Chapter I

I saw another land

Fast by the land of Life, the land of Death;

More drear than where, outcast, Cain flew accursed,

And built with blood-stained hands his godless home.

* * * * *

WADY HALFA TO NEW DONGOLA.

Arrival at the second cataract of the Nile. — The desert beyond. — Resting-places. — A distressed traveller. — Green fields again. — Asleep on a horse. — The river from the second to the third cataract. — Irrigation beyond.

ON 13th November 1875 we started up the Nile from Cairo; our expedition consisted of eight civil engineers and one doctor, besides native assistants, soldiers and servants. Our object was to prospect and survey for a line of railway from Aboo Goossi to El Fasher, or Tendelti,[2] the capital of Darfoor. Aboo Goossi is a considerable village six miles higher up the Nile than Old Dongola, and is on the line of the proposed Soudan railway, on the survey of which I had been engaged in a subordinate capacity some years before. There was also to be a branch line surveyed from Sotaire, or Sotahl, to Khartoom. Sotaire, or Sotahl, is the site of two wells about eighty miles from Aboo Goossi on the proposed line to El Fasher.

Two steamers and one large barge were told off to carry the members of the expedition to the first cataract; one steamer was occupied by the engineers and doctor, the other by the native assistants, and the barge by the soldiers and stores. At Assouan we left our steamers and barge and proceeded by a recently constructed railway, nine miles in length, to the top of the first cataract; here we found two other steamers waiting for us and boats for the soldiers. His Excellency, Mustapha Fehmy Pacha, then newly appointed Director-General of the Railways of Upper Egypt, including the Soudan railway at that time in course of construction, accompanied us from Cairo as far as Wady Halfa.

Wady Halfa, “valley of grass,” is a village at the foot of the second or Great Cataract on the right bank of the Nile, at a distance of about a thousand miles from the Mediterranean; it is at the commencement of the Soudan railway. We disembarked on the left bank of the river opposite the village; the camels for our journey, to the number of three hundred and fifty, were in the neighbourhood, some on one side of the Nile, some on the other. The section of our expedition whose destination was Khartoom were ready to go the day before us, and we wished them good-bye to meet again in the Sahara some months after and a thousand miles away. On the following day we paid our farewell visit to Mustapha Pacha and started on our journey.

Tourists from Europe and America, visiting Egypt, seldom proceed further up the Nile than the first cataract; Philæ at its upper end is usually the limit of their travels; some few go as far as the second cataract, but I fancy their numbers may be counted by twos and threes. Indisputable evidence of this may be found in the state of the ruined temples of the Nile valley; below the first cataract Brown, Jones and Robinson may be seen carefully carved on their walls, as also some greater names which the world will hardly remember the longer, or esteem the more, for being in such company. Above Philæ this is rarely the case; time and the elements are left to do their work unaided.

The route generally taken by travellers to Khartoom and the White or Blue Niles starts from Korosco, about eighty miles below Wady Halfa. The route crosses the eastern desert of the Bishareen and Ababdeh Arabs, and joins the Nile again at Aboo Hamed, whence boats may be obtained to Khartoom and beyond, or the journey may be continued on camels.

This is the route that has been taken by all the great explorers; that portion of the Nile between Wady Halfa and Aboo Hamed is consequently little, if at all, known to Europeans.

A complete change occurs in the Nile valley as soon as the second cataract is reached; below this the desert, with its rock and its sand, only comes down to the river in places; above, the river is bounded closely by the lifeless wilderness. From Wady Halfa to the island of Say, I should doubt whether the whole cultivable border on the west bank of the Nile is much larger than Hyde Park; this is a distance of one hundred and twenty miles. Every ten or twenty miles little patches of deposited mud are to be met with, some of them no bigger than a table- cloth; every inch of these is cultivated, generally with beans or lentils. In some places the area is larger, then a little “doura”[3] is grown. Sometimes even in these happy secluded spots a few palm-trees give life to the landscape; two or three mud-houses, with a few families possessing fowls, goats, sheep, and perhaps a donkey, are erected in their shade. The donkey is used for carrying to head-quarters the products of the outlying little bits of land, and, in many cases, so small is the yield that the donkey eats it all up before he gets home. The people living here are happy and undisturbed, scarcely any caravans move up or down through their trackless world, and a few boats, only when the Nile is at its highest, pass to and fro in many years. Their intercourse with the outer world, limited as it is, is, however, sufficient to sharpen their wits and to teach them the value of money. They know what a sovereign is worth as well as anyone in London, perhaps better; once they have become possessed of it they never part with it. They are not averse to trade. A sheep seldom exceeds one dollar in price and fowls in proportion, but I fancy that if a few hungry Englishmen were to take up their quarters in this district prices would very soon go up. The waste that bounds these simple homes is almost devoid of vegetation; small tufts of dry yellow grass may be occasionally met with; they are not, however, sufficiently numerous to give sustenance to even a very small number of camels. The “hammals,” or camel-drivers, generally manage to collect a supply of dry grass before starting to help the more weakly animals through their journey; well-fed and healthy animals, some time out of work, will easily travel for five or six days with only an occasional mouthful.

