I climbed up into the lap of one of the statues; it is there only that you can get an adequate idea of the size of the body. What a roomy lap! Nearly ten feet between the wrists that rest upon the legs! I sat comfortably in the navel of the statue, as in a niche, and mused on the passing of the nations. To these massive figures the years go by like the stream. With impassive, serious features, unchanged in expression in thousands of years, they sit listening always to the flowing of the unending Nile, that fills all the air and takes away from that awful silence which would else be painfully felt in this solitude.
The interior of this temple is in keeping with its introduction. You enter a grand hall supported by eight massive Osiride columns, about twenty-two feet high as we estimated them. They are figures of Rameses become Osiris—to be absorbed into Osiris is the end of all the transmigrations of the blessed soul. The expression of the faces of such of these statues as are uninjured, is that of immortal youth—a beauty that has in it the promise of immortality. The sides of this hall are covered with fine sculptures, mainly devoted to the exploits of Rameses II.; and here is found again, cut in the stone the long Poem of the poet Pentaour, celebrating the single-handed exploit of Rameses against the Khitas on the river Orontes. It relates that the king, whom his troops dared not follow, charged with his chariot alone into the ranks of the enemy and rode through them again and again, and slew them by hundreds. Rameses at that time was only twenty-three; it was his first great campaign. Pursuing the enemy, he overtook them in advance of his troops, and, rejecting the councils of his officers, began the fight at once. “The footmen and the horsemen then,” says the poet (the translator is M. de Rouge), “recoiled before the enemy who were masters of Kadesh, on the left bank of the Orontes.... Then his majesty, in the pride of his strength, rising up like the god Mauth, put on his fighting dress. Completely armed, he looked like Baal in the hour of his might. Urging on his chariot, he pushed into the army of the vile Khitas; he was alone, no one was with him. He was surrounded by 2,500 chariots, and the swiftest of the warriors of the vile Khitas, and of the numerous nations who accompanied them, threw themselves in his way.... Each chariot bore three men, and the king had with him neither princes nor generals, nor his captains of archers nor of chariots.”
Then Rameses calls upon Amun; he reminds him of the obelisk he has raised to him, the bulls he has slain for him:—“Thee, I invoke, O my Father! I am in the midst of a host of strangers, and no man is with me. My archers and horsemen have abandoned me; when I cried to them, none of them has heard, when I called for help. But I prefer Amun to thousands of millions of archers, to millions of horsemen, to millions of young heroes all assembled together. The designs of men are nothing, Amun overrules them.”
Needless to say the prayer was heard, the king rode slashing through the ranks of opposing chariots, slaying, and putting to rout the host. Whatever basis of fact the poem may have had in an incident of battle or in the result of one engagement, it was like one of Napoleon’s bulletins from Egypt. The Khitas were not subdued and, not many years after, they drove the Egyptians out of their land and from nearly all Palestine, forcing them, out of all their conquests, into the valley of the Nile itself. During the long reign of this Rameses, the power of Egypt steadily declined, while luxury increased and the nation was exhausted in building the enormous monuments which the king projected. The close of his pretentious reign has been aptly compared to that of Louis XIV.—a time of decadence; in both cases the great fabric was ripe for disaster.
But Rameses liked the poem of Pentaour. It is about as long as a book of the Iliad, but the stone-cutters of his reign must have known it by heart. He kept them carving it and illustrating it all his life, on every wall he built where there was room for the story. He never, it would seem, could get enough of it. He killed those vile Khitas a hundred times; he pursued them over all the stone walls in his kingdom. The story is told here at Ipsambool; it is carved in the Rameseum; the poem is graved on Luxor and Karnak.
Out of this great hall open eight other chambers, all more or less sculptured, some of them covered with well-drawn figures on which the color is still vivid. Two of these rooms are long and very narrow, with a bench running round the walls, the front of which is cut out so as to imitate seats with short pillars. In one are square niches, a foot deep, cut in the wall. The sculptures in one are unfinished, the hieroglyphics and figures drawn in black but not cut—some event having called off the artists and left their work incomplete We seem to be present at the execution of these designs, and so fresh are the colors ot those finished, that it seems it must have been only yesterday that the workman laid down the brush. (A small chamber in the rock outside the temple, which was only opened in 1874, is wonderful in the vividness of its colors; we see there better than anywhere else the colors of vestments.)
These chambers are not the least mysterious portion of this temple. They are in absolute darkness, and have no chance of ventilation. By what light was this elaborate carving executed? If people ever assembled in them, and sat on these benches, when lights were burning, how could they breathe? If they were not used, why should they have been so decorated? They would serve very well for the awful mysteries of the Odd Fellows. Perhaps they were used by the Free Masons in Solomon’s time.
