;charms&rdquo; that he wore at his

-      guard-chain, the necklaces of his wife, the rings and bracelets of his

-      daughter.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      These are very precious things, but you may have them&mdash;such is the

-      softening influence of friendship&mdash;for a trifle of coined gold, a

-      mere trifle, considering their value and the impossibility of replacing

-      them. What are two, five, even ten pounds for a genuine bronze figure of

-      Isis, for a sacred cat, for a bit of stone, wrought four thousand years

-      ago by an artist into the likeness of the immortal beetle, carved

-      exquisitely with the name of the Pharaoh of that epoch, a bit of stone

-      that some Egyptian wore at his chain during his life and which was laid

-      upon his breast when he was wrapped up for eternity. Here in Thebes, where

-      the most important personage is the mummy and the Egyptian past is the

-      only real and marketable article, there comes to be an extraordinary value

-      attached to these trinkets of mortality. But when the traveler gets away,

-      out of this charmed circle of enthusiasm for antiquity, away from this

-      fictitious market in sentiment, among the cold people of the world who

-      know not Joseph, and only half believe in Potiphar, and think the little

-      blue images of Osiris ugly, and the me my-beads trash, and who never heard

-      of the scarabæus, when, I say, he comes with his load of <i>antiques</i>

-      into this air of scepticism, he finds that he has invested in a property

-      no longer generally current, objects of <i>vertu</i> for which Egypt is

-      actually the best market. And if he finds, as he may, that a good part of

-      his purchases are only counterfeits of the antique, manufactured and

-      doctored to give them an appearance of age, he experiences a sinking of

-      the heart mingled with a lively admiration of the adroitness of the smooth

-      and courtly Arabs of Luxor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Social life is so peculiar in the absence of the sex that is thought to

-      add a charm to it in other parts of the world. We receive visits or

-      ceremony or of friendship from the chief citizens of the village, we

-      entertain them at dinner, but they are never accompanied by their wives or

-      daughters; we call at their houses and are <i>feted</i> in turn, but the

-      light of the harem never appears. Dahabeëhs of all nations are arriving

-      and departing, there are always several moored before the town, some of

-      them are certain to have lovely passengers, and the polite Arabs are not

-      insensible to the charm of their society: there is much visiting

-      constantly on the boats; but when it is returned at the houses of the

-      natives, at an evening entertainment, the only female society offered is

-      that of the dancing-girls.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Of course, when there is so much lingual difficulty in intercourse, the

-      demonstrations of civility must be mainly overt, and in fact they are

-      mostly illuminations and &ldquo;fantasies.&rdquo; Almost every boat once in the course

-      of its stay, and usually upon some natal day or in honor of some arrival,

-      will be beautifully illuminated and display fireworks. No sight is

-      prettier than a dahabeëh strung along its decks and along its masts and

-      yards with many colored lanterns. The people of Luxor respond with

-      illuminations in the houses, to which they add barbarous music and the

-      kicking and posturing of the Ghawazees. In this consists the gaiety of the

-      Luxor season.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Perhaps we reached the high-water mark of this gaiety in an entertainment

-      given us by Ali Moorad Effendi, the American consular agent, in return for

-      a dinner on the dahabeëh. Ali is of good Bedawee blood; and has relations

-      at Karnak enough to fill an opera-house, we esteemed him one of the most

-      trustworthy Arabs in the country, and he takes great pains and pleasure in

-      performing all the duties of his post, which are principally civilities to

-      American travelers. The entertainment consisted of a dinner and a

-      'fantasia.' It was understood that it was to be a dinner in Arab style.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We go at sunset when all the broad surface of the Nile is like an opal in

-      the reflected light. The consul's house is near the bank of the river, and

-      is built against the hill so that we climb two or three narrow stairways

-      before we get to the top of it. The landing-places of the stairways are

-      terraces overlooking the river; and the word terrace has such a grand air

-      that it is impossible to describe this house without making it appear

-      better than it is. The consul comes down to the bank to receive us; we

-      scramble up its crumbling face. We ascend a stairway to the long consular

-      reception-room, where we sit for half an hour, during which coffee is

-      served and we get the last of the glowing sunset from the windows.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are then taken across a little terrace, up another flight of steps, to

-      the main house, which is seen to consist of a broad hall with small rooms

-      on each side. No other members of the consul's family appear, and,

-      regarding Arab etiquette, we make no inquiry for them. We could not commit

-      a greater breach of good-breeding than to ask after the health of any

-      members of the harem. Into one of the little rooms we are shown for

-      dinner. It is very small, only large enough to contain a divan and a round

-      table capable of seating eight persons. The only ornaments of the room are

-      an American flag, and a hand-mirror hung too high for anyone to see

-      herself in it. The round table is of metal, hammered out and turned at the

-      edge,&mdash;a little barrier that prevents anything rolling off. At each

-      place are a napkin and a piece of bread&mdash;no plate or knives or forks.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Deference is so far paid to European prejudice that we sit in chairs, but

-      I confess that when I am to eat with my fingers I prefer to sit on the

-      ground&mdash;the position in a chair is too formal for what is to follow.

-      When we are seated, a servant brings water in a basin and ewer, and a

-      towel, and we wash our right hands&mdash;the left hand is not to be used.

-      Soup is first served. The dish is placed in the middle of the table, and

-      we are given spoons with which each one dips in, and eats rapidly or

-      slowly according to habit; but there is necessarily some deliberation

-      about it, for we cannot all dip at once. The soup is excellent, and we

-      praise it, to the great delight of our host, who shows his handsome teeth

-      and says <i>tyeb</i> all that we have hitherto said was <i>tyeb</i>, we

-      now add <i>kateér</i>. More smiles; and claret is brought in&mdash;another

-      concession to foreign tastes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After the soup, we rely upon our fingers, under the instructions of Ali

-      and an Arab guest. The dinner consists of many courses, each article

-      served separately, but sometimes placed upon the table in three or four

-      dishes for the convenience of the convive in reaching it. There are meats

-      and vegetables of all sorts procurable, fish, beef, mutton, veal,

-      chickens, turkeys, quails and other small birds, pease, beans, salad, and

-      some compositions which defied such analysis as one could make with his

-      thumb and finger. Our host prided himself upon having a Turkish artist in

-      the kitchen, and the cooking was really good and toothsome, even to the

-      pastry and sweetmeats; <i>we</i> did not accuse him of making the

-      champagne.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is no difficulty in getting at the meats; we tear off strips,

-      mutually assisting each other in pulling them asunder; but there is more

-      trouble about such dishes as pease and a <i>purée</i> of something. One

-      hesitates to make a scoop of his four fingers, and plunge in; and then it

-      is disappointing to an unskilled person to see how few peas he can convey

-      to his mouth at a time. I sequester and keep by me the breast-bone of a

-      chicken, which makes an excellent scoop for small vegetables and gravies,

-      and I am doing very well with it, until there is a universal protest

-      against the unfairness of the device.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our host praises everything himself in the utmost simplicity, and urges us

-      to partake of each dish; he is continually picking out nice bits from the

-      dish and conveying them to the mouth of his nearest guest. My friend who

-      sits next to All, ought to be grateful for this delicate attention, but I

-      fear he is not. The fact is that Ali, by some accident, in fishing,

-      hunting, or war, has lost the tip of the index finger of his right hand,

-      the very hand that conveys the delicacies to my friend's mouth. And he

-      told me afterwards, that he felt each time he was fed that he had

-      swallowed that piece of the consul's finger.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      During the feast there is music by performers in the adjoining hall, music

-      in minor, barbaric strains insisted on with the monotonous <i>nonchalance</i>

-      of the Orient, and calculated, I should say, to excite a person to

-      ferocity, and to make feeding with his fingers a vent to his aroused and

-      savage passions. At the end of the courses water is brought for us to lave

-      our hands, and coffee and chibooks are served.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dinner very nice, very fine,&rdquo; says Ali, speaking the common thought which

-      most hosts are too conventional to utter.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A splendid dinner, O! consul; I have never seen such an one in America.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The Ghawazees have meantime arrived; we hear a burst of singing

-      occasionally with the wail of the instruments. The dancing is to be in the

-      narrow hall of the house, which is lighted as well as a room can be with

-      so many dusky faces in it. At the far end are seated on the floor the

-      musicians, with two stringed instruments, a tambourine and a darabooka.

-      That which answers for a violin has two strings of horsehair, stretched

-      over a cocoanut-shell; the bowstring, which is tightened by the hand as it

-      is drawn, is of horsehair. The music is certainly exciting, harassing,

-      plaintive, complaining; the very monotony of it would drive one wild in

-      time. Behind the musicians is a dark cloud of turbaned servants and

-      various privileged retainers of the house. In front of the musicians sit

-      the Ghawazees, six girls, and an old women with parchment skin and

-      twinkling eyes, who has been a famous dancer in her day. They are waiting

-      a little wearily, and from time to time one of them throws out the note or

-      two of a song, as if the music were beginning to work in her veins. The

-      spectators are grouped at the entrance of the hall and seated on chairs

-      down each side, leaving but a narrow space for the dancers between; and

-      there are dusky faces peering in at the door.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Before the dance begins we have an opportunity to see what these Ghawazees

-      are like, a race which prides itself upon preserving a pure blood for

-      thousands of years, and upon an ancestry that has always followed the most

-      disreputable profession. These girls are aged say from sixteen to twenty;

-      one appears much older and looks exactly like an Indian squaw, but,

-      strange to say, her profile is also exactly that of Rameses as we see it

-      in the sculptures. The leading dancer is dressed in a flaring gown of red

-      and figured silk, a costly Syrian dress; she is fat, rather comely, but

-      coarsely uninteresting, although she is said to have on more jewelry than

-      any other dancing-girl in Egypt; her abundant black hair is worn long and

-      in strands thickly hung with gold coins; her breast is covered with

-      necklaces of gold-work and coins; and a mass of heavy twinkling silver

-      ornaments hangs about her waist. A third dancer is in an almost equally

-      striking gown of yellow, and wears also much coin; she is a Pharaonic

-      beauty, with a soft skin and the real Oriental eye and profile. The

-      dresses of all are plainly cut, and straight-waisted, like an ordinary

-      calico gown of a milkmaid. They wear no shawls or any other Oriental

-      wrappings, and dance in their stocking-feet.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At a turn in the music, the girl in red and the girl in yellow stand up;

-      for an instant they raise their castanets till the time of the music is

-      caught, and then start forward, with less of languor and a more skipping

-      movement than we expected; and they are not ungraceful as they come

-      rapidly down the hall, throwing the arms aloft and the feet forward, to

-      the rattle of the castanets. These latter are small convex pieces of

-      brass, held between the thumb and finger, which have a click like the

-      rattle of the snake. In mid-advance they stop, face each other, <i>chassée</i>,

-      retire, and again come further forward, stop, and the peculiar portion of

-      the dance begins, which is not dancing at all, but a quivering, undulating

-      motion given to the body, as the girl stands with feet planted wide apart.

-      The feet are still, the head scarcely stirs, except with an almost

-      imperceptible snakelike movement, but the muscles of the body to the hips

-      quiver in time to the monotonous music, in muscular thrills, in waves

-      running down, and at intervals extending below the waist. Sometimes one

-      side of the body quivers while the other is perfectly still, and then the

-      whole frame, for a second, shares in the ague. It is certainly an

-      astonishing muscular performance, but you could not call it either

-      graceful or pleasing. Some people see in the intention of the dance a deep

-      symbolic meaning, something about the Old Serpent of the Nile, with its

-      gliding, quivering movement and its fatal fascination. Others see in it

-      only the common old Snake that was in Eden. I suppose in fact that it is

-      the old and universal Oriental dance, the chief attraction of which never

-      was its modesty.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After standing for a brief space, with the body throbbing and quivering,

-      the castanets all the time held above the head in sympathetic throbs, the

-      dancers start forward, face each other, pass, pirouette, and take some

-      dancing steps, retire, advance and repeat the earthquake performance. This

-      is kept up a long time, and with wonderful endurance, without change of

-      figure; but sometimes the movements are more rapid, when the music

-      hastens, and more passion is shown. But five minutes of it is as good as

-      an hour. Evidently the dance is nothing except with a master, with an

-      actress who shall abandon herself to the tide of feeling which the music

-      suggests and throw herself into the full passion of it; who knows how to

-      tell a story by pantomime, and to depict the woes of love and despair. All

-      this needs grace, beauty, and genius. Few dancing-girls have either. An

-      old resident of Luxor complains that the dancing is not at all what it was

-      twenty years ago, that the old fire and art seem to be lost.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The old hag, sitting there on the floor, was asked to exhibit the ancient

-      style; she consented, and danced marvelously for a time, but the

-      performance became in the end too shameful to be witnessed.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      I fancy that if the dance has gained anything in propriety, which is hard

-      to believe, it has lost in spirit. It might be passionate, dramatic,

-      tragic. But it needs genius to make it anything more than a suggestive and

-      repulsive vulgarity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      During the intervals, the girls sing to the music; the singing is very

-      wild and barbaric. The song is in praise of the Night, a love-song

-      consisting of repeated epithets:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      &ldquo;O the Night! nothing is so lovely as the Night!

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      O my heart! O my soul! O my liver!

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      My love he passed my door, and saw me not;

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      O the night! How lovely is the Night!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The strain is minor, and there is a wail in the voices which stridently

-      chant to the twanging strings. Is it only the echo of ages of sin in those

-      despairing voices? How melancholy it all becomes! The girl in yellow, she

-      of the oblong eyes, straight nose and high type of Oriental beauty, dances

-      down alone; she is slender, she has the charm of grace, her eyes never

-      wander to the spectators. Is there in her soul any faint contempt for

-      herself or for the part she plays? Or is the historic consciousness of the

-      antiquity of both her profession and her sin strong enough to throw yet

-      the lights of illusion over such a performance? Evidently the fat girl in

-      red is a prey to no such misgiving, as she comes bouncing down the line,

-      and flings herself into her ague fit.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Look out, the hippopotamus!&rdquo; cries Abd-el-Atti, &ldquo;I 'fraid she kick me.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      While the dance goes on, pipes, coffee, and brandy are frequently passed;

-      the dancers swallow the brandy readily. The house is illuminated, and the

-      entertainment ends with a few rockets from the terrace. This is a

-      full-blown &ldquo;fantasia.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      As the night is still young and the moon is full, we decide to efface, as

-      much as may be, the vulgarities of modern Egypt, by a vision of the

-      ancient, and taking donkeys we ride to Karnak.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      For myself I prefer day to night, and abounding sunshine to the most

-      generous moonlight; there is always some disappointment in the night

-      effect in ruins, under the most favorable conditions. But I have great

-      deference to that poetic yearning for half-light, which leads one to grope

-      about in the heavy night-shadows of a stately temple; there is no bird

-      more worthy of respect than the round-eyed attendant of Pallas-Athene.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And it cannot be denied that there is something mysterious and almost

-      ghostly in our silent night ride. For once, our attendants fall into the

-      spirit of the adventure, keep silent, and are only shades at our side. Not

-      a word or a blow is heard as we emerge from the dark lanes of Luxor and

-      come out into the yellow light of the plain; the light seems strong and

-      yet the plain is spectral, small objects become gigantic, and although the

-      valley is flooded in radiance, the end of our small procession is lost in

-      dimness. Nothing is real, all things take fantastic forms, and all

-      proportions are changed. One moves as in a sort of spell, and it is this

-      unreality which becomes painful. The old Egyptians had need of little

-      imagination to conjure up the phantasmagoria of the under-world; it is

-      this without the sun.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      So far as we can see it, the great mass of stone is impressive as we

-      approach&mdash;I suspect because we know how vast and solid it is; and the

-      pylons never seemed so gigantic before. We do our best to get into a

-      proper frame of mind, by wandering apart, and losing ourselves in the

-      heavy shadows. And for moments we succeed. It would have been the shame of

-      our lives not to have seen Karnak by moonlight. The Great Hall, with its

-      enormous columns planted close together, it is more difficult to see by

-      night than by day, but such glimpses as we have of it, the silver light

-      slanting through the stone forest and the heavy shadows, are profoundly

-      impressive. I climb upon a tottering pylon where I can see over the

-      indistinct field and chaos of stone, and look down into the weird and

-      half-illumined Hall of Columns. In this isolated situation I am beginning

-      to fall into the classical meditation of Marius at Carthage, when another

-      party of visitors arrives, and their donkeys, meeting our donkeys in the

-      center of the Great Hall, begin (it is their donkeys that begin) such a

-      braying as never was heard before; the challenge is promptly responded to,

-      and a duet ensues and is continued and runs into a chorus, so hideous, so

-      unsanctified, so wretchedly attuned, and out of harmony with history,

-      romance, and religion, that sentiment takes wings with silence and flies

-      from the spot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We can pick up again only some scattered fragments of emotion by wandering

-      alone in the remotest nooks. But we can go nowhere that an Arab, silent

-      and gowned, does not glide from behind a pillar or step out of the shade,

-      staff in hand, and stealthily accompany us. Even the donkey-boys have

-      cultivated their sensibilities by association with other nocturnal

-      pilgrims, and encourage our gush of feeling by remarking in a low voice,

-      &ldquo;Karnak very good.&rdquo; One of them, who had apparently attended only the most

-      refined and appreciative, keeps repeating at each point of view,

-      &ldquo;Exquisite!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      As I am lingering behind the company a shadow glides up to me in the gloom

-      of the great columns, with &ldquo;good evening&rdquo;; and, when I reply, it draws

-      nearer, and, in confidential tones, whispers, as if it knew that the

-      moonlight visit was different from that by day, &ldquo;Backsheesh.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      There is never wanting something to do at Luxor, if all the excursions

-      were made. There is always an exchange of courtesies between dahabeëhs,

-      calls are made and dinners given. In the matter of visits the naval

-      etiquette prevails, and the last comer makes the first call. But if you do

-      not care for the society of travelers, you can at least make one of the

-      picturesque idlers on the bank; you may chance to see a display of Arab

-      horsemanship; you may be entertained by some new device of the

-      curiosity-mongers; and there always remain the &ldquo;collections&rdquo; of the

-      dealers to examine. One of the best of them is that of the German consul,

-      who rejoices in the odd name of Todrous Paulos, which reappears in his son

-      as Moharb Todrous; a Copt who enjoys the reputation among Moslems of a

-      trustworthy man&mdash;which probably means that a larger proportion of his

-      antiquities are genuine than of theirs. If one were disposed to moralize

-      there is abundant field for it here in Luxor. I wonder if there is an

-      insatiable demoralization connected with the dealing in antiquities, and

-      especially in the relics of the departed. When a person, as a business,

-      obtains his merchandise from the unresisting clutch of the dead, in

-      violation of the firman of his ruler, does he add to his wickedness by

-      manufacturing imitations and selling them as real? And what of the

-      traveler who encourages both trades by buying?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      One night the venerable Mustapha Aga gave a grand entertainment, in honor

-      of his reception of a firman from the Sultan, who sent him a decoration of

-      diamonds set in silver. Nothing in a Moslem's eyes could exceed the honor

-      of this recognition by the Khalif, the successor of the Prophet. It was an

-      occasion of religious as well as of social demonstration of gratitude.

-      There was service, with the reading of the Koran in the mosque, for the

-      faithful only; there was a slaughter of sheep with a distribution of the

-      mutton among the poor; and there was a fantasia at the residence of

-      Mustapha (the house built into the columns of the temple of Luxor), to

-      which everybody was bidden. There had been an arrival of Cook's

-      Excursionists by steamboat, and there must have been as many as two

-      hundred foreigners at the entertainment in the course of the evening.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The way before the house was arched with palms and hung with colored

-      lanterns; bands of sailors from the dahabeëhs sat in front, strumming the

-      darabooka and chanting their wild refrains; crowds of Arabs squatted in

-      the light of the illumination and filled the steps and the doorway. Within

-      were feasting, music, and dancing, in Oriental abandon. In the hall, which

-      was lined with spectators, was to be seen the stiff-legged sprawling-about

-      and quivering of the Ghawazees, to the barbarous tum-tum, thump-thump, of

-      the musicians; in each side-room also dancing was extemporized, until the

-      house was pervaded with the monotonous vulgarity, which was more

-      pronounced than at the house of Ali.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the midst of these strange festivities, the grave Mustapha received

-      congratulations upon his newly conferred honor, with the air of a man who

-      was responding to it in the finest Oriental style. Nothing grander than

-      this entertainment could be conceived in Luxor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Let us try to look at it also with Oriental eyes. How fatal it would be to

-      it <i>not</i> to look at it with Oriental eyes, we can conceive by

-      transferring the scene to New York. A citizen, from one of the oldest

-      families, has received from the President, let us suppose, the decoration

-      of the Grand Order of Inspector of Consulates. In order to do honor to the

-      occasion, he throws open his residence on Gramercy Park, procures a lot of

-      sailors to sit on his steps and sing nautical ditties, and drafts a score

-      of girls from Centre-street to entertain his guests with a style of

-      dancing which could not be worse if it had three thousand years of

-      antiquity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I prefer not to regard this Luxor entertainment in such a light; and

-      although we hasten from it as soon as we can with civility, I am haunted

-      for a long time afterwards by I know not what there was in it of fantastic

-      and barbaric fascination.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The last afternoon at Luxor we give to a long walk to Karnak and beyond,

-      through the wheat and barley fields now vocal with the songs of birds. We

-      do not, however, reach the conspicuous pillars of a temple on the desert

-      far to the northeast; but, returning, climb the wall of circuit and look

-      our last upon these fascinating ruins. From this point the relative

-      vastness of the Great Hall is apparent. The view this afternoon is

-      certainly one of the most beautiful in the world. You know already the

-      elements of it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Late at night, after a parting dinner of ceremony, and with a pang of

-      regret, although we are in bed, the dahabeëh is loosed from Luxor and we

-      quietly drop down below old Thebes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0058" id="linkimage-0058"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0397.jpg" alt="0397 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0059" id="linkimage-0059"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0398.jpg" alt="0398 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0031" id="link2HCH0031"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXXI.&mdash;LOITERING BY THE WAY.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E ARE at home

-      again. Our little world, which has been somewhat disturbed by the gaiety

-      of Thebes, and is already as weary of tombs as of temples and of the whole

-      incubus of Egyptian civilization, readjusts itself and settles into its

-      usual placid enjoyment.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We have now two gazelles on board, and a most disagreeable lizard, nearly

-      three feet long; I dislike the way his legs are set on his sides; I

-      dislike his tail, which is a fat continuation of his body; and the &ldquo;feel&rdquo;

-       of his cold, creeping flesh is worse than his appearance; he is

-      exceedingly active, darting rapidly about in every direction to the end of

-      his rope. The gazelles chase each other about the deck, frolicking in the

-      sun, and their eyes express as much tenderness and affection as any eyes

-      can, set like theirs. If they were mounted in a woman's head, and properly

-      shaded with long lashes, she would be the most dangerous being in

-      existence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Somehow there is a little change in the atmosphere of the dahabeëh. The

-      jester of the crew, who kept them alternately laughing and grumbling,

-      singing and quarreling, turbulent with hasheesh or sulky for want of it,

-      was left in jail at Assouan. The reïs has never recovered the injury to

-      his dignity inflicted by his brief incarceration, and gives us no more a

-      cheerful good-morning. The steersman smiles still, with the fixed look of

-      enjoyment that his face assumed when it first came into the world, but he

-      is listless; I think he has struck a section of the river in which there

-      is a dearth of his wives; he has complained that his feet were cold in the

-      fresh mornings, but the stockings we gave him he does not wear, and

-      probably is reserving for a dress occasion. Abd-el-Atti meditates

-      seriously upon a misunderstanding with one of his old friends at Luxor; he

-      likes to tell us about the diplomatic and sarcastic letter he addressed

-      him on leaving; &ldquo;I wrote it,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;very grammatick, the meaning of

-      him very deep; I think he feel it.&rdquo; There is no language like the Arabic

-      for the delivery of courtly sarcasm, in soft words, at which no offence

-      can be taken,&mdash;for administering a smart slap in the face, so to say,

-      with a feather.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a ravishing sort of day, a slight haze, warm but life-giving air,

-      and we row a little and sail a little down the broadening river, by the

-      palms, and the wheat-fields growing yellow, and the soft chain of Libyan

-      hills,&mdash;the very <i>dolce far niente</i> of life. Other dahabeëhs

-      accompany us, and we hear the choruses of their crews responding to ours.

