“Eh! that's Mr. Fiddle,” cries Abd-el-Atti, whose musical nomenclature is not very extensive, “that's a him.”
Once on a moonless night in Upper Nubia, as we lay tied to the bank, under the shadow of the palms, there had swept past us, flashing into sight an instant and then gone in the darkness, an upward-bound dahabeëh, from the deck of which a cornet-à-piston flung out, in salute, the lively notes of a popular American air. The player (whom the dragoman could never call by any name but “Mr. Fiddle”) as we came to know later, was an Irish gentleman, Anglicized and Americanized, and indeed cosmopolitan, who has a fancy for going about the world and awaking here and there remote and commonly undisturbed echoes with his favorite brass horn. I daresay that moonlight voyagers on the Hudson have heard its notes dropping down from the Highlands; it has stirred the air of every land on the globe except India; our own Sierras have responded to its invitations, and Mount Sinai itself has echoed its strains. There is a prejudice against the cornet, that it is not exactly a family instrument; and not more suited to assist in morning and evening devotions than the violin, which a young clergyman, whom I knew, was endeavoring to learn, in order to play it, gently, at family prayers.
This traveled cornet, however, begins to play, with deliberate pauses between the bars, the notes of that glorious hymn, “How firm a foundation ye saints of the Lord,” following it with the Prayer from Der Freischutz, and that, again, with some familiar Scotch airs (a transition perfectly natural in home-circles on Sunday evening), every note of which, leisurely floating out into the night, is sent back in distant echoes. Nothing can be lovelier than the scene,—the tropical night, the sentimental island, the shadows of columns and crags, the mysterious presence of a brooding past,—and nothing can be sweeter than these dulcet, lingering, re-echoing strains, which are the music of our faith, of civilization, of home. From these old temples did never come, in the days of the flute and the darabooka, such melodies. And do the spirits of Isis and Osiris, and of Berenice, Cleopatra, and Antoninus, who worshipped them here, listen, and know perhaps that a purer and better spirit has come into the world?
In the midst of this echoing melody, a little boat, its sail noiselessly furled, its gunwales crowded with gowned and white-turbaned Nubians, glides out of the shadow and comes alongside, as silently as a ferry-boat of the under-world bearing the robed figures of the departed, and the venerable Reis of the Cataract steps on board, with es-salam 'aleykum; and the negotiation for shooting the rapids in the morning begins.
The reïs is a Nubian of grave aspect, of a complexion many shades darker than would have been needed to disqualify its possessor to enjoy civil rights in our country a few years ago, and with watchful and shrewd black eyes which have an occasional gleam of humor; his robe is mingled black and white, his turban is a fine camels-hair shawl; his legs are bare, but he wears pointed red-morocco slippers. There is a long confab between him and the dragoman, over pipes and coffee, about the down trip. It seems that there is a dahabeëh at Assouan, carrying the English Prince Arthur and a Moslem Prince, which has been waiting for ten days the whim of the royal scion, to make the ascent. Meantime no other boat can go up or down. The cataract business is at a standstill. The government has given orders that no other boat shall get in the way; and many travelers' boats have been detained from one to two weeks; some of them have turned back, without seeing Nubia, unable to spend any longer time in a vexatious uncertainty. The prince has signified his intention of coming up the Cataract tomorrow morning, and consequently we cannot go down, although the descending channel is not the same as the ascending. A considerable fleet of boats is now at each end of the cataract, powerless to move.
The cataract people express great dissatisfaction at this interference in their concerns by the government, which does not pay them as much as the ordinary traveler does for passing the cataract. And yet they have their own sly and mysterious method of dealing with boats that is not less annoying than the government favoritism. They will very seldom take a dahabeëh through in a day; they have delight in detaining it in the rapids and showing their authority.
When, at length, the Reis comes into the cabin, to pay us a visit of courtesy, he is perfect in dignity and good-breeding, in spite of his bare legs; and enters into a discourse of the situation with spirit and intelligence. In reply to a remark, that, in America we are not obliged to wait for princes, his eyes sparkle, as he answers, with much vivacity of manner, “You quite right. In Egypt we are in a mess. Egypt is a ewe sheep from which every year they shear the wool close off; the milk that should go the lamb they drink; and when the poor old thing dies, they give the carcass to the people—the skin they cut up among themselves. This season,” he goes on, “is to the cataracts like what the pilgrimage is to Mecca and to Jerusalem—the time when to make the money from the traveler. And when the princes they come, crowding the traveler to one side, and the government makes everything done for them for nothing, and pays only one dollar for a turkey for which the traveler pays two, 'bliges the people to sell their provisions at its own price,”—the sheykh stopped.
“The Reis, then, Abd-el-Atti, doesn't fancy this method of doing business?”
“No, him say he not like it at all.”
And the Reis kindled up, “You may call the Prince anything you like, you may call him king; but the real Sultan is the man who pays his money and does not come here at the cost of the government. Great beggars some of these big nobility; all the great people want the Viceroyal to do 'em charity and take 'em up the Nile, into Abyssinia, I don't know where all. I think the greatest beggars always those who can best afford to pay.”