Part 2 (1/2)

What a treat, to put it in that way, it was to rove about in the reality of the true East, to meet beauty of form and colour and light and shade and movement wherever one's eyes turned, without being brought up with a nasty jar by some modern hideosity or other. This was contentment. You know what a bit of colour in sun or luminous shade does for me. Think of my feelings when I walked through the narrow streets where the rays of the sun slanted down through gaps in the masonry, or, as in some, through c.h.i.n.ks in the overhead matting--now on a white turban, now on a rose-coloured robe relieved against the rich dark background of some cavernous open doorway, now on a bit of bra.s.s-work. The soft tones of the famous Carpet Bazaar in noon-day twilight, with that richness of colour that tells you the invisible suns.h.i.+ne is somewhere, fulfilled--yea, over-filled--my expectations, and close by in real working trim were the bra.s.s-workers tinkering and tapping musically, the while smoking their hubble-bubbles in very truth. The goldsmiths, in their own particular alley, were sitting in the rich chiaroscuro of their little shops waiting for me.

Added to those feasts for the eyes were the sounds which pictures could not give me--the warning shouts of the donkey-and camel-drivers, the ”by your leave” in Arabic, followed by the shuffling sound of hoof and foot in the soft tan; the tinkling of the water-sellers' bra.s.s saucers; the cries, like wild songs in the minor, of hawkers of all kinds of things. Then the scents, also unpaintable. Incense, gums, tan, ripe fruit, wood-smoke. And the smells? Ah, yes, well--the smells, goaty and otherwise. They were all bound up together in that entirety which I would not have deleted.

There was one particular angle of street in front of I forget what ripe old mosque, before which I would have liked to establish myself all day.

The two streams of pa.s.sers-by, human and animal, ceaselessly jostling each other, came at one particular hour into a shaft of sunlight just at the turn where I could see them in perspective. Now a splendid figure in yellow robe and white turban, accentuating the streak of gold to perfection, occupied the centre of the composition and I would make a mental note: ”daffodil yellow and white in intense sunlight; dull crimson curtain in shade behind; man in half-shade in dark brown, boy in indigo in reflected light”--when in the shaft of light now appeared a snow-white robe and rosy turban, putting out the preceding scheme, till a _hadji_ in a turban of soft bluey-green and pale-blue drapery came to suggest a very delicate emphasis to the rich and subdued surroundings.

In the first fresh days how mysterious these covered streets appear, these indoor thoroughfares, m.u.f.fled with tan, where towering camels and shuffling donkeys and curvetting horses seem so astonis.h.i.+ngly out of place.

Anglo-Egyptians who have to live in Cairo smile at my enthusiasm, and tell me they get tired of all this in time, and they are certainly helping to attenuate the charm. A late high official, on leaving Egypt, in his farewell speech told his audience that that day had been the happiest in his life, for he had seen the first ”sandwich man” in the streets of Cairo. Since then another charming form of advertis.e.m.e.nt from the go-ahead West has appeared over the minarets of the alcohol-abhorring Moslems--a ”sky sign” flas.h.i.+ng out against the stars the excellence of somebody's whisky. Can they now say ”the changeless East”? And what a whirlpool of intensely Western amus.e.m.e.nts you may be sucked into if you are not wary. You may hide in the bazaars but you cannot live there, and teas, gymkanas, dances, and dinners will claim you for their own as though you were at Monte Carlo or still nearer home. In fact I have found New Cairo a little London and Monte Carlo rolled into one.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CAMEL CORPS]

One glimpse of the vanis.h.i.+ng Past which I got on a certain Friday at Cairo has left a queer impression on my mind, not at all a happy one. I am told the howling and dancing Dervishes have been lately suppressed, and I am dubious as to the fitness of us Christians being witnesses of those performances. However, I went, and saw what one can no longer see in Cairo. I found it difficult to believe those men were in real earnest, otherwise I should have felt more painfully impressed, but even as it was it was a disagreeable sight to witness the frenzied creatures flinging themselves backwards and forwards in time with the ever-increasing rapidity of the tom-toms till their long hair swept the floor at one moment and flew up straight on end towards the great vaulted interior of the mosque the next. Gasping shouts as of dying men escaped them rhythmically, and when the bewildering music had reached its climax it stopped, and so did they, and the priest, with gestures of loving commiseration and encouragement, very gracefully fell on their necks and gave them a drink of water each in turn. All this went on in a faint light from the hanging lamps, and the heat became suffocating. Mrs. C. put her hand on my shoulder, and pointing upwards asked me, ”What is that?” A little white figure had appeared on a ledge high up under the drum of the dome. Whether man, woman, monkey, or goblin, I never saw a more impish figure, and it squatted there looking down from under its hood. I saw many very queer beings in Egypt as time went on, and decidedly the British occupation has not exorcised all the old magic of the Egyptians. But I have never played with it as some do.

Not from fear, but from dislike. I am told in sober truth, people who came to scoff have begged to be let go when spell-bound with horror at what they have seen in a drop of enchanted ink spilled on a table.

