A TRIP UP THE NILE
One fine morning, some two weeks after my introduction to Tom, I left my
post in the consul’s household, and set about making plans for a journey
up the Nile. For I knew that if I once journeyed up or down this river
with open eyes, I would know all there is to know about this long and
narrow country.
I left Cairo on foot, and, crossing the Nile, turned southward along a
ridge of shifting sand beyond the village of Gizeh. There was an
irrigating ditch near the ridge. Scores of natives, moving with the
regularity of machinery, were ceaselessly dipping the water that gives
life to the fields of Egypt. Between the canal and the sparkling Nile,
groups of Egyptian farmers, called fellahs, deaf to the fiery sunshine,
set out sugar-cane, or clawed the soil of the dry plain. On the desert
wind rode the never-ceasing squawk of the Egyptian water-wheel.
Beyond the Pyramids of Sakkara I found shelter in the palm groves where
the ancient city of Memphis once stood, and took my noonday sleep on the
statue of King Rameses which lies at full length there. When I was
returning to the sandy road, a whole village of dark-faced people came
running up, and tried to head me off and make me give them baksheesh.
They forced me to run a gauntlet of outstretched arms. It is the
national song of Egypt, this cry of baksheesh. Workmen at their labor,
women bound for market, children rooting in the streets, drop everything
to crowd around the traveler who may be coaxed to “sprinkle iron” among
them. Even the unclothed infant astride a mother’s shoulder thrusts
forth a dimpled hand to the passing white man, with a gurgle of
“sheesh.”
[Illustration: “Along the way shadoofs were ceaselessly dipping up the
water that gives life to the fields of Egypt.”]
As darkness came on I reached the town of Magoonza. I spent the night in
a railway station. The next day I took the third-class coach, and halted
near noonday in the wind-swept village of Beni Suef. A young Englishman
who was called “Bromley, Pasha, Inspector of Irrigation,” agreed to meet
me on the bank of the canal beyond the village. Long after dark he
appeared on horseback, attended by two natives who carried flaming
torches. After being ferried across the canal, he led the way toward his
_dahabeah_ (winged house-boat), which was anchored at the shore of the
Nile.
“I fancied I’d find something to put you at,” he explained, turning his
horse over to a jet-black servant who popped up out of the darkness.
“But I didn’t, and the last train’s gone. I’ll buy you a ticket to
Assiut in the morning.”
“I have a ticket,” I put in.
“Oh,” said the Englishman. “Well, you’ll stay with me here to-night,
anyway.”
He led the way across the plank into his floating residence. The change
from the windy plain of African sand to this floating palace was as
strange as if Bromley, Pasha, had been the owner of Aladdin’s lamp.
Richly turbaned servants in spotless white gowns sprang forward to greet
their master; to place a chair for him; to pull off his riding-boots and
to put on his slippers; to slip the Cairo “daily” into his hands; and
then to speed noiselessly away to finish preparing the evening meal.
Breakfast over next morning, I returned to the village, and left on the
south-bound train. The third-class coach was packed with natives huddled
together with unmanageable bundles. Three gloomy Arabs, who had no room
to squat on the floor, perched themselves on a bench at the side of the
car like fowls on a roost. The air that swept through the open car was
almost wintry. Only the faces of the men were uncovered. The women,
wrapped like mummies in fold after fold of black gowns, crouched on the
floor, so motionless that one could hardly tell which were women and
which were bundles.
At every station peddlers of food swarmed around the train. Dates,
boiled eggs, baked fish, oranges, and soggy bread-cakes—enough to feed
an army—were thrust upon all who dared to look outside. From the
neighboring fields came workmen loaded down with freshly cut bundles of
sugar-cane. They looked like a forest in motion. Three great canes, as
long and unmanageable as bamboo fishing-rods, sold for a piaster, and
almost every native in the car bought at least a half dozen.
The canes were broken into pieces two feet long; and each native,
grasping a piece in his hands, bit into it and, jerking his head from
side to side like a bulldog, tore off a strip. Then, with a suckling
that could be heard above the roar of the train, he drew out the juice
and cast the pulp on the floor about him. The pulp dried rapidly, and by
noonday the floor of the car was carpeted with a sugar-cane mat several
inches thick.
