Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia E-Book

William Cowper Prime

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 703

Beschreibung

An indispensable talent or element in a writer of a book of travels is so to present every scene and object described that every reader shall seem to be present and go along with the traveler and see everything he sees and through the same eyes. The author of this book has this very desirable element of an agreeable traveler. He has enthusiasm. He has two eyes. They are both wide awake. He sees every thing seeable. His descriptions are graphic, graceful, and mirror-like, into which the reader looks and sees first the traveler himself in the foreground of the picture. Then he sees the Nile, the boat, the shores, the cities, the numerous and varied objects, moving and stationary, living and dead, passing like a panorama before the mind's eye, all the way up the Nile from Alexandria to Nubia, and back again. You seem to hear his voice describing the objects as they pass. ... Some may think there are a goodly number of idiosyncrasies. But we like to see and keep an eye on the man we are traveling with, even if we are five thousand miles apart. We advise those who would enjoy a pleasant sail up the Nile to Nubia, without its fatigues and exposures, to buy Mr. Prime's book, and borrow his eyes with which to see the scenes and objects so graphically described.

Leseprobe

Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia

WILLIAM COWPER PRIME

Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia, W. Cowper Prime

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849649678

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

Availability: Publicly available via the Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA) through the following Creative Commons attribution license: "You are free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work; to make derivative works; to make commercial use of the work. Under the following conditions: By Attribution. You must give the original author credit. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above." (Status: unknown)

CONTENTS:

Preface. 1

1. Fra Giovanni.3

2. The Classic Sea.6

3. The Dead of Alexandria.14

4. Iskandereyeh.25

5. Cairo the Victorious.31

6. The Footprints of the Patriarchs.38

7. Prayers and Coffee.43

8. La Illah Il Allah.49

9. Sheik Houssein Ibn-Egid.52

10. Law and Liberty.59

11. The Phantom.66

12. Southward Ho!72

13. Braheem Effendi El Khadi.80

14. Manfaloot and Es Siout.88

15. Thanksgiving Day.95

16. Life along the River.100

17. Abd-el-Kader-Bey.107

18. To Love a Star.111

19. The City of a Hundred Gates.117

20. The Ancient Dead at Esne.126

21. Buying Antiques.130

22. Edfou.136

23. The Tower of Syene.143

24. The First Cataract.152

25. Moonlight.159

26. The Nubians.165

27. The Second Cataract.172

28. Abou Simbal.177

29. Northward in Nubia.182

30. Northward in Egypt.187

31. Arrakee and Antiques.192

32. Achmet the Resurrectionist.199

33. Thebes the Magnificent.205

34. The Palaces of the Dead.215

36. The Glory of Karnak.229

37. Memnon and his Daughter.236

38. A Turkish Nobleman.244

39. The Crocodile Pits.248

40. “Desolate Places.”. 261

41. Visions and Realities.269

Appendix.279

A. Sketch Of The History, Religion, And Written Language Of Ancient Egypt.279

B. To Travelers Visiting Egypt.295

Preface

“Have you not a house, O Braheem Effendi?” said my friend Suleiman, on whose shop-front I was accustomed to sit in the bazaars of Cairo. Braheem was the nearest approach to the sound of my name, that an Arab could effect.

“Yea, verily, O Suleiman.”

“Have you not a father and a mother?”

“Thy lips drop fragrant truth, O most magnificent of merchants.”

“Then why in the name of Allah came you here to Musr?”

“To see men and things. To gather knowledge by travel. To know the world.”

“Is it not written, ‘Men are a hidden disease?’ and elsewhere, ‘Communion with men profiteth nothing, unless for idle talk?’ Thou mightest better have remained at home, Braheem Effendi;” and the smoke from his chibouk curled in the still air up to the roof over the bazaar, and out into the sunlight, and vanished.

I sometimes wonder whether, after all, the old man was not right.

In the summer of 1855 I left America for Egypt. The immediate object which I had in view was the prosecution of a favorite study. The kindness of my respected and distinguished friend, Joseph Henry, LL.D., of the Smithsonian Institute, and other gentlemen occupying positions in the service of the Government at Washington, provided me with such introductions as enabled me to prosecute my explorations in Egypt with satisfactory success, while the accomplished scholarship of my companion, J. Hammond Trumbull, Esq., of Hartford, not only contributed to this success, but added more than I can tell to the pleasure of the voyage.

The results of my studies are but hinted at in these pages, which are devoted almost exclusively to incidents of travel along the Nile.

The dreams of childhood realized, the hopes of early manhood fully accomplished, I returned home with stories of travel for ears which, alas the day! were closed to my voice by the solemn seal of death.

Whether, that I have seen the sunrise flush the brow of Remeses at Abou Simbal, and touch with passionate, yet gentle and trembling caress—as a lover would touch the lips of his maiden love, dead in her glorious beauty— the cold lips of Memnon at old Thebes; that I have wandered through the stately halls of Karnak, and looked up the stream of time from the summit of Cheops; that I have knelt at the Sepulchre, and felt the night wind on my forehead in Gethsemane—whether all this is sufficient to repay me for the loss of the last gaze out of the eyes of a young, noble, and beloved brother, and, yet more, of the last words of lips whose utterances were the guide of my young years, whose teachings made me love the countries of which old Homer sang, of which old historians wrote, old philosophers discoursed eloquently, whose morning and evening prayers had made dear to me every inch of land that was hallowed by the footprints of the Lord—judge ye, who have heard the blessing of a dying father, or ye who, like myself, have been far wanderers when the God of Peace entered the dear home circle!

W. C. P. NEW YORK, March 27, 1857.

1. Fra Giovanni.

Fra Giovanni was a Franciscan. His face was one that you loved to look at. A calm and beautiful face. Sometimes, when the long black lashes fell over his cheek and his mind went wandering over the hills about San Germano in the fair land of Italy, I used to think I was looking at the face of him of Patmos, the beloved disciple, who, much as he loved the ascended Christ, yet remained longest of all the twelve away from him; and when my friend prayed, as I have seen him pray, with tears, and yet very bright hope, in his eyes, I used to remember the same John, and think I could see his eyes, when he uttered the last fervent prayer that his Lord would come quickly, from whom he had been so long separated.

