Читать книгу Eastern Life - Harriet Martineau - Страница 9

In the morning, our canvas was down, along the landward side of our boats, so that the people on shore could not pry. It was pleasant, however, to play the spy upon them. There were many donkeys, and gay groups of their owners, just above the boat. On the one hand were a company of men washing clothes in the river under a picturesque old wall; and on the other, boat-builders diligently at work on the shore. The Arab artisans appear to work well. The hammers of these boat-builders were going all day; and the tinman, shoemakers, and others whom I observed in the bazaars, appeared dexterous and industrious.

Asyoot is the residence of the Governor of Upper Egypt. Selim Pasha held this office as we went up the river. While we were coming down, he was deposed, to the great regret of all whom we heard speak of it. He was so well thought of that there was every hope of his reinstatement. Selim Pasha is he who married his sister, and made the terrible discovery while at supper on his wedding-day, in his first interview with his bride. Both were Circassian slaves; and he had been carried away before the birth of this sister. This adventure happened when the now grey-bearded man was young: but it invests him with interest still, in addition to that inspired by his high character. We passed his garden to-day, and thought it looked well, – the palace being embosomed among palms, acacias, and the yellow-flowering mimosa; which last, when intermixed with other trees, gives a kind of autumnal tinge to masses of dark foliage.

We were much struck by the causeway, which would be considered a vast work in England. It extends from the river bank to the town, and thence on to the Djebel (mountain) with many limbs from this main trunk. In direct extent, I think it can hardly be less than two miles; but of this I am not sure. Its secondary object is to retain the Nile water after the inundation, the water flowing in through sluices which can be easily closed. The land is divided by smaller embankments, within this large one, into compartments or basins, where the most vigorous crops of wheat, clover, and millet were flourishing when we rode by. The water stands not more than two feet deep at high Nile in the most elevated of these basins. Inside the causeway was the canal which yielded its earth to its neighbour. In this canal many pools remained; and the seed was only just springing in the driest parts. In some places I saw shaken piers, and sluices where the unbaked brick seemed to have melted down in the water: but the new walls and bridges appeared to be solidly constructed. – On the banks of the causeway and canal on the south side of the town were flowering mimosas as large, we thought, as oaks of fifty years' growth in England. The causeway afforded an admirable road – high, broad, and level. The effect was strange of entering from such a road into such a town.

The streets had, for the most part, blank walls, brown, and rarely perpendicular. Some sloped purposely, and some from the giving way of the mud bricks. Many were cracked from top to bottom. Jars were built in near the top of several of the houses, for the pigeons. The bazaars appeared well stocked, and the business going forward was brisk. I now began to feel the misery which every Frank woman has to endure in the provincial towns of the East – the being stared at by all eyes. The staring was not rude or offensive; but it was enough to be very disagreeable; at least, to one who knew, as I did, that the appearance of a woman with an uncovered face is an indecency in the eyes of the inhabitants. At Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus, one feels nothing of this, and the staring is no more than we give to a Turk in the streets of London or Liverpool: but in the provincial towns there is an air of amazement in the people, mingled in some places with true Mohammedan hatred of the Christians, which it is hard to meet with composure. The gentlemen of my party, who did not care for their share as Christians, wondered at my uneasiness, and disapproved of it: but I could not help it: and though I never gave way to it so far as to omit seeing anything on account of it, I never got over it at all, and felt it throughout to be the greatest penalty of my Eastern travel. Yet I would not advise any Englishwoman to alter her dress or ways. She can never, in a mere passage through an Eastern country, make herself look like an Eastern woman; and an unsupported assumption of any native custom will obtain for her no respect, but only make her appear ashamed of her own origin and ways. It is better to appear as she is, at any cost, than to attempt any degree of imposture.

While we were waiting in the street to have our letters addressed in Arabic to the care of our consul at Cairo, I was, for the first time, struck by the number of blind and one-eyed people among those who surrounded us. Several young boys were one-eyed. As everybody knows, this is less owing to disease than to dread of the government.

It was strange to see, in the middle of a large town, vultures and other wild birds flying overhead. Among others, we saw an eagle, with a fish in its beak. – On our way to the caves in the Djebel, we met a funeral procession coming from the cemetery which lies between the town and the hills. The women were uttering a funeral howl worthy of Ireland.

