Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/753

Rh yet more unlike anything else. The entire conformation of the country changes—the channel narrows into a ribbonlike belt, and the cultivated area on either side dwindles to a mere strip, but a strip of such exquisite beauty that one wonders how it happened, with that ever-present menace of the desert rimming it close. Great hedges of castor-oil plant, shading from green to bronze and back again; clumps of feathery doom-palms and thickets of sunt-trees—a variety of mimosa with delicate frondlike leaves and tiny fluffy yellow balls of blossom, aromatically sweet; and in the midst, sheltered by palm and bamboo screens, and clinging to the sheer bank, great moist sakiehs groaning out their round to the treading of the bullocks and the floating song of the driver.

Beyond, the desert—saffron-gold sand in great masses, broken by gaunt, dark, prune-colored mesas of rock, looming up out of the wide expanse like so many lost Step Pyramids, or derelict temples of some strange uncouth giants of old. There are but few craft on the river; now and then one passes a native boat with queer slanting poop, a grim survival of the old Nubian slave-dhows of lurid memory,—or perhaps a tiny raft made of inflated skins floats downstream with a load of fresh-cut green and a shiny brown-bodied skipper bestriding it. But of tourist life there is little.

Every winter an artist moors his boat under the shadow of Abu-Simbel, and pitches his tent over against the temple, that he may paint what seems the climax of Egyptian grandeur; his poultry-farm is transferred to the bank, the indispensable chicken-boy sits among the coops in the shadow of the centuries, and the ducks go gayly forth to swim with strings tied to their legs, and are ruthlessly hauled back to shore again at stated intervals. Once we found an artist brave enough to try and paint from the frescos in the deep-gathered gloom of Queen Nefertari's temple, by the same process of reflected sunlight as Rameses's artisans used centuries on centuries ago when they hewed and decorated the only temple in Egypt ever raised to a woman. Our artist was sitting in a black corner, in a general atmosphere of dust and bats, while a sailor from his dahabeah worked an improvised heliostat concocted out of a bedroom mirror, a tin bath-tub, a sheet of white paper, and several pieces of family plate. But for the most part the disciples of the brush prefer the larger temple, with its sterner beauty. It is grandly lonely there on the face of the eternal cliff, with the sweep of golden sand like a molten sunbeam running down from the mountain's crest.

Of the real social life of the river the tourist sees but little,—one must be of it to be in it: the good-humored rivalry between the various dahabeahs where one dines or lunches, the domestic complications between the cook and his boy, the all-pervasive pigeon of one's diet, and the odd way the Christmas turkey has of dying just before he is about to be killed, so that, barred in scorn from the master's table, he comes up done to a turn on the lower deck. Dining out on a dahabeah has great charm, and London and Paris can offer but a poor substitute for the moonlight row in the felucca, the scrambling over the side, the wild excitement of a different menu, and then the still dropping down-stream under the stars to one's own boat again. Besides, one never knows whom one is going to meet, for nowhere in the world is there a more charming coterie of people worth while than on the Egyptian river—savants, artists, scientists, archæologists, architects,—men with a work to do, an aim to strive for, a goal to reach.

It all has an infinite, individual charm of its own,—a heritage, perhaps, of ancient days and past supremacy,—the evolution from a power political to a power beautiful, by which Egypt still holds the world in bond; but however that may be, life in the Nile Valley, for all its hard work, its play of mind and patience of research, has—to even the most parched scientist of them all—the lightness and care-freedom of a bird song, the unstinted latent laughter of river and wind and sun.