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CHAPTER I
CAIRO
TO the East! What a thrill of pleasure those words caused me when they meant that I was really off for Egypt. The East has always had for me an intense fascination, and it is one of the happiest circumstances of my life that I should have had so much enjoyment of it.
My childish sketch-books, as you remember, are full of it, and so are my earliest scribblings. To see the reality of my fervid imaginings, therefore, was to satisfy in an exquisite way the longing of all my life.
The Gordon expedition was my opportunity, and it was a bold and happy conception of W.’s that of my going out with the two eldest little ones to join him on the Nile when the war should be over. I may say I—and the British Army—had the Nile pretty well to ourselves, for few tourists went up the year I was there. But I had to wait some time at Cairo and at Luxor before all trouble had been put an end to by the battle of Ginniss, which closed the recrudescence of rebellion that burst out after the great Khartoum campaign.
The emotion on seeing the East for the first time can never be felt again. The surprise can never be repeated, and holds a type of pleasure different from that which one feels on revisiting it, as I have so often done since.
One knows the “gorgeous East” at first only in pictures; one takes it on trust from Delacroix, Decamps, GÉrÔme, MÜller, Lewis, and a host of others. You arrive, and their pictures suddenly become breathing realities, and in time you learn, with exquisite pleasure, that their most brilliant effects and groups are no flights of fancy but faithful transcripts of every-day reality.
IN A CAIRO BAZAAR
IN A CAIRO BAZAAR
But at first you ask, “Can those figures in robes and turbans be really going about on ordinary business? Are they bringing on that string of enormous camels to carry real hay down that crowded alley; are those bundles in black and in white wrappers, astride of white asses caparisoned in blue and silver, merely matter-of-fact ladies of the harem taking their usual exercise? That Pasha’s curvetting white Arab horse’s tail is dyed a tawny red, and what is this cinder-coloured, bare-headed, jibbering apparition, running along, clothed in rattling strings of sea-shells and foaming at the mouth? A real fanatic? That water-seller by GÉrÔme has moved; he is selling a cup of water to that gigantic negro in the white robe and yellow slippers, and is pocketing the money quite in an ordinary way. And there is a praying man by MÜller, not arrested in mid-prayer, but going through all the periods with the prescribed gestures, his face to the East, and the declining sun adding an ever-deepening flush to the back of his amber-coloured robe.”
It takes two or three days to rid oneself of the idea that the streets are parading their colours and movement and their endless variety of Oriental types and costumes for your diversion only, on an open-air stage.
Cairo in ‘85, ‘86, was only at the beginning of its mutilations by occidentalism, and the Oriental cachet was dominant still. To sit on the low shady terrace of the old Shepheard’s hotel under the acacias and watch the pageant of the street below was to me an endless delight.
The very incongruity of the drama unrolling itself before one’s eyes had a charm of its own. Look at that Khedivial officer in sky-blue, jerkily riding his pretty circus Arab. There follows him a majestic and most genuine Bedouin in camel’s hair burnoos, deigning not the turn of an eyelash as he passes our frivolous throng on the terrace; two Greek priests, their long hair gathered up in knots under the tall black cap and flowing veil, equal him in quiet dignity, and a mendicant friar rattles his little money-box, like an echo of the water-seller’s cups over the way, as a hint to our charity. An Anglo-Indian officer of high degree is driven up to our steps in a ‘bus under a pile of baggage. He has just arrived from India and is impressively escorted by various Sikhs, whose immense puggarees are conceived in a totally different spirit from that of the native turbans. A British hussar, smart as only a British soldier can be, trots by on a wiry Syrian horse; a cab full of Highlanders out for a spree bumps along the unpaved roadway. I confess I was disappointed with the effect of our honoured British red. What did it look like where the red worn by the natives was always of the most harmonious tones!
See that string of little donkeys cheerily toddling along, all but extinguished under their loads of sugar-canes that sweep the ground with their long leaves; humble peasant donkeys, meeting a flashing brougham with windows rigidly closed, through which the almond eyes of veiled ladies of some high Pasha’s harem glance up at us and take us all in in that devouring sweep of vision. Double syces run before such equipages.
French bugles tell us an Egyptian regiment is coming, and, meeting it, will go by with a dull rumble a string of English baggage-waggons drawn by mules and driven by Nubians, escorted by British soldiers in dusty khaki uniforms; stout fellows going to the front, a good many of them to stay there—under the sand.
About 5.30 P.M. weird music and flaring torches brings us out again on the terrace, and we see a tumultuous crowd of pilgrims just arrived from Mecca by the five o’clock Suez train. They gather the crowd by their unearthly din and sweep it along with them. Beggars, flower-sellers, snake-charmers, tourists, and touts are all rolling along in a continuous buzz of various noises. Perhaps the full escort of cavalry jingles past our point of observation and the native crowd salutes the Khedive. Not so the British officers on the terrace, who keep their seats.
But what was all this to diving into the old city, and in a ten minutes’ donkey ride to find oneself in the Middle Ages; in the real, breathing, moving, sounding life of the Arabian Nights? Then when inclined to come back to our time and its comforts, which I am far from despising, ten minutes’ return ride and the glimpse into the old life of the East became as a vision. For what I call the pageant of the street in front of Shepheard’s was much too much mixed with modernity to allow of so complete a transformation of ideas.
The bazaars of Cairo have been painted and written about more than those of any other Oriental city. The idea of my having “a try” at them seems to come a little late! But if it is true that, as some croakers say, Old Cairo is gradually dying, I feel impelled to lay one flower of appreciation beside the grave which is ere long to close.
What a treat, to put it in that way, it was to rove about in the reality of the true East, to meet beauty of form and colour and light and shade and movement wherever one’s eyes turned, without being brought up with a nasty jar by some modern hideosity or other. This was contentment. You know what a bit of colour in sun or luminous shade does for me. Think of my feelings when I walked through the narrow streets where the rays of the sun slanted down through gaps in the masonry, or, as in some, through chinks in the overhead matting—now on a white turban, now on a rose-coloured robe relieved against the rich dark background of some cavernous open doorway, now on a bit of brass-work. The soft tones of the famous Carpet Bazaar in noon-day twilight, with that richness of colour that tells you the invisible sunshine is somewhere, fulfilled—yea, over-filled—my expectations, and close by in real working trim were the brass-workers tinkering and tapping musically, the while smoking their hubble-bubbles in very truth. The goldsmiths, in their own particular alley, were sitting in the rich chiaroscuro of their little shops waiting for me.
Added to those feasts for the eyes were the sounds which pictures could not give me—the warning shouts of the donkey-and camel-drivers, the “by your leave” in Arabic, followed by the shuffling sound of hoof and foot in the soft tan; the tinkling of the water-sellers’ brass saucers; the cries, like wild songs in the minor, of hawkers of all kinds of things. Then the scents, also unpaintable. Incense, gums, tan, ripe fruit, wood-smoke. And the smells? Ah, yes, well—the smells, goaty and otherwise. They were all bound up together in that entirety which I would not have deleted.
