CHAPTER VI. Egypt and the Soudan

EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN

Family matters—Malta and Alexandria—Nile—Korosko—Berber by desert—Boat to Khartum and White Nile—Bayouda Desert to Dongola—Wady Halfa and Cairo—Recent visit to Professor Petrie’s camp at Abydos

The home side of my surroundings has been only slightly alluded to, not that it was of small importance to myself, but because it belonged to a different phase of my life from that with which I am here chiefly concerned. When I had outgrown the tuition of my sister Adele, I led in one sense a solitary life. For though I joined my other two unmarried sisters in their social amusements, I was always treated by them and their companions as a boy, and I felt during this time like an only child with aunts. Their affection to me was deep, so was mine to them, but it was not and could not be reciprocated on equal terms. But I received in full measure the priceless treasure of a home, in which each member knew the essential characteristics, good and bad, of all the others, and who loved each other all the same, and would support him or her through thick and thin. The younger of my brothers, Erasmus, was mostly away; in the first instance in the navy, afterwards in farming his property in Somersetshire, or again in service as an officer in the Militia. My elder brother Darwin was a great favourite among his friends from his early life onwards. He used me as his fag when I was a boy, and taught me to be fairly smart. I imbibed many common-sense maxims from him, but our ideals of life differed to an almost absurd degree: he had not the slightest care for literature or science, and I had no taste for country pursuits. Our differences of temperament became more marked the older we grew. These few remarks, in connection with what has previously been said, will give a supplementary idea of what my surroundings had been during much of my boyhood. It was now the year 1845, when I was twenty-three years old, and the acuteness of my late bereavement had passed away.

After the necessary legal business was finished, the members of the family gradually adapted themselves to their new conditions. My sister Emma lived thenceforth with my mother, whose house, whether at Claverdon or Leamington, I always thought of as “home.” Emma soon became my loving and beloved correspondent, continuing so during the remaining seventy years of her long life, ever devoted to my interests and keenly sympathetic. I was indeed fortunate in possessing such an unselfish and affectionate sister. My sister Lucy was in suffering health, from the results of acute rheumatic fever when a child, and lived only three years longer. My sisters Bessy and Adele were then either married or about to be married; my eldest brother Darwin was married and living with his young wife and her mother, Mrs. Philips, at her country house, called “Edstone,” between Stratford-on-Avon and Henley-on-Arden; and my second brother Erasmus was, as already said, at his estate at Loxton in Somersetshire.

I was therefore free, and I eagerly desired a complete change; besides, I had many “wild oats” yet to sow. So I started on travel, this time to Egypt. At Malta I found my old friend Robert Frere, of whom I have already spoken. He was acting medically towards his uncle, Hookham Frere, much as I had been acting towards my own father. Hookham Frere was too unwell to be seen, or I should greatly have valued the privilege of a few words with so accomplished a man, whatever his diplomatic shortcomings may have been. Not the less so because of the amusing parody written jointly by himself and Canning of my grandfather Darwin’s Loves of the Plants under the title of Loves of the Triangles, which gave a coup de grâce to the turgid poetry that had become a temporary craze in my grandfather’s time.

At Malta I took steamer to Alexandria, and found two Cambridge friends on board, who had been travelling in Greece. They were Montagu Boulton, the third and youngest brother of Matthew Boulton, and Hedworth Barclay, a very distant kinsman of my own and the son of David Barclay of Eastwick Park. We ultimately agreed to join. Boulton had a first-rate courier named Evard, who had also been groom of the chamber to one of the most fashionable of English families. Barclay had a good Greek cook, Christopher, and I was to contribute a dragoman, which I did. His name was Ali.

Mehemet Ali was at that time the ruler of Egypt. Barclay had an audience of him, and received the usual firman entitling us to impress men to pull up our boat at certain well-known places where the stream is exceptionally strong. I myself saw the old greybeard driving, but that was all. Shepherd’s Hotel then looked out upon rice-fields, and modern Cairo did not exist, but Waghorn’s overland wagons to Suez had been established. After some stay at Cairo, we hired a dahabeyah; Barclay put on board a keg of his own porter, and so we started, intending to live luxuriously and in grand style. We also engaged an Arab lad as coffee-bearer and to make himself generally useful, who went by the name of Bob. He turned out to be a lad of parts.

