WE are giving our minds to a name for our dahabeëh. The owners have
desired us to christen it, and the task is getting heavy. Whatever
we are doing; guiding a donkey through the mazes of a bazaar; eating
oranges at the noon breakfast; watching the stream of color and
fantastic apparel, swaying camels and dashing harem-equipage with
running saïses and outriding eunuchs, flowing by the hotel; following
a wedding procession in its straggling parade, or strolling vacantly
along, knocked, jostled, evaded by a dozen races in a dozen minutes and
lost in the whirl, color, excitement of this perpetual masquerade, we
are suddenly struck with, “what shall we call that boat?”
We want a name that is characteristic of the country and expressive
of our own feelings, poetic and not sentimental, sensible and not
common-place. It seems impossible to suggest a good name that is not
already borne by a dahabeëh on the river—names such as the Lotus, the
Ibis, the Gazelle, Cleopatra, Zenobia, names with an Eastern flavor. And
we must have not only a name for the boat, but a motto or device for our
pennant, or “distinguisher flag,” as the dragoman calls the narrow fifty
feet long strip of bunting that is to stream from the forward yard.
We carry at the stern the flag of our country, but we float our
individuality in the upper air. If we had been a bridal party we should
of course have taken some such device as that of a couple who went
up the river under the simple but expressive legend of “Nestle-down,”
written on their banner.
What would you name a Nile dahabeëh?
The days go all too rapidly for us to catch the shifting illusions
about us. It is not so much what we see of the stated sights that can
be described, but it is the atmosphere in which we live that makes the
strangeness of our existence. It is as if we had been born into another
world. And the climate is as strange as the people, the costumes, the
habits, the morals. The calendar is bewitched. December is a mixture of
September and July. Alas, yes. There are the night-fogs of September,
and the mosquitoes of July. You cannot tell whether the season is going
backwards or forwards. But for once you are content to let Providence
manage it, at least so long as there is a north wind, and you forget
that the sky has any shade other than blue.
And the prophecy of the poet is realized. The nights are filled with
music, and the cares that infest the day are invariably put off till
tomorrow, in this deliciously procrastinating land. Perhaps, however,
Mr. Longfellow would not be satisfied with the music; for it seems to be
the nasal daughter of Lassitude and Monotony, ancient gods of the East.
Two or three strings stretched over a sounding skin and a parchment drum
suffice to express the few notes that an Arab musician commands; harmony
does not enter into his plan. Yet the people are fond of what they
consider music. We hear on all sides at night the picking of strings,
the throb of the darabooka and the occasional outburst of a wailing and
sentimental strain. Like all barbarous music, this is always minor. When
the performers are sailors or common strollers, it is doubtless
exactly the same music that delighted the ancient Egyptians; even
the instruments are the same, and the method of clapping the hands in
accentuation of the music is unchanged.
There is a café chantant on one side of the open, tree-grown court of a
native hotel, in the Ezbekeëh where one may hear a mongrel music, that
is not inexpressive of both the morals and the mixed condition of Cairo
to-day. The instruments of the band are European; the tunes played are
Egyptian. When the first strain is heard we say that it is strangely
wild, a weird and plaintive minor; but that is the whole of it. The
strain is repeated over and over again for a half hour, as if it were
ground out of a coffee-mill, in an iteration sufficient to drive the
listener insane, the dissolute scraping and thumping and barbarous
dissonance never changing nor ending. From time to time this is varied
with singing, of the nasal, fine-tooth-comb order, with the most
extraordinary attempts at shakes and trills, and with all the agony of a
moonlit cat on a house-top. All this the grave Arabs and young Egyptian
rakes, who sit smoking, accept with entire satisfaction. Later in the
evening dancing begins and goes on with the strumming, monotonous music
till at least the call for morning prayer.
