KOSSEIR
We had not long to wait before the _Mudir_, or Governor of Kosseir,
arrived to welcome us. He was a stout, good-natured, middle-aged
Maltese; he spoke English fluently, but with the accent of his
countrymen. His pleasure at seeing us was very genuine, and the more
we heard him tell of life in Kosseir, the more we appreciated what an
event in his dull existence our arrival must have been. Besides his
wife and little daughter there was not a European in the place, except
an Austrian mechanic who attended to the sea-water condenser. A Syrian
doctor had been sent here to attend to the sick, and as no one ever was
sick, and the Mudir never had any cases to try, their only topic of
conversation was of the dulness of the place. There were 1500 souls in
Kosseir when the Mudir was first appointed, and now there are barely
300. They lived on the fish they caught and some bags of flour which
a coasting steamer left here at long intervals. The arrival of the
steamer was the one event which awakened the inhabitants, who, during
the intervals, spent most of their time in sleep.
I asked what the large building was which we noticed when first we
caught sight of the place, and I was told that it was a condenser
which the government had erected so as to save the people having to go
four miles to the nearest well to fetch the brackish water it supplied.
The Mudir would show us over it the following morning, as well as
the other objects of interest in the town. We were told we could not
get some necessaries we thought we might be able to procure for our
return journey. ‘There is nothing here, nothing, nothing,’ and which
he pronounced ‘Nozing, nozing, nozing,’ while the tears almost started
from the poor man’s eyes.
It appeared that when he was first sent here the people were often
reduced to eating chopped straw with their fish. The little trade,
which had hitherto kept the place going, disappeared when Suakin and
Suez became the only places of call on that coast. The great condenser
had supplied the ships with water, and a trade in fish gave the men an
occupation and brought a little money into the place. The Mudir sent a
report to the government on the starving condition of the inhabitants,
and a grant was voted to transplant the population to more prosperous
districts. Three-quarters of the people left when the means were given
them to do so, and as none but the aged remained, it was hoped that
Kosseir would soon cease as an inhabited town. So great, however,
is the native’s attachment to his locality, that a certain number
returned, after a while, to the semi-starvation of their natal place.
We asked if the people were honest and well-behaved. ‘Dere is nozing to
steal, and when they are not fishing dey sleep,’ was our answer. The
doctor had as little to do as the Mudir in his capacity as magistrate,
for, in spite of the poor living, old age was the only physical
complaint from which any one suffered.
On this barren coast, where no blade of grass can grow, the germs of
disease do not easily spread, and the filth from the habitations is
soon sterilised in the perpetual sunshine. To rust out takes longer
than to wear out in such a climate, and this must account for the great
age which most of the inhabitants attain.
Our baggage had arrived during these tales of woe, and we tried to
induce the governor to share our dinner. He would not stay, but
promised to have tea with us the next day, and to bring his daughter,
the Austrian mechanic, and the Syrian doctor. He had hardly taken his
departure when some men arrived bringing half a dozen chairs and a
present of fish, with a message that if there was anything Kosseir
could supply, it was at our orders. I think the kind-hearted Mudir left
to spare us our expressions of gratitude.
To lie on the soft sand within a few yards of the gentle plashing of
the incoming waves, and to watch the full moon slowly emerging above
the sharp-cut line of the blue waters, consoled us that Kosseir could
at least supply a half-hour of as exquisite enjoyment as any wealth
could command in the most prosperous of cities. The fizzling sounds
which proceeded from Selim’s cooking-tent did not jar in the least,
for the anticipation of some fresh fish, after a régime of tinned
meats, was far from disagreeable. After a course of crayfish and of a
well-served _belbul_, we told Selim that he could give his tin-opener a
thorough rest.
We returned to our soft couches in the sand, and lay there till the
moon was high in the heavens, when we turned in for the night.
