IT IS a sparkling morning at Wady Saboda; we have the desert and some
of its high, scarred, and sandy pyramidal peaks close to us, but as
is usual where a wady, or valley, comes to the river, there is more
cultivated land. We see very little of the temple of Rameses II. in this
“Valley of the Lions,” nor of the sphinxes in front of it. The desert
sand has blown over it and over it in drifts like snow, so that we walk
over the buried sanctuary, greatly to our delight. It is a pleasure to
find one adytum into which we cannot go and see this Rameses pretending
to make offerings, but really, as usual, offering to show himself.
At the village under the ledges, many of the houses are of stone, and
the sheykh has a pretentious stone enclosure with little in it, all to
himself. Shadoofs are active along the bank, and considerable crops
of wheat, beans, and corn are well forward. We stop to talk with a
bright-looking Arab, who employs men to work his shadoofs, and lives
here in an enclosure of cornstalks, with a cornstalk kennel in one
corner, where he and his family sleep. There is nothing pretentious
about this establishment, but the owner is evidently a man of wealth,
and, indeed, he has the bearing of a shrewd Yankee. He owns a camel,
two donkeys, several calves and two cows, and two young Nubian girls for
wives, black as coal and greased, but rather pleasant-faced. He has also
two good guns—appears to have duplicates of nearly everything. Out of
the cornstalk shanty his wives bring some handsome rugs for us to sit
on.
The Arab accompanies us on our walk, as a sort of host of the country,
and we are soon joined by others, black fellows; some of them carry the
long flint-lock musket, for which they seem to have no powder; and all
wear a knife in a sheath on the left arm; but they are as peaceable
friendly folk as you would care to meet, and simple-minded. I show the
Arab my field-glass, an object new to his experience. He looks through
it, as I direct, and is an astonished man, making motions with his hand,
to indicate how the distant objects are drawn towards him, laughing with
a soft and childlike delight, and then lowering the glass, looks at it,
and cries, “Bismillah! Bismillah,” an ejaculation of wonder, and also
intended to divert any misfortune from coming upon him on account of his
indulgence in this pleasure.
He soon gets the use of the glass and looks beyond the river and all
about, as if he were discovering objects unknown to him before. The
others all take a turn at it, and are equally astonished and delighted.
But when I cause them to look through the large end at a dog near by,
and they see him remove far off in the desert, their astonishment is
complete. My comrade's watch interested them nearly as much, although
they knew its use; they could never get enough of its ticking and of
looking at its works, and they concluded that the owner of it must be a
Pasha.
The men at work dress in the slight manner of the ancient Egyptians;
the women, however, wear garments covering them, and not seldom hide the
face at our approach. But the material of their dress is not always of
the best quality; an old piece of sacking makes a very good garment for
a Nubian woman. Most of them wear some trinkets, beads or bits of silver
or carnelian round the neck, and heavy bracelets of horn. The boys have
not yet come into their clothing, but the girls wear the leathern belt
and fringe adorned with shells.
The people have little, but they are not poor. It may be that this
cornstalk house of our friend is only his winter residence, while his
shadoof is most active, and that he has another establishment in town.
There are too many sakiyas in operation for this region to be anything
but prosperous, apparently. They are going all night as we sail along,
and the screaming is weird enough in the stillness. I should think that
a prisoner was being tortured every eighth of a mile on the bank. We are
never out of hearing of their shrieks. But the cry is not exactly that
of pain; it is rather a song than a cry, with an impish squeak in it,
and a monotonous iteration of one idea, like all the songs here.
It always repeats one sentence, which sounds like Iskander
logheh-n-e-e-e-n—whatever it is in Arabic; and there is of course a
story about it. The king, Alexander, had concealed under his hair two
horns. Unable to keep the secret to himself he told it in confidence
to the sakiya; the sakiya couldn't hold the news, but shrieked out,
“Alexander has two horns,” and the other sakiyas got it; and the scandal
went the length of the Nile, and never can be hushed.
The Arabs personify everything, and are as full of superstitions as the
Scotch; peoples who have nothing in common except it may be that the
extreme predestinationism of the one approaches the fatalism of the
other—begetting in both a superstitious habit, which a similar cause
produced in the Greeks. From talking of the sakiya we wander into
stories illustrative of the credulity and superstition of the Egyptians.
