YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

FROM CAIRO TO THE
SOUDAN FRONTIER

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Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson fef Co.
At the Ballantyne Press

PREFACE
The sketches here published pretend to no
other character than that of a record of im
pressions derived from a couple of brief tours
in Egypt during the winters of 1893-4 and
1895-6. But it is hoped that their interest,
such as it is — and some interest can hardly fail
to attach to any truthful description of one of
the most interesting countries in the world —
may have been to some extent enhanced by
the events of which the Nile Valley has sub
sequently become the scene.
I have attempted in these pages to por
tray to the best of my ability the life and
character, the aspect and the manners of

vi PREFACE
that ancient and unchanging people, for whose
destinies England, the last of many great
Empires to undertake that duty, has by so
strange a series of chances become respon
sible. At the time when my latest chapters
were penned some weeks had yet to pass
before the orders were given for the forward
movement into the Soudan. But advance
was already "in the air." Workmen were
busy repairing the iron-plates of the armoured
transports at Shel-lal ; signs of unwonted
military activity, indefinable but unmistakable,
were to be discerned at Wady Haifa ; the
restlessness of the Dervishes, especially as
evidenced by their recent audacious and suc
cessful raid on a Nubian river village, well
within the line of the English defences, was
in all Egyptian mouths. Enough was to be
seen to fill the mind of the least expert of
civilians with suspicions which it needed only

PREFACE vii
the obstinate taciturnity of the military
authorities to confirm.
Nor apart from these immediate premoni
tions of a forward movement could even the
civilian aforesaid have failed to appreciate the
cogency of the standing arguments for an
advance. Every league of the Nile Valley
from Assuan to Wady Haifa, and every line
in the conformation of Wady Haifa itself is
eloquent of them. For near two hundred
miles of water-way you travel through a land
of almost desolation ; often between rocks or
desert reaching to the very river brim, never
with more than the narrowest ribbon of tilth
or herbage interposed between them and the
stream. At the end of your journey you
come tp a so-called frontier " post," which
might as well have been anywhere else in the
wide wilderness for all that Nature has done
to help man strengthen it. Another ten score

viii PREFACE
miles beyond it spreads a fair and fruitful
tract of country, worth defending and easier
to defend, which was once in possession of the
owners of Assuan and Wady Haifa. The
sight and knowledge of these three things
must impress even the most careless or pre
judiced of English observers. The truth
becomes plain to him, perhaps, for the first
time that what was done by Mr. Gladstone's
Government in obedience to the real or sup
posed exigencies of the military and financial
situation in 1884, was to compel Egypt to
abandon a richly fertile and readily defensible
district, in order to draw an essentially arbi
trary and unnatural frontier across a long and
narrow strip of well-nigh worthless river-
valley, whose inhabitants it is, from that posi
tion, almost impossible to protect.
The doubts which exercise the patriotic
minds of Mr. Labouchere and his party as

PREFACE ix
to the expediency of effacing this artificial
and mischievous delimitation seldom trouble
those who have visited the country for them
selves. The question of thrusting back the
ever menacing hordes of marauding barbarism
from those marches of African civilisation of
which we have become the wardens — nay,
the greater question of reconquering the vast
region over which the beginnings at least of
that civilisation once extended — does not
delay them long. They think of the thousand
miles of peace and industry, and simple
contentment, and pathetic defencelessness
through which they have passed ; of the flood
of savagery that beats for ever upon those ill-
protecting barriers, and of the deeps of human
misery that lie beyond ; and they can have
no doubt of the direction in which the duty
of England points. Perhaps then, as has
been said, the pages which follow may have

x PREFACE
a strengthened claim on the attention of the
reader as from the pen of one who and whose
fellow-travellers were among the last of the
detachments of English tourists to visit Wady
Haifa before the advance, and to look forth
across its frontier over that far-stretching
waste of anarchy into which the troops of
Egypt, under the leadership of her protector,
are now penetrating : under, it is true, the
grudging and malevolent eyes of English
Radicals, but with the hearty God-speed of
every friend of order and good government
and human happiness throughout the
English-speaking world. H. D. T.

CONTENTS

CHAP. I. LIFE AT SEA ....
II. THE WONDERFUL DITCH
III. THE STREETS OF CAIRO
IV. TOMMY'S EGYPTIAN CHRISTMAS
V. THE FATHER OF TERROR
VI. THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES
VII. A THEBAN RACE MEETING .
VIII. A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY
IX. AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER .
X. AN AQUATIC INDUSTRY .
XI. A RAIDED VILLAGE
XII. A BREAKWATER OF BARBARISM
XIII. OF PALMS AND SUNSETS
XIV. THE TEMPLE-SERVANT OF AMMON
XV. A KHEDIVIAL PROGRESS
XVI. TWIRLING TO PARADISE

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FROM CAIRO TO THE
SOUDAN FRONTIER
CHAPTER I
LIFE AT SEA
It is two hours since we picked our way be
tween Scylla and Charybdis — no such mighty
difficult feat to the navigators of to-day as it
so strangely seems to have been to the sailors
of the ancient world — and settled down for our
two days' further run to our Egyptian port.
Reggio and Messina have long since disap
peared ; the spurs of Etna, which almost
challenged comparison with their parent
height as we were issuing from the Straits,
have dwindled into knolls and hillocks, and
for well-nigh an hour the great bare cone has
stood out black and solitary against the deep
orange of the western sky. Sicily itself has
A

2 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
become one with its "mountain of old
name ; " there is nothing to be seen of the
romantic island but its giant volcano, nothing
left to recall any one of its clustering multi
tude of classic legends, save only the earliest
and sternest of them all. The home of
nymph and shepherd, of sacred fountain and
love-sick river god, has vanished, and the
everlasting prison of the buried Titan alone
remains. But that grim donjon glooms at
our departing vessel for long. It is still
faintly visible when the pale lilac of the sky
has melted into a still paler blue, when the
flame-tipped purple of the sunset-wrack has
become a lustreless brown, when the silver
sheen of twilight has faded from the darken
ing waters. It is a race between the mists
and the night to hide it first, and it would be
hard to say which wins. Dusk or the sea-
haze does at last hide it, leaving visible only
the glimmering phantom of the Italian main
land, which itself, also, is soon swallowed up
in the night. Then the moon glides, queen-

LIFE AT SEA 5
like, into her great throne-room of the heavens;
the evening star calls up its slow and timid
followers into the presence ; the night-breeze
begins to marshal her ermine-clad court of
clouds ; and then — why then the ineffable
poetry of the hour and the scene is broken
by the unspeakable prose of the dinner bell.
Life, as Carlyle observed at a moment
when he was able to contemplate it undis
turbed by dyspepsia, is a " conflux of two
eternities." The sea and sky, when the last
streak of land has disappeared, become a
conflux of two virtual infinities. Life on the
sea, therefore, being spent amid a combina
tion of illimitables — at a representation of the
Absolute, "supported," so to speak, "by the
whole strength of the company " — one might
well expect the spirit of man to be answerably
affected by the solemnity of its surroundings.
The correct thing for it to do, I believe, is
" to beat against the bars of its fleshly prison,"
and to " long for absorption in the all-em
bracing Universe." Our muddy vesture of

4 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
decay should grossly close us in no longer.
A starry night on deck should speak to us
more eloquently than it spoke to Lorenzo and
Jessica on their moonlit bank, and the quiring
of the spheres to the young-eyed cherubim
should be audible above the wash of the
flying waters, and perhaps even the throb of
the engines.
As a matter of fact, however, there is no
situation in which the spirit of man seems
more eminently contented with its corporeal
captivity than at this moment when it should
be struggling for its freedom. The only
result of these communings of his with the
Infinite seems to be to magnify immensely
his interest in the infinitesimal. Space, Time,
Matter, and the Void, the One and the Many
— all these vast and imposing abstractions
appear to efface themselves in his imagina
tion. As to Space, he is only conscious of it
in its limitations while he is dressing. Time
shrinks to an arbitrary though convenient
method of computing the intervals between

LIFE AT SEA 5
meals. Towards the close of each such
period he becomes temporarily conscious of
the Void ; and in the perpetually recurring
struggle with these repasts he may perhaps
find a symbol of the eternal antithesis be
tween the One and the Many, and of the
eternal effort of the Many to merge itself in
the One. The human mind, in short, instead
of expanding in this transcendental company,
contracts. Its emotions, at a moment when
they might be expected to range the uni
verse, assume their most egotistically per
sonal shape ; and when its intellectual and
spiritual powers ought — in common decency,
one might almost say — to predominate, its
primitive, even its savage, instincts are
supreme. Man, or, at any rate, average
man, approaches as near to the condition of
mechanism as, perhaps, it is possible for him
to approach without actually becoming a
machine. Human life is reduced to its
purely animal processes, and the great facts
and forces of Nature exist for the sole

6 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
purpose of ministering to them. The sun
rises that you may bask in its rays ; the sea
breeze blows for the disinterested encourage
ment of your appetite ; the moon and stars
are to look at while you smoke before
"turning in." That the sea may lull and
rock you to sleep is without doubt the final
cause of its cradle-like movement, and the
sufficient explanation of its soothing sound.
You say to yourself as you sink to slumber
that the ingenious Dr. Paley could not have
anywhere found a more triumphant proof of
his great doctrine of design in creation.
As to the spiritual, the intellectual, and
even the moral regions of human life — well,
at sea there are no such regions. They do
not exist in human life. The talk about them
which you remember to have heard on land,
and to have believed in, had no solid basis in
fact. It was a traveller's tale, the fable of
some wonder-weaving explorer of the meta
physical ocean who has temporarily taken you
in. You know better now. You know, for

LIFE AT SEA 7
instance, that the so-called " Session of 1893 "
was a mere " railway -journey nightmare,"
the result of a too copious meal too hastily
devoured at Newcastle. We had found that
out, every one of us, ere we had been twenty-
four hours on board. One lost soul there
was among us, it is true, who muttered strange
words, which sounded like " Parish Councils
Bill ; " but we others, the saved, gazed upon
him with compassion and without compre
hension, and anon he faded away. So, too,
it fared with those who had brought with
them broken sentences of the language of
some dreamland in which men talk, it would
seem, about Realism, and Impressionism, and
other plainly imaginary things; but these
sufferers also were easily curable. Their
malady soon yielded to the humane treatment
of neglect, and they ceased to regard their
illusions as realities. For illusions, of course,
they are. There are, in reality, no such
things as politics, or economics, or art, or
literature, or science, or philanthropy, or in-

8 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
dustry — particularly industry. There is no
religion, except a vague form of Pantheism.
There is no drama, save the one everlasting
miracle play, which has the dawn for its Pro
logue, and morning, afternoon, evening, and
night for its Acts. There are even no amuse
ments — or none as the word and the thing
are understood ashore. Sport and pastime
no longer possess any traces of their terrene
meaning. At sea there need not be, nor is
there, any element in them which either
promises excitement or pre-supposes skill.
Otherwise, how could the most adventurous
spirit derive full satisfaction, as it does, from
bezique in the saloon, or the masculine intelli
gence find contentment in the imbecility of
deck-quoits ?
It is on the short voyage, the three, four,
or five days' steam, as from one Mediter
ranean port to another, that these curious
phenomena are most commonly to be re
marked. The six or seven days' breathless
run across the Atlantic in the "floating

LIFE AT SEA 9
palace " is, of course, another matter. There
you can hardly be said to leave the habits, or
even the appliances, of your daily life on land
behind you, and the " City man " almost
expects to find his daily paper every morning
on the breakfast-table, if not a Stock Ex
change in the smoking saloon. And on any
longer voyages it is well known that another
process of demoralisation sets in. After
anything more than " a week of it " at sea
the contented frivolity of the traveller, the
vacuous repose of mind in which he has
hitherto been lapped, give way in most cases
to a feeling of acute unrest. The infinite
bores him as much as ever, but the finite, at
any rate in its more innocent forms, has
ceased to distract. He has read his novel ;
the mild recreations of the deck interest him
no longer ; the regularly recurring summons
to the groaning, and possibly rolling, board
has lost its power to awaken a responsive
thrill in his breast. It is more than probable
that he is bilious ; it is tolerably certain that

10 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
he is beginning to suffer from severe moral
dyspepsia. In such a moment the traveller
is thrown back, according to his or her sex,
upon one or other of the two great — indeed,
one may say the only two known — forms of
relief from the irritating ennui of the sea
voyage. He is driven to gambling, and she
to quarrelling. Occasionally, it is true, the
two pastimes are combined, or the former
may lead by delightfully easy and natural
stages to the latter. But, as a general rule,
the two forms of distraction remain distinct
in their character and incidents, although
there is a certain superficial resemblance in
their effects. Both of them exert a markedly
centrifugal force. Gambling splits up the
men into parties of four or more, according
as they seek solace in whist or in "nap";
while quarrelling divides the women into
smaller factions still. The process of dis
integration, having once set in, advances with
as terrible a rapidity as though Mr. Gladstone
in person were the presiding genius of the

LIFE AT SEA n
scene ; and before the end of the voyage the
entire saloon is as deeply infected with the
"virus of Particularism" as gallant little
Wales itself.
To pick up a homeward-bound P. and O.
at Gibraltar and to finish with her her
journey to England is to assist at a truly
melancholy drama of disenchantments. The
deck is strewed with the fragments of lightly-
made and lightly-broken eternal friendships
and with the ashes of extinct flirtations.
Bosoms which glowed with reciprocal
passion in the Indian Ocean have cooled
down in the Red Sea, and mutual admirations
have given way to mutual criticism in the
Suez Canal. But the short voyage allows
no such scope for the display of this par
ticular form of human weakness. It develops
no worse characteristic than the somewhat
fatuous form of complacent self-absorption
which I have endeavoured to describe. And
even this resolute refusal on the part of the
average man to rise to the level of his

12 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
august surroundings may in itself, perhaps, be
regarded as a tribute to their majesty. The
mind may be only taking refuge in little
things from the oppression of great ones,
just as Charles Lamb had, he tells us, to
counteract the awe-inspiring impression of
the mountains in the Lake Country by
" thinking of the ham and beef shop in
Vinegar-yard." After all, too, Nature can
better afford to put up with the indifference
of man in this case than in almost any other ;
since there is no situation in which at her
pleasure she can so easily compel his homage.
Her skies have but to frown upon him, her
sea has but to wrinkle its terrible brows, and
puny man is at once recalled to a due sense
of her awful presence. When that happens
he more than makes up for his former
irreverence ; and happen it did to us some
forty-eight hours before reaching our desti
nation. We foolishly overtook a gale — an
error inexcusable to so slow a boat — and
from six o'clock of one night till about the

LIFE AT SEA 13
same hour on the following morning we did
a good deal too much of Tennysonian
" climbing up the climbing wave." Nature
was then more than amply avenged upon
those who had neglected to worship her in
her gentler aspects. Many of them went,
indeed, to the opposite extreme ; for ere
night fell they had exchanged their careless
lounging postures for what it would be in
adequate to describe as a mere attitude of
worship. It was one of absolute prostration.

CHAPTER II
THE WONDERFUL DITCH
In one of those rhetorical outbursts to which
even the subject of sanitary engineering had
power to provoke him, Victor Hugo once
passionately exclaimed, " A sewer is a mis
understanding ! " So acutely did he feel the
estrangement which has arisen between men
and those fertilising agents which he treats
for the most part as mere nuisances instead
of entertaining them as friends and allies.
The analogy may at first sight seem a fanci
ful one, but the isthmus has always appeared
to me to resemble the drainpipe, as being a
misunderstanding — not, indeed, on the part
of man, who does his best to remove it, but
on that of Nature. For it divorces things

THE WONDERFUL DITCH 15
which seem obviously designed for union ;
it separates and alienates natural forces
which are striving for co-operation, and which
come so near to fulfilling what strikes one
as their obvious destiny that one cannot but
resent the narrow barrier which alone stands
between them and success. The isthmus
which keeps two oceans from mingling their
waters in one common highway of nations
is a purely gratuitous obstacle. This you
cannot say of the strait which sunders con
tinents ; for straits are the boundary fences
of states and races, and their existence makes
for the individual security of peoples, and
therefore for the peace of the world. Isola
tion is but a cheap price to pay for the bless
ing of even compulsory amity. If France,
Italy, Germany, and Russia were suddenly
converted by some cosmic catastrophe into
four islands, the volume of international com
merce might at first suffer some decrease,
but how vast would be the compensation in
internal wealth which would result from the

1 6 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
release of Continental industry from its over
whelming military burdens ! Seas, however,
have no quarrel with each other, and the
isthmuses which sunder them in both hemi
spheres, to the diversion of human inter
course by many thousand miles of ocean
from its shortest routes, are really mere
obstructions, and nothing more. Nature
began it, at any rate in the Eastern hemi
sphere. Her original idea, according to the
geologist, was to divide Asia from Africa by
a waterway, and not by an isthmus, and, pro
bably, for a little matter of a few million ages,
the Red Sea flowed amicably onwards past
what is now the head of the Gulf of Suez,
and met the waters of the Mediterranean in
a fraternal embrace.
Unfortunately, however, at some remote
geological period she changed her mind, set
her gales and currents to work to sow strife
between the two seas, and brought a north
ward-flowing stream on the one side in the
teeth of southward-blowing winds on the

THE WONDERFUL DITCH 17
other. Neither would give way, and the
inevitable result followed. The Red Sea
began to throw up a sandbar ; the Mediter
ranean, not to be behindhand, took to silting
operations on its own account, and thus a
barrier rose imperceptibly, grew and grew by
infinitesimal degrees in height and breadth,
was dried by the sun and blown by the desert
winds into drifts, and piled up into dunes and
sand-hills, until at last, in the creeping course
of ages, it became the Isthmus of Suez — a
closed door in the face of voyaging man seek
ing maritime transit between the Northern
and Southern regions of the globe, and a
door, moreover, which was to remain closed
for all the innumerable sons by which the
date of those fossil conchylia that the Red
Sea has left on the shores of Lake Timsah
is divided from that day in March, 1869,
when the long-separated waters met again.
From the spondylus of the protozoic periods
to the late M. de Lesseps is a big jump ; and
perhaps no breach between two ancient com-
B

1 8 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
panions, which had lasted as long as this, was
ever before so effectually healed.
Yet it is interesting to note how many
and what persevering attempts have been
made throughout all history to re-marry the
divorced couple. In such a land of lakes and
swamps and branching river arms as the Delta
of the Nile it could hardly have been other
wise. Water communication, or the readiest
facilities for establishing it, appeared every
where except in the precise direction in which
it was most wanted. Hence, from the time
of the Pharaohs down to the Mohammedan
conquest the dream of every active and
capable Egyptian ruler has been to connect
the two seas. The warrior kings of the
eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, the Setis
and the Rameseses, laid the foundation of
that ancient fresh-water canal system, which
was extended by conqueror after conqueror,
by Persians and Ptolemies, by Caesars and
Caliphs, and which only finally fell into utter
disrepair in the eighth century of the Chris-

THE WONDERFUL DITCH 19
tian era, to remain neglected for over a thou
sand years, till it was restored by the famous
French engineer as an operation subsidiary
to his great work. For centuries before and
after Christ, a chain of fresh-water canals and
lakes had rendered water transit practicable
from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.
Nevertheless, the practicable was not often
the practised. Trade in all ages of the world
has been obstinate in its preferences, and
neither Pharaohs nor Ptolemies nor Cassars
ever succeeded in turning it into the devious
waterways which had been constructed for it.
The Roman imports from the East reached
the Queen city of the world by another route.
Her Indian argosies touched at ports on the
Western Coast of the Red Sea — at Koser, for
instance, where the eastward-bending Nile
touches its nearest point to those waters — and
their unladen cargoes were conveyed by the
great caravan route to Coptos, and re-em
barked in boats on the great river for Alex
andria, whence they were reshipped for their

20 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
ultimate destination. The Mohammedan con
querors of Egypt tinkered, like their fore
runners, with the ancient fresh-water canal
system ; and Amr Ibn-el-Asi used it for the
transport of grain from his newly-founded
Fostat — the Cairo of later times — to Suez, en
route for Arabia ; but under the Abbassides it
fell into complete disuse. Venice, again,
hankered, as might be expected, after a short
cut through the isthmus to that gorgeous
East which she " held in fee " ; but she, too,
followed her predecessors to decay without
having done anything to realise her idea;
while, unfortunately, the latest successor of
Venice as the great trading State of the world
allowed political apprehensions to chill her
ancient spirit of commercial enterprise, and
held aloof from that great project of re-uniting
the two seas from which she has been so in
comparably the greatest gainer, both in wealth
and power.
To an Englishman who steams for the first
time between the two-mile long breakwaters

THE WONDERFUL DITCH 21
that protect the harbour of Port Said from
the mud-laden current that would otherwise
soon block its mouth, it is difficult to repress
a pang of patriotic regret that England— the
modern Rome — let slip the chance of adding
this more than Roman work to the roll of her
great engineering exploits. We, who have
spanned continents and bridged oceans, should
never have left it to any man of another race
to cleave a way through the few score miles
of isthmus which had so long obstructed the
intercourse of the Eastern with the Western
world. There is nothing very imposing, it is
true, in that polgylot port — that unspeakable
sentina gentium — that meeting-place of every
race and every vice which plays janitrix of
this Mediterranean gateway. But when a
mansion is as spacious and as splendid as
that which lies at the end of the passage,
who cares about the private morals of the
concierge ? Say that Port Said is a sordid
little Monte Carlo, doubled with a squalid
little Corinth : say that it is a nest of silver

22 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
hells and sailors' bagnios, and what matters ?
In a few hours we shall have discharged our
Egyptian consignments, and taken our India-
bound cargo, and away we shall have steamed
southward into that curious maritime ditch
that has been dug in the desert to correct the
"second thoughts " of Nature ill-inspired, and
to reconstitute the conditions of an infinitely
distant geological past.
And what a wonderful ditch it is ! More
wonderful, perhaps, thanj> ever now that,
thanks to the ingenuities of modern science,
it is navigable by night as well as by day.
Before the age of electricity, the on-coming
of darkness meant the arrest of navigation,
and the canal after nightfall was tenanted only
by moored and motionless ships. But now,
with the dazzling rays of the search-light
streaming from our bows, and throwing its
broad, fan-shaped patch of radiance on the
dark waters ahead of us, we can steam
steadily on. Five miles an hour is not
exactly what you would call good running

THE WONDERFUL DITCH 23
for a large steamer, but it is better than
absolute rest — for those, at least, who want
to reach their journey's end ; and if you were
only sure of being able to keep it up you would
be in a position to make a fairly accurate
guess at the time at which you will reach
your destination at Ismailia. This, however,
is just what you cannot do ; and it is the
impossibility of doing it that lends so " sport
ing " an interest to the Egypt-bound tra
vellers' passage -through the Canal. Facts
on board ship are always hard to come by,
and the earnest seeker after truth as regards
the vessel's movements, dates of arrival,
hours of departure, and so forth, is usually
led to the conclusion that the object of his
search is to be found nowhere but in the
bosom of the captain — if there ; a circum
stance, however, which does not in any degree
check the confident circulation of statements
varying through every degree of inaccuracy
on the authority of the more "knowing"
among the passengers. But this is a case in

24 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
which not even the experienced and obliging
commander of the P. and O. steamship
Sumatra can give us any precise information
as to when we shall find ourselves at the goal
of our voyage. It will not be before the
small hours of the morning, of that we may
assure ourselves ; but exactly how small
they will be he cannot say. A new day will
have come to the birth before we arrive,
so much is certain ; but the age which the
new-born babe will have attained on our
arrival cannot be precisely fixed. It may
be a miserable, purblind, chilly infant of
two or three, or a stouter, healthier brat
of five, or, best of all, a rosy, sun-warmed
child of eight. All depends on our luck,
and our orders from the stations on the
bank. " Do you see that coloured light ? " said
the captain, pointing to a signal some way
ahead of us. " That means that ships from
the North are to hold on their course, and
ships from the South to ' tie up.' We shall

THE WONDERFUL DITCH 25
pass one in a few minutes. Do you see her
search-light ? "
At this distance it looks a mere mass of
silver haze ; but it grows sharper and clearer
as we approach, and in a little while we can
make out the dim outline of the great ship
that carries it. Higher and higher she seems
to rise as we approach, and her squat funnels
begin to shape themselves in the luminous
mist. Another minute or two and we are
alongside; and, though the Sumatra is
assuredly no cock-boat, the ship we are pass
ing seems to tower above us, a huge black
wall with motionless figures gazing at us
over its battlements. Inquisitive passengers
hail these apparitions from our side with
inquiries as to name and nationality of the
vessel, but they vouchsafe no reply. Again
and again the question is repeated, but still
no answer. This is absurd, since everybody
understands the English language; it even
seems uncanny. Not a sound comes from
them, not a limb stirs, not a footfall is heard

26 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
on her decks as we glide past this looming
bastion, and exchange its utter blackness for
the grey surface of the canal bank. For all
that appears she might be the phantom ship
that the Ancient Mariner saw, the ship of
"the nightmare Death-in-Life, that thicks
men's blood with cold." As a matter of fact,
she is a French transport returning with
troops from Madagascar.
If she looked spectral in the weird half-
light around us, it is only because every
other object which we are passing has a
phantasmal air. The patch of illuminated
water before our bows is as bright as day ;
but the buoys which lie outside this luminous
arc slip past us like a grey procession of
ghosts, the banks are as shadowy as the
shores of Styx itself, and the desert stretches
away on either side vast and silent, like the
" empty kingdoms of Dis." It would scarcely
surprise one to see Charon pulling across our
wake with a boatload of strengthless shades.
The ferryman and his freight would hardly

THE WONDERFUL DITCH 27
seem more unearthly than the whole scene.
As we creep thus leisurely onward the sound
of our engines has become little more than
an audible murmur. No faintest echo of
man or animal reaches us from either shore.
The silence is unbroken save by the occa
sional clang of the electric signal bell from
the bridge and the sleepy lapping of the
water about our bows. The endless train of
buoys filing dimly past us on the waters, the
canal banks drifting by in grey monotony,
begin at last to affect the senses like the
reiterated cadence of a song. They lull your
brain by degrees, especially at midnight, into
a sort of half-waking slumber, in which you
seem to be sailing dream-like through a world
of dreams, till at last you might almost be
lieve that the mysterious channel itself which
you are navigating is still the vision that it
was to the Pharaoh of 3000 years ago, and
to Persian and to Greek, to Roman and to
Arab since his day, and that M. Ferdinand
de Lesseps never appeared among the sons

28 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
of men to build up a reputation in one
isthmus and to wreck it in another.
But it is our turn to "tie up " and give the
northward-bound ships a chance, and to tie
up may mean a wait of any length from half
an hour to thrice that time. With so much
more of the canal still to be traversed before
we reach our destination a tying up of the
steamer justifies the turning in of the pas
senger. We have still four or five good
hours before us ere we bring to in Lake
Timsah, and the steam tender bears us across
its waters in the grey of the morning towards
"the haven where we would be."

