Warner Charles Dudley
My Winter on the Nile
While the dragoman talked with the family, I climbed up to their dwelling, in a ravine in the rocks. The house was of the simplest architecture—a circular stone enclosure, so loosely laid up that you could anywhere put your hand through it. Over a segment of this was laid some cornstalks, and under these the piece of matting was spread for the bed. That matting was the only furniture of the house. All their clothes the family had on them, and those were none too many—they didn’t hold out to the boy. And the mercury goes down to 470 these mornings! Before the opening of this shelter, was a place for a fire against the rocks, and a saucepan, water-jar, and some broken bottles The only attraction about this is its simplicity. Probably this is the country-place of the proprietor, where he retires for “shange of air” during the season when his crops are maturing, and then moves into town under the palm-trees during the heat of summer.
Talking about Mohammed (we are still walking by the shore) I found that Abd-el-Atti had never heard the legend of the miraculous suspension of the Prophet’s coffin between heaven and earth; no Moslem ever believed any such thing; no Moslem ever heard of it.
“Then there isn’t any tradition or notion of that sort among Moslems?”
“No, sir. Who said it?”
“Oh, it’s often alluded to in English literature—by Mr-Carlyle for one, I think.”
“What for him say that? I tink he must put something in his book to make it sell. How could it? Every year since Mohammed died, pilgrims been make to his grave, where he buried in the ground; shawl every year carried to cover it; always buried in that place. No Moslem tink that.”
“Once a good man, a Walee of Fez, a friend of the Prophet, was visited by a vision and by the spirit of the Prophet, and he was gecited (excited) to go to Mecca and see him. When he was come near in the way, a messenger from the Prophet came to the Walee, and told him not to come any nearer; that he should die and be buried in the spot where he then was. And it was so. His tomb you see it there now before you come to Mecca.
“When Mohammed was asked the reason why he would not permit the Walee to come to his tomb to see him, he said that the Walee was a great friend of his, and if he came to his tomb he should feel bound to rise and see him; and he ought not to do that, for the time of the world was not yet fully come; if he rose from his tomb, it would be finish, the world would be at an end. Therefore he was ‘bliged to refuse his friend.
“Nobody doubt he buried in the ground. But Ali, different. Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed (married his daughter Fat’meh, his sons Hasan and Hoseyn,) died in Medineh. When he died, he ordered that he should be put in a coffin, and said that in the morning there would come from the desert a man with a dromedary; that his coffin should be bound upon the back of the dromedary, and let go. In the morning, as was foretold, the man appeared, leading a dromedary; his head was veiled except his eyes. The coffin was bound upon the back of the beast, and the three went away into the desert; and no man ever saw either of them more, or knows, to this day, where Ali is buried. Whether it was a man or an angel with the dromedary, God knows!”
Getting round the great bend at Korosko and Amada is the most vexatious and difficult part of the Nile navigation. The distance is only about eight miles, but the river takes a freak here to run south-south-east, and as the wind here is usually north-north-west, the boat has both wind and current against it. But this is not all; it is impossible to track on the west bank on account of the shallows and sandbars, and the channel on the east side is beset with dangerous rocks. We thought ourselves fortunate in making these eight miles in two days, and one of them was a very exciting day. The danger was in stranding the dahabeëh on the rocks, and being compelled to leave her; and our big boat was handled with great difficulty.
Traders and travelers going to the Upper Nile leave the river at Korosko. Here begins the direct desert route—as utterly waste, barren and fatiguing as any in Africa—to Aboo Hamed, Sennaar and Kartoom. The town lies behind a fringe of palms on the river, and backed by high and savage desert mountains.
As we pass we see on the high bank piles of merchandise and the white tents of the caravans.
This is still the region of slavery. Most of the Arabs, poor as they appear, own one or two slaves, got from Sennaar or Darfoor—though called generally Nubians. We came across a Sennaar girl to day of perhaps ten years of age, hoeing alone in the field. The poor creature, whose ideas were as scant as her clothing, had only a sort of animal intelligence; she could speak a little Arabic, however (much more than we could—speaking of intelligence!) and said she did not dare come with us for fear her mistress would beat her. The slave trade is, however, greatly curtailed by the expeditions of the Khedive. The bright Abyssinian boy, Ahmed, whom we have on board, was brought from his home across the Red Sea by way of Mecca. This is one of the ways by which a few slaves still sift into Cairo.