Beyond the great hall is a transverse hall (having two small chambers off from it) with four square pillars, and from this a corridor leads to the adytum. Here, behind an altar of stone, sit four marred gods, facing the outer door, two hundred feet from it. They sit in a twilight that is only-brightened by rays that find their way in at the distant door; but at morning they can see, from the depth of their mountain cavern, the rising sun.
We climbed, up the yielding sand-drifts, to the top of the precipice in which the temple is excavated, and walked back to a higher ridge. The view from there is perhaps the best desert view on the Nile, more extensive and varied than that of Aboosir. It is a wide sweep of desolation. Up and down the river we see vast plains of sand and groups of black hills; to the west and north the Libyan desert extends with no limit to a horizon fringed with sharp peaks, like aiguilles of the Alps, that have an exact resemblance to a forest.
At night, we give the ancient deities a sort of Fourth of July, and illuminate the temple with colored lights. A blue-light burns upon the altar in the adytum before the four gods, who may seem in their penetralia to receive again the worship to which they were accustomed three thousand years ago. A green flame in the great hall brings out mysteriously the features of the gigantic Osiride, and revives the midnight glow of the ancient ceremonies. In the glare of torches and colored lights on the outside, the colossi loom in their gigantic proportions and cast grotesque shadows.
Imagine this temple as it appeared to a stranger initiated into the mysteries of the religion of the Pharaohs—a cultus in which the mathematical secrets of the Pyramid and the Sphinx, art and architecture, were wrapped in the same concealment with the problem of the destiny of the soul; when the colors on these processions of gods and heroes, upon these wars and pilgrimages sculptured in large on the walls, were all brilliant; when these chambers were gorgeously furnished, when the heavy doors that then hung in every passage, separating the different halls and apartments, only swung open to admit the neophyte to new and deeper mysteries, to halls blazing with light, where he stood in the presence of these appalling figures, and of hosts of priests and acolytes.
The temple of Aboo Simbel was built early in the reign of Rameses II., when art, under the impulse of his vigorous predecessors was in its flower, and before the visible decadence which befel it later under a royal patronage and “protection,” and in the demand for a wholesale production, which always reduces any art to mechanical conditions. It seemed to us about the finest single conception in Egypt. It must have been a genius of rare order and daring who evoked in this solid mountain a work of such grandeur and harmony of proportion, and then executed it without a mistake. The first blow on the exterior, that began to reveal the Colossi, was struck with the same certainty and precision as that which brought into being the gods who are seated before the altar in the depth of the mountain. A bolder idea was never more successfully wrought out.
Our last view of this wonder was by moonlight and by sunrise. We arose and went forth over the sand-bank at five o’clock. Venus blazed as never before. The Southern Cross was paling in the moonlight. The moon, in its last half, hung over the south-west corner of the temple rock, and threw a heavy shadow across a portion of the sitting figures. In this dimness of the half-light their proportions were supernatural. Details were lost.
These might be giants of pre-historic times, or the old fabled gods of antediluvian eras, outlined largely and majestically, groping their way out of the hills.
Above them was the illimitable, purplish blue of the sky. The Moon, one of the goddesses of the temple, withdrew more and more before the coming of Re, the sun-god to whom the temple is dedicated, until she cast no shadow on the façade. The temple, even the interior, caught the first glow of the reddening east. The light came, as it always comes at dawn, in visible waves, and these passed over the features of the Colossi, wave after wave, slowly brightening them into life.
In the interior the first flush was better than the light of many torches, and the Osiride figures were revealed in their hiding-places. At the spring equinox the sun strikes squarely in, two hundred feet, upon the faces of the sitting figures in the adytum. That is their annual salute! Now it only sent its light to them; but it made rosy the Osiride faces on one side of the great hall.
The morning was chilly, and we sat on a sand-drift, wrapped up against the cutting wind, watching the marvellous revelation. The dawn seemed to ripple down the gigantic faces of the figures outside, and to touch their stony calm with something like a smile of gladness; it almost gave them motion, and we would hardly have felt surprised to see them arise and stretch their weary limbs, cramped by ages of inaction, and sing and shout at the coming of the sun-god. But they moved not, the strengthening light only revealed their stony impassiveness; and when the sun, rapidly clearing the eastern hills of the desert, gilded first the row of grinning monkeys, and then the light crept slowly down over faces and forms to the very feet, the old heathen helplessness stood confessed.
And when the sun swung free in the sky, we silently drew away and left the temple and the guardians alone and unmoved. We called the reis and the crew; the boat was turned to the current, the great sweeps dipped into the water, and we continued our voyage down the eternal river, which still sings and flows in this lonely desert place, where sit the most gigantic figures man ever made.