Our donkeys took us up a very steep path, nearly to the first range of caves. When we turned to overlook the landscape, what a view was there! Mr. E., who has travelled much, said he had never seen so rich an expanse of country. I felt that I had seen something like it; but I could not, at the moment, remember where. It was certainly not in England: nor was it like the plains of Lombardy; nor yet the unfenced expanse of cultivation that one sees in Germany. At last it struck me that the resemblance was to an Illinois prairie. The rich green, spreading on either hand to the horizon, was prairie-like: but I never was, in Illinois, on a height which commanded one hundred miles of unbroken fertility, such as I now saw. And even in Illinois, in the finest season, there is never such an atmosphere as here gave positive brilliancy to every feature of the scenery. A perfect level of the most vivid green extended north and south, till it was lost, not in haze, but from the mere inability of the eye to take in more; and through this wound away, from end to end, the full blue river. To the east, facing us, was the varied line of the Arabian hills, of a soft lilac tint. Seventeen villages, overshadowed by dark palms, were set down beside the river, or some little way into the land; and the plain was dotted with Arab husbandmen and their camels, here and there, as far as the eye could reach. Below us lay the town, with its brown, flat-roofed houses, relieved by the palms of its gardens, and two or three white cupolas, and fourteen minarets, of various heights and forms. Between it and us lay the causeway, enlivened by groups of Arabs, with their asses and camels, appearing and disappearing among the thickets of acacia which bordered it. Behind all lay the brilliant Djebel, with its glowing yellow lights and soft blue shadows. The whole scene looked to my eyes as gay as the rainbow, and as soft as the dawn. As I stood before the cave, I thought nothing could be more beautiful: but one section of it looked yet lovelier when seen through the lofty dark portal of an upper cave. But there is no conveying such an impression as that.

The caves are tombs; some of them very ancient: so ancient, that Abraham might have seen them, if he had come so far up the country. One race of those old times remains – the wolves. They were sacred here (Asyoot being the Lycopolis of the Greek times); their mummies are in many pits of the Djebel; and we saw the tracks of two in the dust of the caves. – The cave called Stabl d'Antar (Stable of the Architect, or, as others say, Stable of Antar) is lofty and large – about seventy-two feet by thirty-six. Its ceiling is covered with patterns which we should call Greek borders anywhere else: but this ceiling is older than Greek art. The colours are chiefly blue, light grey, and white. The colours of the hieroglyphic sculptures were red and blue, the blue predominating. Two large figures flanked the portal; one much defaced; the other nearly perfect.

I have since seen so much of the old Egyptian monuments, and they have become so familiarly interesting to me, that I look back with amusement to this hour of my first introduction to hieroglyphics and burial Caves. I can scarcely believe it was only a few months ago, so youthful and ignorant seem now the feelings of mere curiosity and wonder with which I looked upon such painting and sculpture as afterwards became an intelligible language to me. I do not mean by this that I made any attempts to learn the old Egyptian language or its signs, beyond a few of the commonest symbols. It is a kind of learning which requires the devotion of years; and it is perhaps the only kind of learning of which a smattering can be of no use, and may probably be mischievous. – I remember being extremely surprised at the amount of sculptured inscriptions here – little imagining what a mere sprinkling they were compared with what I should see in other places.

In the succession of chambers within, and in the caves above, we found ranges of holes for the deposit of wolf mummies, and pits for the reception of coffins. The roofs of some of these caves had been supported by large square pillars, whose capitals remain attached, while the shafts are gone. This gave us a hint of the architectural adornment of which we were to see so much hereafter in the tombs of Thebes and Benee Hasan. In the corner of a tomb lay a human skull, the bone of which was remarkably thick. Many bones and rags of mummy-cloth lay scattered about. On the side of the hill below we found a leg and a foot. The instep was high by compression, but very long. There was also a skull, wrapped in mummy-cloth; not fragrant enough now, for all its antique spicery, to bring away.

In the pits of these caves were the mummies lying when Cambyses was busy at Thebes, overthrowing the Colossus in the plain. And Jong after, came the upstart Greeks, relating here their personal adventures in India under their great Alexander, and calling the place Lycopolis, and putting a wolf on the reverse of their local coins. And, long after, came the Romans, and called Lycopolis the ancient name of the place, and laid the ashes of their dead in some of the caves. And, long after, came the Christian anchorites, and lived a hermit life in these rock abodes. Among them was John of Lycopolis, who was consulted as an oracle by the Emperor Theodosius, as by many others, from his supposed knowledge of futurity. A favourite eunuch, Eutropius, was sent hither from Constantinople, to learn from the hermit what would be the event of the civil war. I once considered the times of the Emperor Theodosius old times. How modern do they appear on the hill-side at Asyoot!