Charms and incantations are relied on for expelling diseases and warding
off dangers. The snake-charmer is a person still in considerable request
in towns and cities. Here in Nubia there is no need of his offices, for
there are no snakes; but in Lower Egypt, where snakes are common, the
mud-walls and dirt-floors of the houses permit them to come in and be
at home with the family. Even in Cairo, where the houses are of brick,
snakes are much feared, and the house that is reputed to have snakes in
it cannot be rented. It will stand vacant like an old mansion occupied
by a ghost in a Christian country. The snake-charmers take advantage of
this popular fear.
Once upon a time when Abd-el-Atti was absent from the city, a
snake-charmer came to his house, and told his sister that he divined
that there were snakes in the house. “My sister,” the story goes on,
“never see any snake to house, but she woman, and much 'fraid of snakes,
and believe what him say. She told the charmer to call out the snakes.
He set to work his mumble, his conjor—('.xorcism'. yes, dat's it,
exorcism 'em, and bring out a snake. She paid him one dollar.
“Then the conjuror say, 'This the wife; the husband still in the house
and make great trouble if he not got out.'.rdquo;
“He want him one pound for get the husband out, and my sister give it.
“When I come home I find my sister very sick, very sick indeed, and I
say what is it? She tell me the story that the house was full of snakes
and she had a man call them out, but the fright make her long time ill.
“I said, you have done very well to get the snakes out, what could we do
with a house full of the nasty things? And I said, I must get them out
of another house I have—house I let him since to machinery.
“Machinery? For what kind of machinery! Steam-engines?”
“No, misheenary—have a school in it.”
“Oh, missionary.”
“Yes, let 'em have it for bout three hundred francs less than I get
before. I think the school good for Cairo. I send for the snake-charmer,
and I say I have 'nother house I think has snakes in it, and I ask him
to divine and see. He comes back and says, my house is full of snakes,
but he can charm them out.
“I say, good, I will pay you well. We appointed early next morning for
the operation, and I agreed to meet the charmer at my house. I take with
me big black fellow I have in the house, strong like a bull. When we get
there I find the charmer there in front of the house and ready to begin.
But I propose that we go in the house, it might make disturbance to the
neighborhood to call so many serpents out into the street. We go in, and
I sav, tell me the room of the most snakes. The charmer say, and as soon
as we go in there, I make him sign the black fellow and he throw the
charmer on the ground, and we tie him with a rope. We find in his bosom
thirteen snakes and scorpions. I tell him I had no idea there were so
many snakes in my house. Then I had the fellow before the Kadi; he had
to pay back all the money he got from my sister and went to prison.
But,” added Abd-el-Atti, “the doctor did not pay back the money for my
sister's illness.”
Alexandria was the scene of another snake story. The owner of a house
there had for tenants an Italian and his wife, whose lease had
expired, but who would not vacate the premises. He therefore hired a
snake-charmer to go to the house one day when the family were out, and
leave snakes in two of the rooms. When the lady returned and found
a snake in one room she fled into another, but there another serpent
raised his head and hissed at her. She was dreadfully frightened, and
sent for the charmer, and had the snakes called out but she declared
that she wouldn't occupy such a house another minute. And the family
moved out that day of their own accord. A novel writ of ejectment.
In the morning we touched bottom as to cold weather, the thermometer
at sunrise going down to 47° it did, indeed, as we heard afterwards, go
below 40° at Wady Haifa the next morning, but the days were sure to
be warm enough. The morning is perfectly calm, and the depth of the
blueness of the sky, especially as seen over the yellow desert sand
and the blackened surface of the sandstone hills, is extraordinary. An
artist's representation of this color would be certain to be called
an exaggeration. The skies of Lower Egypt are absolutely pale in
comparison.
Since we have been in the tropics, the quality of the sky has been the
same day and night—sometimes a turquoise blue, such as on rare days we
get in America through a break in the clouds, but exquisitely delicate
for all its depth. We passed the Tropic of Cancer in the night,
somewhere about Dendodr, and did not see it. I did not know, till
afterwards, that there had been any trouble about it. But it seems that
it has been moved from Assouan, where Strabo put it and some modern
atlases still place it, southward, to a point just below the ruins of
the temple of Dendoor, where Osiris and Isis were worshipped. Probably
the temple, which is thought to be of the time of Augustus and
consequently is little respected by any antiquarian, was not built with
any reference to the Tropic of Cancer; but the point of the turning of
the sun might well have been marked by a temple to the mysterious deity
who personified the sun and who was slain and rose again.
