Sunday, 18th.—Started about six. Reached Syoot, or rather El Hamza for Syoot, which is a mile inland, at eleven. Between Manfalût and Syoot the Nile takes an immense sweep west, and assumes altogether a tortuous course; the plain opens out, the eastern mountains recede, and for the first time an important chain closes in on the west. Game is already beginning to be abundant. I saw a sandbank full of pelicans and geese just below this place. I wish I could get at the names of the small birds I see here, which are mostly new to me; an Arab invariably answers your questions on this subject by the word "asfoor," i.e. a bird—thankee! The peasants here all wear a loose dark brown robe like that of a Franciscan monk; and as they squat fishing on the brown bank of the river with their skull-caps and black beards, I fancy I see the monks of the Thebaïd coming, as in old days, to get their daily meat out of the Nile.
Irrigation seems to go on more actively even than lower down; I saw to-day no less than twenty-four shadoofs all in a row, and in full play. The men that worked them, mostly naked, were of every colour between a new halfpenny and an old shoe, and the effect of them all toiling away and surrounded by groups of squatting onlookers was very striking.
Hosseyn, my servant, the angler, is having his head shaved on deck; when he has done I shall visit the town.
Meanwhile I have had a visit from the government doctor, a rather intelligent man who made his studies in Pisa.
Here comes Hosseyn clean-shaven. He is a nice boy, eager and willing—but wants varnish; he can never address me without scratching his spine at its lowest extremity; Audrey herself could not have done it in a manner more naïvely unconventional. Though only twenty, he has had two wives; not liking the first, who snubbed his relations, he gave her three months' wages and dismissed her. To avoid further unpleasantness he then married his cousin: "She good woman—very quiet—good tongue."
The village at which we have landed is very picturesque. The mud and brick architecture is here carried out with some care and is entirely delightful. The walls are mostly crowned with an openwork finish made by a simple arrangement of the bricks which is most effective. Sometimes, as, for instance, in the cemetery, they are surmounted by crenulations like those we see in the old Assyrian monuments; the heads of the doorways are decorated with a charming sort of diapered ornament, capable of great variety and produced entirely by the arrangement in patterns of the bricks; the patterns being painted black and the ground filled in with white. The woodwork in the windows is also very pretty, and altogether the general aspect of the houses most novel and striking.
Beyond the village I wandered into a delightful garden; a half cultivated wilderness of palm and gum trees in which one came on unexpected pergolas, and lovely garden trees all pouring out their most intoxicating scents under the fiercest sun I ever walked beneath. I saw oleanders, the flowers of which were as thick as roses and smelt like a quintessence of nectarines; there were also some beautiful olive trees with weeping branches—a thing I had never seen before—and with berries as large as plums. Overhead, amongst the yellow dates, sat doves the colour of pale violets.
Syoot itself is beautifully situated amongst groves and gardens; except in that it is brown and not white, it reminded me much of an Algerine town; it is very unlike Cairo. The rock-cut tombs in the mountain above the town are so mutilated and disfigured that little can be made of them; but they have that stamp of vastness which is so characteristic of all the ancient monuments of this country.
The view from the height is very fine. The river has barely begun to fall yet, so that everything is reflected in the great sheets of water that cover the land. At evening I saw the sunset through the tall palm trees, with the domes of Syoot dark against its flaming light.