A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

At How, where the new town is partly built on the mounds of the old (Diospolis Parva), we next morning saw the natives transporting small boat-loads of ancient brick rubbish to the opposite side of the river, for the purpose of manuring those fields from which the early durra crop had just been gathered in. Thus, curiously enough, the mud left by some inundation of two or three thousand years ago comes at last to the use from which it was then diverted, and is found to be more fertilizing than the new deposit. At Kasr es Sayd, a little farther on, we came to one of the well-known “bad bits”—a place where the bed of the river is full of sunken rocks, and sailing is impossible. Here the men were half the day punting the dahabeeyah over the dangerous part, while we grubbed among the mounds of what was once the ancient city of Chenoboscion. These remains, which cover a large superficial area and consist entirely of crude brick foundations, are very interesting and in good preservation. We traced the ground-plans of several houses; followed the passages by which they were separated; and observed many small arches which seemed built on too small a scale for doors or windows, but for which it was difficult to account in any other way. Brambles and weeds were growing in these deserted inclosures; while rubbish-heaps, excavated pits, and piles of broken pottery divided the ruins and made the work of exploration difficult. We looked in vain for the dilapidated quay and sculptured blocks mentioned in Wilkinson’s “General View of Egypt”; but if the foundation-stones of the new sugar factory close against the mooring-place could speak, they would no doubt explain the mystery. We saw nothing, indeed, to show that Chenoboscion had contained any stone structures whatever, save the broken shaft of one small granite column.

The village of Kasr es Sayd consists of a cluster of mud huts and a sugar factory; but the factory was idle that day and the village seemed half deserted. The view here is particularly fine. About a couple of miles to the southward, the mountains, in magnificent procession, come down again at right angles to the river, and thence reach away in long ranges of precipitous headlands. The plain, terminating abruptly against the foot of this gigantic barrier, opens back eastward to the remotest horizon—an undulating sea of glistening sand, bordered by a chaotic middle distance of mounded ruins. Nearest of all, a narrow foreground of cultivated soil, green with young crops and watered by frequent shâdûfs, extends along the river side to the foot of the mountains. A sheik’s tomb shaded by a single dôm palm is conspicuous on the bank, while far away, planted amid the solitary sands, we see a large Coptic convent with many cupolas; a cemetery full of Christian graves; and a little oasis of date palms indicating the presence of a spring.

The chief interest of this scene, however, centers in the ruins; and these—looked upon from a little distance, blackened, desolate, half-buried, obscured every now and then, when the wind swept over them, by swirling clouds of dust—reminded us of the villages we had seen not two years before, half-overwhelmed and yet smoking, in the midst of a lava-torrent below Vesuvius.

We now had the full moon again, making night more beautiful than day. Sitting on deck for hours after the sun had gone down, when the boat glided gently on with half-filled sail and the force of the wind was spent, we used to wonder if in all the world there was another climate in which the effect of moonlight was so magical. To say that every object far or near was visible as distinctly as by day, yet more tenderly, is to say nothing. It was not only form that was defined; it was not only light and shadow that were vivid—it was color that was present. Color neither deadened nor changed; but softened, glowing, spiritualized. The amber sheen of the sand-island in the middle of the river, the sober green of the palm-grove, the little lady’s turquoise-colored hood, were clear to the sight and relatively true in tone. The oranges showed through the bars of the crate like nuggets of pure gold. L——’s crimson shawl glowed with a warmer dye than it ever wore by day. The mountains were flushed as if in the light of sunset. Of all the natural phenomena that we beheld in the course of the journey, I remember none that surprised us more than this. We could scarcely believe at first that it was not some effect of after-glow, or some miraculous aurora of the east. But the sun had nothing to do with that flush upon the mountains. The glow was in the stone, and the moonlight but revealed the local color.

For some days before they came in sight we had been eagerly looking for the Theban hills; and now, after a night of rapid sailing, we woke one morning to find the sun rising on the wrong side of the boat, the favorable wind dead against us, and a picturesque chain of broken peaks upon our starboard bow. By these signs we knew that we must have come to the great bend in the river between How and Keneh, and that these new mountains, so much more varied in form than those of Middle Egypt, must be the mountains behind Denderah. They seemed to lie upon the eastern bank, but that was an illusion which the map disproved, and which lasted only till the great corner was fairly turned. To turn that corner, however, in the teeth of wind and current, was no easy task, and cost us two long days of hard tracking.