The Mudir was awaiting us when we arrived at his office at eight
o’clock on the following morning. It was in a large building, for our
host’s duties were various: he was consul to many nations, of whom a
subject might be here cast ashore; he was also postmaster-general,
in case a letter ever arrived; head of the customs--on what dutiable
articles was not related. As captain of the coastguards a chance of
some work might occur, for were this coast not guarded, hasheesh would
be sure to find an inlet and poison some of the people in the Nile
valley. He was here also to enforce the orders given by the sanitary
inspectors in regard to pilgrims returning from Mecca through this
port. In spite of these and other duties, Mr. Wirth (as we discovered
his name to be) had plenty of time to place at our disposal, and when
we had sipped the usual cup of coffee we started to see Kosseir under
his guidance.
The huge and unsightly building which housed the condensing machinery
was, as might be expected, the _pièce de résistance_, and with pride
we were shown the one thing left in which some lingering signs of
vitality remained. The government had spent £14,000 to put this thing
up. It was large enough to supply water to 10,000 souls, and now by
working it during two mornings per month it more than supplied the
present population. A paternal government had decreed that a charge
of one millième, that is a farthing, should be made for each pailful
supplied; but as many had not the farthing, it was a case of ‘thank
you for nothing.’ The governor informed us that many women filled their
pitchers at the brackish well, four miles off, from want of this money
to pay for the distilled water: a case of farthing wise and pound
foolish on the part of the government.
I was glad when we got out of the place and proceeded to inspect the
chief mosque. When we had awakened the caretaker, he started removing
the matting, so as not to oblige us to take off our shoes. Mr. Wirth
wittily remarked that the ground would be less likely to dirty our
shoes than would the mats if we stepped on them. We prevented the man
from moving one of them, so as not to disturb the sleep of one or two
worshippers who lay there. It was a picturesque old mosque, and Mr.
Whymper and I decided to return and make a drawing of it when we had
seen what else Kosseir had to show.
The fort stands close by, and we were taken to see the place where
Desaix had quartered some troops, and where these French soldiers
pined, during two years, for their native country, until they were
hurriedly dislodged by the Anglo-British force under Baird. Our
Maltese friend, being a British subject, pointed out with pride
the gate through which the English and Indian soldiers effected an
entrance, and at the back of the fort he showed us from whence the poor
Frenchmen escaped to try and reach the Nile across the desert. How many
succeeded, history does not relate. Knowing what preparations have to
be made to make a desert journey, it is awful to contemplate the fate
of these soldiers with only the food they could hurriedly grab up, and
the wells guarded by the enemy. We are told that the British troops
reached Keneh, and that the French had by that time evacuated Egypt.
General Desaix had joined Napoleon’s army more than a year before, and
fell in the battle of Marengo on the 14th of June 1800.
His brilliant career was cut short while only in his thirty-second
year, his greatest achievement being the conquest of Upper Egypt, where
he became known by the natives as the Just Sultan.
The custodian of the fort told us how the British fired water from
their ships on to the ammunition of the French, and the latter, then
being unable to return the fire, tried to reach Keneh as best they
could. Strange things are often related by Arab custodians!
The main street of Kosseir is picturesque, with the minaret towering
above the deserted shops, or rather it might have been, had the
coloured stuffs and fruits and a busy throng been there to furnish it
with the usual properties which make up an oriental street picture.
The two stalls which had something to sell had no other customers than
a swarm of flies, and we should hardly have had the heart to wake the
shopman from his profound sleep had there been anything worth buying.
The Mudir had had the little quay repaired, as well as the wooden pier
which formed the breakwater to a small harbour. He had also fenced in
a space of about a hundred yards square in the sea, so as to allow any
one who wished to bathe to be able to do so in safety from the sharks.
We mentioned that one of our party had bathed near our camp, and he
was horrified, for the sea, he told us, was alive with sharks. ‘Had
we not noticed a shark lying on the strand with its throat cut?’ We
mentioned that we had, though not till after our friend’s bath. We were
then told that a youth was standing there with his feet just in the sea
when a shark made a dash at him, and, missing his prey, landed too high
on the beach to be able to get back into the water before the youth cut
its throat. This had only happened a couple of days before our arrival
at the coast.
