THE HIGHWAY OF EGYPT
There could hardly be a daintier boat than the Memnon. It just holds our party; it is as clean and speckless as possible, and there is an open deck the full width of the tiny steamer, with pretty rugs and lazy chairs, where we may lounge and drowse and dream and look out on the gently passing panorama of the Nile.
For we have left Luxor, and are floating in this peaceful fashion down to Cairo, resting in the delight of it, after those fierce temple-hunting, tomb-visiting days. Not that we are entirely through with temples and the like. Here and there we tie up to the bank, and go ashore and scamper away on donkeys to some tumbled ruin, but it is a diversion now, not a business, and we find such stops welcome. For the most part we spend our days just idling, and submitting to the spell of Egypt, which has encompassed us and possessed us as it will encompass and possess any one who has a trace of the old human tendency to drift and dream.
It has been said of Boston that it is less a locality than a state of mind. I wish I had said that—of Egypt. I will say it now, and without humor, for of this land it is so eminently true. A mere river-bank; a filament of green; a long slender lotus-stem, of which the Delta is the flower—that is Egypt. Remote—shut in by the desert and the dead hills—it is far less a country and a habitation than a psychological condition which all the mummied ages have been preparing—which the traveller from the earliest moment is bound to feel. It has lived so long! It had made and recorded its history when the rest of the world was dealing in nursery-tales! The glamour of that stately past has become the spell, the enchantment of to-day. The magic of the lotus grows more potent with the years.
It is such a narrow land! Sometimes the lifeless hills close in on one side or the other to the water's edge. Nowhere is the fertile strip wide, for its fertility depends wholly on the water it receives from the Nile, and when that water is drawn up by hand with a goat-skin pail and a well-sweep—a shaduf, as they call it—it means that fields cannot be very extensive, even if there were room, which as a rule there is not.
THINK OF WATERING A WHOLE WHEAT-FIELD WITH A WELL-SWEEP AND A PAIL
Think of watering a whole wheat-field with a well-sweep and a pail! Furthermore, where the banks are high the water is sometimes lifted three times between the Nile and the surface, and much of it is wasted in transit. It is the oldest form of irrigation; the hieroglyphics show that it was in use in Egypt five thousand years ago. It is also still the most popular form in Upper Egypt. We saw a good many of the sakkieh—primitive and wasteful water-wheels propelled by a buffalo or a camel or a cow—and at rare intervals a windmill, where some Englishman has established a plantation, but it is the shaduf that largely predominates.
The mud villages among the date-palms are unfailingly picturesque; the sail-boats of the Nile—markab they call them—drifting down upon us like great butterflies, have a charm not to be put in words; the life along the shores never loses its interest; the sun sets and the sun rises round the dreamy days with a marvel of color that seems each time more wonderful. Then there is the moonlight. But I must not speak of Egyptian moonlight or I shall lose my sense of proportion altogether, for it is like no other light that ever lay on sea or land.
We do not travel through the night, but anchor at dusk until daybreak. It is curious to reflect that one sees the entire country on a trip like this, if he rises early. We do rise early, most of us—though the cool nights (nights are always cool in Egypt) and the stillness are an inducement to sleep—and we are usually very hungry before breakfast comes along. One may have coffee on the deck if he likes—the picturesque Arab will bring it joyfully, especially where there is a baksheesh at the end. It is good coffee, too, and the food is good; everything is good on the Memnon except the beverages and the cigars. The wine could be improved and the cigars could be thrown away. I paid a shilling for one that was as hard as a stick and crumbled to dust when I bit it. Never mind the flavor. That brand was called "The Scarab." It should have been named "The Mummy"—it had all the characteristics.
The pilot commands this boat—the captain merely conducts the excursion. The captain wears European dress and speaks English, but the pilot is Arab throughout—dark-faced, heavily turbaned, silent—watching the water like a sphinx. Now and then he makes a motion and says a word to the steersman at his side. Whenever we lie up or strike safe water he locates Mecca, prostrates himself, and prays. I should think his emotions would be conflicting at times. Doctrinally, of course, it is his duty to pray for the boat to sink and exterminate this crowd. Professionally, it is his duty to take us safely to Cairo. Poor old Abbas! how are you going to explain to the prophet by-and-by?
We may not reach Cairo, however. The Nile is shallow at this season, and already we have scraped the sand more than once. It is a curious river—full of currents and shifting sand—the water getting scantier as you descend. That seemed strange to us until we realize that its entire flow comes from the far interior; that it has no feeding tributaries, while the steady evaporation, the irrigation, and the absorption of these burning sands constitute a heavy drain. It is hard to grasp a condition like that, or what this river means—has always meant—to the dwellers along its shores. Not alone an artery of life, it is life itself—water, food, clothing, cleanliness.
