CHAPTER IV.NILE FENS.

TheDelta is unvisited by the thousands who seek their pleasure winter by winter on the Nile, although a glimpse of the fringe of its fens is everyone’s earliest and most vivid impression of Egypt. As the train speeds south from Alexandria, a vista slips past of level mere and copper-green fields and ant-hill villages breaking the line of an amber sky; or, more at leisure, between Port Said and Ismailia, you may look from the hurricane-deck over a silent lagoon, with flocks of waders standing at gaze, or trailing like far-blown smoke across the setting sun.

Twice I have gone for a sojourn of some weeks into the western fens, to glean, after another’s harvesting, on the mounds of Gaif, where King Amasis once made the Greeks build a very naughty city. It is a water-logged, ill-smelling spot, whose every detail is ugly or mean; but the large sunlit spaces around made one careless of the foreground, and even in this the eye was content with the shapely Walad Ali thieves who roam the mounds, and, if one lodged at the sheikh’s of the northern hamlet, with his daughter, Ayesha. She was as wild a maid as ever scoured pans for a Coptic cook and served two dusty diggers at their meat. Hers were the features of a Scopas head, the eyes of a frightened hare, and thewrists, hands, ankles, and feet of the purest breed of man. She was tattooed on brow and cheek and chin; the hue of her only robe was a smear of all the cakes in a paintbox; and she would rarely speak. When she did break silence, it was to ask for something in coin or kind towards the dowry, for lack of which she was aging at eighteen. The last time I visited Gaif, I heard she had been lifted at length to a bridal bower on camel-back, and had followed a Bedawi lord to the desert, as a sheikh’s daughter should. All luck and love be with her!

I had visited the fens, however, before I saw Gaif, having once ridden into them from Alexandria, when I was ranging the neighbourhood for buried Greek cities. Much was being said then of a mound lying beyond the swamps of Mariut, in a district almost without villages—a desolate doubtful tract of sour desert fringe, through which a pioneer canal had lately been dug. Some kind of farm was said to exist near thistell, tenanted by a party of Frenchmen; and no sooner had the good offices of an Alexandrian friend made me known to one of them, than I was bade cordially to come as I was and stay as long as I pleased. The farm-hands should attend me, cook for me and dig, and camels and Arab steeds were waiting my pleasure. But I caught the accent of Tarascon, and when I left Alexandria a few days later, it was with both horses and a servant of my own.

A BRIDAL BOWER AT GAIF.

A dislocated omnibus train put me down at a shed in the marsh-land, whence a path led westward through cultivated lands, and among hamlets, standing high on their proper ruin. After a halt at noon beneath a stunted palm, we passed into a region where man stillfought a drawn battle with sand and water. Here he has won a long stretch, embanked it, washed it, and raised clover and cotton in triumph; but there the salt flood has slopped into his canal, and ridge and furrow are once more barren sand.

After a while, flakes of mud began to appear among the green. The ditches, fringed with salt growths and clogged with weed, spread themselves out more frequently in muddy sloughs, and at last the main canal died away in a chain of rank reedy hollows.Fellahinyielded place to rare Bedawi goat-herds, and mud hovels to their black tents, pitched sparsely on sand-spits or dustytells. The Frenchmen’s house soon loomed in sight, set high above the vast level on one of these mounds; but not far short of it the path broke off at a black and unbridged drain, and when we had found a crossing, and floundered through the slime to the gate of the compound, it wanted but two hours to sunset. My friend’s mares, mules, and camels were evidently out at pasture, for through the frequent gaps in the mud wall I could see no more than a rotting cart, some hens standing forlorn on greasy islets, and a few ducks more at their ease. The farm-house cried aloud for repair. Its roof gaped; in the windows was more paper than glass; and the balcony would not have borne up a dog. The gate of a shaggy garden swung wide on one hinge, and we clattered in unremarked by so much as a cat. No human being was visible, and as none answered to knock or call, I pushed the door, and found myself in a room of all work. The table showed that here, as in Wonderland, there was no time to wash teacups between meals; nor, apparently, had a figure, sitting somnolent beside it, with bandaged headand eye, and a torn shirt and ragged breeches for all its clothing, had more time to wash itself. The strange being blinked a single bloodshot eye, staggered to its feet, and regarded me unsteadily. Then intelligence dawned, and yelling, “Jules! Jules!” it seized me by hand and waist, and asked with affectionate solicitude what I would take—wine, beer, cognac, or champagne? A glance at the bottle on the table suggested a more local liquor. My host was hurt. Why not beer or champagne? Well, if it must bemastica, there it was of Scio, the best. And in his own cloudy glass he presented me with sheer unabashed potato spirit, which, taken unwarily, grips the gullet and deprives one of speech or breath.

