Part 4 (1/2)
On board the little ”_Rose_,” lent us by an Armenian Bey, I tasted once more the placid pleasure of fresh water travel under sail and oar; and I again heard the strange intervals of the songs that kept the oarsmen in time at their work. But I also learnt what Egyptian rain was like, and how hideous the Mahmoudieh becomes under weeping skies. I saw in this land the deepest and ugliest mud in the world--mud of the colour of chocolate. The weather cleared usually towards evening, and nothing more weird have I ever seen than the villages, cemeteries, solitary tombs, goats, buffaloes, and wild human beings that loomed upon the sky-line on the top of the banks against the windy clouds, reddened by the fiery globe that had sunk below the palm-fringed horizon. These ca.n.a.l banks might give many people the horrors, and I certainly thought them in that weather the uncanniest bits of manipulated nature I had ever seen.
At Atfeh, after three days' ca.n.a.l, we emerged upon the wide and glorious Nile, and the skies smiled upon us once more. But the sadness of the country remained to us as we contemplated the miserable villages which occurred so frequently, with their poor graveyards at their sides, the latter only distinguishable by the smaller size of the dwellings, and the fact that the huts of the living had doors, and the huts of the dead had none--that was all.
Once on the swift Nile current, with the eight sweeps flas.h.i.+ng and splas.h.i.+ng to the rhythm of the strange singing (the prevailing north wind being against sailing), we made a good run down to Rosetta, on whose mud bank we thumped in a surprising manner, at 10 P.M. by a pale watery moonlight.
Never have I seen anything sadder than the land we pa.s.sed through that day--dead, neglected, forlorn. Every now and then what seemed a great city loomed mistily ahead of us, with domes and minarets, and what seemed mighty palaces, piled one above the other on stately terraces.
These apparitions were on the sites of once magnificent centres of wealth and luxury, and from afar they might still appear to be what once they were. Then, as we neared them, the domes unveiled themselves into heaps of filthy straw; the palaces were mud hovels a few feet high; the great mosques were merely poor half-ruined tombs into which a single person could scarcely crawl. The illusion occurred every time we came in sight of one of these phantasms, and the effect on the mind was most singular. City after city arose thus on one's sight in the distance, as though seen through the long ages that have rolled by since their prime, and those long ages seemed like a veil that rapidly dissolved to show us, as we approached, the wretched reality of to-day. ”The pride of life,” ”pomp,” ”arrogance,” ”luxury,”--those epithets were their own once, while to-day the very ant.i.theses of such terms would best become them. They are literally all dust now, and there survive only the poor blunt-shaped dwellings for living and dead, that lie huddled together in such pathetic companions.h.i.+p.
As the daylight fades we see the people creeping into their shelters like their animals, to wait, like them, in the unlighted darkness, for the coming of the morning. Their up-river fellow-workers live in a land where the hards.h.i.+ps of this cold and muddy winter misery are unknown.
I was glad to see the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, thus completing rather an extended, as well as intimate, knowledge of the great river from there to Sarras in the Soudan. Return tickets to Khartoum had not yet taken travellers by rail up the Nile in so many dusty hours.
Still grey was the weather down to where the river merges into the melancholy sea, between Napoleon's two dismantled forts, and what beauty there might have been was densely veiled. The old French ”Fort St.
Julien” was interesting as being the place where the ”Rosetta Stone,”
which gave the key to all the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was discovered.
There we moored for the night on our return to Rosetta, in a Napoleonic atmosphere, and next day I sketched the once opulent commercial city, where now nothing seems doing. A bald old pelican caused some movement in the streets by raiding the odoriferous fish-market and scurrying down, chased by small boys, to the water's edge where I was sitting, in order to float, by copious draughts, the fish that lay in his pouch down his throat, pill-wise. The pelican always got his pill down in time, and the race to the river was repeated more than once with the small boys.
