My Winter on the Nile

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.

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.