The usual distance travelled per day by a caravan is twenty miles, and the rate two and a half miles per hour. If towards the end of a day’s journey there should be no approach to the river, the drivers will either stop shorter or go on a little further. They always go down to the river at night. If there should be a patch of cultivated ground at the resting-place, and no guardians near, the drivers help themselves to a meal of the produce, and often the camels, if not properly looked after, finish up the remainder. In those parts of the journey which are distant from the river, little mud-huts roofed over with palm-branches and doura-stalks are occasionally found. Inside is a raised divan of mud from one end to the other, and two or three large vases filled with water are half buried in the ground. These huts are resting-places for weary travellers. Coming to one of them one day, I asked one of the drivers, who placed them there? His reply was “Allah.” I wondered at the time, from the ingenuous simplicity of his answer, whether he really believed that the house and the water had been placed there through some miraculous interposition of Providence. On questioning him again I learned that “Allah” had made the hearts of good men to do it. “Allah brought the water”; or, what was the same thing, “He made the good men bring it.” His philosophy seemed to resolve itself into _qui facit per alium facit per se_, a doctrine not entirely unknown amongst ourselves. I decided to avail myself of the shade provided by the good men. I went in and spread my rug on the divan, my Arab friend sat on the ground near; I drank of the cool Nile water mixed with brandy, my friend drank it neat—not the brandy, but the water. We lighted my long “chibook” and shared it between us in alternate puffs, and discussed in calm and enlightened terms his theological proposition. I came to the conclusion that in the simple heart of this wandering son of the sand there was a pure and earnest faith which, if properly laid out, might have started many a poor curate in a good way of business and yielded fair returns. May he reap his profits.

One day our party was stopping for lunch in one of these cool and shady resting-places, when we were joined by a poor shoeless traveller, footsore, ragged, and unwashed. He was an Italian who had not succeeded in business. He had walked all the way from Khartoom, following the bank of the Nile, a distance of about eight hundred miles, and, although never very far from the river, had, apparently, not once availed himself of the facilities its waters afforded for taking a bath. He had started without money, and had lived on the hospitality of the natives dwelling on his long and weary route. This kindness, he told us, had never once been refused. At night shelter was always provided for him, dates and doura, or other simple fare, were given him for his breakfast, and more was always offered him for his day’s journey. Let it be remembered, this kind unquestioning hospitality was given to a Christian by Mohammedans who, in England we believe, would rather see a Christian die in a ditch than lift one finger to help him. In our own country he would have been locked up as a rogue and a vagabond, which he certainly was. The story he told us was a sad one. His partner, with the sum they had between them, was to have purchased spirits and beer, to be sold at a profit in Khartoom. He had certainly purchased the spirits and beer, but only retail, by the glass, “to be drunk on the premises”; there were consequently no profits. We were determined not to be behindhand in our hospitality; we gave him some cold lunch, a glass or two of claret, followed by a few cigars and a drop of brandy and water. The cold lunch, the glasses of claret, the cigars, and the drop of brandy and water, opened his poor suffering and disappointed soul—he wept. We raised five dollars between us and gave them to him. One of us, more generous than the rest, gave him an old worn coat, for which he had no further use, and which, as we were in the tropics, was not likely to be of much service to our unfortunate rogue and vagabond. He wept again; this unexampled generosity completely unmanned him. As work was at that time going on briskly at Wady Halfa for the Soudan railway, we referred him by letter to the engineer-in-chief, an esteemed friend of mine, who has since gone to South America in charge of an important railway in course of construction in the Brazils. He placed the letter in the pocket of the nice, warm, moth-eaten old coat, thus putting his handsome present to some use. No arrangement was come to with the engineer at Wady Halfa; the terms were not sufficiently high. He might have earned in one month enough to keep him in idleness for six. Perhaps, however, he was ambitious, and wished to realize a rapid fortune. I found him, on my way back, in a grog shop at Assouan in a state of intoxication but little removed from absolute torpidity.

This melancholy and profitless part of the earth offers no food for man unless it be food for reflection. There can, however, be no pleasure in dreaming about sterile rock and sand; I shall therefore endeavour to describe its loneliness as quickly as possible. There is no better simile than the face of the full moon, beautiful from our far-off distance, but in reality a rocky, waterless, lifeless, scorched-up world. The surface of this desert is waterworn by countless rivers and smaller streams, which may have flowed through a smiling land when, long ago, the earth was a little child, but which are now all dried up, old and gray.