We met in the theatre at Arles, that old town of the south of France which boasts a rival to the Roman Coliseum. I was sitting in the twilight, with no one but Miriam and the guardian near me, and I was dreaming, as I suppose any enthusiastic American may be permitted to dream the first time he finds his feet on the boards—on the rocks, I should say—of an ancient theatre. The fading light was not unfavorable to such an occupation. Ghosts came at my call and filled the otherwise vacant seats.

I saw fair women, brave men, magistrates, soldiers, senators, and an emperor, yea verily, an emperor, in the seat between the marble columns. There were wrestlers, just come from the games near by in the amphitheatre, standing by the stage, and dancers, and jesters, and masked figures flitting to and fro. All was silent. But the silence grew intolerable, and at length I interrupted it myself.

You need not laugh at me for talking Greek. Those Roman ghosts could understand Greek as well as English, or, for that matter, as well as Latin, and if they knew any thing they should have known Æschylus. So I acted prompter and gave them

“Χθονοςμὲν εἰς τηλουρὸν ἤκομεν πέδον Σκόθην ἑςο ἱμον ἄβροτον εἰς ἑρημίαν,”

whereupon the ghosts vanished. In a flash, in the twinkling of a star, the scene was one of cold bare rocks in the gray twilight, a ruined hall, fallen columns over which countless snails were crawling, and Kaiser and actor were dust of a verity under my feet.

But a voice answered my voice. For in a nook among the confused stones near the stage had been sitting, all this time, a person that I had not seen, whose clear soft voice came pleasantly to me as he hailed congenial company in this place of ruins.

“Who is there, that would renew old and familiar echoes in these walls?”

“Why? Do you think they ever heard that before?”

 “The Prometheus? Yes—why not? There were scholarly days when the fashionable Romans delighted in Greek plays.”

We walked out, all together, and down to the miserable forum and the hotel, where, in the evening, over a bottle of St. Peray that I had brought from Valence with my own baggage, we talked down the hours. Thus I became acquainted with Fra Giovanni—and our acquaintance fast ripened. He was an Italian, young, wealthy, of good family, and a priest. He had not been long an ecclesiastic. There were moments when the former life flashed out through the fine eyes under his cowl. The memory of other times alternately lit and darkened his face. There was some deep grief there of which he never told me, and which I never sought to know. He was a good, gentle, faithful friend. That was enough.

Some time after that, we were standing in the crypt of the cathedral of St John's at Malta. That day we were to separate. I to go eastward, and he to travel he scarcely knew whither, on the work of his sacred calling. Before us, in marble silence, lay the stout Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and a little way off the brave Valetta, sleeping after his last great battle with the Turks, who surrounded this, his rocky fortress.

He who goes to the East should always go by way of Malta. It is a proper stepping-stone between Europe and the Orient, where the last wave of the crusades rolled back from the walls of Jerusalem, and sank in foam.

“You. will find yourself always looking back to this little crypt in the middle of the sea, wherever your footsteps turn,” said Fra Giovanni. “No place in the Mediterranean is so intimately connected with the history of the East as this island of Malta, and there is scarcely any part of the Orient in which you will not be reminded of it. This fact alone, that it is the place of the death and burial of that mighty order who for so great a period swayed the sceptre of power in Europe, is enough to connect it with Egypt and Holy Land, indeed with all the possessions of the Turks. Here, when Valetta was Grand Master, the arms of the Moslem had their first great check, and the followers of the false prophet learned that their boasted invincibility was a fable. Here, too, but yesterday, when the great leader of the French had garrisoned the island, your stout cousins of England, who followed his swift feet as the hounds follow after the deer, drove out his soldiery. You will think of that when you see the boastful inscription of Desaix at the cataract of the Nile. There have been valiant deeds done on this rock. If the sea could have a voice, it would tell of men of might, and deeds of might done here, that are themes for bards who love to celebrate the great acts of men. But the sea is the only living thing that knows them. For there are no trees, nor ancient vines, nor any thing here but the great rock, and the living, moving, throbbing sea around it.”

I don't know but my friend would have talked on all day, had not a gun from the harbor announced that the steamer was heaving up her anchor.

We left the crypt and walked over the splendid floor of the cathedral, which is inlaid with a thousand tombstones of knights of the Cross. I glanced once more at the picture of the Beheading of John, which Caravaggio painted that he might be admitted to the order, and painted in fading colors (water some say) that the evidence of his debasement of the art, and their debasement of the order, might disappear; and then, rushing out into the Strada Reale, and plunging down the steep narrow streets to the landing-place, overturning a half-dozen commissionaires, each of whom swore he was the man that said good-morning the day previous, and became thereby entitled to his five francs (for no one need imagine that he will land at Malta without paying, at least, three commissionaires and five porters, if he carry no baggage on shore, or twice as many, if he have one portmanteau), I parted from Fra Giovanni, with a warm pressure of the hand, a low “God bless you,” and a long, earnest look out of those eyes of John the-Saint.

When the Nubia swung up on the port-chain, with her head to the opening of the harbor, and ran out to sea, she passed close under the Lower Barracka, so close that I could recognize faces on it. In the corner, by the monument of Sir Alexander Ball, I saw my friend. As he recognized me, he waved his hand toward me, and even in that motion I caught his intent; for he, good Catholic that he was, could not let me, his heretic friend, go to sea, and especially to the East, without that last sign of the redemption by way of benediction. I thanked him for it, for he meant it lovingly, and so I was away for the Orient. We met again at the Holy Sepulchre.

Such was my step from the modern world to the ancient. From good old Presbyterian habits and friends to the companionship and affection of a Franciscan brother among the relics of the mediæval world, and then to the heart of Orient; Cairo the Magnificent, el Kahira the Victorious.

2. The Classic Sea.

There is a comfort, when traveling eastward, in meeting Englishmen. You are very certain, in coming in contact with the English pleasure-traveler, to meet a gentleman. Exceptions are very rare. It is also worthy of remark, that the English gentleman, so soon as he learns that you are American, regards you as a fit companion, which is a degree of confidence that he is very far from reposing in one of his own nationality. Englishmen meeting Englishmen, look on one another as so many pickpockets might, each of whom was certain that each of his neighbors meant to rob him on the first available opportunity.

