Warner Charles Dudley
My Winter on the Nile
CHAPTER XX.—ON THE BORDERS OF THE DESERT
IN PASSING the First Cataract of the Nile we pass an ancient boundary line; we go from the Egypt of old to the Ethiopia of old; we go from the Egypt proper of to-day, into Nubia. We find a different country, a different river; the people are of another race; they have a different language. We have left the mild, lazy, gentle fellaheen—a mixed lot, but in general of Arabic blood—and come to Barâbra, whose district extends from Philæ to the Second Cataract, a freer, manlier, sturdier people altogether. There are two tribes of them, the Kendos and the Nooba; each has its own language.
Philæ was always the real boundary line, though the Pharaohs pushed their frontier now and again, down towards the Equator, and built temples and set up their images, as at Aboo Simbel, as at Samneh, and raked the south land for slaves and ivory, concubines and gold. But the Ethiopians turned the tables now and again, and conquered Egypt, and reigned in the palaces of the Pharaohs, taking that title even, and making their names dreaded as far as Judea and Assyria.
The Ethiopians were cousins indeed of the old Egyptians, and of the Canaanites, for they were descendants of Cush, as the Egyptians were of Mizriam, and the Canaanites were of Canaan; three of the sons of Ham. The Cushites, or Ethiops, although so much withdrawn from the theater of history, have done their share of fighting—the main business of man hitherto. Besides quarrels with their own brethren, they had often the attentions of the two chief descendants of Shem,—the Jews and the Arabs; and after Mohammed’s coming, the Arabs descended into Nubia and forced the inhabitants into their religion at the point of the sword. Even the sons of Japhet must have their crack at these children of the “Sun-burned.” It was a Roman prefect who, to avenge an attack on Svene by a warlike woman, penetrated as far south as El Berkel (of the present day), and overthrew Candace the Queen of the Ethiopians in Napata, her capital; the large city, also called Meroë, of which Herodotus heard such wonders.
Beyond Ethiopia lies the vast, black cloud of Negroland. These negroes, with the crisp, woolly hair, did not descend from anybody, according to the last reports; neither from Shem, Ham nor Japhet. They have no part in the royal house of Noah. They are left out in the heat. They are the puzzle of ethnologists, the mystery of mankind. They are the real aristocracy of the world, their origin being lost in the twilight of time; no one else can trace his descent so far back and come to nothing. M. Lenormant says the black races have no tradition of the Deluge. They appear to have been passed over altogether, then. Where were they hidden? When we first know Central Africa they are there. Where did they come from? The great effort of ethnologists is to get them dry-shod round the Deluge, since derivation from Noah is denied them. History has no information how they came into Africa. It seems to me that, in history, whenever we hear of the occupation of a new land, there is found in it a primitive race, to be driven out or subdued. The country of the primitive negro is the only one that has never invited the occupation of a more powerful race. But the negro blood, by means of slavery, has been extensively distributed throughout the Eastern world.
These reflections did not occur to us the morning we left Philæ. It was too early. In fact, the sun was just gilding “Pharaoh’s bed,” as the beautiful little Ptolemaic temple is called, when we spread sail and, in the shadow of the broken crags and savage rocks, began to glide out of the jaws of this wild pass. At early morning everything has the air of adventure. It was as if we were discoverers, about to come into a new African kingdom at each turn in the swift stream.
One must see, he carnot imagine, the havoc and destruction hereabout, the grotesque and gigantic fragments of rock, the islands of rock, the precipices of rock, made by the torrent when it broke through here. One of these islands is Biggeh—all rocks, not enough soft spot on it to set a hen. The rocks are piled up into the blue sky; from their summit we get the best view of Philæ—the jewel set in this rim of stone.
Above Philæ we pass the tomb of a holy man, high on the hill, and underneath it, clinging to the slope, the oldest mosque in Nubia, the Mosque of Belal, falling now into ruin, but the minaret shows in color no sign of great age. How should it in this climate, where you might leave a pair of white gloves upon the rocks for a year, and expect to find them unsoiled.
“How old do you suppose that mosque is Abd-el-Atti?”
“I tink about twelve hundred years old. Him been built by the Friends of our prophet when they come up here to make the people believe.”
I like this euphuism. “But,” we ask, “suppose they didn’t believe, what then?”
