A black hand, extended from the lowest deck beneath us, grasps one of these loaves and begins to finger it with a view to purchase; we cannot see the owner of the hand, but we can see his fingers feeling cautiously all around that loaf; he nips it between finger and thumb, he prods it, kneads it, rubs it, and finally, when no inch of it has been untouched, he hands over reluctantly a small coin and withdraws with the bread.

"Hope that isn't for us," says the cheerful voice of a young officer leaning over the rail beside us in the dark. "Think I'll cut off my crust at dinner to-night on the off-chance, anyway!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN EGYPTIAN SOLDIER.]

CHAPTER IX

A MILLION SUNRISES

It is very cold and quite dark when I wake. The steamer is anch.o.r.ed close up to the bank and not a sound comes from the still water. My blankets are very comfortable; it can't be time to turn out yet. It is an effort even to stretch out a hand and strike a light to see my watch--5.15! Yes, we ought to go!

You take some waking, and only my threat of, "You'll never get another chance in your life," brings you out of your bunk at last.

If you've ever done anything nastier than trying to dress against time, two together in a small cabin on a cold morning in the pitch dark, I'd like to know it. The electric light is off, because the engines are not running, and there are no candles. By the time we've got into some sort of clothing we're both at snarling-point. Twice I've violently tried to put on your boots, thinking they were mine, and I know you've got my shirt on, because I couldn't find it and had to drag out a clean one!

A walk along the cold dark deck and across a slippery plank to the mud bank does not improve matters. Apparently we have this exhilarating entertainment all to ourselves, for the rest of the fifteen pa.s.sengers have not appeared.

The sand is like the softest silk, and it seems sometimes as if we must be walking backwards so little headway do we make. If it wasn't for this icy wind I should think I was still dreaming. All the time that red bar in the east glows steadily brighter, and warns us that if we want to see one of the grandest sights in the world--Abu Simbel by sunrise--we must hurry up.

When at last we get clear of the sand we find ourselves on a piece of ground cut up by cracks wide enough to put a foot in. There is just sufficient light to keep us from twisting our ankles if we walk along with our eyes glued to the ground, and so we get along somehow, till suddenly we stop--sunrise is here!

A considerable distance in front of us and above our level we see three mighty seated figures and the remains of a fourth in a flat recess chiselled out of the side of a great rounded cliff. That first touch of dawn has tinged them with rosy pink, and they sit with their faces to the sunrise, which they must have seen somewhere about one million times already. Night succeeding day, day succeeding night, light following darkness, darkness following light, thus has time flickered before them throughout their stupendous age. As we creep nearer and climb higher they seem to rise and rise in size. Silently we seat ourselves on a stone, forgetting the shivering wind, and we stare and gaze spellbound at the triumphant eager expression on those mighty features, which, as the dawn spreads, softens to a deep complacence. Then the pink changes to a splendour of living gold, which sweeps over like a curtain, and the full majesty of them strikes us almost like a blow.

Their expression has in it something akin to that of all mighty time-resisting images set up by man; it is found in the face of the Sphinx and on that of the Buddhas of the East. It is an expression of soul-crushing superiority, so without doubt of its own una.s.sailable dignity that it can afford to be benign. We must make up a word and call it "supremity"--it is the only one that fits it.

Under the knee of each mighty figure is the plump outline of a little wife, small it looks from here, but draw nearer still, stand right under that colossus on the right and you will find that she is twice the height of a man.

As they tower above us, seeming to grow greater every instant as the light filters into the crevices, we get some idea of the monster size of these n.o.ble statues, and discover that each foot is nearly as long as a man! From the broken face of the sloping cliff they have been hewn, not built and pieced together and brought here from elsewhere, but born full size, springing to life from out the living rock. They all represent the king with whom we are already familiar, Rameses II., who caused this great temple to be made to celebrate his victory over the Kheta, a tribe of Syrians, living far away by the river Orontes in the north of the Holy Land.

Two on each side of the temple doorway the statues sit, and between them, in low relief, is the small figure of the G.o.d Harmakhis. Running above, across them all, is an inscription, part of which signifies--

"I give to thee all life and strength."

Look up at it beyond those towering immovable heads, and from it again to the rough cliff untouched by tool, and from that to the sky, now of the purest, softest blue, hanging like a canopy above.