There was one particular angle of street in front of I forget what ripe old mosque, before which I would have liked to establish myself all day. The two streams of passers-by, human and animal, ceaselessly jostling each other, came at one particular hour into a shaft of sunlight just at the turn where I could see them in perspective. Now a splendid figure in yellow robe and white turban, accentuating the streak of gold to perfection, occupied the centre of the composition and I would make a mental note: “daffodil yellow and white in intense sunlight; dull crimson curtain in shade behind; man in half-shade in dark brown, boy in indigo in reflected light”—when in the shaft of light now appeared a snow-white robe and rosy turban, putting out the preceding scheme, till a hadji in a turban of soft bluey-green and pale-blue drapery came to suggest a very delicate emphasis to the rich and subdued surroundings.
In the first fresh days how mysterious these covered streets appear, these indoor thoroughfares, muffled with tan, where towering camels and shuffling donkeys and curvetting horses seem so astonishingly out of place.
Anglo-Egyptians who have to live in Cairo smile at my enthusiasm, and tell me they get tired of all this in time, and they are certainly helping to attenuate the charm. A late high official, on leaving Egypt, in his farewell speech told his audience that that day had been the happiest in his life, for he had seen the first “sandwich man” in the streets of Cairo. Since then another charming form of advertisement from the go-ahead West has appeared over the minarets of the alcohol-abhorring Moslems—a “sky sign” flashing out against the stars the excellence of somebody’s whisky. Can they now say “the changeless East”? And what a whirlpool of intensely Western amusements you may be sucked into if you are not wary. You may hide in the bazaars but you cannot live there, and teas, gymkanas, dances, and dinners will claim you for their own as though you were at Monte Carlo or still nearer home. In fact I have found New Cairo a little London and Monte Carlo rolled into one.
THE CAMEL CORPS
THE CAMEL CORPS
One glimpse of the vanishing Past which I got on a certain Friday at Cairo has left a queer impression on my mind, not at all a happy one. I am told the howling and dancing Dervishes have been lately suppressed, and I am dubious as to the fitness of us Christians being witnesses of those performances. However, I went, and saw what one can no longer see in Cairo. I found it difficult to believe those men were in real earnest, otherwise I should have felt more painfully impressed, but even as it was it was a disagreeable sight to witness the frenzied creatures flinging themselves backwards and forwards in time with the ever-increasing rapidity of the tom-toms till their long hair swept the floor at one moment and flew up straight on end towards the great vaulted interior of the mosque the next. Gasping shouts as of dying men escaped them rhythmically, and when the bewildering music had reached its climax it stopped, and so did they, and the priest, with gestures of loving commiseration and encouragement, very gracefully fell on their necks and gave them a drink of water each in turn. All this went on in a faint light from the hanging lamps, and the heat became suffocating. Mrs. C. put her hand on my shoulder, and pointing upwards asked me, “What is that?” A little white figure had appeared on a ledge high up under the drum of the dome. Whether man, woman, monkey, or goblin, I never saw a more impish figure, and it squatted there looking down from under its hood. I saw many very queer beings in Egypt as time went on, and decidedly the British occupation has not exorcised all the old magic of the Egyptians. But I have never played with it as some do. Not from fear, but from dislike. I am told in sober truth, people who came to scoff have begged to be let go when spell-bound with horror at what they have seen in a drop of enchanted ink spilled on a table.
We have sometimes played tricks on those people with imitation magic, but never more successfully than did our friend Sir James Dormer out in the Great Desert, when he struck the Bedouins dumb by taking out his glass eye, which they, of course, believed to be his own, tossing it in the air, and replacing it. He had great power over them, I should say, for ever after. Brave man, he was killed shortly after in India by the wild animal he had wounded and who sprang on him on his blind side. I think a man with a single eye is doubly brave who goes out tiger-shooting in the jungle.
A much wholesomer diversion than the Dervishes was provided by the then General in command at Cairo a few days later, when some three hundred of the Native Camel Corps were put through a series of splendid manoeuvres out in the great open spaces of Abassieh, beyond the Tombs of the Mameluks. I got out of the carriage when warned that the final charge was about to be delivered, and stood so as to see them coming nearly “stem on.” It was a sight worth seeing, and surprising to me, who, before I landed, had never seen a camel worthy of the name. When the “halt!” was sounded, down fell the three hundred bellowing creatures on their knees in mid-career, close up to us, and the panting riders leapt off, their accoutrements in most admired disorder, and their puttees for the most part streaming along the ground. I was in a hurry to get back to Shepheard’s to take the impression down, for I was greatly struck by so novel a sight. The red morocco-leather saddle covers were most effective, and very sorry I was on my next visit to Egypt to find they had gone the way of all “effective” bits of military equipment, and were replaced by dull brown substitutes. Henceforth I was an enthusiastic admirer of that most picturesque of animals, and though I approached the camel at first with diffidence and apprehension, I soon found him much easier to draw than the horse. What you would like to do with a horse to give him movement and action, but mustn’t, you may do with a camel. You can twist his neck almost indefinitely and brandish his great coarse head as you like, and his long legs give you carte-blanche for producing speed. I found out a curious fact as time went on and I had dogged dozens of camels about the desert and made orderlies walk them up and down for me—namely, that the camel moves his legs in the walk precisely like the horse, but when he falls into a trot he moves the legs of the same side forward together. He walks like a horse and trots like a camel! As to the gallop, a more dislocating performance I never saw. Lady —— once told me she had, by an unlucky chance, got on a baggage camel with a hard mouth, or rather nose, and it ran away with her in the wide, wide desert. She hauled in the nose rope with the strength of despair, till the detestable animal’s face was twisted back taut into her lap and was looking at her, and still the body galloped forward without the remotest check. She artistically left the end of the adventure untold.
As to the camel’s noises, I don’t think I ever got to the end of them. The snarl and the grunt I was prepared for—the horrible querulous and sickening sound that some one has likened to the roar of a lion and the grunt of a pig combined; but one day, as I was making a study of one of these ungracious creatures for a big picture, I thought I heard a sweet lark warbling somewhere, and I marvelled at its presence over the Egyptian desert. The warblings came from the camel’s throat, and there was a look in his eye that seemed to warn me that he considered the sitting had lasted long enough. The length of his neck suggested that I was within measurable distance of a bite, and I dismissed my sitter and his lanky rider with promptitude.