“When thim believe, all right; when thim not believe, do away wid ‘em.”
“But they might believe something else, if not what Mohammed believed.”
“Well, what our Prophet say? Mohammed, he say, find him anybody believe in God, not to touch him; find him anybody believe in the Christ, not to touch him; find him anybody believe in Moses, not to touch him; find him believe in the prophets, not to touch him; find him believe in bit wood, piece stone, do way wid him. Not so? Men worship something wood, stone, I can’t tell—I tink dis is nothing.”
Abd-el-Atti always says the “Friends” of Mohammed, never followers or disciples. It is a pleasant word, and reminds us of our native land. Mohammed had the good sense that our politicians have. When he wanted anything, a city taken, a new strip of territory added, a “third term,” or any trifle, he “put himself in the hands of his friends.”
The Friends were successful in this region. While the remote Abyssinians retained Christianity, the Nubians all became Moslems, and so remain to this day.
“You think, then, Abd-el-Atti, that the Nubians believed?”
“Thim ‘bliged. But I tink these fellows, all of ‘em, Musselmens as far as the throat; it don’t go lower down.”
The story is that this mosque was built by one of Mohammed’s captains after the great battle here with the Infidels—the Nubians. Those who fell in the fight, it is also only tradition, were buried in the cemetery near Assouan, and they are martyrs: to this day the Moslems who pass that way take off their slippers and shoes.
After the battle, as the corpses of the slain lay in indistinguishable heaps, it was impossible to tell who were martyrs and who were unbelievers. Mohammed therefore ordered that they should bury as Moslems all those who had large feet, and pleasant faces, with the mark of prayer on the forehead. The bodies of the others were burned as infidels.
As we sweep along, the mountains are still high on either side, and the strips of verdure are very slight. On the east bank, great patches of yellow sand, yellow as gold, and yet reddish in some lights, catch the sun.
I think it is the finest morning I ever saw, for clearness and dryness. The thermometer indicates only 60°, and yet it is not too cool. The air is like wine. The sky is absolutely cloudless, and of wonderful clarity. Here is a perfectly pure and sweet atmosphere. After a little, the wind freshens, and it is somewhat cold on deck, but the sky is like sapphire; let the wind blow for a month, it will raise no cloud, nor any film of it.
Everything is wanting in Nubia that would contribute to the discomfort of a winter residence:—
It never rains;
There is never any dew above Philæ;
There are no flies;
There are no fleas;
There are no bugs, nor any insects whatever.
The attempt to introduce fleas into Nubia by means of dahabeëhs has been a failure.
In fact there is very little animal life; scarcely any birds are seen; fowls of all sorts are rare. There are gazelles, however, and desert hares, and chameleons. Our chameleons nearly starved for want of flies. There are big crocodiles and large lizards.
In a bend a few miles above Philæ is a whirlpool called Shaymtel Wah, from which is supposed to be a channel communicating under the mountain to the Great Oasis one hundred miles distant. The popular belief in these subterranean communications is very common throughout the East. The holy well, Zem-Zem, at Mecca, has a connection with a spring at El Gebel in Syria. I suppose that is perfectly well known. Abd-el-Atti has tasted the waters of both; and they are exactly alike; besides, did he not know of a pilgrim who lost his drinking-cup in Zem-Zem and recovered it in El Gebel.
This Nubia is to be sure but a river with a colored border, but I should like to make it seem real to you and not a mere country of the imagination. People find room to live here; life goes on after a fashion, and every mile there are evidences of a mighty civilization and a great power which left its record in gigantic works. There was a time, before the barriers broke away at Silsilis, when this land was inundated by the annual rise; the Nile may have perpetually expanded above here into a lake, as Herodotus reports.
We sail between low ridges of rocky hills, with narrow banks of green and a few palms, but occasionally there is a village of square mud-houses. At Gertassee, boldly standing out on a rocky platform, are some beautiful columns, the remains of a temple built in the Roman time. The wind is strong and rather colder with the turn of noon; the nearer we come to the tropics the colder it becomes. The explanation is that we get nothing but desert winds; and the desert is cool at this season; that is, it breeds at night cool air, although one does not complain of its frigidity who walks over it at midday.
