My Winter on the Nile

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.”

CHAPTER XXVI.—MYSTERIOUS PHILÆ

WE are on deck early to see the approach to Philæ, which is through a gateway of high rocks. The scenery is like parts of the Rhine; and as we come in sight of the old mosque perched on the hillside, and the round tomb on the pinnacle above, it is very like the Rhine, with castle ruins. The ragged and rock island of Biggeh rises before us and seems to stop the way, but, at a turn in the river, the little temple, with its conspicuous columns, then the pylon of the great temple, and at length the mass of ruins, that cover the little island of Philæ, open on the view.

In the narrows we meet the fleet of government boats conveying the engineer expedition going up to begin the railway from Wady Haifa to Berber. Abd-el-Atti does not like the prospect of Egypt running deeper and deeper in debt, with no good to come of it, he says; he believes that the Khedive is acting under the advice of England, which is entirely selfish and only desires a short way to India, in case the French should shut the Suez Canal against them (his view is a very good example of a Moslem’s comprehension of affairs). Also thinking, with all Moslems, that it is best to leave the world and its people as the Lord has created and placed them, he replied to an enquiry about his opinion of the railroad, with this story of Jonah:—

“When the prophet Jonah came out of the whale and sat down on the bank to dry under a tree (I have seen the tree) in Syria, there was a blind man sitting near by, who begged the prophet to give him sight. Then Jonah asked the Lord for help and the blind man was let to see. The man was eating dates at the same time, and the first thing he did when he got his eyes open was to snap the hard seeds at Jonah, who you know was very tender from being so long in the whale. Jonah was stung on his skin, and bruised by the stones, and he cry out, ‘O! Lord, how is this?’ And the Lord said, ‘Jonah, you not satisfied to leave things as I placed ‘em; and now you must suffer for it’.”

One muses and dreams at Philæ, and does not readily arouse himself to the necessity of exploring and comprehending the marvels and the beauties that insensibly lead him into sentimental reveries. If ever the spirit of beauty haunted a spot, it is this. Whatever was harsh in the granite ledges, or too sharp in the granite walls, whatever is repellant in the memory concerning the uses of these temples of a monstrous theogony, all is softened now by time, all asperities are worn away; nature and art grow lovely together in a gentle decay, sunk in a repose too beautiful to be sad. Nowhere else in Egypt has the grim mystery of the Egyptians cultus softened into so harmless a memory.

The oval island contains perhaps a hundred acres. It is a rock, with only a patch or two of green, and a few scattered palms, just enough to give it a lonely, poetic, and not a fruitful aspect, and, as has been said, is walled all round from the water’s edge. Covered with ruins, the principal are those of the temple of Isis. Beginning at the southern end of the island, where a flight of steps led up to it, it stretches along, with a curved and broadening colonnade, giant pylons, great courts and covered temples. It is impossible to imagine a structure or series of structures, more irregular in the lines or capricious in the forms. The architects gave free play to their fancy, and we find here the fertility and variety, if not the grotesqueness of imagination of the mediaeval cathedral builders. The capitals of the columns of the colonnade are sculptured in rich variety; the walls of the west cloister are covered with fine carvings, the color on them still fresh and delicate; and the ornamental designs are as beautiful and artistic as the finest Greek work, which some of it suggests: as rich as the most lovely Moorish patterns, many of which seem to have been copied from these living creations–diamond-work, birds, exquisite medallions of flowers, and sphinxes.

Without seeing this mass of buildings, you can have no notion of the labor expended in decorating them. All the surfaces of the gigantic pylons, of the walls and courts, exterior and interior, are covered with finely and carefully cut figures and hieroglyphics, and a great deal of the work is minute and delicate chiselling. You are lost in wonder if you attempt to estimate the time and the number of workmen necessary to accomplish all this. It seems incredible that men could ever have had patience or leisure for it. A great portion of the figures, within and without, have been, with much painstaking, defaced; probably it was done by the early Christians, and this is the only impress they have left of their domination in this region.

The most interesting sculptures, however, at Philæ are those in a small chamber, or mortuary chapel, on the roof of the main temple, touching the most sacred mystery of the Egyptian religion, the death and resurrection of Osiris. This myth, which took many fantastic forms, was no doubt that forbidden topic upon which Herodotus was not at liberty to speak. It was the growth of a period in the Egyptian theology when the original revelation of one God grew weak and began to disappear under a monstrous symbolism. It is possible that the priests, who held their religious philosophy a profound secret from the vulgar (whose religion was simply a gross worship of symbols), never relinquished the belief expressed in their sacred texts, which say of God “that He is the sole generator in heaven and earth, and that He has not been begotten.... That He is the only living and true God, who was begotten by Himself.... He who has existed from the beginning.... who has made all things and was not Himself made.” It is possible that they may have held to this and still kept in the purity of its first conception the myth of the manifestation of Osiris, however fantastic the myth subsequently became in mythology and in the popular worship.

