My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

A small freight dahabeëh obstructs the way, and while this is being hauled ahead, we prepare for the final struggle. The chief cataract is called Bab (gate) Aboo Rabbia, from one of Mohammed Ali's captains who some years ago vowed that he would take his dahabeëh up it with his own crew and without aid from the cataract people. He lost his boat. It is also sometimes called Bab Inglese from a young Englishman, named Cave, who attempted to swim down it early one morning, in imitation of the Nubian swimmers, and was drawn into the whirlpools, and not found for days after. For this last struggle, in addition to the other ropes, an enormous cable is bent on, not tied to the bow, but twisted round the cross-beams of the forward deck, and carried out over the rocks. From the shelter where we lie we are to push out and take the current at a sharp angle. The water of this main cataract sucks down from both sides above through a channel perhaps one hundred feet wide, very rapid and with considerable fall, and with such force as to raise a ridge in the middle. To pull up this hill of water is the tug; if the ropes let go we shall be dashed into a hundred pieces on the rocks below and be swallowed in the whirlpools. It would not be a sufficient compensation for this fate to have this rapid hereafter take our name.

The preparations are leisurely made, the lines are laid along the rocks and the men are distributed. The fastenings are carefully examined. Then we begin to move. There are now four conductors of this gigantic orchestra (the employment of which as a musical novelty I respectfully recommend to the next Boston Jubilee), each posted on a high rock, and waving a stick with a white rag tied to it. It is now four o'clock. An hour has been consumed in raising the curtain for the last act. We are now carefully under way along the rocks which are almost within reach, held tight by the side ropes, but pushed off and slowly urged along by a line of half-naked fellows under the left side, whose backs are against the boat and whose feet walk along the perpendicular ledge. It would take only a sag of the boat, apparently, to crush them. It does not need our eyes to tell us when the bow of the boat noses the swift water. Our sandal has meantime carried a line to a rock on the opposite side of the channel, and our sailors haul on this and draw us ahead. But we are held firmly by the shore lines. The boat is never suffered, as I said, to get an inch the advantage, but is always held tight in hand.

As we appear at the foot of the rapid, men come riding down it on logs as before, a sort of horseback feat in the boiling water, steering themselves round the eddies and landing below us. One of them swims round to the rock where a line is tied, and looses it as we pass; another, sitting on the slippery stick and showing the white soles of his black feet, paddles himself about amid the whirlpools. We move so slowly that we have time to enjoy all these details, to admire the deep yellow of the Libyan sand drifted over the rocks at the right, and to cheer a sandal bearing the American flag which is at this moment shooting the rapids in another channel beyond us, tossed about like a cork. We see the meteor flag flashing out, we lose it behind the rocks, and catch it again appearing below. “Oh star spang”—but our own orchestra is in full swing again. The comical Sheykh begins to swing his arms and his stick back and forth in an increasing measure, until his whole body is drawn into the vortex of his enthusiasm, and one leg after the other, by a sort of rhythmic hitch, goes up displaying the white and baggy cotton drawers. The other three conductors join in, and a deafening chorus from two hundred men goes up along the ropes, while we creep slowly on amid the suppressed excitement of those on board who anxiously watch the straining cables, and with a running fire of “backsheesh, backsheesh,” from the boys on the rocks close at hand. The cable holds; the boat nags and jerks at it in vain; through all the roar and rush we go on, lifted I think perceptibly every time the sheykh lifts his leg.

At the right moment the sail is again shaken down; and the boat at once feels it. It is worth five hundred men. The ropes slacken; we are going by the wind against the current; haste is made to unbend the cable; line after line is let go until we are held by one alone; the crowd thins out, dropping away with no warning and before we know that the play is played out, the cataract people have lost all interest in it and are scattering over the black rocks to their homes. A few stop to cheer; the chief conductor is last seen on a rock, swinging the white rag, hurrahing and salaaming in grinning exultation; the last line is cast off, and we round the point and come into smooth but swift water, and glide into a calm mind. The noise, the struggle, the tense strain, the uproar of men and waves for four hours are all behind; and hours of keener excitement and enjoyment we have rarely known. At 12.20 we left Assouan; at 4.45 we swung round the rocky bend above the last and greatest rapid. I write these figures, for they will be not without a melancholy interest to those who have spent two or three days or a week in making this passage.