CHAPTER III
THE STREETS OF CAIRO
Among those who have seen many Oriental
cities there is controversy as to which of them
most conspicuously embodies the character
istics of the East. Some lay claim to have
found in Syria, others in Persia, and yet
others in India the type in question ; yet one
cannot help suspecting that if a vote were
taken upon a sort of scrutin de liste of all the
more famous capitals and great towns of Asia
and Northern Africa, Cairo would win the
first place among cities, as Themistocles won
it among Athenian commanders. Every
body, that is to say, after putting his own
special favourite first, would put Cairo second.
The colour and movement and perpetual
play of light and shade on an ever-shifting

30 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
mass of hues, that kaleidoscope of humanity
which the ordinary every-day traffic of the
Egyptian capital keeps twirling before the
eyes must be bad to beat. Even here, on
this hotel terrace, bathed in the morning glory
of that peculiarly liquid sunshine which is
almost a speciality of Egypt — even here, in
front of Shepheard's, where the West is ever
busily dashing its sombre blacks and sober
greys on the glowing palette of the East, the
effect is almost bewildering. But the coat
and boots and billycock of the European,
with their suggestions of the incongruous and
the over-civilised and the unpicturesque, are
easily got rid of. That is the charm of Cairo.
You step aside from one of the main thorough
fares, crowded with Western vehicles of every
description, from the drag to a pony trap, and
in an instant you are at once in a maze of
alleys, where no draught animal of any kind
has ever set foot since the houses were built
on either side, and through which you may
thread your way, surrounded by the same

THE STREETS OF CAIRO 31
moving masses of colour for as many hours
as you please without emerging again into
Western civilisation.
Lost, in every sense of the word, geogra
phically as well as imaginatively — for there
is no city, not even Venice, where you can
become hopelessly ddsoriente with so little
trouble — you wander on amid the restlessly
flowing stream of swarthy turbaned faces and
lithe white-and-blue robed figures, your ears
filled with the strange cries and your senses
intoxicated with the nameless odours of the
East Further and further you ramble, and
deeper and deeper plunge into this magic
labyrinth of winding ways. The alleys seem
to narrow more and more every minute until
the rich brown profusely-carven woodwork
of the jutting gables on either side of the
roadway almost threatens to meet and blot
out the strip of burning blue above your
head. As the street straitens the crowd
appears to thicken, until at the moment when
the one is at its narrowest and the other at

32 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
its densest you step out into a little square
in which the blaze of colour and the play of
movement reach their height. You are in
the carpet bazaar of Cairo — the spot at which
the many-coloured throng around you finds
its most gorgeous background. Carpets of
every hue and web — Tunisian, Algerian,
Smyrniote, Persian — drape the whole quad
rangle with an arras worthy of a Sultan's
seraglio. To think in "cold blood," and out
of sight of it, of such a picture in such a
frame would be to conjure up a vision of
crude and garish magnificence at which the
eye would ache and the taste revolt. But
the East is an artist of unerring though un
studied skill, and every patch of brilliant
and violently contrasted colour that it seems
to have flung so recklessly together has fallen
as by a divinely pre-established harmony
into its proper and most effective place.
And Nature herself, in compounding the
pigments for these swarthy skins, has entered
into a decorative conspiracy with man. Con-

THE STREETS OF CAIRO 33
sidered merely as an arrangement in browns,
the faces of a Cairene crowd are a study in
themselves. Between the light cafd-au-lait
colour of the half- Westernised Levantine
and the blue-black negroid from Abyssinia
or the Soudan, there are well-nigh half a
dozen different shades distinguishable to the
attentive eye. The cafd-au-lait changes to
chocolate, the chocolate to a kind of cafe" noir,
the kind that you complain of on grounds of
defective strength; and this, again, to the
kind that you complain of on the strength
of excessive grounds. Then comes the
lustreless jet, as of the unpolished boot ;
and then — last and lowest note of the gamut,
the lower C, so to speak, in the descending
scale of colour — comes that deep glossy
ebony which might drive all the blacking
manufacturers in the world to the despairing
confession that, whatever a certain fashionable
paradoxist of the day may say to the con
trary, Nature is, here, at any rate, superior
to art. It is from this point, however, that
c

34 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
the artist, conscious or unconscious, takes
his start, and there is simply no limit to the
varied effects that he can produce with this
army of browns on the one hand, and, on
the other, every shade of yellow, from the
deepest orange to the palest primrose, open
to him for his turban, and for his body-gar
ment every gradation of colour that divides
" forget-me-not " from " navy " blue. White,
I suppose, is, take it all round, the prevailing
mode both for head-dress and robe ; but for
the latter blue is also " much worn," as the
fashion-books say, and the variety of colour-
schemes obtained by combining its varying
values with every imaginable shade of brown
in the face and of yellow and red in the
turbans is inexhaustible and a source of ever-
new delight.
But, after all, this whirlpool of colour fur
nishes only one element in Cairo's complex
charm. It is a charm of endless contrast,
not chromatic alone — of contrasts of race,
features, form, costume, attitude, occupation,

THE STREETS OF CAIRO 35
movement, mood ; of everything, in short,
which belongs to man and man's surround
ings. This it is that makes the magic of the
marvellous Eastern city for the Western eye.
Splendour and squalor, the gracious and the
hideous, stolidity and vivacity, dignity and
frivolity, conflict and intermingle at every
step. The mere confusion of races in its
streets would be enough to bemuse the
newly-arrived traveller. Gibraltar itself is
beaten by it as a sentina gentium ; nothing
beats it that I have ever known or heard of,
except Port Said. It is a perfect salad of
nationalities, and a salad mixed by that
" madman " who, according to the old recipe,
should stir the bowl after the miser has
added the vinegar and the spendthrift the
oil. The babel of languages is positively
Pentecostal. Parthians and Medes, Greeks
and Arabians, dwellers in Mesopotamia and
the parts of Libyia about Cyrene, are all
represented here, and if the miracle of the
first Whit Sunday were to repeat itself, the

36 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
audience assembled here would be fully as
well qualified to appreciate it as its original
witnesses. Nor is the medley of manners
less striking than the hotch-potch of races
and the tangle of tongues. The Oriental of
popular Western conception is grave and
dignified of aspect, tall of stature, stately of
gait, slow of speech and movement, calm and
impassive of temperament ; and popular
Western conception is not wrong. The
Oriental is all these things — and their
opposites. In one form of him he treads
the roadway with the majesty of Haroun
Alraschid ; in another he scampers through
the streets like a Parisian gamin. Here his
utterance is as measured, his manual actions
as restrained as those of an English judge
pronouncing a capital sentence ; there, just
across the street, he is as full of jabber and
gesture as a Neapolitan lazzarone. The
features of that venerable merchant who has
pipes to sell are as absolutely unemotional as
a Red Indian's ; but if the purchaser who is

THE STREETS OF CAIRO 37
^haggling with him for the abatement of a
piastre were pleading for the life of his only
child the passionately suppliant expression of
his countenance would more than satisfy the
dramatic requirements of the situation. The
East and the South, in short, join hands at
this longitude and latitude with a singular
effect, as of the contact of two extremes ; and
man, paradoxical as it may sound, is here
both a more reserved and a more demon
strative animal than he is in the North and
West. One may ramble, however, through the
streets of Cairo for an hour at a time without
finding very many opportunities for compar
ing the Eastern and Western types. Choose
well your region and your hour, and you will
find few Englishmen at the bazaars, and, in
deed, few European costumes at all, save
those which here and there incongruously
clothe some Levantine trader of race too
, , , obvious to need the confession of his scarlet
fez. As you slowly make your way back to

38 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
your hotel, conducted, as you will inevitably
have to be were you the most inspired of
topographers, by an improvised native guide,
you will pass unvaryingly, at any rate until
you hit off the Muski or the Boulevard
Mehemet Ali, through the same burnoused
and turbaned crowd that has surrounded you
from the first. Yet no ! If you are fortunate
you may, just at the moment when the tide of
Oriental life is at its full, come across one
crowning contrast, one final shock of piquant
opposites, one topmost culmination and apex
of the pyramid of picturesque contrarieties
which has been accumulating, layer by layer,
during your walk. Has that piece of good
fortune befallen you ? Yes, it has.
Look down this narrow alley. Let your
eye thread its way through the seething,
jostling, rainbow-coloured multitude that
streams along it ; past the water-carrier, with
his bellied skin-wallet slung across his shoul
ders, and his metal cups jingling musically to
the cry of his trade ; past the camel-rider,

THE STREETS OF CAIRO 39
swaying on his ungainly beast ; past the
group of chattering loungers outside the
cross-legged, gravely-smoking slipper-seller's
stall : and what is that apparition which has
just turned the corner from the main street,
and is now advancing slowly towards you
along that narrow strip of blinding sunlight
in the middle of the road ? What is that
figure, which completes the scheme of colour
with one vivid blot of scarlet and another of
white, and puts the last dramatic touch to the
contrast of East and West ? The scarlet
blot is the uniform coat of the British lines
man ; the white blot is the pith pickelhaube
of the same ; and the whole apparition is
that of Private Thomas Atkins, of the
115th, or South-West Wurzelshire Regiment,
sedately taking the air on a donkey ! To see
him jigging rhythmically towards you, the
sole visible representative of Western civili
sation, the one bright " Occidental Star" — to
borrow the description of Queen Elizabeth
from the Preface to the Prayer Book — amid

40 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
this enveloping cloud of Orientals, is to feel
oneself confronted with the strangest possible
combination of the humanly comic and the
historically impressive.
He is a trifle short, is Tommy, and his
stature is not increased to the eye by the sur
mounting pickelhaube, which looks, as no
doubt it must look if it is fully to serve its
purpose, several sizes too large for its wearer.
But he carries himself well, and he could not
bestride his charger with more resolute dignity
if the charger were Copenhagen and he the
Iron Duke. Behind him trots the donkey-
boy, rending the air with friendly yells, and
dividing his copper visage with a grin which
shows his entire four-octave keyboard of daz
zling white teeth, while jocular exclamations
in Arabic assail the rider's ears from every
side. But in comparison with the stony im
mobility of Atkins's countenance the expres
sion of the Sphinx is one of shy and uneasy
self-consciousness. No sign of animation, no
evidence even of any perception of surround-

THE STREETS OF CAIRO 41
ing objects ; nay, no hint of any acknowledg
ment of a community of human nature with
the living beings among whom he is passing
is visible in any feature of his face until he
is abreast of his countryman. Then for one
brief moment the wooden lineaments relax,
the eye is cast towards you with a momentary
flash of recognition, the cockney nez retrousse"
receives an almost imperceptible upward jerk,
a faint smile flickers on the lips for a moment,
to be immediately afterwards suppressed as a
weakness not to be indulged in before the bar
barian, and the gallant fellow turns the corner
of the street and disappears from view. He
was here and he has gone ! The vision of
the red coat and white helmet has passed
before the eyes and vanished as fleetingly as
a dream. The English uniform has flitted
for a moment across the scene, like a streak
of stormy sunlight across a swollen river ;
has flitted and flashed away, and the eternal
tide of Oriental life flows on.
O, Thomas! is it an allegory— an "alle-

42 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
gory on the banks of the Nile ? " Dost
thou, the symbol of British conquest in thy
military attire, symbolise also in the swiftness
of thy transit its brief duration ? Four of
the world's conquerors have already swept
over this hoary land and are gone. Persian
and Macedonian, and Roman and Arab —
they have all passed, like the bird or the
arrow of Ecclesiastes, behind whose flight
the air closes, so that no man can tell of its
passage. Their records remain, as all things
remain in this country of the imperishable;
but the traces of their power in anything
more human or vital than graven granite or
moulded clay might be sought in vain. The
conquests which create peoples, the wars
which sow the seeds of States are here un
known. Master after master of Egypt has
come as a conqueror; and as conquerors
always, and as nation-builders never, the
dynasties founded by them have ruled and
have disappeared, the fruits of their victories
perishing with them, and the mere tradition

THE STREETS OF CAIRO 43
of their triumphs alone remaining. Where
are the hoof-prints of Cambyses, and of
Alexander, of Caesar and of Omar ? Can it
be, O Thomas, that thy donkey, even thine,
makes tracks as fleeting as the chargers of
those mighty warriors, and that thy sojourn
here is destined, like theirs and their descend
ants', to be remembered but as a mere brief
episode in the history of this strange monu
mental people, who still look forth upon
the traveller with the self- same eyes and
faces that confront him from their sculptured
tombs ?

CHAPTER IV
TOMMY'S EGYPTIAN CHRISTMAS
Our Christmas pudding, like our morning
drum, rolls round the globe, and the British
soldier keeps the great national festival in
many a remote and unfamiliar region in
every zone. But nowhere, perhaps, is it
celebrated among stranger surroundings than
environ one on the dusty parade-ground
where the troops of our Cairo garrison are
assembled for their Christmas sports. Could
the great Saracen prince who built the
Citadel only leave his green-scarfed houris
for a couple of hours to revisit it, what would
he think of the scene before his eyes?
Saladin, it is true, would find an old ac
quaintance in the English infidel. He and
we gave and took hard knocks in Palestine

TOMMY'S EGYPTIAN CHRISTMAS 45
700 years agone ; but perhaps his recollec
tions of Plantagenet knights and cross-
bowmen would hardly assist him to recog
nise their successors in the persons of Tommy
Atkins and his officers. Nor would he be
aided in this recognition by an observation
of the particular form of activity in which, as
we drive under the massive archway of the
Citadel and enter the barrack-square, sur
rounded by a crowd of blue-gowned, grin
ning, gesticulating Arabs, who are probably
not much altered in appearance from the
Cairene donkey-boys of the days of the last
Fatimite Caliphs, a row of broad-faced,
bullet-headed British soldiers, each one of
them planted firmly on the back of an un
willingly participating steed, is contending
for the prize of victory. It is the second
event in the day's programme — the " tug-of-
war on donkeys " — and a long and indecisive
event it proves. It might be war on the old
system, with both of the armies withdrawn
into winter quarters, so immovable are the

46 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
two forces, and so uneventful the situation.
Both sides pull till their joints crack, but
neither produces the least effect upon the
other. Nor does either receive the slightest
assistance from their own animals, or en
counter any resistance, save that of inertia,
from those of their opponents. Each ass
stands motionless, inconvenienced by both
belligerents but aiding neither, a perfect type
of the conscientious neutral ; and as eight
men cannot be expected, without some very
commanding superiority in weight and
strength, to drag along an equal number of
their comrades plus eight donkeys, and at
the same time to kick or otherwise persuade
eight other profoundly unsympathetic asses
into rendering their assistance, the contest
naturally ends in a draw, both sides retiring
with equal honour from the field.
The "Officers' Mule Race" would no
doubt have been less surprising to our Sara
cenic revenant, who would naturally assume
that the descendants of the Crusaders must

TOMMY'S EGYPTIAN CHRISTMAS 47
know how to ride, though he might not
expect to find them as much at home on a
barebacked courser as his own wild horsemen
of the desert. He would be puzzled, again,
however, by the " Children's Handicap," one
of the prettiest events of the day, with its
dozen or so of small competitors dashing off
at the word of the starter, and the fair-haired,
delicate-featured officer's child running neck-
and-neck with the sturdy progeny of Mr. and
Mrs. Thomas Atkins for a prize of thirty
piastres, or a little more than six silver
shillings. And, above all, what would
Saladin, the son of Yussuf, have said to
the boot-race, with its strange and onerous
conditions ? " Boots," he would have read,
or his interpreter would have read to him
from his programme — " Boots to be taken off
at starting-post, placed in a heap fifty yards
off, race to heap, competitors to pick out their
own boots, and the first to return to starter
with boots fully laced up to win." Severe as
is this trial of the qualities of fleetness of the

48 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
foot, quickness of eye, dexterity of hand, and
a nice discrimination in boots, it is made yet
more arduous by the exertions of the stewards,
who mix the boots of the competitors with all
the care of a croupier shuffling a pack of
cards. At last the operation is completed,
the bootless antagonists withdraw to the
starting-place, and toe the line with their
stocking-soled feet. The word is given, and
they are off. The fifty yards are soon
cleared and in another moment they fall
headlong, hands and knees, upon the heap,
a pushing, jostling, hustling mass, while the
dust rises in a dense cloud, shoulder high,
around them, and, above their heads — since
the next best thing to finding your own boots
is to throw those of your rivals to as great a
distance as possible — the upper air is black
with boots. After a minute or two of wild
confusion, some half-dozen of the competitors
burst breathless from the struggling crowd,
each with a pair of boots, his own or another's,
held high in air. One flings himself down at

TOMMY'S EGYPTIAN CHRISTMAS 49
the very outskirts of the meUe; another hurries
to a distance — freedom from interruption
seeming to him worth securing, even at the
expense of lost ground. Dusty feet are
thrust with furious haste into boots, them
selves already half filled with dust by facetious
hands ; nervous fingers pluck at the laces ;
then one man leaps to his feet and rushes for
the goal. In another moment a second is in
pursuit of him, a slower lacer, but a faster
racer, and the two breast the handkerchief
almost side by side.
Other "events " as interesting, but certainly
no less bewildering to the shade of his High
ness the Caliph, succeed the boot-race- Infidel
non - commissioned officers, each holding
between his teeth a spoon with an egg
balanced in its bowl, career cautiously over a
fifty yards course for a prize of a turkey and
a pair of chickens to him who shall reach the
goal with his fragile charge unbroken. Then
privates, mounted on donkeys for a wrestling
match, proceed to show, as Napier says of
D

50 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
their forefathers on the terrible field of Al-
buera, " with what majesty the British soldier
fights." With little, it must be owned, of the
science that the Arab equestrian wrestler dis
plays, they tear the shirts off each other's
back in the fury of their grapple, finishing, as
a rule, in about sixty seconds or so a bout
which a couple of native donkey-boys would
have artistically prolonged for at least five
minutes. In the meanwhile Arabs, narrowly
watched by a British soldier or two told off to
see that play does not become earnest, tackle
each other at quarter-staff, to the profit of a
veteran "gamester" of sixty years, biensonnis,
who simply does what he likes with every
opponent that steps into the ring. It would
have been a graceful compliment tothefounder
of the Citadel if the feat named after him —
that of cleaving a floating veil in twain with
a sword — had been exhibited, as it not infre
quently is in English military games, by some
trooper of our Egyptian contingent of cavalry.
This, at any rate, the Caliph would have

TOMMY'S EGYPTIAN CHRISTMAS 51
understood and appreciated. Unfortunately
it is not in the programme.
But what is this which follows ? Surely a
contest still more familiar to him by report,
at any rate, if not from actual experience,
than any other. O Saladin ! it is a tourna
ment — a joust such as your spies may have
brought you word of from the camp of the
Crusaders before Acre and elsewhere in the
lands overrun by their unbelieving hosts. A
tournament, did I say ? Nay, it is an " Ivan-
hoe Tournament," a passage of arms like that
in which, though their names are recorded in
no historic chronicle, knights as real as any
you ever fought with took such gallant part.
Hark ! the note of the bugle ! Will Sir Brian
de Bois-Guilbert come pricking forth into the
lists with lance uplifted ? Or will El Des-
dichado, the Disinherited Knight, appear
amid a blare of trumpets at the far end of
the barrack-square? No; there are other
and more modern j ousters. They are Sir
Thomas de Blanchefarine and Sir Atkyn Le

52 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
Ramoneur, one armed with a floury, the
other with a sooty mop. At sound of bugle
they lay besom in rest and, charging, meet
in deadly shock in the centre of the tilt-yard.
The gallant steeds bestridden by them,
animals of a strangely human expression of
countenance, who might easily be mistaken
for two of their riders' comrades, are not
exactly " thrown upon their haunches by the
concussion," as was usual with the chargers
of Saladin's day ; but they certainly remain
erect on their hind legs during the whole
encounter, engaged, apparently, in an ex
tremely animated, though not unfriendly,
conversation. As to their riders, each of
them has attempted that most ambitious,
but, if successful, most effective coup of the
tourney, which consists in aiming, not at the
shield or body of an adversary, but at his
head ; and each has hit his mark. The dark
features of Le Ramoneur are sicklied o'er
with the pale cast of flour, and the candid
countenance of De Blanchefarine has received

TOMMY'S EGYPTIAN CHRISTMAS 53
a rich coating of lampblack. The two
knights separate, and having with difficulty
forced their steeds a few yards apart, they
clash again and yet again, until at last the
black champion, who has indeed by this time
almost changed places with the white knight,
is borne to the earth.
Let us dismiss the phantom of Saladin to
his Moslem Paradise, and wander away from
this scene of the British soldier's harmless
high jinks on a quest of our own. The spot is
full of associations which, though much more
recent, are almost as grotesquely incongruous
with this Yuletide horseplay of the nine
teenth century as are those of the First
Crusade. For the Citadel of Cairo is over
shadowed by the sombre memories of
Mohammed Ali, the last of the warlike
Princes of Egypt, the statesman and soldier
who, assisted by the military abilities of his
adopted son, Ibrahim, might, but for the in
tervention of the Great Powers, have shaken
down the tottering throne of the House of

54 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
Othman fifty years ago, and have founded a
new dynasty of his own upon the ruins. Not
many yards from here rises the magnificent
mosque which bears his name, and uprears
the two exquisitely graceful minarets which
form a landmark visible for many miles to
the traveller in the desert. Within its walls,
rich with shafted alabaster, lie Mohammed
Ali's remains, and he built and dedicated it,
the grim old satrap, on the very scene of the
most ruthless and most treacherous massacre
by which any ruler ever swept political
enemies from his path. It was here on this
height — or, rather, in the narrow way, with
a high wall, which leads to it through the
Bab-el-Azab — that the wretched Mamelukes
and their followers, to the number of 450,
lured thither by a pretended offer of hospi
tality, were slaughtered in huddled heaps by
the soldiery of the Pasha in 181 1, one only
escaping, who had refused to enter the narrow
way, and had cleared one of the walls of the
courtyard on horseback, alighting on the steep

TOMMY'S EGYPTIAN CHRISTMAS 55
slope outside. They still point you out the
corner of the enclosure at which this desperate
leap for life was taken, and from it, if the
stately edifice which surrounds the body of
Mohammed Ali were removed, you could
pitch a pebble on to his tomb. So near to
the death-place of the great company of his
murdered victims did the slayer of the Mame
lukes choose his last resting-place, nothing
doubting, I daresay, of his own place in
Paradise. They had none of our weak Western mis
givings on the subject of necessary, or what
they deemed unnecessary, bloodshed, those
Oriental princes of the old school, and none
assuredly troubled the repose of Mohammed
Ali. At the opening of the overland route
to the East and South, a few years before the
close of the Pasha's long life, a now aged
Englishman passed through Egypt, among
the first batch of travellers returning from
one of our Australasian colonies. He and
his companions were royally entertained at

56 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
Cairo, and, among other attentions, he was
admitted to view his host's bed-chamber. Its
severe simplicity was relieved by but one
mural decoration — a picture. It was a portrait
of the single Mameluke who had escaped him.
The sole memento of that ancient crime, now
more than thirty years behind him, which
Mohammed Ali cared to cherish, was one
which would serve to remind him, for pre
caution's sake, of the features of his one
surviving enemy.
But the sports are over. The turbaned
spectators are trooping down the hill to the
town, and Tommy Atkins is betaking himself
to barracks after a Christmas Day spent
much better, thanks to the kindly forethought
of his officers, than in fortifying himself with
strong liquors against the gentle melancholy
naturally engendered by a Christmas cele
brated in exile. Tea is awaiting us in the
hospitable messroom of the Citadel, and from
its windows, which command an unrivalled
view of this pearl of Eastern cities, we can

TOMMY'S EGYPTIAN CHRISTMAS 57
watch the countless domes and minarets of
Cairo, now all suffused with the golden haze
of sunset, grow gradually clearer and sharper
in that intense olive green gloaming which
melts so gradually into the magical Egyptian
night.

CHAPTER V
THE FATHER OF TERROR
When that amiable amateur coachman, Count
R., who drives the four-horse drag daily from
Cairo to the Pyramids for sheer love of the
art, assures the passengers who mount beside
and behind him in a blazing sun, that they
will need no umbrella or parasol, inasmuch
as "the road is shaded all the way," they
are apt on the first impulse to suspect that
the statement is one of those expressions of
affectionate partiality which require a strong
dash of seasoning from the salt-cellar of
scepticism. To drive for ten or a dozen
miles along a public highway, and to be pro
tected from the rays of the sun throughout
the whole route is a blessing not often vouch
safed to travellers in a dry and thirsty land.

THE FATHER OF TERROR 59
The world is not built that way, as a rule,
and it is not easy to believe that it is so con
structed between Cairo and Ghizeh. It
turns out, however, that the pleasing assur
ance of our charioteer is a good deal nearer
the literal truth than such assurances usually
manage to get. Perhaps the grain of salt is
wanted, but it is a very small one. In the
town itself we have the protecting walls of
the houses with an occasional strip of boule
vard-planted avenue where the street is too
wide to afford us mural shade ; and, once
through the Kasr-en-Nil and out of Cairo by
the great Nile Bridge, we do in very truth
enter what, without material exaggeration,
might be called a continuous covered way.
For miles before us the road to Ghizeh
lies straight and white between two almost
unbroken lines of acacia-like lebbek trees,
through whose embowering shade the sun
beams filter diluted when they penetrate at
all. A light wind, too, is abroad, enough to
refresh without stirring too much of the

60 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
easily-raised and almost impalpable dust ; and
the air and scene together breathe an ex
hilaration which even the notes of the guard's
horn are powerless to dash. For we have a
guard, and our guard has a horn, and both
guard and horn, as might be expected in the
turn-out of the agreeable Anglo-maniac who
is coaching us, are all that the most exacting
orthodoxy of the English road could require,
in every respect save one. The result of the
combined, yet not always concerted efforts of
guard and horn to produce music leaves
something to be desired. This, however, is
a matter not easy to provide for even in
England, where indeed, one often hears less
harmonious strains than are just now being
wafted on the breeze. There is, perhaps, no
musical performer in the world who has more
need than the average post-horn player to
entreat his audience, in the terms in which a
newly-elected Speaker of the House of
Commons approaches the Crown or its repre
sentative Commission, to "place the most

THE FATHER OF TERROR 61
favourable construction on all his acts." To
demand a pedantic accuracy of musical phras
ing in the cheerful flourishes with which a
guard is accustomed to herald the arrival
of the coach would be to fail in reasonable
indulgence for human shortcomings. It is
probable that unless the will of the performer
were liberally accepted as equivalent to the
deed, and his good intentions treated as
atoning for a proportion of not less than
three or four flat notes out of every half-
dozen, the art of playing a post-horn from
the top of a mail-coach would speedily be
come extinct.
Inspirited by the stimulating sound of this
manly struggle with difficulties we speed
along. Cairo fades behind us into a mere
picturesquely-broken mass of houses, domi
nated to the last by the two exquisite minarets
of the Mosque of Mohammed Ali. A few
more miles and you catch your first glimpse
of the Pyramids — a disappointing one, as
first glimpses of all great objects, except

62 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
certain mountains from a distance, usually
are ; and, finally, after a drive of about an
hour and a quarter from Cairo you pull up
before the pleasant terrace of the Mena
House Hotel, with the world-famed Pyramid
of Cheops — all but the oldest, as it is quite
the vastest of those great sepulchres — a few
hundred yards from the spot at which you
alight. Yet, now that you have reached it,
the chances are that it is not this huge struc
ture which first arrests your gaze. Unless,
indeed, you are a fanatical Egyptologist first,
and a Nature worshipper afterwards, it is
upon the landscape you have left behind, and
not on that in front of you that your eye will
be fixed. Assuredly will this be so with any
one who here for the first time makes ac
quaintance with that most delightful of earthly
sights — the yellow desert marching league
on league with the river-belt of vivid green.
Far as the eye can travel stretches out that
union of the living and the dead — the arid
Libyan wilderness, its parched and stony

THE FATHER OF TERROR 63
levels broken here and there by the low
rolling billows of the sandhills and bounded
only by the western horizon, and side by side
with it along the river-marge that broad bright
strip of verdure chequered everywhere with
rich brown patches of fresh-sown soil, the
priceless gift of Nilus to the children of his
banks. Indescribable in words as is the glow and
glare of the desert which, grey on the skyline
and yellow in the middle distance, seems in
the foreground almost incandescent under
the pitiless sunblaze, it is hardly easier to do
descriptive justice to the charm and refresh
ment of its cultivated fringe. A native of
our own moist islands would naturally be
fastidious, one might think, as a connoisseur
of verdure, and would hardly expect to find
within a few score miles of the tropics a suc
cessful rival of the beauty of an English field
in April. Yet never and nowhere, not even
in the rainiest spring of rainy Ireland, could
you match the deep, cool, glossy green of

64 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
these Nile- watered meadows, from which the
bare red -brown stems of the palm trees, hardly
elsewhere visible, save with their roots
embedded in sandy, sterile-looking soil, uplift
themselves into the golden air. Is there any
other region in the world in which fertility so
sweet and gracious and barrenness so fierce
and forbidding can be so instantaneously
exchanged ? On the right, within a stone's-
throw of where you stand, lie the boundless
reaches of the Libyan Desert — a land in
hospitable and accursed for unnumbered ages
and unexplored by all-subduing man even to
the present day. To the left this rich selvage
of prolific soil, which the waters of the Nile
have for as many recurring seasons strewn
upon its shores. What wonder that so ancient
a benefactor of mortals should have been
worshipped as a god ?
There can be very little that has been left
unsaid about anything in Egypt, and least of
all about that most wondrous of its many
wonders, the Great Pyramid. The Titanic

THE FATHER OF TERROR 65
tomb which rises, dominating its fellows,
from this range of low sandhills has for so
many thousand years aroused the awe of
mankind that the faculty of human speech
and the resources of human imagination have
had a considerable time to exercise and ex
haust themselves upon it That justice has
still to be done to it in spite of all these
efforts, and that probably such justice never
will be done to it, is not surprising. For,
after all, how should it have been; how
should it ever be possible for description to
deal adequately with an object possessing
two characteristics which overshadow all the
rest, and of which one eludes the eye and the
other paralyses the imagination? Size too
huge to be visually measured ; age too vast
to be mentally realised ; that is the Pyramid
of Cheops. It is discernible so far off that,
as has been said already, the first glimpse of
it disappoints the beholder with an appear
ance of insignificance, while when you are
close to it the absence of any standard of

66 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
comparison disables you from appreciating
its dimensions. You perceive, of course,
that it is considerably bigger than its two
adjacent companions ; but then how big are
its two companions ? They also are set in
this sandy desert with no building on the
same level to dwarf with their stature.
To be sure, it is open to you to adopt the
desperate expedient of climbing the Great
Pyramid. There are more, many more,
Arabs ready to help you up its face for a
consideration than you " have any use for."
This method, however, like a drawn battle
between two brave enemies, is heroic, but
inconclusive. The "personal equation" comes
in to impair its validity in a quadruple form ;
in the "form," first, of the traveller himself,
which varies considerably as between one
traveller and another ; and secondly, thirdly,
and fourthly, in the form of the three Arabs,
who — one on your right hand, the other on
your left, and their companion using the
peculiar means described in the outspoken

