We returned to the river at Bellianeh, the boat having moved on around the bend during our absence. It was late in the afternoon when we came there, and we were ready for dinner. Lunch had been taken among the ruins of the temple. While picking the leg of a chicken, and washing it down with the water of the Nile, I sat with my back against a column whereon was sculptured the figure of a king offering a tribute to one of the divinities of his time. He had had no chicken or anything else for many hundred years, but he stood there perfectly composed, and never once hinted that I ought to divide with him. He was a patient old oyster, and I wanted to shake hands with him at parting, but couldn’t find his flipper.
One of our favorite amusements at each landing-place was to make the natives scramble for money. They came down in large numbers, sometimes two or three hundred of them, and kept up a continual howl of “Backsheesh, O, Howadji!” that sounded very much like the murmurs of a mob. They gathered on the bank opposite the stern of the boat, and were ready to catch all the money we would throw to them. We had a supply of copper for just such cases, and by a judicious use of it, we made a franc go a great ways, and this was the way we would distribute it.
One of us would take a copper, and after balancing and aiming it several times, would give it a toss. A mass of hands would be stretched to receive it, and the crowd would sway in the direction of the falling coin. If it struck in the dirt, a dozen Arabs would spring upon the place where it fell, and there would be a scramble for it. Sometimes the struggle would be so fierce, that the cloud of dust raised thereby would completely conceal the combatants, and they would emerge with torn garments.
Our best fun was in tossing the money so that it would fall just at the river’s edge; the rear of the crowd would sway forward to seize it, and their swaying and surging would press the front rank into the water, so that in a little while we would have half the crowd dripping from an involuntary bath. The small boys were generally on the lookout for this, and removed their clothes at an early part of the performance, so that we had them in puris naturalibus. The men and girls were generally more modest, but not always so.
Usually we had half an hour’s sport before the departure of the steamer from a village, and sometimes the entire population, with the exception of a few dignified elders, joined in the scramble. At Bellianeh, the heads of the village thought the affair undignified, and determined to put a stop to it. Two of them appeared on the scene, armed with courbashes—whips made from hippopotamus hide—and caused a very lively scattering.
The boys were whipped into their clothes, and public decency was thereby protected, but only for a short time. The boat was to lie there half an hour longer, and we wanted the fun to continue.
So we sent one of the waiters to convey our compliments to the city fathers, and ask them to go home, and to emphasize the request with an offer of “backsheesh.”