Our way lay over the waste and rolling desert (the track of the southern caravans,) at some little distance from the river; and I suppose six miles of this travel are as good as a hundred. The sun was blazing hot, the yellow sand glowed in it, and the far distance of like sand and bristling ledges of black rock shimmered in waves of heat. No tree, no blade of grass, nothing but blue sky bending over a sterile land. Yet, how sweet was the air, how pure the breath of the desert, how charged with electric life the rays of the sun!
The rock Aboosir, the ultima Thule of pleasure-travel on the Nile, is a sheer precipice of perhaps two to three hundred feet above the Nile; but this is high enough to make it one of the most extensive lookouts in Egypt. More desert can be seen here than from almost anywhere else. The Second Cataract is spread out beneath us. It is less a “fall” even than the First. The river is from a half mile to a mile in breadth and for a distance of some five miles is strewn with trap-rock, boulders and shattered fragments, through which the Nile swiftly forces itself in a hundred channels. There are no falls of any noticeable height. Here, on the flat rock, where we eat our luncheon, a cool breeze blows from the north. Here on this eagle’s perch, commanding a horizon of desert and river for a hundred miles, fond visitors have carved their immortal names, following an instinct of ambition that is well-nigh universal, in the belief no doubt that the name will have for us who come after all the significance it has in the eyes of him who carved it. But I cannot recall a single name I read there; I am sorry that I cannot, for it seems a pitiful and cruel thing to leave them there in their remote obscurity.
From this rock we look with longing to the southward, into vast Africa, over a land we may not further travel, which we shall probably never see again; or the far horizon the blue peaks of Dongola are visible, and beyond these we know are the ruins of Meroë, that ancient city, the capital of that Ethiopian Queen, Candace, whose dark face is lighted up by a momentary gleam from the Scriptures.
On the beach at Wady Haifa are half a dozen trading-vessels, loaded with African merchandise for Cairo, and in the early morning there is a great hubbub among the merchants and the caravan owners. A sudden dispute arises among a large group around the ferry-boat, and there ensues that excited war, or movement, which always threatens to come to violence in the East but never does; Niagaras of talk are poured out; the ebb and flow of the parti-colored crowd, and the violent and not ungraceful gestures make a singular picture.
Bales of merchandise are piled on shore, cases of brandy and cottons from England, to keep the natives of Soudan warm inside and out; Greek merchants splendid in silk attire, are lounging amid their goods, slowly bargaining for their transportation. Groups of camels are kneeling on the sand with their Bedaween drivers. These latter are of the Bisharee Arabs, and free sons of the desert. They wear no turban, and their only garment is a long strip of brown cotton thrown over the shoulder so as to leave the right arm free, and then wound about the waist and loins. The black hair is worn long, braided in strands which shine with oil, and put behind the ears. This sign of effeminacy is contradicted by their fine, athletic figures; by a bold, strong eye, and a straight, resolute nose.
Wady Haifa (wady is valley, and Haifa is a sort of coarse grass) has a post-office and a mosque, but no bazaar, nor any center of attraction. Its mud-houses are stretched along the shore for a mile and a half, and run back into the valley, under the lovely palm-grove; but there are no streets and no roads through the deep sand. There is occasionally a sign of wealth in an extensive house, that is, one consisting of several enclosed courts and apartments within one large mud-wall; and in one we saw a garden, watered by a sakiya, and two latticed windows in a second story looking on it, as if some one had a harem here which was handsome enough to seclude..
We called on the Kadi, the judicial officer of this district, whose house is a specimen of the best, and as good as is needed in this land of the sun. On one side of an open enclosure is his harem; in the other is the reception-room where he holds court. This is a mud-hut, with nothing whatever in it except some straw mats. The Kadi sent for rugs, and we sat on the mud-bench outside, while attendants brought us dates, popped-corn, and even coffee; and then they squatted in a row in front of us and stared at us, as we did at them. The ladies went into the harem, and made the acquaintance of the judge’s one wife and his dirty children. Not without cordiality and courtesy of manner these people; but how simple are the terms of life here; and what a thoroughly African picture this is, the mud-huts, the sand, the palms, the black-skinned groups.
