THE UPPER NILE
And now for Luxor. Of all the modes of travel there is none, to my mind,
so enjoyable as that by water--fresh water, be it understood--and if you
can do this in a house-boat with your home comforts about you, what more
can you desire? We had the “Post Boat” to Luxor, and the sailing
dahabieh after that. Travelling thus on the Nile you see the life of the
people on the banks, you look into their villages, yet a few yards of
water afford you complete immunity from that nearer contact which travel
by road necessitates; and in the East, as you know, this is just as
well. Not that I really allow the drawbacks of the East to interfere
with my own enjoyment, but the isolation of the boat is best, especially
with little children on board.
I had read many books of travel on the Nile and knew what to look for.
Is there not a charm in knowing that some city, some temple, some
natural feature you have tried to realize in your mind is about to
appear in very truth just round that bend of road or river? You are
going to see in a few minutes that historic thing itself, not its
counterfeit in a book, but _it_. And so, as we neared Luxor towards
evening, I looked out for Karnac on the left, and lo! the first pylon
glided by. My first pylon! How many like it I was to see before I had
done with Old Nile. They are not beautiful in shape, nor can any
Egyptian architecture, as far as form goes, be called beautiful; the
shapes are barbaric--I had almost said brutal--stupidly powerful and
impressive by mere bulk. The beauty lies in the colouring. What a feast
these ruins afford to the eye by their colour, what a revel of blues,
greens, and low-toned reds in their unfaded paintings! Taken as bits of
colour only, without dwelling too much on the forms, all in such light,
the shadows filled with golden reflections--taken thus, or deeply tinged
with the lustrous after-glow, or the golden moonlight, they are
all-satisfying.
[Illustration: REGISTERING FELLAHEEN FOR THE CONSCRIPTION]
I will not, however, burden you with these ponderous pylons and
mammoth monoliths; they can only be enjoyed _in situ_, illuminated and
glorified by the climate of their homes. Indeed, I felt often very
oppressed and tired by them, but never did I weary of the landscape, the
people, the animals, the river.
One very saddening glimpse of fellah life was afforded Mrs. C---- and
myself at Luxor by the English Consul (a negro), who arranged that we
should see the registering of the young fellaheen for the conscription.
I think the British have changed all this lately, so we were lucky in
seeing a bit of the vanishing Past--a remnant of the Oriental Past which
no one can regret. We worked our way, led by the Consul, through the
Arab crowd in the village till we came to the entrance of the courtyard
where the drama was about to open. At the gate was a scuffling mass of
indescribably hideous old hags--the mothers and aunts and grannies of
the young fellahs inside, wailing and jerking out their lamentations
with marionette-like action of their shrivelled arms. As though by one
accord they would stop dead for a minute and look at each other, and
then all together begin again the skeleton chorus, throwing dust on
their heads. The unsavoury group came in with us pell-mell when the
gate was opened, and we found ourselves hoisted rather than conducted to
a divan prepared for us under a shed, from whence we could see all that
passed.
[Illustration: “NO MOORING TO-NIGHT!”]
Three Circassian inspectors, looking horrid in European clothes, were at
the head of a long rickety table, covered with a white cloth, in front
of us. This white cloth, in combination with the surging groups, made a
wonderfully good blank space in the composition of what I thought would
make a striking picture. The sketch I insert here is in no particular
arranged by me, but everything is exactly as I saw it. I noted
everything down in my sketch-book on the spot. The sheiks, stately men
in silken robes, who had brought each his quota of recruits from his
district, sat chatting over their coffee at the farther end of the
table, and the doctor at once set to to examine the miserable youths
that came up for registration. Fathers pleaded exemption for their sons
on one pretext or another, such as leprous heads, blindness, weak
chests, and so forth; the mothers, aunts, and grannies aforesaid went on
jibbering and clacking their jaws in the background, no one paying the
least attention to them. If a fellah was passed by the doctor a gendarme
gripped him and pummelled him all the way to the standard, where he
was measured. If satisfactory, the woe-begone creature received a
sounding box on the ear, just in fun, from the gendarme, and was shoved
into the pen where the successful (!) candidates were interned; if he
was below the mark, all the same he got his blow, and was pushed and
cuffed back to his friends and relatives. One mother had crept forward
while her son was having his lanky leg straightened by the doctor, the
father pleading the boy’s lameness (Erckmann-Chatrian’s _Conscript_
orientalised!): a gendarme sprang forward and knocked her down, then
hauled her off by her arms, which were so very thin and suggestive of a
mummy that I could not look any longer; he was so rough I really thought
he would pull them out of their sockets. My friend was crying, and if I
had not been so concentrated on my pencil notes I should have cried too.