Our Scotch friends came up in the evening. As they were detained for the same reason as ourselves, we left them behind when we started the next afternoon. They gave us bows and waving of handkerchiefs, when the shouts of our crew gave notice of our departure; and they no doubt hoped to see us again speedily.

The next day, I told Mr. E. that a certain area we were coming to on the east bank must be the site of some old town. I judged this from the advantages evident at a glance. The space was nearly semicircular, its chord being the river-bank, and the rest curiously surrounded by three ranges of hills, whose extremities overlapped each other. There was thus obtained a river frontage, shelter from the sands of the desert behind, and a free ventilation through the passages of the hills. We referred to our books and map, and found that here stood Antaeopolis. From this time, it was one of my amusements to determine, by observation of the site, where to look for ancient towns; and the requisites were so clear that I seldom found myself deceived.

Diodorus Siculus tells us that Antae (supposed by Wilkinson to be probably the same with Ombte) had charge of the Ethiopian and Lybian parts of the kingdom of Osiris, while Osiris went abroad through the earth to benefit it with his gifts. Antae seems not to have been always in friendship with the house of Osiris, and was killed here by Hercules,⁹ on behalf of Osiris: but he was worshipped here, near the spot where the wife and son of Osiris avenged his death on his murderer Typho. The temple sacred to Antae (or, in the Greek, Antaeus), parts of which were standing thirty years ago, was a rather modern affair, having been built about the time of the destruction of the Colossus of Rhodes. Ptolemy Philopater built it; and he was the Egyptian monarch who sent presents and sympathy to Rhodes, on occasion of the fall of the Colossus. Now nothing remains of the monuments but some heaps of stones – nothing whatever that can be seen from the river. The traveller can only look upon hamlets of modern Arabs, and speculate on the probability of vast »treasures hid in the sand.«

If I were to have the choice of a fairy gift, it should be like none of the many things I fixed upon in my childhood, in readiness for such an occasion. It should be for a great winnowing fan, such as would, without injury to human eyes and lungs, blow away the sand which buries the monuments of Egypt. What a scene would be laid open then! One statue and sarcophagus, brought from Memphis, was buried one hundred and thirty feet below the mound surface. Who knows but that the greater part of old Memphis, and of other glorious cities, lies almost unharmed under the sand! Who can say what armies of sphinxes, what sentinels of colossi, might start up on the banks of the river, or come forth from the hill-sides of the interior, when the cloud of sand had been wafted away! The ruins which we now go to study might then appear occupying only eminences, while below might be ranges of pylons, miles of colonnade, temples intact, and gods and goddesses safe in their sanctuaries. What quays along the Nile, and the banks of forgotten canals! What terraces, and flights of wide shallow steps! What architectural stages might we not find for a thousand miles along the river, where now the orange sands lie so smooth and light as to show the track – the clear footprint – of every beetle that comes out to bask in the sun! – But it is better as it is. If we could once blow away the sand, to discover the temples and palaces, we should next want to rend the rocks, to lay open the tombs; and Heaven knows what this would set us wishing further. It is best as it is; for the time has not come for the full discovery of the treasures of Egypt. It is best as it is. The sand is a fine means of preservation; and the present inhabitants perpetuate enough of the names to serve for guidance when the day for exploration shall come. The minds of scholars are preparing for an intelligent interpretation of what a future age may find: and science, chemical and mechanical, will probably supply such means hereafter as we have not now for treating and removing the sand when its conservative office has lasted long enough. We are not worthy yet of this great unveiling: and the inhabitants are not, from their ignorance, trustworthy as spectators. It is better that the world should wait, if only care be taken that the memory of no site now known be lost. True as I feel it to be that we had better wait, I was for ever catching myself in a speculation, not only on the buried treasures of the mounds on shore, but on means for managing this obstinate sand.