Of all the figures that delighted me in Cairo those of the syces soon became first favourites. The dress, the springing run, the beauty of the movements—I don’t think the human figure could be more charmingly shown off. The English General’s syces alone wear the scarlet jacket, and deep indigo blue or maroon are the usual colours for the liveries of those mercuries. Our fast-trotting horses now try them too much, and we don’t let them run very far, but take them up after a little while. They were intended to trot before the ambling horses or donkeys of Pashas, to clear the way with shouts and sticks through the crowded bazaars. I saw a lady (alas!) driving a very fast English horse past Shepheard’s in a rakish T-cart, and the unfortunate syce was constantly on the point of being knocked down by the high-stepper. It did not add to the smartness of this turn-out to see this panting creature looking over his shoulder every minute in terror of the horse, and sometimes, when flagging in his run, being overtaken and having to run alongside. I levelled mental epithets at the thoughtless driver, and wondered how such a thing could be. Some of us are curiously inconsiderate. I am afraid she was but a type of many. Witness the suffering horses bitted up with tight bearing-reins standing for hours outside shops and smart houses where “at homes” are going on, when a word from the fair owners to their ignorant coachmen might procure ease for their miserable beasts. I am not enthusiastic about motors, but I am thankful for the fact that they are greatly reducing the sufferings of our poor “gees.” I hope by and by the motor will be made noiseless and odourless, for at present I cannot enjoy its country driving. The scents of the country are replaced by smell and the sounds by noise.
You are better friends with the motor than I am, and have gathered much advantage from its audacity in taking you up, for instance, such rugged heights as those about Tivoli, well within a morning’s outing from Rome, which I have looked at as inaccessible, and only to be admired from a lowly distance; those remote cones crowned with mediÆval towns that figure in the backgrounds of many an “Adoration of the Magi” and “Flight into Egypt.”
I am, like you, of two minds about very rapid travel. There is something to say for and against it. “For” it, the freshness with which the mind, untrammelled with the bodily weariness of “diligence” or “vetturino” jogging, receives impressions of points of interest; “against” it, the hustling of venerable monuments and reverenced natural features which should be approached with more ceremony. There is too much hustling nowadays. I don’t know that I enjoyed my last visit to Venice quite as much as usual, feeling apologetic and guilty in participating in the “bumping” of the gondolas by the electric boats, whose back-wash sends them hopping and lurching in such an undignified manner. The sedate, gracious gondola, too well-bred ever to be in a hurry, “knocked out of time” by a fussing little electric launch, which is always in a hurry, with or without reason! What with the hurry, and the whistlings, and puffings, and syren-bellowings, the powers that be are actually succeeding in making Venice noisy. But I have got off the Egyptian track a long way.
After a visit to Sakkara and to the Pyramids and the Sphinx I shall launch out upon Old Nile at once. Our Sakkara day was typical of many I was to experience in this strangest of lands—full of the delights, then new to me, of donkey-riding through the fresh winter air of the desert, but donkey-riding over tombs. Sakkara is the necropolis of Memphis, itself long buried, that capital of the Pyramid Period that looms dark far behind the nearer glories of Thebes and the Temples.
My hilarity induced by the sun, the breeze, the absurd goings-on of the donkeys of our party was constantly damped by the weird reminders we constantly came upon. Those Sakkara pyramids lack the majesty of the Pyramids, and one looks at the amorphous heaps in an oppressed silence. The Tomb of Ti raised one’s spirits by its vivid frescoes showing the every-day life of that Prime Minister’s mÉnage: it was cheery to see the poulterer in brilliant colours bringing in the goose to the cook, but the final extinguisher fell when we were conducted along an avenue—a sandy causeway—lined on either side with I forget how many sarcophagi of sacred bulls. Each granite sarcophagus was, as far as my memory could say, of exactly the same dimensions and of almost the same shape as that of the great Napoleon at the “Invalides”! And all for bulls.
It was crushing; but well for me was the scamper back to the Cairo train. You cannot afford to be pensive riding a donkey at that pace with an Arab saddle to which you are not yet accustomed.
THE ENGLISH GENERAL’S SYCES
THE ENGLISH GENERAL’S SYCES
I am not going to dare to try to say anything new about the Pyramids of Gizeh or the Sphinx; nothing new in any shape can come in contact with these monuments. One feels overcome with hoariness oneself by their mere proximity and silenced by the weight of ages. I am not going to ask you to follow me into any interiors, for I did not go in myself; and indeed, in my progress through this land of tombs, I protested more or less successfully against burrowing into sepulchres, shuffling in thick gloom through pungent and uncanny mummy dust, in bat-scented atmosphere, while above-ground the blessed light of that matchless sky and the uplifting air of the desert were being wasted. Polite compulsion on certain social and festive (!) excursions alone forced me to forego for a while the joy of that “to-day” above-ground for the mould of the dead Aeons below.
I refer to a letter for my first visit to the Pyramids. That first sight of anything one has read of and pictured in one’s child’s mind in the course of education is a most precious occurrence, to be chronicled and set down at the moment.
30th November ‘85.—“A sweet gentle morning; limpid air, lovely fresh clouds in a soft blue sky. We started at 11 in a carriage, with our dragoman, and were soon taken at the usual hand gallop over the big iron bridge with the colossal green lions at each end which spans the wide Nile, into the acacia-shaded road which runs for a long distance in an imposing straight line to almost the very base of the great Pyramid. As we sped towards the illustrious group which we saw rising grey and stern at the very edge of the desert where it meets the bright green of the cultivated land we alternately looked ahead at what was awaiting us and at the ever-interesting groups of men, women, children, and animals which we passed, and at the mud villages with their palms and rude domes and minarets which lay in the well-watered, low-lying land on either side of the road. From the first moment I saw the Pyramids afar off I knew I was not destined to be disappointed, and my apprehensions caused by some travellers’ descriptions vanished at the outset. It is difficult to put my feelings into words as I came nearer and nearer to these wonders of man’s work, so pathetic in their antiquity and in the evidence they give of their builders’ colossal failure to ensure for their poor bodies absolute safety during the long waiting for the Resurrection. The seals are broken, the secret places found out, the contents gone to the winds!
“My beloved father was constantly in my mind to-day, for he it was who with such patience taught us the value and fascinating interest of old Egyptian history, and here were some of the scenes he used to read to us of so often, but which he himself was not allowed to see. “Mrs. C—— and I, on getting out of the carriage, first made the circuit of the Great Pyramid—a space of ‘thirteen statute acres,’ I remember Menzies telling us. I found that the most striking point from which to feel the immensity of the Pyramids is in the centre of the base, not the angles.
“We hear of ‘weeping stone.’ Here is stone that has wept blood and tears! Each succeeding year of the king’s reign forced an additional coating to his tomb, and prolonged the slave-toil under the lash—all to safeguard a little dust that has now vanished. This age of ours is about the time the old Egyptians looked to for the Great Awakening, for which all their poor mummies were embalmed.
“How intolerable these three Pyramids must have looked when new and entirely coated with white marble. Their glitter under the blinding sunlight and the hardness of their repellent shapes make me shudder as I realise the effect. Seen in the rough, as they now are, they do not jar, but only oppress the mind by their ponderous immensity, and the eye takes great pleasure in their tawny colouring.
