Part 57 (2/2)

In May 1858 Mr. Brunel went to Vichy, and thence to Switzerland, returning home in the autumn by way of Holland. When at Lucerne he went up the Righi, and was so charmed with it that, instead of spending only a night there, he remained a week, working at the designs for the Eastern Bengal Railway.

It was on his return to England in September that the alarming nature of his illness was ascertained. After anxious consultation with Sir Benjamin Brodie and Dr. Bright, he was ordered to spend the winter in Egypt, in the hope that he might return in the March or April following in restored health.

He was very unwilling to be so long absent from England, especially as a new company had just been formed to finish the 'Great Eastern,' and the contracts for her completion were about to be let.

However, it was thought that very serious consequences might follow if he remained at home; and in the beginning of December he left for Alexandria, with his wife and younger son.

Having stayed there a day or two, they went on to Cairo, where they found Mr. Robert Stephenson. He and Mr. Brunel dined together on Christmas Day.

On December 30 the journey up the Nile commenced. On January 21 they arrived at Thebes, and spent some days there. Mr. Brunel was able to ride about on a donkey, and made some sketches of the celebrated ruins in the neighbourhood.[196]

They reached a.s.souan on February 2, and made preparations for ascending the cataracts. They went as far as Dakkeh, and got back to a.s.souan on February 19.

The following letter from Mr. Brunel to his sister, Lady Hawes, describes some of the scenes through which he pa.s.sed:--

Philae, February 12, 1859.

I now write to you from a charming place; but a.s.souan, which I left to come here, is also beautiful, and I will speak of that first. It is strange that so little is said in the guide books of the picturesque beauty of these places. Approaching a.s.souan, you glide through a reef of rocks, large boulders of granite polished by the action of the water charged with sand. You arrive at a charming bay or lake of perfectly still water and studded with these singular jet-black or red rock islands. In the distance you see a continuation of the river, with distant islands shut in by mountains, of beautiful colours, some a lilac sandstone, some the bright red yellow of the sands of the desert. Above the promontories the water excursions are delicious. You enter at once among the islands of the Cataracts, fantastic forms of granite heaps of boulders split and worn into singular shapes.

After spending a week at a.s.souan, with a trip by land to Philae, I was so charmed with the appearance of the Cataracts as seen from the sh.o.r.e, and with the deliciously quiet repose of Philae, that I determined to get a boat, and sleep a few nights there. We succeeded in hiring a country boat laden with dates, and emptied her, and fitted up her three cabins.[197] We put our cook and dragoman and provisions, &c., on board, and some men, and went up the Cataract. It was a most amusing affair, and most beautiful and curious scenery all the way. It is a long rapid of three miles, and perhaps one mile wide, full of rocky islands and isolated rocks. A bird's-eye view hardly shows a free pa.s.sage, and some of the more rapid falls are between rocks not forty feet wide--in appearance not twenty. Although they do not drag the boats up perpendicular falls of three or four feet, as the travellers' books tell you, they really do drag the boats up rushes of water which, until I had seen it, and had then calculated the power required, I should imprudently have said could not be effected. We were dragged up at one place a gush of water, what might fairly be called a fall of about three feet, the water rus.h.i.+ng past very formidably, and between rocks seemingly not more than wide enough to let our boat pa.s.s, and this only by some thirty-five men at three or four ropes, the men standing in the water and on the rocks in all directions, shouting, plunging into the water, swimming across the top or bottom of the fall, just as they wanted, then getting under the boat to push it off rocks, all with an immense expenditure of noise and apparent confusion and want of plan, yet on the whole properly and successfully. We were probably twenty or thirty minutes getting up this one, sometimes b.u.mping hard on one rock, sometimes on another, and jammed hard first on one side and then on the other, the boat all the time on the fall with ropes all strained, sometimes going up a foot or two, sometimes losing it, till at last we crept to the top, and sailed quietly on in a perfectly smooth lake. These efforts up the different falls had been going on for nearly eight hours, and the relief from noise was delicious. We selected a quiet spot under the temples of Philae.... Our poultry-yard is on the sandbank, where fowls, pigeons, and turkeys are walking about loose, and, like all animals in this country, perfectly tame. Yes, they walk up and catch a pigeon to be killed when you like. In the midst of these and of the small birds which always walk and fly about us, have been walking for hours this morning three or four large eagles, who, with the politeness peculiar to animals here, pay no attention to our fowls, nor do they to the eagles. But here I am entering on the anomalies and contradictions of Egypt, which would fill volumes.

After leaving Egypt, Mr. Brunel went to Naples and Rome, where he spent Easter, and he returned to England in the middle of May.

When abroad, Mr. Brunel made sight-seeing a pleasure rather than a business; thus in Egypt he preferred to visit frequently the same places, and rather to enjoy that which he knew gave him pleasure, than to hurry about with the object of seeing all that was to be seen. At Philae he stopped more than a week, and at Thebes he spent more time in a small outlying temple near Karnac than in the great ruin itself. So also at Rome he went frequently to the Colosseum, and he spent many hours in the interior of St. Peter's.

Shortly after his return to England he went to Plymouth, and over the Saltash bridge and other parts of the Cornwall Railway, which had been opened during his absence abroad.

Although it had by this time become certain that the disease under which he laboured had a.s.sumed a fatal character, he continued to give unremitting attention to his various professional duties; and in order to be nearer the 'Great Eastern,' he took a house at Sydenham, and removed there with his family in the beginning of August.

Almost every day he went to the great s.h.i.+p and superintended the preparations for getting her to sea. She was advertised to sail on September 6, and Mr. Brunel had intended going round in her to Weymouth.

He was on board early on the morning of the 5th, and his memorandum book has, under that date, an entry of some unfinished work which had to be looked after. Towards midday he felt symptoms of failing power, and went home to his house in Duke Street, when it became evident that he had been attacked with paralysis.

At one time it seemed possible that he might recover; but on the tenth day after his seizure, Thursday, September 15, all hope was taken away.

In the afternoon he spoke to those who watched around him, calling them to him by their names; as evening closed in he gradually sank, and died at half-past ten, quietly and without pain.

The funeral was on September 20, at the Kensal Green Cemetery.

Along the road leading to the chapel many hundreds of his private and professional friends, his neighbours among the tradespeople of Westminster, the Council of the Inst.i.tution of Civil Engineers, and the servants of the Great Western Railway Company, had a.s.sembled, and, with his family, followed his body to its place of burial, in the grave of his father and mother.[198]

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