A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

For the Egyptians, it seems, used potsherds instead of papyrus for short memoranda; and each of these fragments which we had picked up contained a record complete in itself. I fear we should have laughed if any one had suggested that they might be tax-gatherers’ receipts. Yet that is just what they were—receipts for government dues collected on the frontier during the period of Roman rule in Egypt. They were written in Greek, because the Romans deputed Greek scribes to perform the duties of this unpopular office; but the Greek is so corrupt and the penmanship so clownish that only a few eminent scholars can read them.

Not all the inscribed fragments found at Elephantine, however, are tax-receipts, or written in bad Greek. The British Museum contains several in the demotic, or current, script of the people, and a few in the more learned hieratic, or priestly, hand. The former have not yet been translated. They are probably business memoranda and short private letters of Egyptians of the same period.

But how came these fragile documents to be preserved, when the city in which their writers lived, and the temples in which they worshiped, have disappeared and left scarce a trace behind? Who cast them down among the potsherds on this barren hillside? Are we to suppose that some kind of public record office once occupied the site, and that the receipts here stored were duplicates of those given to the payers? Or is it not even more probable that this place was the Monte Testaccio of the ancient city, to which all broken pottery, written as well as unwritten, found its way sooner or later?

With the exception of a fine fragment of Roman quay nearly opposite Assûan, the ruined gateway of Alexander and the battered statue of Menephtah are the only objects of archæological interest in the island. But the charm of Elephantine is the everlasting charm of natural beauty—of rocks, of palm-woods, of quiet waters.

The streets of Assûan are just like the streets of every other mud town on the Nile. The bazaars reproduce the bazaars of Minieh and Siût. The environs are noisy with cafés and dancing-girls, like the environs of Esneh and Luxor. Into the mosque, where some kind of service was going on, we peeped without entering. It looked cool, and clean, and spacious; the floor being covered with fine matting, and some scores of ostrich-eggs depending from the ceiling. In the bazaars we bought baskets and mats of Nubian manufacture, woven with the same reeds, dyed with the same colors, shaped after the same models, as those found in the tombs at Thebes. A certain oval basket with a vaulted cover, of which specimens are preserved in the British Museum, seems still to be the pattern most in demand at Assûan. The basket-makers have neither changed their fashion nor the buyers their taste since the days of Rameses the Great.

Here also, at a little cupboard of a shop near the shoe bazaar, we were tempted to spend a few pounds in ostrich feathers, which are conveyed to Assûan by traders from the Soudan. The merchant brought out a feather at a time, and seemed in no haste to sell. We also affected indifference. The haggling on both sides was tremendous. The by-standers, as usual, were profoundly interested, and commented on every word that passed. At last we carried away an armful of splendid plumes, most of which measured from two and a half to three feet in length. Some were pure white, others white tipped with brown. They had been neither cleaned nor curled, but were just as they came from the hands of the ostrich-hunters.

By far the most amusing sight in Assûan was the traders’ camp down near the landing-place. Here were Abyssinians like slender-legged baboons; wild-looking Bisharîyah and Ababdeh Arabs with flashing eyes and flowing hair; sturdy Nubians the color of a Barbedienne bronze; and natives of all tribes and shades, from Kordofân and Sennâr, the deserts of the Bahuda and the banks of the Blue and White Niles. Some were running from Cairo; others were on their way thither. Some, having disembarked their merchandise at Mahatta (a village on the other side of the cataract), had come across the desert to re-embark it at Assûan. Others had just disembarked theirs at Assûan, in order to re-embark it at Mahatta. Meanwhile, they were living sub jove; each intrenched in his own little redoubt of piled-up bales and packing-cases, like a spider in the center of his web; each provided with a kettle and coffee-pot, and an old rug to sleep and pray upon. One sulky old Turk had fixed up a roof of matting, and furnished his den with a kafas, or palm-wood couch; but he was a self-indulgent exception to the rule.

Some smiled, some scowled, when we passed through the camp. One offered us coffee. Another, more obliging than the rest, displayed the contents of his packages. Great bundles of lion and leopard skins, bales of cotton, sacks of henna-leaves, elephant-tusks swathed in canvas and matting, strewed the sandy bank. Of gum-arabic alone there must have been several hundred bales; each bale sewed up in a raw hide and tied with thongs of hippopotamus leather. Toward dusk, when the camp-fires were alight and the evening meal was in course of preparation, the scene became wonderfully picturesque. Lights gleamed; shadows deepened; strange figures stalked to and fro, or squatted in groups amid their merchandise. Some were baking flat cakes; others stirring soup, or roasting coffee. A hole scooped in the sand, a couple of stones to support the kettle, and a handful of dry sticks, served for kitchen range and fuel. Meanwhile all the dogs in Assûan prowled round the camp, and a jargon of barbaric tongues came and went with the breeze that followed the sunset.

I must not forget to add that among this motley crowd we saw two brothers, natives of Khartûm. We met them first in the town, and afterward in the camp. They wore voluminous white turbans and flowing robes of some kind of creamy cashmere cloth. Their small proud heads and delicate aristocratic features were modeled on the purest Florentine type; their eyes were long and liquid; their complexions, free from any taint of Abyssinian blue or Nubian bronze, were intensely, lustrously, magnificently black. We agreed that we had never seen two such handsome men. They were like young and beautiful Dantes carved in ebony; Dantes unembittered by the world, unsicklied by the pale cast of thought, and glowing with the life of the warm south.

Having explored Elephantine and ransacked the bazaars, our party dispersed in various directions. Some gave the remainder of the day to letter-writing. The painter, bent on sketching, started off in search of a jackal-haunted ruin up a wild ravine on the Libyan side of the river. The writer and the idle man boldly mounted camels and rode out into the Arabian desert.