Fearful of being left behind, I rose at dawn and hastened away to the bazaars to make provision for the day—bread-cakes for hunger and oranges for thirst. A native boatman, denied a fee of ten piastres, accepted one, and set me down on the western bank. The shrill screams of a troop of donkey boys, embarking their animals below the temple, greeted the rising sun. Not long after their landing a vanguard of three veiled and helmeted tourists stepped ashore, and, mounting as many animals, sped away into the trackless desert. I followed them as swiftly as was consistent with faranchee dignity until the last resounding whack of a donkey boy’s stave came faintly to my ear; then sat down to await the next section. The inhabitants of a mud village swooped down upon me, and, convinced that I had fallen from my donkey, sought to force upon me a score of wabbly-kneed beasts. My refusal to choose one of these “ver’ cheap, ver’ fine” animals was taken as an attempt at facetiousness, which it was to their interests as prospective beneficiaries to roar at with delight. When the supposed canard waxed serious, their mirth turned to virulence, and I was in a fair way to be mounted by force when the steamer party rode down upon us.
’Twas an inspiring sight. The half-mile train of donkeys that trailed off across the desert was bestridden by every condition of Anglo-Saxon from raw-boned scientists and diaphanous maidens to the corpulent matrons and mighty masses of self-made men whose incessantly belabored animals brought up the rear. I kept pace with the band and even outstripped the stragglers. After an hour’s swift march, that left me dripping with perspiration, the party dismounted to inspect a temple. Gates were there none, and what two guardians could examine the tickets of such a band all at once? I had satisfied my antiquarian tastes before an observant dragoman pointed me out to the officials, and my consequent exit gave me just the time needed to empty the sand from my slippers before the cavalcade set off again.
The main entrance to the ruins of Karnak
The sharp ascent to the Tombs of the Kings was more irksome to an over-burdened ass than to a pedestrian. Even though the jeering donkey boys succeeded in pocketing me in the narrow gorges, it was I who carried news of the advancing throng to the gate of the mausoleum. A native lieutenant of police was on hand to offer assistance to the keeper against the unticketed. But the lieutenant spoke Italian, and was so delighted to find that he could hold converse with me without being understood by the surrounding rabble, that he gave me permission to enter, in face of the gate tender’s protest.
Sufficiently orientated now to find my way alone, I took silent leave of the party and struck southward towards a precipitous cliff of stone and sand. To pass this barrier the bedonkeyed must make a circuit of many miles. Clinging to crack and crevice, I began the ascent. Halfway up, a roar of voices sounded from the plain below. I groped for a safer hand hold and looked down. About the lieutenant at the foot of the cliff was grouped the official party, gazing upward, confirmed now, no doubt, in their earlier suspicion that I was some madman at large. Before their circuit of the mountain had well begun, I had reached the summit above the goal from which they were separated by many a weary mile.
The view that spread out from the rarely visited spot might well have awakened the envy of the tourists below. North and south, unadorned by a vestige of verdure, stretched the Lybian range, deep vermilion in the valleys, the salient peaks splashed blood-red by the homicidal sunshine. Below bourgeoned the plain of Thebes, its thick green carpet weighted down by a few fellaheen villages and the ponderous playthings of an ancient civilization. As the eye wandered, a primeval saying took on new meaning:—“Egypt is the Nile.” Tightly to the life-giving river, distinctly visible in this marvelous atmosphere for a hundred miles, clung the slender land of Egypt, a spotless ribbon of richest green, following every contour of the Father of Waters. All else was but a limitless sea of yellow, choking sand.
I descended to the Tomb of Queen Hatasu and spent the afternoon among the ruins on the edge of the plain. Arriving alone and unannounced, I had little difficulty in entering where I chose. For were the guardian not asleep, I had only to refuse to understand his Arabic and his excited gestures, until I had examined each monument to my heart’s content. I had passed the Colossi of Memnon before the tourists, jaded and drooping from a day in the saddle, overtook me, and I made headway against them to the bank of the river. There they shook me off, however. The dragomans in charge of the party snarled in anger when I offered to pay for the privilege of embarking in the company boat. There was nothing else to do, much as I rebelled against the recrimination, but to be ferried over with the donkeys.
I departed, next day, by the narrow-gauge railway to Assuan, and reached that watering place of the first cataract in time to grace the afternoon concert. Pietro’s retreat is the last of the chain. Nearly six hundred miles, now, from the headquarters of die Kunde, I was reduced again to a native inn and the companionship of a half-barbaric horde. It was no such palace as housed my fellow-countrymen on Elephantine Island; but the bedroom on the roof was airy, and the bawling of a muezzin in the minaret above summoned forth no other faranchee to witness the gorgeous birth of a new day.
Some miles beyond Assuan lay the new barrage, where work was plentiful. Just how far, I could not know; still less that it was connected with the village by rail. From morning until high noon, I clawed my way along the ragged cliffs overhanging the impoverished cataract, ere I came in sight of the vast barrier that has robbed it of its waters. Among the rocks of what was once the bed of the Nile, sat a dozen wooden shanties. From the largest, housing the superintendent, came sounds of revelry out of all keeping with the gigantic task at hand. It transpired, however, that this was no ordinary dinner-hour festival. I had arrived, as so often before, mal à propos.