The high black doorway of the temple lies like a gash on the face of the cliff, and on one day of the year the ray of light from the rising sun falls through it clean as a shot arrow. The black-robed guardian has been expecting us, he stands waiting, holding his staff of office, and admits us to the interior. It is very dark, and even with the light of the flickering candle he holds up it is difficult to make out those great columns, each seventeen feet high, carved with an image of the G.o.d Osiris. As for the deep-cut pictures everywhere on the walls we can only get the merest glimpses of them. We pa.s.s on through several halls, noting how the angles and lines are absolutely plumb and true, and come to the innermost sanctuary, where we find the king again as one of four seated statues, not very large, the other three being G.o.ds! That was the idea Rameses had of his own importance!

Then it grows on us with increasing wonder that all this temple--the walls, the columns, the statues--are cut out of the actual rock, and that all the stone dislodged in the cutting must have been carried out through that doorway. How was it achieved? The depth of the temple to its farthest wall is one hundred and eighty-five feet, or almost three times a cricket-pitch! Imagine this depth driven in to the rock and cleared out to a great height without any machine power or modern tools!

And this was accomplished in the reign of one king. Rameses reigned some sixty years, and his great victory over the Kheta was five years after his coronation, so perhaps sixty years is the longest we can give for the construction of the temple, and it was probably much less. The story goes that in this great battle the king, cut off from his men and alone in the midst of a hostile army, performed prodigies of valour; he slew and hewed right and left until he sent the greater part of the Syrian army flying before him; all this is recorded on the walls. Of course in the case of kings these doings are apt to be magnified, still, there is no doubt that this was one of the most memorable occasions of his life, and he has certainly caused it to be remembered by building this enduring monument.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CHILD HOLDS OUT A STRANGE LITTLE BEAST.]

We hear voices, and are joined by half a dozen of our fellow-travellers from the steamer. As we all walk back together a child sidles up and holds out a strange little beast with a head like a skull and a long tail like a rat. It is about as big as your hand. One of the army men takes it and puts it in the sleeve of his green tweed coat, and as he walks along carrying it the quaint little beast turns a greenish colour.

It is a chameleon and has the faculty of changing to the colour of its background whatever that may be; this forms a protection against its enemies, who cannot easily see it.

"I'll keep it," says the soldier, laughing and giving the child a coin.

"He is a useful little beggar. You should see that tongue of his flick out and catch an unwary fly half a foot away."

The steamer hoots a warning note and we all scramble on board hastily.

Yes, I _told_ you it was my shirt!

An hour or so later we pa.s.s the boundary into the Soudan.

"Now we are out of Egypt," says another of our friends, a Government official with years of experience behind him. "The Soudan is a greatly superior place; no one is allowed to bother you here--we don't let them.

The children don't even know the meaning of the word _bakshish_; they are not allowed to learn it."

This sounds comforting and gives a good prospect for the day we shall have to spend at our stopping-place, Wady Haifa, before going back on the steamer to a.s.souan.

There is no railway between a.s.souan and Wady Haifa, and so Government steamers run all the year round to bridge the gap between the two ends of the railway. In the season Cook runs steamers too, and they give much more time for pa.s.sengers to see Abu Simbel and other temples on the way; unfortunately, as we are too early in the year, we could not take advantage of them and had to go on a Government boat.

The men we have been with are all pa.s.sing on by rail from Wady Haifa, and when we land there we go in the afternoon to see them off at the station. They are a keen, hard-bitten crew, and make us feel proud of our countrymen; they are reticent mostly, bearing the unmistakable stamp of responsibility. Men who "build the Empire" are little apt to "slop over" or demand sympathy. The boyish vigour remains with them later than with most men, but it is tempered by a certain hardness outside. The train is particularly comfortable and well managed, with sleeping-cars that bear comparison with the best in Europe, and a good dining-car; and it is necessary, for these men have a journey of a day and a night before reaching Khartoum, the capital of the Soudan, and the way lies right across barren desert, where the sand insidiously creeps in at every c.h.i.n.k in spite of the closely shut windows. To some of them indeed Khartoum is only a jumping-off place. There is one army man who received orders to leave Cairo at ten days' notice and plunge into Central Africa, there to hold an outpost as the only white man for hundreds of miles around. He knows little of what is expected of him beyond the fact that he is to purchase a year's stores in Khartoum, and that when he has gone as far as boat and waterway can take him, he will have to march at least a hundred miles through country where his equipment must be carried by natives, as it is the haunt of the dreaded tsetse fly whose bite is fatal to animals. He has a map made up mostly of rivers "unexplored" and country "unknown." It looks quite full of information and names when you merely glance at it, but when you begin to handle it you find a great deal of the print tells you only what is not there. The owner of it hardly knows what language he will have to speak, but he is as pleased about it all as a girl going to her first ball. In his own words, he "has got his chance." When we ask him what he is going to take with him, he answers with a merry twinkle, "I started with two dozen tooth-brushes; I should think in their line they would be enough."

