My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

WE ARE at home again. Our little world, which has been somewhat disturbed by the gaiety of Thebes, and is already as weary of tombs as of temples and of the whole incubus of Egyptian civilization, readjusts itself and settles into its usual placid enjoyment.

We have now two gazelles on board, and a most disagreeable lizard, nearly three feet long; I dislike the way his legs are set on his sides; I dislike his tail, which is a fat continuation of his body; and the “feel” of his cold, creeping flesh is worse than his appearance; he is exceedingly active, darting rapidly about in every direction to the end of his rope. The gazelles chase each other about the deck, frolicking in the sun, and their eyes express as much tenderness and affection as any eyes can, set like theirs. If they were mounted in a woman's head, and properly shaded with long lashes, she would be the most dangerous being in existence.

Somehow there is a little change in the atmosphere of the dahabeëh. The jester of the crew, who kept them alternately laughing and grumbling, singing and quarreling, turbulent with hasheesh or sulky for want of it, was left in jail at Assouan. The reïs has never recovered the injury to his dignity inflicted by his brief incarceration, and gives us no more a cheerful good-morning. The steersman smiles still, with the fixed look of enjoyment that his face assumed when it first came into the world, but he is listless; I think he has struck a section of the river in which there is a dearth of his wives; he has complained that his feet were cold in the fresh mornings, but the stockings we gave him he does not wear, and probably is reserving for a dress occasion. Abd-el-Atti meditates seriously upon a misunderstanding with one of his old friends at Luxor; he likes to tell us about the diplomatic and sarcastic letter he addressed him on leaving; “I wrote it,” he says, “very grammatick, the meaning of him very deep; I think he feel it.” There is no language like the Arabic for the delivery of courtly sarcasm, in soft words, at which no offence can be taken,—for administering a smart slap in the face, so to say, with a feather.

It is a ravishing sort of day, a slight haze, warm but life-giving air, and we row a little and sail a little down the broadening river, by the palms, and the wheat-fields growing yellow, and the soft chain of Libyan hills,—the very dolce far niente of life. Other dahabeëhs accompany us, and we hear the choruses of their crews responding to ours. From the shore comes the hum of labor and of idleness, men at the shadoofs, women at the shore for water; there are flocks of white herons and spoonbills on the sandbars; we glide past villages with picturesque pigeon-houses; a ferry-boat ever and anon puts across, a low black scow, its sides banked up with clay, a sail all patches and tatters, and crowded in it three or four donkeys and a group of shawled women and turbaned men, silent and sombre. The country through which we walk, towards night, is a vast plain of wheat, irrigated by canals, with villages in all directions; the peasants are shabbily dressed, as if taxes ate up all their labor, but they do not beg.

The city of Keneh, to which we come next morning, is the nearest point of the Nile to the Red Sea, the desert route to Kosseir being only one hundred and twenty miles; it is the Neapolis of which Herodotus speaks, near which was the great city of Chemmis, that had a temple dedicated to Perseus. The Chemmitæ declared that this demi-god often appeared to them on earth, and that he was descended from citizens of their country who had sailed into Greece; there if no doubt that Perseus came here when he made the expedition into Libya to bring the Gorgon's head.

Keneh is now a thriving city, full of evidences of wealth, and of well-dressed people, and there are handsome houses and bazaars like those of Cairo. From time immemorial it has been famous for its koollehs, which are made of a fine clay found only in this vicinity, of which ware is manufactured almost as thin as paper. The process of making them has not changed since the potters of the Pharaohs' time. The potters of to-day are very skillful at the wheel. A small mass of moistened clay, mixed with sifted ashes of halfeh-grass and kneaded like bread, is placed upon a round plate of wood which whirls by a treadle. As it revolves the workman with his hands fashions the clay into vessels of all shapes, graceful and delicate, with a sleight of hand that is wonderful. He makes a koolleh, or a drinking-cup, or a vase with a slender neck, in a few seconds, fashioning it as truly as if it were cast in a mould. It was like magic to see the fragile forms grow in his hands. We sat for a long time in one of the cool rooms where two or three potters were at work, shaded from the sun by palm-branches, which let the light flicker upon the earth-floor, upon the freshly made vessels and the spinning wheels of the turbaned workmen, whose deft fingers wrought out unceasingly these beautiful shapes from the revolving clay.

At the house of the English consul we have coffee; he afterwards lunches with us and insists, but in vain, that we stay and be entertained by a Ghawazee dance in the evening. It is a kind of amusement of which a very little satisfies one. At his house, Prince Arthur and his suite were also calling; a slender, pleasant appearing young gentleman, not noticeable anywhere and with a face of no special force, but bearing the family likeness. As we have had occasion to remark more than once, Princes are so plenty on the Nile this year as to be a burden to the officials,—especially German princes, who, however, do not count any more. The private, unostentatious traveler, who asks no favor of the Khedive, is becoming almost a rarity. I hear the natives complain that almost all the Englishmen of rank who come to Egypt, beg, or shall we say accept? substantial favors of the Khedive. The nobility appear to have a new rendering of noblesse oblige. This is rather humiliating to us Americans, who are, after all, almost blood-relations of the English; and besides, we are often taken for Inglese, in villages where few strangers go. It cannot be said that all Americans are modest, unassuming travelers; but we are glad to record a point or two in their favor:—they pay their way, and they do not appear to cut and paint their names upon the ruins in such numbers as travelers from other countries; the French are the greatest offenders in this respect, and the Germans next.

We cross the river in the afternoon and ride to the temple of Athor or Venus at Denderah. This temple, although of late construction, is considered one of the most important in Egypt. But it is incomplete, smaller, and less satisfactory than that at Edfoo. The architecture of the portico and succeeding hall is on the whole noble, but the columns are thick and ungraceful, and the sculptures are clumsy and unartistic. The myth of the Egyptian Avenues is worked out everywhere with the elaboration of a later Greek temple. On the ceiling of several rooms her gigantic figure is bent round three sides, and from a globe in her lap rays proceed in the vivifying influence of which trees are made to grow.

Everywhere in the temple are subterranean and intramural passages, entrance to which is only had by a narrow aperture, once closed by a stone. For what were these perfectly dark alleys intended? Processions could not move in them, and if they were merely used for concealing valuables, why should their inner sides have been covered with such elaborate sculptures?

The most interesting thing at Denderah is the small temple of Osiris, which is called the “lying-in temple,” the subjects of sculptures being the mystical conception, birth, and babyhood of Osiris. You might think from the pictures on the walls, of babes at nurse and babes in arms, that you had obtruded into one of the institutions of charity called a Day Nursery. We are glad to find here, carved in large, the image of the four-headed ugly little creature we have been calling Typhon, the spirit of evil; and to learn that it is not Typhon but is the god Bes, a jolly promoter of merriment and dancing. His appearance is very much against him.