In the handsome Ezbekeëh park or garden, where there are shady walks and
some fine sycamores and banyans to be seen, a military band plays
every afternoon, while the foreigners of both sexes, and Egyptian men
promenade. Of course no Egyptian lady or woman of respectability is ever
seen in so public a place. In another part of the garden, more retired,
a native band is always playing at nightfall. In this sheltered spot,
under the lee of some gigantic rock and grotto-work are tables and
chairs, and a divan for the band. This rock has water pleasantly running
through it, but it must have been struck by somebody besides Moses, for
beer is brought out of its cool recesses, as well. Rows of men of all
colors and costumes may be seen there, with pipe and mug and coffee cup;
and on settees more elevated and next the grotto, are always sitting
veiled women, in outer wrappers of black silk, sometimes open enough
to show an underskirt of bright color and feet in white slippers. These
women call for beer or something stronger, and smoke like the men; they
run no risk in being in this publicity, for they have nothing to lose
here or elsewhere. Opposite them on a raised divan, not unlike a roomy
bedstead, sits the band.
It is the most disreputable of bands. Nothing in the whole East so
expressed to me its fagged-out dissoluteness as this band and its
performances. It is a sleepy, nonchalant band, as if it had been awake
all the previous night; some of its members are blear-eyed, some have
one eye, some have two; they are in turbans, in tarbooshes, in gowns of
soiled silk, of blue cotton, of white drilling. It is the feeblest band;
and yet it is subject to spurts of bacchantic fervor. Sometimes all the
instruments are striving together, and then only one or two dribble
the monotonous refrain; but somehow, with all the stoppings to light
cigarettes and sip coffee, the tune is kept groaning on, in a minor that
is as wild as the desert and suggestive of sin.
The instruments are as African as the music. There is the darabooka,
a drum made of an earthen or wooden cylinder with a flaring head, over
which is stretched a parchment; the tar, a kind of tambourine; kemengeh,
a viol of two strings, with a cocoa-nut sounding-body; the kanoon, an
instrument of strings held on the knees, and played with the fingers;
the '.od, a sort of guitar with seven double strings; played with a
plectrum, a slip of vultures' feather held between the thumb and finger;
and the nay, a reed-flute blown at the end.
In the midst of the thumbing and scraping, a rakish youth at the end,
is liable, at any moment, to throw back his head and break out in a soft
womanish voice, which may go no farther than a nasal yah, ah, m-a-r-r,
that appears to satisfy his yearnings; or it may expand into a droning
song, “Ya benat Iskendereeyeh,” like that which Mr. Lane renders:—
“O ye damsels of Alexandria!
Your walk over the furniture is alluring:
Ye wear the Kashmeer shawl with embroidered work,
And your lips are sweet as sugar.”
Below the divan sit some idlers or supernumeraries, who, as inclination
moves them, mark the rhythm by striking the palms of the hands together,
or cry out a prolonged ah-yah, but always in a forgetful, uninterested
manner, and then subside into silence, while the picking and throbbing
of the demoralized tune goes on. It is the “devilish iteration” of it, I
think, that steals away the senses; this, and some occult immorality
in the debased tune, that blots virtue out of the world. Yet there is
something comic in these blinking owls of the night, giving sentimental
tongue to the poetic imagery of the Eastern love-song—“for a solitary
gazelle has taken away my soul”:—
“The beloved came to me with a vacillating gait;
And her eyelids were the cause of my intoxication.
I extended my hand to take the cup;
And was intoxicated by her eyes.
O thou in the rose-colored dress!
O thou in the rose-colored dress!
Beloved of my heart! remain with me.”
Or he pipes to the “dark-complexioned, and with two white roses”:—
“O damsel! thy silk shirt is worn out, and thine arms have become
visible,
And I fear for thee, on account of the blackness of thine eyes.
I desire to intoxicate myself, and kiss thy cheeks,
And do deeds that Antar did not.”
To all of which the irresponsible chorus, swaying its head, responds O!
y-a-a-a-h! And the motley audience sips and smokes; the veiled daughters
of sin flash invitation from their kohl-stained eyes; and the cool night
comes after the flaring heat of the day; and all things are as they
have been for thousands of years. It is time to take you to something
religious.