-      From the shore comes the hum of labor and of idleness, men at the

-      shadoofs, women at the shore for water; there are flocks of white herons

-      and spoonbills on the sandbars; we glide past villages with picturesque

-      pigeon-houses; a ferry-boat ever and anon puts across, a low black scow,

-      its sides banked up with clay, a sail all patches and tatters, and crowded

-      in it three or four donkeys and a group of shawled women and turbaned men,

-      silent and sombre. The country through which we walk, towards night, is a

-      vast plain of wheat, irrigated by canals, with villages in all directions;

-      the peasants are shabbily dressed, as if taxes ate up all their labor, but

-      they do not beg.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The city of Keneh, to which we come next morning, is the nearest point of

-      the Nile to the Red Sea, the desert route to Kosseir being only one

-      hundred and twenty miles; it is the Neapolis of which Herodotus speaks,

-      near which was the great city of Chemmis, that had a temple dedicated to

-      Perseus. The Chemmitæ declared that this demi-god often appeared to them

-      on earth, and that he was descended from citizens of their country who had

-      sailed into Greece; there if no doubt that Perseus came here when he made

-      the expedition into Libya to bring the Gorgon's head.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Keneh is now a thriving city, full of evidences of wealth, and of

-      well-dressed people, and there are handsome houses and bazaars like those

-      of Cairo. From time immemorial it has been famous for its <i>koollehs</i>,

-      which are made of a fine clay found only in this vicinity, of which ware

-      is manufactured almost as thin as paper. The process of making them has

-      not changed since the potters of the Pharaohs' time. The potters of to-day

-      are very skillful at the wheel. A small mass of moistened clay, mixed with

-      sifted ashes of halfeh-grass and kneaded like bread, is placed upon a

-      round plate of wood which whirls by a treadle. As it revolves the workman

-      with his hands fashions the clay into vessels of all shapes, graceful and

-      delicate, with a sleight of hand that is wonderful. He makes a koolleh, or

-      a drinking-cup, or a vase with a slender neck, in a few seconds,

-      fashioning it as truly as if it were cast in a mould. It was like magic to

-      see the fragile forms grow in his hands. We sat for a long time in one of

-      the cool rooms where two or three potters were at work, shaded from the

-      sun by palm-branches, which let the light flicker upon the earth-floor,

-      upon the freshly made vessels and the spinning wheels of the turbaned

-      workmen, whose deft fingers wrought out unceasingly these beautiful shapes

-      from the revolving clay.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At the house of the English consul we have coffee; he afterwards lunches

-      with us and insists, but in vain, that we stay and be entertained by a

-      Ghawazee dance in the evening. It is a kind of amusement of which a very

-      little satisfies one. At his house, Prince Arthur and his suite were also

-      calling; a slender, pleasant appearing young gentleman, not noticeable

-      anywhere and with a face of no special force, but bearing the family

-      likeness. As we have had occasion to remark more than once, Princes are so

-      plenty on the Nile this year as to be a burden to the officials,&mdash;especially

-      German princes, who, however, do not count any more. The private,

-      unostentatious traveler, who asks no favor of the Khedive, is becoming

-      almost a rarity. I hear the natives complain that almost all the

-      Englishmen of rank who come to Egypt, beg, or shall we say accept?

-      substantial favors of the Khedive. The nobility appear to have a new

-      rendering of <i>noblesse oblige</i>. This is rather humiliating to us

-      Americans, who are, after all, almost blood-relations of the English; and

-      besides, we are often taken for <i>Inglese</i>, in villages where few

-      strangers go. It cannot be said that all Americans are modest, unassuming

-      travelers; but we are glad to record a point or two in their favor:&mdash;they

-      pay their way, and they do not appear to cut and paint their names upon

-      the ruins in such numbers as travelers from other countries; the French

-      are the greatest offenders in this respect, and the Germans next.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We cross the river in the afternoon and ride to the temple of Athor or

-      Venus at Denderah. This temple, although of late construction, is

-      considered one of the most important in Egypt. But it is incomplete,

-      smaller, and less satisfactory than that at Edfoo. The architecture of the

-      portico and succeeding hall is on the whole noble, but the columns are

-      thick and ungraceful, and the sculptures are clumsy and unartistic. The

-      myth of the Egyptian Avenues is worked out everywhere with the elaboration

-      of a later Greek temple. On the ceiling of several rooms her gigantic

-      figure is bent round three sides, and from a globe in her lap rays proceed

-      in the vivifying influence of which trees are made to grow.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Everywhere in the temple are subterranean and intramural passages,

-      entrance to which is only had by a narrow aperture, once closed by a

-      stone. For what were these perfectly dark alleys intended? Processions

-      could not move in them, and if they were merely used for concealing

-      valuables, why should their inner sides have been covered with such

-      elaborate sculptures?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The most interesting thing at Denderah is the small temple of Osiris,

-      which is called the &ldquo;lying-in temple,&rdquo; the subjects of sculptures being

-      the mystical conception, birth, and babyhood of Osiris. You might think

-      from the pictures on the walls, of babes at nurse and babes in arms, that

-      you had obtruded into one of the institutions of charity called a Day

-      Nursery. We are glad to find here, carved in large, the image of the

-      four-headed ugly little creature we have been calling Typhon, the spirit

-      of evil; and to learn that it is not Typhon but is the god Bes, a jolly

-      promoter of merriment and dancing. His appearance is very much against

-      him.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mariette Bey makes the great mystery of the <i>adytum</i> of the large

-      temple, which the king alone could enter, the golden <i>sistrum</i> which

-      was kept there. The <i>sistrum</i> was the mysterious emblem of Venus; it

-      is sculptured everywhere in this building&mdash;although it is one of the

-      sacred symbols found in all temples. This sacred instrument <i>par

-      excellence</i> of the Egyptians played as important a part in their

-      worship, says Mr. Wilkinson, as the tinkling bell in Roman Catholic

-      services. The great privilege of holding it was accorded to queens, and

-      ladies of rank who were devoted to the service of the deity. The <i>sistrum</i>

-      is a strip of gold, or bronze, bent in a long loop, and the ends, coming

-      together, are fastened in an ornamented handle. Through the loop bars are

-      run upon which are rings, and when the instrument is shaken the rings move

-      to and fro. Upon the sides of the handle were sometimes carved the faces

-      of Isis and of Nephthys, the sister goddesses, representing the beginning

-      and the end.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a little startling to find, when we get at the inner secret of the

-      Egyptian religion, that it is a rattle! But it is the symbol of eternal

-      agitation, without which there is no life. And the Egyptians profoundly

-      knew this great secret of the universe.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We pass next day, quietly, to the exhibition of a religious devotion which

-      is trying to get on without any <i>sistrum</i> or any agitation whatever.

-      Towards sunset, below How, we come to a place where a holy man, called

-      Sheykh Saleem, roosts forever on a sloping bank, with a rich country

-      behind him; beyond, on the plain, hundreds of men and boys are at work

-      throwing up an embankment against the next inundation; but he does not

-      heed them. The holy man is stark naked and sits upon his haunches, his

-      head, a shock of yellow hair, upon his knees. He is of that sickly,

-      whitey-black color which such holy skin as his gets by long exposure.

-      Before him on the bank is a row of large water-jars; behind him is a

-      little kennel of mud, into which he can crawl if it ever occurs to him to

-      go to bed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      About him, seated on the ground, is a group of his admirers. Boys run

-      after us along the bank begging backsheesh for Sheykh Saleem. A crowd of

-      hangers-on, we are told, always surround him, and live on the charity that

-      his piety evokes from the faithful. His own wants are few. He spend his

-      life in this attitude principally, contemplating the sand between his

-      knees. He has sat here for forty years.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      People pass and repass, camels swing by him, the sun shines, a breeze as

-      of summer moves the wheat behind him and our great barque, with its gay

-      flags and a dozen rowers rowing in time, sweeps before him, but he does

-      not raise his head. Perhaps he has found the secret of perfect happiness.

-      But his example cannot be widely imitated. There are not many climates in

-      the world in which a man can enjoy such a religion out of doors at all

-      seasons of the year.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We row on and by sundown are opposite Farshoot and its sugar-factories;

-      the river broadens into a lake, shut in to the north by limestone hills

-      rosy in this light, and it is perfectly still at this hour. But for the

-      palms against the sky, and the cries of men at the shadoofs, and the

-      clumsy native boats with their freight of immobile figures, this might be

-      a glassy lake in the remote Adirondack forest, especially when the light

-      has so much diminished that the mountains no longer appear naked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next morning as we were loitering along, wishing for a breeze to take

-      us quickly to Bellianeh, that we might spend the day in visiting old

-      Abydus, a beautiful wind suddenly arose according to our desire.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You always have good fortune,&rdquo; says the dragoman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I thought you didn't believe in luck?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not to call him luck. You think the wind to blow 'thout the Lord know

-      it?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We approach Bellianeh under such fine headway that we fall almost into the

-      opposite murmuring, that this helpful breeze should come just when we were

-      obliged to stop and lose the benefit. We half incline to go on, and leave

-      Abydus in its ashes, but the absurdity of making a journey of seven

-      thousand miles and then passing near to, but unseen, the spot most sacred

-      to the old Egyptians, flashes upon us, and we meekly land. But our

-      inclination to go on was not so absurd as it seems; the mind is so

-      constituted that it can contain only a certain amount of old ruins, and we

-      were getting a mental indigestion of them. Loathing is perhaps too strong

-      a word to use in regard to a piece of sculpture, but I think that a sight

-      at this time, of Rameses II. in his favorite attitude of slicing off the

-      heads of a lot of small captives, would have made us sick.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      By eleven o'clock we were mounted for the ride of eight miles, and it may

-      give some idea of the speed of the donkey under compulsion, to say that we

-      made the distance in an hour and forty minutes. The sun was hot, the wind

-      fresh, the dust considerable,&mdash;a fine sandy powder that, before

-      night, penetrated clothes and skin. Nevertheless, the ride was charming.

-      The way lay through a plain extending for many miles in every direction,

-      every foot of it green with barley (of which here and there a spot was

-      ripening), with clover, with the rank, dark Egyptian bean. The air was

-      sweet, and filled with songs of the birds that glanced over the fields or

-      poised in air on even wing like the lark. Through the vast, unfenced

-      fields were narrow well-beaten roads in all directions, upon which men

-      women, and children, usually poorly and scantily clad, donkeys and camels,

-      were coming and going. There was the hum of voices everywhere, the

-      occasional agonized blast of the donkey and the caravan bleat of the

-      camel. It often seems to us that the more rich and broad the fields and

-      the more abundant the life, the more squalor among the people.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We had noticed, at little distances apart in the plain, mounds of dirt

-      five or six feet high. Upon each of these stood a solitary figure, usually

-      a naked boy&mdash;a bronze image set up above the green.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What are these?&rdquo; we ask.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What you call scarecrows, to frighten the birds; see that chile throw

-      dirt at 'em!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They look like sentries; do the people here steal?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Everybody help himself, if nobody watch him.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      At length we reach the dust-swept village of Arâbat, on the edge of the

-      desert, near the ruins of the ancient Thinis (or Abvdus), the so-called

-      cradle of the Egyptian monarchy. They have recently been excavated. I

-      cannot think that this ancient and most important city was originally so

-      far from the Nile; in the day of its glory the river must have run near

-      it. Here was the seat of the first Egyptian dynasty, five thousand and

-      four years before Christ, according to the chronology of Mariette Bey. I

-      find no difficulty in accepting the five thousand but I am puzzled about

-      the <i>four</i> years. It makes Menes four years older than he is

-      generally supposed to have been. It is the accuracy of the date that sets

-      one pondering. Menes, the first-known Egyptian king, and the founder of

-      Memphis, was born here. If he established his dynasty here six thousand

-      eight hundred and seventy-nine years ago, he must have been born some time

-      before that date; and to be a ruler he must have been of noble parents,

-      and no doubt received a good education. I should like to know what sort of

-      a place, as to art, say, and literature, and architecture, Thinis was

-      seven thousand and four years ago. It is chiefly sand-heaps now.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Not only was Menes born here, in the grey dawn of history, but Osiris, the

-      manifestation of Light on earth, was buried here in the greyer dawn of a

-      mythic period. His tomb was venerated by the Pharaonic worshippers as the

-      Holy Sepulchre is by Christians, and for many ages. It was the last desire

-      of the rich and noble Egyptians to be buried at Thinis, in order that they

-      might lie in the same grave with Osiris; and bodies were brought here from

-      all parts of Egypt to rest in the sacred earth. Their tombs were heaped up

-      one above another, about the grave of the god. There are thousands of

-      mounds here, clustering thickly about a larger mound; and, by digging, M.

-      Mariette hopes to find the reputed tomb of Osiris. An enclosure of crude

-      brick marks the supposed site of this supposed most ancient city of Egypt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      From these prehistoric ashes, it is like going from Rome to Peoria, to

-      pass to a temple built so late as the time of Sethi I., only about

-      thirty-three hundred years ago. It has been nearly all excavated and it is

-      worth a long ride to see it. Its plan differs from that of all other

-      temples, and its varied sculpture ranks with the best of temple carving;

-      nowhere else have we found more life and grace of action in the figures

-      and more expressive features; in number of singular emblems and devices,

-      and in their careful and beautiful cutting, and brilliant coloring, the

-      temple is unsurpassed. The non-stereotyped plan of the temple beguiled us

-      into a hearty enjoyment of it. Its numerous columns are pure Egyptian of

-      the best style&mdash;lotus capitals; and it contains some excellent

-      specimens of the Doric column, or of its original, rather. The famous

-      original tablet of kings, seventy-six, from Menes to Sethi, a partial copy

-      of which is in the British Museum, has been re-covered with sand for its

-      preservation. This must have been one of the finest of the old temples. We

-      find here the novelty of vaulted roofs, formed by a singular method. The

-      roof stones are not laid flat, as elsewhere, but on edge, and the roof,

-      thus having sufficient thickness, is hollowed out on the under side, and

-      the arch is decorated with stars and other devices. Of course, there is a

-      temple of Rameses II., next door to this one, but it exists now only in

-      its magnificent foundations.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We rode back through the village of Arâbat in a whirlwind of dust, amid

-      cries of &ldquo;backsheesh,&rdquo; hailed from every door and pursued by yelling

-      children. One boy, clad in the loose gown that passes for a wardrobe in

-      these parts, in order to earn his money, threw a summersault before us,

-      and, in a flash, turned completely out of his clothes, like a new-made

-      Adam! Nothing was ever more neatly done; except it may have been a feat of

-      my donkey a moment afterwards, executed perhaps in rivalry of the boy.

-      Pretending to stumble, he went on his head, and threw a summersault also.

-      When I went back to look for him, his head was doubled under his body so

-      that he had to be helped up.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we returned we found six other dahabeëhs moored near ours. Out of the

-      seven, six carried the American flag&mdash;one of them in union with the

-      German&mdash;and the seventh was English. The American flags largely

-      outnumber all others on the Nile this year; in fact Americans and various

-      kinds of Princes appear to be monopolizing this stream. A German, who

-      shares a boat with Americans, drops in for a talk. It is wonderful how

-      much more space in the world every German needs, now that there is a

-      Germany. Our visitor expresses the belief that the Germans and the

-      Americans are to share the dominion of the world between them. I suppose

-      that this means that we are to be permitted to dwell on our present

-      possessions in peace, if we don't make faces; but one cannot contemplate

-      the extinction of all the other powers without regret.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Of course we have outstayed the south wind; the next morning we are slowly

-      drifting against the north wind. As I look from the window before

-      breakfast, a Nubian trader floats past, and on the bow deck is crouched a

-      handsome young lion, honest of face and free of glance, little dreaming of

-      the miserable menagerie life before him. There are two lions and a

-      leopard, and a cargo of cinnamon, senna, elephants' tusks, and

-      ostrich-feathers, on board; all Central Africa seems to float beside us,

-      and the coal-black crew do not lessen the barbaric impression.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is after dark when we reach Girgeh, and are guided to our moorage by

-      the lights of other dahabeëhs. All that we see of this decayed but once

-      capital town, are four minarets, two of them surrounding picturesque ruins

-      and some slender columns of a mosque, the remainder of the building having

-      been washed into the river. As we land, a muezzin sings the evening call

-      to prayer in a sweet, high tenor voice; and it sounds like a welcome.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Decayed, did we say of Girgeh? What is not decayed, or decaying, or

-      shifting, on this aggressive river? How age laps back on age and one

-      religion shuffles another out of sight. In the hazy morning we are passing

-      Menshéëh, the site of an old town that once was not inferior to Memphis;

-      and then we come to Ekhmeem&mdash;ancient Panopolis. You never heard of

-      it? A Roman visitor called it the oldest city of all Egypt; it was in fact

-      founded by Ekhmeem, the son of Misraim, the offspring of Cush, the son of

-      Ham. There you are, almost personally present at the Deluge. Below here

-      are two Coptic convents, probably later than the time of the Empress

-      Helena. On the shore are walking some Coptic Christians, but they are in

-      no way superior in appearance to other natives; a woman, whom we hail,

-      makes the sign of the cross, and then demands backsheesh.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We had some curiosity to visit a town of such honorable foundation. We

-      found in it fine mosques and elegant minarets, of a good Saracenic epoch.

-      Upon the lofty stone top of one sat an eagle, who looked down upon us

-      unscared; the mosque was ruinous and the door closed, but through the

-      windows we could see the gaily decorated ceiling; the whole was in the

-      sort of decay that the traveler learns to think Moslemism itself.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We made a pretence of searching for the remains of a temple of Pan,&mdash;though

-      we probably care less for Pan than we do for Rameses. Making known our

-      wants, several polite gentlemen in turbans, offered to show us the way&mdash;the

-      gentlemen in these towns seem to have no other occupation than to sit on

-      the ground and smoke the chibook&mdash;and we were attended by a

-      procession, beyond the walls, to the cemetery. There, in a hollow, we saw

-      a few large stones, some of them showing marks of cutting. This was the

-      temple spoken of in the hand-book. Our hosts then insisted upon dragging

-      us half a mile further through the dust of the cemetery mounds, in the

-      glare of the sun, and showed us a stone half buried, with a few

-      hieroglyphics on one end. Never were people so polite. A grave man here

-      joined us, and proposed to show us some <i>quei-is antéeka</i> (&ldquo;beautiful

-      antiquities&rdquo;); and we followed this obliging person half over town; and

-      finally, in the court of a private house, he pointed to the torso of a

-      blue granite statue. All this was done out of pure hospitality; the people

-      could not have been more attentive if they had had something really worth

-      seeing. The town has handsome, spacious coffee-houses and shops, and an

-      appearance of Oriental luxury.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

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

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 &ldquo;old masters.&rdquo;

-       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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;a kind of dishonesty that seems to be ingrained in

-      the Eastern economy. The Khedive loses both ways:&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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 (<i>limon</i>) of

-      the overflowing Nile will repair all wastes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;we

-      have had occasion to say before that the hens lay ridiculously small eggs&mdash;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&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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,&mdash;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&mdash;&ldquo;Isn't

-      it a beauty?&rdquo; 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&mdash;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&mdash;the plume of truth in

-      beauty's bonnet.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;a beast whose enormous strength is only

-      made a snow of, like that of Samson; and pretty silver-work from Soudan.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is this beautiful tawny skin, upon which I am sitting?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Lion's; she was the mother of one of the young lions out yonder. And

-      this,&rdquo; continued the trader, drawing something from the corner, &ldquo;is her

-      skull.&rdquo; 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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What's that thick stuff in a bottle there behind you?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That's lion's oil, some of <i>her</i> oil.&rdquo; Unhappy family, the mother

-      skinned and boiled, the offspring dragged into slavery.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And is that another bottle of it?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;<i>Mais</i>, no; you don't get a lion every day for oil; that is

-      ostrich-oil. This is good for rheumatism.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;the dull glare of

-      animality.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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,&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;an instrument of two short

-      reeds, each with four holes, bound together, and played like a clarionet.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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&mdash;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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      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.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0060" id="linkimage-0060"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0417.jpg" alt="0417 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0032" id="link2HCH0032"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXXII.&mdash;JOTTINGS.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">L</span>ETTING our

-      dahabeëh drift on in the morning, we spend the day at Assiout, intending

-      to overtake it by a short cut across the oxbow which the river makes here.