WE HAVE been learning the language. The language consists merely of tyeb. With tyeb in its various accents and inflections, you can carry on an extended conversation. I have heard two Arabs talking for a half hour, in which one of them used no word for reply or response except tyeb “good.”
Tyeb is used for assent, agreement, approval, admiration, both interrogatively and affectionately. It does the duty of the Yankee “all right” and the vulgarism “that’s so” combined; it has as many meanings as the Italian va bene, or the German So! or the English girl’s yes! yes? ye-e-s, ye-e-as? yes (short), ‘n ye-e-es in doubt and really a negative—ex.:—“How lovely Blanche looks to-night!” “‘n ye-e-es.” You may hear two untutored Americans talking, and one of them, through a long interchange of views will utter nothing except, “that’s so,” “that’s so?” “that’s so,” “that’s so.” I think two Arabs meeting could come to a perfect understanding with:
“Tyeb?’
“Tyeb.”
“Tyeb!” (both together).
“Tyeb?” (showing something).
“Tyeb” (emphatically, in admiration).
“Tyeb” (in approval of the other’s admiration).
“Tyeb Ketér” (“good, much”).
“Tyeb Keter?”
“Tyeb.”
“Tyeb.” (together, in ratification of all that has been said).
I say tyeb in my satisfaction with you; you say tyeb in pleasure at my satisfaction; I say tyeb in my pleasure at your pleasure. The servant says tyeb when you give him an order; you say tyeb upon his comprehending it. The Arabic is the richest of languages. I believe there are three hundred names for earth, a hundred for lion, and so on. But the vocabulary of the common people is exceedingly limited. Our sailors talk all day with the aid of a very few words.
But we have got beyond tyeb. We can say eiwa (“yes”)—or nam, when we wish to be elegant—and la (“no”). The universal negative in Nubia, however, is simpler than this—it is a cluck of the tongue in the left check and a slight upward jerk of the head. This cluck and jerk makes “no,” from which there is no appeal. If you ask a Nubian the price of anything—be-kam dee?—and he should answer khamsa (“five”), and you should offer thelata (“three”), and he should kch and jerk up his head, you might know the trade was hopeless; because the kch expresses indifference as well as a negative. The best thing you could do would be to say bookra (“to-morrow”), and go away—meaning in fact to put off the purchase forever, as the Nubian very well knows when he politely adds, tyeb.
But there are two other words necessary to be mastered before the traveller can say he knows Arabic. To the constant call for “backsheesh” and the obstructing rabble of beggars and children, you must be able to say mafeesh (“nothing”), and im’shee (“getaway,” “clear out,” “scat.”) It is my experience that this im’shee is the most necessary word in Egypt.
We do nothing all day but drift, or try to drift, against the north wind, not making a mile an hour, constantly turning about, floating from one side of the river to the other. It is impossible to row, for the steersman cannot keep the boat’s bow to the current.
There is something exceedingly tedious, even to a lazy and resigned man, in this perpetual drifting hither and thither. To float, however slowly, straight down the current, would be quite another thing. To go sideways, to go stern first, to waltz around so that you never can tell which bank of the river you are looking at, or which way you are going, or what the points of the compass are, is confusing and unpleasant. It is the one serious annoyance of a dahabeëh voyage. If it is calm, we go on delightfully with oars and current; if there is a southerly breeze we travel rapidly, and in the most charming way in the world. But our high-cabined boats are helpless monsters in this wind, which continually blows; we are worse than becalmed, we are badgered.
However, we might be in a worse winter country, and one less entertaining. We have just drifted in sight of a dahabeëh, with the English flag, tied up to the bank. On the shore is a picturesque crowd; an awning is stretched over high poles; men are busy at something under it—on the rock near sits a group of white people under umbrellas. What can it be? Are they repairing a broken yard? Are they holding a court over some thief? Are they performing some mystic ceremony? We take the sandal and go to investigate.
An English gentleman has shot two crocodiles, and his people are skinning them, stuffing the skin, and scraping the flesh from the bones, preparing the skeletons for a museum. Horrible creatures they are, even in this butchered condition. The largest is twelve feet long; that is called a big crocodile here; but last winter the gentleman killed one that was seventeen feet long; that was a monster.
In the stomach of one of these he found two pairs of bracelets, such as are worn by Nubian children, two “cunning” little leathern bracelets ornamented with shells—a most useless ornament for a crocodile. The animal is becoming more and more shy every year, and it is very difficult to get a shot at one. They come out in the night, looking for bracelets. One night we nearly lost Ahmed, one of our black boys; he had gone down upon the rudder, when an enquiring crocodile came along and made a snap at him—when the boy climbed on deck he looked white even by starlight.
The invulnerability of the crocodile hide is exaggerated. One of these had two bullet-holes in his back. His slayer says he has repeatedly put bullets through the hide on the back.
