A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

We had little opportunity of observing domestic life in Egypt. L—— visited some of the vice-regal hareems at Cairo and brought away on each occasion the same impression of dreariness. A little embroidery, a few musical toys of Geneva manufacture, a daily drive on the Shubra road, pipes, cigarettes, sweetmeats, jewelry and gossip, fill up the aimless days of most Egyptian ladies of rank. There are, however, some who take an active interest in politics; and in Cairo and Alexandria the opera-boxes of the khedive and the great pashas are nightly occupied by ladies. But it is not by the daily life of the wives of princes and nobles, but by the life of the lesser gentry and upper middle-class, that a domestic system should be judged. These ladies of Ayserat had no London-built brougham, no Shuba road, no opera. They were absolutely without mental resources; and they were even without the means of taking air and exercise. One could see that time hung heavy on their hands, and that they took but a feeble interest in the things around them. The hareem stairs were dirty; the rooms were untidy; the general aspect of the place was slatternly and neglected. As for the inmates, though all good-nature and gentleness, their faces bore the expression of people who are habitually bored. At Luxor, L—— and the writer paid a visit to the wife of an intelligent and gentlemanly Arab, son of the late governor of that place. This was a middle-class hareem. The couple were young and not rich. They occupied a small house which commanded no view and had no garden. Their little court-yard was given up to the poultry; their tiny terrace above was less than twelve feet square; and they were surrounded on all sides by houses. Yet in this stifling prison the young wife lived, apparently contented, from year’s end to year’s end. She literally never went out. As a child, she had no doubt enjoyed some kind of liberty; but as a marriageable girl, and as a bride, she was as much a prisoner as a bird in a cage. Born and bred in Luxor, she had never seen Karnak; yet Karnak is only two miles distant. We asked her if she would like to go there with us; but she laughed and shook her head. She was incapable even of curiosity.

It seemed to us that the wives of the fellahîn were in truth the happiest women in Egypt. They work hard and are bitterly poor; but they have the free use of their limbs and they at least know the fresh air, the sunshine and the open fields.

When we left Ayserat, there still lay three hundred and thirty-five miles between us and Cairo. From this time the navigation of the Nile became every day more difficult. The dahabeeyah, too, got heated through and through, so that not even sluicing and swabbing availed to keep down the temperature. At night when we went to our sleeping-cabins, the timbers alongside of our berths were as hot to the hand as a screen in front of a great fire. Our crew, though to the manner born, suffered even more than ourselves; and L—— at this time had generally a case of sunstroke on her hands. One by one, we passed the places we had seen on our way up—Siût, Manfalût, Gebel Abufayda, Roda, Minieh. After all, we did not see Beni Hassan. The day we reached that part of the river, a furious sandstorm was raging; such a storm that even the writer was daunted. Three days later, we took the rail at Bibbeh and went on to Cairo, leaving the Philæ to follow as fast as wind and weather might permit.

We were so wedded by this time to dahabeeyah life, that we felt lost at first in the big rooms at Shepheard’s hotel, and altogether bewildered in the crowded streets. Yet here was Cairo, more picturesque, more beautiful than ever. Here were the same merchants squatting on the same carpets and smoking the same pipes, in the Tunis bazaar; here was the same old cake seller still ensconced in the same doorway in the Muski; here were the same jewelers selling bracelets in the Khan-Khalîli; the same money-changers sitting behind their little tables at the corners of the streets; the same veiled ladies riding on donkeys and driving in carriages; the same hurrying funerals and noisy weddings; the same odd cries and motley costumes and unaccustomed trades. Nothing was changed. We soon dropped back into the old life of sight-seeing and shopping—buying rugs and silks and silver ornaments and old embroideries and Turkish slippers and all sorts of antique and pretty trifles; going from Mohammedan mosques to rare old Coptic churches; dropping in for an hour or two most afternoons at the Boulak museum; and generally ending the day’s work with a drive on the Shubra road, or a stroll round the Esbekiyeh gardens.

The Môlid-en-Nebi, or festival of the birth of the prophet, was being held at this time in a tract of waste ground on the road to old Cairo. Here, in some twenty or thirty large open tents ranged in a circle, there were readings of the Koran and meetings of dervishes going on by day and night, without intermission, for nearly a fortnight. After dark, when the tents were all ablaze with lighted chandeliers, and the dervishes were howling and leaping, and fire-works were being let off from an illuminated platform in the middle of the area, the scene was extraordinary. All Cairo used to be there, on foot or in carriages, between eight o’clock and midnight every evening; the veiled ladies of the khedive’s hareem in their miniature broughams being foremost among the spectators.

