Title: Sketches in Egypt
Author: Gibson, Charles Dana
Language: English
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                           Sketches in Egypt

                      Written and illustrated by

                          Charles Dana Gibson

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                               New York

                        Doubleday & McClure Co.

                                 1899

                          Copyright, 1899, by
                           S. S. McCLURE Co.

                          Copyright, 1899, by
                        DOUBLEDAY & MCCLURE Co.

[Illustration]




ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                    PAGE

British Influence                                           Frontispiece

Indifference                                                          xi

A Son of the Desert                                                    3

A Peddler                                                              5

The Slipper Bazaar, Cairo, January 22, 1898                            7

Egyptian High Life                                                     9

The Present Situation                                                 12

A Dealer in Antiquities                                               13

The Bridge                                                            14

A Village on the Road to the Pyramids                                 14

In the Fish-Market                                                    15

Rameses the Great                                                     17

At Lady Grenfell’s Masquerade Ball--on the eve of Kitchener’s
 departure for the Soudan                                             20

A Descendant of the Prophet--El Saied Ahmad Abdel Khalek
Affandi, Sheik el Sadat                                               22

A Bargain in the Ghezireh Gardens                                     23

A Dancing-Girl                                                        25

A Daughter of the Nile                                                27

On the Road to Cairo                                                  31

Our Christmas Dinner, Esneh, December 23                              35

Karnak, January 2, 1898                                               37

Salem Ghesiri, Dragoman                                               39

A Karnak Beggar                                                       40

Ali, the Pilot                                                        42

Statue of Thothmes, Karnak                                            43

Lunching in Karnak                                                    45

An Assiût Donkey                                                      47

Temple of Ti                                                          50

Tombs of the Kings, Thebes                                            51

A Guardian of the Temple                                              53

“Most of the day was spent with Baedeker”                             55

Christmas, 1897                                                       59

Guardians of the Temple                                               61

Christmas Night-“Auld Lang Syne”                                      63

Thebes, January 2, 1898                                               67

Some Visitors                                                         71

Vignette                                                              74

His Highness Prince Mahomet Ali, Cairo, February 14, 1898             76

On the Bank                                                           77

Shopping                                                              79

Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo                                              81

A Luxor Dancing-Girl                                                  83

Camel-Back                                                            85

The Sheik of the Pyramids                                             88

On Grenfell Hill    The Keeper of the Tomb, Assuan,
 December 29, 1897                                                    89

At the Races, Khedival Sporting Club                                  94

An Assuan Beggar                                                      95

An Artist in the Mouskie                                              97

Our Bisharin Friends, Assuan                                         100

Beni-Hassan                                                          101

At Philæ                                                             104

“As good an imitation of Monte Carlo as the law allows”              105

“The man who has ‘been there before’”                                110

In a Coffee-House, Cairo                                             111

At Komombos                                                          115




SKETCHES IN EGYPT

C. D. GIBSON




CHAPTER FIRST

[Illustration: A Son of the Desert.]

EGYPT has sat for her likeness longer than any other country. Nothing
disturbs her composure. Financial ruin may stare her in the face, armies
may come and go, but each year the Nile rises and spreads out over her,
and all traces of disturbances are gone.

Newspapers may be busy telling of her troubles, but very few of those
troubles seem to affect her expression. The stockholders in London
worry, and send out more Englishmen to look after their interests.
Sugar-factories are inspected, and the barrage is doctored. But it is
all very quietly done.

The French cabinet may resign on account of her, and the English army
may be increased for her sake, but few signs of these compliments does
she show. All is tranquil. The only disturbance seems to be made by the
dragomans who meet you at the station.

Important events follow each other so closely in Egypt that a year-old
guide-book is several chapters too short. Last year it was Kitchener’s
campaign against the dervishes, and now the French are threatening to
interfere with England’s march to the Cape. The dragoman is sometimes as
satisfactory as the guide-book, and it is often pleasant to find how
soon he is through with his recitation and you are allowed to go alone
among the great temples. Earthquakes have shaken some in orderly ruin,
as if the unseen hands of the men who built them were quietly and slowly
building them up again.

