But I found nothing so interesting as a holiday we managed to squeeze in and spend on board a little dahabieh for two, on a nine days’ cruise to Rosetta and back. I then knew the Western Delta and, superficially, the life of its neglected and forgotten people. I am much afraid that since the Assouan Dam and its doings, their meagre water-supply is anything but increased, and I pray that the English authorities may remember those poor people at last. They are like fish in a pond that is slowly drying up.
On board the little “Rose,” lent us by an Armenian Bey, I tasted once more the placid pleasure of fresh water travel under sail and oar; and I again heard the strange intervals of the songs that kept the oarsmen in time at their work. But I also learnt what Egyptian rain was like, and how hideous the Mahmoudieh becomes under weeping skies. I saw in this land the deepest and ugliest mud in the world—mud of the colour of chocolate. The weather cleared usually towards evening, and nothing more weird have I ever seen than the villages, cemeteries, solitary tombs, goats, buffaloes, and wild human beings that loomed upon the sky-line on the top of the banks against the windy clouds, reddened by the fiery globe that had sunk below the palm-fringed horizon. These canal banks might give many people the horrors, and I certainly thought them in that weather the uncanniest bits of manipulated nature I had ever seen.
At Atfeh, after three days’ canal, we emerged upon the wide and glorious Nile, and the skies smiled upon us once more. But the sadness of the country remained to us as we contemplated the miserable villages which occurred so frequently, with their poor graveyards at their sides, the latter only distinguishable by the smaller size of the dwellings, and the fact that the huts of the living had doors, and the huts of the dead had none—that was all.
Once on the swift Nile current, with the eight sweeps flashing and splashing to the rhythm of the strange singing (the prevailing north wind being against sailing), we made a good run down to Rosetta, on whose mud bank we thumped in a surprising manner, at 10 P.M. by a pale watery moonlight.
Never have I seen anything sadder than the land we passed through that day—dead, neglected, forlorn. Every now and then what seemed a great city loomed mistily ahead of us, with domes and minarets, and what seemed mighty palaces, piled one above the other on stately terraces. These apparitions were on the sites of once magnificent centres of wealth and luxury, and from afar they might still appear to be what once they were. Then, as we neared them, the domes unveiled themselves into heaps of filthy straw; the palaces were mud hovels a few feet high; the great mosques were merely poor half-ruined tombs into which a single person could scarcely crawl. The illusion occurred every time we came in sight of one of these phantasms, and the effect on the mind was most singular. City after city arose thus on one’s sight in the distance, as though seen through the long ages that have rolled by since their prime, and those long ages seemed like a veil that rapidly dissolved to show us, as we approached, the wretched reality of to-day. “The pride of life,” “pomp,” “arrogance,” “luxury,”—those epithets were their own once, while to-day the very antitheses of such terms would best become them. They are literally all dust now, and there survive only the poor blunt-shaped dwellings for living and dead, that lie huddled together in such pathetic companionship.
As the daylight fades we see the people creeping into their shelters like their animals, to wait, like them, in the unlighted darkness, for the coming of the morning. Their up-river fellow-workers live in a land where the hardships of this cold and muddy winter misery are unknown.
I was glad to see the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, thus completing rather an extended, as well as intimate, knowledge of the great river from there to Sarras in the Soudan. Return tickets to Khartoum had not yet taken travellers by rail up the Nile in so many dusty hours.
Still grey was the weather down to where the river merges into the melancholy sea, between Napoleon’s two dismantled forts, and what beauty there might have been was densely veiled. The old French “Fort St. Julien” was interesting as being the place where the “Rosetta Stone,” which gave the key to all the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was discovered. There we moored for the night on our return to Rosetta, in a Napoleonic atmosphere, and next day I sketched the once opulent commercial city, where now nothing seems doing. A bald old pelican caused some movement in the streets by raiding the odoriferous fish-market and scurrying down, chased by small boys, to the water’s edge where I was sitting, in order to float, by copious draughts, the fish that lay in his pouch down his throat, pill-wise. The pelican always got his pill down in time, and the race to the river was repeated more than once with the small boys. On another evening, on our return voyage, we moored under the wild town of Syndioor, whose minaret, the tallest, I should think, in the world, proved to be no phantom, but a lovely and solid reality. In the pearly light of the succeeding mornings the shining cities looked, through their misty veils, more lovely afar off than ever. Finally we dropped back again between the mud banks of the canal, and in due time landed under the oleanders of our starting-place, the crew kissing hands and paying us the prescribed compliments of farewell.