A clatter of loose heels on the stairs heralded Jules. It was my little friend of Alexandria, evidently just out of bed. As I shook his hand I heard a gurgling sound behind, and was conscious that the common glass had been filled and emptied again. Jules placed his bed at my disposal, sheets and all, as they were, and apparently as they had been for many nights. Victor passed therakirepeatedly, and drank a glass for every one I refused. Both upbraided me in chorus for having brought horses, where those animals were as the sand of the sea in multitude. But none the less, on visiting the compound at sundown to seek a standing for my animals, I found a single weedy mare in the one shed, and various windy proposals resulted in my stallion being tethered to the decadent cart in the open. Presently he freed himself, and, being foiled in a gallant effort to reach the mare through the roof of her shed, took incontinently to the marsh, and amused four Bedawi catchers until the moon rose. Two days later,when I wanted an extra baggage animal, I moved heaven and earth, and hardly obtained one mangy camel.

In the meanwhile, if only to stem the tide of alcohol, I had proposed to Jules that he should show me thetell, which rose hard by the farm. He replied that it stretched as far as the eye could see, and that to enumerate the marvellous things upon it would take the night; but, if I wished it, we might go as far as the foot. The path led through a group of Bedawi hovels, backed against the wall of the compound. There, said Jules, dwelt his men; but the manner of the retainers’ salute did not savour of feudal respect. A hurried step sounded behind us, and I turned to see a third European. He offered a cordial but hasty hand, and passed on ahead, shouldering a heavy staff. Halting as we halted, and moving when we moved, he kept his distance; and ever and anon tufts of herbage caught his eye, and, with curses in French, Italian, or Arabic, or all three tongues at once, he battered them furiously with the staff. I turned wondering towards Jules, who whispered, “Serpents!” Few tufts escaped, and while I walked about the Mound, this Patrick was accounting for reptiles innumerable; but alas! they lived again hydra-like as fast as he slew.

The wholetellwas seen in half an hour. It was quite featureless, rotten with salt and of no promise to a digger. Granite blocks crumbled to shingle, and brick walls to powder at a touch. The aspect of the site was as melancholy as all the landscape about it—as the sour grey herbage, the brackish flood-waters, and the plough-lands relapsed to waste. No creak of water-wheels or plash of sluices broke the evening silence; but rotting framesstood gaunt against the sky, adding surcease of sadness to the desolation of nature.

The sun was down when we returned to the farm, but no food was set out, nor to all appearance was any being made ready. But there was more than enoughraki. Victor made merriment for the party. He had cost in his time 30,000 francs to the Egyptian Government—moneys paid for his higher education at Paris in the glorious days of Ismail. “There you are!” cried Jules. “There’s 30,000 francs—a bargain!” and the failure seemed to enjoy the inexhaustible jest as much as anyone else. I began to glean something of the past of the queer crew. The four—for yet another lurked in the house, invisible and suffering, they said, fromcoup de soleil—seemed to have held posts of profit, if not honour, on Khedivial backstairs. The farm had come to Jules from his father; but there was a long tale of water-wars with neighbouring owners and trouble with the Bedawis, of mortgages, encroachments, domiciliary visits from irrigation officials, and difficulties with tax-gatherers—all these being main incidents in the history of the surrender of three parts of the land to water and salt. The fourth part was let out to Bedawis, on whose camels or buffaloes violent hands had to be laid whenever any rent was due. The dykes and bridges had gone the way of the farmhouse, and the day seemed near when barbarism would resume an undisputed sway.

