Eastern Life. Harriet Martineau

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СКАЧАТЬ thirsty, and quite disposed for wine and water. The critical passage of four hours was over; but the Rais of the Cataract did not leave us till we were off Mahatta, there being still much skill and labour required to pass us through the yet troubled waters. Our boat rolled a good deal, having but little ballast as yet; and when we were about to go to dinner, a lurch caused the breakage of some soup-plates and other ware: so we put off dinner till we should be at Philae, where we were to complete our ballast. Meantime, we had the poor amusement of seeing a fight on shore, – the Rais and his men quarrelling about the baksheesh. The pay of the Rais and his men was included in the contract for the kandjia: but of course the Rais asked for baksheesh. He was offered ten piastres, and refused them; then a bottle of wine, which he put under his arm, demanding the ten piastres too. Then he refused both, and went off; but returned for the money; and ended by fighting about the division of it. The amount is small to contend about; but travellers should remember those who come after them, and the real good of the natives; and not give way to encroachment to save a little trouble.

      It was four o'clock when we moored at Philae under what once was the great landing place of the island, on the east side. The hypaethral temple, vulgarly called Pharaoh's Bed, stood conspicuous on the height above us: and we ran up to it after sunset, while the last of our ballast was stowing, – glad of every opportunity of familiarising our minds with the aspect of the island, before returning to explore the remains in due order. – We had seen nothing more beautiful anywhere than what was before us this evening on our departure by moonlight. The pillars of the open temple first, and then the massive propyla of the great temple, stood up against the soft, clear sky, and palms fringed every bank and crowned every eminence. The wildness of the rocky boundary was lost, by this light. We felt that we had, for the present, done with rapids and islands: we were fairly in Nubia, and were now passing into the broad stream of the Nile, here calmer than ever, from being so near the dam of the islands. The Lybian range shone distinctly yellow by moonlight. I thought that I had never heard of colour by moonlight before; and I was sure I had never seen it. Now my eyes feasted on it night by night. The effect of palm clumps standing up before these yellow backgrounds, which are themselves bounded by a line of purple hills, with silver stars hanging above them, and mysterious heavenly lights gushing up from behind all, exceeds in rich softness any colouring that sunshine can show.

      VIII. Nubia – The second Cataract

      We were not long in finding how different Nubia is from the lower part of the Nile valley, both in its aspect and its people. We soon began to admire these poor Berbers for their industry and thrift, their apparent contentment, and their pleasant countenances. The blue underlip of the women, some tattoo marks here and there, nose rings, and hundreds of tiny braids of hair, all shining and some dripping with castor-oil, might seem likely to make these people appear ugly enough to English eyes: but the open good-humour of most of their countenances, and the pathetic thought-fulness of many, rendered them interesting, I may say charming, to us; to say nothing of the likeness we were constantly tracing in them to the most ancient sculptured faces of the temples. The dyed underlip was the greatest drawback, perhaps from its having a look of disease. The women wore silver bracelets almost universally, and a quantity of bead necklaces. They swathed themselves sufficiently in their blue garments without covering their faces. The men wore very little clothing: the children, for the most part, hone at all, except that the girls had a sort of leather fringe tied round the loins. Sometimes the people would run away from us, or be on the start to do so, as we were walking on the shore. Sometimes the women would permit us to bid for their necklaces, or would offer matting or baskets for sale. Sometimes we found their huts empty, – left open while the family were out at work, – and we were glad of such an opportunity of examining their dwellings, and forming some notion of their household economy.

      The first we entered in the absence of the inmates was a neat house, the walls mud, and narrowing upwards, so as to give the building a slightly pyramidal form. Mud walls, it must be remembered, are in Nubia quite a different affair from what they are in rainy countries. The smooth plastering gives the dwelling a neat appearance inside and out: and it is so firmly done, and so secure from wet in that climate, as not to crumble away, or, apparently, to give out dust, as it would with us. The flat roof of this house was neatly made of palm, the stems lying along, and the fronds forming a sort of thatch. A deewán of mud was raised along the whole of both the side-walls, and two large jars, not of the same size, were fixed at the end; one, no doubt, to hold water, the other grain. The large jar for grain is often fixed outside the house, opposite the door, and we were assured that it is never plundered. Some dwellings have partitions, one or two feet high, separating, as we suppose, the sleeping-places of the family. If the peasant has the rare fortune of possessing a cow and calf, or if there is an ox in the establishment, to work the sakia, there is a mud shed with a flat roof, like the house. The fences are of dry millet-stalks, which rise from eleven to fourteen feet high. In the garden or field-plot is often seen a pillar of stones, whereon stands the slinger, whose business it is to scare away the birds from the crops. The field-plot is often no more than a portion of the sloping river bank. At the season of our visit the plots were full of wheat, barley, and lupins. The kidney bean, with a purple blossom and very dark leaves, was beautiful; and so were the castor-oil and cotton plants.

      Behind the dwelling which we visited, the dark stony desert came down to the very path, and among its scattered rocks lay, not at once distinguishable to the eye, the primitive burying-ground of the region. The graves were marked out with ovals of stones, and thorns were laid thick on the more recent ones. A dreary place it looked for the dead to lie in, but the view from it was beautiful; and especially of the hedge-like Lybian bank over the river, where the fringe of mimosas was all overgrown and compacted with bindweed of the brightest green.

      I do not at present see that much can be done for the Nubians, as there certainly may for the Egyptians. In Egypt, the population once amounted to 8,000,000, or nearly so, while now it is supposed to be not more than 2,500,000; and there seems no reason why it should not, with the knowledge and skill of our own time, rise to what it once was, and exceed it. Everywhere there are tokens, even to the careless eye of a passing traveller, of land let out of cultivation – yielded up without a struggle to the great old enemy, the Desert, and even to the encroachments of the friendly Nile. There are signs that drainage is as much wanted as irrigation. However much the natural face of the country may be supposed to have changed, there is abundant evidence of wilful and careless lapse. In Nubia it is far otherwise. There, not only are the villages diminutive, – almost too small to be called hamlets, – and the sprinkling of people between them is so scanty as barely to entitle the country to be called inhabited, but this is clearly from the scarcity of cultivable land. That it was always so is hardly conceivable, when we think of the number of temples still visible between the first and second cataracts, and the many villages declared by Pliny to have studded both shores; but that it is to be helped now I do not see how anyone can show who has beheld the hopeless yellow desert, with its black volcanic rocks, coming down to the very river. As the people have no raw material for any manufacture, it is not easy to tell how they could prosper by other kinds of industry, if Egypt supplied them ever so plentifully with food. It appeared to us that they were diligent and careful in making the most of what they have. As soon as we crossed their frontier, we saw the piers which they preserve – the stone barriers once built out into the stream to arrest the mud as it is carried down, and thus obtain new land. There are so many of these as to be mischievous in some parts; as, when these piers are opposite to each other, they alter the currents and narrow the river. We saw dusky labourers on the banks, toiling with the hoe to form the soil into terraces and ledges, so as to make the most of it. From their diligence, it seems as if the Nubians had sufficient security to induce them to work, and their appearance is that of health, cheerfulness, and content. What more can be done for them, beyond perhaps improving their simple arts of life, it is difficult to say.

      Simple enough, indeed, are their arts. Early one morning, when walking ashore, I came upon a loom which would excite the astonishment of my former fellow-townsmen, the Norwich weavers. A little pit was dug in the earth, under a palm; – a pit just big enough to hold the treadles and the feet of the weaver, who sits СКАЧАТЬ