The Howling Derweeshes are the most active religionists in the East; I
think they spend more force in devotion than the Whirling Derweeshes,
though they are probably not more meritorious. They exceed our own
western “Jumpers,” and by contrast make the worship of our dancing
Shakers tame and worldly. Of all the physical manifestations of
religious feeling there is none more warming than the zikr of these
devotees. The derweeshes are not all wanderers, beggars, saints in
patched garments and filthy skin; perhaps the most of those who belong
to one of the orders pursue some regular occupation; they are fishermen,
laborers in the fields, artisans, and water-carriers, and only
occasionally join in the ceremonies, processions and zikrs of their
faith. I have seen a laborer drop into the ring, take his turn at a
zikr, and drop out again, very much as the western man happens in and
takes a hand in a “free fight,” and then retires.
This mosque at which the Howling Derweeshes perform is circular, and
large enough to admit a considerable number of spectators, who sit, or
stand against the wall. Since the exercise is one of the sights of the
metropolis, and strangers are expected, it has a little the air of a
dress-parade, and I could not but fear that the devotion lost somewhat
of its singleness of purpose. When we enter, about forty men stand in an
oblong ring facing each other; the ring is open towards the mehhrab,
or niche which marks the direction of Mecca. In the opening stands
the Sheykh, to direct the performance; and at his left are seated the
musicians.
The derweeshes have divested themselves of turbans, fezes, outer gowns
and slippers, which lie in a heap in the middle of the circle, an
indistinguishable mass of old clothes, from which when the owners come
to draw they cannot fail to get as good as they deposited. The ceremony
begins with a little uneasiness on the part of the musical instruments;
the sheykh bows his head and brings the palms of his hands together; and
the derweeshes, standing close together, with their hands straight at
their sides, begin slowly to bow and to sway to the right in a compound
motion which is each time extended. The daraboo-ka is beaten softly
and the '.od is picked to a slow measure. As the worshippers sway,
they chant, La ilaha illa-llah (“There is no deity but God”) in endless
repetition, and imperceptibly quickening the enunciation as they bow
more rapidly. The music gets faster, and now and again one of the
roguish boys who is thumping the drum breaks out into vocal expression
of his piety or of his hilarity. The circle is now under full swing, the
bowings are lower and much more rapid, and the ejaculation has become
merely Allah, Allah, Allah, with a strong stress on the final syllable.
The peculiarities of the individual performers begin to come out. Some
only bow and swing in a perfunctory manner; others throw their strength
into the performance, and their excitement is evinced by the working of
the face and the rolling of the eyes. Many of them have long hair, which
has evidently known neither scissors nor comb for years, and is matted
and twisted in a hopeless tangle. One of the most conspicuous and
the least clad, a hairy man of the desert, is, exactly in apparel and
features, like the conventional John the Baptist. His enormous shock
of faded brown hair is two feet long and its ends are dyed yellow with
henna. When he bends forward his hair sweeps the floor, and when he
throws his head back the mass whips over with a swish through the air.
The most devout person, however, is a negro, who puts all the fervor
of the tropics into his exercise. His ejaculations are rolled out with
extraordinary volume, and his black skin shines with moisture; there is,
too, in his swaying and bowing, an abandon, a laxity of muscles, and a
sort of jerk that belong only to his sympathetic race.
The exercise is every moment growing more rapid, but in regular
increments, as the music hastens—five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen
minutes—until there is a very high pressure on, the revolutions of the
cylinder are almost one in two seconds, and the piston moves quicker and
quicker. The music, however, is not louder, only more intense, and now
and then the reed-flute executes a little obligato, a plaintive strain,
that steals into the frenzy like the note of a lost bird, sweet as love
and sad as death. The performers are now going so rapidly that they can
only ejaculate one syllable, '.ah, 'lah, 'lah, which is aspirated in
a hoarse voice every time the head is flung forward to the floor. The
hands are now at liberty, and swing with the body, or are held palm to
palm before the face. The negro cannot longer contain himself but breaks
occasionally into a shrill “hoo!” He and two or three others have “the
power,” and are not far from an epileptic fit.