-      We saw in the city two examples, very unlike, of the new activity in

-      Egypt. One related to education, the other to the physical development of

-      the country and to conquest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After paying out respects to the consul, we were conducted by his two sons

-      to the Presbyterian Mission-School. These young men were educated at the

-      American College in Beyrout. Nearly everywhere we have been in the East,

-      we have found a graduate of this school, that is as much as to say, a

-      person intelligent and anxious and able to aid in the regeneration of his

-      country. It would not be easy to overestimate the services that this one

-      liberal institution of learning is doing in the Orient.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The mission-school was under the charge of the Rev. Dr. John Hogg and his

-      wife (both Scotch), with two women-teachers, and several native

-      assistants. We were surprised to find an establishment of about one

-      hundred and twenty scholars, of whom over twenty were girls. Of course the

-      majority of the students were in the primary studies, and some were very

-      young; but there were classes in advanced mathematics, in logic, history,

-      English, etc. The Arab young men have a fondness for logic and

-      metaphysics, and develop easily an inherited subtlety in such studies. The

-      text-books in use are Arabic, and that is the medium of teaching.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The students come from all parts of Upper Egypt, and are almost all the

-      children of Protestant parents, and they are, with an occasional

-      exception, supported by their parents, who pay at least their board while

-      they are at school. There were few Moslems among them, I think only one

-      Moslem girl. I am bound to say that the boys and young men in their close

-      rooms did not present an attractive appearance; an ill-assorted assembly,

-      with the stamp of physical inferiority and dullness&mdash;an effect

-      partially due to their scant and shabby apparel, for some of them had

-      bright, intelligent faces.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The school for girls, small as it is, impressed us as one of the most

-      hopeful things in Egypt. I have no confidence in any scheme for the

-      regeneration of the country, in any development if agriculture, or

-      extension of territory, or even in education, that does not reach woman

-      and radically change her and her position. It is not enough to say that

-      the harem system is a curse to the East: woman herself is everywhere

-      degraded. Until she becomes totally different from what she now is, I am

-      not sure but the Arab is right in saying that the harem is a necessity:

-      the woman is secluded in it (and in the vast majority of harems there is

-      only one wife) and has a watch set over her, because she cannot be

-      trusted. One hears that Cairo is full of intrigue, in spite of locked

-      doors and eunuchs. The large towns are worse than the country; but I have

-      heard it said that woman is the evil and plague of Egypt&mdash;though I

-      don't know how the country could go on without her. Sweeping

-      generalizations are dangerous, but it is said that the sole education of

-      most Egyptian women is in arts to stimulate the passion of men. In the

-      idleness of the most luxurious harem, in the grim poverty of the lowest

-      cabin, woman is simply an animal.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      What can you expect of her? She is literally uneducated, untrained in

-      every respect. She knows no more of domestic economy than she does of

-      books, and she is no more fitted to make a house attractive or a room tidy

-      than she is to hold an intelligent conversation. Married when she is yet a

-      child, to person she may have never seen, and a mother at an age when she

-      should be in school, there is no opportunity for her to become anything

-      better than she is.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A primary intention in this school is to fit the girls to become good

-      wives, who can set an example of tidy homes economically managed, in which

-      there shall be something of social life and intelligent companionship

-      between husband and wife. The girls are taught the common branches,

-      sewing, cooking, and housekeeping&mdash;as there is opportunity for

-      learning it in the family of the missionaries. This house of Dr. Hogg's,

-      with its books, music, civilized <i>menage</i>, is a school in itself, and

-      the girl who has access to it for three or four years will not be content

-      with the inconvenience, the barren squalor of her parental hovel; for it

-      is quite as much ignorance as poverty that produces miserable homes. Some

-      of the girls now here expect to become teachers; some will marry young men

-      who are also at this school. Such an institution would be of incalculable

-      service if it did nothing else than postpone the marriage of women a few

-      years. This school is a small seed in Egypt, but it is, I believe, the

-      germ of a social revolution. It is, I think, the only one in Upper Egypt.

-      There is a mission school of similar character in Cairo, and the Khedive

-      also has undertaken schools for the education of girls.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the last room we came to the highest class, a dozen girls, some of them

-      mere children in appearence, but all of marriageable age. I asked the age

-      of one pretty child, who showed uncommon brightness in her exercises.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;She is twelve,&rdquo; said the superintendent, &ldquo;and no doubt would be married,

-      if she were not here. The girls become marriageable from eleven years, and

-      occasionally they marry younger; if one is not married at fifteen she is

-      in danger of remaining single.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do the Moslems oppose your school?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The heads of the religion endeavor to prevent Moslem children coming to

-      it; we have had considerable trouble; but generally the mothers would like

-      to have their girls taught here, they become better daughters and more

-      useful at home.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Can you see that you gain here?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Little by little. The mission has been a wonderful success. I have been

-      in Egypt eighteen years; since the ten years that we have been at Assiout,

-      we have planted, in various towns in Upper Egypt, ten churches.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What do do you think is your greatest difficulty?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, perhaps the Arabic language.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The labor of mastering it?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not that exactly, although it is an unending study. Arabic is an

-      exceedingly rich language, as you know&mdash;a tongue that has often a

-      hundred words for one simple object has almost infinite capabilities for

-      expressing shades of meaning. To know Arabic grammatically is the work of

-      a lifetime. A man says, when he has given a long life to it, that he knows

-      a little Arabic. My Moslem teacher here, who was as learned an Arab as I

-      ever knew, never would hear me in a grammatical lesson upon any passage he

-      had not carefully studied beforehand. He begged me to excuse him, one

-      morning, from hearing me (I think we were reading from the Koran) because

-      he had not had time to go over the portion to be read. Still, the

-      difficulty of which I speak, is that Arabic and the Moslem religion are

-      one and the same thing, in the minds of the faithful. To know Arabic is to

-      learn the Koran, and that is the learning of a learned Arab. He never gets

-      to the end of the deep religious meaning hidden in the grammatical

-      intricacies. Religion and grammar thus become one.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose that is what our dragoman means, when he is reading me

-      something out of the Koran, and comes to a passage that he calls too

-      deep.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. There is room for endless differences of opinion in the rendering of

-      almost any passage, and the disagreement is important, because it becomes

-      a religious difference. I had an example of the unity of the language and

-      the religion in the Moslem mind. When I came here the learned thought I

-      must be a Moslem because I knew the grammatical Arabic; they could not

-      conceive how else I should know it.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      When we called upon his excellency, Shakeer Pasha, the square in front of

-      his office and the streets leading to it were so covered with sitting

-      figures that it was difficulty to make a way amidst them. There was an

-      unusual assembly of some sort, but its purport we could not guess. It was

-      hardly in the nature of a popular convention, although its members sat at

-      their ease, smoking, and a babel of talk arose. Nowhere else in Egypt have

-      I seen so many fine and even white-looking men gathered together. The

-      center of every group was a clerk, with inkhorn and reed, going over

-      columns of figures.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The governor's quarters were a good specimen of Oriental style and

-      shabbiness; spacious whitewashed apartments, with dirty faded curtains.

-      But we were received with a politeness that would have befitted a palace,

-      and with the cordial ease of old friends. The Pasha was heartbroken that

-      we had not notified him of our coming, and that now our time would not

-      permit us to stay and accept a dinner&mdash;had we not promised to do so

-      on our return? He would send couriers and recall our boat, he would detain

-      us by force. Allowing for all the exaggeration of Oriental phraseology, it

-      appeared only too probable that the Pasha would die if we did not stay to

-      dinner and spend the night. But we did not.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This great concourse? Oh, they were sheykhs and head men of all the

-      villages in the country round, whom he had summoned to arrange for the

-      purchase of dromedaries. The government has issued orders for the purchase

-      of a large number, which it wants to send to Darfour. The Khedive is

-      making a great effort to open the route to Darfour (twenty-eight days by

-      camel) to regular and safe travel, and to establish stations on the road.

-      That immense and almost unknown territory will thus be brought within the

-      commercial world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      During our call we were served with a new beverage in place of coffee; it

-      was a hot and sweetened tea of cinnamon, and very delicious.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On our return to the river, we passed the new railway station building

-      which is to be a handsome edifice of white limestone. Men women, and

-      children are impressed to labor on it, and, an intelligent Copt told us,

-      without pay. Very young girls were the mortar-carriers, and as they walked

-      to and fro, with small boxes on their heads, they sang, the precocious

-      children, an Arab love-song;&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      &ldquo;He passed by my door, he did not speak to me.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We have seen little girls, quite as small as these, forced to load coal

-      upon the steamers, and beaten and cuffed by the overseers. It is a hard

-      country for women. They have only a year or two of time, in which

-      all-powerful nature and the wooing sun sing within them the songs of love,

-      then a few years of married slavery, and then ugliness, old age, and hard

-      work.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I do not know a more melancholy subject of reflection than the condition,

-      the lives of these women we have been seeing for three months. They have

-      neither any social nor any religious life. If there were nothing else to

-      condemn the system of Mohammed, this is sufficient. I know what splendors

-      of art it has produced, what achievements in war, what benefits to

-      literature and science in the dark ages of Europe. But all the culture of

-      a race that in its men has borne accomplished scholars, warriors, and

-      artists, has never touched the women. The condition of woman in the Orient

-      is the conclusive verdict against the religion of the Prophet.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I will not contrast that condition with the highest; I will not compare a

-      collection of Egyptian women, assembled for any purpose, a funeral or a

-      wedding, with a society of American ladies in consultation upon some work

-      of charity, nor with an English drawing-room. I chanced once to be present

-      at a representation of Verdi's Grand Mass, in Venice, when all the world

-      of fashion, of beauty, of intelligence, assisted. The <i>coup d'oil</i>

-      was brilliant. Upon the stage, half a hundred of the chorus-singers were

-      ladies. The leading solo-singers were ladies. I remember the freshness,

-      the beauty even, the vivacity, the gay decency of the toilet, of that

-      group of women who contributed their full share in a most intelligent and

-      at times profoundly pathetic rendering of the Mass. I recall the

-      sympathetic audience, largely composed of women, the quick response to a

-      noble strain nobly sung, the cheers, the tears even which were not wanting

-      in answer to the solemn appeal, in fine, the highly civilized

-      sensitiveness to the best product of religious art. Think of some such

-      scene as that, and of the women of an European civilization; and then

-      behold the women who are the product of this,&mdash;the sad, dark fringe

-      of water-drawers and baby-carriers, for eight hundred miles along the

-      Nile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We have a row in the sandal of nine miles before we overtake our dahabeëh,

-      which the wind still baffles. However, we slip along under the cover of

-      darkness, for, at dawn, I hear the muezzin calling to prayer at Manfaloot,

-      trying in vain to impress a believing but drowsy world, that prayer is

-      better than sleep. This is said to be the place where Lot passed the

-      period of his exile. Near here, also, the Holy Family sojourned when it

-      spent a winter in Egypt. (The Moslems have appropriated and localized

-      everything in our Scriptures which is picturesque, and they plant our

-      Biblical characters where it is convenient). It is a very pretty town,

-      with minarets and gardens.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It surprises us to experience such cool weather towards the middle of

-      March; at nine in the morning the thermometer marks 550; the north wind is

-      cold, but otherwise the day is royal. Having nothing better to do we climb

-      the cliffs of Gebel Aboofeyda, at least a thousand feet above the river;

-      for ten miles it presents a bold precipice, unscalable except at

-      intervals. We find our way up a ravine. The rocks' <i>surface</i> in the

-      river and the ravine are worn exactly as the sea wears rock, honeycombed

-      by the action of water, and excavated into veritable sea-caves near the

-      summit. The limestone is rich in fossil shells.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The plain on top presented a singular appearance. It was strewn with small

-      boulders, many of them round and as shapely as cannon-balls, all formed no

-      doubt before the invention of the conical missiles. While we were amusing

-      ourselves with the thousand fantastic freaks of nature in hardened clay,

-      two sinister Arabs approached us from behind and cut off our retreat. One

-      was armed with a long gun and the other with a portentous spear. We

-      saluted them in the most friendly manner, and hoped that they would pass

-      on: but, no, they attached themselves to us. I tried to think of cases of

-      travelers followed into the desert on the Nile and murdered, but none

-      occurred to me. There seemed to be no danger from the gun so long as we

-      kept near its owner, for the length of it would prevent his bringing it

-      into action close at hand. The spear appeared to be the more effective

-      weapon of the two; it was so, for I soon ascertained that the gun was not

-      loaded and that its bearer had neither powder nor balls. It turned out

-      that this was a detachment of the local guard, sent out to protect us; it

-      would have been a formidable party in case of an attack.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Continuing our walk over the stone-clad and desolate swells, it suddenly

-      occurred to us that we had become so accustomed to this sort of

-      desert-walking, with no green or growing thing in sight, that it had

-      ceased to seem strange to us. It gave us something like a start,

-      therefore, shortly after, to see, away to the right, blue water forming

-      islands out of the hill-tops along the horizon; there was an appearance of

-      verdure about the edge of the water, and dark clouds sailed over it. There

-      was, however, when we looked steadily, about the whole landscape a shimmer

-      and a shadowy look that taught us to know that it was a <i>mirage</i>, the

-      rich Nile valley below us, with the blue water, the green fields, the

-      black lines of palms, was dimly mirrored in the sky and thrown upon the

-      desert hills in the distance. We stood where we could compare the original

-      picture with the blurred copy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Making our way down the face of the cliff, along some ledges, we came upon

-      many grottoes and mummy-pits cut in the rock, all without sculptures,

-      except one; this had on one side an arched niche and pilasters from which

-      the arch sprung. The vault of the niche had been plastered and painted,

-      and a Greek cross was chiseled in each pilaster; but underneath the

-      plaster the rock was in ornamental squares, lozenges and curves in

-      Saracenic style, although it may have been ancient Egyptian. How one

-      religion has whitewashed, and lived on the remains of another here; the

-      tombs of one age become the temples of another and the dwellings of a

-      third. On these ledges, and on the desert above, we found bits of pottery.

-      Wherever we have wandered, however far into the desert from the river, we

-      never get beyond the limit of broken pottery; and this evidence of man's

-      presence everywhere, on the most barren of these high or low plains of

-      stone and sand, speak of age and of human occupation as clearly as the

-      temples and monuments. There is no virgin foot of desert even; all is worn

-      and used. Human feet have trodden it in every direction for ages. Even on

-      high peaks where the eagles sit, men have piled stones and made shelters,

-      perhaps lookouts for enemies, it may be five hundred, it may be three

-      thousand years ago. There is nowhere in Egypt a virgin spot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      By moonlight we are creeping under the frowning cliffs of Aboofeyda, and

-      voyage on all night in a buccaneerish fashion; and next day sail by Hadji

-      Kandeel, where travelers disembark for Tel el Amarna. The remains of a

-      once vast city strew the plain, but we only survey it through a

-      field-glass. What, we sometimes say in our more modern moments, is one

-      spot more than another? The whole valley is a sepulchre of dead

-      civilizations; its inhabitants were stowed away, tier on tier, shelf on

-      shelf, in these ledges.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      However, respect for age sent us in the afternoon to the grottoes on the

-      north side of the cliff of Sheykh Said. This whole curved range, away

-      round to the remains of Antinoë, is full of tombs. Some that we visited

-      are large and would be very comfortable dwellings; they had been used for

-      Christian churches, having been plastered and painted. Traces of one

-      painting remain&mdash;trees and a comical donkey, probably part of the

-      story of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. We found in one the

-      ovals of Cheops, the builder of the great pyramid, and much good sculpture

-      in the best old manner&mdash;agricultural scenes, musicians, dancers,

-      beautifully cut, with careful details and also with spirit. This is very

-      old work, and, even abused as it has been, it is as good as any the

-      traveler will find in Egypt. This tomb no doubt goes back to the fourth

-      dynasty, and its drawing of animals, cows, birds, and fish is better than

-      we usually see later. In a net in which fish are taken, many kinds are

-      represented, and so faithfully that the species are recognizable; in a

-      marsh is seen a hippopotamus, full of life and viciousness, drawn with his

-      mouth stretched asunder wide enough to serve for a menagerie show-bill.

-      There are some curious false doors and architectural ornaments, like those

-      of the same epoch in the tombs at the pyramids.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At night we were at Rhoda, where is one of the largest of the Khedive's

-      sugar-factories; and the next morning at Beni Hassan, famed, next to

-      Thebes, for its grottoes, which have preserved to us, in painted scenes,

-      so much of the old Egyptian life. Whoever has seen pictures of these old

-      paintings and read the vast amount of description and inferences

-      concerning the old Egyptian life, based upon them, must be disappointed

-      when he sees them to-day. In the first place they are only painted, not

-      cut, and in this respect are inferior to those in the grottoes of Sheykh

-      Saïd; in the second place, they are so defaced, as to be with difficulty

-      deciphered, especially those depicting the trades.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Some of the grottoes are large&mdash;sixty feet by forty feet; fine

-      apartments in the rock, high and well lighted by the portal.

-      Architecturally, no tombs are more interesting; some of the ceilings are

-      vaulted, in three sections; they are supported by fluted pillars some like

-      the Doric, and some in the beautiful lotus style; the pillars have

-      architraves; and there are some elaborately wrought false doorways. And

-      all this goes to show that, however ancient these tombs are, they imitated

-      stone buildings already existing in a highly developed architecture.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Essentially the same subjects are represented in all the tombs; these are

-      the trades, occupations, amusements of the people. Men are blowing glass,

-      working in gold, breaking flax, tending herds (even doctoring animals that

-      are ill), chiseling statues, painting, turning the potter's wheel; the

-      barber shaves his customer; two men play at draughts; the games most in

-      favor are wrestling and throwing balls, and in the latter women play. But

-      what one specially admires is the honesty of the decorators, which

-      conceals nothing from posterity; the punishment of the bastinado is again

-      and again represented, and even women are subject to it; but respect was

-      shown for sex; the women was not cast upon the ground, she kneels and

-      takes the flagellation on her shoulders.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We saw in these tombs no horses among the many animals; we have never seen

-      the horse in any sculptures except harnessed in a war-chariot; &ldquo;the horse

-      and his rider&rdquo; do not appear.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There is a scene here which was the subject of a singular mistake, that

-      illustrates the needless zeal of early explorers to find in everything in

-      Egypt confirmation of the Old Testament narrative. A procession, painted

-      on the wall, now known to represent the advent of an Asiatic tribe into

-      Egypt, perhaps the Shepherds, in a remote period, was declared to

-      represent the arrival of Joseph's brethren. The tomb, however, was made

-      several centuries before the advent of Joseph himself. And even if it were

-      of later date than the event named, we should not expect to find in it a

-      record of an occurrence of such little significance at that time. We ought

-      not to be surprised at the absence in Egypt of traces of the Israelitish

-      sojourn, and we should not be, if we looked at the event from the Egyptian

-      point of view and not from ours. In a view of the great drama of the

-      ancient world in the awful Egyptian perspective, the Jewish episode is

-      relegated to its proper proportion in secular history. The whole Jewish

-      history, as a worldly phenomenon, occupies its narrow limits. The

-      incalculable effect upon desert tribes of a long sojourn in a highly

-      civilized state, the subsequent development of law and of a literature

-      unsurpassed in after times, and the final flower into Christianity,&mdash;it

-      is in the light of all this that we read the smallest incident of Jewish

-      history, and are in the habit of magnifying its contemporary relations. It

-      was the slenderest thread in the days of Egyptian puissance. In the

-      ancient atmosphere of Egypt, events purely historical fall into their

-      proper proportions. Many people have an idea that the ancient world

-      revolved round the Jews, and even hold it as a sort of religious faith.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is difficult to believe that the race we see here are descendants of

-      the active, inventive, joyous people who painted their life upon these

-      tombs. As we lie all the afternoon before a little village opposite Beni

-      Hassan I wonder for the hundredth time what it is that saves such

-      miserable places from seeming to us as vile as the most wretched abodes of

-      poverty in our own land. Is it because, with an ever-cheerful sun and a

-      porous soil, this village is not so filthy as a like abode of misery would

-      be with us? Is it that the imagination invests the foreign and the Orient

-      with its own hues; or is it that our reading, prepossessing our minds,

-      gives the lie to all our senses? I cannot understand why we are not more

-      disgusted with such a scene as this. Not to weary you with a repetition of

-      scenes sufficiently familiar, let us put the life of the Egyptian fellah,

-      as it appears at the moment, into a paragraph.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Here is a jumble of small mud-hovels, many of them only roofed with

-      cornstalks, thrown together without so much order as a beaver would use in

-      building a village, distinguishable only from dog-kennels in that they

-      have wooden doors&mdash;not distinguishable from them when the door is

-      open and a figure is seen in the aperture. Nowhere any comfort or

-      cleanliness, except that sometimes the inner kennel, of which the woman

-      guards the key, will have its floor swept and clean matting in one corner.

-      The court about which there are two or three of these kennels, serves the

-      family for all purposes; there the fire for cooking is built, there are

-      the water-jars, and the stone for grinding corn; there the chickens and

-      the dogs are; there crouch in the dirt women and men, the women spinning,

-      making bread, or nursing children, the men in vacant idleness. While the

-      women stir about and go for water, the men will sit still all day long.

