Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/702

 694 proceed, how thrilling was the last thing he saw! A mountain peak rose at an immense distance dim on the horizon. So it was not a blank which was left behind! What was that mountain? What might not have been known if he could only have reached it! Could he not have done just that much more? But in time that part of the scene was laid open: now a great lake, now a great river, which turned out to be the Niger, flowing quite differently from what had been supposed; and half a score great kingdoms, full of people and rich in produce, where lions had been imagined lords of the desert. At last, Dr. Barth got to Timbuctoo, and lived there, and brought us drawings of the place and the people, and full accounts of the road to it, and the kingdoms and populations between it and Lake Tchad.

At about the same distance south of the equator, Dr. Livingstone crossed the whole continent, and annihilated the blanks on the map in those latitudes; but there remained above twenty degrees still bare of names and signs between the Adamawi and Dr. Livingstone’s track; and old Nile was as mysterious as ever.

Among the great changes of the time, one of the most deeply felt is that of the accessibility of the Nile to so many of us. We can now know for ourselves, in faint reflection, the feelings of the explorers in gaining point after point, and having at last to turn back. These are sensations which cannot be communicated; and it is a privilege of the time, that so many can experience them. Passengers to India know nothing of them. There is a sort of emotion, no doubt, in first meeting the Nile at the junction with the canal from Alexandria: and there comes a deeper sense of its glory and venerableness when its course is traced upwards and downwards from the caves above Siout. Then the crocodiles begin to appear, and Coptic convents are left behind. Then the desert, with its rocks, closes in upon it; and vast quarries, even more than old temples, suggest the associations of the ancient world. Then comes Thebes, and the spectacle of the seated colossi, the eternal sentinels which create an awe like that of an admission to the presence of the ancient gods. It is the same set of associations which renders the approach to Philæ so magical an experience. To reach it in the failing evening light, to moor the boat beneath its temple walls in the moonlight, to look out in the night with the ancient oath sounding in one’s ear, “By Him who sleeps in Philæ,” and to spend days in the temples, following out on the pictured walls the apotheosis of Osiris, and the traditions of Isis, is worth any amount of travel to achieve. But all this is only connected with the Nile, and not the essential interest of the mysterious river itself.

That interest receives a sudden increase when the First Cataract and the sites of the civilisation of old Egypt are left behind. The river itself is the god of one’s imagination when one has left Osiris behind, buried and glorified. And it is time, when one gets to Nubia, to be profoundly impressed by the majestic primitive character of the mighty stream. The people grow wilder (while simpler and more engaging), the desert grows wilder, if possible; and the architectural remains grow more uncouth, more strange and solemn, till Aboo-Simbil carries up the tension to the highest point. That reach of the stream being passed, the Nile remains the sole engrossing interest. Here, after so many weeks of voyaging, its current is strong and full as below, and not more, for not a single tributary has fed its waters. Here it is, as it was six weeks back,—brown in the morning light, white in the noonday glare, and andand [sic] lilac and pale green under the sunset sky,—always abundant and rapid, and always profoundly mysterious, sweeping past all who go so far to question it, without any chance token, for these many thousand years, which may afford even a guess of whence it comes, and why its annual overflow takes place. There are local incidents which deepen the sense of mystery. It is not (or was not lately) set down for us that hurricanes are to be looked for there: but each traveller finds himself the sport of the winds in that region within the tropic. They come pouncing down on his boat from between the hills, and sweeping across the desert, laying his vessel almost flat on the water, and whistling among the coarse grass and the lupins on the banks, and making the palms clatter like mills. Then, next day after reaching the eddies of the Second Cataract, comes the hour, the pain of which can hardly be anticipated. Then the primitive interest of the Nile is found to be stronger than all that arises from any settlements, in all ages, on its banks. The hour comes for turning back.

After a ride through a reach of hot desert, amidst whitened bones of perished camels, and a peeping jerboa here and there, or a brood of partridges flitting between the sandhills, with nothing green but the thick, fleshy leaves of the colocynth plant, the goal is reached,—the rock of Abousir. From its summit—a precipice two hundred feet directly above the Nile—the last view southwards is obtained,—the last for any but adventurous traders and explorers. Nothing can well be wilder than the scene, all made up of white sands and an infinity of black rocks, with the river swirling among them, and no living thing visible but the travellers’ asses at the foot of the rock, and the swarm of blue pigeons, scared from their holes by the tread of man. This is the immediate scene. Far away there may be a sail or two on the river which has been left behind; and eastward there are the remote Arabian hills: but all the interest lies in the South. There an immeasurable expanse of black, broken rocks spreads out, without any relief except two or three sparkles of the river, where its full current makes a bend among the clustering islets. But there is something beyond. Two mountain summits just appear on the horizon,—reminding one of the two peaks from which the explorer from Tripoli was obliged to turn away. If it was affecting to read of that view southward, it is more so to make the farewell in one’s own person here. By reaching those peaks, one would be far on one’s way to Dongola; and there, one might look forward to Kordofan, and feel as if one was drawing near to the source of the Nile. “The source of the Nile;”—that is indeed the interest here. As the traveller seats