“We next went down to the Sphinx and rested a long while in its broad shadow. The gaze of the eyes is exceedingly impressive, and though the face is so mutilated one would not have it restored. Strange that one should prefer the broken nose and the hare-lip! It would not be the Sphinx if it had the universal Sphinx face as originally carved. Originally! When? It was there long before the Pyramids, and it now appears that more than the ‘forty centuries’ looked down upon Napoleon’s army from their summits. Sixty centuries, some say now. Time is annihilated as one stands confronted with the Sphinx, and a feeling of annihilation swirls around one’s own microscopic personality.
“This annihilation of Time is one of the sensations of Egypt. Look at Rameses the Great in his glass coffin in the Cairo Museum. There, more than ever, the intervening cycles are as though they had never been as one stands face to face with Sesostris. More appalling than the Sphinx—a chimera in stone—here is the Man. Not his effigy, not his mask taken after death, but the Man! There is his hair, rusted by the Ages, his teeth still in their sockets, the gash across his forehead cleft in battle. His father lies in the next glass case, his grandfather on the other side, and many other Pharaohs similarly enclosed in glass and docketed lie around, all torn out of their hiding-places, stripped of their multitudinous envelopes, and exposed to the stare of the passers-by. Their mortuary jewels are ticketed in other glass cases, and only a few shreds of winding-sheet adhere to their bodies. They were religiously preserved, at infinite pains, for this.
“From the entrance to the Great Pyramid in the north face I had an enchanting view of Cairo on the right, in sun and shadow with a sky of most beautiful cloud-forms, and on the left the lovely pearly and rosy desert stretching away into the golden West. How cheerily, how consolingly the wholesome, refreshing Present receives us back after those wanderings down the corridors of the dead Ages! Let us wash our faces and smile again and feel young. The drive back was exhilarating and full of living interest. We overtook shepherds guiding their flocks along the road and carrying tired lambs on their shoulders. There were buffaloes and oxen and ploughmen going home from work in the tender after-glow, and then as soon as we were over the big iron bridge and in the suburbs again it was dark, and the gas lamps were being lighted, and ‘Tommy Atkins’ was about, and British officers were riding in from polo, and the cafÉs of this Parisianized quarter were full and noisy, and I felt I had leapt back into To-day by crossing an iron bridge that spanned six thousand years. My thoughts lingered long amongst the most ancient, most pathetic, most solemn monuments of the pre-Christian world.”
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CHAPTER II
THE UPPER NILE
AND now for Luxor. Of all the modes of travel there is none, to my mind, so enjoyable as that by water—fresh water, be it understood—and if you can do this in a house-boat with your home comforts about you, what more can you desire? We had the “Post Boat” to Luxor, and the sailing dahabieh after that. Travelling thus on the Nile you see the life of the people on the banks, you look into their villages, yet a few yards of water afford you complete immunity from that nearer contact which travel by road necessitates; and in the East, as you know, this is just as well. Not that I really allow the drawbacks of the East to interfere with my own enjoyment, but the isolation of the boat is best, especially with little children on board.
I had read many books of travel on the Nile and knew what to look for. Is there not a charm in knowing that some city, some temple, some natural feature you have tried to realize in your mind is about to appear in very truth just round that bend of road or river? You are going to see in a few minutes that historic thing itself, not its counterfeit in a book, but it. And so, as we neared Luxor towards evening, I looked out for Karnac on the left, and lo! the first pylon glided by. My first pylon! How many like it I was to see before I had done with Old Nile. They are not beautiful in shape, nor can any Egyptian architecture, as far as form goes, be called beautiful; the shapes are barbaric—I had almost said brutal—stupidly powerful and impressive by mere bulk. The beauty lies in the colouring. What a feast these ruins afford to the eye by their colour, what a revel of blues, greens, and low-toned reds in their unfaded paintings! Taken as bits of colour only, without dwelling too much on the forms, all in such light, the shadows filled with golden reflections—taken thus, or deeply tinged with the lustrous after-glow, or the golden moonlight, they are all-satisfying.
REGISTERING FELLAHEEN FOR THE CONSCRIPTION
REGISTERING FELLAHEEN FOR THE CONSCRIPTIONI will not, however, burden you with these ponderous pylons and mammoth monoliths; they can only be enjoyed in situ, illuminated and glorified by the climate of their homes. Indeed, I felt often very oppressed and tired by them, but never did I weary of the landscape, the people, the animals, the river.
One very saddening glimpse of fellah life was afforded Mrs. C—— and myself at Luxor by the English Consul (a negro), who arranged that we should see the registering of the young fellaheen for the conscription. I think the British have changed all this lately, so we were lucky in seeing a bit of the vanishing Past—a remnant of the Oriental Past which no one can regret. We worked our way, led by the Consul, through the Arab crowd in the village till we came to the entrance of the courtyard where the drama was about to open. At the gate was a scuffling mass of indescribably hideous old hags—the mothers and aunts and grannies of the young fellahs inside, wailing and jerking out their lamentations with marionette-like action of their shrivelled arms. As though by one accord they would stop dead for a minute and look at each other, and then all together begin again the skeleton chorus, throwing dust on their heads. The unsavoury group came in with us pell-mell when the gate was opened, and we found ourselves hoisted rather than conducted to a divan prepared for us under a shed, from whence we could see all that passed.
“NO MOORING TO-NIGHT!”
“NO MOORING TO-NIGHT!”
Three Circassian inspectors, looking horrid in European clothes, were at the head of a long rickety table, covered with a white cloth, in front of us. This white cloth, in combination with the surging groups, made a wonderfully good blank space in the composition of what I thought would make a striking picture. The sketch I insert here is in no particular arranged by me, but everything is exactly as I saw it. I noted everything down in my sketch-book on the spot. The sheiks, stately men in silken robes, who had brought each his quota of recruits from his district, sat chatting over their coffee at the farther end of the table, and the doctor at once set to to examine the miserable youths that came up for registration. Fathers pleaded exemption for their sons on one pretext or another, such as leprous heads, blindness, weak chests, and so forth; the mothers, aunts, and grannies aforesaid went on jibbering and clacking their jaws in the background, no one paying the least attention to them. If a fellah was passed by the doctor a gendarme gripped him and pummelled him all the way to the standard, where he was measured. If satisfactory, the woe-begone creature received a sounding box on the ear, just in fun, from the gendarme, and was shoved into the pen where the successful (!) candidates were interned; if he was below the mark, all the same he got his blow, and was pushed and cuffed back to his friends and relatives. One mother had crept forward while her son was having his lanky leg straightened by the doctor, the father pleading the boy’s lameness (Erckmann-Chatrian’s Conscript orientalised!): a gendarme sprang forward and knocked her down, then hauled her off by her arms, which were so very thin and suggestive of a mummy that I could not look any longer; he was so rough I really thought he would pull them out of their sockets. My friend was crying, and if I had not been so concentrated on my pencil notes I should have cried too. “Surely,” she said, “that can’t be his mother, she looks a hundred at least.” “A hundred!” I exclaimed, “she is four thousand years old—a mummy!” I felt very sick as well as sorry. We were politely offered coffee in jewelled cups, which we could not taste, and surreptitiously emptied behind the divan.