When we came away we declined steaks, but the owner gave us some eggs, so that we might raise our own crocodiles.
Gradually we drift out of this almost utterly sterile country, and come to long strips of palm-groves, and to sakiyas innumerable, shrieking on the shore every few hundred feet. We have time to visit a considerable village, and see the women at their other occupation (besides lamentation) braiding each other’s hair; sitting on the ground, sometimes two at a head, patiently twisting odds and ends of loose hair into the snaky braids, and muddling the whole with sand, water, and clay, preparatory to the oil. A few women are spinning with a hand-spindle and producing very good cotton-thread. All appear to have time on their hands. And what a busy place this must be in summer, when the heat is like that of an oven! The men loaf about like the women, and probably do even less. Those at work are mostly slaves, boys and girls in the slightest clothing; and even these do a great deal of “standing round.” Wooden hoes are used.
The desert over which we walked beyond the town was very different from the Libyan with its drifts and drifts of yellow sand. We went over swelling undulations (like our rolling prairies), cut by considerable depressions, of sandstone with a light sand cover but all strewn with shale or shingle. This black shale is sometimes seen adhering like a layer of glazing to the coarse rock; and, though a part of the rock, it has the queer appearance of having been a deposit solidified upon it and subsequently broken off. On the tops of these hills we found everywhere holes scooped out by the natives in search of nitre; the holes showed evidence, in dried mud, of the recent presence of water.
We descended into a deep gorge, in which the rocks were broken squarely down the face, exhibiting strata of red, white, and variegated sandstone; the gorge was a Wady that ran far back into the country among the mountains; we followed it down to a belt of sunt acacias and palms on the river. This wady was full of rocks, like a mountain stream at home; a great torrent running long in it, had worn the rocks into fantastic shapes, cutting punch-bowls and the like, and water had recently dried in the hollows. But it had not rained on the river.
This morning we are awakened by loud talking and wrangling on deck, that sounds like a Paris revolution. We have only stopped for milk! The forenoon we spend among the fashionable ladies of Derr, the capital of Nubia, studying the modes, in order that we may carry home the latest. This is an aristocratic place. One of the eight-hundred-years-old sycamore trees, of which we made mention, is still vigorous and was bearing the sycamore fig. The other is in front of a grand mud-house with latticed windows, the residence of the Kashefs of Sultan Selim whose descendants still occupy it, and, though shorn of authority, are said to be proud of their Turkish origin. One of them, Hassan Kashef, an old man in the memory of our dragoman, so old that he had to lift up his eyelids with his finger when he wanted to see, died only a few years ago. This patriarch had seventy-two wives as his modest portion in this world; and as the Koran allows only four, there was some difficulty in settling the good man’s estate. The matter was referred to the Khedive, but he wisely refused to interfere. When the executor came to divide the property among the surviving children, he found one hundred and five to share the inheritance.
The old fellow had many other patriarchal ways. On his death-bed he left a legacy of both good and evil wishes, requests to reward this friend, and to “serve out” that enemy, quite in the ancient style, and in the Oriental style, recalling the last recorded words of King David, whose expiring breath was an expression of a wish for vengeance upon one of his enemies, whom he had sworn not to kill. It reads now as if it might have been spoken by a Bedawee sheykh to his family only yesterday:—“And, behold, thou hast with thee Shimei the son of Gera, a Benjamite of Bahurim, which cursed me with a grievous curse in the day when I went to Mahanaim; but he came down to meet me at Jordan, and I sware to him by the Lord, saying, I will not put thee to death with the sword. Now therefore hold him not guiltless: for thou art a wise man, and knowest what thou oughtest to do unto him; but his hoar head bring thou down to the grave with blood. So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David.”
We call at the sand-covered temple at A’mada, and crawl into it; a very neat little affair, with fresh color and fine sculptures, and as old as the time of Osirtasen III. (the date of the obelisk of Heliopolis, of the Tombs of Beni Hassan, say about fifteen hundred years before Rameses II.); and then sail quickly down to Korosko, passing over in an hour or so a distance that required a day and a half on the ascent.
At Korosko there are caravans in from Kartoom; the camel-drivers wear monstrous silver rings, made in the interior, the crown an inch high and set with blood-stone. I bought from the neck of a pretty little boy a silver “charm,” a flat plate with the name of Allah engraved on it. Neither the boy nor the charm had been washed since they came into being.
The caravan had brought one interesting piece of freight, which had just been sent down the river. It was the head of the Sultan of Darfoor, preserved in spirits, and forwarded to the Khedive as a present. This was to certify that the Sultan was really killed, when Darfoor was captured by the army of the Viceroy; though I do not know that there is any bounty on the heads of African Sultans. It is an odd gift to send to a ruler who wears the European dress and speaks French, and whose chief military officers are Americans.