We are working along in sight of Korosko all day. Just above it, on some rocks in the channel, lies a handsome dahabeëh belonging to a party of English gentlemen, which went on a week ago; touched upon concealed rocks in the evening as the crew were tracking, was swung further on by the current, and now lies high and almost dry, the Nile falling daily, in a position where she must wait for the rise next summer. The boat is entirely uninjured and no doubt might have been got off the first day, if there had only been mechanical skill in the crew. The governor at Derr sent down one hundred and fifty men, who hauled and heaved at it two or three days, with no effect. Half a dozen Yankees, with a couple of jack-screws, and probably with only logs for rollers, would have set it afloat. The disaster is exceedingly annoying to the gentlemen, who have, however, procured a smaller boat from Wady Haifa in which to continue their voyage. We are several hours in getting past these two boats, and accomplish it not without a tangling of rigging, scraping off of paint, smashing of deck rails, and the expenditure of a whole dictionary of Arabic. Our Arabs never see but one thing at a time. If they are getting the bow free, the stay-ropes and stern must take care of themselves. If, by simple heedlessness, we are letting the yard of another boat rip into our rigging, God wills it. While we are in this confusion and excitement, the dahabeëh of General McClellan and half a dozen in company, sweep down past us, going with wind and current.
It is a bright and delicious Sunday morning that we are still tracking above Korosko. To-day is the day the pilgrims to Mecca spend upon the mountain of Arafat. Tomorrow they sacrifice; our crew will celebrate it by killing a sheep and eating it—and it is difficult to see where the sacrifice comes in for them. The Moslems along this shore lost their reckoning, mistook the day, and sacrificed yesterday.
This is not the only thing, however, that keeps this place in our memory. We saw here a pretty woman. Considering her dress, hair, the manner in which she had been brought up, and her looks, a tolerably pretty woman; a raving beauty in comparison with her comrades. She has a slight cast, in one eye, that only shows for a moment occasionally and then disappears. If these feeble tributary lines ever meet that eye, I beg her to know that, by reason of her slight visual defect, she is like a revolving light, all the more brilliant when she flashes out.
We lost time this morning, were whirled about in eddies and drifted on sandbars, owing to contradictory opinions among our navigators, none of whom seem to have the least sconce. They generally agree, however, not to do anything that the pilot orders. Our pilot from Philæ to Wady Haifa and back, is a Barâbra, and one of the reises of the Cataract, a fellow very tall, and thin as a hop-pole, with a withered face and a high forehead. His garments a white cotton nightgown without sleeves, a brown over-gown with flowing sleeves, both reaching to the ankles, and a white turban. He is barefooted and barelegged, and, in his many excursions into the river to explore sandbars, I have noticed a hole where he has stuck his knee through his nightgown. His stature and his whole bearing have in them something, I know not what, of the theatrical air of the Orient.
He had a quarrel to day with the crew, for the reason mentioned above, in which he was no doubt quite right, a quarrel conducted as usual with an extraordinary expense of words and vituperation. In his inflamed remarks, he at length threw out doubts about the mother of one of the crew, and probably got something back that enraged him still more. While the wrangle went on, the crew had gathered about their mess-dish on the forward deck, squatting in a circle round it, and dipping out great mouthfuls of the puree with the right hand. The pilot paced the upper deck, and his voice, which is like that of many waters, was lifted up in louder and louder lamentations, as the other party grew more quiet and were occupied with their dinner—throwing him a loose taunt now and then, followed by a chorus of laughter. He strode back and forth, swinging his arms, and declaring that he would leave the boat, that he would not stay where he was so treated, that he would cast himself into the river.
“When you do, you’d better leave your clothes behind,” suggested Abd-el-Atti.
Upon this cruel sarcasm he was unable to contain himself longer. He strode up and down, raised high his voice, and tore his hair and rent his garments—the supreme act of Oriental desperation. I had often read of this performance, both in the Scriptures and in other Oriental writings, but I had never seen it before. The manner in which he tore his hair and rent his garments was as follows, to wit:—He almost entirely unrolled his turban, doing it with an air of perfect recklessness; and then he carefully wound it again round his smoothly-shaven head. That stood for tearing his hair. He then swung his long arms aloft, lifted up his garment above his head, and with desperate force, appeared to be about to rend it in twain. But he never started a seam nor broke a thread. The nightgown wouldn’t have stood much nonsense.