There is a limit, however, to the endurance of the body; the swaying
has become so rapid that it is difficult to distinguish faces, and it is
impossible for the performers to repeat even a syllable of the name of
Allah, all they can do is to push out from the depths of the lungs a
vast hoarse aspiration of la-a-h, which becomes finally a gush exactly
like the cut-off of a steam engine, short and quick.
The end has nearly come; in vain the cymbals clang, in vain the drum is
beaten harder, and the horn calls to quicker work. The limit is reached,
and while the reed expresses its plaintive fear, the speed slackens,
the steam puffs are slower, and with an irregular hoo! from the colored
brother, the circle stands still.
You expect to see them sink down exhausted. Not a bit of it. One or
two having had enough of it, take their clothes and withdraw, and their
places are filled by others and by some very sensible-looking men,
trades-people evidently. After a short rest they go through the same or
a similar performance, and so on for an hour and a half, the variations
being mainly in the chanting. At the end, each derweesh affectionately
embraces the Sheykh, kisses his hand without servility, resumes his
garments and quietly withdraws. They seem to have enjoyed the exercise,
and certainly they had plenty of it. I should like to know what they
think of us, the infidel spectators, who go to look at their religious
devotions as if they were a play.
That derweesh beggar in a green turban is by that token a shereef, or
descendant of the Prophet. No one but a shereef is allowed to wear the
green turban. The shereefs are in all ranks of society, many of them
wretched paupers and in the most menial occupations; the title is
inherited from either parent and the representatives of the race have
become common. Some who are entitled to the green turban wear the
white instead, and prefer to be called Sevd (master or lord) instead of
Shereef. Such a man is Seyd Sadat, the most conspicous representative of
the family of the Prophet in Cairo. His ancestors for a long period
were the trustees of the funds of all the great mosques of Cairo, and
consequently handled an enormous revenue and enjoyed great power. These
millions of income from the property of the mosques the Khedive has
diverted to his own purposes by the simple process of making himself
their trustee. Thus the secular power interferes every few centuries,
in all countries, with the accumulation of property in religious houses.
The strict Moslems think with the devout Catholics, that it is an
impious interference.
Seyd Sadat lives in the house that his family have occupied for
over eight centuries! It is perhaps the best and richest specimen of
Saracenic domestic architecture now standing in the East. This house,
or collection of houses and disconnected rooms opening upon courts and
gardens, is in some portions of it in utter decay; a part, whose elegant
arches and marvelous carvings in stone, with elaborate hanging balconies
and painted recesses, are still studies of beauty, is used as a stable.
The inhabited rooms of the house are tiled two-thirds of the way to the
lofty ceilings; the floors are of variegated marbles, and the ceilings
are a mass of wood in the most intricate arabesque carving, and painted
in colors as softly blended as the hues of an ancient camels' hair
shawl. In one of these gorgeous apartments, the furniture of which is
not at all in keeping with the decorations (an incongruity which one
sees constantly in the East—shabbiness and splendor are indissolubly
married), we are received by the Descendant with all the ceremony of
Eastern hospitality. Seated upon the divan raised above the fountain
at one end of the apartment, we begin one of those encounters of
compliments through an interpreter, out of which the traveler always
comes beaten out of sight. The Seyd is a handsome intelligent man of
thirty-five, sleek with good living and repose, and a master of Oriental
courtesy. His attire is all of silk, the blue color predominating;
his only ornament is a heavy gold chain about the neck. We frame long
speeches to the Seyd, and he appears to reply with equal verboseness,
but what he says or what is said to him we never know. The Eastern
dragoman is not averse to talking, but he always interprets in a sort of
short-hand that is fatal to conversation. I think the dragomans at such
interviews usually translate you into what they think you ought to say,
and give you such a reply as they think will be good for you.
“Say to his lordship that we thank him for the honor of being permitted
to pay our respects to a person so distinguished.”
