My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

We are approaching the capital of Nubia, trying to get round a sharp bend in the river, with wind adverse, current rapid, sandbars on all sides. Most of the crew are in the water ahead, trying to haul us round the point of a sand-spit on which the stream foams, and then swirls in an eddy below. I can see now the Pilot, the long Pilot, who has gone in to feel about for deep water, in his white nightgown, his shaven head, denuded of its turban, shining in the sun, standing in two feet of water, throwing his arms wildly above his head, screaming entreaties, warnings, commands, imprecations upon the sailors in the river and the commanders on the boat. I can see the crew, waist deep, slacking the rope which they have out ahead, stopping to discuss the situation. I can see the sedate reïs on the bow arguing with the raving pilot, the steersman, with his eternal smile, calmly regarding the peril, and the boat swinging helplessly about and going upon the shoals. “Stupids,” mutters Abd-el-Atti, who is telling his beads rapidly, as he always does in exciting situations.

When at length we pass the point, we catch the breeze so suddenly and go away with it, that there is no time for the men to get on board, and they are obliged to scamper back over the sand-spits to the shore and make a race of it to meet us at Derr. We can see them running in file, dodging along under the palms by the shore, stopping to grab occasionally a squash or a handful of beans for the pot.

The capital of Nubia is the New York of this region, not so large, nor so well laid out, nor so handsomely built, but the centre of fashion and the residence of the ton. The governor lives in a whitewashed house, and there is a Sycamore here eight hundred years old, which is I suppose older than the Stuyvesant Pear in New York. The houses are not perched up in the air like tenement buildings for the poor, but aristocratically keep to the ground in one-story rooms; and they are beautifully moulded of a tough clay. The whole town lies under a palm-grove. The elegance of the capital, however, is not in its buildings, but in its women; the ladies who come to the the river to fill their jars are arrayed in the height of the mode. Their hair is twisted and clayed and castoroiled, but, besides this and other garments, they wear an outer robe of black which sweeps the ground for a yard behind, and gives them the grace and dignity that court-robes always give. You will scarcely see longer skirts on Broadway or in a Paris salon. I have, myself, no doubt that the Broadway fashions came from Derr, all except the chignons. Here the ladies wear their own hair.

Making no landing in this town so dangerous to one susceptible to the charms of fashion, we went on, and stopped at night near Ibreem, a lofty precipice, or range of precipices, the southern hill crowned with ruins and fortifications which were last occupied by the Memlooks, half a century and more ago. The night blazed with beauty; the broad river was a smooth mirror, in which the mountains and the scintillating hosts of heaven were reflected. And we saw a phenomenon which I have never seen elsewhere. Not only were the rocky ledges reproduced in a perfect definition of outline, but even in the varieties of shade, in black and reddish-brown color.

Perhaps it needs the affidavits of all the party to the more surprising fact, that we were all on deck next morning before five o'clock, to see the Southern Cross. The moon had set, and these famous stars of the southern sky flashed color and brilliancy like enormous diamonds. “Other worlds than ours”? I should think so! All these myriads of burning orbs only to illuminate our dahabeëh and a handful of Nubians, who are asleep! The Southern Cross lay just above the horizon and not far from other stars of the first quality. There are I believe only three stars of the first magnitude and one of the second, in this constellation, and they form, in fact, not a cross but an irregular quadrilateral. It needs a vivid imagination and the aid of small stars to get even a semblance of a cross out of it. But if you add to it, as we did, for the foot of the cross, a brilliant in a neighboring constellation, you have a noble cross.

This constellation is not so fine as Orion, and for all we saw, we would not exchange our northern sky for the southern; but this morning we had a rare combination. The Morning Star was blazing in the east; and the Great Bear (who has been nightly sinking lower and lower, until he dips below the horizon) having climbed high up above the Pole in the night, filled the northern sky with light. In this lucid atmosphere the whole heavens from north to south seemed to be crowded with stars of the first size.

During the morning we walked on the west bank through a castor-oil plantation; many of the plants were good-sized trees, with boles two and a half to three inches through, and apparently twenty-five feet high. They were growing in the yellow sand which had been irrigated by sakiyas, but was then dry, and some of the plants were wilting. We picked up the ripe seeds and broke off some of the fat branches; and there was not water enough in the Nile to wash away the odor afterwards.

Walking back over the great sand-plain towards the range of desert mountains, we came to an artificial mound—an ash-heap, in fact—fifty or sixty feet high. At its base is a habitation of several compartments, formed by sticking the stalks of castor-oil plants into the ground, with a roof of the same. Here we found several women with very neat dabs of clay on the ends of their hair-twists, and a profusion of necklaces, rings in the hair and other ornaments—among them, scraps of gold. The women were hospitable, rather modest than shy, and set before us plates of dried dates; and no one said “backsheesh.” A better class of people than those below, and more purely Nubian.

It would perhaps pay to dig open this mound. Near it are three small oases, watered by sakiyas, which draw from wells that are not more than twenty feet deep. The water is clear as crystal but not cool. These are ancient Egyptian wells, which have been re-opened within a few years; and the ash-mound is no doubt the débris of a village and an old Egyptian settlement.

At night we are a dozen miles from Aboo Simbel (Ipsamboul), the wind—which usually in the winter blows with great and steady force from the north in this part of the river—having taken a fancy to let us see the country.