And yet, vexatious as is its presence in many a daily scene, this sand has a bright side to its character, like everything else. Besides its great office of preserving unharmed for a future age the records of the oldest times known to man, the sand of the desert has, for many thousand years, shared equally with the Nile the function of determining the character and the destiny of a whole people, who have again operated powerfully on the characters and destiny of other nations. Everywhere, the minds and fortunes of human races are mainly determined by the characteristics of the soil on which they are horn and reared. In our own small island, there are, as it were, three tribes of people, whose lives are much determined still, in spite of all modern facilities for intercourse, by the circumstance of there being born and reared on the mineral strip to the west, the pastoral strip in the middle, or the eastern agricultural portion. The Welsh and Cornwall miners are as widely different from the Lincolnshire or Kentish husbandmen, and the Leicestershire herdsmen, as Englishmen can be from Englishmen. Not only their physical training is different; their intellectual faculties are differently exercised, and their moral ideas and habits vary accordingly. So it is in every country where there is a diversity of geological formation: and nowhere is the original constitution of their earth so strikingly influential on the character of its inhabitants as in Egypt. There everything depends – life itself, and all that it includes – on the state of the unintermitting conflict between the Nile and the Desert. The world has seen many struggles; but no other so pertinacious, so perdurable, and so sublime as the conflict of these two great powers. The Nile, ever young because perpetually renewing its youth, appears to the inexperienced eye to have no chance, with its stripling force, against the great old Goliath, the Desert, whose might has never relaxed from the earliest days till now; but the giant has not conquered yet. Now and then he has prevailed for a season; and the tremblers whose destiny hung on the event have cried out that all was over: but he has once more been driven back, and Nilus has risen up again, to do what we see him doing in the sculptures – bind up his water-plants about the throne of Egypt. These fluctuations of superiority have produced extraordinary effects on the people for the time: but these are not the forming and training influences which I am thinking of now. It is true that when Nile gains too great an accession of strength, and runs in destructively upon the Desert, men are in despair at seeing their villages swept away, and that torrents come spouting out from the sacred tombs in the mountain, as the fearful clouds of the sky come down to aid the river of the valley. It is true that, in the opposite case, they tremble when the heavens are alive with meteors, and the Nile is too weak to rise and meet the sand columns that come marching on, followed by blinding clouds of the enemy: and that famine is then inevitable, bringing with it the moral curses which attend upon hunger. It is true that at such times strangers have seen (as we know from Abdallatif, himself an eye-witness) how little children are made food of,¹⁰ and even men slaughtered for meat, like cattle. It is true that such have been the violent effects produced on men's conduct by extremity here – effects much like what are produced by extremity everywhere. It is not of this that I am thinking when regarding the influence on a nation of the incessant struggle between the Nile and the Desert. It is of the formation of their ideas and habits, and the training of their desires.

From the beginning, the people of Egypt have had everything to hope from the river; nothing from the desert: much to fear from the desert; and little from the river. What their Fear may reasonably be, anyone may know who looks upon a hillocky expanse of sand, where the little jerboa burrows, and the hyaena prowls at night. Under these hillocks lie temples and palaces, and under the level sands, a whole city. The enemy has come in from behind, and stifled and buried it. What is the Hope of the people from the river, anyone may witness who, at the regular season, sees the people grouped on the eminences, watching the advancing waters, and listening for the voice of the crier, or the boom of the cannon which is to tell the prospect or event of the inundation of the year. Who can estimate the effect on a nation's mind and character of a perpetual vigilance against the desert (see what it is in Holland of a similar vigilance against the sea!), and of an annual mood of Hope in regard to the Nile? Who cannot see what a stimulating and enlivening influence this periodical anxiety and relief must exercise on the character of a nation? – And then, there is the effect on their Ideas. The Nile was naturally deified by the old inhabitants. It was a god to the mass; and at least one of the manifestations of deity to the priestly class. As it was the immediate cause of all they had, and all they hoped for, the creative power regularly at work before their eyes, usually conquering, though occasionally checked, it was to them the Good Power; and the Desert was the Evil one. Hence came a main part of their faith, embodied in the allegory of the burial of Osiris in the sacred stream, whence he rose, once a year, to scatter blessings over the earth. – Then, the structure of their country originated or modified their ideas of death and life. As to the disposal of their dead; – they could not dream of consigning their dead to the waters, which were too sacred to receive any meaner body than the incorruptible one of Osiris: nor must any other be placed within reach of its waters, or in the way of the pure production of the valley. There were the boundary rocks, with the hints afforded by their caves. These became sacred to the dead. After the accumulation of a few generations of corpses, it became clear how much more extensive was the world of the dead than that of the living: and as the proportion of the living to the dead became, before men's eyes, smaller and smaller, the state of the dead became a subject of proportionate importance to them, till their faith and practice grew into what we see them in the records of the temples and tombs – engrossed with the idea of death and in preparation for it. The unseen world became all in all to them; and the visible world and present life of little more importance than as the necessary introduction to the higher and greater. The imagery before their eyes perpetually sustained these modes of thought. Everywhere they had in presence the symbols of the worlds of death and life; – the limited scene of production, activity, and change; – the valley with its verdure, its floods, and its busy multitudes, who were all incessantly passing away, to be succeeded by their like; while, as a boundary to this scene of life, lay the region of death, to their view unlimited, and everlastingly silent to the human ear. Their imagery of death was wholly suggested by the scenery of their abode. Our reception of this is much injured by our having been familiarised with it first through the ignorant and vulgarised Greek adoption of it, in their imagery of Charon. Styx, Cerberus, and Rhadamanthus: but if we can forget these, and look upon the older records with fresh eyes, it is inexpressibly interesting to contemplate the symbolical representations of death by the oldest of the Egyptians, before Greek or Persian was heard of in the world; the passage of the dead across the river or lake of the valley, attended by the Conductor of souls, the god Anubis; the formidable dog, the guardian of the mansion of Osiris (or the divine abode); the balance in which the heart or deeds of the deceased are weighed against the symbol of Integrity; the infant Harpocrates, the emblem of a new life, seated before the throne of the judge; the range of assessors who are to pronounce on the life of the being come up to judgment; and finally the judge himself, whose suspended sceptre is to give the sign of acceptance or condemnation. Here the deceased has crossed the living valley and river; and in the Caves of the death region, where the howl of the wild dog is heard by night, is this process of judgment going forward: and none but those who have seen the contrasts of the region with their own eyes – none who have received the idea through the borrowed imagery of the Greeks, or the traditions of any other people – can have any adequate notion how the mortuary ideas of the primitive Egyptians, and, through them, of the civilised world at large, have been originated by the everlasting conflict of the Nile and the Desert.

