From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier

Front matter

FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN FRONTIER

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. At the Ballantyne Press

PREFACE

Chapter 1

FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN FRONTIER

CHAPTER I

LIFE AT SEA

It is two hours since we picked our way between Scylla and Charybdis—no such mighty difficult feat to the navigators of to-day as it so strangely seems to have been to the sailors of the ancient world—and settled down for our two days further run to our Egyptian port. Reggio and Messina have long since disappeared; the spurs of Etna, which almost challenged comparison with their parent height as we were issuing from the Straits, have dwindled into knolls and hillocks, and for well-nigh an hour the great bare cone has stood out black and solitary against the deep orange of the western sky. Sicily itself has become one with its "mountain of old name;" there is nothing to be seen of the romantic island but its giant volcano, nothing left to recall any one of its clustering multitude of classic legends, save only the earliest and sternest of them all. The home of nymph and shepherd, of sacred fountain and love-sick river god, has vanished, and the everlasting prison of the buried Titan alone remains. But that grim donjon glooms at our departing vessel for long. It is still faintly visible when the pale lilac of the sky has melted into a still paler blue, when the flame-tipped purple of the sunset-wrack has become a lustreless brown, when the silver sheen of twilight has faded from the darkening waters. It is a race between the mists and the night to hide it first, and it would be hard to say which wins. Dusk or the sea-haze does at last hide it, leaving visible only the glimmering phantom of the Italian mainland, which itself, also, is soon swallowed up in the night. Then the moon glides, queen like, into her great throne-room of the heavens; the evening star calls up its slow and timid followers into the presence; the night-breeze begins to marshal her ermine-clad court of clouds; and then—why then the ineffable poetry of the hour and the scene is broken by the unspeakable prose of the dinner bell.

Life, as Carlyle observed at a moment when he was able to contemplate it undisturbed by dyspepsia, is a "conflux of two eternities." The sea and sky, when the last streak of land has disappeared, become a conflux of two virtual infinities. Life on the sea, therefore, being spent amid a combination of illimitables—at a representation of the Absolute, "supported," so to speak, "by the whole strength of the company"—one might well expect the spirit of man to be answerably affected by the solemnity of its surroundings. The correct thing for it to do, I believe, is "to beat against the bars of its fleshly prison," and to "long for absorption in the all-embracing Universe." Our muddy vesture of decay should grossly close us in no longer. A starry night on deck should speak to us more eloquently than it spoke to Lorenzo and Jessica on their moonlit bank, and the quiring of the spheres to the young-eyed cherubim should be audible above the wash of the flying waters, and perhaps even the throb of the engines.

As a matter of fact, however, there is no situation in which the spirit of man seems more eminently contented with its corporeal captivity than at this moment when it should be struggling for its freedom. The only result of these communings of his with the Infinite seems to be to magnify immensely his interest in the infinitesimal. Space, Time, Matter, and the Void, the One and the Many—all these vast and imposing abstractions appear to efface themselves in his imagination. As to Space, he is only conscious of it in its limitations while he is dressing. Time shrinks to an arbitrary though convenient method of computing the intervals between meals. Towards the close of each such period he becomes temporarily conscious of the Void; and in the perpetually recurring struggle with these repasts he may perhaps find a symbol of the eternal antithesis between the One and the Many, and of the eternal effort of the Many to merge itself in the One. The human mind, in short, instead of expanding in this transcendental company, contracts. Its emotions, at a moment when they might be expected to range the universe, assume their most egotistically personal shape; and when its intellectual and spiritual powers ought—in common decency, one might almost say—to predominate, its primitive, even its savage, instincts are supreme. Man, or, at any rate, average man, approaches as near to the condition of mechanism as, perhaps, it is possible for him to approach without actually becoming a machine. Human life is reduced to its purely animal processes, and the great facts and forces of Nature exist for the sole purpose of ministering to them. The sun rises that you may bask in its rays; the sea breeze blows for the disinterested encouragement of your appetite; the moon and stars are to look at while you smoke before "turning in." That the sea may lull and rock you to sleep is without doubt the final cause of its cradle-like movement, and the sufficient explanation of its soothing sound. You say to yourself as you sink to slumber that the ingenious Dr. Paley could not have anywhere found a more triumphant proof of his great doctrine of design in creation.

