Every place on the boat was occupied, and there might have been a dozen more, had there been any place to put them in. The boats leave every two weeks from the first of December to the end of March, and if at any time there are passengers enough to fill an extra boat, one is sent off.
Three o’clock was the hour for starting, so we left the hotel at two, sending our luggage on a charette, and taking donkeys, (for ourselves,) to the landing.
Gustave and I thought we would get ahead of Mr. Cook a little, by taking our own wine along, as the wines on the boat were extra, and sold at a very high price, and we found that we would save about fifty per cent, by taking wine from the shop, and paying Cook a shilling a bottle, the advertised price for corkage. So we bought three cases and put them with our baggage, but they were stopped on the deck of the steamer, by the Chief Steward of the line, who said he would examine the wine, fix a price upon it, and then charge us fifty per cent, on its value. We had about five minutes of very lively talk, which ended in our triumph, as we had taken care to bring a copy of the advertisement, with the proper paragraph ready marked for inspection.
It turned out that Cook had bought a large quantity of wine from the steamboat company, at the time he took charge of the business, and was anxious to sell it. Under such circumstances it was very natural that he should object to a passenger supplying himself with wine to drink on the voyage. It reminded me of the enterprise of train boys on American railways who neglect to fill the water-coolers in the cars, in order that they may be able to assuage the thirst of passengers, by selling them lemonade at five or ten cents a glass. Of course there were some passengers who came late, so that we were not off until half an hour beyond the appointed time. We amused ourselves, while waiting, by watching the movements of the people on shore. Troops of women and girls came down to the river to fill water jars, which they poised on their heads and then carried away. Occasionally a man came down to fill a pig-skin, and I observed that the men never carried water in anything else than a pig or goat-skin, while the women as invariably carried it in jars. In several places, men and women, some of them very scantily dressed, were washing clothes in the river, and some of the water for drinking purposes was scooped up unpleasantly near the scene of their operations. One man came to the bank about twenty feet from the stern of our boat, removed his garments, and took a bath with as much sang froid as if he were the only person present.
The human form divine, without superfluous adornment or encumbrance, is a frequent object in an Egyptian landscape. A student of living figures, a la nature, would here find a good field for his observations.
We had not been ten minutes under way before there was an alarm of fire, and the boat was stopped. It was nothing very serious, only the awning over the upper deck had taken fire from a spark from the chimney, and a hole about six inches across was burned in the canvas. A little while afterward we went aground, but we did not stick there long; half an hour later there was something wrong about the engine, and we had to run to the shore. None of these things wasted much time, but they didn’t promise well for the future. Luckily, however, they were the only events of the kind in the voyage, except that we went aground occasionally, and the bad beginning proved like many other similar affairs in life, a good ending.
We steamed past the city, watching the grey walls of Cairo, the domes and minarets of the mosques, the palaces and hovels, the gardens of the Island of Roda, the building containing the famous Nilometer, the green fields of the valley, the glistening sands of the desert, the yellow hills of the Mokattam, bounding the Lybian waste, the palm-trees stippled here and there, singly and in clusters, the dahabecahs, with their long-sloping sails and their trim and jaunty appearance, the native boats sunk deep with cargoes of food destined for digestion in the great stomach of the city, the camels and donkeys and buffaloes, on the bank of the river the half-dressed or almost undressed natives working the shadoofs to raise water for irrigating the land, the groups of natives scattered here and there at work or lazily idling away their time, and over all, the clear sky of Egypt, with scarcely a touch of color and with no mist or haze to keep back the rays of the sun. Away to the west were the pyramids of Gizeh, and south of them were the pyramids of Sakkarah, among the burning sands and overlooking the site of Memphis. Eastward were the hills that border the Lybian desert, and in the north was the spreading valley of the Nile. As we steamed on, the broad valley disappeared, and the hills seemed to shut in close upon the river. The great pyramids grew faint in the distance, and when the sun went down, they were just perceptible through the tops of the palm-trees.
We stopped for the night at Badresheyn, a village about fifteen miles above Cairo; we were to lie there until daylight, as these steamers do not run at night. From this point passengers on the dahabeeahs generally make an excursion to the site of Memphis, and to the Apis Mausoleum.
As for Memphis there is very little of it. A half buried statue lying on its face is shown you, and there are a few substructions and some heaps of ruins. There are some statues and statuettes in the Museum at Cairo, that were discovered at Memphis, and i the sites of two temples have been traced. I went to Memphis with a party early in January, and at that time the water was so high that most of the famous statue was invisible. This statue was originally about fifty feet high, and hewn from a single block of limestone; it stood in front of a temple and is supposed to be the one mentioned by Herodotus. Memphis was used as a quarry for supplying stone for the construction of Cairo, and hence the disappearance of the ancient city.
The ride from here to the Apis Mausoleum, or Serapeum as it is frequently called, is partly through a grove of palm trees and partly through the desert. This was only recently discovered, and rather curiously we are indebted to a passage in Strabo, for the mention of its site. M. Mariette, conservator of the Monuments of Ancient Egypt, found it in 1860, by one day discovering the head of a sphinx in the sand, and beneath the head was the body. Mariette then thought of a passage in Strabo which says, “There is also a Serapeum in a very sandy spot where drifts of sand are raised by the wind to such a degree that we saw some sphinxes buried up to their heads and others half buried.”