In the midst of his most passionate outburst, he went forward and filled his pipe, and then returned to his tearing and rending and his lamentations. The picture of a strong man in grief is always touching.
The country along here is very pretty, the curved shore for miles being a continual palm-grove, and having a considerable strip of soil which the sakiya irrigation makes very productive. Beyond this rise mountains of rocks in ledges; and when we climb them we see only a waste desert of rock strewn with loose shale and, further inland, black hills of sandstone, which thickly cover the country all the way to the Red Sea.
Under the ledges are the habitations of the people, square enclosures of stone and clay of considerable size, with interior courts and kennels. One of them—the only sign of luxury we have seen in Nubia—had a porch in front of it covered with palm boughs. The men are well-made and rather prepossessing in appearance, and some of them well-dressed—they had no doubt made the voyage to Cairo; the women are hideous without exception. It is no pleasure to speak thus continually of woman; and I am sometimes tempted to say that I see here the brown and bewitching maids, with the eyes of the gazelle and the form of the houri, which gladden the sight of more fortunate voyagers through this idle land; but when I think of the heavy amount of misrepresentation that would be necessary to give any one of these creatures a reputation for good looks abroad, I shrink from the undertaking.
They are decently covered with black cotton mantles, which they make a show of drawing over the face; but they are perhaps wild rather than modest, and have a sort of animal shyness. Their heads are sights to behold. The hair is all braided in strings, long at the sides and cut off in front, after the style adopted now-a-days for children (and women) in civilized countries, and copied from the young princes, prisoners in the Tower. Each round strand of hair hasa dab of clay on the end of it. The whole is drenched with castor-oil, and when the sun shines on it, it is as pleasant to one sense as to another. They have flattish noses, high cheek-bones, and always splendid teeth; and they all, young girls as well as old women, hold tobacco in their under lip and squirt out the juice with placid and scientific accuracy. They wear two or three strings of trumpery beads and necklaces, bracelets of horn and of greasy leather, and occasionally a finger-ring or two. Nose-rings they wear if they have them; if not, they keep the bore open for one by inserting a kernel of doora.
In going back to the boat we met a party of twenty or thirty of these attractive creatures, who were returning from burying a boy of the village. They came striding over the sand, chattering in shrill and savage tones. Grief was not so weighty on them that they forgot to demand backsheesh, and (unrestrained by the men in the town) their clamor for it was like the cawing of crows; and their noise, when they received little from us, was worse. The tender and loving woman, stricken in grief by death, is, in these regions, when denied backsheesh, an enraged, squawking bird of prey. They left us with scorn in their eyes and abuse on their tongues.
At a place below Korosko we saw a singular custom, in which the women appeared to better advantage. A whole troop of women, thirty or forty of them, accompanied by children, came in a rambling procession down to the Nile, and brought a baby just forty days old. We thought at first that they were about to dip the infant into Father Nile, as an introduction to the fountain of all the blessings of Egypt. Instead of this, however, they sat down on the bank, took kohl and daubed it in the little fellow’s eyes. They perform this ceremony by the Nile when the boy is forty days old, and they do it that he may have a fortunate life. Kohl seems to enlarge the pupil, and doubtless it is intended to open the boy’s eyes early.
At one of the little settlements to-day the men were very hospitable, and brought us out plates (straw) of sweet dried dates. Those that we did not eat, the sailor with us stuffed into his pocket; our sailors never let a chance of provender slip, and would, so far as capacity “to live on the country” goes, make good soldiers. The Nubian dates are called the best in Egypt. They are longer than the dates of the Delta, but hard and quite dry. They take the place of coffee here in the complimentary hospitality. Whenever a native invites you to take “coffee,” and you accept, he will bring you a plate of dates and probably a plate of popped doora, like our popped corn. Coffee seems not to be in use here; even the governors entertain us with dates and popped corn.
