Round the Wonderful World Part 5

"So long as they treat their womenfolk like that they'll never rise to anything better," he says emphatically. "The higher the civilisation of a nation is the higher the position of its women. A nation of men who ride and let the women carry the burdens is bound to be rotten and flabby."

Next there pa.s.ses across our window-frame a flock of goats, but they are not much like those we know--they are dark brown and black, with thick rough coats and cheeky tufted tails; numbers of kids dance up and down the steep sides of the tow-path after the manner of kids all the world over. A small boy, dressed in what appears to be a striped flannel night-s.h.i.+rt, with a tiny skull-cap on his head, is driving them. He pulls his single garment up to his waist as he dances and pirouettes as if the joy of living were almost too much for him. He is enveloped in a cloud of dust raised by the goats, but he s.n.a.t.c.hes handfuls of the dust from the ground and flings it in the air around as if he could never get enough of it!

"The Lady of Shalott," in Tennyson's poem, who watched in her mirror all who went down to Camelot, cannot ever have seen anything half so interesting as this.

Presently we meet a long string of fine-looking camels, one of them pure white; they are fastened by a connecting rope and so covered with loads of bristling twigs that each looks like a walking bush, out of which the great padded feet are planted with deliberate steps and the haughty heads swaying at the ends of the long necks stick out. It is the scrub of the cotton bush that they are carrying; you will see fields of it presently, some of it bursting into fluffy pods, for cotton growing is one of the most extensive and profitable of Egyptian industries. The twigs and branches are used as fuel by the people, who have a happy knack of letting nothing be wasted.

"I never!" exclaims the American. "If that isn't like them!" We are overtaking a second string of camels, precisely similar to the first, and similarly laden, stepping gingerly and protestingly in the opposite direction from the first, having just pa.s.sed them. "Why couldn't they arrange things better?" demands the American. "If one lot is going this way and the other that, an exchange would have saved time and labour."

In America labour is costly and all sorts of inventions for saving time have been invented; in this eastern land time is of no value at all, and a man working all day in the fields is content to earn a s.h.i.+lling.

Perhaps the contrast with their own country is the reason of the fascination Egypt has for Americans!

What are those strange-looking beasts mincing along like gigantic peac.o.c.ks? As we draw nearer we see that they are camels too, each bearing a load of sword-bladed leaves, which hang down over their hindquarters exactly like the folded fan-tail of a peac.o.c.k. Upon my word I never noticed it before, but a camel walks just like a peac.o.c.k, with the same hesitating "Don't-care-a-hang-for-you" stride. The bundles so arranged hide the animals' hind legs and bring out the resemblance.

But what is it they are carrying? Not maize stalks this time, nor bushy cotton twigs, for these stalks are a dull crimson at the upper end. It is sugar-cane, which grows in quant.i.ties here, and forms a more profitable crop than maize. You will see it sold at the stations; the people buy it, and, breaking off a joint, eat it with pleasure.

We cannot tear ourselves away from this fascinating window even for a moment; far in the distance across the green fields and waving palm trees we see glimpses of the desert, looking pinkish-yellow, and rising up in it, changing with every mile we travel, are many pyramids, not only those famous ones at Gizeh we visited yesterday, but others stretching farther and farther away. You will notice that the favourite colour for the dress of the peasants, or fellaheen, as they are called, is a glorious blue, but that all the women are in black--most unsuitable of hues, as they live and move and have their being amid drab-coloured dust; khaki would be much better.

As our breakfast, though better than that in France, was nothing so very wonderful, we begin to feel hungry, and are ready to go along early to the luncheon-car; we had a good dinner in that one on the train coming up from Port Said to Cairo, and antic.i.p.ate something of the same kind.

As we get up the American remarks casually, "Best pull in your belts and have a smoke--there isn't any."

No luncheon-car! No means of getting any kind of refreshment on the train! And we, having started at eight, are in for a journey of fourteen hours! Lively this! It is one of the little incidental discomforts of travel! The American is in the same plight himself. But he found out soon after we started that there was no restaurant-car; it only runs three times a week, for the season hasn't begun yet!

We call the Egyptian attendant to find out if there is any prospect of buying anything on the way. He stands grinning very affably but doesn't understand a word of English. Presently, however, he seems to understand, and dashes off, to return triumphantly with a feather-brush in his hand with which he violently flops the seats of the carriages and all our personal belongings until we are choked and smothered with the dust.

