Part 6

“Here you are, dear,” he shouts to his wife, guarding the rugs; “plenty of room, and a hot water pan for your feet.”

They all got in together--two Parisian ladies, who (likely) could not speak a word of English, and our fellow patriot, who was (likely) as ignorant of French. And the tin vessel.

Did they lift it with reverence and fold it in many wraps, and did he fight for its possession? Are they still describing the wanton impiety of this heretic? and has he a conclusive illustration of the incredible folly of our neighbours? Perhaps, after all, they knew each other's tongues, and then nothing happened; but surely there must have been circumstances, and I, with a spare moment at my disposal occasionally, refused to be robbed of that interior.

X.--NILE VIEWS

IF one has only three weeks' holiday, and desires sunshine for his body, let him spend the time upon the Riviera, where he will get a few degrees higher temperature and a little more sunshine than in Cornwall--with worse food and a more treacherous climate--and if he rather desires inspiration for his mind, let him go to Florence; but in any case let him understand that there is no place in Europe where one can get equal good both for mind and body, and no place where one can escape winter. Upon this matter doctors dream dreams and invalids fondly talk against facts, for the cold in Florence, say, in the month of February, is quite monumental for its piercing quality, and bad weather on the Riviera is more cheerless than a wet day in the West Highlands, since in the latter case you can get a decent fire during the day, and in the evening you may have a sunset to remember for life. If, however, through any conjunction of favourable circumstances, a man has six weeks at his disposal in winter time (it is not likely he will have this very often in the present vale of tears), then let him take his courage in both his hands, and go to the Nile. Suppose he had three months, and were a good sailor, then he ought to join a P. and O. liner at London, and go the long sea voyage, for there is a chance, even in December or January, that he might have summer weather on the fickle Mediterranean, and--such things have happened--across the Bay. But with half that, time his plan is to go by the special boat express to Marseilles, and join his steamer there for Port Said; or, if he be hopelessly in fear of the sea, and wishes to save every hour for Egypt, to take the Brindisi mail, and cross to Port Said by one of the two passenger torpedo boats which make the passage between Italy and Egypt in about forty-eight hours either over the sea or through it.

Until it has been completely rebuilt after Western fashions, and electric trolley cars are running down a widened Mooskee, and the men have given up the tarboosh and the women their veil, Cairo will always fascinate a European by its Eastern atmosphere. Sitting on the verandah before his hotel, and looking over the heads of a herd of dragomen, guides, pedlars, and beggars, he will see a panorama pass. A Pasha's carriage, with a running footman in front, and the great man within, mourning the restraints of European government; a camel from the outlands laden with fresh green grass; a water-seller with his leather barrel upon his back; a company of Egyptian soldiers, marching admirably, and looking as if they could go anywhere; working women in dark blue, with only their eyes visible, which are said to be the single beautiful feature they possess; a closed carriage, with two ladies of a great man's harem; a miscellaneous crowd of sellers of many articles, shouting their goods, and workmen of many trades carrying things they have made; a Bedouin from the desert in his white flowing robes, tall and stately, and a Nubian as black as ebony from up country, with people of all shades between white and black, and in all colours; here and there a European tourist looking very much out of place in his unsightly garments, and a couple of Highland soldiers looking as if the whole place belonged to them. And if one desires to bathe in the life of the place, then he can spend a day drifting up and down the Mooskee, plunging down side alleys, attending native auctions, watching street dramas, bargaining in bazaars, and visiting mosques; but the wise man who is seeking for rest will not abide long in Cairo. Its air is close and not invigorating, its smells innumerable and overpowering, its social occupations wearisome and exacting, and its fleas larger, hungrier, more impudent, and more insinuating than those of any other place I have ever known. When the visitor has seen the citadel--and sunset from the citadel is worth the journey to Cairo--and half a dozen of the grander mosques, and the Pyramids and the great Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, then, although it may be difficult to resist the delightful hospitality of the English community, military and civil, the traveller had better start by the Nile for Upper Egypt.

