CHAPTER THREE

Christmas, 1897.

Guardians of the Temple.

served as a curtain-raiser to the next day’s visit to the greatest of all temples.

That evening a Cook’s steamer arrived, and we were deserted by the crowd on the bank. After dinner Ghesiri entertained the sheiks of the donkey-boys and made arrangements for our mounts for the next day. Two of us volunteered to go to the village and locate thedancing that the guide-books said could be found here, but we learned there was to be none until the following Saturday.

The next day was spent at Karnak, where Ghesiri led us over its famous stones, until lunch was brought from theNitocris, and served in a colonnade surrounded by columns resembling huge granite lozenges, piled at all angles, one on top of the other, like ancient friends, those who had fought successfully with time supporting those who had been less fortunate; and apart from the rest, requiring no support, and with no friends to be helped, stood the greatest column of them all, the lonely survivor of the great peristyle court, with its lotus capital, looking down on all but its lonely rival, an obelisk. It looks as though it had been polished and placed there the day before, in striking contrast to its unfortunate mate, which centuries ago gave up battling with earthquakes and wars, and now lies, a hopeless ruin, at its feet.

Christmas Night—“Auld Lang Syne.”

We spent the next three days at Karnak and Thebes, saving the tombs of the kings until we should stop again on our way down from Assuan.

And now the important question was, Where should we spend Christinas? The better we knew Karnak and Thebes, the more forbidding they had grown. They were too stiff and formal, and their great rigid Rameses too depressing for a Christmas. We wanted a cheerful temple, and we found it at Komombos.

We left Karnak on the morning of December 24, and spent Christmas eve at Edfu. That night the deck was entirely housed in by canvas. The crew sat in a circle back of the smoke-stack, and while they divided the cigarettes we had bought for them at Luxor, they listened to our “Down upon the Suwanee River.”

Christmas morning we came on deck, and found that Ghesiri had transformed it intoa bower of palm-branches, sugar-cane, and oranges. The crew were all smiles, and when we presented them with the price of a sheep, they gave us three cheers and a merry Christmas. More cigarettes were distributed, and shortly after breakfast we started for Komombos.

There was little in the day to remind a New-Englander of Christmas. In the lightest clothes, we sat about the deck and watched the villages go by. It was good to see our old friends the water-wheels and cheerful sakiehs again. They looked better to us after our somber stay at Karnak. Early in the afternoon we came to Komombos, the temple we were looking for, and tied to the river’s bank just below it; and if you must be traveling on Christmas, there can be no better place to stop.

At Komombos the never-resting Nile has worked its way to the foot of the little hill on which the temple is making its last stand

Thebes, January 2, 1898.

against time. Some kind friends have covered the bank with stones, but the river is slowly wearing them away, and sooner or later it will claim its own; and it will be a pity, for Komombos’s temple is dainty in comparison with Karnak, where great stiff Rameses stand with their arms folded across their breasts in very much the same manner in which the real arms are held in the glass case at the Gizeh Museum.

At Karnak there were miles of half-buried walls, and cut deep in them gigantic figures of Rameses, with one hand raised about to strike off the heads of enemies done up in bundles like asparagus and held by the hair of their heads, while armies are shown flying in confusion. The bas-reliefs at Komombos are more cheerful and cut with greater skill. They represent the ancient gods of Egypt in their more playful moods, floating down the Nile, spearing miniature hippopotamuses and crocodiles, with here and there a triumphantprocession. The debris of the forgotten city that once covered Komombos has been removed, and the great hall, with its holy of holies now exposed to the light of day, is swept by the wind as clean as a Dutch kitchen; and yet the carvings are as fresh as the day they were made. From theNitocristo the temple is only a few steps through some sugar-cane. It was a novel experience to find no donkey-boys with their patient and sleepy donkeys.

But the natives were different from any we had heretofore seen, and proved that we were getting into real Africa. They were mostly Nubians, and very black, and our preconceived idea of what an African should be.

Komombos and Philæ are the only temples we climbed up to, and it seems to me that they, above all others, lend themselves more readily to the sentimental tourist. It is easier for the imagination to people them; they are more like dwellings.

Home Visitors.

After tea had been brought from theNitocrisand served in its portals, we all decided that Komombos would be the temple to own. That evening the crew hung lanterns around the deck among the sugar-canes and palms, and after dinner they gave an exhibition, which started well enough with a dance by the first mate.

