An important official and his secretary rode over to my hut on the following day and gave us a good example of Egyptian red-tapism: age, place of birth, nationality, profession, etc., of all the witnesses had to be taken down by the secretary; each one in turn down to the cook and our messenger had to give their testimony. ‘Did the man call you names, and if so how many?’ was one of the questions put to me; as if it mattered what a madman said, for the poor man had been pronounced insane by the doctor that very morning. It is also difficult to see how our ages and places of birth bore on the subject, unless one had the mind of an Egyptian and that of an official as well.
We heard that the patient had gone out of his mind once before some years previously, and that he had now been sent to the lunatic asylum at Keneh. Madness must either be quickly cured there or else the rumours—that baksheesh (if in sufficient quantity) can get a patient out—must be true, for in less than three weeks the man was in our neighbourhood again. He was, however, carefully watched by his relatives, and we had no further visits from him.
To give some idea of the dread the fellaheen have of hospitals (unless they go as out-patients), as well as of lunatic asylums, I will repeat what one of these peasants maintained takes place in the latter. He declared that those of unsound mind were hung by their heels from the ceiling, over a charcoal brazier, and then holes were bored in their heads to let out a valuable juice for which the doctors got a large price. ‘A piastre a drop,’ said one; ‘No, three piastres a drop,’ declared another. It would be curious to trace the origin of such an absurd statement. In some of the out-of-the-way places, I am, however, sorry to hear that some native doctors are not above extracting baksheesh from their patients.
I heard this from an Englishman and his wife, whose words I cannot doubt. A man whom they employed as gardener in Upper Egypt, where they were living, had to go to a hospital owing to some accident to his leg. The doctor who attended him said he could cure the leg, but might possibly have to amputate it. He then asked the patient what he earned and what his relatives were worth, and on being told, suggested that a certain sum would be necessary to save the leg. The poor gardener could not pay this, and, after the usual bargaining, the sum agreed on was obtained from the patient’s people, and the man soon left the hospital with both his legs. Of course, had the doctor’s villainous behaviour been reported to high quarters he would have been summarily dealt with. Let us hope that he has been found out since.
Any one seeing the poor hovels many of the fellaheen dwell in would be surprised at the attachment they have for their homes. During my second winter at Thebes we had a poor Nile, and a large portion of the land near us had not had its usual share of inundation; besides this, the Egyptian Exploration Fund having started their work elsewhere, the three hundred men and boys it had been employing for some years past had not this work to do. It was therefore a singularly bad year for the people of Gurna. Work at the Assuan dam was being paid at three times the rate these men got while the excavations were on, and now a great many were stranded with no means of a livelihood. It was useless to try and persuade any to apply at Assuan for work, the idea of going more than a hundred miles to better their circumstances was abhorrent to them. It was pitiable to see the number of men who applied for the little work I could give them in connection with the reproduction of the bas-reliefs.
Towards the end of the season the view of the Ramesseum was being spoilt by a great bank of earth that was being raised round it as an encircling wall. I was sorry to see this, as it ruined the effect of the temple from a distance; but I had some consolation in the fact that it gave employment to a number of the villagers. Let us hope that a similar amount of work in pulling it down again may be reserved for the next bad Nile.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE CROSS DESERT JOURNEY TO KOSSEIR
I PROPOSE now to break the sequence of events during my second season at Thebes, and attempt to describe a desert journey I took early in November. During the months I spent at Der el-Bahri, when I joined the camp of the Egyptian Exploration Fund, I was awakened every morning by the first light in the eastern sky, and daily saw the sun rise above the distant hills which shut off the Nile valley from the Arabian desert. The Libyan desert, on the eastern fringe of which we camped, stretches for two thousand miles and more in a westerly direction till it reaches Morocco, that land of the setting sun known in Egypt as el-Maghrib, the West.
The ‘call of the desert’ could easily have been satisfied without crossing the Nile valley; but the Libyan desert called me no further into its tractless wastes than to the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. Distance lent an enchantment to the view of the low-lying hills between me and the rising sun, and as Alice wished to see what went on in the room beyond the looking-glass, so I felt drawn to the land which lay between those hills and the Red Sea.