My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

In the midst of his most passionate outburst, he went forward and filled his pipe, and then returned to his tearing and rending and his lamentations. The picture of a strong man in grief is always touching.

The country along here is very pretty, the curved shore for miles being a continual palm-grove, and having a considerable strip of soil which the sakiya irrigation makes very productive. Beyond this rise mountains of rocks in ledges; and when we climb them we see only a waste desert of rock strewn with loose shale and, further inland, black hills of sandstone, which thickly cover the country all the way to the Red Sea.

Under the ledges are the habitations of the people, square enclosures of stone and clay of considerable size, with interior courts and kennels. One of them—the only sign of luxury we have seen in Nubia—had a porch in front of it covered with palm boughs. The men are well-made and rather prepossessing in appearance, and some of them well-dressed—they had no doubt made the voyage to Cairo; the women are hideous without exception. It is no pleasure to speak thus continually of woman; and I am sometimes tempted to say that I see here the brown and bewitching maids, with the eyes of the gazelle and the form of the houri, which gladden the sight of more fortunate voyagers through this idle land; but when I think of the heavy amount of misrepresentation that would be necessary to give any one of these creatures a reputation for good looks abroad, I shrink from the undertaking.

They are decently covered with black cotton mantles, which they make a show of drawing over the face; but they are perhaps wild rather than modest, and have a sort of animal shyness. Their heads are sights to behold. The hair is all braided in strings, long at the sides and cut off in front, after the style adopted now-a-days for children (and women) in civilized countries, and copied from the young princes, prisoners in the Tower. Each round strand of hair hasa dab of clay on the end of it. The whole is drenched with castor-oil, and when the sun shines on it, it is as pleasant to one sense as to another. They have flattish noses, high cheek-bones, and always splendid teeth; and they all, young girls as well as old women, hold tobacco in their under lip and squirt out the juice with placid and scientific accuracy. They wear two or three strings of trumpery beads and necklaces, bracelets of horn and of greasy leather, and occasionally a finger-ring or two. Nose-rings they wear if they have them; if not, they keep the bore open for one by inserting a kernel of doora.

In going back to the boat we met a party of twenty or thirty of these attractive creatures, who were returning from burying a boy of the village. They came striding over the sand, chattering in shrill and savage tones. Grief was not so weighty on them that they forgot to demand backsheesh, and (unrestrained by the men in the town) their clamor for it was like the cawing of crows; and their noise, when they received little from us, was worse. The tender and loving woman, stricken in grief by death, is, in these regions, when denied backsheesh, an enraged, squawking bird of prey. They left us with scorn in their eyes and abuse on their tongues.

At a place below Korosko we saw a singular custom, in which the women appeared to better advantage. A whole troop of women, thirty or forty of them, accompanied by children, came in a rambling procession down to the Nile, and brought a baby just forty days old. We thought at first that they were about to dip the infant into Father Nile, as an introduction to the fountain of all the blessings of Egypt. Instead of this, however, they sat down on the bank, took kohl and daubed it in the little fellow's eyes. They perform this ceremony by the Nile when the boy is forty days old, and they do it that he may have a fortunate life. Kohl seems to enlarge the pupil, and doubtless it is intended to open the boy's eyes early.

At one of the little settlements to-day the men were very hospitable, and brought us out plates (straw) of sweet dried dates. Those that we did not eat, the sailor with us stuffed into his pocket; our sailors never let a chance of provender slip, and would, so far as capacity “to live on the country” goes, make good soldiers. The Nubian dates are called the best in Egypt. They are longer than the dates of the Delta, but hard and quite dry. They take the place of coffee here in the complimentary hospitality. Whenever a native invites you to take “coffee,” and you accept, he will bring you a plate of dates and probably a plate of popped doora, like our popped corn. Coffee seems not to be in use here; even the governors entertain us with dates and popped corn.

We are working up the river slowly enough to make the acquaintance of every man, woman, and child on the banks; and a precious lot of acquaintances we shall have. I have no desire to force them upon the public, but it is only by these details that I can hope to give you any idea of the Nubian life.

We stop at night. The moon-and-starlight is something superb. From the high bank under which we are moored, the broad river, the desert opposite, and the mountains, appear in a remote African calm—a calm only broken by the shriek of the sakiyas which pierce the air above and below us.

In the sakiya near us, covered with netting to keep off the north wind, is a little boy, patient and black, seated on the pole of the wheel, urging the lean cattle round and round. The little chap is alone and at some distance from the village, and this must be for him lonesome work. The moonlight, through the chinks of the palm-leaf, touches tenderly his pathetic figure, when we look in at the opening, and his small voice utters the one word of Egypt—“backsheesh.”