Osiris, the personification of the sun, the life-giving, came upon the earth to benefit men, and one of his titles was the “manifester of good and truth.” He was slain in a conflict with Set the spirit of evil and darkness; he was buried; he was raised from the dead by the prayers of his wife, Isis; he became the judge of the dead; he was not only the life-giving but the saving deity; “himself the first raised from the dead, he assisted to raise those who were justified, after having aided them to overcome all their trials.”

But whatever the priests and the initiated believed, this myth is here symbolized in the baldest forms. We have the mummy of Osiris passing through its interment and the successive stages of the under-world; then his body is dismembered and scattered, and finally the limbs and organs are reassembled and joined together, and the resurrection takes place before our eyes. It reminds one of a pantomime of the Ravels, who used to chop up the body of a comrade and then put him together again as good as new, with the insouciance of beings who lived in a world where such transactions were common. This whole temple indeed, would be a royal place for the tricks of a conjurer or the delusions of a troop of stage wizards. It is full of dark chambers and secret passages, some of them in the walls and some subterranean, the entrances to which are only disclosed by removing a close-fitting stone.

The great pylons, ascended by internal stairways, have habitable chambers in each story, lighted by deep slits of windows, and are like palace fortresses. The view from the summit of one of them is fascinating, but almost grim; that is, your surroundings are huge masses of granite mountains and islands, only relieved by some patches of green and a few palms on the east shore. But time has so worn and fashioned the stones of the overtopping crags, and the color of the red granite is so warm, and the contours are so softened that under the brilliant sky the view is mellowed and highly poetical, and ought not to be called grim.

This little island, gay with its gorgeously colored walls, graceful colonnades, garden-roofs and spreading terraces, set in its rim of swift water, protected by these granite fortresses, bent over by this sky, must have been a dear and sacred place to the worshippers of Isis and Osiris, and we scarcely wonder that the celebration of their rites was continued so long in our era. We do not need, in order to feel the romance of the place, to know that it was a favorite spot with Cleopatra, and that she moored her silken-sailed dahabeëh on the sandbank where ours now lies. Perhaps she was not a person of romantic nature. There is a portrait of her here (the authenticity of which rests upon I know not what authority) stiffly cut in the stone, in which she appears to be a resolute woman with full sensual lips and a determined chin. Her hair is put up in decent simplicity. But I half think that she herself was like her other Egyptian sisters and made her silken locks to shine with the juice of the castor-oil plant. But what were these mysteries in which she took part, and what was this worship, conducted in these dark and secret chambers? It was veiled from all vulgar eyes; probably the people were scarcely allowed to set foot upon the sacred island.

Sunday morning was fresh and cool, with fleecy clouds, light and summer-like. Instead of Sabbath bells, when I rose late, I heard the wild chant of a crew rowing a dahabeëh down the echoing channel. And I wondered how church bells, rung on the top of these pylons, would sound reverberating among these granite rocks and boulders. We climbed, during the afternoon, to the summit of the island of Biggeh, which overshadows Philæ, and is a most fantastic pile of crags. You can best understand this region by supposing that a gigantic internal explosion lifted the granite strata into the air, and that the fragments fell hap-hazard. This Biggeh might have been piled up by the giants who attempted to scale heaven, when Zeus blasted them and their work with his launched lightning.

From this summit, we have in view the broken, rock-strewn field called the Cataract, and all the extraordinary islands of rock above, that almost dam the river; there, over Philæ, on the north shore, is the barrack-like Austrian Mission, and neat it the railway that runs through the desert waste, round the hills of the Cataract, to Assouan. These vast piled-up fragments and splintered ledges, here and all about us, although of raw granite and syenite, are all disintegrating and crumbling into fine atoms. It is this decay that softens the hardness of the outlines, and harmonizes with the ruins below. Wild as the convulsion was that caused this fantastic wreck, the scene is not without a certain peace now, as we sit here this Sunday afternoon, on a high crag, looking down upon the pagan temples, which resist the tooth of time almost as well as the masses of granite rock that are in position and in form their sentinels.

Opposite, on the hill, is the mosque, and the plastered dome of the sheykh’s tomb, with its prayer-niche, a quiet and commanding place of repose. The mosque looks down upon the ever-flowing Nile, upon the granite desolation, upon the decaying temple of Isis,—converted once into a temple of the true God, and now merely the marvel of the traveler. The mosque itself, representative of the latest religion, is falling to ruin. What will come next? What will come to break up this civilized barbarism?

