My Winter on the Nile. Warner Charles Dudley

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ by two mites of children, a girl and a boy (no clothing wasted on them), and between the three a great deal of jabber and whacking with cane sticks is going on, but nothing is performed except the taking of a long snake from a bag and tying it round the little girl’s neck. Paras are collected, however, and that is the main object of all performances.

      A little further on, another group is gathered around a storyteller, who is reeling off one of the endless tales in which the Arab delights; love-adventures, not always the most delicate but none the less enjoyed for that, or the story of some poor lad who has had a wonderful career and finally married the Sultan’s daughter. He is accompanied in his narrative by two men thumping upon darabooka drums, in a monotonous, sleepy fashion, quite in accordance however with the everlasting leisure that pervades the air. Walking about are the venders of sweets, and of greasy cakes, who carry tripods on which to rest their brass trays, and who split the air with their cries.

      It is color, color, that makes all this shifting panorama so fascinating, and hides the nakedness, the squalor, the wretchedness of all this unconcealed poverty; color in flowing garments, color in the shops, color in the sky. We have come to the land of the sun.

      At night when we walk around the square we stumble over bundles of rags containing men who are asleep, in all the corners, stretched on doorsteps, laid away on the edge of the sidewalk. Opposite the hotel is a casino, which is more Frank than Egyptian. The musicians are all women and Germans or Bohemians; the waiter-girls are mostly Italian; one of them says she comes from Bohemia, and has been in India, to which she proposes to return. The habitués are mostly young Egyptians in Frank dress except the tarboosh, and Italians, all effeminate fellows. All the world of loose living and wandering meets here. Italian is much spoken. There is little that is Oriental here, except it may be a complaisance toward anything enervating and languidly wicked that Europe has to offer. This cheap concert is, we are told, all the amusement at night that can be offered the traveler, by the once pleasure-loving city of Cleopatra, in the once brilliant Greek capital in which Hypatia was a star.

      CHAPTER III.—EGYPT OF TO-DAY

      EGYPT has excellent railways. There is no reason why it should not have. They are made without difficulty and easily maintained in a land of no frosts; only where they touch the desert an occasional fence is necessary against the drifting sand. The rails are laid, without wooden sleepers, on iron saucers, with connecting bands, and the track is firm and sufficiently elastic. The express train travels the 131 miles to Cairo in about four and a half hours, running with a punctuality, and with Egyptian drivers and conductors too, that is unique in Egypt. The opening scene at the station did not promise expedition or system.

      We reach the station three quarters of an hour before the departure of the train, for it requires a longtime—in Egypt, as everywhere in Europe—to buy tickets and get baggage weighed. The officials are slower workers than our treasury-clerks. There is a great crowd of foreigners, and the baggage-room is piled with trunks of Americans, ‘boxes’ of Englishmen, and chests and bundles of all sorts. Behind a high counter in a smaller room stand the scales, the weigher, and the clerks. Piles of trunks are brought in and dumped by the porters, and thrust forward by the servants and dragomans upon the counter, to gain them preference at the scales. No sooner does a dragoman get in his trunk than another is thrust ahead of it, and others are hurled on top, till the whole pile comes down with a crash. There is no system, there are neither officials nor police, and the excited travelers are free to fight it out among themselves. To venture into the mêlée is to risk broken bones, and it is wiser to leave the battle to luck and the dragomans. The noise is something astonishing. A score or two of men are yelling at the top of their voices, screaming, scolding, damning each other in polyglot, gesticulating, jumping up and down, quivering with excitement. This is your Oriental repose! If there were any rule by which passengers could take their turns, all the trunks could be quickly weighed and passed on; but now in the scrimmage not a trunk gets to the scales, and a half hour goes by in which no progress is made and the uproar mounts higher.

      Finally, Ahmed, slight and agile, handing me his cane, kuffia and watch, leaps over the heap of trunks on the counter and comes to close quarters with the difficulty. He succeeds in getting two trunks upon the platform of the scales, but a traveler, whose clothes were made in London, tips them off and substitutes his own. The weighers stand patiently waiting the result of the struggle. Ahmed hurls off the stranger’s trunk, gives its owner a turn that sends him spinning over the baggage, and at last succeeds in getting our luggage weighed. He emerges from the scrimmage an exhausted man, and we get our seats in the carriage just in time. However, it does not start for half an hour.

      The reader would like to ride from Alexandria to Cairo, but he won’t care to read much about the route. It is our first experience of a country living solely by irrigation—the occasional winter showers being practically of no importance. We pass along and over the vast shallows of Lake Mareotis, a lake in winter and a marsh in summer, ride between marshes and cotton-fields, and soon strike firmer ground. We are traveling, in short, through a Jersey flat, a land black, fat, and rich, without an elevation, broken only by canals and divided into fields by ditches. Every rod is cultivated, and there are no detached habitations. The prospect cannot be called lively, but it is not without interest; there are ugly buffaloes in the coarse grass, there is the elegant white heron, which travelers insist is the sacred ibis, there are some doleful-looking fellaheen, with donkeys, on the bank of the canal, there is a file of camels, and there are shadoofs. The shadoof is the primitive method of irrigation, and thousands of years have not changed it. Two posts are driven into the bank of the canal, with a cross-piece on top. On this swings a pole with a bucket of leather suspended at one end, which is outweighed by a ball of clay at the other. The fellah stands on the slope of the bank and, dipping the bucket into the water, raises it and pours the fluid into a sluice-way above. If the bank is high, two and sometimes three shadoofs are needed to raise the water to the required level. The labor is prodigiously hard and back-straining, continued as it must be constantly. All the fellaheen we saw were clad in black, though some had a cloth about their loins. The workman usually stands in a sort of a recess in the bank, and his color harmonizes with the dark soil. Any occupation more wearisome and less beneficial to the mind I cannot conceive. To the credit of the Egyptians, the men alone work the shadoof. Women here tug water, grind the corn, and carry about babies, always; but I never saw one pulling at a shadoof pole.

      There is an Arab village! We need to be twice assured that it is a village. Raised on a slight elevation, so as to escape high water, it is still hardly distinguishable from the land, certainly not in color. All Arab villages look like ruins; this is a compacted collection of shapeless mud-huts, flat-topped and irregularly thrown together. It is an aggregation of dog-kennels, baked in the sun and cracked. However, a clump of palm-trees near it gives it an air of repose, and if it possesses a mosque and a minaret it has a picturesque appearance, if the observer does not go too near. And such are the habitations of nearly all the Egyptians.

      Sixty-five miles from Alexandria, we cross the Rosetta branch of the Nile, on a fine iron bridge—even this portion of the Nile is a broad, sprawling river; and we pass through several respectable towns which have an appearance of thrift—Tanta especially, with its handsome station and a palace of the Khedive. At Tanta is held three times a year a great religious festival and fair, not unlike the old fair of the ancient Egyptians at Bubastis in honor of Diana, with quite as many excesses, and like that, with a gramme of religion to a pound of pleasure. “Now,” says Herodotus, “when they are being conveyed to the city Bubastis, they act as follows:—for men and women embark together, and great numbers of both sexes in every barge: some of the women have castanets on which they play, and the men play on the flute during the whole voyage; and the rest of the women and men sing and clap their hands together at the same time.” And he goes on to say that when they came to any town they moored the barge, and the women chaffed those on shore, and danced with indecent gestures; and that at the festival more wine was consumed than all the rest of the year. The festival at Tanta is in honor of a famous Moslem saint whose tomb is there; but the tomb is scarcely so attractive as the field of the fête, with the story-tellers and СКАЧАТЬ