There are no fleas;
There are no bugs, nor any insects whatever.
The attempt to introduce fleas into Nubia by means of dahabeëhs has been a failure.
In fact there is very little animal life; scarcely any birds are seen; fowls of all sorts are rare. There are gazelles, however, and desert hares, and chameleons. Our chameleons nearly starved for want of flies. There are big crocodiles and large lizards.
In a bend a few miles above Philæ is a whirlpool called Shaymtel Wah, from which is supposed to be a channel communicating under the mountain to the Great Oasis one hundred miles distant. The popular belief in these subterranean communications is very common throughout the East. The holy well, Zem-Zem, at Mecca, has a connection with a spring at El Gebel in Syria. I suppose that is perfectly well known. Abd-el-Atti has tasted the waters of both; and they are exactly alike; besides, did he not know of a pilgrim who lost his drinking-cup in Zem-Zem and recovered it in El Gebel.
This Nubia is to be sure but a river with a colored border, but I should like to make it seem real to you and not a mere country of the imagination. People find room to live here; life goes on after a fashion, and every mile there are evidences of a mighty civilization and a great power which left its record in gigantic works. There was a time, before the barriers broke away at Silsilis, when this land was inundated by the annual rise; the Nile may have perpetually expanded above here into a lake, as Herodotus reports.
We sail between low ridges of rocky hills, with narrow banks of green and a few palms, but occasionally there is a village of square mud-houses. At Gertassee, boldly standing out on a rocky platform, are some beautiful columns, the remains of a temple built in the Roman time. The wind is strong and rather colder with the turn of noon; the nearer we come to the tropics the colder it becomes. The explanation is that we get nothing but desert winds; and the desert is cool at this season; that is, it breeds at night cool air, although one does not complain of its frigidity who walks over it at midday.
After passing Tafa, a pretty-looking village in the palms, which boasts ruins both pagan and Christian, we come to rapids and scenery almost as wild and lovely as that at Philæ. The river narrows, there are granite rocks and black boulders in the stream; we sail for a couple of miles in swift and deep water, between high cliffs, and by lofty rocky islands—not without leafage and some cultivation, and through a series of rapids, not difficult but lively. And so we go cheerily on, through savage nature and gaunt ruins of forgotten history; past Kalâbshe, where are remains of the largest temple in Nubia; past Bayt el Wellee—“the house of the saint”—where Rameses II. hewed a beautiful temple out of the rock; past Gerf Hossdyn, where Rameses II. hewed a still larger temple out of the rock and covered it with his achievements, pictures in which he appears twelve feet high, and slaying small enemies as a husbandman threshes wheat with a flail. I should like to see an ancient stone wall in Egypt, where this Barnum of antiquity wasn't advertising himself.
We leave him flailing the unfortunate; at eight in the evening we are still going on, first by the light of the crescent moon, and then by starlight, which is like a pale moonlight, so many and lustrous are the stars; and last, about eleven o'clock we go aground, and stop a little below Dakkeh, or seventy-one miles from Philæ, that being our modest run for the day.
Dakkeh, by daylight, reveals itself as a small mud-village attached to a large temple. You would not expect to find a temple here, but its great pylon looms over the town and it is worth at least a visit. To see such a structure in America we would travel a thousand miles; the traveler on the Nile debates whether he will go ashore.