As darkness came on I reached the town of Magoonza. I spent the night in a railway station. The next day I took the third-class coach, and halted near noonday in the wind-swept village of Beni Suef. A young Englishman who was called “Bromley, Pasha, Inspector of Irrigation,” agreed to meet me on the bank of the canal beyond the village. Long after dark he appeared on horseback, attended by two natives who carried flaming torches. After being ferried across the canal, he led the way toward his dahabeah (winged house-boat), which was anchored at the shore of the Nile.
“I fancied I’d find something to put you at,” he explained, turning his horse over to a jet-black servant who popped up out of the darkness. “But I didn’t, and the last train’s gone. I’ll buy you a ticket to Assiut in the morning.”
“I have a ticket,” I put in.
“Oh,” said the Englishman. “Well, you’ll stay with me here to-night, anyway.”
He led the way across the plank into his floating residence. The change from the windy plain of African sand to this floating palace was as strange as if Bromley, Pasha, had been the owner of Aladdin’s lamp. Richly turbaned servants in spotless white gowns sprang forward to greet their master; to place a chair for him; to pull off his riding-boots and to put on his slippers; to slip the Cairo “daily” into his hands; and then to speed noiselessly away to finish preparing the evening meal.
Breakfast over next morning, I returned to the village, and left on the south-bound train. The third-class coach was packed with natives huddled together with unmanageable bundles. Three gloomy Arabs, who had no room to squat on the floor, perched themselves on a bench at the side of the car like fowls on a roost. The air that swept through the open car was almost wintry. Only the faces of the men were uncovered. The women, wrapped like mummies in fold after fold of black gowns, crouched on the floor, so motionless that one could hardly tell which were women and which were bundles.
At every station peddlers of food swarmed around the train. Dates, boiled eggs, baked fish, oranges, and soggy bread-cakes—enough to feed an army—were thrust upon all who dared to look outside. From the neighboring fields came workmen loaded down with freshly cut bundles of sugar-cane. They looked like a forest in motion. Three great canes, as long and unmanageable as bamboo fishing-rods, sold for a piaster, and almost every native in the car bought at least a half dozen.
The canes were broken into pieces two feet long; and each native, grasping a piece in his hands, bit into it and, jerking his head from side to side like a bulldog, tore off a strip. Then, with a suckling that could be heard above the roar of the train, he drew out the juice and cast the pulp on the floor about him. The pulp dried rapidly, and by noonday the floor of the car was carpeted with a sugar-cane mat several inches thick.
I spent the night at the largest city in upper Egypt—Assiut. Long before daylight next morning I rose and groped my way back through the darkness to the station. A ticket to Luxor took less than half my money. I boarded the train and once more started south. At break of day the railway crossed to the eastern bank of the river, and at the next station the train stood motionless while engineer, trainmen, and passengers went outside and performed their morning prayers in the desert sand. Beyond, the chimneys of great sugar factories puffed forth dense clouds of smoke, and at every stopping-place shivering small boys offered for sale cone-shaped lumps of sugar, dark-brown in color.
The voice of the south spoke more clearly with every mile. We were now coming to the district where rain and dew were unknown. The desert grew more dry and parched; the whirling sand became finer, until it sifted through one’s very clothing. The natives, already of a darker shade than the cinnamon-colored Cairene, grew blacker and blacker. The chilling wind of two days before turned warm, then piping hot; and before we drew into Luxor, Egypt lay, as of old, under her glittering covering of gleaming sunshine.