Rapacity of the Dragomans--The Mahmoudieh Canal--The Nile at
Atfeh--The muddy Waters of the Nile--Richness of the Soil--Accident
to the Boatmen--Night Sailing--A Collision--A Vessel run
down--Escape of the Crew--Solemn Investigation--Final
Judgment--Curious Mode of Fishing--Tameness of the Birds--Jewish
Malefactors--Moving Pillar of Sand--Arrival at Cairo--Hospitable
Reception by the Consul-General.
So long as there were no hotels in Egypt, the process of fleecing the
unwary traveller was conducted on different principles from those
followed in Europe. As he seldom understands the language, he requires
an interpreter, or dragoman, who, as a matter of course, manages all his
pecuniary affairs. The newly-arrived European eats and drinks whatever
his dragoman chooses to give him; sees through his dragoman's eyes;
hears through his ears; and, although he thinks himself master, is, in
fact, only a part of the property of this Eastern servant, to be used by
him as he thinks fit, and turned to the best account like any other real
or personal estate.
On our landing at Alexandria, my friend and I found ourselves in the
same predicament as our predecessors, and straightway fell into the
hands of these Philistines, two of whom we hired as interpreters. They
were also to act as ciceroni, and were warranted to know all about the
antiquities, and everything else in Egypt; they were to buy everything
we wanted, to spend our money, and to allow no one to cheat us except
themselves. One of these worthies was sent to engage a boat, to carry us
down the Mahmoudieh Canal to Atfeh, where the canal is separated from
the river by flood-gates, in consequence of which impediment we could
not proceed in the same boat, but had to hire a larger one to take us on
to Cairo.
The banks of the canal being high, we had no view of the country as we
passed along; but on various occasions when I ascended to the top of the
bank, while the men who towed the boat rested from their labours, I saw
nothing but great sandy flats interspersed with large pools of stagnant,
muddy water. This prospect not being very charming, we were glad to
arrive the next day on the shores of the Father of Rivers, whose swollen
stream, although at Atfeh not more than half a mile in width, rolled by
towards the north in eddies and whirlpools of smooth muddy water, in
colour closely resembling a sea of mutton-broth.
In my enthusiasm on arriving on the margin of this venerable river, I
knelt down to drink some of it, and was disappointed in finding it by no
means so good as I had always been told it was. On complaining of its
muddy taste, I found that no one drank the water of the Nile till it had
stood a day or two in a large earthen jar, the inside of which is
rubbed with a paste of bitter almonds. This causes all impurities to be
precipitated, and the water, thus treated, becomes the lightest,
clearest, and most excellent in the world. At Atfeh, after a prodigious
uproar between the men of our two boats, each set claiming to be paid
for transporting the luggage, we set sail upon the Nile, and after
proceeding a short distance, we stopped at a village, or small town, to
buy some fruit. Here the surrounding country, a flat alluvial plain, was
richly cultivated. Water-melons, corn, and all manner of green herbs
flourished luxuriantly; everything looked delightfully fresh and green;
flocks of pigeons were flying about; and multitudes of white spoonbills
and other strange birds were stalking among the herbage, and rising
around us in every direction. The fertility of the land appeared
prodigious, and exceeded anything I had seen before. Numberless boats
were passing on the river, and the general aspect of the scene betokened
the wealth and plenty which would reward the toils of the agriculturist
under any settled form of government. We returned to our boat loaded
with fruit, among which were the Egyptian fig, the prickly pear, dates,
limes, and melons of kinds that were new to us.
Whilst we were discussing the merits of these refreshing productions, a
board, which had been fastened on the outside of the vessel for four or
five men to stand on, as they pushed the boat with poles through the
shallow water, suddenly gave way, and the men fell into the river: they
could, however, all swim like water-rats, and were soon on board again;
when, putting out into the middle of the stream, we set two huge
triangular lateen sails on our low masts, which raked forwards instead
of backwards, and by the help of the wind made our way slowly towards
the south. We slept in a small cabin in the stern of our vessel; this
had a flat top, and formed the resting-place of the steersman, the
captain of the ship, and our servants, who all lay down together on some
carpets; the sailors slept upon the deck. We sailed on steadily all
night; the stars were wonderfully bright; and I looked out upon the
broad river and the flat silent shores, diversified here and there by a
black-looking village of mud huts, surrounded by a grove of palms,
whence the distant baying of the dogs was brought down upon the wind.
Sometimes there was the cry of a wild bird, but soon again the only
sound was the gentle ripple of the water against the sides of our boat.
If the steersman was not asleep, every one else was; but still we glided
on, and nothing occurred to disturb our repose, till the blazing light
of the morning sun recalled us to activity, and all the bustling
preparations for breakfast.
