MAC TOURS IN COMFORT
Mac sighed appreciatively. If Egypt was to be seen, this was
undoubtedly the way to see it. On the whole it had been an exceedingly
profitable little bit of diplomacy, coupled with good luck, that had
attached him to a party of distinguished people, whose privilege it was
to be shown Egypt as the Government chose to show it. He lay
comfortably in his bed smoking. Travelling in this manner appealed to
him. His first tastes of Egyptian railway travelling, in dirty,
clanking boxes, which required disinfecting, had not been pleasant.
Now, from the darkened cabin of a saloon car on the Cairo-Luxor express
de luxe, he watched the fleeting vista of moonlit palms, sleeping
villages, and silhouetted hills.
He had left New Zealand some six months before with the intention of
slaying Germans, not of touring in luxury in Egypt, but he was not
averse to these interim enjoyments. The war could wait, and anyhow at
that particular moment it was hardly showing any inclination of
stopping, and neither was Zeitoun Camp a place of unmixed blessings.
Arrived at this state of mental satisfaction, he threw the remnants of
his cigarette out of the window and went to sleep.
When he awoke, they were rattling over a Nile bridge, and the sun shone
full in upon him. The early morning scene of industrious blue-robed
fellaheen at work in the green fields, the graceful palms, desert
hills, and blue sky thrilled the one artistic fibre which had strayed
into his soul. He shaved at leisure, bathed luxuriously, dressed, and
met the other four members of the party in the saloon for breakfast.
Towards the end of the meal they steamed into Luxor, where once stood
the ancient and wonderful Theban capital.
Here many days were passed, investigating tombs and temples of all
shapes and sizes; great and wonderful hieroglyphics were explained,
though these left the trooper cold. They rode on donkeys deep into the
deserts, followed by Sudanese guards on fine Arab steeds.
From Luxor they duly departed in the direction of Assuan. The direct
distance was not over-long, but the day was blazing hot, the railway
was badly constructed, and the sand filtered steadily into the cars.
It was a comic-opera railway, this narrow-gauge line. The contract for
its construction was let at an exceedingly profitable rate per mile to
a French company. More miles meant more money, so naturally they spun
the thing out and consequently for no apparent reason, the line zigzags
across perfectly level stretches of desert.
Assuan at last. Great nabobs bowed; Mac saluted. The honoured guests
would take the State gharries to their hotel? No? Walk! Impossible!
Great people did not walk. It took much gentle persuasion to convey to
the Mahmoudieh--the Governor of the Province--that the guests wished to
take exercise, now that the cool of the evening was come. His
Excellency was a gentleman of portly proportions, who, at some other
period, may have walked. Despite his dimensions, he was agile and
graceful in his sweeping salaams; when he spoke he emphasized every
word with an appropriate sweep of the arm, and his eyebrows arched and
his eyes bulged in superlative, ecstatic moments. The tassel of his
tarboosh, a little red inverted flowerpot capping the summit, gyrated
violently in moments of excitement. Altogether he was a mighty person.
Perceiving this, the five great ones from the far south paid court to
him, addressed him "Your Excellency this" and "Your Excellency that";
and paid tribute to his lands, to his people, and his province, and
expressed a desire to see his wives. The Mahmoudieh visibly swelled
with pleasure.
Assuan was duly investigated. Much like Luxor, it consisted of a
terrace along the river-bank, of hotels, some clean and comfortable,
some Greek; foreign consulates and banks. Gardens, shaded by palms and
lebbak-trees, made this portion of the town quite habitable. Behind,
on the rising sand-dunes, lay the crowded, stifling mass of native
dwellings, to visit which one's heart must be strong. Bazaars might be
artistic and unique, but as their quaintness and picturesqueness
increased so also did the odours of garlic, the uncleanliness, and the
flies in their myriads.
Time passed pleasantly in Assuan, though at length Mac thought they had
about exhausted most of its possibilities. There were mosques, temples
and bazaars; there was a wild race of desert Bisharin, whose living was
precarious in those days of war, since they had existed by dancing
weird, wild dances for the enlightenment of tourists; there was a
museum, rather a mouldy place like their kind, where were relics of
ages untold, and, much to Mac's amusement, a mummified sheep. He
thought the New Zealand method of freezing much more practicable.