I spent the night at the largest city in upper Egypt—Assiut. Long before
daylight next morning I rose and groped my way back through the darkness
to the station. A ticket to Luxor took less than half my money. I
boarded the train and once more started south. At break of day the
railway crossed to the eastern bank of the river, and at the next
station the train stood motionless while engineer, trainmen, and
passengers went outside and performed their morning prayers in the
desert sand. Beyond, the chimneys of great sugar factories puffed forth
dense clouds of smoke, and at every stopping-place shivering small boys
offered for sale cone-shaped lumps of sugar, dark-brown in color.
The voice of the south spoke more clearly with every mile. We were now
coming to the district where rain and dew were unknown. The desert grew
more dry and parched; the whirling sand became finer, until it sifted
through one’s very clothing. The natives, already of a darker shade than
the cinnamon-colored Cairene, grew blacker and blacker. The chilling
wind of two days before turned warm, then piping hot; and before we drew
into Luxor, Egypt lay, as of old, under her glittering covering of
gleaming sunshine.
Before me were two great European hotels filled with tourists. And close
by the station was an inn for penniless wanderers. It was a tumble-down
shack wherein, dreaming away his old age over a cigarette, sat Pietro
Saggharia. Pietro was a wanderer once. His stories of “the road,”
collected during forty years of roaming about in Africa, and told in
almost any language the listener may choose, are to be had for a kind
word.
I left my knapsack in Pietro’s keeping, and struck off toward Karnak.
Tourists go to Karnak to see what is left of many temples there. The
principal temple is that built in honor of Ammon, a being that the
Egyptians once worshiped. Ammon was an imaginary creature with the body
of a man and the head and horns of a ram. He was supposed to be very
wise and able to answer any question asked of him. His temple was once
magnificent, having immense columns, carvings, sculptures, and
paintings, placed there by his worshipers.
I did not expect to see the inside of the famous temples, for I had no
ticket. The price of such a ticket is little short of a vagabond’s
fortune. I journeyed to Karnak, therefore, with my mind made up to be
content with a view of her row of sphinxes and a walk around her outer
walls.
Natives swarmed about me, calling for “baksheesh.” Before I had shaken
off the last screeching youth I came upon a great iron gate that shut
out the un-ticketed, and paused to peer through the bars. On the ground
before the gate squatted a sleek, well fed native. He arose and told me
he was the guard, but made no attempt to drive me off.
As I turned away he said in Arabic: “You don’t see much from here. Have
you already seen the temple? Or perhaps you have no ticket?”
“No; no ticket,” I answered in Arabic. “Therefore I must stay outside.”
“Ah! Then you are no tourist?” smiled the native. “Are you English?”
“Aywa,” I answered, for the Arabic term “Inglesi” means all who speak
that language; “but no tourist, merely a working-man.”
“Ah,” sighed the guard: “too bad you are an Inglesi, then; for if you
spoke French the superintendent who has the digging done is a good
friend of working-men. But he speaks no English.”
“Where shall I find him?”
“In the office just over the hill, there.”
I went in the direction pointed out, and came upon a small office before
which an aged European sat motionless in a rocking-chair. About him were
scattered many kinds of statues, broken and whole.
“Are you the superintendent, sir?” I asked in French.
The aged Frenchman frowned, but answered not a word. I repeated the
question in a louder voice.
“Va t’en!” shrieked the old man, grasping a heavy cane that leaned
against his chair, and shaking it feebly at me. “Go away! You’re a
beggar. I know you are.”
I told him I had mistaken him for the superintendent. The aged Frenchman
watched me with the half-closed eyes of a cat, clinging to his stick.
“Why do you want to see the superintendent?” he demanded.
“To work, if he has any. If not, to see the temple.”
“You will not ask him for money?”
“Certainly not.”
“Well! It is there. Maghmood!” he coughed.
A native appeared at the door of the shanty.
“My son is the superintendent,” said the old man, showing a maze of
wrinkles meant for a smile. “Follow Maghmood.”
The son, a polite young Frenchman clothed in the thinnest of white
trousers and an open shirt, was bowed over a small stone covered with
ancient Egyptian figures. I told him why I had come.
“Work?” he replied. “No. Unfortunately, the society allows us to hire
only natives. I wish I might have a few Europeans to look after the
digging. But I am pleased to find a workman interested in the ruins. You
are as free to go inside as if you had a ticket. But it is midday now.
How do you escape a sunstroke, with only that cap? You had better sit
here in the shade until the heat dies down a bit.”
I assured him that the Egyptian sun did not trouble me, and he stepped
to the door to shout an order to the well fed gate-keeper just out of
sight over the hill. That official grinned knowingly as I appeared,
unlocked the gate, and, pushing back with one hand several small black
boys who were racing about, let me in to the noonday quiet of the forest
of pillars.