The mornings were delightful. We rolled out of our beds half awake and tumbled ourselves into the river, climbing back very wide awake indeed into the boat by help of the big rudder, to the exquisite enjoyment of the first cup of coffee and a pipe. We chattered with Bob, the captain, sailors, and others, and soon smattered in Arabic. Boulton studied it classically as well, working very hard. So the voyage proceeded in the usual way. We were pulled safely up the First Cataract, and onward we went.

When near Korosko, men had to be impressed, but a person in a rather shabby Egyptian dress, but of Egyptian rank as a Bey, claimed and insisted on precedence. We were cross, and relieved our minds by the use of uncomplimentary English words. But by the time we had walked together to Korosko we had become fairly friendly, for he was a far more interesting man than we had supposed, and had much to tell us in French. He invited us to see his hut, where everything was perfectly clean and well ordered. Small as it was, a scientific and literary air pervaded it. There were maps, good books and scientific instruments of various kinds, so my heart warmed towards him. Then he began to address us in fairly good English, and made us understand that he was quite aware of our phrases when we were cross, and that he forgave us, but did so in a dignified way. There was one thing we could do well which he could not, and that was to provide a really good dinner. Evard and the cook rose at once to the occasion, and nothing could have been managed in better style under the circumstances.

The stranger proved to be Arnaud Bey, one of the distinguished St. Simonians who, having been banished from France, helped greatly to civilise Egypt in the days of Mehemet Ali. He had just returned from a long exploratory journey after gold and other valuable products in the districts about the Blue Nile. It will be hard now for a reader to put himself in the attitude of geographical ignorance that was then almost universal in respect to those places. Arnaud said at last, “Why do you content yourself like other tourists to go no farther than Wady Halfa? Why not travel overland by camel from this very place, Korosko, to Khartum? The Sheikh of the intervening Bishari Desert is in the village at this very moment. I know him well, and can easily arrange that he shall take you to Berber at moderate cost. You will then find your way by boat to Khartum.” We were amazed at the proposition, for the very names of those places were unknown to us. He drew a map on a small piece of paper for us to keep, on which he marked bits of useful information. At length, after hours of eating and drinking and talking, we fell wholly into his plan. The Sheikh was sent for, and I shall never forget his entrance. The cabin reeked with the smells of a recent carouse, when the door opened and there stood the tall Sheikh, marked with sand on his forehead that indicated recent prostration in prayer. The pure moonlight flooded the Bacchanalian cabin, and the clear cool desert air poured in. I felt swinish in the presence of his Moslem purity and imposing mien. For all that, we soon came to terms, and were to start the day after the morrow. The boat was to be sent to Wady Halfa under Bob in chief command to await our return there, and we three and our three servants were to travel into the unknown on the backs of beasts strange to our experience. So it all befell.

A more complete change can hardly be imagined than that from a luxurious cabin to nightly open-air bivouacs on the cold sand. Our first day was the customary march of little more than an hour, to be assured that nothing needful had been omitted. The next day the real journey began. The track we followed was presumably the same that has been followed since the most ancient days; it bore marks of its continued use during recent times in the whitened bones with which it was strewed. Sometimes we came across a camel whose skin had not yet disappeared, but formed a hollow shell including marrowless and porous bones. These desiccated remains were of most unexpected lightness. My arm is far from strong, but I easily lifted with one hand and held aloft the quarter of a camel in this dried-up state.

The ribbed rocks looked like the bones of the earth from which all the flesh, in the shape of soil and vegetation, had been blown away as sand and dust. Travellers by the railway that now runs along that very track can ill appreciate the effect the desert had on such as myself at that time. Ali proved an excellent and devoted servant. I long bore in mind his kindness to me on one bitterly cold night, for the nights were sometimes extremely chill, in quietly taking off his own jacket and wrapping it round my shivering body.

Many strangers joined our slowly moving caravan. One group was such as is frequently seen on similar occasions; it consisted of a husband on foot, with his wife and child mounted on a donkey, like the often-painted subject of the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. Another personage was a middle-aged and rather mild-looking individual, who possessed little more than a sword, and was on his way to Abyssinia, where some fighting was expected with neighbouring savage tribes. He proposed to take part in it, and to make his profit from the slaves he captured. He was an old hand at this, and his businesslike account of the process was explicit. It was a moot question with him on each occasion when a man had been captured, whether to mutilate him at once or not. If so, the man was apt to die, and would certainly require costly attention for a long time; on the other hand, if he recovered, his market value was greatly increased. I shall have a little to say later on of some results of the particular slave-hunting expedition which this worthy person went to join.

