In consequence of these disasters my entomology had to be carried out with ruder implements—to wit, a bath towel and a thick stick. If a butterfly settled on the ground I stalked it carefully, and then fell upon it with the towel; but I often rose from the earth with no butterfly, and nothing in my hands except half a dozen mimosa thorns. Incensed at failure, one struck at the gaudy insects as they fluttered past, and sometimes succeeded in braining a few; but as I gathered up the scattered remains I trembled to think of the Professor's sarcasms upon the condition of my Sudanese specimens. The natives used to gaze upon my pursuit of butterflies with looks of amusement and surprise. What could the Englishman want with these worthless insects? Were they his totems or fetiches? did he collect them for gastronomic purposes, or as material for magical rites? I sometimes offered some trifling bakshish for butterflies, but the Arabs could never be brought to realise that I wanted variety and quality as well as quantity. On one occasion a struggling mass of fifteen or twenty common white butterflies in a matchbox—all exactly the same—was triumphantly brought me by a small boy. I liberated the unhappy prisoners, and rewarded the boy with one penny and a severe lecture.[1]
As to the other insects in my collection, many of these were so appallingly ugly and malignant in appearance that one had to pull oneself together to attempt their capture. A soda-water bottle had been filled with whisky amid the protests of Cross, who thought this a waste of good liquor, and when some grisly insect with a striped body, projecting eyes, and aggressive antennæ appeared inside the tent, something like this conversation used to take place:—
E. N. B.—"Do you mind catching that harmless lepidopt, Cross, while I hold the bottle?"
H. C.—"I think, somehow, that you're better at catching those beasts than I am; give me the bottle."
As I had decreed death as the penalty for any creeping thing which invaded our tent, the noisome creature was, as a rule, gingerly secured and forced into the spirit, where it speedily died of delirium tremens. Nothing is more unpleasant in tropical countries than to have a winged insect of great size and energy enter one's tent in the dark. Omne ignotum pro terribili: suddenly the Unknown makes its presence felt by rising up from the ground with a loud buzz; it necessarily strikes against the tent pole or the canvas, and immediately collapses with a thud on the bedclothes or one's face; and then, after a brief interval for recovery, it recommences its clumsy gambols and aërial flights.
Our stock of literature in the Wad Hamed camp was of amazing variety. We established by usage a sort of Desert Circulating Library, and novels, old magazines, and even newspapers of venerable antiquity were eagerly sought for and exchanged. My own parcel of books on board the Tamai consisted of Whyte Melville's Holmby House, The Juggler and the Soul, by Helen Mathers, and a penny edition of Quentin Durward. I was surprised on one occasion to find a Scotchman engaged in reading Horace's Satires in a new translation by Mr. Coutts. He knew nothing of the original Latin, but had purchased the volume, and was wading through the archaic material with apparent relish. Possibly the jokes of antiquity may have succeeded in striking that chord in a Scottish temperament which is so often unresponsive to contemporary humour! Whenever one got a periodical of any sort, such as The Wide World, one did not toy with it in a dilettante fashion. Every line of it was read from cover to cover, and even the advertisements of life assurance offices were perused with some degree of interest amid this comparative dearth of intellectual pabulum.
One evening, in an interval of leisure before dinner, I strolled along the Nile to see if I could add a little fresh fish to our ménu. I had with me one of the excellent rods made for a few shillings by Slater of Newark-on-Trent, which pack up into very small compass, and can easily be carried in a hold-all or Gladstone bag. The river was much too muddy for fly fishing, and one of my officer friends remarked that the fish would have to jump a foot out of the water before they saw the fly. Nevertheless I tried a few casts with a Zulu and a nondescript chub-fly, and after a couple of rises managed to land a curious fish of the carp (?) tribe with long barbules, which is called by the Arabs "Abu Shenab" (Father of Moustaches). There is another very common fish in the Nile of the bream species. It is shaped like a pair of bellows, and has about the same flavour when cooked.
It is always worth while to try a cast or two on unknown waters in the course of one's travels. This spring I was fortunate enough to get some excellent sport from a few hours' fly fishing in the Waters of Merom and the Jordan. The latter river simply teems with fish of seventeen different species, some of which, including the "Father of Moustaches," are found elsewhere only in the Nile—a fact which seems to indicate a connection between the two streams at some remote period.
Sir Francis Grenfell told me that a friend of his had landed some huge fish at the junction of the Nile and Atbara, and during our stay there a native caught a fish weighing nearly a hundred pounds, which was served up, I believe, at the Guards' mess. When the Nile gets lower, some splendid sport might be enjoyed with these monstrous fish. In fact, when one fishes in a stream like the Atbara, there is a delightful uncertainty about the nature of the prospective catch. One never knows what is coming up. That keen sportsman, the late Sir Samuel Baker, fished in this stream with a live bait 2 lbs. in weight, and landed fish up to 180 lbs.! On one occasion he tells how something seized the bait, and would not budge an inch. The dead weight on the line was tremendous, and Sir Samuel says it felt "as if the devil himself had got hold of the hook." At last, after placing his feet against a rock and pulling, something moved upwards in the water which looked for all the world like a cart wheel. Finally, up came a huge water-tortoise, which gave one plunge, and broke away with the hook and several yards of line.
By day the vast area occupied by the two British brigades, and various battalions of Sudanese and Egyptians, was full of ceaseless work, accompanied by a perfect babel of sounds, as fatigue parties hurried in various directions, and long strings of native labourers carried loads or hauled at ropes, with their monotonous sing-song recitation of Koran fragments. The Gregorian chant, which secures the exclusive devotion of some Churchmen, is doubtless an approximation to the music of the primitive Church, but solely because that Church happened to find its earliest home in the East, where no other type of music has ever been known or appreciated. But there is no more reason why an Englishman should feel bound to sing ugly Gregorians than that he should chant the psalms in loose cotton garments without his boots. In either case the "local colour" is quite un-Western.