If the Egyptian desert answered back in harmonious tones the light of the sun and moon, what a crescendo of glowing response came from the Nubian sands! Immediately we crossed the frontier my eyes were surprised by the golden tone the desert had assumed, and the polished rocks that studded it had suddenly put on the richest colours granite holds—deep red and purple, and the black of basalt. It was a new scheme of colouring. The sunset and the after-glow were still more astonishing than those of Egypt, the colour of the shadows on the golden sands at sundown more positive in their limpid colours. One felt looking at the stars and planets as though one had been lifted to a world nearer to them than before, so large and clear had they grown even from the extraordinary clearness they had at Luxor. Oh! land of enchantment, is it any wonder the Nile is so passionately loved, especially by the artist, to whom the joy of the eye is supreme? As to worthily painting the Egyptian landscape, I cannot think any one will ever do it—the light is its charm, and this light is unattainable. There is one thing very certain, oil paints are hopelessly “out of it,” and in water-colours alone can one hope to suggest that light. I soon gave up oils in Egypt, not only on account of their heaviness, but the miseries I endured from flies and sand were heart-breaking; your skies are seamed with the last wanderings and struggles of moribund flies, and coated with whiffs of sand suddenly flung on them by a desert gust! I was particularly anxious to get a souvenir of the doorway in the court of the temple on Philæ Island, where Napoleon’s soldiers engraved their high-sounding “Une page d’histoire ne doit pas,” etc. Unfortunately, on the day I chose, we had a high wind, a very exasperating ordeal, and my attempt at oil-sketching this subject was a fiasco. After persevering with one half-blinded eye open at a time and with sand thickly mixed with my paints, I saw the panel I had been desperately holding on the easel hurled to the ground on its buttered side as for a moment I turned to answer a remark of Mrs. C.’s. She said I bore it angelically. As since those days lovely Philæ Island is being submerged and the temple melting away, the poor little panel has become more historically valuable than I thought it ever would do at the time, and I insert its replica in water-colours minus the smudges.
Many pleasant hours we spent at Philæ, which, I suppose, is the culminating point of the Nile’s beauties and marvels. One day, while W. was gone to Assouan for provisions, I went over with Mrs. C. to the opposite bank of the river by boat, an imp of a small boy taking upon himself to escort us. He divested himself of his one garment, which he carried in a bundle on his head, and swam alongside our “felucca.” Our approach had been observed from a wild mud hamlet up on the fantastic rocks, and a bevy of black and brown women came hopping and skipping down to us. Little shrivelled old hags and wild little young women with nose rings and anklets, their hair plaited in hundreds of little tails reeking with castor oil, each little tail ending in a lump of mud.
Mrs. C. asked them to unfasten and display their locks, and in return let down her own six-foot-long auburn tresses and stood on them to “astonish the natives.” They danced and wailed in slow cadence, softly clapping their hands and wagging their heads in admiration as they made the round of the tall, rosy Englishwoman. There she stood, on her hair, that trailed on the sand, in a golden halo of sunshine, the grim hypæthral temple and the huge rocks as background, and surrounded by little skinny, skipping, half-naked, barbarian women and quite-naked little children. They turned to me and made signs that I should also let my hair down. Because I excused myself, the little boy imp, still with his garment on his head, came forward and took upon himself condescendingly to explain to the little women, shouting “Mafeesh, mafeesh!” (“Nothing, nothing!”) and dismissing me with a wave of his arm.
From Philæ we soon glided into the Tropics. I say in a letter: “The moonlight in Nubia also surpasses that of Egypt, and I see in it a light I never saw before I came to this wonderful land. It is difficult to describe this light. It is brilliant yet soft; light in darkness; not like the day; not like the dawn: the sky at full moon is so bright that only the larger stars are seen; and the yellow sand, the ashen bloom on the tops of the sand-hills, the various tones of green in palm-tree, tamarisk, and mimosa keep distinctly their local tints, yet softened and darkened and changed into a mysterious vision of colour too subtle for words of mine. Every night Venus and other great planets and stars shed reflections in the still water like little moons in every part of the Great Stream wherever one turns.”
W. could not spare the time for lotus-eating under sail, so a “stern-wheeler” towed us from Philæ to Wady Halfa. It took very little away from the romance, and the steady progress was very grateful. On that glassy river, as it was now, we would have been an age getting to our goal.
I was greatly struck with Korosko, a place which, besides its natural desolate and most strange appearance, was sad with memories of Gordon. This was his starting-point as he left the Nile to travel across the desert to Khartoum, never to return. From a height one can see the black and grey burnt-up landscape which lonely Gordon traversed. It is a most repellent tract of desert just there, calcined and blasted. A view I had of the Nile, southward, from the mountains of Thebes one day, though bathed in sunshine, has remained most melancholy in my mind, because, looking towards Khartoum, I thought of the hundreds of my countrymen who lay buried in already obliterated graves all along those lonely banks, away, away to the remote horizon and beyond, sacrificed to the achievement of a great disaster. Others like them have arisen since and will arise, eager to offer their lives for success or failure, honours or a nameless grave.
One evening, as the “Fostât,” in tow, was skimming through the calm water with a rippling sound, and we were all sitting on deck, W. described to us so vividly a memorable night before the fight that put a stop to hostilities, that I could see the whole scene as though I had been there. They were out in the desert, the moon was full; the Dervishes were “sniping” at long range, when afar off was heard a Highland “lament.” The “sniping” ceased all along the enemy’s line and dead silence fell upon the night but for the wail of the bagpipes. The Dervishes seemed to be listening. The “lament” increased in sound, and presently the Cameron Highlanders approached, bearing, under the Union Jack, the body of an officer who had died that day of fever, to add yet another grave to the number that lay at intervals along the shores of the great river. You should hear the pipes in the desert, as well as on the mountain-side, to understand them.
“Every phase of the day and night” (letter, 12th January ‘86), “appeals to me on the Nile, not forgetting those few moments that follow the after-glow which are like the last sigh of the dying day. The delicacy of those pure tints is such that one scarcely dares to handle them in writing. Evening after evening I have watched by the desert death-bed of the day, looking eastward so as to have the light upon the hills.