Rakíis, if anything, an appetiser, and always a most unsatisfactory substitute for supper; but as the latter was not forthcoming, I was obliged to ask when and by what the pangs of hunger were to be stayed. Jules was astonished that he had not thought of supperearlier, but what could he do? Victor was cook, and Victor, it was not to be denied, was drunk. I called up my own servant, and told him to cook what he could find. Jules pronounced the idea original and admirable, and sup we did at last on potatoes and milk and bread and a tin or so of conserves from my saddle-bags. Vague associations of the past made Victor clutch now and then at my fork and spoon, only to forget them again and return to nature’s tools. Withrakionce more on the board, I waived ceremony, and sought upstairs the sleep in which two of the party were sunk already where they sat. But it was long in coming. Like a traveller in an eighteenth century inn, I had better say I ‘lay’ that night with myriads of companions as sleepless as myself. But at some late hour I did lose consciousness only to regain it as the level beams of the sun shot through the open window. The first object of my waking vision was the unkempt Victor, whose lying down and uprising evidently were carried out with as little ceremony as his dog’s. He sat with an eye to a battered telescope, and in reply to my salutation murmured an apology for being in the room, but did not avert his gaze.

Little loth to leave the bed, I stood behind him and tried to discover what he spied; but nothing did my field-glass show, except swamp and sand. Begging a sight at his spyhole, I saw more clearly the same sand and swamp, with here and there a ditch—land, once drained and probably cultivated, now glistening salt and wet in the early sun—but no stock, not even a grazing camel, and no human life. Evidently Victor had watched his labourers from afar in better days, and now could not pass his fuddled hours otherwise thanby gazing where the labourers had been. It was a cheerless spectacle in the first glory of morning—that ragged figure in an unswept room with cobwebbed walls, spying phantom harvests on a salt-marsh, and the ghosts of departed hinds.

The succeeding day proved less irksome, for I spent it mostly in the sun and air, riding to various mounds, large and small. Returning at sunset, I found all as the night before, and I suppose, day in and day out, Victor sits still at his spyglass, or sleeps offrakiupstairs; the Serpent-slayer fights his elusive foes; and the Invisible Man remains invisible. At the dawn of the third day Jules embraced me: the man with the staff went before, beating the bushes to the boundary of the farm: and Victor, who had pledged himself, as one granting a dying man’s request, to keep the telescope trained upon us, till we should dip below the horizon, no doubt kept his word.

We rode back to Alexandria in one long day by a rarely travelled track round the western end of the Mariut lagoon. It is the road by which Napoleon’s legions, marching on Damanhur, nearly perished of thirst; but we were to fall into no such peril, for, as the afternoon wore on, rain came up from the sea and soaked the very bones of us. Through the mist of driving storm I could see little of the desolate land, which used to be set so thick with the Mareotic vines, and nothing of the lake, except turbid wavelets chasing each other to the shallow marge. The dour Arabs of the district, who have often given trouble, had all gone to ground, and we hardly passed a house, except one or two outposts of the Slavery Prevention Service. Slithering and stumbling, the horses climbed at sunset on to the Mariut causeway, and it was the third hour of nightbefore we sighted the flares in the noisome bazars of Gabbári.

AN OLD FEN VILLAGE.

* * * * *

I went back for the last time to the Delta some eighteen months after I had done with Crete, wishing to visit the most remote part of it, that stretch of fen and lagoon which divides Nile from Nile along the Mediterranean seaboard. This is a region apart from the rest of Egypt, and difficult to penetrate even by boat. More than the half is inundated by stagnant waters of the great river, which is dammed by a broad belt of dunes, and the land is fouled by the drainage of salt soils and by the inflowing sea. Along the shore-line itself lies an almost continuous chain of great lagoons; and for a long day’s journey south of these the land will still be found deep marsh, rotten with the overflow of forgotten canals and lost arms of Nile, almost trackless, and only beginning to undergo here and there the first process of reclamation.

