A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

We left Abou Simbel just as the moon was rising on the evening of the 18th of February, and dropped down with the current for three or four miles before mooring for the night. At six next morning the men began rowing; and at half-past eight the heads of the colossi were still looking placidly after us across a ridge of intervening hills. They were then more than five miles distant in a direct line; but every feature was still distinct in the early daylight. One went up again and again, as long as they remained in sight, and bade good-by to them at last with that same heartache which comes of a farewell view of the Alps.

When I say that we were seventeen days getting from Abou Simbel to Philæ, and that we had the wind against us from sunrise till sunset almost every day, it will be seen that our progress was of the slowest. To those who were tired of temples, and to the crew who were running short of bread, these long days of lying up under the bank, or of rocking to and fro in the middle of the river, were dreary enough.

Slowly but surely, however, the hard-won miles go by. Sometimes the barren desert hems us in to right and left, with never a blade of green between the rock and the river. Sometimes, as at Tosko,[153] we come upon an open tract, where there are palms and castor-berry plantations and corn-fields alive with quail. The idle man goes ashore at Tosko with his gun, while the little lady and the writer climb a solitary rock about two hundred feet above the river. The bank shelves here, and a crescent-like wave of inundation, about three miles in length, overflows it every season. From this height one sees exactly how far the wave goes, and how it must make a little bay when it is there. Now it is a bay of barley, full to the brim, and rippling to the breeze. Beyond the green comes the desert; the one defined against the other as sharply as water against land. The desert looks wonderfully old beside the young green of the corn, and the Nile flows wide among sand-banks, like a tidal river near the sea. The village, squared off in parallelograms like a cattle market, lies mapped out below. A field-glass shows that the houses are simply cloistered court-yards roofed with palm-thatch; the sheik’s house being larger than the rest, with the usual open space and spreading sycamore in front. There are women moving to and fro in the court-yards, and husbandmen in the castor-berry patches. A funeral with a train of wailers goes out presently toward the burial-ground on the edge of the desert. The idle man, a slight figure with a veil twisted round his hat, wades, half-hidden, through the barley, signaling his whereabouts every now and then by a puff of white smoke. A cargo-boat, stripped and shorn, comes floating down the river, making no visible progress. A native felucca, carrying one tattered brown sail, goes swiftly up with the wind at a pace that will bring her to Abou Simbel before nightfall. Already she is past the village; and those black specks yonder, which we had never dreamed were crocodiles, have slipped off into the water at her approach. And now she is far in the distance—that glowing, illimitable distance—traversed by long silvery reaches of river, and ending in a vast flat, so blue and aerial that, but for some three or four notches of purple peaks on the horizon, one could scarcely discern the point at which land and sky melt into each other. Ibrim comes next; then Derr; then Wady Sabooyah. At Ibrim, as at Derr, there are “fair” families, whose hideous light hair and blue eyes (grafted on brown-black skins) date back to Bosnian forefathers of three hundred and sixty years ago. These people give themselves airs, and are the haute noblesse of the place. The men are lazy and quarrelsome. The women trail longer robes, wear more beads and rings, and are altogether more unattractive and castor-oily than any we have seen elsewhere. They keep slaves, too. We saw these unfortunates trotting at the heels of their mistresses, like dogs. Knowing slavery to be officially illegal in the dominions of the khedive, the M. B.’s applied to a dealer, who offered them an Abyssinian girl for ten pounds. This useful article—warranted a bargain—was to sweep, wash, milk, and churn; but was not equal to cooking. The M. B.’s, it is needless to add, having verified the facts, retired from the transaction.

At Derr we pay a farewell visit to the temple; and at Amada, arriving toward close of day, see the great view for the last time in the glory of sunset.

And now, though the north wind blows persistently, it gets hotter every day. The crocodiles like it, and come out to bask in the sunshine. Called up one morning in the middle of breakfast we see two—a little one and a big one—on a sand-bank near by. The men rest upon their oars. The boat goes with the stream. No one speaks; no one moves. Breathlessly and in dead silence, we drift on till we are close beside them. The big one is rough and black, like the trunk of a London elm, and measures full eighteen feet in length. The little one is pale and greenish and glistens like glass. All at once the old one starts, doubles itself up for a spring, and disappears with a tremendous splash. But the little one, apparently unconscious of danger, lifts its tortoise-like head and eyes us sidewise. Presently some one whispers; and that whisper breaks the spell. Our little crocodile flings up its tail, plunges clown the bank, and is gone in a moment.