On reaching the neighbourhood of the island Say, green fields of doura and a fringe of date-trees along the banks of the river make a pleasing change from the scorching desert. There is a much-prized salt mine not far off, which is a source of great wealth to its owners. Its produce forms a subject of brisk barter and trade in the district. Two and a half days beyond Say is the fine temple of Pthur, in a very good state of preservation, and seemingly of the Greek or Roman period, light and graceful in design, and, with the exception of the island temple of Isis at Philæ, with its rocky scenery, unsurpassed for beauty and sublimity in any other part of the Nile; and of rock-hewn Aboo-Simbel, with its four sitting giant figures, perfect types of Semitic beauty, it is certainly the finest to be found in Nubia.

Kohe, where it was proposed to bridge the river in order to carry over the Soudan railway, is about one hour’s ride above this temple. Here the route leaves the bank and crosses thirty miles of desert, and joins the Nile again at Fakeer Bender. It is always necessary to travel over this distance in one day, as water is only carried in sufficient quantity for drinking on the road. It is a dreary journey of twelve hours, and throughout the length scarcely a rock is found large enough to cast shadow for a rest and lunch. I once rode over this stretch of desert on horseback, starting shortly before sundown, as no horse could travel through it in the day-time. The natural pace of these miserable, sore- backed, Nubian horses is only two and a half miles an hour, and their gait is like that of the camel, moving two legs on one side at once, the result, I suppose, of pacing with the caravans. Long before morning I was fast asleep in the saddle, and my poor horse must have been sleeping too, for he rolled over and woke me. Finding it useless to persuade him to go further at that time, we lay down and slept side by side for two or three hours, and only reached the tents next morning in time for a late breakfast.

A day’s journey beyond Fakeer Bender is Hannek, which gives its name to the third cataract, at the upper end of which stands Haffeer, where the Nile again becomes navigable.

Although those portions of the Nile in the vicinity of Wady Halfa and Hannek are called respectively the second and third cataracts, it would be more correct to describe the whole length of the river between those places as one long series of rapids, in some parts rougher than in others, and with an occasional stretch of smooth water intervening, but generally unnavigable, unless it be at extreme high Nile, and then only for small boats.

On our first expedition into the Soudan in 1871, it was decided in Cairo, owing to insufficient information, that we should proceed up this part of the river in boats. We disembarked at Wady Halfa, took camels for ten miles to Amka, at the top of the cataract, and re-embarked at that place in open native boats (nuggahs). Although all the available natives living along each bank were requisitioned to tow us, the voyage to Kohe, a distance of one hundred and fifty odd miles, took us nearly a month. At times the north wind would fail us, and we were more than once becalmed for several days, tied to a rock in the middle of the river. Fortunately the atmosphere above the seething and whirling waters is always free from pests in the shape of flies and mosquitoes, &c., or, unprotected by the bed and window curtains which are fixed in the travellers’ “dahabeeahs” below the rapids, we must have suffered, in our anything but convenient boats, more than I care to think about. We had enough of this sort of travelling by the time we reached Kohe. We sent the boats on by themselves, and took horses to New Dongola.

Above Haffeer the struggles between the water and the rocks are over, or, rather, I should more correctly say, have not yet commenced. The Nile flows again, peaceful and smooth, through broad banks of some of the richest land in the world. So wide are these always cultivated banks that the province of Dongola, although so much of it is included in the sandy and stony tract of country I have endeavoured to describe, is certainly one of the richest, if not the richest, in the dominions of the ruler of Egypt. At every short distance along the banks, sometimes as near together as twenty feet, are “zakeeyehs,” or chain and bucket pumps, worked by a vertical and a horizontal wheel, turned by two stout oxen under the charge of a child, boy or girl, seldom more than six or seven years old. The child sits on the shaft and sleeps half the day to the harsh music which the wheels are purposely constructed to grind out of their axles. Sometimes the oxen stop; the child then wakes up and shouts, and if they do not go on briskly, or if they stop again, they are simply unyoked and driven home to feed, others are brought, and the grinding and raising of water goes on as before. This system of irrigation is carried on day and night, and, although simple and rude, is sufficient to render the inhabitants almost entirely independent of the rise and fall of the Nile. When the river is low, they lengthen the rope and fasten on a few more buckets, and as the water rises the extra buckets are removed, and the rope is shortened. At extreme high Nile the wheel stops, the oxen have a rest, and the child goes home to play.

On 2nd January we reached New Dongola, the capital of Lower Nubia, having been delayed a week in our journey from Wady Halfa, by stopping to take a series of soundings for the bridge across the Nile at Kohe.

[Decoration]