In English fas.h.i.+on we have kept the windows open, not realising that in this country it is impossible, and that slowly we have been silted up with a layer of fine soft dust; but we didn't feel the inconvenience of it much until this idiot stirred it up and made it unendurable.

Having accomplished this great feat he stands still, grinning and holding out a broad palm. Officials on the trains are probably forbidden to utter the wicked word "Baks.h.i.+sh," meaning tips, but they can ask quite as well without it.

Having got rid of him, we turn in despair to the station at which we have just pulled up. There is a fine mingled crowd on the platform.

Lying in the sun, awaiting their master's pleasure, are two beautifully kept white donkeys, with their hides clipped in neat patterns, very superior creatures indeed to what we know as donkeys, more like mules in size. A group of children, fascinated by our strange faces, draw nearer and gaze their fill unwinkingly; one poor little mite of about four has a ma.s.s of flies crawling all over its face, especially about the eyes.

It never attempts to brush them off, for long habit has made it callous.

Formerly very many children were so afflicted, and the crawling flies, carrying disease, made them blind; but since the British took the matter in hand the evil is much less. Yet so indifferent are the mothers, that in many cases even when lotion is supplied free for the children's faces they will not trouble to use it!

There is nothing eatable being sold in the station except fruit, but there seems plenty of that, and by the time the train starts again we find ourselves with a fine a.s.sortment in rich colours of purple and orange and scarlet. First there is a packet of dates which looks all right on the top, but turning them out we find the purple side of one had been placed carefully uppermost, and the rest are all hard, green, and unripe, not in the least like the sweet juicy dates we are accustomed to. The attendant, who is watching, scoops them up and devours them as if he hadn't been fed for a month. Then comes a bit of sugar-cane, stringy and sickly, which makes us feel as if we had bitten into a piece of sweet wood when we try it. That great purple pomegranate is, like all pomegranates, unsatisfactory and full of seeds, and though the little green limes are refres.h.i.+ng for the moment while we suck the juice, after a while our lips begin to smart as if they were raw, and we both keep on furtively wiping them. It is a tantalising feast, and the American smiles serenely as he smokes in his corner and refuses to have anything to do with it. The only thing we do get out of it are some really good green figs, which cannot, however, be eaten without shameless messiness, as they are so difficult to peel.

When the afternoon sun grows scorchingly hot the grinning attendant proves himself for once useful, by showing us that we can pull up sun-shutters with wooden slats outside the gla.s.s ones. He has indeed been anxious to pull them up all round the compartment ever since we started, and nothing but physical force has restrained him, for he cannot conceive how anyone could want to look out. Even now we keep down those on the sunless side, which grieves him deeply.

So all the afternoon we watch the glorious scenes changing in sunlight; we see the sailing boats, with their tapering white wings, laden with cargoes of straw, drifting up the ca.n.a.l, driven by the strong north wind; we pa.s.s innumerable villages, and some larger towns, where market-day has attracted vast crowds.

The small villages are indeed wonderful, and the first one excited us all three so much that we had to hurry to the window. Imagine a colony of last year's swallows' nests under the eaves, or a collection of ruined pigsties and sheds, only they are not ruins at all, but living, thriving villages with healthy people in them. The houses are all made of mud; a few are fas.h.i.+oned out of mud bricks, but many are merely of mud stuck and moulded together as a child would form a mud house with his hands. The doors and the holes for windows are crooked and lop-sided as they would be in a childish attempt. The roof is covered over with an untidy thatch of straw, thrown on anyhow, with piles of cotton scrub on the top of it. This scrub is for firing, and it is kept up there in the Egyptian's only storehouse; it is backed up by cakes of dried buffalo dung used for the same purpose. As it never rains the fuel is quite safe from damp.

Every man builds his own house as it pleases him, without regard to the style or position of his neighbour's, consequently the streets are narrow crooked pa.s.sages of uneven levels; there is not a green thing in them, and the people live in dust and eat it and wallow in it. Here and there you can see a tray of flat cakes pushed out into the midst of the dust to bake in the sun and form a playground for the flies and the microbes, for the Egyptian has no respect for microbes, he is germ-proof; for generations he and his forefathers have drunk the Nile water, unfiltered and carried in goat-skins not too well cured. Yet the people are happy and the children apparently a gay set of youngsters.