At a point about ten miles below Denderah we saw some thousands of fellâheen at work amid clouds of sand upon the embankments of a new canal. They swarmed over the mounds like ants, and the continuous murmur of their voices came to us across the river like the humming of innumerable bees. Others, following the path along the bank, were pouring toward the spot in an unbroken stream. The Nile must here be nearly half a mile in breadth; but the engineers in European dress and the overseers with long sticks in their hands were plainly distinguishable by the help of a glass. The tents in which these officials were camping out during the progress of the work gleamed white among the palms by the river side. Such scenes must have been common enough in the old days when a conquering Pharaoh, returning from Libya or the land of Kush, set his captives to raise a dyke, or excavate a lake, or quarry a mountain. The Israelites, building the massive walls of Pithom and Rameses with bricks of their own making, must have presented exactly such a spectacle.

That we were witnessing a case of forced labor could not be doubted. Those thousands yonder had most certainly been drafted off in gangs from hundreds of distant villages, and were but little better off, for the time being, than the captives of the ancient empire. In all cases of forced labor under the present régime, however, it seems that the laborer is paid, though very insufficiently, for his unwilling toil; and that his captivity only lasts so long as the work for which he has been pressed remains in progress. In some cases the term of service is limited to three or four months, at the end of which time the men are supposed to be returned in barges towed by government steam-tugs. It too often happens, nevertheless, that the poor souls are left to get back how they can; and thus many a husband and father either perishes by the way or is driven to take service in some village far from home. Meanwhile his wife and children, being scantily supported by the Sheik el Beled, fall into a condition of semi-serfdom; and his little patch of ground, left untilled through seed-time and harvest, passes after the next inundation into the hands of a stranger.

But there is another side to this question of forced labor. Water must be had in Egypt, no matter at what cost. If the land is not sufficiently irrigated the crops fail and the nation starves. Now, the frequent construction of canals has from immemorial time been reckoned among the first duties of an Egyptian ruler; but it is a duty which cannot be performed without the willing or unwilling co-operation of several thousand workmen. Those who are best acquainted with the character and temper of the fellâh maintain the hopelessness of looking to him for voluntary labor of this description. Frugal, patient, easily contented as he is, no promise of wages, however high, would tempt him from his native village. What to him are the needs of a district six or seven hundred miles away? His own shâdûf is enough for his own patch, and so long as he can raise his three little crops a year neither he nor his family will starve. How, then, are these necessary public works to be carried out, unless by means of the corvée? M. About has put an ingenious summary of this “other-side” argument into the mouth of his ideal fellâh. “It is not the emperor,” says Ahmed to the Frenchman, “who causes the rain to descend upon your land; it is the west wind—and the benefit thus conferred upon you exacts no penalty of manual labor. But in Egypt, where the rain from heaven falls scarcely three times in the year, it is the prince who supplies its place to us by distributing the waters of the Nile. This can only be done by the work of men’s hands; and it is therefore to the interest of all that the hands of all should be at his disposal.”

We regarded it, I think, as an especial piece of good fortune when we found ourselves becalmed next day within three or four miles of Denderah. Abydos comes first in order, according to the map; but then the temples lie seven or eight miles from the river, and, as we happened just thereabouts to be making some ten miles an hour, we put off the excursion till our return. Here, however, the ruins lay comparatively near at hand, and in such a position that we could approach them from below and rejoin our dahabeeyah a few miles higher up the river. So, leaving Reïs Hassan to track against the current, we landed at the first convenient point, and, finding neither donkeys nor guides at hand, took an escort of three or four sailors and set off on foot.

The way was long, the day was hot, and we had only the map to go by. Having climbed the steep bank and skirted an extensive palm-grove, we found ourselves in a country without paths or roads of any kind. The soil, squared off as usual like a gigantic chess-board, was traversed by hundreds of tiny water-channels, between which we had to steer our course as best we could. Presently the last belt of palms was passed—the plain, green with young corn and level as a lake, widened out at the foot of the mountains—and the temple, islanded in that sea of rippling emerald, rose up before us upon its platform of blackened mounds.