CHAPTER XLII--A VOYAGE UP THE NILE.--THE MYSTERIES OF EGYPTIAN ART AND WORSHIP.

_Up the Nile in a Sail-Boat--Starting for the Cataracts--Advantages of a Drago man--A Tricky Lot--Frauds on Travellers--Our Party--Rather Cosmopolitan--Getting Ahead of Mr. Cook--Our Little Game, and How it Worked--A Bath with Spectators--Decidedly Cool--Getting Aground--A Picturesque Landscape--Last Glimpse of the Pyramids--Spending Night on Shore--Among the Ruins of Memphis--The Wonders of Egyptian Art--What Marriette Bey Discovered--Laying Bare a Mysterious Sepulchre--Ancient Egyptian Worship--Sacred Bulls and Beetles--A History Written in Stone--Bricks Made by the Israelites._

A JOURNEY to Egypt without a trip up the Nile is something like Hamlet without the melancholy Dane. Time and money are the insignificant requisites for the excursion, and it is necessary to be pretty well provided with both, in order to make the journey a comfortable one.

The proper way to do the Nile trip is in a sail boat or _dahabeeah_, as it is called there; this is the way that most travellers have made it, and the way in which all were obliged to make it until a few years ago, when steamers were introduced. For a _dahabeeah_ voyage you must be prepared to take your own time, and not be restricted to getting back to Cairo at a certain date, unless you make that date so far distant as to cover all contingencies. You can hire the boat by the day or by the course; either way is not altogether satisfactory, as I have heard that no matter which mode you select, you will afterwards advise intending voyagers to take the other. If you go by the day, it is for the {530}interest of the boatman to be on the river as long as possible, and he will invent all sorts of excuses for delays.

If you go by the course, you are hurried along as fast as he can crowd you, and if you wish to stop at a place while ascending the river, he will make a variety of objections to your doing so, unless there is an adverse wind or some other cause to prevent the advance of the boat. Most travellers charter the boat by the course, and, all things considered, this is the best plan,--with a stipulation for a certain number of days for stoppages at various points. From fourteen to twenty days delay are the ordinary stipulation, and the whole journey can be made from Cairo to the First Cataract and back in about fifty days. Three weeks must be added if the trip is prolonged to the Second Cataract. These periods are approximations, as the trip has been made to the First Cataract and back inside of forty, and in excess of eighty days, and to the Second inside of sixty, and beyond a hundred.

A few years ago the Egyptian government placed some steamers on the Nile, and arranged to run them to the First Cataract {531}and back at stated intervals during the winter season. For a sailboat journey, much preparation is required, as you must hire a boat, stock it with provisions, engage a dragoman, and do a variety of things before you start, and the preparations will take from a week to a fortnight, according to circumstances. Sometimes a dragoman will take you for a stipulated sum per day, and supply you with boat and everything, but in this case you can be sure that you will not be well supplied, unless you pay a high price.

With the steamboat trip you have no trouble at all; you have only to buy your ticket, and go on board at the appointed time; you are fed, lodged, furnished with guides and donkeys, told when to admire, and how much you can admire, and have a given number of days, hours, and minutes in which to do everything. If no accident happens, you will be back in Cairo twenty days and five hours from the time of your departure, and will have been put through the Nile trip, as though you were a trunk or a bale of goods. You have a printed programme of the places to be visited, and of the time to be devoted to each, and also of the sights at each of those places. You are instructed not to stray from the party, but to follow the dragoman and observe the orders he gives.

There is in London a man, named Cook, who has been for a quarter of a century or more a dealer in excursion tickets for England and the Continent. A few years ago he extended his excursion business to the East, and latterly he has extended it to America, and around the globe. He has a rival named Gaze, and they are very savage on each other. Gaze says (in polite phraseology) that Cook is a liar, and Cook (in equally polite phraseology) says Gaze is a liar.

I have read both their pamphlets, and have come to the conclusion, when perusing their personal anathemas, that they both tell the truth.

Cook sells tourist and single tickets for almost everywhere, and Gaze does likewise. To travel on one of the tourist tickets is beautiful in theory, but to me, at least, a great nuisance in practice. I always avoid the tourist tickets when I can, but sometimes you find a line of transit monopolized by one of these enterprising agents, and are obliged to take his ticket or not go {532}at all. Cook has managed to obtain the appointment of sole and exclusive, agent for the Nile steamers, and consequently the traveller who cannot spare the time and money for a _dahabeeah_ journey, must patronize Cook.