The English have worked wonders since those days with the Egyptian army. Taking the young men in the right way our officers have turned them into remarkably smart-looking soldiers, and their terror of the service, I am told, has vanished.
This was altogether a day which showed us the seamy side of Egyptian life, for in the evening we and all the guests of the hotel went to see the dancing at the cafÉ, a sort of mud cave full of wood smoke. It was all very ugly and repulsive, and the music was impish and quite in keeping. I was glad to have this experience, but once is enough. Talking of music, I don’t know anything more appealing in its local sentiment than the song of our crew when they were hauling and poling on calm nights later on. Strange, unaccustomed intervals, and the key always in the minor. In the pauses we heard the beetles and crickets on the banks chiming in in a cheerful major.
Our sojourn at Luxor was a time of deep enjoyment, for we made almost daily excursions on both banks of the Nile, excursions beginning in the very early mornings, at sunrise, and ending in gallops home on our donkeys in the after-glow, or trips on board the ferry-boat, from Thebes, in a crowd of splendid Arabs, whose heads, figures, and blue and white robes, or brown striped camel’s hair burnouses, added greatly to the charm of the landscape. It was a joy merely to breathe that desert air. All that was wholesome and not too tiring, nor risky from the sun, was enjoyed by the children with us, but I kept them chiefly in the paradisaical hotel garden as the safest place. One had to be very careful. I cannot say that “black care” did not sometimes ride on my donkey’s crupper, for I knew W. was pressing the enemy harder every day, and that a battle was imminent. At last the great telegram came. Ginniss was fought and won, and all the enemy’s guns and standards taken. He sent me the message from the field. We might now come up. It took a day or two to get the “FostÂt” ready—the dahabieh which he had sent down for us. Some wounded officers from the front brought news of the battle, and, strange to relate, the only officer killed at Ginniss was son of one of Mrs. C.’s oldest friends! What strange things happen in life. I had met young Soltau the year before at her house on Dartmoor, and she and I were destined to hear together of his death in battle on the Upper Nile.
We set sail in the first week of ‘86 for Assouan, where W. was to meet us, and I witnessed the daily development of the Nile’s beauties with the deepest pleasure, and a mind no longer over-shadowed.
I wonder how many people who have been to Egypt recognise the fact that all its beauty is reflected? It is either the sun or the moon or the stars that make Egypt glorious. Under thick cloudy skies it would be nothing. But the co-operation of the illuminated objects is admirable, and the two powers combined produce the Egypt we admire. W. and I came to the same conclusion, that much of the glory of the moonlights is owing to the response of the desert, especially the golden desert of Nubia.
THE “FOSTÂT” BECALMED
THE “FOSTÂT” BECALMED
But I have also seen, on rare occasions, delicate effects of veiled sunshine on river, palms, and desert too exquisite in refinement to be easily described. I remember one memorable grey day which we spent in turning the loveliest river reach of the whole series below Assouan, the wind having completely dropped—a day which dwells in my memory as a precious passage of silvery colour amidst all the gold. The palm-tree stems towards sundown were illuminated with rosy light against the pallid background of sand-hills facing the West, and of the delicate pearl-grey sky. The greens were cool and vivid, the water like a liquid opal. I wrote a whole letter to Mamma on that one grey day on the Nile. But even that evening the after-glow made itself felt through the clouds, lighting them from behind in an extraordinary manner, so that the filmy screen appeared red-hot. The beautiful cloud-veil could not shut out so fervid a rush of colour.
When a strong wind blows the desert sand into the air, obscuring the sun and thickening the sky, what a change comes over the scene! Egypt is then undoubtedly ugly, and all charm flies away on the wings of the blast.
But the blast speeds the dahabieh on its way, and pleasant it was sitting of an evening in the cosy saloon to see the hanging lamp swinging with the motion of the bounding “FostÂt,” and to hear the creaking of the timbers, for the distance from Assouan, where W. was to meet us, was being sensibly diminished. On some other evenings the fair north wind was just enough to quicken the pace without dulling the brilliant light of the moon, and there was to be no tying up under the mud bank those nights. Then again a dead calm might come down upon us, and after poling, tracking, or hauling up to the kedge anchor all day to their monotonous sing-song, the crew would have orders to moor for the night. I would then venture a run along the shore with the children, and have a scamper among the palms and cotton plants, which were waving and rustling mysteriously to imperceptible sighings of the air at the water’s edge. One or two armed men, of course, landed also.
At Esneh I had the honour of entertaining the Pasha of that wonderful place, whose temple I had particularly wished to see. He received us with much ceremony, and we all went on shore escorted by his guard in great state, walking through the bazaars accompanied by the wild and ragged population. But for the soldiers and their whips we could not have moved a yard. We visited the wonderful temple, the first we had seen with the ceiling intact, which the colossal pillars were made to support. I prefer the ruins so open to the sky that the sun may be seen amongst them. Here, owing to the unbroken ceiling, all was gloom. At Edfoo I was to see a whole temple with pylons and all, almost in perfect preservation, and to know the Egyptian temple in its entirety.
How funny our party looked—two English ladies, two little children, and English maid, guarded by bashi-bazouks, slowly progressing through a crowd of indescribable dirt and wildness. We looked into an oil mill where the press was exactly like the wine-presses in Tuscany. You remember the one I sketched at Signa, the picturesque Strettojo of the vintage? We poked our noses into the cavernous recesses where gigantic negroes were dyeing the native cloth a splendid indigo, their black arms blue to the shoulder. Oh, what colour!
On going back to the dahabieh we all, except myself, had our fortunes told in a narrow lane where a row of Soudanese fortune-tellers were squatting with patches of smooth sand before them on which they made the person interested impress his or her hand. Upon the impression they made many signs and marks. Everything was quite satisfactory. The children were to have “pleasant paths in life and strong loins.” The maid was to marry a white man, which was a comfort.
In the evening the Pasha dined on board. He spoke in French, and nothing could surpass the florid eulogies he bestowed on “his brother, that lion,” my husband. I saw him depart on his sleek and fat white ass, which stood quite fourteen hands, and was equipped in Arab trappings of indigo and dead gold. In the morning I received the Pasha’s presents of fruit, vegetables, eggs in hundreds, two live turkeys, and a black lamb. A gorgeous cavass in sky blue and carrying a wand of office was installed on board for the rest of the voyage to Assouan. There had been feasting and much thumping of tom-toms and whinings of curious fiddles on deck during dinner the night before, where the crew were entertaining the Pasha’s body-guard. My dragoman’s bill next day included these items: “Trinks and trymbals for the crew”; “hay for the limp.” The poor black “limp” with his hay was put into the little boat in tow, and I had to deliver him up, as a matter of course, to the crew a few days later. Then came Edfoo, whose temple is one of the most conspicuous in Egypt. I had been on the look-out for its mighty pylons with especial eagerness, and I was glad that we had time to spend two hours on land while some repairs were being done on the “FostÂt.” The Esneh cavass was useful as well as extremely ornamental, as he kept off the wild crowd in the village by magical waves of his wand of office, and an occasional thump on a screaming villager.