We are working up the river slowly enough to make the acquaintance of every man, woman, and child on the banks; and a precious lot of acquaintances we shall have. I have no desire to force them upon the public, but it is only by these details that I can hope to give you any idea of the Nubian life.
We stop at night. The moon-and-starlight is something superb. From the high bank under which we are moored, the broad river, the desert opposite, and the mountains, appear in a remote African calm—a calm only broken by the shriek of the sakiyas which pierce the air above and below us.
In the sakiya near us, covered with netting to keep off the north wind, is a little boy, patient and black, seated on the pole of the wheel, urging the lean cattle round and round. The little chap is alone and at some distance from the village, and this must be for him lonesome work. The moonlight, through the chinks of the palm-leaf, touches tenderly his pathetic figure, when we look in at the opening, and his small voice utters the one word of Egypt—“backsheesh.”
Attracted by a light—a rare thing in a habitation here—we walk over to the village. At the end of the high enclosure of a dwelling there is a blaze of fire, which is fed by doora-stalks, and about it squat five women, chattering; the fire lights up their black faces and hair shining with the castor-oil. Four of them are young; and one is old and skinny, and with only a piece of sacking for all clothing. Their husbands are away in Cairo, or up the river with a trading dahabeëh (so they tell our guide); and these poor creatures are left here (it may be for years it may be forever) to dig their own living out of the ground. It is quite the fashion husbands have in this country; but the women are attached to their homes; they have no desire to go elsewhere. And I have no doubt that in Cairo they would pine for the free and simple life of Nubia.
These women all want backsheesh, and no doubt will quarrel over the division of the few piastres they have from us. Being such women as I have described, and using tobacco as has been sufficiently described also, crouching about these embers, this group composes as barbaric a picture as one can anywhere see. I need not have gone so far to set such a miserable group; I could have found one as wretched in Pigville (every city has its Pigville)? Yes, but this is characteristic of the country. These people are as good as anybody here. (We have been careful to associate only with the first families.) These women have necklaces and bracelets, and rings in their ears, just like any women, and rings in the hair, twisted in with the clay and castor-oil. And in Pigville one would not have the range of savage rocks, which tower above these huts, whence the jackals, wolves, and gazelles come down to the river, nor the row of palms, nor the Nile, and the sands beyond, yellow in the moonlight.
CHAPTER XXII.—LIFE IN THE TROPICS. WADY HALFA
OURS is the crew to witch the world with noble seamanship. It is like a first-class orchestra, in which all the performers are artists. Ours are all captains. The reïs is merely an elder brother. The pilot is not heeded at all. With so many intentions on board, it is an hourly miracle that we get on at all.
We are approaching the capital of Nubia, trying to get round a sharp bend in the river, with wind adverse, current rapid, sandbars on all sides. Most of the crew are in the water ahead, trying to haul us round the point of a sand-spit on which the stream foams, and then swirls in an eddy below. I can see now the Pilot, the long Pilot, who has gone in to feel about for deep water, in his white nightgown, his shaven head, denuded of its turban, shining in the sun, standing in two feet of water, throwing his arms wildly above his head, screaming entreaties, warnings, commands, imprecations upon the sailors in the river and the commanders on the boat. I can see the crew, waist deep, slacking the rope which they have out ahead, stopping to discuss the situation. I can see the sedate reïs on the bow arguing with the raving pilot, the steersman, with his eternal smile, calmly regarding the peril, and the boat swinging helplessly about and going upon the shoals. “Stupids,” mutters Abd-el-Atti, who is telling his beads rapidly, as he always does in exciting situations.
When at length we pass the point, we catch the breeze so suddenly and go away with it, that there is no time for the men to get on board, and they are obliged to scamper back over the sand-spits to the shore and make a race of it to meet us at Derr. We can see them running in file, dodging along under the palms by the shore, stopping to grab occasionally a squash or a handful of beans for the pot.