-      The amount of sitting down here in Egypt is inconceivable; you might

-      almost call it the feature of the country. No one in the village knows

-      anything, either of religion or of the world; no one has any plans; no one

-      exhibits any interest in anything; can any of them have any hopes? From

-      this life nearly everything but the animal is eliminated. Children, and

-      pretty children, swarm, tumbling about everywhere; besides, nearly every

-      woman has one in her arms.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We ought not to be vexed at this constant north wind which baffles us, for

-      they say it is necessary to the proper filling out of the wheat heads. The

-      boat drifts about all day in a mile square, having passed the morning on a

-      sand-spit where the stupidity and laziness of the crew placed it; and we

-      have leisure to explore the large town of Minieh, which lies prettily

-      along the river. Here is a costly palace, which I believe has never been

-      occupied by the Khedive, and a garden attached, less slovenly in condition

-      than those of country palaces usually are. The sugar-factory is furnished

-      with much costly machinery, which could not have been bought for less than

-      half a million of dollars. Many of the private houses give evidences of

-      wealth in their highly ornamented doorways and Moorish arches, but the

-      mass of the town is of the usual sort here&mdash;tortuous lanes in which

-      weary hundreds of people sit in dirt, poverty, and resignation. We met in

-      the street and in the shops many coal-black Nubians and negroes, smartly

-      dressed in the recent European style, having an impudent air, who seemed

-      to be persons of wealth and consideration here. In the course of our

-      wanderings I came to a large public building, built in galleries about an

-      open court, and unwittingly in my examination of it, stumbled into the

-      apartment of the Governor, Osman Bey, who was giving audience to all

-      comers. Justice is still administered in patriarchal style; the door is

-      open to all; rich and poor were crowding in, presenting petitions and

-      papers of all sorts, and among them a woman preferred a request. Whether

-      justice was really done did not appear, but Oriental hospitality is at

-      least unfailing. Before I could withdraw, having discovered my blunder,

-      the governor welcomed me with all politeness and gave me a seat beside

-      him. We smiled at each other in Arabic and American, and came to a perfect

-      understanding on coffee and cigarettes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The next morning we are slowly passing the Copt convent of Gebel e' Tayr,

-      and expecting the appearance of the swimming Christians. There is a good

-      opportunity to board us, but no one appears. Perhaps because it is Sunday

-      and these Christians do not swim on Sunday. No. We learn from a thinly

-      clad and melancholy person who is regarding us from the rocks that the

-      Khedive has forbidden this disagreeable exhibition of muscular

-      Christianity. It was quite time. But thus, one by one, the attractions of

-      the Nile vanish.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      What a Sunday! But not an exceptional day. &ldquo;Oh dear,&rdquo; says madame, in a

-      tone of injury, &ldquo;here's another fine day!&rdquo; Although the north wind is

-      strong, the air is soft, caressing, elastic.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      More and more is forced upon us the contrast of the scenery of Upper and

-      Lower Egypt. Here it is not simply that the river is wider and the

-      mountains more removed and the arable land broader; the lines are all

-      straight and horizontal, the mountain-ranges are level-topped, parallel to

-      the flat prairies&mdash;at sunset a low level of white limestone hills in

-      the east looked exactly like a long line of fence whitewashed. In Upper

-      Egypt, as we have said, the plains roll, the hills are broken, there are

-      pyramidal mountains, and evidences of upheaval and disorder. But these

-      wide sweeping and majestic lines have their charm; the sunsets and

-      sunrises are in some respects finer than in Nubia; the tints are not so

-      delicate, the colors not so pure, but the moister atmosphere and clouds

-      make them more brilliant and various. The dawn, like the after-glow, is

-      long; the sky burns half round with rose and pink, the color mounts high

-      up. The sunsets are beyond praise, and always surprise. Last night the

-      reflection in the east was of a color unseen before&mdash;almost a purple

-      below and a rose above; and the west glowed for an hour in changing tints.

-      The night was not less beautiful&mdash;we have a certain comfort in

-      contrasting both with March in New England. It was summer; the Nile slept,

-      the moon half-full, let the stars show; and as we glided swiftly down, the

-      oars rising and falling to the murmured chorus of the rowers, there were

-      deep shadows under the banks, and the stately palms, sentinelling the vast

-      plain of moonlight over which we passed,&mdash;the great silence of an

-      Egyptian night&mdash;seemed to remove us all into dreamland. The land was

-      still, except for the creak of an occasional shadoof worked by some wise

-      man who thinks it easier to draw water in the night than in the heat of

-      the day, or an aroused wolfish dog, or a solitary bird piping on the

-      shore.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Thus we go, thus we stay, in the delicious weather, encouraged now and

-      again by a puff of southern wind, but held back from our destination by

-      some mysterious angel of delay. But one day the wind comes, the sail is

-      distended, the bow points downstream, and we move at the dizzy rate of

-      five miles an hour.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a day of incomparable beauty. We see very little labor along the

-      Nile; the crops are maturing. But the whole population comes to the river,

-      to bathe, to sit in the shallows, to sit on the bank. All the afternoon we

-      pass groups, men, women, children, motionless, the picture of idleness.

-      There they are, hour after hour, in the sun. Women, coming for water, put

-      down their jars, and bathe and frolic in the grateful stream. In some

-      distant reaches of the river there are rows of women along the shore,

-      exactly like the birds which stand in the shallow places or sun themselves

-      on the sand. There are more than twenty miles of bathers, of all sexes and

-      ages.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When at last we come to a long sand-reef, dotted with storks, cranes and

-      pelicans, the critic says he is glad to see something with feathers on it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are in full tide of success and puffed up with confidence: it is

-      perfectly easy to descend the Nile. All the latter part of the afternoon

-      we are studying the False Pyramid of Maydoom, that structure, older than

-      Cheops, built, like all the primitive monuments, in degrees, as the Tower

-      of Babel was, as the Chaldean temples were. It lifts up, miles away from

-      the river, only a broken mass from the <i>debris</i> at its base. We leave

-      it behind. We shall be at Bedreshayn, for Memphis, before daylight. As we

-      turn in, the critic says, &ldquo;We've got the thing in our own hands now.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Alas! the Lord reached down and took it out. The wind chopped suddenly,

-      and blew a gale from the north. At breakfast time we were waltzing round

-      opposite the pyramids of Dashoor, liable to go aground on islands and

-      sandbars, and unable to make the land. Determined not to lose the day, we

-      anchored, took the sandal, had a long pull, against the gale, to

-      Bedreshayn, and mounted donkeys for the ruins of ancient Memphis.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When Herodotus visited Memphis, probably about four hundred and fifty

-      years before Christ, it was a great city. He makes special mention of its

-      temple of Vulcan, whose priests gave him a circumstantial account of the

-      building of the city by Menes, the first Pharaoh. Four hundred years

-      later, Diodorus found it magnificent; about the beginning of the Christian

-      era, Strabo says it was next in size to Alexandria. Although at the end of

-      the twelfth century it had been systematically despoiled to build Cairo,

-      an Arab traveler says that, &ldquo;its ruins occupy a space half a day's journey

-      every way,&rdquo; and that its wonders could not be described. Temples, palaces,

-      gardens, villas, acres of common dwellings&mdash;the city covered this

-      vast plain with its splendor and its squalor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The traveler now needs a guide to discover a vestige, a stone here and

-      there, of this once most magnificent capital. Here came Moses and Aaron,

-      from the Israelitish settlement in the Delta, from Zoan (Tanis) probably,

-      to beg Menephtah to let the Jews depart; here were performed the miracles

-      of the Exodus. This is the Biblical Noph, against which burned the wrath

-      of the prophets. &ldquo;No (Heliopolis, or On) shall be rent asunder, and Noph

-      shall have distresses daily.&rdquo; The decree <i>was</i> &ldquo;published in Noph&rdquo;:&mdash;&ldquo;Noph

-      shall be waste and desolate without an inhabitant;&rdquo; &ldquo;I will cause their

-      images to cease out of Noph.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      The images have ceased, the temples have either been removed or have

-      disappeared under the deposits of inundations; you would ride over old

-      Memphis without knowing it, but the inhabitants have returned to this

-      fertile and exuberant plain. It is only in the long range of pyramids and

-      the great necropolis in the desert that you can find old Memphis.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The superabundant life of the region encountered us at once. At Bedreshayn

-      is a ferry, and its boats were thronged, chiefly by women, coming and

-      going, and always with a load of grain or other produce on the head. We

-      rode round the town on an elevated dyke, lined with palms, and wound

-      onward over a flat, rich with wheat and barley, to Mitrahenny, a little

-      village in a splendid palm-grove. This marks the central spot of the ruins

-      of old Memphis. Here are some mounds, here are found fragments of statues

-      and cut stones, which are preserved in a temporary shelter. And here,

-      lying on its side, in a hollow from which the water was just subsiding, is

-      a polished colossal statue of Rameses II.&mdash;the Pharaoh who left more

-      monuments of less achievements than any other &ldquo;swell&rdquo; of antiquity. The

-      face is handsome, as all his statues are, and is probably conventionalized

-      like our pictures of George Washington, or Napoleon's busts of himself. I

-      confess to a feeling of perfect satisfaction at seeing his finely chiseled

-      nose rooting in the mud.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This&mdash;some mounds, some fragments of stone, and the statue,&mdash;was

-      all we saw of Memphis. But I should like to have spent a day in this

-      lovely grove, which was carpeted with the only turf I saw in Egypt;

-      reclining upon the old mounds in the shade, and pretending to think of

-      Menes and Moses and Menephtah; and of Rhampsinitus, the king who

-      &ldquo;descended alive into the place which the Greeks call Hades, and there

-      played at dice with Ceres, and sometimes won, and other times lost,&rdquo; and

-      of the treasure-house he built here; and whether, as Herodotus believed,

-      Helen, the beautiful cause of the Iliad, really once dwelt in a palace

-      here, and whether Homer ever recited his epic in these streets.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We go on over the still rich plain to the village of Sakkarah&mdash;chiefly

-      babies and small children. The cheerful life of this prairie fills us with

-      delight&mdash;flocks of sheep, herds of buffaloes, trains of dromedaries,

-      hundreds of laborers of both sexes in the fields, children skylarking

-      about; on every path are women, always with a basket on the head, their

-      blue cotton gown (the only article of dress except a head-shawl,) open in

-      front, blowing back so as to show their figures as they walk.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we reach the desert we are in the presence of death&mdash;perhaps the

-      most mournful sight on this earth is a necropolis in the desert, savage,

-      sand-drifted, plundered, all its mounds dug over and over. We ride along

-      at the bases of the pyramids. I stop at one, climb over the <i>débris</i>

-      at its base, and break off a fragment of stone. The pyramid is of

-      crumbling limestone, and, built in stages or degrees, like that of

-      Maydoom; it is slowly becoming an unsightly heap. And it is time. This is

-      believed to be the oldest structure in the world, except the Tower of

-      Babel. It seems to have been the sepulchre of Keken, a king of the second

-      dynasty. At this period hieroglyphic writing was developed, but the

-      construction and ornamentation of the doorway of the pyramid exhibit art

-      in its infancy. This would seem to show that the Egyptians did not

-      emigrate from Asia with the developed and highly perfected art found in

-      the sculptures of the tombs of the fourth, fifth, and sixth dynasties, as

-      some have supposed, but that there was a growth, which was arrested later.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But no inference in regard to old Egypt is safe; a discovery tomorrow may

-      upset it. Statues recently found, representing persons living in the third

-      dynasty, present a different type of race from that shown in statues of

-      the fourth and fifth dynasties. So that, in that period in which one might

-      infer a growth of art, there may have been a change of the dominating

-      race.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The first great work of Mariette Bey in Egypt&mdash;and it is a monument

-      of his sagacity, enthusiasm, and determination, was the unearthing, in

-      this waste of Memphis, the lost Serapeum and the Apis Mausoleum, the tombs

-      of the sacred bulls. The remains of the temple are again covered with

-      sand; but the visitor can explore the Mausoluem. He can walk, taper in

-      hand, through endless galleries, hewn in the rock, passing between rows of

-      gigantic granite sarcophagi, in which once rested the mummies of the

-      sacred bulls. Living, the bull was daintily fed&mdash;the Nile water

-      unfiltered was thought to be too fattening for him&mdash;and devotedly

-      worshipped; and dying, he was entombed in a sepulchre as magnificent as

-      that of kings, and his adorers lined the walls of his tomb with votive

-      offerings. It is partly from these stelæ, or slabs with inscriptions, that

-      Mariette Bey has added so much to our knowledge of Egyptian history.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Near the Serapeum is perhaps the most elegant tomb in Egypt, the tomb of

-      Tih, who lived in the fifth dynasty, some time later than Cheops, but when

-      hippopotami abounded in the river in front of his farm, Although Tih was a

-      priest, he was a gentleman of elegant tastes, an agriculturist, a

-      sportsman. He had a model farm, as you may see by the buildings and by the

-      thousand details of good management here carved. His tomb does him great

-      credit. In all the work of later times there is nothing so good as this

-      sculpture, so free, so varied, so beautiful; it promises everything. Tih

-      even had, what we do not expect in people of that early time, humor; you

-      are sure of it from some of the pictures here. He must have taken delight

-      in decorating his tomb, and have spent, altogether, some pleasant years in

-      it before he occupied it finally; so that he had become accustomed to

-      staying here.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But his rule was despotic, it was that of the &ldquo;stick.&rdquo; Egyptians have

-      never changed in this respect, as we have remarked before. They are now,

-      as then, under the despotism of some notion of governance&mdash;divine or

-      human&mdash;despotic and fateful. The &ldquo;stick&rdquo; is as old as the monarchy;

-      it appears in these tombs; as to day, nobody then worked or paid taxes

-      without its application.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The sudden arrest of Egyptian art was also forced upon us next day, in a

-      second visit to the pyramids of Geezeh. We spent most of the day in the

-      tombs there. In some of them we saw the ovals of all the kings of the

-      fourth dynasty, many of them perfect and fresh in color. As to drawing,

-      cutting, variety, liveliness of attitude and color, there is nothing

-      better, little so good, in tombs of recent date. We find almost every

-      secular subject in the early tombs that is seen in the latest. In

-      thousands of years, the Egyptians scarcely changed or made any progress.

-      The figures of men and animals are better executed in these old tombs than

-      in the later. Again, these tombs are free from the endless repetitions of

-      gods and of offerings to them. The life of the people represented is more

-      natural, less superstitious; common events are naively portrayed, with the

-      humorous unconsciousness of a simple age; art has thought it not unworthy

-      its skill to represent the fact in one tomb, that men acted as midwives to

-      cows, in the dawn of history.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      While we lay at Geezeh we visited one of the chicken-hatching

-      establishments for which the Egyptians have been famous from a remote

-      period. It was a very unpretending affair, in a dirty suburb of the town.

-      We were admitted into a low mud-building, and into a passage with ovens on

-      each side. In these ovens the eggs are spread upon mats, and the necessary

-      fire is made underneath. The temperature is at 100° to 108° Fahrenheit.

-      Each oven has a hole in the center, through which the naked attendant

-      crawls to turn the eggs from time to time. The process requires usually

-      twenty-one days, but some eggs hatch on the twentieth. The eggs are

-      supplied by the peasants who usually receive, without charge, half as many

-      chickens as they bring eggs. About one third of the eggs do not hatch. The

-      hatching is only performed about three months in the year, during the

-      spring.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the passage, before one of the ovens, was a heap of soft chickens,

-      perhaps half a bushel, which the attendant scraped together whenever they

-      attempted to toddle off. We had the pleasure of taking up some handfuls of

-      them. We also looked into the ovens, where there was a stir of life, and

-      were permitted to hold some eggs while the occupants kicked off the shell.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I don't know that a plan will ever be invented by which eggs, as well as

-      chickens, will be produced without the intervention of the hen. If one

-      could be, it would leave the hen so much more time to scratch&mdash;it

-      would relieve her from domestic cares so that she could take part in

-      public affairs. The hen in Egypt is only partially emancipated, But since

-      she is relieved from setting, I do not know that she is any better hen.

-      She lays very small eggs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This ends what I have to say about the hen. We have come to Cairo, and the

-      world is again before us.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0061" id="linkimage-0061"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0436.jpg" alt="0436 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0062" id="linkimage-0062"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0437.jpg" alt="0437 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0033" id="link2HCH0033"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXXIII.&mdash;THE KHEDIVE.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HAT excitement

-      there is in adjacency to a great city! To hear its inarticulate hum, to

-      feel the thrill of its myriads, the magnetism of a vast society! How the

-      pulse quickens at the mere sight of multitudes of buildings, and the

-      overhanging haze of smoke and dust that covers a little from the sight of

-      the angels the great human struggle and folly. How impatient one is to

-      dive into the ocean of his fellows.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The stir of life has multiplied every hour in the past two days. The river

-      swarms with boats, the banks are vocal with labor, traffic, merriment.

-      This morning early we are dropping down past huge casernes full of

-      soldiers&mdash;the bank is lined with them, thousands of them, bathing and

-      washing their clothes, their gabble filling the air. We see again the

-      lofty mosque of Mohamed Ali, the citadel of Salàdin, the forest of

-      minarets above the brown roofs of the town. We pass the isle of Rhoda and

-      the ample palaces of the Queen-Mother. We moor at Gezereh amid a great

-      shoal of dahabeëhs, returned from High Egypt, deserted of their

-      passengers, flags down, blinds closed&mdash;a spectacle to fill one with

-      melancholy that so much pleasure is over.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The dahabeëhs usually discharge their passengers at Gezereh, above the

-      bridge. If the boat goes below with baggage it is subject to a port-duty,

-      as if it were a traveler,&mdash;besides the tax for passing the

-      draw-bridge. We decide to remain some days on our boat, because it is

-      comfortable, and because we want to postpone the dreaded breaking up of

-      housekeeping, packing up our scattered effects, and moving. Having

-      obtained permission to moor at the government dock below Kasr-el-Nil, we

-      drop down there.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The first person to greet us there is Aboo Yusef, the owner. Behind him

-      comes Habib Bagdadli, the little Jew partner. There is always that in his

-      mien which says, &ldquo;I was really born in Bagdad, but I know you still think

-      I am a Jew from Algiers. No, gentlemens, you wrong a man to whom

-      reputation is everything.&rdquo; But he is glad to see his boat safe; he

-      expresses as much pleasure as one can throw from an eye with a cast in it.

-      Aboo Yusef is radiant. He is attired gorgeously, in a new suit, from fresh

-      turban to red slippers, on the profits of the voyage. His robe is silk,

-      his sash is cashmere. He overflows with complimentary speech.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Allah be praised, I see you safe.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We have reason to be grateful.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And that you had a good journey.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A perfect journey.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We have been made desolate by your absence; thank God, you have enjoyed

-      the winter.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose you are glad to see the boat back safe also?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is nothing, not to mention it, I not think of it; the return of the

-      boat safe, that is nothing. I only think that you are safe. But it is a

-      good boat. You will say it is the first-class of boats? And she goes up

-      the cataract all right. Did I not say she go up the cataract? Abd-el-Atti

-      he bear me witness.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You did. You said so. Habib said so also. Was there any report here in

-      Cairo that we could not go up.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Mashallah. Such news. The boat was lost in the cataract; the reïs was

-      drowned. For the loss of the boat I did not care; only if you were safe.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did you hear that the cataract reises objected to take us up?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What rascals! They always make the traveler some trouble. But, Allah

-      forgive us all, the head reïs is dead. Not so, Abd-el-Atti?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What, the old reïs that we said good-bye to only a little while ago at

-      Assouan?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Him dead,&rdquo; says Abd-el-Atti. &ldquo;I have this morning some conversation with

-      a tradin' boat from the Cataract. Him dead shortly after we leave.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that one of these tough

-      old Bedaween could die in the ordinary manner.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But alas his spirit was too powerful for his frame. We have not in this

-      case the consolation of feeling that his loss is our gain; for there are

-      plenty more like him at the First Cataract. He took money from Aboo Yusef

-      for <i>not</i> taking us up the Cataract, and he took money from us <i>for</i>

-      taking us up. His account is balanced. He was an impartial man. Peace to

-      his colored ashes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Aboo Yusef and the little Jew took leave with increased demonstrations of

-      affection, and repeated again and again their joy that we had ascended the

-      Cataract and returned safe. The Jew, as I said, had a furtive look, but

-      Aboo is open as the day. He is an Arab you would trust. I can scarcely

-      believe that it was he and his partner who sent the bribe to the reïs of

-      the Cataract to prevent our going up.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As we ride to town through the new part, the city looks exceedingly bright

-      and attractive; the streets are very broad; the handsome square houses&mdash;ornamented

-      villas, with balconies, pillared piazzas, painted with lively figures and

-      in <i>bizarre</i> patterns&mdash;stand behind walls overgrown with the

-      convolvulus, and in the midst of gardens; plats in the center of open

-      spaces and at the angles of streets are gay with flowers in bloom&mdash;chiefly

-      scarlet geraniums. The town wears a spring aspect, and would be altogether

-      bright but for the dust which overlays everything, houses, streets,

-      foliage. No amount of irrigation can brighten the dust-powdered trees.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When we came to Cairo last fall, fresh from European cities, it seemed

-      very shabby. Now that we come from Upper Egypt, with our eyes trained to

-      eight hundred miles of mud-hovels, Cairo is magnificent. But it is Cairo.

-      There are just as many people squatting in the dust of the highways as

-      when we last saw them, and they have the air of not having moved in three

-      months. We ride to Shepherd's Hotel; there are twenty dragomans for every

-      tourist who wants to go to Syria, there is the usual hurry of arrival and

-      departure, and no one to be found; we call at the consul's: it is not his

-      hour; we ride through the blindest ways to the bankers, in the Rosetti

-      Gardens (don't imagine there is any garden there), they do no business

-      from twelve to three. It is impossible to accomplish anything in Cairo

-      without calm delay. And, falling into the mode, we find ourselves

-      sauntering through one of the most picturesque quarters, the bazaar of

-      Khan Khaléel, feasting the eye on the Oriental splendors of silks,

-      embroidered stuffs, stiff with gold and silver, sown with pearls, antique

-      Persian brasses, old arms of the followers of Saladin. How cool, how quiet

-      it is. All the noises are soft. Noises enough there are, a babel of

-      traffic, jostling, pushing, clamoring; and yet we have a sense of quiet in

-      it all. There is no rudeness, no angularity, no glare of sun. At times you

-      feel an underflow of silence. I know no place so convenient for meditation

-      as the recesses of these intricate bazaars. Their unlikeness to the

-      streets of other cities is mainly in the absence of any hard pavement.

