So the Nubians were left in sin and grease, and taxed accordingly. And at this day the taxes are even heavier. Every date-palm and every sakiya is taxed. A sakiya sometimes pays three pounds a year, when there is not a piece of fertile land for it to water three rods square.
CHAPTER XXI—ETHIOPIA.
IT IS a sparkling morning at Wady Saboda; we have the desert and some of its high, scarred, and sandy pyramidal peaks close to us, but as is usual where a wady, or valley, comes to the river, there is more cultivated land. We see very little of the temple of Rameses II. in this “Valley of the Lions,” nor of the sphinxes in front of it. The desert sand has blown over it and over it in drifts like snow, so that we walk over the buried sanctuary, greatly to our delight. It is a pleasure to find one adytum into which we cannot go and see this Rameses pretending to make offerings, but really, as usual, offering to show himself.
At the village under the ledges, many of the houses are of stone, and the sheykh has a pretentious stone enclosure with little in it, all to himself. Shadoofs are active along the bank, and considerable crops of wheat, beans, and corn are well forward. We stop to talk with a bright-looking Arab, who employs men to work his shadoofs, and lives here in an enclosure of cornstalks, with a cornstalk kennel in one corner, where he and his family sleep. There is nothing pretentious about this establishment, but the owner is evidently a man of wealth, and, indeed, he has the bearing of a shrewd Yankee. He owns a camel, two donkeys, several calves and two cows, and two young Nubian girls for wives, black as coal and greased, but rather pleasant-faced. He has also two good guns—appears to have duplicates of nearly everything. Out of the cornstalk shanty his wives bring some handsome rugs for us to sit on.
The Arab accompanies us on our walk, as a sort of host of the country, and we are soon joined by others, black fellows; some of them carry the long flint-lock musket, for which they seem to have no powder; and all wear a knife in a sheath on the left arm; but they are as peaceable friendly folk as you would care to meet, and simple-minded. I show the Arab my field-glass, an object new to his experience. He looks through it, as I direct, and is an astonished man, making motions with his hand, to indicate how the distant objects are drawn towards him, laughing with a soft and childlike delight, and then lowering the glass, looks at it, and cries, “Bismillah! Bismillah,” an ejaculation of wonder, and also intended to divert any misfortune from coming upon him on account of his indulgence in this pleasure.
He soon gets the use of the glass and looks beyond the river and all about, as if he were discovering objects unknown to him before. The others all take a turn at it, and are equally astonished and delighted. But when I cause them to look through the large end at a dog near by, and they see him remove far off in the desert, their astonishment is complete. My comrade's watch interested them nearly as much, although they knew its use; they could never get enough of its ticking and of looking at its works, and they concluded that the owner of it must be a Pasha.