To ascend by sail-boat to the First Cataract, and return to Cairo, will cost two persons about fifteen hundred dollars, and four persons about two thousand dollars. To go to the Second Cataract will cost about five hundred more in each case. If the party is larger, the charge is somewhat lower for each person. For these figures one can get a large, well-fitted boat, and be entitled to live with every possible comfort; lower rates can be made for smaller boats, and less luxury; the best terms I heard of when I was in Egypt, were sixty-five Napoleons (two hundred and sixty dollars gold) each for a party of five to the First Cataract, and allowing them fourteen days for stoppages on the return trip. I was several times offered a contract at seventy or eighty Napoleons each, for a party of five or six to the First Cataract, and for a hundred Napoleons each, to the Second. But this was late in the season (early in January), in fact too late to have a reasonable chance of reaching the Second Cataract. To go there, one should start in the latter part of November, or early in December, and for the First Cataract one should start in December. Early in the season the prices are high; later on they are more reasonable, as the dragomen and owners of boats begin to be doubtful of securing an engagement.

The price by steamer is forty-six pounds sterling, including everything except saddles for donkey-riding and one or two insignificant items, which rouse the temper much more than they deplete the purse. After you have paid an exorbitantly high price, and are told that it includes everything, you are then told that you must pay five shillings extra for a saddle, and eight shillings for a chair; then when you reach the First Cataract, you are told it will cost from two to five shillings more to see the cataract, although the advertisement specially says “The ticket includes the trip to the First Cataract and back.” These petty frauds are of course inseparable from the tourist business, as I never yet knew of a person who had bought a ticket to include everything who was not called on to pay something more. The nearest one can {533}come to it, is on an ocean steamer, and on some of the river boats in America, but even there you are liable to be bled considerably in the course of your journey. You are sometimes very forcibly reminded of the story of the traveller, who said that the terms of a certain hotel out west were four dollars per day, with meals and lodging extra.

We were a party of thirty persons altogether, and included six nationalities,--American, English, French, German, Danish, and Italian.

Every place on the boat was occupied, and there might have been a dozen more, had there been any place to put them in. The boats leave every two weeks from the first of December to the end of March, and if at any time there are passengers enough to fill an extra boat, one is sent off.

Three o’clock was the hour for starting, so we left the hotel at two, sending our luggage on a _charette_, and taking donkeys, (for ourselves,) to the landing.

Gustave and I thought we would get ahead of Mr. Cook a little, by taking our own wine along, as the wines on the boat were extra, and sold at a very high price, and we found that we would save about fifty per cent, by taking wine from the shop, and paying Cook a shilling a bottle, the advertised price for corkage. So we bought three cases and put them with our baggage, but they were stopped on the deck of the steamer, by the Chief Steward of the line, who said he would examine the wine, fix a price upon it, and then charge us fifty per cent, on its value. We had about five minutes of very lively talk, which ended in our triumph, as we had taken care to bring a copy of the advertisement, with the proper paragraph ready marked for inspection.

It turned out that Cook had bought a large quantity of wine from the steamboat company, at the time he took charge of the business, and was anxious to sell it. Under such circumstances it was very natural that he should object to a passenger supplying himself with wine to drink on the voyage. It reminded me of the enterprise of train boys on American railways who neglect to fill the water-coolers in the cars, in order that they may be able to assuage the thirst of passengers, by selling them lemonade at five or ten cents a glass. {534}Of course there were some passengers who came late, so that we were not off until half an hour beyond the appointed time. We amused ourselves, while waiting, by watching the movements of the people on shore. Troops of women and girls came down to the river to fill water jars, which they poised on their heads and then carried away. Occasionally a man came down to fill a pig-skin, and I observed that the men never carried water in anything else than a pig or goat-skin, while the women as invariably carried it in jars. In several places, men and women, some of them very scantily dressed, were washing clothes in the river, and some of the water for drinking purposes was scooped up unpleasantly near the scene of their operations. One man came to the bank about twenty feet from the stern of our boat, removed his garments, and took a bath with as much _sang froid_ as if he were the only person present.

The human form divine, without superfluous adornment or encumbrance, is a frequent object in an Egyptian landscape. A student of living figures, _a la nature_, would here find a good field for his observations.

