Warner Charles Dudley
My Winter on the Nile
Getting away from this idyllic scene, which has not a single resemblance to any civilized town, we work our way up to El Hamra late in the afternoon. This is the landing-place for Asioot; the city itself is a couple of miles inland, and could be reached by a canal at high water. We have come again into an active world, and there are evidences that this is a busy place. New boats are on the stocks, and there is a forge for making some sort of machinery. So much life has not been met with since we left Cairo. The furling our great sail is a fine sight as we round in to the bank, the sailors crawling out on the slender, hundred-feet-long yard, like monkeys, and drawing up the hanging slack with both feet and hands.
It is long since we have seen so many or so gaily dressed people as are moving on shore; a procession of camels passes along; crowds of donkeys are pushed down to the boat by their noisy drivers; old women come to sell eggs, and white grease that pretends to be butter, and one of them pulls some live pigeons from a bag. We lie at the mud-bank, and classes of half-clad children, squatting in the sand, study us. Two other dahabeëhs are moored near us, their passengers sitting under the awning and indolently observing the novel scene, book in hand, after the manner of Nile voyagers.
These are the pictures constantly recurring on the river, only they are never the same in grouping or color, and they never weary one. It is wonderful, indeed, how satisfying the Nile is in itself and how little effort travelers make for the society of each other. Boats pass or meet and exchange salutes, but with little more effusion than if they were on the Thames. Nothing afloat is so much like a private house as a dahabeëh, and I should think, by what we hear, that sociability decreases on the Nile with increase of travel and luxury.
CHAPTER XII.—SPENDING CHRISTMAS ON THE NILE
PROBABLY this present writer has the distinction of being the only one who has written about the Nile and has not invented a new way of spelling the name of the town whose many minarets and brown roofs are visible over the meadows.
It is written Asioot, Asyoot, Asiüt, Ssout, Siôout, Osyoot, Osioot, O’Sioôt, Siüt, Sioot, O’siout, Si-ôôt, Siout, Syouth, and so on, indefinitely. People take the liberty to spell names as they sound to them, and there is consequently a pleasing variety in the names of all places, persons, and things in Egypt; and when we add to the many ways of spelling an Arabic word, the French the German, and the English translation or equivalent, you are in a hopeless jumble of nomenclature. The only course is to strike out boldly and spell everything as it seems good in your eyes, and differently in different moods. Even the name of the Prophet takes on half a dozen forms; there are not only ninety-nine names of the attributes of God, but I presume there are ninety-nine ways of spelling each of them.
This Asioot has always been a place of importance. It was of old called Lycopolis, its divinity being the wolf or the wolf-headed god; and in a rock-mountain behind the town were not only cut the tombs of the inhabitants, but there were deposited the mummies of the sacred wolves. About these no one in Asioot knows or cares much, to day. It is a city of twenty-five thousand people, with a good many thriving Copt Christians; the terminus, to day, of the railway, and the point of arrival and departure of the caravans to and from Darfoor—a desert march of a month. Here are made the best clay pipe-bowls in Egypt, and a great variety of ornamented dishes and vases in clay, which the traveler buys and doesn’t know what to do with. The artisans also work up elephants’ tusks and ostrich feathers into a variety of “notions.”
Christmas day opens warm and with an air of festivity. Great palm-branches are planted along the bank and form an arbor over the gang-plank. The cabin is set with them, in gothic arches over windows and doors, with yellow oranges at the apex. The forward and saloon decks are completely embowered in palms, which also run up the masts and spars. The crew have entered with zeal into the decoration, and in the early morning transformed the boat into a floating bower of greenery; the effect is Oriental, but it is difficult to believe that this is really Christmas day. The weather is not right, for one thing. It is singularly pleasant, in fact like summer. We miss the usual snow and ice and the hurtling of savage winds that bring suffering to the poor and make charity meritorious. Besides, the Moslems are celebrating the day for us and, I fear, regarding it simply as an occasion of backsheesh. The sailors are very quick to understand so much of our religion as is profitable to themselves.
In such weather as this it would be possible for “shepherds to watch their flocks by night.”
Early in the day we have a visit from Wasef el Khyat, the American consul here for many years, a Copt and a native of Asioot, who speaks only Arabic; he is accompanied by one of his sons, who was educated at the American college in Beyrout. So far does that excellent institution send its light; scattered rays to be sure, but it is from it and such schools that the East is getting the real impetus of civilization.
I do not know what the consul at Asioot does for America, but our flag is of great service to him, protecting his property from the exactions of his own government. Wasef is consequently very polite to all Americans, and while he sipped coffee and puffed cigars in our cabin he smiled unutterable things. This is the pleasantest kind of intercourse in a warm climate, where a puff and an occasional smile will pass for profuse expressions of social enjoyment.