The capital of Nubia is the New York of this region, not so large, nor so well laid out, nor so handsomely built, but the centre of fashion and the residence of the ton. The governor lives in a whitewashed house, and there is a Sycamore here eight hundred years old, which is I suppose older than the Stuyvesant Pear in New York. The houses are not perched up in the air like tenement buildings for the poor, but aristocratically keep to the ground in one-story rooms; and they are beautifully moulded of a tough clay. The whole town lies under a palm-grove. The elegance of the capital, however, is not in its buildings, but in its women; the ladies who come to the the river to fill their jars are arrayed in the height of the mode. Their hair is twisted and clayed and castoroiled, but, besides this and other garments, they wear an outer robe of black which sweeps the ground for a yard behind, and gives them the grace and dignity that court-robes always give. You will scarcely see longer skirts on Broadway or in a Paris salon. I have, myself, no doubt that the Broadway fashions came from Derr, all except the chignons. Here the ladies wear their own hair.
Making no landing in this town so dangerous to one susceptible to the charms of fashion, we went on, and stopped at night near Ibreem, a lofty precipice, or range of precipices, the southern hill crowned with ruins and fortifications which were last occupied by the Memlooks, half a century and more ago. The night blazed with beauty; the broad river was a smooth mirror, in which the mountains and the scintillating hosts of heaven were reflected. And we saw a phenomenon which I have never seen elsewhere. Not only were the rocky ledges reproduced in a perfect definition of outline, but even in the varieties of shade, in black and reddish-brown color.
Perhaps it needs the affidavits of all the party to the more surprising fact, that we were all on deck next morning before five o’clock, to see the Southern Cross. The moon had set, and these famous stars of the southern sky flashed color and brilliancy like enormous diamonds. “Other worlds than ours”? I should think so! All these myriads of burning orbs only to illuminate our dahabeëh and a handful of Nubians, who are asleep! The Southern Cross lay just above the horizon and not far from other stars of the first quality. There are I believe only three stars of the first magnitude and one of the second, in this constellation, and they form, in fact, not a cross but an irregular quadrilateral. It needs a vivid imagination and the aid of small stars to get even a semblance of a cross out of it. But if you add to it, as we did, for the foot of the cross, a brilliant in a neighboring constellation, you have a noble cross.
This constellation is not so fine as Orion, and for all we saw, we would not exchange our northern sky for the southern; but this morning we had a rare combination. The Morning Star was blazing in the east; and the Great Bear (who has been nightly sinking lower and lower, until he dips below the horizon) having climbed high up above the Pole in the night, filled the northern sky with light. In this lucid atmosphere the whole heavens from north to south seemed to be crowded with stars of the first size.
During the morning we walked on the west bank through a castor-oil plantation; many of the plants were good-sized trees, with boles two and a half to three inches through, and apparently twenty-five feet high. They were growing in the yellow sand which had been irrigated by sakiyas, but was then dry, and some of the plants were wilting. We picked up the ripe seeds and broke off some of the fat branches; and there was not water enough in the Nile to wash away the odor afterwards.
Walking back over the great sand-plain towards the range of desert mountains, we came to an artificial mound—an ash-heap, in fact—fifty or sixty feet high. At its base is a habitation of several compartments, formed by sticking the stalks of castor-oil plants into the ground, with a roof of the same. Here we found several women with very neat dabs of clay on the ends of their hair-twists, and a profusion of necklaces, rings in the hair and other ornaments—among them, scraps of gold. The women were hospitable, rather modest than shy, and set before us plates of dried dates; and no one said “backsheesh.” A better class of people than those below, and more purely Nubian.
It would perhaps pay to dig open this mound. Near it are three small oases, watered by sakiyas, which draw from wells that are not more than twenty feet deep. The water is clear as crystal but not cool. These are ancient Egyptian wells, which have been re-opened within a few years; and the ash-mound is no doubt the débris of a village and an old Egyptian settlement.
At night we are a dozen miles from Aboo Simbel (Ipsamboul), the wind—which usually in the winter blows with great and steady force from the north in this part of the river—having taken a fancy to let us see the country.
A morning walk takes us over a rocky desert; the broken shale is distributed as evenly over the sand as if the whole had once been under water, and the shale were a dried mud, cracked in the sun. The miserable dwellings of the natives are under the ledges back of the strip of arable land. The women are shy and wild as hawks, but in the mode; they wear a profusion of glass beads and trail their robes in the dust.
