A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

There are many other special bazaars in Cairo, as the sweetmeat bazaar; the hardware bazaar; the tobacco bazaar; the sword-mounters’ and coppersmiths’ bazaars; the Moorish bazaar, where fez caps, burnouses and Barbary goods are sold; and some extensive bazaars for the sale of English and French muslins and Manchester cotton goods; but these last are for the most part of inferior interest. Among certain fabrics manufactured in England expressly for the eastern market, we observed a most hideous printed muslin representing small black devils capering over a yellow ground, and we learned that it was much in favor for children’s dresses.

But the bazaars, however picturesque, are far from being the only sights of Cairo. There are mosques in plenty; grand old Saracenic gates; ancient coptic churches; the museum of Egyptian antiquities; and, within driving distance, the tombs of the Caliphs, Heliopolis, the Pyramids and the Sphinx. To remember in what order the present travelers saw these things would now be impossible; for they lived in a dream and were at first too bewildered to catalogue their impressions very methodically. Some places they were for the present obliged to dismiss with only a passing glance; others had to be wholly deferred till their return to Cairo.

In the meanwhile, our first business was to look at dahabeeyahs; and the looking at dahabeeyahs compelled us constantly to turn our steps and our thoughts in the direction of Boulak—a desolate place by the river, where some two or three hundred Nile boats lay moored for hire. Now, most persons know something of the miseries of house-hunting, but only those who have experienced them know how much keener are the miseries of dahabeeyah-hunting. It is more bewildering and more fatiguing, and is beset by its own special and peculiar difficulties. The boats, in the first place, are all built on the same plan, which is not the case with houses; and, except as they run bigger or smaller, cleaner or dirtier, are as like each other as twin oysters. The same may be said of their captains, with the same differences; for, to a person who has been only a few days in Egypt, one black or copper-colored man is exactly like every other black or copper-colored man. Then each reïs, or captain, displays the certificates given him by former travelers; and these certificates, being apparently in active circulation, have a mysterious way of turning up again and again on board different boats and in the hands of different claimants. Nor is this all. Dahabeeyahs are given to changing their places, which houses do not do; so that the boats which lay yesterday alongside the eastern bank may be over at the western bank to-day, or hidden in the midst of a dozen others half a mile lower down the river. All this is very perplexing; yet it is as nothing compared with the state of confusion one gets into when attempting to weigh the advantages or disadvantages of boats with six cabins and boats with eight; boats provided with canteen, and boats without; boats that can pass the cataract, and boats that can’t; boats that are only twice as dear as they ought to be, and boats with that defect five or six times multiplied. Their names, again—ghazal, sarawa, fostat, dongola—unlike any names one has ever heard before, afford as yet no kind of help to the memory. Neither do the names of their captains; for they are all Mohammeds or Hassans. Neither do their prices; for they vary from day to day, according to the state of the market as shown by the returns of arrivals at the principal hotels.

Add to all this the fact that no reïs speaks anything but Arabic, and that every word of inquiry or negotiation has to be filtered, more or less inaccurately, through a dragoman, and then perhaps those who have not yet tried this variety of the pleasures of the chase may be able to form some notion of the weary, hopeless, puzzling work which lies before the dahabeeyah-hunter in Cairo.

Thus it came to pass that, for the first ten days or so, some three or four hours had to be devoted every morning to the business of the boats; at the end of which time we were no nearer a conclusion than at first. The small boats were too small for either comfort or safety, especially in what Nile travelers call “a big wind.” The medium-sized boats (which lie under the suspicion of being used in summer for the transport of cargo) were for the most part of doubtful cleanliness. The largest boats, which alone seemed unexceptionable, contained from eight to ten cabins, besides two saloons, and were obviously too large for a party consisting of only L——, the writer and a maid. And all were exorbitantly dear. Encompassed by these manifold difficulties; listening now to this and now to that person’s opinion; deliberating, haggling, comparing, hesitating, we vibrated daily between Boulak and Cairo and led a miserable life. Meanwhile, however, we met some former acquaintances; made some new ones; and when not too tired or downhearted, saw what we could of the sights of Cairo—which helped a little to soften the asperities of our lot.

One of our first excursions was, of course, to the pyramids, which lie within an hour and a half’s easy drive from the hotel door. We started immediately after an early luncheon, followed an excellent road all the way and were back in time for dinner at half-past six. But it must be understood that we did not go to see the pyramids. We went only to look at them. Later on (having meanwhile been up the Nile and back and gone through months of training), we came again, not only with due leisure, but also with some practical understanding of the manifold phases through which the arts and architecture of Egypt had passed since those far-off days of Cheops and Chephren. Then, only, we can be said to have seen the pyramids; and till we arrive at that stage of our pilgrimage it will be well to defer everything like a detailed account of them or their surroundings. Of this first brief visit, enough, therefore, a brief record.

The first glimpse that most travelers now get of the pyramids is from the window of the railway carriage as they come from Alexandria; and it is not impressive. It does not take one’s breath away, for instance, like a first sight of the Alps from the high level of the Neufchâtel line, or the outline of the Acropolis at Athens as one first recognizes it from the sea. The well-known triangular forms look small and shadowy, and are too familiar to be in any way startling. And the same, I think, is true of every distant view of them—that is, of every view which is too distant to afford the means of scaling them against other objects. It is only in approaching them, and observing how they grow with every foot of the road, that one begins to feel they are not so familiar after all.

But when at last the edge of the desert is reached, and the long sand-slope climbed, and the rocky platform gained, and the great pyramid in all its unexpected bulk and majesty towers close above one’s head, the effect is as sudden as it is overwhelming. It shuts out the sky and the horizon. It shuts out all the other pyramids. It shuts out everything but the sense of awe and wonder.

Now, too, one discovers that it was with the forms of the pyramids, and only their forms, that one had been acquainted all these years past. Of their surface, their color, their relative position, their number (to say nothing of their size), one had hitherto entertained no kind of definite idea. The most careful study of plans and measurements, the clearest photographs, the most elaborate descriptions, had done little or nothing, after all, to make one know the place beforehand. This undulating table-land of sand and rock, pitted with open graves and cumbered with mounds of shapeless masonry, is wholly unlike the desert of our dreams. The pyramids of Cheops and Chephren are bigger than we had expected; the pyramid of Mycerinus is smaller. Here, too, are nine pyramids, instead of three. They are all entered in the plans and mentioned in the guide-books; but, somehow, one is unprepared to find them there, and cannot help looking upon them as intruders. These six extra pyramids are small and greatly dilapidated. One, indeed, is little more than a big cairn.

Even the great pyramid puzzles us with an unexpected sense of unlikeness. We all know and have known from childhood, that it was stripped of its outer blocks some five hundred years ago to build Arab mosques and palaces; but the rugged, rock-like aspect of that giant staircase takes us by surprise, nevertheless. Nor does it look like a partial ruin either. It looks as if it had been left unfinished, and as if the workmen might be coming back to-morrow morning.