This perhaps arises from the danger that foreign acquaintances may entail unpleasant and impracticable recognitions at home. There is no apprehension of this in meeting Americans, and this may serve to explain a willingness to find society for the time which will not prove troublesome in the future.

But I am disposed to give our cousins over the water more credit for kindred affection. I have always found them cordial, warm-hearted, frank and hearty companions and friends. I was, perhaps, fortunate in those whom I met, but they were many, lords, spiritual and temporal, soldiers, sailors, and shop-keepers; and I found the name of American a pass to their hearts. Some had friends in our new country, and perhaps I had seen and known them—and once or twice I had—all had an idea that we were a race of brave and active men, given to boasting, but good-natured at that, nearly related to them in blood, and allies of England as champions of freedom against the despotisms of the world.

This last idea was one of new and startling force to me, as I looked back from Europe and the East to England and America. The line between freedom and tyranny runs up the British Channel. It is not the broad Atlantic. Our Constitution is of English origin, based on English law, and the boast which we inherit from our revolutionary patriots was, that Britons would never be slaves.

The sea was still. From Marseilles to Malta, in the little mail steamer Valetta, we had experienced a constant gale, sailing almost all the way under water. Ladies had nearly died from the exhaustion of sea-sickness. The day that we passed the straits of Bonifacio was the worst in my memory of bad days at sea. All day long the sea went over us, fore and aft. To live below deck was impossible, the foul air of the little steamer close shut and battened down being poisonous. The ladies who were sea-sick were brought on deck and laid on island cushions around which the water washed back and forth. Here day and night for seventy hours they moaned and shrieked. One of them we thought hourly would die. Miriam and Amy, our American ladies, were brave and good sailors, but the scene was almost too much for them. The gale saw us into the port of Malta, and then flattened down to a calm, and never was there such a beautiful sea as we sailed over to Alexandria. No wind disturbed the profound beauty of that water whose azure I had never before dreamed of. It was a never-ending source of pleasure to lean over the side and gaze into the deep blue, that surpassed the sky in richness, on which the bubbles from the swift prow went dancing gayly before as, white flashing and vanishing, to be followed by others and others, all day and all night long.

The poop cabin had been by some odd chance left vacant, and I had secured it for Miriam and Amy. In a season when the through India passengers crowded the line of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, this was a most fortunate and unexpected occurrence. The cabin was much the pleasantest on shipboard, and they slept in it enough to make up their losses on the Valetta.

I passed the night on deck, and could wake at any hour and recognize the stars over me, that had so often seen me sleeping in western wanderings. The old Englishman who had the wheel on the starboard watch on the first night out from Malta, when he saw the rolling a blanket around me and lying down on a bench, grunted a disapproval of it to himself, and even ventured to his mate at the wheel a remark to the detriment of my eyes, expressing also his belief that I would go below before morning. How he came to be on the watch in the morning I don't know, but he expressed unmitigated delight at my visual organs being unaffected by his remarks, when he saw me start up before the break of dawn in the east, and throw off my blanket and sleep together, while I walked over to the rail and watched to see the coming day.

Let him who would see the magnificence of dawn behold it in the Levant, off the coast of the Pentapolis. It is no matter for wonder that the ancients had such glorious ideas of Aurora and her train. The first rays over the blue horizon were splendid. I gazed to see if Jerusalem itself were not the visible origin of that splendor. Then swift in the track of his rays, came the gorgeous sun, springing out of the sea like a god of triumph, and he went up into the heavens with a majestic pomp that the sun has nowhere but just here. There was on board the ship a Pharsee, with his servants. I did not wonder at that longing gaze with which I saw him looking at his rising god. I, too, had I been taught as he, would die a worshiper of that god of light.

The second-class passengers were a motley crowd. Italian, Maltese, French, Greek, Arab, and Lascar, they lay in heaps along the deck until the pumps sent the water flooding over them when the decks were washed, and then climbed into the rigging and sunned themselves dry. I held a general levee among them every forenoon, examining their various developments, and ended it with a handful of cigars on deck, which transformed the crowd into a mass of legs and arms, their heads being absolutely invisible in the mêlée. The first day there grew four separate fights out of this generosity of mine, and the second day three. I omitted it the third, but there were six combats on that morning, and I would have resumed the practice on the fourth morning but that we were in the harbor of Alexandria.

Among the passengers were two major-generals in the East India Company's service, one of whom was capital company. I usually had possession of the port side of the after skylight deck, which being lifted up at each end to allow air in the cabin below, made a very comfortable lounge. As it was close to the poop cabin, I furnished it easily with cushions and pillows, and we were accustomed to make this our reception-room of an afternoon. The general enjoyed a talk about America, by way of introduction to a story, and stories, by himself about India and the Indians, which he much delighted to relate, and to which, I confess, I was not unwilling to listen.

The Scene on the deck of the steamer at such times was the gayest imaginable; unlike any other great line of travel, either by sea or land, in that the ladies on board seemed to vie with each other in the elegance of their afternoon dresses. Here lay on a pile of cushions a lady of rare and delicate beauty, dressed in white from head to foot, her dress the finest lawns and laces of exquisite texture; while, by way of contrast or foil to her beauty, an Indian servant, black as an African, and dressed in crimson, with a long piece of yellow cloth wound around his head and shoulders stood fanning his mistress. There stood a group of young ladies, all in black, but all richly dressed and every neck gleaming with jewels; while a half-dozen young men, officers and civilians intermingled, were making the neighborhood intolerable by their incessant flow of nonsense. Two English generals, with their families, were on deck, and a Portuguese governor-general, with his suite, outward-bound to the possessions of Portugal in the Indies. Children were playing everywhere, and officers hastening hither or thither found themselves constantly entangled in the games of the young ones, or lost in circles of laughing girls, or actually made fast by the endless questions of some elderly mother of a family.