As the shadows began to grow long, a flock of sheep rushed into the
sacred place, and, stumbling through the ruins, awoke the sleeping
echoes with their bleating. They were trying to get to their shepherds,
who were calling to them in voices that sounded like phonographs. After
they had left, there came more peaceful beings weighed down with cameras
and note-books. Everybody was interested in one lively corner of the
place. There, in the latest hollow dug, an army of men and boys toiled
at the machines that raised the sand and the water which had been poured
into the pit to loosen the soil. Other natives, naked, groped in the mud
at the bottom, eager to win the small reward offered to the discoverer
of each ancient treasure buried in the earth.
One such prize was captured in the afternoon. A small boy, half buried
in mud and water, suddenly stopped wallowing about, and uttered a shrill
shriek of joy. He came dangerously near being trampled out of sight by
his fellow workmen. In a twinkling half the band, amid a mighty roar of
shouting and splashing, was tugging at some heavy object hidden from
view in the mud.
They raised it at last—a woman’s figure in blue stone, about four feet
in length. The news of the discovery was quickly carried to the shanty
on the hill. In a great white helmet that made him look like a walking
toad-stool, the superintendent hurried down to the edge of the pit, and
gave orders that the statue be carried to a level space, where a crowd
of excited tourists lay in wait with open note-books. There it was
carefully washed with sponges, while the tourists stood gazing eagerly
at it. Then it was placed on a car of the tiny railway laid among the
ruins. Crowds of natives grasped the long rope attached to the car, and,
moving in time to a wild Arabic song of rejoicing, dragged the new find
through the temple and placed it at the feet of the aged Frenchman.
As evening fell I turned back to my lodging-place. Several lodgers had
gathered, but neither they nor Pietro could tell me anything about the
land across the Nile, which I meant to visit next day.
There is another ruined temple near Luxor. Although it is a mile north
of Karnak, it was once connected with the temples of that town by an
avenue bordered on either side with ram-headed sphinxes. The temple is
of sandstone, and until the digging for it was begun in 1883 it was
entirely buried in sand and rubbish. About it six enormous statues of an
Egyptian king are still standing.
No one at the inn could tell me anything about the ruins that the
tourists came to see. The Greek keeper of the inn knew nothing of the
ruins of Thebes except the story of a man who had once stopped at his
hotel. This man had tried to make the excursion, and had returned wild
with thirst, mumbling a confused tale of having floundered about in a
sea of sand.
“For our betters,” said Pietro, in the softened Italian in which he
chose to address me, “for the rich ladies and gentlemen who can ride on
donkeys and be guarded by many guides, a visit to Thebes is very well.
But common folk like you and me! Bah! We are not wanted there. They
would send no army to look for _us_ if we disappeared in the desert.
Besides, you must have a ticket to see anything.”
I rose at dawn the next morning, and hastened away to the bazaars to get
food for the day’s trip—bread-cakes for hunger and oranges for thirst. A
native boatman tried to charge me ten piasters for rowing me to the
other side; but when I refused to pay him that much, he accepted one
instead, and set me down on the western bank. The shrill screams of a
troop of donkey-boys, who were crossing the river with their animals,
greeted the rising sun. A moment later a party of tourists, wearing
veils and helmets, stepped ashore from a steamer, and, mounting the
animals, sped away into the trackless desert. It was an interesting
sight. The half-mile train of donkeys that trailed off across the desert
was bestridden by every kind of European, from thin scholars and slender
maidens to heavy women and mighty masses of men, who had to beat their
animals continually to make them keep up with the rest.
The sharp climb to the Tomb of the Kings was more difficult to an
overburdened ass than to a man on foot. I kept pace with the band, and
even got ahead of the stragglers, often stopping to shake the sand from
my shoes. Even though the jeering donkey-boys kept pushing me into the
narrow gorges between the rocks, it was I who reached the gate first. An
Arabian policeman was on hand to help the keeper take tickets. But he
spoke Italian, and was so delighted to find that he could talk with me
without being understood by the rest of the crowd that he gave me
permission to enter.
I was now so used to such places that I was able to find my way about
alone. I left the party and struck southward toward a steep cliff of
stone and sand. To go past this, those on donkeys had to make a circuit
of many miles; but I made up my mind to climb over it. Clinging to sharp
edges of rock, I began the climb. Half way up, a roar of voices sounded
from the plain below. I felt for a safer hand-hold and looked down.