It is near this village that we have an opportunity to execute justice. As the crew were tracking, and lifting the rope over a sakiya, the hindmost sailor saw a sheath-knife on the bank, and thrust it into his pocket as he walked on. In five minutes the owner of the knife discovered the robbery, and came to the boat to complain. The sailor denied having the knife, but upon threat of a flogging gave it up. The incident, however, aroused the town, men and women came forth discussing it in a high key, and some foolish fellows threatened to stone our boat. Abd-el-Atti replied that he would stop and give them a chance to do it. Thereupon they apologized; and as there was no wind, the dragoman asked leave to stop and do justice.
A court was organized on shore. Abd-el-Atti sat down on a lump of earth, grasping a marline-spike, the crew squatted in a circle in the high beans, and the culprit was arraigned. The owner testified to his knife, a woman swore she saw the sailor take it, Abd-el-Atti pronounced sentence, and rose to execute it with his stake. The thief was thrown upon the ground and held by two sailors. Abd-el-Atti, resolute and solemn as an executioner, raised the club and brought it down with a tremendous whack—not however upon the back of the victim, he had at that instant squirmed out of the way. This conduct greatly enraged the minister of justice, who thereupon came at his object with fury, and would no doubt have hit him if the criminal had not got up and ran, screaming, with the sailors and Abd-el-Atti after him. The ground was rough, the legs of Abd-el-Atti are not long and his wind is short. The fellow was caught, and escaped again and again, but the punishment was a mere scrimmage; whenever Abd-el-Atti, in the confusion, could get a chance to strike he did so, but generally hit the ground, sometimes the fellow’s gown and perhaps once or twice the man inside, but never to his injury. He roared all the while, that he was no thief, and seemed a good deal more hurt by the charge that he was, than by the stick. The beating was, in short, only a farce laughable from beginning to end, and not a bad sample of Egyptian justice. And it satisfied everybody.
Having put ourselves thus on friendly relations with this village, one of the inhabitants brought down to the boat a letter for the dragoman to interpret. It had been received two weeks before from Alexandria, but no one had been able to read it until our boat stopped here. Fortunately we had the above little difficulty here. The contents of the letter gave the village employment for a month. It brought news of the death of two inhabitants of the place, who were living as servants in Alexandria, one of them a man eighty years old and his son aged sixty.
I never saw grief spread so fast and so suddenly as it did with the uncorking of this vial of bad news. Instantly a lamentation and wild mourning began in all the settlement. It wasn’t ten minutes before the village was buried in grief. And, in an incredible short space of time, the news had spread up and down the river, and the grief-stricken began to arrive from other places. Where they came from, I have no idea; it did not seem that we had passed so many women in a week as we saw now They poured in from all along the shore, long strings of them, striding over the sand, throwing up their garments, casting dust on their heads (and all of it stuck), howling, flocking like wild geese to a rendezvous, and filling the air with their clang. They were arriving for an hour or two.
The men took no part in this active demonstration. They were seated gravely before the house in which the bereaved relatives gathered; and there I found Abd-el-Atti, seated also, and holding forth upon the inevitable coming of death, and saying that there was nothing to be regretted in this case, for the time of these men had come. If it hadn’t come, they wouldn’t have died. Not so?
The women crowded into the enclosure and began mourning in a vigorous manner. The chief ones grouping themselves in an irregular ring, cried aloud: “O that he had died here!”
“O that I had seen his face when he died;” repeating these lamentations over and over again, throwing up the arms, and then the legs in a kind of barbaric dance as they lamented, and uttering long and shrill ululations at the end of each sentence.
To-day they kill a calf and feast, and tomorrow the lamentations and the African dance will go on, and continue for a week. These people are all feeling. It is a heathen and not a Moslem custom however; and whether it is of negro origin or of ancient Egyptian I do not know, but probably the latter. The ancient Egyptian women are depicted in the tombs mourning in this manner; and no doubt the Jews also so bewailed, when they “lifted up their voices” and cast dust on their heads, as we saw these Nubians do. It is an unselfish pleasure to an Eastern woman to “lift up the voice.” The heavy part of the mourning comes upon the women, who appear to enjoy it. It is their chief occupation, after the carrying of water and the grinding of doora, and probably was so with the old race; these people certainly keep the ancient customs; they dress the hair, for one thing, very much as the Egyptians did, even to the castor-oil.
