My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

The grottoes are tombs in the sandstone mountain, of the time of the eighteenth dynasty, which began some thirty-five hundred years ago. Two of them have remarkable sculptures, the coloring of which is still fresh; and I wish to speak of them a little, because it is from them (and some of the same character) that Egyptologists have largely reconstructed for us the common life of the ancient Egyptians. Although the work is somewhat rude, it has a certain veracity of execution which is pleasing.

We assume this tomb to have been that of a man of wealth. This is the ante-chamber; the mummy was deposited in a pit let into a small excavation in the rear. On one wall are sculptured agricultural scenes: plowing, sowing, reaping wheat and pulling doora (the color indicates the kind of grain), hatcheling the latter, while oxen are treading out the wheat, and the song of the threshers encouraging the oxen is written in hieroglyphics above; the winnowing and storing of the grain; in a line under these, the various domestic animals of the deceased are brought forward to a scribe, who enumerates them and notes the numbers on a roll of papyrus. There are river-scenes:—grain is loaded into freight-boats; pleasure-dahabeëhs are on the stream, gaily painted, with one square sail amidship, rowers along the sides, and windows in the cabin; one has a horse and chariot on board, the reïs stands at the bow, the overseer, kurbash in hand, is threatening the crew, a sailor is falling overboard. Men are gathering grapes, and treading out the wine with their feet; others are catching fish and birds in nets, and dressing and curing them. At the end of this wall, offerings are made to Osiris. In one compartment a man is seated holding a boy on his lap.

On the opposite wall are two large figures, supposed to be the occupant of the tomb and his wife, seated on a fauteuil; men and women, in two separate lines, facing the large figures, are seated, one leg bent under them, each smelling a lotus flower. In the rear, men are killing and cutting up animals as if preparing for a feast. To the leg of the fauteuil is tied a monkey; and Mr. Wilkinson says that it was customary at entertainments for the hosts to have a “favorite monkey” tied to the leg of the chair. Notwithstanding the appearance of the monkey here in that position, I do not suppose that he would say that an ordinary entertainment is represented here. For, although there are preparations for a feast, there is a priest standing between the friends and the principal personages, making offerings, and the monkey may be present in his character of emblem of Thoth. It seems to be a funeral and not a festive representation. The pictures apparently tell the story of the life of the deceased and his occupations, and represent the mourning at his tomb. In other grottoes, where the married pair are seated as here, the arm of the woman on the shoulder of the man, and the “favorite monkey” tied to the chair, friends are present in the act of mourning, throwing dust on their heads, and accompanied by musicians; and the mummy is drawn on a sledge to the tomb, a priest standing on the front, and a person pouring oil on the ground that the runners may slip easily.

The setting sun strikes into these chambers, so carefully prepared for people of rank of whom not a pinch of dust now remains, and lights them up with a certain cheer and hope. We cannot make anything melancholy out of a tomb so high and with such a lovely prospect from its front door. The former occupants are unknown, but not more unknown than the peasants we see on the fields below, still at the tasks depicted in these sculptures. Thirty-five hundred years is not so very long ago! Slowly we pick our way down the hill and regain our floating home; and, bidding farewell forever to El Kab, drift down in the twilight. In the morning we are at Esneh.

In Esneh the sound of the grinding is never low. The town is full of primitive ox-power mills in which the wheat is ground, and there are always dahabeëhs staying here for the crew to bake their bread. Having already had one day of Esneh we are tired of it, for it is exactly like all other Egyptian towns of its size: we know all the possible combinations of mud-hovels, crooked lanes, stifling dust, nakedness, squalor. We are so accustomed to picking our way in the street amid women and children sprawling in the dirt, that the scene has lost its strangeness; it is even difficult to remember that in other countries women usually keep indoors and sit on chairs.