And when the sun went down in the sea, our fellow- passenger, the Pharsee, might be seen on the distant forecastle, standing calmly with folded arms and steadfast eyes fixed on his descending god, and following his course with fixed countenance long after he had disappeared, as if he could penetrate the very earth itself with that adoring gaze. And it did not seem strange here that he should worship that orb. I, too, began to feel that there was something grand, majestic—almost like a god—in the everlasting circuit of the sun above these seas. Day by day—day by day—for thousands of years, the eye of his glory had seen the waves of the Great Sea. The Phœnician sailors, Cadmus, Jason—all the bold navigators that are known in song and story—he had watched and guided to port or destruction.

Is it the same great sun that looks down on American forests? Is it the same sun that has shone on me when I slept at noonday on the rocky shores of the Delaware, or whose red departure I have watched from the hills of Minnesota? The same sun that beheld the glory of Nineveh, the fall of Persepolis, the crumbling ruins of the Acropolis? In such lands, on such seas as this, he is a poor man, poor in imagination and the power of enjoyment, who does not have new ideas of the grandeur of the sun that has shone on the birth, magnificence, burial, and forgotten graves of so many nations. Well as men have marked them, tall as they have builded their monuments, broad and deep as they have laid their foundations, none know them now save the sun and stars, that have marked them day by day with unforgetful visitation. And when the day was gone, and the night, with its deep blue filled with ten thousand more stars than I had ever seen before, was above us, I wrapped my plaid around me, and disdaining any other cover than that glorious canopy, I slept on deck and dreamed of home.

I say I slept and dreamed. It was pleasant though fitful sleep, and I woke at dawn. It could not be otherwise. From my childhood, the one longing desire to visit Egypt and the Holy Land grew on me with my growth. It entered into all my plans of life—all my prospects for the future. I talked of it often, thought of it oftener, dreamed of it nightly for years. One and another obstacle was removed, and I began to see before me the immediate realization of my hopes. It would be idle to say my heart did not beat somewhat faster when I saw the blue line of the American horizon go down behind the sea. It would still be more idle to say, that I did not weep sometimes—tears that were not childish—when I remembered the silent parting from those dear lips that had taught me for thirty years to love the land that God's footsteps had hallowed, and whose eyes looked so longingly after me as I hastened away. (God granted never again those dear embraces.) It would be idle to deny that in my restless sleep on the Atlantic in the narrow cabin, my gentle Miriam, who slept less heavily, heard me sometimes speak strange words that might have puzzled others, but which she, as the companion of my studies, recognized as the familiar names of holy places.

But notwithstanding all this, I did not, in my calm, waking hours, feel that I was approaching eastern climes and classic or sacred soil until I had left Malta, and felt the soft north wind coming down from Greece. That first night on the Nubia was full of it. I could not sleep more than half an hour at a time, and then I would start up wide awake, with the idea that some one had spoken to me; and once, I could not doubt it, I heard as plainly as if it were real, my father's voice—as I have heard it often and often—reading from the old prince and father of song.

Just before daybreak I crossed the deck and bared my forehead to a soft, faint breeze that stole over the sea. The moon lay in the west. The night was clear, and I could read as if it were day. I leaned on the rail, and looked up to windward, where, here and there, I could see the white caps of the thousand waves, silvered in the light of the purest moon I ever saw , and thinking of my friend, Fra Giovanni, and of my first meeting with him, and yielding to the temptation of a quotation, where no one was near to hear me and to call it pedantic, I began to recite that other splendid passage from the Prometheus, which was born in the poet's brain on this identical water which now rolled around me:

Ὠ δῖος αἰθὴρ καὶ ταχǷβπτεροι πνοιαὶ Ποταμῶν τε πηγαὶ,ποντίων τε κυμάτων Ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα, παμμῆτόρ τε γῆ Καὶ τὸν πανόπτην κǷβκλον ἡλίου, καλῶ.

“And what's the use of calling on them?” said a clear, pleasant voice behind me, as I started around to recognize one of the English generals whom I have mentioned as with us on the ship.

“I say, what's the use of calling on them when they won't come? Times are changed. There are no gods in Greece now, and, by Jupiter, no men either, and the river nymphs are all gone; and the smiles of the waves, look at them—they come when they will, and go where they will; but the good old days of poetry are gone, gone, gone! Even as the glory of yonder cities is gone!” And he pointed to the southern horizon, where I now saw the low line of the coast of Africa for the first time. We were just seventeen hours from Malta when we came up with it. It was Cape Arabat, and here were the cities of the Pentapolis. Here was Berenice the beautiful; Ptolemais was here and Cyrene. That long line of sand, deserted and desolate, was all that I was to see of their grandeur; but I was not sorry that my first view of Africa should be connected with such associations.

In the forenoon we lost sight of land again, and were then left to our own resources in the ship. The sea was in a generous humor. From the hour we left Malta there was almost a flat calm. We did not suffer a moment's discomfort, and I think there was not a case of sea-sickness on board.

Around our cabin doors, on the after deck, we assembled a gay group daily. The ship's band made pleasant music for us in the afternoons and evenings, once delighting us with “Hail Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle,” which sounded the more home-like for the unexpectedness of those familiar sounds on an English ship along the coast of Africa.

Night after night came over us with never-diminishing wealth of beauty, and each successive dawn and sunrise woke me from deep slumber on the deck of the vessel. Thursday evening came. At midnight the deck was deserted, and I was alone. In that soft air and exquisite climate I preferred the deck to my cabin, and had made my bed every night on the planks under the sky. This night I could not sleep. The restlessness of which I have spoken had increased as we approached the shore of Egypt, and I walked the deck steadily for an hour, and then threw myself into one of the dozen large chairs which, in the day-time, were the private property of as many English ladies. At one o'clock I heard the officer of the deck discussing the power of his eyesight, and springing to the rail, I saw clearly, on the starboard bow, the light of the Pharos at Alexandria.

You may be curious to know what were my emotions at the visible presence of Egypt before my eyes, and the evidence that I should tread its soil to-morrow. I did not pause to think of the magnificence of the old Pharos which this one replaces, or of the grandeur that made it one of the seven wonders of the world. The great mirror that exhibited vessels a hundred miles at sea; the lofty tower that shone in the nights of those old centuries, almost on the rocky shores of Crete; the palaces that lined the shore and stretched far out into the blue Mediterranean; none of these were in my mind.