AT PHILÆ
AT PHILÆ
The guard turned out and saluted our party, and altogether things went very well, and I enjoyed my long-looked-forward-to Edfoo.
Then on board again, with a steady north breeze which, if it had filled our eyes with sand at Edfoo, was making up for the discomfort by carrying us in spanking style towards Assouan and the meeting.
After one of our fair-wind nights, when the “FostÂt” was bowling along over the lumpy water, I asked the reis if we had come to Comombos. He made vigorous signs showing we had passed it in the night. “Silsileh?”; again the welcome backward wave of his arm. That, too, was long passed. We were getting very near. I noticed the people on the banks were becoming blacker and there were fewer of them; the mountains had vanished and were replaced by lion-coloured sand-hills, typically African. The black rocks looked like sleeping crocodiles.
A faint whisp of smoke presently rose beyond a bend of the river, far ahead. “What is that?” I asked the dragoman. “English steamer.” Great excitement. The little armed steamer puffs into sight; some one is waving a red handkerchief from the turret! “Furl the “FostÂt’s” mainsail!” The crew swarm up the spar. Ding, ding goes the electric bell on the gunboat. The meeting is an accomplished fact—we from Plymouth, he from Wady Halfa. We are soon at Assouan, and while the “FostÂt” is being hauled by great gangs of negroes through the cataract, we are guests of the General in that command on board his charming dahabieh moored under PhilÆ. There the solemn rocks echo the waltzes of the military band and the talk and laughter of our rÉunions on board the “Pharaon.”
If the Egyptian desert answered back in harmonious tones the light of the sun and moon, what a crescendo of glowing response came from the Nubian sands! Immediately we crossed the frontier my eyes were surprised by the golden tone the desert had assumed, and the polished rocks that studded it had suddenly put on the richest colours granite holds—deep red and purple, and the black of basalt. It was a new scheme of colouring. The sunset and the after-glow were still more astonishing than those of Egypt, the colour of the shadows on the golden sands at sundown more positive in their limpid colours. One felt looking at the stars and planets as though one had been lifted to a world nearer to them than before, so large and clear had they grown even from the extraordinary clearness they had at Luxor. Oh! land of enchantment, is it any wonder the Nile is so passionately loved, especially by the artist, to whom the joy of the eye is supreme? As to worthily painting the Egyptian landscape, I cannot think any one will ever do it—the light is its charm, and this light is unattainable. There is one thing very certain, oil paints are hopelessly “out of it,” and in water-colours alone can one hope to suggest that light. I soon gave up oils in Egypt, not only on account of their heaviness, but the miseries I endured from flies and sand were heart-breaking; your skies are seamed with the last wanderings and struggles of moribund flies, and coated with whiffs of sand suddenly flung on them by a desert gust! I was particularly anxious to get a souvenir of the doorway in the court of the temple on PhilÆ Island, where Napoleon’s soldiers engraved their high-sounding “Une page d’histoire ne doit pas,” etc. Unfortunately, on the day I chose, we had a high wind, a very exasperating ordeal, and my attempt at oil-sketching this subject was a fiasco. After persevering with one half-blinded eye open at a time and with sand thickly mixed with my paints, I saw the panel I had been desperately holding on the easel hurled to the ground on its buttered side as for a moment I turned to answer a remark of Mrs. C.’s. She said I bore it angelically. As since those days lovely PhilÆ Island is being submerged and the temple melting away, the poor little panel has become more historically valuable than I thought it ever would do at the time, and I insert its replica in water-colours minus the smudges.
Many pleasant hours we spent at PhilÆ, which, I suppose, is the culminating point of the Nile’s beauties and marvels. One day, while W. was gone to Assouan for provisions, I went over with Mrs. C. to the opposite bank of the river by boat, an imp of a small boy taking upon himself to escort us. He divested himself of his one garment, which he carried in a bundle on his head, and swam alongside our “felucca.” Our approach had been observed from a wild mud hamlet up on the fantastic rocks, and a bevy of black and brown women came hopping and skipping down to us. Little shrivelled old hags and wild little young women with nose rings and anklets, their hair plaited in hundreds of little tails reeking with castor oil, each little tail ending in a lump of mud.
A “LAMENT” IN THE DESERT
A “LAMENT” IN THE DESERT
Mrs. C. asked them to unfasten and display their locks, and in return let down her own six-foot-long auburn tresses and stood on them to “astonish the natives.” They danced and wailed in slow cadence, softly clapping their hands and wagging their heads in admiration as they made the round of the tall, rosy Englishwoman. There she stood, on her hair, that trailed on the sand, in a golden halo of sunshine, the grim hypÆthral temple and the huge rocks as background, and surrounded by little skinny, skipping, half-naked, barbarian women and quite-naked little children. They turned to me and made signs that I should also let my hair down. Because I excused myself, the little boy imp, still with his garment on his head, came forward and took upon himself condescendingly to explain to the little women, shouting “Mafeesh, mafeesh!” (“Nothing, nothing!”) and dismissing me with a wave of his arm.
From PhilÆ we soon glided into the Tropics. I say in a letter: “The moonlight in Nubia also surpasses that of Egypt, and I see in it a light I never saw before I came to this wonderful land. It is difficult to describe this light. It is brilliant yet soft; light in darkness; not like the day; not like the dawn: the sky at full moon is so bright that only the larger stars are seen; and the yellow sand, the ashen bloom on the tops of the sand-hills, the various tones of green in palm-tree, tamarisk, and mimosa keep distinctly their local tints, yet softened and darkened and changed into a mysterious vision of colour too subtle for words of mine. Every night Venus and other great planets and stars shed reflections in the still water like little moons in every part of the Great Stream wherever one turns.”
W. could not spare the time for lotus-eating under sail, so a “stern-wheeler” towed us from PhilÆ to Wady Halfa. It took very little away from the romance, and the steady progress was very grateful. On that glassy river, as it was now, we would have been an age getting to our goal.
I was greatly struck with Korosko, a place which, besides its natural desolate and most strange appearance, was sad with memories of Gordon. This was his starting-point as he left the Nile to travel across the desert to Khartoum, never to return. From a height one can see the black and grey burnt-up landscape which lonely Gordon traversed. It is a most repellent tract of desert just there, calcined and blasted. A view I had of the Nile, southward, from the mountains of Thebes one day, though bathed in sunshine, has remained most melancholy in my mind, because, looking towards Khartoum, I thought of the hundreds of my countrymen who lay buried in already obliterated graves all along those lonely banks, away, away to the remote horizon and beyond, sacrificed to the achievement of a great disaster. Others like them have arisen since and will arise, eager to offer their lives for success or failure, honours or a nameless grave.
