Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/746



ing-dahabeahs, their infinitely slender yards and blowing flags and pennants filling every chink of the picture with grace and color.

There are three ways of "doing" the river—by steam, by sail, or by a combination of the two, which, being interpreted, means a dahabeah and a tug. The steam method may again be divided into three classes—tourist, express, and private steamers. The express steamers run with the avowed intention of carrying as many natives and as much freight as great a distance and in as short a time as Allah pleases; first-class passengers are only a secondary consideration, and therefore they are given the whole of the upper deck, excellent accommodation, and a chance for studying the genus Egyptian such as no other method provides. The tourist-steamers, on the other hand, take up the white man's burden, and cater only to the tourist, stopping to show him each and every temple in the Nile Valley, setting his hours for rising and retiring, for eating and sight-seeing, keeping a guiding and restraining hand over him during the whole of the three weeks which are considered necessary for him to become thoroughly acquainted with one of the greatest civilizations of history, and finally shaking him off in Cairo, where he is very likely to wake up and wonder what it was really all about. Finally, for those mortals blessed with a superabundance of this world's goods, there remains the private steam-dahabeah—not perhaps a dahabeah in the usual acceptance of the term, but no one has as yet had the temerity to call them yachts, which, in fact, they little resemble. They are of all kinds and all sizes, from the small launch with a single cabin to the large boats capable of accommodating fourteen or fifteen people, and the hiring of one of them resembles the chartering of a yacht at home, in that one does what one pleases, goes where one wishes, and calls neither wind nor current master.

The sailing-dahabeah is a house-boat of one hundred to one hundred and thirty feet in length, carrying a large crew, twenty or thereabouts, and propelled by