Since then I have found that all travelers on the Nile are likely to have this same experience. We were proof against the “Dhabir Devil” that the guide-books had warned us against, but Baedeker had made no mention of the possibility of this entertainment happening to us; still, the crew went at it as though it was an old story with them, and as I write this there may be some unsuspecting tourist about to go through with it. It sounds very good-natured on the part of the crew; and if the entertainment had stopped when the mate had finished the dance, it would have been well enough; butthe dance was only to hold our attention while the others were getting ready, and then the dreary horse-play began. There was a barber-shop scene, in which flour paste was used and a door-mat acted as a towel. A crew that mutinies is tame compared with an Egyptian crew that acts. We stopped them as soon as we could without hurting their feelings, and they subsided and formed a circle back of the smoke-stack. The rest of the evening was spent in entertainment of our own choice, and by midnight all was still but the river, which never rests.

His Highness Prince Mahomet Ali, Cairo, February 14, 1898.

On the Bank.

THE starting of the engines had us up fairly early the next morning, and we found the country very much changed. The desert now came to the river’s edge, and granite had taken the place of limestone; it seemed as though we had come to the end of fertile Egypt. Two white vultures were the only living things in sight. Then wecame to some wonderful bends in the river, and the sakiehs once more began to dip up the muddy water; but the skins of the men who worked them had changed: they glistened like coal in the sunlight.

By two o’clock we reached Assuan, and moored to the island of Elephantine, just opposite the town, from which any number of little bright-painted ferry-boats rowed toward us; and in a few minutes some thin-legged Egyptian policemen and a few natives were on the bank, and a small boy with a stick had been selected to mind the turkeys that we had brought from Esneh. Some of the poor birds were very weak on their legs, and where they ought to have been red they were only a pale salmon-color; but the little cook promised that they would be all right in a day or two. Some of the crew had homes on the island, and they all put on their best clothes and were met by friends. They immediately established a laundry on shore, andthe building of an oven proved that we were to be there for some time.

We began the 27th with a visit to the tombs on Grenfell Hill, high on the river’s bank, below Elephantine. There was a strong wind, full of sand, from the south, and the light natives had trouble in getting the heavy boat to the foot of the hill. The wind helped us back to theNitocris, and after lunch we crossed the river to Assuan, where the inhabitants seemed especially prepared for tourists. The natives were more theatrical in Assuan, and the bazaars were filled with musical instruments, made as primitive as possible to please the traveler.

Shopping.

There is a railroad at Assuan. It is only a small, disconnected link; but some dayit will be part of a road to the Cape, and vestibule trains will run over it, and passengers may get only flying glimpses of Philæ from car windows. Think of being on a train that went by Pharaoh’s Bed in the night! But it is impossible to believe that the world could become used to such a wonderful place, and it is to be hoped that all trains will go slow when they come to Philæ; for without it Egypt would be like “Romeo and Juliet” without a balcony. It is the most romantic ruin in Egypt, and it marks the end of the first-cataract tourist’s journey.

If theNitocrishad been a sailing-dahabiyeh, and had belonged to us, and if the season had been younger and the river higher, we would have had her pulled up one cataract after another until we had made some important discoveries; but we were one-month tourists on a hired boat, and that night, while theNitocriswas tied fast to some large wooden pegs driven deep into the

Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo.

A Luxor Dancing-girl.

beach, we read how theRip Van Winkleand other dahabiyehs had gone to Abu-Simbel.

The next morning we chose the nine-o’clock train, in preference to camels and donkeys; and after some minutes of rocking and twisting in the little box-car, we were ferried from the mainland to the famous island, where we were to forget Komombos and all the others amid new beauties, which no guide-book can exaggerate.

After lunch we walked to the northern end of the island, hoarded a big, clumsy, eight-oared boat with a great deal of rigging lashed overhead, and our homeward journey began. There was a crew of ten, and we soon had the greatest respect for their skill, especially one little man with crooked teeth, who sat in the stern and shouted over our heads at the men in the boat.

The rapids were tame enough at first. The wind was strong against us, and we found some shelter behind the high granite islands we drifted among. The river had worn them into fantastic shapes so closely resembling temples that hieroglyphics had been cut on the polished stones by the Pharaohs, who never tired of seeing their names in print.

At one place we stopped and watched ten or fifteen boys swim and float down a part of the rapids. They would come shivering up to us, and the next instant they would be in

Camel-back.

the water shooting by us on a log, screaming to attract our attention, and then back again to us, with their teeth chattering for bakshish.

But after that it was very different. The man at the tiller half stood up, and I could see, by the little patches of sand on his forehead that the wrinkles there had formed in two parallel lines, that he had been praying while we had been watching the boys swim, and by the same sign I could see that most of the crew had been doing the same thing; and Mohammed must have been with us, for fifty times within half that number of minutes we needed help. With the little man in the stern continually wetting his lips and jamming the tiller from side to side, apparently steering in just the wrong place, and always proving that he was right, we “shot” over the uneven surface of the river, dodging half-buried rocks, first near one bank and then the other, until we reached the natural bed of the

The Sheik of the Pyramids.

river. Here the crew began their battle with the wind, and by evening, after much chanting and hard rowing on their part, we reached theNitocris, feeling very much as if our faces had been sandpapered. During our stay at Elephantine we made friends with four little Bisharin girls. They were graceful and pretty, and had the power to make the most dismal tomb cheerful. They followed us to the quarries back of Assuan, and turned the top of the half-finished obelisk into a stage and danced in the sunlight, while the blackest man in Africa played an instrument of his own invention. And the last I remember of Assuan is their

On Grenfell Hill. The Keeper of the Tomb, Assuan, December 29, 1897.

four little figures wrapped in the brightest-colored shawls that could be bought in Lower Egypt, and they waving their hands until a bend in the river hid them.

