OURS is the crew to witch the world with noble seamanship. It is like a
first-class orchestra, in which all the performers are artists. Ours
are all captains. The reïs is merely an elder brother. The pilot is not
heeded at all. With so many intentions on board, it is an hourly miracle
that we get on at all.
We are approaching the capital of Nubia, trying to get round a sharp
bend in the river, with wind adverse, current rapid, sandbars on all
sides. Most of the crew are in the water ahead, trying to haul us round
the point of a sand-spit on which the stream foams, and then swirls in
an eddy below. I can see now the Pilot, the long Pilot, who has gone in
to feel about for deep water, in his white nightgown, his shaven head,
denuded of its turban, shining in the sun, standing in two feet of
water, throwing his arms wildly above his head, screaming entreaties,
warnings, commands, imprecations upon the sailors in the river and the
commanders on the boat. I can see the crew, waist deep, slacking the
rope which they have out ahead, stopping to discuss the situation. I
can see the sedate reïs on the bow arguing with the raving pilot, the
steersman, with his eternal smile, calmly regarding the peril, and the
boat swinging helplessly about and going upon the shoals. “Stupids,”
mutters Abd-el-Atti, who is telling his beads rapidly, as he always does
in exciting situations.
When at length we pass the point, we catch the breeze so suddenly and
go away with it, that there is no time for the men to get on board, and
they are obliged to scamper back over the sand-spits to the shore and
make a race of it to meet us at Derr. We can see them running in
file, dodging along under the palms by the shore, stopping to grab
occasionally a squash or a handful of beans for the pot.
The capital of Nubia is the New York of this region, not so large, nor
so well laid out, nor so handsomely built, but the centre of fashion and
the residence of the ton. The governor lives in a whitewashed house,
and there is a Sycamore here eight hundred years old, which is I suppose
older than the Stuyvesant Pear in New York. The houses are not perched
up in the air like tenement buildings for the poor, but aristocratically
keep to the ground in one-story rooms; and they are beautifully moulded
of a tough clay. The whole town lies under a palm-grove. The elegance
of the capital, however, is not in its buildings, but in its women; the
ladies who come to the the river to fill their jars are arrayed in the
height of the mode. Their hair is twisted and clayed and castoroiled,
but, besides this and other garments, they wear an outer robe of black
which sweeps the ground for a yard behind, and gives them the grace
and dignity that court-robes always give. You will scarcely see longer
skirts on Broadway or in a Paris salon. I have, myself, no doubt that
the Broadway fashions came from Derr, all except the chignons. Here the
ladies wear their own hair.
Making no landing in this town so dangerous to one susceptible to the
charms of fashion, we went on, and stopped at night near Ibreem, a lofty
precipice, or range of precipices, the southern hill crowned with ruins
and fortifications which were last occupied by the Memlooks, half a
century and more ago. The night blazed with beauty; the broad river was
a smooth mirror, in which the mountains and the scintillating hosts of
heaven were reflected. And we saw a phenomenon which I have never
seen elsewhere. Not only were the rocky ledges reproduced in a perfect
definition of outline, but even in the varieties of shade, in black and
reddish-brown color.
Perhaps it needs the affidavits of all the party to the more surprising
fact, that we were all on deck next morning before five o'clock, to
see the Southern Cross. The moon had set, and these famous stars of the
southern sky flashed color and brilliancy like enormous diamonds. “Other
worlds than ours”? I should think so! All these myriads of burning
orbs only to illuminate our dahabeëh and a handful of Nubians, who are
asleep! The Southern Cross lay just above the horizon and not far from
other stars of the first quality. There are I believe only three stars
of the first magnitude and one of the second, in this constellation, and
they form, in fact, not a cross but an irregular quadrilateral. It needs
a vivid imagination and the aid of small stars to get even a semblance
of a cross out of it. But if you add to it, as we did, for the foot of
the cross, a brilliant in a neighboring constellation, you have a noble
cross.
