History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 02 - Vol. 01, Ch. 01: The Nile and Egypt, pt. 2

1 From a drawing by Boudier, after a photograph by Insinger, taken in 1881. All kinds of granite are found together in this corner of Africa.

There are the pink and red Syenites, porphyritic granite, yellow granite, grey granite, both black granite and white, and granites veined with black and veined with white.

As soon as these disappear behind us, various sandstones begin to crop up, allied to the coarsest _calcaire grossier_.

The hill bristle with small split blocks, with peaks half overturned, with rough and denuded mounds.

League beyond league, they stretch in low ignoble outline.

Here and there a valley opens sharply into the desert, revealing an infinite perspective of summits and escarpments in echelon one behind another to the furthest plane of the horizon, like motionless caravans.

The now confined river rushes on with a low, deep murmur, accompanied night and day by the croaking of frogs and the rhythmic creak of the sâkîeh.

[*] * The sâkîeh is made of a notch-wheel fixed vertically on a horizontal axle, and is actuated by various cog-wheels set in continuous motion by oxen or asses.

A long chain of earthenware vessels brings up the water either from the river itself, or from some little branch canal, and empties it into a system of troughs and reservoirs.

Thence, it flows forth to be distributed over all the neighbouring land.

Jetties of rough stone-work, made in unknown times by an unknown people, run out like breakwaters into midstream.

[Illustration: 018. jpg THE ENTRANCE TO THE FIRST CATARACT] From time to time waves of sand are borne over, and drown the narrow fields of durra and of barley.

Scraps of close, aromatic pasturage, acacias, date-palms, and dôm-palms, together with a few shrivelled sycamores, are scattered along both banks.

The ruins of a crumbling pylon mark the site of some ancient city, and, overhanging the water, is a vertical wall of rock honeycombed with tombs.

Amid these relics of another age, miserable huts, scattered hamlets, a town or two surrounded with little gardens are the only evidence that there is yet life in Nubia.

South of Wâdy Halfah, the second granite bank is broken through, and the second cataract spreads its rapids over a length of four leagues: the archipelago numbers more than 350 islets, of which some sixty have houses upon them and yield harvests to their inhabitants.

The main characteristics of the first two cataracts are repeated with slight variations in the cases of the three which follow,--at Hannek, at Guerendid, and El-Hu-mar.

It is Egypt still, but a joyless Egypt bereft of its brightness: impoverished, disfigured, and almost desolate.

[Illustration: 020. jpg ENTRANCE TO THE SECOND CATAKACT.

1] 1 View taken from the top of the rocks of Abusîr, after a photograph by Insinger, in 1881. There is the same double wall of hills, now closely confining the valley, and again withdrawing from each other as though to flee into the desert.

Everywhere are moving sheets of sand, steep black banks with their narrow strips of cultivation, villages which are scarcely visible on account of the lowness of their huts sycamore ceases at Gebel-Barkal, date-palms become fewer and finally disappear.

The Nile alone has not changed.

And it was at Philse, so it is at Berber.

Here, however, on the right bank, 600 leagues from the sea, is its first affluent, the Takazze, which intermittently brings to it the waters of Northern Ethiopia.

At Khartum, the single channel in which the river flowed divides; and two other streams are opened up in a southerly direction, each of them apparently equal in volume to the main stream.

Which is the true Nile?

Is it the Blue Nile, which seems to come down from the distant mountains?

Or is it the White Nile, which has traversed the immense plains of equatorial Africa.

The old Egyptians never knew.

The river kept the secret of its source from them as obstinately as it withheld it from us until a few years ago.

Vainly did their victorious armies follow the Nile for months together as they pursued the tribes who dwelt upon its banks, only to find it as wide, as full, as irresistible in its progress as ever.

It was a fresh-water sea, and sea--_iaûmâ, iôma_--was the name by which they called it.

The Egyptians therefore never sought its source.

They imagined the whole universe to be a large box, nearly rectangular in form, whose greatest diameter was from south to north, and its least from east to west.

The earth, with its alternate continents and seas, formed the bottom of the box; it was a narrow, oblong, and slightly concave floor, with Egypt in its centre.

The sky stretched over it like an iron ceiling, flat according to some, vaulted according to others.

Its earthward face was capriciously sprinkled with lamps hung from strong cables, and which, extinguished or unperceived by day, were lighted, or became visible to our eyes, at night.

[Illustration: 022. jpg AN ATTEMPT TO REPRESENT THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSE.

2] 2 Section taken at Hermopolis.

To the left, is the bark of the sun on the celestial river.

Since this ceiling could not remain in mid-air without support, four columns, or rather four forked trunks of trees, similar to those which maintained the primitive house, were supposed to uphold it.