The women here are modestly clad, but most of them frightfully ugly and castor-oily; yet we chanced upon two handsome girls, or rather married women, of fifteen or sixteen. One of them had regular features and a very pretty expression, and evidently knew she was a beauty, for she sat apart on the ground, keeping her head covered most of the time, and did not join the women who thronged about us to look with wonder at the costume of our ladies and to beg for backsheesh. She was loaded with necklaces, bracelets of horn and ivory, and had a ring on every finger. There was in her manner something of scorn and resentment at our intrusion; she no doubt had her circle of admirers and was queen in it. Who are these pale creatures who come to stare at my charms? Have they no dark pretty women in their own land? And she might well have asked, what would she do—a beauty of New York city, let us say—when she sat combing her hair on the marble doorsteps of her father’s palace in Madison Square, if a lot of savage, impolite Nubians, should come and stand in a row in front of her and stare?
The only shops here are the temporary booths of traders, birds of passage to or from the equatorial region. Many of them have pitched their gay tents under the trees, making the scene still more like a fair or an encampment for the night. In some are displayed European finery and trumpery, manufactured for Africa, calico in striking colors, glass beads and cotton cloth; others are coffee-shops, where men are playing at a sort of draughts—the checker-board being holes made in the sand and the men pebbles. At the door of a pretty tent stood a young and handsome Syrian merchant, who cordially invited us in, and pressed upon us the hospitality of his house. He was on his way to Darfoor, and might remain there two or three years, trading with the natives. We learned this by the interpretation of his girl-wife, who spoke a little barbarous French. He had married her only recently, and this was their bridal tour, we inferred. Into what risks and perils was this pretty woman going? She was Greek, from one of the islands, and had the naïvete and freshness of both youth and ignorance. Her fair complexion was touched by the sun and ruddy with health. Her blue eyes danced with the pleasure of living. She wore her hair natural, with neither oil nor ornament, but cut short and pushed behind the ears. For dress she had a simple calico gown of pale yellow, cut high in the waist, à la Grecque, the prettiest costume women ever assumed. After our long regimen of the hideous women of the Nile, plastered with dirt, soaked in oil, and hung with tawdry ornaments, it may be imagined how welcome was this vision of a woman, handsome, natural and clean, with neither the shyness of an animal nor the brazenness of a Ghawazee.
Our hospitable entertainers hastened to set before us what they had; a bottle of Maraschino was opened, very good European cigars were produced, and a plate of pistachio nuts, to eat with the cordial. The artless Greek beauty cracked the nuts for us with her shining teeth, laughing all the while; urging us to eat, and opening her eyes in wonder that we would not eat more, and would not carry away more. It must be confessed that we had not much conversation, but we made it up in constant smiling, and ate our pistachios and sipped our cordial in great glee. What indeed could we have done more with words, or how have passed a happier hour? We perfectly understood each other; we drank each other’s healths; we were civilized beings, met by chance in a barbarous place; we were glad to meet, and we parted in the highest opinion of each other, with gay salaams, and not in tears. What fate I wonder had these handsome and adventurous merchants among the savages of Darfoor and Kordofan?
The face of our black boy, Gohah, was shining with pleasure when we walked away, and he said with enthusiasm, pointing to the tent, “Sitt tyeb, quéi-is.” Accustomed as he was to the African beauties of Soudan, I do not wonder that Gohah thought this “lady” both “good” and “beautiful.”
