I caught up my knapsack as I ran, made a flying leap at the slowly moving barge, and landed on all fours under the feet of a troop of horses.
An Arab who stood grinning at me as I picked myself up seemed to be the only man on the craft who had noticed how suddenly I had boarded the vessel. He was dressed in native clothes, save for a tightly buttoned khaki jacket which he wore over his gown. His legs were bare, his feet thrust into red slippers. About his head was wound a large turban of red and white checks: on each cheek were the scars of three long gashes; in the top of his right ear hung a large silver ring.
The scars and ring showed him to be a Nubian; the jacket, an officer of cavalry; the bridle in his hand showed him to be care-taker of the horses; and of course his name was Maghmood!
We became great chums, Maghmood and I, before the journey ended. By night we shared the same blanket; by day he would have divided the lunch in his saddle-bag with me had I been without food. But the black men who trooped down to each landing with baskets of native food kept me supplied with all I needed. Maghmood told me tales of the time he was in the battle-field with Kitchener, in a clear-cut Arabic that even a faranchee could understand; and, except for the five periods each day when he stood barefoot at his prayers, he was as pleasant a companion as any one from the Western world could have been.
When morning broke I climbed a rickety ladder to the upper deck. It was so closely packed from rail to rail with Arabs huddled together that a poodle could not have found room to sit on his haunches. I climbed still higher, and came out upon the roof of the barge. No one else was there. From that height I could view the vast moving picture of the Nile.
Arab passengers on the Nile steamer. Except when saying their prayers, they scarcely move once a day.
There was nothing growing on its banks. The fertile strips of green fed by the dippers and the squawking waterwheels had been left behind. Except for a few tiny oases, the desert had pushed its way to the very water’s edge, here sloping down in beaches of the softest sand, there falling sheer into the stream in rugged, rocky cliffs. Yet somewhere in this yellow wilderness a hardy people found a living. Now and then a dark-faced peasant waved a hand or a tattered flag from the shore, and the steamer ran her nose high up on the beach to pick up the bale of produce that he rolled down the slope. At every landing a troop of dark barbarians sprang up from a sandy nowhere, making in the gorgeous sunlight wild-looking shadows as black as their leathery skins.
We tied up at Wady Haifa after nightfall. I landed the next morning. In two days I saw everything there was to see in Wady Haifa, and decided to return to Cairo.
On a Monday morning I boarded the steamer Cleopatra as a deck passenger, and drifted lazily down the Nile for five days, landing here and there with the tourists of the upper deck to visit a temple or a mud village. In Cairo, at the Asile Rudolph, Captain Stevenson welcomed me with open arms. A day later I called on the superintendent of the railway, and, armed with a pass to Port Said, bade the capital farewell.