THE ETHIOPIAN NILE.
Fortunate Travel—The America—Ethiopian Scenery—The Atbara
River—Damer—A Melon Patch—Agriculture—The Inhabitants—Change of
Scenery—The First Hippopotamus—Crocodiles—Effect of My Map—The
Raïs and Sailors—Arabs in Ethiopia—Ornamental Scars—Beshir—The
Slave Bakhita—We Approach Meroë.
“Fair is that land as evening skies,
And cool—though in the depth it lies
Of burning Africa.”—WORDSWORTH.
The voyage from Berber to Khartoum was another link in my chain of
fortunate travel The Ethiopian Nile seemed to me more beautiful than
the Egyptian; at least, the vegetation was richer, the air milder and
sweeter, the water purer, and to crown all, the north-wind unfailing. Day
and night there was a fresh, steady breeze, carrying us smoothly against
the current, at the precise rate of speed which is most pleasant in a
sailing craft—three to four miles an hour. The temperature was that of an
American June, the nights deliciously mild and sweet, and the full moon
shone with a splendor unknown in northern latitudes. I was in perfect
health of body, and suffered no apprehension or anxiety for the future to
disturb my happy frame of mind.
El Mekheyref looked very picturesque in the soft clear light of the
last afternoon hour, as I sailed away from it. The Bey’s mansion and the
mosque rose conspicuously above the long lines of clay walls, and groups
of luxuriant date-trees in the gardens supplied the place of minarets and
spires. Both shores, above the city, were in a high state of cultivation,
and I passed many thriving villages before dusk. Even under the moon,
the corn-fields on either hand were green and bright. I was installed
in a temporary cabin, formed of my tent-canvas, stretched over a frame
of palm-sticks, erected on the narrow poop-deck. Achmet and Ali took
possession of the hold, which they occupied as kitchen and store-room.
The raïs, sailors, and the two beautiful sheep which the Bey gave me,
were grouped on the forecastle. On this first evening, the men, fatigued
by their extra labors on my account, were silent, and I was left to the
full enjoyment of the scene. The waves rippled pleasantly against the
prow of the _America_; the frogs and crickets kept up a concert along the
shore, and the _zikzak_, or crocodile-bird, uttered his sharp, twittering
note at intervals. Hours passed thus, before I was willing to close my
eyes.
The landscapes next morning were still more beautiful. The Nile was as
broad as in Lower Egypt, flowing between banks of the most brilliant
green. Long groves of palms behind the shore, shut out from view the
desert tracts beyond, and my voyage all day was a panorama of the
richest summer scenery. Early in the forenoon I passed the mouth of the
Atbara, the ancient Astaboras, and the first tributary stream which the
traveller meets on his journey from the Mediterranean. Its breadth is
about one-third that of the main river, but the volume of water must be
in a much smaller proportion. The water is a clear, bright green, and its
junction with the darker Nile is distinctly marked. I could look up the
Atbara for about a mile, to where it curved out of sight between high
green banks covered with flowering mimosas. It was a charming piece of
river scenery, and I longed to follow the stream upward through the wild
domains of the Hallengas and Hadendoas, through the forests and jungles
of Takka and Schangalla, to where, an impetuous torrent, it foams through
the Alpine highlands of Samen, under the eternal snows of Abba-Jaret
and Amba-Hai. In Abyssinia it bears the name of Tacazze, but afterwards
through the greater part of its course, is called the Atbara (and the
country it waters, Dar Atbara), except at its junction with the Nile,
where the natives name it El-bahr Mogran.
Two or three hours later we reached the large town of Damer, which gives
its name to the point of land between the two rivers. It is a quarter of
a mile from the shore, and is a collection of mud buildings, scattered
through a grove of sont trees. My sailors stopped to get some mats, and
I climbed the bank to look at the place, but there was nothing in the
view to tempt me to enter. During the day we stopped at an island in
the river, to buy some vegetables. Two men were guarding a large patch
of ripe melons and cucumbers, behind which extended fields of dourra,
divided by hedges of a kind of shrub cypress, all overgrown with a
purple convolvulus in flower, and a wild gourd-vine, with bright yellow
blossoms. In wandering through the luxuriant mazes of vegetation, I
came upon a dwelling of the natives—a nest or arbor, scooped out of a
thick clump of shrubs, and covered with dry branches. It resembled the
_milpas_, or brush-huts of the Mexican rancheros. The only furniture was
a frame of palm-sticks, serving as a divan, and four stones, arranged
so as to form a fireplace. On returning to the shore, I found Achmet in
dispute with the two men. He had taken some melons, for which he offered
them two and a half piastres. They demanded more, but as he had purchased
melons for less in El Mekheyref, he refused, and giving them the money,
took the melons perforce. “Well,” said they, “you are our masters, and
we must submit;” but they would sell no more to my sailors. The latter,
however, procured a bowl of treacle, made of dates, and some sour milk,
at another hut, and were contented therewith. The bean-fields along
the shore had just been trampled down by a hippopotamus, whose huge
footprints we saw in the soft mud near the water.