[Illustration: A Peddler.]

But there is a temptation to grow sentimental over Egypt. It is far more
cheerful than it sounds. It is happy and a place for a holiday--a
country to make sketches in. These were made between December, 1897, and
March, 1898, and I have been asked to help them tell their story of that
part of Egypt the tourist is most likely to see, where the old and the
new world meet most often.

The ancient Egyptian artist must have been very happy. Temples were
built with great smooth walls for him to cover with pictures that
required very little writing to go with them, seldom more than Pharaoh’s
cartouches, and even these he made more like a picture than a name. That
must have been very pleasant, and it should have compensated him for
all the restrictions imposed upon him by the high priest of those days,
who often limited his choice of subject to a king. The choice of subject
is now unlimited. There never were so many different kinds of people in
Egypt before. But it would be difficult to draw the king now, for there
is much difference of opinion as to who he is.

I left New York with a small library of Egyptian guide-books, and in
nearly every one of them was a good description of a traveler’s feelings
upon arriving at Alexandria or Port Saïd. I have been in both places,
and about the same sensations will fit either port; and traveling is too
personal a matter to describe at length, unless it is done with skill.
To give advice is much more simple; and mine is that if you are on a
steamer that is going through the Canal, don’t stay on her until she
gets to Ismailia, but disembark at Port Saïd and get to Cairo that night
all the way by

[Illustration: The Slipper Bazaar, Cairo, January 22, 1898.]

[Illustration: Egyptian High Life.]

rail. You will see as much of the Canal as you want to, and you will not
run the chance of being delayed a day, as the _Königin Luise_ was last
year by a little tramp steamer that had run foul of a coal-barge.

More advice is to look out of the right-hand window of the car for a
first glimpse of the pyramids, the first sure proof that you are in
Napoleon’s Egypt. After they are once found, it is easy for your eye to
follow them through palm-trees and over mud villages until darkness
interferes. Then you come to the station in Cairo, a hotbed of porters
and dragomans, and through the confusion you finally reach Shepheard’s,
on the street like a great show-window--all but the plate glass--full of
odds and ends from all the world. New arrivals are handed in by the
dragomans and porters. It is as if you climbed over the footlights to
assist in the performance. You finally stand before the good-looking Mr.
Bailer, at the back of the stage. If he thinks you will stand a room
overlooking the stable-yard, you will get it. The next morning I moved
to the sunny side, overlooking the garden, where a tame pelican walked
among tall palm-trees.

The dragoman who first lays hands on you claims you for his own. You
will find him waiting for you in the morning. He will sell you antiques,
will take you snipe-shooting. He knows when the dervishes will howl or
whirl, or where there is a native wedding, to which he will take you. It
may be the fame of Shepheard’s, or the magic name of Egypt, but it all
has a wonderful charm.

[Illustration: The Present Situation.]

[Illustration: A Dealer in Antiquities.]

The remains of Rameses and Seti are lying on their backs out in the
Gizeh Museum, and there is a strong desire to hurry to them, in spite of
the fact that they will keep. But the panorama in front of Shepheard’s
is absorbing, and your first morning will most likely be spent in
watching it.

My first afternoon was spent with an evil-eyed dragoman whose pockets
were filled with dirty cards and letters, all testimonials from former
customers proving that he was, as he continually told me, the best
dragoman in the business. He could recite some of

[Illustration: The Bridge.]

“Mother Goose,” but knew very little English besides. With him I drove
through streets that might have been in Paris, and by barracks and
sentries that might have been in London, to a river that could only be

[Illustration: A Village on the Road to the Pyramids.]