“Surely,” she said, “that can’t be his mother, she looks a hundred at
least.” “A hundred!” I exclaimed, “she is four thousand years old--a
mummy!” I felt very sick as well as sorry. We were politely offered
coffee in jewelled cups, which we could not taste, and surreptitiously
emptied behind the divan.
The English have worked wonders since those days with the Egyptian army.
Taking the young men in the right way our officers have turned them into
remarkably smart-looking soldiers, and their terror of the service, I am
told, has vanished.
This was altogether a day which showed us the seamy side of Egyptian
life, for in the evening we and all the guests of the hotel went to see
the dancing at the _café_, a sort of mud cave full of wood smoke. It was
all very ugly and repulsive, and the music was impish and quite in
keeping. I was glad to have this experience, but once is enough. Talking
of music, I don’t know anything more appealing in its local sentiment
than the song of our crew when they were hauling and poling on calm
nights later on. Strange, unaccustomed intervals, and the key always in
the minor. In the pauses we heard the beetles and crickets on the banks
chiming in in a cheerful major.
Our sojourn at Luxor was a time of deep enjoyment, for we made almost
daily excursions on both banks of the Nile, excursions beginning in the
very early mornings, at sunrise, and ending in gallops home on our
donkeys in the after-glow, or trips on board the ferry-boat, from
Thebes, in a crowd of splendid Arabs, whose heads, figures, and blue
and white robes, or brown striped camel’s hair burnouses, added greatly
to the charm of the landscape. It was a joy merely to breathe that
desert air. All that was wholesome and not too tiring, nor risky from
the sun, was enjoyed by the children with us, but I kept them chiefly in
the paradisaical hotel garden as the safest place. One had to be very
careful. I cannot say that “black care” did not sometimes ride on my
donkey’s crupper, for I knew W. was pressing the enemy harder every day,
and that a battle was imminent. At last the great telegram came. Ginniss
was fought and won, and all the enemy’s guns and standards taken. He
sent me the message from the field. We might now come up. It took a day
or two to get the “_Fostât_” ready--the dahabieh which he had sent down
for us. Some wounded officers from the front brought news of the battle,
and, strange to relate, the only officer killed at Ginniss was son of
one of Mrs. C.’s oldest friends! What strange things happen in life. I
had met young Soltau the year before at her house on Dartmoor, and she
and I were destined to hear together of his death in battle on the Upper
Nile.
We set sail in the first week of ‘86 for Assouan, where W. was to meet
us, and I witnessed the daily development of the Nile’s beauties with
the deepest pleasure, and a mind no longer over-shadowed.
I wonder how many people who have been to Egypt recognise the fact that
all its beauty is reflected? It is either the sun or the moon or the
stars that make Egypt glorious. Under thick cloudy skies it would be
nothing. But the co-operation of the illuminated objects is admirable,
and the two powers combined produce the Egypt we admire. W. and I came
to the same conclusion, that much of the glory of the moonlights is
owing to the response of the desert, especially the golden desert of
Nubia.
[Illustration: THE “_FOSTÂT_” BECALMED]
But I have also seen, on rare occasions, delicate effects of veiled
sunshine on river, palms, and desert too exquisite in refinement to be
easily described. I remember one memorable grey day which we spent in
turning the loveliest river reach of the whole series below Assouan, the
wind having completely dropped--a day which dwells in my memory as a
precious passage of silvery colour amidst all the gold. The palm-tree
stems towards sundown were illuminated with rosy light against the
pallid background of sand-hills facing the West, and of the delicate
pearl-grey sky. The greens were cool and vivid, the water like a liquid
opal. I wrote a whole letter to Mamma on that one grey day on the Nile.
But even that evening the after-glow made itself felt through the
clouds, lighting them from behind in an extraordinary manner, so that
the filmy screen appeared red-hot. The beautiful cloud-veil could not
shut out so fervid a rush of colour.
When a strong wind blows the desert sand into the air, obscuring the sun
and thickening the sky, what a change comes over the scene! Egypt is
then undoubtedly ugly, and all charm flies away on the wings of the
blast.