We have seen Wady Haifa. The expedition to Darfoor is packing up to begin its desert march in the morning. Our dahabeëh has been transformed and shorn of a great part of its beauty. We are to see no more the great bird-wing sail. The long yard has been taken down and is slung above us the whole length of the deck. The twelve big sweeps are put in place; the boards of the forward deck are taken up, so that the Lowers will have place for their feet as they sit on the beams. They sit fronting the cabin, and rise up and take a step forward at each stroke, settling slowly back to their seats. On the mast is rigged the short stern-yard and sail, to be rarely spread. Hereafter we are to float, and drift, and whirl, and try going with the current and against the wind.
At ten o’clock of a moonlight night, a night of summer heat, we swing off, the rowers splashing their clumsy oars and setting up a shout and chorus in minor, that sound very much like a wail, and would be quite appropriate if they were ferrymen of the Styx. We float a few miles, and then go aground and go to bed.
The next day we have the same unchanging sky, the same groaning and creaking of the sakiyas, and in addition the irregular splashing of the great sweeps as we slide down the river. Two crocodiles have the carelessness to show themselves on a sand-island, one a monstrous beast, whose size is magnified every time we think how his great back sunk into the water when our sandal was yet beyond rifle-shot. Of course he did not know that we carried only a shot-gun and intended only to amuse him, or he would not have been in such haste.
The wind is adverse, we gain little either by oars or by the current, and at length take to the shore, where something novel always rewards us. This time we explore some Roman ruins, with round arches of unburned bricks, and find in them also the unmistakable sign of Roman occupation, the burnt bricks—those thin slabs, eleven inches long, five wide, and two thick, which, were a favorite form with them, bricks burnt for eternity, and scattered all over the East wherever the Roman legions went.
Beyond these is a village, not a deserted village, but probably the laziest in the world. Men, and women for the most part too, were lounging about and in the houses, squatting in the dust, in absolute indolence, except that the women, all of them, were suckling their babies, and occasionally one of them was spinning a little cotton-thread on a spindle whirled in the hand. The men are more cleanly than the women, in every respect in better condition, some of them bright, fine-looking fellows. One of them showed us through his house, which was one of the finest in the place, and he was not a little proud of it. It was a large mud-wall enclosure. Entering by a rude door we came into an open space, from which opened several doors, irregular breaks in the wall, closed by shackling doors of wood. Stepping over the sill and stooping, we entered the living-rooms. First, is the kitchen; the roof of this is the sky—you are always liable to find yourself outdoors in these houses—and the fire for cooking is built in one corner. Passing through another hole in the wall we come to a sleeping-room, where were some jars of dates and doora, and a mat spread in one corner to lie on. Nothing but an earth-floor, and dust and grime everywhere. A crowd of tittering girls were flitting about, peeping at us from doorways, and diving into them with shrill screams, like frightened rabbits, if we approached.
Abd-el-Atti raises a great laugh by twisting a piastre into the front lock of hair of the ugliest hag there, calling her his wife, and drawing her arm under his to take her to the boat. It is an immense joke. The old lady is a widow and successfully conceals her reluctance. The tying the piece of silver in the hair is a sign of marriage. All the married women wear a piastre or some scale of silver on the forehead; the widows leave off this ornament from the twist; the young girls show, by the hair plain, except always the clay dabs, that they are in the market. The simplicity of these people is noticeable. I saw a woman seated on the ground, in dust three inches thick, leaning against the mud-bank in front of the house, having in her lap a naked baby; on the bank sat another woman, braiding the hair of the first, wetting it with muddy water, and working into it sand, clay, and tufts of dead hair. What a way to spend Sunday!
This is, on the whole, a model village. The people appear to have nothing, and perhaps they want nothing. They do nothing, and I suppose they would thank no one for coming to increase their wants and set them to work. Nature is their friend.
I wonder what the staple of conversation of these people is, since the weather offers nothing, being always the same, and always fine.
A day and a night and a day we fight adverse winds, and make no headway. One day we lie at Farras, a place of no consequence, but having, almost as a matter of course, ruins of the time of the Romans and the name Rameses II. cut on a rock. In a Roman wall we find a drain-tile exactly like those we use now. In the evening, after moon-rise, we drop down to Aboo Simbel.
