Upper Nile

“ This being a concise summary of the Nile system, I shall describe twelve months' exploration, during which I examined every individual river that is tributary to the Nile from Abyssinia, including the Atbara, Settite, Royan, Salaam, Angrab, Rahad, Dinder, and the Blue Nile. The interest attached to these portions of Africa differs entirely from that of the White Nile regions, as the whole of Upper Egypt and Abyssinia is capable of development, and is inhabited by races either Mohammedan or Christian ”

“ Our road was through a plain and level country, but, to appearance, desolated and uninhabited, being overgrown with high bent grass and bushes, as also destitute of water. We passed the solitary village Adega, three miles on our left, the only one we had seen. At eight o'clock we came to the brink of a prodigious valley, in the bottom of which runs the Tacazzè, next to the Nile the largest river in Upper Abyssinia. ”

“ Nothing would be more simple than to form a succession of weirs across the Rahad and Dinder, that would enable the entire country to be irrigated at any season of the year, but there is not an engineering work of any description throughout Upper Egypt, beyond the sageer or water-wheel of the Nile. Opposite Abou Harraz, the Blue Nile was a grand river, about five hundred yards in width; the banks upon the north side were the usual perpendicular cliffs of alluvial soil, but perfectly bare of trees; while, on the south, the banks were ornamented with nabbuk bushes and beautiful palms. ”

“ The Nile season is the Nile sailors’ harvest time. When the warm weather sets in and the travelers migrate with the swallows, these poor fellows disperse in all directions; some to seek a living as porters in Cairo; others to their homes in Middle and Upper Egypt, where, for about four-pence a day, they take hire as laborers, or work at Shâdûf irrigation till the Nile again overspreads the land. The Shâdûf work is hard, and a man has to keep on for nine hours out of every twenty-four ”

“ The water is excessively bad throughout the White Nile, especially between the Shillook and the Kytch tribes; that of the Bahr Gazal is even worse. The reis Diabb tells me that the north wind always fails between the Nuehr and the upper portion of the Kytch. I could not believe that so miserable a country existed as the whole of this land. There is no game to be seen at this season, few birds, and not even crocodiles show themselves; all the water-animals are hidden in the high grass ”

“ The upper reaches of the Nile lay in the mountains of Central Africa. The Nile delta, built up through ages by silt deposits, provided a meeting place where African, European and Asian traders could exchange their wares and lay the foundations for the civilization of lower Egypt. ”

“ It seems as if those immense quarries, which run into Upper Egypt 10° N. from this, first take their rise here. This day we journied through woods of acacia and jujebs. At twenty minutes past eight we alighted in a wood to feed our camels. The sun was so immoderately hot that we could not travel. The Nile from Gerri declines almost insensibly from the E. of N. The whole country is desert and without inhabitants, saving the banks of the river; for there are here no regular rains that can be depended upon at any certain time for the purpose of agriculture ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They sit in a twilight that is only-brightened by rays that find their way in at the distant door; but at morning they can see, from the depth of their mountain cavern, the rising sun.
We climbed, up the yielding sand-drifts, to the top of the precipice in which the temple is excavated, and walked back to a higher ridge. The view from there is perhaps the best desert view on the Nile, more extensive and varied than that of Aboosir. It is a wide sweep of desolation. Up and down the river we see vast plains of sand and groups of black hills ”

“ 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. ”

“ The banks of the stream are here hemmed in by ranges of hills from 100 to 250 feet high; these are entirely destitute of soil, being composed of enormous masses of red granite, piled block upon block, the rude masonry of Nature that has walled in the river. The hollows between the hills are choked with a yellow sand, which, drifted by the wind, has, in many instances, completely filled the narrow valleys. Upon either side of the Nile are vestiges of ancient forts. The land appears as though it bore the curse of Heaven; misery, barrenness, and the heat of a furnace are its features. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not all the influence of the sun, which has already past its zenith, and for many days has been as it were stationary within a few degrees of it over Syene, in the tropic of Cancer, can bring them one inch farther to the northward, neither do any dews fall there as might be reasonably expected from the quantity of fresh and exhalable water that is then running in the Nile, though it passes close by that village, and after, through that wild and dreary desert. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The men have been selecting sweethearts instead; thus I must wait here tomorrow, that being the "Soog" or market day, when I shall purchase my camels and milch goats. The banks of the river very uninteresting—flat, desert, and mimosa bush. The soil is not so rich as on the banks of the Blue Nile—the dhurra (grain) is small. The Nile is quite two miles wide up to this point, and the high-water mark is not more than five feet above the present level. The banks shelve gradually like the sands at low tide in England, and quite unlike the perpendicular banks of the Blue Nile. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In fact, we know no river, north of the sources of the Nile, that does not fall into the Nile. Nay, I may say, that not one river, in all Abyssinia, empties itself into the Red Sea. The tropical rains are bounded, and finish in lat. 16°, and there is no river, from the mountains, that falls into the desert of Nubia; nor do we know of any river which is tributary to the Nile, but what has its rise under the tropical rains. It would be a very singular circumstance, then, that the Frat should rise in one of the dryest places in the globe, that it should be a river at least equal to the Nile ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Population, we see, produces a swerd of grass round ancient cities in the most desert parts of Africa, which keeps the sand immoveable till the place is no longer inhabited.
I apprehend the numerous lakes in Egypt were all contrived as reservoirs to lay up a store of water for supplying gardens and plantations in the months of the Nile’s decrease. The great effects of a very little water are seen along the calish, or canal, in a number of bushes that it produces, and thick plantations of date-trees, all in a very luxuriant state ”

“ That of the Deserts of Tripoli, and Cyrenaicum, is very beautiful; that of Egypt is spotted white like the Guinea-fowl, but upon a brown ground, not a blue one, as that latter bird is. However, they are all very bad to eat, but they are not of the same kind with the partridge. Its legs and feet are all covered with feathers, and it has but two toes before. The Arabs imagine it feeds on stones, but its food is insects.
After Comadreedy, the Nile is again divided by another fragment of the island, and inclines a little to the westward. On the east is the village Sidi Ali el Courani. ”

“ The plain lies panting in the sun—naked, dusty, and ashen—scored with intersecting cracks as far as eye can see. The Nile is only half its usual width, and holds not more than a twentieth of the volume of water which is borne down in October. It has at first hard work to recover its former bed, and attains it by such subtle gradations that the rise is scarcely noted. It is, however, continually gaining ground; here a sandbank is covered, there an empty channel is filled, islets are outlined where there was a continuous beach, a new stream detaches itself and gains the old shore. ”

“ The Bahr el Gazal extends due west from this point for a great distance, the entire river being a system of marshes, stagnant water overgrown by rushes, and ambatch wood, through which a channel has to be cleared to permit the passage of a boat. Little or no water can descend to the Nile from this river, otherwise there would be some trifling current at the embouchure. The Nile has a stream of about a mile and a half per hour, as it sweeps suddenly round the angle, changing its downward course from north to east. ”