My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

“It has been very pleasant; only for a day or two we have wanted wind.”

“Your misfortune, his excellency say, his pleasure; it give him the opportunity of your society. But he say if you want wind he sorry no wind; it cause him to suffer that you not come here sooner.”

“Will his excellency dine with us to-day?”

“He say he think it too much honor.”

“Assure his excellency that we feel that the honor is conferred by him.”

And he consents to come. After we have taken our leave, the invitation is extended to the consul, who is riding with us.

The way to the town is along a winding, shabby embankment, raised above high water, and shaded with sycamore-trees. It is lively with people on foot and on donkeys, in more colored and richer dress than that worn by country-people; the fields are green, the clover is springing luxuriantly, and spite of the wrecks of unburned-brick houses, left gaping by the last flood, and spite of the general untidiness of everything, the ride is enjoyable. I don't know why it is that an irrigated country never is pleasing on close inspection, neither is an irrigated garden. Both need to be seen from a little distance, which conceals the rawness of the alternately dry and soaked soil, the frequent thinness of vegetation, the unkempt swampy appearance of the lowest levels, and the painful whiteness of paths never wet and the dustiness of trees unwashed by rain. There is no Egyptian landscape or village that is neat, on near inspection.

Asioot has a better entrance than most towns, through an old gateway into the square (which is the court of the palace); and the town has extensive bazaars and some large dwellings. But as we ride through it, we are always hemmed in by mud-walls, twisting through narrow alleys, encountering dirt and poverty at every step. We pass through the quarter of the Ghawâzees, who, since their banishment from Cairo, form little colonies in all the large Nile towns. There are the dancing-women whom travelers are so desirous of seeing; the finest-looking women and the most abandoned courtesans, says Mr. Lane, in Egypt. In showy dresses of bright yellow and red, adorned with a profusion of silver-gilt necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, they sit at the doors of their hovels in idle expectation. If these happen to be the finest-looking women in Egypt, the others are wise in keeping their veils on.

Outside the town we find a very pretty cemetery of the Egyptian style, staring white tombs, each dead person resting under his own private little stucco oven. Near it is encamped a caravan just in from Darfoor, bringing cinnamon, gum-arabic, tusks, and ostrich feathers. The camels are worn with the journey; their drivers have a fierce and free air in striking contrast with the bearing of the fellaheen. Their noses are straight, their black hair is long and shaggy, their garment is a single piece of coarse brown cloth; they have the wildness of the desert.

The soft limestone ledge back of the town is honeycombed with grottoes and tombs; rising in tiers from the bottom to the top. Some of them have merely square-cut entrances into a chamber of moderate size, in some part of which, or in a passage beyond, is a pit cut ten or twenty feet deep in the rock, like a grave, for the mummy. One of them has a magnificent entrance through a doorway over thirty feet high and fifteen deep; upon the jambs are gigantic figures cut in the rock. Some of the chambers are vast and were once pillared, and may have served for dwellings. These excavations are very old. The hieroglyphics and figures on the walls are not in relief on the stone, but cut in at the outer edge and left in a gradual swell in the center—an intaglio relievato. The drawing is generally spirited, and the figures show knowledge of form and artistic skill. It is wonderful that such purely conventional figures, the head almost always in profile and the shoulders square to the front, can be so expressive. On one wall is a body of infantry marching, with the long pointed shields mentioned by Xenophon in describing Egyptian troops. Everywhere are birds, gracefully drawn and true to species, and upon some of them the blue color is fresh. A ceiling of one grotto is wrought in ornamental squares—a “Greek pattern,” executed long before the time of the Greeks. Here we find two figures with the full face turned towards us, instead of the usual profile.