Nothing surely can be so restful as life on a Nile boat, where one lies at his ease upon the deck with some book like _Pyramids in Progress_ in his hand, and watches the procession along the banks of men, women, and children, donkeys, camels, cattle, and occasionally horses, which goes on from Cairo to Assouan, and, so far as I know, to Khartoum, and looking into the far distances of the desert, across the strip of green on either side of the river, and listening to the friendly sound of the water wheels which distribute the Nile through the parched ground, and then standing to see the blood-red sunset fade into orange and green and violet, while the river turns into that delicate and indescribable colour which, for want of some other word, is known as water-of-Nile. The river itself takes hold of the imagination, whose origin has been a historical mystery, on whose rise and fall the welfare of a country depends, which carries the fertility of Egypt in its bosom, and on which nations depend for their very life. No wonder it runs as a blue streak through the frescoes in the tombs, and is never away from the thoughts of the painters, for the Nile runs also through the life of the people. It is the great highway up which the native boats sail their skilful course driven by the north wind, down which they drop laden with produce or pottery. It gives them the soil they till, which is rich enough to bear twelve harvests a year, if crops could be ripened in a month. Upon its banks the people sit as at their club; they bring down their cattle to water at it, they wash in the Nile, both themselves and their clothes, they swim and dive in the Nile as if they had been bom in it, and they drink its thick, brown, sweet water with such relish that a native Egyptian resents the idea of a filter because it takes away from him the very joy of taste, and laughs at the idea of danger from his loved Nile, which may give typhoid fever to Western tourists, but will never do any injury to its own children.

After sugar cane and doora, the chief product of the steaming, prolific Nile valley is the Fellaheen, who are not the descendants of the ancient Egyptians, a lineage justly claimed by the Copts, but who are the Egyptian people of to-day. The Fellah is the absolute creature of his environment, an offspring of Nile mud, and when he is working on his field, in the garments nature gave him, can hardly be distinguished from the soil. He is brown, well-built, enduring, with perfect teeth and excellent health. His home is a mud hut, with one room where he and his family eat, and another where they sleep, and a courtyard inhabited by the livestock of goats, donkeys, cocks and hens, pigeons, and a dog. It is thatched with palm branches or doora straw, and on the roof the dog will promenade in the daytime with great dignity, and from the roof, when the moon is shining, and thoughts occur to his mind, he will express himself to the other seventy-six dogs of the village who are on their roofs, and are also moved to speech, with the result that no European can sleep in the vicinity. Add a few vessels and mats by way of furniture to the inside of the hut, and build a mud jar on the top of the courtyard wall where the baby of the family can be put in safety, and the household equipment of the Fellah is complete. He is very ignorant, is not very keen about his religion, has no principles, except a habit of industry and a keen sense of property, and he has not one comfort or luxury of civilization, and not one political or national ambition. But he has all the clothes he needs, which certainly is not very much; he has plenty to eat, and for drink the endlessly delightful Nile water; he is very seldom cold, and he has sunshine from January to December, and from morning to night. Thanks to England, he is no longer dragged away to work upon canals and public enterprises without wages and without food, and to perish through toil and disease as his father did, but is now paid and cared for when working for the community. He is no longer in terror of the lash, and he is not robbed by his rulers; he gets justice at the courts, and is now being delivered from the hands of the money-lender, that terror of the East, by the excellent national bank which has been recently established, and which advances him money on reasonable terms. We pity him as we pass, toiling at his shadoof, or coming like a rabbit out of his burrow, because he works so hard and lives so plainly, and has no books and no vote, and no glass in his windows, and no cheap trips. But perhaps we had better reserve our pity for the home land. One does not see in the Arab village the ignoble squalor of a town slum, nor the dreary, hopeless poverty, nor the evil look of degraded people, nor the miserable intemperance. The Fellah does not stand very high in the evolution of society, and neither his wife nor his child is particularly fortunate; one would not wish to be a Fellah, but, at any rate, he does not know the pinch of want, he is on good terms with everybody, he has a ready joke, which perhaps it is better you do not understand, and a quick smile; he is a well-fed and contented animal.

The Fellah can be studied near at hand in your donkey boy, who is simply a Nile peasant quickened by contact with Europeans. Within five minutes he sizes you up with unerring judgment, and knows whether he can get baksheesh from you by annoyance, or will fare better by leaving you in peace; whether he can do as he pleases with you in the matter of speed, or whether it will be better to do as you tell him. Once you are on good terms with him--have learned the name of the donkey, approved the donkey's excellence and his own, and settled whether you are going to race or not--he settles down to make the journey agreeable both for himself and you. He will make jests about every little incident, join in the chorus of English songs, give information, such as he can, on antiquities, and delight to teach you Arabic. Suppose you have a long wait somewhere, and time is dragging, two of the junior donkey boys will improvise a play. They will get up a fight, and after cuffing one another in a way that would almost deceive you into the belief that they were serious, one will knock the other down, and the fallen hero will look as dead as Rames es the Great. A crowd will gather round him, lifting a leg or an arm, which falls heavily to the ground, raising his head, which rolls helplessly to the side. Horrified, they will then look at one another, and shake their heads; they will cover the dead man's face, and proceed to carry him home. By-and-by they will have a funeral, and convey the corpse to the cemetery with wailing and weeping, and after it has been solemnly laid to rest there will be a rapid and delightful resurrection. The mourners will turn a set of somersaults with extraordinary rapidity, the murderer and his victim will give a gymnastic exhibition, and then the whole company, having raised an enthusiastic hip, hip, hurrah! in applause for their own drama and as a genial tribute to the Anglo-Saxon race, will stand opposite you in a body with the most solemn countenance and demand baksheesh.

