Having stayed there a day or two, they went on to Cairo, where they found Mr. Robert Stephenson. He and Mr. Brunel dined together on Christmas Day.
On December 30 the journey up the Nile commenced. On January 21 they arrived at Thebes, and spent some days there. Mr. Brunel was able to ride about on a donkey, and made some sketches of the celebrated ruins in the neighbourhood.[196]
They reached Assouan on February 2, and made preparations for ascending the cataracts. They went as far as Dakkeh, and got back to Assouan on February 19.
The following letter from Mr. Brunel to his sister, Lady Hawes, describes some of the scenes through which he passed:—
Philæ, February 12, 1859.
I now write to you from a charming place; but Assouan, which I left to come here, is also beautiful, and I will speak of that first. It is strange that so little is said in the guide books of the picturesque beauty of these places. Approaching Assouan, you glide through a reef of rocks, large boulders of granite polished by the action of the water charged with sand. You arrive at a charming bay or lake of perfectly still water and studded with these singular jet-black or red rock islands. In the distance you see a continuation of the river, with distant islands shut in by mountains, of beautiful colours, some a lilac sandstone, some the bright red yellow of the sands of the desert. Above the promontories the water excursions are delicious. You enter at once among the islands of the Cataracts, fantastic forms of granite heaps of boulders split and worn into singular shapes.
After spending a week at Assouan, with a trip by land to Philæ, I was so charmed with the appearance of the Cataracts as seen from the shore, and with the deliciously quiet repose of Philæ, that I determined to get a boat, and sleep a few nights there. We succeeded in hiring a country boat laden with dates, and emptied her, and fitted up her three cabins.[197] We put our cook and dragoman and provisions, &c., on board, and some men, and went up the Cataract. It was a most amusing affair, and most beautiful and curious scenery all the way. It is a long rapid of three miles, and perhaps one mile wide, full of rocky islands and isolated rocks. A bird’s-eye view hardly shows a free passage, and some of the more rapid falls are between rocks not forty feet wide—in appearance not twenty. Although they do not drag the boats up perpendicular falls of three or four feet, as the travellers’ books tell you, they really do drag the boats up rushes of water which, until I had seen it, and had then calculated the power required, I should imprudently have said could not be effected. We were dragged up at one place a gush of water, what might fairly be called a fall of about three feet, the water rushing past very formidably, and between rocks seemingly not more than wide enough to let our boat pass, and this only by some thirty-five men at three or four ropes, the men standing in the water and on the rocks in all directions, shouting, plunging into the water, swimming across the top or bottom of the fall, just as they wanted, then getting under the boat to push it off rocks, all with an immense expenditure of noise and apparent confusion and want of plan, yet on the whole properly and successfully. We were probably twenty or thirty minutes getting up this one, sometimes bumping hard on one rock, sometimes on another, and jammed hard first on one side and then on the other, the boat all the time on the fall with ropes all strained, sometimes going up a foot or two, sometimes losing it, till at last we crept to the top, and sailed quietly on in a perfectly smooth lake. These efforts up the different falls had been going on for nearly eight hours, and the relief from noise was delicious. We selected a quiet spot under the temples of Philæ.... Our poultry-yard is on the sandbank, where fowls, pigeons, and turkeys are walking about loose, and, like all animals in this country, perfectly tame. Yes, they walk up and catch a pigeon to be killed when you like. In the midst of these and of the small birds which always walk and fly about us, have been walking for hours this morning three or four large eagles, who, with the politeness peculiar to animals here, pay no attention to our fowls, nor do they to the eagles. But here I am entering on the anomalies and contradictions of Egypt, which would fill volumes.
After leaving Egypt, Mr. Brunel went to Naples and Rome, where he spent Easter, and he returned to England in the middle of May.
When abroad, Mr. Brunel made sight-seeing a pleasure rather than a business; thus in Egypt he preferred to visit frequently the same places, and rather to enjoy that which he knew gave him pleasure, than to hurry about with the object of seeing all that was to be seen. At Philæ he stopped more than a week, and at Thebes he spent more time in a small outlying temple near Karnac than in the great ruin itself. So also at Rome he went frequently to the Colosseum, and he spent many hours in the interior of St. Peter’s.
Shortly after his return to England he went to Plymouth, and over the Saltash bridge and other parts of the Cornwall Railway, which had been opened during his absence abroad.