On another evening, on our return voyage, we moored under the wild town of Syndioor, whose minaret, the tallest, I should think, in the world, proved to be no phantom, but a lovely and solid reality. In the pearly light of the succeeding mornings the s.h.i.+ning cities looked, through their misty veils, more lovely afar off than ever. Finally we dropped back again between the mud banks of the ca.n.a.l, and in due time landed under the oleanders of our starting-place, the crew kissing hands and paying us the prescribed compliments of farewell.
Our major-domo, Ruffo the European, was with us on board. I must tell you of Ruffo; such an honest man in a country of much corruption! He did all my housekeeping, and that zealously; but, desiring sometimes to consult me about dinner, his figurative way of putting things before me was a little trying. ”Miladi, would you like cutlets?” patting his ribs; ”or a leg?” advancing that limb; ”or, for a very nice entree, brains?”
tapping his perspiring forehead. ”Oh no, Ruffo, _never_ brains, _please_!” He would rejoice in strokes of good luck in the market, and fly through the sitting-rooms to me, perhaps bearing, like a gonfalon, a piece of beef, where good beef was so rare; ”Look, miladi, you will not often meet such beef walking in the street.” He always smelled the melons on presenting them to me, to invite my attention to their ripeness.
After Cairo, Alexandria struck me very disagreeably at first; but when I got over its Western pseudo-Italian garishness, I was able to console myself with many a precious bit of orientalism, and even the bizarre mixture of flashy European tinsel with the true native metal amused me so much that I ended by enjoying the place and in being delighted to return there for yet another winter, and another. Nor can I ever forget that this appointment afforded us the most memorable journey of our lives--the ride through Palestine!
Not even the drive on the old s...o...b..a Road at Cairo surpa.s.sed the Alexandrian Rotten Row on the Mahmoudieh Ca.n.a.l on a Friday afternoon in its heterogeneous comicality. Every type was on the Mahmoudieh, in carriages, and on horseback--Levantine, Greek, Jew, Italian, Arab; up and down they rode on the b.u.mpy promenade, under the shade of acacias and other flowering trees that skirted the picturesque ca.n.a.l. Across this narrow strip of water you saw the Arab villages of a totally different world; and I really felt a qualm every time I saw a _fellah_ over the way turning his back to the western sun (and to us) to pray, in absolute oblivion of our silly goings-on. On our side was Worldiness running up and down, helter-skelter; on the other, the repose of Kismet.
Here comes a foreign consul--you know him by his armed, picturesque ruffian on the box--in a smart Victoria, driven by a coal-black Nubian in spotless white necktie and gloves; the Arab horse is ambling along with high measured action. Much admired is _Monsieur le Consul_--the observed of all observers; he looks as though he felt himself ”quite, quite.” But ”Awah, awah!” Here come at a smart leaping run two shouting syces turbaned in the Alexandrian fas.h.i.+on; and behind them a barouche and pair driven by an English coachman of irreproachable deportment.
What thrilling rivalry is here!
Exquisite horses with showy saddle-cloths there are, with _le sport_ on their backs in the person of ”young Egypt” in the inevitable _tarboosh_.
That _tarboosh_! It is the ”bowler” hat of the East, and I don't know which I hate most--it or the ”bowler.”
The ladies are overwhelming; and I rest my eyes occasionally by watching the demure feminine figures of the ”East end” who are filling their _amphorae_ under the oleanders over the way, or was.h.i.+ng their clothes and their babies in the drinking water supply of the native town.
Towards sunset there is a _sauve qui peut_ of equipages citywards, and I never heard such a din as is set up as soon as the soft roads are pa.s.sed and the paved streets are reached. Over it all you may hear:--
The tow-row-row and the tow-row-row Of the British Grenadiers.
The Suffolks or the Surreys are marching from Mandara Camp to the sound of that drum which we like to remind ourselves ”beats round the world.”
[Ill.u.s.tration]
[Ill.u.s.tration: SYNDIOOR ON THE LOWER NILE]