Two high-sterned dhows were beached near here for repairs; they added
considerably to the characteristics of the place, which had something
un-Egyptian about them. Kosseir is a Red Sea port, and it bears
something, hard to define, but which is not to be observed till on this
side of Suez. The people dressed as Egyptians; but on studying their
features more carefully, one could discern that nothing of the old
Egyptian stock was here. Their blood is Arabian intermixed with that of
the Ababdi tribe. We were neither pestered with beggars nor importuned
by the officiousness met with in the Nile resorts.
I returned to the mosque to start my drawing, and remained there until
it was time to join our tea-party at the camp. Two or three men dropped
in during the midday prayer, but the caretaker beckoned to me not to
move my easel. Some boys arrived later on and sat around an old sheykh
who expounded the Koran to them.
A date stone of two hundred years ago, probably only alluded to
a restoration. I should place the original construction some five
centuries earlier, though in an out-of-the-world place such as this
architectural style changes very slowly.
I arrived at the camp in time for our tea-party. The governor regretted
that Mrs. Wirth was not well enough to accompany him; his daughter
was a pretty girl of about thirteen years of age. The poor child
seemed very conscious of having outgrown her frock, judging from the
way she kept smoothing it down over her knees. She had plenty to say
for herself, and could say it in four different languages. Her father
regretted that no means of educating the child existed except such
instruction as her mother could give her, and that there was not
another child in Kosseir for her to associate with. ‘If I could only
get her to Alexandria and get there myself also,’ he said with a sigh.
‘It is four years since we had an opportunity of getting her some
frocks.’ The poor girl coloured up and seemed more conscious of her
legs than ever, and had the last pleat of her skirt not been newly let
out to its full limits, we should probably not have seen her at our
party.
The Austrian mechanic was pleased to find some one who could speak
German; but he, poor man, seemed conscious of being without a collar
to his shirt. It was difficult to put him at his ease till he got well
launched into the subject of what a dismal hole Kosseir was to live in.
The Syrian doctor seemed disappointed at not seeing a possible patient
amongst us; we all looked in disgustingly rude health. We promised to
look in at his dispensary the next day, where he assured us he had the
means of coping with every ailment; but as the whole population was
always in the best of health, time hung heavily on his hands.
He amused himself by fishing occasionally, and told us of the
extraordinary number of crayfish which were to be got by the simple
process of getting on to the coral reefs at night and holding a candle
over the pools. The stupid creatures then come to have a look at
the light, and you have only then to pick them out of the water and
put them in the basket. Should we care to have a try, he would be
delighted to take us to the best place that very night. The moon was
the difficulty, for a dark night was necessary. It was settled that he
should bring some men and lanterns at midnight, when he reckoned that
the moon would have disappeared.
We turned in after our dinner, so as to get what sleep we could before
starting on our fishing expedition. When the doctor summoned us that
night, the moon was so high in the sky that we were loath to turn out.
Bed was so comfortable; while pottering about on a sunken reef, with
the moon to spoil our sport, seemed hardly good enough. The doctor
hoped that the moon would be down before we reached the coral reefs,
and for the first time we realised that the reefs were three miles
away. It seemed, however, ungracious not to go, so off we started.
The doctor was rather depressed when he heard moonlight effects being
discussed, though we were thinking more of its pictorial aspects than
of its influence on crayfish. Early recollections of coral islands, in
a book which made my tenth birthday memorable, excited my curiosity to
see at last what a coral reef was like. Grottos as pink as a necklace,
of a ten-year-old little girl I associated with my book, rose in my
imagination, and to see these in a brilliant moonlight might more than
compensate me for a poor catch of crayfish.
We found several fishermen on the reefs, and we were puzzled to guess
what they were up to. They appeared to be walking on the water, for
when we first saw them they were some distance out at sea, and the
water looked no shallower than that which we had hitherto skirted. Some
were running about and beating the surface with long sticks, and the
proceedings had an uncanny look until we got near enough to follow what
they were about. A long net, which a couple of men hung on to at the
water’s edge, reached some distance into the sea, making a slight curve
to its furthest extremity, which was held by some men far out on the
partially submerged reef; the water was being beaten with the object of
driving the fish into the net. The men furthest out presently advanced
towards the shore, dragging the net through the deep water while they
walked along the edge of the reef. We were able to reach them by seldom
being more than ankle deep, taking care, however, to avoid the deep
holes in the coral. As the net curved more and more on the advance to
the shore of its further end, our interest to see what it would bring
in became as great as that of the fishermen.
