Nilghai

“ We rode up the bank of the Tigris, and when we came opposite to Tell Nimrûd there, by good fortune, was a ferry-boat, plying across the river with the men and flocks of the Jebbûr. The cause of their migration to the left bank was hopping about our feet—locusts, newly issued from the rocky ground and swarming over every blade of grass and corn.
“In two days there will be no pasture, and our flocks will die,” explained an aged shepherd. “Let the consul cross!” he shouted, as the ferry-boat drew up beside the bank and half the tribe clambered into it. ”

“ And one drifts, too; one can but drift, happily, sleepily, forgetting every care. From Abydos to Denderah one drifts, and from Denderah to Karnak, to Luxor, to all the marvels on the western shore; and on to Edfu, to Kom Ombos, to Assuan, and perhaps even into Nubia, to Abu-Simbel, and to Wadi-Halfa. Life on the Nile is a long dream, golden and sweet as honey of Hymettus. ”

“ 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! ”

“ It was necessary for me to gain as much personal knowledge of the whole Nile valley, as far up as possible, since the nature of this country, so limited in its width, has more influence than anything else upon the progress of its history.
On the White River one cannot journey for more than a few days to the frontier of Mohammed Ali’s conquests, without peculiar preparations and precautions. There are found the Shilluk on the western shore, and on the eastern, the Dinka, both{156} native negro people, who are never the best friends with the northern folk. ”

“ Standing at the mouth of the Blue Nile, which flows down from the gold and iron mountains of Abyssinia, and of the White Nile, the only avenue to a dozen Negro kingdoms, rich in ivory and gum, and being nearly equidistant from the conquered provinces of Sennaar, Kordofan, Shendy and Berber, it speedily outgrew the old Ethiopian cities, and drew to itself the greater part of their wealth and commercial activity. Now it is the metropolis of all the eastern part of Soudân, and the people speak of it in much the same style as the Egyptians speak of their beloved Cairo. ”

“ General Andreossy reckons it nearly nine British miles in breadth, and exceedingly deep; and the Nile does not at any time carry a body of water, equal to one mile in breadth! What the state of things was, at an earlier period of the world, we know not, but within the reach of history, the Nile appears to have been much of the same bulk, as at present.
But this is not the only difficulty. The province of Faiume, through which the supposed issue of the Nile must have been, is separated from the valley of the Nile, by a continuation of the ridge of hills that forms the western wall of Egypt ”

“ 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. ”

“ The writer of the tablet is mainly concerned with the sacrilege committed in the temples of the gods, and with the magnitude of the offence against Ningirsu. He can find no reason for the wrongs the city has suffered in any transgression on the part of Urukagina, its king; for Ningirsu has had no cause to be angry with his representative. All he can do is to protest his belief that the city-god will one day be avenged upon the men of Umma and their goddess Nidaba. Meanwhile Lagash lay desolate, and Umma inherited the position she had held among the cities of Southern Babylonia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let it not grieve my brother's heart that it is too little. For in my land the hand of Nergal (the god of pestilence) has slain all the workers, and copper cannot be produced. And, my brother, take it not to heart that thy messenger stayed three years in my land. For the hand of Nergal is in it, and in my house my young wife died.” Yet this ruler also had to guard himself against embassies unworthy of a king sent by Napkhuria. Another prince, in a letter unfortunately much damaged, made the complaint that Napkhuria had once caused his own name to be written first in a letter. ”

“ The horn is very conspicuous on the heads of men in the Nineveh (Asshur) sculptures, still, as a fashion, retained in Ethiopia (Cush, Abyssinia [4] ) , the origin of the Chaldeans, through Nimrod the Cushite (Gen. x. 8.) , who probably derived their chief sustenance from the river Tigris (Hiddekel) . Subsistence from (1) fishing, (2) hunting (e.g. Nimrod) , (3) grazing, and (4) agriculture, seems to have succeeded in the order named. The repeated appearance of fish on the same sculptures, is in allusion, doubtless, to the name Nineveh (= fish + habitation) ”

“ We do not even know the source of the Atbara; how should we know the source of the great Nile. A great portion of the Atbara flows through the Pasha of Egypt's dominions; the firman in your possession with his signature, will insure you respect, so long as you remain within his territory; but if you cross his frontier, you will be in the hands of savages. The White Nile is the country of the negroes; wild, ferocious races who have neither knowledge of God nor respect for the Pasha, and you must travel with a powerful armed force; the climate is deadly ”

“ She was smiling as she handed him the plate.
"I should think Egypt would be better!" exclaimed Nigel, with a strength and a vehemence that contrasted almost startlingly with her light, half-laughing tone. "Why don't you go there? Why don't you try the free life?"
"Live among the tribes, like Lady Hester Stanhope in the Lebanon? I'm afraid I could never train myself to wear a turban. Besides, Egypt is fearfully civilized now. Every one goes there. I should be cut all up the Nile." ”