[Illustration: In the Fish-Market.]

in Egypt. My carriage went between the two bronze lions and joined in
the procession of camels across the bridge over the famous river to the
Gizeh side, where tall trees meet overhead; then to a smaller bridge,
more trees, quaint shipping, and a stucco palace, once a harem where
some of Ismail’s wives lived, and now a museum, the temporary
resting-place of those uneasy mummied heads that once wore Egypt’s
crown; small mouse-colored

[Illustration: Rameses the Great.]

donkeys on all sides, and, streaking in among them, tall camels; then
seven more miles of trees and a good causeway to the pyramids. Since
then I have gone over the road many times, and I am of the opinion that
the Nile’s valley would make an ideal “happy hunting-ground,” to which
all good tourists might go when cruel waves have ceased to toss them and
their hotel lives are over.

All too soon you must go hack to Cairo, where the Bedouin ceases to be
the proud son of the desert and becomes a peddler, where sheep become
mutton and clover is only fodder. But Cairo is about what the tourist
expects of it and what the hotel proprietor thinks you want. He fills
the halls of his hotel with gaily painted columns, and on each side of
the staircase are gaudy figures; and for those tourists who take their
Egypt between the slipper bazaar and the fish-market it may do.

[Illustration: At Lady Grenfell’s Masquerade Ball--on the eve of
Kitchener’s departure for the Soudan.]

The Gizeh side of the river is more restful, with its ferry to Bulak,
its gardens, and its khedival sporting club, which is Egypt as England
would have it--polo twice a week, croquet and rackets, a grand stand,
and a steeplechase course; and the same men who play polo spend their
mornings on the desert, teaching their troops to form hollow squares
against the day they will have to meet the dervishes.

You should choose your own Cairo. If you leave it to a dragoman you will
get mostly howling dervishes and mosques; and if you leave it to a
donkey-boy, there is no telling where he will take you--most likely to
the fish-market. But with a guide-book and a bicycle you will miss very
little that lies between the citadel and the pyramids. Cairo is not all
hotel life, and bazaars lining narrow streets like open fireplaces,
filled with putty-faced Turks as watchful as the brown buzzards that fly
overhead; there are streets

[Illustration: A Descendant of the Prophet--El Saied Ahmad Abdel Khalek
Affandi, Sheik el Sadat.]

that are difficult to find, leading to forgotten courtyards with great
trees standing in the middle of them, latticed windows bulging out over
uneven pavements below, where black and gray crows waddle about. In such
a

[Illustration: A Bargain in the Ghezireh Gardens.]

[Illustration: A Dancing-Girl.]

place sits the neglected Sheik el Sadat, a lineal descendant of the
prophet. Through a doorway, in one corner of a tiled room, stands the
gold-mounted saddle on which his ancestors once proudly rode. That was
long before the days of the Suez Canal, boulevards, stucco palaces, and
the opera-house. At court the sheik is no longer the fashion, but there
is still a little band of Mohammedans who believe in him. To them the
sheik and his old house are sacred. Through the thirty days of Ramadan
they sat and howled in his courtyard, and respectfully kissed his hand;
and, like the sheik, there must be many other distinguished Oriental
relics of the days gone by, left behind by the former tenants, and of no
use to the present occupants.

In Egypt the English hold the reins, and one of these days the Egyptian
donkey may turn to the left when you meet him, as his distant relative
in Whitechapel does. At present he keeps to the right, and staggers
along under a load that is much too big for him. To-day he is not the
fashion in Cairo. He is only ridden by tourists after dark, through
streets that are too narrow and crooked for a carriage. But up the river
it is very different. There you learn to like him. From his back you
first see Karnak, and the statues of Memnon, and he is forever
associated in your memory with the tombs of the kings. Tourists quarrel
over him, and in most cases his name is “Rameses, the Great.” His chief
complaint must be that an Englishman weighs more than an Egyptian; but
he should consider

[Illustration: A Daughter of the Nile.]

how much better off the Egyptian is since the English have held the
reins. He will only know of this from his own observation, and from what
he hears the English say. He will never get it from a Frenchman; and the
Egyptian, who could tell him, is sulky, and stupidly wishes that he had
been rescued by some one else. The half-breed Jew and Turk in the
“Mooskee” is too busy; and all the rest of Egypt don’t know why they are
better off, or who to thank for law and order or the improved irrigation
that gives them a fair chance with the rest of civilized mankind. But
whether the donkey knows it or not, he is much hotter off, for an
Englishman never rides him when he is old and weak, and that is more
than he can expect from his Egyptian friends, who often get on him two
at a time.