Enough to say that, before I thought of this as the burial-place of the mighty son of Philip; before I thought of it as the residence of the most beautiful of queens; the abode of luxury and magnificence surpassing all that the world had seen or will see; before the remembrance of the fabled Proteus, or even the great Julius came to my mind, I was seated in my chair, my head bowed down on my breast, and before my vision swept a train of old men of lordly mien, each man kingly in his presence and bearing, yet each man in his life poor, lowly, if not despised. I saw the old Academician, his white locks flowing on the wind, and the Stagyrite, the mighty man of all old or modern philosophy, and a host of the great men of learning, whose names are lost now. And last in that visionary procession—calmer, more stately than the rest, with clear bright eye fixed on the heaven where last of all he saw the flashing footsteps of the angels that bore away his Lord, with that bright light around his white forehead that crowned him a prince and king on earth and in heaven—I saw Mark, the Apostle of Him whom Plato longed to see and Aristotle died ignorant of.

With daybreak came the outlines of the shore and the modern city of Iskandereyeh, conspicuous above all being the Pillar of Diocletian, known to modern fame as Pompey's Pillar. We lay outside all night waiting for a pilot. The only benefit to be derived from the modern lighthouse at Alexandria is its warning not to approach the harbor, which is entered by a winding channel among innumerable reefs and rocks. We threw rockets, burned blue-lights, and fired cannon; but an Egyptian pilot is not to be aroused before sunrise, and it was, therefore, two hours after daylight before he came off to us, and we entered the port on the west side of the city.

The instant that the anchor was dropped, a swarm, like the locusts of Egypt, of all manner of specimens of the human animal, poured up the sides of the ship and covered the deck from stem to stern. It would be vain to attempt to describe them. Moors, Egyptians, Bedouins, Turks, Nubians, Maltese, nondescripts—white, black, yellow,copper-colored, and colorless—to the number of two or three hundred, dressed in as many costumes, convinced us that we were in a new country for us. There were many who wore elegant and costly dresses, but the large majority were of the poorest sort, and poverty here seems to make what we call poverty at home positive wealth.

Of a hundred or more of this crowd, the dress of each man consisted of one solitary article of clothing—a shirt of coarse cotton cloth, reaching not quite to the knees, and this so thin as to reveal the entire outline of the body, while it was usually so ragged as to leave nothing to be complained of in the way of extra clothing. They went to work like horses, and I never saw men exhibit such feats of strength. The cargo of the ship was to be got out as rapidly as possible. Five dollars a day is ample pay for a hundred of these men. A piastre and a half (about eight cents) is the highest rate of wages in Egypt.

With the crowd who came on board were the usual number of anxious and officious dragomans.

The word dragoman, derived from turgoman, and meaning simply an interpreter, has gotten to signify a sort of courier, valet, servant, adviser, and traveling companion, all combined, on whom the Oriental traveler must expect to be dependent for his very subsistence from day to day, from and after the moment he becomes attached to him.

A friend of mine, speaking of the servants, was accustomed to call them “the young ladies who boarded with his mother.” The dragoman may be defined as the gentleman who travels with you. He becomes a part of yourself, goes where you go, sleeps where you sleep, you talk through him, buy through him (and pay him and through him at the same time), and, in point of fact, you become his servant. All this, if you choose. But, if you choose otherwise, you may make him what he should be, a very good servant, and nothing more. He who can not manage his own servants should stay at home and not travel. The man whose servant can cheat him, should not keep servants, or should submit to his own stupidity.

I may as well pause here, to advise the Egyptian traveler under no circumstances to take a dragoman until he reaches Cairo. He will find English, French, and Italian, spoken everywhere in Alexandria, and on the railway to Cairo, so that he will need no assistance until he begins to make his arrangements to go up the Nile; which he should. not make in Alexandria.

One of the importunate, who came on board the Nubia, may serve as an example of the rest.

He was as Nubian, black and shining; dressed in the Nizam costume, embroidered jacket, silk vest, and flowing trowsers, all of dark green. He offered a handful of testimonials, but I rejected these, and asked him a question for the sake of getting rid of him.

“What languages do you speak?”

“All de kinds. I had school went to—sixty, seventy year. I ought know.”

“Perhaps you ought, but you won't do for me.”

I had observed a respectable-looking Maltese, who was the commissionaire for Cesar Tortilla's Hotel d' Europe. Placing the baggage in his charge, we made our way down into a boat, and tall, half-naked Arab, standing up to his oars, pulled us slowly in to the crowded landing- place at the custom-house of Alexandria.

Here I entered Egypt; and, at this same spot, on a moony midnight five months later, I departed for the Holy Land.

3. The Dead of Alexandria.

Alexandria is a strange medley. The West and the East have met and intermarried in her streets. The great square presents the most singular spectacle that can be imagined in any city of Orient or sunset, from the strange commingling of races, nations, costumes, and animals. The great modern institution of Egypt is the donkey, especially to American eyes.

The Egyptian donkey is the smallest imaginable animal of the species. The average height is from three feet and a half to four feet, though large numbers of them are under three feet. These little fellows carry incredible loads, and apparently with ease. In the square were scores of them. Here an old Turk, fat and shaky, his feet reaching to within six inches of the ground, went trotting across the square; there a dozen half naked boys, each perched between two goat-skins of water. Four or five English sailors, full of wonderment at the novel mode of travel, were plunging along at a fast gallop, and got foul of the old Turk. The boys, one of whom always follows his donkey, however swift the pace, belaboring him with a stick, and ingeniously poking him in the ribs or under the saddle-strap, commenced beating each other. Two ladies and two gentlemen, India passengers, taking their first donkey ride, became entangled in the group. Twenty long-legged, single-shirted fellaheen rushed up, some with donkeys and some with long rods. A row of camels stalked slowly by, and looked with quiet eyes at the increasing din; and when the confusion seemed to be inextricable, a splendid carriage dashed up the square, and fifty yards in advance of it ran, at all the speed of a swift horse, an elegantly-dressed runner, waving his silver rod, and shouting to make way for the high and mighty Somebody; and forthwith, in a twinkling, the mass scattered in every direction, and the square was free again. The old Turk ambled along his way, and the sailors surrounded one of their number who had managed to lose his seat in the hubbub, and whose curses were decidedly home-like.

