Battle of the Nile

“ Part of the Delta was overrun and devastated before the Pharaoh could make head against his foes. But a decisive battle was at length fought at Pa-Alu-sheps, not far from Heliopolis, which ended in the complete overthrow of the invading hordes. Egypt was saved from the danger which had threatened it, but it seems never to have recovered from the shock. The power of the government was weakened in the valley of the Nile itself, and one by one the foreign conquests passed out of its grasp. ”

“ But with the eventual abandonment of the Nile expedition that of Suakin followed. On the 17th May the troops commenced to withdraw. They had had a severe time of it, with the thermometer at 120° in the tents, and constant disturbances night after night from the enemy. He was by no means to be despised. He combined the courage of the fanatic who saw heaven in view if he fell in battle with the infidel, with the most determined physical bravery. Few men want more killing than those Arabs of the Sudan. ”

“ As for the opinion of those, that the Nile may be turned into the Red Sea from Nubia or Egypt, it deserves no answer. What could be the motive of such an undertaking? Would the Egyptians suffer such an operation to be carried on in their own country for the sake of starving themselves? and if the country had been taken from them by an enemy, still it could not be the interest of that conqueror to let the inhabitants, now become his subjects, perish, and much less to reduce them to the necessity of so doing by such an undertaking. ”

“ No one can hold Egypt securely unless he holds also the whole valley of the Nile. The sources of the river in hostile, or even in indifferent, lands must always be a grave cause of danger, or, at the best, anxiety. If tradition be correct, the Abyssinians on more than one occasion made use of their position on the Nile as a powerful lever in negotiations with Egypt. ”

“ Notwithstanding which, no sooner was he arrived at Thebes (in Egypt) than he detached a large army to plunder the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, the greatest object of the worship of these shepherds; which army utterly perished without a man remaining, covered, as I suppose, by the moving sands. He then began his march against the Macrobii, keeping close to the Nile. The country there being too high to receive any benefit from the inundation of the river, produced no corn, so that part of his army died for want of provision. ”

“ Their duty touches very nearly the lives of all who [112] dwell and labour within their districts. There can be no question of any folding of the hands to slumber. But beyond all this, it is the peculiar good fortune of those whose care is the water-supply of Egypt that they have to travel in thought or in fact over half a great continent, and discuss schemes of a magnitude and extent enough to stagger the imagination of the boldest dreamer. The Anglo-Egyptian army at Omdurman opened an entirely new chapter in the history of the control of the Nile. ”

“ But a shower of bullets, like hail stones, fell upon them, and the waves of the Nile were crimsoned with their blood. Others sought the desert, a wild and rabble rout. The victors, with their accustomed celerity pursued, pitilessly pouring into the dense masses of their flying foes the most terrible discharges of artillery and musketry. The rout was complete—the carnage awful. The sun had hardly reached the meridian, before the whole embattled host had disappeared, and the plain as far as the eye could extend, was strewn with the dying and the dead. ”

“ The iron-like sterility of the granite rocks, naked except in spots where the wind has sheeted them with sand; the groves of palms springing unexpectedly into view in this desert wilderness, as a sudden bend of the river discovers a village; the ever blue and never clouded sky above, and, the only blessing of this blighted land, the Nile, silently flowing between its stern walls of rocks towards the distant land of Lower Egypt, form a total that produces a scene to be met with nowhere but upon the Nile. ”

“ For years the infernal traffic in slaves and its attendant horrors had existed like a pestilence in the negro countries, and had so exasperated the tribes, that people who in former times were friendly had become hostile to all comers. An exploration to the Nile sources was thus a march through an enemy's country, and required a powerful force of well-armed men. For the traders there was no great difficulty, as they took the initiative in hostilities, and had fixed camps as "points d'appui;" ”

“ From no other spot, perhaps, can the mind become so fully impressed by the fact that to the Nile, and the Nile alone, does Egypt owe all she has of fertility and wealth. Beyond is the desert of sand, a sea-bed without its animate forms, lifeless and waste. Dean Stanley has well observed, that the Nile, as it glides between the Tombs of the Pharaohs, and the City of the Caliphs, is indeed a boundary between two worlds. ”

“ On the coast lands of the Mediterranean a sparse population might still eke out a miserable existence by storing the scanty rainfall, but nowhere else. The very oases of the desert would be dried up, and in a short time the shifting sands of the Sahara would have overlaid the deposits in the river-valley, and buried out of sight even the ruins of the past. The waters of the Nile are, and ever have been, the sole giver of all life in Egypt. ”

“ On the other hand, we have for the defence of the Nile itself been compelled to send a considerable force of British and Egyptian troops up the Nile; and the positions which are now occupied by those troops are so many stages on the advance by the Nile Valley.... The proposal which I make is that a brigade should be ordered to advance as soon as possible to Dongola by the Nile.... I have not entered into the question whether it is or is not probable that General Gordon can leave Khartoum without assistance. As we know absolutely nothing, any opinion on this subject can only be guess-work. ”

“ But he told me, that, for the first twenty-seven years of his life, he never had seen the Nile, unless upon some plundering party; that he had been constantly at war with the people of the cultivated part of Egypt, and reduced them often to the state of starving; but now that he was old, a friend to Shekh Hamam, and was resident near the Nile, he drank of its water, and was little better, for he was already a martyr to the disease. ”

“ 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 cultivator of the soil within the Khedive's dominion—here is the limit of peace, order, and security in the Nile Valley: beyond is chaos. ”

