Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/752

700 backsheesh, and started the fires, hoping to be away before his relatives heard of the accident. The lad was very proud of his bandaged head, and showed it with great glee to his friends, exhibiting his backsheesh as he strutted about, and altogether posing as the capitalist of the district. In half an hour more steam would be up, and we were just congratulating ourselves, when, "Why don't you go home and show your beautiful face to your mother?" was suggested to the victim, and the proud capitalist started on a run for the village. A sort of groan went up all over the boat, and the expression muttered by some one, "Now it's all over but the shouting!" seemed to fit our case exactly.

We waited for the inevitable with our eye on the steam-gauge and a sailor at each mooring-rope. Presently we heard it approaching—the frenzied wail of outraged motherhood,—and over the bank a screaming black whirlwind burst upon our men, and drove them incontinently back to the boat. She and her friends—there were a dozen frothing furies to bear her company—were strategists of the first order, and having seized the mooring pegs and ropes, sat on them, wailing and beating their breasts, and defying us to move.

It was an awesome sight, but a nuisance, as the safety-valve was popping merrily, and we were feeling more and more keenly our inability to enjoy the sunset from some other point of view on the river. The temper of our crew had been slowly rising for some time, and before we realized what had happened, the sailors, under the leadership of the chief stoker, were a flying wedge in rapid motion, wreaking a fierce vengeance on the male relations of the furies.

It was very difficult to recall this marauding sortie, but the reis finally got them in hand, and they returned sullenly to the fore-deck. We then sent for the Mudir, and sat down to wait in what patience we might. Three more filibustering expeditions of the crew were suppressed, but not until countless turbans had been trampled in the dirt and six men thrown into the river. All things have an end, however, and after faddling for hours over coffee and cigarettes, with the lad as exhibit A, and the chief men of the village as jury, the Mudir decided that one pound backsheesh was right and proper, and that we might depart in peace. This we refused to do, however, as it was then late, so we demanded an armed guard, which we posted in a half-mile circle on the shore to keep away distant but devoted relatives, who had been arriving in droves all the afternoon. The only person to see us off in the morning was the divorced husband of the mother of the boy, who had tramped twelve miles to have his finger in the backsheesh pie, and whose loud adjectives of disappointment were hurled after us as we washed the mud of that village from our decks.

The ascent of the First Cataract used to be a matter of both danger and interest. Some of the former still remains, owing to the absurdly incapable manner in which the plans for the navigation channel have been carried out, but the latter is replaced by a measureless monotony of marvellously constructed steel gates which close enormous basins with wonderful precision and absolute silence.

Perhaps it is the doing away with all the strenuous cataract life that disappoints one,—for when all is said and done, the effect of crowds of pulling, singing natives, fifty to a tow-rope, three and four lines of them shouting and hauling in unison to the beat of their leader's flag, is but poorly replaced by one soberly clad European manipulating numberless valves and levers. One accomplishes a journey now in three hours which formerly often occupied as many days, and for which even Charles Dudley Warner, who did everything on the river more rapidly than any one else either before or since, took four hours thirty-five and one-half minutes. The sternwheelers of the War Department pass through the locks several times a week, but for the tourist travelling in a dahabeah the tortuous channel to the first basin holds enough lurking terrors in the shape of sharp rocks, showing through and above the swirling waters, to give sufficient excitement to the beginning of the ascent.

The Assuan Dam is the open sesame to a whole new river world, that upper reach which seems so unlike Egypt, and