All day, we sailed between shores of vegetation, of the ripest green.
Both banks of the river, through this region, are studded with
water-wheels, whose creaking ceases not by day nor by night. It was
pleasant to see the strings of jars ascending and descending, and to hear
the cool plashing of the precious blood of the Nile, as it poured into
the branching veins which are the life of that teeming soil. The wheels
were turned by oxen, driven by Dinka slaves, who sang vociferous melodies
the while, and the water was conveyed to fields distant from the river in
the hollow trunks of the doum-tree.
There, where I expected to sail through a wilderness, I found a garden.
Ethiopia might become, in other hands, the richest and most productive
part of Africa. The people are industrious and peaceable, and deserve
better masters. Their dread of the Turks is extreme, and so is their
hatred. I stopped one evening at a little village on the western bank.
The sailors were sent to the houses to procure fowls and eggs, and after
a long time two men appeared, bringing, as they said, the only chicken
in the place. They came up slowly, stooped and touched the ground, and
then laid their hands on their heads, signifying that they were as dust
before my feet. Achmet paid them the thirty paràs they demanded, and when
they saw that the supposed Turks had no disposition to cheat them, they
went back and brought more fowls. Travellers who go by the land routes
give the people an excellent character for hospitality. I was informed
that it is almost impossible to buy anything, even when double the value
of the article is tendered, but by asking for it as a favor, they will
cheerfully give whatever they have.
When I crept out of my tent on the third morning, the features of the
scenery were somewhat changed. A blue chain of hills, which we had passed
in the night, lay behind us, and a long, graceful mountain range rose
on the right, broken by a pass which was cut through it at right angles
to its course. The mountains retreated out of my horizon during the
forenoon, but in the afternoon again approached nearly to the water’s
edge, on the eastern bank. They were of a dark-red color, exhibiting
a broken, mound-like formation. We passed several islands during the
day—beds of glorious vegetation. The sakias were turning at intervals
of a hundred yards or less, and the rustling fields of wheat and dourra
seemed bursting with the fulness of their juices. I now began to notice
that warm vermilion tinge of the clouds, which is frequently exhibited
near the Equator, but is nowhere so striking as in Central Africa. Lying
heavily along the horizon, in the warm hours of the day, they appeared
to glow with a dead, smouldering fire, like brands which are soft white
ashes on the outside, but living coals within.
On the same day I saw the first hippopotamus. The men discerned him
about a quarter of a mile off, as he came up to breathe, and called
my attention to him. Our vessel was run towards him, and the sailors
shouted, to draw his attention: “How is your wife, old boy?” “Is your
son married yet?” and other like exclamations. They insisted upon it
that his curiosity would be excited by this means, and he would allow
us to approach. I saw him at last within a hundred yards, but only the
enormous head, which was more than three feet in breadth across the ears.
He raised it with a tremendous snort, opening his huge mouth at the same
time, and I thought I had never seen a more frightful-looking monster.
He came up in our wake, after we had passed, and followed us for some
time. Directly afterwards we spied five crocodiles on a sand-bank. One of
them was of a grayish-yellow color, and upward of twenty feet in length.
We approached quietly to within a few yards of them, when my men raised
their poles and shouted. The beasts started from their sleep and dashed
quickly into the water, the big yellow one striking so violently against
our hull, that I am sure he went off with a head-ache. The natives have
many superstitions concerning the hippopotamus, and related to me some
astonishing examples of his cunning and sagacity. Among others, they
asserted that an Arab woman, at Abou-Hammed, went down to the river to
wash some clothes, once upon a time. She laid the garments upon some
smooth stones, and was engaged in trampling them with her feet, when a
huge hippopotamus thrust his head out of the river, and after watching
her for some time, made for the shore. The woman fled in terror leaving
the clothes behind her; whereupon the beast immediately took her place,
and pounded away so vigorously with his feet, that in a short time there
was not left a fragment as big as your hand.
On making inquiries for the ruins of Meroë, which we were then
approaching, the raïs only knew that there were some “_beioot kadeem_”
(ancient houses) near the village of Bedjerowiyeh, which we would
probably reach that night. As I found on my map a name which nearly
corresponded to that of the village, I had no doubt that this was Meroë,
and gave orders that the boat should halt until the next day. The raïs
was greatly surprised at my knowing the names of all the towns along
the river, seeing that I had never been there before. I showed him my
map, and told him that I knew from it, the name of every mountain, every
village, and every river, from Cairo to Abyssinia. The men crowded around
and inspected it with the utmost astonishment, and when I pointed out to
them the location of Mecca, and read them the names of all the villages
as far as Khartoum, they regarded it with an expression of reverential
awe. “Wallah!” exclaimed the raïs: “this is truly a wonderful Frank!”