In their present state, as might be expected, these fens have very few inhabitants; and perhaps none of the sparse hamlets, now found on the southern fringe, is much older than the nineteenth century. Such as these are, they seem to have grown up round lonely farmsteads, and still bear the names of gentry, who, not above a generation or two ago, were living far to southward. When the Egyptian people numbered not half its present strength, under the rule of the last Mameluke Beys, there was no reason to attempt the conquest of saline and water-logged soils; and tradition remembers a not distant day—not more distant than Mehemet Ali’s reign—when these fens still offered a sure, if uncomfortable, refuge to broken men who would escapethe Pasha’s levies, or had deserted from the battalions that were ever being sent to die in Arabia, the Sudan or Syria. The repute of the northern marshes remained indeed what it had been in the fifth century after Christ, when Heliodorus, in the opening scene of hisAethiopic Romance, described an amphibious outlawed folk living there by fishing and raiding. For persecuted Christians at least the marshes were a safer refuge even than the Desert: and the lone convent of Gemiana was an Egyptian Ely. I saw a poor Moslem woman bowing and muttering before the icon of Our Lady in its church, and asked what she did there. “They all come,” said the monk with a shrug. “Why should she not? Her son is sick.”

To some memory of this old order of things must be due the timid and surly manner which even now the inhabitants of the few older hamlets maintain. Here alone in modern Egyptfellàhiwomen will bar their doors at sight of a stranger, while the children run to hide among the reeds or scrub. Even grown men, met in the way, hold aloof like Bedawis, till assured of your character and purpose. Although the wild boar is certainly not to be found there now, many natives assert that they have seen it in past years; and twice I have come on stories even of the hippopotamus, stories told by men too savage to have learned them from foreign mouths. And why should they not have the fact from their fathers? There is good warrant for a hippopotamus having been killed in the Northern Delta in 1818.

THE LONE CONVENT OF GEMIANA.

To visit this region you quit the Berari train, which crosses mid-Delta from Dessuk on the one Nile to Sherbin on the other, at any of its halts, but best atKafr es-Sheikh or Belkas; for thence roads have been made northward towards the limit of settled life. This is soon reached except along the banks of the old Nile arms, where clusters of huts succeed each other till almost within sight of the Lagoons. These tiny hamlets are built of mud into such fantastic pepper-pot forms as will throw off the frequent rains, and, seen afar, seem the work of gigantic building insects. Thereafter nothing appears ahead but the great saline flats, and vision is limited only by the curve of the globe. The monotonous surface is varied by many pools, which shrink slowly as the spring advances, leaving broad plains cracked like a crocodile’s hide, and always treacherous where seeming dry; for under the thin crusts, white with efflorescent salts, lie depths of black saturated sand. Elsewhere the level is broken by soapy sand-hummocks, heaped upon shrubs or clumps of reeds, slough succeeds to slough, and the going for many miles is worse, at the best, than on loose chalk-land at the breaking of a long frost. There broods a sense of death over all this spongy salt tract, which melts into water under your heel. Nothing breaks the spell—not the many birds shocking in their tameness; not the myriad mosquitoes which pursue a traveller luckless enough to ride down wind; not the teeming life of the ditches; not the half-wild buffaloes, strayed from southern farmsteads, which you startle from their wallows, and send soughing knee-deep through the slime; not even the tireless north wind which lashes the huddled reeds. Yet with all its sameness and deadness one likes the land. The breeze blows hard and clear off sea and lagoon—hard and clear, as through the bolt ropes about a mast—, and the flats have the mysterious charm of all large and free horizons.

To the soapy bogs and salt lagoons fall drains and canals, which have sprung far up the Delta to die at last unregarded under the face of the dunes; and there is also a network of forgotten waterways of Ptolemaic and Roman days which now wander unguided. A day will often be half spent in seeking a ford from one of their crumbling banks to the other. Sometimes you must strip under a noonday sun among the ever wakeful mosquitoes; at other times, but rarely, you may be ferried in the log-boat of a marshman, son of former outlaws, who spends his days afishing and his nights prone under just such a bee-hive shelter of reeds and mud as a lake-dweller built in the age of stone. Heliodorus, who wrote of boats “rudely hewed out of the rough tree,” which crept about these channels in 400A.D., saw the fenland much as it all was till lately and as it still is in the remote parts of Menzaleh. Thus he wrote as Underdowne rendered him.

