A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

Perhaps the most entirely curious and unaccustomed features in all this scene are the mountains. They are like none that any of us have seen in our diverse wanderings. Other mountains are homogeneous and thrust themselves up from below in masses suggestive of primitive disruption and upheaval. These seem to lie upon the surface foundationless; rock loosely piled on rock, bowlder on bowlder; like stupendous cairns, the work of demigods and giants. Here and there, on shelf or summit, a huge rounded mass, many tons in weight, hangs poised capriciously. Most of these blocks, I am persuaded, would “log” if put to the test.

But for a specimen stone commend me to yonder amazing monolith down by the water’s edge opposite, near the carob trees and the ferry. Though but a single block of orange-red granite, it looks like three; and the Arabs, seeing it in some fancied resemblance to an arm-chair, call it Pharaoh’s throne. Rounded and polished by primeval floods and emblazoned with royal cartouches of extraordinary size, it seems to have attracted the attention of pilgrims in all ages. Kings, conquerors, priests, travelers, have covered it with records of victories, of religious festivals, of prayers, and offerings, and acts of adoration. Some of these are older by a thousand years and more than the temples on the island opposite.

Such, roughly summed up, are the fourfold surroundings of Philæ—the cataract, the river, the desert, the environing mountains. The Holy Island—beautiful, lifeless, a thing of the far past, with all its wealth of sculpture, painting, history, poetry, tradition—sleeps, or seems to sleep, in the midst.

It is one of the world’s famous landscapes, and it deserves its fame. Every sketcher sketches it; every traveler describes it. Yet it is just one of those places of which the objective and subjective features are so equally balanced that it bears putting neither into words nor colors. The sketcher must perforce leave out the atmosphere of association which informs his subject; and the writer’s description is at best no better than a catalogue raisonnée.

CHAPTER XIII.
PHILÆ TO KOROSKO.

Sailing gently southward—the river opening wide before us, Philæ dwindling in the rear—we feel that we are now fairly over the border; and that if Egypt was strange and far from home, Nubia is stranger and farther still. The Nile here flows deep and broad. The rocky heights that hem it in so close on either side are still black on the one hand, golden on the other. The banks are narrower than ever. The space in some places is little wider than a towing-path. In others, there is barely room for a belt of date-palms and a slip of alluvial soil, every foot of which produces its precious growth of durra or barley. The steep verge below is green with lentils to the water’s edge. As the river recedes, it leaves each day a margin of fresh, wet soil, in which the careful husbandman hastens to scratch a new furrow and sow another line of seeds. He cannot afford to let so much as an inch of that kindly mud lie idle.

Gliding along with half-filled sail, we observe how entirely the population seems to be regulated by the extent of arable soil. Where the inundation has room to spread, villages come thicker; more dusky figures are seen moving to and fro in the shade of the palms; more children race along the banks, shrieking for backshîsh. When the shelf of soil is narrowed, on the contrary, to a mere fringe of luminous green dividing the rock from the river, there is a startling absence of everything like life. Mile after mile drags its slow length along, uncheered by any sign of human habitation. When now and then a solitary native, armed with gun or spear, is seen striding along the edge of the desert, he only seems to make the general solitude more apparent.

Meanwhile, it is not only men and women whom we miss—men laboring by the river side; women with babies astride on their shoulders, or water-jars balanced on their heads—but birds, beasts, boats; everything that we have been used to see along the river. The buffaloes dozing at midday in the shallows, the camels stalking home in single file toward sunset, the water-fowl haunting the sand-banks, seem suddenly to have vanished. Even donkeys are now rare; and as for horses, I do not remember to have seen one during the seven weeks we spent in Nubia. All night, too, instead of the usual chorus of dogs barking furiously from village to village, we hear only the long-drawn wail of an occasional jackal. It is not wonderful, however, that animal life should be scarce in a district where the scant soil yields barely food enough for those who till it. To realize how very scant it is, one needs only to remember that about Derr, where it is at its widest, the annual deposit nowhere exceeds half a mile in breadth; while for the most part of the way between Philæ and Wady Halfeh—a distance of two hundred and ten miles—it averages from six to sixty yards.

Here, then, more than ever, one seems to see how entirely these lands which we call Egypt and Nubia are nothing but the banks of one solitary river in the midst of a world of desert. In Egypt, the valley is often so wide that one forgets the stony waste beyond the corn-lands. But in Nubia the desert is ever present. We cannot forget it, if we would. The barren mountains press upon our path, showering down avalanches of granite on the one side and torrents of yellow sand on the other. We know that those stones are always falling; that those sands are always drifting; that the river has hard work to hold its own; and that the desert is silently encroaching day by day.

These golden sand-streams are the newest and most beautiful features in the landscape. They pour down from the high level of the Libyan desert just as the snows of Switzerland pour down from the upper plateaux of the Alps. Through every ravine and gap they find a channel—here trickling in tiny rivulets; flowing yonder in broad torrents that widen to the river.