“Do you think we shall have any wind to-day?”
“I d'know, be sure. The wind come from Lord. Not so?”
Hadji Kandeel is in truth only a scattered line of huts, but one lands here to visit the grottoes or rock-tombs of Tel el Amarna. All this country is gaping with tombs apparently; all the cliffs are cut into receptacles for the dead, all along the margin of the desert on each side are old necropolises and moslem cemeteries, in which generation after generation, for almost fabulous periods of time, has been deposited. Here behind Hadji Kandeel are remains of a once vast city built let us say sixteen hundred years before our era, by Amunoph IV., a wayward king of the eighteenth dynasty, and made the capital of Egypt. In the grottoes of Tel el Amârna were deposited this king and his court and favorites, and his immediate successors—all the splendor of them sealed up there and forgotten. This king forsook the worship of the gods of Thebes, and set up that of a Semitic deity, Aten, a radiating disk, a sun with rays terminating in human hands. It was his mother who led him into this, and she was not an Egyptian; neither are the features of the persons sculptured in the grottoes Egyptian.
Thus all along the stream of Egyptian history cross currents are coming in, alien sovereigns and foreign task-masters; and great breaks appear, as if one full civilization had run its course of centuries, and decay had come, and then ruin, and then a new start and a fresh career.
Early this morning, when we were close in to the west bank, I heard measured chanting, and saw a procession of men and women coming across the field. The men bore on a rude bier the body of a child. They came straight on to the bank, and then turned by the flank with military precision and marched upstream to the place where a clumsy country ferry-boat had just landed. The chant of the men, as they walked, was deep-voiced and solemn, and I could hear in it frequently repeated the name of Mohammed. The women in straggling file followed, like a sort of ill-omened birds in black, and the noise they made, a kind of wail, was exactly like the cackle of wild geese. Indeed before I saw the procession I thought that some geese were flying overhead.
The body was laid on the ground and four men kneeled upon the bank as if in prayer. The boat meantime was unloading, men, women and children scrambling over the sides into the shallow water, and the donkeys, urged with blows, jumping after them. When they were all out the funeral took possession of the boat, and was slowly wafted across, as dismal a going to a funeral as if this were the real river of death. When the mourners had landed we saw them walking under the palm-trees, to the distant burial-place in the desert, with a certain solemn dignity, and the chanting and wailing were borne to us very distinctly.
It is nearly a dead calm all day, and our progress might be imperceptible to an eye naked, and certainly it must be so to the eyes of these natives which are full of flies. It grows warm, however, and is a summer temperature when we go ashore in the afternoon on a tour of exploration. We have for attendant, Ahmed, who carries a big stick as a defence against dogs. Ahmed does not differ much in appearance from a wild barbarian, his lack of a complete set of front teeth alone preventing him from looking fierce. A towel is twisted about his head, feet and legs are bare, and he wears a blue cotton robe with full sleeves longer than his arms, gathered at the waist by a piece of rope, and falling only to the knees. A nice person to go walking with on the Holy Sabbath.
The whole land is green with young wheat, but the soil is baked and cracked three or four inches deep, even close to the shore where the water has only receded two or three days ago. The land stretches for several miles, perfectly level and every foot green and smiling, back to the desert hills. Sprinkled over this expanse, which is only interrupted by ditches and slight dykes upon which the people walk from village to village, are frequent small groves of palms. Each grove is the nucleus of a little settlement, a half dozen sun-baked habitations, where people, donkeys, pigeons, and smaller sorts of animated nature live together in dirty amity. The general plan of building is to erect a circular wall of clay six or seven feet high, which dries, hardens, and cracks in the sun. This is the Oriental court. In side this and built against the wall is a low mud-hut with a wooden door, and perhaps here and there are two similar huts, or half a dozen, according to the size of the family. In these hovels the floor is of smooth earth, there is a low bedstead or some matting laid in one corner, but scarcely any other furniture, except some earthen jars holding doora or dried fruit, and a few cooking utensils. A people who never sit, except on their heels, do not need chairs, and those who wear at once all the clothes they possess need no closets or wardrobes. I looked at first for a place where they could keep their “Sunday clothes” and “nice things,” but this philosophical people do not have anything that is too good for daily use. It is nevertheless true that there is no hope of a people who do not have “Sunday clothes.”
The inhabitants did not, however, appear conscious of any such want. They were lounging about or squatting in the dust in picturesque idleness; the children under twelve years often without clothes and not ashamed, and the women wearing no veils. The women are coming and going with the heavy water-jars, or sitting on the ground, sorting doora and preparing it for cooking; not prepossessing certainly, in their black or dingy brown gowns and shawls of cotton. Children abound. In all the fields men are at work, picking up the ground with a rude hoe shaped like an adze. Tobacco plants have just been set out, and water-melons carefully shaded from the sun by little tents of rushes. These men are all Fellaheen, coarsely and scantily clad in brown cotton gowns, open at the breast. They are not bad figures, better than the women, but there is a hopeless acceptance of the portion of slaves in their bearing.
We encountered a very different race further from the river, where we came upon an encampment of Bedaween, or desert Arabs, who hold themselves as much above the Fellaheen as the poor white trash used to consider itself above the negroes in our Southern States. They pretend to keep their blood pure by intermarrying only in desert tribes, and perhaps it is pure; so, I suppose, the Gipsies are pure blood enough, but one would not like them for neighbors. These Bedaween, according to their wandering and predatory habit, have dropped down here from the desert to feed their little flock of black sheep and give their lean donkeys a bite of grass. Their tents are merely strips of coarse brown cloth, probably camel's hair, like sacking, stretched horizontally over sticks driven into the sand, so as to form a cover from the sun and a protection from the north wind. Underneath them are heaps of rags, matting, old clothes, blankets, mingled with cooking-utensils and the nameless broken assortment that beggars usually lug about with them. Hens and lambs are at home there, and dogs, a small, tawny wolfish breed, abound. The Arabs are worthy of their dwellings, a dirty, thievish lot to look at, but, as I said, no doubt of pure blood, and having all the virtues for which these nomads have been celebrated since the time when Jacob judiciously increased his flock at the expense of Laban.