Did you ever come across a bunch of melancholy pilgrims from the suburban villas and the dull gray provincial towns of dear old England? Did you ever observe the frightened manner in which they hold aloof from Germans, Americans, Bedouins, Turks, and other foreigners? They fear that if they drift into friendly relationship with people they meet while travelling, later on some of these chance acquaintances may look them up at Birmingham or Stoke-on-Trent and expect to be entertained at the foundry.
A large majority of our fellow passengers from Luxor to Assouan were of elderly pattern. We estimated the average age to be about eighty-three. Mr. Peasley said an irreverent thing about these venerable tourists.
"Why do these people come all the way to Egypt to look at the ruins?" he asked. "Why don't they stay at home and look at one another?"
We rebuked him for saying it, but somehow or other these rebukes never seemed to have any permanent restraining effect.
Our boat arrived at Assouan one morning accompanied by a sand storm and a cold wave. The Cataract Hotel stood on a promontory overlooking a new kind of Nile—a swift and narrow stream studded with gleaming boulders of granite. We liked Assouan because the weather was ideal (after the sand storm ran out of sand), the hotel was the best we had found in Egypt, and there were so few antiques that sightseeing became a pleasure. Besides, after one has been to Luxor, anything in the way of ancient temples is about as much of a come-down as turkey hash the day after Thanksgiving.
Here, on the border of Nubia, we began to get glimpses of real Africa. We rode on camels to a desert camp of hilarious Bisharins. They are the gypsies of Nubia—dress their hair with mud instead of bay rum and reside under a patch of gunnysack propped up by two sticks. On the hills back of the town we saw the barracks where the English army gathered itself to move south against the Mahdists. We were invited to go out in the moonlight and hunt hyenas, but did not think it right to kill off all the native game.
The big exhibit at Assouan, and one of the great engineering achievements of modern times, is the dam across the Nile. It is a solid wall of granite, a mile and a quarter long, 100 feet high in places and 88 feet through the base, and it looks larger than it sounds. We went across it on a push car after taking a boat ride in the reservoir basin, which is said to contain 234,000,000 gallons of water. This estimate is correct, as nearly as we could figure it. The dam is about four miles above the town. We rode up on a dummy train, with cars almost as large as Saratoga trunks, and came back in a small boat. We shot the rapids, just for excitement, and after we had caved in the bottom of the boat and stopped an hour for repairs we decided that we had stored up enough excitement, so after that we followed the more placid waters.
The black boatmen had a weird chant, which they repeated over and over, keeping time with the stroke. It was a combination of Egyptian melody and American college yell, and ran as follows:—
Hep! Hep! Horay!
Hep! Hep! Horay!
Hep! Hep! Horay!
All right! Thank you!
This effort represented their sum total of English, and they were very proud of it, and we liked it, too—that is, the first million times. After that, the charm of novelty was largely dissipated.