THE FATHER OF TERROR 67
title of a once famous tract by the eminent
Nonconformist divine, Richard Baxter — to
gether hale or propel you up the flight of
yard-high steps by which you gain the apex
of the Pyramid.
The exactitude of this method of computa
tion is gravely impaired by the introduction
of these four indeterminates ; for there is
certainly many a traveller to whom the mere
fact that the ascent of the Pyramid of Cheops
has exhausted him and " pumped " three
Arabs would afford no solid ground for the
inference that it is one of the wonders of the
world. Figures help us no better. What is
the use of knowing, as a bare proposition of
linear measurement, that the Great Pyramid
is 451 feet high, and that each of its sides is
250 yards long at its base ? There is just
as little use in it, as there is in any of those
ingenious comparisons with domestic (and
now therefore distant) objects, whereby people
attempt to bring the proportions of this
mighty sepulchre within the grasp of their

68 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
imaginations. It may well be, as they tell
us, that the Great Pyramid would fill Lin
coln's Inn Fields, and that its apex would
tower above the cross of St. Paul's. But
this, alas, is not Lincoln's Inn Fields, nor are
we now surveying the summit of our great
metropolitan cathedral from the top of Lud-
gate Hill ; and to fancy ourselves on the
steps of the College .of Surgeons, or facing
the statue of Queen Anne, is surely an ima
ginative effort no less difficult than that which
it is supposed to facilitate.
As to the age of the Pyramid, it is no
more possible to conceive of that than it is to
realise its size. We may flatter ourselves
that we do so when we are mechanically
repeating as the result of the latest and most
authoritative computations of Egyptologists
that Cheops flourished about 3733 B.C., or
some 5627 years ago. But it is in fact a mere
idle form of words. We simply lose our
mental way in these enormous tracts of time,
as we should lose our geographical way in

THE FATHER OF TERROR 69
the illimitable spaces of the desert. The
periods of which we have any record in our
own or in European history are all too
ludicrously short for comparison. Eighteen
times as long a period as divides us from the
birth of Shakespeare ; fourteen times as long
as the New World has existed for the Old.
What measure of the awful age of these
monuments do we get from such compari
sons ? Or, again, a good deal of water has
flowed through the valley of the Thames
since Caesar crossed it at the head of his
legions ; yet the distance which we have to
look back to descry the first historic conqueror
of our islands through the haze of the ages
is but one-third of the distance which would
have had to be imaginatively spanned by
Caesar himself if the conqueror of Ptolemaic
Egypt had striven to recall the builder of
the Great Pyramid. The 800 years during
which that infinitely complex, tremulously
nervous, exquisitely refined organism which
we call modern England has evolved itself

70 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
from the almost protoplasmic simplicity of
Saxon manners seems a long and slow-
unfolded period to us ; yet ancient Egypt
thrice completed an era of equal length be
tween the civilisation of the first pyramid-
builders and the civilisation of the Ptolemies.
This great tomb was nearly 4000 years old
when Antony " well lost " the world for
Cleopatra ; it was over 3000 years old when
Greek art and literature reached their zenith
in the closing years of Athenian supremacy ;
it was more than 2000 when the Israelites
made their exodus from Egypt and Jewish
history began.
But if by these or any other methods of
chronological computation we fail to realise
the age of the Pyramids of Ghizeh, what are
we to say of the still greater antiquity of that
awful Figure which watches over them — the
Father of Terror, as the Arabs call it — the
tremendous and inscrutable Sphinx ? For
the Sphinx, it is now known, is older than
the gigantic sepulchres which it seems to

THE FATHER OF TERROR 71
guard. Inscriptions discovered within recent
years have proved that it is no mere mush
room growth of the Middle Empire, as was
once supposed — no "jerry-built " edifice, if
one may so express it, which had barely com
pleted its two thousandth year at the com
mencement of the Christian era — but that it
was in existence when the Pyramids them
selves were being piled, and that, in all pro
bability, one at least of their builders repaired
it. It is certainly older, therefore, than the
Fourth Dynasty, and, perhaps, even than the
first ; older, it may be, than Menes, the first
human King of Egypt, and no more traceable
to its beginnings than are the gods them
selves. Even to think of its antiquity almost
takes the breath away. Suppose it to have
been only 300 years old when Cheops reigned,
then it would already have been gazing
for 4000 years across the desert when the
Star of the Nativity was stayed over the
manger at Bethlehem. One million four
hundred and sixty thousand times had those

72 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
stony features been smitten by the level rays
of that rising sun to which the great statue
is dedicated; 133 generations of men had
been born and grown up, had married and
been given in marriage, had aged and passed
away, and mouldered, for all the wrappings
of the embalmer, into dust. Napoleon, in
his grandiose, Hugonesque manner, told the
soldiers of his Egyptian expedition that
"forty centuries were looking down upon
them." He did not often understate the case
in his public deliverances, but in this par
ticular instance he was unduly, though no
doubt undesignedly, modest. Why, Alex
ander might almost have said as much of
the Sphinx when he entered Pelusium to
deliver Egypt from the Persian yoke, and
the Father of Terror had more than com
pleted its fifth millennium when Amr-Ibn-el-
Asi led the hosts of Omar to the destruction
of the tottering Byzantine rule.
Sixty, and not forty, was the number of
those shadowy spectators that looked down

THE FATHER OF TERROR 73
upon the struggle of Frenchmen and Arabs
in 1 798, and more than half that number had
been witnesses of the overthrow of the rebel
Ptolemy by the legionaries of Caesar, of the
meteor-like rush of the Macedonian con
queror on the richest spoil of the prostrate
Persian — nay, even of the rout of the army
of Psammetichus by the Immortals of Cam
byses. The Father of Terror has seen it
all. Of all these far-off historic conflicts —
big each one of them with the fates of East
and West — the Sphinx has been a witness,
and it was old itself when the oldest of them
raged out its day of shock and tumult and
died away into the silence of the desert.
" Everything fears Time, but Time fears the
Pyramids," wrote Abd-el-Latif, an Arabian
physician of the twelfth century ; and the
audacious vaunt appears as well warranted
now as it did, when it was uttered 700
years ago. It certainly seems justified of
their stupendous guardian. If anything of
human origin may defy that which all else

74 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
fears it is the Sphinx ; for apparently neither
Time nor those forces of Nature with which
Time conspires have permanent power over
it. The Libyan sands have for ages threat
ened to submerge it. Their wind-blown
masses are even now heaped high upon the
back of the couchant figure and have buried
one of those gigantic paws between which
there stood once an open shrine. It is more
than 3000 years since Thothmes was com
manded in a dream by his " divine father/'
Ra-Harmachis, whose effigy it is, to clear
away the encroachments of the desert. Man,
moreover, has reinforced the hostility of
Nature by his own puny efforts at destruc
tion. The face of the Sphinx has been
mutilated by Moslem fanaticism within com
paratively recent times, and the brutal
Mamelukes used it for a target. But the
power of these upstart barbarians, its last
assailants, was swept away in blood by
Mohammed Ali on the fatal 1st of March,
181 1 ; and the Sphinx remains, still fixing

THE FATHER OF TERROR 75
upon the desert that mysterious gaze with
which it had already for 2000 years con
fronted the endless caravan of days and
nights when the Divine call came to
Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees.

CHAPTER VI
THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES
A smile of ineffable pity rests on the coun
tenance of the aged, disabled, and supremely
dirty beggar who squats at the base of the
Northern Pylon of the great Temple of
Karnak, as, powdered from head to foot with
desert dust, we file past him at the tail of our
dragoman through its gigantic portals. He
is too lazy, too sublimely content with mere
living, is this aged sage, to join for the moment
in the pursuit of bakshish. Moreover, he has
observed how his brother pests have sped on
the hunt for piastres, and the result, so far,
has not been encouraging. When Ali was
thirty years younger he would have had more
perseverance. Thirty years ago he would
gladly enough have formed one of that crowd

THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES 77
of human flies which buzzes round and settles
upon the visitor at the gates of every temple
and on the steps of every tomb in Egypt ;
and he would then, no doubt, have proved
himself as pertinaciously importunate, as im-
perturbably good-humoured, as impenetrably
proof against every known form of appeal,
protest, or denunciation as is now the most
widely exasperating of their number. And
how much that is to say of him ! What an
unbounded tribute to his powers of provoca
tion and his willingness to provoke ! Our
familiar English definition of such or such a
man as " one who will not take No for an
answer " would be a deplorably inadequate
description of the Egyptian " bakshjsh fly,"
the donkey-boy and his fellow-nuisances.
Take No for an answer, indeed ! They
will not take it for an answer in any tongue
spoken of man, whether in the East or West.
They will not take it in any tone expressive
of any variety of emotion, or appropriated to
any mode of address — in the tone of amiable

78 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
deprecation, or of grave remonstrance, or of
passionate entreaty, or of deadly hate. They
will not take it in any form of language
however potently fortified with the most
vigorous phrases of European invective,
or however richly arabesqued with the
most highly decorative specimens of Oriental
imprecation. They will take it only when
emphasised with the stick, and unless the
traveller feels sufficiently at home with
them to punctuate his refusals with a stout
cudgel, he is practically at their mercy. The
venerable Ali is well aware of this ; yet it is
apparently without any wish to join them
that he watches the black swarm of Hamids
and Hassans at their maddening work. The
agonised voices of the victims are audible to
him, where he squats, as their heart-felt
utterances, sounding like so many extracts
from an animated and somewhat profane
Ollendorf, fill the dusty air. " No ! no,
thank you ! No, I tell you ! No, no ! Be
off ! Get away ! Imshi / I don't want it !

THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES 79
I tell you I don't want it ! No, nor that,
nor anything ! I don't want a scarabasus ;
no, nor the foot of a mummy, nor a coin of
the Ptolemies, nor a piece of sun-dried Nile
mud inscribed with the cartouche of Rameses
the Great. No ! No, I tell you ! No, con
found you ! No ! No ! No !!!... . Look
here, if you don't go away I'll  " and so
on, da capo.
All these and many other ejaculations long
familiar to him reach the ears of the aged
man, as also do the cheerful cries of his
fellow-countrymen. "Scarabee! Forpiaster!
Very good Ramses ! Mummy anteeker,
Mister ! Say 'ow much ! You no want
Ramses! Orright!" He sees the sufferers
gradually shake off the terrible "bakshish
fly" (musca piastrisuga vulgaris) and flee
for sanctuary into the vast hall of the
vastest temple in the world. Whereupon,
having observed that hardly one of the tor
mentors has succeeded in drawing a single
drop of blood, he composes himself to sleep

80 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
with the complacent reflection that Allah, the
Merciful, the Compassionate, brings wisdom
to the old ; and that it does not follow be
cause Franks are so mad as to leave their
own countries by thousands and tramp about
foreign lands in droves of forty or fifty head,
that they can be bled at any given moment
by the exercise of sufficient importunity.
Better for Ali to enjoy another hour's sleep
in the shadow of the great Pylon, and fall
upon his prey when they come forth ex
hausted by the perambulation of those acres
of ruins, and confused to the last point of
mental bewilderment by the explanations of
their dragoman.
Not that these well-meant attempts of
incomplete knowledge to enlighten complete
ignorance through the medium of an imper
fectly mastered language are necessary to the
full obfuscation of the ordinary tourist. In
any case, he is likely enough to emerge from
the Temple of Karnak stupefied by that mere
vastness of scale, those Titanic proportions of

THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES 81
architecture which ranked it ages ago, when
it was intact or nearly so, and which rank it
to-day, when it is a ruin, among the Wonders
of the World. It is not the mere area of the
mighty building which oppresses one, though
four Cathedrals of Notre Dame would go, it
is said, into the Hypostyle Hall. Nor is it
merely the altitude to which the towering
columns mount, or their enormous girth, or
their forest-like array. You think of those
huge pillars that lose themselves in the upper
gloom at Seville, and of the endlessly inter
secting avenues of the Mosque of Cordova ;
and you feel that in these two points, at any
rate, Karnak, if it be not exactly rivalled, is
not so very far ahead. It is the astonishing
successful combination of all the widely dif
fering architectural effects which are severally
produced by number, by size, by proportion,
by disposition, by the imperious influence of
mass, and the winning appeal of perspective
— it is the combination of these into a phalanx
of forces to be launched irresistibly against

82 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
the senses and the soul of the beholder that
make the great temple what it is. Those
Atlantean columns, which were built, surely, to
uphold the heavens themselves, and which
seem to bear up their enormous surmounting
monoliths as a giant would lift a child, have
no suggestion of unwieldiness in their colossal
size, leave no sense of excess in their multi
tudinous number. The calyx-capital into
which each column blossoms would take ten
men to span its monstrous girth ; yet it opens
out against the blue Egyptian sky above its
roofless head as lightly as if it were the finest
Gothic tracery above an English cathedral
nave. Everywhere the feeling of absolute fitness,
of perfect proportion redeems this majestic
hall of the offence of mere Brobdingnagerie ;
and whether the eye dwells upon the parts or
sweeps the whole — whether it travels through
the endless alleys of this forest of stone, and
rests by turns upon base and shaft and flower
like capital of its component columns, or

THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES 83
pauses to peruse walls deep-graven with
colossal gods and kings, and still glowing
here and there with the undying colours of
4000 years, the artistic taste is alike satisfied.
So admirable, indeed, are the proportions of
the whole that the stupendous bulk of its
constituent parts is hardly realised. De
rangement of their symmetry seems neces
sary to enable one to measure it in its full
awfulness, as we do there, where one of these
gigantic pillars has fallen and bows its hun
dreds of tons of weight and the superincum
bent burden of its huge plinth, dislocated and
askew, towards one of its fellows. The cause
of this portentous displacement no man
knows ; but the vague tradition that ascribes
it to the conqueror Cambyses may be safely
dismissed. No mortal hands, relying solely
on the strength of human muscles and the
only known forces of an age that knew not of
gunpowder could ever have done the work
of inchoate destruction which is above our
heads. Nothing short of an earthquake

84 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
could have thrust one of those tremendous
plinths into the position of that overhanging
horror. Karnak is the greatest of the ruins of
hundred-gated Thebes, as perhaps it is the
greatest ruin of the world, but it is only one
of many monuments, the least of which would
suffice to make Luxor and its surroundings
famous. For here, on the west bank of the
Nile, are the Ramesseum, and the exquisite
temple of Hathorat Medinet Habu, and those
wonderful rock-built Tombs of the Kings
which were rescued by so strange a series of
chances from the hands of their Arab ex
ploiters but a few years ago. Above all,
here are those two dread effigies of Ameno-
phis, the Colossi who sit for ever gazing side
by side from the desert border over the green
plain towards the Nile and that sunrise which
was fabled to draw from the granite lips of
the northern figure its mysterious morning
song. Perhaps no Egyptian monument more
keenly excites the interest of the Western

THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES 85
traveller, largely, no doubt, in virtue of its
strange legend, than this, the so-called Vocal
Memnon ; yet, seen after the Sphinx, it dis
appoints. Its position and surroundings are
against it. All the associations of the Sphinx
are with the loneliness of the inhuman desert,
with the leagues of barren wind-blown sand,
in the midst of which it rests half buried, and
which in the course of ages has again and
again submerged it. The Colossi, it is true,
have the bare yellow spurs of the Libyan
range behind them ; but their feet are actually
set in the verdure of cultivation, and they
look over smiling plots of wheat and lentil
and dura, a kindly land enriched by human
labour and made cheerful with the voice of
man. Placed where they are they have too
much the air of transported antiquities, of
gigantic "curios" brought over from their
native site and planted by some eccentric
English landed proprietor in the midst of his
fields. Arab fanaticism, moreover, or the
rage of the Persian conqueror, has chipped

89 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
and battered their stony countenances out of
all resemblance to a human face ; so that the
effect of their towering figures and their atti
tude of majestic repose is unassisted by any
of that strange fascination of expression which
the Sphinx so powerfully exerts. Neverthe
less, it would be an uncanny sight enough,
one can well believe, to see those gigantic
featureless figures glimmering through the
grey twilight of an Egyptian dawn, the while
one waited for the first level shaft of light
from the East to smite the vocal effigy, and
awaken that weird strain of music which the
traveller of olden days so often journeyed
from afar to hear. To the Greeks of the
classic period, with their happy knack of
poetising legend, the note uttered by the
statue was the sweet and plaintive greeting
of Memnon, slain at Troy, to his dawn-
mother Eos. To the sceptical Strabo, writing
three centuries after that period, it seemed
the effect of some natural, though conjectural
cause, and one can see plainly enough that

THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES 87
the worthy geographer more than suspected
it to be a mere imposture of the priests
designed to increase their hold on the super
stition of the faithful.
"When I was at those places with G31ius
Gallus, and numerous friends about him, I
heard a noise (says he) at the first hour of
the day, but whether proceeding from the
base or from the Colossus, or produced on
purpose by some of those standing round the
base, I cannot confidently assert. But from
the uncertainty of the cause I am disposed to
believe anything rather than that stones dis
posed in that manner could send forth sound."
To the modern man of science the morning
song of the Memnon, when audible at all,
which is very rarely the case, is a simple
physical phenomenon, easily explicable in
terms of force and matter. According to
eminent physicists it is perfectly possible for
a hard resonant stone, exposed to the sudden
heat of the morning sun-rays following upon
the cold Egyptian nights, to emit a sound.

88 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
Professor Ebers has heard the like under the
porphyry cliffs of Sinai ; the granite sanctuary
of Karnak, the granite quarries of Assouan
are said to be musical also ; and the "music-
stones " of the Orinoco are well known. The
extensive broken and sloping surface of the
Colossus, wet with the dews of early morning
— the tears of Eos over her child, according
to the Greek myth — becomes suddenly warm
at sunrise, and "the current of air produced
by this rapid change of temperature passing
over its rough and pebbly surface " produces
the mystic sound. The " eminent physicists "
who offer us this explanation of the song of
the Northern Colossus have omitted, it will
be seen, to explain the silence of its col
league ; but this by the way. Enough that
science satisfies herself in the matter, and
hat as the chant of the Memnon was holy to
the mytho-poet and fraudulent to the ancient
geographer, so it is simply a natural effect of
heat and moisture to the modern sage. To
our assembled party at the base of the statue

THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES 89
it is the resonant clang of a small metallic
gong or tambourine, stricken by an excep
tionally tattered Arab, who has with catlike
agility swarmed up the twenty feet or so of
pedestal and granite calf and clambered over
the thigh of the Colossus into his monstrous
lap, in the hollow of which both instrument
and musician could easily lie concealed. It
was typical of the history of human thought !
First, the age of myth ; secondly, the age of
religious faith ; thirdly, the age of philosophic
doubt ; and lastly, the age of blank and ribald
materialism. At one end of the long chain
of the centuries a hushed and awe-stricken
throng of kneeling worshippers waiting for a
sign ; at the other, a crowd of globe-trotters
gazing upward from the backs of their
donkeys, while a ragged Arab clambers on
to the knees of the desecrated Memnon to
bang a gong for a piastre.
Let us be thankful, however, that the
descent from the sublime to the vulgar is
no worse than this. Better the weaponless

90 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
native, who slides down the statue, leaving
it none the worse for his having mounted it,
than the terrible foreigner, armed with jack-
knife and chisel, bent on immortalising his
name by inscribing it side by side with the
cartouche of a Pharaoh.
There is, or was, an American — his identity
the relator of his exploits mercifully con
ceals — who went the round of the Egyptian
temples with a pot of tar in one hand and a
brush in the other, and daubed his idiotic
signature on the walls of each. The motive
which prompts these outrages defies psycho
logical analysis. One can only tentatively
conjecture that men like the Yankee with
the tar brush hope that we, who disgustedly
read their names, will "wonder who and
what they are." Whereas we do not wonder,
we know. We could name and classify
them as easily as we can the animals they
probably rode ; and our only wonder is what
particular circle of the Inferno is reserved for
their final abode. Happily there are none

THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES 91
such among the (generally speaking) help
less, but invariably respectful and well-con
ducted ignoramuses who are gathered at this
moment round the feet of the twin giants.
We are a motley and polyglot band, no
doubt, numbering, as we do, among us a
highly-respected English Bishop in partibus
infidelium, a London surgeon of world-wide
fame alike for his personal skill and for
the success with which he has advanced the
borders of his science, a German sculptor of
high distinction, and a jockey whose name, as
that of one of the foremost and most accom
plished of English horsemen, is familiar to
every turf-loving member of our widely-
scattered race. Invalids in search of health,
idlers in search of distraction, busy men in
search of rest, or at any rate change ; Ger
mans indulging their newly-acquired national
taste for rambling; Frenchmen anxious to
look on the land with which they claim
so mysteriously sentimental a connection ;
Americans calmly bent upon doing the

92 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
world within a fixed period and being "on
time " at the finish — these make up the re
mainder of our company. A harmless, nay,
an eminently respectable, if for the most part
an, Egyptologically speaking, unlearned
party. Yet what irony in the thought that
these mighty stones around us were piled by
groaning millions under the scourges of their
square-browed tyrants to make a holiday
sight for us ! Shelley's well-known sonnet
on the empty boast of " Osymandias, King
of Kings " did that potentate injustice. Osy
mandias, it is agreed, was Rameses the
Great, and certainly the mightiest monarchs
"looking on his works" might well "de
spair." But though the Ramesseum and the
Temple of Karnak have survived to render
his name eternal, he, like every Pharaoh of
them all, has missed the far more vital
eternity that he sought.
With infinite care and pains did the great
king labour to protect his mortal remains from
displacement, so that after the lapse of long

THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES 93
ages the soul might find them ready for re
union with it under the decree of the gods of
the dead. It was for this purpose that the
highest and costliest skill of the embalmer
was secured for the preparation of the mummy;
for this that the Royal Tombs of Der-el-
Bahari were scooped deep in the living rock,
and the ponderous sarcophagi disposed far
down in its lowest and inmost recesses. Nay,
it might almost have seemed as if Nature,
co-operating with the designs of the Pharaohs,
had assisted to secure the everlasting sanctity
of these sepulchres by covering them for ages
under the desert sands. But in vain. Ra
meses the Great proposed (about 1300 B.C.),
but in 1 87 1 Abd-er-Rasul Ahmed, native of
the Arab village of Kurnah, virtually dis
posed. For in that year Abd-er-Rasul, " pro
specting around " among these sand-strewn
rocks, chanced upon a large buried tomb filled
with coffins heaped one upon another. On
the greater number of them the cartouche
and other signs indicated that their tenants

94 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
were Royal personages, and that their lucky
discoverer had made a "find " of the greatest
value. They were the mummies of kings,
queens, and princesses belonging to no fewer
than five Egyptian dynasties, and among them
was that of Rameses the Great.
But alas ! for Abd-er-Rasul ! They were
too heavy for one man to remove, or even
effectively to rifle. He had to let two of his
brothers and one of his sons into the secret,
and unable to dispose of the mummies engros
they determined to exploit them en ddtail.
For some time the firm drove a prosperous
trade among chance tourists on the Nile,
selling them these priceless treasures doubt
less for, comparatively speaking, so many
" songs," and replenishing their store, when
ever it ran short, by gruesome descents, under
cover of the night, to the bottom of these
long hidden tombs, forty feet beneath the
earth's surface, and approached by a sculp
tured and pictured corridor of seventy yards
in length. The game, however, was too good

THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES 95
to last. Scarabs, papyri, jewels, of startling
age and yet undoubted genuineness, began to
find their way into the hands of experts, and
Egyptologists began to smell a rat. M. Mas-
pero, the indefatigable Director of the Boulak
Museum, was communicated with, and
promptly betook himself to Thebes, armed
with full powers of investigation. Abd-er-
Rasul was arrested by the police, examined —
some say "put to the question " in the old
grim sense of the phrase — imprisoned, re
leased, and finally frightened into turning
" Khedive's evidence " and making a clean
breast of it to the Mudir of Keneh. Then
all the Royal mummies were exhumed, and
as some of them were found to be decompos
ing, M. Maspero decided to unroll the whole
collection, and Rameses II. was the first of
these mighty rulers and builders whose
features were shown to the world once more,
after a lapse of 3200 years. That exposure
meant the final defeat of the crowning effort
of his religious creed. Osiris and his forty-

96 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
two colleagues may have long since pro
nounced favourable sentence on him in the
judgment-hall of the under world ; and Thoth,
the clerk of the gods, may have duly inscribed
it on his papyrus roll. But the body of
Osymandias, King of Kings, which was em
balmed so carefully and hidden so sedulously
within tons of granite sarcophagus, and under
fathoms of limestone rock, to be in everlast
ing readiness for re-animation, lies black and
mouldering in the Ghizeh Museum, as unfit
for reunion with the soul as are the bones of
his son, Seti Meneptah, the Pharaoh of the
Exodus, bleaching at the bottom of the Red
Sea.

CHAPTER VII
A THEBAN RACE MEETING
In the splendid pasan of the Book of Exodus
over the destruction of the Egyptians in the
Red Sea, the overthrow, not only of " Pha
raoh's chariots," but of his " horsemen " also,
is triumphantly celebrated. If, however, the
word "horsemen" here means "knights" or
"troopers," and not merely "charioteers,"
the passage of Scripture is surely the only
testimony to the existence of a cavalry arm
or even to the practice of the art of equitation
among the early Egyptians that ancient
records afford. No such evidence seems at
any rate to be discoverable in their wall-
paintings or mural sculpture. Any number
of Egyptian kings may be seen portrayed in
the act of shooting at their foes with bow
G

98 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
and arrow from a chariot, and, possibly, one
might find pictured examples of the employ
ment of such vehicles for ceremonial pur
poses ; but neither in battle, nor pageant, nor
pastime, nor religious rite does one ever
meet with any king of the first twenty dynas
ties or so, or any of his subjects, " outside a
horse." There was no Theban race meeting
while Thebes was. No enterprising citizen
of the hundred-gated city ever started a
hundred-and-first gate at which money might
be taken for the privilege of witnessing from
a favourable position a trial of speed between
Egyptian horses. No Seti or Rameses ever
gave a cup to be run for, or founded a
"stakes" fund to be for ever named after
him, and to constitute a surer passport than
mummification to immortality. Never, there
fore, under any of those monarchs can such
an occasion have arisen as that which to-day
seems to have brought the whole population
of Luxor, permanent and temporary, throng
ing forth on foot, on donkey or camel back,

A THEBAN RACE MEETING 99
to the outlying strip of grassland which serves
the town for a racecourse.
The dwellers in this corner of the ruins of
ancient Thebes — insignificant fraction as they
are of its once vast population — have done
their best, it must be owned, to make a good
show. There are, perhaps, 4000 or so of
native Egyptians, collected together from
Luxor and its vicinity, traders of the town,
local donkey-boys with their "allied indus
tries," loafers from the neighbouring villages,
and so forth ; and, packed three or four deep
along the rope that lines the half-mile of
" straight " which constitutes the entire
course, they present a curiously picturesque
contrast to the race-going crowd that assem
bles on Epsom Downs or Ascot Heath. Blue
and white, with an occasional splash of red
from a fez, form a prettier arrangement of
colour than those rows of black and grey
wideawakes, surmounting grey and black
masses of clothing, which together make up
the general effect produced by an assembly

ioo FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
of Englishmen. It is true you miss that
sudden lightening-up — as of a windswept
wheatfield — of the European multitude, when
their white faces all turn in the same direc
tion ; but the loss of this one impressive
touch of chiaroscuro is more than compen
sated by that incessant play of shifting hues
which flickers along the forms and faces of
any restless Oriental crowd.
And restless is scarcely the word for the
throng assembled here, with their native ex
citability heightened tenfold by their intense
eagerness to witness what is to most of them
so unusual a scene. Indeed, were it not for
the difference between English and Egyptian
methods of police this crowd would, no doubt,
be an uncontrollable one. As it is, and given
that difference, the task of controlling it is as
easy as that of keeping even the most good-
humoured of English crowds within the pre
scribed bounds is difficult. Here the swarthy
guardian of order guards it in the most ele
mentary of fashions — mainly, that is to say,

A THEBAN RACE MEETING 101
by the profuse and indiscriminate employment
of the whip. When he desires to make the
native public " dress up in line " he cheerfully
hammers their bare toes with the handle of
his kourbash. When they are straying care
lessly over the course between races, as
crowds will do, and he desires to clear it, he
simply flogs them off it with the lash. The
thong whistles merrily round their brown
calves, and they fly like a flock of sheep,
startled, but not angered, alike without resist
ance and without rancour. It seems as
natural a thing to them that they should be
drilled and marshalled by liberally lavished
blows as that they themselves should direct
the movements of their donkeys by the same
means. And even if they were possessed of
full Parliamentary institutions, it is extremely
doubtful whether any one of them would care
enough about the matter to move the mem
ber for his constituency to " ask a question "
on the subject in an Egyptian House of
Commons.