After passing Tafa, a pretty-looking village in the palms, which boasts ruins both pagan and Christian, we come to rapids and scenery almost as wild and lovely as that at Philæ. The river narrows, there are granite rocks and black boulders in the stream; we sail for a couple of miles in swift and deep water, between high cliffs, and by lofty rocky islands—not without leafage and some cultivation, and through a series of rapids, not difficult but lively. And so we go cheerily on, through savage nature and gaunt ruins of forgotten history; past Kalâbshe, where are remains of the largest temple in Nubia; past Bayt el Wellee—“the house of the saint”—where Rameses II. hewed a beautiful temple out of the rock; past Gerf Hossdyn, where Rameses II. hewed a still larger temple out of the rock and covered it with his achievements, pictures in which he appears twelve feet high, and slaying small enemies as a husbandman threshes wheat with a flail. I should like to see an ancient stone wall in Egypt, where this Barnum of antiquity wasn’t advertising himself.
We leave him flailing the unfortunate; at eight in the evening we are still going on, first by the light of the crescent moon, and then by starlight, which is like a pale moonlight, so many and lustrous are the stars; and last, about eleven o’clock we go aground, and stop a little below Dakkeh, or seventy-one miles from Philæ, that being our modest run for the day.
Dakkeh, by daylight, reveals itself as a small mud-village attached to a large temple. You would not expect to find a temple here, but its great pylon looms over the town and it is worth at least a visit. To see such a structure in America we would travel a thousand miles; the traveler on the Nile debates whether he will go ashore.
The bank is lined with the natives who have something to sell, eggs, milk, butter in little greasy “pats,” and a sheep. The men are, as to features and complexion, rather Arabic than Nubian. The women have the high cheek-bones and broad faces of our Indian squaws, whom they resemble in a general way. The little girls who wear the Nubian costume (a belt with fringe) and strings of beads, are not so bad; some of them well formed. The morning is cool and the women all wear some outer garment, so that the Nubian costume is not seen in its simplicity, except as it is worn by children. I doubt if it is at any season. So far as we have observed the Nubian women they are as modest in their dress as their Egyptian sisters. Perhaps ugliness and modesty are sisters in their country. All the women and girls have their hair braided in a sort of plait in front, and heavily soaked with grease, so that it looks as if they had on a wig or a frontlet of leather; it hangs in small, hard, greasy curls, like leathern thongs, down each side. The hair appears never to be undone—only freshly greased every morning. Nose-rings and earrings abound.
This handsome temple was began by Ergamenes, an Ethiopian king ruling at Meroë, at the time of the second Ptolemy, during the Greek period; and it was added to both by Ptolemies and Cæsars. This Nubia would seem to have been in possession of Ethiopians and Egyptians turn and turn about, and, both having the same religion, the temples prospered.
Ergamenes has gained a reputation by a change he made in his religion, as it was practiced in Meroë. When the priests thought a king had reigned long enough it was their custom to send him notice that the gods had ordered him to die; and the king, who would rather die than commit an impiety, used to die. But Ergamenes tried another method, which he found worked just as well; he assembled all the priests, and slew them—a very sensible thing on his part.
You would expect such a man to build a good temple. The sculptures are very well executed, whether they are of his time, or owe their inspiration to Berenice and Cleopatra; they show greater freedom and variety than those of most temples; the figures of lion, monkeys, cows, and other animals are excellent; and there is a picture of a man playing on a musical instrument, a frame with strings stretched over it, played like a harp but not harp shaped—the like of which is seen nowhere else. The temple has the appearance of a fortification as well as a place of worship. The towers of the propylon are ascended by interior flights of stairs, and have, one above the other, four good-sized chambers. The stairways and the rooms are lighted by slits in the wall about an inch in diameter on the outside; but cut with a slant from the interior through some five feet of solid stone. These windows are exactly like those in European towers, and one might easily imagine himself in a Middle Age fortification. The illusion is heightened by the remains of Christian paintings on the walls, fresh in color, and in style very like those of the earliest Christian art in Italian churches. In the temple we are attended by a Nubian with a long and threatening spear, such as the people like to carry here; the owner does not care for blood, however; he only wants a little backsheesh.