CHAPTER XXIV.—GIANTS IN STONE
WHEN daylight came the Colossi of Aboo Simbel (or Ipsambool) were looking into our windows; greeting the sunrise as they have done every morning for three thousand five hundred years; and keeping guard still over the approach to the temple, whose gods are no longer anywhere recognized, whose religion disappeared from the earth two thousand years ago:—vast images, making an eternity of time in their silent waiting.
The river here runs through an unmitigated desert. On the east the sand is brown, on the west the sand is yellow; that is the only variety. There is no vegetation, there are no habitations, there is no path on the shore, there are no footsteps on the sand, no one comes to break the spell of silence. To find such a monument of ancient power and art as this temple in such a solitude enhances the visitor’s wonder and surprise. The Pyramids, Thebes, and Aboo Simbel are the three wonders of Egypt. But the great temple of Aboo Simbel is unique. It satisfies the mind. It is complete in itself, it is the projection of one creative impulse of genius. Other temples are growths, they have additions, afterthoughts, we can see in them the workings of many minds and many periods. This is a complete thought, struck out, you would say, at a heat.
In order to justify this opinion, I may be permitted a little detail concerning this temple, which impressed us all as much as anything in Egypt. There are two temples here, both close to the shore, both cut in the mountain of rock which here almost overhangs the stream. We need not delay to speak of the smaller one, although it would be wonderful, if it were not for the presence of the larger. Between the two was a rocky gorge. This is now nearly filled up, to the depth of a hundred feet, by the yellow sand that has drifted and still drifts over from the level of the desert hills above.
This sand, which drifts exactly like snow, lies in ridges like snow, and lies loose and sliding under the feet or packs hard like snow, once covered the façade of the big temple altogether, and now hides a portion of it. The entrance to the temple was first cleared away in 1817 by Belzoni and his party, whose gang of laborers worked eight hours a day for two weeks with the thermometer at 1120 to 1160 Fahrenheit in the shade—an almost incredible endurance when you consider what the heat must have been in the sun beating upon this dazzling wall of sand in front of them.
The rock in which the temple is excavated was cut back a considerable distance, but in this cutting the great masses were left which were to be fashioned into the four figures. The façade thus made, to which these statues are attached, is about one hundred feet high. The statues are seated on thrones with no intervening screens, and, when first seen, have the appearance of images in front of and detached from the rock of which they form a part. The statues are all tolerably perfect, except one, the head of which is broken and lies in masses at its feet; and at the time of our visit the sand covered the two northernmost to the knees. The door of entrance, over which is a hawk-headed figure of Re, the titular divinity, is twenty feet high. Above the colossi, and as a frieze over the curve of the cornice, is a row of monkeys, (there were twenty-one originally, but some are split away), like a company of negro minstrels, sitting and holding up their hands in the most comical manner. Perhaps the Egyptians, like the mediaeval cathedral builders, had a liking for grotesque effects in architecture; but they may have intended nothing comic here, for the monkey had sacred functions; he was an emblem of Thoth, the scribe of the under-world, who recorded the judgments of Osiris.
These colossi are the largest in the world[3 - The following are some of the measurements of one of these giants:—height of figure sixty-six feet; pedestal on which it sits, ten; leg from knee to heel, twenty; great toe, one and a half feet thick; ear, three feet, five inches long; fore-finger, three feet; from inner side of elbow-joint to end of middle finger, fifteen feet.]; they are at least fifteen feet higher than the wonders of Thebes, but it is not their size principally that makes their attraction. As works of art they are worthy of study. Seated, with hands on knees, in that eternal, traditional rigidity of Egyptian sculpture, nevertheless the grandeur of the head and the noble beauty of the face take them out of the category of mechanical works. The figures represent Rameses II. and the features are of the type which has come down to us as the perfection of Egyptian beauty.
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.
CHAPTER XXV.—FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA
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.”