102 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
The Beshereens, who are to figure in the
first event of the day, belong to a race which
is only sparsely represented among the
spectators ; but it is doubtful whether the
local methods of coercion could be very
hopefully tried on them. There is hardly a
greater difference between the hound and the
hare than there is between this spirited son
of the Nubian desert and the fellah of the
Nile Valley. Lithe, shiny, jet black, nearly
naked, his woolly hair twisted into unwilling
plaits, bright-eyed, with teeth of dazzling
whiteness, and an alert animated air which
contrasts strongly with the dull, meek ex
pression of the Egyptian and Egyptianised
Arab, the Beshereen, as we view him side
by side with the lighter-skinned and more
heavily draped races around him, looks as if
he might indeed have sat for that " Fuzzy
Wuzzy" who earned name and benediction
from Mr. Rudyard Kipling, as the only
naked warrior who ever "bruk a British
square." From his fantastic top-knot to the

A THEBAN RACE MEETING 103
sole of his sable foot, every inch of him is
of the stuff of which fighting men are made.
You would like to see him figuring in an
assault-of-arms with his native weapon, the
spear, in his hands, instead of making what
it must be owned, was very moderate time
as a " sprinter " in the first event on the card,
a copy of which is here subjoined:
THE LUXOR SPORTING CLUB.
Second Meeting.
Thursday, Jan. 4, 1894, commencing at three p.m.
Programme.
1. Beshereen race.
2. Donkey-boys' race, standing on donkeys.
3. Buffalo race.
4. Gentlemen's donkey race, facing donkey's tail.
5. Camel race.
6. Horse race. First and second heat. Best three of
each to run in the final.
7. Ladies' donkey race, dropping rings from palm-
sticks into jars.
8. Horse race. Final heat.
9. Donkey-boys' race, without saddle or bridle.

104 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
10. Thread and needle race, on donkeys, for ladies and
gentlemen. n. Wrestling on donkeys, for donkey-boys.
Still, one must, no doubt, vary the pro
gramme as much as possible at a meeting of
this sort, and the Beshereen foot-race serves
well enough to whet our interest in what is
to follow. The next event, a "donkey-boys'
race, standing on donkeys," is vastly popular ;
and as the dozen or so of rival jackasses are
seen coming up the straight at a pace generally
pronounced to be good, and which, indeed,
does in some instances border upon a gallop,
a roar of Arabic ejaculations goes up from
the side of the racecourse opposite the double
row of awning-shaded seats which constitute
the " grand stand." Many of the animals
are completing the race alone — apparently as
a matter of duty — their riders, like the guests
in Omar Khayyam's convivial lines, "star-
scattered on the grass ; " but the struggle be
tween the remaining four or five donkeys,
whose backs are still tenanted, would offer

A THEBAN RACE MEETING 105
almost unlimited scope for the operations of
the bookmaker, if there were any "ring."
For up to the very last moment it is
quite evidently anybody's race. Indeed, it
is, if one may so put it, even more " anybody's
race" than any horse-race could possibly be.
To say that a horse-race is anybody's race
means that any one horse seems as likely to
outstrip its competitors as any other. To say
that a donkey-race with riders standing on
the animals' backs is anybody's race may
mean — and in this instance does mean — not
only that any one donkey seems as likely to
outstrip its competitors as any other, but that
any one rider seems as likely (or as unlikely)
as any other to maintain his balance. And
inasmuch as any increase in the speed of the
donkey tends to enhance the insecurity of his
rider's foothold, and therewith the risk of his
disqualification through slipping off its back,
it follows that the probability of any one
donkey's first passing the post varies inversely
as his chance of winning the stakes. His

106 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
effective "expectation of success" under these
circumstances could not perhaps be precisely
measured without resort to algebraical formula;
but it can be easily seen, and may be roughly
said, that that expectation is vague enough to
make the contest a very " open thing."
In the present case, the donkey who is lead
ing at almost a dozen yards from home is fol
lowed by a rival whose rider seems to have, so
to speak, a certain amount of equilibrium " in
hand," while it is itself ridden by a youth
whose inclination to the horizon is rapidly
tending to exceed those angular limits to
which man's enjoyment of his glorious
privilege, the erect attitude, is restricted.
The question, therefore, is whether the time
during which a donkey moving at a given
velocity — the product of a frequently and
freely given stick — can cover so many yards
of a racecourse is greater or less than the
time which a human body of a fixed weight,
but with an unfixed footing, will take to slip
off that donkey's back to the ground. It is a

A THEBAN RACE MEETING 107
pretty problem ; but the pace is too good for
the most expert mathematician to have tackled
it. Before he could have said " x," the gallant
little animal got its head past the post, at the
very moment when the last toe of the tottering
Arab reluctantly loosed hold of its "back
hair ; " and rider and stakes were at the same
moment successfully landed.
The next event, the buffalo-race, might be
simply disposed of by saying that it was won
by a man seated astride of a buffalo. Such
a description of the winner would not lead to
any confusion, for there was no other com
petitor who answered to it at the finish.
Nevertheless this contest would have had
its interest for a zoologist; and, indeed,
like the last, for a mathematician also, if
only as showing the number of combina
tions, other than the ordinary equestrian
one, which may be formed out of a man and
a buffalo as the result of a buffalo-race. In
the first place — and this, it must be admitted,
was the most frequent combination, if such it

108 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
can be called — the buffalo may arrive at the
winning-post without the man, who in that
case usually contemplates the close of the
contest from a sitting position some fifty or
a hundred yards in the rear. Or, secondly,
the man may arrive without the buffalo, which
occurs in those cases in which the buffalo,
having rid himself of his rider at an early
stage of the proceedings, makes at once for
his desert home. Or, thirdly, the man may
arrive at the winning-post dragging the
buffalo after him, which occurs when a buffalo,
having thrown without disabling his rider
shows a disposition to exchange the part of
a competitor for that of a spectator. Or
fourthly, the buffalo may arrive, dragging
the man after him, a situation generally
created by the endeavours of a dismounted
rider to stop his runaway steed by seiz
ing its tail. Or, lastly, the man and the
buffalo may reach the post side by side,
the former affectionately clasping the latter
round the neck, and making desperate but

A THEBAN RACE MEETING 109
unsuccessful efforts to remount him as he
runs. Something of the same elasticity of pro
cedure was noticeable in the " gentlemen's
donkey race, facing donkey's tail," where the
animals who succeeded in dislodging their
jockeys either retired promptly from the
contest — the difficulties of remounting being
in the circumstances insuperable — or made
the pace gratuitously hot for those who were
still in the race ; while the donkeys who found
themselves still bestridden, but in no degree
controlled, naturally took a line of their own,
which usually led them anywhere rather than
to the goal which their respective and retro
spective riders fondly imagined themselves
to be approaching. It was almost a relief to
turn from these fantastic and semi-jocular
trials of speed and skill to the straight
forward and almost appalling simplicity of
the camel race. No one who has not seen
the " ship of the desert " under a press of
sail, so to speak, can have any idea of the

no FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
number of knots an hour which it can make ;
while as to picturing to the imagination the
appearance of a fully " extended " camel, the
feat may be simply pronounced impossible.
The finish in this race was magnificent.
Three camels flew along neck-and-neck —
and such necks ! — for full a hundred yards to
within a few lengths of the post, their
ungainly heads erect, their splay, disjointed
legs opening and shutting at each stride like
a dozen jack-knives worked by machinery,
and their riders literally waving fore and aft
with the violence of the motion, as if a giant
was about to hurl them from a sling. How
they held on nobody could see, and Allah,
the Merciful, the Compassionate, alone knew.
Some knelt, grasping the brute's retorted
neck ; some sat or crouched on the saddle-
seat ; some frankly extended themselves
almost at full length on the animal's moun
tainous dorsal ridge, and clung on to the
hump as a shipwrecked sailor might cling
to a rock. It was a sight to haunt the

A THEBAN RACE MEETING m
waking memory, and to ride the dyspeptic
dreams. After the camel race the humours of the
Theban race meeting began, it must be ad
mitted, to flag a little. The horse-race was
very much like Western horse-races, with
performers not of the first class, and the
bare-backed donkey-race was commonplace.
One of the ladies' events disappeared from
the card altogether, and the other drew a
very small field, and went but tamely off.
Popular interest was evidently centred on the
last event of the day — the "wrestling on
donkeys for donkey-boys " — the boys being,
of course, not as the wording of the pro
gramme might appear to suggest the prizes
of the competition, but the competitors.
Three or four pairs of them entered for the
contest, and a struggle of longer duration, of
more indomitable spirit, or of so many and
such surprising vicissitudes no one need wish
to see. The last of the bouts is the best con
tested of them all. One of the two wrestlers

112 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
is a stumpy, thick-set little donkey-boy, the
other leaner and lither, a little the less skilled
performer of the two in attack, but almost
impossible to dislodge. His legs seem every
where. He uses them like a couple of
additional straps attached to the animal's
harness, and while you are wondering how it
is that he holds on when every other part of
his person seems detached from the donkey,
you notice at last that one brown foot has
been passed under the donkey's belly and
between her hind legs, and is hooked firmly
on to one of her hocks. There is as much
manoeuvring for position and the players
seem as fastidious about their " grip " as in a
wrestling match in the Cornish and Devon
shire style. Round and round they circle,
catching at and again loosing each other,
until, each satisfied, apparently, with his
momentary position, they close. The shorter
donkey-boy has the taller round the middle,
and is exerting desperate efforts to dislodge
him. To and fro they sway, and again and

A THEBAN RACE MEETING 113
again he seems — but only seems — to have
succeeded in his attempt. Now, surely, he
has him — Ali is slipping over his donkey's
haunches. No ! he is up again, and well
forward in his saddle. Stop ! he is too much
forward. Hassan, by that clever twist, has
got him on his donkey's withers. He is off !
He is down. No ! he is on ! He is up
again ! And now it is Hassan himself who
is in difficulties. Thus swings the balance of
Fortune, this way and that, and in the mean
time the behaviour of the donkeys is the most
exquisitely funny part of the whole proceed
ings. Side by side they stand while this
battle is raging on their backs, motionless,
absolutely impassive, and with an air of
intense thoughtfulness on their expressive
countenances. On a sudden, and without the slightest
previous warning, one of them lowers his
pensive head and throws his heels wildly into
the air. The kick of a donkey is in itself
not a very common phenomenon ; but this is
H

114 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
not a single kick, but a volley. Not a few
notes carelessly struck with the hoof, so to
speak, but an elaborate fantasia — a passionate
bravura of recalcitration. Its contrast with
the previous inertia of the animal is so
amazing that the spectator is confounded.
To what, he asks himself, is this sudden and
vehement participation in the contest to be
attributed ? To art or nature ? To asinine
impulse or to human suggestion ? The latter
seems more -probable, for keen-eyed ob
servers declare that at critical moments they
have detected Ali in the act of kicking his
opponent's donkey with his disengaged heel.
The stratagem, however, if stratagem it be,
is in any case a failure ; for the tempest-
tossed Hassan neither loses seat nor looses
hold. After a few vain wrenches Ali is fain
to fall back on the defensive. The crowd—
which has long since broken through the
barriers — presses closer and closer round the
wrestlers, too deeply interested to shout or
chatter. The police, themselves absorbed in

A THEBAN RACE MEETING 115
the struggle, forget to flog them back behind
the ropes, and for the moment bear the whip
in vain. Nay, the very shins they were
operating upon half an hour ago now press
with impunity against their own sacred calves.
Authority is human, and stares open-
mouthed, as though made of common clay.
But now the sun is sinking, and the long
contest draws to a close. Twice have the
panting combatants released each other,
paused to recover breath, and again buckled
to ; and this third round is the last. The
grip of Ali's right leg round his donkey's
neck has been gradually relaxing, and his
adversary, disengaging him by a dexterous
or fortunate twist from the saddle, lays him
flat on his back upon the grass. The hard-
fought battle, and with it the Luxor Second
Meeting, is over ; and remounting our don
keys, into whom the sight of their contending
brethren seems to have breathed an unwonted
spirit of emulation, we gallop back in a golden
sunset-lighted cloud of dust to the town.

CHAPTER VIII
A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY
On the edge of the Libyan wilderness, about
a bowshot to the east of the line " that just
divides the desert from the sown," their backs
turned to the mountain and their faces to
the river, sit and have sat for more than
thirty centuries the two Colossi of Amenophis.
Of the temple that they once guarded scarce
a vestige remains — only the stele recording
the pompous titles of the royal temple-
builder, and commending him and his work
to an immortality which the great fane whose
very ground-plan is now lost has done nothing
to preserve. Nature herself has undergone
a change in the course of these three thou
sand years, and Tama and Shama, as the
Arabs call them, once high and dry at all

A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY 117
seasons of the year, now sit through the
months of overflow with their huge feet in
the flooding Nile waters, and throughout
the winter and springtime plant them in its
rich alluvium, green with the sprouting
wheat, or blue-flecked with blossoms of the
lentil. More than sixteen hundred years had
passed since either of them had uttered a
sound, and the silence was becoming mono
tonous. Shama, the Southern Colossus, was
the first to break it.
" Are you still there, Tama ? " he asked,
in a low and carefully modulated voice, which,
however, awoke thunderous echoes from the
Libyan range behind him, and slightly shook
the windows of the Luxor Hotel.
" Why, certainly," replied his companion
in the same subdued tone.
" It seems an age since I heard you sing
at sunrise," muttered the Southern Colossus.
"Does it?" said Tama, with a slightly
ironical inflection of the voice. " Only an

u8 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
age ? Time seems to pass quicker with you
than it does with me, or else your reckoning
of it is different from mine. Considering, at
least, that one World Empire has passed
away, that the Power that wrested from it
the dominion of the East has itself been
waning for five centuries, and that Egypt
has passed under a dozen dynasties, and
more than a hundred rulers since I sang my
last morning hymn, * an age ' seems rather
an inadequate measure of the period, don't
you think ? "
"How long do you make it, then ? " inquired
Shama, somewhat nettled.
"Can't you calculate it yourself? You
must know very well that I haven't sung since
I was repaired."
" Which was in the year — what ? "
"About 200 a.d., wasn't it?" said the
Northern Colossus, after a short pause of
reflection. " Well, if you can't remember the exact
date," observed Shama, shaking down a little

A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY 119
avalanche of debris from a mound behind
him with a rumble of suppressed laughter,
" I can hardly be expected to."
"What does it matter withjn a year or two.
It was the fool's trick of Septimius Severus
whenever it was, and I know that it was about
the end of the second century that he brought
a party here for an Egyptian tour. They came
with the special object of hearing me sing,
and because I didn't happen to be in the
humour to perform just then, he must needs
restore me from the waist upwards, by way,
as he imagined, of propitiating the god. The
consequence is that I have never sung a note
since." " The consequence, you call it," echoed
the Southern Colossus. "Well, I have never
been musical myself, so of course I don't
know what sort of provocation it requires to
make an offended singer keep silence for six
teen hundred years ; but I confess I don't
quite see where the connection comes in, or
why you should have left off singing because

120 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
Severus had some much-needed repairs exe
cuted in your upper story."
" What ? Not as an everlasting lesson to
all rash restorers ? "
"Rash restorers!" echoed Shama, con
temptuously. " You talk as if your song had
been as old as yourself, and a natural or super
natural birth-gift of your own."
The Southern Colossus spoke with some
tartness of tone. He was a little irritated at
his brother's airs of superiority. The Nor
thern Figure maintained a dignified silence.
"Look here," resumed Shama at last, "I
think that after all these years we might as
well be candid with each other. It won't do
to talk about your singing as though it were
an accomplishment of immense antiquarian
value. As a matter of fact, we both of us
know very well that you hadn't a note in you
before the earthquake of B.C. 27. A musical
career of only a little over a couple of cen
turies isn't much to make a fuss about."
"It might have occurred to a more logical

A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY 121
mind than yours," observed Tama coldly,
" that if my power of singing was created by
an injury, nothing would be more likely to
reduce me to silence than its repair. But
who says I never had a note of music in me
before b.c. 27 ?"
"Well, there is no mention of it whatever
in any very early record, and no one, at any
rate, seems to have paid much attention to it
before the Roman period."
" Have you forgotten the beautiful legend
of the Greeks ? "
" By no means. But the Greeks were in
the habit of inventing beautiful legends with
very slight provocation from the facts."
" To them," said the^" Northern Colossus
dreamily, " I was the statue of Memnon, the
son of Tithonus and Aurora, the ill-fated
young Ethiopian prince who was the first to
be slain before the walls of Troy ; and my
song at sunrise was the voice of my lament
to my mother, the Morning, even as the
dews which she sprinkled upon me were her

122 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
tears shed for her hapless son. Ah, me!
It was indeed a lovely myth."
" Oh, lovely ! " said Shama, with a sneer.
" But you must forgive me for reminding you
that my own surface is just as dewy as yours
at daybreak, and, further, that since we are as
like as two beans in one of those pods down
below in the field yonder, my claim to be a
statue of Memnon would appear to be every
bit as good as yours. Besides, why keep up
the pretence of believing this silly old fable
between ourselves ? You must know as well
as I do that the whole of the Memnon legend
arose out of a ridiculous Greek misunder
standing of an Egyptian word, and that we
are neither of us anything more romantic or
mysterious than a sandstone portrait model
of His Majesty King Amenhotep III."
In the stony recesses of his inmost heart-
say, at a depth of about five feet from the
surface — the Northern Colossus was as well
aware of this fact as his brother, and he
relapsed into a melancholy silence of some

A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY 123
two years and a half. But, on one exquisite
spring morning at the close of this period,
just as the first shaft of sunrise darted across
the Nile from the broken sky-line of the
Arabian desert and smote his songless lips he
spoke again.
" I suppose you accept the scientific ex
planation, then?" he said, in a somewhat
embarrassed tone.
"Of course I do," replied Shama, quot
ing briskly from Baedeker. "The sounds
which used formerly to proceed from you
are on no account to be attributed to any
mere priestly trick, for, in the opinion of
eminent physicists it is perfectly possible that
a hard resonant stone, heated by the warm
sunshine suddenly following upon the cold
nights in Egypt, might emit a sound in the
early morning. Perhaps you are not aware
that a similar phenomenon has been observed
under the porphyry cliffs in the Sinai Moun
tains, though you might be expected to know
that it has been also met with as near home

124 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
as in the granite sanctuary just over the river
at Karnak. It is possible that when your
extensive broken and sloping surface — I
speak, of course, of your condition previous
to your injudicious restoration by Severus —
was ' exposed to the direct rays of the rising
sun while wet with the dews of early morning,
a current of air might have been set up by this
sudden change of temperature, and, passing
over your rough and pebbly surface, might
have produced the famous music. In that
case the phenomenon would naturally cease
when the upper part of the figure was
replaced.' "
Shama recited this instructive passage with
considerable fluency. Fragments of it had,
in fact, been wafted up to him on many dif
ferent occasions from the groups of sightseers
round his base, and he had once heard it read
out in extenso — and a loud voice — by a tourist
who had mistaken him for the vocal Colossus,
and under that delusion had clambered up
into his lap.

A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY 125
"Yes ; that is all there is to it," he con
tinued. "Just for about two hundred and
twenty-seven years you, owing solely to an
injury, were a musical prodigy, while I,
simply because I hadn't so much the matter
with me, have never been able to sing a
note." "All art is morbid," murmured Tama,
sadly, yet with a touch of complacency.
" Genius is a kind of disease."
" And you," said his brother contemp
tuously, "could be proud of such a gift as
that ! Why, I would as soon plume myself on
the performance of the Arab who swarms up
your leg for a piastre and hides himself be
tween your thighs to beat a tom-tom."
" Fool ! " cried the Northern Colossus an
grily ; " Don't you see that I owe that very
indignity to the fact that I can no longer
make music of my own ? "
"Well, and suppose you could do so once
more, what, in these days, would be the con
sequence ? Why, simply this : That there

126 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
would be personally conducted parties every
morning at daybreak, to hear the perform
ances. And what would that mean ? More
tourists, more donkeys, more shouting Arabs,
more spouting dragomen, more scarab-
sellers, more mummy-hunters, more carved
Smiths from Birmingham, and sculptured
Browns from Chicago on your pedestal. But
perhaps you enjoy that sort of thing ? "
To this unworthy taunt the silently-indig
nant Tama vouchsafed no reply.
" You don't answer ? I suppose you really
do enjoy it. You positively like being vul
garised." The offensive word was too much for the
mighty figure to endure.
" Vulgarised ! " he cried in a voice of wrath
that rumbled up the Valley of the Nile to the
First Cataract like thunder among the hills.
" Vulgarised ! O, Father Time ! As if any
thing on earth could vulgarise us ! Are we
the meaner or the newer or the less awful for
the bees that hum around our heads and hide

A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY 127
in the crevices of our limbs ? And what
more power over us have the wingless, two-
legged insects that crawl on the earth be
neath us, creatures of a but little longer day ?
Do you forget how many generations of
them we have seen — how many swarms of
these human locusts have passed over the
land and disappeared — how many conquerors,
as they call themselves, have swept with
their hosts along the valley towards the prize
of Thebes, and trampled these fair, green
fields into a mire of blood to grasp it ? Do
you remember them I say ? Ethiopian and
Assyrian, Babylonian and Mede, Cambyses
and his Immortals, Alexander and his
phalanx, Caesar and his legions, Omar and
his savage horsemen, Bonaparte and his
eager levies — all, all have passed before us,
in storm of battle or in pageant of victory,
and all have vanished into the night ! But
we — we remain."
" Yes," said the Southern Colossus, who
had not been unaffected by his companion's

128 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
outburst, but thought fit to hide his emotion
under a mask of cynicism. " Yes, we remain,
if that is a matter on which to congratulate
ourselves. And I have no doubt we shall
see out the present occupants of the country ;
which, by the way, may be all the worse for
the fellah who seems as eternal as ourselves.''
" Fear not but we shall outlive this tribe
of red coats and black hats as we have out
lived the turbaned warriors they have dis
placed and the mail-clad legionaries of the
dynasty before. And then, like enough, that
cry of the fellaheen, which has moaned along
this valley from the age of the pyramid
builders till it was hushed but yesterday,
may ascend once more. But we — we shall
remain when these things of yesterday have
passed away. To the human insects of an
hour we shall stand, as we have always
stood, for the emblems of an antiquity to
which he must bow the head in awe."
The Northern Colossus had hardly ceased
speaking when, under the fast-broadening

A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY 1*9
sunlight, two early visitors from Luxor
trotted up on their donkeys to the base of
Shama's pedestal. They dismounted and
proceeded leisurely to examine him.
" Observe the cartouche of Amenhotep
III.," said the first visitor, "and the inscrip
tion, ' Son of the Sun. Beloved of  .' "
" Oh, yes," said the second, though in no
very profoundly interested tone. "Quart-
zose sandstone, you see. This came from
the quarries between Keneh and Koser, no
doubt. You notice, I daresay, that it does
not belong to the formation of the district,
which consists, I need hardly tell you, of
nummulite limestone. You don't find the
sandstone-conglomerate until you get as high
as  "
" The waist. Yes, that is where the
restoration began. But it is rather singular,
considering how fond the Roman Emperors
were of airing their Egyptian titles, that one
doesn't find any record of the fact. I wish,
old chap, you would just take a turn round
1

130 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
the base of the Colossus and see if you can
happen upon a cartouche beginning with a
hieroglyphic resembling a dicky-bird looking
into a stable-bucket. Because that will be
the signature of Septimius Severus Auto-
crator, the Johnny who  "
" By Jove ! Here's a find ! "
" What is it ? A scarab ? Eh ? Of the
eighteenth dynasty? A relic of that in
finitely dim and distant past which  "
" Pooh ! " exclaimed his companion, in a
tone of withering contempt. " Infinitely dim
and distant fiddlestick! Why, the whole
show is an affair of yesterday. Late tertiary,
every foot of it. You and your scarabs !
No, no, my boy! Nothing so beastly modern
as that. Look at it," he continued, holding
out his treasure-trove. " Do you know what
it is? No! Well, then, let me tell you
that, from the geologist's point of view, it is
the only thing of any decent age in the place.
It's Xanthopsis Paulino-Wiirtembergicus, one
of those fossil-crabs which the Arabs offer

A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY 131
you for a few piastres on the Mokattam, and
which have been deposited here or there by
the sea that swept over this desert a few
million years before these two sandstone
gentlemen took the seat that, no doubt, in
the modern spirit of unrest, they are be
ginning to get tired of already."
And, lightly humming to himself an adap
tation of the irreverent French refrain,
Car ils sont en pierre, en pierre,
Pour eux ce n'est pas amusant,
the geologist wandered away in quest of new
" indications." Tama, fortunately, had not heard the con
versation, and Shama, who had, had never
heard geology talked before, and did not
understand it. Hence there was nothing
to mar the stony complacency with which,
unconscious of their comparative juvenility,
they continued staring over the Nile.

CHAPTER IX
AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER
On the wall of the passage leading to the
interior of the Great Pyramid you will find
scrawled with some rude pigment in the
Arabic script the words "Ahmed the Car
penter." Tradition has it that this is the
sign-manual of the enterprising explorer who
was the first, at least under the Arab domi
nation of Egypt, to force his way into the
mighty sepulchre. Not, of course, the abso
lute first to violate King Khufu's " house of
eternity." The Persians had broken into it
more than a thousand years before, when
already it was over thirty centuries old, and
no doubt the Romans also at the beginning
of the Christian era. But to Ahmed, the

AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER 133
Arab artisan of the ninth century A.D.,
belongs the honour, such as it is, of having
anticipated the Khalif Mamun in penetrating
once again into the recesses of the Giant
Tomb. Whether he got much for his trouble
except the barren glory of recording his ex
ploit on the passage-wall is extremely doubt
ful. A field which had been reaped by
Cambyses and probably gleaned by a Roman
pro-consul of the Empire was likely to be
pretty bare ; and it may be that " Tomb-
breaker" rather than "Tomb-robber" would
be the proper appellative of this Moham
medan artisan. It has been solemnly decided
by the English Court for the Consideration of
Crown Cases Reserved that the attempt to
pick an empty pocket does not amount to the
offence even of constructive larceny, and it
may reasonably be assumed that at the time
when this particular Ahmed effected his bur
glarious entrance into it, the Great Pyramid,
so far as jewels and other ornaments of the
dead are concerned, was completely " cleaned

134 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
out." Another of his name in later days has
been more fortunate.
" Would you like to see Ahmed the Car
penter's spiritual heir ? " asked a well-known
English resident at Luxor, as we stood
watching the noisy crowd of Arabs before
the Pylon of the Ramesseum. " His name
sake, too, by the way," he added with a
sudden touch of that mysterious satisfaction
which is always aroused by the discovery of
coincidence. " Curious ! There must be
something in the name of Ahmed that impels
the owner of it to break into tombs. Yes,
that's the fellow, the old man who has just
shaken hands with the dragoman, and is now
exchanging salutations with the native police.
Oh, yes. On excellent terms with the con
stituted authorities nowadays. Still, they
keep their eye upon him, and if our friend
Ahmed Abd-er-Rasul were often to be seen
walking pensively at eventide in the direction
of those hills yonder I have an idea that he
would be shadowed."

AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER 135
Meanwhile, there was no sign of any con
straint in his relations with the representa
tives of the law. The grey, wiry, rather
humorous-looking Arab peasant of some fifty
odd years was chatting and laughing gaily
with those around him, by whom he was
evidently regarded with the respect due to
a prominent citizen of distinguished antece
dents. " Oh, he is mighty proud of the feat, I can
tell you," said our informing friend. " He
has often talked about it to me with perfect
freedom and even complacency, as a soldier
fights his battles o'er again. Indeed, he is a
little inclined to ' gas ' about his knowledge
of the treasures hidden under these hills, as
though he had had the run of every tomb
that they contain. When, for instance, he
was told the other day of that magnificent
batch of blue scarabs that Professor Flinders
Petrie has just turned up he received the
news with the ineffably superior smile of the
man who could have laid his own hand on

136 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
the Professor's ' find ' any day had it not
been for the unworthy espionage of the
police." " You think that's mere swagger, do you ?
Isn't it possible that he may have discovered
more tombs than he ever confessed to ? "
" Well, he himself never confessed to any.
It was his dear brother Mohammed who per
formed that act of repentance on his behalf."
" But did Mohammed make an absolutely
clean breast of it, do you think ? "
" Probably not. An Arab seldom performs
that operation with completeness, either in
the moral or in the physical sense. But it is
fourteen years, you must remember, since the
confession was made; and during the last
few years, at any rate, we have been digging
pretty industriously out here. So that I
imagine we have opened up everything that
the Abd-er-Rasul family could have known
of, and more to boot."
" How did they first light upon the
tombs ? "

AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER 137
" Well, that is a part of the story that the
guide-books don't give. You must get that,
as I did, from the excellent Ahmed himself.
It is rather quaint and characteristic, and
may be taken, I think, with a somewhat
smaller grain of salt than is usually required
as the condiment of an Oriental story. It
seems that Ahmed, his elder brother, and a
stranger were digging one day up in the hills
there, when  "
" Do you mean actually digging for buried
treasure ? "
" Well, yes, I suppose so, in a sort of way.
That is to say, they were ' mousing ' about
in the usual Arab fashion, in search of any
thing that might turn up in the ' antika ' line,
and be worth anything from half a dozen
piastres to twice as many pounds. But, of
course, he could not have had the slightest
expectation of hitting on the biggest find in
money's worth, and incomparably the largest
in scientific value, that has ever been made
in these regions since modern history began.