So long as England produces men of this metal she need not fear the decadence of the race.

When we have parted from them all we stroll down the bazaar at Wady Haifa and are immediately followed by a horde of children of all ages, sizes, and descriptions, who, whenever we stop and look around at them, say with growing confidence, "Bakshish, bakshish!" even the tiny fat babe who can scarcely toddle murmurs "'Shish!"

Still pursued by the horde we make our way to a tea-house, where numerous natives of Haifa sit out in a little compound surrounded by a wooden fence and refresh themselves. We order tea, and get it after some difficulty; but it is more because the attendant guesses what we would be likely to ask for than because he understands us that we eventually are provided with a small pot of quite decent tea.

While we drink the children gather from afar; every one in Haifa under the age of fourteen is there I should say. They glue themselves to the fence and force their little faces between the posts, or spike their chins on the top and then watch in solemn deadly earnest the ways of these strange beings whom fate has so kindly sent to amuse them. The rest-house attendant does not approve of these manners, so he slips out of a side-door with a basin of water in his hand and pitches it straight over the little crew as if they were a flock of intrusive chickens; they fly, shrieking with delight, and return in thicker swarms than ever inside of two minutes.

An affable gentleman in a gown seats himself beside us.

"I wish you good-day," he says in English, and we return his greeting.

"I am dragoman here," he continues.

We point to one small girl with a face quite different from that of the other children, and her hair done in innumerable little tight pigtails, and ask him who she is. "Nubian," he says. "Eat castor oil, plenty oil, like it much." We tell him to bring the child to us, but directly he translates, she flies screaming, is captured by the other children, and a noise begins like that inside the parrot-house at the Zoo. I explain that we don't want her to be frightened, but that if she will come and speak to us she shall have bakshish. The magic word produces instant calm, the child comes forward at once with coquettish a.s.surance and when, through the interpreter, we inquire her name, and she tells us it is "Nafeesa," we give her half a piastre and let her go.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A LITTLE NUBIAN GIRL.]

When we start off again for the steamer the whole crowd follows hard on our heels, for it is we who provide the free circus to-day. One mite trotting forward with his eyes glued on us goes smack into a tree and so hurts his little face that he covers it with a crooked arm and sets off homewards wailing softly.

This is really a deserving case, even in England it is allowable to soothe the feelings of a hurt child, so we mutter "Bakshish," and all the eager crew rush after the little suffering child, yelling, "Bakshish," and they bring him back triumphantly with the tears already dried on his hurt face.

So much for the Government official!

Now we are off really! Back down the Nile and good-bye to this glorious land. Rapidly we fly down-stream, past Abu Simbel, past the sweeps of deep rich yellow sand seen nowhere south of a.s.souan in such glorious colouring; sand that is swept smooth by the wind into great banks and drifts with sharp edges like snow-drifts; past ma.s.ses of plum-coloured rock sticking up out of it; past defiles of stony mountains falling sheer to the water; hiding here and there in their folds tiny villages indistinguishable from the rocks without gla.s.ses. There is hardly a _shaduf_ to be seen and very little cultivation, it is either desert or stony hills on each side. Grand beyond thought is it when seen in the flaming light of the afterglow!

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PEOPLE GOING HOME IN THE EVENINGS--WATER-CARRIERS.]

At a.s.souan we have time for a glimpse at the great dam, extending for over a mile in length and built of masonry eighty-two feet thick at the bottom. This banks up the water, we have already seen, among the hills into a prodigious lake when the great swirl of the river comes down at flood-time, and thus much of it, which would have rushed away and been lost, is stored and let out gradually through the sluice-gates as required.

Then we change on to one of Cook's steamers, and for days we fly down-stream to Cairo. We see the green fields of maize, and we watch the people going home in the evenings with the tired oxen and the little donkeys carrying their provender on their backs. And one day we arrive at Cairo and take the train for Port Said.

Good-bye to Egypt! Mysterious, beautiful land! Never in all our wanderings round the globe shall we come upon a country more interesting.