But the blast speeds the dahabieh on its way, and pleasant it was
sitting of an evening in the cosy saloon to see the hanging lamp
swinging with the motion of the bounding “_Fostât_,” and to hear the
creaking of the timbers, for the distance from Assouan, where W. was to
meet us, was being sensibly diminished. On some other evenings the fair
north wind was just enough to quicken the pace without dulling the
brilliant light of the moon, and there was to be no tying up under the
mud bank those nights. Then again a dead calm might come down upon us,
and after poling, tracking, or hauling up to the kedge anchor all day to
their monotonous sing-song, the crew would have orders to moor for the
night. I would then venture a run along the shore with the children, and
have a scamper among the palms and cotton plants, which were waving and
rustling mysteriously to imperceptible sighings of the air at the
water’s edge. One or two armed men, of course, landed also.
At Esneh I had the honour of entertaining the Pasha of that wonderful
place, whose temple I had particularly wished to see. He received us
with much ceremony, and we all went on shore escorted by his guard in
great state, walking through the bazaars accompanied by the wild and
ragged population. But for the soldiers and their whips we could not
have moved a yard. We visited the wonderful temple, the first we had
seen with the ceiling intact, which the colossal pillars were made to
support. I prefer the ruins so open to the sky that the sun may be seen
amongst them. Here, owing to the unbroken ceiling, all was gloom. At
Edfoo I was to see a _whole_ temple with pylons and all, almost in
perfect preservation, and to know the Egyptian temple in its entirety.
How funny our party looked--two English ladies, two little children, and
English maid, guarded by bashi-bazouks, slowly progressing through a
crowd of indescribable dirt and wildness. We looked into an oil mill
where the press was exactly like the wine-presses in Tuscany. You
remember the one I sketched at Signa, the picturesque _Strettojo_ of the
vintage? We poked our noses into the cavernous recesses where gigantic
negroes were dyeing the native cloth a splendid indigo, their black arms
blue to the shoulder. Oh, what colour!
On going back to the dahabieh we all, except myself, had our fortunes
told in a narrow lane where a row of Soudanese fortune-tellers were
squatting with patches of smooth sand before them on which they made the
person interested impress his or her hand. Upon the impression they made
many signs and marks. Everything was quite satisfactory. The children
were to have “pleasant paths in life and _strong loins_.” The maid was
to marry a white man, which was a comfort.
In the evening the Pasha dined on board. He spoke in French, and nothing
could surpass the florid eulogies he bestowed on “his brother, that
lion,” my husband. I saw him depart on his sleek and fat white ass,
which stood quite fourteen hands, and was equipped in Arab trappings of
indigo and dead gold. In the morning I received the Pasha’s presents of
fruit, vegetables, eggs in hundreds, two live turkeys, and a black lamb.
A gorgeous cavass in sky blue and carrying a wand of office was
installed on board for the rest of the voyage to Assouan. There had been
feasting and much thumping of tom-toms and whinings of curious fiddles
on deck during dinner the night before, where the crew were entertaining
the Pasha’s body-guard. My dragoman’s bill next day included these
items: “Trinks and trymbals for the crew”; “hay for the limp.” The poor
black “limp” with his hay was put into the little boat in tow, and I had
to deliver him up, as a matter of course, to the crew a few days later.
Then came Edfoo, whose temple is one of the most conspicuous in Egypt. I
had been on the look-out for its mighty pylons with especial eagerness,
and I was glad that we had time to spend two hours on land while some
repairs were being done on the “_Fostât_.” The Esneh cavass was useful
as well as extremely ornamental, as he kept off the wild crowd in the
village by magical waves of his wand of office, and an occasional thump
on a screaming villager.
[Illustration: AT PHILÆ]
The guard turned out and saluted our party, and altogether things went
very well, and I enjoyed my long-looked-forward-to Edfoo.
Then on board again, with a steady north breeze which, if it had filled
our eyes with sand at Edfoo, was making up for the discomfort by
carrying us in spanking style towards Assouan and the meeting.
After one of our fair-wind nights, when the “_Fostât_” was bowling along
over the lumpy water, I asked the reis if we had come to Comombos. He
made vigorous signs showing we had passed it in the night. “Silsileh?”;
again the welcome backward wave of his arm. That, too, was long passed.
We were getting very near. I noticed the people on the banks were
becoming blacker and there were fewer of them; the mountains had
vanished and were replaced by lion-coloured sand-hills, typically
African. The black rocks looked like sleeping crocodiles.
A faint whisp of smoke presently rose beyond a bend of the river, far
ahead. “What is that?” I asked the dragoman. “English steamer.” Great
excitement. The little armed steamer puffs into sight; some one is
waving a red handkerchief from the turret! “Furl the “_Fostât’s_”
mainsail!” The crew swarm up the spar. _Ding_, _ding_ goes the electric
bell on the gunboat. The meeting is an accomplished fact--we from
Plymouth, he from Wady Halfa. We are soon at Assouan, and while the
“_Fostât_” is being hauled by great gangs of negroes through the
cataract, we are guests of the General in that command on board his
charming dahabieh moored under Philæ. There the solemn rocks echo the
waltzes of the military band and the talk and laughter of our _réunions_
on board the “_Pharaon_.”
