THE DOWNFALL OF THE NILE
Some thousands of years ago, at the beginning of our geological period,
when the continents had taken, in the last great upheaval, almost the
forms by which we now know them, and when the rivers began to trace
their hesitating courses, it happened that the rains of a whole
watershed of Africa were precipitated in one formidable torrent across
the uninhabitable region which stretches from the Atlantic to the
Indian Ocean, and is called the region of the deserts. And this enormous
waterway, lost as it was in the sands, by-and-by regulated its course:
it became the Nile, and with untiring patience set itself to the proper
task of river, which in this accursed zone might well have seemed
an impossible one. First it had to round all the blocks of granite
scattered in its way in the high plains of Nubia; and then, and more
especially, to deposit, little by little, successive layers of mud, to
form a living artery, to create, as it were, a long green ribbon in the
midst of this infinite domain of death.
How long ago is it since the work of the great river began? There is
something fearful in the thought. During the 5000 years of which we have
any knowledge the incessant deposit of mud has scarcely widened this
strip of inhabited Egypt, which at the most ancient period of history
was almost as it is to-day. And as for the granite blocks on the plains
of Nubia, how many thousands of years did it need to roll them and to
polish them thus? In the times of the Pharaohs they already had their
present rounded forms, worn smooth by the friction of the water, and the
hieroglyphic inscriptions on their surfaces are not perceptibly effaced,
though they have suffered the periodical inundation of the summer for
some forty or fifty centuries!
It was an exceptional country, this valley of the Nile; marvellous and
unique; fertile without rain, watered according to its need by the great
river, without the help of any cloud. It knew not the dull days and the
humidity under which we suffer, but kept always the changeless sky of
the immense surrounding deserts, which exhaled no vapour that might dim
the horizon. It was this eternal splendour of its light, no doubt, and
this easiness of life, which brought forth here the first fruits of
human thought. This same Nile, after having so patiently created the
soil of Egypt, became also the father of that people, which led the way
for all others--like those early branches that one sees in spring,
which shoot first from the stem, and sometimes die before the summer.
It nursed that people, whose least vestiges we discover to-day with
surprise and wonder; a people who, in the very dawn, in the midst of the
original barbarity, conceived magnificently the infinite and the divine;
who placed with such certainty and grandeur the first architectural
lines, from which afterwards our architecture was to be derived; who
laid the bases of art, of science, and of all knowledge.
Later on, when this beautiful flower of humanity was faded, the Nile,
flowing always in the midst of its deserts, seems to have had for
mission, during nearly two thousand years, the maintenance on its banks
of a kind of immobility and desuetude, which was in a way a homage of
respect for these stupendous relics. While the sand was burying the
ruins of the temples and the battered faces of the colossi, nothing
changed under this sky of changeless blue. The same cultivation
proceeded on the banks as in the oldest ages; the same boats, with the
same sails, went up and down the thread of water; the same songs kept
time to the eternal human toil. The race of fellahs, the unconscious
guardian of a prodigious past, slept on without desire of change, and
almost without suffering. And time passed for Egypt in a great peace of
sunlight and of death.
But to-day the foreigners are masters here, and have wakened the
old Nile--wakened to enslave it. In less than twenty years they have
disfigured its valley, which until then had preserved itself like a
sanctuary. They have silenced its cataracts, captured its precious water
by dams, to pour it afar off on plains that are become like marshes and
already sully with their mists the crystal clearness of the sky. The
ancient rigging no longer suffices to water the land under cultivation.
Machines worked by steam, which draw the water more quickly, commence to
rise along the banks, side by side with new factories. Soon there will
scarcely be a river more dishonoured than this, by iron chimneys and
thick, black smoke. And it is happening apace, this exploitation of
the Nile--hastily, greedily, as in a hunt for spoils. And thus all its
beauty disappears, for its monotonous course, through regions endless
alike, won us only by its calm and its old-world mystery.
Poor Nile of the prodigies! One feels sometimes still its departing
charm, stray corners of it remain intact. There are days of transcendent
clearness, incomparable evenings, when one may still forget the ugliness
and the smoke. But the classic expedition by dahabiya, the ascent of the
river from Cairo to Nubia, will soon have ceased to be worth making.
