CHAPTER II
THE UPPER NILE

AND now for Luxor. Of all the modes of travel there is none, to my mind, so enjoyable as that by water—fresh water, be it understood—and if you can do this in a house-boat with your home comforts about you, what more can you desire? We had the “Post Boat” to Luxor, and the sailing dahabieh after that. Travelling thus on the Nile you see the life of the people on the banks, you look into their villages, yet a few yards of water afford you complete immunity from that nearer contact which travel by road necessitates; and in the East, as you know, this is just as well. Not that I really allow the drawbacks of the East to interfere with my own enjoyment, but the isolation of the boat is best, especially with little children on board.

I had read many books of travel on the Nile and knew what to look for. Is there not a charm in knowing that some city, some temple, some natural feature you have tried to realize in your mind is about to appear in very truth just round that bend of road or river? You are going to see in a few minutes that historic thing itself, not its counterfeit in a book, but it. And so, as we neared Luxor towards evening, I looked out for Karnac on the left, and lo! the first pylon glided by. My first pylon! How many like it I was to see before I had done with Old Nile. They are not beautiful in shape, nor can any Egyptian architecture, as far as form goes, be called beautiful; the shapes are barbaric—I had almost said brutal—stupidly powerful and impressive by mere bulk. The beauty lies in the colouring. What a feast these ruins afford to the eye by their colour, what a revel of blues, greens, and low-toned reds in their unfaded paintings! Taken as bits of colour only, without dwelling too much on the forms, all in such light, the shadows filled with golden reflections—taken thus, or deeply tinged with the lustrous after-glow, or the golden moonlight, they are all-satisfying.

I will not, however, burden you with these ponderous pylons and mammoth monoliths; they can only be enjoyed in situ, illuminated and glorified by the climate of their homes. Indeed, I felt often very oppressed and tired by them, but never did I weary of the landscape, the people, the animals, the river.

One very saddening glimpse of fellah life was afforded Mrs. C—— and myself at Luxor by the English Consul (a negro), who arranged that we should see the registering of the young fellaheen for the conscription. I think the British have changed all this lately, so we were lucky in seeing a bit of the vanishing Past—a remnant of the Oriental Past which no one can regret. We worked our way, led by the Consul, through the Arab crowd in the village till we came to the entrance of the courtyard where the drama was about to open. At the gate was a scuffling mass of indescribably hideous old hags—the mothers and aunts and grannies of the young fellahs inside, wailing and jerking out their lamentations with marionette-like action of their shrivelled arms. As though by one accord they would stop dead for a minute and look at each other, and then all together begin again the skeleton chorus, throwing dust on their heads. The unsavoury group came in with us pell-mell when the gate was opened, and we found ourselves hoisted rather than conducted to a divan prepared for us under a shed, from whence we could see all that passed.

Three Circassian inspectors, looking horrid in European clothes, were at the head of a long rickety table, covered with a white cloth, in front of us. This white cloth, in combination with the surging groups, made a wonderfully good blank space in the composition of what I thought would make a striking picture. The sketch I insert here is in no particular arranged by me, but everything is exactly as I saw it. I noted everything down in my sketch-book on the spot. The sheiks, stately men in silken robes, who had brought each his quota of recruits from his district, sat chatting over their coffee at the farther end of the table, and the doctor at once set to to examine the miserable youths that came up for registration. Fathers pleaded exemption for their sons on one pretext or another, such as leprous heads, blindness, weak chests, and so forth; the mothers, aunts, and grannies aforesaid went on jibbering and clacking their jaws in the background, no one paying the least attention to them. If a fellah was passed by the doctor a gendarme gripped him and pummelled him all the way to the standard, where he was measured. If satisfactory, the woe-begone creature received a sounding box on the ear, just in fun, from the gendarme, and was shoved into the pen where the successful (!) candidates were interned; if he was below the mark, all the same he got his blow, and was pushed and cuffed back to his friends and relatives. One mother had crept forward while her son was having his lanky leg straightened by the doctor, the father pleading the boy’s lameness (Erckmann-Chatrian’s Conscript orientalised!): a gendarme sprang forward and knocked her down, then hauled her off by her arms, which were so very thin and suggestive of a mummy that I could not look any longer; he was so rough I really thought he would pull them out of their sockets. My friend was crying, and if I had not been so concentrated on my pencil notes I should have cried too. “Surely,” she said, “that can’t be his mother, she looks a hundred at least.” “A hundred!” I exclaimed, “she is four thousand years old—a mummy!” I felt very sick as well as sorry. We were politely offered coffee in jewelled cups, which we could not taste, and surreptitiously emptied behind the divan.