If the Egyptian desert answered back in harmonious tones the light of
the sun and moon, what a _crescendo_ of glowing response came from the
Nubian sands! Immediately we crossed the frontier my eyes were surprised
by the golden tone the desert had assumed, and the polished rocks that
studded it had suddenly put on the richest colours granite holds--deep
red and purple, and the black of basalt. It was a new scheme of
colouring. The sunset and the after-glow were still more astonishing
than those of Egypt, the colour of the shadows on the golden sands at
sundown more positive in their limpid colours. One felt looking at the
stars and planets as though one had been lifted to a world nearer to
them than before, so large and clear had they grown even from the
extraordinary clearness they had at Luxor. Oh! land of enchantment, is
it any wonder the Nile is so passionately loved, especially by the
artist, to whom the joy of the eye is supreme? As to worthily painting
the Egyptian landscape, I cannot think any one will ever do it--the
light is its charm, and this light is unattainable. There is one thing
very certain, oil paints are hopelessly “out of it,” and in
water-colours alone can one hope to suggest that light. I soon gave up
oils in Egypt, not only on account of their heaviness, but the miseries
I endured from flies and sand were heart-breaking; your skies are seamed
with the last wanderings and struggles of moribund flies, and coated
with whiffs of sand suddenly flung on them by a desert gust! I was
particularly anxious to get a _souvenir_ of the doorway in the court of
the temple on Philæ Island, where Napoleon’s soldiers engraved their
high-sounding “_Une page d’histoire ne doit pas_,” etc. Unfortunately,
on the day I chose, we had a high wind, a very exasperating ordeal, and
my attempt at oil-sketching this subject was a fiasco. After persevering
with one half-blinded eye open at a time and with sand thickly mixed
with my paints, I saw the panel I had been desperately holding on the
easel hurled to the ground on its buttered side as for a moment I turned
to answer a remark of Mrs. C.’s. She said I bore it angelically. As
since those days lovely Philæ Island is being submerged and the temple
melting away, the poor little panel has become more historically
valuable than I thought it ever would do at the time, and I insert its
replica in water-colours _minus_ the smudges.
Many pleasant hours we spent at Philæ, which, I suppose, is the
culminating point of the Nile’s beauties and marvels. One day, while W.
was gone to Assouan for provisions, I went over with Mrs. C. to the
opposite bank of the river by boat, an imp of a small boy taking upon
himself to escort us. He divested himself of his one garment, which he
carried in a bundle on his head, and swam alongside our “felucca.” Our
approach had been observed from a wild mud hamlet up on the fantastic
rocks, and a bevy of black and brown women came hopping and skipping
down to us. Little shrivelled old hags and wild little young women with
nose rings and anklets, their hair plaited in hundreds of little tails
reeking with castor oil, each little tail ending in a lump of mud.
[Illustration: A “LAMENT” IN THE DESERT]
Mrs. C. asked them to unfasten and display their locks, and in return
let down her own six-foot-long auburn tresses and stood on them to
“astonish the natives.” They danced and wailed in slow cadence, softly
clapping their hands and wagging their heads in admiration as they made
the round of the tall, rosy Englishwoman. There she stood, on her hair,
that trailed on the sand, in a golden halo of sunshine, the grim
hypæthral temple and the huge rocks as background, and surrounded by
little skinny, skipping, half-naked, barbarian women and quite-naked
little children. They turned to me and made signs that I should also let
my hair down. Because I excused myself, the little boy imp, still with
his garment on his head, came forward and took upon himself
condescendingly to explain to the little women, shouting “_Mafeesh_,
_mafeesh_!” (“Nothing, nothing!”) and dismissing me with a wave of his
arm.
From Philæ we soon glided into the Tropics. I say in a letter: “The
moonlight in Nubia also surpasses that of Egypt, and I see in it a light
I never saw before I came to this wonderful land. It is difficult to
describe this light. It is brilliant yet soft; light in darkness; not
like the day; not like the dawn: the sky at full moon is so bright that
only the larger stars are seen; and the yellow sand, the ashen bloom on
the tops of the sand-hills, the various tones of green in palm-tree,
tamarisk, and mimosa keep distinctly their local tints, yet softened and
darkened and changed into a mysterious vision of colour too subtle for
words of mine. Every night Venus and other great planets and stars shed
reflections in the still water like little moons in every part of the
Great Stream wherever one turns.”