We had sailed on for some time after this important event, and I was
quietly reading in the shade of the cabin, when I was thrown backwards
by the sudden stopping of the vessel, which struck against something
with prodigious force, and screams of distress arose from the water all
around us. On rushing upon deck I found that we had run down another
boat, which had sunk so instantly that nothing was to be seen of it
except the top of the mast, whose red flag was fluttering just above
water, and to which two women were clinging. A few yards astern seven or
eight men were swimming towards the shore, and our steersman having in
his alarm left the rudder to its own devices, our great sails were
swinging and flapping over our heads. There was a cry that our bows were
stove in, and we were sinking; but, fortunately, before this could
happen, the stream had carried us ashore, where we stuck in the mud on a
shoal under a high bank, up which we all soon scrambled, glad to be on
terra firma. The country people came running down to satisfy their
curiosity, and we procured a small boat, which immediately rowed off to
rescue the women who were still clinging to the mast-head of the sunken
vessel, which was one of the kind called a djerm, and was laden with
thirty tons of corn, besides other goods. No one, luckily, was drowned,
though the loss was a serious one to the owners, for there was no chance
of recovering either the vessel or the cargo. Whilst we were looking,
the red flag to which the women had been clinging toppled over sideways,
which completed the entire disappearance of the unfortunate djerm.
Our reis, or captain, now returned to the roof of the cabin, where he
sat down upon a mat, and lighting his pipe, smoked away steadily without
saying a word, while the wet and dripping sailors, as well as the ladies
belonging to the shipwrecked vessel, surrounded him, screaming,
vociferating, and shouting all manner of invectives into his ears; in
which employment they were effectively joined by a number of half-naked
Arabs who had been cultivating the fields hard by. To all this they got
no answer, beyond an occasional ejaculation of "God is great, and
Mohammed is the prophet of God." His pipe was out before the clamour of
the crowd had abated, and then, all of a sudden, he got up and with two
or three others embarked in the little boat for a neighbouring village,
to report the accident to the sheick, who, we were told, would return
with him and inquire into the circumstances of the case.
In about three hours the boat returned with the local authorities, two
old villagers, in long blue shirts and dirty turbans, who took their
seat upon a mat on the bank and smoked away in a serious manner for some
time. Our captain made no more reply to the fresh accusations of the
reassembled multitude than he had done before; but lit another pipe, and
asserted that God was great. At last the two elders made signs that they
intended to speak; and silence being obtained, they, with all due
solemnity, declared that they agreed with the captain that God was
great, and that undoubtedly Mohammed was the prophet of God. All parties
having come to this conclusion, it appeared that there was nothing more
to be said, and we returned to our boat, which the sailors, with the
help of a rough carpenter, had patched up sufficiently to allow us to
sail for a village on the other side of the river.
During the time that we were remaining on the bank I was amused by
watching the manœuvres of some boys, who succeeded in catching a
quantity of small fish in a very original way. They rolled together a
great quantity of tangled weeds and long grass, with one end of which
they swam out into the Nile, and bringing it back towards the shore,
numerous unsuspecting fish were entangled in the mass of weeds, and were
picked out and thrown on the bank by the young fishermen before they had
time to get out of the scrape. In this way the boys secured a very
respectable heap of small fry.
We arrived safely at the village, where we stayed the night; but the
next morning it appeared that the bows of our vessel were so much
damaged that she could not be repaired under a delay of some days.
Indeed, it appeared that we had been fortunate in accomplishing our
passage across the river, for if we had foundered midway, not being able
to swim like the amphibious Egyptians, we should probably have been
drowned. It was, however, a relief to me to think that there were no
crocodiles in this part of the Nile.
The birds at this place appeared to be remarkably tame: some gulls, or
waterfowl, hardly troubled themselves to move out of the way when a boat
passed them; while those in the fields went on searching among the crops
for insects close to the labourers, and without any of the alarm shown
by birds in England.
While we were dawdling about in the neighbourhood of the village, one of
the servants, an old Maltese, discovered a boat with ten or twelve oars,
lying in the vicinity. It belonged to the government, and was conveying
two malefactors to Cairo under the guardianship of a kawass, who on
learning our mishap gave us a passage in his boat, and to our great joy
we bid adieu to our silent captain, and were soon rowing at a great
rate, in a fine new canjah, on the way to Cairo. The two prisoners on
board were Jews: one was taken up for cheating, and the other for using
false weights. They were fastened together by the neck, with a chain
about five feet long. One of the two was very restless; they said he had
a good chance of being hanged; and he was always pulling the other
unfortunate Hebrew about with him by the chain, in a manner which
excited the mirth of the sailors, though it must have been anything but
amusing to the person most concerned.
