A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

He stooped, inhaling their perfume. He looked puzzled.

“They are very sweet,” he said. “Are they roses?”

The question gave us a kind of shock. We could hardly believe we had reached a land where roses were unknown. Yet the governor, who had smoked a rose-water narghilé and drunk rose-sherbet and eaten conserve of roses all his days, recognized them by their perfume only. He had never been out of Assûan in his life; not even as far as Erment. And he had never seen a rose in bloom.

We had hoped to begin the passage of the cataract on the morning of the day following our arrival at the frontier; but some other dahabeeyah, it seemed, was in the act of fighting its way up to Philæ; and till that boat was through, neither the sheik nor his men would be ready for us. At eight o’clock in the morning of the next day but one, however, they promised to take us in hand. We were to pay £12 English for the double journey; that is to say, £9 down; and the remaining £3 on our return to Assûan.

Such was the treaty concluded between ourselves and the sheik of the cataract at a solemn conclave over which the governor, assisted by the kadi and mudîr, presided.

Having a clear day to spend at Assûan, we of course gave part thereof to Elephantine, which in the inscriptions is called Abu, or the Ivory Island. There may perhaps have been a depôt, or “treasure-city,” here for the precious things of the Upper Nile country; the gold of Nubia and the elephant-tusks of Kush.

It is a very beautiful island—rugged and lofty to the south; low and fertile to the north; with an exquisitely varied coast-line full of wooded creeks and miniature beaches in which one might expect at any moment to meet Robinson Crusoe with his goat-skin umbrella, or man Friday bending under a load of faggots. They are all Fridays here, however; for Elephantine, being the first Nubian outpost, is peopled by Nubians only. It contains two Nubian villages, and the mounds of a very ancient city which was the capital of all Egypt under the Pharaohs of the sixth dynasty, between three and four thousand years before Christ. Two temples, one of which dated from the reign of Amenhotep III, were yet standing here some seventy years ago. They were seen by Belzoni in 1815, and had just been destroyed to build a palace and barracks when Champollion went up in 1829. A ruined gateway of the Ptolemaic period and a forlorn-looking sitting statue of Menephtah, the supposed Pharaoh of the exodus, alone remain to identify the sites on which they stood.

Thick palm-groves and carefully tilled patches of castor-oil and cotton plants, lentils, and durra, make green the heart of the island. The western shore is wooded to the water’s edge. One may walk here in the shade at hottest noon, listening to the murmur of the cataract and seeking for wild flowers—which, however, would seem to blossom nowhere save in the sweet Arabic name of Gezîret-el-Zahr, the island of flowers.

Upon the high ground at the southern extremity of the island, among rubbish heaps, and bleached bones, and human skulls, and the sloughed skins of snakes, and piles of party-colored potsherds, we picked up several bits of inscribed terra-cotta—evidently fragments of broken vases. The writing was very faint, and in part obliterated. We could see that the characters were Greek; but not even our idle man was equal to making out a word of the sense. Believing them to be mere disconnected scraps to which it would be impossible to find the corresponding pieces—taking it for granted, also, that they were of comparatively modern date—we brought away some three or four as souvenirs of the place, and thought no more about them.

We little dreamed that Dr. Birch, in his cheerless official room at the British Museum so many thousand miles away, was at this very time occupied in deciphering a collection of similar fragments, nearly all of which had been brought from this same spot.[50] Of the curious interest attaching to these illegible scrawls, of the importance they were shortly to acquire in the eyes of the learned, of the possible value of any chance additions to their number we knew, and could know, nothing. Six months later we lamented our ignorance and our lost opportunities.