“ I cannot find that Egypt was ever governed in any other way than on the old plan of force and fear.
If there is anything that these officers and sailors do not understand, it is the management of a Nile boat. But this is anticipating. Just now all goes as merrily as a colored ball. The night is soft, the moon is half full; the river spreads out in shining shallows; the shores are dim and show lines of feathery palms against the sky; we meet or pass white sails which flash out of the dimness and then vanish; the long line of pyramids of Sakkara is outlined beyond the palms ”

“ Now speaking, now rocking their bodies to and fro, in the evening sunlight, they sat and watched the Nile in flood covering the wide wastes of the Fayoum, spreading over the land rich deposits of earth from the mountains of Abyssinia. When that flood subsided there would be fields to be planted with dourha and onions and sugar-cane; but they whose strong arms should plough and sow and wield the sickle, the youth, the upstanding ones, had been carried off in chains to serve in the army of Egypt, destined for the far Soudan, for hardship, misery, and death, never to see their kindred any more. ”

“ Baker cut through fifty miles of the sudd, and urged the khédive to reopen the Nile. The work was successfully undertaken by Ishmail Ayub Pasha, and the White Nile became clear for large vessels when Gordon reached Khartum in 1874. It is practically impossible to keep the central provinces of the Nile open to civilisation unless the course of the Nile is free. Yet in 1878 the obstruction had been renewed, and during the occupation of these provinces by the rebel dervishes under the Mahdi and the califa the Nile was completely blocked, as formerly, at Lake No. ”

“ Sacrifice is mettle to every god as it is made to the Nile. The Nile has made its retreats in Southern Egypt, its name is not known beyond the Tuau. The god manifests not his forms, He baffles all conception.
Men exalt him like the cycle of the gods, they dread him who creates the heat, even him who has made his son the universal master in order to give prosperity to Egypt. Come prosper! Come prosper! O Nile, come prosper! O you who make men to live through his flocks and his flocks through his orchards! ”

“ I said, "Ibrahim, why should we be enemies in the midst of this hostile country? We believe in the same God, why should we quarrel in this land of heathens, who believe in no God? You have your work to perform; I have mine. You want ivory; I am a simple traveller; why should we clash? If I were offered the whole ivory of the country, I would not accept a single tusk, nor interfere with you in any way. Transact your business, and don't interfere with me: the country is wide enough for us both. I have a task before me, to reach a great lake— the head of the Nile. ”

“ The neighbouring inhabitants, realizing their incapacity to resist regular troops, endeavoured to buy off the invaders by yielding up all they possessed in the way of slaves, flocks, wood, or precious metals. The generals in command, however, had to reckon with the approaching low Nile, which forced them to beat a retreat; they were obliged to halt at the first appearance of it, and they turned homewards “in peace,” their only anxiety being to lose the smallest possible number of men or captured animals on their return journey. ”

“ I often compare the hard lot of our honest poor in England with that of these scoundrels, whose courage consists in plundering and murdering defenceless natives, while the robbers fatten on the spoil. I am most anxious to see whether the English Government will take active notice of the White Nile trade, or whether diplomacy will confine them to simple protest and correspondence, to be silenced by a promise from the Egyptian Government to put a stop to the present atrocities. The Egyptian Government will of course promise, and, as usual with Turks, will never perform. ”

“ At the present moment, ten thousand square miles lie desolate in thorny jungles, where formerly a sea of waving rice-crops floated on the surface; the people are dead, the glory is departed. This glory had been the fruit of irrigation. All this prosperity might be restored: but in Egypt there has been no annihilation of a people, and the Nile invites a renewal of the system formerly adopted in Ceylon; there is an industrious population crowded upon a limited space of fertile soil, and yearning for an increase of surface. ”

“ I do not comprehend what idea other travellers have formed of the beginning of the inundation of the Nile, as they seem to admit that the banks are not overflowed; and this is certainly the case; because the cities and villages are built there as securely as on the highest part of Egypt, and even when the Nile has risen to its greatest height they still are obliged to water those spots with machines. ”

“ The bands of Bedouin, lurking in the neighbourhood, would have rejoiced to surprise them, and by their depredations to stop the commerce between the Said and the Upper Nile, during the few weeks in which it could be carried on with a minimum of danger. A narrow gorge crossed by a bed of granite, through which the Nile passes at Semneh, afforded another most favourable site for the completion of this system of defence. On cliffs rising sheer above the current, the king constructed two fortresses, one on each bank of the river, which completely commanded the approaches by land and water. ”

“ The tide of war has rolled far away and spent itself utterly in remote corners. The whole of the Soudan lies between Assouan and the frontier of any possible enemy. Even the yellow fort is untenanted save by a few policemen. True, for four years an army of 10,000 men has been marshalled here, but it was an invasion of the arts of peace, creative and not destructive. Possibly the inhabitants would have liked their occupation to go on for ever; but even the best of times must have an end, and it was a good occasion for a [92] holiday. In every Nile village flags and bunting were flying. ”

“ But how would it be possible for a lady, young and delicate, to endure what would kill the strongest man? Travel along the Atbara river into the Taka country, there is much to be seen that is unexplored; but give up the mad scheme of the Nile source. ”

“ Imagine to what a God the reverently-inclined primal nations would have exalted this mountain, which from such a far-away region as this contributed so copiously to their beneficent and sacred Nile. And this thought of the beneficent Nile brings on another. In fancy we look down along that crooked silver vein to where it disports and spreads out to infuse new life to Egypt near the Pyramids, some 4000 miles away, where we beheld populous swarms of men—Arabs, Copts, Fellahs, Negroes, Turks, Greeks, Italians, Frenchmen, English, Germans, and Americans—bustling, jostling, or lounging ”