138 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
Well, they struck a shaft obviously of many
feet deep, which might either have belonged
to a disused and buried well, or, as I dare
say the 'cutest of the party suspected, might
lead to a rock-hewn tomb. Ahmed volun
teered to descend and explore it. He was
lowered by a rope, and at the bottom found
himself facing a passage, which he entered
and followed — not, I dare say, as far as it has
since been found to lead, but far enough to
make Ahmed Abd-er-Rasul' s heart beat and
perhaps his mouth water. There was enough
to show him that he had struck a vast mor
tuary full of the costly death-gifts of the great.
It is immensely to his credit as a man of
coolness and resource that he was not so
overcome by his extraordinary discovery as
to be unable to conceal it from his com
panions. Calm and alert of judgment even
in the presence of all this buried wealth, he
instantly conceived a dodge for doing his
brother and his ' pal ' out of their share. He
hurried back to the bottom of the shaft and

AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER 139
called to them in an agitated voice to draw
him up at once, and on reaching the surface
of the earth informed them in tones of horror
that he had seen an Afrit."
" Seen a what ? "
" An Afrit, an evil spirit. There is no
Psychical Society among the Arabs, you know.
They are not curious about ghosts. They are
simply afraid of them, and give them as wide
a berth as possible."
" I see ; Ahmed's little ruse was intended
to discourage further excavations on that par
ticular spot ? "
" Exactly ; but observe the thoroughness
of his dispositions. It evidently occurred to
him that his brother or the other man might
on further reflection consider the Afrit story
too ' thin,' so after dark that very same night
he returned on donkey-back to the spot, ac
companied by his wife, whom, like a wise man,
he took into his confidence, and, arriving at
the shaft, he dismounted and threw the
wretched creature — I need hardly say I mean

140 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
the donkey — to the bottom of it, a distance of
about forty feet."
" With the view of ? "
" With the view of giving colour — or per
haps I should say odour — to the story that an
Afrit, who, I should tell you, always manifests
his presence by an intolerable stench, was
really the tenant of this underground
abode." " By Jove ! it was a rather elaborate and
expensive way of creating a nuisance."
" Yes, but effective. A few days after the
donkey's death there was no one in the neigh
bourhood who was not firmly convinced that
an unclean spirit lived at the bottom of the
shaft. Having allowed a decent interval of
mourning to elapse, Ahmed again descended
into the shaft, removed the decomposing re
mains of the donkey, covered up the hole, and
marked the spot ; and then there began for him
that lucrative business in valuable ' antlkas '
to which his brother was afterwards admitted,
and as to the details of which are they not

AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER 141
written in the books of Baedeker and Budge ?
The little game lasted for several years — long
enough, at any rate, to enable Ahmed to
lay by a comfortable provision for his old
age, though, no doubt, he must have sold
many things at prices vastly below their real
value." " I never could quite make out how the
' find ' was found out by the authorities."
" Well, the wonder to me is that it was not
spotted before. There surely must have been
some of the mummy ornaments, sepulchral
vessels, and so forth, which bore the signatures
of the dead to whom they belonged, and
thereby proved that the seller or the person
from whom he acquired them must have ob
tained access to some hitherto unknown tomb.
However, it was the funeral papyrus of Queen
Netemet, of the twenty-first dynasty — a scroll
taken straight from that lady's tomb — which
put Egyptologists on the scent, and finally
enabled them to run the ingenious Ahmed to
earth. However, they wouldn't have managed

142 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
it so easily, even as it was, if it hadn't been
for the fraternal assistance of brother Mo
hammed." " Ahmed was game, was he ? "
" As a pebble; The Mudir of Keneh had
him under lock and key for weeks, and sub
jected him to a most severe interrogation.
Ahmed still points with pride to the record
of it on the soles of his feet. But they never
got anything out of him. That was in the
summer of 1880, and in the winter of that
year his elder brother stepped round to the
Mudirate, and, if you will excuse an Arabic
expression, { blew the gaff.' Then, as we all
know, M. Maspero took the matter in hand,
and Brugsch Bey made his expedition to the
spot in the sweltering July heats of 188 1 and
— but why inflict guide-book upon you ?
Every one has read the famous Egyptologist's
graphic account of this most stupendous of
all archaeological ' finds ' — how he made his
way along the passage from the bottom of
the shaft pointed out to him by the reluctant

AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER 143
Ahmed, and what his sensations were on
finding himself in the marvellous death-
chamber and treasure-house at its end, every
inch of it covered with coffins and antiquities
of all kinds ; ' My astonishment was so over
powering that I scarcely knew whether I
was awake or whether it was only a mocking
dream. Resting on a coffin, in order to
recover from my intense excitement, I me
chanically cast my eyes over the coffin-lid,
and distinctly saw the name of King Seti I.,
the father of Rameses II., both belonging to
the nineteenth dynasty. A few steps further
on, in a simple wooden coffin, with his hands
crossed on his breast, lay Rameses II., the
great Sesostris himself. The further I ad
vanced the greater was the wealth displayed,
here Amenophis I., there Amasis, the three
Thothmes, Queen Ahmes Nefertari, all the
mummies well preserved — thirty-six coffins,
all belonging to kings or queens or princes
or princesses."
" Yes," said one of the listeners, " but even

144 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
that part of the story is not so remarkable as
the incident of the fellahin women following
the boat containing the royal mummies down
the river with their hair loosened and filling
the air with lamentations."
" Strange," murmured another of our party,
" that these old kings should have kept the
treasures of their tombs inviolate for thousands
of years only to be rifled at last by an Arab
villager ! And it is the more wonderful when
one remembers that many centuries must
have passed before these sepulchres were
finally covered up and hidden by the desert
sands, and that during all that time their
position and their riches contained in them
must have been matters of common knowledge.
It says much for the honesty and piety of the
early Egyptians that they seem never to
have  "
" My dear fellow ! " interrupted our friend,
who had been listening to this rhapsody
with a queer smile ; " Don't say another
word. Let me remind you of that pregnant

AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER 145
remark which Sir Peter Teazle makes in the
last act of the ' School for Scandal.' "
" What pregnant remark ? "
" ' It's a damned wicked world, Sir Oliver,
and the fewer people we praise the better.'
I advise you to exercise a certain caution in
extolling the honesty and piety of the early
Egyptians or, at any rate, in congratulating
them on their universal innocence of the
crime of tomb-robbing."
"You don't mean to say that this par
ticular form of sacrilegious burglary is an
ancient  "
" Only just upon three thousand years
old. The earliest recorded case was about
1 100 B.C."
" Recorded ? "
" Yes, to be sure. Ask some Egyptologist
to give you a translation of the passages about
it in the Abbott and Amherst papyri. You
will find enough there to convince you
that the early Egyptians knew a thing or
two about mummy-snatching, and that
K

146 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
Ahmed Abd-er-Rasul is a mere modern
plagiarist." And so it proved to be. For here, fur
nished me by the kindness of Mr. Percy
Newberry, the accomplished archaeologist
who has done such admirable work for the
Egypt Exploration Society, is the translated
record of this oldest of old-world criminal
investigations. " It was found," reported the
commissioners of inquiry into an alleged
desecration of the Royal tombs, " that the
thieves had violated it" (the tomb of King
Sebekensanef and his consort) "by boring
through the principal chamber of the sepulchre
of Neb-Amon, the Superintendent of the
Granaries of King Thothmes III. The
place of sepulture was found to be without
its occupant. So was the Chamber of the
Royal wife, Nubkhas. The thieves had laid
hands on them."
The tomb-robbers, as the public, even at
this considerable distance of time, will, no
doubt, learn with satisfaction, were ultimately

AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER 147
captured and brought to justice. And here,
from the Amherst papyrus, is the record of
their trial. It appears that they were eight
in number, most of them servants in the
Temple of Amon, and, having been "ex
amined," or, in other words, " beaten with
sticks both on their hands and feet" — pre
cisely the same form of "question" it will
be seen, as was applied to Abd-er-Rasul —
one of them confessed to the theft. " We
broke into the passage," said this sacrilegious
Sikes of the age of Rameses IX., "and
found the tomb protected and surrounded
by masonry and covered with roofing. This
we destroyed and found the King's and
Queen's mummies inside. We then opened
their sarcophagi and the coffins in which
they lay. We found the King with his axe
beside him and a long chain of golden
amulets about his neck. His head was
covered with gold, and the mummy was
entirely overlaid with gold, and his coffin
was burnished with gold and silver, both

148 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
inside and out, and inlaid with all kinds of
precious i stones. We took the gold which
we found and the amulets and ornaments
that were round his neck. We found the
Royal consort, and we likewise took all that
we found with her, and we set fire to their
coffins and stole their furniture which we
found with them, vases of gold, of silver,
and of bronze, and divided them into eight
lots." Here, unfortunately, the record breaks
off, so we do not know what punishment
was inflicted on the desperate villains who
thus confessed to an offence which the
orthodox Egyptian of ancient times must
have regarded with unspeakable horror.
But the more remote sequel of these pro
ceedings is pretty well ascertained, and is,
in itself, curious. For it was, no doubt, the
increasing audacity and success of the tomb-
robbers which some hundred years later
induced the priests to transfer the Royal
mummies from their original resting-place

AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER 149
at Biban-el-Muluk to the crypt in which
they were ultimately found by Ahmed-Abd-
er-Rasul three thousand years later. Thus
did Time and Fate conspire to mock these
mighty kings with a temporary prolongation
of the sanctity of their tomb-treasures, with
drawing them from the reverent explorer
only to leave them at the mercy of the
robber. And thus does one resurrection-
man stretch out his unscrupulous hand to
another across the centuries.

CHAPTER X
AN AQUATIC INDUSTRY
Every great river begets its own peculiar
industries which may vary indefinitely in
dignity and emolument, as, for instance, from
the occupation of the boat-builders who let
steam-launches on the Upper Thames, to
that of the mudlarks who scramble for cop
pers in the ooze at Greenwich. The Nile
itself is not without its children of this
description, though the simple life of the
dwellers on its banks does much, of course,
to restrict their number. There is no brisk
demand for pleasure-boats among the fellahs
of the Nile Valley, and even ferries do not
seem much in demand, as one might have
expected. For countless generations, in fact,
the toiling cultivator can have known little or

AN AQUATIC INDUSTRY 151
nothing of the great river on whose banks he
lives save in its sole aspect of the beneficent
helpmeet in his labours. He knows it in
its annual bounty of rich alluvium, and as
the great reservoir from which, at vast expen
diture of labour, he irrigates his plot of land ;
but otherwise he recks little of it, and asks
nothing save that it shall offer its broad
bosom to the heavy-laden lateen-sailed grain-
boats that bear his produce to the market.
See him as he bends at the shad&f with
which, unchanged in form and mechanic prin
ciple, his forefathers of three thousand years
ago drew water under the Pharoahs. Spare,
graceful, active, trained "to fiddlestrings,"
and looking as fit to run for his life as the
fleetest and most Mercury-like of those satses
who do actually run for their living before the
carriages of the "quality" at Cairo, behold
him, one of two, sometimes one of three or
four, men engaged together hour after hour in
the monotonous and, to a European, the
heart-breaking labour of watering a plain with

152 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
a vessel about the size of a stable bucket.
Imagination can conceive nothing more primi
tive than the process or more rude than the
appliance by which the work is performed.
The wooden lever from one end of which the
bucket is suspended, hangs midway in its
length upon a thick upright which serves
as a fulcrum ; the end at which the power
is applied is weighted with nothing more
elaborate than a large lump of sun-dried mud.
The steep bank is terraced in one, two, or
three places, according to its height, by a
rough-cut ledge or ledges, of only a few feet in
breadth, and hollowed out to form a shallow
tank. Into this tank the labourer at the
water's edge empties the bucket which he
has just filled from the river, and from the
tank his comrade or comrades ladle it by the
same rudimentary leverage at one or more
stages, as the case may be, to the top of the
bank, for diffusion over the soil. In its utter
simplicity, in its profound yet contented in
adequacy, the whole operation is pathetic in

AN AQUATIC INDUSTRY 153
the highest degree. It is the childhood of
Labour appealing for assistance to the infancy
of Mechanics. On one side the mighty
volume of moving water; on the other the
far-stretching belt of tilth and verdure, and
between them these two or three patient
adscripts of the glebe emptying spoonfuls of
the one upon acres of the other.
For a full hour I have stood watching the
toiler on the lowest shelf of that shaddf. It
is past noon and he has stood there, like
enough, since sunrise. Three or four times
in every minute he draws down one end of
the lever till the bucket is immersed, fills it,
steadies the full vessel as, with the descent of
the weighted lever, it ascends to the level of
the tank at his shoulder, empties it with his
disengaged hand and stoops again for
another bucketful. His movements repeat
themselves with the regularity of a machine ;
but there is the perfect ease and living grace
of strong, untiring manhood in every stoop
and recovery of his supple frame. He is in

154 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
much too " hard condition " to perspire, but
he is plentifully besprinkled with the splash-
ings from the tank. His toes dabble in the
river mud ; the loin cloth, which is his only
garment, has become a sodden rag ; but he
works on cheerily, wet and warm in the
delicious air, and fanned by that desert breeze
which would leave him as dry as a biscuit if
he paused for five minutes in his work. His
rhythmic motions are so springy and elastic,
his countenance is so placid and painless, his
harmony with his surroundings is so com
plete, his understanding with his work so
thorough, that one might almost see in him
the original of that Perfectly Contented Man
of Eastern story, whom the emissaries of the
Sultan sought everywhere far and wide that
their master might wear his shirt and be
healed, and on whom at last they lighted — to
find him shirtless, like this one, but not
perhaps more free from care. For what, after
all, is there to trouble him ? The times are
good ; he is sure of his simple daily meal of

AN AQUATIC INDUSTRY 155
rice and sugar-cane, sure of the tax in hand
when the collector comes round, sure, above
all, that so long as the English redcoats are
at Cairo once paying it will be enough, and
that, come what may, the soles of those
muddy feet of his have nothing to fear from
the bamboo.
But this, after all, is no aquatic industry
in the ordinary sense of the word. The
Nile is to him but a huge reservoir which
once a year beneficially bursts and provides
him with soil for the planting of his crops,
but from which afterwards he must pump
long and patiently ere he can raise and
gather them. As a river or a waterway for
navigation his concern with it ceases, and he
does not attempt to eke out his livelihood by
the practice of any art upon its stream. Nor,
indeed, do any of the riparian population
lower down than Assouan — or not now at
least since the enterprising inmates of the
Coptic monastery at Gebel-el-Tayr have dis
continued their peculiar method of seeking

156 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
contributions to the support of their brother
hood. Formerly it was the practice of these
" religious " to dive from the rock on which
their monastery is situated, and swim out to
the passing steamer or dahabiyeh to solicit
bakshish. It seems a pity that so picturesque
and adventurous a custom should have been
put an end to by the Patriarch of the Coptic
Church ; but, after all, one can hardly wonder
at his disapproval of it. If the minor clergy
of the riparian parishes of the Upper Thames
took to diving, scantily clad, into the river,
and importuning the occupants of house-boats
for aid to the Curates' Augmentation Fund, it
is eminently probable that their diocesan
would interfere. Anyhow the monks of
Gebel-el-Tayr take their headers no longer,
and an aquatic industry of an absolutely
unique character has in consequence dis
appeared from the Nile. Nor is it till we
reach the First Cataract that we meet with
another, of somewhat the same description,
and almost if not quite as extraordinary — an

AN AQUATIC INDUSTRY 157
industry which fears the frown of no Patriarch,
and which so long as European tourists
throng to the Upper Nile and human nature
remains unaltered, may be regarded as pretty
certain to endure. Yet its existence, were it
not for the marplot guide-books which
discount half the delightful surprises of a
new country — as dramatic critics do of a new
play — might well be unsuspected until it
confronts you in full activity.
You have taken, let us say, the first and
favourite expedition from Assuan. That is
to say, you have ridden over the flat strip of
desert that divides you from Philae to that
most beautiful of islands ; you have duly
admired the gem-like little ruin that crowns
its precipitous sides ; you have thoroughly
explored the Temple of I sis ; too probably,
you have desecrated that beautiful kiosque by
lunching on " Pharaoh's bed " ; and then,
having started for that row home through the
smaller rapids, which is somewhat grandilo
quently described as "shooting the cataract,"

158 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
you are landed at a rocky point on the left
bank of the river, and find yourself unex
pectedly — or what would be unexpectedly
were it not for the marplots aforesaid — in
presence of the singular aquatic industry of
which I have spoken.
At your feet some couple of fathoms below
you races the First Cataract, no genuine
"waterfall" even here at its point of greatest
force and volume, but only a pretty swift,
tolerably deep, and very moderately steep
rapid. Here, where it is at its steepest, the
river twists round a sharpish corner, and
descends to a level some thirty or forty feet
lower by a gradient of, say, fifty or sixty
yards in length. This incline of one in five
or so can hardly be considered very abrupt for
a river, whatever it might be for a road ; and,
indeed, the so-called cataract is merely a brisk
and lively, but in no sense a formidable, or
even an imposing, water-race. " At this rate,"
it was remarked, " we have rivers in Scotland
which are pretty nearly all cataract " ; and you

AN AQUATIC INDUSTRY 159
are marvelling greatly to yourself at that
union of Eastern cupidity and Western fatuity
which has fixed the boatman's tariff for shoot
ing this " one-horse " cataract at from ^10 to
,£12, when lo! you find yourself suddenly
surrounded by a swarm of Nubians, clad in
blue bathing calegons of an almost laconic
brevity, but otherwise in a state of natal
nakedness. Some of them are leaning on
light, though bulky, logs of the dom-palm ;
others — and these for the most part the
younger and more vigorous — rely solely upon
their own limbs and muscles for the success
ful practice of their industry. There must
be a good deal more than a score of them, all
told, and they range in age from here and
there awhite-polled blackamoorwho lookswell
on in the sixties, down to a sable urchin of not
more than ten or twelve. But however they
may vary in age, in one respect, at any rate,
they are unvarying — in their hunger and thirst
after the piastre.
What common impulse prompted them to

160 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
plunge with one accord into the Nile in pur
suit of it it would be difficult to determine.
A hint from some curious spectator, a mere
nod from the dragoman of a party would no
doubt suffice ; but anyhow, in a moment,
in the twinkling of an eye, the whole herd of
amphibia are in the water together. The
palm-log men have scampered off a few yards
up stream to get a better launching place ;
the swimmers, old and young, simply take
headers from the top of the ten-foot bank, or
flop like seals into the water from some
lower perch, and in a few seconds a dozen
woolly heads are being swept at racing speed
in mid-torrent toward the brow of the water
slope, while half a dozen black bodies astride
on palm logs drift more sedately in their rear.
For a moment they appear as though
suspended on the summit of the watery de
clivity and then over — and under — they go.
For some seconds scarcely the head of a
single swimmer is to be seen. The suck of
the under-current has drawn them down ; but

AN AQUATIC INDUSTRY 161
soon the jet black knobs come bobbing up
again like so many burnt corks some twenty
yards down the river ; and then, while the
"log-rollers" drift away still further down
stream in search of a smoother landing-place,
every swimmer — for is not bakshish limited
and time of importance? — turns over in an
instant towards the left bank. Every pair of
arms is flung out of the water and set revolv
ing like a couple of paddle wheels in the effort
of cutting across the powerful current, and
one by one they spring ashore and race each
other up the bank to where we are standing,
their heaving flanks and quivering nostrils
telling plainly enough of the exertion of their
brief but sharp struggle with the river.
Their fuzzy wigs seem to curl tighter than
ever for their dip, and in the brilliant after
noon their wet bodies gleam like burnished
bronze. For strength and symmetry and
inches, for natural grace of pose and splendid
ease of movement, some of these cataract
shooters are unsurpassable. Look at that
L

1 62 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
youth of twenty or thereabouts who is
approaching us and say what he reminds
you of, Truly, you need but to clap a
negroid skull with a Nubian nose and lips
on that noble Perseus of Cellini who stands
in bronze before the Loggia dei Lanzi at
Florence holding the dripping Gorgon's head
in his hand and you have him !
The African demigod advances with hand
outstretched ; he wants a piastre. If half a
dozen of us unwieldy and ill-shapen Westerns
would each contribute a sum equal to two
pence halfpenny English his display of god
like strength and skill would seem to him
amply rewarded. But alas ! the supply even
of such "ridiculously small" coins is limited,
and these divine athletes reverse the propor
tion between the harvest and the reapers in
the parable. They are many in number,
from the aged man who is a little " out of it "
among his younger competitors in the hunt
for bakshish, to the urchin at whose pre
cocious pluck you have been wondering, till

AN AQUATIC INDUSTRY 163
you reflect how excellent a training for the
nerves of childhood it must be to have been
carried down the cataract on the shoulders of
your big brother from as early a date of your
life as you can recall. The piastre hunt is
soon concluded tant bien que mat, and the
hunters are ready to try their luck a second
time. Again there is a sudden stampede to
the water's edge ; again the headers from the
high bank, and the flop-flopping of the shiny-
coated little seals from the lower ledges, and
away once more goes the flying procession of
woolly pates down the water-race, now visible,
now whelmed, until the deepest and swiftest
swathes of hurrying water bury them and
foam over them, and jerk them up to the
surface again in the stiller pools below.
Well, it is an occupation like another,
though to be sure it is not very like any
other that is commonly practised in the West.
Still there are points of resemblance, moral if
not physical, between it and certain well
reputed and indeed eminently respectable

1 64 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
pursuits of civilised man. The life of the
Nubian cataract shooter is, of course, more
picturesque, more highly coloured than that
of the English man of business who goes to
the City every morning by 'bus or Under
ground ; but the nature of his industry after
one or other of those conveyances has de
posited him in the neighbourhood of Capel
Court, has often more points of resemblance
to that of the poor benighted African brother
than he might care to admit. Shooting the
cataract is unquestionably a more or less
" casual " kind of business to go into ; it
would not supply a prudent father with an
entirely satisfactory answer to the question :
" What to do with our boys." You cannot
"plunge" every day in the Nile with a
prospect of profit, as you can on the Stock
Exchange. Nay, you cannot even seek your
own market for yourself ; it is necessary to
await its coming to you at the uncertain
intervals which separate dahabiyehs if not
tourist steamers from each other. Yet some-

AN AQUATIC INDUSTRY 165
how this band of Nubian swimmers and
" log-rollers " are always on the spot.
Where do they spring from ? Who knows ?
No one whom we asked could tell. There
is no village visible ; for aught that appears
the spot is miles from any human habitation.
Yet just as neither man nor beast can die in
the desert but within a few minutes those
tiny specks which are to grow into vultures
appear mysteriously on the horizon, so the
European tourists cannot show in any force
in the neighbourhood of this rocky bend, but
straightway the desert sand is dotted with
the black nude figures of these singular
athletes ready and eager to plunge into a
torrent and be whirled down a water-slope
for little more than what an English working
man would call the " price of a pint."

CHAPTER XI
A RAIDED VILLAGE
It is a scattered Nubian hamlet of some forty
or fifty houses, with one larger building, the
abode of the local Sheikh, conspicuous in its
midst. Behind it stretch the long levels of
the Arabian Desert, and somewhat further in
its rear arises a barren ridge of hills to a
height of some three or four hundred feet.
The Nile, here broad and peaceful, stealing
smoothly down to its rocky prison at Bab-el-
Kalabshi, has edged the little village with a
narrow strip of its richly fertile soil, now
thickly covered with green-leaved shrubs of
the kiki and sweet with flowering beans.
Between us and the river, as we pass along
the broken line of mud-cabins, stand the
cattle-pens of the peasantry, no longer, thanks

A RAIDED VILLAGE 167
to timely aid from the Administration, en
tirely denuded of their stock. Goats and
sheep are not wanting, and here and there,
through the wattled fences of dura, we catch
glimpses of horned cattle. It is just an ordi
nary Nubian village, such as one passes in
scores on both banks of the river between
the Cataracts ; yet we approach it in a very
different mood of mind from that in which we
should enter any of its neighbours. Indeed,
our very debarcation on a spot so like a
thousand others in Upper Egypt is enough
in itself to keep its object continually before
our minds, and the constant presence of our
military escort is not needed to refresh our
memories. From the First Cataract upwards we have
been "shadowed" by this sable bodyguard
from a Soudanese regiment, each with an
honest, round, blubber-lipped face, as black
and shiny as a patent-leather boot, but tall,
strapping, well-set-up fellows, making as
brave a show in their blue and yellow jackets

168 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
and red sashes as the heart of man or
woman could desire. We have eight and
twenty of them all told, six men and a non
commissioned officer to each of our four
boats. Their duty is to guard the bodies
of us helpless tourists from Assuan to
Wady Haifa, and they perform it with a
fidelity so conscientious as to become almost
comic. The temples of this part of Upper
Egypt are most of them conveniently near
the shore, a climb of a few score feet, or a
walk of a few hundred yards being usually
all that is necessary to reach them. Swift
as are its movements, a band of Dervishes
could hardly descend upon us rapidly enough
to cut us off from our boats. Nevertheless,
there stand our black men-at-arms ready
even for this emergency. A couple of them
mount guard at the landing-place, two others
accompany the sight-seers up the bank, a
third pair we find waiting for us at the doors
of the temple. In the early morning, when
the stern-wheeler has been tied up to the

A RAIDED VILLAGE 169
bank the previous night, you may dimly
descry one of them doing sentry-go along
the dusty shore. At the great rock-temple
of Abu Simbel he was to be seen patrolling
one of the lower ledges of the sandstone
rock, in front of the four gigantic Colossi,
looming awful in the dawn-light, with a
peculiarly weird effect. At the end of the
hour's ride into the desert, which must be
taken to reach the rock of Abu Sir, with its
view of the Second Cataract, you note the
figure of a black soldier silhouetted against
the sky on every rocky knoll around you —
a look-out man on the watch for any
approaching troop of men, visible as they
would be for leagues of distance over this
boundless waste.
On board our trusty Soudanese appear to
pass their time cheerily enough in their
quarters on the lower deck, where one may
find the men who have been on guard during
the night now sleeping like so many logs of
black bog-oak, while their comrades sit cross-

170 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
legged, cigarettes between their ample lips,
chattering gaily to each other as they clean
their Martinis or furbish up the brass of their
belts. This week on the Nile is for them,
no doubt, a pleasant little outing ; but, still,
it is, of course, a serious business also, and
not by any means intended merely as a treat,
so to speak, for a good soldier boy.
No boat, neither tourist steamer, mail-boat,
nor steam dahabiyeh, is at present allowed
to navigate the Nile between the First and
Second Cataracts without an escort. As to
sailing dahabiyehs, the Sirdar has stopped
them altogether. Dependent as they are on
the wind and unable to moor for the night
in mid-stream, they would be at the absolute
mercy of any predatory horde that chose to
descend upon them, while to give military
protection to them all would, of course, be
impossible. And landing, as we have done,
for the purpose of visiting the scene of a
murderous raid committed by the Dervishes
not much more than a month ago, we are

A RAIDED VILLAGE 171
naturally better able than we otherwise should
be to appreciate the need of these precautions.
Still, one finds it hard to believe that
this quiet little village, lapped as it is now in
the sleepy peace of a glowing tropical fore
noon, has so lately been given over to rapine
and bloodshed, and that seventeen corpses
of its innocent, feeble folk, shot or speared
by these savage robber-fanatics of the desert,
were so short a time ago laid out in the dust
of the little village square to await the in
spection and examination of those to whom
this duty belongs. Assuredly there is nothing
to indicate it in the demeanour of the sur
vivors. The little train of villagers which
has attended us as we march ankle-deep
through the soft, hot sand increases but
slightly in bulk with our progress, and is
rather more apathetic than an ordinary crowd
of fellaheen. They do not even beg for bak
shish, so primitive is their civilisation. It
is indeed more than possible that they have
never seen a body of European tourists

i72 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
before, for " the season " above the First
Cataract is barely a fortnight old, and the
calamity which has singled out the inhabit
ants of Atandan from all the other nameless
groups of their fellow peasants along the Nile
is itself not very much older.
But their tongues are soon unloosed when
they know the object of our visit, and the in
formation which they are all of them ready to
pour out at once into the ears of our interpreter
leaves nothing to be desired in point of quan
tity at any rate. Like the common people in
all countries, they are proud of their tragic
experience, and would not for a moment think
of sparing us a single horror. Yes, it was
just here that they slaughtered seven of us,
and here — pointing to a wide-eyed Nubian boy
with a ring through his left nostril — is the son
of one of those whom they slew. This was
his house ; and we stoop our heads to pass
under the low doorway of the hovel. A mud
hut is not exactly a decorative building any
where in the world ; but to the inhabitants of