-      From the moment you come into the Mooskee, you strike a silent way, no

-      noise of wheels or hoofs, nor footfalls of the crowd. It is this absence

-      of footfall-patter which is always heard in our streets, that gives us the

-      impression here of the underflow of silence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Returning through the Ezbekeëh Park and through the new streets, we are

-      glad we are not to judge the manhood of Egypt by the Young Egypt we meet

-      here, nor the future of Egypt by the dissolute idlers of Cairo and

-      Alexandria. From Cairo to Wady Halfeh we have seen men physically well

-      developed, fine specimens of their race, and better in Nubia than in Egypt

-      Proper; but these youths are feeble, and of unclean appearance, even in

-      their smart European dress. They are not unlike the effeminate and gilded

-      youth of Italy that one sees in the cities, or Parisians of the same

-      class. Egypt, which needed a different importation, has added most of the

-      vices of Europe to its own; it is noticeable that the Italians, who

-      emigrate elsewhere little, come here in great numbers, and men and women

-      alike take kindly to this loose feebleness. French as well as Italians

-      adapt themselves easily to Eastern dissoluteness. The French have never

-      shown in any part of the globe any prejudice against a mingling of races.

-      The mixture here of the youths of the Latin races and the worn-out

-      Orientals, who are a little polished by a lacquer of European vice, is not

-      a good omen for Egypt. Happily such youths are feeble and, I trust, not to

-      be found outside the two large cities.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The great question in Egypt, among foreigners and observers (there <i>is</i>

-      no great question among the common people), is about the Khedive, Ismail

-      Pasha, his policy and his real intentions with regard to the country. You

-      will hear three distinct opinions; one from devout Moslems, another from

-      the English, and a third from the Americans. The strict and conservative

-      Moslems like none of the changes and innovations, and express not too much

-      confidence in the Khedive's religion. He has bought pictures and statues

-      for his palaces, he has marble images of himself, he has set up an

-      equestrian statue in the street; all this is contrary to the religion. He

-      introduces European manners and costumes, every government <i>employé</i>

-      is obliged to wear European dress, except the tarboosh. What does he want

-      with such a great army; why are the taxes so high, and growing higher

-      every day?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      With the Americans in Cairo, as a rule, the Khedive is popular; they

-      sympathize with his ambition, and think that he has the good of Egypt at

-      heart; almost uniformly they defend him. The English, generally, distrust

-      the Khedive and criticise his every movement. Scarcely ever have I heard

-      Englishmen speak well of the Khedive and his policy. They express a want

-      of confidence in the sincerity of his efforts to suppress the slave-trade,

-      for one thing. How much the fact that American officers are preferred in

-      the Khedive's service has to do with the English and the American

-      estimate, I do not know; the Americans are naturally preferred over all

-      others, for in case of a European complication over Egypt they would have

-      no entangling alliances.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Americans point to what has actually been accomplished by the present

-      Viceroy, the radical improvements in the direction of a better

-      civilization, improvements which already change the aspect of Egypt to the

-      most casual observer. There are the railroads, which intersect the Delta

-      in all directions, and extend over two hundred and fifty miles up the

-      Nile, and the adventurous iron track which is now following the line of

-      the telegraph to distant Kartoom. There are the canals, the Sweet-Water

-      that runs from Cairo and makes life on the Isthmus possible, and the

-      network of irrigating canals and system of ditches, which have not only

-      transformed the Delta, but have changed its climate, increasing enormously

-      the rainfall. No one who has not seen it can have any conception of the

-      magnitude of this irrigation by canals which all draw water from the Nile,

-      nor of the immense number of laborers necessary to keep the canals in

-      repair. Talk of the old Pharaohs, and their magnificent canals, projected

-      or constructed, and their vaunted expeditions of conquest into Central

-      Africa! Their achievements, take them all together, are not comparable to

-      the marvels the Khedive is producing under our own eyes, in spite of a

-      people ignorant, superstitious, reluctant. He does not simply make raids

-      into Africa: he occupies vast territories, he has absolutely stopped the

-      Nile slave-trade, he has converted the great slave-traders into his

-      allies, by making it more their interest to develope legitimate commerce

-      than to deal in flesh and blood; he has permanently opened a region twice

-      as large as Egypt to commercial intercourse; he sends explorers and

-      scientific expeditions into the heart of Africa. It is true that he wastes

-      money, that he is robbed and cheated by his servants, but he perseveres,

-      and behold the results. Egypt is waking out of its sleep, it is annexing

-      territory, and population by millions, it is becoming a power. And Ismail

-      Pasha is the center and spring of the whole movement.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Look at Cairo! Since the introduction of gas, the opening of broad

-      streets, the tearing down of some of the worst rookeries, the admission of

-      sun and air, Cairo is exempt from the old epidemics, the general health is

-      improved, and even that scourge, ophthalmia, has diminished. You know his

-      decree forbidding early marriages; you know he has established and

-      encourages schools for girls; you see what General Stone is doing in the

-      education of the common soldiers, and in his training of those who show

-      any aptitude in engineering, draughting, and the scientific

-      accomplishments of the military profession.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Thus the warmest admirers of the Khedive speak. His despotism, which is

-      now the most absolute in the world, perhaps, and least disputed, is

-      referred to as a &ldquo;personal government.&rdquo; And it is difficult to see how

-      under present circumstances it could be anything else. There is absolutely

-      in Egypt no material for anything else. The Khedive has annually summoned

-      for several years, a sort of parliament of the chief men of Egypt, for

-      information and consultation. At first it was difficult to induce the

-      members to say a word, to give any information or utter an opinion. It is

-      a new thing in a despotic government, the shadow even of a parliament.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An English gentleman in Cairo, and a very intelligent man, gives the

-      Khedive credit for nothing but a selfish desire to enrich himself, to

-      establish his own family, and to enjoy the traditional pleasures of the

-      Orient.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But he is suppressing the slave-trade.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He is trying to make England believe so. Slaves still come to Cairo; not

-      so many down the Nile, but by the desert. I found a slave-den in some

-      desert tombs once over the other side the river; horrible treatment of

-      women and children; a caravan came from Darfour by way of Assiout.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But that route is cut off by the capture of Darfour.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, you'll see; slaves will come if they are wanted. Why, look at the

-      Khedive's harem!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He hasn't so many wives as Solomon, who had seven hundred; the Khedive

-      has only four.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, but he has more concubines; Solomon kept only three hundred, the

-      Khedive has four hundred and fifty, and perhaps nearer five hundred. Some

-      of them are beautiful Circassians for whom it is said he paid as much as

-      £2000 and even £3000 sterling.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose that is an outside price.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course, but think of the cost of keeping them. Then, each of his four

-      wives has her separate palace and establishment. Rather an expensive

-      family.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Almost as costly as the royal family of England.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That's another affair; to say nothing of the difference of income. The

-      five hundred, more or less, concubines are under the charge of the

-      Queen-mother, but they have <i>carte blanche</i> in indulgence in jewels,

-      dress, and all that. They wear the most costly Paris modes. They spend

-      enormous sums in pearls and diamonds. They have their palaces refurnished

-      whenever the whim seizes them, re-decorated in European style. Where does

-      the money come from? You can see that Egypt is taxed to death. I heard

-      to-day that the Khedive was paying seventeen per cent, for money, money

-      borrowed to pay the interest on his private debts. What does he do with

-      the money he raises?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Spends a good deal of it on his improvements, canals, railroads, on his

-      army.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I think he runs in debt for his improvements. Look again at his family.

-      He has something like forty palaces, costing from one half-million to a

-      million dollars each; some of them, which he built, he has never occupied,

-      many of them are empty, many of those of his predecessors, which would

-      lodge a thousand people, are going to decay; and yet he is building new

-      ones all the time. There are two or three in process of erection on the

-      road to the pyramids.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perhaps they are for his sons or for his high officers? Victor Emanuel,

-      whose treasury is in somewhat the condition of the Khedive's, has a palace

-      in every city of Italy, and yet he builds more.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If the Khedive is building for his children, I give it up. He has

-      somewhere between twenty and thirty acknowledged children. But he does

-      give away palaces and houses. When he has done with a pretty slave, he may

-      give her, with a palace or a fine house here in town, to a favorite

-      officer. I can show you houses here that were taken away from their

-      owners, at a price fixed by the Khedive and not by the owner, because the

-      Viceroy wanted them to give away with one or another of his concubines.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose that is Oriental custom.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I thought you Americans defended the Khedive on account of his

-      progressive spirit.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He is a man who is accomplishing wonders, trammelled as he is by usages

-      thousands of years old, which appear monstrous to us, but are to him as

-      natural as any other Oriental condition. Yet I confess that he stands in

-      very contradictory lights. If he knew it, he could do the greatest service

-      to Egypt by abolishing his harem of concubines, converting it into&mdash;I

-      don't know what&mdash;a convent, or a boarding-school, or a milliner's

-      shop, or an establishment for canning fruit&mdash;and then set the example

-      of living, openly, with one wife.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Wait till he does. And you talk about the condition of Egypt! Every

-      palm-tree, and every sakiya is taxed, and the tax has doubled within a few

-      years. The taxes are now from one pound and a half to three pounds an acre

-      on all lands not owned by him.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In many cases, I know this is not a high tax (compared with taxes

-      elsewhere) considering the yield of the land, and the enormous cost of the

-      irrigating canals.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It is high for such managers as the fellahs. But they will not have to

-      complain long. The Khedive is getting into his own hands all the lands of

-      Egypt. He owns I think a third of it now, and probably half of it is in

-      his family; and this is much the better land.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;History repeats itself in Egypt. He is following the example of Joseph

-      who, you know, taking advantage of the famine, wrung all the land, except

-      that in possession of the priests, from the people, and made it over to

-      Pharaoh; by Joseph's management the king owned, before the famine was

-      over, not only all the land, but all the money, all the cattle, and all

-      the people of Egypt. And he let the land to them for a fifth of its

-      increase.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don't know that it is any better because Egypt is used to it. Joseph

-      was a Jew. The Khedive pretends to be influenced by the highest motives,

-      the elevation of the condition of the people, the regeneration of Egypt.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I think he is sincerely trying to improve Egypt and the Egyptians. Of

-      course a despot, reared in Oriental prejudices, is slow to see that you

-      can't make a nation except by making men; that you can't make a rich

-      nation unless individuals have free scope to accumulate property. I

-      confess that the chief complaint I heard up the river was, that no one

-      dared to show that he had any money, or to engage in extensive business,

-      for fear he would be 'squeezed.'.rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So he would be. The Khedive has some sixteen sugar-factories, worked by

-      forced labor, very poorly paid. They ought to be very profitable.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They are not.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, he wants more money, at any rate. I have just heard that he is

-      resorting to a forced loan, in the form of bonds. A land-owner is required

-      to buy them in the proportion of one dollar and a half for each acre he

-      owns; and he is to receive seven per cent, interest on the bonds. In Cairo

-      a person is required to take these bonds in a certain proportion on his

-      personal property. And it is said that the bonds are not transferable, and

-      that they will be worthless to the heirs. I heard of this new dodge from a

-      Copt.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose the Khedive's friends would say that he is trying to change

-      Egypt in a day, whereas it is the work of generations.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      When we returned to the dahabeëh we had a specimen of &ldquo;personal

-      government.&rdquo; Abd-el-Atti was standing on the deck, slipping his beads, and

-      looking down.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What has happened?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ahman, been took him.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Who took him?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Police, been grab him first time he go 'shore, and lock him up.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What had he been doing?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing he been done; I send him uptown of errand; police catch him right

-      out there.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What for?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Take him down to Soudan to work; the vice-royal he issue an order for the

-      police to catch all the black fellows in Cairo, and take 'em to the

-      Soudan, down to Gondokora for what I know, to work the land there.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But Ahman is our servant; he can't be seized.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, I know, Ahman belong to me, he was my slave till I give him liberty;

-      I go to get him out directly. These people know me, I get him off.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But if you had no influence with the police, Ahman would be dragged off

-      to Soudan to work in a cotton or rice field?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Lots of black fellows like him sent off. But I get him back, don't you

-      have worry. What the vice-royal to do with my servant&mdash;I don't care

-      if he Kin' of Constantinople!&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      Sure enough, early in the evening the handsome Abyssinian boy came back,

-      none the worse, except for a thorough scare, eyes and teeth shining, and

-      bursting into his usual hearty laugh upon allusion to his capture.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Police <i>tyeb?</i>&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;<i>Moosh-tyeb</i>&rdquo; (&ldquo;bad&rdquo;), with an explosion of merriment.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The boy hadn't given himself much uneasiness, for he regards his master as

-      his Providence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are moored at the dock and below the lock of the Sweet-Water Canal

-      which runs to Ismailia. A dredge-boat lies in the entrance, and we have an

-      opportunity of seeing how government labor is performed; we can understand

-      why it is that so many laborers are needed, and that the great present

-      want of Egypt is stout and willing arms.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the entrance of the canal and in front of the lock is a flat-boat upon

-      which are fifteen men. They have two iron scoops, which would hold about a

-      gallon each; to each is attached a long pole and a rope. Two men jab the

-      pole down and hold the pot on the bottom, while half a dozen pull

-      leisurely on the rope, with a &ldquo;<i>yah-sah</i>&rdquo; or other chorus, and haul

-      in the load; when it comes up, a man scrapes out the mud with his hand,

-      sometimes not getting more than two quarts. It is very restful to watch

-      their unexhausting toil. It takes several minutes to capture a pot of

-      sand. There are fifteen men at this spoon-work, but one scoop is only kept

-      going at a time. After it is emptied, the men stop and look about,

-      converse a little, and get ready for another effort, standing meantime in

-      liquid mud, ankle deep. When they have rested, over goes the scoop again,

-      and the men stand to the rope, and pull feebly, but only at intervals,

-      that is when they sing the response to the line of the leader. The

-      programme of singing and pulling is something like this:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Salee ah nadd (voice of the leader).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Yalee, halee (chorus, pull altogether).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Salee ah nadd.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Yalee, halee (pull).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Salee ah nadd.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Yalee, halee (pull).

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And the outcome of three or four minutes of hauling and noise enough to

-      raise a ton, is about a quart of mud!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The river panorama is always varied and entertaining, and we are of a

-      divided mind between a lazy inclination to sit here and watch the busy

-      idleness of the population, or address ourselves to the much that still

-      remains to be seen in Cairo. I ought to speak, however, of an American

-      sensation on the river. This is a little steam-yacht&mdash;fifty feet long

-      by seven and a half broad&mdash;which we saw up the Nile, where it

-      attracted more attention along the banks than anything else this season. I

-      call it American, because it carries the American flag and is owned by a

-      New-York art student, Mr. Anderson, and an English-American, Mr. Medler;

-      but the yacht was built in London, and shipped on a large steamboat to

-      Alexandria. It is the first steam-vessel, I believe, carrying anything

-      except Egyptian (or Turkish) colors that has ever been permitted to ascend

-      the Nile. We took a trip on it one fine morning up to Helwân, and enjoyed

-      the animation of its saucy speed. When put to its best, it makes eighteen

-      miles an hour; but life would not be as long on it as it is on a dahabeëh.

-      At Helwân are some hot sulphur-springs, famous and much resorted to in the

-      days of the Pharaohs, and just now becoming fashionable again.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Our days pass we can hardly say how, while we wait for the proper season

-      for Syria, and regard the invincible obstacles that debar us from the

-      longed-for desert journey to Sinai and Arabia Petra. The bazaars are

-      always a refuge from the heat, a never-failing entertainment. We spend

-      hours in lounging through them. We lunch at the shops of the sweatmeat

-      makers, on bread, pistachio-nuts, conserve of roses, I know not what, and

-      Nile-water, with fingans of coffee fetched hot and creamy from the shop

-      near by. We give a copper to an occasional beggar: for beggars are few in

-      the street, and these are either blind or very poor, or derweeshes; and to

-      all these, being regarded as Allah's poor, the Moslems give cheerfully,

-      for charity is a part of their religion. We like also to stand at the

-      doors of the artisans. There is a street where all the workmen are still

-      making the old flint-lock guns and pistols, and the firearms with the

-      flaring blunderbuss muzzles, as if the object was to scatter the charge,

-      and hit a great many people but to kill none. I think the peace society

-      would do well to encourage this kind of gun. There are shops also where a

-      man sits before a heap of flint-chalk, chipping the stone with a flat iron

-      mallet, and forming the flints for the antiquated locks.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We happen to come often in our wanderings, the distinction being a matter

-      of luck, upon a very interesting old city-gate of one of the quarters. The

-      gate itself is a wooden one of two leaves, crossed with iron bands

-      fastened with heavy spikes, and not remarkable except as an illustration

-      of one of the popular superstitions of the Arabs. The wood is driven full

-      of nails, bits of rags flutter on it, and human teeth are crowded under

-      the iron bands. It is believed that if a person afflicted with headache

-      will drive a nail into this door he will never have the headache again.

-      Other ills are relieved by other offerings, bits of rag, teeth, etc. It

-      would seem to be a pretty sure cure for toothache to leave the tooth in

-      this gate. The Arabs are called the most superstitious of peoples, they

-      wear charms against the evil-eye (&ldquo;charm from the eye of girl, sharper

-      than a spike; charm from the eye of boy, more painful than a whip&rdquo;), and

-      they have a thousand absurd practices. Yet we can match most of them in

-      Christian communities.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      How patiently all the people work, and wait. Complaints are rare. The only

-      reproof I ever received was from a donkey-boy, whom I had kept waiting

-      late one evening at the Hotel Nil. When I roused him from his sleep on the

-      ground, he asked, with an accent of weariness, &ldquo;how much clock you got?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      By the twenty-third day of March it is getting warm; the thermometer is

-      81°. It is not simply the heat, but the Khâmaseen, the south wind, the

-      smoky air, the dust in the city, the languor. To-day it rained a few

-      drops, and looked threatening, just as it does in a hot summer day at

-      home. The outskirts of Cairo are enveloped in dust, and the heat begins to

-      simmer over the palaces and gardens. The travelers are leaving. The sharp

-      traders, Jews from Bagdad, Syrians, Jews from Constantinople, Greeks,

-      Armenians from Damascus, all sorts, are packing up their goods, in order

-      to meet the traveler and fleece him again in Jerusalem, in Beyrout, in

-      Damascus, in Smyrna, on the Golden Horn. In the outskirts, especially on

-      the open grounds by the canal, are the coffee-booths and dance-shanties&mdash;rows

-      of the disreputable. The life, always out of doors even in the winter, is

-      now more flamboyantly displayed in these open and verandahed dwellings;

-      there is a yielding to the relaxation of summer. We hear at night, as we

-      sit on the deck of our dahabeëh, the throbbing of the darabookah-drum and

-      the monotonous song of the dissolute ones.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0063" id="linkimage-0063"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0450.jpg" alt="0450 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0064" id="linkimage-0064"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0451.jpg" alt="0451 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0034" id="link2HCH0034"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXXIV.&mdash;THE WOODEN MAN.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE Khedive and his

-      court, if it may be so called, are not hedged in by any formidable

-      barriers; but there are peculiarities of etiquette. When his Highness

-      gives a grand ball and public reception, of course only the male members

-      of his household are present, only the men of the Egyptian society; it

-      would in fact be a male assembly but for the foreign ladies visiting or

-      residing in the city. Of course there cannot be any such thing as

-      &ldquo;society&rdquo; under such circumstances; and as there are no women to regulate

-      the ball invitations, the assembly is &ldquo;mixed.&rdquo; There is no such thing as

-      reciprocity with the Arabs and Turks; they are willing to meet the wives

-      or the female friends of all foreigners; they never show their own.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If a lady visiting Cairo wishes to visit one of the royal harems, it is

-      necessary that her husband or some gentleman of her party, should first be

-      presented to the Khedive. After this ceremony, notice is received through

-      the chamberlain of the Viceroy that the lady will be received on such a

-      day and hour, in a palace named, by her Highness So So. Which Highness?

-      That you can never tell before the notice is received. It is a matter of

-      royal convenience at the time. In a family so large and varied as that of

-      the Khedive, you can only be presented to a fragment of it. You may be

-      received by one of his wives; it may please the Queen, mother, who is in

-      charge of his largest harem, to do the honors or the wife of the

-      heir-apparent, or of one of the younger sons, may open her doors to you. I

-      suppose it is a good deal a matter of whim with the inmates of the harem;

-      sometimes they are tired of seeing strangers and of dressing for them.

-      Usually they are eager to break the monotony of their lives with a visit

-      that promises to show them a new costume. There is only one condition made

-      as to the dress of the lady who is to be received at a royal harem; she

-      must not wear black, there is a superstition connected with a black dress,

-      it puts the inmates of the harem in low spirits. Gentlemen presented to

-      the Khedive wear the usual evening dress.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Khedive's winter-residence is the Palace of Abdeen, not far from the

-      Ezbekeëh, and it was there that Dr. Lamborn and myself were presented to

-      his highness by Mr. Beardsley, our consul-general. Nothing regal could be

-      more simple or less ceremonious. We arrived at the door at the moment

-      fixed, for the Khedive is a man of promptness and I imagine has his entire

-      day parcelled out in engagements. We first entered a spacious

-      entrance-hall, from which a broad stairway leads to the first story; here

-      were thirty or forty janizaries, gentlemen-in-waiting, and eunuchs,

-      standing motionless, at the sides, and guarding the approach to the

-      stairway, in reception attitudes. Here we were received by an attendant

-      who conducted us to a room on the left, where we were introduced to the

-      chamberlain, and deposited our outer coats and hats. The chamberlain then

-      led us to the foot of the stairs, but accompanied us no further; we

-      ascended to the first landing, and turning to another broad stairway saw

-      the Khedive awaiting us at the head of it. He was unattended; indeed we

-      saw no officer or servant on this floor. The furniture above and below was

-      European, except the rich, thick carpets of Turkey and Persia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      His Highness, who wore a dress altogether European except the fez,

-      received us cordially, shaking hands and speaking with simplicity, as a

-      private gentleman might, and, wasting no time in Oriental compliments, led

-      the way to a small reception-room furnished in blue satin. We were seated

-      together in a corner of the apartment, and an animated talk at once began.

-      Dr. Lamborn's special errand was to ascertain whether Egypt would be

-      represented in our Centennial, about which the Khedive was well informed.

