A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

We were never known to make light of the painter’s repertory of select abuse after this. If that note-book of his had been the drowned book of Prospero, or the magical Papyrus of Thoth fished up anew from the bottom of the Nile, we could not have regarded it with a respect more nearly bordering upon awe.

Though there exists no boundary line to mark where Egypt ends and Nubia begins, the nationality of the races dwelling on either side of that invisible barrier is as sharply defined as though an ocean divided them. Among the shellalee, or cataract villagers, one comes suddenly into the midst of a people that have apparently nothing in common with the population of Egypt. They belong to a lower ethnological type, and they speak a language derived from purely African sources. Contrasting with our Arab sailors the sulky-looking, half-naked, muscular savages who thronged about the Philæ during her passage up the cataract, one could not but perceive that they are to this day as distinct and inferior a people as when their Egyptian conquerors, massing together in one contemptuous epithet all nations south of the frontier, were wont to speak of them as “the vile race of Kush.” Time has done little to change them since those early days. Some Arabic words have crept into their vocabulary. Some modern luxuries—as tobacco, coffee, soap, and gunpowder—have come to be included in the brief catalogue of their daily wants. But in most other respects they are living to this day as they lived in the time of the Pharaohs; cultivating lentils and durra, brewing barley beer, plaiting mats and baskets of stained reeds, tracing rude patterns upon bowls of gourd-rind, flinging the javelin, hurling the boomerang, fashioning bucklers of crocodile-skin and bracelets of ivory, and supplying Egypt with henna. The dexterity with which, sitting as if in a wager boat, they balance themselves on a palm-log, and paddle to and fro about the river, is really surprising. This barbaric substitute for a boat is probably more ancient than the pyramids.

Having witnessed the passage of the first few rapids, we were glad to escape from the dahabeeyah and spend our time sketching here and there on the borders of the desert and among the villages and islands round about. In all Egypt and Nubia there is no scenery richer in picturesque bits than the scenery of the cataract. An artist might pass a winter there, and not exhaust the pictorial wealth of those five miles which divide Assûan from Philæ. Of tortuous creeks shut in by rocks fantastically piled—of sand-slopes golden to the water’s edge—of placid pools low-lying in the midst of lupin-fields and tracts of tender barley—of creaking sakkiehs, half-hidden among palms and dropping water as they turn—of mud dwellings, here clustered together in hollows, there perched separately on heights among the rocks, and perpetuating to this day the form and slope of Egyptian pylons—of rude boats drawn up in sheltered coves, or going to pieces high and dry upon the sands—of water-washed bowlders of crimson, and black, and purple granite, on which the wild fowl cluster at midday and the fisher spreads his nets to dry at sunset—of camels, and caravans, and camps on shore—of cargo-boats and cangias on the river—of wild figures of half-naked athletes—of dusky women decked with barbaric ornaments, unveiled, swift-gliding, trailing long robes of deepest gentian blue—of ancient crones, and little naked children like live bronzes—of these, and a hundred other subjects, in infinite variety and combination, there is literally no end. It is all so picturesque, indeed, so biblical, so poetical, that one is almost in danger of forgetting that the places are something more than beautiful backgrounds, and that the people are not merely appropriate figures placed there for the delight of sketchers, but are made of living flesh and blood, and moved by hopes, and fears, and sorrows, like our own.

Mahatta, green with sycamores and tufted palms, nestled in the hollow of a little bay; half-islanded in the rear by an arm of backwater, curved and glittering like the blade of a Turkish cimeter, is by far the most beautifully situated village on the Nile. It is the residence of the principal sheik, and, if one may say so, is the capital of the cataract. The houses lie some way back from the river. The bay is thronged with native boats of all sizes and colors. Men and camels, women and children, donkeys, dogs, merchandise and temporary huts, put together with poles and matting, crowd the sandy shore. It is Assûan over again, but on a larger scale. The shipping is tenfold more numerous. The traders’ camp is in itself a village. The beach is half a mile in length and a quarter of a mile in the slope down to the river. Mahatta is, in fact, the twin port to Assûan. It lies, not precisely at the other extremity of the great valley between Assûan and Philæ, but at the nearest accessible point above the cataract. It is here that the Soudan traders disembark their goods for re-embarkation at Assûan. Such ricketty, barbaric-looking craft as these Nubian cangias we had not yet seen on the river. They looked as old and obsolete as the ark. Some had curious carved verandas outside the cabin-entrance. Others were tilted up at the stern like Chinese junks. Most of them had been slavers in the palmy days of Defterdar Bey; plying then as now between Wady Halfeh and Mahatta, discharging their human cargoes at this point for re-shipment at Assûan; and rarely passing the cataract, even at the time of inundation. If their wicked old timbers could have spoken they might have told us many a black and bloody tale.

