* * * * *
Two bubbles floating o’er the sea of Life,
Wind-driven, meet, and are at once but one.
Then came the hour of parting and the tears,
The thousand vows of faith and no distrust,
The warm embrace of ecstasy and pain,
And the long kiss of sorrow and of love;
And then the last firm grasp of hands, and then
Eternal separation, and the gaze
Upon the slow-retreating form, then years—
In moments—of wild anguish and despair,
And nights of prayers, and days without a smile.
* * * * *
FROM OLD DONGOLA TO SOTAIRE.
Started. — Commotion in camp. — Welcome news. — Festivities. — The
gazelle. — Mohommed Effendi’s diary. — A deserted donkey. — Mahtool. —
Wady Milkh. — Sotaire. — A polite shiekh. — Tribes. — A legend. — Feuds.
— A fantasia. — Rebecca. — A sad story.
BEFORE starting on our journey I desired Mohommed Effendi, Lieutenant of
Engineers, to make ample notes of the nature of the country through
which we were about to travel. We left our camp at Old Dongola at 11
o’clock and travelled for six hours. Our usual hour for stopping was 4
o’clock, but having been unavoidably compelled to start late, we were
anxious to make up for the delay.
After two hours’ journey, when we were about a mile ahead of the camels,
we were somewhat startled to observe, from the summit of a low hill we
had ascended in order to get a view of the country round, a general
commotion in the caravan behind. Its march was arrested, and the sound
reached us of rifle-firing, for which we were utterly unable to account.
A few of the swiftest riders were seen coming at full speed across the
desert in our direction, evidently with something of importance to
communicate. The Arabs were flourishing their spears, and some of them
their swords, and one or two of the soldiers who were with them were
firing their rifles and revolvers in every direction. With many shouts
and other demonstrations of joy, we were informed on their arrival that
the favourite wife of Mohommed, the chief Mahound, had three days before
given birth to an heir, an event to which the family had looked forward
for years. A special messenger had been sent on from New Dongola, and
had fortunately overtaken the caravan, where the joy was universal. We
expressed our unbounded delight, and waited for the camels to come up,
when we congratuled the Mahound on his good fortune, and promised him a
pot of jam for the festivities which, he smilingly and exultingly told
us, would take place that very night, when our travelling was ended. A
fantasia was kept up all that evening with music, dancing, shouting,
screaming, and firing of rifles and pistols. The happy, blushing father
bore the honours done him with dignity, and presided over the
entertainment to the unquestioned satisfaction of all concerned.
After the enthusiasm had quieted down, Mohommed Effendi came into my
tent with his day’s report. It was as follows:—
“General character of ground sand and stones, similar to Bahiuda desert,
no vegetation.
“5 P.M., moving sand-hills.
“Om Medhayr (no water).”
His report was correct except in saying “like Bahiuda desert.” In that
desert large quantities of fossil wood are found, occasionally even
entire trees, in addition to volcanic fragments and much lava, although
no craters of extinct volcanoes exist in the country.
All through this day’s journey we saw troops of gazelles, from two to
four in number, but never near enough to give us a shot. In a large
tract of desert country like that through which we were travelling,
where even the small quantity of grass which grows in the rainy season
is, for the greater part of the year, dried up and incapable of
affording the necessary moisture for food, it is somewhat difficult to
account for the presence, in large numbers, of so considerable an animal
as the gazelle. It is never seen in the cultivated parts, which it would
necessarily have to traverse in order to get down to the Nile to drink,
and all the wells in the neighbourhood are many feet below the surface
of the ground. The great speed of the gazelle enables it to travel over
vast distances in a comparatively short space of time, and those we see
to-day scampering over the sand and stones, may within a week be many
miles away to the south, in a region where the vegetation is, all
through the year, green and sufficiently moist to give them proper
sustenance. They are caught by the Arabs throughout these parts by a
foot-trap, to which a log of wood is attached, not heavy enough to fix
them to the spot, but only forming an impediment to their rapid flight,
when they may be easily run down by a dog or an active man. Sometimes
they are found starved to death with the trap and log attached to the
foot. That they travel far is evidenced by the circumstance of their
being occasionally taken with marks on them of their having escaped from
traps used in the distant country of the Shillooks, where, in addition
to the method of catching them described above, they are also trapped by
the neck, a trap never used by the Arabs, as the animal sometimes dies
by strangulation, rendering it unfit for the food of a good and pious
Mohommedan. Their flesh is excellent eating, resembling venison, and, if
prepared for the table in the same manner, is in no way inferior.
On the second day we travelled for nine hours and fifteen minutes. On
arrival in camp Mohommed Effendi furnished me with the following notes
of the journey:—
“Small stones, little sparse grass, and rolling sand till 11 o’clock.