“His excellency (who has been talking two minutes) say you do him too
much honor.”
“We were unwilling to leave Cairo without seeing the residence of so
celebrated a family.”
“His excellency (who has now got fairly going) feels in deep the visit
of strangers so distinguish.”
“It is a great pleasure also to us to see an Arab house so old and
magnificent.”
“His excellency (who might have been reciting two chapters of the Koran
in the interval) say not to mention it; him sorry it is not more worth
you to see.”
The attendants bring sherbet in large and costly cups, and chibooks
elegantly mounted, and the conversation flounders along. The ladies
visit the harem above, and we look about the garden and are shown into
room after room, decorated in endless variety and with a festivity of
invention and harmony of color which the moderns have lost. The harem
turns out to be, like all ordinary harems, I think, only mysterious on
the outside. We withdraw with profuse thanks, frittered away through our
dragoman, and “His excellency say he hope you have pleasant voyage and
come safe to your family and your country.” About the outer court, and
the door where we mount our donkeys, are many idlers in the sun, half
beggars, half attendants, all of whom want backsheesh, besides the
regular servants who expect a fee in proportion to the “distinguish”
of the visitor. They are probably not unlike the clients of an ancient
Roman house, or the retainers of a baronial lord of the middle ages.
If the visitor, however, really desires to see the antiquities of the
Christian era, he will ride out to Old Cairo, and mouse about among the
immense rubbish heaps that have been piled there since Fostat (as the
ancient city was called) was reduced to ashes, more than seven hundred
years ago, by a fire which raged nearly two months. There is the
ruined mosque of Amer, and there are the quaint old Coptic convents and
churches, built about with mud walls, and hidden away amid mounds of
rubbish. To these dust-filled lanes and into these mouldering edifices
the antiquarian will gladly go. These churches are the land of the flea
and the home of the Copt. Anything dingier, darker, dirtier, doesn't
exist. To one of them, the Sitt Miriam, Church of Our Lady, we had the
greatest difficulty in getting admission. It is up-stairs in one of the
towers of the old Roman gateway of Babylon. It is a small church, but
it has five aisles and some very rich wood-carving and stone-mosaics. It
was cleaner than the others because it was torn to pieces in the process
of renovation. In these churches are hung ostrich eggs, as in the
mosques, and in many of them are colored marbles, and exquisite mosaics
of marble, mother-of-pearl, and glass. Aboo Sirgeh, the one most
visited, has a subterranean chapel which is the seat of an historical
transaction that may interest some minds. There are two niches in the
wall, and in one of them, at the time of the Flight into Egypt, the
Virgin Mary rested with the Child, and in the other St. Joseph reposed.
That is all.
A little further on, by the river bank, opposite the southern end of the
island of Rhoda, the Moslems show you the spot where little Moses lay in
his little basket, when the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe (for
Pharaoh hadn't a bath-tub in his house) and espied him. The women of the
Nile do to-day exactly what Pharaoh's daughter and her maidens did, but
there are no bulrushes at this place now, and no lad of the promise of
Moses is afloat.
One can never have done with an exploration of Cairo, with digging down
into the strata of overlying civilizations, or studying the shifting
surface of its Oriental life. Here, in this Old Cairo, was an ancient
Egyptian town no doubt; the Romans constructed here massive walls and
towers; the followers of St. Mark erected churches; the friends of
Mohammed built mosques; and here the mongrel subjects of the Khedive,
a mixture of ancient Egyptian, conquering Arabian, subject Nubian,
enslaved Soudan, inheritors of all civilizations and appropriators of
none, kennel amid these historic ash-heaps, caring neither for their
past nor their future. But it is drawing towards the middle of December;
there are signs that warn us to be off to the south. It may rain. There
are symptoms of chill in the air, especially at night, and the hotel,
unwarmed, is cheerless as a barn, when the sun does not shine. Indeed,
give Cairo the climate of London in November and everybody would perish
in a week. Our preparations drift along. It is always “tomorrow.” It
requires a week to get the new name of the boat printed on a tin. The
first day the bargain for it is made; the work is to be finished
bookra, tomorrow. Next day the letters are studied. The next the tin is
prepared. The next day is Friday or Wednesday or some other day in which
repose is required. And the next the workman comes to know what
letters the howadji desires to have upon the tin, and how big a sign is
required.
