Damanhûr, which the railroad traverses, looks very much as must have looked the ancient cities of Egypt, now buried under the sand or fallen into dust. It is surrounded by sloping walls built of unbaked bricks or of pisé which preserves its earthy colour. The flat-roofed houses rise one above another like a collection of cubes dotted with little black holes. A few dovecotes, the cupolas of which are whitewashed, and one or two minarets striped with red and white, alone impart to the antique appearance of that city the modern aspect of Islamism. On the top of the terraces women, squatting on mats or standing in their long robes of brilliant colours, are looking at us, no doubt attracted by the passing of the train. As they show against the sky, they are wondrously elegant and graceful. They look like statues erected on the top of buildings or the front of temples.
The moment the train stopped, it was invaded by a band of women and children, offering fresh water, bitter oranges, and honey confections to the travellers; and it was delightful to see these brown faces showing at the carriage window their bright smile and their white teeth. I should have liked to remain some time in Damanhûr, but travel, like life, is made up of sacrifices. How many delightful things one is compelled to leave by the roadside, if one wishes to reach the end. A man cannot see everything, and must be satisfied with seeing a few things. So I had to leave Damanhûr and to behold that dream from afar without being able to traverse it. As far as I could see, even through my glass, the land reached to the horizon line, intersected by canals, broken by gutters, shimmering with pools of water, with scattered clumps of sycamore trees and date palms, with long strips of cultivated ground, water-wheels rising here and there, and enlivened by the incessant coming and going of the labourers who followed, on the backs of camels, horses, or asses, or on foot, the narrow road bordering the levees. At intervals there arose, under the shade of a mimosa, the white cupola of a tomb; sometimes a nude child stood motionless on the edge of the water in the attitude of unconscious reverie, not even turning his head to see the train fly along. This deep gravity in childhood is peculiar to the East. What could that boy, standing on his lump of earth as a Stylites on his pillar, be thinking of? From time to time flocks of pigeons, busy feeding, flew off with a sudden whir as the train passed by, and alighted farther away on the plain; aquatic birds swam swiftly through the reeds that outstretched behind them, pretty wagtails hopped about, wagging their tails, on the crest of the levees; and in the heavens at a vast height, soared hawks, falcons, and gerfalcons, sweeping in great circles. Buffaloes wallowed in the mud of the ditches, and flocks of black sheep with hanging ears, very like goats, were hurrying along driven by the shepherds. The antique simplicity of the costume of the young herdsmen, with their short tunics, white or blue, faded by the sun, their bare legs, their dusty, naked feet, their felt caps, their crooks, recalled the patriarchal scenes of the Bible.
At the next station we stopped, and I got out to have a look at the landscape. I had scarcely gone a few steps when a wondrous sight met my astonished eyes: before me was the Nile, old Hapi, to give it its ancient Egyptian name, the inexhaustible Father of Waters. Through one of those involuntary plastic impressions which act upon the imagination, the Nile called up to my mind the colossal marble god in one of the lower halls of the Louvre, carelessly leaning on his elbow and, with paternal kindliness, allowing himself to be climbed over by the little children which represent cubits, and the various phases of the inundation. Well, it was not under this mythological aspect that the great river appeared to me for the first time. It was flowing in flood, spreading out broadly like a torrent of reddish mud which scarcely looked like water as it swelled and rushed by irresistibly. It looked like a river of soil; scarcely did the reflection of the sky imprint here and there upon the gloomy surface of its tumultuous waves a few light touches of azure. It was still almost at the height of its rise, but the flood had the tranquil power of a regular phenomenon, and not the convulsive disorder of a scourge. The majesty of that vast sheet of water laden with fertilising mud produces an almost religious impression. How many vanished civilisations have been reflected for a time in that ever-flowing wave! I remained absorbed as I gazed at it, sunk in thought, and feeling that strange sinking of the heart which one experiences after desire has been fulfilled, and reality has taken the place of the dream. What I was looking at was indeed the Nile, the real Nile, the river which I had so often endeavoured to discover by intuition. A sort of stupor nailed me to the bank, and yet it was a very natural thing that I should come across the Nile in Egypt in the very centre of the Delta. But man is subject to such artless astonishment.
Dhahabîyehs and felûkas spreading their great lateen sails were tacking across the river, passing from one shore to the other, and recalling the shape of the mystic baris of the times of the Pharaohs.
We set out again. The aspect of the country was still the same; fields of cotton, maize, doora, stretched as far as the eye could reach. Here and there glimmered the portions of the ground covered by the flood. Slate-blue buffaloes wallowed in the pools and emerged covered with mud; water birds stood along the edges, and sometimes flew off as the train passed, watched by families of fellahs, squatting on the banks of the ditches. Along the road travelled the endless procession of camels, asses, oxen, black goats, and foot-passengers, which enlivened to such an extent that peaceful, flat landscape. I had already noticed when in Holland the additional importance given to figures by a flat country; the lack of hills makes them stand out, and as they usually show against the sky they loom larger. I seemed to see pass by the zones of painted bassi-relievi representing agricultural scenes which occasionally formed part of the decoration of the halls of Egyptian tombs. Here and there rose villages or farms, the lines of whose sloping, earth-gray walls recalled the substructures of antique temples. Groups of sycamore and mimosa trees, set off by clumps of date palms, brought out the soft tones of the walls by the contrast of their rich verdure. Elsewhere I caught sight of fellahin huts surmounted by whitewashed dovecotes, placed side by side like beehives or the minarets of a mosque. We soon reached Tantah, a somewhat important town, to which the fine mosque of Seyd Ahmed Badouy attracts pilgrims twice a year, and the fairs of which are frequented by the caravans.
