A journey to Central Africa

by Bayard Taylor

Ali Effendi, the agent of the Moodir, or Governor, came to see me and afterwards went on board my vessel. As the wind was blowing so furiously that we could not leave, I invited him to dinner, and in the meantime we had a long talk on afrites and other evil spirits. I learned many curious things concerning Arabic faith in such matters. The belief in spirits is universal, although an intelligent Arab will not readily confess the fact to a Frank, unless betrayed into it by a simulated belief on the part of the latter. Ali Effendi informed me that the spirit of a man who is killed by violence, haunts the spot where his body is buried, until the number of years has elapsed, which he would otherwise have lived. He stated, with the greatest earnestness, that formerly, in passing at night over the plain between Embabeh and the Pyramids, where Napoleon defeated the Mamelukes, he had frequently heard a confusion of noises,—cries of pain, and agony, and wrath—but that now there were but few sounds to be heard, as the time of service of the ghosts had for the most part expired.

One of his personal experiences with an afrite amused me exceedingly. He was walking one night on the road from Cairo to Shoobra, when he suddenly saw a donkey before him. As he was somewhat fatigued, and the donkey did not appear to have an owner, he mounted, and was riding along very pleasantly, when he was startled by the fact that the animal was gradually increasing in size. In a few minutes it became nearly as large as a camel; and he thereby knew that it was no donkey, but an afrite. At first he was in such terror that the hairs of his beard stood straight out from his face, but suddenly remembering that an afrite may be brought to reveal his true nature by wounding him with a sharp instrument, he cautiously drew his dagger and was about to plunge it into the creature’s back. The donkey-fiend, however, kept a sharp watch upon him with one of his eyes, which was turned backwards, and no sooner saw the dagger than he contracted to his original shape, shook off his rider and whisked away with a yell of infernal laughter, and the jeering exclamation: “Ha! ha! you want to ride, do you?”

We had scarcely left Esneh before a fresh gale arose, and kept us tossing about in the same spot all night. These blasts on the Nile cause a rise of waves which so shake the vessel that one sometimes feels a premonition of sea-sickness. They whistle drearily through the ropes, like a gale on the open sea. The air at these times is filled with a gray haze, and the mountain chains on either hand have a dim, watery loom, like that of mountains along the sea-coast. For half a day I lay in sight of Esneh, but during the following night, as there was no wind, I could not sleep for the songs of the sailors. The sunrise touched the colonnade of Luxor. I slept beyond my usual time, and on going out of the cabin what should I see but my former guide, Hassan, leading down the beach the same little brown mare on which I had raced with him around Karnak. We mounted and rode again down the now familiar road, but the harvests whose planting I had witnessed in December were standing ripe or already gathered in. It was autumn in Egypt. The broad rings of clay were beaten for threshing floors, and camels, laden with stacks of wheat-sheaves paced slowly towards them over the stubble fields. Herds of donkeys were to be seen constantly, carrying heavy sacks of wheat to the magazines, and the capacious freight-boats were gathering at the towns along the Nile to carry off the winter’s produce.

It was a bright, warm and quiet day that I spent at Thebes. The great plain, girdled by its three mountain-chains, lay in a sublime repose. There was no traveller there, and, as the people were expecting none, they had already given up the ruins to their summer silence and loneliness. I had no company, on either side of the river, but my former guides, who had now become as old friends. We rode to Karnak, to Medeenet Abou, to the Memnonium, and the Colossi of the Plain. The ruins had now not only a memory for me, but a language. They no longer crushed me with their cold, stern, incomprehensible grandeur. I was calm as the Sphinx, whose lips no longer closed on a mystery. I had gotten over the awe of a neophyte, and, though so little had been revealed to me, walked among the temples with the feelings of a master. Let no one condemn this expression as presumptuous, for nothing is so simple as Art, when once we have the clue to her infinite meanings.