The desolate hills behind Korosko rise a thousand feet, and we climbed one of the peaks to have a glimpse of the desert route and the country towards Kartoom. I suppose a more savage landscape does not exist. The peak of black disintegrated rocks on which we stood was the first of an assemblage of such as far as we could see south; the whole horizon was cut by these sharp peaks; and through these thickly clustering hills the caravan trail made its way in sand and powdered dust. Shut in from the breeze, it must be a hard road to travel, even with a winter sun multiplying its rays from all these hot rocks; in the summer it would be frightful. But on these summits, or on any desert swell, the air is an absolute elixir of life; it has a quality of lightness but not the rarity that makes respiration difficult.
At a village below Korosko we had an exhibition of the manner of fighting with the long Nubian war-spear and the big round shield made of hippopotamus-hide. The men jumped about and uttered frightening cries, and displayed more agility than fight, the object being evidently to terrify by a threatening aspect; but the scene was as barbarous as any we see in African pictures. Here also was a pretty woman (pretty for her) with beautiful eyes, who wore a heavy nose-ring of gold, which she said she put on to make her face beautiful; nevertheless she would sell the ring for nine dollars and a half. The people along here will sell anything they have, ornaments, charms to protect them from the evil-eye,—they will part with anything for money. At this village we took on a crocodile ten feet long, which had been recently killed, and lashed it to the horizontal yard. It was Abd-el-Atti’s desire to present it to a friend in Cairo, and perhaps he was not reluctant, when we should be below the cataract, to have it take the appearance, in the eyes of spectators, of having been killed by some one on this boat.
We obtained above Korosko one of the most beautiful animals in the world—a young gazelle—to add to our growing menagerie; which consists of a tame duck, who never gets away when his leg is tied; a timid desert hare, who has lived for a long time in a tin box in the cabin, trembling like an aspen leaf night and day; and a chameleon.
The chameleon ought to have a chapter to himself. We have reason to think that he has the soul of some transmigrating Egyptian. He is the most uncanny beast. We have made him a study, and find very little good in him. His changeableness of color is not his worst quality. He has the nature of a spy, and he is sullen and snappish besides. We discovered that his color is not a purely physical manifestation, but that it depends upon his state of mind, upon his temper. When everything is serene, he is green as a May morning, but anger changes him instantly for the worse. It is however true that he takes his color mainly from the substance upon which he dwells, not from what he eats; for he eats flies and allows them to make no impression on his exterior. When he was taken off an acacia-tree, this chameleon was of the bright-green color of the leaves. Brought into our cabin, his usual resting-place was on the reddish maroon window curtains, and his green changed muddily into the color of the woollen. When angry, he would become mottled with dark spots, and have a thick cloudy color. This was the range of his changes of complexion; it is not enough (is it?) to give him his exaggerated reputation.
I confess that I almost hated him, and perhaps cannot do him justice. He is a crawling creature at best, and his mode of getting about is disagreeable; his feet have the power of clinging to the slightest roughness, and he can climb anywhere; his feet are like hands; besides, his long tail is like another hand; it is prehensile like the monkey’s. He feels his way along very carefully, taking a turn with his tail about some support, when he is passing a chasm, and not letting go until his feet are firmly fixed on something else. And, then, the way he uses his eye is odious. His eye-balls are stuck upon the end of protuberances on his head, which protuberances work like ball-and-socket joints—as if you had your eye on the end of your finger. When he wants to examine anything, he never turns his head; he simply swivels his eye round and brings it to bear on the object. Pretending to live in cold isolation on the top of a window curtain, he is always making clammy excursions round the cabin, and is sometimes found in our bed-chambers. You wouldn’t like to feel his cold tail dragging over you in the night.
The first question every morning, when we come to breakfast, is,
“Where is that chameleon?”
He might be under the table, you know, or on the cushions, and you might sit on him. Commonly he conceals his body behind the curtain, and just lifts his head above the roller. There he sits, spying us, gyrating his evil eye upon us, and never stirring his head; he takes the color of the curtain so nearly that we could not see him if it was not for that swivel eye. It is then that he appears malign, and has the aspect of a wise but ill-disposed Egyptian whose soul has had ill luck in getting into any respectable bodies for three or four thousand years. He lives upon nothing,—you would think he had been raised in a French pension. Few flies happen his way; and, perhaps he is torpid out of the sun so much of the time, he is not active to catch those that come. I carried him a big one the other day, and he repaid my kindness by snapping my finger. And I am his only friend.