They don't take as much advantage of that last blessing as they should—nor of the next to the last. It is true that most of them have some semblance of clothing, but not all of them. In this interior Nile, as we may call the district between Luxor and Cairo, early principles to some extent still prevail. At first we saw boys—donkey-boys and the like—without any perceivable clothing, and more lately we have seen men—brown-skinned muscular creatures loading boats—utterly destitute of wardrobe. Yet, somehow, these things did not shock us—not greatly. They seemed to go with the sun, and the dead blue sky and the other scenery. A good deal depends on surroundings.
Our stops were not all brief. We put in a full day at Abydos, where there is a splendid temple built by Seti I., and Rameses the Great (of course), and where the donkeys are as poor as they are good in Luxor. Not that they were wretched in appearance, or ill-cared for, but they were a stiff-necked, unwilling breed. Mine had a way of stopping suddenly and facing about toward home. Twice I went over his head during these manœuvres, which the others thought entertaining.
But they had their troubles, too. The distance to the temple was long—eight miles, I should think—and part of the way the road was an embankment several feet high. Some of the donkeys seemed to think it amusing to suddenly decide to go down this embankment and make off over the desert. We were a scattering, disordered cavalcade, and what with the flies and distracting donkey-boys who were perpetually at one's side with "Mister, good donkey—fine donkey—baksheesh, mister," the trip was a memorable one. Once when my donkey, whose name was "Straight Flush" and should have been "Two-spot" got behind the party, I caught my attendant, not only twisting his tail, but biting it.
It was a good excursion, on the whole. We had luncheon in the great hall of the temple, and I could not help wondering who had held the first feast in that mighty place where we were holding the last, to date.
We feel at home now in a temple, especially when we see the relief of our faithful Rameses, and of Osiris, king of the underworld, and his kind. We have become familiar and even disrespectful toward these great guardians of the past. This makes it hard on Gaddis at times; especially after luncheon, when we are in a sportive mood.
"Zis is ze temple of Rameses ze Great"—he begins.
"Ah, so it is—we suspected it all along."
"Here you will see hees seventy-two son—"
"Sure enough—our old friends."
"And hees fourteen wive."
"Happy man, but why a king and so few?"
"An' here all zose seventy-two son carry gift to Osiris—"
"King of the underworld—so they do, we would recognize that gang anywhere."
Truly, it is time we were giving up temples; we are no longer serious. But in this temple of Seti I., at Abydos, we sometimes forgot to jest. Frivolous and riotous as we have become, we were silent in the presence of one splendid decoration of Seti offering sacrifice before the sacred boat, and again where we confronted in a corridor that precious and beautiful relief carving, the Tablet of Egypt's Kings. The cartouche of every king down to Seti I. is there—with one exception: the name of Amenophis IV., the king who abandoned his faith and worshipped his mother's gods, has no place in that royal company. Otherwise the story is as complete as it is impressive, and I recognized something of what that document means to those of Egypt who know (like Gaddis), when I put out a finger to touch the exquisite work and he whispered, "No, please."
What record will there be of our history thirty-five centuries from now? Not a book of all those printed to-day will last any considerable fraction of that period. A tablet like this sets one to wondering if we should not get an appropriation to preserve at least the skeleton of our chronology on plates of bronze to be stored in some deep vault safe from the ravages of fire and flood and earthquake.
We also stopped at Assuit, or Asyut, or Suit—I like these Egyptian names—you can spell them any way you please. Every one of them has all the spellings you can think of; you could not invent a new one if you tried. It is at Assuit they make the spangled shawls, and the natives flock down to the boat-landing to sell them. Gaddis had probably telegraphed ahead that a floating asylum of Americans was on the way and they had assembled accordingly. Long before we were in trading distance they began to dance about and gesticulate—the sheen of their fabrics blazing in the sun—crying the prices which they did not expect to get.
Some of our ladies were quite eager, and began to make offers when we were still many yards from shore. I suppose they thought the supply was limited. By the time we touched the landing the wildest trading was already going on. Shawls rolled in a ball were being flung aboard for examination, and flung back wildly with preposterous under-bids, only to come hurtling back again with a fierce protest of refusal. For a time it was a regular game of snowball and fireworks. There were canes to sell, too, and fly-whips—beautiful ivory-handled things. Commerce swelled to high tide. In the midst of the melée somebody happened to notice, what we had not seen before, another steamer lying a little way ahead—an English party, we were told—the ladies and gentlemen quietly reading or pityingly regarding our exhibition. I know, now, that the English have no sense of humor. Another American boat would have been in spasms of delight at our antics. Also, the Englishman's Egypt is not as ours, and he does not enjoy it as much. How could he, without loading up, as we did, with those wonderful Assuit shawls?