About the policeman at the foot of the cliff was grouped the party of
Europeans, gazing upward—certain now, no doubt, of their earlier belief
that I was a madman who had escaped from his guardians. Before they had
gone one fourth the distance around the mountain, I had reached the top,
while they had still many a weary mile to travel.
The view that spread out from the top of that mountain was one that
might have awakened the envy of the tourists below. North and south
stretched sand-colored hills, deep and brilliant vermilion in the
valleys, the highest peaks splashed blood-red by the sunshine. Below lay
the plain of Thebes, its thick green carpet weighted down by a few farm
villages and the great heavy playthings of an ancient people. As I
looked off before me, an old saying came to my mind: “Egypt is the
Nile.” Clinging tightly to the life-giving river, easily seen in that
clear air for a hundred miles, the slender hand of Egypt looked like a
spotless ribbon of richest green, following every curve of the Father of
Waters. All else to the east and to the west was nothing but an endless
sea of choking yellow sand.
[Illustration: The Egyptian fellah dwells in a hut of reeds and mud.]
I climbed down, and spent the afternoon among the ruins at the edge of
the plain. I had examined almost everything before the tourists, worn
out and drooping from a day in the saddle, overtook me, and I went on
before them to the bank of the river. There they shook me off, however.
The guides in charge of the party snarled in anger when I offered to pay
for crossing the river in the company boat. There was nothing else for
me to do, much as I disliked the idea, but to be ferried over with the
donkeys.
I left next day on the train for Assuan, and reached that place in time
to hear the afternoon concert. I was now nearly six hundred miles from
the last “hotel” for homeless wanderers, and I was again obliged to go
to a native inn and to put up with the companionship of half-savage
Arabians. But my bedroom on the roof was airy, and the bawling of the
priest who stood on the balcony of a Mohammedan church steeple calling
out the hour of prayer awoke me early enough to see the glorious sunrise
of a new day.
Some miles beyond Assuan lay the new dam, where there was work for any
one who wanted it. Just how far, I could not know; neither did I know
that it was connected with the village by rail. From morning till high
noon I clawed my way along the ragged rocks overhanging the weakened
falls of the river, before I came in sight of the great dam that had
robbed them of their waters.
This dam was built by the British for the purpose of irrigating the
surrounding country. Among the rocks in what was once the bed of the
Nile sat a dozen wooden shanties for the workmen. But I had arrived too
late. The superintendent of the work told me that the dam had been
completed that very day, and he and his men were going back to England
in the morning.
I still had left fifty piasters, so I decided to push on up the Nile.
I came to the end of the railway. But steamers left twice a week from
Shellal, a town above the dam. At the landing a swarm of natives were
loading a rickety old barge, and a native agent was dozing behind the
bars of a home-made ticket-office.
“Yes,” he yawned, in answer to my question; “there is to-night leaving
steamer. Soon be here. The fare is two hundred fifty piasters.”
“Two hundred!” I gasped. “Why, that must be first-class.”
“Yes, very first-class. But gentleman not wish travel second-class?”
“Certainly not. Give me a third-class ticket.”
The Egyptian jumped to his feet and stared at me through the bars.
“What say gentleman? Third-class! No! No! Not go third-class.
Second-class one hundred thirty piasters very poor.”
“But there is a third-class, isn’t there?”
“Third-class go. Forty piasters. But only for Arabs. White man never go
third-class. Not give food, not give sleep, not ride on steamer; ride on
barge there, tied to steamer with string. All gentlemen telling me must
have European food. Gentlemen not sleep with boxes and horses on barge?
Very Arab; very bad smell.”
“Yes, I know; but give me a third-class ticket,” I interrupted, counting
out forty piasters.
The native blinked, sat down sadly on his stool, and with a sigh reached
for a ticket. Suddenly his face lighted up, and he pushed my money back
to me.
“If white man go third-class,” he crowed, “must have pass. Not can sell
ticket without.”
“But how can I get a pass?”
“There is living English colonel with fort the other side of Assuan. Can
get pass from him.”
I hurried away to the railroad station. The fare to Assuan was a few
cents, and one train went each way during the afternoon. But it made the
up trip first! I struck out on foot down the railroad, raced through
Assuan, and tore my way to the fort, which was three miles below the
village. A squad of black men dressed in khaki uniforms flourished their
bayonets uncomfortably near my ribs. I bawled out my errand in Arabic,
and an officer waved the guard aside.