A RAIDED VILLAGE 173
Western countries it carries with it associations
of squalor and misery which unfairly, though
naturally, prepossess him against its Eastern
counterpart. You soon perceive, however,
that in a land of scorching heat and in an
atmosphere of intense dryness mud is a much
more eligible building material than you had
supposed. There is nothing of the poverty-
stricken Irish cabin about this Nubian hut.
Its interior, furnished only with a low truckle
bed, and otherwise, indeed, entirely empty,
save for a barrel of meal and a little heap of
fruit and vegetables in a corner, is well swept,
well kept, and deliciously cool, and though
lacking windows not wanting them, since the
narrow streams of brilliant sunshine that filter
here and there through its dura thatch serve
all the purposes of lighting and ventilation.
In short, it is a typical Egyptian peasant's
home, pathetically bare and rude to the eye
of a dweller in great cities, but comfortable
enough, no doubt, for the inhabitant of aland
where nature is so royally bountiful of light

174 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
and warmth that man owes little even to the
most rudimentary of the arts of life. Such
as it was, at any rate it held all that life had
for its simple peasant owner, and it sufficed.
Probably his small and quiet world wagged
well enough with him till that fatal afternoon
o
in December, 1895, when he heard shouts and
shots in the street of his village, and stepped
out, or, more likely, perhaps, was dragged out
to his cruel death.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon when
these desert-wolves swooped down on this
wretched flock. This is the first thing that
we gather from the son of the Sheikh, to
whom a brisk member of our party, who
suddenly develops the gifts of a heaven-born
examiner-in-chief, proceeds to put a series of
very pertinent questions. It is investigation
under difficulties, since the English vocabulary
of our worthy dragoman is not extensive,
neither is his speech fluent ; but on the whole
we make out enough to satisfy any reason
able mind that the raid was really the work

A RAIDED VILLAGE 175
of Dervishes, and not, as certain wiseacres of
Cairo would have had us believe, of some
mere wandering tribe of, so to speak, private
banditti. " From which direction did they come ? "
is one of the first questions asked of our
witness, and " From over there " is the
answer, as the young fellow points to the
rocky ridge in the background. "Were
they dressed alike ? " he is next asked, the
object being to ascertain whether the men
were in the Mahdi's uniform or in the go-as-
you-please costume of a mixed band of free
booters. The reply was " Yes," and that
they wore red turbans. A bugle, adds our
informant, was sounded on their approach.
They divided themselves into three parties,
which re-united again at the sound of the
bugle, when their work of plunder and mas
sacre — a business of some three hours — was
over. " How were they armed ? " we ask. With
spears, we are told ; and some of them with

176 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
rifles — Remingtons, we afterwards learnt, a
weapon with which the Mahdi's soldiers were
known to be equipped. Everything, in fact,
whether in the appearance of the raiders or
in the mode of their advance, attack and
retreat, unmistakably pointed to the existence
among them of military discipline and organi
sation ; and this last detail about the rifles
completed the proof of their identity. It was
no longer possible even for the most sceptical
to doubt that they were followers of the
Khalifa acting under orders frojn head
quarters, and executing what probably was
as much a planned demonstration against
the English protectors of Egypt as a mere
adventure after " loot."
Not but that the raid would have been
well worth making for plunder alone. To
those who are unfamiliar with the habits
of an Oriental peasantry, the amount of the
spoil carried off by the robbers from this
little settlement of mud cabins may seem
well-nigh incredible. It has been estimated

A RAIDED VILLAGE 177
after careful investigation by competent Eng
lish inquirers at from three hundred to four
hundred pounds. Its magnitude is, of course,
mainly due, not to the value of the cattle,
sheep and other live stock lifted from the
village, but to the aggregation of the modest
hoards of money found in many of the hovels,
and to the silver ornaments of the women.
Nevertheless, to do these ruthless ruffians
justice, they doubtless prized the victory
higher than its spoils. The joy which swelled
their savage hearts as they passed southward
home across the desert was not mainly in
spired, one may well believe, by thoughts of
the booty with which their camels were
laden, or of the half-dozen hapless women
whom they carried with them, and one of
whom was found dead a few days afterwards
on the track of their retreat. What, no doubt,
fired them with a far fiercer exultation
was the consciousness of having for once
evaded the vigilance of the English patrols,
of having swooped down upon the territory
M

178 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
under our protection, and made their way
back again before our troops could cut
them off.
The son of the Sheikh having duly de
poned, there are, of course, any number of
his fellow-villagers ready to take up the
dismal tale. We are surrounded, like the
Apostle, by a great cloud of witnesses, some
of them prepared with exhibits as well as
with oral evidence. Will we see Hassan
Abdullah ? Hassan Abdullah was shot in the
neck, but he managed to flee and hide him
self, and so by the blessing of Allah, the
Merciful, the Compassionate, he escaped.
Come forward, Hassan Abdullah, and there
stands before us a spare and grizzled old
peasant, between the wiry muscles of whose
lean brown neck a rifle bullet might certainly
stow itself comfortably away without making
any external difference in his cervical confor
mation. Another villager adds a pathetic
detail to the story. At a little distance from
us can be heard the droning of a sakkiyeh,

A RAIDED VILLAGE 179
one of those ancient water-wheels turned by
a bullock, which are almost as familiar to the
traveller on the Nile as the shaddf itself, and
which, with their long complaining note —
often heard far into the night-watches when
the river is falling and time is becoming pre
cious to those who still need water for their
lands — might well sound to a fanciful imagi
nation like the secular moan of this patient
race of eternal toilers under eternal task
masters, echoing through the ages. It was
on the labourer at the sakkiyeh that the Der
vishes first lighted as they came down the
hill, and whether in mere wantonness of
blood-lust or from fear lest he should give the
alarm they shot the poor wretch dead beside
his water-wheel. The two ideal archetypes of
predatory barbarism and of peaceful industry
could hardly have come into more dramatic
conflict, or have acted and suffered more
exactly after their kind. It was the history
of Egypt in little — an epitome of the ever
lasting fate of its timid and defenceless

180 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
people, the prey of every spoiler and the
victims of every sword.
The sakkiyeh is droning and dripping again
now after its former wont ; the patient beast
that turns it has a new master no less patient
and even more spiritless than itself; the dead
have been buried, the wounded have been
returned cured from the military hospital at
Wady Haifa, where everything was done for
them that surgical skill could do ; and the
world has resumed its unspeakably slow revo
lutions in the little Nubian village of Atandan,
The stoicism of the Mohammedan superposed
upon that blissful apathy of the labourer in all
countries which so soon deadens all sense of
loss and sorrow for the departed with the
numbing anodyne of daily fatigue has already
done its work. Except for the occasional
pleasure of rehearsing the story of their
calamity that revives the villagers' recollection
of it, it is probably almost forgotten. The
handful of ten-piastre pieces, the yield of a
hastily whipped-up subscription, which in

A RAIDED VILLAGE 181
their presence we entrust to the son of the
Sheikh, they receive with gratitude, but with
out effusion. As has already been said, they
have not asked for bakshish, and seemed
surprised that strangers should give without
being asked. They accompany us, the same
placid, listless, little crowd, to the landing-
place, and tranquilly look on at our re-embark
ation and departure. Perhaps they will watch
the steamer till its smoke disappears from
view, but then they will go back to their
everlasting round of toil and rest and toil
again — good human bullocks, turning the
sakkiyeh of life as untiringly and resignedly
as their fathers and their fathers' fathers up
to a past that loses itself in the mists of
legend.

CHAPTER XII
A BREAKWATER OF BARBARISM
It is a pretty and peaceful-looking riverside
settlement which meets the eye of the
traveller up the Nile as he approaches Wady
Haifa. A little group of houses, at which
the steamer stops to deliver letters, and which
has sprung up during the last few years
under the protecting shadow of the British
garrison, forms his first halting-place ; in
another ten minutes he has rounded the
point behind which lies the military station
proper and draws up at the landing-stage
hard by the headquarters of the Com
mandant. A flag flying over the roof of a
bungalow surrounded by a garden rich with
palms, lebbek and poinsettia, denotes the
spot, and but for these signs of tropical

A BREAKWATER OF BARBARISM 183
vegetation it might be a sequestered villa on
the Upper Thames. A little flight of half a
dozen steps leading up to and through its
shrubberies from the water's edge to the
entrance contributes to the support of the
illusion. Some few hundred yards down the
river you have passed another long, low
building, set parallel instead of transversely
to the river, which you judge, and rightly so,
to be the officers' mess-room. Otherwise,
there is nothing to show that you have
reached a frontier " stronghold " of Egypt.
The place effectually hides its military
character from this point of approach. It
turns its warlike face away from the river
and towards the desert, and looks out only
with the air of a smiling village over the
broad and tranquil Nile. Yet this is Wady
Haifa, the finger-tip, so to speak, of the arm
of British protective power in Egypt, and as
true a breakwater of barbarism as any that is
to be found on the face of the globe. For
here, to every pacific and law-abiding culti-

1 84 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
vator of the soil within the Khedive's domi
nion — here is the limit of peace, order, and
security in the Nile Valley : beyond is chaos.
South of this position, or, at any rate, south
of that more southward zone which a salutary
fear of the Haifa garrison and its patrols
keeps clear of the marauder, lies a country
tenanted or scoured by tribes whose business
is robbery and whose pastime murder, and
who seek nothing better than a chance such
as they found made for themselves the other
day at Atandan, of swooping down on a
defenceless village, slaying as many of its
inhabitants as they come across, and making
off with as much booty as they can lay their
hands upon. Against these desert wolves
there is nothing but the British soldier-shep
herd to protect the Egyptian peasant-sheep,
and very vigilant, very rarely evaded, that
protection is.
It is not many weeks, however, since these
prowling ravagers slipped within the line of
our guard — if that shadowy cordon, which,

A BREAKWATER OF BARBARISM 185
of course, it is impossible to stretch along so
many miles of river, can properly or fairly be
so called — and very evident is the natural
soreness displayed by our genial hosts at the
recollection of the incident. Their feeling
on the subject is eminently characteristic,
and well brings out the everlasting contrast
between Oriental apathy and the strenuous
energy of the West. The task which has
been set to these British officers — that of
policing some two hundred miles of abso
lutely exposed river-bank from two stations,
one at each end of the line — is an imprac
ticable one, and they know it. Yet they
devote themselves to it with a cheerful and
untiring activity which refreshes one to
witness, and they are far more restless under
occasional illustrations of its impossibility
than the people who suffer from the fact. If
ever there were a case when the " Kismet "
which amply satisfies the victims of a robber
raid in these regions might do consolation-
duty for their baffled protectors it is that of

1 86 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
the descent on the village of Atandan. Yet
our officers at Wady Haifa are quite unable
to take that view of the incident. They dis
cussed it freely enough, and with a frank
military admiration mingling with their dis
gust. " It was really not half a bad performance
for dervishes," said the staff officer, with
whom we were conversing about it. " They
came from a distance of over a hundred
miles, and across a country without wells,
and they got safe back again with their
booty, and without losing a man. Yes, it
was a very well organised and well executed
piece of work."
"How long did it take them to sack the
unfortunate village ? "
" Well, that would only be a work of two
or three hours ; but it was getting back on to
their own ground, and beyond the risk of our
cutting them off — it was that which was the
difficulty." " They cut the telegraph wires, didn't they ?"

A BREAKWATER OF BARBARISM 187
"Oh, yes, of course. They always com
mence operations in that way. But still they
wouldn't have got anything like so long a
start as they did if it had not been for the
villagers themselves. The fellows who were
despatched to this place to give us informa
tion of the raid actually put up for the night
on their way here, and we didn't get the
news till the next morning. What can you
do with a people so ' casual ' as that ? "
It did seem a little easy-going, to be sure.
One tried to imagine the Malise of Scott's
poem stopping at a Highland inn, interrupt
ing his wild career through the glens, with
"danger, death, and deadly deed" behind
him, for a cosy supper and a bed.
When the messengers did at last arrive
the troops of the garrison were, it seems,
engaged in manoeuvring — " Egyptian Army
resisting an attack of Dervishes," being the
order of the day's programme, and a droll
misunderstanding occurred. " The Dervishes
have captured a village, sir," was the breath-

188 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
less announcement made to the commanding
officer watching the evolutions of the com
batants ; and " All right " was the natural
reply. "So much the better for the officer
in command of them." It was, of course,
some little time before the two armies could
be generally apprised of the fact that it was
a question of real and not of sham Dervishes,
and that they must unite forces in pursuit of
the common enemy, who, thanks to the
leisurely proceedings of the villagers, were
by that time well on their way back to their
base of operations.
"It was too many hours' start to give the
rascals," said our informant, regretfully.
We expressed the surprise of ignorance at
its being possible to give them any start at
all. Surely a tribe whose business is " rob
bery under arms," would be as well mounted
as a clan of Border-reivers in the old cattle-
lifting days. The camels of a band of raiding
Dervishes ought to be a match for any others.
"Wait till you have seen ours," replied

A BREAKWATER OF BARBARISM 189
our friend, with a smile. " Our camel-corps
are mounted on the finest animals to be ob
tained anywhere in the African desert. In
fact, most people who come to Egypt don't
really know what a camel is, and is capable
of, until they have paid us a visit. There is
as much difference between a cavalry camel
of the first quality and the unkempt and un
gainly brutes that shamble backwards and
forwards between the Pyramids and the
Mena House Hotel as there is between a
cart-horse and a thoroughbred. But look !
Here come some of the camel-corps back
from exercise. We have not got such a good
show to-day as we should have liked to give
you, but you can almost see the difference in
their way of ' going,' even at this distance."
Under a dense cloud of the desert dust
two considerable detachments of camel-
cavalry were seen approaching us at the
trot, which by the time they had got abreast
of us had slackened into a walk. Truly,
there was no exaggeration in the praises to

190 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
which we had been listening. The difference
between what may be called the camel of
commerce and this humped charger was
immense, astonishing, to any one who has not
seen it almost incredible. It was the differ
ence between a slouching, morose, and
ragged street loafer and the same man set
up and smartened into the well-drilled
soldier of a crack regiment. The camel of
commerce, as we most of us know him, is a
coarse-haired, untidy brute, knock-kneed and
awkward-gaited, with a sullen, if not vindic
tive, expression of countenance, and a coat
all tags and tufts. But these were clean
limbed and comely creatures, with skins that
shone like satin in the evening sun. They
carried their heads as if they were proud of
them, and planted their feet with neatness
and precision, keeping step as perfectly as
the chargers of a troop of cavalry. Merely
to see them walk was enough to dispel all
doubts as to their ability to ourstrip any
animal that a Dervish is likely to be

A BREAKWATER OF BARBARISM 191
bestriding. And as for drill and discipline,
we soon have an opportunity of judging of
their efficiency in those respects when we
follow our guide to the camping-ground and
see. scores of these usually unmanageable
animals kneeling down in long rows at the
word of command before the shallow trenches
in which the men have placed for them their
evening meal.
"We keep a detachment of the Camel
Corps in a condition to take the field, you
might almost say, at a moment's notice,"
another officer told us. " Rations for the
men, forage for the beasts, arms and ammu
nition — everything in constant readiness.
In less than half an hour after the order was
given they would be on the march."
We looked along the lines of crouching
and feeding camels, with their sturdy,
sable Soudanese riders standing motionless
behind them — the picture of organised
efficiency — and we could well understand the
present inclination of the Dervishes to give

1 92 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
them as wide a berth as possible. The
Khalifa's followers have had lessons in that
wisdom since the severe one which they
received at Toski in 1889. A year or two
ago the country around Wady Haifa was
alive with them, and though they never
actually attacked our position, they had the
audacity to threaten it. But since then they
have been so effectually cleared out that
this sudden excursion upon a Nubian village
well to the north of the frontier which we
defend was a peculiarly irritating surprise.
It is the more so because, for political
and other reasons, reprisals are out of the
question. " The watch-dog," observed one of our
officers, with some bitterness, " is, unfortu
nately, tied. He is allowed to go only to
the length of his chain, and then he is
pulled up."
Obviously, therefore, if the thief can only
get start enough to save his calves he
gets off scot free. Yet, on the other hand,

A BREAKWATER OF BARBARISM 193
one sees the futility of any temporary slipping
of the collar. The watch-dog sees it himself.
There would not be the slightest difficulty in
chastising the perpetrators of this raid by a
descent upon the district from which they
came. But what would be the use ? "We
should probably kill 5 per cent, of the men
who were concerned in it," observed a high
official of the Intelligence Department, " and
95 per cent, of people who have no more to
do with it than you or I." There is nothing
to be done but to keep "pegging away"
at patrol work, and trust to catching the
Dervishes in the very act on their next
attempt. It may not be long before the
opportunity occurs, for the Dervishes, one
hears, are full of elation at their recent
success. They could hardly be " more cock-
a-whoop," one of our friends puts in, " if they
had sacked Cairo." They are boasting, it is
believed, that it takes the camel corps of the
infidels six hours to mobilise. It is the eager
hope of every man in the garrison of Wady
N

194 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
Haifa that they will soon test the accuracy of
this calculation.
In talk of this kind the golden afternoon
wears away in a still, starry, tropical night.
Dinner awaits us at the hospitable mess-
room looking over the moon-lit Nile, and
it is time to bring our walk through the
camp to a close. To-morrow we set our
faces to the north once more, and leave
behind us this furthest outpost of civilisation
in Northern Africa, with its garrison of
stalwart blacks, and their cheery young
English officers, keeping inviolate the Pax
Britannica, even as their spiritual fathers in
history kept the Roman Peace on those
distant barriers of their empire against which,
until the day of its decline, the insurging
tides of barbarism beat so long in vain.

CHAPTER XIII
OF PALMS AND SUNSETS
If any one were to say that the scenery of the
Nile Valley from Cairo to Assuan is monoto
nous, I wonder what would be the proper
reply to him. For that matter, indeed, one
may well wonder what is the proper reply
to anybody who says that anything is monoto
nous. What is monotony ? Is it a quality of
the object perceived or of the percipient sub
ject ? Is it in the seer or in the seen ? If we
endeavour to assign an objective origin to it
we soon find ourselves in^ the cleft-stick of
the alternative conclusions either that all is
monotony or that nothing is monotonous.
The waking life of the eye, for instance, is
simply an endless succession of visual per
ceptions ; and what monotony could be more

196 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
profound than that. On the other hand, it is
a succession of visual perceptions of which no
two between the cradle and the grave exactly
resemble each other : and what better example
of infinite variety could there be than that ?
Hence, to use Socrates's phrase of hypocritical
sympathy with a confuted adversary, " we
seem in danger of having to admit " that
monotony must be in ourselves and cannot be
in the world without. It is, in fact, our own
personal contribution to the sum of things.
It is a portion of that inexhaustible fund of
" tediousness " which, in the liberal spirit of
Chief Constable Dogberry, we handsomely
bestow upon the Cosmos.
To the man who sees no difference between
one human being and another a London
street is monotonous, as are the Alps to him
who finds every peak and pass and glacier
exactly like the last. Thus, then, if any one
pleases to say, as some have been heard to
say, that the Nile Valley up to the First
Cataract is a mere tiresome succession of

OF PALMS AND SUNSETS 197
palm trees and mud villages, a perpetual
panorama of long levels of greenest verdure,
broken every here and there by reaches of
yellow sandbank, with an eternal foreground
of bright-blue river and an everlasting back
ground of grey or red gold mountains, it
would be idle to gainsay him. If that is all
that there seems to him to be on the Nile,
then that is all that the Nile is — for him. A
palm-tree " by the river brim " has no more
charm — for the wrong sort of eye — than a
primrose in the same situation. Nay, if any
man fails to find a beauty in the very mono
tony, as he would doubtless call it, of this
stately plumed procession sweeping slowly
past him for six hundred miles of river — if he
does not feel to the very core of his being
their indefinable harmony with man and
nature in these regions, their indissoluble
affinity with the wilderness which they fringe,
and with the ancient world-relics amid which
they stand, the attempt to impress him with
it would be vain. But if by chance he does

198 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
feel it, he will no more find monotony on the
banks of the Nile than he could find it in the
heaven of unchanging stars.
The peculiar glamour of the palm is, like
most other such mysterious appeals to the
imagination through the senses, hard to seize
and analyse. Yet it is undeniable and un
mistakable. In all ages it has captured the
romantic temperament and stormed the cita
del of the poet's heart. Heine's exquisite
lyric, with its image of the northern pine-tree
dreaming in the frozen silence of its brother
the palm in the burning sands of the desert,
does not stand alone, though it does stand
before all others. And the tree is as dear
to those races who are native to its soil as to
the poets and artists of the North.
Tu tambien insigne palma
Eres aqui forestiera.
" Thou, too, O noble palm," ran the sweet,
sad lament of the Moorish captive in Spain ;
" thou, too, art a stranger in this land even

OF PALMS AND SUNSETS 199
as I." For him the palm of Southern Europe
was a mere exotic flourishing only in such
latitudes under exceptionally favourable con
ditions, and the prisoner sighed for the
towering stems and spreading frondage of
his African home. Perhaps there was some
thing more than mere nostalgic prejudice in
his plaintive cry. "We do it wrong, being
so majestical," to set the palm in the midst of
European vegetation. Its charm, no doubt,
is largely of the spiritual and imaginative
order — a charm depending not only upon
perfect accord with its surroundings, but
upon unchallenged supremacy therein. It is
the child of solitude and the brother of steri
lity. Its natural companions are the sandhill
and the limestone rock, or at best those rare
low-lying shrubs of the desert that lift up no
head to a tenth part of its full stature. Even
the green floor of the Nile banks seems
almost alien to it, and it needs that same
" monotonous " background of mountain and
wilderness to keep it "in the picture."

200 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
But so placed, as it is here, the eye must
be strangely incurious and unappreciative
that finds any lack of variety in the landscape
wherein the palm plays so continual a part.
Those who charge it with sameness are de
ceived by its mere uniformity of general out
line. Architecturally speaking, it must be
admitted that this famous tree is simplicity
itself. The irreverent have been known to
compare it to a mop which has earned its
right to retirement by long and wearing ser
vices ; and, indeed, the broad resemblance
between stem and handle, drooping fronds
and well-worn mop-head, could hardly escape
the eye of a child. Comparing it, for instance,
with the countless shapes assumed by the
English tree which stands first for beauty of
line — the beech — one might have thought it
beyond the power even of so inventive an
artist as Nature to get much variety out of
the endless repetition of this simple figure.
Nature, however, has signally triumphed over
these difficulties of her own creation. With-

OF PALMS AND SUNSETS 201
out varying, except within very narrow limits,
the form of the palm, she varies its angle of
growth, its grouping, its artistic function and
significance in the scene with a fertility of in
vention which seems inexhaustible. There is
no tree which lends itself to so great a num
ber or so manifold a variety of decorative
purposes in landscape, none which "com
poses " so well, in the artist's phrase, as the
palm. Alone, in groups of two or three, in
clumps of a dozen or a score, in widely scat
tered " plantations " of fifty to a hundred, in
thickest groves of double or treble that num
ber, its effect is equally satisfying, and its
value to the eye alike inestimable in all. Its
simplest dispositions are full of charm and of
command. Simplicity, indeed, may almost be said to
constitute the chief and abiding fascination
of Nile scenery as a whole; the broadest
effects, produced by the slenderest of means,
abound. Here, before me, at an ordinary
bend of the river — one among thousands of

202 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
others so like, yet so unlike it — is an example
ready to hand. On the narrow spit of land
that thrusts itself lance-like into the broad
bosom of the waters stands a little group of
palms, the guardians of a tiny Arab village.
Shorewise from their roots runs a long
narrow strip of intensely vivid green. In
land, for miles behind it, the " lone and level
sands stretch far away," their dusty yellow
melting gradually at the horizon into the
pearl-grey of the morning sky. In mid
stream a single lateen- sail hovers over the
glassy surface of the river, like some huge
water-fowl, motionless, blinding white. There
is nothing more ; it is the very slightest of
impressionist sketches, dashed off as it were
in half a dozen strokes of Nature's most
careless brush ; but it is perfect with a per
fection of its own, and is of the kind which
lives long in the memory of the eye. In
every such delightful vignette of river scenery
— and at every turn of the Nile there is a
fresh one — the palm is the dominant feature.

OF PALMS AND SUNSETS 203
And unlike so many other trees which
require a strong light to be seen at their
best, its beauty is the same at all hours. It
is beautiful with all its midday grace of line
when other trees have become mere masses
of darkening shadow under the gloaming ;
and it is the first to trace itself against the
dawn-grey of the Eastern heaven. The fir
itself shows not more nobly when the sunset
flames behind its stem ; nor is there any
where so " adorable a dreamer " in the moon
light. But the Nile has something more wonder
ful to show than the scenery of its shores —
something more beautiful than its majestic
palms, and more enduring than even its
golden mountains. Never elsewhere is the
"incomparable pomp of eve" so gorgeous
as in the skies which it reflects, and nowhere
does the funeral pageant of the departed day
defile with such entrancing and long-drawn
splendour as across its waters. The Nile
sunsets are famous, and every evening of the

204 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
three weeks we have spent upon the river
there was a general muster of the whole
strength of our steamer's passengers to assist
at these magnificent obsequies. Hardly
upon a single night of the whole twenty did
they disappoint us, and the brilliancy and
richness of the colours on which, night after
night, we feasted our eyes were not more
extraordinary than their inexhaustible variety
of scheme. There is not a colour-tube in the
artist's paint-box which would not, on one
evening or another, have been called into
requisition, and there is scarcely one which
he would not have found himself mixing on
his palette into some new and exquisite com
bination with another. The hues of the
western horizon at the actual moment of the
sun's disappearance below it might, no doubt,
except in point of intensity, be matched in a
colder sky. In England, under fortunate con
ditions, one has often seen a blaze of sunset
glory which it is impossible to outdo, and which
no southern or tropical clime could do more

OF PALMS AND SUNSETS 205
than match. It is in the lights and colours
of the entire firmament taken as a whole that
the difference here is felt, in the far-reaching
translucency of the northern and southern
quarters of the heaven, and in that sensation
of an infinitely widened world which is an
effect of the clearness of the atmosphere.
A second point in which a Nile sunset
distances all competitors elsewhere is in its
performances, so to speak, as a " water
colourist." No one who has not seen this
artist at work can have the faintest conception
of the astonishing feats which he performs
with the smooth surface of the river for his
sketching-block, or of the daring " slapdash "
with which he flings his pigments upon it, or
of the transcendent success of the result. He
reserved his most startling effect till the very
last day of our trip. On that evening the sun
went down in a perfect sea of flame, which
overflowed into the Nile waters. As good
luck would have it, the wake of our steamer
was racing straight through this flaming flood,

206 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
and the waves streamed aft from the paddle-
wheels, a deep purple in their hollows and on
every rounded crest a bar of ruddy gold. A
German artist sat near me desperately dash
ing in the colours upon his sketching-block as
they glowed before him ; but if he values his
reputation for veracity he will never show any
one that sketch when it is finished, for most
certainly no one who sees it will believe it.
Yet, after all, it is not so much the actual
sunset itself as its sequel which is the miracu
lous thing. For what words can describe the
magic, the long-drawn sweetness, the strange,
wild beauty of the Egyptian afterglow?
Everywhere, or at least in all latitudes in
which this epilogue of the nightly world
drama is given at all, it is impressive ; but
elsewhere it is short in duration and more or
less subdued in tone. In the tropics, as is
well known, it is the custom to dispense with
it altogether. " The sun's rim dips, the stars
rush out ; at one stride comes the dark,"
remarks the Ancient Mariner, describing his

OF PALMS AND SUNSETS 207
agitating experiences, and it is for the scien
tific to explain why six hundred miles up the
Nile, on the very threshold of the Tropic of
Cancer, the afterglow should last almost
thrice as long as it does elsewhere in the
temperate zone. But so it is. To call it an
epilogue of the mystery play of sunset is
perhaps to describe it inadequately. In
reality it is an additional and more pro
foundly interesting act of the great drama.
It is the very reverse of the phenomenon
depicted in Coleridge's two pregnant lines.
The dipping of the sun's rim in these regions
is followed by no outrush of the stars, no
striding forward of the dark. On the con
trary, after some ten minutes or so of fading
twilight, such as in other lands is a mere pre
lude to complete darkness, the whole heaven
suddenly lightens up again.
The grey of dusk almost disappears, and
objects near and distant which had been
melting into obscurity start once more, as
though touched by the wand of an enchanter,

208 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
into clear and sharply outlined view. It is
as though the sun, instead of having just set,
were about to rise ; it is like the dawn of a
new day. Brighter and brighter grows the
afterglow, and more and more golden as it
brightens, the red rays of the prism which
assume such prominence in most European
sunsets seeming here — no doubt for some
good optical reason, if one only knew it — to
be far surpassed in intensity by the yellow.
To describe the mysterious, the almost
" eerie " light-effect produced by this flood
of liquid gold immersing and suffusing the
whole earth for long after the sun's disc has
disappeared, and while the northern and
eastern skies are darkening every minute, is
impossible ; but the nearest though a distant
resemblance to it that one remembers in
England is to be found in that unearthly light
that sometimes gleams luridly under a brazen-
bellied thunder-cloud on a sultry summer
afternoon. Things look just as spectral in
the Egyptian afterglow as they do with us

OF PALMS AND SUNSETS 209
in one of those storm-laden hours when
" wildly dashed on tower and tree, The sun
beam strikes along the world." Only they
are thrice as vividly outlined, thrice as solidly
projected against their background of earth
or sky.
During this reillumining of the landscape
the deep orange of the western horizon has
glowed steadily and undimmed ; but mean
while the quarter of the heaven lying imme
diately above it has undergone an astonishing
change. " God made himself an awful rose
of dawn," wrote Tennyson in the " Vision of
Sin," and fastidious critics have been known
to object alike to the figure and to the phrase
— to the imagery as false, and to the expres
sion as affected. Yet all but the last two
words of the description might be applied
with perfect truth and sobriety to the after
glow of a sunset on the Nile. For slowly
during all this time there has been ascending
from the skyline of the desert as its base, and
to an altitude of full thirty degrees above it,
o

210 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
a glorious arc of the softest rose colour, which
melts as it draws nearer to the blue of the
zenith into a gradually paling lilac, through
the very midst of which looks forth the silver
of the evening star. The chastened magnifi
cence, the sober splendour of this atmospheric
effect surpasses imagination. It is the very
classicism of colour, just as the gorgeous
hues of the actual sunset — its splashes of
fierce crimson and blazing gold — might stand
as typical of the rich exuberance of romance.
But the time and space of this aerial marvel,
the sphere of its radiance and the spell of its
duration, are, perhaps, most wonderful of all.
Laterally measured, this arc of glory spans a
full quarter of the horizon — from due north
west to a point about midway between west
and south. Vertically, as has already been
said, it climbs at least one-third of the dome
of sky between the horizon and the zenith ;
and it lasts in flawless and unimpaired beauty
for a full half-hour. The sunset orange
against which yon passing string of camels

OF PALMS AND SUNSETS 211
and their turbaned leaders are silhouetted
black as jet will have faded into purple haze,
the evening star will have changed from a
rayless speck of silver into a flashing jewel,
and the lake of lilac in which it swims will
have become blanched and colourless ere that
great rose-window through which we have
been gazing as into the lighted cathedral of
the heavens is itself at last swallowed up
in night.