How the presence of these elements has, in all ages, determined the occupations and habits of the inhabitants, needs only to be pointed out; the fishing, the navigation, and the almost amphibious habits of the people are what they owe to the Nile; and their practice of laborious tillage to the Desert. A more striking instance of patient industry can nowhere be found than in the method of irrigation practised in all times in this valley. After the subsidence of the Nile, every drop of water needed for tillage, and for all other purposes, for the rest of the year, is hauled up and distributed by human labour – up to the point where the sakia, worked by oxen, supersedes the shadoof, worked by men. Truly the Desert is here a hard taskmaster, or, rather, a pertinacious enemy, to be incessantly guarded against: but yet a friendly adversary, inasmuch as such natural compulsion to toil is favourable to a nation's character.

One other obligation which the Egyptians owe to the Desert struck me freshly and forcibly, from the beginning of our voyage to the end. It plainly originated their ideas of Art. Not those of the present inhabitants, which are wholly Saracenic still; but those of the primitive race who appear to have originated art all over the world. The first thing that impressed me in the Nile scenery, above Cairo, was the angularity of almost all forms. The trees appeared almost the only exception. The line of the Arabian hills soon became so even as to give them the appearance of being supports of a vast tableland, while the sand heaped up at their bases was like a row of pyramids. Elsewhere, one's idea of sand-hills is that, of all round eminences, they are the roundest; but here their form is generally that of truncated pyramids. The entrances of the caverns are square. The masses of sand left by the Nile are square. The river banks are graduated by the action of the water, so that one may see a hundred natural Nilometers in as many miles. Then, again, the forms of the rocks, especially the limestone ranges, are remarkably grotesque. In a few days, I saw, without looking for them, so many colossal figures of men and animals springing from the natural rock, so many sphinxes and strange birds, that I was quite prepared for anything I afterwards met with in the temples. The higher we went up the country, the more pyramidal became the forms of even the mud houses of the modern people; and in Nubia they were worthy, from their angularity, of old Egypt. It is possible that the people of Abyssinia might, in some obscure age, have derived their ideas of art from Hindostan, and propagated them down the Nile. No one can now positively contradict it. But I did not feel on the spot that any derived art was likely to be in such perfect harmony with its surroundings as that of Egypt certainly is; – a harmony so wonderful as to be perhaps the most striking circumstance of all to a European, coming from a country where all art is derived,¹¹ and its main beauty therefore lost. It is useless to speak of the beauty of Egyptian architecture and sculpture to those who, not going to Egypt, can form no conception of its main condition – its appropriateness. I need not add that I think it worse than useless to adopt Egyptian forms and decoration in countries where there is no Nile and no Desert, and where decorations are not, as in Egypt, fraught with meaning – pictured language – messages to the gazer. But I must speak more of this hereafter. Suffice it now that in the hills, angular at their summits, with angular mounds at their bases, and angular caves in their strata, we could not but at once see the originals of temples, pyramids, and tombs. Indeed, the pyramids look like an eternal fixing down of the shifting sand-hills which are here a main feature of the Desert. If we consider further what facility the Desert has afforded for scientific observation, how it was the field for the meteorological studies of the Egyptians, and how its permanent pyramidal forms served them, whether originally or by derivation, with instruments of measurement and calculation for astronomical purposes, we shall see that, one way or another, the Desert has been a great benefactor to the Egyptians of all time, however fairly regarded, in some senses, as an enemy. The sand may, as I said before, have a fair side to its character, if it has taken a leading part in determining the ideas, the feelings, the worship, the occupation, the habits, and the arts of the people of the Nile valley for many thousand years.