Like other folk, the donkey boys have their own trials, and I am still sorry for Hassan, who attended me for four days at Luxor, and with whom I became very friendly. His donkey was called Telephone, and was very strong, handsome, and well caparisoned, and had, indeed, only one vice, and that was that he would not go slowly, although the thermometer stood at 130 degrees in the sun, but insisted on leading the procession. Hassan had just married, and was never weary of describing the beauty and goodness of his sixteen-year-old bride, and he was greatly lifted when I sent home to her by his own hand a present of a silk headdress--I think at least that was what the silk would be used for--such as I was assured by a native friend the young women of that ilk greatly loved. Hassan parted with me in high spirits when I went up the river, and I promised that, on my third visit to Egypt, which will likely never take place, I would ride no other donkey but “Telephone,” and have no other footman but Hassan. And then tidings reached me at Assouan that the poor bridegroom had been drawn for the army. For thirteen years he would have to serve, partly in the regular forces, partly in the police, and for half the time he would be entirely separated from his wife, and perhaps for it all, and at the thought thereof and the terror of the army, and the unknown places and duties before him, there was great lamentation in Hassan's little home. So Hassan is by this time being drilled at Cairo, and soon will be a smart soldier in the Egyptian army; but up at Luxor his young wife will be mourning for him, and, alas! for an Eastern woman, she will be aged before Hassan returns. This is the shadow which hangs over the life of a Fellah.

XI.--THE RESTLESS AMERICAN

MANY Americans were good enough to call upon me before I had the pleasure of visiting their country, and many Americans have called since, and no American ever does me this honour without charging the very atmosphere of my study with oxygen, and leaving an impression of activity which quickens my slow pulses and almost reduces me to despair.

It is now several years ago that a tall, thin, alert man followed his card into my study with such rapidity that I had barely time to read it before my visitor was in the room.

“My name is Elijah K. Higgins, and I am a busy man. You are also busy and have no time to fool away. Four days is all I can give to the United Kingdom, and I wished to shake hands with you. Good-bye, I am off to Drumtochty.”

I calculate that Mr. Higgins spent thirty seconds in my study, and left the room so swiftly that I overtook him only at the front door. When I asked him if he knew where Drumtochty was, “Guess I do!” he said. “Got the route in my pocket, north-west from Perth, N.B.,” and in two seconds more he was whirling away in a fast hansom. As I returned to my study and imagined my visitor compassing Great Britain (I think he excluded Ireland, but I am not certain) in four days, I was for a moment roused from the state of comparative lethargy which we, in England, call work, and added six more engagements to my afternoon's programme. For days afterwards, and as often as I was tempted to rest in my chair, the remembrance of that whirlwind gave me a shock of new vigour. Sometimes a reaction would follow, and I humbly thanked Providence, although that was to write myself a weakling and a sluggard, that I was not bom in the country where Mr. Higgins lived and was at home.

Such lively experiences, which I often recall in jaded moments, prepare one for a visit or a re-visit to America, as a tonic gives a sluggish person an appetite for dinner, and it is bare justice to say that one's expectations of American energy in its own home have not been disappointed. If Americans, depressed by our heavy climate and our leisurely life, could yet maintain such a level of thought and motion, what might not be possible to them in their own country, where the atmosphere is charged with electricity, and every second man is a “hustler from way-back.” The stir of the New World affects the visitor and quickens his pulses as he goes up the Hudson and gets his first glimpse of New York. Your steamer had waited four hours at Queenstown for the mails, but the same mails were transferred to the United States tender as the steamer steams up the bay. Little tugs dart about on all sides with feverish speed, and larger steamers pass with their upper machinery indecently exposed, as if there had not been time, or it had not been worth while, to cover it. Buildings of incredible height line the shores, and suggest that the American nation, besides utilizing the ground, proposes also to employ the heavens for commercial purposes. It was, I think, a Texas paper which translated the austere saying, “_Per aspera ad astra_,” into “the hustler gets to heaven,” and certain New York builders seem now to be on the way. Whetted by this overture on the river, one is ready for the full music of the city; and I wish to pay the compliment with all honesty that New York, with the possible exception of Chicago, is the activest and noisiest place I have ever seen, or expect to see, in this present world. While an English merchant saunters down to his office between nine and ten, a New York man rises at half-past six in his suburb and is busy at work at eight o'clock. The Englishman takes off an hour during the day for luncheon at his club, while the American eats his meal in fifteen minutes. The Englishman spends more than another hour at afternoon tea, and gossip with friends, and sauntering about between his club and his office, while the American packs every minute with work. The very walk of an English merchant, slow, dignified, self-satisfied, and that of the American, rapid, eager, anxious--the one looking as if time were of no importance nor circumstances, and the other as if the loss of a minute might mean ruin--are the visible indices to the character of the nations. It is only yesterday that elevators were introduced into English city buildings, and there are many London offices to which you still have to make an Alpine ascent of four stairs; but a New Yorker regards a stair as a survival of barbarism, and hardly knows how to use it. The higher buildings have several sets of elevators, like the four tracks which railways lay down to work the swift and slow traffic.