One evening, as the “FostÂt,” in tow, was skimming through the calm water with a rippling sound, and we were all sitting on deck, W. described to us so vividly a memorable night before the fight that put a stop to hostilities, that I could see the whole scene as though I had been there. They were out in the desert, the moon was full; the Dervishes were “sniping” at long range, when afar off was heard a Highland “lament.” The “sniping” ceased all along the enemy’s line and dead silence fell upon the night but for the wail of the bagpipes. The Dervishes seemed to be listening. The “lament” increased in sound, and presently the Cameron Highlanders approached, bearing, under the Union Jack, the body of an officer who had died that day of fever, to add yet another grave to the number that lay at intervals along the shores of the great river. You should hear the pipes in the desert, as well as on the mountain-side, to understand them.
“Every phase of the day and night” (letter, 12th January ‘86), “appeals to me on the Nile, not forgetting those few moments that follow the after-glow which are like the last sigh of the dying day. The delicacy of those pure tints is such that one scarcely dares to handle them in writing. Evening after evening I have watched by the desert death-bed of the day, looking eastward so as to have the light upon the hills.
“Those tender, sad, pathetic hills, and beyond them the mournful mountains, possessing nothing,—not a blade of grass, not a lichen, not a herb; they are absolute paupers amongst mountains, and they might be in the moon, these derelicts, so bereft are they of all things.
“And yet the light, the atmosphere, give them a consoling beauty. What a poem might be written to them as they look thus for a minute or two before the dark-blue pall of night sinks down!”
Wady Sabooah, the “Valley of Lions,” was one of the most striking things I had seen on this exquisite section of our river voyage. The abrupt sand-hills held shadows of the most delicate amethyst at noonday which, combined with the gold of the sunlit parts, produced a delicacy of vibrating tones which enchanted the eye but saddened the artist’s mind, recognising as it did the futility of trying to record such things in paint! But I shall weary you with all this daily rapture, and I will bid good-bye in these pages to the desert, well named by the Moslems “The Garden of Allah.” There is no pollution there, and He may walk in His garden unoffended.
In the first really hot days of March I and the children came home—Wady Halfa was becoming no place for us, and W. remained with his Brigade through the weary days of summer, unknown in their exhausted and horrible listlessness to me who will always think of the Nile as an earthly paradise. One halt I must make on our way down, at Abu Simbel, that mysterious rock temple I had longed to see in the first ray of sunrise, for it faces due east. W., who accompanied us as far as Assouan, gave orders that our stern-wheeler (the old “FostÂt” had been dismissed) should tie up overnight at the temple, and before daylight I was up and ready. I had packed my water-colours and had only a huge canvas and oil-paints available. With these I climbed the hill and waited for the first ray in the wild wind of dawn.
The event was all I hoped for as regards the effect of those “scarlet shafts” on the four great figures (how many sunrises had they already awakened to?) “A great cameo,” Miss Amelia Edwards calls that faÇade at sunrise in her fascinating book, and that phrase had made me long for years for this moment. But alas! my canvas acted as a sail before the wind and nearly carried me into the river, the sand powdered the wet paint more viciously than ever, and I returned very blue to breakfast. Still, I had got my “Abu Simbel at Sunrise,” and I insert a water-colour taken in comfort from the hard-earned but scarcely presentable original.
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ABU SIMBEL AT SUNRISE
ABU SIMBEL AT SUNRISE
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CHAPTER III
ALEXANDRIA
OUR subsequent experiences of Egypt at Alexandria from ‘90 to ‘93 made me acquainted with the Delta and that “Lower Nile” which has a very particular charm of its own, and possesses the precious advantage of being out of the tourist track altogether.
Not the least amongst the attractions of an Egyptian command (to Madame!) is the yearly autumn journey to that country through Italy, with Venice as an embarkation point. Madame knows nothing of the horrors of the summer months endured by the “man on duty” out there, and serenely enjoys “the best,” without the seamy side ever turning up. She thinks that to spend one’s winters on the Nile, and one’s summers in the “Emerald Isle,” is as near an ideal existence as this world allows us. It is good to be a woman!
That farewell scene at Venice on board the P. & O., when friends came to see us off with bouquets and “bon voyage”—how I should like just one more of those gay leave-takings! I see again the dancing gondolas on the sparkling ripples as they wait round the ship; the hat and handkerchief wavings ashore and afloat, and Venice encircling the sprightly little drama with her gracious arms.
Who that has plied between Italy and Egypt does not know the poetry of that first night at sea, when the cloud-like mountains behind the vanished Venice have also faded away, and there is nothing for it now but to turn to the darkling Adriatic, heaving dimly beyond the ship’s bows, and commit oneself to the mercies of the deep. “And the dinner-bell,” some one is sure to add. Never shall it be said of me that I chronicle the meals of my little travels.
The next morning the cessation of vibrations and throbbings wakes you. Behold through the port-hole Ancona’s white church high up overhead, shining in the level sunbeams of the young day.
The morning after that it is Brindisi, where they wait for the “long sea” passengers and the mails, and the Italian chatter and laughter along the quays never stops. Here, in the course of a stroll, you may pat the two pillars that form the winning-post of that Appian Way whose starting-post you know in Rome.
There is very little monotony in a voyage of this kind, for you are never for long out of sight of land. The Albanian coast, the Ionian Islands, Crete, “Morea’s Hills”—what a series of lovely things to beguile the six days’ passage! Yet, all the same, one has a thrill of delight one day when an unusual stir amongst the crew begins, and the hatches over the heavy baggage-hold are opened, and the lifting gear is got into position. “We shall be in at daybreak.” Bless the captain for those words! And the “man on duty” aforesaid will be standing on the landing-stage.
W. arranged a good studio for me at our new post, but I had distractions. British and Foreign naval squadrons occasionally bore down on us with thundering salutes, and had to be attended to; distinguished and even august personages paused at Alexandria on their way “up”; picnics on horse-back, donkey-back, camel-back, by road, rail, and river, to Aboukir, Aboo-sir, and sundry oases all claimed my delighted co-operation, plus my unsociable sketch-book.
Ah, the good good time, the golden Egyptian days!
But I found nothing so interesting as a holiday we managed to squeeze in and spend on board a little dahabieh for two, on a nine days’ cruise to Rosetta and back. I then knew the Western Delta and, superficially, the life of its neglected and forgotten people. I am much afraid that since the Assouan Dam and its doings, their meagre water-supply is anything but increased, and I pray that the English authorities may remember those poor people at last. They are like fish in a pond that is slowly drying up.
MADAME’S “AT HOME” DAY; SERVANTS AT THE GATE
MADAME’S “AT HOME” DAY; SERVANTS AT THE GATE
On board the little “Rose,” lent us by an Armenian Bey, I tasted once more the placid pleasure of fresh water travel under sail and oar; and I again heard the strange intervals of the songs that kept the oarsmen in time at their work. But I also learnt what Egyptian rain was like, and how hideous the Mahmoudieh becomes under weeping skies. I saw in this land the deepest and ugliest mud in the world—mud of the colour of chocolate. The weather cleared usually towards evening, and nothing more weird have I ever seen than the villages, cemeteries, solitary tombs, goats, buffaloes, and wild human beings that loomed upon the sky-line on the top of the banks against the windy clouds, reddened by the fiery globe that had sunk below the palm-fringed horizon. These canal banks might give many people the horrors, and I certainly thought them in that weather the uncanniest bits of manipulated nature I had ever seen.
