We feel more and more that the Nile is Egypt. Everything takes place on its banks. From our boat we study its life at our leisure. The Nile is always vocal with singing, or scolding, or calling to prayer; it is always lively with boatmen or workmen, or picturesque groups, or women filling their water-jars. It is the highway; it is a spectacle a thousand miles long. It supplies everything. I only wonder at one thing. Seeing that it is so swift, and knowing that it flows down and out into a world whence so many wonders come, I marvel that its inhabitants are contented to sit on its banks year after year, generation after generation, shut in behind and before by desert hills, without any desire to sail down the stream and get into a larger world. We meet rather intelligent men who have never journeyed so far as the next large town.
Thus far we have had only a few days of absolutely cloudless skies; usually we have some clouds, generally at sunrise and sunset, and occasionally an overcast day like this. But the cloudiness is merely a sort of shade; there is no possibility of rain in it.
And sure of good weather, why should we hasten? In fact, we do not. It is something to live a life that has in it neither worry nor responsibility. We take an interest, however, in How and Disnah and Fow, places where people have been living and dying now for a long time, which we cannot expect you to share. In the night while we are anchored a breeze springs up, and Abd-el-Atti roars at the sailors, to rouse them, but unsuccessfully, until he cries, “Come to prayer!”
The sleepers, waking, answer, “God is great, and Mohammed is his prophet.”
They then get up and set the sail. This is what it is to carry religion into daily life.
To-day we have been going northward, for variety. Keneh, which is thirty miles higher up the river than How, is nine minutes further north. The Nile itself loiters through the land. As the crew are poling slowly along this hot summer day, we have nothing to do but to enjoy the wide and glassy Nile, its fertile banks vocal with varied life. The songs of Nubian boatmen, rowing in measured stroke down the stream, come to us. The round white wind-mills of Keneh are visible on the sand-hills above the town. Children are bathing and cattle and donkeys wading in the shallows, and the shrill chatter of women is heard on the shore. If this is winter, I wonder what summer here is like.
