My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

We are moored against the bank. The dragoman has gone on shore to shoot pigeons and buy vegetables. Our turkeys, which live in cages on the stern-deck, have gone ashore and are strutting up and down the sand; their gobble is a home sound and recalls New England. Women, as usual, singly and in groups, come to the river to fill their heavy water-jars. There is a row of men and boys on the edge of the bank. Behind are two camels yoked wide apart drawing a plow. Our crew chaff the shore people. The cook says to a girl, “You would make me a good wife; we will take you along.” Men, squatting on the bank say, “Take her along, she is of no use.”

Girl retorts, “You are not of more use than animals, you sit idle all day, while I bring water and grind the corn.”

One is glad to see this assertion of the rights of women in this region where nobody has any rights; and if we had a tract we would leave it with her. Some good might be done by travelers if they would distribute biscuit along the Nile, stamped in Arabic with the words, “Man ought to do half the work,” or, “Sisters rise!”

In the afternoon we explore a large extent of country, my companion carrying a shot-gun for doves. These doves are in fact wild pigeons, a small and beautiful pearly-grey bird. They live on the tops of the houses in nests formed for them by the insertion of tiles or earthen pots in the mud-walls. Many houses have an upper story of this sort on purpose for the doves; and a collection of mere mud-cabins so ornamented is a picturesque sight, under a palm-grove. Great flocks of these birds are flying about, and the shooting is permitted, away from the houses.

We make efforts to get near the wild geese and the cranes, great numbers of which are sunning themselves on the sandbanks, but these birds know exactly the range of a gun, and fly at the right moment. A row of cranes will sometimes trifle with our feelings. The one nearest will let us approach almost within range before he lifts his huge wings and sails over the river, the next one will wait for us to come a few steps further before he flies, and so on until the sand-spit is deserted of these long-legged useless birds. Hawks are flying about the shore and great greyish crows, or ravens, come over the fields and light on the margin of sand—a most gentlemanly looking bird, who is under a queer necessity of giving one hop before he can raise himself in flight. Small birds, like sand-pipers, are flitting about the bank. The most beautiful creature, however, is a brown bird, his wing marked with white, long bill, head erect and adorned with a high tuft, as elegant as the blue-jay; the natives call it the crocodile's guide.

We cross vast fields of wheat and of beans, the Arab “fool,” which are sown broadcast, interspersed now and then with a melon-patch. Villages, such as they are, are frequent; one of them has a mosque, the only one we have seen recently. The water for ablution is outside, in a brick tank sunk in the ground. A row of men are sitting on their heels in front of the mosque, smoking; some of them in white gowns, and fine-looking men. I hope there is some saving merit in this universal act of sitting on the heels, the soles of the feet flat on the ground; it is not an easy thing for a Christian to do, as he will find out by trying.

Toward night a steamboat flying the star and crescent of Egypt, with passengers on board, some of “Cook's personally conducted,” goes thundering down stream, filling the air with smoke and frightening the geese, who fly before it in vast clouds. I didn't suppose there were so many geese in the world.

Truth requires it to be said that on Tuesday morning the dahabeëh holds about the position it reached on Sunday morning; we begin to think we are doing well not to lose anything in this rapid current. The day is warm and cloudy, the wind is from the east and then from the south-east, exactly the direction we must go. It is in fact a sirocco, and fills one with languor, which is better than being frost-bitten at home. The evening, with the cabin windows all open, is like one of those soft nights which come at the close of sultry northern days, in which there is a dewy freshness. This is the sort of winter that we ought to cultivate.

During the day we attempt tracking two or three times, but with little success; the wind is so strong that the boat is continually blown ashore. Tracking is not very hard for the passengers and gives them an opportunity to study the bank and the people on it close at hand. A long cable fastened on the forward deck is carried ashore, and to the far end ten or twelve sailors attach themselves at intervals by short ropes which press across the breast. Leaning in a slant line away from the river, they walk at a snail's pace, a file of parti-colored raiment and glistening legs; occasionally bursting into a snatch of a song, they slowly pull the bark along. But obstructions to progress are many. A spit of sand will project itself, followed by deepwater, through which the men will have to wade in order to bring the boat round; occasionally the rope must be passed round trees which overhang the caving bank; and often freight-boats, tied to the shore, must be passed. The leisure with which the line is carried outside another boat is amusing even in this land of deliberation. The groups on these boats sit impassive and look at us with a kind of curiosity that has none of our eagerness in it. The well-bred indifferent “stare” of these people, which is not exactly brazen and yet has no element of emotion in it, would make the fortune of a young fellow in a London season. The Nubian boatmen who are tracking the freight-dahabeëh appear to have left their clothes in Cairo; they flop in and out of the water, they haul the rope along the bank, without consciousness apparently that any spectators are within miles; and the shore-life goes on all the same, men sit on the banks, women come constantly to fill their jars, these crews stripped to their toil excite no more attention than the occasional fish jumping out of the Nile. The habit seems to be general of minding one's own business.

At early morning another funeral crossed the river to a desolate burial-place in the sand, the women wailing the whole distance of the march; and the noise was more than before like the clang of wild geese. These women have inherited the Oriental art of “lifting up the voice,” and it adds not a little to the weirdness of this ululation and screeching to think that for thousands of years the dead have been buried along this valley with exactly the same feminine tenderness.