Only one more stop along the Nile will I record. This was at Tell al-Amarna, where, in the desert a little beyond the green, lies all that is left of the city built by the heretic king, Amenophis IV., who abandoned Amen-Ra for the sun-worship of his Mesopotamia mother, Queen Thi.
It was a splendid granite city once, but it is all gone now. Only a little of the floor of the palace is left, Queen Thi's apartment, Gaddis said, but it held for us a curious interest. For it is painted, or perhaps enamelled, in colors, and the decorations, still in a good state of preservation, are not Egyptian in design, but Syrian or Persian! The Princess who had left her land to marry an Egyptian king could not forsake her gods and her traditions, and that old floor remains to-day after thirty-five centuries to tell the story of her loyalty and her love.
We should have made other stops, perhaps, but we met disaster. The Nile was low, as I have said, and a hundred miles below Cairo we awoke one morning to find our boat hard and fast aground. We had, in fact, grounded the evening before, and Abbas and his men had been working all night, putting out anchors and pulling on ropes, a picturesque group, to the chorus "Ali sah—ali ya seni—ali hoop!" which is an appeal to the god of the Nile, Gaddis said, in this case unavailing. We were there to stay for the summer, unless we took train to Cairo, so after breakfast Gaddis and I went ashore with Abraham, still semi-officially attached to our party, and walked three miles to the nearest railway station to see what might be done. It was a fine walk, even though a warm one, across the Egyptian fields, and I saw some papyrus plant and bought a distaff and spindle from a man who was sitting by the road spinning after the fashion of the earliest race of men.
It was Fachen that we reached, an Arab town to which tourists never come, and the donkeys we arranged for there, to carry our party from the shore landing to the station, were a nondescript lot without saddle or bridle—with no gear, in fact, except a remnant of rope tied around the neck. Then we walked back opposite the boat, another three miles, and sat on the bank, and sweat and waved our hands and called to those people, half a mile away in mid-stream, who for some reason could not see our signals.
It was not uninteresting, though. The natives came to inspect us—an unusual opportunity for them—and some women came down to the Nile with great stone jars for water. Those jars must hold eight or ten gallons, and are heavy enough empty, yet those women will balance them on their heads and go stepping away chatting lightly, indifferent to their great burdens. They were barefooted and wore anklets which I wanted to buy, but Gaddis did not seem interested, and I could not transact a delicate business like that without careful interpretation.
Our people saw us at last and came for us in a boat. Then there was a bustle of preparation; a loading into the markab which we had engaged to take us ashore; a good-bye to our pretty, unfortunate little Memnon; a drifting down to the donkey landing, and a sorry-looking procession to the railway.
Our guides had difficulty settling with donkey-men, who, never having had tourists before, had engaged, no doubt, at their usual rates; then suddenly they had awakened to the idea that they were missing the chance of a fortune. The baksheesh we gave them must have opened their eyes. Probably they had never received so much at one time before. At all events, they came back for a new settlement, surrounded Gaddis and Abraham, and for a while we thought inferno had broken loose. Gaddis finally resorted to a stick, but Abraham, who is as big as a camel, first delivered an admonition, and then ran bodily upon the whole crowd and swept them like chaff from the platform.
The wait at Fachen was not overlong, but it became a trifle tedious after the novelty of the place had passed. We telegraphed Cairo of our coming, and Abraham entertained us with a few marvels to while away the time. He said that the stone used in building the pyramids had been brought across the Nile; that such stone was light like pumice-stone when quarried; that it floated across, and that the water it soaked up solidified and turned it into hard, heavy stone on the other side. The Credulous One believed this statement. He said the Memnon had grounded on a reef of crocodiles, at this season asleep, tucked up in the bed of the Nile. The Credulous One believed that, too. Several of the party did. He said that all telegrams in Egypt are sent in English, for the reason that the Arabic characters get tangled up in the wires. I believed that myself. He would have enlightened us further, only the train came just then.
We had to change at Wasta, where it was night, and I shall never forget that fevered scene of Arab faces and flaring lamps, and heat, and thirst—the one hot night in Egypt—as we wandered about that Egyptian station waiting for the Cairo express. Suddenly we came upon another party of our ship-dwellers, whose boat, ahead of ours, had grounded too. Finding them there in that weird place was all like something in a fever. Then we were on the express at last, roaring away through the dust and dark and heat to Cairo—a flight out of Egypt so modern that one could imagine the gates of the dead centuries behind us rushing together with a bang.