This constellation is not so fine as Orion, and for all we saw, we would
not exchange our northern sky for the southern; but this morning we had
a rare combination. The Morning Star was blazing in the east; and the
Great Bear (who has been nightly sinking lower and lower, until he dips
below the horizon) having climbed high up above the Pole in the night,
filled the northern sky with light. In this lucid atmosphere the whole
heavens from north to south seemed to be crowded with stars of the first
size.
During the morning we walked on the west bank through a castor-oil
plantation; many of the plants were good-sized trees, with boles two and
a half to three inches through, and apparently twenty-five feet high.
They were growing in the yellow sand which had been irrigated by
sakiyas, but was then dry, and some of the plants were wilting. We
picked up the ripe seeds and broke off some of the fat branches; and
there was not water enough in the Nile to wash away the odor afterwards.
Walking back over the great sand-plain towards the range of desert
mountains, we came to an artificial mound—an ash-heap, in fact—fifty or
sixty feet high. At its base is a habitation of several compartments,
formed by sticking the stalks of castor-oil plants into the ground, with
a roof of the same. Here we found several women with very neat dabs of
clay on the ends of their hair-twists, and a profusion of necklaces,
rings in the hair and other ornaments—among them, scraps of gold. The
women were hospitable, rather modest than shy, and set before us plates
of dried dates; and no one said “backsheesh.” A better class of people
than those below, and more purely Nubian.
It would perhaps pay to dig open this mound. Near it are three small
oases, watered by sakiyas, which draw from wells that are not more than
twenty feet deep. The water is clear as crystal but not cool. These are
ancient Egyptian wells, which have been re-opened within a few years;
and the ash-mound is no doubt the débris of a village and an old
Egyptian settlement.
At night we are a dozen miles from Aboo Simbel (Ipsamboul), the
wind—which usually in the winter blows with great and steady force from
the north in this part of the river—having taken a fancy to let us see
the country.
A morning walk takes us over a rocky desert; the broken shale is
distributed as evenly over the sand as if the whole had once been under
water, and the shale were a dried mud, cracked in the sun. The miserable
dwellings of the natives are under the ledges back of the strip of
arable land. The women are shy and wild as hawks, but in the mode; they
wear a profusion of glass beads and trail their robes in the dust.
It is near this village that we have an opportunity to execute justice.
As the crew were tracking, and lifting the rope over a sakiya, the
hindmost sailor saw a sheath-knife on the bank, and thrust it into
his pocket as he walked on. In five minutes the owner of the knife
discovered the robbery, and came to the boat to complain. The sailor
denied having the knife, but upon threat of a flogging gave it up. The
incident, however, aroused the town, men and women came forth discussing
it in a high key, and some foolish fellows threatened to stone our boat.
Abd-el-Atti replied that he would stop and give them a chance to do it.
Thereupon they apologized; and as there was no wind, the dragoman asked
leave to stop and do justice.
A court was organized on shore. Abd-el-Atti sat down on a lump of earth,
grasping a marline-spike, the crew squatted in a circle in the high
beans, and the culprit was arraigned. The owner testified to his
knife, a woman swore she saw the sailor take it, Abd-el-Atti pronounced
sentence, and rose to execute it with his stake. The thief was thrown
upon the ground and held by two sailors. Abd-el-Atti, resolute and
solemn as an executioner, raised the club and brought it down with a
tremendous whack—not however upon the back of the victim, he had at
that instant squirmed out of the way. This conduct greatly enraged the
minister of justice, who thereupon came at his object with fury, and
would no doubt have hit him if the criminal had not got up and ran,
screaming, with the sailors and Abd-el-Atti after him. The ground was
rough, the legs of Abd-el-Atti are not long and his wind is short. The
fellow was caught, and escaped again and again, but the punishment was
a mere scrimmage; whenever Abd-el-Atti, in the confusion, could get a
chance to strike he did so, but generally hit the ground, sometimes the
fellow's gown and perhaps once or twice the man inside, but never to his
injury. He roared all the while, that he was no thief, and seemed a good
deal more hurt by the charge that he was, than by the stick. The beating
was, in short, only a farce laughable from beginning to end, and not a
bad sample of Egyptian justice. And it satisfied everybody.
