I was glad when we got out of the place and proceeded to inspect the chief mosque. When we had awakened the caretaker, he started removing the matting, so as not to oblige us to take off our shoes. Mr. Wirth wittily remarked that the ground would be less likely to dirty our shoes than would the mats if we stepped on them. We prevented the man from moving one of them, so as not to disturb the sleep of one or two worshippers who lay there. It was a picturesque old mosque, and Mr. Whymper and I decided to return and make a drawing of it when we had seen what else Kosseir had to show.
The fort stands close by, and we were taken to see the place where Desaix had quartered some troops, and where these French soldiers pined, during two years, for their native country, until they were hurriedly dislodged by the Anglo-British force under Baird. Our Maltese friend, being a British subject, pointed out with pride the gate through which the English and Indian soldiers effected an entrance, and at the back of the fort he showed us from whence the poor Frenchmen escaped to try and reach the Nile across the desert. How many succeeded, history does not relate. Knowing what preparations have to be made to make a desert journey, it is awful to contemplate the fate of these soldiers with only the food they could hurriedly grab up, and the wells guarded by the enemy. We are told that the British troops reached Keneh, and that the French had by that time evacuated Egypt. General Desaix had joined Napoleon’s army more than a year before, and fell in the battle of Marengo on the 14th of June 1800.
His brilliant career was cut short while only in his thirty-second year, his greatest achievement being the conquest of Upper Egypt, where he became known by the natives as the Just Sultan.
The custodian of the fort told us how the British fired water from their ships on to the ammunition of the French, and the latter, then being unable to return the fire, tried to reach Keneh as best they could. Strange things are often related by Arab custodians!
The main street of Kosseir is picturesque, with the minaret towering above the deserted shops, or rather it might have been, had the coloured stuffs and fruits and a busy throng been there to furnish it with the usual properties which make up an oriental street picture. The two stalls which had something to sell had no other customers than a swarm of flies, and we should hardly have had the heart to wake the shopman from his profound sleep had there been anything worth buying. The Mudir had had the little quay repaired, as well as the wooden pier which formed the breakwater to a small harbour. He had also fenced in a space of about a hundred yards square in the sea, so as to allow any one who wished to bathe to be able to do so in safety from the sharks. We mentioned that one of our party had bathed near our camp, and he was horrified, for the sea, he told us, was alive with sharks. ‘Had we not noticed a shark lying on the strand with its throat cut?’ We mentioned that we had, though not till after our friend’s bath. We were then told that a youth was standing there with his feet just in the sea when a shark made a dash at him, and, missing his prey, landed too high on the beach to be able to get back into the water before the youth cut its throat. This had only happened a couple of days before our arrival at the coast.
Two high-sterned dhows were beached near here for repairs; they added considerably to the characteristics of the place, which had something un-Egyptian about them. Kosseir is a Red Sea port, and it bears something, hard to define, but which is not to be observed till on this side of Suez. The people dressed as Egyptians; but on studying their features more carefully, one could discern that nothing of the old Egyptian stock was here. Their blood is Arabian intermixed with that of the Ababdi tribe. We were neither pestered with beggars nor importuned by the officiousness met with in the Nile resorts.
I returned to the mosque to start my drawing, and remained there until it was time to join our tea-party at the camp. Two or three men dropped in during the midday prayer, but the caretaker beckoned to me not to move my easel. Some boys arrived later on and sat around an old sheykh who expounded the Koran to them.
A date stone of two hundred years ago, probably only alluded to a restoration. I should place the original construction some five centuries earlier, though in an out-of-the-world place such as this architectural style changes very slowly.
I arrived at the camp in time for our tea-party. The governor regretted that Mrs. Wirth was not well enough to accompany him; his daughter was a pretty girl of about thirteen years of age. The poor child seemed very conscious of having outgrown her frock, judging from the way she kept smoothing it down over her knees. She had plenty to say for herself, and could say it in four different languages. Her father regretted that no means of educating the child existed except such instruction as her mother could give her, and that there was not another child in Kosseir for her to associate with. ‘If I could only get her to Alexandria and get there myself also,’ he said with a sigh. ‘It is four years since we had an opportunity of getting her some frocks.’ The poor girl coloured up and seemed more conscious of her legs than ever, and had the last pleat of her skirt not been newly let out to its full limits, we should probably not have seen her at our party.
The Austrian mechanic was pleased to find some one who could speak German; but he, poor man, seemed conscious of being without a collar to his shirt. It was difficult to put him at his ease till he got well launched into the subject of what a dismal hole Kosseir was to live in. The Syrian doctor seemed disappointed at not seeing a possible patient amongst us; we all looked in disgustingly rude health. We promised to look in at his dispensary the next day, where he assured us he had the means of coping with every ailment; but as the whole population was always in the best of health, time hung heavily on his hands.