CHAPTER XIV
THE TEMPLE-SERVANT OF AMMON
Where are their palaces ? is a question often
asked in perplexity by those who find them
selves for the first time among the remains
of Ancient Egypt. They built both their
tombs and their temples for eternity. Yet
of their earthly houses, stately and splendid
as the abodes of, at any rate, the greater and
prouder of the Egyptian kings must have
been, not a trace remains. We not only
know not how or where the Royal builders
of the Pyramids lived while their wretched
slaves were toiling on the sands of Ghizeh,
but we are as little able to fix the habitations
of the much later monarchs who raised or
added to that gigantic pillar forest at Karnak,
or who carved the colossi on the rock-face

THE TEMPLE-SERVANT OF AMMON 213
at Abu Simbel. The Egyptologist's explana
tion of this puzzle is, of course, a familiar one.
Magnificent as may have been, and doubtless
were, the palaces of the Egyptian kings, it
was not necessary for their constructors to aim
at anything more than temporary splendour.
If the palace served the purposes of the king
and his successors for a few generations it
was enough. He looked to the temple to
perpetuate his memory, and to the deeply
graven sculpturings on its walls to keep his
name and his exploits in everlasting remem
brance. What mattered it whether the house
in which Rameses abode during his short
life, on earth remained or disappeared, so long
as the record of his great deeds was imperish-
ably secured ? His tomb, of course, was
built for eternity on other grounds. It was
part of his religion to make it so if possible,
just as it was a matter of religious duty to
provide if he could for the punctual supply
of his entombed mummy with the aliment
necessary for the due sustenance of its

2i4 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
"double" in the other world. This has
naturally raised the question why Egyptian
tombs are not more numerous than they are ;
to which the answer current among Irish
students of Egyptology is that as a matter of
fact they are considerably more numerous
than that, only they have not yet been dis
covered. It was not, of course, to be ex
pected that the private citizen — even the
"prominent" citizen of ancient Thebes or
Memphis — could afford to hew out and
decorate for himself a subterranean sepulchre
on the scale of a Seti ; and many of the death-
chambers of such persons have no doubt
crumbled into irremediable decay. But it is
probable that very many more are only
awaiting the spade of the excavator. Their
smaller dimensions have made them more
difficult to light upon and to extricate from
the heaped-up dust of ages, than are the
tombs of the kings, queens, princesses, and
high-priests which have been discovered and
laid open to the inspection of the modern

THE TEMPLE-SERVANT OF AMMON 215
world. There must be many and many a
counterpart of the exquisite little tomb of
the "Temple servant Nekht," lying hidden
under the wind-blown sands of the Libyan
desert, in the vast Necropolis of Thebes.
At present, however, this singular and
most touching relic of an infinitely remote
civilisation is practically unique. The only
tombs which approach it in purely human
interest are those of Ameni and Chnemu-
Hetep, on the hill of Beni Hassan, for in
the long autobiographical inscription with
which the tomb of the former is decorated,
there is something which comes much closer
home to the common sympathies of mankind
in every age than in all the monotonous
boastings on the temple- wall of the king. It
is in the same complacent vein, it is true, but
it awakens a response in hearts which the
epic of Pentaur leaves utterly cold. " I have
done all that I have said," wrote this pro
vincial governor 2400 years before Christ.
"lama gracious and a compassionate man,

216 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
and a ruler who loves his town. I have
passed the course of years as the ruler of
Meh, and all the labours of the palace have
been carried out at my hands. I have given
to the overseers of the temples of the gods
of Meh 3000 bulls with their cows, and I was
in favour in the palace on account of it, for I
carried all the products of the milk-bearing
cows to the palace, and no contributions to
the king's storehouses have been more than
mine. I have never made a child grieve, I
have never robbed the widow, I have never
repulsed the labourer, I have never shut up
a herdsman, I have never impressed for
forced labour the labourers of a man who
only employed free men. There was never
a person miserable in my time, no one went
hungry under my rule, for if there were years
of scarcity I ploughed up all the arable land
in the home of such up to its very frontiers
on the north and south. By this means I
made its people live and procured for them
provisions, so that there was not a hungry

THE TEMPLE-SERVANT OF AMMON 217
person among them. I gave to the widow
the same amount as I gave to the married
woman, and I made no distinction between
the great and little in all that I gave. And,
behold, when the inundation was great and
the owners of the land became rich thereby
I laid no additional tax on the fields."
Here is a lesson from the ages on the
question of "unearned increment." Has
any modern controller of taxation, Imperial
or local, so clear a record as this ? It is a
short inscription, but it is worth a whole wall
full of the vapourings of Rameses II. over
his famous battle with the Hittites — a piece
of almost ludicrously vainglorious writing
which the great conqueror has repeated in
more than one of the mural records left
behind by him in the temples of his construc
tion, and the style of which was not ap
proached in " general orders," so far as one
knows, until the days of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The sculptured representation of this eternal
victory over the Hittites becomes at last a

218 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
weariness to the student's soul. Rameses
the Great in his chariot discharging volleys
of arrows among the Hittites, with his
charioteer visible in miniature between his
legs ; Rameses the Great destroying his de
feated enemies, apparently in cold blood,
where the great King has got a whole batch
of them by the hair like a bunch of vege
tables, and is menacing them with a weapon
which looks at a distance like a life-pre
server, but on a closer view is seen to possess
the facilities of a scalping-knife ; Rameses
the Great returning in triumph ; the King
making offerings to Ammon-Ra, with an in
terminable train of Hittite captives behind
him, each couple chained together on a dif
ferent principle from the preceding one.
There is just a little too much of it, and after
a long course of victory over the Hittites it
is quite refreshing to meet with the wall-
painting of his degenerate successor, Ra
meses III., playing chess in his harem.
There is, of course, nothing of this kind

THE TEMPLE-SERVANT OF AMMON n9
in the Epic of Pentaur, but a poem about
the domestic life of the Egyptian monarchs
would be very welcome after many perusals
of the famous battle-piece of that very early
Laureate. In fact, the further one gets from " official
poetry," and from official tomb inscriptions in
general, the nearer you get to Nature, and
even in the sepulchre of Chnemu-Hetep you
are conscious of a smack of officialism in the
otherwise simple recital of the Governor's
public services and private virtues in general.
In the case of Nekht, however, we really get,
as Mr. Wallis Budge has said, a typical
example of the tomb of a " Theban gentle
man of the Middle Empire," or, in other
words, of a gentleman who lived, moved, and
had his being, who loved and hated, and
hoped and feared, and worked and played on
the site of these ruins, say a thousand and
odd years before the Greek Father of History
was born, and nearly two thousand years
before history begins for our own islands with

220 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
the first settlement of the Saxons on English
shores. Nekht, it is true, was, in a certain
limited sense, a public official. He was a
" temple servant " of Ammon, and his sister,
of whom he obviously thought a great deal,
was also attached to the religious ritual and
services of that deity ; but though he never
fails to give himself and her their sacerdotal
descriptions on his tomb-walls, he seems to
have done so rather as a matter of private
devoutness and piety than in any official spirit.
The exquisite little tomb, in fact, which has
only been opened six or seven years, and the
wall-paintings on the ceiling, which are in
many places still as clear in design and as
beautifully fresh in colour as when they were
put on more than thirty centuries ago, had
evidently been the delight of its future occu
pant during its construction and decoration.
A pious Theban gentleman of the Middle
Empire " made his soul " by making himself
a costly and artistic sepulchre, just as a
Western devotee of our own day makes it

THE TEMPLE-SERVANT OF AMMON 221
by building a church or endowing a religious
order. One sees in a moment that Nekht
must have worked lovingly at his own little
" bijou residence " for eternity. It is nearly
finished, but not quite ; its incomplete condi
tion meaning, it is to be feared, in this as in
other cases, that the heir was of opinion that
the deceased had spent quite enough money
on his hobby, that it was really quite suffi
ciently decorated to do all reasonable credit
to the family, and that on the whole the tomb
might be closed without calling upon the
artist to add the colours to that little wall-
scene which he had just "blocked out" in
black and white in one corner of the chamber
when the late lamented paid the debt of
nature. Unfortunately, the imperfection of
the pictured record begins at the very point
at which the dead man's deeply religious
instincts would have made him particularly
regret the failure to complete it. In this
scene Nekht and his wife are seated at a
table loaded with funereal offerings, and four

222 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
priestly officials are bringing up haunches of
veal or beef. To have left this plain instead
of coloured was a grave omission. Did
Nekht suffer for it in the underworld, one
wonders ? Did it undo the work of those
multiplied prayers in hieroglyphic, the in
cessant reiteration of which on the walls of
Egyptian mortuary-chambers produces almost
an effect of passionate appeal ? Osiris and
Harmachis, and Ammon and Anubis are
again and again beseeched to grant favours
to " the double of the temple-servant, Nekht,
a free passport for the disembodied soul to
the regions of the dead, a coming-in and
going-out from the underworld, not being re
pulsed at its gates." It is to be hoped that
there was no hitch in the arrangements.
The temple-servant, however, was evidently
a cheery soul, and seems to have been not less
interested in the things of this world than in
those of the other. It is this which brings
him so much nearer to us than all the con
quering and building kings who have raised

THE TEMPLE-SERVANT OF AMMON 223
their gigantic temples, and mined the earth
with their vast sepulchres all up the valley of
the Nile. Nekht has made his artists set
forth scenes of his daily life, its business and
its pleasures. Here we see his farm-servants
gathering grapes, treading them in the wine
press, and drawing off the new wine into jars.
Here, again, are men ploughing and reaping,
women gleaning, labourers binding up the
sheaves. Nekht looks on with a complacent
air of proprietorship, with the inscription
above his head, " Sitting in the chamber
seeth his fields, the temple-servant of Ammon,
Nekht triumphant before the great God."
Further on, we see the worthy citizen taking
a holiday with his wife and children. They
have, in fact, gone out for a day's sport, and
are spearing fish from a boat, and bringing
down birds with the boomerang in a papyrus
swamp. Above is the inscription : " Passeth
through wild-fowl marshes, traverseth wild
fowl marshes with gladness, speareth fish,
Nekht triumphant." On the bank stand two

224 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
of his servants holding sandals, staff, boome
rang, &c., and lower down is another servant
bringing the game to his master. The in
scriptions above it read : " Rejoiceth, seeth
happiness in making the chase and in the work
of the Goddess Sekhet " (the country goddess,
the Ceres of the ancient Egyptians) ; " the
temple-servant Nekht triumphant. His sister
the singing priestess of Ammon, the lady of
the house, Tani, saith, ' Rejoice thou in the
work of Sekhet and the birds which he
(Nekht) sets apart for her selection.' " Such
was the sort of diary of his simple pursuits
and pleasures this Theban gentleman of the
Middle Empire kept upon the walls of his
tomb-chamber for perpetual remembrance. It
is like a page of Pepys in stone.

CHAPTER XV
A KHEDIVIAL PROGRESS
When the Mudlr of Keneh presented his
compliments to the officers and passengers
of Messrs. Cook and Sons' Nile steamer,
Rameses, and requested the pleasure of
their company on the evening of Wednesday,
January 10, at the reception to be given
by him in honour of the visit of his High
ness the Khedive, the Mudlr of Keneh
reckoned without the inhabitants of Keneh
and the surrounding villages, and without
his own available staff of police. That is to
say, he failed to form a concise estimate of
the very considerable numbers of the one or
the extremely slender force of the other.
The consequence was that when the said
Nile steamer Rameses had brought up
alongside the Keneh landing-place, and

226 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
those of the passengers who " felt like it "
had landed and made their way on foot
or donkey-back to the Mudir's house, to be
presented to that worshipful functionary and
receive from him the ceremonial coffee and
cigarette, it became necessary for the chief
of the police to break it gently to the spokes
man of the party that the hospitable design
of the Governor would have to be foregone.
His house was over a mile from the shore ;
the crowd, drawn together from many miles
round by the Khedivial visit, was dense, and,
except under the actual kourbash, inclined to
be disorderly ; and, to put the matter briefly,
there was not enough kourbash to "go
round." In other words, the chief of the
police did not see his way to providing an
escort sufficiently large to conduct a party
some five and twenty strong, and largely
consisting of ladies, in safety from the
steamer to the Mudir's "At Home." The
male passengers might risk their less valuable
lives — or garments — by endeavouring to

A KHEDIVIAL PROGRESS 227
make their way through the crowd if they
pleased, but the softer sex was recommended
to remain on shipboard. So the project was
abandoned, and the " disinvited " guests
assembled on the upper deck of their steamer
to console themselves by viewing the arrival
and reception of the Khedive from that
excellent vantage-ground.
The occasion was certainly an interesting
one. It is not often that one has the oppor
tunity of seeing a newly succeeded Prince
make his first acquaintance with the most
famous and anciently historic portion of his
dominions ; yet, strange as it seems — or as it
may, perhaps, seem until we remind ourselves
of his extreme youth — the present Khedive
of Egypt had never before been up the Nile.
He was now making his first State progress
up its sacred stream as far as Wady Haifa, the
virtual limit of his effective rule. Assuan,
which we left two days ago, was gay with
streamers and triumphal arches in readiness
for his coming ; it is the next place after this

228 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
at which he is to touch on his upward journey.
Luxor, where he will stop only on his return
voyage to Cairo, has still its preparations to
make ; but Keneh, as indeed we could see
half a mile off, on our approach to it, is deter
mined to show that — like Todgers's — it " can
do it when it likes." A specially constructed
flight of landing-steps, gorgeous with crimson
cloth, ascends the high river bank some hun
dred yards or so above the point at which we
are moored, and at the entrance of the long
straight road which leads to the town of
Keneh rises a lofty arch of really light and
graceful line, flanked on each side by a row
of smaller ones, all of them thickly hung from
base to summit with coloured lamps. A
score or two of yards below us crowds quite
a little fleet of dahabiyehs, every one of them
all a-flutter with flags from hull to topmost
" top-joint " of its fishing-rod of a yard. And
exactly opposite us, though, indeed, by no
undesigned coincidence, appears the most
curious sight of all — the native crowd.

A KHEDIVIAL PROGRESS 229
Probably enough it is one of the largest
Egyptian gatherings ever got together out
side, or at least at any distance from, the
walls of a great city. Oriental hyperbole
puts it down in our hearing at forty thousand ;
but in all likelihood the speaker had never
himself seen one-fifth of that number gathered
together. Keneh, to be sure, is no "one-
horse" place, as Egyptian townships go. It
is the capital town of a district, and contains
from fifteen to twenty thousand souls. If we
suppose all its adult males to have turned
out — there is, of course, only the merest
sprinkling of women — and their strength to
have been doubled by the recruits from the
surrounding villages, we shall still be safe in
halving the estimate given above. Never
theless, there are enough of them within eye
shot, and, as we know to our cost, within
earshot of us to make not merely a good
show but an extraordinary and even be
wildering spectacle.
The bank of the river lends itself admirably

230 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
to the theatrical coup d'asil. From water's
edge to summit it ascends for some ten or
twelve yards at an angle apparently steeper
than forty-five degrees. To pack it with
a European crowd would be impossible ; the
European boot and shoe, if nothing else,
would forbid it. The naked and almost pre
hensile foot of the Egyptian fellah can only
just manage to maintain him on the slope
and no more ; and inasmuch as the dry soil
breaks away beneath him almost every other
minute in a cloud of dust, continual readjust
ments of his position are necessary to keep
him from slipping gradually into the Nile.
It would be difficult for the most powerful
imagination to conceive a situation of more
hideous discomfort ; yet for three mortal
hours did the crowd occupy it, on and off,
clinging to it as long as possible, and return
ing to it whenever the coercion, professional
or amateur, which was from time to time
applied to them, relaxed even for a moment.
For a space of some fifty yards along the

A KHEDIVIAL PROGRESS 231
shore, the whole of this steep declivity
was packed from brow to base with white
turbans, blue gullabias, brown faces, and
flashing teeth. Not a foot of the bank
was visible, save at the very edge of the
water, so completely was it submerged be
neath this cascade, this cataract of Oriental
humanity. It was as though notice had been given that
"Egyptian fellahs may be shot here," and
some colossus, suddenly endowed with life,
had emptied a gigantic barrow-load of them
down the bank. The little ones being the
lightest, would naturally have rolled out first,
and there, indeed, they are at the bottom of
the slope, up to their knees in water and Nile
mud, a dirty rag, which may have been a shirt
under the Ptolemies, their only garment, and
they themselves a mere incarnate cry for bak
shish. Few of them get it, perhaps only one,
the sole artist of the assembled multitude — a
blind youth with an endearing gift of mimicry,
which enables him to delight us for a quarter

232 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
of an hour, and madden us for an hour and a
half with curiously faithful imitations of a
steamer's whistle, the bray of a donkey, the
clucking of a hen, and other familiar sounds.
Roars of laughter, in which an attentive ear
may perhaps detect a note of satire, burst
from the crowd as the performer passes with
singular psychological insight through each
one of those varied phases of emotion which
agitate the donkey between the broken gasps
from which his bray begins, the passionate cri
du cceur in which it culminates, and the long,
desolate wail with which it concludes. And
the blind artist gets his piastres ultimately,
though there is a scramble among the mud
larks to grasp them first, the popular feeling
being apparently opposed to robbing the
afflicted. Still he greatly outstays his wel
come. Indeed, he prolongs his performance
as unconscionably as though he were giving
imitations of eminent actors at an English
evening party, and the incessant yelling which
has, as at all times, considerably impaired

A KHEDIVIAL PROGRESS 233
the effect of his subtler efforts now drowns
them altogether.
The crowd, in fact, appears to grow noisier
and more restless every half-hour. The
laughter and shouting and chatter of a
British gathering of expectant sightseers
would have died away into the silence of
fatigue and of its dogged endurance long ere
this ; but the animation and mobility, the
bird-like chirp and hop and twitter of these
people seem inexhaustible. Except for a
row or two of greybeards on the upper tiers,
they are never still. Every turban seems in
perpetual movement, every eye rolling, every
mouth grinning, every hand gesticulating.
The mere shifting play of colours which it
produces is wearying to the eye and brain.
It is almost a relief when, at certain, or rather
uncertain intervals, the bank is cleared, and
another side of the almost infantile Egyptian
character is exhibited, as childish fear and
submissiveness take the place of childish
merriment and noise. The Mudlr, as we

234 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
soon see, has not underrated the deficiencies
of Keneh in the matter of police. No doubt
the whole available force is engaged at the
town, for the professional guardian of order
rarely shows up at the river-side during these
hours. This, however, matters comparatively
little in provincial Egypt, where, apparently,
any man with a kourbash and a consciousness
of good intentions may play the part of police
man without any previous formality of a
commission to discharge that office. The
Arab crew of our steamer cheerfully under
take it, with pails of water discharged over
the side, upon the heads of the too obtrusive
crowd. The dragoman occasionally springs
ashore and lays about him with his whip.
An elderly man with a turban, but with no
visible official badge of authority, " teaches"
the men of Keneh every now and then, as
Gideon taught the men of Succoth, though
with a half-broken bamboo used flail-fashion
instead of with " thorns and briars."
And every time this blunt Arabic form of

A KHEDIVIAL PROGRESS 235
our English " Further back, please ! " is ad
ministered there is a hasty scurrying of robes
and turbans up the bank, as though a gust of
wind had swept suddenly over a blue and
white flower-bed ; and for a few minutes the
bare and dusty shore, lately hidden by a
forest of brown legs, once more becomes
visible, and a blessed silence reigns. No
sooner, however, is the hand of "authority"
removed than, pair by pair, the legs creep
back again, wet and whipped, but supporting
meekly, not to say abjectly, contented and
unresentful owners, and again the bank is
covered and the shrill, distracting clamour is
renewed. Towards dusk it abates a little,
but not with any signs of exhaustion on the
part of the clamourers. It is merely that
their audience is thinning as the hour for the
Khedive's arrival draws near, and the un
speakable beauty of the Nile sunset attracts
us to the opposite side of the boat. The sun
has not long disappeared behind the Libyan
mountains, and we are still in the midst of

236 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
that mysterious interval of twilight which
seems in this wonderful atmosphere to divide
the sunset from the afterglow, when, as
though instinctively seizing upon the exact
moment for throwing down their challenge to
the departing day, the lights start out upon
the triumphal arches along the shore and
festoon the dahabiyehs on the water. The
effecti as the sky gradually lightens again
with the afterglow, and the lamps twinkle in
silver through the flood of liquid gold that
bathes land and water alike, is of an almost
unearthly beauty. Minute by minute it
changes, and the colours on shore and river,
on the darkening hulls of the little fleet ot
pleasure-vessels, on the distant mountains,
on the intervening tracts of verdure, and on
the ever-moving crowd upon the bank, are
changing every minute ; but it is a full half-
hour before its last splendours fade away, and
night settles down upon the Nile.
By this time we on the steamer begin to
grow impatient, for though the Khedive shows

A KHEDIVIAL PROGRESS 237
no signs of arriving the dinner-hour does.
He was due at six, we had been told. Why
tarry the wheels — or the screw — of his steam
dahabiyeh ? What if he should have changed
his plans and determined not to arrive to
night at all ? He is Oriental, in itself an
element of uncertainty ; he is believed to be
something froward and self-willed, and he
has probably no English adviser on board to
remonstrate with him. Above all, he is
young, and has perhaps not yet learnt that
punctuality is the cardinal virtue of princes.
It is with no little relief that we at last see
the lights of His Highness's approaching
dahabiyeh. Steaming past us amid the weird,
barbaric chant of a body of Egyptian school
children greeting him from a brilliantly
illuminated vessel moored amid-stream, it
makes for the decorated landing-place. Guns
salute, a band strikes up the somewhat
Salvation-Army-like strains of the Khedivial
Hymn ; the boat is brought alongside. His
Highness has arrived. We pull out our

238 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
watches, and anxiously consult them. He
has beaten our dinner-hour by the shortest of
heads. It might have been worse, and, well
content, we betake ourselves to our meal, as
he to his, for he is to dine and hold a recep
tion of his own on board, before proceeding
to the Mudir's.
So long an affair, indeed, was this reception,
that it., afforded ample opportunity of study
ing the methods of Oriental State functions,
and the striking contrast which they illustrate
between the East and the West. In a
European country, on an occasion of this
kind, " programme " would be everything.
The whole course of the day's or the night's
ceremonial would have been fixed beforehand
to the minutest detail, and the humblest
spectator in the crowd would have the means,
if he cared to avail himself of them, of ascer
taining how, when, and where everything
was to happen. Here, not only did nobody
know anything for certain about Abbas
Pasha's intended movements, but nobody,

A KHEDIVIAL PROGRESS 239
not even perhaps the Mudlr himself, his pro
spective host, knew whether certainty was
even attainable. The Khedive would not
land till a much later hour than had been
originally fixed. The Khedive would not
land at all. The Khedive would land when
his horses arrived. The Khedive's horses had
arrived, but he would not land, as he had
resolved to receive the notables of Keneh on
board his steamer. In the meantime the one
thing certain was that the Khedive was
actually receiving the notables of Keneh, and
that the ceremony promised to last a con
siderable time. For the best part of two
hours an interminable procession of turbaned
heads might be seen filing gravely from the
bank on to the steamer, along its deck, up
one of the stairways to the saloon, and down
the other on to the deck again. Ulemas,
judges, court officials of the district, Coptic
priests, foreign consuls, local merchants,
sheiks of the villages — there seemed no end
to them.

240 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
But, all the while, the more watchful of the
observers had noticed that a sort of spacious
floating horse-box had been brought up at a
" dummy " near the landing-stage, and that
with much clatter of hoofs on woodwork the
frightened animals were being landed. Then,
all of a sudden, at about eleven o'clock there
was a banging of explosive fireworks and a
rocket soared into the air. The Khedive
had landed! A minute more and he was
dashing in a carriage-and-four up the mile-
long lighted avenue to the Mudir's house, in
front of which stood the doomed bullocks,
with their slaughterers standing over them
ready to deliver the death-stroke in token of
Oriental welcome as soon as he set foot on
his servant's threshold. Through the gaps
in the crowd could be seen the white chargers
of his escort streaming at full gallop behind
him, between two dense rows of dark and
voiceless spectators, like riders in a dream.
It was a strange, wild sight, but stranger far
was the almost total absence of sound. Amid

A KHEDIVIAL PROGRESS 241
all this flashing light and movement there
was something positively uncanny in the
accompanying silence. The roar of an
English crowd as large as this would have
been heard a mile off; yet this multitude,
which for hours past had been deafening us
with their incessant din, now stood before the
Prince whose coming they had so long and
patiently awaited, without uttering a single
cry of welcome ! True types of that mute
and unresisting people who have known so
many masters, and through and over whom,
from the earliest ages of recorded history,
conqueror after conqueror has swept as swift
and dreamlike as Abbas Pasha and his train.