When finally the whole net was drawn on to the strand, we beheld
as strange an assortment of creatures as can be seen in the Naples
Aquarium. Some had transparent bodies with long filmy tentacles, others
were difficult to class, whether as fish or as marine plants, for they
were so rapidly picked up and thrown into baskets that we had little
time to examine them. The queer things left on the shore might safely
be classed as unedible. The men telling us that the moon would not
be down till three o’clock, I bothered no more about crayfish, but
found plenty of entertainment in peering into the holes in the reef.
The water was so transparent that, where the moonlight reached the
bottom, the shadow of my head was clearly defined. I might have been
looking into a depth of one or two feet instead of into several fathoms
of water. Some of the beautifully arranged tanks in the Aquarium at
Naples might have been modelled on what I saw here. The holes were
sometimes globular in shape, though passages might have existed where
the moonbeams did not fall. Two lights, an inch or two apart, moved
about in the shadow of one of these holes, and disappeared whenever
they reached the moonlit part. I crept down on my knees to see if I
could distinguish any form around these weird lights, and as I could
not do so, I concluded that they were the eyes of a transparent fish
such as those we had seen taken out of the fishermen’s nets. The lights
disappearing, I crept round to a hole a few yards off, and there I
could distinguish the entrance to a passage leading towards the hole
I had left. The two lights reappeared, were lost again as they passed
through the moonlit space, and seen once more until they were lost in
some cavern in the darkness.
Sea-anemones stuck to the sides and hung from the roofs of these
fairylike chambers, the claws of a hermit crab just distinguishable in
a hollow at the base of what looked more like some hot-house plant than
of a conscious creature. On touching the spreading tentacles with my
stick, they rapidly contracted to a conical knob.
The reefs in themselves were a disappointment, for I should hardly have
known them as coral had I not been told so; but what we saw of the
marvellous forms of life contained in their caverns well repaid us for
our night’s excursion. Some attempts were made to beguile the crayfish
with lighted candles; three were brought back to our camp, but I never
quite got rid of a suspicion that the Syrian doctor had caught these
out of the fishermen’s net by means of a piastre. He need not have
looked so sad about his miscalculations, for each one of us had spent
a most interesting hour or more on the reefs. It became too cold for
us to remain any longer in our wet clothes, and we were glad to tramp
briskly back to our camp.
Weigall and Erskine Nicol rode on the following morning to the ruins
of Old Kosseir, some five miles north of the Arab town, while Whymper
and I returned to the mosque to finish our drawings. We paid the doctor
a visit in his dispensary, and were shown how up-to-date was its
equipment. ‘But what is the use of all this,’ he said, ‘if no one is
ever ill?’--one more proof of the ingratitude of the native.
We bid farewell to the kindly governor, and hoped for his sake that
he might soon be transferred to some more congenial place, trusting
that one who had the welfare of the people at heart as much as he had
might be found to fill his post. May his charming little daughter
be where suitable companions abound, and also frocks long enough to
reach to her ankles. The doctor may now be surrounded with patients
more than enough, for the two years’ exile he then anticipated are now
over. Let us hope that the Austrian engineer has been replaced by one
whose orders may allow him to distribute the distilled water without
having to exact the farthing per bucket from the impoverished people of
Kosseir.
We bought some pretty shells--about the only things the town had to
sell. The good Mudir spoke the truth when he said, ‘In Kosseir dere is
nozing, nozing, nozing!’
Some fish was sent to us as a departing present when we were starting
on our return journey to the Nile valley. The whitewashed town was pink
in the light from the rising sun when we again mounted our camels.
Kosseir was asleep, and Kosseir has probably slept ever since, just
waking up for a short while when the coasting steamer brings the bags
of flour.