As to the spiritual, the intellectual, and even the moral regions of human life—well, at sea there are no such regions. They do not exist in human life. The talk about them which you remember to have heard on land, and to have believed in, had no solid basis in fact. It was a traveller's tale, the fable of some wonder-weaving explorer of the metaphysical ocean who has temporarily taken you in. You know better now. You know, for instance, that the so-called "Session of 1893" was a mere "railway-journey nightmare," the result of a too copious meal too hastily devoured at Newcastle. We had found that out, every one of us, ere we had been twenty-four hours on board. One lost soul there was among us, it is true, who muttered strange words, which sounded like "Parish Councils Bill;" but we others, the saved, gazed upon him with compassion and without comprehension, and anon he faded away. So, too, it fared with those who had brought with them broken sentences of the language of some dreamland in which men talk, it would seem, about Realism, and Impressionism, and other plainly imaginary things; but these sufferers also were easily curable. Their malady soon yielded to the humane treatment of neglect, and they ceased to regard their illusions as realities. For illusions, of course, they are. There are, in reality, no such things as politics, or economics, or art, or literature, or science, or philanthropy, or in —particularly industry. There is no religion, except a vague form of Pantheism. There is no drama, save the one everlasting miracle play, which has the dawn for its Prologue, and morning, afternoon, evening, and night for its Acts. There are even no amusements—or none as the word and the thing are understood ashore. Sport and pastime no longer possess any traces of their terrene meaning. At sea there need not be, nor is there, any element in them which either promises excitement or pre-supposes skill. Otherwise, how could the most adventurous spirit derive full satisfaction, as it does, from bezique in the saloon, or the masculine intelligence find contentment in the imbecility of deck-quoits?

It is on the short voyage, the three, four, or five days' steam, as from one Mediterranean port to another, that these curious phenomena are most commonly to be remarked. The six or seven days' breathless run across the Atlantic in the "floating palace" is, of course, another matter. There you can hardly be said to leave the habits, or even the appliances, of your daily life on land behind you, and the "City man" almost expects to find his daily paper every morning on the breakfast-table, if not a Stock Exchange in the smoking saloon. And on any longer voyages it is well known that another process of demoralisation sets in. After anything more than "a week of it" at sea the contented frivolity of the traveller, the vacuous repose of mind in which he has hitherto been lapped, give way in most cases to a feeling of acute unrest. The infinite bores him as much as ever, but the finite, at any rate in its more innocent forms, has ceased to distract. He has read his novel; the mild recreations of the deck interest him no longer; the regularly recurring summons to the groaning, and possibly rolling, board has lost its power to awaken a responsive thrill in his breast. It is more than probable that he is bilious; it is tolerably certain that he is beginning to suffer from severe moral dyspepsia. In such a moment the traveller is thrown back, according to his or her sex, upon one or other of the two great—indeed, one may say the only two known—forms of relief from the irritating ennui of the sea voyage. He is driven to gambling, and she to quarrelling. Occasionally, it is true, the two pastimes are combined, or the former may lead by delightfully easy and natural stages to the latter. But, as a general rule, the two forms of distraction remain distinct in their character and incidents, although there is a certain superficial resemblance in their effects. Both of them exert a markedly centrifugal force. Gambling splits up the men into parties of four or more, according as they seek solace in whist or in "nap"; while quarrelling divides the women into smaller factions still. The process of disintegration, having once set in, advances with as terrible a rapidity as though Mr. Gladstone in person were the presiding genius of the scene; and before the end of the voyage the entire saloon is as deeply infected with the "virus of Particularism" as gallant little Wales itself.