No one could be contented in Alexandria more than fifteen minutes without going to Pompey's Pillar, as fame has it, or the Pillar of Diocletian, as it is now more frequently and properly called.

Leaving the ladies to their baths and a late breakfast, we mounted donkeys at the door, and being joined by a half dozen English officers bound to India, who were detained in Alexandria for the train until evening, we dashed off up the square at a furious gallop; furious in appearance, but the rate of progress was about equal to a slow trot on horseback. Nevertheless, a donkey carrying a heavy American on his back has some momentum when he gallops, as the guard in the gateway found to his cost; for he was dozing, after the prescribed manner of an Egyptian noon-day doze, and he dreamed that he heard the Frenchmen coming again, as they came once in his time; and before he had time to pick up his scattered intellect he had more to do in picking up himself, for we went over him like a thunder-storm, rattling on the draw-bridge, across an open space, through another gateway, across another draw-bridge, and so out into a long, broad street, on each side of which was a row of acacia trees (known as the sont), and so to a hill that overlooks the city and the harbor, on which stands this solitary column, the lonesome relic of unknown grandeur. Of what it formed a part, whether of the great library, or of some gorgeous temple, no one knows.

We sat down in the dust and looked up at its massive proportions, and admired and wondered, as hundreds of thousands have looked and admired in past years, and commented as they had, and dreamed as they had.

Shall I confess it? There was an Arab girl, who came from a mud village close by, and who stood at a little distance gazing at us, whose face attracted more of my attention than this mysterious column, in whose shade I sat. She was tall, slender, graceful as a deer, and her face exceedingly beautiful. She was not more than fourteen. She was dressed in the style of the country; a single blue cotton shirt. As it was a female who wore it, perhaps it deserves another name; but that will answer, since the sex did not vary the pattern. It was open from the neck to the waist, exposing the bust, and it reached but to her knees. She stood erect, with a proud uplifted head, and to my imagination she answered well for a personification of the angel of the degraded country in which I found myself. The ancient glory was here, but, clothed in the garb of poverty, she was reduced to be an outcast among the nations of the earth.

As I sat on the sand and looked at her, I put out my hand to support myself, and it fell on a skull. Bones, whether of ancient or modern Egyptians I knew not then, lay scattered around.

When I would have apostrophised the brown angel, she started in affright, and vanished in a hut built of most unromantic materials, such, indeed, as lay sun-drying all around us. It was gathered in the streets, and dried in cakes, which served the purpose of fuel, and occasionally of house building. Six naked children of eight years old and under remained. No imagination could make them other than the filthy wretches they were. Here we learned the sound of that word which is omnipotent in Turkish lands, and which travelers now too much ridicule, as if its benefits belonged to the beggar.

Before the gate of El Azhar, in Cairo, I whispered it in the ear of the Sheik, and it opened the old college to my profane feet. At the mosque of Machpelah, in Hebron, I said “Bucksheesh” to the venerable guardian of the place, and though five hundred howling Arabs were outside the door shouting for him to bring me out to them, he said: “Come in the night, when these dogs are sleeping, and I will show you the tomb of Ibrahim.” I sent it by my dragoman to the Bim-pasha of Jerusalem, and he gave me fifty soldiers, and marched me through every corner of the mosque of Omar, or the Mesjid El Aksa.

It is a magic word, of value to be known: spoken interrogatively, it is offensive; spoken suggestively, it is powerful. If you doubt it, try it, as I have.

I have said that I did not sleep on board the ship the night before. Neither did I sleep on shore the first night in Egypt. But the cause of my wakefulness was different. Dogs abound in the city of the son of Philip. They have no special owners, and are a sort of public property, always respected. But such infernal dog-fights as occurred once an hour under our windows no one elsewhere has known or heard of. I counted fifteen dogs in one mêlée the first evening, each fighting, like an Irishman in a fair, on his own account.

Besides this, the watchmen of the city are a nuisance. There are a large number of them, and some twenty are stationed in and around the grand square. Every quarter of an hour, the chief of a division enters the square and shouts his call, which is a prolonged cry, to the utmost extent of his breath. As he commences, each watchman springs into the square; and by the time he has exhausted his breath they take up the same shout in a body, and reply. He repeats it, and they again reply; and all is then still for fifteen minutes. But as if this were not enough, there was a tall gaunt fellow, who had once been a dragoman, but was a poor and drunken dog now, and in fact, crazy from bad habits, who slept somewhere in the square every night, and who invariably echoed the watchmen with a yell that rang down the square, in unmistakable English, “all right;” and once I heard him add, in the same tremendous tones, “Damn the rascals!”

And just before the dawn, when the law of Mohammed prescribed it, at that moment that a man could distinguish between a white thread and a black, there was a sound which now came to my ears with a sweetness that I can not find words to express. In a moment of the utmost stillness, when all the earth, and air, and sky was calm and peaceful, a voice fell through the solemn night, clear, rich, prolonged, but in a tone of rare melody that thrilled through my ears, and I needed no one to tell me that it was the muezzin's call to prayer. “There is no God but God!” said the voice, in the words of the Book of the Law given on the mountain of fire, and our hearts answered the call to pray.

My first business in Alexandria was to get on shore, from the steamer, the various articles which we had purchased at Marseilles and Malta for a winter on the Nile. One of these, a cask of Marsala wine—Wood- house's best—must necessarily pass through the custom- house, and I was not sorry to have an opportunity of witnessing the fashion of collecting the revenue of the Viceroy of Egypt. The cask had been landed from the Nubia , and, as all the other goods here landed, was in the public stores of the custom-house. Business is transacted in Arabic or Italian, or in the mixed Arabic and Italian which forms the Maltese. We—that is, Trumbull and I, accompanied by a servant and interpreter—went first to look for the wine. Having found it, I was amused at the simple fashion of getting it through the business which, in other countries, is made so needlessly tedious.