Ordinarily this voyage is made in the winter, so that the traveller may
follow the course of the sun as it makes its escape towards the southern
hemisphere. The water then is low and the valley parched. Leaving the
cosmopolitan town of modern Cairo, the iron bridges, and the pretentious
hotels, with their flaunting inscriptions, it imparts a sense of sudden
peacefulness to pass along the large and rapid waters of this river,
between the curtains of palm-trees on the banks, borne by a dahabiya
where one is master and, if one likes, may be alone.
At first, for a day or two, the great haunting triangles of the pyramids
seem to follow you, those of Dashur and that of Sakkarah succeeding
to those of Gizeh. For a long time the horizon is disturbed by their
gigantic silhouettes. As we recede from them, and they disengage
themselves better from neighbouring things, they seem, as happens in
the case of mountains, to grow higher. And when they have finally
disappeared, we have still to ascend slowly and by stages some six
hundred miles of river before we reach the first cataract. Our way lies
through monotonous desert regions where the hours and days are marked
chiefly by the variations of the wonderful light. Except for the
phantasmagoria of the mornings and evenings, there is no outstanding
feature on these dull-coloured banks, where may be seen, with never
a change at all, the humble pastoral life of the fellahs. The sun is
burning, the starlit nights clear and cold. A withering wind, which
blows almost without ceasing from the north, makes you shiver as soon as
the twilight falls.
One may travel for league after league along this slimy water and make
head for days and weeks against its current--which glides everlastingly
past the dahabiya, in little hurrying waves--without seeing this warm,
fecundating river, compared with which our rivers of France are mere
negligible streams, either diminish or increase or hasten. And on
the right and left of us as we pass are unfolded indefinitely the two
parallel chains of barren limestone, which imprison so narrowly the
Egypt of the harvests: on the west that of the Libyan desert, which
every morning the first rays of the sun tint with a rosy coral that
nothing seems to dull; and in the east that of the desert of Arabia,
which never fails in the evening to retain the light of the setting sun,
and looks then like a mournful girdle of glowing embers. Sometimes the
two parallel walls sheer off and give more room to the green fields, to
the woods of palm-trees, and the little oases, separated by streaks
of golden sand. Sometimes they approach so closely to the Nile that
habitable Egypt is no wider than some two or three poor fields of corn,
lying right on the water's edge, behind which the dead stones and the
dead sands commence at once. And sometimes, even, the desert chain
closes in so as to overhang the river with its reddish-white cliffs,
which no rain ever comes to freshen, and in which, at different heights,
gape the square holes leading to the habitations of the mummies. These
mountains, which in the distance look so beautiful in their rose-colour,
and make, as it were, interminable back-cloths to all that happens
on the river banks, were perforated, during some 5000 years, for the
introduction of sarcophagi and now they swarm with old dead bodies.
And all that passes on the banks, indeed, changes as little as the
background.
First there is that gesture, supple and superb, but always the same,
of the women in their long black robes who come without ceasing to fill
their long-necked jars and carry them away balanced on their veiled
heads. Then the flocks which shepherds, draped in mourning, bring to
the river to drink, goats and sheep and asses all mixed up together.
And then the buffaloes, massive and mud-coloured, who descend calmly to
bathe. And, finally, the great labour of the watering: the traditional
noria, turned by a little bull with bandaged eyes and, above all, the
shaduf, worked by men whose naked bodies stream with the cold water.
The shadufs follow one another sometimes as far as the eye can see. It
is strange to watch the movement--confused in the distance--of all
these long rods which pump the water without ceasing, and look like the
swaying of living antennae. The same sight was to be seen along this
river in the times of the Ramses. But suddenly, at some bend of
the river, the old Pharaonic rigging disappears, to give place to a
succession of steam machines, which, more even than the muscles of
the fellahs, are busy at the water-drawing. Before long their blackish
chimneys will make a continuous border to the tamed Nile.
