My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

Our next run is to Assouan. Let us sketch it rapidly, and indicate by a touch the panorama it unrolled for us.

We are under way at daylight, leaving our two companions of the race asleep. We go on with a good wind, and by lovely sloping banks of green; banks that have occasionally a New England-river aspect; but palm-trees are behind them, and beyond are uneven mountain ranges, the crumbling limestone of which is so rosy in the sun. The wind freshens, and we spin along five miles an hour. The other boats have started, but they have a stern chase, and we lose them round a bend.

The atmosphere is delicious, a little under a summer heat, so that it is pleasant to sit in the sun; we seem to fly, with our great wings of sails, by the lovely shores. An idle man could desire nothing more. The crew are cutting up the bread baked yesterday and spreading it on the deck to dry. They prefer this to bread made of bolted wheat; and it would be very good, if it were not heavy and sour, and dirty to look at, and somewhat gritty to the teeth.

In the afternoon we pass the new, the Roman, and the old town of El Kab, back of which are the famous grottoes of Eilethyas with their pictures of domestic and agricultural life. We go on famously, leaving Edfoo behind, to the tune of five miles an hour; and, later, we can distinguish the top of the sail of the Philæ at least ten miles behind. Before dark we are abreast of the sandstone quarries of Silsilis, the most wonderful in the world, and the river is swift, narrow and may be rocky. We have accomplished fifty-seven miles since morning, and wishing to make a day's run that shall astonish Egypt, we keep on in the dark. The wind increases, and in the midst of our career we go aground. We tug and push and splash, however, get off the sand, and scud along again. In a few moments something happens. There is a thump and a lurch, and bedlam breaks loose on deck.

We have gone hard on the sand. The wind is blowing almost a gale, and in the shadow of these hills the night is black. Our calm steersman lets the boat swing right about, facing down-stream, the sail jibes, and we are in great peril of upsetting, or carrying away yard, mast and all. The hubbub is something indescribable. The sailors are ordered aloft to take in the sail. They fear to do it. To venture out upon that long slender yard, which is foul and threatens to snap every moment, the wind whipping the loose sail, is no easy or safe task. The yelling that ensues would astonish the regular service. Reis and sailors are all screaming together, and above all can be heard the storming of the dragoman, who is most alive to the danger, his voice broken with excitement and passion. The crew are crouching about the mast, in terror, calling upon Mohammed. The reïs is muttering to the Prophet, in the midst of his entreaty. Abd-el-Atti is rapidly telling his beads, while he raves. At last Ahmed springs up the rigging, and the others, induced by shame and the butt-end of a hand-spike, follow him, and are driven out along the shaking yard. Amid intense anxiety and with extreme difficulty, the sail is furled and we lie there, aground, with an anchor out, the wind blowing hard and the waves pounding us, as if we were making head against a gale at sea. A dark and wildish night it is, and a lonesome place, the rocky shores dimly seen; but there is starlight. We should prefer to be tied to the bank, sheltered from the wind rather than lie swinging and pounding here. However, it shows us the Nile in a new aspect. And another good comes out of the adventure. Ahmed, who saved the boat, gets a new suit of clothes. Nobody in Egypt needed one more. A suit of clothes is a blue cotton gown.

The following morning (Sunday) is cold, but we are off early as if nothing had happened, and run rapidly against the current—or the current against us, which produces the impression of going fast. The river is narrower, the mountains come closer to the shores, and there is, on either side, only a scant strip of vegetation. Egypt, along here, is really only three or four rods wide. The desert sands drift down to the very shores, and the desert hills, broken, jagged, are savage walls of enclosure.

The Nile no doubt once rose annually and covered these now bleached wastes, and made them fruitful. But that was long ago. At Silsilis, below here, where the great quarries are, there was once a rocky barrier, probably a fall, which set the Nile back, raising its level from here to Assouan. In some convulsion this was carried away. When? There is some evidence on this point at hand. By ten o'clock we have rounded a long bend, and come to the temples of Kom Ombos, their great columns conspicuous on a hill close to the river. They are rather fine structures, for the Ptolemies. One of them stands upon foundations of an ancient edifice built by Thothmes I. (eighteenth dynasty); and these foundations rest upon alluvial deposit. Consequently the lowering of the Nile above Silsilis, probably by breaking through the rock-dam there, was before the time of Thothmes I. The Nile has never risen to the temple site since. These striking ruins are, however, destined to be swept away; opposite the bend where they stand a large sand-island is forming, and every hour the soil is washing from under them. Upon this sand-island this morning are flocks of birds, sunning themselves, and bevies of sand-grouse take wing at our approach. A crocodile also lifts his shoulders and lunges into the water, when we get near enough to see his ugly scales with the glass.

As we pass the desolate Kom Ombos, a solitary figure emerges from the ruins and comes down the slope of the sand-hill, with turban flowing, ragged cotton robe, and a long staff; he runs along the sandy shore and then turns away into the desert, like a fleeing Cain, probably with no idea that it is Sunday, and that the “first bell” is about to ring in Christian countries.

The morning air is a little too sharp for idle comfort, although we can sit in the sun on deck and read. This west wind coming from the mountains of the desert brings always cold weather, even in Nubia.

Above Kom Ombos we come to a little village in a palm-grove—a scene out of the depths of Africa,—such as you have often seen in pictures—which is the theatre of an extraordinary commotion. There is enacted before us in dumb-show something like a pantomime in a play-house; but this is even more remote and enigmatical than that, and has in it all the elements of a picture of savagery. In the interior of Africa are they not all children, and do they not spend their time in petty quarreling and fighting?