Tantah, from the railway station,—for the train does not stop long enough to allow travellers to visit the town,—has an animated and picturesque aspect. Amid the houses in the Arab style with their look-outs and their awnings, rise buildings in that Oriental-Italian style dear to persons of progress and of modern ideas, painted in soft colours, ochre, salmon, or sky-blue; flat-roofed clay huts; over all, the minarets of the mosque, the white cupolas of a few tombs, and the inevitable fig trees and palms rising above the low garden walls. Between the town and the station stretches waste ground, a sort of fair-ground, on which are camps, huts of reed or of date-palm branches, tents formed of old rags of cloth and sometimes of the linen of an unrolled turban. The inhabitants of these frail dwellings cook in the open air. The coffee is made, a cup at a time, in a small brass kettle, and on plates of tin are cooked the thin doora cakes. The fuel is camel's-dung. The fellahs suck eagerly the sweetish juice of the sugar-cane cut into short pieces, and the slices of watermelon show within the green skin their ripe, rosy, flesh, spotted with black seeds. Women, as graceful as statues, come and go, holding the end of their veil between their teeth so as to conceal one half of the face, and bearing on their heads Theban jars or copper vases; while the men, squatting on the ground or on small carpets, their knees up to their chins, forming an acute angle like the legs of locusts, in an attitude which no European could assume, and recalling the judges of Amenti ranged in rows one behind another on the papyri of funeral rituals, preserve that dreamy immobility so dear to Orientals when they have nothing to do; for to move about merely for exercise, as Christians do, strikes them as utter folly.
Dromedaries, alone or grouped in circles, kneeling under their burdens, stretch out their long legs on the sand, motionless in the burning sun. Asses, some of which are daintily harnessed, with saddles of red morocco rising in a boss on the withers, and with headstalls adorned with tufts, and others with an old carpet for a saddle-cloth, were waiting for the travellers who were to stop at Tantah to bear them from the station to the town. The donkey drivers, clothed in short blue and white tunics, bare-armed and bare-legged, their heads covered with a fez, a wand in their hand, and resembling the slender figures of shepherds or youths which are so exquisitely drawn on the bodies of Greek vases, stood near their animals in an indolent attitude, which they abandoned as soon as a chance customer came their way. Then they indulged in mad gesticulations, guttural cries, and fought with each other until the unfortunate tourist ran the risk of being torn to pieces or stripped of the best part of his garments. Tawny, wandering dogs with jackal ears, fallen indeed from their old position, and forgetting apparently that they counted Anubis, the dog-headed Anubis latrator, among their ancestors, passed in and out among the groups, but without taking the least interest in what was going on.
The bonds which in Europe unite the dog to man do not exist in the East; its social instinct has not been developed, its sympathies have not been appealed to; it has no master, and lives in a savage state. No services are asked of it, and it is not cared for; it has no home and dwells in holes which it makes, unless it stays in some open tomb; no one feeds it; it hunts for itself, gorging on dead bodies and unnamable débris. There is a proverb which says that wolves do not eat each other; Eastern dogs are less scrupulous; they readily devour their sick, wounded, or dead companions. It seemed strange to me to see dogs which did not make any advances to me, and did not seek to be caressed, but maintained a proud and melancholy reserve.
Little girls in blue gowns and little negroes in white tunics came up to the carriages, offering pastry, cakes, bitter oranges, lemons, and apples,—yes, apples. Eastern people seem to be very fond of that acid Northern fruit which, along with wretched, granulous pears, forms part of every dessert, at which of course one never gets either pomegranates, or bananas, or dates, or oranges, or purple figs, or any native fruits, which are no doubt left to the common people.
The whistle of the engine sounded, and we were again carried away through that very humid and very green Delta. However, as we advanced there showed on the horizon lines of rosy land from which vegetable life was wholly absent. The sand of the desert advances with its waves, as sterile as those of the sea, eternally disturbed by the winds and beating upon the islet of cultivated earth surrounded and stormed by dusty foam, as upon a reef which it endeavours to cover up. In Egypt, whatever lies above the level of the flood is smitten with death. There is no transition; where stops Osiris, Typhon begins; here luxuriant vegetation, there not a blade of grass, not a bit of moss, not a single one of the adventurous plants which grow in solitary and lonely places,—nothing but ground-up sandstone without any mixture of loam. But if a drop of Nile water falls upon it, straightway the barren sand is covered with verdure. These strips of pale salmon-colour form a pleasant contrast with the rich tints of the great plain of verdure spread out before us.