Beyond Dakkeh the country opens finely; the mountains fall back, and we look a long distance over the desert on each side, the banks having only a few rods of green. Far off in the desert on either hand and in front, are sharp pyramidal mountains, in ranges, in groups, the resemblance to pyramids being very striking. The atmosphere as to purity is extraordinary. Simply to inspire it is a delight for which one may well travel thousands of miles.
We pass small patches of the castor-oil plant, and of a reddish-stemmed bush, bearing the Indian bendigo, Arabic bahima, the fruit a sort of bean in appearance and about as palatable. The castor-oil is much used by the women as a hair-dressing, but they are not fastidious; they use something else if oil is wanting. The demand for butter for this purpose raised the price of it enormously this morning at Dakkeh.
In the afternoon, waiting for wind, we walk ashore and out upon the naked desert—the desert which is broken only by an occasional oasis, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea; it has a basis of limestone, strewn with sand like gold-dust, and a detritus of stone as if it had been scorched by fire and worn by water. There is a great pleasure in strolling over this pure waste blown by the free air. We visit a Nubian village, and buy some spurious scarabæi off the necks of the ladies of the town—alas, for rural simplicity! But these women are not only sharp, they respect themselves sufficiently to dress modestly and even draw their shawls over their faces. The children take the world as they find it, as to clothes.
The night here, there being no moisture in the air is as brilliant as the day; I have never seen the moon and stars so clear elsewhere. These are the evenings that invite to long pipes and long stories. Abd-el-Atti opens his budget from time to time, as we sit on deck and while the time with anecdotes and marvels out of old Arab chronicles, spiced with his own ready wit and singular English. Most of them are too long for these pages; but here is an anecdote which, whether true or not illustrates the character of old Mohammed Ali:—
“Mohammed Ali sent one of his captains, name of Walee Kasheef, to Derr, capital of Nubia (you see it by and by, very fashionable place, like I see ‘em in Hydee Park, what you call Rotten Row). Walee when he come there, see the women, their hair all twisted up and stuck together with grease and castor-oil, and their bodies covered with it. He called the sheykhs together and made them present of soap, and told them to make the women clean the hair and wash themselves, and make themselves fit for prayer. It was in accordin’ to the Moslem religion so to do.
“The Nubians they not like this part of our religion, they not like it at all. They send the sheykhs down to have conversation with Mohammed Ali, who been stop at Esneh. They complain of what Walee done. Mohammed send for Walee, and say, ‘What this you been done in Nubia?’ ‘Nothing, your highness, ‘cept trying to make the Nubians conform to the religion.’ ‘Well,’ says old Mohammed, ‘I not send you up there as a priest; I send you up to get a little money. Don’t you trouble the Nubians. We don’t care if they go to Gennéh or Gehennem, if you get the money.’.rdquo;
So the Nubians were left in sin and grease, and taxed accordingly. And at this day the taxes are even heavier. Every date-palm and every sakiya is taxed. A sakiya sometimes pays three pounds a year, when there is not a piece of fertile land for it to water three rods square.
CHAPTER XXI—ETHIOPIA
IT IS a sparkling morning at Wady Saboda; we have the desert and some of its high, scarred, and sandy pyramidal peaks close to us, but as is usual where a wady, or valley, comes to the river, there is more cultivated land. We see very little of the temple of Rameses II. in this “Valley of the Lions,” nor of the sphinxes in front of it. The desert sand has blown over it and over it in drifts like snow, so that we walk over the buried sanctuary, greatly to our delight. It is a pleasure to find one adytum into which we cannot go and see this Rameses pretending to make offerings, but really, as usual, offering to show himself.
At the village under the ledges, many of the houses are of stone, and the sheykh has a pretentious stone enclosure with little in it, all to himself. Shadoofs are active along the bank, and considerable crops of wheat, beans, and corn are well forward. We stop to talk with a bright-looking Arab, who employs men to work his shadoofs, and lives here in an enclosure of cornstalks, with a cornstalk kennel in one corner, where he and his family sleep. There is nothing pretentious about this establishment, but the owner is evidently a man of wealth, and, indeed, he has the bearing of a shrewd Yankee. He owns a camel, two donkeys, several calves and two cows, and two young Nubian girls for wives, black as coal and greased, but rather pleasant-faced. He has also two good guns—appears to have duplicates of nearly everything. Out of the cornstalk shanty his wives bring some handsome rugs for us to sit on.