To pick up a homeward-bound P. and O. at Gibraltar and to finish with her her journey to England is to assist at a truly melancholy drama of disenchantments. The deck is strewed with the fragments of lightly-made and lightly-broken eternal friendships and with the ashes of extinct flirtations. Bosoms which glowed with reciprocal passion in the Indian Ocean have cooled down in the Red Sea, and mutual admirations have given way to mutual criticism in the Suez Canal. But the short voyage allows no such scope for the display of this particular form of human weakness. It develops no worse characteristic than the somewhat fatuous form of complacent self-absorption which I have endeavoured to describe. And even this resolute refusal on the part of the average man to rise to the level of his august surroundings may in itself, perhaps, be regarded as a tribute to their majesty. The mind may be only taking refuge in little things from the oppression of great ones, just as Charles Lamb had, he tells us, to counteract the awe-inspiring impression of the mountains in the Lake Country by "thinking of the ham and beef shop in Vinegar-yard." After all, too, Nature can better afford to put up with the indifference of man in this case than in almost any other; since there is no situation in which at her pleasure she can so easily compel his homage. Her skies have but to frown upon him, her sea has but to wrinkle its terrible brows, and puny man is at once recalled to a due sense of her awful presence. When that happens he more than makes up for his former irreverence; and happen it did to us some forty-eight hours before reaching our destination. We foolishly overtook a gale—an error inexcusable to so slow a boat—and from six o'clock of one night till about the same hour on the following morning we did a good deal too much of Tennysonian "climbing up the climbing wave." Nature was then more than amply avenged upon those who had neglected to worship her in her gentler aspects. Many of them went, indeed, to the opposite extreme; for ere night fell they had exchanged their careless lounging postures for what it would be inadequate to describe as a mere attitude of worship. It was one of absolute prostration.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

THE WONDERFUL DITCH

In one of those rhetorical outbursts to which even the subject of sanitary engineering had power to provoke him, Victor Hugo once passionately exclaimed, "A sewer is a misunderstanding!" So acutely did he feel the estrangement which has arisen between men and those fertilising agents which he treats for the most part as mere nuisances instead of entertaining them as friends and allies. The analogy may at first sight seem a fanciful one, but the isthmus has always appeared to me to resemble the drainpipe, as being a misunderstanding—not, indeed, on the part of man, who does his best to remove it, but on that of Nature. For it divorces things which seem obviously designed for union; it separates and alienates natural forces which are striving for co-operation, and which come so near to fulfilling what strikes one as their obvious destiny that one cannot but resent the narrow barrier which alone stands between them and success. The isthmus which keeps two oceans from mingling their waters in one common highway of nations is a purely gratuitous obstacle. This you cannot say of the strait which sunders continents; for straits are the boundary fences of states and races, and their existence makes for the individual security of peoples, and therefore for the peace of the world. Isolation is but a cheap price to pay for the blessing of even compulsory amity. If France, Italy, Germany, and Russia were suddenly converted by some cosmic catastrophe into four islands, the volume of international commerce might at first suffer some decrease, but how vast would be the compensation in internal wealth which would result from the release of Continental industry from its overwhelming military burdens! Seas, however, have no quarrel with each other, and the isthmuses which sunder them in both hemispheres, to the diversion of human intercourse by many thousand miles of ocean from its shortest routes, are really mere obstructions, and nothing more. Nature began it, at any rate in the Eastern hemisphere. Her original idea, according to the geologist, was to divide Asia from Africa by a waterway, and not by an isthmus, and, probably, for a little matter of a few million ages, the Red Sea flowed amicably onwards past what is now the head of the Gulf of Suez, and met the waters of the Mediterranean in a fraternal embrace.

Unfortunately, however, at some remote geological period she changed her mind, set her gales and currents to work to sow strife between the two seas, and brought a northward-flowing stream on the one side in the teeth of southward-blowing winds on the other. Neither would give way, and the inevitable result followed. The Red Sea began to throw up a sandbar; the Mediterranean, not to be behindhand, took to silting operations on its own account, and thus a barrier rose imperceptibly, grew and grew by infinitesimal degrees in height and breadth, was dried by the sun and blown by the desert winds into drifts, and piled up into dunes and sand-hills, until at last, in the creeping course of ages, it became the Isthmus of Suez—a closed door in the face of voyaging man seeking maritime transit between the Northern and Southern regions of the globe, and a door, moreover, which was to remain closed for all the innumerable aeons by which the date of those fossil conchylia that the Red Sea has left on the shores of Lake Timsah is divided from that day in March, 1869, when the long-separated waters met again. From the spondylus of the protozoic periods to the late M. de Lesseps is a big jump; and perhaps no breach between two ancient com , which had lasted as long as this, was ever before so effectually healed.