The whole place is called the Pasture of the Egyptians, about the which is a lowe valley, which receiveth certaine exundations of Nylus, by means whereof it becometh a poole, and is in the midst very deepe, about the brimmes whereof are marishes or fennes. For looke, as the shore is to the Sea, such is the Fennes to every great Poole. In that place have the theeves of Egypt, how many soever they bee, their common wealth. And for as much as there is a little land without the water, some live in small cottages, others in boates which they use as wel for their house as for passage over the poole. In these doe their women serve them, and if need require, be also brought to bedde. When a child is borne first, they let him suck his mother’s milk a while, but after they feede him with fishes taken in the lake and roasted in the hot sunne. And when they perceive that he beginnes to goe, they tie a cord about his legs, and suffer him but onely to goe about theboate.... Moreover the great plenty of reede that groweth there in the moozy ground is in a manner as good as a bulwark to them. For by devising many crooked and cumbrous wayes, through which the passage tothemby oft use is very easie, but toothershard, they have made it as a sure defence, that by no sudden invasion they may be endammaged.

A FEN FISHERMAN.

Yet once there were towns in this sodden land, which raised not only corn to stay the hunger of Rome, but vines and olives. Some two score mounds, covering as many towns, rise out of the maze of irrigation channels and choked drains, and you may see still the bed-stones of oil-presses and faint traces of ridge and furrow on higher lying patches. It is a mystery how men ever lived and tilled in a land, whither one would surely say

no man comesNor hath come since the making of the world.

no man comes

Nor hath come since the making of the world.

For they had no pumps, those husbandmen of the Roman time, and their drainage must have been by natural flow. Has all the Delta sunk slowly since their day, even as its shore has plainly been sinking at Alexandria ever since those Ptolemaic buildings, which are now awash in the eastern bay, were built high and dry on Lechaeum?

Even on the margin of the great northern lagoons, where Heliodorus’ichthyophagistill survive, you can ride nowhere far without happening on ancient tracks of civilised man. Basins hollowed for flat-bottomed shipping, and silted canals with broken dykes, mock again and again your sanguine essay of a bee-line to some far seen Tell. Arrived at last, after many a false turn and lure of cheating mirage, you will find noimposing ruin; for in this region builders used little except brick, and the most of it adobe. But the surface will be seen strewn with vitreous slags, left by Arabs, who have burnt what stone there was for lime; with fragments of iridescent glass, that vies with the green hues of copper scraps and coins; with sherds of crumbling blue faience and red earthenware. It is meagre loot after so much toil through bog and soapy sand; nor is much more to be got by digging at a venture. The mounds are made mostly of little adobe houses, piled one on another, and rotted through and through with salt; and below these, if you are hopeful enough to dig, you will pass through some feet of empty sand, compressed to the consistency of asphalt, only to find at the bottom a core of black Nile mud, heaped by the first builders to raise their town above the damp of the surrounding flats. Now and again the newly come natives, who dig in these mounds for the nitrous earth, which exists on all ancient sites by the Nile, or for ready-made bricks, have turned up drums or capitals of small columns, an inscription or two, or even a Roman sculpture—trophies all of an Empire, under whose rule Egypt was more widely tilled than even at this day. But these are rare rewards.

The lagoons lie farther yet, and, if you would see them well, you must sail before the summer heats down one of the greater canals of the Delta in a boat of the lightest draught. The last lock is left far behind, and you pass beyond all hamlets into an amphibious Limbo where no life of man abides. The canal has no longer dykes on either hand, and its rims sink below your gunwale. Drop down a mile or two more. The flood brims bank high, and slops on to the flats, and, before you arewell aware, the Nile land has slid under its own waters. You are out on a Lagoon, boundless and bottomless to all appearance, so low are its shores, and so turbid its harassed waves. Yet, in fact, when a tall man lets himself down in mid-lake, the ripples hardly wash his breast.

THE NORTHERNMOST HAMLET.

