III
CHAPTER I
It was morning on the Blue Nile. The turbulent blue river rolled joyously between its banks, for it was high Nile, and a swift, light breeze was blowing—the companion of the Dawn. The vault of the sky seemed arched at a great height above the earth, springing clearly, without any object to break the line from the horizon of gold sand, and full of those white, filmy, light-filled gleaming clouds that are one of the wonders and glories of Upper Egypt and the Soudan. It was a morning and a scene to make a man's heart rise high in his breast, and cry out, as his eyes turned from the level-sanded desert floor, through sunlit space, to the vaulted roof, "After all, the world is a good house to live in."
Slowly the strong yellow sunlight poured over the plain, the bank and the river, gilding every ripple; and, as the light grew, hundreds of delicate shapes—the forms of the ibis and flamingo and crane, and other river-fowl—became visible, crowding down the dark banks, with flapping of white and crimson wings, and stretching of legs, and opening of beaks, rustling down, shaking their feathers, to bathe and drink of the Blue River.
Wonderful light, and miraculous, gleaming, cloud-filled sky, and wonderful birds preening their plumage and calling to each other, and wonderful breeze-swept water, bluer than the bluest depths of the Indian Ocean.
It was still so early that, in the whole stretch of rollicking, tumbling, buoyant waters between bank and bank, only one piece of river-craft could be seen. This pushed onward, cleaving through the little billows in the teeth of the morning breeze. It was a tiny naphtha launch—a horrid, fussy, smoking little thing, cutting through breeze and water, and diffusing a scent of oil and greased iron in the pure and radiant air. A white bird on the bank looked at it, and rose with a startled note of alarm, and a flight of lovely-salmon-coloured colleagues followed. The others merely looked up and paused, with their wings wide stretched, and then went on calmly with their toilets—they had seen it before.
In the launch, of which the whole centre was taken by the naphtha-stove—the engine by courtesy—sat a young Englishman, whose face had that frank, attractive look of one whose thoughts are kindly, well disposed to all the world; and at stem and stern stood, erect and silent, the white-clothed figure of a boy from the Soudan. Lithe, graceful forms supported long necks and straight-featured faces, black as if carved out of smooth ebony, and contrasting strangely with the white turbans of stiff linen twisted deftly into a high crest above the brows. Swiftly the little boat ran on for a mile or two against wind, with its three silent and motionless occupants; then one boy turned, and pronounced solemnly the two words, "Mister, Omdurman!"