My Winter on the Nile

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.

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.