Did one not know their bearings, the great ruins of this Egypt would
pass unnoticed. With a few rare exceptions they lie beyond the green
plains on the threshold of the solitudes. And against the changeless,
rose-coloured background of these cliffs of the desert, which follow you
during the whole of this tranquil navigation of some 600 miles, are to
be seen only the humble towns and villages of to-day, which have
the neutral colour of the ground. Some openwork minarets dominate
them--white spots above the prevailing dullness. Clouds of pigeons whirl
round in the neighbourhood. And amongst the little houses, which are
only cubes of mud, baked in the sun, the palm-trees of Africa, either
singly or in mighty clusters, rise superbly and cast on these little
habitations the shade of their palms which sway in the wind. Not long
ago, although indeed everything in these little towns was mournful and
stagnant, one would have been tempted to stop in passing, drawn by that
nameless peace that belonged to the Old East and to Islam. But, now,
before the smallest hamlet--amongst the beautiful primitive boats, that
still remain in great numbers, pointing their yards, like very long
reeds, into the sky--there is always, for the meeting of the tourist
boats, an enormous black pontoon, which spoils the whole scene by its
presence and its great advertising inscription: “Thomas Cook & Son
(Egypt Ltd.).” And, what is more, one hears the whistling of the
railway, which runs mercilessly along the river, bringing from the
Delta to the Soudan the hordes of European invaders. And to crown all,
adjoining the station is inevitably some modern factory, throned there
in a sort of irony, and dominating the poor crumbling things that still
presume to tell of Egypt and of mystery.
And so now, except at the towns or villages which lead to celebrated
ruins, we stop no longer. It is necessary to proceed farther and for the
halt of the night to seek an obscure hamlet, a silent recess, where we
may moor our dahabiya against the venerable earth of the bank.
And so one goes on, for days and weeks, between these two interminable
cliffs of reddish chalk, filled with their hypogea and mummies, which
are the walls of the valley of the Nile, and will follow us up to the
first cataract, until our entrance into Nubia. There only will the
appearance and nature of the rocks of the desert change, to become the
more sombre granite out of which the Pharaohs carved their obelisks and
the great figures of their gods.
We go on and on, ascending the thread of this eternal current, and
the regularity of the wind, the persistent clearness of the sky, the
monotony of the great river, which winds but never ends, all conspire
to make us forget the hours and days that pass. However deceived and
disappointed we may be at seeing the profanation of the river banks,
here, nevertheless, isolated on the water, we do not lose the peace of
being a wanderer, a stranger amongst an equipage of silent Arabs, who
every evening prostrate themselves in confiding prayer.
And, moreover, we are moving towards the south, towards the sun, and
every day has a more entrancing clearness, a more caressing warmth, and
the bronze of the faces that we see on our way takes on a deeper tint.
And then too one mixes intimately with the life of the river bank,
which is still so absorbing and, at certain hours, when the horizon is
unsullied by the smoke of pit-coal, recalls you to the days of artless
toil and healthy beauty. In the boats that meet us, half-naked men,
revelling in their movement, in the sun and air, sing, as they ply their
oars, those songs of the Nile that are as old as Thebes or Memphis. When
the wind rises there is a riotous unfurling of sails, which, stretched
on their long yards, give to the dahabiyas the air of birds in full
flight. Bending right over in the wind, they skim along with a lively
motion, carrying their cargoes of men and beasts and primitive things.
Women are there draped still in the ancient fashion, and sheep and
goats, and sometimes piles of fruit and gourds, and sacks of grain. Many
are laden to the water's edge with these earthenware jars, unchanged for
3000 years, which the fellaheens know how to place on their heads with
so much grace--and one sees these heaps of fragile pottery gliding along
the water as if carried by the gigantic wings of a gull. And in the
far-off, almost fabulous, days the life of the mariners of the Nile had
the same aspect, as is shown by the bas-reliefs on the oldest tombs; it
required the same play of muscles and of sails; was accompanied no doubt
by the same songs, and was subject to the withering caress of this same
desert wind. And then, as now, the same unchanging rose coloured the
continuous curtain of the mountains.
But all at once there is a noise of machinery, and whistlings, and
in the air, which was just now so pure, rise noxious columns of black
smoke. The modern steamers are coming, and throw into disorder the
flotillas of the past; colliers that leave great eddies in their wake,
or perhaps a wearisome lot of those three-decked tourist boats, which
make a great noise as they plough the water, and are laden for the most
part with ugly women, snobs and imbeciles.
Poor, poor Nile! which reflected formerly on its warm mirror the utmost
of earthly splendour, which bore in its time so many barques of gods and
goddesses in procession behind the golden barge of Amen, and knew in the
dawn of the ages only an impeccable purity, alike of the human form and
of architectural design! What a downfall is here! To be awakened from
that disdainful sleep of twenty centuries and made to carry the floating
barracks of Thomas Cook & Son, to feed sugar factories, and to
exhaust itself in nourishing with its mud the raw material for English
cotton-stuffs.