His excellency Shakirr Pasha, the governor of this large and rich province, has sent word that he is about to put carriages and donkeys at our disposal, but this probably meant that the consul would do it; and the consul has done it. The carriage awaits us on the bank. It is a high, paneled, venerable ark, that moves with trembling dignity; and we choose the donkeys as less pretentious and less liable to come to pieces. This is no doubt the only carriage between Cairo and Kartoom, and its appearance is regarded as an event.
Our first visit is paid to the Pasha, who has been only a few days in his province, and has not yet transferred his harem from Cairo. We are received with distinguished ceremony, to the lively satisfaction of Abd-el-Atti, whose face beams like the morning, in bringing together such “distinguish” people as his friend the Pasha, and travelers in his charge. The Pasha is a courtly Turk, of most elegant manners, and the simplicity of high breeding, a man of the world and one of the ablest governors in Egypt. The room into which we are ushered, through a dirty alley and a mud-wall court is hardly in keeping with the social stilts on which we are all walking. In our own less favored land, it would answer very well for a shed or an out-house to store beans in, or for a “reception room” for sheep; a narrow oblong apartment, covered with a flat roof of palm logs, with a couple of dirty little windows high up, the once whitewashed walls stained variously, the cheap divans soiled.
The hospitality of this gorgeous salon was offered us with effusion, and we sat down and exchanged compliments as if we had been in a palace. I am convinced that there is nothing like the Oriental imagination. An attendant (and the servants were in keeping with the premises) brought in fingans of coffee. The servant presents the cup in his right hand, holding the bottom of the silver receptacle in his thumb and finger; he takes it away empty with both hands, placing the left under and the right on top of it. These formalities are universal and all-important. Before taking it you ought to make the salutation, by touching breast, lips, and forehead, with the right hand—an acknowledgment not to the servant but to the master. Cigars are then handed round, for it is getting to be considered on the Nile that cigars are more “swell” than pipes; more’s the pity.
The exchange of compliments meantime went on, and on the part of the Pasha with a fineness, adroitness, and readiness that showed the practice of a lifetime in social fence. He surpassed our most daring invention with a smiling ease, and topped all our extravagances with an art that made our pool efforts appear clumsy. And what the effect would have been if we could have understood the flowery Arabic I can only guess; nor can we ever know how many flowers of his own the dragoman cast in.
“His excellency say that he feel the honor of your visit.”
“Say to his excellency that although we are only spending one day in his beautiful capital, we could not forego the-pleasure of paying our respects to his excellency.” This sentence is built by the critic, and strikes us all favorably.
“His excellency himself not been here many days, and sorry he not know you coming, to make some preparations to receive you.”
“Thank his excellency for the palms that decorate our boat.”
“They are nothing, nothing, he say not mention it; the dahabeëh look very different now if the Nile last summer had not wash away all his flower-garden. His excellency say, how you enjoyed your voyage?”
“It has been very pleasant; only for a day or two we have wanted wind.”
“Your misfortune, his excellency say, his pleasure; it give him the opportunity of your society. But he say if you want wind he sorry no wind; it cause him to suffer that you not come here sooner.”
“Will his excellency dine with us to-day?”
“He say he think it too much honor.”
“Assure his excellency that we feel that the honor is conferred by him.”
And he consents to come. After we have taken our leave, the invitation is extended to the consul, who is riding with us.
The way to the town is along a winding, shabby embankment, raised above high water, and shaded with sycamore-trees. It is lively with people on foot and on donkeys, in more colored and richer dress than that worn by country-people; the fields are green, the clover is springing luxuriantly, and spite of the wrecks of unburned-brick houses, left gaping by the last flood, and spite of the general untidiness of everything, the ride is enjoyable. I don’t know why it is that an irrigated country never is pleasing on close inspection, neither is an irrigated garden. Both need to be seen from a little distance, which conceals the rawness of the alternately dry and soaked soil, the frequent thinness of vegetation, the unkempt swampy appearance of the lowest levels, and the painful whiteness of paths never wet and the dustiness of trees unwashed by rain. There is no Egyptian landscape or village that is neat, on near inspection.
Asioot has a better entrance than most towns, through an old gateway into the square (which is the court of the palace); and the town has extensive bazaars and some large dwellings. But as we ride through it, we are always hemmed in by mud-walls, twisting through narrow alleys, encountering dirt and poverty at every step. We pass through the quarter of the Ghawâzees, who, since their banishment from Cairo, form little colonies in all the large Nile towns. There are the dancing-women whom travelers are so desirous of seeing; the finest-looking women and the most abandoned courtesans, says Mr. Lane, in Egypt. In showy dresses of bright yellow and red, adorned with a profusion of silver-gilt necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, they sit at the doors of their hovels in idle expectation. If these happen to be the finest-looking women in Egypt, the others are wise in keeping their veils on.
