My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

A morning walk takes us over a rocky desert; the broken shale is distributed as evenly over the sand as if the whole had once been under water, and the shale were a dried mud, cracked in the sun. The miserable dwellings of the natives are under the ledges back of the strip of arable land. The women are shy and wild as hawks, but in the mode; they wear a profusion of glass beads and trail their robes in the dust.

It is near this village that we have an opportunity to execute justice. As the crew were tracking, and lifting the rope over a sakiya, the hindmost sailor saw a sheath-knife on the bank, and thrust it into his pocket as he walked on. In five minutes the owner of the knife discovered the robbery, and came to the boat to complain. The sailor denied having the knife, but upon threat of a flogging gave it up. The incident, however, aroused the town, men and women came forth discussing it in a high key, and some foolish fellows threatened to stone our boat. Abd-el-Atti replied that he would stop and give them a chance to do it. Thereupon they apologized; and as there was no wind, the dragoman asked leave to stop and do justice.

A court was organized on shore. Abd-el-Atti sat down on a lump of earth, grasping a marline-spike, the crew squatted in a circle in the high beans, and the culprit was arraigned. The owner testified to his knife, a woman swore she saw the sailor take it, Abd-el-Atti pronounced sentence, and rose to execute it with his stake. The thief was thrown upon the ground and held by two sailors. Abd-el-Atti, resolute and solemn as an executioner, raised the club and brought it down with a tremendous whack—not however upon the back of the victim, he had at that instant squirmed out of the way. This conduct greatly enraged the minister of justice, who thereupon came at his object with fury, and would no doubt have hit him if the criminal had not got up and ran, screaming, with the sailors and Abd-el-Atti after him. The ground was rough, the legs of Abd-el-Atti are not long and his wind is short. The fellow was caught, and escaped again and again, but the punishment was a mere scrimmage; whenever Abd-el-Atti, in the confusion, could get a chance to strike he did so, but generally hit the ground, sometimes the fellow's gown and perhaps once or twice the man inside, but never to his injury. He roared all the while, that he was no thief, and seemed a good deal more hurt by the charge that he was, than by the stick. The beating was, in short, only a farce laughable from beginning to end, and not a bad sample of Egyptian justice. And it satisfied everybody.

Having put ourselves thus on friendly relations with this village, one of the inhabitants brought down to the boat a letter for the dragoman to interpret. It had been received two weeks before from Alexandria, but no one had been able to read it until our boat stopped here. Fortunately we had the above little difficulty here. The contents of the letter gave the village employment for a month. It brought news of the death of two inhabitants of the place, who were living as servants in Alexandria, one of them a man eighty years old and his son aged sixty.

I never saw grief spread so fast and so suddenly as it did with the uncorking of this vial of bad news. Instantly a lamentation and wild mourning began in all the settlement. It wasn't ten minutes before the village was buried in grief. And, in an incredible short space of time, the news had spread up and down the river, and the grief-stricken began to arrive from other places. Where they came from, I have no idea; it did not seem that we had passed so many women in a week as we saw now They poured in from all along the shore, long strings of them, striding over the sand, throwing up their garments, casting dust on their heads (and all of it stuck), howling, flocking like wild geese to a rendezvous, and filling the air with their clang. They were arriving for an hour or two.

The men took no part in this active demonstration. They were seated gravely before the house in which the bereaved relatives gathered; and there I found Abd-el-Atti, seated also, and holding forth upon the inevitable coming of death, and saying that there was nothing to be regretted in this case, for the time of these men had come. If it hadn't come, they wouldn't have died. Not so?

The women crowded into the enclosure and began mourning in a vigorous manner. The chief ones grouping themselves in an irregular ring, cried aloud: “O that he had died here!”

“O that I had seen his face when he died;” repeating these lamentations over and over again, throwing up the arms, and then the legs in a kind of barbaric dance as they lamented, and uttering long and shrill ululations at the end of each sentence.

To-day they kill a calf and feast, and tomorrow the lamentations and the African dance will go on, and continue for a week. These people are all feeling. It is a heathen and not a Moslem custom however; and whether it is of negro origin or of ancient Egyptian I do not know, but probably the latter. The ancient Egyptian women are depicted in the tombs mourning in this manner; and no doubt the Jews also so bewailed, when they “lifted up their voices” and cast dust on their heads, as we saw these Nubians do. It is an unselfish pleasure to an Eastern woman to “lift up the voice.” The heavy part of the mourning comes upon the women, who appear to enjoy it. It is their chief occupation, after the carrying of water and the grinding of doora, and probably was so with the old race; these people certainly keep the ancient customs; they dress the hair, for one thing, very much as the Egyptians did, even to the castor-oil.

At this village, as in others in Nubia, the old women are the corn-grinders. These wasted skeletons sit on the ground before a stone with a hollow in it; in this they bruise the doora with a smaller stone; the flour is then moistened and rubbed to a paste. The girls and younger women, a great part of the time, are idling about in their finery. But, then, they have the babies and the water to bring; and it must be owned that some of them work in the field—grubbing grass and stuff for “greens” and for fuel, more than the men. The men do the heavy work of irrigation.