The next day there was a hot wind, and the thermometer stood at 98° in
the shade. The kawass called our attention to a pillar of sand moving
through the air in the desert to the south-east; it had an extraordinary
appearance, and its effect upon a party travelling over those burning
plains would have been terrific. It was evidently caused by a whirlwind,
and men and camels are sometimes suffocated and overwhelmed when they
are met by these columns of dry, heated sand, which stalk through the
deserts like the evil genii of the storm. I have seen them in other
countries, more particularly in Armenia; but this, which I saw on my
first journey up the Nile, was the only moving pillar which I met with
in Egypt or in any of the surrounding deserts. We passed two men fishing
from a small triangular raft, composed of palm-branches fastened on the
tops of a number of earthen vases. This raft had a remarkably light
appearance; it seemed only just to touch the surface of the water, but
was evidently badly calculated for such rude encounters as the one which
we had lately experienced. Soon afterwards the tops of the great
Pyramids of Giseh caught our admiring gaze, and in the morning of the
12th of August we landed at Boulac, from which a ride of half an hour on
donkeys brought our party to the hospitable mansion of the
Consul-General, who was good enough to receive us in his house until we
could procure quarters for ourselves.
Having arrived at Cairo, a short account of the history of the city may
be interesting to some readers. In the sixth and seventh centuries of
our era this part of Egypt was inhabited principally by Coptic
Christians, whose chief occupation consisted in quarrelling among
themselves on polemical points of divinity and ascetic rule. The deserts
of Nitria and the shores of the Red Sea were peopled with swarms of
monks, some living together in monasteries, some in lavras, or monastic
villages, and multitudes hiding their sanctity in dens and caves, where
they passed their lives in abstract meditation. In the year 638 the
Arabian general Amer ebn el As, with four hundred Arabs (see Wilkinson),
advanced to the confines of Egypt, and after thirty days' siege took
possession of Pelusium, which had been the barrier of the country on the
Syrian side from the earliest periods of the Egyptian monarchy: he
advanced without opposition to the city of Babylon, which occupied the
site of Masr el Ateekeh, or Old Cairo, on the Nile; but the Roman
station, which is now a Coptic monastery, containing a chamber said to
have been occupied by the blessed Virgin, was so strong a fortress that
the invaders were unable to effect an entrance in a siege of seven
months. After this, a reinforcement of four hundred men arriving at
their camp, their courage revived, and the castle of Babylon was taken
by escalade. On the site of the Arabian encampment at Fostat, Amer
founded the first mosque built on Egyptian soil. The town of Babylon
was connected with the island of Rhoda by a bridge of boats, by which a
communication was kept up with the city of Memphis, on the other side of
the Nile. The Copts, whose religious fanaticism occasioned them to hate
their masters, the Greeks of the Eastern Empire, more than the
Mahomedans, welcomed the moment which promised to free them from their
religious adversaries; and the traitor John Mecaukes, governor of
Memphis, persuaded them to conclude a treaty with the invaders, by which
it was stipulated that two dinars of gold should be paid for every
Christian above sixteen years of age, with the exception of old men,
women, and monks. From this time Fostat became the Arabian capital of
Egypt. In the year 879 Sultan Tayloon, or Tooloon, built himself a
palace, to which he added several residences or barracks for his guards,
and the great mosque, which still exists, with pointed arches, between
Fostat and the present citadel of Cairo. It was not, however, till the
year 969 that Goher, the general of El Moez, Sultan of Kairoan, near
Tunis, having invaded Egypt, and completely subdued the country, founded
a new city near the citadel of Qattaeea, which acquired the name of El
Kahira from the following circumstance. The architect having made his
arrangements for laying the first stone of the new wall, waited for the
fortunate moment, which was to be shown by the astrologers pulling a
cord, extending to a considerable distance from the spot. A certain
crow, however, who had not been taken into the council of the wise men,
perched upon the cord, which was shaken by his weight, and the architect
supposing that the appointed signal had been given, commenced his work
accordingly. From this unlucky omen, and the vexation felt by those
concerned, the epithet of Kahira ("the vexatious" or "unlucky") was
added to the name of the city, Masr el Kahira meaning "the unlucky (city
of) Egypt." Kahira in the Italian pronunciation has been softened into
Cairo, by which name this famous city has been known for many centuries
in Europe, though in the East it is usually called Masr only. From this
time the Fatemite caliphs of Africa, who brought the bones of their
ancestors with them from Kairoan, reigned for ten generations over the
land of Egypt. The third in this succession was the Caliph Hakem, who
built a mosque near the Bab el Nassr, and who was the founder of the
sect of the Druses, and, as some say, of the Assassins. In the year 1171
the famous Saladin usurped the throne from the last of the race of
Fatema. His descendant, Moosa el Ashref, was deposed in his turn, in
1250; from which time till the year 1543 Cairo was governed by the
curious succession of Mameluke kings, who were mostly Circassian slaves
brought up at the court of their predecessors, and arriving at the
supreme rule of Egypt by election or intrigue. Toman Bey, the last of
the Mameluke kings, was defeated by Selim, Emperor of the Turks, and
hanged at Cairo, at the Bab Zooaley. But the aristocracy of the
Mamelukes, as it may be called, still remained; and various beys became
governors of Egypt under the Turkish sway, till they were all destroyed
at one blow by Mohammed Ali Pasha, the now all but independent sovereign
of Egypt.