It was a novelty to find ourselves going with the current, which had been until now against us, and we could count on much bigger runs; but there was double the danger of running on a sand-bar, and from that time on there was always a man with a pole in the bow.

On the 30th we stopped beneath our old friend Komombos, and visited Edfu the next day; and from the top of its pylons we looked into the mud-walled yards of the town, where little fly-covered children stopped playing with goats and called to us, even at that height, for bakshish.

On the 31st we were once more in Luxor, where the donkey-boys and beggars gave us a hearty welcome. Again we visited Thebes, and were followed from tomb to tomb bythe usual venders of imitation antiques and shriveled mummy-hands.

Our trips back from Thebes were always enlivened by donkey-races across the great fields of young wheat, in the middle of which the great Memnons sit. Those races generally proved that “Columbus” was a faster donkey than “New York.”

Pharaoh must have continually thought of the future. His tombs at Thebes show how anxious he was to outlast time. And it seems hard that his carefully prepared plans should have been interfered with. How impressive it would be to find, at the end of the long subterranean passage, the king whose one wish had been to lie there. He must have visited it often before his death. He might have superintended its building and criticized the drawings that decorate its walls. But the sarcophagus is now empty, and its lid is broken, and the king’s new friends have put him in a cheap wooden house; and written

At the Races, Khedival Sporting Club.

An Assuan Beggar.

on a piece of cardboard, and tacked on the glass case in which he now lies, is the name he was so fond of cutting in granite.

One year more or less makes very little difference to Egypt, but the New Year was properly welcomed aboard theNitocris, for one of us had never seen a January 1 before. So it happened that, even in Egypt, the occasion was treated as a novelty, and theNitocrisonce more blossomed out with lanterns, and looked as well that night as her more graceful rivals, the sailing-dahabiyehs, that were anchored above and below us.

January 4 was our last day at Luxor. We had ridden up the limestone valley at Thebes to the tombs of the kings, had spent several days and a moonlight night atKarnak. We had said good-by to our donkey-boys. Mine had held an umbrella over me with one hand and had fought natives at the same time with the other, and I hope that some day he will be a dragoman. Before daylight on the 5th we had once more started north, with only five more days on the river left to us. At night we tied to the bank and walked through moon-lighted villages, and did our best to imagine that our journey had only just begun.

On the evening of the 7th an extraordinary thing happened. It rained hard enough to make a noise on the awning over us, and in the excitement we almost forgot that there were only three more days between us and Cairo. We had begun to count the hours and to dread that fatal bend in the river that would show us the pyramids at Sakkara, where we were to spend our last night. We passed dahabiyehs with American and English flags flying over them, and we were filled with

An Artist in the Mouskie.

envy. Handkerchiefs and parasols were sympathetically waved at us, and at a distance we may have looked cheerful; but it was a forlorn, childish feeling to be taken home because our time was up and our dahabiyeh had another engagement. We felt that all the other boats knew our secret, and we even suspected the crew of having become tired of us and only remaining civil in order to collect the present that they were expecting.

Ghesiri’s suggestion that we spend the night of the 10th at Cairo seemed to prove that they were anxious to have done with us; but we had no inclination to be tied to the bank at Cairo overnight, waiting to be sent away in the morning before a crowd of natives, and among them, possibly, those other people who had chartered our boat. We would wait at Sakkara, and not get to Cairo one minute before our time was up.

On the 8th we visited a sugar-factory at

Our Bisharin Friends, Assuan.

Tel-el-Amarna, and later on the same day passed our first landing-place, Beni-Hassan.

By noon on the 9th we reached the fatal bend in the river and saw that we were once more in the land of pyramids, and we were soon tied to the bank beneath which once stood the city of Memphis. We rode to Marietta’s House, past the pyramids and the colossal Rameses lying on his back among tall palms, surrounded, for some reason, by a mud house, as if the great granite figure had not already proved that it could continue its battle with time unassisted by a few mud bricks and some tin roofing that is very much in the way.

We lighted candles and walked through the hot, suffocating galleries of the mausoleum, and peered into the huge granite sarcophagi that once held the mummied sacred bulls. Then we rode to the tomb of Ti, and Ghesiri’s last lecture was about that gentleman.