Outside the town we find a very pretty cemetery of the Egyptian style, staring white tombs, each dead person resting under his own private little stucco oven. Near it is encamped a caravan just in from Darfoor, bringing cinnamon, gum-arabic, tusks, and ostrich feathers. The camels are worn with the journey; their drivers have a fierce and free air in striking contrast with the bearing of the fellaheen. Their noses are straight, their black hair is long and shaggy, their garment is a single piece of coarse brown cloth; they have the wildness of the desert.
The soft limestone ledge back of the town is honeycombed with grottoes and tombs; rising in tiers from the bottom to the top. Some of them have merely square-cut entrances into a chamber of moderate size, in some part of which, or in a passage beyond, is a pit cut ten or twenty feet deep in the rock, like a grave, for the mummy. One of them has a magnificent entrance through a doorway over thirty feet high and fifteen deep; upon the jambs are gigantic figures cut in the rock. Some of the chambers are vast and were once pillared, and may have served for dwellings. These excavations are very old. The hieroglyphics and figures on the walls are not in relief on the stone, but cut in at the outer edge and left in a gradual swell in the center—an intaglio relievato. The drawing is generally spirited, and the figures show knowledge of form and artistic skill. It is wonderful that such purely conventional figures, the head almost always in profile and the shoulders square to the front, can be so expressive. On one wall is a body of infantry marching, with the long pointed shields mentioned by Xenophon in describing Egyptian troops. Everywhere are birds, gracefully drawn and true to species, and upon some of them the blue color is fresh. A ceiling of one grotto is wrought in ornamental squares—a “Greek pattern,” executed long before the time of the Greeks. Here we find two figures with the full face turned towards us, instead of the usual profile.
These tombs have served for a variety of purposes. As long as the original occupants rested here, no doubt their friends came and feasted and were mournfully merry in these sightly chambers overlooking the Nile. Long after they were turned out, Christian hermits nested in them, during that extraordinary period of superstition when men thought they could best secure their salvation by living like wild beasts in the deserts of Africa. Here one John of Lycopolis had his den, in which he stayed fifty years, without ever opening the door or seeing the face of a woman. At least, he enjoyed that reputation. Later, persecuted Christians dwelt in these tombs, and after them have come wanderers, and jackals, and houseless Arabs. I think I should rather live here than in Asioot; the tombs are cleaner and better built than the houses of the town, and there is good air here and no danger of floods.
When we are on the top of the bluff, the desert in broken ridges is behind us. The view is one of the best of the usual views from hills near the Nile, the elements of which are similar; the spectator has Egypt in all its variety at his feet. The valley here is broad, and we look a long distance up and down the river. The Nile twists and turns in its bed like one of the chimerical serpents sculptured in the chambers of the dead; canals wander from it through the plain; and groves of palms and lines of sycamores contrast their green with that of the fields. All this level expanse is now covered with wheat, barley and thick clover, and the green has a vividness that we have never seen in vegetation before. This owes somewhat to the brown contrast near at hand and something maybe to the atmosphere, but I think the growing grain has a lustre unknown to other lands. This smiling picture is enclosed by the savage frame of the desert, gaunt ridges of rocky hills, drifts of stones, and yellow sand that sends its hot tongues in long darts into the plain. At the foot of the mountain lies Asioot brown as the mud of the Nile, a city built of sun-dried bricks, but presenting a singular and not unpleasing appearance on account of the dozen white stone minarets, some of them worked like lace, which spring out of it.
The consul’s home is one of the best in the city, but outside it shows only a mud-wall like the meanest. Within is a paved court, and offices about it; the rooms above are large, many-windowed, darkened with blinds, and not unlike those of a plain house in America. The furniture is European mainly, and ugly, and of course out of place in Africa. We see only the male members of the family. Confectionery and coffee are served and some champagne, that must have been made by the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company; their champagne is well known in the Levant, and there is no known decoction that is like it. In my judgment, if it is proposed to introduce Christianity and that kind of wine into Egypt, the country would better be left as it is.
During our call the consul presents us fly-whisks with ivory handles, and gives the ladies beautiful fans of ostrich feathers mounted in ivory. These presents may have been due to a broad hint from the Pasha, who said to the consul at our interview in the morning:—
“I should not like to have these distinguished strangers go away without some remembrance of Asioot. I have not been here long; what is there to get for them?”
“O, your excellency, I will attend to that,” said the consul.