“ The old hermit, Nikaiyah, who, in the early twilight, pursued his devotions on the banks of the river, was making his orisons to the Ganges when the reddening water and glowing east gave tokens of the dawn. As he stooped to perform his ablutions, an object, dark upon the water, caught his eye. It was the lotus-cradle and its burden. The old man’s heart was moved, and, despite the voice of religion, which forbade to rob the Ganges, he listened to the voice of nature, and with many deprecations of the divine wrath, he took up the child and carried it to his humble dwelling. ”

“ He next appealed to Ea, who, taking pity on him, ordered the warrior god Nergal to produce the spirit of Enkidu, and this god opened a hole in the ground through which the spirit of Enkidu passed up into this world "like a breath of wind." Gilgamish began to ask the spirit of Enkidu questions, but gained very little information or satisfaction. The last lines of the tablet seem to say that the spirit of the unburied man reposeth not in the earth, and that the spirit of the friendless man wandereth about the streets eating the remains of food which are cast out from the cooking pots. ”

“ Piankhi returned up the Nile to his own city of Napata amid songs and rejoicings—whether sincere or feigned, who shall say? His own account of the matter is the following: "When His Majesty sailed up the river, his heart was glad; all its banks resounded with music. The inhabitants of the west and of the east betook themselves to making melody at His Majesty's approach. To the notes of the music they sang, 'O king, thou conqueror! O Piankhi, thou conquering king! Thou hast come and smitten Lower Egypt; thou madest the men as women. ”

“ If nothing is denied me I shall deny thee nothing.” Meanwhile, the dear brother in Egypt was continually finding opportunities to annoy the Babylonian. Assyria was then a small state on the middle Tigris, in exactly the same relation to the suzerainty of Babylonia as Canaan was to that of Egypt. Disregarding this fact, Napkhuria sent a very large quantity of gold to the prince Assurnadinakhi and ostentatiously received an Assyrian embassy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The old expression of Nile awakes here, therefore, at the moment when it discloses itself as a divinity, a protector, and a nourisher of the country and people. Only the large pastoral Arab tribe of the Shukuriës, in the so-called Meroë, between the Blue River and the Atbara, has the peculiar name of “Adehk,” in its Aggem language for this stream, whilst the other nations in their name for it, indicate its colour. Those of Dongola, and Mahass, who both boast to be Gins betal Thin (people of the soil) , call it Amanga Arumga, and Essige Rumege, and the united stream, Ruga ”

“ At three o’clock in the afternoon we arrived at Girgé, the largest town we had seen since we left Cairo; which, by the latitude Ptolemy has very rightly placed it in, should be the Diospolis Parva, and not Gawa, as Mr Norden makes it. For this we know is the beginning of the Diospolitan nome, and is near a remarkable crook of the Nile, as it should be. It is also on the western side of the river, as Diospolis was, and at a proper distance from Dendera, the ancient Tentyra, a mark which cannot be mistaken.
The Nile makes a kind of loop here; is very broad, and the current strong. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let us notice a little more minutely what the Buddhists say of Nirwana; for herein to them hides all the power of their philosophy and lies the absorbing charm of their religion.
"The state that is peaceful, free from body, from passion, and from fear, where birth or death is not, that is Nirwana." "Nirwana puts an end to coming and going, and there is no other happiness." "It is a calm wherein no wind blows." "There is no difference in Nirwana." "It is the annihilation of all the principles of existence." ”

“ The Fayoum is no part of the natural bed of the Nile, and has not been scooped out by its energy. It is a natural depression in the western desert, separated off from the Nile valley by a range of limestone hills from two hundred to five hundred feet in height, and, apart from the activity of man, would have been arid, treeless, and waterless. Still, it derives from the Nile all its value, all its richness, all its fertility. ”

“ Now it is restricted to the uplands forming the water-parting between the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the middle Nile. This is the region known to the Arabs by the name of Habesh, or Abyssinia, a term supposed to denote a mixed or mongrel population, hence reluctantly accepted by natives acquainted with Arabic. The people occupying the plateau traversed by the Blue Nile and other large Nilotic affluents, conscious of a glorious past, proudly designate themselves as "Itiopiavian," that is, Ethiopians. ”

“ The Nile divides above the village; it fell very calm, and here we passed the night of the fifteenth.
Our Rais Abou Cuffi begged leave to go to Comadreedy, a small village on the west of the Nile, with a few palm-trees about it; he said that his wife was there. As I never heard any thing of this till now, I fancied he was going to divert himself in the manner he had done the night before he left Cairo; for he had put on his black surtout, or great coat, his scarlet turban, and a new scarlet shaul, both of which he said he had brought, to do me honour in my voyage. ”

“ The insolence of the Djawi had come to such a pitch that they had offered Eshté battle; but they had fled with very little resistance, and been driven over the Nile to their countrymen whence they came. Eshté, roused from his indolence, now shewed himself the gallant soldier that he really was. He crossed the Nile at a place never attempted before; and though he lost a considerable number of men in the passage, yet that disadvantage was more than compensated by the advantage it gave him of falling upon the Galla unexpectedly. ”