Our walk on shore to-day reminded us of a rugged path in Switzerland.
Before we come to Kalkeh (which is of no account, except that it is in
the great bend below Korosko) the hills of sandstone draw close to the
east bank, in some places in sheer precipices, in others leaving a strip
of sloping sand. Along the cliff is a narrow donkey-path, which travel
for thousands of years has worn deep; and we ascend along it high above
the river. Wherever at the foot of the precipices there was a chance to
grow a handful of beans or a hill of corn, we found the ground occupied.
In one of these lonely recesses we made the acquaintance of an Arab
family.
Walking rapidly, I saw something in the path, and held my foot just in
time to avoid stepping upon a naked brown baby, rather black than brown,
as a baby might be who spent his time outdoors in the sun without any
umbrella.
“By Jorge! a nice plumpee little chile,” cried Abd-el-Atti, who is fond
of children, and picks up and shoulders the boy, who shews no signs of
fear and likes the ride.
We come soon upon his parents. The man was sitting on a rock smoking
a pipe. The woman, dry and withered, was picking some green leaves
and blossoms, of which she would presently make a sort of purée, that
appears to be a great part of the food of these people. They had three
children. Their farm was a small piece of the sloping bank, and was in
appearance exactly like a section of sandy railroad embankment grown to
weeds. They had a few beans and some squash or pumpkin vines, and there
were remains of a few hills of doora which had been harvested.
While the dragoman talked with the family, I climbed up to their
dwelling, in a ravine in the rocks. The house was of the simplest
architecture—a circular stone enclosure, so loosely laid up that you
could anywhere put your hand through it. Over a segment of this was laid
some cornstalks, and under these the piece of matting was spread for the
bed. That matting was the only furniture of the house. All their clothes
the family had on them, and those were none too many—they didn't hold
out to the boy. And the mercury goes down to 470 these mornings! Before
the opening of this shelter, was a place for a fire against the rocks,
and a saucepan, water-jar, and some broken bottles The only attraction
about this is its simplicity. Probably this is the country-place of the
proprietor, where he retires for “shange of air” during the season when
his crops are maturing, and then moves into town under the palm-trees
during the heat of summer.
Talking about Mohammed (we are still walking by the shore) I found that
Abd-el-Atti had never heard the legend of the miraculous suspension of
the Prophet's coffin between heaven and earth; no Moslem ever believed
any such thing; no Moslem ever heard of it.
“Then there isn't any tradition or notion of that sort among Moslems?”
“No, sir. Who said it?”
“Oh, it's often alluded to in English literature—by Mr-Carlyle for one,
I think.”
“What for him say that? I tink he must put something in his book to make
it sell. How could it? Every year since Mohammed died, pilgrims been
make to his grave, where he buried in the ground; shawl every year
carried to cover it; always buried in that place. No Moslem tink that.”
“Once a good man, a Walee of Fez, a friend of the Prophet, was visited
by a vision and by the spirit of the Prophet, and he was gecited
(excited) to go to Mecca and see him. When he was come near in the way,
a messenger from the Prophet came to the Walee, and told him not to come
any nearer; that he should die and be buried in the spot where he then
was. And it was so. His tomb you see it there now before you come to
Mecca.
“When Mohammed was asked the reason why he would not permit the Walee to
come to his tomb to see him, he said that the Walee was a great friend
of his, and if he came to his tomb he should feel bound to rise and see
him; and he ought not to do that, for the time of the world was not
yet fully come; if he rose from his tomb, it would be finish, the world
would be at an end. Therefore he was 'bliged to refuse his friend.
“Nobody doubt he buried in the ground. But Ali, different. Ali, the
son-in-law of Mohammed (married his daughter Fat'meh, his sons Hasan and
Hoseyn,) died in Medineh. When he died, he ordered that he should be
put in a coffin, and said that in the morning there would come from the
desert a man with a dromedary; that his coffin should be bound upon the
back of the dromedary, and let go. In the morning, as was foretold, the
man appeared, leading a dromedary; his head was veiled except his eyes.
