He had been the playmate of the little grandson of Nasr, the son of her daughter Dauer, and was presented to me under the name of Rehân, the Arabic name for the sweet-smelling basil. It was added, that he was from the district of Makâdi, on the Abyssinian frontier, whence the most intelligent and faithful slaves generally came. This district is under Christian dominion, and is inhabited by Christians and Mahommedans, in separate villages. The former call themselves Nazâra (Nazarenes) or Amhâra (Amharic Christians), the latter Giberta. Of these Giberta children are often stolen from their own race and from among their neighbours, and sold to Arabic slave-dealers; for, in the interior of Abyssinia, the slave trade is strictly prohibited. This account of the lad, however, was soon found to be untrue, and was only invented to preclude the blame of offering me a Christian slave; while, on the contrary, it would seem much more wrong to deliver me a Mahommedan. The boy first told our Christian cook, and then me, that he was of Christian parentage, had received the name Rehân here, and that his real name was Gabre Mariam, i. e. in Abyssinian, “Slave of Maria.” His birth-place is near Gondar, the metropolis of Amhâra. He seems to belong to a distinguished family, for the place Bamba, which is denoted by Bruce in the vicinity of Lake Tzana, according to his story, belonged to his grandfather, and his father, who is now dead, had many flocks, which he himself had often driven to the pasturage. When he was somewhat far off his dwelling with them one day, about three or four years ago, he was stolen by mounted Bedouins, carried to the village of Waldakarel, and, afterwards sold to King Idris Adlân, who had given him to his sister Nasr. He is a handsome, but very dark-coloured boy, about eight or nine years of age, but much more advanced than a child of that age would be with us. The girls marry here at the age of eight. He wears his hair in innumerable little plaits, which must be redone and anointed at least once a month, by a woman understanding it; his body, too, is rubbed with fat from time to time. His whole clothing consists of a great white cloth that he fastens round the hips, and throws over his shoulders. I now call him by his Christian name, and shall bring him to Europe with me.
Saïd Hashim tried his utmost to induce us to remain a few more days in Wed Médineh. On the first evening he invited us to his house with a number of the most considerable Turks, and had a number of female dancers to show us the national dances of the country, which consist chiefly in movements of the upper part of the body and the arms, as they are found on the Egyptian monuments, yet differing from the present Egyptian dances, which are made up of very ungraceful and lascivious movements and motions of the hips and legs.
An old good humoured and very comic man led the dances, singing Arabic songs having reference to persons in the room or those known to them, such as Nasr, Idris Adlân, Mak (i. e. Melek) Bâdi, and others, with a piercing but not unpleasant voice, and at the same time struck a five-stringed lyre with his left hand, beating time with the plectrum in his right. His instrument only extended to six tones of the octave. The first string to the right had the highest tone C, struck with the thumb; the next had the deepest E, then came the third with F, the fourth with A, the fifth with B. The instrument is called rabâba, the player rebâbi. This man had been instructed by an old famous rebâbi at Shendi, had made his instrument just like that of his master, also learning all his art of versification, and thus had become the black favourite bard of Wed Médineh. All his songs were composed by himself, sometimes improvised, and whoever offended himself or his patron became the target of a pasquinading song.
I sent for him the next day, and had four of his songs written down by Jussuf, one on Mohammed, son of the Mak Mesâ’d, who lives at Metammeh, one on King Nimr, who burnt Ismael Pasha, and is now living in Egypt, a third on Nasr; and, lastly, a song in praise of pretty girls.[79] It is impossible to give these melodies in notes. A little only, approaching our kind of music in somewise, have I written down. They are generally half recited, half sung, with wavering tones from the highest notes to the deepest tone long sustained. These are the most peculiar, but are utterly incapable of being expressed. Every verse contains four rhymes, on each of which it is easy to keep the voice, on the second more than on the first and third; but the longest on the final line, and to this always comes one of the same deep tones, giving the song a kind of dignified progression. A certain recurrence of the melody is first observable, but is not retainable for an European ear. I bought the friendly old man’s instrument, which he gave unwillingly, although I allowed him to fix the price himself, and several times a shade of sorrow passed over his expressive countenance when he had taken the money and laid the instrument in its place. Next day I sent for him again. He was cast down, and told me that his wife had beaten him thoroughly for parting with the instrument. It is no shame for a man to be beaten by his wife, but vice versá. A beaten wife goes at once to the Kadi to complain, she generally obtains justice, and the husband is punished.