But it was doubtless feared lest some tempest should overturn them, for they were superseded by four lofty peaks, rising at the four cardinal points, and connected by a continuous chain of mountains.

The Egyptians knew little of the northern peak: the Mediterranean, the "Very Green," interposed between it and Egypt, and prevented their coming near enough to see it.

The southern peak was named Apit the Horn of the Earth; that on the east was called Bâkhû, the Mountain of Birth; and the western peak was known as Manu, sometimes as Onkhit, the Region of Life.

[Illustration: 023. jpg FOOTNOTES WITH GRAPHICS] Bâkhû was not a fictitious mountain, but the highest of those distant summits seen from the Nile in looking towards the red Sea.

In the same way, Manu answered to some hill of the Libyan desert, whose summit closed the horizon.

When it was discovered that neither Bâkhû nor Manu were the limits of the world, the notion of upholding the celestial roof was not on that account given up.

It was only necessary to withdraw the pillars from sight, and imagine fabulous peaks, invested with familiar names.

These were not supposed to form the actual boundary of the universe; a great river--analogous to the Ocean-stream of the Greeks--lay between them and its utmost limits.

This river circulated upon a kind of ledge projecting along the sides of the box a little below the continuous mountain chain upon which the starry heavens were sustained.

On the north of the ellipse, the river was bordered by a steep and abrupt bank, which took its rise at the peak of Manu on the west, and soon rose high enough to form a screen between the river and the earth.

The narrow valley which it hid from view was known as Da'it from remotest times.

Eternal night enfolded that valley in thick darkness, and filled it with dense air such as no living thing could breathe.

Towards the east the steep bank rapidly declined, and ceased altogether a little beyond Bâkhû, while the river flowed on between low and almost level shores from east to south, and then from south to west.

The sun was a disc of fire placed upon a boat.

At the same equable rate, the river carried it round the ramparts of the world.

Erom evening until morning it disappeared within the gorges of Daït; its light did not then reach us, and it was night.

From morning until evening its rays, being no longer intercepted by any obstacle, were freely shed abroad from one end of the box to the other, and it was day.

The Nile branched off from the celestial river at its southern bend;[*] hence the south was the chief cardinal point to the Egyptians, and by that they oriented themselves, placing sunrise to their left, and sunset to their right.

* The classic writers themselves knew that, according to Egyptian belief, the Nile flowed down from heaven.

The legend of the Nile having its source in the ocean stream was but a Greek transposition of the Egyptian doctrine, which represented it as an arm of the celestial river whereon the sun sailed round the earth.

Before they passed beyond the defiles of Gebel Silsileh, they thought that the spot whence the celestial waters left the sky was situate between Elephantine and Philae, and that they descended in an immense waterfall whose last leaps were at Syene.

It may be that the tales about the first cataract told by classic writers are but a far-off echo of this tradition of a barbarous age.

Conquests carried into the heart of Africa forced the Egyptians to recognize their error, but did not weaken their faith in the supernatural origin of the river.

They only placed its source further south, and surrounded it with greater marvels.

They told how, by going up the stream, sailors at length reached an undetermined country, a kind of borderland between this world and the next, a "Land of Shades," whose inhabitants were dwarfs, monsters, or spirits.

Thence they passed into a sea sprinkled with mysterious islands, like those enchanted archipelagoes which Portuguese and Breton mariners were wont to see at times when on their voyages, and which vanished at their approach.

These islands were inhabited by serpents with human voices, sometimes friendly and sometimes cruel to the shipwrecked.

He who went forth from the islands could never more re-enter them: they were resolved into the waters and lost within the bosom of the waves.

A modern geographer can hardly comprehend such fancies; those of Greek and Roman times were perfectly familiar with them.

They believed that the Nile communicated with the Red Sea near Suakin, by means of the Astaboras, and this was certainly the route which the Egyptians of old had imagined for their navigators.

The supposed communication was gradually transferred farther and farther south; and we have only to glance over certain maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to see clearly drawn what the Egyptians had imagined--the centre of Africa as a great lake, whence issued the Congo, the Zambesi, and the Nile.

Arab merchants of the Middle Ages believed that a resolute man could pass from Alexandria or Cairo to the land of the Zindjes and the Indian Ocean by rising from river to river.

[*] * Joinville has given a special chapter to the description of the sources and wonders of the Nile, in which he believed as firmly as in an article of his creed.

As late as the beginning of the seventeenth century, Wendelinus devoted part of his _Admiranda Nili_ to proving that the river did not rise in the earthly Paradise.

At Gûrnah, forty years ago, Rhind picked up a legend which stated that the Nile flows down from the sky.

[Illustration: 027. jpg SOUTH AFRICA AND THE SOURCES OF THE NILE, BY ODOAKDO LOPEZ.

