Narghile

“ We were shortly seated on carpets outside the tent, and after pipes and coffee, and the usual preliminary compliments, my dragoman explained, that the main object of our journey was to search for the sources of the Nile, or, as he described it, "the head of the river."
Both the Governor and Halleem Effendi, with many officers who had accompanied them, were Turks; but, in spite of the gravity and solidity for which the Turk is renowned, their faces relaxed into a variety of expressions at this (to them) absurd announcement. "The head of the Nile!" they exclaimed, "impossible!" ”

“ What the Nile is to Egypt, the Ganges is to a part of India, giving life and verdure to plains that but for it were a desert. As it bursts through the gates of the Himalayas, and sweeps along with resistless current, cooling with its icy breath the hot plains of India, and giving fertility to the rice fields of Bengal, it may well seem to the Hindoo the greatest visible emblem of Almighty power and Infinite beneficence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A considerable number of instances occur in which a human figure, with the head of a hawk or eagle, threatens a winged human-headed lion—the emblem of Nergal—with a strap or mace. In these we may have a spirit of evil assailing a god, or possibly one god opposing another—the hawk-headed god or genius driving Nergal (i.e., War) beyond the Assyrian borders.
If we pass from the objects to the mode of worship in Assyria, we must notice at the outset the strongly idolatrous character of the religion. ”

“ Hundreds of miles of dry, choking sand, with nothing but dirty Nile water to wash it off your face and out of your throat! A lot of smashed-up rocks, covered with pictures of hens and roosters, all red hot under the cursed sun that never stops blazing. And besides that, niggers—millions of dirty niggers, blind niggers, and half-blind niggers who do nothing but crawl around after decent white men and beg. That’s all there is in Egypt, if you go up the Nile, till you come to the sudd-fields of Uganda. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nagdragore is one with a thousand nameless ruins; a crumbling mass of shattered stone and broken marble, lost in the waving green deeps of the blind crawling jungle.
This tale is of the times of Nagdragore's lost splendor, before she decayed and fell before the ravages of White Hun, Tatar and Mogul; a tale of the Age that saw her gleam like a scintillant jewel on the dusky breast of India, when her imperial towers rose golden, white and purple in the blue, gazing with the pride of assured destiny across the green-girdling, white-foaming Gulf of Cambay. ”

“ Men say, his billows pour upon the land.
Some speak of hollow caverns, breathing holes
Deep in the earth, within whose mighty jaws
Waters in noiseless current underneath
From northern cold to southern climes are drawn:
And when hot Meroe pants beneath the sun,
Then, say they, Ganges through the silent depths
And Padus pass: and from a single fount
The Nile arising not in single streams
Pours all the rivers forth. And rumour says
That when the sea which girdles in the world (15)
O'erflows, thence rushes Nile, by lengthy course,
Softening his saltness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nergal, who became the god of violent destruction in general, and, more particularly, the god of war, the god whose emblem was the lion, who was cruel and of forbidding aspect,—such a god was admirably adapted to rule those who could only look forward to a miserable imprisonment in a region filled with horror. Nergal, therefore, became the chief god of the pantheon of the lower world. ”

“ Few sights that meet the eye of the traveller in the regions watered by the Nile are at once so striking and so splendid as that presented by a flock of these glowing creatures, as they dart in masses over the green fields of durrah, looking, when the sun sheds his rays upon them, like a multitude of aerial flames, appearing and disappearing almost with the rapidity of lightning, as they rise into the air or take refuge among the corn. ”

“ I must say, there was a considerable majority for sparing the women and child, and not one but who willingly decreed the death of the man, who had confessed he was endeavouring to steal our camels, and that he intended to carry them to his party at the Nile; in which case the loss of all our lives was certain, as we should have been starved to death, or murdered by the Arabs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am the Governor and Guide of all men, in all their periods, the Most Great, the Father of the gods, Shu, the Great One, the Chief of the earth. The two halves of heaven are my abode. The Nile is poured out in a stream by me, and it goeth round about the tilled lands, and its embrace produceth life for every one that breatheth, according to the extent of its embrace.... I will make the Nile to rise for thee, and in no year shall it fail, and it shall spread its water out and cover every land satisfactorily. ”

“ Among other nations, the sword is, similarly, the symbol of the deity, as the plague-bringer as well as the warrior.
To this day, a pestilence is the general accompaniment of war in the East, or follows in its wake. Different from Nin-ib, who is also a god of war, Nergal symbolizes more particularly the destruction which accompanies war, and not the strong champion who aids his subjects in the fight. Nergal is essentially a destroyer, and the various epithets applied to him in the religious texts, show that he was viewed in this light. ”