A caravan yields so many strange experiences and affords so many occasions of mutual helpfulness and of friendships, that it is easy to understand the importance of the Hadj pilgrimage in uniting Moslems. I have often wished that something of the sort could be revived among ourselves, such as the famous Canterbury Pilgrimage of Chaucer, but the religious motive for real pilgrimages is generally wanting in Protestant countries. The Congresses of large itinerant societies like the British Association, in some few respects may be considered as taking the place of pilgrimages, but they want the long hours and days of open-air life, hard exercise, and leisure.

After four days’ travel from morning to evening, we came to a half-way place where a brack but drinkable water was to be had, which replaced the redolent stuff that our water-skins afforded, and so on for four more days, when we reached the Nile at Abu Hamed, having cut across its huge bend. Oh! the delights to such tourists as we were, of a temporary exemption from the discomforts of the desert, and of unlimited rations of water. We travelled farther by the side of the Nile for another three days or so, till Berber was reached, when we paid our dues and said good-bye to the camels. The Governor of Berber was very civil; the sherbet he gave us, though made from limes and not from lemons, tasted heavenly. He gave me a monkey, and I bought another, and these two were my constant companions on camel-back and everywhere else for many months, until I reached England.

A boat had here to be hired to take us up to Khartum. We got one in which the part below decks was much too low to stand in, and it swarmed with cockroaches, but it sufficed. The people at Berber were unruly, and so obstructive that the boatmen feared to enter with us into their own boat. However, we showed determination, and pushed off into the stream, with the result that first one and then another of the men ran alongside and plunged into the water and swam to the boat and turned its head up stream. We then set sail to Khartum.

In due time we passed Shendy, the scene of the recent massacre of Abbas Pasha, a younger son of Mehemet Ali. He was sent to collect imposts and to overawe the people. At Shendy he and his soldiers committed all sorts of outrages, and finally he demanded the daughter of the Deftader (or Tax-gatherer) in a form of marriage that was equivalent to temporary concubinage, which was a grave insult to her father, the most important man in the place. The Deftader was unable to resist; so he resigned himself, but gave orders secretly. While Abbas Pasha with his suite were at dinner and stupid with what they had drunk, the Pasha noticed that great bundles of stalks of the native corn were being brought in and stacked about the tent. He asked and was told that it was forage and litter for his Highness’s horses. When enough of this straw had been brought in, a signal was given to fire it, and every man who attempted to break through was massacred, including of course Abbas himself. The Deftader escaped to Abyssinia; something more of him will be said shortly.

Finally we reached Khartum, then a group of huts with a wagon-roofed hall for the audiences of the Pasha. We heard of an extraordinary Frank, believed to be English, who had arrived some weeks previously. We went to call on him, knocked at the door, were told to enter, which we did, and came into the presence of a white man nearly naked, as agile as a panther, with head shorn except for the Moslem tuft, reeking with butter, and with a leopard skin thrown over his shoulder. He was recognised at once by my companions as an undergraduate friend, Mansfield Parkyns. He had got into a College scrape, and, leaving Cambridge prematurely, found his way to Abyssinia, where during years of adventure he had made friends with the just-mentioned Deftader of Shendy, and was then acting as an intermediary and the bringer of a substantial present whereby to obtain, if possible, his forgiveness and restoration.

Of the many travellers whom I have known I should place Mansfield Parkyns (1823-1894) as perhaps the most gifted with natural advantages for that career. He easily held his own under difficulties, won hearts by his sympathy, and could touch any amount of pitch without being himself defiled. He was consequently an admirable guide in that then sink of iniquity, Khartum. The saying was that when a man was such a reprobate that he could not live in Europe, he went to Constantinople; if too bad to be tolerated in Constantinople, he went to Cairo, and thenceforward under similar compulsion to Khartum. Half a dozen or so of these trebly refined villains resided there as slave-dealers; they were pallid, haggard, fever-stricken, profane, and obscene. Mansfield Parkyns complacently tolerated and mastered them all. The abominations of their habitual conversation exceeded in a far-away degree any other I have ever listened to, but it was clever. When one of them was out of the room, the others freely related his adventures to us, in which some anecdote like this was frequent. “So he said, ‘Let us be friends; come drink a cup of coffee and smoke a pipe,’ then he put poison into the coffee.” There is a gourd whose dried seeds are said to be poisonous and not very unlike coffee in taste, which is particularly convenient in such cases. With all their villainy there was something of interest in their talk, but I had soon quite enough of it. Still, the experience was acceptable, for one wants to know the very worst of everything as well as the very best.

