Certain trees—as for instance the perky little pine of the German wald—are apt to become monotonous; but one never wearies of the palm. Whether taken singly or in masses, it is always graceful, always suggestive. To the sketcher on the Nile it is simply invaluable. It breaks the long parallels of river and bank and composes with the stern lines of Egyptian architecture as no other tree in the world could do.
“Subjects, indeed!” said once upon a time an eminent artist to the present writer; “fiddlesticks about subjects! Your true painter can make a picture out of a post and a puddle.”
Substitute a palm, however, for a post; combine it with anything that comes first—a camel, a shâdûf, a woman with a water-jar upon her head—and your picture stands before you ready made.
Nothing more surprised me at first than the color of the palm-frond, which painters of eastern landscape are wont to depict of a hard bluish tint, like the color of a yucca leaf. Its true shade is a tender, bloomy, sea-green gray; difficult enough to match, but in most exquisite harmony with the glow of the sky and the gold of the desert.
The palm-groves kept us company for many a mile, backed on the Arabian side by long level ranges of sandstone cliffs, horizontally stratified, like those of the Thebaid. We now scarcely ever saw a village—only palms and sakkiehs and sand-banks in the river. The villages were there, but invisible, being built on the verge of the desert. Arable land is too valuable in Nubia for either the living to dwell upon it or the dead to be buried in it.
At Ibrim—a sort of ruined Ehrenbreitstein on the top of a grand precipice overhanging the river—we touched for only a few minutes, in order to buy a very small shaggy sheep which had been brought down to the landing-place for sale. But for the breeze that happened just then to be blowing we should have liked to climb the rock and see the view and the ruins—which are part modern, part Turkish, part Roman, and little, if at all, Egyptian.
There are also some sculptured and painted grottoes to be seen in the southern face of the mountain. They are, however, too difficult of access to be attempted by ladies. Alfred, who went ashore after quail, was drawn up to them by ropes, but found them too much defaced as to be scarcely worth the trouble of a visit.
We were now only thirty-four miles from Abou Simbel; but making slow progress and impatiently counting every foot of the way. The heat at times was great, frequent and fitful spells of Khamsîn wind alternating with a hot calm that tried the trackers sorely. Still we pushed forward, a few miles at a time, till by and by the flat-topped cliffs dropped out of sight and were again succeeded by volcanic peaks, some of which looked loftier than any of those about Dakkeh or Korosko.
Then the palms ceased and the belt of cultivated land narrowed to a thread of green between the rocks and the water’s edge; and at last there came an evening when we only wanted breeze enough to double two or three more bends in the river.
“Is it to be Abou Simbel to-night?” we asked for the twentieth time before going down to dinner.