The coffin was bound upon the back of the beast, and the three went away
into the desert; and no man ever saw either of them more, or knows, to
this day, where Ali is buried. Whether it was a man or an angel with the
dromedary, God knows!”
Getting round the great bend at Korosko and Amada is the most vexatious
and difficult part of the Nile navigation. The distance is only about
eight miles, but the river takes a freak here to run south-south-east,
and as the wind here is usually north-north-west, the boat has both wind
and current against it. But this is not all; it is impossible to track
on the west bank on account of the shallows and sandbars, and the
channel on the east side is beset with dangerous rocks. We thought
ourselves fortunate in making these eight miles in two days, and one of
them was a very exciting day. The danger was in stranding the dahabeëh
on the rocks, and being compelled to leave her; and our big boat was
handled with great difficulty.
Traders and travelers going to the Upper Nile leave the river at
Korosko. Here begins the direct desert route—as utterly waste, barren
and fatiguing as any in Africa—to Aboo Hamed, Sennaar and Kartoom. The
town lies behind a fringe of palms on the river, and backed by high and
savage desert mountains.
As we pass we see on the high bank piles of merchandise and the white
tents of the caravans.
This is still the region of slavery. Most of the Arabs, poor as they
appear, own one or two slaves, got from Sennaar or Darfoor—though called
generally Nubians. We came across a Sennaar girl to day of perhaps ten
years of age, hoeing alone in the field. The poor creature, whose ideas
were as scant as her clothing, had only a sort of animal intelligence;
she could speak a little Arabic, however (much more than we
could—speaking of intelligence!) and said she did not dare come with
us for fear her mistress would beat her. The slave trade is, however,
greatly curtailed by the expeditions of the Khedive. The bright
Abyssinian boy, Ahmed, whom we have on board, was brought from his home
across the Red Sea by way of Mecca. This is one of the ways by which a
few slaves still sift into Cairo.
We are working along in sight of Korosko all day. Just above it, on some
rocks in the channel, lies a handsome dahabeëh belonging to a party
of English gentlemen, which went on a week ago; touched upon concealed
rocks in the evening as the crew were tracking, was swung further on by
the current, and now lies high and almost dry, the Nile falling daily,
in a position where she must wait for the rise next summer. The boat is
entirely uninjured and no doubt might have been got off the first day,
if there had only been mechanical skill in the crew. The governor at
Derr sent down one hundred and fifty men, who hauled and heaved at it
two or three days, with no effect. Half a dozen Yankees, with a couple
of jack-screws, and probably with only logs for rollers, would have set
it afloat. The disaster is exceedingly annoying to the gentlemen, who
have, however, procured a smaller boat from Wady Haifa in which to
continue their voyage. We are several hours in getting past these two
boats, and accomplish it not without a tangling of rigging, scraping
off of paint, smashing of deck rails, and the expenditure of a whole
dictionary of Arabic. Our Arabs never see but one thing at a time. If
they are getting the bow free, the stay-ropes and stern must take care
of themselves. If, by simple heedlessness, we are letting the yard of
another boat rip into our rigging, God wills it. While we are in this
confusion and excitement, the dahabeëh of General McClellan and half a
dozen in company, sweep down past us, going with wind and current.
It is a bright and delicious Sunday morning that we are still tracking
above Korosko. To-day is the day the pilgrims to Mecca spend upon the
mountain of Arafat. Tomorrow they sacrifice; our crew will celebrate it
by killing a sheep and eating it—and it is difficult to see where the
sacrifice comes in for them. The Moslems along this shore lost their
reckoning, mistook the day, and sacrificed yesterday.
This is not the only thing, however, that keeps this place in our
memory. We saw here a pretty woman. Considering her dress, hair, the
manner in which she had been brought up, and her looks, a tolerably
pretty woman; a raving beauty in comparison with her comrades. She has
a slight cast, in one eye, that only shows for a moment occasionally and
then disappears. If these feeble tributary lines ever meet that eye, I
beg her to know that, by reason of her slight visual defect, she is like
a revolving light, all the more brilliant when she flashes out.
