When I saw Holman Hunt's "Isabel," his pot of basil puzzled me sorely; I had seen a great deal of basil, and have an especial love for it; but I had never seen it except with a very small leaf. I was sure, however, knowing his great accuracy, that Hunt had sufficient foundation for the large leaf he gave the plant in his picture; the very fellow of it is now before me in a nosegay of flowers, very kindly sent me by the old governor of Esne. As I smell it I am assailed by pleasant memories of Lindos—"Lindos the beautiful"—and Rhodes, and that marvellous blue coast across the seas, that looks as if it could enclose nothing behind its crested rocks but the Gardens of the Hesperides; and I remember those gentle, courteous Greeks of the island (so unlike their swaggering kinsfolk—if they are their kinsfolk—of the mainland), and the little nosegay, a red carnation and a fragrant sprig of basil, with which they always dismiss a guest.
As we lay anchored by the shore in the evening, the dahabiehs came sweeping past in the moonlight; and the faint glimmering of the shell-like sails, and the flutter of the water against the swift, cutting keels, and the silence of the huddled groups, and the dark watchful figure of the helmsman at the helm, were strangely fantastic and beautiful.
Saturday, 24th.—Started at half-past five—passed Edfou (which I leave for my return) at half-past seven. Shall we reach Assouan to-day? Hosseyn's pious orgies have, I fear, turned his head, for I observed yesterday that he has taken to fishing again. "Brabs!—Insha Allah!" His interpretation of dreams is worthy of the ancient oracle-mongers; on the night before his sacrifice he dreamt that he had bought a slave, and then released it: "Wull! the slave is my sheep—is it not my slave? Wull, have I not buy it? Wull, I give it to the beebles—go!—I release it!" Whether the sheep, personally, considered itself released is problematic.
Saturday Evening.—Reached Assouan this afternoon at four, and, after the usual visit from the governor, took a stroll. I don't yet know whether I am disappointed in the place or not. At all events it is quite unlike my expectations of it. I had imagined, I suppose from descriptions, a narrower gorge and higher rocks; in point of fact there is no gorge at all, but the river is narrowed, or, rather, split by several islands and some fine granite boulders cropping up here and there to fret the river, and announcing the rapids; otherwise the country is open enough, and original and striking in aspect; I shall know better to-morrow what I think of it all. I saw during my evening stroll, and for the first time in my life, a group of slaves, mostly girls. If I had seen them subjected to any ill-treatment I should have felt very indignant; but I am bound to own that, seeing them squatting round a fire like any other children, showing no mark of slavery, and occupied in cooking their food, scratching themselves (as well, no doubt, they might!) and looking otherwise very like monkeys, I found it difficult to realise to myself the hardship of their position, however much it may revolt one in the abstract. They were black, and uglier than young negroes generally are; their hair was arranged in an infinity of minute, highly-greased plaits all round their heads; the elder ones were draped; the youngest wore a fringe pour tout potage. This is a noisy night; there is a "moolid" going on on the high bank to which we have made fast, and which borders the public square. A double row of howling dervishes are squatting and rocking and howling after their kind, almost over my head. In the brief lulls during which they take breath for further efforts, I hear from the other side of the river the mournful, weary, incessant creak of the water-wheel (with its blindfold cow or camel plodding round and round and round, apparently for ever), which in this region almost entirely supersedes the hand-worked bucket. The contrast is very curious.
I have just returned the governor's visit. I found him sitting on a sofa in the piazza opposite the Government House, with half-a-dozen hand lanterns brought by the guests in front of him, and on each side a long row of benches (forming an avenue up to his seat) on which squatted and smoked numbers of picturesque folk, who looked to great advantage by the flickering glimmer of the lamps and under the soft warm light of an African moon. I sat in the place of honour, smoked my conventional tchibouque, drank my inevitable cup of coffee, conveyed through my dragoman the usual traveller's remarks and questions (cardboard questions, so to speak, of which I knew the answers) to my host, who, like all the Turkish officials that I have seen, has the manners of a perfect gentleman and much natural dignity.
Sunday, 25th.—Started for Phylæ at half-past seven; arrived there at nine o'clock. The road leads through a broad tract of yellow sand (where, I believe, an arm of the Nile is supposed to have flowed in remote antiquity) along which on either side crop up, in wild, irregular fashion, bumps and hillocks and hills of dark red granite, covered over with innumerable fragments of the same stone, scattered in the most incredible confusion, and having rather a ludicrous appearance of having been left about and forgotten. You could get an excellent notion of the thing in miniature, by hastily spilling a coal-scuttle on a gravel walk and running away.