“Abd-el-Atti, why do you suppose the Lord permitted the old heathen to have such a lovely place as this Philæ for the practice of their superstitions?”

“Do’ know, be sure. Once there was a stranger, I reckon him travel without any dragoman, come to the tent of the prophet Abraham, and ask for food and lodging; he was a kind of infidel, not believe in God, not to believe in anything but a bit of stone. And Abraham was very angry, and sent him away without any dinner. Then the Lord, when he saw it, scolded Abraham.

“‘But,’ says Abraham, ‘the man is an infidel, and does not believe in Thee.’

“‘Well,’ the Lord he answer to Abraham, ‘he has lived in my world all his life, and I have suffered him, and taken care of him, and prospered him, and borne his infidelity; and you could not give him a dinner, or shelter for one night in your house!

“Then Abraham ran after the infidel, and called him back, and told him all that the Lord he say. And the infidel when he heard it, answer, ‘If the Lord says that, I believe in Him; and I believe that you are a prophet.’.rdquo;

“And do you think, Abd-el-Atti, that men have been more tolerant, the Friends of Mohammed, for instance, since then?”

“Men pretty nearly always the same; I see ‘em all ‘bout alike. I read in our books a little, what you call ‘em?—yes, anecdote, how a Moslem ‘ulama, and a Christian priest, and a Jewish rabbi, were in a place together, and had some conversation, and they agreed to tell what each would like best to happen.

“The priest he began:—’I should like,’ says he, ‘as many Moslems to die as there are animals sacrificed by them on the day of sacrifice.’

“‘And I,’ says the ‘ulama, ‘would like to see put out of the way so many Christians as they eat eggs on Easter.’

“Now it is your turn, says they both to the rabbi:—’Well, I should like you both to have your wishes.’ I think the Jew have the best of it. Not so?”

The night is soft and still, and envelopes Philæ in a summer warmth. The stars crowd the blue-black sky with scintillant points, obtrusive and blazing in startling nearness; they are all repeated in the darker blue of the smooth river, where lie also, perfectly outlined, the heavy shadows of the granite masses. Upon the silence suddenly breaks the notes of a cornet, from a dahabeëh moored above us, in pulsations, however, rather to emphasize than to break the hush of the night.

“Eh! that’s Mr. Fiddle,” cries Abd-el-Atti, whose musical nomenclature is not very extensive, “that’s a him.”

Once on a moonless night in Upper Nubia, as we lay tied to the bank, under the shadow of the palms, there had swept past us, flashing into sight an instant and then gone in the darkness, an upward-bound dahabeëh, from the deck of which a cornet-à-piston flung out, in salute, the lively notes of a popular American air. The player (whom the dragoman could never call by any name but “Mr. Fiddle”) as we came to know later, was an Irish gentleman, Anglicized and Americanized, and indeed cosmopolitan, who has a fancy for going about the world and awaking here and there remote and commonly undisturbed echoes with his favorite brass horn. I daresay that moonlight voyagers on the Hudson have heard its notes dropping down from the Highlands; it has stirred the air of every land on the globe except India; our own Sierras have responded to its invitations, and Mount Sinai itself has echoed its strains. There is a prejudice against the cornet, that it is not exactly a family instrument; and not more suited to assist in morning and evening devotions than the violin, which a young clergyman, whom I knew, was endeavoring to learn, in order to play it, gently, at family prayers.

This traveled cornet, however, begins to play, with deliberate pauses between the bars, the notes of that glorious hymn, “How firm a foundation ye saints of the Lord,” following it with the Prayer from Der Freischutz, and that, again, with some familiar Scotch airs (a transition perfectly natural in home-circles on Sunday evening), every note of which, leisurely floating out into the night, is sent back in distant echoes. Nothing can be lovelier than the scene,—the tropical night, the sentimental island, the shadows of columns and crags, the mysterious presence of a brooding past,—and nothing can be sweeter than these dulcet, lingering, re-echoing strains, which are the music of our faith, of civilization, of home. From these old temples did never come, in the days of the flute and the darabooka, such melodies. And do the spirits of Isis and Osiris, and of Berenice, Cleopatra, and Antoninus, who worshipped them here, listen, and know perhaps that a purer and better spirit has come into the world?

In the midst of this echoing melody, a little boat, its sail noiselessly furled, its gunwales crowded with gowned and white-turbaned Nubians, glides out of the shadow and comes alongside, as silently as a ferry-boat of the under-world bearing the robed figures of the departed, and the venerable Reis of the Cataract steps on board, with es-salam ‘aleykum; and the negotiation for shooting the rapids in the morning begins.