We lost time this morning, were whirled about in eddies and drifted on
sandbars, owing to contradictory opinions among our navigators, none of
whom seem to have the least sconce. They generally agree, however, not
to do anything that the pilot orders. Our pilot from Philæ to Wady Haifa
and back, is a Barâbra, and one of the reises of the Cataract, a fellow
very tall, and thin as a hop-pole, with a withered face and a high
forehead. His garments a white cotton nightgown without sleeves, a brown
over-gown with flowing sleeves, both reaching to the ankles, and a white
turban. He is barefooted and barelegged, and, in his many excursions
into the river to explore sandbars, I have noticed a hole where he has
stuck his knee through his nightgown. His stature and his whole bearing
have in them something, I know not what, of the theatrical air of the
Orient.
He had a quarrel to day with the crew, for the reason mentioned above,
in which he was no doubt quite right, a quarrel conducted as usual with
an extraordinary expense of words and vituperation. In his inflamed
remarks, he at length threw out doubts about the mother of one of the
crew, and probably got something back that enraged him still more. While
the wrangle went on, the crew had gathered about their mess-dish on
the forward deck, squatting in a circle round it, and dipping out great
mouthfuls of the puree with the right hand. The pilot paced the upper
deck, and his voice, which is like that of many waters, was lifted up in
louder and louder lamentations, as the other party grew more quiet and
were occupied with their dinner—throwing him a loose taunt now and then,
followed by a chorus of laughter. He strode back and forth, swinging his
arms, and declaring that he would leave the boat, that he would not stay
where he was so treated, that he would cast himself into the river.
“When you do, you'd better leave your clothes behind,” suggested
Abd-el-Atti.
Upon this cruel sarcasm he was unable to contain himself longer. He
strode up and down, raised high his voice, and tore his hair and rent
his garments—the supreme act of Oriental desperation. I had often
read of this performance, both in the Scriptures and in other Oriental
writings, but I had never seen it before. The manner in which he
tore his hair and rent his garments was as follows, to wit:—He
almost entirely unrolled his turban, doing it with an air of
perfect recklessness; and then he carefully wound it again round his
smoothly-shaven head. That stood for tearing his hair. He then swung
his long arms aloft, lifted up his garment above his head, and with
desperate force, appeared to be about to rend it in twain. But he never
started a seam nor broke a thread. The nightgown wouldn't have stood
much nonsense.
In the midst of his most passionate outburst, he went forward and
filled his pipe, and then returned to his tearing and rending and his
lamentations. The picture of a strong man in grief is always touching.
The country along here is very pretty, the curved shore for miles being
a continual palm-grove, and having a considerable strip of soil which
the sakiya irrigation makes very productive. Beyond this rise mountains
of rocks in ledges; and when we climb them we see only a waste desert
of rock strewn with loose shale and, further inland, black hills of
sandstone, which thickly cover the country all the way to the Red Sea.
Under the ledges are the habitations of the people, square enclosures of
stone and clay of considerable size, with interior courts and kennels.
One of them—the only sign of luxury we have seen in Nubia—had a porch in
front of it covered with palm boughs. The men are well-made and rather
prepossessing in appearance, and some of them well-dressed—they had no
doubt made the voyage to Cairo; the women are hideous without exception.
It is no pleasure to speak thus continually of woman; and I am sometimes
tempted to say that I see here the brown and bewitching maids, with the
eyes of the gazelle and the form of the houri, which gladden the sight
of more fortunate voyagers through this idle land; but when I think of
the heavy amount of misrepresentation that would be necessary to give
any one of these creatures a reputation for good looks abroad, I shrink
from the undertaking.
They are decently covered with black cotton mantles, which they make
a show of drawing over the face; but they are perhaps wild rather than
modest, and have a sort of animal shyness. Their heads are sights to
behold. The hair is all braided in strings, long at the sides and cut
off in front, after the style adopted now-a-days for children (and
women) in civilized countries, and copied from the young princes,
prisoners in the Tower. Each round strand of hair hasa dab of clay on
the end of it. The whole is drenched with castor-oil, and when the sun
shines on it, it is as pleasant to one sense as to another. They have
flattish noses, high cheek-bones, and always splendid teeth; and they
all, young girls as well as old women, hold tobacco in their under lip
and squirt out the juice with placid and scientific accuracy. They wear
two or three strings of trumpery beads and necklaces, bracelets of horn
and of greasy leather, and occasionally a finger-ring or two. Nose-rings
they wear if they have them; if not, they keep the bore open for one by
inserting a kernel of doora.