We had not been ten minutes under way before there was an alarm of fire, and the boat was stopped. It was nothing very serious, only the awning over the upper deck had taken fire from a spark from the chimney, and a hole about six inches across was burned in the canvas. A little while afterward we went aground, but we did not stick there long; half an hour later there was something wrong about the engine, and we had to run to the shore. None of these things wasted much time, but they didn’t promise well for the future. Luckily, however, they were the only events of the kind in the voyage, except that we went aground occasionally, and the bad beginning proved like many other similar affairs in life, a good ending.

We steamed past the city, watching the grey walls of Cairo, the domes and minarets of the mosques, the palaces and hovels, the gardens of the Island of Roda, the building containing the famous Nilometer, the green fields of the valley, the glistening sands of the desert, the yellow hills of the Mokattam, bounding the Lybian waste, the palm-trees stippled here and there, singly and in clusters, the _dahabecahs_, with their long-sloping sails and {535}their trim and jaunty appearance, the native boats sunk deep with cargoes of food destined for digestion in the great stomach of the city, the camels and donkeys and buffaloes, on the bank of the river the half-dressed or almost undressed natives working the _shadoofs_ to raise water for irrigating the land, the groups of natives scattered here and there at work or lazily idling away their time, and over all, the clear sky of Egypt, with scarcely a touch of color and with no mist or haze to keep back the rays of the sun. Away to the west were the pyramids of Gizeh, and south of them were the pyramids of Sakkarah, among the burning sands and overlooking the site of Memphis. Eastward were the hills that border the Lybian desert, and in the north was the spreading valley of the Nile. As we steamed on, the broad valley disappeared, and the hills seemed to shut in close upon the river. The great pyramids grew faint in the distance, and when the sun went down, they were just perceptible through the tops of the palm-trees.

We stopped for the night at Badresheyn, a village about fifteen miles above Cairo; we were to lie there until daylight, as these steamers do not run at night. From this point passengers on the _dahabeeahs_ generally make an excursion to the site of Memphis, and to the Apis Mausoleum.

As for Memphis there is very little of it. A half buried statue lying on its face is shown you, and there are a few substructions and some heaps of ruins. There are some statues and statuettes in the Museum at Cairo, that were discovered at Memphis, and i the sites of two temples have been traced. I went to Memphis with a party early in January, and at that time the water was so high that most of the famous statue was invisible. This statue was originally about fifty feet high, and hewn from a single block of limestone; it stood in front of a temple and is supposed to be the one mentioned by Herodotus. Memphis was used as a quarry for supplying stone for the construction of Cairo, and hence the disappearance of the ancient city.

The ride from here to the Apis Mausoleum, or Serapeum as it is frequently called, is partly through a grove of palm trees and partly through the desert. This was only recently discovered, and rather curiously we are indebted to a passage in Strabo, for {536}the mention of its site. M. Mariette, conservator of the Monuments of Ancient Egypt, found it in 1860, by one day discovering the head of a sphinx in the sand, and beneath the head was the body. Mariette then thought of a passage in Strabo which says, “There is also a Serapeum in a very sandy spot where drifts of sand are raised by the wind to such a degree that we saw some sphinxes buried up to their heads and others half buried.”

Mariette took this as a clue and went to work. The labor was most discouraging as the sand kept falling in almost as fast as it was taken out. An avenue six hundred feet long was cleared out, and sometimes it was necessary to dig the trench sixty or seventy feet deep. A hundred and fifty sphinxes were discovered, besides the pedestals of many others. The foundations of the temple were discovered and laid bare; many statues were found, and at last in 1861 the Apis Mausoleum or Burial place of the Sacred Bulls was opened. The avenue and the foundations of the temple are again covered with sand, and so is a portion of the Mausoleum, but the most interesting part is still kept open.

We left our donkeys at the house where M. Mariette lived during the excavation, and accompanied an Arab guide to the tomb. Entering through a door and descending some steps, we were in the vaults, which consist of parallel galleries, each more than two hundred yards long and united at the ends. The galleries are hewn out of the solid rock, and were evidently cut with great care, but there is nothing very remarkable about them. The wonderful feature of the place is the stone coffins in which the sacred bulls were buried. There are twenty-four of them in recesses, on the sides of the galleries, but never opposite each other, and they are about the heaviest things in the coffin line that anybody has ever seen. They vary a little in size, but the average may be taken at thirteen feet long, seven feet six inches wide, and eleven feet high.