Little Ga.s.sim or Achmed, in the single unchanged and unwashed garment that covers their little brown bodies, dance and roll and sing and drive the loathly black buffaloes to the water and eat sc.r.a.ps of sugar-cane, and are as happy as the day is long. They work hard, it is true, from the time they can toddle, but so does everyone else, and all the animals do their share of toil, day in and day out. "I can't understand why they don't find a way of harnessing the turkeys," says the American sarcastically as we pa.s.s a lordly camel, stepping, with protest in every movement, alongside a st.u.r.dy bullock who helps to drag a primitive plough. The plough merely scratches the surface of the ground, but that is enough, for the Egyptian will never go deeper than he need.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A WATER-CARRIER.]

We are getting very hungry indeed! Six hours more! How are we going to stand it?

Hurrah! A bit of luck! The American has been along the corridor and come across some friends who are getting out at the next station. They have presented him with the remains of a lunch-basket supplied by their hotel, and he is generously willing to share it with us. Never was prize-packet opened with greater eagerness; suppose it should only contain enough for one?

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Amid the white wrappings of the open pannier we find slices of tongue, rolls of bread, chicken legs, hard-boiled eggs, and a bottle of soda-water!

Never did food taste better! We sit gnawing the chicken bones and blessing the American!

Meantime the sun falls and a splendour you never yet have imagined fills the air. Streaks of flaming colour shoot athwart the sky, bursting up behind the tufted palms; the eastern sky catches the reflection and shows softest blues and pinkest pinks in contrast. A veil of amber light hangs like a curtain overhead and changes to orange and again to apricot as the afterglow sweeps the sky before darkness falls like the curtain on a scene at the theatre.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COLUMNS IN THE TEMPLE AT LUXOR.]

CHAPTER VI

A MIGHTY MAN

Our beds face the windows, which open like high gla.s.s doors, French fas.h.i.+on; before retiring we set them wide, and close outside the long shutters made of slats of wood. In the morning we are awakened suddenly, almost at the same instant, by a red flame glowing between the slats as fire glows between the bars of a grate. Springing from our curtains we fling open the shutters, expecting to see a great conflagration, and behold, it is the sunrise!

The sun does not greet us in such boisterous fas.h.i.+on in England! Here it fills the sky with a blood-red radiance and lights up the palm groves in the garden below, where a mighty congregation of small birds are shrieking out their joy to greet the G.o.d of morning. There is an intensity in it all, in the flaming sky, and in the thrill of the birds'

clarion that sends exhilaration into our veins and makes us feel it is good to be alive!

It is not long before we are out and around the garden--and what a garden! Strange coffee-coloured men in blue garments like smock frocks, with baggy blue trousers caught tightly round their ankles, appear and disappear noiselessly, their bare brown feet making no sound on the sanded paths. There is something unreal about it all, something that makes one think of the _Arabian Nights_ and an enchanted garden. The hotel is called "The Winter Palace," and in England we should a.s.sociate such a name with a vast artificially warmed gla.s.shouse filled with broad-leaved plants of dark green; here, right overhead, is a tall bush covered with ma.s.ses of sulphur-coloured flowers, shaped like tiny trumpets, hanging in festoons against a sky of glorious blue. Through plumed palms we catch glimpses of the spreading fingers of a deep red poinsettia; there is a pink frilled flower shooting toward the sky, so decorative that it looks exactly like those made of crinkled paper for decorations; this is the well-known oleander. The gra.s.s is so vividly green that it seems as if the greenness sprang away from the blades; as we draw near to it we see that it is not all matted together and interwoven, as is our gra.s.s, but is composed of separate blades, each one apart and upright, all together standing like a regiment of soldiers. It has to be sown every year freshly, for no roots can survive the long drought. Close by is a lawn of bare earth, and a boy of about your age, with a thin pathetic brown face, runs round and round it, shouting and waving a flapper to keep off the birds from the newly sown seed.

We are just going to plunge into a grove of trees--some acacias with leaves like delicate ferns, and others eucalyptus with long narrow leaves looking like frosted silver--when we find they are growing in a swamp, with the earth banked up all round to keep the water in!

Other flowers, familiar to us in England, such as roses, look rather pale and washed-out here in contrast with the flaming beauty of richest mauve and brightest orange worn by those which are at home in a hot country. As the sun gets strong we hear the drone of a swarm of great creatures like prodigious wasps with legs like stilts, which fly around the sweet-scented blooms. In ancient inscriptions this wasp, or hornet, was used as the sign of Northern or Lower Egypt. Across the flower-beds run miniature ca.n.a.ls of stone, by means of which the water from the life-giving river is carried all over the ground, so that it can be easily watered; a very large part of the time of the blue-bloused gardeners is spent in watering. A garden which was watered from the sky would be a miracle to them.