The town is not without liveliness It is half Copt, and beggars demand backsheesh on the ground that they are Christians, and have a common interest with us. We wander through the bazaars where there is nothing to buy and into the market-place, always the most interesting study in an unknown city. The same wheat lies on the ground in heaps; the same roots and short stalks of the doora are tied in bundles and sold for fuel, and cakes of dried manure for the like use; people are lying about in the sun in all picturesque attitudes, some curled up and some on their backs fast asleep; more are squating before little heaps of corn or beans or some wilted “greens,” or dried tobacco-leaves and pipe-bowls; children swarm and tumble about everywhere; donkeys and camels pick their way through the groups.

I spent half an hour in teaching a handsome young Copt how to pronounce English words in his Arabic-English primer. He was very eager to learn and very grateful for assistance. We had a large and admiring crowd about us, who laughed at every successful and still more at every unsuccessful attempt on the part of the pupil, and repeated the English words themselves when they could catch the sound,—an exceedingly good-natured lot of idlers. We found the people altogether pleasant, some in the ingrained habit of begging, quick to take a joke and easily excited. While I had my scholar, a fantasia of music on two tambourines was performed for the amusement of my comrade, which had also its ring of spectators watching the effect of the monotonous thumping, upon the grave howadji; he was seated upon the mastabah of a shop, with all formality, and enjoyed all the honors of the entertainment, as was proper, since he bore the entire expense alone,—about five cents.

The coffee-shops of Esneh are many, some respectable and others decidedly otherwise. The former are the least attractive, being merely long and dingy mud-apartments, in which the visitors usually sit on the floor and play at draughts. The coffee-houses near the river have porticoes and pleasant terraces in front, and look not unlike some picturesque Swiss or Italian wine-shops. The attraction there seems to be the Ghawazees or dancing-girls, of whom there is a large colony here, the colony consisting of a tribe. All the family act as procurers for the young women, who are usually married. Their dress is an extraordinary combination of stripes and colors, red and yellow being favorites, which harmonize well with their dark, often black, skins, and eyes heavily shaded with kohl. I suppose it must be admitted, in spite of their total want of any womanly charm of modesty, that they are the finest-looking women in Egypt, though many of them are ugly; they certainly are of a different type from the Egyptians, though not of a pure type; they boast that they have preserved themselves without admixture with other peoples or tribes from a very remote period; one thing is certain, their profession is as old as history and their antiquity may entitle them to be considered an aristocracy of vice. They say that their race is allied in origin to that of the people called gypsies, with whom many of their customs are common. The men are tinkers, blacksmiths, or musicians, and the women are the ruling element in the band; the husband is subject to the wife. But whatever their origin, it is admitted that their dance is the same as that with which the dancing-women amused the Pharaohs, the same that the Phoenicians carried to Gades and which Juvenal describes, and, Mr. Lane thinks, the same by which the daughter of Herodias danced off the head of John the Baptist. Modified here and there, it is the immemorial dance of the Orient.

Esneh has other attractions for the sailors of the Nile; there are the mahsheshehs, or shops where hasheesh is smoked; an attendant brings the “hubble-bubble” to the guests who are lolling on the mastabah; they inhale their portion, and then lie down in a stupor, which is at every experiment one remove nearer idiocy.

Still drifting, giving us an opportunity to be on shore all the morning. We visit the sugar establishment at Mutâneh, and walk along the high bank under the shade of the acacias for a couple of miles below it. Nothing could be lovelier in this sparkling morning—the silver-grey range of mountains across the river and the level smiling land on our left. This is one of the Viceroy's possessions, bought of one of his relations at a price fixed by his highness. There are ten thousand acres of arable land, of which some fifteen hundred is in sugar-cane, and the rest in grain. The whole is watered by a steam-pump, which sends a vast stream of water inland, giving life to the broad fields and the extensive groves, as well as to a village the minaret of which we can see. It is a noble estate. Near the factory are a palace and garden, somewhat in decay, as is usual in this country, but able to offer us roses and lemons.