In going back to the boat we met a party of twenty or thirty of these
attractive creatures, who were returning from burying a boy of the
village. They came striding over the sand, chattering in shrill and
savage tones. Grief was not so weighty on them that they forgot to
demand backsheesh, and (unrestrained by the men in the town) their
clamor for it was like the cawing of crows; and their noise, when
they received little from us, was worse. The tender and loving
woman, stricken in grief by death, is, in these regions, when denied
backsheesh, an enraged, squawking bird of prey. They left us with scorn
in their eyes and abuse on their tongues.
At a place below Korosko we saw a singular custom, in which the women
appeared to better advantage. A whole troop of women, thirty or forty of
them, accompanied by children, came in a rambling procession down to the
Nile, and brought a baby just forty days old. We thought at first that
they were about to dip the infant into Father Nile, as an introduction
to the fountain of all the blessings of Egypt. Instead of this, however,
they sat down on the bank, took kohl and daubed it in the little
fellow's eyes. They perform this ceremony by the Nile when the boy is
forty days old, and they do it that he may have a fortunate life. Kohl
seems to enlarge the pupil, and doubtless it is intended to open the
boy's eyes early.
At one of the little settlements to-day the men were very hospitable,
and brought us out plates (straw) of sweet dried dates. Those that we
did not eat, the sailor with us stuffed into his pocket; our sailors
never let a chance of provender slip, and would, so far as capacity
“to live on the country” goes, make good soldiers. The Nubian dates are
called the best in Egypt. They are longer than the dates of the Delta,
but hard and quite dry. They take the place of coffee here in the
complimentary hospitality. Whenever a native invites you to take
“coffee,” and you accept, he will bring you a plate of dates and
probably a plate of popped doora, like our popped corn. Coffee seems not
to be in use here; even the governors entertain us with dates and popped
corn.
We are working up the river slowly enough to make the acquaintance
of every man, woman, and child on the banks; and a precious lot of
acquaintances we shall have. I have no desire to force them upon the
public, but it is only by these details that I can hope to give you any
idea of the Nubian life.
We stop at night. The moon-and-starlight is something superb. From
the high bank under which we are moored, the broad river, the desert
opposite, and the mountains, appear in a remote African calm—a calm only
broken by the shriek of the sakiyas which pierce the air above and below
us.
In the sakiya near us, covered with netting to keep off the north wind,
is a little boy, patient and black, seated on the pole of the wheel,
urging the lean cattle round and round. The little chap is alone and at
some distance from the village, and this must be for him lonesome work.
The moonlight, through the chinks of the palm-leaf, touches tenderly
his pathetic figure, when we look in at the opening, and his small voice
utters the one word of Egypt—“backsheesh.”
Attracted by a light—a rare thing in a habitation here—we walk over to
the village. At the end of the high enclosure of a dwelling there is
a blaze of fire, which is fed by doora-stalks, and about it squat five
women, chattering; the fire lights up their black faces and hair shining
with the castor-oil. Four of them are young; and one is old and skinny,
and with only a piece of sacking for all clothing. Their husbands are
away in Cairo, or up the river with a trading dahabeëh (so they tell our
guide); and these poor creatures are left here (it may be for years it
may be forever) to dig their own living out of the ground. It is quite
the fashion husbands have in this country; but the women are attached
to their homes; they have no desire to go elsewhere. And I have no doubt
that in Cairo they would pine for the free and simple life of Nubia.
These women all want backsheesh, and no doubt will quarrel over the
division of the few piastres they have from us. Being such women as I
have described, and using tobacco as has been sufficiently described
also, crouching about these embers, this group composes as barbaric a
picture as one can anywhere see. I need not have gone so far to set such
a miserable group; I could have found one as wretched in Pigville (every
city has its Pigville)? Yes, but this is characteristic of the country.
These people are as good as anybody here. (We have been careful to
associate only with the first families.) These women have necklaces and
bracelets, and rings in their ears, just like any women, and rings in
the hair, twisted in with the clay and castor-oil. And in Pigville one
would not have the range of savage rocks, which tower above these huts,
whence the jackals, wolves, and gazelles come down to the river, nor
the row of palms, nor the Nile, and the sands beyond, yellow in the
moonlight.
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