We come back again to the hotel and pa.s.s through to the other or front entrance, where we catch sight of the majestic Nile, which we could not see in the darkness of our arrival last night. Standing on a high terrace, bounded by a parapet covered with riotous ma.s.ses of magenta bougainvillea, we see the turquoise-blue river, flecked with boats carrying high, white, three-cornered sails; on the other side rise calm hills of orange-yellow. We shall visit those hills, for in them are buried some of the mightiest kings of Egypt, and the wild fastnesses form a truly royal burial-place, grander than any ordinary mausoleum or cemetery could ever be. On both sides of the river at one time stood the royal city of Thebes, one of the best known of all the capitals of Egypt which sprang up from time to time in its agelong history.

If ever you "do" the ix. book of the _Iliad_ in your schoolwork, you will find that Homer speaks of Thebes as having one hundred gates and possessing twenty thousand war-chariots! It extended for about nine miles along the river-bank.

After breakfast our first plunge into sight-seeing is a visit to the temple of Luxor, which faces the river just five minutes' walk along the street from the hotel. This is the very first Egyptian temple we have examined and it is astonis.h.i.+ng how much we can learn from it. That mighty row of columns, larger and higher than any cathedral pillars you have ever seen, makes us feel like midgets. Standing close together the columns spring right into the clear sky, as there is no roof left. Not so very long ago they were covered up to the capitals in sand and debris. The poorer Egyptians had built their mud huts in and around them for generations, and when one hut crumbled away another was put up on the top of it, and thus the level of the acc.u.mulated earth grew higher and higher. Then some learned Frenchmen saw the wonder of the buried temple and bought the people out, persuading them to go elsewhere, and they gradually cleared away the rubbish until the original beauty of the temple was visible again. Even now, high up on all sides, you can see the depth of the earth surrounding it like cliffs, and on the top are squalid huts with dirty children and fluffy impudent goats and shrill-voiced, black-clad women, living their daily lives and looking down into the temple.

The ancient Egyptian writing was by signs--a bird meant one thing, a flower another, and a serpent another, and so on, but for a long time the meaning of it had been forgotten, and it was impossible for anyone to read these wonderful signs. But at the very end of the eighteenth century a great stone was found which had upon it an inscription written in Greek and in hieroglyphics, as the sign-writing was called, and also in another writing which used to be employed by the priests, and from this, before many years had pa.s.sed, clever men were able to understand the language of signs and read the inscriptions on the temples, which told who had built them and much else. This stone was called the Rosetta Stone, after the place where it was found. It is now in the British Museum.

This was long before Luxor was unearthed, and the inscriptions were deciphered as they came to light; by their help it was found that the temple had been built chiefly by two kings, Amenhetep III. and Rameses II. who came after him, though not immediately. Rameses added to the existing work and carried it on. So far as we know all this was between three and four thousand years ago. In a village in England people are proud if they can point to any part of their parish church and say, "This is Norman work," and yet the Normans only came over to England less than nine hundred years ago! Go back more than three times that, and try to realise the age of this temple. And even this, as we know, is not old compared with the Pyramids! Doesn't it make us feel that, as a nation, we are rather young after all?

Long before we were a nation these mighty kings flourished in Egypt and lived in pomp and splendour. They each had a different name, of course, and more than one, but yet they were all Pharaohs, just as at one time in the Roman Empire each emperor was a Caesar.

The Pharaohs had unlimited power in their own dominions, and forced their subjects to work for them as they pleased without giving them any payment. By some means we can't understand these mighty blocks of sandstone composing this temple and many others were brought from a place farther up the river. It is supposed that they were put on great rafts and floated down at flood-time, but the handling of them is still a mystery. The men who dealt with them had no steel tools, no driving force of steam or electricity at their backs, yet they reared buildings which we to-day, with all our appliances, think masterpieces.

Rameses II. was called the Great; he reigned for over sixty years, and he has a peculiar interest for us because he is believed to have been the Pharaoh who oppressed the Israelites, while his son and successor, Menepthah, was the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

Walk up the great aisle of giant columns into the courtyard at the end, there, between the pillars, stand ma.s.sive images of granite, most of them headless, but one perfect except for the ends of the fingers and toes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STATUE OF RAMESES II. AT LUXOR.]