-      The conversation then passed to the material condition of Egypt, the

-      development of its resources, its canals and railroads, and especially the

-      new road into Soudan, and the opening of Darfour. The Khedive listened

-      attentively to any practical information, either about railroads,

-      factories, or agriculture, that my companion was able to give him, and had

-      the air of a man eager to seize any idea that might be for the advancement

-      of Egypt; when he himself spoke, it was with vivacity, shrewdness, and

-      good sense. And he is not without a gleam of humor now and then,&mdash;a

-      very hopeful quality in a sovereign and especially in an Oriental ruler.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Khedive, in short, is a person to inspire confidence; he appears to be

-      an able, energetic man of affairs, quick and resolute; there is not the

-      slightest stiffness or &ldquo;divine right&rdquo; pretence in his manner. He is short,

-      perhaps five feet seven or eight inches in height, and stout. He has a

-      well-proportioned, solid head, good features, light complexion, and a

-      heavy, strong jaw, which his closely-trimmed beard does not conceal. I am

-      not sure that the penetration of his glance does not gain a little from a

-      slight defect in one eye&mdash;the result of ophthalmia in his boyhood.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When the interview had lasted about fifteen minutes, the Khedive ended it

-      by rising; at the head of the stairs we shook hands and exchanged the

-      proper speeches; at the bottom of the first flight we turned and bowed,

-      his highness still standing and bowing, and then we saw him no more. As we

-      passed out an order had come from above which set the whole household in a

-      flurry of preparation, a running hither and thither as for speedy

-      departure&mdash;the sort of haste that is mingled with fear, as for the

-      command of a power that will not brook an instant's delay.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Exaggerated notions are current about harems and harem-receptions, notions

-      born partly of the seclusion of the female portion of the household in the

-      East. Of course the majority of harems in Egypt are simply the apartment

-      of the one wife and her children. The lady who enters one of them pays an

-      ordinary call, and finds no mystery whatever. If there is more than one

-      wife, a privileged visitor, able to converse with the inmates, might find

-      some skeletons behind the screened windows. It is also true that a foreign

-      lady may enter one of the royal harems and be received with scarcely more

-      ceremony than would attend an ordinary call at home. The receptions at

-      which there is great display, at which crowds of beautiful or ugly slaves

-      line the apartments, at which there is music and dancing by almehs, an

-      endless service of sweets and pipes and coffee, and a dozen changes of

-      dress by the hostess during the ceremony, are not frequent, are for some

-      special occasion, the celebration of a marriage, or the entertainment of a

-      visitor of high rank. One who expects, upon a royal invitation to the

-      harem, to wander into the populous dove-cote of the Khedive, where

-      languish the beauties of Asia, the sisters from the Gardens of Gul, pining

-      for a new robe of the mode from Paris, will be most cruelly disappointed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But a harem remains a harem, in the imagination. The ladies went one day

-      to the house&mdash;I suppose it is a harem&mdash;of Hussein, the waiter

-      who has served us with unremitting fidelity and cleverness. The house was

-      one of the ordinary sort of unburnt brick, very humble, but perfectly tidy

-      and bright. The secret of its cheerfulness was in a nice, cheery, happy

-      little wife, who made a home for Hussein such as it was a pleasure to see

-      in Egypt. They had four children, the eldest a daughter, twelve years old

-      and very good-mannered and pretty. As she was of marriageable age, her

-      parents were beginning to think of settling her in life.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What a nice girl she is, Hussein,&rdquo; says Madame.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes'm,&rdquo; says Hussein, waving his hands in his usual struggle with the

-      English language, and uttering the longest speech ever heard from him in

-      that tongue, but still speaking as if about something at table, &ldquo;yes'm;

-      good man have it; bad man, drinkin' man, smokin' man, eatin' man not have

-      it.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      I will describe briefly two royal presentations, one to the favorite wife

-      of the Khedive, the other to the wife of Mohammed Tufik Pasha, the eldest

-      son and heir-apparent, according to the late revolution in the rules of

-      descent. French, the court language, is spoken not only by the Khedive but

-      by all the ladies of his family who receive foreigners. The lady who was

-      presented to the Khedive's wife, after passing the usual guard of eunuchs

-      in the palace, was escorted through a long suite of showy apartments. In

-      each one she was introduced to a maid of honor who escorted her to the

-      next, each lady-in-waiting being more richly attired than her predecessor,

-      and the lady was always thinking that <i>now</i> this one must be the

-      princess herself. Female slaves were in every room, and a great number of

-      them waited in the hall where the princess received her visitor. She was a

-      strikingly handsome woman, dressed in pink satin and encrusted with

-      diamonds. The conversation consisted chiefly of the most exaggerated and

-      barefaced compliments on both sides, both as to articles of apparel and

-      personal appearance. Coffee, cigarettes, and sweets without end, in cups

-      of gold set with precious stones, were served by the female slaves. The

-      wife was evidently delighted with the impression made by her beauty, her

-      jewels, and her rich dress.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The wife of Tufik Pasha received at one of the palaces in the suburbs. At

-      the door eunuchs were in waiting to conduct the visitors up the flight of

-      marble steps, and to deliver them to female slaves in waiting. Passing up

-      several broad stairways, they were ushered into a grand reception-hall

-      furnished in European style, except the divans. Only a few servants were

-      in attendance, and they were white female slaves. The princess is <i>petite</i>,

-      pretty, intelligent, and attractive. She received her visitors with entire

-      simplicity, and without ceremony, as a lady would receive callers in

-      America. The conversation ran on the opera, the travel on the Nile, and

-      topics of the town. Coffee and cigarettes were offered, and the sensible

-      interview ended like an occidental visit. It is a little disenchanting,

-      all this adoption of European customs; but the wife of Tufik Pasha should

-      ask him to go a little further, and send all the eunuchs out of the

-      palace.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We had believed that summer was come. But we learned that March in Cairo

-      is, like the same month the world over, treacherous. The morning of the

-      twenty-sixth was cold, the thermometer 60°. A north wind began to blow,

-      and by afternoon increased to a gale, such as had not been known here for

-      years. The town was enveloped in a whirlwind of sand; everything loose was

-      shaking and flying; it was impossible to see one's way, and people

-      scudding about the streets with their heads drawn under their robes

-      continually dashed into each other. The sun was wholly hidden. From our

-      boat we could see only a few rods over the turbulent river. The air was so

-      thick with sand, that it had the appearance of a yellow canvas. The desert

-      had invaded the air&mdash;that was all. The effect of the light through

-      this was extremely weird; not like a dark day of clouds and storm in New

-      England, but a pale, yellowish, greenish, phantasmagoric light, which

-      seemed to presage calamity. Such a light as may be at the Judgment Day.

-      Cairo friends who dined with us said they had never seen such a day in

-      Egypt. Dahabeëhs were torn from their moorings; trees were blown down in

-      the Ezbekëeh Gardens.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We spent the day, as we had spent other days, in the Museum of Antiquities

-      at Boulak. This wonderful collection, which is the work of Mariette Bey,

-      had a thousand times more interest for us now than before we made the Nile

-      voyage and acquired some knowledge of ancient Egypt through its monuments.

-      Everything that we saw had meaning&mdash;statues, mummy-cases, images,

-      scarabæi, seals, stelae, gold jewelry, and the simple articles in domestic

-      use.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It must be confessed that to a person uninformed about Egypt and

-      unaccustomed to its ancient art, there is nothing in the world so dreary

-      as a collection of its antiquities. The endless repetition of designs, the

-      unyielding rigidity of forms, the hideous mingling of the human and the

-      bestial, the dead formality, are insufferably wearisome. The mummy is

-      thoroughly disagreeable. You can easily hate him and all his belongings;

-      there is an air of infinite conceit about him; I feel it in the exclusive

-      box in which he stands, in the smirk of his face painted on his case. I

-      wonder if it is the perkishness of immortality&mdash;as if his race alone

-      were immortal. His very calmness, like that of so many of the statues he

-      made, is an offensive contempt. It is no doubt unreasonable, but as a

-      living person I resent this intrusion of a preserved dead person into our

-      warm times,&mdash;an appearance anachronistic and repellant.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But as an illustration of Egyptian customs, art, and history, the Boulak

-      museum is almost a fascinating place. True it is not so rich in many

-      respects as some European collections of Egyptian antiquities, but it has

-      some objects that are unique; for instance, the jewels of Queen Aah-hotep,

-      a few statues, and some stelæ, which furnish the most important

-      information.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      This is not the place, had I the knowledge, to enter upon any discussion

-      of the antiquity of these monuments or of Egyptian chronology. I believe I

-      am not mistaken, however, in saying that the discoveries of Mariette Bey

-      tend strongly to establish the credit of the long undervalued list of

-      Egyptian sovereigns made by Manetho, and that many Oriental scholars agree

-      with the director of this museum that the date of the first Egyptian

-      dynasty is about five thousand years before the Christian era. But the

-      almost startling thought presented by this collection is not in the

-      antiquity of some of these objects, but in the long civilization anterior

-      to their production, and which must have been necessary to the growth of

-      the art here exhibited.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It could not have been a barbarous people who produced, for instance,

-      these life-like images found at Maydoom, statues of a prince and princess

-      who lived under the ancient king Snéfrou, the last sovereign of the third

-      dynasty, and the predecessor of Cheops. At no epoch, says M. Mariette, did

-      Egypt produce portraits more speaking, though they want the breadth of

-      style of the statue in wood&mdash;of which more anon. But it is as much in

-      an ethnographic as an art view that these statues are important. If the

-      Egyptian race at that epoch was of the type offered by these portraits, it

-      resembled in nothing the race which inhabited the north of Egypt not many

-      years after Snéfrou. To comprehend the problem here presented we have only

-      to compare the features of these statues with those of others in this

-      collection belonging to the fourth and fifth dynasties.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The best work of art in the Museum is the statue of Chephron, the builder

-      of the second pyramid. &ldquo;The epoch of Chephron,&rdquo; says M. Mariette,

-      &ldquo;corresponding to the third reign of the fourth dynasty of Manetho, our

-      statue is not less than six thousand years old.&rdquo; It is a life-size sitting

-      figure, executed in red granite. We admire its tranquil majesty, we marvel

-      at the close study of nature in the moulding of the breast and limbs, we

-      confess the skill that could produce an effect so fine in such intractable

-      material. It seems as if Egyptian art were about to burst its trammels.

-      But it never did; it never exceeded this cleverness; on the contrary it

-      constantly fell away from it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The most interesting statue to us, and perhaps the oldest image in Egypt,

-      and, if so, in the world, is the Wooden Man, which was found at Memphis.

-      This image, one metre and ten centimetres high, stands erect, holding a

-      staff. The figure is full of life, the <i>pose</i> expresses vigor,

-      action, pride, the head, round in form, indicates intellect. The eyes are

-      crystal, in a setting of bronze, giving a startling look of life to the

-      regard. It is no doubt a portrait. &ldquo;There is nothing more striking,&rdquo; says

-      its discoverer, &ldquo;than this image, in a manner living, of a person who has

-      been dead six thousand years.&rdquo; He must have been a man of mark, and a

-      citizen of a state well-civilized; this is not the portrait of a

-      barbarian, nor was it carved by a rude artist. Few artists, I think, have

-      lived since, who could impart more vitality to wood.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And if the date assigned to this statue is correct, sculpture in Egypt

-      attained its maximum of development six thousand years ago. This

-      conclusion will be resisted by many, and on different grounds. I heard a

-      clergyman of the Church of England say to his comrade, as they were

-      looking at this figure:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It's all nonsense; six thousand years! It couldn't be. That's before the

-      creation of man.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the other, irreverently, &ldquo;perhaps this was the model.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      This museum is for the historian, the archaeologist, not for the artist,

-      except in his study of the history of art. What Egypt had to impart to the

-      world of art was given thousands of years ago&mdash;intimations,

-      suggestions, outlines that, in freer circumstances, expanded into works of

-      immortal beauty. The highest beauty, that last touch of genius, that

-      creative inspiration which is genius and not mere talent, Egyptian art

-      never attained. It achieved wonders; they are all mediocre wonders;

-      miracles of talent. The architecture profoundly impresses, almost crushes

-      one; it never touches the highest in the soul, it never charms, it never

-      satisfies.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The total impression upon myself of this ancient architecture and this

-      plastic art is a melancholy one. And I think this is not altogether due to

-      its monotony. The Egyptian art is said to be <i>sui generis</i>; it has a

-      character that is instantly recognized; whenever and wherever we see a

-      specimen of it, we say without fear of mistake, &ldquo;that is Egyptian.&rdquo; We are

-      as sure of it as we are of a piece of Greek work of the best age, perhaps

-      surer. Is Egyptian art, then, elevated to the dignity of a type, of

-      itself? Is it so to be studied, as something which has flowered into a

-      perfection of its kind? I know we are accustomed to look at it as if it

-      were, and to set it apart; in short, I have heard it judged absolutely, as

-      if it were a rule to itself. I cannot bring myself so to look at it. All

-      art is one. We recognize peculiarities of an age or of a people; but there

-      is only one absolute standard; to that touchstone all must come.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It seems to me then that the melancholy impression produced by Egyptian

-      art is not alone from its monotony, its rigidity, its stiff formality, but

-      it is because we recognize in it an arrested development. It is archaic.

-      The peculiarity of it is that it always remained archaic. We have seen

-      specimens of the earliest Etruscan figure-drawing, Gen. Cesnola found in

-      Cyprus Phoenician work, and we have statues of an earlier period of Greek

-      sculpture, all of which more or less resemble Egyptian art. The latter are

-      the beginnings of a consummate development. Egypt stopped at the

-      beginnings. And we have the sad spectacle of an archaic art, not growing,

-      but elaborated into a fixed type and adhered to as if it were perfection.

-      In some of the figures I have spoken of in this museum, you can find that

-      art was about to emancipate itself. In all later works you see no such

-      effort, no such tendency, no such hope. It had been abandoned. By and by

-      impulse died out entirely. For thousands of years the Egyptians worked at

-      perfecting the mediocre. Many attribute this remote and total repression

-      to religious influence. Something of the same sort may be seen in the

-      paintings of saints in the Greek chambers of the East to-day; the type of

-      which is that of the Byzantine period. Are we to attribute a like arrest

-      of development in China to the same cause?

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is a theory very plausibly sustained, that the art of a people is the

-      flower of its civilization, the final expression of the conditions of its

-      growth and its character. In reading Mr. Taine's ingenious observations

-      upon art in the Netherlands and art in Greece, we are ready to assent to

-      the theory. It may be the general law of a free development in national

-      life and in art. If it is, then it is not disturbed by the example of

-      Egypt. Egyptian art is not the expression of the natural character, for

-      its art was never developed. The Egyptians were a joyous race, given to

-      mirth, to the dance, to entertainments, to the charms of society, a people

-      rather gay than grave; they lived in the open air, in the most friendly

-      climate in the world. The sculptures in the early tombs represent their

-      life&mdash;an existence full of gaiety, grace, humor. This natural

-      character is not expressed in the sombre temples, nor in their symbolic

-      carvings, nor in these serious, rigid statues, whose calm faces look

-      straight on as if into eternity. This art may express the religion of the

-      priestly caste; when it had attained the power to portray the rigid

-      expectation of immortality, the inscrutable repose of the Sphinx, it was

-      arrested there, and never allowed in any respect to change its formality.

-      And I cannot but believe that if it had been free, Egyptian art would have

-      budded and bloomed into a grace of form in harmony with the character of

-      the climate and the people.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is true that the architecture of Egypt was freer than its sculptures,

-      but the whole of it together is not worth one edifice like the Greek

-      temple at Pæstum. And to end, by what may seem a sweeping statement, I

-      have had more pleasure from a bit of Greek work&mdash;an intaglio, or a

-      coin of the best period, or the sculptures on a broken entablature&mdash;than

-      from anything that Egypt ever produced in art.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0065" id="linkimage-0065"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0461.jpg" alt="0461 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0035" id="link2HCH0035"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXXV.&mdash;ON THE WAY HOME.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">F</span>OR two days after

-      the sand-storm, it gives us pleasure to write, the weather was cold, raw,

-      thoroughly unpleasant, resembling dear New England quite enough to make

-      one homesick. As late as the twenty-eighth of March, this was. The fact

-      may be a comfort to those who dwell in a region where winter takes a fresh

-      hold in March.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We broke up our establishment on the dahabeëh and moved to the hotel,

-      abandoning I know not how many curiosities, antiquities and specimens, the

-      possession of which had once seemed to us of the last importance. I shall

-      spare you the scene at parting with our crew. It would have been very

-      touching, but for the backsheesh. Some of them were faithful fellows to

-      whom we were attached; some of them were graceless scamps. But they all

-      received backsheesh. That is always the way. It was clearly understood

-      that we should reward only the deserving, and we had again and again

-      resolved not to give a piastre to certain ones of the crew. But, at the

-      end, the obdurate howadji always softens; and the Egyptians know that he

-      will. Egypt is full of good-for-nothings who have not only received

-      presents but certificates of character from travelers whom they have

-      disobliged for three months. There was, however, some discrimination in

-      this case; backsheesh was distributed with some regard to good conduct; at

-      the formal judgment on deck, Abd-el-Atti acted the part of Thoth in

-      weighing out the portions, and my friend took the <i>rôle</i> of Osiris,

-      receiving, vicariously for all of us, the kisses on his hand of the

-      grateful crew. I shall not be misunderstood in saying that the faithful

-      Soudan boy, Gohah, would have felt just as much grief in bidding us

-      good-bye if he had not received a penny (the rest of the crew would have

-      been inconsolable in like case); his service was always marked by an

-      affectionate devotion without any thought of reward. He must have had a

-      magnanimous soul to forgive us for the doses we gave him when he was ill

-      during the voyage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are waiting in Cairo professedly for the weather to become settled and

-      pleasant in Syria&mdash;which does not happen, one year with another, till

-      after the first of April; but we are contented, for the novelties of the

-      town are inexhaustible, and we are never weary of its animation and

-      picturesque movement. I suppose I should be held in low estimation if I

-      said nothing concerning the baths of Cairo. It is expected of every

-      traveler that he will describe them, or one at least&mdash;one is usually

-      sufficient. Indeed when I have read these descriptions, I have wondered

-      how the writers lived to tell their story. When a person has been for

-      hours roasted and stifled, and had all his bones broken, you could not

-      reasonably expect him to write so powerfully of the bath as many travelers

-      write who are so treated. I think these bath descriptions are among the

-      marvels of Oriental literature; Mr. Longfellow says of the Roman Catholic

-      system, that it is a religion of the deepest dungeons and the highest

-      towers; the Oriental bath (in literature) is like this; the unwashed

-      infidel is first plunged in a gulf of dark despair, and then he is

-      elevated to a physical bliss that is ecstatic. The story is too long at

-      each end.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I had experience of several different baths in Cairo, and I invariably

-      found them less vigorous, that is milder in treatment, than the Turkish

-      baths of New York or of Germany. With the Orientals the bath is a luxury,

-      a thing to be enjoyed, and not an affair of extreme shocks and brutal

-      surprises. In the bath itself there is never the excessive heat that I

-      have experienced in such baths in New York, nor the sudden change of

-      temperature in water, nor the vigorous manipulation. The Cairo bath, in my

-      experience, is gentle, moderate, enjoyable. The heat of the rooms is never

-      excessive, the air is very moist, and water flows abundantly over the

-      marble floors; the attendants are apt to be too lazy to maltreat the

-      bather, and perhaps err in gentleness. You are never roasted in a dry air

-      and then plunged suddenly into cold water. I do not wonder that the

-      Orientals are fond of their bath. The baths abound, for men and for women,

-      and the natives pay a very small sum for the privilege of using them.

-      Women make up parties, and spend a good part of the day in a bath; having

-      an entertainment there sometimes, and a frolic. It is said that mothers

-      sometimes choose wives for their sons from girls they see at the baths.

-      Some of them are used by men in the forenoon and by women in the

-      afternoon, and I have seen a great crowd of veiled women waiting at the

-      door at noon. There must be over seventy-five of these public baths in

-      Cairo.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As the harem had not yet gone over to the Gezeereh palace, we took the

-      opportunity to visit it. This palace was built by the Khedive, on what was

-      the island of Gezeereh, when a branch of the Nile was suffered to run to

-      the west of its present area. The ground is now the seat of gardens, and

-      of the most interesting botanical and horticultural experiments on the

-      part of the Khedive, under charge of competent scientific men. A botanist

-      or an arboriculturist would find material in the nurseries for long study.

-      I was chiefly interested (since I half believe in the malevolence of some

-      plants) in a sort of murderous East Indian cane, which grows about fifteen

-      to twenty feet high, and so rapidly that (we were told) it attains its

-      growth in a day or two. At any rate, it thrusts up its stalks so

-      vigorously and rapidly that Indian tyrants have employed it to execute

-      criminals. The victim is bound to the ground over a bed of this cane at

-      night, and in the morning it has grown up through his body. We need such a

-      vengeful vegetable as this in our country, to plant round the edges of our

-      city gardens.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The grounds about the palace are prettily, but formally laid out in

-      flower-gardens, with fountains and a kiosk in the style of the Alhambra.

-      Near by is a hot-house, with one of the best collections of orchids in the

-      world; and not far off is the zoological garden, containing a menagerie of

-      African birds and beasts, very well arranged and said to be nearly

-      complete.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The palace is a square building of iron and stucco, the light pillars and

-      piazzas painted in Saracenic designs and Persian colors, but the whole

-      rather dingy, and beginning to be shabby. Inside it is at once a showy and

-      a comfortable palace, and much better than we expected to see in Egypt;

-      the carpenter and mason work are, however, badly done, as if the Khedive

-      had been swindled by sharp Europeans; it is full of rich and costly

-      furniture. The rooms are large and effective, and we saw a good deal of

-      splendor in hangings and curtains, especially in the apartments fitted up

-      for the occupation of the Empress Eugénie. It is wonderful, by the way,

-      with what interest people look at a bed in which an Empress has slept; and

-      we may add awe, for it is usually a broad, high and awful place of repose.