At Shepheard’s people put aside their guide-books for a while. It is a
play that requires no libretto. On the crowded piazza overlooking the
street, London shopkeepers and foreign noblemen elbow each other, and
all celebrities look very much alike.

Cairo is the foyer of Egypt. To go to Egypt and not go up the Nile is
very much like standing outside of a theater and watching the audience
go in, and then waiting until they come out, to glean from their
conversation some idea of the play. But the tourists who go up the river
see the drama of Egypt with all its wonderful scenery, and they feel far
superior to those who waited for them at Shepheard’s. After one month
on the river, it is with a very different feeling they come back to the
museum at Gizeh and look on the face of Seti and his distinguished son,
whom they have tracked from Sakkara to Philæ and back to their tombs in
the sun-baked valley at Thebes, where they had hoped to rest in peace,
surrounded by all that a first-class mummy requires during its long
wait.

[Illustration: On the Road to Cairo.]




CHAPTER SECOND

[Illustration: On the Bank at Komombos.]




CHAPTER SECOND

[Illustration: Our Christmas Dinner, Esneh, December 23.]


SOME Egypt-bound tourists decide to go up the Nile before they buy their
tickets at the company’s office in Bowling Green. Others, if they are
good sailors, make up their minds before they reach Naples. Some are ill
all the way to Port Saïd, and don’t cave. But most travelers are pretty
sure to decide one way or the other soon after Mount Etna has been left
behind, for the East begins for most people from that moment. If the
guide-books fail to persuade you, there is pretty sure to be a
fellow-passenger who will. The man who has once seen Upper Egypt does
his best to make you dissatisfied with Lower Egypt. He can easily show
you that your journey’s end is not Cairo, but, at the very least, the
first cataract. This is the shortest distance he will listen to. And
after he has your promise to go that far, he tells you of the wonders
that can only be seen by going on to the second cataract.

My fellow-passenger was an old traveler. Others besides myself fell
under the spell of his eloquence; so, before we had been at Shepheard’s
a week, we were a party of six, with the steam-dahabiyeh _Nitocris_
chartered for a month, beginning December 12. There were growing plants,
rugs, and a piano on her deck, and six state-rooms below. Salem Ghesiri
was our dragoman. He spoke

[Illustration: Karnak, January 2, 1898.]

good English, and knew the river by heart. Before we left, a few days
were spent in buying cork hats and sun umbrellas, and by ten o’clock on
the morning of the 12th the crew had unloaded the trucks that had
brought our belongings down from Shepheard’s, and we had started, with
the wind and the current so strong against us that it was all we could
do to make six miles an hour against them.

On our left were the mud houses of Old Cairo, with ancient quarries in
the distance, and on the right, far beyond a forest of slanting masts
that belonged to the picturesque ships which lined the bank, were the
tops of the pyramids that we were leaving for a month. As evening
approached, the

[Illustration: Salem Ghesiri Dragoman.]

right bank seemed peopled with silhouettes of camels, donkeys, and men,
while the figures on the opposite bank were rose-color. To us the day
was cool, but to the crew it must have been cold, for their heads were
wrapped in shawls and they huddled together in groups about the deck.
The awning over us had been removed, and Ali, the pilot, looked like a
partly unwrapped mummy as he sat at the wheel.

Those who go up the river in a dahabiyeh like to feel that they are in
the same boat with the travelers whose books they read from New York to
Port Saïd. This would be a very pleasant feeling, if it did not suggest
the responsibility of keeping a record of days that, from all accounts,
are sure to be of so much importance. There is a

[Illustration: A Karnak Beggar.]

