A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

Now the camel-riding that is done at Assûan is of the most commonplace description, and bears to genuine desert traveling about the same relation that half an hour on the Mer de Glace bears to the passage of the Mortaretsch glacier or the ascent of Monte Rosa. The short cut from Assûan to Philæ, or at least the ride to the granite quarries, forms part of every dragoman’s programme, and figures as the crowning achievement of every Cook’s tourist. The Arabs themselves perform these little journeys much more pleasantly and expeditiously on donkeys. They take good care, in fact, never to scale the summit of a camel if they can help it. But for the impressionable traveler, the Assûan camel is de rigueur. In his interests are those snarling quadrupeds, betasseled and berugged, taken from their regular work, and paraded up and down the landing-place. To transport cargoes disembarked above and below the cataract is their vocation. Taken from this honest calling to perform in an absurd little drama got up especially for the entertainment of tourists, it is no wonder if the beasts are more than commonly ill-tempered. They know the whole proceeding to be essentially cockney, and they resent it accordingly.

The ride, nevertheless, has its advantages; not the least being that it enables one to realize the kind of work involved in any of the regular desert expeditions. At all events, it entitles one to claim acquaintance with the ship of the desert, and (bearing in mind the probable inferiority of the specimen) to form an ex pede judgment of his qualification.

The camel has his virtues—so much at least must be admitted; but they do not lie upon the surface. My Buffon tells me, for instance, that he carries a fresh-water cistern in his stomach; which is meritorious. But the cistern ameliorates neither his gait nor his temper—which are abominable. Irreproachable as a beast of burden, he is open to many objections as a steed. It is unpleasant, in the first place, to ride an animal which not only objects to being ridden, but cherishes a strong personal antipathy to his rider. Such, however, is his amiable peculiarity. You know that he hates you, from the moment you first walk round him, wondering where and how to begin the ascent of his hump. He does not, in fact, hesitate to tell you so in the roundest terms. He swears freely while you are taking your seat; snarls if you but move in the saddle; and stares you angrily in the face if you attempt to turn his head in any direction save that which he himself prefers. Should you persevere, he tries to bite your feet. If biting your feet does not answer, he lies down.

Now the lying down and getting up of a camel are performances designed for the express purpose of inflicting grievous bodily harm upon his rider. Thrown twice forward and twice backward, punched in his “wind” and damaged in his spine, the luckless novice receives four distinct shocks, each more violent and unexpected than the last. For this “execrable hunchback” is fearfully and wonderfully made. He has a superfluous joint somewhere in his legs and uses it to revenge himself upon mankind.

His paces, however, are more complicated than his joints and more trying than his temper. He has four: a short walk, like the rolling of a small boat in a chopping sea; a long walk, which dislocates every bone in your body; a trot that reduces you to imbecility; and a gallop that is sudden death. One tries in vain to imagine a crime for which the peine forte et dure of sixteen hours on camelback would not be a full and sufficient expiation. It is a punishment to which one would not willingly be the means of condemning any human being—not even a reviewer.

They had been down on the bank for hire all day long—brown camels and white camels, shaggy camels and smooth camels; all with gay worsted tassels on their heads and rugs flung over their high wooden saddles, by way of housings. The gentlemen of the Fostât had ridden away hours ago, cross-legged and serene; and we had witnessed their demeanor with mingled admiration and envy. Now, modestly conscious of our own daring, we prepared to do likewise. It was a solemn moment when, having chosen our beasts, we prepared to encounter the unknown perils of the desert. What wonder if the happy couple exchanged an affecting farewell at parting?

We mounted and rode away; two imps of darkness following at the heels of our camels and Salame performing the part of body-guard. Thus attended, we found ourselves pitched, swung and rolled along at a pace that carried us rapidly up the slope, past a suburb full of cafés and grinning dancing-girls and out into the desert. Our way for the first half-mile or so lay among tombs. A great Mohammedan necropolis, part ancient, part modern, lies behind Assûan and covers more ground than the town itself. Some scores of tiny mosques, each topped by its little cupola and all more or less dilapidated, stand here amid a wilderness of scattered tombstones. Some are isolated; some grouped picturesquely together. Each covers, or is supposed to cover, the grave of a Moslem santon; but some are mere commemorative chapels dedicated to saints and martyrs elsewhere buried. Of simple headstones defaced, shattered, overturned, propped back to back on cairns of loose stones, or piled in broken and dishonored heaps, there must be many hundreds. They are for the most part rounded at the top like ancient Egyptian stelæ and bear elaborately carved inscriptions, some of which are in the Cufic character and more than a thousand years old. Seen when the sun is bending westward and the shadows are lengthening, there is something curiously melancholy and picturesque about this city of the dead in the dead desert.

Leaving the tombs, we now strike off toward the left, bound for the obelisk in the quarry, which is the stock sight of the place. The horizon beyond Assûan is bounded on all sides by rocky heights, bold and picturesque in form, yet scarcely lofty enough to deserve the name of mountains. The sandy bottom under our camel’s feet is strewn with small pebbles and tolerably firm. Clustered rocks of black and red granite profusely inscribed with hieroglyphed records crop up here and there and serve as landmarks just where landmarks are needed. For nothing would be easier than to miss one’s way among these tawny slopes and to go wandering off, like lost Israelites, into the desert.

Winding in and out among undulating hillocks and tracts of rolled bowlders, we come at last to a little group of cliffs, at the foot of which our camels halt unbidden. Here we dismount, climb a short slope and find the huge monolith at our feet.

Being cut horizontally, it lies half-buried in drifted sand, with nothing to show that it is not wholly disengaged and ready for transport. Our books tell us, however, that the under-cutting has never been done and that it is yet one with the granite bottom on which it seems to lie. Both ends are hidden; but one can pace some sixty feet of its yet visible surface. That surface bears the tool-marks of the workmen. A slanting groove pitted with wedge-holes indicates where it was intended to taper toward the top. Another shows where it was to be reduced at the sides. Had it been finished, this would have been the largest obelisk in the world. The great obelisk of Queen Hatshepsu at Karnak, which, as its inscriptions record, came also from Assûan, stands ninety-two feet high and measures eight feet square at the base;[51] but this which lies sleeping in the desert would have stood ninety-five feet in the shaft, and have measured over eleven feet square at the base. We can never know now why it was left here, nor guess with what royal name it should have been inscribed. Had the king said in his heart that he would set up a mightier obelisk than was ever yet seen by eyes of men, and did he die before the block could be extracted from the quarry? Or were the quarrymen driven from the desert, and the Pharaoh from his throne, by the hungry hordes of Ethiopia, or Syria, or the islands beyond the sea? The great stone may be older than Rameses the Great, or as modern as the last of the Romans; but to give it a date, or to divine its history, is impossible. Egyptology, which has solved the enigma of the sphinx, is powerless here. The obelisk of the quarry holds its secret safe, and holds it forever.