Beni-Hassan.

In the distance was Cairo; and even a view of the pyramids at Gizeh and the citadel failed to console us, and we still mourned our late month on the Nile. We took our last donkey-ride through the palms that now grow where Memphis once stood, and reached theNitocrisby sundown.

By midday on the 10th, we shook hands with the crew and left theNitocristied to the bank where we had first found her, just as though nothing had happened; and, after all, what had happened was this: six more tourists had gone to the first cataract and back, and a few more Egyptian sketches had been made. For us the performance of the Nile was at an end, and we were once more in the streets on our way to the Ghezireh Hotel, with a determination to console ourselves with Cairo, which now looked to us, after our stay in the country, like a full-grown European capital.

By January 10 the season had commenced

At Philæ.

and the prices of rooms had doubled. Since we left, several steamers from the west had brought an army of tourists, who were turning Africa into New York, London, and Paris. And at the Casino, in the Ghezireh Gardens, was as good an imitation of Monte Carlo as the law allows, but such a poor one that even the Frenchmen who worked it seemed ashamed of themselves, and the New-Yorker who owned it was very seldom seen there.

“As good an imitation of Monte Carlo as the law allows.”

At Shepheard’s there is always the man who has “been there before,” and like the same man at the play, he sits beside you and interprets the picture. You finally promise that you will not go to themonskiewithout him, and that you will not see the Sphinx by moonlight unless he is there; for if you do, not having been there before, you will be sure to go too early or too late. He says the moon should be at just such an angle and no other. The peddlers in the monskie know him, and while they entertain him with little cups of sweet tea they complain that they have had no luck since they last saw him, and they ask eagerly after that gentleman he brought to them the year before—the gentleman who had such exquisite taste and backed it up so generously with his money. And you drink their tea, and feel, as you leave the shops, after having only looked at their things, that they will never ask affectionately after you. The man who has beenthere before generally walks in front of you, as if he were not as anxious to have you see the place as he is to have you see that he knows his way about; and, after all, it is no small thing to be proud of. If I ever go to the mouskie again, I shall pity the greenhorn who happens to be with me.

The bazaars are dirty, and so many pasty-faced Turks squatting about in the filth grow tiresome. At first they are described in letters home as fascinating and picturesque, and whole days are spent with them, buying hundreds of things that are destined to be left in hotel bureau drawers and gradually lost. The souvenirs we buy in the mouskie seem to melt away. The precious stones we bought there turn to glass, the slippers become pasteboard, the gilt things tarnish, and the brass-work bends itself into old junk, and the mouskie is only a confused dream; so no wonder the old traveler is proud that he can actually find his

“The man who has ‘been there before.’”

In a Coffee-house, Cairo.

way about in it. He had probably begun to think that there never had been such a place.

But Egypt is full of real things, and probably the most genuine thing of them all is the English occupation. Egypt herself is the best proof of how necessary to her well-being this is. It is hard to tell just how unhappy the fellaheen were before the Englishcame. The Egyptian is not the sort of man that complains. After centuries of oppression, he now accepts whatever form of government is offered in a browbeaten way, and shuffles along after his donkey, and pays his tax for bringing a few bundles of clover across the bridge into Cairo without a murmur; and, judging by his looks, I doubt if he would make much disturbance if he found, some morning, that the tax on his clover had been doubled. He evidently feels like a very small depositor in a broken bank. England is the largest creditor, and is straightening things out for them both, and he is satisfied.

There never were so many cooks trying to spoil a broth. Before a consul-general is received by the Khedive, the Sultan of Turkey must first approve of him, and it is said that the Sultan allows months to go by before he gives his consent, which is his Oriental way of showing his authority. But Egypt isgeographically so important that, in spite of herself, she will be saved, and with England’s help she will some day pay her debts, and in centuries to come the fellah may learn to hold his head up like the Nubian.

There is no fear of Egypt becoming dull and commonplace, for if the East and the West should ever fight, it must be for the possession of her canal; and many an unborn soldier’s reputation will be made before the railroad that has started up the Nile’s valley reaches Cape Town. The same land that offers death and reputation to the strong gives life to the weak, and the tired rich man on his dahabiyeh and the soldier on the transport go up the Nile side by side, and in most cases they both find what they are in search of.

Shepheard’s, in all probability, will forever remain a composite portrait of Europe and Asia, with Cairo as its frame. Time has made, and probably will continue to make,some slight alteration in Upper Egypt’s appearance; but the locomotive’s whistle will have difficulty in breaking the silence and calm of Karnak and Thebes. And the present indications are that Egypt will remain true to the Pharaohs of old, and until the judgment-day she will, in all probability (assisted by the Nile, who made her), continue to quietly resist the attentions of modern nations, and patiently wait for that last day.

At Komombos.

[The image of the book's back cover is unavailable.]

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