My Winter on the Nile Eighteenth Edition

WE have taken possession of our dahabeëh, which lies moored under the bank, out of the current, on the west side of the river above the bridge. On the top of the bank are some s...

AT LAST, twenty-four days from Cairo, the Nubian hills are in sight, lifting themselves up in the south, and we appear to be getting into the real Africa—Africa, which still kee...

LETTING our dahabeëh drift on in the morning, we spend the day at Assiout, intending to overtake it by a short cut across the oxbow which the river makes here. We saw in the cit...

WE ARE at home again. Our little world, which has been somewhat disturbed by the gaiety of Thebes, and is already as weary of tombs as of temples and of the whole incubus of Egy...

IT NEVER rains at Thebes; you begin with that fact. But everybody is anxious to have it rain, so that he can say, “It rained when I was at Thebes, for the first time in four tho...

I SHOULD like to give you a conception, however faint, of the Tombs of the ancient Egyptians, for in them is to be found the innermost secret of the character, the belief, the i...

WE HAVE been learning the language. The language consists merely of tyeb. With tyeb in its various accents and inflections, you can carry on an extended conversation. I have hea...

WE resume our voyage on the sixth of January, but we leave a hostage at Luxor as we did at Asioot. This is a sailor who became drunk and turbulent last night on hasheesh, and wa...

THE morning puts a new face on our affairs. It is Sunday, and the most devout could not desire a quieter day. There is a thick fog on the river, and not breeze enough stirring t...

WE are giving our minds to a name for our dahabeëh. The owners have desired us to christen it, and the task is getting heavy. Whatever we are doing; guiding a donkey through the...

THE ancient Egyptians of the Upper Country excavated sepulchres for their great dead in the solid rocks of the mountain; the dwellers in the lower country built a mountain of st...

IT IS a sparkling morning at Wady Saboda; we have the desert and some of its high, scarred, and sandy pyramidal peaks close to us, but as is usual where a wady, or valley, comes...

ON a high bluff stands the tottering temple of Kom Ombos conspicuous from a distance, and commanding a dreary waste of desert. Its gigantic columns are of the Ptolemaic time, an...

EAGERNESS to see Africa brings us on deck at dawn. The low coast is not yet visible. Africa, as we had been taught, lies in heathen darkness. It is the policy of the Egyptian go...

WHAT excitement there is in adjacency to a great city! To hear its inarticulate hum, to feel the thrill of its myriads, the magnetism of a vast society! How the pulse quickens a...

O CAIRO! Cairo! Masr-el-Kaherah, The Victorious! City of the Caliphs, of Salah-e'-deen, of the Memlooks! Town of mediaeval romance projected into a prosaic age! More Oriental th...

THE Mediterranean still divides the East from the West. Ages of traffic and intercourse across its waters have not changed this fact; neither the going of armies nor of embassie...

SOCIAL life at Thebes, in the season, is subject to peculiar conditions. For one thing, you suspect a commercial element in it. Back of all the politeness of native consuls and...

A GENTLEMAN started from Cairo a few days before us, with the avowed purpose of following in the track of the Children of Israel and viewing the exact point where they crossed t...

WE are on deck early to see the approach to Philæ, which is through a gateway of high rocks. The scenery is like parts of the Rhine; and as we come in sight of the old mosque pe...

The downward run of the Cataract is always made in the early morning, that being the time when there is least likely to be any wind. And a calm is considered absolutely necessar...

WHETHER we go north or south, or wait for some wandering, unemployed wind to take us round the next bend, it is all the same to us. We have ceased to care much for time, and I t...

OUR sight-seeing in Cairo is accomplished under the superintendence of another guide and dragoman, a cheerful, willing, good-natured and careful Moslem, with one eye. He looks e...

THE Khedive and his court, if it may be so called, are not hedged in by any formidable barriers; but there are peculiarities of etiquette. When his Highness gives a grand ball a...

PROBABLY this present writer has the distinction of being the only one who has written about the Nile and has not invented a new way of spelling the name of the town whose many...

OURS is the crew to witch the world with noble seamanship. It is like a first-class orchestra, in which all the performers are artists. Ours are all captains. The reïs is merely...

THERE are two ways of going to see the Second Cataract and the cliff of Aboosir, which is about six miles above Wady Haifa; one is by small boat, the other by dromedary over the...

IN PASSING the First Cataract of the Nile we pass an ancient boundary line; we go from the Egypt of old to the Ethiopia of old; we go from the Egypt proper of to-day, into Nubia...

FOR two days after the sand-storm, it gives us pleasure to write, the weather was cold, raw, thoroughly unpleasant, resembling dear New England quite enough to make one homesick...

WHEN daylight came the Colossi of Aboo Simbel (or Ipsambool) were looking into our windows; greeting the sunrise as they have done every morning for three thousand five hundred...

AS WE sail down into the heart of Egypt and into the remote past, living in fact, by books and by eye-sight, in eras so far-reaching that centuries count only as years in them,...

I SHOULD like to go once to an interesting city where there are no sights. That city could be enjoyed; and conscience—which never leaves any human being in peace until it has na...

YOU need not fear that you are to have inflicted upon you a description of Thebes, its ruins of temples, its statues, obelisks, pylons, tombs, holes in the ground, mummy-pits an...

WE left Suez at eight in the morning by rail, and reached Ismailia in four hours, the fare—to do justice to the conductor already named—being fourteen francs. A part of the way...

“My Winter on the Nile,” and its sequel, “In the Levant,” which record the experiences and observations of an Oriental journey, were both published in 1876; but as this volume w...

WHAT we in Cairo like most to do, is to do nothing in the charming winter weather—to postpone the regular and necessary sight-seeing to that limbo to which the Arabs relegate ev...

THE WEATHER is almost unsettled. There was actually a dash of rain against the cabin window last night—over before you could prepare an affidavit to the fact—and today is cold,...

EGYPT has excellent railways. There is no reason why it should not have. They are made without difficulty and easily maintained in a land of no frosts; only where they touch the...