Alas, the desert hare, whom we have fed with corn, and greens, and tried to breed courage in for a long time, died this morning at an early hour; either he was chilled out of the world by the cold air on deck, or he died of palpitation of the heart; for he was always in a flutter of fear, his heart going like a trip-hammer, when anyone approached him. He only rarely elevated his long silky ears in a serene enjoyment of society. His tail was too short, but he was, nevertheless, an animal to become attached to.
Speaking of Hassan Kashef’s violation of the Moslem law, in taking more than four wives, is it generally known that the women in Mohammed’s time endeavored also to have the privileges of men? Forty women who had cooked for the soldiers who were fighting the infidels and had done great service in the campaign, were asked by the Prophet to name their reward. The chief lady, who was put forward to prefer the request of the others, asked that as men were permitted four wives women might be allowed to have four husbands. The Prophet gave them a plain reason for refusing their petition, and it has never been renewed. The legend shows that long ago women protested against their disabilities.
The strong north wind, with coolish weather, continues. On Sunday we are nowhere in particular, and climb a high sandstone peak, and sit in the shelter of a rock, where wandering men have often come to rest. It is a wild, desert place, and there is that in the atmosphere of the day which leads to talk of the end of the world.
Like many other Moslems, Abd-el-Atti thinks that these are the last days, bad enough days, and that the end draws near. We have misunderstood what Mr. Lane says about Christ coming to “judge” the world. The Moslems believe that Christ, who never died, but was taken up into heaven away from the Jews,—a person in his likeness being crucified in his stead,—will come to rule, to establish the Moslem religion and a reign of justice (the Millenium); and that after this period Christ will die, and be buried in Medineh, not far from Mohammed. Then the world will end, and Azrael, the angel of death, will be left alone on the earth for forty days. He will go to and fro, and find no one; all will be in their graves. Then Christ and Mohammed and all the dead will rise. But the Lord God will be the final judge of all.
“Yes, there have been many false prophets. A man came before Haroun e’ Rasheed pretending to be a prophet.
“‘What proof have you that you are one? What miracle can you do?’.rdquo;
“‘Anything you like.’.rdquo;
“‘Christ, on whom be peace, raised men from the dead.’.rdquo;
“‘So will I.’ This took place before the king and the chief-justice. ‘Let the head of the chief-justice be cut off,’ said the pretended prophet, ‘and I will restore him to life.’.rdquo;
“‘Oh,’ cried the chief-justice, ‘I believe that the man is a real prophet. Anyone who does not believe can have his head cut off, and try it.’.rdquo;
“A woman also claimed to be a prophetess. ‘But,’ said the Khalif Haroun e’ Rasheed, ‘Mohammed declared that he was the last man who should be a prophet.’.rdquo;
“‘He didn’t say that a woman shouldn’t be,’ the woman she answer.”
The people vary in manners and habits here from village to village, much more than we supposed they would. Walking this morning for a couple of miles through the two villages of Maharraka—rude huts scattered under palm-trees—we find the inhabitants, partly Arab, partly Barabra, and many negro slaves, more barbaric than any we have seen; boys and girls, till the marriageable age, in a state of nature, women neither so shy nor so careful about covering themselves with clothing as in other places, and the slaves wretchedly provided for. The heads of the young children are shaved in streaks, with long tufts of hair left; the women are loaded with tawdry necklaces, and many of them, poor as they are, sport heavy hoops of gold in the nose, and wear massive silver bracelets.
The slaves, blacks and mulattoes, were in appearance like those seen formerly in our southern cotton-fields. I recall a picture, in abolition times, representing a colored man standing alone, and holding up his arms, in a manner beseeching the white man, passing by, to free him. To-day I saw the picture realized. A very black man, standing nearly naked in the midst of a bean-field, raised up both his arms, and cried aloud to us as we went by. The attitude had all the old pathos in it. As the poor fellow threw up his arms in a wild despair, he cried “Backsheesh, backsheesh, O! howadji!”
For the first time we found the crops in danger. The country was overrun with reddish-brown locusts, which settled in clouds upon every green thing; and the people in vain attempted to frighten them from their scant strip of grain. They are not, however, useless. The attractive women caught some, and, pulling off the wings and legs, offered them to us to eat. They said locusts were good; and I suppose they are such as John the Baptist ate. We are not Baptists.
As we go down the river we take in two or three temples a day, besides these ruins of humanity in the village,—-Dakkeh, Gerf Hossâyn, Dendoor. It is easy to get enough of these second-class temples. That at Gerf Hossâyn is hewn in the rock, and is in general arrangement like Ipsambool—it was also made by Rameses II.—but is in all respects inferior, and lacks the Colossi. I saw sitting in the adytum four figures whom I took to be Athos, Parthos, Aramis, and D’Artignan—though this edifice was built long before the day of the “Three Guardsmen.”