Some few years later, when trade had thriven and Khartum had become less barbarous, it was deemed expedient to appoint an English Consul, partly to watch and report on matters connected with the slave trade. Mr. Petherick, who had been an ivory dealer in the Soudan, was the first to hold that post. I often saw him after his return; he was extremely cheery, and apparently frank in conversation, but very reticent on much that I wanted to hear. I could not discover what had been the end of my villainous acquaintances, nor how far the society of Khartum had become purified by the time he arrived there.

We had a few days still to spare, and Parkyns was glad to join us in a short cruise up the White Nile. His birthday and mine proved to be the same, and we had an appropriate jollification. Our house or hut looked over the swift and broad Blue Nile on to the waste beyond, where pillars of whirling sand were constantly forming at that time of year, February. Many of them careered simultaneously, but soon dissipated. I have never been caught in one; it would no doubt be disagreeable, but I never saw one that behaved as if it were dangerous.

It was a strange sight on turning the corner where the two Niles meet, to change from the Blue Nile, which sparkled and rushed like a clear Highland river, into the stagnant and foul, but deep White Nile. We sailed through mournful scenery up a width of water visited by great flocks of pelicans. The river had few marked banks, but lapped upon grassy shores like a flooded mere. The water was so stagnant, that when we anchored for the night the offal thrown overboard by the cook hung about the boat, and a man had to be sent each morning with a pitcher to get less undrinkable water from a distance. Heads of hippopotami bobbed up at times all about us in the mid river, but were very shy of approach. At that date, I should have said there were crocodiles on nearly every sandbank on the Nile below the Cataracts, for considerably more than half of the way thence to Cairo.

Beyond the despondency caused by the air and the mournful character of the scenery, I have little to say, except that our journey upwards was concluded somewhat earlier than intended, through an adventure. One of my two companions, attended by Parkyns, lay out at night to shoot a hippopotamus, whose recent tracks were only too apparent. They returned in the dark and very early morning in much excitement, and tried to make us understand that we ought to wake up and return at once, for some unintelligible reason. However, to please them, we yielded to their insistence, roused up the crew and sailed homewards. It turned out, some hours later, that the real reason was that my sportsman-companion had shot, not a hippopotamus, but a cow that was coming down to the river to drink. There really seemed no feasible way of making amends for the mistake, and a certainty of clamour and excessive claims if we confessed it. So we disappeared from that district, much as a pestilence would have done.

Our return journey past Khartum was by our boat to Matemma, opposite to Shendy, where we discharged it, and hired camels to take us a six days’ journey, I think, across the Bayouda Desert to Dongola. We had become by that time used to camel-riding, we were well mounted, and travelled even as much as eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, on more than one day. The Polar Star and the pointers of the Great Bear served as the hand of a huge sidereal clock to tell the weary time.

At length we reached our destination. It is the habit of dragomans to tell fibs about their masters, to enhance their own importance; anyhow, we were treated to a review as distinguished strangers. I then had little experience with horses; Boulton was not a much better horseman than myself. Barclay was, but even he found himself in difficulty when sitting in a Turkish saddle with short stirrups and holding a rein armed with so powerful a curb that it required the lightest of hands to use it properly. However, we all passed the ordeal, without ludicrous mishap.

From Dongola we rode three days across the desert on the opposite side of the Nile, to cut off a small bend, and thenceforward by the west side of the Nile itself, so far as the very broken ground permitted. Semney was a surprise; a compact little temple, high above a spot where the whole Nile at that time of the year flowed through a channel so narrow that a cricketer ought to be able to throw a stone across. I tried, but, being bad at throwing, failed by a little. On the other hand, at the Sixth Cataract, between Berber and Shendy, where the river is broad, I had waded right across it to shoot ducks.

