THE DOG.—THE UNCLEAN ANIMAL.—THE BUFFALO.—THE OX.—THE GOAT AND THE
SHEEP.—FERÆ NATURÆ.
Nobis et cum Deo et cum animalibus est aliqua
communitas.—LACTANTIUS.
The dog has, in the East, been spurned from the companionship of man.
He is no longer allowed to guard a master’s property, or to be the
playfellow of his children. He has been expelled from the home, and
the door has been closed against him; every contumely has been heaped
upon him; religion has pronounced him unclean, and his contact double
defilement.
But centuries of ill-usage have not obliterated nature. He cannot
divest himself of his old, hereditary, unreasoning feelings of eternal
dependence, and fidelity. Man has, it is true, with injurious harshness,
renounced the compact first indented in some distant age, perhaps in some
remote northern clime; but the dog neither makes retort, nor claims his
liberty. He remains faithful to his part of the broken bond. Only let
him be near his old master, allow him no more companionship than to see
him pass by, and he will bear all the scorn, and all the hardnesses, of
his cruel lot, and will ever be forward to do him any service, however
unhonoured. And so it is that he has become homeless and masterless, the
scavenger, and the knacker, of eastern cities.
Among wild animals, every individual, or if the species be gregarious,
every association of individuals, has its own beat, which is as much its
own property as a landed estate is the property of its human owner. In
this we have the germ, and the rationale, of the human developments of
the natural necessity, and idea of property. Each of these beats is an
appropriated hunting ground. Any outsider who appears within its limits
is an invader, and is treated as such. So it is with the dogs of a large
eastern city. They are divided into associations, and each association
occupies its own district of the city. If a dog sets his foot beyond the
boundaries of his own district, he is instantly attacked by those whose
district he has invaded. An alarm is given, and all concerned rush to
drive off the intruder, who is often seriously mauled. These raids, and
their repulses, generally take place at night. To sybarite travellers,
and to those who take no interest in the life of the world around them,
the canine uproar caused in these affairs is simply insufferable. The
growling is certainly very harsh: you might think it issued from the
throats of packs of hyænas. Many of these dogs are badly wounded, we may
infer, from one another’s teeth in these night rows, because if such
results do not ensue, for what earthly purpose do they make all this
uproar? It would then be made out of pure _cussedness_, which one cannot
believe of them.
I never saw a bitch with more than two pups—seldom with more than one.
I supposed some inhabitant of the district had knocked the rest of the
family on the head, to prevent the pack becoming too numerous.
If a dog in the interior of the city makes himself disagreeable, he is
taken up by the scruff of the neck, and carried outside the city. He is
never known to return again to his old haunts: in fact, he is unable to
do so, being always hindered by those in possession of the intervening
districts from passing through them. He thus remains on the outside of
the city, an outcast from the dog community, a pariah among dogs, for the
rest of his days.
They never show any disposition to molest one in the day-time; at night,
however, it is always necessary to go about provided with a good stick,
for they will then scarcely ever allow a Frank to pass without assailing
him, if not with their teeth, at all events with their tongues. The
town dogs are about the size of our English pointers, but with longer
coats, generally of a yellowish colour. The tail is somewhat bushy.
The village dogs are larger and much fiercer. They are dark brown or
black. Their size, courage, and social position improve as the river is
ascended. I met a Scotchman, who carried his dislike, and fear, of these
ill-used animals so far, that he never went out, night or day without a
revolver, or a kind of fire-arm, of German manufacture, which goes off
without a report. He boasted of the hecatombs he had slain—perhaps more
had been maimed than slain—during his residence in the country. At one
time he had cleared off so many in the quarter of the city in which he
was living, that the natives, inferring from the number of dead dogs
found in the neighbourhood of his house that it was his doing, laid a
complaint against him before the cadi for canicide. He was admonished to
abstain for the future from taking the life of, or wounding, useful and
unoffending animals.
Although the Arab can give the dog no place in his affections, nor allow
him the smallest familiarity, yet in his treatment of him you may trace
the working of a sort of compassionate kindliness. He sets up for him
water-troughs about the city; and I often observed a poor man, as he ate
his scanty meal, throw a morsel to a canine mendicant, probably, and if
so not misthinkingly, in the name of God.
THE UNCLEAN ANIMAL.
The unclean animal often divides with the dogs the scavengering of the
towns. The part assigned him is the part the dogs’ stomachs will not
allow them to undertake. Outside the city a herd of swine is generally
to be seen on the filth-heap. It was there I saw them, at Alexandria,
Jerusalem, and elsewhere. A few solitary stragglers only are met with
in the streets. Of all that is hideous-looking, and hideously filthy, I
never beheld anything worse than these eastern town pigs: long-snouted,
long-legged, long-haired, ridge-backed, mangy, bespattered with grime. I
could hardly have supposed that there had been in the nature of things
such disgusting organisms. A sense of loathing sickens you as you see
them. But we must not be hard on the helpless brute: is it not more
shocking that man, endowed with large discourse of reason, with sovereign
power to distinguish wrong from right, the lord, the soul, the very
blossom of this visible world, bid to look with the inward eye, as he
has been enabled to do with the bodily eye, onwards and upwards, should,
notwithstanding, still make himself a hog, morally a scavenger? And this
position has been forced by necessity on the swine of the East—they did
not turn to it from choice.
