Nile

“ The view is one long to remember:—the long curving shore, with the shadoofs and the workmen, singing as they dip; people in flowing garments moving along the high bank, and processions of donkeys and camels as well; rows of palms above them, and beyond the purple Libyan hills, in relief against a rosy sky, slightly clouded along the even mountain line. In the foreground the Nile is placid and touched with a little color.
We feel more and more that the Nile is Egypt. Everything takes place on its banks. From our boat we study its life at our leisure. ”

“ It rouses one’s imagination to a sense of the greatness of the Nile. We look across a world of desert, and see the river still coming from afar. We have reached a point at which all that is habitable and familiar comes abruptly to an end. Not a village, not a bean-field, not a shâdûf, not a sakkieh, is to be seen in the plain below. There is no sail on those dangerous waters. There is no moving creature on those pathless sands. ”

“ Then follow babbling shallows, clusters of busy villages, mile upon mile of banana-groves, of fields green with maize, millet, beans, and peas, groups of laughing women balancing pitchers on their heads, lowing herds of cattle, a huge rock-torn gorge, black with forest, and the Nile, fast growing, has swept out into its long, tortuous, course which meanders through the vast alluvium of the Rutchuru plains. ”

“ But the Nile has something more wonderful 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 true Nile, the Eastern Nile, is less a river than a sinuous lake encumbered with islets and sandbanks, and its navigable channel winds capriciously between them, flowing with a strong and steady current below the steep, black banks cut sheer through the alluvial earth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The value of Philæ lies in its beauty more than in its antiquarian interest. No one who has witnessed night after night the glorious sunsets on the Nile, the mysterious charm of the changing waters, the dark belt of palms reflected in the river below and standing out in strong contrast against the sky, the limestone cliffs of the desert clear-cut in the dry air, and flushing pink in the radiance of the indescribable after-glow, no one who has seen the Temples of Karnak, could hesitate to make so small a sacrifice, in comparison, for the sake of the river-side people. ”

“ I see a hundred miles of mere—great wastes of weed through which the Nile rushes down narrow lanes between wide, placid pools, where the heavy thud of a leaping 7-foot fish and the sad cries of water-birds alone break the silence of the evening—a mere set in a long trough of sun-shorn hills, where trees burst like guns and the brown grass shrivels and drifts, ash-like, on the breeze; where heat is heat, and aged rhinos wander unceasingly through dry belts of thorn; where Shulis and Lures—curious Nilotic men—sit meditating in the sun—a sun round, red, and glowing like a furnace door ”

“ Nature prepared a place here for a vast city. The valley of the Nile, narrow above and below, suddenly spreads out into a great circular plain, the Arabian and Libyan ranges of mountains falling back to make room for it. In the circle of these mountains, which are bare masses of limestone, but graceful and bold in outline, lies the plain, with some undulation of surface, but no hills: the rim of the setting is grey, pink, purple, according to the position of the sun; the enclosure is green as the emerald. The Nile cuts this plain into two unequal parts. ”

“ It is a day of incomparable beauty. We see very little labor along the Nile; the crops are maturing. But the whole population comes to the river, to bathe, to sit in the shallows, to sit on the bank. All the afternoon we pass groups, men, women, children, motionless, the picture of idleness. There they are, hour after hour, in the sun. Women, coming for water, put down their jars, and bathe and frolic in the grateful stream. In some distant reaches of the river there are rows of women along the shore, exactly like the birds which stand in the shallow places or sun themselves on the sand. ”

“ As we draw near, expecting hourly to see something of the temple, the Nile increases in breadth and beauty. It is a peaceful, glassy morning. The men have been tracking since dawn, and stop to breakfast at the foot of a sandy bank, wooded with tamarisks and gum-trees. A glistening network of gossamer floats from bough to bough. The sky overhead is of a tender, luminous blue, such as we never see in Europe. The air is wonderfully still. The river, which here takes a sudden bend toward the east, looks like a lake and seems to be barred ahead by the desert. ”

“ The face of the country is level, and there is no mountain to be seen on either bank of the Nile. It is a melancholy, deserted region, showing only palms growing wildly and rankly along the river, fields covered with halfeh, water-courses broken down, sakias dismantled, and everywhere dwellings in ruin. Here and there a few inhabitants still lingered, tending their fields of stunted cotton, or watering some patches of green wheat. ”

“ We left behind us a dreamy river, a silent shore, an ever-present desert. Returning, we plunged back at once into the midst of a fertile and populous region. All day long, now, we see boats on the river; villages on the banks; birds on the wing; husbandmen on the land; men and women, horses, camels and asses, passing perpetually to and fro on the towing-path. There is always something moving, something doing. The Nile is running low and the shâdûfs—three deep, now—are in full swing from morning till night. Again the smoke goes up from clusters of unseen huts at close of day. ”

“ Our manner of life is simple, and might even be called monotonous, but we have never found the greatest variety of landscape and incident so thoroughly enjoyable. The scenery of the Nile, thus far, scarcely changes from day to day, in its forms and colors, but only in their disposition with regard to each other. The shores are either palm-groves, fields of cane and dourra, young wheat, or patches of bare sand, blown out from the desert. ”

