Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/745



UR first view of the Nile was at the Kasr-el-Nil bridge in Cairo, but the true meaning, the real portent of its hurrying flood, whipped into ugly little brown waves by an incipient sand-storm, was obscured by the intense movement of life which played across the iron highway. A lattice-work of girders shut off the water, and it was with difficulty we could make out our dahabeah lying among a maze of funnels and masts at the western bank; while our eyes were much more attractively engaged in scanning the stream of brown humanity which surged around our decrepit arrabeah, elbowing bodily and verbally its tortuous way between horses, donkeys, camels, and the howling syces of closed broughams, whose veiled occupants looked out on the throng with beautiful, tired eyes. A quick turn at the Ghezireh and we are out of the turmoil, looking for our boat from the high bank which gives us a downward view of all the chipping, and hides from our Western eyes the faults, which, did we but know it, must be sought from below upwards.

Underneath us, on this side of a dirty yellow expanse, whose opposite edge is the pink wall of an abandoned palace, are spread the different methods of river locomotion: towering tourist-steamers of two and three decks; fat, squat post-boats, grimy after much voyaging and little paint; launches belonging to the Cairo elite, spick and span with glinting varnish and shining brass-work, and, like many of their owners, hiding an unknown quantity under a modern smartness; while here, there, and everywhere, in possible and impossible places, are the sail-