A tall Nubian, black as night, looked at the barrel, weighed it with his eye (it was over two hundred weight), twisted a cord around it, and wound the cord around his head, taking the strain on his forehead, and then, with a swing of his giant body, he had it on his back, and followed us to the inspector. This gentleman, an old Turk, with a beard not quite as heavy as my own, but much more gray, addressed us very pleasantly in Italian, and passed us along to his clerk, who sat by his side, each with his legs invisible under him. The proper certificate of the contents was here made, and sealed— for Turk or Copt never writes his name, impressing it on the paper with ink on a seal—and the black carried the wine to the scales to be weighed. This was done in an instant, the weight noted, and another man received the duty, whereupon it was ready to be carried up to the hotel. All this was done in fifteen minutes or less, and the majesty of the viceroy and ourselves were equally well satisfied.

My next business was with the viceroy himself, and its object to procure a firman which should enable me to make excavations among the ruins of Upper Egypt. Mr. De Leon, who so successfully fills the post of American consul in Egypt, was absent on a visit to Greece. This consulate is by far the most important foreign consular appointment of our government, since it amounts to a Chargéship, the Egyptian government being, in all commercial matters, independent of the Porte, and receiving communications through the consul direct. The power of this functionary is absolutely startling to an American, who suddenly finds himself in a land where he has no protection from the government, no obedience to render to it, where he is not liable to punishment for any offence against its laws, and where, in fact, he may commit wholesale murder with no penalty other than being sent out of the country by the American consul. I shall speak further of this in another place, and I allude to it here only to say that Mr. De Leon is most remarkably successful in his difficult and responsible position, having secured the confidence of the government, and thus enabled himself more effectually to protect travelers, who find themselves in constant need of some strong friend to appeal to the government in their aid.

During his absence the seal of the consulate was in the custody of Mr. Petersen, the vice-consul of Sweden and Norway, and I take this opportunity of expressing my thanks to him for his unremitting kindness and attention to us during our stay in Alexandria.

On my representing to him my wishes, and presenting the papers on which I relied for the furtherance of my application, he went immediately to the viceroy, and within the forenoon of the day sent to me the desired paper, which was a letter directed to Latif Pasha, governor of Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia, resident at Es Siout, requiring him to furnish me with all necessary papers and assistance, letters to inferior governors and officers of whatever grade, and to provide men and beasts as I should demand, at any point on the river.

The cost of this paper was a polite “thank you,” which I repeat here, as well to Mr. Petersen as to the Egyptian government. How invaluable it afterward proved to me I shall frequently have occasion to describe. Without reference to its usefulness for the immediate objects of my visit to Egypt, it operated as an introduction to all men of rank in the upper country, and enabled me to become acquainted with some whose friendship is among the pleasantest recollections of my winter on the Nile, as well as the pleasantest anticipations of a return.

Alexandria has been visited by many travelers, and is described in all the books on Egypt, but with the exception of the Pillar of Diocletian (Pompey's Pillar) and Cleopatra's Needles, there are no antiquities which have attracted their attention.

The modern city stands on a neck of land, to the eastward of which is the old and deserted harbor, and on the west the new, and rather inaccessible, but safe anchorage in which vessels of every nation are found. As a port, it is one of the most important on the Mediterranean, especially as the western terminus of the Suez railway, which is soon to be completed across the isthmus; and which renders the proposed canal, across the isthmus, more than ever undesirable. The chief trade of the port is in coals from England, and grain and cotton thither.

But around modern Alexandria, in all directions, lie mounds of yellow dust and sand, destitute of the slightest vegetation, and burning in the hot sun. Under these mounds lie the ruins of the city of the Ptolemies. Excavations are carried on continually, but only to obtain stone for building purposes, to be used in walls or burned for lime. No investigations have been made by antiquarians, as yet, among these hills, where there is, without doubt, a rich store of treasure to be opened. Here, indeed, but little of the very ancient is to be expected. It was in the later days of Egypt, when the Pharaohs had been succeeded by the Ptolemies, when Memphis was old, and Thebes was crumbling into ruin, that the Alexandrian splendor filled the eastern, though it was then called the western, world.

I had no desire to spend time or money here, further than to take one step backward in time before I found myself treading the halls of Remeses.

The Pillar of Diocletian I have already mentioned. The Needles of Cleopatra, as they have been long called, are in their old sites, one standing erect where the spray of the sea washes over it, in the eastern part of the city, the other lying on the ground, almost under ground indeed, near it. But not being in their original positions, having been brought here in Roman times, they possess but little more interest than that at Paris, scarcely so much as those at Rome.

The Baths of Cleopatra, as they are called, ancient tombs open and partially sunken in the sea, on the west side of the city, are interesting only as deserted tombs, without name or mark. Having visited these, we supposed the antiquities of Alexandria were “done.”

But the Maltese Abrams, whom I have mentioned, and whom I recommend as a capital servant, told us of certain catacombs that he knew of, three miles east of the city on the sea shore, where the natives were digging lime-stone for building purposes and for burning. Accordingly we rode out one day to look at them.

It proved a fortunate discovery, especially as on my return to Alexandria I found that these catacombs were entirely dug away and all appearance of them had vanished, although there remain doubtless many tombs under the ground never yet reached, for future explorers to open.

We were no novices in donkey-riding by this time; you would have supposed that we were used to riding them all our lives, had you seen the four which we mounted,and the speed at which we dashed down the long street that leads to the Rosetta gate, followed by our four boys, shouting and screaming to the groups of people walking before us. We raised a cloud of dust all the way, and elicited not a few Mohammedan curses from women with vailed faces, whose black eyes flashed contempt on the bare faces of Amy and Miriam. Now working to windward of a long row of camels laden with stone, now to leeward of a gathering of women around a fruit-stall, now passing a funeral procession that went chanting their songs along the middle of the way—we dashed, in a confused heap, donkeys and boys, through the arched gateway, to the terror of the Pasha's soldiers who sat smoking under the shade, and who had heard doubtless of our victory over the guard on the first day, across the draw-bridge with a thunder that you would not have believed the donkey's hoof could have extracted from the plank, through the second arch, and out into the desolate tract of land, without grass, or tree, or living object for miles, where once stood the palaces of the city of Cleopatra.

Winding our way over the mounds of earth that concealed the ruins, catching sight here and there of a projecting cornice, a capital, or a slab of polished stone, we at length descended to the shore at the place where the men were now engaged in digging out stone for lime and buildings in the modern city.