Yet it is interesting to note how many and what persevering attempts have been made throughout all history to re-marry the divorced couple. In such a land of lakes and swamps and branching river arms as the Delta of the Nile it could hardly have been otherwise. Water communication, or the readiest facilities for establishing it, appeared everywhere except in the precise direction in which it was most wanted. Hence, from the time of the Pharaohs down to the Mohammedan conquest the dream of every active and capable Egyptian ruler has been to connect the two seas. The warrior kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, the Setis and the Rameseses, laid the foundation of that ancient fresh-water canal system, which was extended by conqueror after conqueror, by Persians and Ptolemies, by Cæsars and Caliphs, and which only finally fell into utter disrepair in the eighth century of the Chris era, to remain neglected for over a thousand years, till it was restored by the famous French engineer as an operation subsidiary to his great work. For centuries before and after Christ, a chain of fresh-water canals and lakes had rendered water transit practicable from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the practicable was not often the practised. Trade in all ages of the world has been obstinate in its preferences, and neither Pharaohs nor Ptolemies nor Cæsars ever succeeded in turning it into the devious waterways which had been constructed for it. The Roman imports from the East reached the Queen city of the world by another route. Her Indian argosies touched at ports on the Western Coast of the Red Sea—at Koser, for instance, where the eastward-bending Nile touches its nearest point to those waters—and their unladen cargoes were conveyed by the great caravan route to Coptos, and re-embarked in boats on the great river for Alexandria, whence they were reshipped for their ultimate destination. The Mohammedan conquerors of Egypt tinkered, like their forerunners, with the ancient fresh-water canal system; and Amr Ibn-el-Asi used it for the transport of grain from his newly-founded Fostat—the Cairo of later times—to Suez, en route for Arabia; but under the Abbassides it fell into complete disuse. Venice, again, hankered, as might be expected, after a short cut through the isthmus to that gorgeous East which she "held in fee"; but she, too, followed her predecessors to decay without having done anything to realise her idea; while, unfortunately, the latest successor of Venice as the great trading State of the world allowed political apprehensions to chill her ancient spirit of commercial enterprise, and held aloof from that great project of re-uniting the two seas from which she has been so incomparably the greatest gainer, both in wealth and power.

To an Englishman who steams for the first time between the two-mile long breakwaters that protect the harbour of Port Said from the mud-laden current that would otherwise soon block its mouth, it is difficult to repress a pang of patriotic regret that England— the modern Rome—let slip the chance of adding this more than Roman work to the roll of her great engineering exploits. We, who have spanned continents and bridged oceans, should never have left it to any man of another race to cleave a way through the few score miles of isthmus which had so long obstructed the intercourse of the Eastern with the Western world. There is nothing very imposing, it is true, in that polgylot port—that unspeakable sentina gentium—that meeting-place of every race and every vice which plays janitrix of this Mediterranean gateway. But when a mansion is as spacious and as splendid as that which lies at the end of the passage, who cares about the private morals of the concierge? Say that Port Said is a sordid little Monte Carlo, doubled with a squalid little Corinth: say that it is a nest of silver hells and sailors' bagnios, and what matters? In a few hours we shall have discharged our Egyptian consignments, and taken our India-bound cargo, and away we shall have steamed southward into that curious maritime ditch that has been dug in the desert to correct the "second thoughts" of Nature ill-inspired, and to reconstitute the conditions of an infinitely distant geological past.

