The scars and ring announced him a Nubian; the jacket, a corporal of cavalry; the bridle in his hand, custodian of the horses; and any blockhead must have known that he answered to the name of Maghmoód. We became boon companions, Maghmoód and I, before the journey ended. By night we shared the same blanket; by day he would have divided the contents of his saddlebags with me, had not the black men who trooped down to each landing with baskets of native food made that sacrifice unnecessary. He spun tales of his campaigns with Kitchener in a clear-cut Arabic that even a faranchee must have understood, and, save for the five periods each day when he stood barefooted at his prayers, was as pleasant a companion as any denizen of the western world could have been.
When morning broke I climbed a rickety ladder to the upper deck. It was so densely packed from rail to rail with huddled Arabs that a poodle could not have found room to sit on his haunches. I mounted still higher and came out upon the roof of the barge, an uncumbered promenade from which I could survey the vast panorama of the Nile.
Its banks were barren, now. The fertile strips of green, fed by the shaduf and the sakka, had been left behind with the land of Egypt. Except for a few tiny oases, the aggressive desert had pushed its way to the very water’s edge, here sloping down in beaches of softest sand, there falling sheer into the stream in rugged, verdureless cliffs. Yet somewhere in this yellow wilderness a hardy people found sustenance. Now and then a 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 he had rolled down the slope. With every landing a group of tawny barbarians sprang up from a sandy nowhere to slash from the gorgeous sunlight fantastic shadows as black as their own leathery skins.
On the level with my promenade deck was that of the first-class passengers. There were no English-speaking travelers among them. Half the party were priests of the Eastern Church, phlegmatic, robust men in long black gowns and a headdress like an inverted “stovepipe,” beneath which a tangled thicket of hair and beard left barely more than nose and eyes visible. The laymen, evidently, were of the same faith. They took part in the religious services, and their speech was redundant with the softened S of modern Greek.
Maghmoód, perhaps, betrayed my confidences. At any rate, the oily-skinned Armenian who accosted me from the steamer in execrable French knew more of my affairs than I had told to anyone but the cavalryman.
“My friends have been wondering,” he began, abruptly, “how you will find work in the Soudan if you have not money enough to go to Khartum, where the work is? We are all going to Khartum. The venerable patriarch there, with the longest beard, is the head of our church in Africa, going there to look after the Greeks. You should come too.”
Several times during the afternoon, he returned to ply me with questions. As we halted before the cliff-hewn temple of Abu Simbel, I descended to the lower deck to pose Maghmoód for a picture. He had just called up Mecca, however, and before he deigned to notice my existence, a voice sounded above me:—“Faranchee, taala hena.” I looked up to see the servant of the Armenian beckoning to me from the upper deck.
“All the cabin passengers have been saying,” maundered the master, when I reached the roof of the barge, “that you must get to Khartum. We were about to take up a collection to buy you a ticket when the venerable patriarch showed us a better plan. He is in need of a servant who can write English and French. Of course, he is very rich, like all the head patriarchs, and he will, perhaps, pay you much. If he does not need you when he gets to Khartum, there is plenty of work there. Come with me to the cabin.”
The “venerable patriarch” spoke only his native tongue. One of his attendant priests, however, was well versed in Italian, and through him his chief dictated a letter to the English mudir of Wady Halfa, and a second to the French consul at Assiut. Neither epistle contained matter of international importance. I half suspected that my employment was little more than charity in disguise; yet the Greek assured me that my services were indispensable. Who knows? But for the force of circumstances, I might still be gracing the suite of the patriarch of Africa.
We tied up at Wady Halfa after nightfall. The first man to cross the gang plank was an English officer bearing an order forbidding any one to land. A telegram from Assuan announced the outbreak of the plague, and the steamer was to be held in quarantine.