“Rolling sand and stones till 12.
“Level, sandy, with stones and rock till 1.30.
“Rock to right and left till 2.
“Flat, sandy, till 3.40.
“Rocky till 5.10—end of journey. Few trees, no water, uninhabited. Met a
donkey.”
Than these few short notes of the Lieutenant, it is impossible to give a
better description of this desert.
The deserted donkey we found on the road offered us matter for as much
speculation as the watch that Dr. Paley invites his readers to suppose
they might find on a heath. We concluded it had not been there for ever,
but how it got there at all was to us a puzzle. It was standing on the
top of a slight rise, fixed and motionless, with its head hanging down
to the ground, as though grazing, and was visible to us for nearly two
hours before we reached it; but presenting only an end view, we could
make nothing of its appearance at all. We supplied it with water and
half a dozen Abernethy biscuits. It became a grateful friend and a
useful servant, but the mystery of its existence we were never able to
unravel.
After travelling for two hours on the following day we arrived at
Mahtool on the border of the Wady Milkh, or Royal valley, a large
extinct river, from ten to thirty miles wide, along the bed of which we
proposed to travel to Darfoor. Its deepest part, for a width of two or
three miles, contains a few thorn-trees and shrubs. Its sides are formed
by a more or less interrupted series of sandstone rocks, marked and
water-worn into picturesque and castellated forms. The outlet of this
dried-up valley is at Dabbe, seventeen or eighteen miles higher up the
Nile than Old Dongola. The last five miles of its ancient course have
been entirely choked and obliterated by the rolling sand, so that at
Dabbe no traces of this once gigantic tributary of the Nile are now
discernible. The quantity of rain which falls on its area is never
sufficiently large to give it a current in any part of its course; the
water lies about in pools only in the rainy season, but wells sunk to a
depth of thirty or forty feet will, I was told, always surely find it.
The wells at Mahtool are only two in number, but, unlike many others in
the desert, never run dry and are always abundantly supplied with water,
which is, however, brackish. They are situated in a small plain, about
two hundred feet long by eighty feet wide, surrounded on all sides by
sand-hills. There are no habitations near, the site being too near the
latitude of the rainless district. The vegetation in the centre of the
valley is very sparse, and the surrounding desert is, as I have
described it, almost barren. We stayed here two days, in order to give
the camels, which had fasted since our departure, an opportunity of
feeding in the valley and of having a drink. On the morning of the 7th,
having replenished our water-skins, we started again, following the Wady
Milkh. The trees in the centre, consisting only of the thorniest
varieties of the mimosa, became almost hourly more numerous and the
scattered tufts of yellow grass more plentiful. Gazelles were running
about in numbers, affording us good sport, and the sheep we had brought
with us from Old Dongola were now sadly at a discount. On the second day
we arrived at Sotaire, two wells in a little valley buried among the
mountains about a mile distant to the east. The vegetation in the Wady
Sotaire, though much greener and denser than that below, affords not a
tree nor a blade of any kind of grass which the sheep, or even the
camels, will eat, and our animals, after watering, had to be taken down
into the Wady Milkh to feed. We pitched our tents in the neighbourhood
of the wells, and decided to empty away all the brackish water we had
brought from Mahtool, and refil the tanks and skins with the more
palatable element of Sotaire.
Several wandering Arabs were stationed in the district, some of whom
were drawing water for the large flocks of sheep, goats and cattle they
had brought with them. The shiekh came into our camp shortly after our
arrival and, after salaaming, said that he and his family and every one
of his people wished to be our servants and our servants’ servants while
we remained, and would draw water for us all. Yacoob brought coffee and
cigarettes, which we drank and smoked with the venerable old shiekh,
father of many families. He intended remaining for the dry season at
Sotaire and should water run short, which it was sure to do, his sons
and his oxen, his wives and his daughters (camels he had none) would
leave daily for Mahtool, and bring up the necessary supplies.
Mohommed Effendi procured the names of the sub-tribes, some of each of
whom were staying round the wells:
Welled Ochbeh.
Otoobeh.
El Khawachleh.
Barharrha.
Mahadeed.
Saragahbeh.
Horhab.
All of these belong to the great tribe of the Khababbeesh, the western
limits of whose happy hunting-grounds is only reached on the borders of
Darfoor.