The Môlid-en-Nebi ends with the performance of the Dóseh, when the sheik of the Saädîyeh dervishes rides over a road of prostrate fanatics. L—— and the writer witnessed this sight from the tent of the Governor of Cairo. Drunk with opium, fasting and praying, rolling their heads and foaming at the mouth, some hundreds of wretched creatures lay down in the road packed as close as paving-stones, and were walked and ridden over before our eyes. The standard-bearers came first; then a priest reading the Koran aloud; then the sheik on his white Arab, supported on either side by barefooted priests. The beautiful horse trod with evident reluctance and as lightly and swiftly as possible on the human causeway under his hoofs. The Mohammedans aver that no one is injured or even bruised[261] on this holy occasion; but I saw some men carried away in convulsions, who looked as if they would never walk again.[262]

It is difficult to say but a few inadequate words of a place about which an instructive volume might be written; yet to pass the Boulak Museum in silence is impossible. This famous collection is due, in the first instance, to the liberality of the late khedive and the labors of Mariette. With the exception of Mehemet Ali, who excavated the Temple of Denderah, no previous viceroy of Egypt had ever interested himself in the archæology of the country. Those who cared for such rubbish as encumbered the soil or lay hidden beneath the sands of the desert, were free to take it; and no favor was more frequently asked or more readily granted than permission to dig for “anteekahs.” Hence the Egyptian wealth of our museums. Hence the numerous private collections dispersed throughout Europe. Ismail Pasha, however, put an end to that wholesale pillage; and for the first time since ever “mummy was sold for balsam,” or for bric-à-brac, it became illegal to transport antiquities. Thus, for the first time, Egypt began to possess a national collection.

Youngest of great museums, the Boulak collection is the wealthiest in the world in portrait-statues of private individuals, in funerary tablets, in amulets and in personal relics of the ancient inhabitants of the Nile valley. It is necessarily less rich in such colossal statues as fill the great galleries of the British Museum, the Turin Museum and the Louvre. These, being above ground and comparatively few in number, were for the most part seized upon long since and transported to Europe. The Boulak statues are the product of the tombs. The famous wooden “sheik,” about which so much has been written,[263] the magnificent diorite statue of Khafra (Chephren), the builder of the second pyramid, the two marvelous sitting statues of Prince Ra-hotep and Princess Nefer-t, are all portraits; and, like their tombs, were executed during the lifetime of the persons represented. Crossing the threshold of the great vestibule,[264] one is surrounded by a host of these extraordinary figures, erect, colored, clothed, all but in motion. It is like entering the crowded ante-room of a royal palace in the time of the ancient empire.

The greater number of the Boulak portrait statues are sculptured in what is called the hieratic attitude; that is, with the left arm down and pressed close to the body, the left hand holding a roll of papyrus, the right leg advanced and the right hand raised, as grasping the walking-staff. It occurred to me that there might be a deeper significance than at first sight appears in this conventional attitude, and that it perhaps suggests the moment of resurrection, when the deceased, holding fast by his copy of the book of the dead, walks forth from his tomb into the light of life eternal.

Of all the statues here—one may say, indeed, of all known Egyptian statues—those of Prince Ra-hotep and Princess Nefer-t are the most wonderful. They are probably the oldest portrait-statues in the world.[265] They come from a tomb of the third dynasty, and are contemporary with Snefru, a king who reigned before the time of Khufu and Khafra. That is to say, these people who sit before us side by side, colored to the life, fresh and glowing as the day when they gave the artist his last sitting, lived at a time when the great pyramids of Ghîzeh were not yet built, and at a date which is variously calculated as from about six thousand three hundred to four thousand years before the present day. The princess wears her hair precisely as it is still worn in Nubia, and her necklace of cabochon drops is of a pattern much favored by the modern Ghawâzi. The eyes of both statues are inserted. The eyeball, which is set in an eyelid of bronze, is made of opaque white quartz, with an iris of rock-crystal inclosing a pupil of some kind of brilliant metal. This treatment—of which there are one or two other instances extant—gives to the eyes a look of intelligence that is almost appalling. There is a play of light within the orb, and apparently a living moisture upon the surface, which has never been approached by the most skillfully made glass eyes of modern manufacture.[266]