[Illustration: All, the Pilot.]

sentimental belief that each day on the river is to be of the greatest
importance, just as if thousands of tourists on Cook’s steamers were not
taking the same journey each year. So overpowering becomes this delusion
that even letters home seem to take the form of historic biographies,
and sound like messages that are sometimes found floating in bottles
thrown overboard by shipwrecked people. The Nile itself seems to insist
that all mention of it should be made in the form of a diary, for, with
very few exceptions, all accounts adopt that mode of expression when
they come to it. Cairo and

[Illustration: Statue of Thothmes, Karnak.]

Upper Egypt may be treated in the form of essays, but the endless
parallel banks of the river immediately suggest that all days will be
very much alike and lose their identity, unless they are numbered and
described. It seems to be of the greatest importance to find the best
way to spell the name of the mud village where you tie up for the night
(which name most of the guide-books spell differently)--as if it made
any difference to the people at home.

But the diaries on the _Nitocris_ during that month were very
conscientious and particular about these small things, and I think they
will all agree in their spelling, for each one of us waited until all
the others had agreed upon the most popular way to spell the names of
these various landmarks before we wrote them down.

We soon made friends with our crew. There were sixteen of them. They
were

[Illustration: Lunching in Karnak.]

[Illustration: An Assiût Donkey.]

from every part of Egypt, and of all colors, shading from the engineer,
who was a cream-colored Turk,--when his face was washed,--to Ali, who
must have been a Sudanese. Our head steward was almost as black, and the
second steward was another of the cream-colored variety. We seldom saw
the cook. Sometimes he would put his head and shoulders out of the
hatchway, with his arms on the deck, and then we could see that he was a
little, white-faced Turk with a large black mustache.

Salem was a Syrian Christian, and he had lost all his earnings in an
unprofitable exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago. His costumes were
always elaborate, and he was very ornamental, with his silk sashes and
fancy turbans. He superintended our meals, and always suggested the next
day’s program during dinner; so with our coffee we would read aloud
Charles Dudley Warner’s and Miss Edwards’s opinions of our next
stopping-place.

After our first dinner we tied to the bank, by a little village, Salem
said, just big enough to have a name. It was-dark, and we could hear and
see nothing; so we took his word for it.

We were off early the next morning, and all that day the river’s banks
were fringed with sugar-cane and sakiehs. The many boats we passed were
loaded with natives, sometimes perched upon loads of grain, or mixed in
with turkeys and cattle.

[Illustration: Temple of Ti.]

[Illustration: Tombs of the Kings, Thebes.]

On December 14 we made our first landing, and had our first donkey ride,
at Beni-Hassan, one hundred and seventy-one miles from Cairo. The
Egyptian policemen who accompanied us to the tombs were out of keeping
with the peaceful look of the place, and only succeeded in keeping at a
distance the children, who were very pretty.

From the cliffs back of the village we had our first view of the valley
of the Nile, with its delicate green fields, beginning immediately at
the foot of the sun-baked hills on which we stood. I rode back before
the rest to make a sketch; but the arrival of the post-boat put an end
to that, and its passengers soon had our donkeys, beggars, naked
children, policemen, and all, and were taking them back to

[Illustration: A Guardian of the Temple.]

the tombs we had just left. The post-boat was to us what the foot-prints
in the sand must have been to Robinson Crusoe. Our frame of mind
underwent a change. We finally became reconciled to the fact that we
were not doing anything uncommon, and from that moment our diaries
suffered. Then the most contagious of all Nile ambitions seized us, and
our one desire was to find a mummy.

Most of the 15th was spent with Baedeker, preparing for Assiût, where we
were to tie up for the night.

After an early breakfast, we climbed the bank, and found that it was
chiefly inhabited by beggars. We visited the tombs, and came back to the
dahabiyeh by way of the bazaars, where the natives were dyeing the
dark-blue cloth which they all dress in. That afternoon we came upon an
army of pelicans on a mud flat in the middle of the river. At the sound
of our whistle they got up, and we

[Illustration: “Most of the day was spent with Baedeker.”]

lost them far ahead in the twilight, and we thought of that tame pelican
that waddles about in Shepheard’s stable-yard.

