"Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! We camped last night on the top of a stony
granite hill, and this morning we can see the silver streak of the Nile
with the sweet green verdure along its banks, and the great dam at
Assouan with its cascades of falling water. Such joy! Such a frenzy of
gladness! The people are capering about like demented children. Just
so must the children of Israel have felt when God brought them out of
the wilderness and they saw the promised land before them.
"Black Zogal galloped into the town at daybreak and has just galloped
back, bringing a great company of Sheikhs and Notables--Egyptians,
chiefly--who have come up the Nile to meet us, but many are Bedouins
from the wild East country running to the Red Sea. Such fine faces and
stately figures! Most of them living in tents, but all dressed like
princes. They are saluting Ishmael as the 'Deliverer,' the 'Guided
One,' the 'Redeemer,' and even the 'Lord Isa,' and _he is not reproving
them_!
"But I cannot think of Ishmael now. I feel as if I were coming out of
chaos and entering into the world. If anything has happened to you I
shall know it soon. Shall I be able to control myself? I shall! I
must!
"Oh, how my heart beats and swells! I can scarcely breathe. But you
are alive, I am sure you are, and I shall hear from you presently. I
shall also escape from this false position and sleep at last, as the
Arabs say, with both eyes shut. I must stop. My tent has to be struck.
The camp is already in movement.
* * * * *
"One word. We were plunging into Assouan, through the cool bazaars with
their blazing patches of sunlight and sudden blots of shadow when I saw
your Sheikh sidling up to me. He slipped your letter into my hand and
is to come back in a moment for mine. I am staying at a khan. Oh, God
bless and love you! El Hamdullillah! My dear, my dear, my dear!
"HELENA."
*CHAPTER IX*
I
"THE NILE
"(_between Assouan and Luxor_).
"OH, MY DEAR, DEAREST GORDON,--Mohammed's rapture when he received from
the angel the 'holy Koran' was a mild emotion compared to mine when I
read your letter. Perhaps I ought to be concerned about the contents of
it, but I am not--not a bit of me! Having found out what the Grand Cadi
is doing, you will confound his 'knavish tricks.'
"Never mind, my dear old boy, what the officials are saying. They'll
soon see whether you have been a bad Englishman, and in any case you
cannot compete with the descendants of _all_ the creeping things that
came out of the Ark.
"Don't worry about me either. Unparalleled as my position is, I am
quite capable of taking care of myself, for I find that in the decalogue
you delivered to your devoted slave on the day she saw you first, there
was one firm and plain commandment, 'Thou shalt have no other love but
me.' I dare say, being a woman, I am faithless to the first instinct of
my sex in telling you this, but I have no time for 'female' fooleries,
however delicious, and be bothered to them anyway!
"As you see, I did not run away from Ishmael's camp on reaching the
railway terminus, and the reason was that you said you were writing to
me again at Luxor. Hence, I was compelled to come on, for of course I
would not have lost that letter, or let it go astray, for all the value
of the British Empire.
"I was delighted with my day at Assouan though, with its glimpses of a
green, riotous, prodigal, ungovernable Nature after the white nakedness
of the wilderness: with its flashlight peep at civilised frivolities,
its hotels for European visitors, its orchestras playing 'When we are
mar-ried,' its Egyptian dragomans with companies of tourists tailing
behind them, its dahabeahs and steam launches, and, above all, its
groups of English girls, maddeningly pretty and full of the intoxication
of life, yet pretending to be consumed by a fever of self-culture and
devoured by curiosity about mummies and tombs.
"It's no use--these pink-white faces after the brown and black are a joy
to behold, and when I came upon a bunch of them chattering and laughing
like linnets ('Frocks up, children!' as they crossed a puddle made by
the watermen) I could hardly help kissing them all round, they looked so
sweet and so homelike.
"You were right about the boats. A whole fleet was waiting for us,
which was a mercy, for the animals were utterly done up after the desert
journey, and next morning we embarked under the strenuous supervision of
a British Bimbashi who looked as large as if he had just won the battle
of Waterloo.
"Of course the people were following Ishmael like a swarm of bees, and,
much to my discomfiture, I came in for a share of reflected glory from a
crowd of visitors who were evidently wondering whether I was a
reincarnation of Lady Hester Stanhope or the last Circassian slave-wife
of the Ameer of Afghanistan. One horrible young woman cocked her camera
and snapped me--American, of course, a sort of half-countrywoman of
yours, sir, shockingly stylish, good-looking and attractive, with frills
and furbelows that gave a far view of Regent Street and the Rue de la
Paix, and made me feel so dreadfully shabby in my Eastern dress and veil
that I wanted to slap her.
"We are now two days down the river, five hundred to a thousand
boat-loads of us, our peaked white sails looking like a vast flight of
seagulls and our slanting bamboo masts like an immense field of ripe
corn swaying in the wind. It is a wonderful sight, this flotilla of
'feluccas' going slowly down the immemorial stream, and when one thinks
of it in relation to its object it is almost magnificent--a nation going
up to its millennium!
"They have rigged up a sort of cabin for me in the bow of one of the
high-prowed boats, with shelter and shade included, so that I still have
some seclusion in which to write my 'Journal,' in spite of this
pestilent Arab woman who is always watching me. In the hold outside
there must be a hundred men at least, and at the stern there are a few
women who bake durali cakes on a charcoal stove, making it a marvel to
me that they do not set fire to the boat a dozen times a day.
"The wind being fair and the river in full flood--seven men's height
above the usual level, and boiling and bubbling and tearing down like a
torrent--we sail from daylight to dark, but at night we are hauled up
and moored to the bank, so that the people may go ashore to sleep if
they are so minded.
"Oh, these delicious mornings! Oh, these white, enchanting nights! The
wide, smooth, flowing water, reflecting the tall palms, the banks, the
boats themselves; in the morning a soft brown, at noon a cool green, at
sunset a glowing rose, at night a pearly grey! Then the broad blue sky
with its blaze of lemon and yellow and burnished gold as the sun goes
down; the rolling back of the darkness as the dawn appears and the
sweeping up of the crimson wings of day! If I dared only give myself up
to the delight of it! But I daren't, I daren't, having something to do
here, so my dear one says, though what the deuce and the dickens it is
(except to stay until I receive that letter) I cannot conceive."