“Don't go in there,” my friend said, with whom I was going to lunch at a club on the top floor of a many-storied New York building. “That's an accommodation elevator; stops, you know, at every station. This is the express for the top floor.”

“Would it have made much difference?” I said.

“Very nearly a minute,” as if the loss of the minute would have thrown us back for the rest of the day.

No man goes slow if he has the chance of going fast, no man stops to talk if he can talk walking, no man walks if he can ride in a trolley car, no one goes in a trolley car if he can get a convenient railway, and by-and-by no one will go by railway car if he can be shot through a pneumatic tube. No one writes with his own hand if he can dictate to a stenographer, no one dictates if he can telegraph, no one telegraphs if he can telephone, and by-and-by, when the spirit of American invention has brought wireless telegraphy into thorough condition, a man will simply sit with his mouth at one hole and his ear at another, and do business with the ends of the earth in a few seconds, which the same machine will copy and preserve in letter books and ledgers. It is the American's regret that at present he can do nothing with his feet while he is listening at the telephone, but doubtless some employment will be found for them in the coming age.

If a slow-witted and slow-moving Englishman desires a liberal education, let him take a journey of a month on the steam cars in the United States. No train in Europe travels as fast as certain American expresses, and if other trains go slower it is a matter of thankfulness, because they are less likely to kill passengers on level crossings, or in the main streets of the city along which they take their way, and cattle have more time to get off the unprotected tracks. As trains have also a trick of jumping the rails, either through the rails spreading or the eccentricity of the engine, both being instances of exuberant national vitality, it is just as well that every express does not go at the rate of the Empire State Express on the New York Central. Nowhere in Europe can a traveller find stronger or handsomer cars, and they are marvels of adaptability and convenience. There is a dining car, in order that you may not lose time at a station, and also, which is not unimportant, in order that you may be able to occupy your time with something practical on the train. Of course, there is a smoking compartment, where men can compare notes upon politics and business, and be able to escape from idleness and themselves. The best expresses have a reading car, where the American can pick up such morsels of information from the magazines as he can contain between the interstices of business. There is a desk where he can read his letters, and a typewriter to answer them, for this train is the American's sleep-ing-place and dining-place, and his home and his office. One thing only he regrets; the train, as it flies along, is not connected with the telegraph and the telephone, so that, as an idea occurs to him or he obtains a hint from a man in the smoking car, he might be able to do business with his correspondents in Chicago or San Francisco. While an Englishman on a railway journey is generally dressed in roughly and loosely fitting tweeds, suggestive of a country life and of sport, the coat of his American cousin is of dark material and has not a superfluous inch of cloth. From his collar to his neat little boot the American is prim, spick-and-span, and looks as if he had come out of a band-box and were ready to appear in the principal room of any office. He is dressed in fact for business, and looks like business from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet, while an Englishman's appearance suggests that he is going to see a cricket match or that he has retired to live upon a farm.

My countryman arrives at the station with two and a half minutes to spare, and laden with small baggage. A porter carries his rug and an ulster, very likely also a hat-box and a bag with books, papers, and such like in it, to say nothing of an umbrella and a mackintosh, and he secures his seat at the last moment. He fastens his hat above his head, puts on a travelling cap, changes into an ulster, if it be winter time, and throws a rug over his knee; he puts on travelling gloves, and gets out the Times, and he will sit without budging and read his _Times_ without intermission for fifty minutes. Besides these trifles with him in the carriage, he has a portmanteau in the van, which he hopes has been addressed, and which the porter promised to see put in, and he will scramble for it at his terminus along with a hundred other passengers, who are all trying to identify and extricate their luggage from a huge heap on the platform.