Above Assouan we are fairly in Nubia, and of course none but the darkest complexions are to be seen; but so large a number of negroes make their way here from the Soudan (the Nubians are not black, but of a beautiful dark cairngorm brown), that the whole place has an air of negro-land which is disagreeable to me. The young men, indeed, both black and brown, are sometimes extremely fine fellows (bar the legs, which are never good), but the girls, as far as one can see them, are tolerably ill-favoured, and the old women, of an ugliness which passes all belief. They are far worse than apes. The ladies in this part of the country gladden the hearts of their admirers by anointing their bodies with castor oil, so that the atmosphere of their villages, however full of sweet suggestion to a native, is much the reverse to a traveller with a nose not attuned to these perfumes; the smell that greets you through an open door is a mixture of the bouquet just named, and a penetrating flavour of accumulated stuffed beasts, and naturally interferes much with my enjoyment.
At Mahatter we left our donkeys and took a boat to Phylæ, a quarter of a mile, which takes half an hour owing to the rapidity of the current just above the cataract. The scenery about Phylæ has been spoken of as Paradise; I never saw anything less like my notion of Paradise, and so far, therefore, I am disappointed. Original and strange it is, in a high degree. It is in fact exactly like the valley of which I spoke a little further back, only that the hills are four times as high, and water takes the place of the sand; the same breaking up of the rocks into a myriad of fragments, putting all grandeur and massiveness of form out of the question—and, with the exception of a few palm trees and a sycamore or two, the same barrenness. Looking up in the direction of Wâdy Halfâ, the mountains appear to grow finer in outline, and a tract of very yellow sand amongst their highest crests is striking and original—gold dust in a cup of lapis lazuli. With the island itself and its beautiful group of temples it is impossible not to be delighted. Nothing could be more fantastic or more stately than the manner in which it rises out of the bosom of the river like a vast ship, surrounded as it is on all sides by a high wall sheer from the water to the level on which the temples stand. One hall in the main temple, and one only, shows still a sufficient amount of colour to give a very good idea of what the effect must have been originally; the green and blue capitals must have been very lovely. It is needless to say that here, as elsewhere, travellers have left by hundreds lasting memorials of their brutality, in the shape of names and dates drawn, painted, scratched, and cut on every wall and column, so that the eye finds no rest from them. This strange and ineffably vulgar mania is as old as the world, and the tombs of the kings at Thebes are scrawled over with inscriptions left there by ancient Greek and Roman visitors. I shall return to Phylæ shortly to make a sketch or two—Insha Allah.
Here, at last, I have found that absolutely clear crystalline atmosphere of which I had so often heard; I own it is not pleasing to me; a sky of burnished steel over a land of burning granite would no doubt be grand if the outlines of the granite were fine—but they are not. Meanwhile, perspective is abolished—everything is equally and obtrusively near, and I sadly miss the soft mysterious veils and pleasant doubts of distance that enchant one in other lands. I think it very likely that in winter one has great compensation from the exhilarating purity of the air; but just now the heat, which is simply infernal, is too trying for me to do justice to these advantages; no doubt the air is light and dry, but I feel unfortunately so very heavy and wet, that I am not in a position fully to appreciate it. Returning to Assouan in the evening, saw a dahabieh that had just got through the jaws of the cataracts, always rather a nervous matter; at least so they say; "to be very dyinger" (dangerous?), according to Hosseyn; the men were chanting a monotonous strain that had little of triumph in it, but rather conveyed a feeling of an always impending calamity escaped this time; it was melancholy and very striking, I thought, in the silence of the gloaming; very likely pure fancy on my part, for I doubt whether more than a couple of boats are lost in a season, and the sailors of the Nile must be well accustomed to the dangers of these rapids; but the impression on me at the time was very strong.
Monday, 26th.—The dragoman of the ship having a swelling of some sort on his arm, an Arab doctor was sent for, and forthwith informed him that his arm was possessed of the devil!! Went to see the island of Elephantina opposite Assouan, but saw nothing to suggest its ancient magnificence. Gave a silver farthing to a funny little child, which (the farthing) being perforated, his mother immediately tied into one of his little oily locks—an ingenious substitute for a pocket. I observed several little boys simply attired in a piece of string tied round their loins—there, Diogenes!