The Arab accompanies us on our walk, as a sort of host of the country, and we are soon joined by others, black fellows; some of them carry the long flint-lock musket, for which they seem to have no powder; and all wear a knife in a sheath on the left arm; but they are as peaceable friendly folk as you would care to meet, and simple-minded. I show the Arab my field-glass, an object new to his experience. He looks through it, as I direct, and is an astonished man, making motions with his hand, to indicate how the distant objects are drawn towards him, laughing with a soft and childlike delight, and then lowering the glass, looks at it, and cries, “Bismillah! Bismillah,” an ejaculation of wonder, and also intended to divert any misfortune from coming upon him on account of his indulgence in this pleasure.
He soon gets the use of the glass and looks beyond the river and all about, as if he were discovering objects unknown to him before. The others all take a turn at it, and are equally astonished and delighted. But when I cause them to look through the large end at a dog near by, and they see him remove far off in the desert, their astonishment is complete. My comrade’s watch interested them nearly as much, although they knew its use; they could never get enough of its ticking and of looking at its works, and they concluded that the owner of it must be a Pasha.
The men at work dress in the slight manner of the ancient Egyptians; the women, however, wear garments covering them, and not seldom hide the face at our approach. But the material of their dress is not always of the best quality; an old piece of sacking makes a very good garment for a Nubian woman. Most of them wear some trinkets, beads or bits of silver or carnelian round the neck, and heavy bracelets of horn. The boys have not yet come into their clothing, but the girls wear the leathern belt and fringe adorned with shells.
The people have little, but they are not poor. It may be that this cornstalk house of our friend is only his winter residence, while his shadoof is most active, and that he has another establishment in town. There are too many sakiyas in operation for this region to be anything but prosperous, apparently. They are going all night as we sail along, and the screaming is weird enough in the stillness. I should think that a prisoner was being tortured every eighth of a mile on the bank. We are never out of hearing of their shrieks. But the cry is not exactly that of pain; it is rather a song than a cry, with an impish squeak in it, and a monotonous iteration of one idea, like all the songs here. It always repeats one sentence, which sounds like Iskander logheh-n-e-e-e-n—whatever it is in Arabic; and there is of course a story about it. The king, Alexander, had concealed under his hair two horns. Unable to keep the secret to himself he told it in confidence to the sakiya; the sakiya couldn’t hold the news, but shrieked out, “Alexander has two horns,” and the other sakiyas got it; and the scandal went the length of the Nile, and never can be hushed.
The Arabs personify everything, and are as full of superstitions as the Scotch; peoples who have nothing in common except it may be that the extreme predestinationism of the one approaches the fatalism of the other—begetting in both a superstitious habit, which a similar cause produced in the Greeks. From talking of the sakiya we wander into stories illustrative of the credulity and superstition of the Egyptians. Charms and incantations are relied on for expelling diseases and warding off dangers. The snake-charmer is a person still in considerable request in towns and cities. Here in Nubia there is no need of his offices, for there are no snakes; but in Lower Egypt, where snakes are common, the mud-walls and dirt-floors of the houses permit them to come in and be at home with the family. Even in Cairo, where the houses are of brick, snakes are much feared, and the house that is reputed to have snakes in it cannot be rented. It will stand vacant like an old mansion occupied by a ghost in a Christian country. The snake-charmers take advantage of this popular fear.
Once upon a time when Abd-el-Atti was absent from the city, a snake-charmer came to his house, and told his sister that he divined that there were snakes in the house. “My sister,” the story goes on, “never see any snake to house, but she woman, and much ‘fraid of snakes, and believe what him say. She told the charmer to call out the snakes. He set to work his mumble, his conjor—(’.xorcism’. yes, dat’s it, exorcism ‘em, and bring out a snake. She paid him one dollar.
“Then the conjuror say, ‘This the wife; the husband still in the house and make great trouble if he not got out.’.rdquo;
“He want him one pound for get the husband out, and my sister give it.
“When I come home I find my sister very sick, very sick indeed, and I say what is it? She tell me the story that the house was full of snakes and she had a man call them out, but the fright make her long time ill.
“I said, you have done very well to get the snakes out, what could we do with a house full of the nasty things? And I said, I must get them out of another house I have—house I let him since to machinery.