The hills now, above Antaeopolis, approached the river in strips, which, on arriving at them, we found to be united by a range at the back. Some fine sites for cities were thus afforded; and many of them were, no doubt, thus occupied in past ages. A little further on rises a lofty rock, a precipice three hundred feet high, which our Rais was afraid to pass at night. I was on deck before sunrise on the morning of the nth, to see it; but I found there was no hurry. A man was sent for milk from this place: so I landed too, and walked some way along the bank. On the Lybian side, I overlooked a rich, green, clumpy country. On the Arabian side, the hills came down so close to the water as to leave only a narrow path, scarcely passable for camels at high Nile. There were goats among the rocks; and on the other shore, sheep, whose brown wool is spun by distaff by men in the fields, or travelling along the bank. The unbleached wool makes the brown garments which all the men wear. I often wished that some one would set the fashion of red garments in the brown Nile scenery. We saw more or less good blue every day; but the only red dress I had seen yet was at Asyoot, where it looked so well chat one wished for more. The red tarboosh is a treat to the eye, when the sun touches it; or at night, the lamp on deck; but the crew did not wear the tarboosh – only little white cotton caps, in the absence of the full-dress turban.

This day was remarkable for our seeing the first doum palm (an angular tree!) and the first crocodile. Alee said he had seen a crocodile two days before, but we had not. And now we saw several. The first was not distinguishable to inexperienced eyes, from the inequalities of the sand. The next I dimly saw slip off into the water. In the afternoon a family of crocodiles were seen basking on a mud-bank which we were to pass. As we drew near, in silence, the whole boat's company being collected at the bows, the largest crocodile slipped into the water, showing its nose at intervals. Another followed, leaving behind the little one, a yellow monster, asleep, with the sunlight full upon it. Mr. E. fired at it, and at the same moment the crew set up a shout. Of course it awoke, and was off in an instant, but unhurt. We had no ball; and crocodile-shooting is hopeless, with nothing better than shot. Our crew seemed to have no fear of these creatures, plunging and wading in the river without hesitation, whenever occasion required. There being no wind, we moored at sunset; and two of us obtained a half-hour's walk before dark. Even then the jackals were howling after us the whole time. Our walk was over mud of various degrees of dryness, and among young wheat and little tamarisks, springing from the cracked soil.

