Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

Everyone knows that flies carry disease and many of the troubles of the Egyptians are due to them. Ophthalmia is especially prevalent. There are blind people everywhere, while one-eyed men and women are common. Diseases of the eye are so universal that one of the charities of Lower Egypt is a company of travelling eye doctors, who are supported by a rich Englishman. The doctors go from village to village, carrying their tents with them. As they enter a town, word goes out that the poor will be treated without charge, and crowds come to their tents to have their eyes examined and cured. They remain in one town for a month or so, serving the poor without money and without price. The institution does great good.

The port of Shellal, where I took the steamer for Wady Halfa, lies opposite the island of Philæ, and during my stay there I made several trips to the island to take photographs of the ruined temples, which have already been more or less affected by the backing up of the water of the Aswan Dam. When the Aswan Dam was first proposed a great outcry came from the savants and archæologists of the world on account of the injury that it would do to Philæ, but the material results have been so valuable to Egypt that the dam went ahead, regardless of the preservation of these ancient ruins. Something like one hundred thousand dollars was spent in fortifying the structure during the building of the dam, and it is probable that twice this amount would have sufficed to take up the temples and carry them to the mainland, or even transport them to Cairo, where all the world might see them.

The island of Philæ, which is on the edge of lower Nubia in the centre of the Nile just above the first cataract, is reached by ferry boat from Shellal or from Aswan and the dam. It is about fifteen hundred feet long and five hundred feet wide, and almost covered with temples built by the Ptolemies and others two or three centuries before Christ.

The chief deity of Philæ was the goddess Isis, though Osiris, Hathor, and the gods of the cataracts were also worshipped there. Under the Roman emperors the temples were enlarged, but when Egypt was converted to Christianity, the hermits and other fanatics made their way into Nubia and took possession of it. They turned some of the temples into Christian churches and their mutilations of the splendid carvings made in honour of the gods of Old Egypt can be plainly seen at low water.

The ruins are well worth a visit. Some of the structures have a forest of columns about them. The Kiosk, which is known as Pharaoh’s Bed, is one of the most beautiful of the Egyptian temples. The stones are all of great size. They probably came from the Aswan quarries, or it may be from the granite rocks that abound in the desert. That region is almost all granite. I rode over it for thirty miles on donkey back, making my way through the desert around and about granite boulders worn smooth by the sandstorms of thousands of years. The rocks are of all shapes and are piled, one upon another, as if by the hands of a race of Titans. Here one stands high over those surrounding it, as though on a pedestal; there others are massed like fortifications; in another spot they rise in towers.

I visited the Aswan quarries, the great stone yards from which the obelisks were taken, and from which came the mighty statues of Rameses and the massive blocks of the greatest of the Theban temples. The quarries to-day are much the same as they were when the Egyptians left them two or three thousand years ago. One can see the marks of their wedges on the rocks and the markings of the old stone-cutters are plain. In one place there is an obelisk half finished, lying on its side, just as the masons of the Pharaohs left it ages ago. When the granite was taken out for the Aswan Dam, the Italian workmen used many of the blocks that the ancient Egyptian mechanics had begun to cut; indeed, that great granite structure was made in partnership by two sets of mechanics born thousands of years apart.

CHAPTER XVIII
FROM THE MEDITERRANEAN TO THE SUDAN

I am in the Sudan on the northern section of the Cape-to-Cairo railroad. I am in the upper end of Nubia at the railroad station of Halfaya, just opposite Khartum, and as far south of Alexandria as the distance from New York to Denver.

In imagination come with me on the trip from the Mediterranean to Khartum. We shall need four days to go from the sea to the junction of the White and Blue Niles, where I now am, but the journey will for the most part be comfortable and there are interesting sights for at least part of the way. We start at Alexandria, the chief sea-port of the whole valley, and in three hours our train carries us across through the delta to Cairo, for there is frequent and rapid train service between these two chief cities of Egypt.