-      Scattered about the rooms are, in defiance of the Prophet's religion,

-      several paintings, all inferior, and a few busts (some of the Khedive) and

-      other pieces of statuary. The place of honor is given to an American

-      subject, although the group was executed by an Italian artist. It stands

-      upon the first landing of the great staircase. An impish-looking young

-      Jupiter is seated on top of a chimney, below which is the suggestion of a

-      house-roof. Above his head is the point of a lightning-rod. The celestial

-      electrician is discharging a bolt into the rod, which is supposed to pass

-      harmless over the roof below. Upon the pedestal is a medallion, the head

-      of Benjamin Franklin, and encircling it, the legend:&mdash;<i>Eripuit

-      coelo fulmen. 1790</i>. The group looks better than you would imagine from

-      the description.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Beyond the garden is the harem-building, which was undergoing a thorough

-      renovation and refurnishing, in the most gaudy French style&mdash;such

-      being the wish of the ladies who occupy it. They are eager to discard the

-      beautiful Moorish designs which once covered the walls and to substitute

-      French decoration. The dormitory portions consist of passages with rooms

-      on each side, very much like a young ladies' boarding-school; the rooms

-      are large enough to accommodate three or four occupants. While we were

-      leisurely strolling through the house, we noticed a great flurry and

-      scurry in the building, and the attendants came to us in a panic, and made

-      desperate efforts to hurry us out of the building by a side-entrance,

-      giving signs of woe and destruction to themselves if we did not flee. The

-      Khedive had arrived, on horseback, and unexpectedly, to inspect his

-      domestic hearths.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We rode, one sparkling morning, after a night of heavy rain, to

-      Heliopolis; there was no mud, however, the rain having served to beat the

-      sand firm. Heliopolis is the On of the Bible, and in the time of

-      Herodotus, its inhabitants were esteemed the most learned in history of

-      all the Egyptians. The father-in-law of Joseph was a priest there, and

-      there Moses and Plato both learned wisdom. The road is excellent and

-      planted most of the distance with acacia trees; there are extensive

-      gardens on either hand, plantations of trees, broad fields under

-      cultivation, and all the way the air was full of the odor of flowers,

-      blossoms of lemon and orange. In luxuriance and riant vegetation, it

-      seemed an Oriental paradise. And the whole of this beautiful land of

-      verdure, covered now with plantations so valuable, was a sand-desert as

-      late as 1869. The water of the Nile alone has changed the desert into a

-      garden.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On the way we passed the race-course belonging to the Khedive, an

-      observatory, and the old palace of Abbas Pasha, now in process of

-      demolition, the foundations being bad, like his own. It is said that the

-      favorite wife of this hated tyrant, who was a Bedawee girl of rank, always

-      preferred to live on the desert, and in a tent rather than a palace. Here

-      at any rate, on the sand, lived Abbas Pasha, in hourly fear of

-      assassination by his enemies. It was not difficult to conjure up the

-      cowering figure, hiding in the recesses of this lonely palace, listening

-      for the sound of horses' hoofs coming on the city road, and ready to mount

-      a swift dromedary, which was kept saddled night and day in the stable, and

-      flee into the desert lor Bedaween protection.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At Mataréëh, we turned into a garden to visit the famous Sycamore tree,

-      under which the Virgin sat to rest, in the time of the flight of the Holy

-      Family. It is a large, scrubby-looking tree, probably two hundred years

-      old. I wonder that it does not give up the ghost, for every inch of its

-      bark, even to the small limbs, is cut with names. The Copt, who owns it,

-      to prevent its destruction, has put a fence about it; and that also is

-      covered all over. I looked in vain for the name of &ldquo;Joseph&rdquo;; but could

-      find it neither on the fence nor on the tree.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At Heliopolis one can work up any number of reflections; but all he can

-      see is the obelisk, which is sunken somewhat in the ground. It is more

-      correct, however, to say that the ground about it, and the whole site of

-      the former town and Temple of the Sun, have risen many feet since the

-      beginning of the Christian Era. This is the oldest obelisk in Egypt, and

-      bears the <i>cartouche</i> of Amenemhe I., the successor of Osirtasen I.&mdash;about

-      three thousand b. c., according to Mariette; Wilkinson and Mariette are

-      only one thousand years apart, on this date of this monument. The wasps or

-      bees have filled up the lettering on one side, and given it the appearance

-      of being plastered with mud. There was no place for us to sit down and

-      meditate, and having stood, surrounded by a swarm of the latest children

-      of the sun, and looked at the remains as long as etiquette required,

-      without a single historical tremor, we mounted and rode joyfully city-ward

-      between the lemon hedges.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In this Spring-time, late in the afternoon, the fashionable drive out the

-      Shoobra road, under the arches of sycamore trees, is more thronged than in

-      winter even. Handsome carriages appear and now and then a pair of blooded

-      Arab horses. There are two lines of vehicles extending for a mile or so,

-      the one going out and the other returning, and the round of the promenade

-      continues long enough for everybody to see everybody. Conspicuous always

-      are the neat two-horse cabriolets, lined with gay silks and belonging to

-      the royal harem; outriders are in advance, and eunuchs behind, and within

-      each are two fair and painted Circassians, shining in their thin white

-      veils, looking from the windows, eager to see the world, and not averse to

-      be seen by it. The veil has become with them, as it is in Constantinople,

-      a mere pretext and a heightener of beauty. We saw by chance one day some

-      of these birds of paradise abroad in the Shoobra Garden&mdash;and live to

-      speak of it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Shoobra palace and its harem, hidden by a high wall, were built by

-      Mohammed Ali; he also laid out the celebrated garden; and the

-      establishment was in his day no doubt the handsomest in the East. The

-      garden is still rich in rare trees, fruit-trees native and exotic, shrubs,

-      and flowers, but fallen into a too-common Oriental decay. Instead of

-      keeping up this fine place the Khedive builds a new one. These Oriental

-      despots erect costly and showy palaces, in a manner that invites decay,

-      and their successors build new ones, as people get new suits of clothes

-      instead of wearing the garments of their fathers.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the midst of the garden is a singular summer-palace, built upon

-      terraces and hidden by trees; but the great attraction is the immense

-      Kiosk, the most characteristic Oriental building I have seen, and a very

-      good specimen of the costly and yet cheap magnificence of the Orient. It

-      is a large square pavilion, the center of which is a little lake, but

-      large enough for boats, and it has an orchestral platform in the middle;

-      the verandah about this is supported on marble pillars and has a

-      highly-decorated ceiling; carvings in marble abound; and in the corners

-      are apartments decorated in the height of barbaric splendor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The pipes are still in place which conveyed gas to every corner and

-      outline of this bizarre edifice. I should like to have seen it illuminated

-      on a summer night when the air was heavy with the garden perfumes. I

-      should like to have seen it then thronged with the dark-eyed girls of the

-      North, in their fleecy splendors of drapery, sailing like water-nymphs in

-      these fairy boats, flashing their diamonds in the mirror of this pool,

-      dancing down the marble floor to the music of soft drums and flutes that

-      beat from the orchestral platform hidden by the water-lilies. Such a

-      vision is not permitted to an infidel. But on such a night old Mohammed

-      Ali might have been excused if he thought he was already in El Genneh, in

-      the company of the girls of Paradise, &ldquo;whose eyes will be very large and

-      entirely black, and whose stature will be proportioned to that of the men,

-      which will be the height of a tall palm-tree,&rdquo; or about sixty feet and

-      that he was entertained in &ldquo;a tent erected for him of pearls, jacinths,

-      and emeralds, of a very large extent.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      While we were lounging in this place of melancholy gaiety, which in the

-      sunlight bears something the aspect of a tawdry watering-place when the

-      season is over, several harem carriages drove to the entrance: but the

-      eunuchs seeing that unbelievers were in the kiosk would not permit the

-      ladies to descend, and the <i>cortege</i> went on and disappeared in the

-      shrubbery. The attendants invited us to leave. While we were still near

-      the kiosk the carriages came round again, and the ladies began to alight.

-      The attendants in the garden were now quite beside themselves, and

-      endeavored to keep our eyes from beholding, and to hustle us down a

-      side-path.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was in vain that we said to them that we were not afraid, that we were

-      accustomed to see ladies walk in gardens, and that it couldn't possibly

-      harm us. They persisted in misunderstanding us, and piteously begged us to

-      turn away and flee. The ladies were already out of the carriages, veils

-      withdrawn, and beginning to enjoy rural life in the garden. They seemed to

-      have no more fear than we. The horses of the out-riders were led down our

-      path; superb animals, and we stopped to admire them. The harem ladies,

-      rather over-dressed for a promenade, were in full attire of soft silks,

-      blue and pink, in delicate shades, and really made a pretty appearance

-      amid the green. It seemed impossible that it could be wrong to look at

-      them. The attendants couldn't deny that the horses were beautiful, but

-      they regarded our admiration of them as inopportune. They seemed to fear

-      we might look under, or over, or around the horses, towards that forbidden

-      sight by the kiosk. It was useless for us to enquire the age and the breed

-      of the horses. Our efforts to gain information only added to the agony of

-      the gardeners. They wrung their hands, they tried to face us about, they

-      ran hither and thither, and it was not till we were out of sight of the

-      odalisques that they recovered any calmness and began to cull flowers for

-      us, and to produce some Yusef Effendis, as a sign of amity and willingness

-      to accept a few piastres.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The last day of March has come. It is time to depart. Even the harem will

-      soon be going out of town. We have remained in the city long enough to

-      imbibe its atmosphere; not long enough to wear out its strangeness, nor to

-      become familiar with all objects of interest. And we pack our trunks with

-      reluctance, in the belief that we are leaving the most thoroughly Oriental

-      and interesting city in all the East.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0066" id="linkimage-0066"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0469.jpg" alt="0469 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0067" id="linkimage-0067"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0470.jpg" alt="0470 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0036" id="link2HCH0036"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXXVI.&mdash;BY THE RED SEA.

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> GENTLEMAN started

-      from Cairo a few days before us, with the avowed purpose of following in

-      the track of the Children of Israel and viewing the exact point where they

-      crossed the Red Sea. I have no doubt that he was successful. So many

-      routes have been laid out for the Children across the Isthmus, that one

-      can scarcely fail to fall into one of them. Our purpose was merely to see

-      Suez and the famous Sea, and the great canal of M. Lesseps; not doubting,

-      however, that when we looked over the ground we should decide where the

-      Exodus must have taken place.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The old direct railway to Suez is abandoned; the present route is by

-      Zagazeeg and Ismailia&mdash;a tedious journey, requiring a day. The ride

-      is wearisome, for the country is flat and presents nothing new to one

-      familiar with Egyptian landscapes. The first part of the journey is,

-      however, enlivened by the company of the canal of Fresh Water, and by the

-      bright verdure of the plain which the canal produces. And this luxuriant

-      vegetation continues until you come to the still unreclaimed desert of the

-      Land of Goshen. Now that water can be supplied it only needs people to

-      make this Land as fat as it was in the days of the Israelites.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Some twenty miles from Cairo we pass near the so-called Mound of the Jew,

-      believed to be the ruins of the city of Orion and the temple built by the

-      high priest Onias in the reign of Ptolemy Philometer and Cleopatra, as

-      described by Josephus. The temple was after the style of that at

-      Jerusalem. This Jewish settlement was made upon old Egyptian ruins; in

-      1870 the remains of a splendid temple of the time of Rameses II. were laid

-      open. The special interest to Biblical scholars of this Jewish colony

-      here, which multiplied itself and spread over considerable territory, is

-      that its establishment fulfilled a prophesy of Isaiah (xix, 19, etc.); and

-      Onias urged this prophesy, in his letter to the Ptolemy, asking permission

-      to purge the remains of the heathen temple in the name of Heliopolis and

-      to erect there a temple to Almighty God. Ptolemy and Cleopatra replied

-      that they wondered Onias should desire to build a temple in a place so

-      unclean and so full of sacred animals, but since Isaiah foretold it, he

-      had leave to do so. We saw nothing of this ancient and once flourishing

-      seat of Jewish enterprise, save some sharp mounds in the distance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Nor did we see more of the more famous city of Bubastis, where was the

-      temple to Pasht, the cat or lioness-headed deity (whom Herodotus called

-      Diana), the avenger of crimes. According to Herodotus, all the cats of

-      Egypt were embalmed and buried in Bubastis. This city was the residence of

-      the Pharaoh Sheshonk I. (the Shishak of the Bible) who sacked Jerusalem,

-      and it was at that time the capital of Egypt. It was from here, on the

-      Bubastic (or Pelusiac) branch of the Nile, that the ancient canal was dug

-      to connect with the Heroôpolite Gulf (now the Bitter Lakes), the

-      northernmost arm of the Red Sea at that date; and the city was then, by

-      that fresh-water canal, on the water-way between the Red Sea and the

-      Mediterranean. But before the Christian era the Red Sea had retired to

-      about its present limit (the Bitter Lakes being cut off from it), and the

-      Bubastic branch of the Nile was nearly dried up. Bubastis and all this

-      region are now fed by the canal which leaves the Nile at Cairo and runs to

-      Ismailia, and thence to Suez. It is a startling thought that all this

-      portion of the Delta, east, and south, and the Isthmus depend for life

-      upon the keeper of the gate of the canal at Cairo. If we were to leave the

-      train here and stumble about in the mounds of Bubastis, we should find

-      only fragments of walls, blocks of granite, and a few sculptures.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At the Zagazeeg station, where there is a junction with the Alexandria and

-      Cairo main line, we wait some time, and find very pleasant the garden and

-      the picturesque refreshment-house in which our minds are suddenly diverted

-      from ancient Egypt by a large display of East Indian and Japanese

-      curiosities on sale.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      From this we follow, substantially, the route of the canal, running by

-      villages and fertile districts, and again on the desert's edge. We come

-      upon no traces of the Israelites until we reach Masamah, which is supposed

-      to be the site of Rameses, one of the treasure-cities mentioned in the

-      Bible, and the probable starting-point of the Jews in their flight. This

-      is about the center of the Land of Goshen, and Rameses may have been the

-      chief city of the district.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      If I knew exactly the route the Israelites took, I should not dare to

-      disclose it; for this has become, I do not know why, a tender subject. But

-      it seems to me that if the Jews were assembled here from the Delta for a

-      start, a very natural way of exit would have been down the Wadee to the

-      head of the Heroopolite Gulf, the route of the present and the ancient

-      canal. And if it should be ascertained beyond a doubt that Sethi I. built

-      as well as planned such a canal, the argument of probability would be

-      greatly strengthened that Moses led his vast host along the canal. Any

-      dragoman to-day, desiring to cross the Isthmus and be beyond pursuit as

-      soon as possible, supposing the condition of the country now as it was at

-      the time of the Exodus, would strike for the shortest line. And it is

-      reasonable to suppose that Moses would lead his charge to a point where

-      the crossing of the sea, or one of its arms, was more feasible than it is

-      anywhere below Suez; unless we are to start with the supposition that

-      Moses expected a miracle, and led the Jews to a spot where, apparently,

-      escape for them was hopeless if the Egyptian pursued. It is believed that

-      at the time of the Exodus there was a communication between the Red Sea

-      and the Bitter Lakes&mdash;formerly called Heroopolite Gulf&mdash;which it

-      was the effort of many rulers to keep open by a canal. Very anciently, it

-      is evident, the Red Sea extended to and included these lakes; and it is

-      not improbable that, in the time of Moses, the water was, by certain

-      winds, forced up to the north into these lakes: and again, that, crossings

-      could easily be made, the wind being favorable, at several points between

-      what is now Suez and the head of the Bitter Lakes. Many scholars make

-      Cha-loof, about twelve miles above Suez the point of passage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We only touch the outskirts of Ismailia in going on to Suez. Below, we

-      pass the extensive plantation and garden of the Khedive, in which he has

-      over fifty thousand young trees in a nursery. This spot would be absolute

-      desert but for the Nile-water let in upon it. All day our astonishment has

-      increased at the irrigation projects of the Viceroy, and his herculean

-      efforts to reclaim a vast land of desert; the enlarging of the Sweet-Water

-      Canal, and the gigantic experiments in arboriculture and agriculture.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We noticed that the Egyptian laborers at work with the wheelbarrows

-      (instead of the baskets formerly used by them) on the enlargement of the

-      canal, were under French contractors, for the most part. The men are paid

-      from a franc to a franc and a quarter per day; but they told us that it

-      was very difficult to get laborers, so many men being drafted for the

-      army.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At dark we come in sight of the Bitter Lakes, through which the canal is

-      dredged; we can see vessels of various sorts and steamers moving across

-      them in one line; and we see nothing more until we reach Suez. The train

-      stops &ldquo;at nowhere,&rdquo; in the sand, outside the town. It is the only train of

-      the day, but there are neither carriages nor donkeys in waiting. There is

-      an air about the station of not caring whether anyone comes or not. We

-      walk a mile to the hotel, which stands close to the sea, with nothing but

-      a person's good sense to prevent his walking off the platform into the

-      water. In the night the water looked like the sand, and it was only by

-      accident that we did not step off into it; however, it turned out to be

-      only a couple of feet deep.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The hotel, which I suppose is rather Indian than Egyptian, is built round

-      a pleasant court; corridors and latticed doors are suggestive of hot

-      nights; the servants and waiters are all Hindoos; we have come suddenly in

-      contact with another type of Oriental life.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Coming down from Ismailia, a friend who was with us had no ticket. It was

-      a case beyond the conductor's experience; he utterly refused backsheesh

-      and he insisted on having a ticket. At last he accepted ten francs and

-      went away. Looking in the official guide we found that the fare was nine

-      francs and a quarter. The conductor, thinking he had opened a guileless

-      source of supply, soon returned and demanded two francs more. My friend

-      countermined him by asking the return of the seventy-five centimes

-      overpaid. An amusing pantomime ensued. At length the conductor lowered his

-      demand to one franc, and, not getting that, he begged for backsheesh. I

-      was sorry to have my high ideal of a railway-conductor, formed in America,

-      lowered in this manner.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We are impatient above all things for a sight of the Red Sea. But in the

-      brilliant starlight, all that appears is smooth water and a soft picture

-      of vessels at anchor or aground looming up in the night. Suez, seen by

-      early daylight, is a scattered city of some ten thousand inhabitants, too

-      modern and too cheap in its buildings to be interesting. There is only a

-      little section of it, where we find native bazaars, twisting streets,

-      overhanging balconies, and latticed windows. It lies on a sand peninsula,

-      and the sand-drifts close all about it, ready to lick it up, if the canal

-      of fresh water should fail.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The only elevation near is a large mound, which may be the site of the

-      fort of ancient Clysma, or Gholzim as it was afterwards called&mdash;the

-      city believed to be the predecessor of Suez. Upon this mound an American

-      has built, and presented to the Khedive, a sort of <i>châlet</i> of wood&mdash;the

-      whole transported from America ready-made, one of those white, painfully

-      unpicturesque things with two little gables at the end, for which our

-      country is justly distinguished. Cheap. But then it is of wood, and wood

-      is one of the dearest things in Egypt. I only hope the fashion of it may

-      not spread in this land of grace.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was a delightful morning, the wind west and fresh. From this hillock we

-      commanded one of the most interesting prospects in the world. We looked

-      over the whole desert-flat on which lies the little town, and which is

-      pierced by an arm of the Gulf that narrows into the Suez canal; we looked

-      upon two miles of curved causeway which runs down to the docks and the

-      anchoring place of the steam-vessels&mdash;there cluster the dry-docks,

-      the dredges, the canal-offices, and just beyond the shipping lay; in the

-      distance we saw the Red Sea, like a long lake, deep-green or deep-blue,

-      according to the light, and very sparkling; to the right was the reddish

-      limestone range called Gebel Attâka&mdash;a continuation of the Mokattam;

-      on the left there was a great sweep of desert, and far off&mdash;one

-      hundred and twenty miles as the crow flies&mdash;the broken Sinai range of

-      mountains, in which we tried to believe we could distinguish the sacred

-      peak itself.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I asked an intelligent railway official, a Moslem, who acted as guide that

-      morning, &ldquo;What is the local opinion as to the place where the Children of

-      Israel crossed over?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The French,&rdquo; he replied, &ldquo;are trying to make it out that it was at

-      Chaloof, about twenty miles above here, where there is little water. But

-      we think it was at a point twenty miles below here; we must put it there,

-      or there wouldn't be any miracle. You see that point, away to the right?

-      That's the spot. There is a wady comes down the side.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But where do the Christians think the crossing was?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, here at Suez; there, about at this end of Gebel Attâka.&rdquo; The Moslems'

-      faith in the miraculous deliverance is disturbed by no speculations.

-      Instead of trying to explain the miracle by the use of natural causes, and

-      seeking for a crossing where the water might at one time have been heaped

-      and at another forced away by the winds, their only care is to fix the

-      passage where the miracle would be most striking.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After breakfast and preparations to visit Moses' Well, we rode down the

-      causeway to the made land where the docks are. The earth dumped here by

-      the dredging-machines (and which now forms solid building ground), is full

-      of a great variety of small sea-shells; the walls that enclose it are of

-      rocks conglomerate of shells. The ground all about gives evidence of salt

-      we found shallow pools evaporated so that a thick crust of excellent salt

-      had formed on the bottom and at the sides. The water in them was of a

-      decidedly rosy color, caused by some infusorial growth. The name, Red Sea,

-      however, has nothing to do with this appearance, I believe.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We looked at the pretty houses and gardens, the dry-dock and the shops,

-      and the world-famous dredges, without which the Suez Canal would very

-      likely never have been finished. These enormous machines have arms or

-      ducts, an iron spout of semi-elliptical form, two hundred and thirty feet

-      long, by means of which the dredger working in the center of the channel

-      could discharge its contents over the bank. One of them removed, on an

-      average, eighty thousand cubit yards of soil a month. A faint idea may be

-      had of this gigantic work by the amount of excavation here, done by the

-      dredgers, in one month,&mdash;two million seven hundred and sixty-three

-      thousand cubic yards. M. de Lesseps says that if this soil were &ldquo;laid out

-      between the Arc de Triomphe and the Place de la Concorde, it would cover

-      the entire length and breadth of the Champs Elysées, a distance equal to a

-      mile and a quarter, and reach to the top of the trees on either side.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      At the pier our felucca met us and we embarked and sailed into the mouth

-      of the canal. The channel leading to it is not wide, and is buoyed at

-      short intervals. The mouth of the canal is about nine hundred feet wide

-      and twenty-seven deep, * and it is guarded on the east by a long stone

-      mole projected from the Asiatic shore. There is considerable ebb and flow

-      of the tide in this part of the canal and as far as the Bitter Lakes,

-      where it is nearly all lost in the expanse, being only slightly felt at

-      Lake Timsah, from which point there is a slight uniform current to the

-      Mediterranean.

-    </p>

-<pre xml:space="preserve">

-     * Total length of Canal, 100 miles. Width of water-line,

-     where banks are low, 328 feet; in deep cuttings, 190; width

-     at base, 2; depth, 26.