At Atfeh, after three days’ canal, we emerged upon the wide and glorious Nile, and the skies smiled upon us once more. But the sadness of the country remained to us as we contemplated the miserable villages which occurred so frequently, with their poor graveyards at their sides, the latter only distinguishable by the smaller size of the dwellings, and the fact that the huts of the living had doors, and the huts of the dead had none—that was all.
Once on the swift Nile current, with the eight sweeps flashing and splashing to the rhythm of the strange singing (the prevailing north wind being against sailing), we made a good run down to Rosetta, on whose mud bank we thumped in a surprising manner, at 10 P.M. by a pale watery moonlight.
Never have I seen anything sadder than the land we passed through that day—dead, neglected, forlorn. Every now and then what seemed a great city loomed mistily ahead of us, with domes and minarets, and what seemed mighty palaces, piled one above the other on stately terraces. These apparitions were on the sites of once magnificent centres of wealth and luxury, and from afar they might still appear to be what once they were. Then, as we neared them, the domes unveiled themselves into heaps of filthy straw; the palaces were mud hovels a few feet high; the great mosques were merely poor half-ruined tombs into which a single person could scarcely crawl. The illusion occurred every time we came in sight of one of these phantasms, and the effect on the mind was most singular. City after city arose thus on one’s sight in the distance, as though seen through the long ages that have rolled by since their prime, and those long ages seemed like a veil that rapidly dissolved to show us, as we approached, the wretched reality of to-day. “The pride of life,” “pomp,” “arrogance,” “luxury,”—those epithets were their own once, while to-day the very antitheses of such terms would best become them. They are literally all dust now, and there survive only the poor blunt-shaped dwellings for living and dead, that lie huddled together in such pathetic companionship.
As the daylight fades we see the people creeping into their shelters like their animals, to wait, like them, in the unlighted darkness, for the coming of the morning. Their up-river fellow-workers live in a land where the hardships of this cold and muddy winter misery are unknown.
I was glad to see the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, thus completing rather an extended, as well as intimate, knowledge of the great river from there to Sarras in the Soudan. Return tickets to Khartoum had not yet taken travellers by rail up the Nile in so many dusty hours.
Still grey was the weather down to where the river merges into the melancholy sea, between Napoleon’s two dismantled forts, and what beauty there might have been was densely veiled. The old French “Fort St. Julien” was interesting as being the place where the “Rosetta Stone,” which gave the key to all the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was discovered. There we moored for the night on our return to Rosetta, in a Napoleonic atmosphere, and next day I sketched the once opulent commercial city, where now nothing seems doing. A bald old pelican caused some movement in the streets by raiding the odoriferous fish-market and scurrying down, chased by small boys, to the water’s edge where I was sitting, in order to float, by copious draughts, the fish that lay in his pouch down his throat, pill-wise. The pelican always got his pill down in time, and the race to the river was repeated more than once with the small boys. On another evening, on our return voyage, we moored under the wild town of Syndioor, whose minaret, the tallest, I should think, in the world, proved to be no phantom, but a lovely and solid reality. In the pearly light of the succeeding mornings the shining cities looked, through their misty veils, more lovely afar off than ever. Finally we dropped back again between the mud banks of the canal, and in due time landed under the oleanders of our starting-place, the crew kissing hands and paying us the prescribed compliments of farewell.Our major-domo, Ruffo the European, was with us on board. I must tell you of Ruffo; such an honest man in a country of much corruption! He did all my housekeeping, and that zealously; but, desiring sometimes to consult me about dinner, his figurative way of putting things before me was a little trying. “Miladi, would you like cutlets?” patting his ribs; “or a leg?” advancing that limb; “or, for a very nice entrÉe, brains?” tapping his perspiring forehead. “Oh no, Ruffo, never brains, please!” He would rejoice in strokes of good luck in the market, and fly through the sitting-rooms to me, perhaps bearing, like a gonfalon, a piece of beef, where good beef was so rare; “Look, miladi, you will not often meet such beef walking in the street.” He always smelled the melons on presenting them to me, to invite my attention to their ripeness.
After Cairo, Alexandria struck me very disagreeably at first; but when I got over its Western pseudo-Italian garishness, I was able to console myself with many a precious bit of orientalism, and even the bizarre mixture of flashy European tinsel with the true native metal amused me so much that I ended by enjoying the place and in being delighted to return there for yet another winter, and another. Nor can I ever forget that this appointment afforded us the most memorable journey of our lives—the ride through Palestine!
Not even the drive on the old Shoubra Road at Cairo surpassed the Alexandrian Rotten Row on the Mahmoudieh Canal on a Friday afternoon in its heterogeneous comicality. Every type was on the Mahmoudieh, in carriages, and on horseback—Levantine, Greek, Jew, Italian, Arab; up and down they rode on the bumpy promenade, under the shade of acacias and other flowering trees that skirted the picturesque canal. Across this narrow strip of water you saw the Arab villages of a totally different world; and I really felt a qualm every time I saw a fellah over the way turning his back to the western sun (and to us) to pray, in absolute oblivion of our silly goings-on. On our side was Worldiness running up and down, helter-skelter; on the other, the repose of Kismet.
Here comes a foreign consul—you know him by his armed, picturesque ruffian on the box—in a smart Victoria, driven by a coal-black Nubian in spotless white necktie and gloves; the Arab horse is ambling along with high measured action. Much admired is Monsieur le Consul—the observed of all observers; he looks as though he felt himself “quite, quite.” But “Awah, awah!” Here come at a smart leaping run two shouting syces turbaned in the Alexandrian fashion; and behind them a barouche and pair driven by an English coachman of irreproachable deportment. What thrilling rivalry is here!
Exquisite horses with showy saddle-cloths there are, with le sport on their backs in the person of “young Egypt” in the inevitable tarboosh. That tarboosh! It is the “bowler” hat of the East, and I don’t know which I hate most—it or the “bowler.”
The ladies are overwhelming; and I rest my eyes occasionally by watching the demure feminine figures of the “East end” who are filling their amphorÆ under the oleanders over the way, or washing their clothes and their babies in the drinking water supply of the native town.
Towards sunset there is a sauve qui peut of equipages citywards, and I never heard such a din as is set up as soon as the soft roads are passed and the paved streets are reached. Over it all you may hear:—
The tow-row-row and the tow-row-row
Of the British Grenadiers.
The Suffolks or the Surreys are marching from Mandara Camp to the sound of that drum which we like to remind ourselves “beats round the world.”
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SYNDIOOR ON THE LOWER NILE
SYNDIOOR ON THE LOWER NILE