White among the many white days of my travel, that day at Thebes is registered; and if I left with pain, and the vast regret we feel on turning away from such spots, at least I took with me the joy that Thebes, the mighty and the eternal, was greater to me in its living reality than it had ever been in all the shadow-pictures my anticipation had drawn. Nor did the faultless pillars of the Memnonium, nor the obelisks of Karnak, take away my delight in the humbler objects which kept a recognition for me. The horses, whose desert blood sent its contagion into mine; the lame water-boy, always at my elbow with his earthen bottle; the grave guides, who considered my smattering of Arabic as something miraculous, and thence dubbed me “Taylor Effendi;” the half-naked Fellahs in the harvest-fields, who remembered some idle joke of mine,—all these combined to touch the great landscape with a home-like influence, and to make it seem, in some wise, like an old resting-place of my heart. Mustapha Achmet Aga, the English agent at Luxor, had a great deal to tell me of the squabbles of travellers during the winter: how the beach was lined with foreign boats and the temples crowded day after day with scores of visitors; how these quarrelled with their dragomen, and those with their boatmen, and the latter with each other, till I thanked Heaven for having kept me away from Thebes at such a riotous period.

Towards evening there was a complete calm, and every thing was so favorable for our downward voyage that I declined Mustapha’s invitation to dine with him the next day, and set off for Kenneh. The sailors rowed lustily, my servant Ali taking the leading oar. Ali was beside himself with joy, at the prospect of reaching his home and astonishing his family with his marvellous adventures in Soudân. He led the chorus with a voice so strong and cheery that it rang from shore to shore. As I was unable to write or read, I sat on deck, with the boy Hossayn at my elbow to replenish the pipe as occasion required, and listened to the songs of the sailors. Their repertory was so large that I was unable to exhaust it during the voyage. One of their favorite songs was in irregular trochaic lines, consisting of alternate questions and answers, such as “ed-dookan el-liboodeh fayn?” (where’s the shop of the cotton caps?) sung by the leader, to which the chorus responded: “Bahari Luxor beshwoytayn.” (A little to the northward of Luxor). Another favorite chorus was: “Imlāl-imlāl-imlālee!” (Fill, fill, fill to me!) Many of the songs were of too broad a character to be translated, but there were two of a more refined nature, and these, from the mingled passion, tenderness and melancholy of the airs to which they were sung, became great favorites of mine.[7]

Before sunrise we reached Kenneh. Here I was obliged to stop a day to let the men bake their bread, and I employed the time in taking a Turkish bath and revisiting the temple of Dendera. My servant Ali left me, as his family resided in the place. I gave him a good present, in consideration of his service during the toilsome journey we had just closed. He kissed my hand very gratefully, and I felt some regret at parting with, as I believed, an honest servant, and a worthy, though wild young fellow. What was my mortification on discovering the next day that he had stolen from me the beautiful stick, which had been given me in Khartoum by the Sultana Nasra. The actual worth of the stick was trifling, but the action betrayed an ingratitude which I had not expected, even in an Arab. I had a charming ride to Dendera, over the fragrant grassy plain, rippled by the warm west wind. I was accompanied only by the Fellah who owned my donkey—an amiable fellow, who told me many stories about the robbers who used formerly to come in from the Desert and plunder the country. We passed a fine field of wheat, growing on land which had been uncultivated for twenty years. My attendant said that this was the work of a certain Effendi, who, having seen the neglected field, said that it was wrong to let God’s good ground lie idle, and so planted it. “But he was truly a good man,” he added; “and that is the reason why the crop is so good. If he had been a bad man, the wheat would not have grown so finely as you see it.”

For three days after leaving Kenneh, a furious head-wind did its best to beat me back, and in that time we only made sixty miles. I sighed when I thought of the heaps of letters awaiting me in Cairo, and Achmet could not sleep, from the desire of seeing his family once more. He considered himself as one risen from the dead. He had heard in Luxor that his wife was alarmed at his long absence, and that his little son went daily to Boulak to make inquiries among the returning boats. Besides, my eyes were no better. I could not go ashore, as we kept the middle of the stream, and my only employment was to lounge on the outside divan and gossip with the raïs. One evening, when the sky was overcast, and the wind whirled through the palm-trees, we saw a boy on the bank crying for his brother, who had started to cross the river but was no longer to be seen. Presently an old man came out to look for him, in a hollow palm-log, which rolled on the rough waves. We feared the boy had been drowned, but not long afterwards came upon him, drifting at the mercy of the current, having broken his oar. By the old man’s assistance he got back to the shore in safety.