-</pre>

-    <p>

-      From the canal entrance we saw great ships and steamboats in the distance,

-      across the desert, and apparently sailing in the desert; but we did not

-      follow them; we turned, and crossed to the Asiatic shore. We had brought

-      donkeys with us, and were soon mounted for a scrambling gallop of an hour

-      and a half, down the coast, over level and hard sand, to Moses' Well. The

-      air was delicious and the ride exhilarating. I tried to get from our

-      pleasant Arab guide, who had a habit of closing one eye, what he thought

-      of the place of the passage.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Where did the Children of Israel cross?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Over dat mountain.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, but where did they cross the Sea?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You know Moses?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, I know Moses. Where did he cross?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; closing his eye very tight, &ldquo;him long time ago, not now. He cross

-      way down there, can't see him from here.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      On the way we passed the white tents of the Quarantine Station, on our

-      right by the shore, where the caravan of Mecca pilgrims had been detained.

-      We hoped to see it: but it had just set out on its desert march further

-      inland. It was seen from Suez all day, straggling along in detachments,

-      and at night camped about two miles north of the town. However, we found a

-      dozen or two of the pilgrims, dirty, ragged, burned by the sun, and

-      hungry, lying outside the enclosure at the wells.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Wells of Moses (or <i>Ain Moosa</i>, &ldquo;Moses' Well,&rdquo; in the Arabic) are

-      distant a mile or more from the low shore, and our first warning of

-      nearness to them was the appearance of some palms in a sandy depression.

-      The attempt at vegetation is rather sickly, and the spot is but a desolate

-      one. It is the beginning of the route to Mount Sinai, however, and is no

-      doubt a very welcome sight to returning pilgrims. Contrast is everything;

-      it is contrast with its surroundings that has given Damascus its renown.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There are half a dozen of these wells, three of which are some fifteen to

-      twenty feet across, and are in size and appearance very respectable

-      frog-ponds. One of them is walled with masonry, evidently ancient, and two

-      shadoofs draw water from it for the garden, an enclosure of an acre,

-      fenced with palm-matting. It contains some palms and shrubs and a few

-      vegetables. Here also is a half-deserted house, that may once have been a

-      hotel and is now a miserable trattoria without beds. It is in charge of an

-      Arab who lives in a hut at the other side of the garden, with his wife and

-      a person who bore the unmistakable signs of being a mother-in-law. The

-      Arab made coffee for us, and furnished us a table, on which we spread our

-      luncheon under the verandah. He also gave us Nile-water which had been

-      brought from Suez in a cask on camel-back; and his whole charge was only

-      one bob (a shilling) each. I mention the charge, because it is

-      disenchanting in a spot of so much romance to pay for your entertainment

-      in &ldquo;bobs.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We had come, upon what I may truly call a sentimental pilgrimage, on

-      account of Moses and the Children of Israel. If they crossed over from

-      Mount Attâka yonder, then this might be the very spot where Miriam sang

-      the song of triumph. If they crossed at Chaloof, twenty miles above, as it

-      is more probable they did, then this might be the Marah whose bitter

-      waters Moses sweetened for the time being; the Arabs have a tradition that

-      Moses brought up water here by striking the ground with his stick. At all

-      events, the name of Moses is forever attached to this oasis, and it did

-      not seem exactly right that the best well should be owned by an Arab who

-      makes it the means of accumulating bobs. One room of the house was

-      occupied by three Jews, traders, who establish themselves here a part of

-      the year in order to buy, from the Bedaween, turquoise and antiquities

-      which are found at Mount Sinai. I saw them sorting over a peck of rough

-      and inferior turquoise, which would speedily be forwarded to

-      Constantinople, Paris, and London. One of them sold me a small intaglio,

-      which was no doubt of old Greek workmanship, and which he swore was picked

-      up at Mount Sinai. There is nothing I long more to know, sometimes, than

-      the history of wandering coins and intaglios which we see in the Orient.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is not easy to reckon the value of a tradition, nor of a traditional

-      spot like this in which all the world feels a certain proprietorship. It

-      seemed to us, however, that it would be worth while to own this famous

-      Asiatic well; and we asked the owner what he would take for it. He offered

-      to sell the ranche for one hundred and fifty guineas; this, however, would

-      not include the camel,&mdash;for that he wanted ten pounds in addition;

-      but it did include a young gazelle, two goats, a brownish-yellow dog, and

-      a cat the color of the sand. And it also comprised, in the plantation, a

-      few palms, some junipers, of the Biblical sort, the acacia or &ldquo;shittah&rdquo;

-       tree of the Bible, and, best of all, the large shrub called the tamarisk,

-      which exudes during two months in the year a sweet gummy substance that

-      was the &ldquo;manna&rdquo; of the Israelites.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mother-in-law wore a veil, a string of silver-gilt imitation coins,

-      several large silver bracelets, and a necklace upon which was sewed a

-      string of small Arabic gold coins. As this person more than anyone else

-      there represented Miriam,&mdash;not being too young,&mdash;we persuaded

-      her to sell us some of the coins as mementoes of our visit. We could not

-      determine, as I said, whether this spot is associated with Miriam or

-      whether it is the Marah of bitter waters; consequently it was difficult to

-      say what our emotions should be. However, we decided to let them be

-      expressed by the inscription that a Frenchman had written on a wall of the

-      house, which reads:&mdash;<i>Le cour me palpitait comme un amant qui

-      revoit sa bien aimée</i>.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There are three other wells enclosed, but unwalled, the largest of which&mdash;and

-      it has near it a sort of <i>loggia</i> or open shed where some dirty

-      pilgrims were reposing&mdash;is an unsightly pond full of a green growth

-      of algæ. In this enclosure, which contains two or three acres, are three

-      smaller wells, or natural springs, as they all are, and a considerable

-      thicket of palms and tamarisks. The larger well is the stronger in taste

-      and most bitter, containing more magnesia. The water in all is flat and

-      unpleasant, and not enlivened by carbonic acid gas, although we saw

-      bubbles coming to the surface constantly. If the spring we first visited

-      could be aerated, it would not be worse to drink than many waters that are

-      sought after. The donkeys liked it; but a donkey likes any thing. About

-      these feeble plantations the sand drifts from all directions, and it would

-      soon cover them but for the protecting fence. The way towards Sinai winds

-      through shifting sand-mounds, and is not inviting.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The desert over which we return is dotted frequently with tufts of a

-      flat-leafed, pale-green plant, which seem to thrive without moisture; and

-      in the distance this vegetation presents an appearance of large shrub

-      growth, greatly relieving the barrenness of the sand-plain. We had some

-      fine effects of mirage, blue lakes and hazy banks, as of streams afar off.

-      When we reached an elevation that commanded a view of the indistinct Sinai

-      range, we asked the guide to point out to us the &ldquo;rosy peaks of Mount

-      Sinai&rdquo; which Murray sees from Suez when he is there. The guide refused to

-      believe that you can see a rosy peak one hundred and twenty miles through

-      the air, and confirmed the assertion of the inhabitants of Suez that Mount

-      Sinai cannot be seen from there.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On our return we overtook a caravan of Bedaween returning from the holy

-      mount, armed with long rifles, spears, and huge swords, swinging along on

-      their dromedaries,&mdash;a Colt's revolver would put the whole lot of

-      braggarts to flight. One of them was a splendid specimen of manhood, and

-      we had a chance to study his graceful carriage, as he ran besides us all

-      the way; he had the traditional free air, a fine face and well-developed

-      limbs, and his picturesque dress of light-blue and buff, somewhat in rags,

-      added to his attractions. It is some solace to the traveler to call these

-      fellows beggars, since he is all the time conscious that their natural

-      grand manner contrasts so strongly with the uncouthness of his more recent

-      and western civilization.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Coming back into Suez, from this journey to another continent, we were

-      stopped by two customs-officers, who insisted upon searching our

-      lunch-basket, to see if we were attempting to smuggle anything from Asia.

-      We told the guide to give the representative of his Highness, with our

-      compliments, a hard-boiled egg.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Suez itself has not many attractions. But we are much impressed at the

-      hotel by the grave Hindoo waiters, who serve at table in a close-fitting

-      habit, like the present extremely narrow gown worn by ladies, and

-      ludicrous to our eyes accustomed to the flowing robes of the Arabs. They

-      wear also, while waiting, broad-brimmed, white, cork hats, slightly turned

-      up at the rim. It is like being waited on by serious genii. These men also

-      act as chambermaids. Their costume is Bengalee, and would not be at all

-      &ldquo;style&rdquo; in Bombay.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Suez is reputed a healthful place, enjoying both sea and desert air, free

-      from malaria, and even in summer the heat is tempered. This is what the

-      natives say. The English landlady admits that it is very pleasant in

-      winter, but the summer is intensely hot, especially when the Khamseen, or

-      south wind, blows&mdash;always three days at a time&mdash;it is hardly

-      endurable; the thermometer stands at 110° to 1140 in the shaded halls of

-      the hotel round the court. It is unsafe for foreigners to stay here more

-      than two years at a time; they are certain to have a fever or some disease

-      of the liver.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The town is very much depressed now, and has been ever since the opening

-      of the canal. The great railway business fell off at once, all freight

-      going by water. Hundreds of merchants, shippers and forwarders are out of

-      employment. We hear the Khedive much blamed for his part in the canal, and

-      people here believe that he regrets it. Egypt, they say, is ruined by this

-      loss of trade; Suez is killed; Alexandria is ruined beyond reparation,

-      business there is entirely stagnant. What a builder and a destroyer of

-      cities has been the fluctuation of the course of the East India commerce!

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0068" id="linkimage-0068"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0481.jpg" alt="0481] \ [illustration: 0482 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2HCH0037" id="link2HCH0037"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      CHAPTER XXXVII.&mdash;&ldquo;EASTWARD HO!&rdquo;

-     </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>E left Suez at

-      eight in the morning by rail, and reached Ismailia in four hours, the fare&mdash;to

-      do justice to the conductor already named&mdash;being fourteen francs. A

-      part of the way the Bitter Lakes are visible, and we can see where the

-      canal channel is staked out through them. Next we encountered the

-      Fresh-Water Canal, and came in view of Lake Timsah, through which the Suez

-      canal also flows. This was no doubt once a fresh-water lake, fed by water

-      taken from the Nile at Bubastis.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Ismailia is a surprise, no matter how much you have heard of it. True, it

-      has something the appearance of a rectangular streeted town dropped,

-      ready-made, at a railway station on a western prairie; but Ismailia was

-      dropped by people of good taste. In 1860 there was nothing here but desert

-      sand, not a drop of water, not a spear of vegetation. To-day you walk into

-      a pretty village, of three or four thousand inhabitants, smiling with

-      verdure. Trees grow along the walks; little gardens bloom by every

-      cottage. Fronting the quay Mohammed Ali, which extends along the broad

-      Fresh-Water Canal, are the best residences, and many of them have better

-      gardens than you can find elsewhere, with few exceptions, in Egypt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The first house we were shown was that which had most interest for us&mdash;the

-      Swiss-like châlet of M. de Lesseps; a summerish, cheerful box, furnished

-      simply, but adorned with many Oriental curiosities. The garden which

-      surrounds it is rich in native and exotic plants, flowers and fruits. On

-      this quay are two or three barn-like, unfurnished palaces built hastily

-      and cheaply by the Khedive for the entertainment of guests. The finest

-      garden, however, and as interesting as any we saw in the East, is that

-      belonging to M. Pierre, who has charge of the waterworks. In this garden

-      can be found almost all varieties of European and Egyptian flowers;

-      strawberries were just ripening. We made inquiry here, as we had done

-      throughout Egypt, for the lotus, the favorite flower of the old Egyptians,

-      the sacred symbol, the mythic plant, the feeding upon which lulls the

-      conscience, destroys ambition, dulls the memory of all unpleasant things,

-      enervates the will, and soothes one in a sensuous enjoyment of the day to

-      which there is no tomorrow. It seems to have disappeared from Egypt with

-      the papyrus.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The lotus of the poets I fear never existed, not even in Egypt. The lotus

-      represented so frequently in the sculptures, is a water-plant, the <i>Nymphaea

-      lutea</i>, and is I suppose the plant that was once common. The poor used

-      its bulb for food in times of scarcity. The Indian lotus, or <i>Nelumbium</i>,

-      is not seen in the sculptures, though Latin writers say it existed in

-      Egypt. It may have been this that had the lethean properties; although the

-      modern eaters and smokers of Indian hemp appear to be the legitimate

-      descendants of the lotus-eaters of the poets. However, the lotus whose

-      stalks and buds gave character to a distinct architectural style, we

-      enquired for in vain on the Nile. If it still grows there it would

-      scarcely be visible above water in the winter. But M. Pierre has what he

-      supposes to be the ancient lotus-plant; and his wife gave us seeds of it

-      in the seed-vessel&mdash;a large flat-topped funnel-shaped receptacle,

-      exactly the shape of the sprinkler of a watering-pot. Perhaps this is the

-      plant that Herodotus calls a lily like a rose, the fruit of which is

-      contained in a separate pod, that springs up from the root in form very

-      like a wasp's nest; in this are many berries fit to be eaten.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The garden adjoins the water-works, in which two powerful pumping-engines

-      raise the sweet water into a stand-pipe, and send it forward in iron pipes

-      fifty miles along the Suez Canal to Port Said, at which port there is a

-      reservoir that will hold three days' supply. This stream of fresh water is

-      the sole dependence of Port Said and all the intervening country.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We rode out over the desert on an excellent road, lined with sickly

-      acacias growing in the watered ditches, to station No 6 on the canal. The

-      way lies along Lake Timsah. Upon a considerable elevation, called the

-      Heights of El Guisr, is built a <i>château</i> for the Khedive; and from

-      this you get an extensive view of the desert, of Lake Timsah and the

-      Bitter Lakes. Below us was the deep cutting of the Canal. El Guisr is the

-      highest point in the Isthmus, an elevated plateau six miles across and

-      some sixty-five feet above the level of the sea. The famous gardens that

-      flourished here during the progress of the excavation have entirely

-      disappeared with the cessation of the water from Ismailia. While we were

-      there an East India bound steamboat moved slowly up the canal, creating,

-      of course, waves along the banks, but washing them very little, for the

-      speed is limited to five miles an hour.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Although the back streets of Ismailia are crude and unpicturesque, the

-      whole effect of the town is pleasing; and it enjoys a climate that must

-      commend it to invalids. It is dry, free from dust, and even in summer not

-      too warm, for there is a breeze from the lakes by day, and the nights are

-      always cooled by the desert air. Sea-bathing can be enjoyed there the year

-      round. It ought to be a wholesome spot, for there is nothing in sight

-      around it but sand and salt-water. The invalid who should go there would

-      probably die shortly of ennui, but he would escape the death expected from

-      his disease. But Ismailia is well worth seeing. The miracle wrought here

-      by a slender stream of water from the distant Nile, is worthy the

-      consideration of those who have the solution of the problem of making

-      fertile our western sand-deserts.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We ate at Suez and Ismailia what we had not tasted for several months&mdash;excellent

-      fish. The fish of the Nile are nearly as good as a New-England sucker,

-      grown in a muddy mill-pond. I saw fishermen angling in the salt canal at

-      Ismailia, and the fish are good the whole length of it; they are of

-      excellent quality even in the Bitter Lakes, which are much salter than the

-      Mediterranean&mdash;in fact the bottom of these lakes is encrusted with

-      salt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      We took passage towards evening on the daily Egyptian pocket-boat for Port

-      Said&mdash;a puffing little cigar-box of a vessel, hardly fifty feet long.

-      The only accommodation for passengers was in the forward cabin, which is

-      about the size of an omnibus, and into it were crammed twenty passengers,

-      Greeks, Jews, Koorlanders, English clergymen, and American travelers, and

-      the surly Egyptian mail-agent, who occupied a great deal of room, and

-      insisted on having the windows closed. Some of us tried perching on the

-      scrap of a deck, hanging our legs over the side; but it was bitterly cold

-      and a strong wind drove us below. In the cabin the air was utterly vile;

-      and when we succeeded in opening the hatchway for a moment, the draught

-      chilled us to the bones.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      I do not mean to complain of all this; but I want it to appear that

-      sailing on the Suez Canal, especially at night, is not a

-      pleasure-excursion. It might be more endurable by day; but I do not know.

-      In the hours we had of daylight, I became excessively weary of looking at

-      the steep sand-slopes between which we sailed, and of hoping that every

-      turn would bring us to a spot where we could see over the bank.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At eight o'clock we stopped at Katanah for supper, and I climbed the bank

-      to see if I could obtain any information about the Children of Israel.

-      They are said to have crossed here. This is the highest point of the low

-      hills which separate Lake Menzaleh from the interior lakes. Along this

-      ridge is still the caravan-route between Egypt and Syria; it has been, for

-      ages unnumbered, the great highway of commerce and of conquest. This way

-      Thothmes III., the greatest of the Pharaohs and the real Sesostris, led

-      his legions into Asia; and this way Cambyses came to repay the visit with

-      interest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was so dark that I could see little, but I had a historic sense of all

-      this stir and movement, of the passage of armies laden with spoils, and of

-      caravans from Nineveh and Damascus. And, although it was my first visit to

-      the place, it seemed strange to see here a restaurant, and waiters

-      hurrying about, and travelers snatching a hasty meal in the night on this

-      wind-blown sand-hill. And to feel that the stream of travel is no more

-      along this divide but across it! By the half-light I could distinguish

-      some Bedaween loitering about; their little caravan had camped here, for

-      they find it very convenient to draw water from the iron pipes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was quite dark when we presently sailed into Lake Menzaleh, and we

-      could see little. I only know that we held a straight course through it

-      for some thirty miles to Port Said. In the daytime you can see a dreary

-      expanse of morass and lake, a few little islands clad with tamarisks, and

-      flocks of aquatic birds floating in the water or drawn up on the

-      sand-spits in martial array&mdash;the white spoonbill, the scarlet

-      flamingo, the pink pelican. It was one o'clock in the morning when we saw

-      the Pharos of Port Said and sailed into the basin, amid many lights.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Port Said was made out of nothing, and it is pretty good. A town of eight

-      to ten thousand inhabitants, with docks, quays, squares, streets, shops,

-      mosques, hospitals, public buildings; in front of our hotel is a garden

-      and public square; all this fed by the iron pipe and the pump at Ismailia&mdash;without

-      this there is no fresh water nearer than Damietta. It is a shabby city,

-      and just now has the over-done appearance of one of our own western town

-      inflations. But its history is a record of one of the most astonishing

-      achievements of any age. Before there could be any town here it was

-      necessary to build a standpoint for it with a dredging machine.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Along this coast from Damietta to the gulf of Pelusium, where once emptied

-      the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, is a narrow strip of sand, separating the

-      Mediterranean from Lake Menzaleh; a high sea often breaks over it. It

-      would have saved much in distance to have carried the canal to the

-      Pelusium gulf, but the Mediterranean is shallow there many miles from

-      shore. The spot on which Port Said now stands was selected for the

-      entrance of the canal, because it was here that the land can be best

-      approached&mdash;the Mediterranean having sufficient depth at only two

-      miles from the shore. Here therefore, the dredgers began to work. The lake

-      was dredged for interior basins; the strip of sand was cut through; the

-      outer harbor was dredged; and the dredgings made the land for the town.

-      Artificial stone was then manufactured on the spot, and of this the long

-      walls, running out into the sea and protecting the harbor, the quays, and

-      the lighthouses were built. We saw enormous blocks of this composite of

-      sand and hydraulic lime, which weigh twenty-five tons each.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It is impossible not to respect a city built by such heroic labor as this;

-      but we saw enough of it in half a day. The shops are many, and the signs

-      are in many languages, Greek being most frequent. I was pleased to read an

-      honest one in English&mdash;&ldquo;Blood-Letting and Tooth-picking.&rdquo; I have no

-      doubt they all would take your blood. In the streets are vagabonds,

-      adventurers, merchants, travelers, of all nations; and yet you would not

-      call the streets picturesque. Everything is strangely modernized and made

-      uninteresting. There is, besides, no sense of permanence here. The traders

-      appear to occupy their shops as if they were booths for the day. It is a

-      place of transit; a spot of sand amid the waters. I have never been in any

-      locality that seemed to me so nearly nowhere. A spot for an African bird

-      to light on a moment on his way to Asia. But the world flows through here.

-      Here lie the great vessels in the Eastern trade; all the Mediterranean

-      steamers call here.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Erymanthe is taking in her last freight, and it is time for us to go

-      on board. Abd-el-Atti has arrived with the baggage from Cairo. He has the

-      air of one with an important errand. In the hotels, on the street, in the

-      steamer, his manner is that of one who precedes an imposing embassy. He

-      likes state. If he had been born under the Pharaohs he would have been the

-      bearer of the flabellum before the king; and he would have carried it

-      majestically, with perhaps a humorous twinkle in his eye for some comrade

-      by the way. Ahman Abdallah, the faithful, is with him. He it was who made

-      and brought us the early morning coffee to-day,&mdash;recalling the peace

-      of those days on the Nile which now are in the dim past. It is ages ago

-      since we were hunting in the ruins of Abydus for the tomb of Osiris. It

-      was in another life, that delicious winter in Nubia, those weeks following

-      weeks, free from care and from all the restlessness of this driving age.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I shouldn't wonder if you were right, Abd-el-Atti, in not wanting to

-      start for Syria sooner. It was very cold on the boat last night.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not go in Syria before April; always find him bad. 'Member what I say

-      when it rain in Cairo?&mdash;'This go to be snow in Jerusalem.' It been

-      snow there last week, awful storm, nobody go on the road, travelers all

-      stop, not get anywhere. So I hunderstand.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is the prospect for landing at Jaffa tomorrow morning?&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do' know, be sure. We hope for the better.&rdquo;

-     </p>

-    <p>

-      We get away beyond the breakwater, as the sun goes down. The wind

-      freshens, and short waves hector the long sea swell, Egypt lies low; it is

-      only a line; it fades from view.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0069" id="linkimage-0069"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">

-      <img src="images/0488.jpg" alt="0488 " width="100%" /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h5>

-      <a href="images/0488.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>

-    </h5>

-    <div style="height: 6em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-<pre>

-

-

-

-

-

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