My raïs, whose name was Bakhid, belonged, with his men, to the Nubian
tribe of Màhass, below Dongola. They were tall, well-formed men, with
straight features and high cheek-bones, but the lips were thicker than
those of the Arab tribes of Ethiopia. The latter are of almost pure
Shemitic blood, and are descended from families which emigrated into
Africa from the Hedjaz, seven or eight centuries ago. This accounts for
the prevalence and purity of the Arab language in these regions. The
descendants of the Djaaleyn, or tribe of Beni Koreish, of Yemen, are
still to be found in the country of the Atbara, and there are those in
Ethiopia, who claim to be descendants from the line of the Abbasides and
the Ommiades. There has been very little intermixture with the negro
races beyond Sennaar, who are looked upon as little better than wild
beasts. The Arabic language is spoken from the Red Sea to the borders of
Dar-Fūr and Bornou, and according to Burckhardt, the prevalent idioms
are those of Hedjaz, in Arabia. The distinction between the descendants
of the old Arab stock, and those who, like the Ababdehs and Bishàrees,
belong to the native African races, is obvious to the most careless
observer. The latter, however, must not be confounded with the Negro
race, from which they differ still more widely.
Raïs Bakhid had with him a son named Ibrahim—a boy of twelve. His head
was shaven so as to leave a circular tuft of hair on the crown; large
silver rings hung from his ears, and each cheek was adorned with four
broad scars—three horizontal, and one vertical,—which were produced
by gashing the skin with a knife, and then raising the flesh so as to
prevent the edges from uniting. All the Nubian tribes are scarred in
the same way, frequently upon the breast and back as well as the face,
and the number and position of the marks is generally a token of the
particular tribe to which the person belongs. The slaves brought from the
mountains of Fazogl, on the Abyssinian frontier, have a still greater
profusion of these barbaric ornaments. I had another Mahassee on board—a
fellow of five and twenty, named Beshir, who kept all the others in a
continual laugh with his droll sayings. He spoke the dialect of his
tribe, not a word of which I could understand, but his face and voice
were so comical, that I laughed involuntarily, whenever he spoke. He
was a graceless fellow, given to all sorts of debauchery, and was never
so happy as when he could drink his fill of _om bilbil_; (the “mother
of nightingales,”) as the beer of the country is called, because he who
drinks it, sings.
Another curious character was an old woman named Bakhita, a slave of the
owner of the vessel, who acted as cook for the sailors. She sat squatted
on the forward deck all day, hideously and nakedly ugly, but performed
her duties so regularly and with such a contented face, laughing heartily
at all the jokes which the men made at her expense, that I soon learned
to tolerate her presence, which was at first disgusting. She was a native
of the mountains of Dar-Fūr, but had been captured by the slave-hunters
when a child. She was in Shendy on the night when Ismaïl Pasha and his
soldiers were burned to death by Mek Nemr, in the year 1822. But with
all my questioning, she could give no account of the scene, and it was
a marvel that she remembered it at all. Life was to her a blank page,
and what one day might write upon it, the next day erased. She sat
from morning till night, grinding the dourra between two flat stones,
precisely as the Mexican women grind their maize, occasionally rubbing
her hands upon her woolly head to rid them of the paste. Her only trouble
was my white sheep, which, in its search after food, would deliberately
seize her mealy top-knots and begin to chew them. Her yells, at such
times, were the signal for a fresh attack of Beshir’s drollery. Yet old,
and ugly, and imbruted as she was, no Frankish belle, whose bloom is
beginning to wane, could have been more sensitive about her age. I was
delighted to find this touch of vanity in her; it was the only trace of
feminine nature she ever betrayed. Beshir’s declaration that she was
a hundred and fifty years old, roused her to fury. She rose up, turned
to me with a face so hideously distorted that I could not laugh at it,
and yelled out: “Look at me, O my lord! and tell me if this son of a dog
speaks the truth!” “He lies, Bakhita,” I answered; “I should say that you
were not more than thirty years old.” The fury of her face was instantly
replaced by a simper of vanity which made it even more hideous; but
from that time Bakhita considered me as her friend. Beshir, who never
missed an opportunity of hailing the people on shore, called out one day
to a damsel who came down to the river for water: “Here is your sister
on board.” The amiable maiden, not at all pleased with the comparison,
rejoined; “Am I sister to a hyena?”—a compliment, over which the old
woman chuckled for a long time.
The wind fell at sunset, when we were about seven miles from Meroë, and
while the sailors moored the boat to the shore and built a fire to cook
the head and ribs of my sheep, I climbed the bank, to get a sight of the
country. As far as I could see, the soil was cultivated, principally with
cotton and dourra. The cotton was both in flower and pod, and was of
excellent quality. Achmet and I visited a water-mill, under the charge of
a Dinka slave, who came up humbly and kissed our hands. We commanded him
to go on with his work, when he took his seat on the beam of the wheel
and drove his cows around, to the accompaniment of a loud, shrill song,
which, at a distance harmonized strangely with the cry of the jackal, in
the deserts away beyond the river.