Now stop and think before you go on; stop and think how large a room it would take to hold one of these coffins; well, each coffin is one solid piece of granite, from the quarries at Assouan, five hundred and eighty miles up the Nile, and is finished as nicely as you ever saw anything in the granite line. Four or five persons can sit comfortably inside, and one of them contains the

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{539}table and chairs where the Empress Eugenie, and the Prince and Princess of Wales took lunch when they came here. The lid of each coffin is in proportion to the rest of the work, and like it is of a single piece of granite. An effort was made a few years ago to remove one of the coffins, but it was unsuccessful.

The Egyptians knew some things that we don’t. We can’t move these stone coffins; they moved them along the Nile nearly six hundred miles, and from the East to the West bank, and put them in these galleries underground and exactly in the recesses where they wanted them, and they used them as the burial places of the sacred bulls of Memphis; the bulls that they worshipped as the incarnation of divinity.

All the region around here was a burial place, and many excavations have been made among the tombs. Thousands of mummies have been found, and doubtless thousands more might be discovered if further researches were made. It is four thousand years since some of these mummied gentlemen were pickled and preserved, and they have kept well; you may find them to-day as fresh as when they were planted, and they reflect creditably upon the mummy-sharps that put them up, and also upon the wonderfully dry climate of Egypt. I half suspect that the climate is responsible for the religious faith of the ancient Egyptians, and particularly for that part of it which bade them bestow so much care upon their tombs and the preservation of the body.

Had their climate been like that of London or New York, they would have constructed a different religion, as they would have known they could not successfully carry out the mummy part of it.

Not far from the Bull-Pits, as they are irreverently called, is a portion of a tomb of a very early date, which is known as the Tomb of Tih. The body of Mr. Tih was buried in the rock below, and the portion now visible is the entrance chamber to the establishment. The interesting feature about it is the mass of sculptures and paintings on the walls. Most of them are done in low relief, and very well done too. The drawing and execution show great artistic skill, and some of the groups evince a knowledge of perspective. The scenes represented are supposed to be incidents in the life of Tih; they represent him at home and in the field, and also at the chase. {540}Tih was a priest who lived at Memphis about the Vth dynasty of the ancient empire; that is to say, about thirty-seven hundred years before Christ, or fifty-six hundred years ago. We wont be particular about a year or two. He is dead now, or at all events they buried him here. To describe all the scenes pictured on the walls of this tomb, would keep me writing for a week, and then I shouldn’t be through. In some of them Tih is hunting crocodiles and hippopotami; in others he is looking on, while his servants till the fields; in others he is superintending the building of a wall; and so on through all the incidents of a life of that period. The life of the Ancient Empire can be studied from the pictures on this and other tombs of the locality, and we can learn what they did and how they did it, what animals they used, and what most delighted them to engage in. Some of the pictures on the Tomb of Tih have a comic touch about them, and show that there was fun even so far back as fifty-six centuries ago.

There is one picture which shows some donkeys, brought up to be laden, and they are raising their heels in a miscellaneous sort of a way, and making things rather lively for those who are trying to control them. In another picture, where some men are fishing, one has fallen from the boat, and his friends are pulling him out of the mud. In another, a man has evidently been pulling at a rope, which has broken, and left him to fall in an attitude which is decidedly comical.

Evidently Tih was no slouch. He got up his tomb regardless of expense, and made it the best of the kind. The Egyptians often spent more money on their tombs than on their houses; they considered that they were only temporary occupants of their houses, but that the tomb was to be their eternal dwelling place. The tomb was the real home, and hence the effort to surround the occupant with the scenes he had witnessed on earth.

One of the pyramids of Sakkarah is built in degrees or terraces, is nearly two hundred feet high, and, next to Gizeh, is the largest of the pyramids. It is supposed to belong to the period of the First Dynasty of the Ancient Empire, and to be the oldest monument, not only in Egypt, but in the whole world. According to several archaeologists, it was erected five thousand years {541}before Christ. It is built, not of stone, but of sun-dried brick, and though portions of it had crumbled, they have not altered the general appearance of the pyramid. Could you wish for better evidence of the preservative qualities of the climate of Egypt? This pyramid was opened in 1825, but nothing of consequence was found in it. I had had quite enough of climbing at Gizeh, and therefore did not attempt to ascend here, and I have not heard of any other person trying to climb it.

Some of the archaeologists say that the bricks of which this pyramid is composed were made by the Israelites, during their captivity. I shouldn’t be surprised if this was the case. I certainly don’t know that the bricks were _not_ made by them.

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