The people in the village below have such a bad reputation that the dragoman in great fright sent sailors after us, when he found we were strolling through the country alone. We have seen no natives so well off in cattle, sheep, and cooking-utensils, or in nose-rings, beads, and knives; they are, however, a wild, noisy tribe, and the whole village followed us for a mile, hooting for backsheesh. The girls wear a nose-ring and a girdle; the boys have no rings or girdles. The men are fierce and jealous of their wives, perhaps with reason, stabbing and throwing them into the river on suspicion, if they are caught talking with another man. So they say. At this village we saw pits dug in the sand (like those described in the Old Testament), in which cattle, sheep and goats were folded; it being cheaper to dig a pit than to build a stone fence.
At Kalâbshee are two temples, ruins on a sufficiently large scale to be imposing; sculptures varied in character and beautifully colored; propylons with narrow staircases, and concealed rooms, and deep windows bespeaking their use as fortifications and dungeons as well as temples; and columns of interest to the architect; especially two, fluted (time of Rameses II.) with square projecting abacus like the Doric, but with broad bases. The inhabitants are the most pestilent on the river, crowding their curiosities upon us, and clamoring for money. They have for sale gazelle-horns, and the henna (which grows here), in the form of a green powder.
However, Kalâbshee has educational facilities. I saw there a boys’ school in full operation. In the open air, but in the sheltering angle of a house near the ruins, sat on the ground the schoolmaster. Behind him leaned his gun against the wall; before him lay an open Koran; and in his hand he held a thin palm rod with which he enforced education. He was dictating sentences from the book to a scrap of a scholar, a boy who sat on the ground, with an inkhorn beside him, and wrote the sentences on a board slate, repeating the words in aloud voice as he wrote. Nearby was another urchin, seated before a slate leaning against the angle of of the wall, committing the writing on it to memory, in a loud voice also. When he looked off the stick reminded him to attend to his slate. I do not know whether he calls this a private or a public school.
Quitting these inhospitable savages as speedily as we can, upon the springing up of a south wind, we are going down stream at a spanking rate, leaving a rival dahabeëh, belonging to an English lord, behind, when the adversary puts it into the head of our pilot to steer across the river, and our prosperous career is suddenly arrested on a sandbar. We are fast, and the English boat, keeping in the channel, shows us her rudder and disappears round the bend.
Extraordinary confusion follows; the crew are in the water, they are on deck, the anchor is got out, there are as many opinions, as people, and no one obeys. The long pilot is a spectacle, after he has been wading about in the stream and comes on deck. His gown is off and his turban also; his head is shaved; his drawers are in tatters like lace-work. He strides up and down beating his breast, his bare poll shining in the sun like a billiard ball. We are on the sand nearly four hours, and the accident, causing us to lose this wind, loses us, it so happens, three days. By dark we tie up near the most excruciating Sakiya in the world. It is suggested to go on shore and buy the property and close it out. But the boy who is driving will neither sell nor stop his cattle.
At Gertassee we have more ruins and we pass a beautiful, single column, conspicuous for a long distance over the desert, as fine as the once “nameless column” in the Roman forum, These temples, or places of worship, are on the whole depressing. There was no lack of religious privileges if frequency of religious edifices gave them. But the people evidently had no part in the ceremonies, and went never into these dark chambers, which are now inhabited by bats. The old religion does not commend itself to me. Of what use would be one of these temples on Asylum Hill, in Hartford, and how would the Rev. Mr. Twichell busy himself in its dark recesses, I wonder, even with the help of the deacons and the committee? The Gothic is quite enough for us.
This morning—we have now entered upon the month of February—for the first time in Nubia, we have early a slight haze, a thin veil of it; and passing between shores rocky and high and among granite breakers, we are reminded of the Hudson river on a June morning. A strong north wind, however, comes soon to puff away this illusion, and it blows so hard that we are actually driven up-stream.
The people and villages under the crumbling granite ledges that this delay enables us to see, are the least promising we have encountered; women and children are more nearly barbarians in dress and manners; for the women, a single strip of brown cotton, worn à la Bedawee, leaving free the legs, the right arm and breast, is a common dress. And yet, some of these women are not without beauty. One pretty girl sitting on a rock, the sun glistening on the castor-oil of her hair, asked for backsheesh in a sweet voice, her eyes sparkling with merriment. A flower blooming in vain in this desert!