On the 13th we fell in with Selim Pasha, without being aware what we were going to see. Our crew having to track, the Rais and Alee went ashore for charcoal, and Mr. E. and I for a walk Following a path which wound through coarse grass and thorny mimosas, we found ourselves presently approaching the town of Soohaj: and near the arched gate of the town, and everywhere under the palms, were groups and crowds of people, in clean turbans and best clothes. Then appeared, from behind the trees on the margin, three boats at anchor, one being that of Selim Pasha himself, the others for his suite. He had come up the river to receive his dues, and was about to settle accounts now at Soohaj. He had a crew of twenty-three men, and was proceeding day and night. His interpreter accosted us, offered us service, discussed the wind and weather, and invited us to take coffee on board the Governor's boat. I was sorry to be in the way of Mr. E.'s going; but I could not think of such an adventure in Mrs. Y.'s absence. We saw the Governor leave his boat, supported by the arms, for dignity's sake. He then took his seat under a palm, and received some papers offered him. He looked old, short, and very business-like. A scribe sat on the top of his cabin, with ink-horn and other apparatus; and a man was hurrying about on shore with a handful of papers covered with Arabic writing. All this, with the turbaned and gazing groups under the tamarisks, the white-robed soldiers before the gate of the barracks, the stretch of town-walls beside us, and the minarets of Eckmim rising out of the palm-groves on the opposite shore, made up a new and striking scene. Mr. and Mrs. Y. saw, from the boat, part of the reverse side; they saw eight men in irons, reserved to be bastinadoed for the non-payment of their taxes. – As we walked on, we passed a school, where the scholars were moving their bodies to and fro, and jabbering as usual. Then we descended the embankment of the canal, which winds in towards the town, and crossed its sluice; and then we came out upon a scene of millet-threshing Two oxen, muzzled, were treading out the grain; five men were beating the ears, and a sixth was turning over and shaking the husks with a rake. Such are the groups which incessantly delight the eye in Eastern travel. – Next, we found ourselves among a vast quantity of heavy stones, squared for building. They were deeply embedded, but did not look like the remains of ancient building. And now it was time for us to stop, lest there should be difficulty, if we went further, in getting on board. So we sat down in a dusty but shady place, among some fowl-houses, and beside an oven. I never took a more amusingly foreign walk. – A short ramble that evening was as little like home; but more sad than amusing. We entered a beautiful garden, or cultivated palm orchard, which was in course of rapid destruction by the Nile. Whole plots of soil and a great piece of wall were washed away. Repeatedly we saw signs of this destruction; and we wondered whether an equivalent advantage was given anywhere else. By day we passed towns which, like Manfaloot, were cut away year by year; and by night the sullen plash caused by the fall of masses of earth was heard. In countries where security of property is more thought of than it is here, this liability must seriously affect the value of the best portions of the land – those which have a river frontage. Here it appears to be quietly submitted to, as one of the decrees of inevitable fate. The circumstance of the Nile changing its course must also affect some historical and geographical questions – in the one case as regards the marches of ancient armies, and the sites of old cities; and in the other, the relations of different parts of the country. Many towns, called inland by geographers, are now on the banks of the river. At Manfaloot, it is clear that the divergence from the old course under the rocks is very great; and near Benee Hasan the change is made almost from year to year. When Sir G. Wilkinson visited the caves,¹² the river was so far off as to leave a breadth of two miles between it and the rocks; and Mrs. Romer, who was there the year before us, describes the passage to the caves as something laborious and terrific: whereas, when we visited the caves on our return, we found the river flowing at the base of the acclivity; and we reached the tombs easily in twelve minutes. From the heights, we traced its present and former course, and could plainly see a third bed, in which it had at one time run. We were sorry to see it cut through fine land, where the crops on either bank showed what the destruction must have been. The banks were falling in during the few hours of our stay; and here, as in similar places, we observed that the river was more turbid than usual. These local accidents must largely affect the great question of the rate of rising of the bed of the river, and, in consequence, that of the whole valley: a question which some have attempted to determine by comparison of the dates of the buildings at Thebes with the depth of the sand accumulated above their bases.

The next place where we went ashore, Girgeh, once stood a quarter of a mile inland: it is now in course of being washed down. It is a miserable place, as might be expected, with such a fate hanging over it. We stayed here an hour for the purchase of bread, fowls, and a sheep. We give 30 paras (1¾ d.) for a fowl; 6 s. for a sheep; and a piastre, (2¼ d.) for 42 eggs. The small bazaars had few people in them at this hour (7 A.M.), and of those few many were blind; and on our return to the boat, we found a row of blind people on the bank, hoping for baksheesh. – The millet stalks here measured eleven feet; and, of course, the fields are a perfect jungle. We saw occasionally the millet stalks burnt, and strewn over the fields for a top-dressing. At other times we observed that where the millet had been cut, wheat was sown broadcast among the stubble, which was left to rot. The only manuring that we saw, besides this top-dressing, was that of the gardens with pigeons' dung; and the qualifying of the Nile mud with sand from the desert, or dust out of the temples, brought in frail-baskets on the backs of asses.

Two of our sapient crew having quarrelled at mess about which should have a particular morsel of bread, and fought noisily on shore, the Rais administered the bastinado. The first was laid down, and held by the feet and shoulders, while flogged with a boat-pole. He cried out vigorously. The other came forward cheerfully from the file and laid himself down. The Rais broke the pole over him: but he made no noise, jumped up, spat the dust out of his mouth, and went to work at the tow-rope as if nothing had happened. They seem to bear no malice, and joke with one another immediately after the bitterest quarrels. – One of our Nubians wears his knife in a sheath, strapped about the upper part of his left arm. Another wears an amulet in the same manner. Two who come from Dongola have their faces curiously gashed with three cuts on each cheek, and four on each side the eye. These cuts are given them by their parents in childhood for beauty-marks.

We now began to meet rafts of pottery coming down from Kenneh, the seat of the manufacture of the water-jars which are in general use. Porous earth and burnt grass are the chief materials used. We meet seven or more rafts in a group. First, a layer of palm fronds is put on the raft; and then a layer of jars; then another layer of each. The jars all have their mouths out of the water. They are so porous that their conductors are continually employed in emptying them of water: that is, they are always so employed when we meet them. Not being worth sponges, they dip in and wring out cloths, with strings to them. The oars are mere branches, whose boughs are tied together at the extremity. Though they bend too much, they answer their purpose pretty well; but the whole affair looks rude and precarious enough. In curious contrast with their progress was that of the steamer, conveying the Prince of Prussia, which we met to-day, hurrying down from Thebes. We preferred our method of voyaging, though we now advanced only about twelve miles a day, and had been fourteen days making the same distance that we did the first two.