Having put ourselves thus on friendly relations with this village, one
of the inhabitants brought down to the boat a letter for the dragoman to
interpret. It had been received two weeks before from Alexandria, but no
one had been able to read it until our boat stopped here. Fortunately
we had the above little difficulty here. The contents of the letter gave
the village employment for a month. It brought news of the death of two
inhabitants of the place, who were living as servants in Alexandria, one
of them a man eighty years old and his son aged sixty.
I never saw grief spread so fast and so suddenly as it did with the
uncorking of this vial of bad news. Instantly a lamentation and wild
mourning began in all the settlement. It wasn't ten minutes before the
village was buried in grief. And, in an incredible short space of time,
the news had spread up and down the river, and the grief-stricken began
to arrive from other places. Where they came from, I have no idea; it
did not seem that we had passed so many women in a week as we saw now
They poured in from all along the shore, long strings of them, striding
over the sand, throwing up their garments, casting dust on their
heads (and all of it stuck), howling, flocking like wild geese to a
rendezvous, and filling the air with their clang. They were arriving for
an hour or two.
The men took no part in this active demonstration. They were seated
gravely before the house in which the bereaved relatives gathered;
and there I found Abd-el-Atti, seated also, and holding forth upon the
inevitable coming of death, and saying that there was nothing to be
regretted in this case, for the time of these men had come. If it hadn't
come, they wouldn't have died. Not so?
The women crowded into the enclosure and began mourning in a vigorous
manner. The chief ones grouping themselves in an irregular ring, cried
aloud: “O that he had died here!”
“O that I had seen his face when he died;” repeating these lamentations
over and over again, throwing up the arms, and then the legs in a
kind of barbaric dance as they lamented, and uttering long and shrill
ululations at the end of each sentence.
To-day they kill a calf and feast, and tomorrow the lamentations and the
African dance will go on, and continue for a week. These people are all
feeling. It is a heathen and not a Moslem custom however; and whether
it is of negro origin or of ancient Egyptian I do not know, but probably
the latter. The ancient Egyptian women are depicted in the tombs
mourning in this manner; and no doubt the Jews also so bewailed, when
they “lifted up their voices” and cast dust on their heads, as we saw
these Nubians do. It is an unselfish pleasure to an Eastern woman to
“lift up the voice.” The heavy part of the mourning comes upon the
women, who appear to enjoy it. It is their chief occupation, after the
carrying of water and the grinding of doora, and probably was so with
the old race; these people certainly keep the ancient customs; they
dress the hair, for one thing, very much as the Egyptians did, even to
the castor-oil.
At this village, as in others in Nubia, the old women are the
corn-grinders. These wasted skeletons sit on the ground before a stone
with a hollow in it; in this they bruise the doora with a smaller stone;
the flour is then moistened and rubbed to a paste. The girls and younger
women, a great part of the time, are idling about in their finery. But,
then, they have the babies and the water to bring; and it must be
owned that some of them work in the field—grubbing grass and stuff for
“greens” and for fuel, more than the men. The men do the heavy work of
irrigation.
But we cannot stay to mourn with those who mourn a week in this style;
and in the evening, when a strong breeze springs up, we spread our sail
and go, in the “daylight of the moon,” flying up the river, by black
and weird shores; and before midnight pass lonesome Aboo Simbel, whose
colossi sit in the moonlight with the impassive mien they have held for
so many ages.
In the morning, with an easy wind, we are on the last stage of our
journey. We are almost at the limit of dahabeëh navigation. The country
is less interesting than it was below. The river is very broad, and we
look far over the desert on each side. The strip of cultivated soil is
narrow and now and again disappears altogether. To the east are seen,
since we passed Aboo Simbel, the pyramid hills, some with truncated
tops, scattered without plan over the desert. It requires no stretch
of fancy to think that these mathematically built hills are pyramids
erected by races anterior to Menes, and that all this waste that they
dot is a necropolis of that forgotten people.