“ No helpful showers the mountain ridge supplies:
When other streams with wintry rains increase,
Then rests the Nile within his banks in peace:
When they in turn scarce trickle through the sand,
Then swells the Nile, and spreads o'er all the land. ”

“ It is a wonderful picture of strife between two material forces, but so intricate and labyrinthine in its features, that the eye can scarcely succeed in separating them, or in viewing it other than as a whole. The streams, in their thousand windings, appear to flow towards all points of the compass, and from their continual noise and motion on all sides, the whole fantastic wilderness of rock seems to heave and tug, as it is throttled by the furious waters. This is the last great struggle and triumph of the Nile. ”

“ Thou makest their life;
Thou placest the Nile in heaven, that it may descend to them,
That it may rise in waves upon the rocks like the sea,
Watering their fields in their villages.
How excellent are thy ways, O Lord of Eternity!
A Nile in heaven poureth down for nations,
For all manner of animals that walk upon feet.
[But] the Nile cometh from the deep to the land of Egypt
Thy rays nourish every field;
Thou risest and they live for thee. [219]
Thou makest the seasons to bring into existence all that thou hast made:
The winter season to refresh them, the heat [to warm them] . ”

“ Nevertheless, throughout that desert, and neglected wilderness, the Nile has flowed for ages, and the people upon its banks are as wild and uncivilized at the present day as they were when the Pyramids were raised in Lower Egypt. The Nile is a blessing only half appreciated; the time will arrive when people will look in amazement upon a mighty Egypt, whose waving crops shall extend, far beyond the horizon, upon those sandy and thirsty deserts where only the camel can contend with exhausted nature. ”

“ The marsh, and the fountains, upon comparison with the rise of many of our rivers, became now a trifling object in my sight. I remembered that magnificent scene in my own native country, where the Tweed, Clyde, and Annan rise in one hill; three rivers, as I now thought, not inferior to the Nile in beauty, preferable to it in the cultivation of those countries through which they flow; superior, vastly superior to it in the virtues and qualities of the inhabitants, and in the beauty of its flocks; crowding its pastures in peace, without fear of violence from man or beast. ”

“ Men will look down from some lofty point upon a network of canals and reservoirs, spreading throughout a land teeming with fertility, and wonder how it was that, for so many ages, the majesty of the Nile had been concealed. ”

“ Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it,—to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black Nile that concerns us. ”

“ When I was sailing down the Nile, I could not help remarking to all the pashas I visited how strange it appeared that men so civilised as they were should be living in such a barren, hot, and glaring land as Egypt, when the negroes on the equator were absolutely living in the richest and pleasantest garden in the world, so far as nature has made the two countries. ”

“ Between these two ranges of hills, which serve as walls or ramparts to keep back the desert-sand, flows the fresh and bounteous Nile, bestowing blessing and abundance; at once the father and the cradle of millions of beings. On each shore spreads the wide plain of black and fruitful soil, and in the depths many-shaped creatures, in coats of mail or scales, swarm and find subsistence.
The lotos floats on the mirror of the waters, and among the papyrus reeds by the shore water-fowl innumerable build their nests. ”

“ All this civilization along the Nile would have been impossible had it not been for the Nile. The great stones that went into the pyramids were floated down the river. Soldiers and workingmen were transported on the river. The fields were made fertile by the river, and the leisure and the wealth that were made possible by the fertile fields on the river's bank gave men time to think and to feel, to invent the beautiful picture writings, to cut out the great tomb temples, and to think the great thoughts of religion, God-thoughts, love-thoughts, and duty-thoughts. ”

“ The Nile, with its ancient mysteries, its dim historic memorials of one of the oldest civilizations, its stupendous monuments of human wisdom and of human folly over which the centuries have brooded in solemn silence, and its wonderful physical peculiarities, is, indeed, a magnificent river. ”

“ The Nile here flows deep and broad. The rocky heights that hem it in so close on either side are still black on the one hand, golden on the other. The banks are narrower than ever. The space in some places is little wider than a towing-path. In others, there is barely room for a belt of date-palms and a slip of alluvial soil, every foot of which produces its precious growth of durra or barley. The steep verge below is green with lentils to the water’s edge. ”

“ Like a man of sense, and master of his subject, he laughed at the dastardly spirit of the modern Egyptians, anxious and trembling lest the Nile should not overflow land enough to give them bread, when they had the power in their hands to procure plenty in abundance for six times the number of the people then in Egypt. ”

“ We wound through several narrow but well-built streets, and arrived at last at the Frank quarter on the banks of the Nile, where our mule-driver brought us to the house allotted for us: it faced the river, commanding a prospect of the country on the opposite side, which, being entirely flat, is very little diversified. But the Nile itself is a never-ceasing source of amusement; being at all times covered with barges, crowded with men, cattle, and goods, and with pleasure-boats, not much inferior to those on the Thames. ”

“ There can be no hope of success until the slave trade shall have ceased to exist.
The journey is long, the countries savage; there are no ancient histories to charm the present with memories of the past; all is wild and brutal, hard and unfeeling, devoid of that holy instinct instilled by nature into the heart of man—the belief in a Supreme Being. In that remote wilderness in Central Equatorial Africa are the Sources of the Nile. ”