The next day we went by mud villages at the foot of high mountains of
white limestone, until we stopped at Farshut for coal, and tried to
awaken some sign of friendliness in the natives, who were as dull as the
mud banks on which they sat.

On the afternoon of the 18th we reached Keneh, and in fifteen minutes we
were on donkeys, going by villages filled with children and barking
dogs, on our way to the temple of Dendera. This was to be our first big
temple, and Salem had made it his chief excuse for hurrying us away from
Beni-Hassan, Assiût, and the rest. Our donkeys raced along the edge of
an empty canal, through herds of goats and buffalo, until we saw a low
pile of stones in the distance, and then we reached the half-buried
temple, and lighted candles, and went down into it and looked up at the
mighty columns. Salem repeated all that the guide-books knew, and then
took us around to the back wall and showed us the famous likeness of
Cleopatra and her son Cæsarion.

Salem was pleased with the way we took our first temple, and rewarded us
by saying it was only the beginning of what was to come. We complimented
him on his choice of subjects, blew out our candles, picked the
candle-grease from our fingers, and reached the dahabiyeh by sundown.

By one o’clock, on December 19, we were abreast of the promised Karnak,
and could see the top of its pylons and obelisk. We had saved most of
our enthusiasm for this place, and we were anxious to get ashore and
expend it; reluctantly we went by it a few miles to Luxor for a better
landing, where we were watched by a bank-load of natives until four
o’clock. Then we walked through them to the village and temple of Luxor,
which

[Illustration: Christmas, 1897.]

[Illustration: Guardians of the Temple.]

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

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

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

[Illustration: Christmas Night--“Auld Lang Syne.”]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Thebes, January 2, 1898.]

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Home Visitors.]

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

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

[Illustration]




CHAPTER THREE

[Illustration: His Highness Prince Mahomet Ali, Cairo, February 14,
1898.]

[Illustration: On the Bank.]



CHAPTER THIRD

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

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

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

[Illustration: Shopping.]

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

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

[Illustration: Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo.]

[Illustration: A Luxor Dancing-girl.]

beach, we read how the _Rip Van Winkle_ and other dahabiyehs had gone to
Abu-Simbel.

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Camel-back.]

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

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

[Illustration: The Sheik of the Pyramids.]

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

[Illustration: On Grenfell Hill. The Keeper of the Tomb, Assuan,
December 29, 1897.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: At the Races, Khedival Sporting Club.]

[Illustration: An Assuan Beggar.]

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: An Artist in the Mouskie.]

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

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

On the 8th we visited a sugar-factory at

[Illustration: Our Bisharin Friends, Assuan.]

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

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

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

[Illustration: Beni-Hassan.]

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

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

By January 10 the season had commenced

[Illustration: At Philæ.]

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

[Illustration: “As good an imitation of Monte Carlo as the law
allows.”]

At Shepheard’s there is always the man who has “been there before,” and
like the same man at the play, he sits beside you and interprets the
picture. You finally promise that you will not go to the _monskie_
without him, and that you will not see the Sphinx by moonlight unless he
is there; for if you do, not having been there before, you will be sure
to go too early or too late. He says the moon should be at just such an
angle and no other. The peddlers in the monskie know him, and while they
entertain him with little cups of sweet tea they complain that they have
had no luck since they last saw him, and they ask eagerly after that
gentleman he brought to them the year before--the gentleman who had such
exquisite taste and backed it up so generously with his money. And you
drink their tea, and feel, as you leave the shops, after having only
looked at their things, that they will never ask affectionately after
you. The man who has been there before generally walks in front of you,
as if he were not as anxious to have you see the place as he is to have
you see that he knows his way about; and, after all, it is no small
thing to be proud of. If I ever go to the mouskie again, I shall pity
the greenhorn who happens to be with me.

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

[Illustration: “The man who has ‘been there before.’”]

[Illustration: In a Coffee-house, Cairo.]

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: At Komombos.]





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