The sailors celebrate the finishing of the journey by a ceremony of
state and dignity. The chief actor is Farrag, the wit of the crew.
Suddenly he appears as the Governor of Wady Haifa, with horns on his
head, face painted, a long beard, hair sprinkled with flour, and dressed
in shaggy sheepskin. He has come on board to collect his taxes. He opens
his court, with the sailors about him, holding a long marline spike
which he pretends to smoke as a chibook. His imitation of the town
dignitaries along the river is very comical, and his remarks are greeted
with roars of laughter. One of the crew acts as his bailiff and summons
all the officers and servants of the boat before him, who are thrown
down upon the deck and bastinadoed, and released on payment of
backsheesh. The travelers also have to go before the court and pay a
fine for passing through the Governor's country. The Governor is
treated with great deference till the end of the farce, when one of
his attendants sets fire to his beard, and another puts him out with a
bucket of water.
'The end of our journey is very much like the end of everything
else—there is very little in it. When we follow anything to its utmost
we are certain to be disappointed—simply because it is the nature of
things to taper down to a point. I suspect it must always be so with
the traveler, and that the farther he penetrates into any semi-savage
continent, the meaner and ruder will he find the conditions of life.
When we come to the end, ought we not to expect the end?
We have come a thousand miles not surely to see Wady Haifa but to see
the thousand miles. And yet Wady Haifa, figuring as it does on the
map, the gate of the great Second Cataract, the head of navigation, the
destination of so many eager travelers, a point of arrival and departure
of caravans, might be a little less insignificant than it is. There is
the thick growth of palm-trees under which the town lies, and beyond
it, several miles, on the opposite, west bank, is the cliff of Aboosir,
which looks down upon the cataract; but for this noble landmark,
this dominating rock, the traveler could not feel that he had arrived
anywhere, and would be so weakened by the shock of arriving nowhere at
the end of so long a journey (as a man is by striking a blow in the air)
that he would scarcely have strength to turn back.
At the time of our arrival, however, Wady Haifa has some extra life. An
expedition of the government is about to start for Darfoor. When we moor
at the east bank, we see on the west bank the white tents of a military
encampment set in right lines on the yellow sand; near them the
government storehouse and telegraph-office, and in front a mounted
howitzer and a Gatling gun. No contrast could be stronger. Here is Wady
Halfah, in the doze of an African town, a collection of mud-huts under
the trees, listless, apathetic, sitting at the door of a vast region,
without either purpose or ambition. There, yonder, is a piece of life
out of our restless age. There are the tents, the guns, the instruments,
the soldiers and servants of a new order of things for Africa. We hear
the trumpet call to drill. The flag which is planted in the sand in
front of the commander's tent is to be borne to the equator.
But this is not a military expedition. It is a corps of scientific
observation, simply. Since the Sultan of Darfoor is slain and the
Khedive's troops have occupied his capital, and formally attached
that empire to Egypt, it is necessary to know something of its extent,
resources, and people, concerning all of which we have only the
uncertain reports of traders. It is thought by some that the annexation
of Darfoor adds five millions to the population of the Khedive's growing
empire. In order that he may know what he has conquered, he has sent
out exploring expeditions, of which this is one. It is under command
of Purdy Bey assisted by Lieutenant-Colonel Mason, two young American
officers of the Khedive, who fought on opposite sides in our civil war.
They are provided with instruments for making all sorts of observations,
and are to report upon the people and the physical character and
capacity of the country. They expect to be absent three years, and after
surveying Darfoor, will strike southward still, and perhaps contribute
something to the solution of the Nile problem. For escort they have a
hundred soldiers only, but a large train of camels and intendants.
In its purpose it is an expedition that any civilized ruler might be
honored for setting on foot. It is a brave overture of civilization to
barbarism. The nations are daily drawing nearer together. As we sit in
the telegraph-office here, messages are flashed from Cairo to Kartoom.
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