Two other necessary articles remain to be procured; rockets and other
fire-works to illuminate benighted Egypt, and medicines. As we were not
taking along a physician and should find none of those experimenting
people on the Nile, I did not see the use of carrying drugs. Besides
we were going into the one really salubrious region of the globe. But
everybody takes medicines; you must carry medicines. The guide-book
gives you a list of absolutely essential, nasty drugs and compounds,
more than you would need if you were staying at home in an artificial
society, with nothing to do but take them, and a physician in every
street.
I bought chunks of drugs, bottles of poisons, bundles of foul smells
and bitter tastes. And then they told me that I needed balances to weigh
them in. This was too much. I was willing to take along an apothecary's
shop on this pleasure excursion; I was not willing to become an
apothecary. No, I said, if I am to feed out these nauseous things on the
Nile, I will do it generously, according to taste, and like a physician,
never stinting the quantity. I would never be mean about giving medicine
to other people. And it is not difficult to get up a reputation for
generosity on epsom salts, rhubarb and castor oil.
We carried all these drugs on the entreaty of friends and the druggist,
who said it would be very unsafe to venture so far without them. But I
am glad we had them with us. The knowledge that we had them was a great
comfort. To be sure we never experienced a day's illness, and brought
them all back, except some doses that I was able to work off upon the
crew. There was a gentle black boy, who had been stolen young out
of Soudan, to whom it was a pleasure to give the most disagreeable
mixtures; he absorbed enormous doses as a lily drinks dew, and they
never seemed to harm him. The aboriginal man, whose constitution is not
weakened by civilization, can stand a great amount of doctor's stuff.
The Nile voyager is earnestly advised to carry a load of drugs with him;
but I think we rather overdid the business in castor-oil; for the fact
is that the people in Nubia fairly swim in it, and you can cut the cane
and suck it whenever you feel like it.
By all means, go drugged on your pleasure voyage. It is such a cheerful
prelude to it, to read that you will need blue-pills, calomel, rhubarb,
Dover's powder, James's powder, carbolic acid, laudanum, quinine,
sulphuric acid, sulphate of zinc, nitrate of silver, ipecacuanha, and
blistering plaster. A few simple directions go with these. If you feel a
little unwell, take a few blue pills, only about as many as you can
hold in your hand; follow these with a little Dover's powder, and then
repeat, if you feel worse, as you probably will; when you rally, take a
few swallows of castor-oil, and drop into your throat some laudanum; and
then, if you are alive, drink a dram of sulphuric acid. The consulting
friends then generally add a little rice-water and a teaspoonful of
brandy.
In the opinion of our dragoman it is scarcely reputable to go up the
Nile without a store of rockets and other pyrotechnics. Abd-el-Atti
should have been born in America. He would enjoy a life that was a
continual Fourth of July. He would like his pathway to be illuminated
with lights, blue, red, and green, and to blaze with rockets. The
supreme moment of his life is when he feels the rocket-stick tearing out
of his hand. The common fire-works in the Mooskee he despised; nothing
would do but the government-made, which are very good. The passion of
some of the Egyptians for fire-arms and gunpowder is partially due to
the prohibition. The government strictly forbids the use of guns and
pistols and interdicts the importation or selling of powder. On the
river a little powder and shot are more valued than money.
We had obtained permission to order some rockets manufactured at the
government works, and in due time we went with Abd-el-Atti to the bureau
at the citadel to pay for them. The process was attended with all that
deliberation which renders life so long and valuable in the East.
We climbed some littered and dusty steps, to a roof terrace upon which
opened several apartments, brick and stucco chambers with cement floors,
the walls whitewashed, but yellow with time and streaked with dirt.