At Wed Médineh we witnessed a funeral, which seemed odd enough to us. A woman had died three days before; the first day after her decease, then the third, the seventh and later days have particular ceremonies. An hour before sunset above a hundred women and children had assembled before the house, and many more kept continually coming and cowering down beside them. Two daughters of the deceased were there, who had already strewn their highly-ornamented heads, powdered with fat in the Arab manner, with ashes, and rubbed the whole upper part of the body white with them,[80] so that only the eyes and mouth gleam freshly and as if inlaid from the white mask. The women wore long cloths round their hips, the young girls and children the rahât, a girdle of close hanging straps of leather, generally bound about the loins, with a string prettily adorned with shells and pearls, and falling halfway down the thigh. A great wooden bowl of ashes was placed there, and continually replenished. Close to the door, on both sides, crouched female musicians, who partly clapped their hands in time, with yelling, ear-piercing screams, partly beat the noisy darabúka (a kind of hand-drum, called here in the Sudan dalúka), and partly struck hollow calabashes, swimming in tubs of water, with sticks. The two daughters, from eighteen to twenty years of age, and the nearest relations, began to move slowly towards the door in pairs, by a narrow lane formed in the midst of the ever-increasing mob. Then suddenly they all began to scream, to clap their hands, and to bellow forth unearthly cries, upon which the others turned round and began their horrible dance of violent jerks. With convulsively strained windings and turnings of the upper part of the body, they pushed their feet on, quite slowly and measuredly, threw their bosoms up with a sudden motion, and turned the head back over the shoulders, which they racked in every direction, and thus wound themselves forward with almost closed eyes. In this way they went down a little hill, for fifteen or sixteen paces, when they threw themselves on the ground, buried themselves in dust and ashes, and then returned to begin the same dance anew. The younger of the two daughters had a pretty slender figure, with an incredibly elastic body, and resembled an antique when standing quietly upright or lying on the ground with the head down, with her regular and soft, but immovable features and classical form, quite peaceably even during the dance. This dancing procession went on over and over again. Each of the mourners must at least have gone through it once, and the nearer the relationship the oftener it is repeated. Whoever cannot get up to the ash-tub takes ashes from the head of a neighbour to strew it on their own head. First, in this squatting assembly, some women crouch, who understand how to sob and to shed tears in quantities, which leave long black streaks on their whitened cheeks. The most prominent and disgusting feature of this scene is, however, that unrestrained passion has nothing to do with it, and that everything is done slowly, pathetically, and with evidently practised motions; children down to the ages of four or five years are put into the procession, and if they make the difficult and unnatural movements well, the mothers, cowering behind, call out taib, taib, to them. “Bravo, well done!” The second act of this deafening ceremony, by the continual clapping, cries, and screams, is that the whole company of dancers throw themselves upon the ground and roll down the hill; but even this is done slowly and premeditatedly, while they draw their knees up to keep hold of their dress, poke their arms in also, and then roll away on their backs and knees. This ceremony begins an hour before sunset and continues into the middle of the night.
The whole of it causes, by its unnaturality surpassing everything else, an indescribable impression, which is rendered the more disagreeable, as one perceives throughout the empty play, the inherited and spoilt custom, and can recognize no trace of individual truth and natural feeling in the persons taking part in it. And yet the comparison with certain descriptions and representations of similar ceremonies among the ancients, teaches us to understand many things, of which, in our own life, we shall never form a proper estimate, until we have seen with our own eyes such caricatures of uncivilisation, occasionally shown to us by the Orient.
Next day we visited the hospital, which we found very clean, and in good order; it contains one hundred patients, but there are only twenty-eight at the present time. Then we proceeded to the barracks, in the large court of which the exercises are gone through. The commanding officer assembled the band, and had several pieces of music played. The first was the Parisienne, which made a strange impression upon me amidst these scenes, as also the following pieces, which were mostly French, and known to me; they are tolerably performed. The musicians had scarcely any but European instruments, and have incorporated in their Arabic musical vocabulary our word trumpet, applying it, however, to the drum which they call trumbêta, while they have for the trumpet a native name, nafir; the great flute they call sumára, the little one sufára, and the great drum tabli. There were only 1,200 men of the regiment (which consists of 4,000) present, almost all negroes, who poked out their black faces, hands, and feet, from their white linen clothes, and red caps like dressed-up monkeys, only looking much more miserable and oppressed than those animals. Yet we did not suspect that in two days, these people would rebel, and go off to their mountains.
Emin Pasha was hourly expected. On the 13th, however, I received a letter from him at Messelemîeh, four or five hours hence, in which he stated that he should first come to Wed Médineh the next day, and hoped to find us still there. At the same time he informed me that the war in Taka was at an end, and that all had submitted. Some hundred natives were killed in the skirmishes; on the morning before the decisive battle, all the Sheikhs of the Taka tribes came to the Pasha to beg for mercy, which was granted them on the condition, that no fugitive should remain in the forest, which had been their chief resort. Next day he had the forest searched, and as there was nobody found, it was set on fire, and burnt down altogether. He is going on his way back through the eastern districts to Katârif, on the Abyssinian frontier, and thence to the Blue River. Scarcely had we read these news from Taka, ere the cannons at the barracks thundered forth the news of victory to the population.
In another letter, which Emin Pasha had received for me, Herr von Wagner gave me the pleasant news that our new comrade, the painter Georgi, had arrived from Italy, and had already left for Dongola, where he would await farther instructions. I shall write him to meet us at Barkal.
As we were certain by the letter to find the Pasha still in Messelemîeh, we departed thither at noon; we went by land, as the city is an hour and a half distant from the Nile.