had burnt off the right leg. If any lady going up the Nile should be so happy as to be able to iron, I should strongly advise her putting up a pair of flat-irons among her baggage. If she can also starch, it will add much to her comfort and that of her party, at little cost of time and trouble.
We went on board our kandjia to dinner, at two o'clock, and were off for the entrance of the Cataract. The smallness of our boat, after our grand dahabieh, was the cause of much amusement, both to-day and during the fortnight of our Nubian expedition. In the inner cabin there was only just room for Mrs. Y. and me by laying our beds close together; and our dressing-room was exactly a yard square. The gentlemen's cabin was somewhat larger; but not roomy enough to admit of our having our meals there – unless a strong cold wind drove us in to tea; which I think happened twice. Our sitting-room was a pretty little vestibule, between the cabins and the deck. This exactly held our table and two chairs; the other seats being two lockers, on which were spread gay carpets. When we set down to our morning employments, we were careful to bring at once all the books, etc., that we were likely to want, as we could not pass in and out without compelling our neighbours to rise to make way. For all this, and though we felt, on our return to our dahabieh, as if we had got from a coaster into a man-of-war, we were never happier than in our little kandjia. There was some amusement in roughing it for a fortnight; and the Nubian part of our voyage was full as interesting as any other.
The Rais of the Cataract was to meet us, the next morning, with his posse, at a point fixed on, above the first rapid, which we were to surmount ourselves. We appeared to be surmounting it, just at dusk. Half our crew were hauling at our best rope on the rocks, and the other half poling on board; and we were slowly – almost imperceptibly – making way against the rushing current, and had our bows fairly through the last mass of foam, when the rope snapped. We swirled down and away – none of us knew whither, unless it were to the bottom of the river. This was almost the most anxious moment of our whole journey: but it was little more than a moment. The boat, in swinging round at the bottom of the rapid, caught by her stern on a sand bank: and our new Rais quickly brought her round, and moored her, in still water, to the bank.
Here we were for the night: and we thought it a pity not to take advantage of the leisure and the moonlight to visit Philae. So the gentlemen and I crossed the rapids to the main in a punt, mounted capital asses, and struck across the desert for Mahatta, where we could get a boat for Philae.
The sun had just set when we left the kandjia; and the Desert looked superb in the afterglow. It had the last depth of colouring I have ever seen in pictures, or heard described. The clear forms and ravishing hues make one feel as if gifted with new eyes.
The boat which took us from Mahatta to Philae was too heavy for her hands, and could hardly stem some of the currents: but at last, about seven o'clock, we set our feet on the Holy Island, and felt one great object of our journey accomplished. What a moment it was, just before, when we first saw Philae, as we came round the point, – saw the crowd of temples looming in the mellow twilight! And what a moment it was now, when we trod the soil, as sacred to wise old races of man as Mecca now to the Mohammedan, or Jerusalem to the Christian; the huge propyla, the sculptured walls, the colonnades, the hypaethral2 temple all standing, in full majesty, under a flood of moonlight! The most sacred of ancient oaths was in my mind all the while, as if breathed into me from without: the awful oath, »By Him who sleeps in Philae.« Here, surrounded by the imperishable Nile, sleeping to the everlasting music of its distant Cataract, and watched over by his Isis, whose temple seems made to stand for ever, was the beneficent Osiris believed to lie. There are many Holy Islands scattered about the seas of the world: the very name is sweet to all ears: but no one has been so long and so deeply sacred as this. The waters all round were, this night, very still; and the more suggestive were they of the olden age when they afforded a path for the processions of grateful worshippers, who came from various points of the mainland, with their lamps, and their harps, and their gifts, to return thanks for the harvests which had sprung and ripened at the bidding of the god. One could see them coming in their boats, there where the last western light gleamed on the river: one could see them land at the steps at the end of the colonnade: and one could imagine this great group of temples lighted up till the prominent sculpture of the walls looked almost as bright and real as the moving forms of the actual offerers. – But the silence and desertion of the place soon made themselves felt. Our footsteps on the loose stones, and our voices in an occasional question, and the flapping wings of the birds whom we disturbed, were the only sounds: and the lantern which was carried before us in the shadowy recesses was a dismal light for such a place. – I could not, under the circumstances, make out anything of the disposition of the buildings: and I think that a visit to Philae by moonlight had better be preceded by a visit to Philae by daylight: but I am glad to have seen the solemn sight, now that I can look back upon it with the fresh eyes of clear knowledge of the site and its temples.
A kandjia lay under the bank when we arrived. It had brought our Scotch friends from Mahatta; and we found them in the court of the hypaethral temple, sitting on the terrace wall in the moonlight, – the gentlemen with their chibouques, the ladies with their bonnets in their hands. Their first and last view of Philae was on this lovely night: and this was our last sight of them. They were to set off down the river the next morning, at the same hour that we were to begin the ascent of the Cataract. Our greetings, our jokes, our little rivalries were all over; and the probability was that we should never meet again. – How sorry we were for them that they were turning back! We not only had Nubia, with its very old temples, – and above all, Aboo-Simbil,3 – full in prospect, but a return to this island, to obtain a clear knowledge of it. My heart would have been very heavy to-night if this had been my only view of Philae; – a view so obscure, so tantalizing, and so oppressive: and I was sorry accordingly for those who were to see it but once, and thus.
Our desert ride in the moonlight was very fine, among such lights and shadows as I never saw by night before. We encountered no hyaenas, though our guide carried a musket, in expectation that we should. We crossed the rapids in safety, and reached our boat excessively tired, and the more eager for rest because the next was to be the greatest day of our journey, – unless, perhaps, that of our passing Thebes.
VII. Ascent of the Cataract
Such an event as the ascent of the Cataract can happen but once in one's life; and we would not hear of going ashore on any such plea as that the feat could be better seen from thence. What I wanted was to feel it. I would have gone far to see a stranger's boat pulled up; but I would not refuse the fortune of being on board when I could. We began, however, with going ashore at the Rapid where we failed the evening before. The rope had been proved untrustworthy; and there was no other till we joined the Rais of the Cataract, with his cable and his posse. Our Rais put together three weak ropes, which were by no means equivalent to one strong one; but the attempt succeeded.
It was a curious scene, – the appearing of the dusky natives on all the rocks around; the eager zeal of those who made themselves our guards, holding us by the arms, as if we were going to jail, and scarcely permitting us to set our feet to the ground, lest we should fall; and the daring plunges and divings of man or boy, to obtain our admiration or our baksheesh. A boy would come riding down a slope of roaring water as confidently as I would ride down a sand-hill on my ass. Their arms, in their fighting method of swimming, go round like the spokes of a wheel. Grinning boys poppled in the currents; and little seven-year-old savages must haul at the ropes, or ply their little poles when the kandjia approached a spike of rock, or dive to thrust their shoulders between its keel and any sunken obstacle: and after every such feat, they would pop up their dripping heads, and cry »baksheesh.« I felt the great peculiarity of this day to be my seeing, for the first, and probably the only time of my life, the perfection of savage faculty: and truly it is an imposing sight. The quickness of movement and apprehension, the strength and suppleness of frame, and the power of experience in all concerned this day contrasted strangely with images of the bookworm and the professional man at home, who can scarcely use their own limbs and senses, or conceive of any control over external realities. I always thought in America, and I always shall think, that the finest specimens of human development I have seen are in the United States, where every man, however learned and meditative, can ride, drive, keep his own horse, and roof