“ Our shirt, chemise, chemisette, etc., was unknown to the Ancients of Europe.
[FN#588] Arab. "Narjís." The Arabs borrowed nothing, but the Persians much, from Greek Mythology. Hence the eye of Narcissus, an idea hardly suggested by the look of the daffodil (or asphodel) -flower, is at times the glance of a spy and at times the die-away look of a mistress. Some scholars explain it by the form of the flower, the internal calyx resembling the iris, and the stalk being bent just below the petals suggesting drooping eyelids and languid eyes. ”

“ And they are thine, O Nile—and well thou knowest
That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil
And fruits and poisons spring where’er thou flowest.
Beware, O Man—for knowledge must to thee,
Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be. ”

“ In the religious texts, the cruel aspects of this god are almost exclusively emphasized. He is the one god towards whom no love is felt, for he is a god without mercy. The fierce aspects of the solar Nergal are accentuated in Nergal, the chief of the pantheon of Aralû. He becomes even more ferocious than he already was, as a god of war. His battle is with all mankind. He is greedy for victims to be forever enclosed in his great and gloomy domain. Destruction is his one and single object; nothing can withstand his attack. ”

“ At the sun in its molten glow;
That's called the Nile, the tranquil Nile,
Of ages and ages ago.
On the purple sheen of its mirror heart
Her galleys bend and row,
And Egypt's queen can still be seen,
Of olden lands the foe. ”

“ He almost shouted with relief when he discovered that the third eye, though still aglow, was much dimmer than it had been in the night. The sun had conquered; the eye's baleful attraction was gone.
Presently the negrito guards brought him his breakfast of water and the same glutinous porridge as on the previous day. He spoke to them, first in English, then in Hindustani, but they answered nothing; if they understood him, they gave no sign of it. An hour or two later they returned, accompanied by one of the shaven priests, who indicated that he was to follow them. ”

“ They are a savage and independent people; it required address to approach them with safety, which, however, I accomplished, (the particulars would take too much room for this place) , was well received, and at perfect liberty to do whatever I pleased. This tribe is called Neardie. Each of the tribe, in the middle between their eyes, has a Greek cross marked with antimony. They are Kabyles. Though living in tribes, they have among the mountains huts, built with mud and straw, which they call Dashkras, whereas the Arabs live in tents on the plains. ”

“ Though I cannot pretend to know the true reason of this, yet I will venture to give a guess:—The origin of great part of religious observances of Egypt began with the worship of the Nile, and probably at the head of it. The country of the Agows, as well where the Nile rises as in parts more distant, is all a honey country; not only their whole 295 sustenance, but their trade, their tribute to the king, and the maintenance of a great part of the capital, depends upon honey and butter, the common food of the better sort of people when they do not eat flesh ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Arabs of Sennaar that are on bad terms with the governor of Atbara, fly hither across the desert to avoid the rapine and violence of that cruel tyrant. The arrival of these produces in an instant the greatest plenty at Ras el Feel; markets are held everywhere; cattle of all kinds, milk, butter, elephants teeth, hides, and several other commodities, are sold to a great amount.
The Arabs are of many different tribes; the chief are the Daveina, then the Nile. ”

“ To see such a structure in America we would travel a thousand miles; the traveler on the Nile debates whether he will go ashore.
The bank is lined with the natives who have something to sell, eggs, milk, butter in little greasy “pats,” and a sheep. The men are, as to features and complexion, rather Arabic than Nubian. The women have the high cheek-bones and broad faces of our Indian squaws, whom they resemble in a general way. The little girls who wear the Nubian costume (a belt with fringe) and strings of beads, are not so bad; some of them well formed. ”

“ The Evil Spirit agreed that his white men should let the Indians have as much rum as the Narragansetts wanted, and they in return were to be his servants. So, from that day to this, the Narragansetts have served the Evil Spirit. They get from the Good Spirit the canoes which enable them to cross rivers and catch fish, and the corn which fills their bellies, but the bows and arrows which lead them to engage in bloody wars, and the rum which makes dogs, and bears, and hogs, and wild cats of them, they get from the Devil and the pale faces. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Nun-gal appears, therefore, to be the ideograph proper to a deity that symbolized, like Nergal, Ninib, and Â, some phase of the sun. The disappearance of the god would thus be naturally accounted for, in view of the tendency that we have found characteristic of the religion, whereby powerful gods absorb the functions of weaker ones whose attributes resemble their own. But while the god disappears, the name survives. Nun-gal with the plural sign attached becomes a collective designation for a group of powerful demons. ”