And what a wonderful ditch it is! More wonderful, perhaps, than ever now that, thanks to the ingenuities of modern science, it is navigable by night as well as by day. Before the age of electricity, the on-coming of darkness meant the arrest of navigation, and the canal after nightfall was tenanted only by moored and motionless ships. But now, with the dazzling rays of the search-light streaming from our bows, and throwing its broad, fan-shaped patch of radiance on the dark waters ahead of us, we can steam steadily on. Five miles an hour is not exactly what you would call good running for a large steamer, but it is better than absolute rest—for those, at least, who want to reach their journey's end; and if you were only sure of being able to keep it up you would be in a position to make a fairly accurate guess at the time at which you will reach your destination at Ismailia. This, however, is just what you cannot do; and it is the impossibility of doing it that lends so "sporting" an interest to the Egypt-bound travellers' passage through the Canal. Facts on board ship are always hard to come by, and the earnest seeker after truth as regards the vessel's movements, dates of arrival, hours of departure, and so forth, is usually led to the conclusion that the object of his search is to be found nowhere but in the bosom of the captain—if there; a circumstance, however, which does not in any degree check the confident circulation of statements varying through every degree of inaccuracy on the authority of the more "knowing" among the passengers. But this is a case in which not even the experienced and obliging commander of the P. and O. steamship Sumatra can give us any precise information as to when we shall find ourselves at the goal of our voyage. It will not be before the small hours of the morning, of that we may assure ourselves; but exactly how small they will be he cannot say. A new day will have come to the birth before we arrive, so much is certain; but the age which the new-born babe will have attained on our arrival cannot be precisely fixed. It may be a miserable, purblind, chilly infant of two or three, or a stouter, healthier brat of five, or, best of all, a rosy, sun-warmed child of eight. All depends on our luck, and our orders from the stations on the bank.

"Do you see that coloured light?" said the captain, pointing to a signal some way ahead of us. "That means that ships from the North are to hold on their course, and ships from the South to 'tie up.' We shall pass one in a few minutes. Do you see her search-light?"

At this distance it looks a mere mass of silver haze; but it grows sharper and clearer as we approach, and in a little while we can make out the dim outline of the great ship that carries it. Higher and higher she seems to rise as we approach, and her squat funnels begin to shape themselves in the luminous mist. Another minute or two and we are alongside; and, though the Sumatra is assuredly no cock-boat, the ship we are passing seems to tower above us, a huge black wall with motionless figures gazing at us over its battlements. Inquisitive passengers hail these apparitions from our side with inquiries as to name and nationality of the vessel, but they vouchsafe no reply. Again and again the question is repeated, but still no answer. This is absurd, since everybody understands the English language; it even seems uncanny. Not a sound comes from them, not a limb stirs, not a footfall is heard on her decks as we glide past this looming bastion, and exchange its utter blackness for the grey surface of the canal bank. For all that appears she might be the phantom ship that the Ancient Mariner saw, the ship of "the nightmare Death-in-Life, that thicks men's blood with cold." As a matter of fact, she is a French transport returning with troops from Madagascar.

If she looked spectral in the weird half-light around us, it is only because every other object which we are passing has a phantasmal air. The patch of illuminated water before our bows is as bright as day; but the buoys which lie outside this luminous arc slip past us like a grey procession of ghosts, the banks are as shadowy as the shores of Styx itself, and the desert stretches away on either side vast and silent, like the "empty kingdoms of Dis." It would scarcely surprise one to see Charon pulling across our wake with a boatload of strengthless shades. The ferryman and his freight would hardly seem more unearthly than the whole scene. As we creep thus leisurely onward the sound of our engines has become little more than an audible murmur. No faintest echo of man or animal reaches us from either shore. The silence is unbroken save by the occasional clang of the electric signal bell from the bridge and the sleepy lapping of the water about our bows. The endless train of buoys filing dimly past us on the waters, the canal banks drifting by in grey monotony, begin at last to affect the senses like the reiterated cadence of a song. They lull your brain by degrees, especially at midnight, into a sort of half-waking slumber, in which you seem to be sailing dream-like through a world of dreams, till at last you might almost believe that the mysterious channel itself which you are navigating is still the vision that it was to the Pharaoh of 3000 years ago, and to Persian and to Greek, to Roman and to Arab since his day, and that M. Ferdinand de Lesseps never appeared among the sons of men to build up a reputation in one isthmus and to wreck it in another.

But it is our turn to "tie up" and give the northward-bound ships a chance, and to tie up may mean a wait of any length from half an hour to thrice that time. With so much more of the canal still to be traversed before we reach our destination a tying up of the steamer justifies the turning in of the passenger. We have still four or five good hours before us ere we bring to in Lake Timsah, and the steam tender bears us across its waters in the grey of the morning towards "the haven where we would be."

