Towards noon we stopped at a village, and the Asian went ashore with Ibrahim to buy provisions, while the European walked ahead with his fowling-piece, to shoot wild ducks for dinner. The American stayed on board and studied an Arabic vocabulary. Presently Ibrahim appeared with two fowls, two pigeons, a pot of milk and a dozen eggs. The Asian set about preparing breakfast, and showed himself so skilful that our bark soon exhaled the most savory odors. When we picked up our European he had only two hawks to offer us, but we gave him in return a breakfast which he declared perfect. We ate on deck, seated on a mat; a pleasant wind filled our sails, and myriads of swallows circled and twittered over our heads in the cloudless air. The calm, contemplative state produced by the coffee and pipes which Ibrahim brought us, lasted the whole afternoon, and the villages, the cane-fields, the Moslem oratories, the wide level of the Delta and the distant mounds of forgotten cities, passed before our eyes like the pictures of a dream. Only one of these pictures marred the serenity of our minds. It was an Arab burying-ground, on the banks of the Canal—a collection of heaps of mud, baked in the sun. At the head and foot of one of the most recent, sat two women—paid mourners—who howled and sobbed, in long, piteous, despairing cries, which were most painful to hear. I should never have imagined that any thing but the keenest grief could teach such heart-breaking sounds.
When I climbed the bank at sunset, for a walk, the minarets of Atfeh, on the Nile, were visible. Two rows of acacias, planted along the Canal, formed a pleasant arcade, through which we sailed, to the muddy excrescences of the town. The locks were closed for the night, and we were obliged to halt, which gave us an opportunity of witnessing an Arabic marriage procession. The noise of two wooden drums and a sort of fife announced the approach of the bride, who, attended by her relatives, came down the bank from the mud-ovens above. She was closely veiled, but the Arabs crowded around to get a peep at her face. No sooner had the three Franks approached, than she was doubly guarded and hurried off to the house of her intended husband. Some time afterwards I ascended the bank to have a nearer view of the miserable hovels, but was received with such outcries and menacing gestures, that I made a slow and dignified retreat. We visited, however, the house of the bridegroom’s father, where twenty or thirty Arabs, seated on the ground, were singing an epithalamium, to which they kept time by clapping their hands.
Next morning, while our raïs was getting his permit to pass the locks (for which four official signatures and a fee of thirty piastres are necessary), we visited the bazaar, and purchased long tubes of jasmine-wood for our pipes, and vegetables for our kitchen. On all such occasions we detailed Seyd, the tall Nubian, whose ebony face shone resplendent under a snow-white turban, to be our attendant. The stately gravity with which he walked behind us, carrying bread and vegetables, was worthy the pipe-bearer of a Sultan. By this time we had installed the Asian as cook, and he very cheerfully undertook the service. We soon discovered that the skill of Ibrahim extended no further than to the making of a pilaff and the preparation of coffee. Moreover his habits and appearance were not calculated to make us relish his handiwork. The naïveté with which he took the wash-basin to make soup in, and wiped our knives and forks on his own baggy pantaloons, would have been very amusing if we had not been interested parties. The Asian was one day crumbling some loaf sugar with a hammer, when Ibrahim, who had been watching him, suddenly exclaimed in a tone of mingled pity and contempt, “that’s not the way!” Thereupon he took up some of the lumps, and wrapped them in one corner of his long white shirt, which he thrust into his mouth, and after crushing the sugar between his teeth, emptied it into the bowl with an air of triumph.
A whole squadron of boats was waiting at the locks, but with Frankish impudence, we pushed through them, and took our place in the front rank. The sun was intensely hot, and we sweated and broiled for a full hour, in the midst of a horrible tumult of Arabs, before the clumsy officers closed the last gate on us and let us float forth on the Nile. It is the western, or Canopic branch of the river which flows past Atfeh. It is not broader than the Hudson at Albany, but was more muddy and slimy from its recent overflow than the Mississippi at New Orleans. Its water is no less sweet and wholesome than that of the latter river. After leaving the monotonous banks of the Canal, the aspect of its shores, fringed with groves of palm, was unspeakably cheerful and inspiring. On the opposite side, the slender white minarets of Fooah, once a rich manufacturing town, sparkled in the noonday sun. A fresh north wind from the Mediterranean slowly pressed our boat against the strong current, while the heavily-laden merchant vessels followed in our wake, their two immense lateen sails expanded like the wings of the Arabian roc. We drank to the glory of old Father Nile in a cup of his own brown current, and then called Ibrahim to replenish the empty shebooks. Those who object to tobacco under the form of cigars, or are nauseated by the fumes of a German meerschaum, should be told that the Turkish pipe, filled with Latakieh, is quite another thing. The aroma, which you inhale through a long jasmine tube, topped with a soft amber mouth-piece, is as fragrant as roses and refreshing as ripe dates. I have no doubt that the atmosphere of celestial musk and amber which surrounded Mahomet, according to the Persian Chronicles, was none other than genuine Latakieh, at twenty piastres the oka. One thing is certain, that without the capacity to smoke a shebook, no one can taste the true flavor of the Orient.
An hour or two after sunset the wind fell, and for the rest of the night our men tracked the boat slowly forward, singing cheerily as they tugged at the long tow-rope. The Asian spread on the deck his Albanian capote, the European his ample travelling cloak, and the representatives of three Continents, travelling in the fourth, lay on their backs enjoying the moonlight, the palms, and more than all, the perfect silence and repose. With every day of our journey I felt more deeply and gratefully this sense of rest. Under such a glorious sky, no disturbance seemed possible. It was of little consequence whether the boat went forward or backward, whether we struck on a sand-bar or ploughed the water under a full head of wind; every thing was right. My conscience made me no reproach for such a lazy life. In America we live too fast and work too hard, I thought: shall I not know what Rest is, once before I die? The European said to me naïvely, one day: “I am a little surprised, but very glad, that no one of us has yet spoken of European politics.” Europe! I had forgotten that such a land existed: and as for America, it seemed very dim and distant.