1] 1 Facsimile of the map published by Kircher in _OEdipus Ægyptiacus_, vol. i.

(_Iconismus II_), p. 53. Many of the legends relating to this subject are lost, while others have been collected and embellished with fresh features by Jewish and Christian theologians.

The Nile was said to have its source in Paradise, to traverse burning regions inaccessible to man, and afterwards to fall into a sea whence it made its way to Egypt.

Sometimes it carried down from its celestial sources branches and fruits unlike any to be found on earth.

The sea mentioned in all these tales is perhaps a less extravagant invention than we are at first inclined to think.

A lake, nearly as large as the Victoria Nyanza, once covered the marshy plain where the Bahr el-Abiad unites with the Sobat, and with the Bahr el-Ghazal.

Alluvial deposits have filled up all but its deepest depression, which is known as Birket Nû; but, in ages preceding our era, it must still have been vast enough to suggest to Egyptian soldiers and boatmen the idea of an actual sea, opening into the Indian Ocean.

The mountains, whose outline was vaguely seen far to southward on the further shores, doubtless contained within them its mysterious source.

There the inundation was made ready, and there it began upon a fixed day.

The celestial Nile had its periodic rise and fall, on which those of the earthly Nile depended.

Every year, towards the middle of June, Isis, mourning for Osiris, let fall into it one of the tears which she shed over her brother, and thereupon the river swelled and descended upon earth.

Isis has had no devotees for centuries, and her very name is unknown to the descendants of her worshippers; but the tradition of her fertilizing tears has survived her memory.

Even to this day, every one in Egypt, Mussulman or Christian, knows that a divine drop falls from heaven during the night between the 17th and 18th of June, and forthwith brings about the rise of the Nile.

Swollen by the rains which fall in February over the region of the Great Lakes, the White Nile rushes northward, sweeping before it the stagnant sheets of water left by the inundation of the previous year.

On the left, the Bahr el-Ghazâl brings it the overflow of the ill-defined basin stretching between Darfûr and the Congo; and the Sobat pours in on the right a tribute from the rivers which furrow the southern slopes of the Abyssinian mountains.

The first swell passes Khartum by the end of April, and raises the water-level there by about a foot, then it slowly makes its way through Nubia, and dies away in Egypt at the beginning of June.

Its waters, infected by half-putrid organic matter from the equatorial swamps, are not completely freed from it even in the course of this long journey, but keep a greenish tint as far as the Delta.

They are said to be poisonous, and to give severe pains in the bladder to any who may drink them.

I am bound to say that every June, for five years, I drank this green water from the Nile itself, without taking any other precaution than the usual one of filtering it through a porous jar.

Neither I, nor the many people living with me, ever felt the slightest inconvenience from it.

Happily, this _Green Nile_ does not last long, but generally flows away in three or four days, and is only the forerunner of the real flood.

The melting of the snows and the excessive spring rains having suddenly swollen the torrents which rise in the central plateau of Abyssinia, the Blue Nile, into which they flow, rolls so impetuously towards the plain that, when its waters reach Khartum in the middle of May, they refuse to mingle with those of the White Nile, and do not lose their peculiar colour before reaching the neighbourhood of Abu Hamed, three hundred miles below.

From that time the height of the Nile increases rapidly day by day.

The river, constantly reinforced by floods following one upon another from the Great Lakes and from Abyssinia, rises in furious bounds, and would become a devastating torrent were its rage not checked by the Nubian cataracts.

Here six basins, one above another, in which the water collects, check its course, and permit it to flow thence only as a partially filtered and moderated stream.

It is signalled at Syene towards the 8th of June, at Cairo by the 17th to the 20th, and there its birth is officially celebrated during the "Night of the Drop."

Two days later it reaches the Delta, just in time to save the country from drought and sterility.

Egypt, burnt up by the Khamsin, a west wind blowing continuously for fifty days, seems nothing more than an extension of the desert.

The trees are covered and choked by a layer of grey dust.

About the villages, meagre and laboriously watered patches of vegetables struggle for life, while some show of green still lingers along the canals and in hollows whence all moisture has not yet evaporated.

The plain lies panting in the sun--naked, dusty, and ashen--scored with intersecting cracks as far as eye can see.

The Nile is only half its usual width, and holds not more than a twentieth of the volume of water which is borne down in October.

It has at first hard work to recover its former bed, and attains it by such subtle gradations that the rise is scarcely noted.

It is, however, continually gaining ground; here a sandbank is covered, there an empty channel is filled, islets are outlined where there was a continuous beach, a new stream detaches itself and gains the old shore.

The first contact is disastrous to the banks; their steep sides, disintegrated and cracked by the heat, no longer offer any resistance to the current, and fall with a crash, in lengths of a hundred yards and more.