We have sometimes played tricks on those people with imitation magic, but never more successfully than did our friend Sir James Dormer out in the Great Desert, when he struck the Bedouins dumb by taking out his gla.s.s eye, which they, of course, believed to be his own, tossing it in the air, and replacing it. He had great power over them, I should say, for ever after. Brave man, he was killed shortly after in India by the wild animal he had wounded and who sprang on him on his blind side. I think a man with a single eye is doubly brave who goes out tiger-shooting in the jungle.

A much wholesomer diversion than the Dervishes was provided by the then General in command at Cairo a few days later, when some three hundred of the Native Camel Corps were put through a series of splendid manuvres out in the great open s.p.a.ces of Aba.s.sieh, beyond the Tombs of the Mameluks. I got out of the carriage when warned that the final charge was about to be delivered, and stood so as to see them coming nearly ”stem on.” It was a sight worth seeing, and surprising to me, who, before I landed, had never seen a camel worthy of the name. When the ”halt!” was sounded, down fell the three hundred bellowing creatures on their knees in mid-career, close up to us, and the panting riders leapt off, their accoutrements in most admired disorder, and their puttees for the most part streaming along the ground. I was in a hurry to get back to Shepheard's to take the impression down, for I was greatly struck by so novel a sight. The red morocco-leather saddle covers were most effective, and very sorry I was on my next visit to Egypt to find they had gone the way of all ”effective” bits of military equipment, and were replaced by dull brown subst.i.tutes. Henceforth I was an enthusiastic admirer of that most picturesque of animals, and though I approached the camel at first with diffidence and apprehension, I soon found him much easier to draw than the horse. What you would _like_ to do with a horse to give him movement and action, but _mustn't_, you _may_ do with a camel. You can twist his neck almost indefinitely and brandish his great coa.r.s.e head as you like, and his long legs give you _carte-blanche_ for producing speed. I found out a curious fact as time went on and I had dogged dozens of camels about the desert and made orderlies walk them up and down for me--namely, that the camel moves his legs _in the walk_ precisely like the horse, but when he falls into a trot he moves the legs of the same side forward together. He walks like a horse and trots like a camel! As to the gallop, a more dislocating performance I never saw. Lady ---- once told me she had, by an unlucky chance, got on a baggage camel with a hard mouth, or rather _nose_, and it ran away with her in the wide, wide desert. She hauled in the nose rope with the strength of despair, till the detestable animal's face was twisted back taut into her lap and was _looking at her_, and still the body galloped forward without the remotest check. She artistically left the end of the adventure untold.

As to the camel's noises, I don't think I ever got to the end of them.

The snarl and the grunt I was prepared for--the horrible querulous and sickening sound that some one has likened to the roar of a lion and the grunt of a pig combined; but one day, as I was making a study of one of these ungracious creatures for a big picture, I thought I heard a sweet lark warbling somewhere, and I marvelled at its presence over the Egyptian desert. The warblings came from the camel's throat, and there was a look in his eye that seemed to warn me that he considered the sitting had lasted long enough. The length of his neck suggested that I was within measurable distance of a bite, and I dismissed my sitter and his lanky rider with prompt.i.tude.

Of all the figures that delighted me in Cairo those of the syces soon became first favourites. The dress, the springing run, the beauty of the movements--I don't think the human figure could be more charmingly shown off. The English General's syces alone wear the scarlet jacket, and deep indigo blue or maroon are the usual colours for the liveries of those mercuries. Our fast-trotting horses now try them too much, and we don't let them run very far, but take them up after a little while. They were intended to trot before the ambling horses or donkeys of Pashas, to clear the way with shouts and sticks through the crowded bazaars. I saw a lady (alas!) driving a very fast English horse past Shepheard's in a rakish T-cart, and the unfortunate syce was constantly on the point of being knocked down by the high-stepper. It did _not_ add to the smartness of this turn-out to see this panting creature looking over his shoulder every minute in terror of the horse, and sometimes, when flagging in his run, being overtaken and having to run alongside. I levelled mental epithets at the thoughtless driver, and wondered how such a thing could be. Some of us are curiously inconsiderate. I am afraid she was but a type of many. Witness the suffering horses bitted up with tight bearing-reins standing for hours outside shops and smart houses where ”at homes” are going on, when a word from the fair owners to their ignorant coachmen might procure ease for their miserable beasts. I am not enthusiastic about motors, but I am thankful for the fact that they are greatly reducing the sufferings of our poor ”gees.” I hope by and by the motor will be made noiseless and odourless, for at present I cannot enjoy its country driving. The scents of the country are replaced by smell and the sounds by noise.

You are better friends with the motor than I am, and have gathered much advantage from its audacity in taking you up, for instance, such rugged heights as those about Tivoli, well within a morning's outing from Rome, which I have looked at as inaccessible, and only to be admired from a lowly distance; those remote cones crowned with mediaeval towns that figure in the backgrounds of many an ”Adoration of the Magi” and ”Flight into Egypt.”