We cannot understand why the country boats are so badly laden as they appear to be. The cargo is placed so forward as to sink the bows in the water; and so many founder in consequence that we cannot conceive why the practice is not altered. We have seen several sunk. One was a merchant boat that had gone down in the night, with five people in her. She was a sad spectacle – her masts and rigging appearing above water in the middle of the stream.

On the morning of the 19th, on leaving our anchorage near the high rock of Chenoboscion, we found that a wind had sprung up; and we enjoyed the sensation of more rapid progress. We might now hope to see the temple of Dendara in a few hours. The Arabian mountains retreated, and the Lybian chain advanced. Crocodiles plunged into the water as we sailed past the mud banks. The doum palms began to congregate, and from clumps they became woods. Behind one of these dark woods, I saw a mass of building which immediately fixed my attention; and when a turn of the river brought us to a point where the sunlight was shining into it, I could clearly distinguish the characteristics of the temple of Dendara. I could see the massive portico, – the dark spaces between the pillars, and the line of the architrave. Thus much we could see for two hours from the opposite shore, as Mr. E. had to ride up to Kenneh for letters; but, as the wind was fair, and the temple was two miles off, we left till our return any closer examination of it.

While Mr. E. and Alee were gone to the town, Mr. Y. walked along the shore, in the direction of Selim Pasha's boats; and Mrs. Y. and I were busy about domestic business on board. I was sewing on deck when Mr. Y. returned, and told me he had been invited to an audience of Selim Pasha. When pipes and coffee had been brought, conversation began through the medium of some Italian gentlemen of the Pasha's suite. On Mr. Y.'s expressing his hope that, by means of commerce, a friendly feeling between the Egyptians and English would always subsist and increase, one of these officers exclaimed, »How should that be, when you have robbed us of Syria?« On Mr. Y.'s pacific observations being again received with an angry recurrence to this sore subject, the Pasha interposed, saying, »These are great and important affairs which are for our superiors to settle, and with which we subordinates have nothing to do. Let us talk of something pleasant.« While Mr. Y. was telling me this, an elderly man, with a white beard, hideous teeth, and coarse face altogether, was approaching the boat; and to my dismay, he stepped on board, or rather, was pushed in by his attendants. Mr. Y. had been sitting with his back to the shore; and now, taken by surprise, seeing the white beard, and having his head full of his late interview, he announced to me »his Excellency Selim Pasha.« Up I jumped, with my lapful of work, even more disappointed that this should be the hero of that romantic story than dismayed at the visit. And he looked so unlike the old man I saw under the palm at Souhadj! I called up Mrs. Y. from the cabin. Mr. Y. made signs to the cook (for our only interpreter was absent) for pipes and coffee; and we sat down in form and order, and abundant awkwardness. To complete the absurdity of the scene, a line of towels, just out of the wash-tub, were drying on the top of the cabin; and the ironing-blanket was on the cabin table. – The first relief was Mr. Y.'s telling me »It is not Selim Pasha. These are the son and grandson of the English consul at Kenneh.«

Then I began to remember certain things of the English consul at Kenneh; – what a discreet old Arab he is reported to be, behaving tenderly to European ladies, and pressing parties to go and dine with him; and then, when they are on the way to the town, stepping back to the boat, and laying hands on all the nice provisions he can find, from eggs to Maraschino: so that he extracts a delectable dinner for himself out of his showy hospitality to strangers. While I was reviving all this in my memory, the old man himself was coming down to us. He shook hands with us all round: and, as I expected, kissed the hand of each lady, and pressed us to go up and dine with him. Alee, who had in the meantime returned with Mr. E., and seen from afar that we were holding a levee, had received his instructions to decline decisively all invitations, and convey that we were in a hurry, as the wind was fair for Thebes: so we were let off with a promise that we would dine with the consul on our return, if we could. – But now arrived the Governor of Kenneh, a far superior-looking person, handsomely dressed in fine brown broadcloth. The consul's elderly son took the opportunity of exploring the cabins, peeping into every corner, and examining Mr. E.'s glass and fowling-piece. We feared a long detention by visitors; but these departed before any others came; and it was still early in the afternoon when we spread our sail, and were off for Thebes.