“Machinery? For what kind of machinery! Steam-engines?”
“No, misheenary—have a school in it.”
“Oh, missionary.”
“Yes, let ‘em have it for bout three hundred francs less than I get before. I think the school good for Cairo. I send for the snake-charmer, and I say I have ‘nother house I think has snakes in it, and I ask him to divine and see. He comes back and says, my house is full of snakes, but he can charm them out.
“I say, good, I will pay you well. We appointed early next morning for the operation, and I agreed to meet the charmer at my house. I take with me big black fellow I have in the house, strong like a bull. When we get there I find the charmer there in front of the house and ready to begin. But I propose that we go in the house, it might make disturbance to the neighborhood to call so many serpents out into the street. We go in, and I sav, tell me the room of the most snakes. The charmer say, and as soon as we go in there, I make him sign the black fellow and he throw the charmer on the ground, and we tie him with a rope. We find in his bosom thirteen snakes and scorpions. I tell him I had no idea there were so many snakes in my house. Then I had the fellow before the Kadi; he had to pay back all the money he got from my sister and went to prison. But,” added Abd-el-Atti, “the doctor did not pay back the money for my sister’s illness.”
Alexandria was the scene of another snake story. The owner of a house there had for tenants an Italian and his wife, whose lease had expired, but who would not vacate the premises. He therefore hired a snake-charmer to go to the house one day when the family were out, and leave snakes in two of the rooms. When the lady returned and found a snake in one room she fled into another, but there another serpent raised his head and hissed at her. She was dreadfully frightened, and sent for the charmer, and had the snakes called out but she declared that she wouldn’t occupy such a house another minute. And the family moved out that day of their own accord. A novel writ of ejectment.
In the morning we touched bottom as to cold weather, the thermometer at sunrise going down to 47° it did, indeed, as we heard afterwards, go below 40° at Wady Haifa the next morning, but the days were sure to be warm enough. The morning is perfectly calm, and the depth of the blueness of the sky, especially as seen over the yellow desert sand and the blackened surface of the sandstone hills, is extraordinary. An artist’s representation of this color would be certain to be called an exaggeration. The skies of Lower Egypt are absolutely pale in comparison.
Since we have been in the tropics, the quality of the sky has been the same day and night—sometimes a turquoise blue, such as on rare days we get in America through a break in the clouds, but exquisitely delicate for all its depth. We passed the Tropic of Cancer in the night, somewhere about Dendodr, and did not see it. I did not know, till afterwards, that there had been any trouble about it. But it seems that it has been moved from Assouan, where Strabo put it and some modern atlases still place it, southward, to a point just below the ruins of the temple of Dendoor, where Osiris and Isis were worshipped. Probably the temple, which is thought to be of the time of Augustus and consequently is little respected by any antiquarian, was not built with any reference to the Tropic of Cancer; but the point of the turning of the sun might well have been marked by a temple to the mysterious deity who personified the sun and who was slain and rose again.
Our walk on shore to-day reminded us of a rugged path in Switzerland. Before we come to Kalkeh (which is of no account, except that it is in the great bend below Korosko) the hills of sandstone draw close to the east bank, in some places in sheer precipices, in others leaving a strip of sloping sand. Along the cliff is a narrow donkey-path, which travel for thousands of years has worn deep; and we ascend along it high above the river. Wherever at the foot of the precipices there was a chance to grow a handful of beans or a hill of corn, we found the ground occupied. In one of these lonely recesses we made the acquaintance of an Arab family.
Walking rapidly, I saw something in the path, and held my foot just in time to avoid stepping upon a naked brown baby, rather black than brown, as a baby might be who spent his time outdoors in the sun without any umbrella.
“By Jorge! a nice plumpee little chile,” cried Abd-el-Atti, who is fond of children, and picks up and shoulders the boy, who shews no signs of fear and likes the ride.
We come soon upon his parents. The man was sitting on a rock smoking a pipe. The woman, dry and withered, was picking some green leaves and blossoms, of which she would presently make a sort of purée, that appears to be a great part of the food of these people. They had three children. Their farm was a small piece of the sloping bank, and was in appearance exactly like a section of sandy railroad embankment grown to weeds. They had a few beans and some squash or pumpkin vines, and there were remains of a few hills of doora which had been harvested.