W. could not spare the time for lotus-eating under sail, so a
“stern-wheeler” towed us from Philæ to Wady Halfa. It took very little
away from the romance, and the steady progress was very grateful. On
that glassy river, as it was now, we would have been an age getting to
our goal.
I was greatly struck with Korosko, a place which, besides its natural
desolate and most strange appearance, was sad with memories of Gordon.
This was his starting-point as he left the Nile to travel across the
desert to Khartoum, never to return. From a height one can see the black
and grey burnt-up landscape which lonely Gordon traversed. It is a most
repellent tract of desert just there, calcined and blasted. A view I had
of the Nile, southward, from the mountains of Thebes one day, though
bathed in sunshine, has remained most melancholy in my mind, because,
looking towards Khartoum, I thought of the hundreds of my countrymen who
lay buried in already obliterated graves all along those lonely banks,
away, away to the remote horizon and beyond, sacrificed to the
achievement of a great disaster. Others like them have arisen since and
will arise, eager to offer their lives for success or failure, honours
or a nameless grave.
One evening, as the “_Fostât_,” in tow, was skimming through the calm
water with a rippling sound, and we were all sitting on deck, W.
described to us so vividly a memorable night before the fight that put a
stop to hostilities, that I could see the whole scene as though I had
been there. They were out in the desert, the moon was full; the
Dervishes were “sniping” at long range, when afar off was heard a
Highland “lament.” The “sniping” ceased all along the enemy’s line and
dead silence fell upon the night but for the wail of the bagpipes. The
Dervishes seemed to be listening. The “lament” increased in sound, and
presently the Cameron Highlanders approached, bearing, under the Union
Jack, the body of an officer who had died that day of fever, to add yet
another grave to the number that lay at intervals along the shores of
the great river. You should hear the pipes in the desert, as well as on
the mountain-side, to understand them.
“Every phase of the day and night” (letter, 12th January ‘86), “appeals
to me on the Nile, not forgetting those few moments that follow the
after-glow which are like the last sigh of the dying day. The delicacy
of those pure tints is such that one scarcely dares to handle them in
writing. Evening after evening I have watched by the desert death-bed of
the day, looking eastward so as to have the light upon the hills.
“Those tender, sad, pathetic hills, and beyond them the mournful
mountains, possessing nothing,--not a blade of grass, not a lichen, not
a herb; they are absolute paupers amongst mountains, and they might be
in the moon, these derelicts, so bereft are they of all things.
“And yet the light, the atmosphere, give them a consoling beauty. What a
poem might be written to them as they look thus for a minute or two
before the dark-blue pall of night sinks down!”
Wady Sabooah, the “Valley of Lions,” was one of the most striking things
I had seen on this exquisite section of our river voyage. The abrupt
sand-hills held shadows of the most delicate amethyst at noonday which,
combined with the gold of the sunlit parts, produced a delicacy of
vibrating tones which enchanted the eye but saddened the artist’s mind,
recognising as it did the futility of trying to record such things in
paint! But I shall weary you with all this daily rapture, and I will bid
good-bye in these pages to the desert, well named by the Moslems “The
Garden of Allah.” There is no pollution there, and He may walk in His
garden unoffended.
In the first really hot days of March I and the children came home--Wady
Halfa was becoming no place for us, and W. remained with his Brigade
through the weary days of summer, unknown in their exhausted and
horrible listlessness to me who will always think of the Nile as an
earthly paradise. One halt I must make on our way down, at Abu Simbel,
that mysterious rock temple I had longed to see in the first ray of
sunrise, for it faces due east. W., who accompanied us as far as
Assouan, gave orders that our stern-wheeler (the old “_Fostât_” had been
dismissed) should tie up overnight at the temple, and before daylight I
was up and ready. I had packed my water-colours and had only a huge
canvas and oil-paints available. With these I climbed the hill and
waited for the first ray in the wild wind of dawn.
The event was all I hoped for as regards the effect of those “scarlet
shafts” on the four great figures (how many sunrises had they already
awakened to?) “A great cameo,” Miss Amelia Edwards calls that façade at
sunrise in her fascinating book, and that phrase had made me long for
years for this moment. But alas! my canvas acted as a sail before the
wind and nearly carried me into the river, the sand powdered the wet
paint more viciously than ever, and I returned very blue to breakfast.
Still, I had got my “Abu Simbel at Sunrise,” and I insert a water-colour
taken in comfort from the hard-earned but scarcely presentable original.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: ABU SIMBEL AT SUNRISE]
[Illustration]