Their style of gardening was stiff and formal. Straight lines were much affected. Angles did not displease. Basins, or pools, of water were de rigueur. Every plant, or tree, was carefully trimmed, and trained. It could not have been otherwise. This was all settled for them by the aspects of Egyptian nature, the character of their religion, and their general manners and customs. As is the case among modern Orientals, flowers were not valued so much for their form and colouring, as for their odour.
The European of to-day, as he looks upon the sculptured and painted representations of Egyptian gardens of three or four thousand years ago, at which date his own ancestors were living in caves, from which their ancestors had expelled races of animals now extinct, finds that, notwithstanding the barbarism of his ancestors, and the recentness of his civilization, there have come to be reproduced in himself ideas and sentiments, which were giving grace and finish to the highly organized society which had been established then, no one can tell for how long a period, on the banks of the Nile. At all events he beholds in these Egyptian gardens a curious instance of an interesting and instructive similarity between the two; for he sees that the Egyptian of that day, just like the Englishman of to-day, took pleasure in watching, and controlling, the life and growth of plants; in tending them, because they tasked, and were dependent on, his thought and care; in making them minister to a refined and refining taste for the beautiful; and in creating by their aid, within the limits in such matters assigned to man, a kind of artificial nature.
Of course all sub-tropical, and many tropical, trees and plants do well here, if only they be regularly supplied with water. I never saw more interesting gardens, on a small scale, than those of S. Cecolani at Alexandria, and of the American Consul at Port Saïd. The same may be said of the garden of the Viceroy at his Gezeerah palace. In them you will find the plants we keep in stove houses doing well in the open air, and many of them in flower at Christmas, or soon after. In the first-mentioned of these gardens I saw very beautiful specimens of the Norfolk Island pine, about thirty feet high, growing luxuriantly. There was also a species of solanum, which, if I knew its Christian name, I would commend to the attention of those who are endeavouring to produce, in their English gardens, something of a sub-tropical effect. It was about ten feet high, and was so regularly filled up with branches, as to have a completely symmetrical, a somewhat dome-like, form. Its leaves were large, rough, and prickly. At the extremity of each twig, or lesser branch, was a large branching spike of purple flowers. The individual flowers in the spikes of bloom were about the size of the flower of its relative, the common potato, and similar in shape. It was a most effective shrub. I never saw one more so.
It is generally supposed amongst us that our English gardens are quite unrivalled. They may be in the thought, care, and money bestowed upon them; but in variety of interest they are very inferior to Egyptian gardens. These may contain all the plants we consider most beautiful and most worthy of artificial heat; which, too, may be grouped with bamboos, palms, Indian figs, bananas, cactuses, daturas, poinsettias nine or ten feet high, and many other plants and trees one would go some way to see growing with the freedom and luxuriance they exhibit in this bright, winterless climate, in which the transparent sunlight is never the mere mocking garb of a withering Liebig-extract of East wind.
CHAPTER L.
ANIMAL LIFE IN EGYPT.—THE CAMEL.
An omne corpus habeat suum ubi?—Lemma.
In representing the natural scene animal must be associated with vegetable life. The two, in their double relation first to each other, and then to the peculiarities of the region that has shaped their characters, constitute the chief features of the natural panorama. A picture, that would exhibit this in a manner suitable to the object of these pages, will not require either complete comprehensiveness, or much minuteness of detail: such a method of treating the subject would belong to science. What is here required is that those forms only should be signalized which possess in their beauty, numbers, utility, history, or in some way or other, what will interest everybody. They must, in short, be regarded here rather from the human than from the scientific point of view.
The form, then, which first attracts the eye of the traveller in Egypt, is the camel, which, strange enough, the ancient Egyptians, either from an antipathy to the animal, or from some other cause unknown, excluded from their paintings and sculptures. If this antipathy originated in religious ideas, was it because the animal appeared to them, as we may easily suppose it might, preternaturally unclean? Or was it because it presented itself to them as the companion, and servant, of their hated Semitic neighbours? But whatever may have been the reason of their repugnance to it, their descendants, who, however, are at least equally the descendants of their Semitic neighbours, do not participate in the feeling. No sooner are you landed at Alexandria than you have the camel before you. Previously, while you were yet on the way, it had occupied a place in your anticipations of the East; and, now that it meets you at every turn, you are never weary of looking at it.