Is it a question of “converting” these people? Certainly, nothing but the religion of the New Testament, put in practice here, bringing in its train, industry, self-respect, and a desire to know, can awaken the higher nature, and lift these creatures into a respectable womanhood. But the task is more difficult than it would be with remote tribes in Central Africa. These people have been converted over and over again. They have had all sorts of religions during the last few thousand years, and they remain essentially the same. They once had the old Egyptian faith, whatever it was; and subsequently they varied that with the Greek and Roman shades of heathenism. They then accepted the early Christianity, as the Abyssinians did, and had, for hundreds of years, opportunity of Christian worship, when there were Christian churches all along the Nile from Alexander to Meroë, and holy hermits in every eligible cave and tomb. And then came Mohammed’s friends, giving them the choice of belief or martyrdom, and they embraced the religion of Mecca as cordially as any other.
They have remained essentially unchanged through all their changes. This hopelessness of their condition is in the fact that in all the shiftings of religions and of dynasties, the women have continued to soak their hair in castor-oil. The fashion is as old as the Nile world. Many people look upon castor-oil as an excellent remedy. I should like to know what it has done for Africa.
At Dabod is an interesting ruin, and a man sits there in front of his house, weaving, confident that no rain will come to spoil his yarn. He sits and works the treadle of his loom in a hole in the ground, the thread being stretched out twenty or thirty feet on the wall before him. It is the only industry of the village, and a group of natives are looking on. The poor weaver asks backsheesh, and when I tell him I have nothing smaller than an English sovereign, he says he can change it!
Here we find also a sort of Holly-Tree Inn, a house for charitable entertainment, such as is often seen in Moslem villages. It is a square mud-structure, entered by two doors, and contains two long rooms with communicating openings. The dirt-floors are cleanly swept and fresh mats are laid down at intervals. Any stranger or weary traveler, passing by, is welcome to come in and rest or pass the night, to have a cup of coffee and some bread. There are two cleanly dressed attendants, and one of them is making coffee, within, over a handful of fire, in a tiny coffee-pot. In front, in the sun, on neat mats, sit half a dozen turbaned men, perhaps tired wanderers and pilgrims in this world, who have turned aside to rest for an hour, for a day, or for a week. They appear to have been there forever. The establishment is maintained by a rich man of the place; but signs of an abode of wealth we failed to discover in any of the mud-enclosures.
When we are under way again, we express surprise at finding here such an excellent charity.
“You no think the Lord he take care for his own?” says Abd-el-Atti. “When the kin’ [king] of Abyssinia go to ‘stroy the Kaabeh in Mecca”—
“Did you ever see the Kaabeh?”
“Many times. Plenty times I been in Mecca.”
“In what part of the Kaabeh is the Black Stone?”
“So. The Kaabeh is a building like a cube, about, I think him, thirty feet high, built in the middle of the mosque at Mecca. It was built by Abraham, of white marble. In the outside the east wall, near the corner, ‘bout so (four feet) high you find him, the Black Stone, put there by Abraham, call him haggeh el ashad, the lucky, the fortunate stone. It is opposite the sunrise. Where Abraham get him? God knows. If any one sick, he touch this stone, be made so well as he was. So I hunderstand. The Kaabeh is in the centre of the earth, and has fronts to the four quarters of the globe, Asia, Hindia, Egypt, all places, toward which the Moslem kneel in prayer. Near the Kaabeh is the well, the sacred well Zem-Zem, has clear water, beautiful, so lifely. One time a year, in the month before Ramadan, Zem-Zem spouts up high in the air, and people come to drink of it. When Hagar left Ishmael, to look for water, being very thirsty, the little fellow scratched with his fingers in the sand, and a spring of water rushed up; this is the well Zem-Zem. I told you the same water is in the spring in Syria, El Gebel; I find him just the same; come under the earth from Zem-Zem.”
“When the kin’ of Abyssinia, who not believe, what you call infidel, like that Englishman, yes, Mr. Buckle, I see him in Sinai and Petra—very wise man, know a great deal, very nice gentleman, I like him very much, but I think he not believe—when the kin’ of Abyssinia came with all his great army and his elephants to fight against Mecca, and to ‘stroy the Kaabeh as well the same time to carry off all the cattle of the people, then the people they say, ‘the cattle are ours, but the Kaabeh is the Lord’s, and he will have care over it; the Kaabeh is not ours.’ There was one of the elephants of the kin’ of Abyssinia, the name of Mahmoud, and he was very wise, more wise than anybody else. When he came in sight of Mecca, he turned back and went the other way, and not all the spears and darts of the soldiers could stop him. The others went on. Then the Lord sent out of the hell very small birds, with very little stones, taken out of hell, in their claws, no larger than mustard seeds; and the birds dropped these on the heads of the soldiers that rode on the elephants—generally three or four on an elephant. The little seeds went right down through the men and through the elephants, and killed them, and by this the army was ‘stroyed.”
“When the kin’, after that, come into the mosque, some power outside himself made him to bow down in respect to the Kaabeh. He went away and did not touch it. And it stands there the same now.”