In the evening, with the dahabeëh beautifully decorated and hung with colored lanterns, upon the deck, which, shut in with canvas and spread with Turkish rugs, was a fine reception-room, we awaited our guests, as if we had been accustomed to this sort of thing in America from our infancy, and as if we usually celebrated Christmas outdoors, fans in hand, with fire-works. A stand for the exhibition of fireworks had been erected on shore. The Pasha was received as he stepped on board, with three rockets, (that being, I suppose, the number of his official “tails,”) which flew up into the sky and scattered their bursting bombs of color amid the stars, announcing to the English dahabeëhs, the two steamboats and the town of Asioot, that the governor of the richest province in Egypt was about to eat his dinner.
The dinner was one of those perfections that one likes to speak of only in confidential moments to dear friends. It wanted nothing either in number of courses or in variety, in meats, in confections, in pyramids of gorgeous construction, in fruits and flowers. There was something touching about the lamb roasted whole, reclining his head on his own shoulder. There was something tender about the turkey. There was a terrible moment when the plum-pudding was borne in on fire, as if it had been a present from the devil himself. The Pasha regarded it with distrust, and declined, like a wise man, to eat flame. I fear that the English have fairly introduced this dreadful dish into the Orient, and that the natives have come to think that all foreigners are Molochs who can best be pleased by offering up to them its indigestible ball set on fire of H. It is a fearful spectacle to see this heathen people offering this incense to a foreign idol, in the subserviency which will sacrifice even religion to backsheesh.
The conversation during dinner is mostly an exchange of compliments, in the art of which the Pasha is a master, displaying in it a wit, a variety of resource and a courtliness that make the game a very entertaining one. The Arabic language gives full play to this sort of social espièglerie, and lends a delicacy to encounters of compliment which the English language does not admit.
Coffee and pipes are served on deck, and the fire-works begin to tear and astonish the night. The Khedive certainly employs very good pyrotechnists, and the display by Abd-el-Atti and his equally excited helpers although simple is brilliant. The intense delight that the soaring and bursting of a rocket give to Abd-el-Atti is expressed in unconscious and unrestrained demonstration. He might be himself in flames but he would watch the flight of the rushing stream of fire, jumping up and down in his anxiety for it to burst:—
“There! there! that’s—a he, hooray!”
Every time one bursts, scattering its colored stars, the crew, led by the dragoman, cheer, “Heep, heep, hooray! heep, heep, hooray!”
A whirligig spins upon the river, spouting balls of fire, and the crew come in with a “Heep, heep, hooray! heep, heep, hooray!”
The steamer, which has a Belgian prince on board, illuminates, and salutes with shot-guns. In the midst of a fusillade of rockets and Roman candles, the crew develop a new accomplishment. Drilled by the indomitable master of ceremonies, they attempt the first line of that distinctively American melody,
“We won’t go home till morning.”
They really catch the air, and make a bubble, bubble of sounds, like automata, that somewhat resembles the words. Probably they think that it is our national anthem, or perhaps a Christmas hymn. No doubt, “won’t-go-home-till-morning” sort of Americans have been up the river before us.
The show is not over when the Pasha pleads an engagement to take a cup of tea with the Belgian prince, and asks permission to retire. He expresses his anguish at leaving us, and he will not depart if we say “no.” Of course, our anguish in letting the Pasha go exceeds his suffering in going, but we sacrifice ourselves to the demand of his station, and permit him to depart. At the foot of the cabin stairs he begs us to go no further, insisting that we do him too much honor to come so far.
The soft night grows more brilliant. Abd-el-Atti and his minions are still blazing away. The consul declares that Asioot in all his life has never experienced a night like this. We express ourselves as humbly thankful in being the instruments of giving Asioot (which is asleep there two miles off) such an “eye-opener.” (This remark has a finer sound when translated into Arabic.)
The spectacle closes by a voyage out upon the swift river in the sandal. We take Roman candles, blue, red, and green lights and floaters which Abd-el-Atti lets off, while the crew hoarsely roar, “We won’t go home till morning,” and mingle “Heep, heep, hooray,” with “Hà Yàlësah, hâ Yâlësah.”
The long range of lights on the steamers, the flashing lines and pyramids of colors on our own dahabeëh, the soft June-like night, the moon coming up in fleecy clouds, the broad Nile sparkling under so many fires, kindled on earth and in the sky, made a scene unique, and as beautiful as any that the Arabian Nights suggest.
To end all, there was a hubbub on shore among the crew, caused by one of them who was crazy with hasheesh, and threatened to murder the reïs and dragoman, if he was not permitted to go on board. It could be demonstrated that he was less likely to slay them if he did not come on board, and he was therefore sent to the governor’s lock-up, with a fair prospect of going into the Khedive’s army. We left him behind, and about one o’clock in the morning stole away up the river with a gentle and growing breeze.
Net result of pleasure:—one man in jail, and Abd-el-Atti’s wrist so seriously burned by the fire-works, that he has no use of his arm for weeks. But, “‘twas a glorious victory.” For a Christmas, however, it was a little too much like the Fourth of July.