Turning away from the ragged mountains of granite which obstruct the straight course of the river, we sail by Mahatta, a little village of Nubians, a port where the trading and freight boats plying between the First and Second Cataract load and unload. There is a forest of masts and spars along the shore which is piled with merchandise, and dotted with sunlit figures squatting in the sand as if waiting for the goods to tranship themselves. With the sunlight slanting on our full sail, we glide into the shadow of high rocks, and enter, with the suddenness of a first discovery, into a deep winding river, the waters of which are dark and smooth, between lofty walls of granite. These historic masses, which have seen pass so many splendid processions and boastful expeditions of conquest in what seems to us the twilight of the world, and which excited the wonder of Father Herodotus only the other day, almost in our own time (for the Greeks belong to us and not to antiquity as it now unfolds itself), are piled in strange shapes, tottling rock upon rock, built up grotesquely, now in likeness of an animal, or the gigantic profile of a human face, or temple walls and castle towers and battlements. We wind through this solemn highway, and suddenly, in the very gateway, Philæ! The lovely! Philæ, the most sentimental ruin in Egypt. There are the great pylon of the temple of Isis, the long colonnades of pillars, the beautiful square temple, with lofty columns and elongated capitals, misnamed Pharaoh's bed. The little oblong island, something like twelve hundred feet long, banded all round by an artificial wall, an island of rock completely covered with ruins, is set like the stone of a ring, with a circle of blue water about it, in the clasp of higher encircling granite peaks and ledges. On the left bank, as we turn to pass to the east of the island, is a gigantic rock which some persons have imagined was a colossus once, perhaps in pre-Adamic times, but which now has no resemblance to human shape, except in a breast and left arm. Some Pharaoh cut his cartouche on the back—a sort of postage-stamp to pass the image along down the ages. The Pharaohs were ostentatious; they cut their names wherever they could find a conspicuous and smooth place.

While we are looking, distracted with novelty at every turn and excited by a grandeur and loveliness opening upon us every moment, we have come into a quiet haven, shut in on all sides by broken ramparts,—alone with this island of temples. The sun is about to set, and its level light comes to us through the columns, and still gilds with red and yellow gold the Libyan sand sifted over the cliffs. We moor at once to a sand-bank which has formed under the broken walls, and at once step on shore. We climb to the top of the temple walls; we walk on the stone roof; we glance into the temple on the roof, where is sculptured the resurrection of Osiris. This cannot be called an old temple. It is a creation of the Ptolemies, though it doubtless replaced an older edifice. The temple of Isis was not begun more than three centuries before our era. Not all of these structures were finished—the priests must have been still carving on their walls these multitudes of sculptures, when Christ began his mission; and more than four centuries after that the mysterious rites of Isis were still celebrated in these dark chambers. It is silent and dead enough here now; and there lives nowhere upon the earth any man who can even conceive the state of mind that gave those rites vitality. Even Egypt has changed its superstitions.

Peace has come upon the earth after the strain of the last few hours. We can scarcely hear the roar of the rapids, in the beating of which we had been. The sun goes, leaving a changing yellow and faint orange on the horizon. Above in the west is the crescent moon; and now all the sky thereabout is rosy, even to the zenith, a delicate and yet deep color, like that of the blush-rose—a transparent color that glows. A little later we see from our boat the young moon through the columns of the lesser temple. The January night is clear and perfectly dry; no dew is falling—no dew ever falls here—and the multiplied stars burn with uncommon lustre. When everything else is still, we hear the roar of the rapids coming steadily on the night breeze, sighing through the old and yet modern palace-temples of the parvenu Ptolemies, and of Cleopatra—a new race of conquerors and pleasure-hunters, who in vain copied the magnificent works of the ancient Pharaohs.

Here on a pylon gate, General Dessaix has recorded the fact that in February (Ventose) in the seventh year of the Republic, General Bonaparte being then in possession of Lower Egypt he pursued to this spot the retreating Memlooks. Egyptian kings, Ethiopian usurpers, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Nectanebo, Cambyses, Ptolemy, Philadelphus, Cleopatra and her Roman lovers, Dessaix,—these are all shades now.