Sometimes I varied this repose by trying to pick up the language. Wilkinson’s Vocabulary and Capt. Hayes’s Grammar did me great service, and after I had tried a number of words with Ibrahim, to get the pronunciation, I made bolder essays. One day when the sailors were engaged in a most vociferous discussion, I broke upon them with: “What is all this noise about? stop instantly!” The effect was instantaneous; the men were silent, and Seyd, turning up his eyes in wonder, cried out: “Wallah! the Howadji talks Arabic!” The two copper-faced Fellahs thought it very amusing, and every new word I learned sufficed to set them laughing for half an hour. I called out to a fisherman, seated on the bank: “O Fisherman, have you any fish?” and he held up a string of them and made answer: “O Howadji, I have.” This solemn form of address, which is universal in Arabic, makes the language very piquant to a student.
During our second night on the river, we passed the site of ancient Saïs, one of the most renowned of Egyptian cities, which has left nothing but a few shapeless mounds. The country was in many places still wet from the inundation, which was the largest that had occurred for many years. The Fellahs were ploughing for wheat, with a single buffalo geared to a sharp pole, which scratched up the soil to the depth of three inches. Fields of maize and sugar-cane were frequent, and I noticed also some plantations of tobacco, millet, and a species of lupin, which is cultivated for its beans. The only vegetables we found for sale in the villages, were onions, leeks and tomatoes. Milk, butter and eggs are abundant and very good, but the cheese of the country is detestable. The habitations resemble ant-hills, rather than human dwellings, and the villages are dépôts of filth and vermin, on the most magnificent scale. Our boat was fortunately free from the latter, except a few cockroaches. Except the palm and acacia, without which a Nile journey would lose half its attractions, I saw few trees. Here and there stood a group of superb plane-trees, and the banana sometimes appeared in the gardens, but there is nothing of that marvellous luxuriance and variety of vegetation which is elsewhere exhibited in the neighborhood of the Tropics.
On the evening of the third day we reached the town of Nadir, and, as there was no wind, went ashore for an hour or two. There was a café on the bank—a mud house, with two windows, adorned with wooden frames, carved in the Moorish style. A divan, built of clay and whitewashed, extended along one side of the room, and on this we seated ourselves cross-legged, while the host prepared the little coffee-cups and filled the pipes. Through the open door we saw the Nile, gleaming broadly under the full moon, and in the distance, two tall palm-trees stood clearly against the sky. Our boatmen, whom we had treated to booza, the Egyptian beer, sat before us, and joined in the chorus of a song, which was sung to entertain us. The performers were three women, and a man who played a coarse reed flute. One of the women had a tambourine, another a small wooden drum, and the third kept time by slapping the closed fingers of the right hand on the palm of the left. The song, which had a wild, rude harmony that pleased me, was followed by a dance, executed by one of the women. It was very similar to the fandango, as danced by the natives of the Isthmus of Panama, and was more lascivious than graceful. The women, however, were of the lowest class, and their performances were adapted to the taste of the boatmen and camel-drivers, by whom they are patronized.
The next day the yellow hills of the Libyan Desert, which in some places press the arable land of the Delta even to the brink of the Nile, appeared in the west. The sand appeared to be steadily advancing towards the river, and near Werdan had already buried a grove of acacias as high as their first branches. The tops were green and flourishing above the deluge, but another year or two would overwhelm them completely. We had a thick fog during the night, and the following day was exceedingly hot though the air was transparent as crystal. Our three faces were already of the color of new bronze, which was burned into the skin by the reflection from the water. While my friends were enjoying their usual afternoon repose, a secret presentiment made me climb to the roof of our cabin. I had not sat there long, before I descried two faint blue triangles on the horizon, far to the south. I rudely broke in upon their indolence with a shout of “the Pyramids!” which Seyd echoed with “El-hàram Faraoon!” I was as much impressed with the view as I expected to be, but I completely nullified the European’s emotion by translating to him Thackeray’s description of his first sight of those renowned monuments.
The same evening we reached the northern point of the Delta, where we were obliged to remain all night, as the wind was not sufficiently strong to allow us to pass the Barrage. Singularly enough, this immense work, which is among the greatest undertakings of modern times, is scarcely heard of out of Egypt. It is nothing less than a damming of the Nile, which is to have the effect of producing two inundations a year, and doubling the crops throughout the Delta. Here, where the flood divides itself into two main branches, which find separate mouths at Damietta and Rosetta, an immense dam has not only been projected, but is far advanced toward completion. Each branch will be spanned by sixty-two arches, besides a central gateway ninety feet in breadth, and flanked by lofty stone towers. The point of the Delta, between the two dams, is protected by a curtain of solid masonry, and the abutments which it joins are fortified by towers sixty or seventy feet in height. The piers have curved breakwaters on the upper side, while the opposite parapet of the arches rises high above them, so that the dam consists of three successive terraces, and presents itself like a wedge, against the force of such an immense body of water. The material is brick, faced with stone. When complete, it is intended to close the side-arches during low water, leaving only the central gateway open. By this means sufficient water will be gained to fill all the irrigating canals, while a new channel, cut through the centre of the Delta, will render productive a vast tract of fertile land. The project is a grand one, and the only obstacle to its success is the light, porous character of the alluvial soil on which the piers are founded. The undertaking was planned and commenced by M. Linant, and has since been continued by other engineers.