Christian travellers in the East, who will eat swine’s flesh, buy it from
the Greeks. That it was sold by a Greek is no guarantee that it is food
for a dog. Day after day I saw at Jerusalem a Greek boy tending a herd
of swine on the filth-heap outside the Jaffa gate. Hard by, against
the wall, were sitting a row of noseless, toothless, handless, footless
lepers. It was a sight, this combination of animal and human debasement,
to make one shudder. But as to those ordure and garbage consuming
organisms on the filth-heap: the chemistry of nature can work wonders,
but those wonders have a limit. It cannot transmute that filth into human
food. As well might you dine on a rat taken from a sewer, or a vulture
caught in the ribbed cavity of a camel it was busy in eviscerating. It
were all one to sup with the ghouls.
In this matter it is entirely, from first to last, a question of climate,
and, through climate, of vegetation. In this part of the world we have a
moist climate, and, as a consequence, we have woods, supplying acorns,
beech-mast, and other sylvan fruits; and the same cause gives us grassy
meadows, and clover-fields, where pigs can graze. And we have abundance
of roots and corn, and much refuse garden-stuff; which all comes to this,
that in these latitudes nature and man supply the pig, all the year
round, with abundance of clean and wholesome food. In the East nature has
withheld every one of these gifts. There are no woods, no meadows; and
for him no roots, no fruits. Throughout Egypt, with the small exception
of some uncultivated marshes in the Delta and Faioum, there is not a
mouthful of food for pigs. They must, therefore, become scavengers of
towns, or make their exit altogether from the scene. People are very poor
in these parts; and those among the Greeks whose poverty suggests to them
the idea of making a few piastres by keeping pigs cannot, of course, be
well off. The supposition, then, that such people will always buy corn,
costly to them, and of which they are in need themselves, for pigs that
other people are to eat, is Utopian.
America could not have been settled without the pig; but then the pig has
in America a perennial feast of good things. It is the pig’s paradise.
The country is under forest. Wood-nuts, and wild fruit of several sorts,
are everywhere. Peaches, and maize, and many other things good enough
for his betters, are in inexhaustible abundance. Here in England it is
one of the luxuries of having a little bit of land, that you never need
be without pig, in one form or another, in the house. Besides it is
the only animal a cottager can keep. Nothing else is within his reach.
Liebig tells us, too, that for those who are exposed to the cold and damp
climate of this part of the world, no food is so suited as bacon; and the
more oleaginous the better.
In the East the law-givers were right who made religion ban piggy. They
could not reason with the multitude on a point of this kind. They could
not make distinctions and exceptions. When you have to do with a hungry
stomach reason does not go for much. Of course they did not take into
consideration the opposite circumstances of other parts of the world.
What would be good for us here was no concern of theirs.
THE BUFFALO.
The buffalo, if it were only for his uncouthness, ought not to be
unnoticed here. He has, however, another claim to a place in our picture,
from his so frequently coming into view. He is hardier, and heavier,
than the ox, and has, therefore, to a great extent, taken its place
both at the plough, and at the water-wheel. The Egyptian buffalo has
no resemblance to the brawny-shouldered, shaggy-maned, clean-legged,
American prairie bison, injuriously miscalled a buffalo. What our
Egyptian’s hairless, slate-coloured carcass is most like is that of some
ill-shaped primæval pachyderm. You would hardly take him for a congener
of the ox, even after you had noticed his horns; such horns as they are,
for they are so reflexed, and twisted, as to give you the idea that
something must have gone wrong with them, till you find that they are
alike in all. The little buffalo calf, by the side of its ugly, dull,
soulless dam, seems a far more creditable piece of nature’s handicraft.
You can hardly believe that a few months will metamorphose it into such
ugliness.
THE OX.
Of the existing ox so little is seen that nothing need be said here,
except that it is a diminutive specimen of its kind; and that it gives
dry, stringy beef. It was different in the time of the old Egyptians.
They had (what had they not?) a polled breed as well as long-horns, and
also some breeds that were curiously-marked. But both bull and cow were
then divine. The latter was sacred to Athyr, the Venus of Egypt. The
former was worshipped as the symbol of strength, and of the generative
powers of nature; and, besides, his quiet rumination suggested the idea
of the sufficiency, and wisdom, of reflective meditation. Since they
ceased to be divine the couple have much degenerated.
THE GOATS AND THE SHEEP.
In Egypt the goats and the sheep, as is the case with their betters, are
not separated from each other. In outward appearance, too, as respects
size, colour, shape, and coat, there is not much difference between
them, nor is there much difference between their mutton. This is not an
instance, as some have suggested, of evil communications having corrupted
good mutton, but the result of similarity of food. The Egyptian sheep
have no mountain wild thyme, and no short sweet herbage to crop. The
weeds, and the dry acrid plants on the edge of the desert, are all that
Nature provides for them, and these they have to divide with the goats.
The sourness of the food is what imparts to the mutton its twang; and
then their wool is long and oily, and this oiliness of the wool must aid
the ill effects of the food. I found, however, little reason to complain
of the mutton, when I compared it with the beef. The goats supply the
greater part of the milk, and of the butter, used in the country. Goats’
butter is as white as paper; in this respect resembling the butter of the
cows of the American prairies. Neither sheep nor goats are larger than an
ordinary-sized Newfoundland dog. They are generally of a rusty black, or
smutty red colour.
FERÆ NATURÆ.
As to the _Feræ Naturæ_, Egypt offers little cover or feeding-ground for
them. I saw none but jackals and foxes. They can, therefore, have no
place in a traveller’s sketch of the country. The crocodile is all but
extinct below the cataract. The steamboat it is, which in this part of
the river, is scaring it away.[9] Formerly, both the crocodile and the
hippopotamus appear to have disported themselves even in the Delta.