Until a few years age the tourist going up the Nile had to take a dahabeah. This sounds like the name of a disease, but it is really a big, roomy, flat-bottomed sailboat. The dahabeah moves only when the wind is in the right direction, and to go from Cairo to Assouan requires the greater part of a lifetime. Those travellers who have money to burn and who are content to settle down to many weeks of rest and indolence charter the private dahabeahs. When a traveller goes aboard a dahabeah he tears up the calendar and lets his watch run down. Those who have more money and are in a hurry use the private steam dahabeahs.
A majority of travellers go by passenger boats. The tourist steamers devote three weeks to a loafing voyage up to Assouan and back, with daily excursions to the graveyards and ruins. The express steamers, carrying freight and native passengers, take less time for the round trip, as they skip some of the less interesting antiquities. We took an express steamer, thereby missing many of the tombs and temples, but still getting enough of them to last us for the next hundred years or so.
Our steamer is a frail affair, double decked and of no draught worth mentioning. It resembles the old style of Missouri River boat, built to run on a heavy dew. There are thirty passengers, who devote most of their time to lolling on deck waiting for the next meal. Mud banks, natives hoisting water, green fields stretching away to the bald range of hills, 'dobe huts, spindly palms, now and then a solemn row of camels, always several donkeys and goats in evidence, every few miles the tall stack of a sugar mill, perpetual sunshine—it is monotonous travel, and yet there is continually something doing along the banks, and the traveller cannot get away from that feeling of satisfaction which results from lying back to watch other people work.
Lying back to watch others work
And the sunsets! You cannot estimate the real dignity and artistic value of a camel until you see him or her silhouetted against a sky of molten gold just at twilight. I have made two or three attempts to describe the glory of a sunset in the desert, but I find myself as helpless as Mr. Peasley, who, after gazing for five minutes at the flaming horizon can only murmur a low but reverent "Gosh!"
It may interest the reader to hear what Baedeker has to say on the subject. Baedeker says (p. 216) "The sunsets are very fine." That's what I like about Baedeker. He doesn't fuss over a lot of words and tack on superfluous adjectives. As soon as he has imparted the necessary information in a trim and concise manner he moves on to the next subject.
I am sending herewith two sketches which show the beauty and variety of landscape to which we are treated every day. View No. 1 is most characteristic. We see before us the rippling Nile and beyond it the sheer river bank of black dirt. Then the field of waving grain, in the distance the range of hills, and over all a dazzling sunshine.