It was a great gathering of the clans. For long years there had been an
irreconcilable feud between the families of the Welled Ochbeh and the
Otoobeh. Many years ago (the Lieutenant, who had been out among the
people to learn the story, said a thousand, but I subsequently
discovered it was only ten), a young girl of the Welled Ochbeh, while
driving home an ox late at evening, had been suddenly set upon by a very
bad man of the Otoobeh, who had beaten her and taken away her ox. She
had, of course, cried very much, but was, nevertheless, determined to
have revenge. All through the night she had tracked the spoiler, and
seeing him, next morning, leaning over a well to draw water, she had
crept stealthily behind him and, making a sudden rush, had fairly pushed
him over into the well. Since then murders had constantly been taking
place. The families with their relatives, from all parts of the desert,
were now met for the purpose of reconciliation, to kill the fatted calf
and hold a grand _fantasìa_. I wandered away from our tents after dinner
and dark to the site of the Arab encampment, about half a mile distant
among the stony mountains. The tents consisted only of four upright
sticks in the sand, with a piece of rush matting spread over as a
protection from the sun by day and the moon by night; they were about
thirty in number, most of them placed in a semicircle—those of the
meaner members of the society being on the outside. The women were
nearly all still at work grinding corn; few of the men had arrived, and
these were hunting up their musical instruments for the _fantasìa_, in
which everyone, high and low, was to take part.
Among the crowd of Arabs, men and women, boys and girls, whom we found
on our arrival round the wells, was a young girl about fourteen or
fifteen years of age, and of extreme beauty. I named her in my mind
“Rebecca,” and, like Abraham’s servant to Rebecca of old, introduced
myself by begging her to draw me some water from the well; this she did,
and gave me to drink from the gourd which she wore suspended from her
neck. I found her again in the Arab camp surrounded by her friends
grinding corn; the offer of my cigarette-case, for most Arab girls love
to smoke, was sufficient excuse for sitting down next to them.
The _fantasìa_ commenced soon after. The old men with the shiekh in
their centre seated themselves in a semi-circle smoking their
“chibooks.” The musicians and singers were three boys with rude cane
pipes giving forth two notes, or three at most; they placed themselves
in a row in front of the shiekh, and alternately advanced and receded a
few paces, playing on the pipes or singing. Melody or tune, to my
untutored ear, there was none; the old men, however, as well as the rest
of the audience, listened apparently entranced. Silence prevailed
through the whole camp; only the shiekh, and occasionally one or two of
the elders, ventured at intervals to whisper, “Teiyib, teiyib” (Good,
good). The boys at length were tired, and, without saying a word, simply
went away into the outer circle, and sat down and joined the spectators.
Other three boys came forward after the lapse of two or three minutes,
and repeated the performance with the same instruments, without varying
the monotony in the least.
Throughout the long tedium of this terrible _fantasìa_ my lovely Arab
friend was seated near me on the sand. Each of us was equally absorbed,
she in intently watching the movements of the three droning musicians, I
in contemplating the beauty of her dreaming moonlit face. I disturbed
her from time to time to give her a cigarette, which I always previously
lighted, as is the custom from a servant to a superior, or when the
giver is desirous of doing honour to the person who accepts.
The _fantasìa_ continued until 10 or 11 o’clock, when a middle-aged
woman, probably her mother, reminded the girl that the goats and sheep
were still scattered abroad. She rose, and, wrapping her ten feet of Old
Dongola cloth more closely round her form, proceeded to execute her
mother’s commission. I took my departure shortly after, as all my
interest in the _fantasìa_, which was interrupted only for a time, was
now at an end. Half a mile distant I overtook her, directed to her
presence by the sound of her voice, calling to collect the flocks, which
was certainly more musical than the strains to which I had listened in
the camp above. I expressed my appreciation of the _fantasìa_, and
congratulated her upon the termination of the long feud which had
existed between the Welled Ochbeh and the Otoobeh. Her sudden
exclamation was, “La, la, la, la!” (No, no, no, no), and she
energetically waved her forefinger in front of her face in order to
emphasize her negative. _Fantasìas_ as great, or greater, even with six
boys singing, and two men making additional music on tomtoms, had been
held three or four times every year, as long as she could remember, with
the object of reconciling the families; but this had always failed, the
quarrel still remained, and would remain for ever. When the great shiekh
was away, either a murder or some other outrage would be committed; then
the shiekh would come back and cause another fantasia to be held, which
would end, as all the others had ended, in effecting friendship only for
a very short time.
The sheep and goats collected round her in obedience to her calls, and
we wended our way slowly back to the neighbourhood of the camp. The
music had recommenced, and sounded somewhat better from the distance.
We parted with many expressions of friendship and good-will, and I
walked thoughtfully home to dream of the nut-brown Kabbabbeesh maid,
whose like, for beauty and purity of face and soul, it has not been my
lot to meet again in this or any other land.
[Decoration]