We had felt no small anxiety about the fate of our dahabeyah, but there she was at Wady Halfa in spick and span order; Bob, that bit of a boy, having risen to the level of his responsibilities and maintained perfect discipline. It appeared that the rais, or captain, was once refractory, but Bob boldly gave the order to the sailors to flog him, and flogged he was by his own crew, and ate the bread of humility.

My excuses for speaking at such length about countries since so familiarly known are that it will help to give some idea of how they struck a tourist-traveller in the time of Mehemet Ali, upwards of sixty years ago, and because this little excursion formed one of the principal landmarks of my life. That chance meeting with Arnaud Bey had important after-results to me by suggesting scientific objects to my future wanderings. I often thought of writing to him in order to bring myself to his remembrance, and to sincerely thank him, but no sufficiently appropriate occasion arose, and it is now too late.

In the winter 1900-1901 I visited Egypt again, and, calling at the Geographical Society there, learnt how important and honoured a place Arnaud Bey had occupied in its history. He had died not many months previously, and I looked at his portrait with regret and kindly remembrance. Being asked to communicate a brief memoir to the Society at its approaching meeting, I selected for my subject a comparison between Egypt then and fifty years previously. I took that opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to Arnaud, which posthumous tribute was all I had the power to pay.

During this same visit to Egypt I spent one of the most interesting weeks of my life at Professor Petrie’s camp. It was by pure chance that when booking my place to Egypt, in the London office, I found Professor Petrie on some similar errand. He then and there invited me and my niece to join him and Mrs. Petrie at Abydos, where he and his very capable party were about to excavate. Abydos lies on the western side of the Nile, roughly one-third of the way between Thebes and Cairo. We were met at the railway station by that most capable lady, then Miss, now Dr. Alice Johnson, mounted on the one horse that the camp possessed, and who with kurbash in hand and voluble Arabic extricated us quickly from a crowd of troublesome natives, and rode with us a distance of eight miles or so to the camp. This consisted of a row of mud huts with a space in front, the whole enclosed with a low mud wall and a wicket gate. The pottery, etc., that had recently been dug up was arranged in front of the huts. They had only mats for doors. One of the huts was the dining-room, and the others were for members of the party, the farthest from the entrance being that of Mr. and Mrs. Petrie. I was prepared for cold nights, but found them more severe than I expected. Being little short of eighty years old, I had lost much of the resisting power of youth, and heaped every scrap of clothing I could find over my body, with only partial success. I amused myself on one occasion by counting the number of layers of these that lay on my chest, and found it to be seventeen. A single skin rug capable of excluding the nimble dry air would have been worth more than half of these flimsy coverings. Our host and hostess were peculiarly independent of ordinary comfort, but the consumption of marmalade at their table was enormous.

I had no idea before of the strenuous life led by a great excavator. The mere digging can be delegated, but the rest seemed to occupy every faculty of our hosts at full stretch from early morning to late evening every day. There was drawing, copying, photographing, recording, comparison of specimens, piecing of them together, discussing them and planning new work, besides attending to the discipline of many men not concentrated at one spot, but dispersed among different diggings.

An amusing scene occurred at a stated hour every morning, when the fellahs who had found any curios and wanted to sell them were seated in a long row at a fixed distance from the camp. They brought in rotation what they had to sell. Professor Petrie knew by long experience exactly how much the various articles would fetch if taken to the dealers in the large towns, and offered that amount for what he cared to buy. The Arabs quite understood the system, namely, that by accepting what was offered they would get just as much as if they took a long journey in hopes of a better bargain, so the traffic was quick. The objects were bought out of funds variously provided, but the Egyptian Government reserved some rights of purchase in the end.

The conversation at meal-time was usually most interesting. Much was going on, and the originality and fertility of the ideas of Professor Petrie and the ingenuity of his explanations were marvellous. The actual digging was of course monotonous and laborious, but the faculties of those of the party who superintended each locality were kept on the alert. They had to record and to make maps as well as to keep the labourers to their work, and to supervise them narrowly. At nightfall the men, who had mostly worked for Professor Petrie during previous years, returned to their own huts, a little way behind one corner of the camp, and there they indulged about once a week in strange performances, not unlike those of dancing and howling dervishes. Their nature seemed to require occasional doses of these ebullitions.

We were fortunate at being present at the impressive feast of the full moon, which included solemn chants. It was dignified in every respect, and appeared to have a deeper religious significance than might have been expected possible with these men.