Formerly the shore for a mile or more must have been bordered by a great necropolis, all cut in solid rock. During a thousand years the entire shore has sunk, I have no means of estimating how much, but not less than thirty feet, as I judge from a rough observation; it may have been fifty, or even more. By this many of the rock-hewn tombs have been submerged entirely, and those on shore have been depressed, and many of them thrown out of perpendicular, while the rock has been cracked, and sand has filled the subterranean chambers. Of the period at which these tombs were commenced we have no means now of judging. It is sufficiently manifest, however, that they have served the purposes of successive generations of nations, if I may use the expression; and have in turn held Egyptians, who were removed to make room for Romans, who themselves slept only until the Saracens needed places for their long sleep.

Already great numbers of tombs had been opened and their contents scattered. The fellaheen who were at work proceeded rapidly in their Vandalish business. Some long corridors stood open in the white limestone of the hill, and broken pottery and innumerable bones lay scattered around. An afternoon was consumed in the first mere looking at these catacombs. Returning the next morning, we selected a spot where the workmen had gone deepest, and hired a dozen men to work under our direction. Miriam and Amy sat in a niche of an open tomb, shaded from the sun, and looking out at the sea, which broke with a grand surf at their very feet.

After breaking into three in succession of the unopened niches, we at length struck on one which had evidently escaped Saracen invasion. It was in the lowest tier of three on the side of an arched chamber, protected by a heavy stone slab inlaid in cement. It required gunpowder to start it. The tomb was about two feet six inches wide by the same height, and extended seven feet into the rock. The others on all sides of the room were of the same dimensions. There were in all twenty-four.

Upon opening this and entering it, we found a skeleton lying at full length, in remarkable preservation, evidently that of a man in the prime of life. At his head stood an alabaster vase, plainly but beautifully cut, in perfect preservation, and as pure and white as if carved but yesterday.

The height of the vase is seventeen and a half inches, the greatest diameter nine and a half inches.

It consisted of four different pieces—the pedestal, the main part of the vase, the cover, and the small knob or handle on the top; not broken but so cut originally.

This vase Mr. Trumbull subsequently shipped to America, where I am happy to say it arrived safely. (The cut at the end of this chapter exhibits the form of this vase.)

Pursuing our success, we removed the bones of the dead man, reserving only a few to go with the vase, and then searched carefully the floor of the tomb, which was covered with fine dust and sand. Here we at length hit on the top of another vase; and after an hour of careful and diligent work, we took out from a deep sunk hole in the rock, scarcely larger than itself, an Etruscan vase, which on opening we found to contain burned bones and ashes, as fresh in appearance as if but yesterday deposited.

EARTHEN VASE FOUND AT ALEXANDRIA.

This vase or urn is fifteen inches high, and its largest diameter is eleven inches. It is of fine earthenware ornamented with flowers and devices.

This vase was too fragile to attempt to send to America, and I left it with Mr. De Leon. The reader will observe the peculiar position of this vase, in the bottom of a tomb under the bones of a dead man. There was another similar hole in the same tomb, but no vase in it. In the bottom of another tomb were found another alabaster urn similarly sunken. It was of ungraceful shape, being simply a tub with a cover.

In one of the lowest excavations we found a tomb which was painted in ancient Egyptian style, but it was so filled with damp sand that nothing remained of the paintings except near the roof which was arched and plastered. There was nothing to indicate the period of its occupation, but it is interesting as being the only tomb I have ever heard of as discovered at Alexandria which was of ancient Egyptian character. All the sarcophagi and tombs hitherto found here have been considered of Greek or Roman period. This, however, was unmistakable, the heads and upper parts of the figures being as brilliant and fresh as the tombs at Thebes. Being on a much lower level than any other that we penetrated, it was possibly of ante-Greek times; but it may have been the tomb of an Egyptian who retained ancient customs after Greek dates.

With this we finished our day's labor, then strolled along the shore, and looked at the gorgeous sunset, right over the Pharos, and then mounting our donkeys, and carrying our vases and sundry pieces of broken pottery in our hands, we rode slowly into the city. I wondered whether the old Greek or Roman whose burned bones I was shaking about in the vase on the pommel of my donkey-saddle had any idea of the curious resurrection he was undergoing in modern Iskandereyeh, or whether it disturbed him beyond the Styx when I shook out his ashes on a copy of the London Times spread on the floor of Cæsar Tortilla's Hôtel d'Europe. Cæsar is a good fellow by-the-by, and his hotel admirable for the East.

The next morning we were up and away at an earlier hour, but fearing to fatigue the ladies too much by a second long ride, we took a carriage to drive out as near as possible to the catacombs. It was not the Oriental fashion. We had no right to try it. The driver said he could do it easily, he had done it before, and lied like an Italian about it, so that we trusted him. We had hardly gone out of the Rosetta gate, and turned up the first hill over the ruins of the ancient city, when one of the horses baulked, and the carriage began backing, but instead of backing straight, the forewheels cramped, and the first plunge of the baulky horse forward took him and us over the side of the bank and down a steep descent into an excavation. The pole of the carriage snapped short off, the other horse, dragged into the scrape by his companion, fell down, and the carriage ran directly over him, and rested on his body. The ladies sprang out as it stopped, and we all reached the ground safely; but there was another ruin on the top of the old ruins. It was, in point of fact, what we call in America a total smash, and we sent back for donkeys, while we amused ourselves with wandering over the site of the old city.

This day I determined to go deeper into the vaults of the catacombs, if possible, than before, and I commenced on the side of the sea in the room that was painted in the brilliant colors of the Egyptians. Setting my men at work here by the light of candles, I was not long in penetrating the bottom of the chamber by a hole which opened into the roof of a similar room below. I thrust myself through the hole as rapidly as possible, but found that the earth had filled it to within three feet of the top. Two hours' work cleared it out; but I found nothing, for the dampness of the sea had reached it, and all was destroyed except the solid walls.

A few moments later one of the men came to tell me that they had opened a new gallery of tombs, and I hastened to see it. Though not what I expected from their description, it was sufficiently strange to be worth examining.