The Streets of Cairo

CHAPTER III

THE STREETS OF CAIRO

Among those who have seen many Oriental cities there is controversy as to which of them most conspicuously embodies the characteristics of the East. Some lay claim to have found in Syria, others in Persia, and yet others in India the type in question; yet one cannot help suspecting that if a vote were taken upon a sort of scrutin de liste of all the more famous capitals and great towns of Asia and Northern Africa, Cairo would win the first place among cities, as Themistocles won it among Athenian commanders. Everybody, that is to say, after putting his own special favourite first, would put Cairo second. The colour and movement and perpetual play of light and shade on an ever-shifting mass of hues, that kaleidoscope of humanity which the ordinary every-day traffic of the Egyptian capital keeps twirling before the eyes must be bad to beat. Even here, on this hotel terrace, bathed in the morning glory of that peculiarly liquid sunshine which is almost a speciality of Egypt—even here, in front of Shepheard's, where the West is ever busily dashing its sombre blacks and sober greys on the glowing palette of the East, the effect is almost bewildering. But the coat and boots and billycock of the European, with their suggestions of the incongruous and the over-civilised and the unpicturesque, are easily got rid of. That is the charm of Cairo. You step aside from one of the main thoroughfares, crowded with Western vehicles of every description, from the drag to a pony trap, and in an instant you are at once in a maze of alleys, where no draught animal of any kind has ever set foot since the houses were built on either side, and through which you may thread your way, surrounded by the same moving masses of colour for as many hours as you please without emerging again into Western civilisation.

Lost, in every sense of the word, geographically as well as imaginatively—for there is no city, not even Venice, where you can become hopelessly désorienté with so little trouble—you wander on amid the restlessly flowing stream of swarthy turbaned faces and lithe white-and-blue robed figures, your ears filled with the strange cries and your senses intoxicated with the nameless odours of the East. Further and further you ramble, and deeper and deeper plunge into this magic labyrinth of winding ways. The alleys seem to narrow more and more every minute until the rich brown profusely-carven woodwork of the jutting gables on either side of the roadway almost threatens to meet and blot out the strip of burning blue above your head. As the street straitens the crowd appears to thicken, until at the moment when the one is at its narrowest and the other at its densest you step out into a little square in which the blaze of colour and the play of movement reach their height. You are in the carpet bazaar of Cairo—the spot at which the many-coloured throng around you finds its most gorgeous background. Carpets of every hue and web—Tunisian, Algerian, Smyrniote, Persian—drape the whole quadrangle with an arras worthy of a Sultan's seraglio. To think in "cold blood," and out of sight of it, of such a picture in such a frame would be to conjure up a vision of crude and garish magnificence at which the eye would ache and the taste revolt. But the East is an artist of unerring though unstudied skill, and every patch of brilliant and violently contrasted colour that it seems to have flung so recklessly together has fallen as by a divinely pre-established harmony into its proper and most effective place. And Nature herself, in compounding the pigments for these swarthy skins, has entered into a decorative conspiracy with man. Con merely as an arrangement in browns, the faces of a Cairene crowd are a study in themselves. Between the light café-au-lait colour of the half-Westernised Levantine and the blue-black negroid from Abyssinia or the Soudan, there are well-nigh half a dozen different shades distinguishable to the attentive eye. The café-au-lait changes to chocolate, the chocolate to a kind of café noir, the kind that you complain of on grounds of defective strength; and this, again, to the kind that you complain of on the strength of excessive grounds. Then comes the lustreless jet, as of the unpolished boot; and then—last and lowest note of the gamut, the lower C, so to speak, in the descending scale of colour—comes that deep glossy ebony which might drive all the blacking manufacturers in the world to the despairing confession that, whatever a certain fashionable paradoxist of the day may say to the contrary, Nature is, here, at any rate, superior to art. It is from this point, however, that the artist, conscious or unconscious, takes his start, and there is simply no limit to the varied effects that he can produce with this army of browns on the one hand, and, on the other, every shade of yellow, from the deepest orange to the palest primrose, open to him for his turban, and for his body-garment every gradation of colour that divides "forget-me-not" from "navy" blue. White, I suppose, is, take it all round, the prevailing mode both for head-dress and robe; but for the latter blue is also "much worn," as the fashion-books say, and the variety of colour-schemes obtained by combining its varying values with every imaginable shade of brown in the face and of yellow and red in the turbans is inexhaustible and a source of ever-new delight.