The crew could not understand how the idle man, after lying in wait for crocodiles at Abou Simbel, should let this rare chance pass without a shot. But we had heard since then of so much indiscriminate slaughter at the second cataract, that he was resolved to bear no part in the extermination of those old historic reptiles. That a sportsman should wish for a single trophy is not unreasonable; but that scores of crack shots should go up every winter killing and wounding these wretched brutes at an average rate of from twelve to eighteen per gun, is mere butchery and cannot be too strongly reprehended. Year by year, the creatures become shyer and fewer; and the day is probably not far distant when a crocodile will be as rarely seen below Semneh as it is now rarely seen below Assûan.

The thermometer stands at 85° in the saloon of the Philæ, when we come one afternoon to Wady Sabooah, where there is a solitary temple drowned in sand. It was approached once by an avenue of sphinxes and standing colossi, now shattered and buried. The roof of the pronaos, if ever it was roofed, is gone. The inner halls and the sanctuary—all excavated in the rock—are choked and impassable. Only the propylon stands clear of sand; and that, massive as it is, looks as if one touch of a battering-ram would bring it to the ground. Every huge stone in it is loose, Every block in the cornice seems tottering in its place. In all this we fancy we recognize the work of our Abou Simbel earthquake.[154]

At Wady Sabooah we see a fat native. The fact claims record, because it is so uncommon. A stalwart, middle-aged man, dressed in a tattered kilt and carrying a palm-staff in his hand, he stands before us the living double of the famous wooden statue at Boulak. He is followed by his two wives and three or four children, all bent upon trade. The women have trinkets, the boys a live chameleon and a small stuffed crocodile for sale. While the painter is bargaining for the crocodile and L—— for a nose-ring, the writer makes acquaintance with a pair of self-important hoopoes, who live in the pylon and evidently regard it as a big nest of their own building. They sit observing me curiously while I sketch, nodding their crested polls and chattering disparagingly, like a couple of critics. By and by comes a small black bird with a white breast and sings deliciously. It is like no little bird that I have ever seen before; but the song that it pours so lavishly from its tiny throat is as sweet and brilliant as a canary’s.

Powerless against the wind, the dahabeeyah lies idle day after day in the sun. Sometimes, when we chance to be near a village, the natives squat on the bank and stare at us for hours together. The moment any one appears on deck they burst into a chorus of “Backshîsh!” There is but one way to get rid of them, and that is to sketch them. The effect is instantaneous. With a good-sized block and a pencil, a whole village may be put to flight at a moment’s notice. If, on the other hand, one wishes for a model, the difficulty is insuperable. The painter tried in vain to get some of the women and girls (not a few of whom were really pretty) to sit for their portraits. I well remember one haughty beauty, shaped and draped like a Juno, who stood on the bank one morning, scornfully watching all that was done on deck. She carried a flat basket back-handed; and her arms were covered with bracelets and her fingers with rings. Her little girl, in a Madame Nubia fringe, clung to her skirts, half-wondering, half-frightened. The painter sent out an ambassador plenipotentiary to offer her anything from a sixpence to half a sovereign if she would only stand like that for half an hour. The manner of her refusal was grand. She drew her shawl over her face, took her child’s hand, and stalked away like an offended goddess. The writer, meanwhile, hidden behind a curtain, had snatched a tiny sketch from the cabin-window.

On the western bank, somewhere between Wady Sabooah and Maharrakeh, in a spot quite bare of vegetation, stand the ruins of a fortified town which is neither mentioned by Murray nor entered in the maps. It is built on a base of reddish rock and commands the river and the desert. The painter and writer, explored it one afternoon, in the course of a long ramble. Climbing first a steep slope strewn with masonry, we came to the remains of a stone gateway. Finding this impassable, we made our way through a breach in the battlemented wall, and thence up a narrow road down which had been poured a cataract of débris. Skirting a ruined postern at the top of this road, we found ourselves in a close labyrinth of vaulted arcades built of crude brick and lit at short intervals by openings in the roof. These strange streets—for they were streets—were lined on either side by small dwellings built of crude brick on stone foundations. We went into some of the houses—mere ruined courts and roofless chambers, in which were no indications of hearths or staircases. In one lay a fragment of stone column about fourteen inches in diameter. The air in these ancient streets was foul and stagnant and the ground was everywhere heaped with fragments of black, red and yellowish pottery, like the shards of Elephantine and Philæ. A more desolate place in a more desolate situation I never saw. It looked as if it had been besieged, sacked and abandoned, a thousand years ago; which is probably under the mark, for the character of the pottery would seem to point to the period of Roman occupation. Noting how the brick super-structures were reared on apparently earlier masonry, we concluded that the beginnings of this place were probably Egyptian and the later work Roman. The marvel was that any town should have been built in so barren a spot, there being not so much as an inch-wide border of lentils for a mile or more between the river and the desert.