I am, like you, of two minds about very rapid travel. There is something to say for and against it. ”For” it, the freshness with which the mind, untrammelled with the bodily weariness of ”diligence” or ”vetturino”

jogging, receives impressions of points of interest; ”against” it, the hustling of venerable monuments and reverenced natural features which should be approached with more ceremony. There is too much hustling nowadays. I don't know that I enjoyed my last visit to Venice quite as much as usual, feeling apologetic and guilty in partic.i.p.ating in the ”b.u.mping” of the gondolas by the electric boats, whose back-wash sends them hopping and lurching in such an undignified manner. The sedate, gracious gondola, too well-bred ever to be in a hurry, ”knocked out of time” by a fussing little electric launch, which is always in a hurry, with or without reason! What with the hurry, and the whistlings, and puffings, and syren-bellowings, the powers that be are actually succeeding in making Venice noisy. But I have got off the Egyptian track a long way.

After a visit to Sakkara and to the Pyramids and the Sphinx I shall launch out upon Old Nile at once. Our Sakkara day was typical of many I was to experience in this strangest of lands--full of the delights, then new to me, of donkey-riding through the fresh winter air of the desert, but donkey-riding over tombs. Sakkara is the necropolis of Memphis, itself long buried, that capital of the Pyramid Period that looms dark far behind the nearer glories of Thebes and the Temples.

My hilarity induced by the sun, the breeze, the absurd goings-on of the donkeys of our party was constantly damped by the weird reminders we constantly came upon. Those Sakkara pyramids lack the majesty of _the_ Pyramids, and one looks at the amorphous heaps in an oppressed silence.

The Tomb of Ti raised one's spirits by its vivid frescoes showing the every-day life of that Prime Minister's _menage_: it was cheery to see the poulterer in brilliant colours bringing in the goose to the cook, but the final extinguisher fell when we were conducted along an avenue--a sandy causeway--lined on either side with I forget how many sarcophagi of sacred bulls. Each granite sarcophagus was, as far as my memory could say, of exactly the same dimensions and of almost the same shape as that of the great Napoleon at the ”Invalides”! And all for bulls.

It was crus.h.i.+ng; but well for me was the scamper back to the Cairo train. You cannot afford to be pensive riding a donkey at that pace with an Arab saddle to which you are not yet accustomed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ENGLISH GENERAL'S SYCES]

I am not going to dare to try to say anything new about the Pyramids of Gizeh or the Sphinx; nothing new in any shape can come in contact with these monuments. One feels overcome with h.o.a.riness oneself by their mere proximity and silenced by the weight of ages. I am not going to ask you to follow me into any interiors, for I did not go in myself; and indeed, in my progress through this land of tombs, I protested more or less successfully against burrowing into sepulchres, shuffling in thick gloom through pungent and uncanny mummy dust, in bat-scented atmosphere, while above-ground the blessed light of that matchless sky and the uplifting air of the desert were being wasted. Polite compulsion on certain social and festive (!) excursions alone forced me to forego for a while the joy of that ”to-day” above-ground for the mould of the dead Aeons below.

I refer to a letter for my first visit to the Pyramids. That first sight of anything one has read of and pictured in one's child's mind in the course of education is a most precious occurrence, to be chronicled and set down at the moment.

_30th November '85._--”A sweet gentle morning; limpid air, lovely fresh clouds in a soft blue sky. We started at 11 in a carriage, with our dragoman, and were soon taken at the usual hand gallop over the big iron bridge with the colossal green lions at each end which spans the wide Nile, into the acacia-shaded road which runs for a long distance in an imposing straight line to almost the very base of the great Pyramid. As we sped towards the ill.u.s.trious group which we saw rising grey and stern at the very edge of the desert where it meets the bright green of the cultivated land we alternately looked ahead at what was awaiting us and at the ever-interesting groups of men, women, children, and animals which we pa.s.sed, and at the mud villages with their palms and rude domes and minarets which lay in the well-watered, low-lying land on either side of the road. From the first moment I saw the Pyramids afar off I knew I was not destined to be disappointed, and my apprehensions caused by some travellers' descriptions vanished at the outset. It is difficult to put my feelings into words as I came nearer and nearer to these wonders of man's work, so pathetic in their antiquity and in the evidence they give of their builders' colossal failure to ensure for their poor bodies absolute safety during the long waiting for the Resurrection. The seals are broken, the secret places found out, the contents gone to the winds!

”My beloved father was constantly in my mind to-day, for he it was who with such patience taught us the value and fascinating interest of old Egyptian history, and here were some of the scenes he used to read to us of so often, but which he himself was not allowed to see.

”Mrs. C---- and I, on getting out of the carriage, first made the circuit of the Great Pyramid--a s.p.a.ce of 'thirteen statute acres,' I remember Menzies telling us. I found that the most striking point from which to feel the immensity of the Pyramids is in the centre of the base, not the angles.