“The colonel is sleeping now,” he said; “come this evening.”
“But I want a pass for this evening’s steamer.”
“We cannot wake the colonel.”
“Is there no one else who can sign the order?”
“Only the colonel. Come this evening.”
Pass or no pass, I would not be cheated out of a journey into the
Soudan. I threw my knapsack over my shoulder again, and pranced off for
the third time on the ten-mile course between Assuan and Shellal. Night
was falling as I rushed through Assuan. When I stepped aside to let the
down train pass, my legs wabbled under me like two rubber tires from
which half the air had escaped. The screech of a steamboat whistle
resounded through the Nile valley as I came in sight of the lights of
Shellal. I broke into a run, falling now and then on the uneven ground.
The sky was clear, but there was no moon, and the night was black in
spite of the stars. The deck-hands were already casting off the shore
lines of the barge, and the steamer was churning the shallow water. I
pulled off my coat, threw it over my head after the fashion in which the
Egyptian fellah wears his gown after nightfall, and dashed toward the
ticket office.
[Illustration: Soudan steamer on the Nile: A Soudanese cavalry soldier
with whom I shared a blanket on the way up to Wady Haifa.]
“A ticket to Wady Haifa,” I gasped in Arabic, trying to imitate the
timid tone of the Egyptian peasant.
For once, I saw a native hurry. The agent glanced at the money, snatched
a ticket, and thrust it through the bars, crying: “Hurry up; the boat is
go—” But the white hand that clutched the ticket showed him who I was.
He sprang to the door with a howl: “Stop! It’s the faranchee! Come
back—”
I caught up my knapsack as I ran, made a flying leap at the slowly
moving barge, and landed on all fours under the feet of a troop of
horses.
An Arab who stood grinning at me as I picked myself up seemed to be the
only man on the craft who had noticed how suddenly I had boarded the
vessel. He was dressed in native clothes, save for a tightly buttoned
khaki jacket which he wore over his gown. His legs were bare, his feet
thrust into red slippers. About his head was wound a large turban of red
and white checks: on each cheek were the scars of three long gashes; in
the top of his right ear hung a large silver ring.
The scars and ring showed him to be a Nubian; the jacket, an officer of
cavalry; the bridle in his hand showed him to be care-taker of the
horses; and of course his name was Maghmood!
We became great chums, Maghmood and I, before the journey ended. By
night we shared the same blanket; by day he would have divided the lunch
in his saddle-bag with me had I been without food. But the black men who
trooped down to each landing with baskets of native food kept me
supplied with all I needed. Maghmood told me tales of the time he was in
the battle-field with Kitchener, in a clear-cut Arabic that even a
_faranchee_ could understand; and, except for the five periods each day
when he stood barefoot at his prayers, he was as pleasant a companion as
any one from the Western world could have been.
When morning broke I climbed a rickety ladder to the upper deck. It was
so closely packed from rail to rail with Arabs huddled together that a
poodle could not have found room to sit on his haunches. I climbed still
higher, and came out upon the roof of the barge. No one else was there.
From that height I could view the vast moving picture of the Nile.
[Illustration: Arab passengers on the Nile steamer. Except when saying
their prayers, they scarcely move once a day.]
There was nothing growing on its banks. The fertile strips of green fed
by the dippers and the squawking waterwheels had been left behind.
Except for a few tiny oases, the desert had pushed its way to the very
water’s edge, here sloping down in beaches of the softest sand, there
falling sheer into the stream in rugged, rocky cliffs. Yet somewhere in
this yellow wilderness a hardy people found a living. Now and then a
dark-faced peasant waved a hand or a tattered flag from the shore, and
the steamer ran her nose high up on the beach to pick up the bale of
produce that he rolled down the slope. At every landing a troop of dark
barbarians sprang up from a sandy nowhere, making in the gorgeous
sunlight wild-looking shadows as black as their leathery skins.
We tied up at Wady Haifa after nightfall. I landed the next morning. In
two days I saw everything there was to see in Wady Haifa, and decided to
return to Cairo.
On a Monday morning I boarded the steamer _Cleopatra_ as a deck
passenger, and drifted lazily down the Nile for five days, landing here
and there with the tourists of the upper deck to visit a temple or a mud
village. In Cairo, at the Asile Rudolph, Captain Stevenson welcomed me
with open arms. A day later I called on the superintendent of the
railway, and, armed with a pass to Port Said, bade the capital farewell.