Henry Duff Traill

“ 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. 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 ”

“ 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 cœur 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 mudlarks to grasp them first, the popular feeling being apparently opposed to robbing the afflicted. ”

“ Nevertheless, 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. ”

“ 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, therefore, 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Yet never and nowhere, not even in the rainiest spring of rainy Ireland, could you match the deep, cool, glossy green of 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? ”

“ Fear not but we shall outlive this tribe of red coats and black hats as we have outlived the turbaned warriors they have displaced 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ That is the charm of Cairo. You step aside from one of the main thoroughfares, 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 moving masses of colour for as many hours as you please without emerging again into Western civilisation. ”

“ The sun has not long disappeared behind the Libyan mountains, and we are still in the midst of 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Spare, graceful, active, trained "to fiddlestrings," and looking as fit to run for his life as the fleetest and most Mercury-like of those saïses 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 a vessel about the size of a stable bucket. ”

“ As the street straitens the crowd appears to thicken, until at the moment when the one is at its narrowest and the other at 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. ”

“ 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 descendants', to be remembered but as a mere brief episode in the history of this strange monumental people, who still look forth upon the traveller with the self-same eyes and faces that confront him from their sculptured tombs? ”

“ 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, 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. ”

“ 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 Mudir, as we soon see, has not underrated the deficiencies of Keneh in the matter of police. ”

“ In England, under fortunate conditions, 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 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. ”

“ 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 darkening waters. It is a race between the mists and the night to hide it first, and it would be hard to say which wins. ”

“ The sunset orange against which yon passing string of camels 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 bonâ-fide devotees.
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. ”

“ We simply lose our mental way in these enormous tracts of time, as we should lose our geographical way in 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. ”

“ At the end of the hours 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. ”

“ 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 occasional 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. ”