Holding on your course, you find that you have passed out of the dead world of the fens into one of teeming life. Of this the aspect of the northernmost hamlet on the canal may have forewarned you, for scores of fishing nets were spread there to wind and sun, beside a little fleet of keelless craft, and a Copt was selling to all comers the last night’s draught of fish. The catch of each crew is offered in gross. A salesman, squatting on a mat, stirs the throbbing pile, working the larger fish to the top. A fat one he puts by in a palm-leaf pannier for the Copt, a second for his writer, a third for himself, and the residue is bid for at ten, twenty, forty piastres, sold, packed on asses, and driven off to be marshmen’s food for many miles around. The fishy wealth of the Lagoon is amazing. Silvery shapes leap in air by tens and twenties, and passing shoals leave wakes in every direction. Boats at anchor, boats adrift, boats under full sail, multiply as one runs northward; and out of the horizon spring groves of poles crossed by poles aslant, masts and yards of invisible hulls moored by invisible islets, whose sandy levels are all but awash. There must be hundreds of craft plying on Lake Burullos, and its fisher-folk are legion—men of blond colouring, active and somewhat silent, with the refined facial type common to old inbred races. Their women often recalled to me pictures that I had seen on the Pharaonic monuments.

The farther shore does not begin to rise on the north-easternhorizon till a dozen barren islets have slipped astern. The higher dunes emerge first, uplifted in a shimmering mirage, roseate and yellow like cumulus lit by sunset. One into another they run, till they become a continuous range, spotted with black tufts, which are the plumes of half-buried palms. A cluster of huts to the left, with square upstanding blocks, is the village of Borg, whose dismantled fort and coastguard station mark the shrunken Sebennytic estuary of Nile. Rank odours of curing come down the wind from its drying grounds which supply half the poor of Lower Egypt. On the starboard bow, as you wear round the last island and set a course due east, a large dark stain resolves itself into a little town distinguished by a minaret or two, which is set on a hillock backed by golden dunes and palms. A forest of naked masts and yards bristles on the lake before it—the fleet of Baltim, chief settlement of the fisher-folk, and the old see, Parallos.

CAMELS LOADING AT BALTIM.

The lake floor here has so slight a slope that a mile from its marge the water is still only inches deep, and the grounded feluccas must discharge their freights on to camels, which are trained against nature to receive their loads standing and wade unconcerned to the shore. Naked children splash all day in the shoal-water, plying tiny javelins and little casting-nets, so far out as to seem no bigger than gulls; and there could be no healthier or happier babes than this amphibious brood, whose playground is the Lagoon. Their fathers and mothers seem to pass the day on the vast stretch of sandy beach, coopering boats, buying and selling fish, chattering, sleeping in the sun. It is astonishing to see so clean a life in Egypt, a life unfouled by the viscousink of the Nile mud. Even the huts are not built of clay, but of ancient Roman bricks dug out of mounds south of the Lagoon, and long ago mellowed to a dusky red that tones to admiration with the yellow dunes and the dark greenery of the palms. Bee-hive shelters, byres and fences are wattled of dry palm-fronds.

HALF BURIED PALM-FOREST, BALTIM.

Coming out of the great southern flats to this long sand-belt, which fences the northern sea, one has an illusion of upland, and, climbing over the sliding dunes, credits with difficulty that the land falls to the Nile level in every deeper hollow. Here palms, planted deep, are bearing abundantly, though the dunes in their constant eastward progression bury them to the spring of their plumes. Potatoes, too, and tomatoes are grown behind long alignments of sheltering wattles; nor even on the dunes is there lacking a wild, waxy pasture whose roots trail fifty or sixty feet to find a moister soil. A region not dissimilar may be seen from the Rosetta railway, and Edku, by its lake, is a village somewhat like Baltim. But there is no view west of the Nile to rival that from the higher dunes of Baltim; nothing like its forest of sand-choked palms stretched ribandwise between the low lake-dunes and the golden seaward hillocks; nothing like the ample prospect of its lake, fringed with fisher hamlets, alive with splashing children, and bearing a distant burden of myriad amber sails.

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