CHAPTER XVI
TWIRLING TO PARADISE
It is the Night of the Middle of Shaban,
perhaps the most sacred, not to say awful,
night in the whole Mohammedan year. For
at a little after sunset this evening the Sidr —
that mystic lote-tree which bears as many
leaves as there are living beings in the world
— will be shaken by the appointed angel in
Paradise ; and on each leaf that comes flut
tering down from it will be found inscribed
the name of some person who is fated to die
before the year is out. If he be destined
to die very soon his leaf is almost wholly
withered ; if later in the year a larger portion
of it is still green ; but whether immediate or
delayed his death within the prescribed period
is assured. To every devout Moslem, there-

TWIRLING TO PARADISE 243
fore, this is a night for serious and solemn
meditation, and no doubt there are many such
pious spirits among those who are wending
their way up the ascent to the citadel of Cairo
and to the great mosque, whose slender
minarets stand out to-night in unwonted clarity
through the darkness, encircled, each of them,
with a double ring of lights. Not so, how
ever, with the majority of the crowd which
surrounds us at the principal entrance into
the buildings. Their errand is either that of
the ordinary European sightseer, or of the
native who lives by ministering to his wants.
They are assembled to witness the State visit
regularly paid by the Khedive on this night
of the year to the mosque of Mohammed Ali,
and they are waiting till he comes out, after
the due performance of his devotions. Like
most acts of homage paid by temporal poten
tates to Eternal Powers, it is appropriately
limited in point of time ; and, after no very
severe trial of our patience, Abbas Pasha,
who has developed into a young man of sin-

244 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
gularly undistinguished appearance and of a
stoutness beyond his years, steps forth from
the entrance porch, divests himself of his
slippers in the midst of salaaming satellites,
and, entering his brougham, drives rapidly
away. Then the crowding sightseers push
and jostle towards the doorway, and, gradually
squeezing through it, flow wide, like water
suddenly liberated from a conduit, over the
spacious floor within.
Large as is the concourse of people who
have poured into the building, they are
scarcely more than enough to dot the vast
area of the great mosque with a mere score
or so of scattered groups. There is space
and to spare between them for the eye to
gratify itself with the rich warm hues of the
immense carpets, gifts of successive Khedives
to the sacred foundation, and among the
finest and most splendid fabrics that Eastern
looms have ever produced. The hundreds
of chandeliers dependent from the lofty roof,
and never lighted save now and during the

TWIRLING TO PARADISE 245
Ramadan, have converted the whole huge
cupola into one great constellation, dissolving
its upper glooms into a luminous mist and
bathing its lower walls and pillars of grained
and gleaming alabaster in softest radiance.
The effect is magnificent beyond conception,
though as little devotional as can well be
imagined. To the eye of an unbeliever it
might seem to be rather an Aladdin's palace
than a house of prayer. It is to the ear
alone that the character either of the place
or of the people reveals itself ; and it is to
the groups of seated figures from whom the
"noise of worship" proceeds that the
curious direct their steps.
The comparatively staid and unemotional
worshippers — the little batches of Arabs ten
or twelve strong who are reciting verses of
the Koran in a low monotone or crooning
responses after the professional "reader"
who has come to the aid of their illiteracy —
collect but scanty audiences. The chief
centre of attraction lies elsewhere. It is to

246 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
be found in that ring of squatting and sway
ing devotees who have chosen their " pitch "
in the south-east corner of the mosque, on
the same side of it as the great tomb of
Mohammed Ali. For those — and they pro
bably form a majority of the foreign visitors
— who have on some previous day hurried
over their lunch in order to hear the so-
called "Howling Dervishes" give what has
been irreverently described as " their cele
brated farmyard imitation," this performance
in the mosque may fail to prove a " draw."
The spectacle is to be witnessed down
at the Kasr-el-Ain Mosque in Old Cairo —
and is variously reported upon by some as
" an extraordinary sight which I would not
have missed for anything," by others as " a
disgusting exhibition that no one should look
at who desires to retain a spark of respect for
human nature" and by yet others, as con
temptuously and more concisely, as " the
biggest fraud in Egypt" — it is at least unique
in its kind. Even if it be to a certain extent

TWIRLING TO PARADISE 247
"faked," as the critics last quoted insinuate
— even if a certain considerable percentage
of these grunting contortionists have the
perfunctory air of " supers " at a piastre a
day, and among them you recognise unmis
takably typical specimens of the bazaar-tout,
the street dragoman out at elbows, and other
worthy or unworthy citizens, certainly not
affiliated to any religious order of Islam —
what then ? Mabille itself, that once famous
temple-grove of the "great goddess Lu
bricity," could not in its later days dispense
with the services of hired ministrants for the
due performance of its saltatory ritual, and
had to supplement the declining zeal of its
habituds by the mercenary agility of the
calicot and the cocotte masquerading as the
grisette. And, anyhow, the performers in
the little monastic courtyard of the Kasr-el-
Ain Mosque, unlike those who disported
themselves in the sylvan shades of the
Parisian pleasure-garden, can at least show a
leaven of bond-fide devotees.

248 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
Some of these wild-eyed, neurotic, semi-
imbecile creatures belong to a type which is
familiar enough all over the world, and which
you may meet with in every costume and
under every sky. Nature only too plainly
proclaims them the congenital victims of
some one or other of the many forms of
hysteria. When these men jerk their heads
in concert from side to side, accompanying
each jerk with a grunt like that which
punctuates every thud of a pavior's rammer ;
when they groan in unison ; when they gasp
and pant and croon in response to the whining
quaver of the old precentor in a filthy turban
and frowsy gaberdine, who " deacons off"
the extraordinary choir ; when, above all,
they bow till their bodies are bent double,
each of them flinging forward his dirty mane
till its ends almost touch the ground and
then throwing it back again over his shoul
ders — you can see that the thing is genuine,
or at any rate as much so as such manifesta
tions of religious excitement ever are. For

TWIRLING TO PARADISE 249
what analysis will ever disengage and measure
the ingredient of personal vanity which enters
into and combines with disinterested enthu
siasm in all public exhibitions of extravagant
and unusual forms of devout emotion ? Every
religious zealot, from a Brahmin fakir to an
English Revivalist, has one eye only upon
the deity of his worship, and the other upon
the spectator. Who can say which of the
two organs of vision fixes the more intent
gaze on its object ?
The howlers of to-night in the Mosque of
Mohammed Ali are noisier than the der
vishes in the Kasr-el-Ain, but then they are,
perhaps, a little more human. In revenge,
however, their grimaces are more hideous,
and their cervical column seems to have such
a peculiar pliancy as to create the agreeable
illusion that their heads, which they wag
from side to side with a looseness that puts
to shame the fore-and-aft nutations of the
porcelain mandarin, are about to part com
pany with their bodies. On the whole, they

2S0 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
form a sufficiently repulsive sight ; and it is
only the erect devotee, who stands in the
centre of their circle, and to whose perform
ance these moppings and mowings are a
species of accompaniment that contrives to
interest, without disgusting, the Western
spectator. The Dancing Dervishes, for some
reason or other, have ceased to dance at the
Tekiyet-el-Maulawlyeh, the usual scene of
their antics, for the present ; but one of their
number is here to-night. Without any pre
lude he has stepped quietly into the ring, a
thin anaemic youth of barely twenty, clad in
the sort of long striped soutane which these
mystics affect. Extending his arms at right
angles to his body he begins to twirl, and
for five and twenty mortal minutes, by the
independent testimony of many watches, he
continues to do so. He was twirling " when
our parcel left," as the cricket reporters say,
and being then evidently "well set," it is
impossible to say how long the innings may
have lasted. Every now and then, say, at

TWIRLING TO PARADISE 251
intervals of about ten minutes, the speed of
his revolutions would slacken, like that of a
spent humming-top, and you might have
thought that he was coming gradually to a
halt from exhaustion. But no! At the
moment when the pace had slowed down
almost to stopping point, it would rapidly
quicken again to its former pitch.
It is a truly extraordinary performance
considered merely from a secular point of
view, and one well worth witnessing on that
account alone. Indeed, you can in a certain
sense respect the performer ; you may even
entertain for him that sort of qualified ad
miration which is commanded by the sword-
swallower or the regurgitator of tape. He
is, at least, doing something which you
cannot. We could, any of us, growl, and
groan, and gasp, and wag our heads and
sway our bodies to and fro by the hour
together. But to revolve upon the long axis
of the spinal column and the human legs,
say, one hundred and fifty times a minute,

2S2 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
for the best part of half an hour, and that
without ever once calling upon the spectator,
in the words of the well-known comic ballad,
to " see me reverse," is an accomplishment
of far greater rarity and merit.
It seems, moreover, to give proof of a far
higher form of religious exaltation. The
grunters and groaners, and tom-tom beaters
and head-waggers are mere energumens.
This man has all the air of a genuine mystic.
It is impossible to contemplate the counte
nance of this twirling fanatic, and the contrast
of its strange quietude with the ceaseless
motion of his body, without being powerfully
impressed by it. As the endless gyrations con
tinue the position of the arms is repeatedly
varied. Now both are extended at full
length ; now one is dropped by the side while
the other remains still stretched out; now
one, now both are bent till the tips of the
fingers touch the shoulders. But all the
time the eyes remain closed and the face
wears the same expression of perfect and

TWIRLING TO PARADISE 253
imperturbable calm. To gaze intently upon
him is to feel his condition gradually com
municating itself to your own brain. That
spinning figure with the unmoved counten
ance begins to exercise a disturbing effect
upon you.
The world of sight must long have dis
appeared from his view ; the whizzing
universe would be a mere blur upon his
retina were he to open his eyes. But does
he see nothing beyond it through their
closed lids ? Has he really twirled himself
in imagination to the gates of Paradise ?
Are the heavens opening in beatific vision
to that human teetotum ? After all, why
not ? Once overcome the feeling of giddi
ness which would probably lay an ordinary
mortal prostrate before he had spun two
minutes, and anything might happen. You
sleep as a top is said to sleep, as this man
is obviously sleeping; and "in that sleep of
tops what dreams may come?" Who knows ?
Perhaps the incessant rotatory motion acts

254 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
on the human brain like haschisch or some
other wonder-working drug. The dervish,
at any rate, has all the air of the wonder-
seer. He is of the true race of the visionaries,
and even if he were not, the stupor of trance
is at any rate a less unwholesome and dis
tressing subject of contemplation than the
spasms of epilepsy. The performance of
the twirling dervish leaves no sense of a
degraded humanity behind it ; but you quit
the company of their grunting and gasping
brothers with all the feeling of having as
sisted at a "camp meeting" of the lower
apes. Soberly devout Mohammedans no doubt
look askance at both. To the question what
such followers of Islam think of these wild
fanatics a venerable Moslem replied the other
day to a friend of mine, " We think of them,
sir, precisely as a sober member of your
Church of England thinks of the Salvation
Army." The parallel, of course, is not quite
exact, but it is sufficiently near for practical

TWIRLING TO PARADISE 255
purposes. Every faith may claim to be
judged by the best specimens of its adherents
and the highest examples of its ritual and
worship. And assuredly El Islam can point
to countless followers, even among the very
humblest, whose simple piety is day by day
and quite unconsciously illustrated under con
ditions which absolutely exclude any possible
element of religious vanity or Pharisaic dis
play. No one can doubt it who has ever,
himself unseen, beheld an Egyptian peasant
alone between the desert and the river, at the
sunset hour, prostrating himself before the
Deity in whose sole presence he imagines
himself to be, the One God who called his
Prophet out of that Mecca towards which his
worshipper devoutly turns. To look on this
sight is to feel the spirit of human worship in
its purest form ; and a pious Moslem twitted
with his howling and posturing dervishes
might as confidently set " this picture" against
that, as we Christians would bid him look,
for instance, at the bowed heads and clasped

256 FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN
hands of the two rustic figures in Millet's
" Angelus," as a corrective to the vulgar
corybantics of Hallelujah lasses, and to "take
away the taste" of Happy Eliza with her
coal-scuttle bonnet and tambourine.

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
London & Edinburgh

This book first appeared serially in the
columns of " The Daily Telegraph" to
the Proprietors of which journal, thanks
are due for permission to reprint.

M« JOHN LANEf

1

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The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. Post 8vo. $s. 6d.
net.
FLETCHER (J. S.).
The Wonderful Wapentake. By "A Son of the Soil."
With 18 full-page illustrations by J. A. Symington.
Cr. 8vo. 51. 6d. net.
FOUR AND SIXPENNY NOVELS.
Each volume with title-page and cover design by Patten
Wilson. Cr. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
Galloping Dick. By H. B. Marriott Watson.
The Wood of the Brambles. By Frank Mathew.
The following are in preparation :
The Sacrifice of Fools. By R. Manifold Craig.
A Lawyer's Wife. By Sir Nevill Geary, Bart.
Weighed in the Balance. By Harry Lander.
Glamour. By Meta Orred.
Patience Sparhawk and her Times. By Gertrude
Atherton.
The Career of Delia Hastings. By H. B. Marriott
Watson.
GALE (NORMAN).
Orchard Songs. With title-page and cover design by J.
iLLiNGWORTH Kay. Fcap. 8vo. Irish Linen. 5J. net-
Also a special edition limited in number on hand-made
paper bound in English vellum. £1 is. net.

THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE

GARNETT (RICHARD).
Poems. With title-page by J. Illingworth Kay. Cr. 8vo.
55. net.
Dante, Petrarch, Camoens. CXXIV Sonnets rendered
in English. Cr. 8vo. 51. net.
GIBSON (CHARLES DANA).
Pictures : Nearly One Hundred Large Cartoons. Oblong
Folio. 15s. net.
GOSSE (EDMUND).
The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Now first
edited. Pott 8vo. $s. net.
Also 25 copies large paper. 12s. 6d. net.
GRAHAME (KENNETH).
Pagan Papers : A Volume of Essays. With title-page
by Aubrey Beardsley. Fcap. 8vo. $s. net.
{Out of print at present.
The Golden Age. With cover design by Charles Robin
son. Cr. 8vo. 3-r. 6d. net. [Third Edition.
GREENE (G. A.).
Italian Lyrists of To-Day. Translations in the original
metres from about 35 living Italian poets with bibliographi
cal and biographical notes. Cr. 8vo. 5.S. net.
GREENWOOD (FREDERICK).
Imagination in Dreams. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
HAKE (T. GORDON).
A Selection from his Poems. Edited by Mrs. Meynell.
With a portrait after D. G. Rossetti, and a cover design
by Gleeson White. Cr. 8vo. 5.1. net.
HAYES (ALFRED).
The Vale of Arden, and Other Poems. With a title-
page and cover design by E. H. New. Fcap. 8vo. 31. 6d
net. Also 25 copies large paper. 155. net.

THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE

HAZLITT (WILLIAM).
Liber Amoris ; or, The New Pygmalion. Edited, with an
Introduction, by Richard Le Gallienne. To which is
added an exact transcript of the original MS. , Mrs. Hazlitt's
diary in Scotland, and letters never before published.
Portrait after Bewick, and facsimile letters. 400 copies
only. 4to, 364 pp., buckram. 2U. net.
HEINEMANN (WILLIAM).
The First Step : A Dramatic Moment. Sm. 4W, 3$. id. net.
HOPPER (NORA).
Ballads in Prose. With a title-page and cover by
Walter West. Sq. i6mo. &. net.
Under Quicken Boughs. With title-page designed by
Patten Wilson. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
HOUSMAN (CLEMENCE).
The Were Wolf. With 6 full-page illustrations, title-page,
and cover-design by Laurence Housman. Sq. i6mo.
y. 6d. net.
HOUSMAN (LAURENCE).
Green Arras : Poems. With 6 illustrations, title-page, and;
cover-design by the Author. Cr. 8vo. 5-r. net.
[/» preparation.
IRVING (LAURENCE).
Godefroi and Yolande : A Play. Sm. 4to. 3s. 6d. net.
[In preparation.
JAMES (W. P.).
Romantic Professions : A volume of Essays. With title-
page designed by J. Illingworth Kay. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net..
JOHNSON (LIONEL).
The Art of Thomas Hardy. Six Essays, with etcbed
portrait by Wm. Strang, and Bibliography by John
LANE. Cr. 8vo. Buckram. 5.1. 6d. net, [Second Edition.
Also 150 copies, large paper, with proofs of the portraits
£is. is, net.

THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE

JOHNSON (PAULINE).
The White Wampum : Poems. With title-page and cover
designs by E. H. New. Cr. 8vo. ss. net.
JOHNSTONE (C. E.).
Ballads of Boy and Beak, with title-page designed by
F. H. Townsend. Sq. 321110. zs. net.
KEYNOTES SERIES.
Each volume with specially designed title-page by Aubrey
Beardsley. Cr. 8vo, cloth. 3*. td. net.
Vol. 1. Keynotes. By George Egerton. [Seventh Edition
Vol. 11. The Dancing Faun. By Florence Farr.
Vol. in. Poor Folk. Translated from the Russian of F.
Dostoievsky by Lena Milman, with a preface
by George Moore.
Vol. rv. A Child of the Age. By Francis Adams.
Vol v. The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light.
By Arthur Machen. [Second Edition.
Vol. vi. Discords. By George Egerton. \Fourth Edition.
Vol. vii. Prince Zaleski. By M. P. Shiel.
Vol viii. The Woman who Did. By Grant Allen.
[Twenty-first Edition,
Vol ix. Women's Tragedies. By H. D. Lowry.
Vol x. Grey Roses. By Henry Harland.
Vol. xi. At the First Corner, and Other Stories.
By H. B. Marriott Watson.
VoL xii. Monochromes. By Ella D'Arcy.
Vol. xiii. At the Relton Arms. By Evelyn Sharp.
Vol. xiv. The Girl from the Farm. By Gertrude
Dix. [Second Edition.
Vol. xv. The Mirror of Music. By Stanley V.
Makower.
Vol. xvi. Yellow and White. By W. Carlton Dawe.
Vol. xvn. The Mountain Lovers. By Fiona Macleod.

THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE

Vol.

XIX.

Vol

XX.

Vol.

XXI.

VoL

XXII.

Vol.

XXIII.

VoL

xxrv.

Vol.

XXV.

KEYNOTES SERIES.
Vol. xviii. The Woman Who Didn't. By Victoria
Crosse. [Third Edition,
xix. The Three Impostors. By Arthur Machen.
Nobody's Fault. By Netta Syrett.
xxi. The British Barbarians. By Grant Allen.
[Second Edition,
In Homespun. By E. Nesbit.
Platonic Affections. By John Smith.
Nets for the Wind. By Una Taylor.
Where the Atlantic Meets the Land. By
Caldwell Lipsett.
The following are in preparation :
Vol. xxvi. In Scarlet and Grey. By the Hon. Mrs.
Arthur Henniker. (With a Story "The
Spectre of the Real," written in collabor
ation with Thomas Hardy).
Vol. xxvii. Maris Stella. By Marie Clothilde Bal
four.
Vol. xxvm. Morrison's Heir. By Mabel E. Wotton.
Vol. xxix. Shapes in the Fire. By M. P. Shiel.
Vol. xxx. Ugly Idol. By Claud Nicholson.
LANE'S LIBRARY.
Each volume, cr. 8vo, %s. 6d. net.
Vol. i. March Hares. By George Forth.
Vol. n. The Sentimental Sex. By Gertrude Warden.
Vol. hi. Gold. By Annie Luden.
Vol. iv. The Sentimental Vikings. By R. V. Risley.
LEATHER (R. K.).
Verses. 250 copies, fcap. 8vo. 3s. net.
Transferred by the Author to the present Publisher.
LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD).
Prose Fancies. With portrait of the Author by WiLSON
Steer. Fourth edition, cr. 8vo, purple cloth. 5s. net.
Also a limited large paper edition, ins. 6d. net.

10 THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE

LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD).
The Book Bills of Narcissus. An account rendered by
Richard le Gallienne. Third edition, with a new
chapter and a frontispiece, cr. 8vo, purple cloth. 31. dd.
net. Also 50 copies on large paper. 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.
English Poems. Fourth edition, revised, cr. 8vo, purple cloth.
4s. 6d. net.
George Meredith: some Characteristics; with a Biblio
graphy (much enlarged) by John Lane, portrait, &c.
Fourth edition, cr. 8vo, purple cloth. 5s. 6d. net.
The Religion of a Literary Man. 5th thousand, cr. 8vo,
purple cloth. 3s. 6d. net.
Also a special rubricated edition on hand-made paper, 8vo.
10s, 6d. net.
Robert Louis Stevenson : An Elegy, and Other Poems,
mainly personal. With etched title-page by D. Y.
Cameron. Cr. 8vo, purple cloth. 4?. 6d. net.
Also 75 copies on large paper. 8vo. 12s. 6d. net.
Retrospective Reviews : A Literary Log, 1891-1895. 2
vols. , cr. 8vo, purple cloth, gs. net.
See also Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, p. 7.
Prose Fancies. (Second Series.) Cr. 8vo, purple cloth.
5^. net. [In preparation.

LUCAS (WINIFRED).
Units : Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

[In preparation.

LYNCH (HANNAH).
The Great Galeoto and Folly or Saintliness. Two
Plays, from the Spanish of JOSE Echegaray, with an
Introduction. Sm. 4to. 5;. 6d. net.
MARZIALS (THEO.).
The Gallery of Pigeons, and Other Poems. Post 8vo.
4f. 6d. net.
Transferred by the Author to the present Publisher,
THE MAY FAIR SET.
Each volume fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Vol. 1. The Autobiography of a Boy. Passages selected
by his friend G. S. Street. With a title-page
designed by C W. Furse. [Fifth Edition.

THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE I I

THE MAYFAIR SET.
Vol. n. The Joneses and the Asterisks : A Story in
Monologue. By Gerald Campbell. With a
title-page and 6 illustrations by F. H. Townsend.
[Second Edition.
Vol. in. Select Conversations with an Uncle, now
Extinct. By H. G. Wells. With a title-page
by F. H. Townsend.
Vol. iv. For Plain Women Only. By George Fleming
With a title-page by Patten Wilson.
Vol. v. The Feasts of Autolycus : The Diary of a Greedy
Woman. Edited by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.
With a title-page by Patten Wilson.
Vol. vi. Mrs. Albert Grundy: Observations in Philistia.
By Harold Frederic. With a title-page by
Patten Wilson.
MEREDITH (GEORGE).
The First Published Portrait of this Author, engraved
on the wood by W. Biscombe Gardner, after the painting
by G. F. Watts. Proof copies on Japanese vellum,
signed by painter and engraver. £i is. net.
MEYNELL (MRS.), (ALICE C. THOMPSON).
POEMS. Fcap. 8vo. 3s.6d.net. [Third Edition.
A few of the 50 large paper copies (1st edition) remain.
I2j. 6d. net.
The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays. Fcap. 8vo.
3s. 6d. net. [Third Edition.
A few of the 50 large paper copies (1st edition) remain,
I2J. 6d. net.
The Colour of Life and other Essays. Fcap. 8vo.
3s. 6d. net. [In preparation.
See also Hake.
MILLER {JOAQUIN).
The Building of the City Beautiful. Fcap. 8vo.
With a decorated cover. $s- net-
MONKHOUSE (ALLAN).
Books and Plays : A Volume of Essays on Meredith,
Borrow, Ibsen and others. Cr. 8vo. $s. net.

12 THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE

NESBIT (E.).
A Pomander of Verse. With a title-page and cover designed
by Laurence Housman. Cr. 8vo. js. net.
In Homespun. (See Keynotes Series.)
NETTLESHIP (J. T.).
Robert Browning. Essays and Thoughts. With a por
trait, cr. 8vo. 5s, 6d, net. [Third Edition.
NOBLE (JAS. ASHCROFT).
The Sonnet in England, and Other Essays. Title-page
and cover design by AUSTIN YOUNG. Cr. 8vo. 5J. net.
Also 50 copies, large paper, 12s. 6d. net.
O'SHAUGHNESSY (ARTHUR).
His Life and His Work. With selections from his Poems.
By Louise Chandler Moulton. Portrait and cover
design, fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.
OXFORD CHARACTERS.
A series of 24 lithographed portraits by Will Rothenstein,
with text byF. York Powell and others. 200 copies
only folio, buckram, £3 3s. net.
25 special large paper copies containing proof impres
sions of portraits signed by the artist, £6 6s. net.
PETERS (WM. THEODORE).
Posies out of Rings. With title-page by Patten Wilson.
Sq. i6mo. 2s. net. [In preparation.
PIERROTS LIBRARY.
Each volume with title-page, cover-design, and end papers
designed by Aubrey Beardsley. Sq. i6mo. 2s. net.
Vol. 1. Pierrot. By H. De Vere Stacpoole.
VoL 11. My Little Lady Anne. By Mrs. Egerton
Castle. The following are in preparation :
Vol. hi. Death, the Knight, and the Lady. By H.
De Vere Stacpoole.
VoL iv. Simplicity. By A. T. G. Price.
Vol. v. My Brother. By Vincent Brown.

THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE I J
PLARR (VICTOR).
In the Dorian Mood : Poems. With title-page designed
by Patten Wilson. Cr. 8vo. 5.1. net. [In preparation.
RADFORD (DOLLIE).
Songs, and Other Verses. With title-page designed by
Patten Wilson. Fcap. 8vo. 41. 6d. net,
RHYS (ERNEST).
A London Rose, and Other Rhymes. With title-page-
designed by Selwyn Image. Cr. 8vo. jr. net.
RICKETTS (C. S.) AND C. H. SHANNON.
Hero and Leander. By Christopher Marlowe and
George Chapman. With borders, initials, and illus
trations designed and engraved on the wood by C S.
Ricketts and C H. Shannon. Bound in English
vellum and gold. 200 copies only. 351. net.
ROBERTSON (JOHN M.).
Essays Towards a Critical Method. (New Series.)'
Cr. 8vo. ss. net. [In preparation.
ST. CYRES (LORD).
The Little Flowers of St. Francis. A new rendering
into English of the Fioretti di San Francesco. Cr.
8vo. 5*. net. [In preparation.
SHORE (LOUISA).
Poems. With a Memoir by Frederic Harrison. Fcap.
8vo. 5s. net. [In preparation.
STEVENSON (ROBERT LOUIS).
Prince Otto: A Rendering in French by Egerton Castle.
Cr. 8vo. With frontispiece, title-page and cover design by
D.Y.Cameron. 7s.6d.net. [In preparation.
Also 100 copies on large paper, uniform in size with the
Edinburgh Edition of the works.
A Child's Garden of Verses. With nearly 100 illustra
tions by Charles Robinson. Cr. 8vo. $s. net.
[Second Edition.

THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE

STODDART (THOMAS TOD).
The Death Wake. With an introduction by Andrew
Lang. Fcap. 8vo. jr. net.
STREET (G. S.).
Miniatures and Moods. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. net.
Episodes. Cr. 8vo. 3s. net.
Transferred by the Author to the present Publisher.
The Autobiography of a Boy, (.Sire Mayfair Set.)
Quales Ego : a few remarks, in particular and at large.
Fcap. 8vo, 3s. 6d. net.
SWETTENHAM (F. A.).
Malay Sketches. With title and cover designs by Patten
Wilson. Cr. 8vo. $s. net. [Second Edition.
TABB (JOHN B.).
Poems. Sq. 32mo. 41. 6d. net.
TENNYSON (FREDERICK).
Poems of the Day and Year. With a title-page designed
by Patten Wilson. Cr. 8vo. $s. net.
THIMM (CARL A.).
A Complete Bibliography of Fencing and Duelling,
as Practised by all European Nations from
the Middle Ages to the Present Day. With a
Classified Index, arranged Chronologically according to
Languages. Illustrated with numerous Portraits of Ancient
and Modern Masters of the Art, title-pages and frontis
pieces of some of the earliest works. Portrait of the
Author by Wilson Steer, and title-page designed by
Patten Wilson. 4to. 21s. net. [In preparation,
THOMPSON (FRANCIS).
Poems. With frontispiece, title-page, and cover design by
Laurence Housman. Pott 4to. 5s. net. [Fourth Edition.
Sister-Songs : An Offering to Two Sisters. With frontis
piece, title-page, and cover design by Laurence Hous
man. Pott 4to, buckram. 5.1. net.

THE PUBLICATIONS OF JOHN LANE 1 5

THOREAU (HENRY DAVID).
Poems of Nature. Selected and edited by Henry S. Salt
and Frank B. Sanborn, with a title-page designed by
Patten Wilson. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
TRAILL (H. D.)
The Barbarous Britishers : A Tip-top Novel. With Title
and Cover Design by Aubrey Beardsley. Crown 8vo.
Wrapper, is. net.
From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier. With cover
design by Patten Wilson. Cr. 8vo. 5*. net.
[In preparation.
TYNAN HINKSON (KATHARINE).
Cuckoo Songs. With title-page and cover design by Laur
ence Housman. Fcap. 8vo. 5*. net.
Miracle Plays : Our Lord's Coming and Childhood.
With 6 illustrations, title-page and cover design by
Patten Wilson. Fcap. 8vo. 4*. 6d. net.

WALTON AND COTTON.
The Compleat Angler. A New Edition. Edited by
Richard le Gallienne. With about 200 illustrations
by Edmund H. New. To be issued in 12 monthly
parts, each is. net, [Now being published.
WATSON (ROSAMUND MARRIOTT).
Vespertilia, and Other Poems. With title-page designed
by R. Anning Bell. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
A Summer Night, and Other Poems. New Edition, with
a decorative title-page. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. net.
WATSON (WILLIAM).
The Father of the Forest : and other Poems. With
new photogravure portrait of the author. Fcap. 8vo.
3s. 6d. net. [Fifth Thousand.
Odes, and Other Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 4.S. 6d. net.
[Fourth Edition.
The Eloping Angels : a Caprice. Sq. i6mo, buckram.
3s. 6d. net. [Second Edition.

1 6 the publications of JOHN LANE

WATSON (WILLIAM).
Excursions in Criticism ; being some Prose Recreations
of a Rhymer. Cr. 8vo. ss. net. [Second Edition.
The Prince's Quest, and Other Poems. With a biblio
graphical note added. Fcap. 8vo. 41. 6d. net.
[Third Edition.
The Purple East : a Series of Sonnets on England's
Desertion of Armenia. With a frontispiece by G. F.
Watts, R.A. Wrappers, 11. net. [Fourth Edition.
WATT (FRANCIS).
The Law's Lumber Room. Fcap. 8vo. 3*. 6d. net.
[Second Edition.
WATTS (THEODORE).
Poems. Crown 8vo. 5*. net. [In preparation.
There will also be an Edition de Luxe of this volume, irinted
at the Kelmscott Press.
WHARTON (H. T.).
Sappho. Memoir, text, selected renderings, and a literal trans
lation by Henry Thornton Wharton. With Three
Illustrations in photogravure and a cover design by Aubrey
Beardsley. Fcap. 8vo. 7s.6d.net. [Third Edition.

The Yellow Book
An Illustrated Quarterly. Pott jto, ;s. net.
Volume 1. April 1894,272 pp., 15 Illustrations. [Out of print.
Volume 11. July 1894, 364 pp., 23 Illustrations.
Volume in. October 1894, 280 pp., 15 Illustrations,
Volume iv. January 1895, 285 pp., 16 Illustrations.
Volume v. April 1895, 317 pp., 14 Illustrations.
Volume vi. July 1895, 335 pp., 16 Illustrations.
Volume vn. October 1895, 320 pp., 20 Illustrations.
Volume viii. January 1896, 406 pp., 26 Illustrations.

YALE

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