Going up through the village and palm gardens, and turning off in a northeasterly direction toward the desert, one presently comes out about midway of that valley to which I have made allusion more than once already. No one, however unskilled in physical geography, could look from end to end of that huge furrow and not see that it was once a river-bed. We know not for how many tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of years the Nile may have held on its course within those original bounds. Neither can we tell when it deserted them. It is, however, quite certain that the river flowed that way within historic times; that is to say, in the days of Amenemhat III (circa B.C. 2800). So much is held to be proven by certain inscriptions[54] which record the maximum height of the inundation at Semneh during various years of that king’s reign. The Nile then rose in Ethiopia to a level some twenty-seven feet in excess of the highest point to which it is ever known to attain at the present day. I am not aware what relation the height of this ancient bed bears to the levels recorded at Semneh, or to those now annually self-registered upon the furrowed banks of Philæ; but one sees at a glance, without aid of measurements or hydrographic science, that if the river were to come down again next summer in a mighty “bore,” the crest of which rose twenty-seven feet above the highest ground now fertilized by the annual overflow, it would at once refill its long-deserted bed and convert Assûan into an island.

Granted, then, that the Nile flowed through the desert in the time of Amenemhat III, there must at some later period have come a day when it suddenly ran dry. This catastrophe is supposed to have taken place about the time of the expulsion of the Hyksos (circa B.C. 1703), when a great disruption of the rocky barrier at Silsilis is thought to have taken place; so draining Nubia, which till now had played the part of a vast reservoir, and dispersing the pent-up floods over the plains of Southern Egypt. It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that the Nile was by this catastrophe turned aside in order to be precipitated in the direction of the cataract. One arm of the river must always have taken the present lower and deeper course; while the other must of necessity have run low—perhaps very nearly dry—as the inundation subsided every spring.

There remains no monumental record of this event; but the facts speak for themselves. The great channel is there. The old Nile mud is there—buried for the most part in sand, but still visible on many a rocky shelf and plateau between Assûan and Philæ. There are even places where the surface of the mass is seen to be scooped out, as if by the sudden rush of the departing waters. Since that time, the tides of war and commerce have flowed in their place. Every conquering Thothmes and Rameses bound for the land of Kush, led his armies that way. Sabacon, at the head of his Ethiopian hordes, took that short cut to the throne of all the Pharaohs. The French under Desaix, pursuing the Memlooks after the battle of the pyramids, swept down that pass to Philæ. Meanwhile the whole trade of the Soudan, however interrupted at times by the ebb and flow of war, has also set that way. We never crossed those five miles of desert without encountering a train or two of baggage-camels laden either with European goods for the far south, or with oriental treasures for the north.

I shall not soon forget an Abyssinian caravan which we met one day just coming out from Mahatta. It consisted of seventy camels laden with elephant tusks. The tusks, which were about fourteen feet in length, were packed in half-dozens and sewed up in buffalo hides. Each camel was slung with two loads, one at either side of the hump. There must have been about eight hundred and forty tusks in all. Beside each shambling beast strode a bare-footed Nubian. Following these, on the back of a gigantic camel, came a hunting-leopard in a wooden cage and a wildcat in a basket. Last of all marched a coal-black Abyssinian nearly seven feet in height, magnificently shawled and turbaned, with a huge cimeter dangling by his side and in his belt a pair of enormous inlaid seventeenth-century pistols, such as would have become the holsters of Prince Rupert. This elaborate warrior represented the guard of the caravan. The hunting-leopard and the wildcat were for Prince Hassan, the third son of the viceroy. The ivory was for exportation. Anything more picturesque than this procession, with the dust driving before it in clouds and the children following it out of the village, it would be difficult to conceive. One longed for Gerôme to paint it on the spot.

The rocks on either side of the ancient river-bed are profusely hieroglyphed. These inscriptions, together with others found in the adjacent quarries, range over a period of between three and four thousand years, beginning with the early reigns of the ancient empire and ending with the Ptolemies and Cæsars. Some are mere autographs. Others run to a considerable length. Many are headed with figures of gods and worshipers. These, however, are for the most part mere graffiti, ill-drawn and carelessly sculptured. The records they illustrate are chiefly votive. The passer-by adores the gods of the cataract; implores their protection; registers his name and states the object of his journey. The votaries are of various ranks, periods, and nationalities; but the formula in most instances is pretty much the same. Now it is a citizen of Thebes performing the pilgrimage to Philæ; or a general at the head of his troops returning from a foray in Ethiopia; or a tributary prince doing homage to Rameses the Great, and associating his suzerain with the divinities of the place. Occasionally we come upon a royal cartouche and a pompous catalogue of titles, setting forth how the Pharaoh himself, the Golden Hawk, the Son of Ra, the Mighty, the Invincible, the Godlike, passed that way.

It is curious to see how royalty, so many thousand years ago, set the fashion in names, just as it does to this day. Nine-tenths of the ancient travelers who left their signatures upon these rocks were called Rameses or Thothmes or Usertasen. Others, still more ambitious, took the names of gods. Ampère, who hunted diligently for inscriptions both here and among the islands, found the autographs of no end of merely mortal Amens and Hathors.[55]