These were government offices, but office furniture was scarce. Men and
boys in dilapidated gowns were sitting about on their heels smoking.
One of them got up and led the way, and pulling aside a soiled curtain
showed us into the presence of a bey, a handsomely dressed Turk, with
two gold chains about his neck, squatting on a ragged old divan at one
end of the little room; and this divan was absolutely all the furniture
that this cheerless closet, which had one window obscured with dust,
contained. Two or three officers were waiting to get the bey's signature
to papers, and a heap of documents lay beside him, with an inkhorn, on
the cushions. Half-clad attendants or petitioners shuffled in and out
of the presence of this head of the bureau. Abd-el-Atti produced his
papers, but they were not satisfactory, and we were sent elsewhere.
Passing through one shabby room after another, we came into one dimmer,
more stained and littered than the others. About the sides of the room
upon low divans sat, cross-legged, the clerks. Before each was a shabby
wooden desk which served no purpose, however, but to hold piles of
equally shabby account books. The windows were thick with dust, the
floor was dirty, the desks, books, and clerks were dirty. But the
clerks were evidently good fellows, just like those in all government
offices—nothing to do and not pay enough to make them uneasy to be rich.
They rolled cigarettes and smoked continually; one or two of them were
casting up columns of figures, holding the sheet of paper in the left
hand and calling each figure in a loud voice (as if a little doubtful
whether the figure would respond to that name); and some of them wrote
a little, by way of variety. When they wrote the thin sheet of paper was
held in the left hand and the writing done upon the palm (as the Arabs
always write); the pen used was a blunt reed and the ink about as thick
as tar. The writing resulting from these unfavorable conditions is
generally handsome.
Our entry and papers were an event in that office, and the documents
became the subject of a general conversation. Other public business
(except the cigarettes) was suspended, and nearly every clerk gave
his opinion on the question, whatever it was. I was given a seat on a
rickety divan, coffee was brought in, the clerks rolled cigarettes for
me and the business began to open; not that anybody showed any special
interest in it, however. On the floor sat two or three boys, eating
their dinner of green bean leaves and some harmless mixture of grease
and flour; and a cloud of flies settled on them undisturbed. What
service the ragged boys rendered to the government I could not
determine. Abd-el-Atti was bandying jocularities with the clerks, and
directing the conversation now and then upon the rockets.
In course of time a clerk found a scrap of paper, daubed one side of it
with Arabic characters, and armed with this we went to another office
and got a signature to it. This, with the other documents, we carried to
another room much like the first, where the business appeared to take a
fresh start; that is, we sat down and talked; and gradually induced
one official after another to add a suggestion or a figure or two.
Considering that we were merely trying to pay for some rockets that were
ready to be delivered to us, it did seem to me that almost a whole day
was too much to devote to the affair. But I was mistaken. The afternoon
was waning when we went again to the Bey. He was still in his little
“cubby,” and made room for me on the divan. A servant brought coffee. We
lighted cigarettes, and, without haste, the bey inked the seal that hung
to his gold chain, wet the paper and impressed his name in the proper
corner. We were now in a condition to go to the treasury office and pay.
I expected to see a guarded room and heavily bolted safes. Instead of
this there was no treasury apartment, nor any strong box. But we found
the “treasury” walking about in one of the passages, in the shape of an
old Arab in a white turban and faded yellow gown. This personage fished
out of his deep breast-pocket a rag of a purse, counted out some
change, and put what we paid him into the same receptacle. The Oriental
simplicity of the transaction was pleasing. And the money ought to be
safe, for one would as soon think of robbing a derweesh as this yellow
old man.
The medicine is shipped, the rockets are on board, the crew have been
fitted out with cotton drawers, at our expense, (this garment is an
addition to the gown they wear), the name of the boat is almost painted,
the flags are ready to hoist, and the dahabeëh has been taken from
Boulak and is moored above the drawbridge. We only want a north wind.
0126
0127