At length, one morning, ere the mist wraiths had vanished, they crawled
slowly southwards across the rich golden sand of the lower Sudanese
desert. It was pleasantly bracing and clear in the early desert
morning, and Mac felt light-hearted and happy, as he gazed across the
distant featureless dunes of sand. Successfully accomplishing a
non-stop run of twenty miles in an hour and a half, they arrived at
Shellal, a village of a few mud huts and a station, a jetty with a
steamer or two, which took travellers farther to the south, to Wadi
Haifa and Khartoum. About the place itself there was little of
interest; it was a one-horse show with a few Arabs, Bedouins and
Sudanese, many flea-bitten mongrels and clouds of flies. But this
island-studded expanse of water was the great Assuan Dam. The gates
had been closed at this season for about a month, and the rising tide
had just reached the floor of the beautiful Temple of Isis, which
stood, half a mile away, perfectly reflected in the calm waters. They
wheezed away over to it in a steam pinnace, got temporarily snagged on
the top of a stray pillar, and eventually disembarked from their
hissing, modern contraption at the very portals, where oft times
Cleopatra and her suite were wont to enter from their state barges.
Mac's rather hazy notions of that lady wrapped her in a halo of
romance, and now he walked the lovely aisles which she had trod. Was
it, he thought, worth while gradually to spoil this wonderful building
for the sake of lucre from twentieth century Egypt?
From the old they went to the new, landing at the eastern end of the
great granite wall that bars the Nile at the head of the foaming first
cataract. Natives pushed them in trollies along the top of the mile
wall. Water roared in great white jets through the sluices, tempering
the blistering heat of the midday hours. It was a wonderful work, this
dam, a great peaceful desert lake above and a turbulent flood below.
They descended by a flight of locks to the quieter water, and steamed
ten or fifteen miles down stream between many islands of red granite,
smoothly polished by the rushing waters of countless centuries. Back
again at Assuan, they embarked on a luxurious river steamer, the
_Sakkara_, and immediately cast off, for down river.
This method of seeing the country took a lot of beating, meditated Mac,
as he lounged back in a low chair on the cool deck, with his sleeves
rolled up, smoking a cigar. The life of the Nile river-bank was deeply
interesting, with a slightly varying background of green fields of
berseem, stately palms and rocky desert hills. How cool the palms
looked, but he knew from experience that the degree of shade ascribed
to them in romantic novels didn't exist in real life. Lulled by the
steady reverberations of the paddle-wheels, conscious internally of a
satisfying lunch and good wine, he fell asleep. When he awoke, they
were manoeuvring carefully up to the bank, and black sailors in Jack
Tar uniform quickly extemporized a landing out of planks.
Drawn up on top of the bank, brightly polished and perspiring, stood a
line of dusky soldiers, presenting arms. At the end of the gang-plank,
his portliness exceeded only by his stateliness, was the great
potentate His Excellency the Mahmoudieh of Assuan. With sweeping
obeisances, he greeted each one in a manner only befitting those who
held his provinces in such deep respect. His demeanour demanded rather
a setting of pillared palace and crimson velvet than a background of
castor-oil bushes and sugar-cane. But he did things properly, did the
Mahmoudieh, showed them Kom Ombo Temple, with all the dignity of the
proprietor, took them to his sugar-mills in his best donkey-drawn
tram-car, and offered them almost everything in his dominions.
Finally, when they re-embarked farther down stream, they warmly bade
farewell to the old boy, told him emphatically of the unapproachability
of his Province, and bowed and waved handkerchiefs until beyond a bend
in the river they lost sight of his memorable shape.
That night the steamer lay moored to the bank near the native town of
Edfu. The skipper was considerably concerned, as he explained with
violent gesticulations, at the possibility of being stranded on the
morrow, as the season of low Nile was at hand. To Mac a day or two in
the middle of the river was a matter of little moment. The quarters
were comfortable, and Zeitoun Camp was no place towards which to hurry.
So, unmoved by the skipper's anxieties, he retired to the lower deck,
and praised the engines to the Sudanese engineer until that gentleman
beamed with pride and his teeth glistened white in the dusk.
In the early hours soon after dawn, they went on donkeys to the Temple
of Edfu. The morning was mysterious and foreboding. Over the whole
country a weird silence reigned and wrapped the towering walls of the
ancient temple in eeriness; there were no clouds, but the sun was like
a great red moon, and all the landscape enveloped in an orange gloom.
They rode in silence, awed strangely by Nature's will. Animals were
restive and gloomy too. They returned to breakfast aboard when the
steamer cast off, and proceeded down river. Soon a hot breath of wind
came from the south, on which great columns of sand swept over the
desert. The gale increased, puffs blew as from a fiery furnace; the
sun became obscured altogether, and soon also the river banks. Bored
by the gloom of his fellow-voyagers and depressed, Mac betook himself
to his state-room, and went to sleep. He woke for lunch, went once
more to sleep, awoke again in the evening when Luxor was reached, and
hastened through the squalid streets to board the saloon car for Cairo.
Even in the gale and the fog of sand the skipper had not managed to
find a convenient mud-bank on which to ground his steamer, and Mac told
him he didn't think he was much of a sport.
He had enjoyed Upper Egypt, especially journeying in so comfortable a
manner, but, after all, it wouldn't be bad fun seeing the boys again,
even if they were at Zeitoun Camp.