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is a very serious one there, and only the native sail boats can be hauled through the rapids by means of ropes. A number of tourists were at this point waiting for their boats to be hauled into the smooth waters beyond, and there was much loss of time to them in consequence, as the passage was difficult and not facilitated by any but the most primitive methods. The work was undertaken by parties of Arab and Negroes who did it as their regular business, and the agreement for the work was made with a sheik who was the chief of a tribe - there being several of these tribes, each one numbering from twelve to twenty. I went to the spot where the current of the rapids was greatest, to see what was going on, and saw that it was a big job to haul the boats through. Large boulders of granite lay scattered about in the stream and they afforded standing room for the men as well as for securing the ropes as the boats proceeded from point to point of the obstructions.
Our steamer stopped at a village on the east bank about a mile below the cataract where several parties in sail boats were awaiting their turn to move on. It was a good opportunity for these to write letters by the returning steamer, and several were handed to me to mail on our return to Cairo. I was also invited to tea on board one of the craft the first evening and found there a very pleasant set of men. The boundary line between Egypt and Nubia is at this point and the population beyond seemed to be mainly of the black race. The alluvial deposit of both banks of the Nile ceases there also, and the granite formation is a conspicuous feature of both banks. Near the spot where the steamer lay is a granite quarry where a large obelisk lies attached from its surroundings, having been thus separated and left so centuries ago. It is most interesting to examine it and to observe the method of quarrying, which does not seem to differ much from the methods of detaching monoliths at the present day.
While preparing to visit the island of Philae which is above the cataract Hayes and myself decided to make the trip on camels, so as to fully realise, and enjoy if possible, the novel sensation. The animal moves along like the elephant, or rather, like a pacing horse, that is to say, with the feet of one side moving together, which is not the mode of progression in a walking horse. His long legs and high humps make the riders seat an elevated one, and the animal is always made to lie down either to be loaded or to allow anyone to get upon his back. While underway the motion at this height of eight or more feet is considerable, and the experience of a camel ride having been once felt there was not any desire to repeat it.
While passing over a strip of desert we met a small caravan of blacks with their camels going in the direction from which we had come. Several of the negro women who were on foot had brass rings in their noses. These were inserted into holes in the septum dividing the two nostrils, just as rings are inserted into the lobe of the caucasian ear. I offered to buy one of these rings from one of the women, a hideous hag in looks, for a small coin worth about three cents, and the purchase was immediately agreed to. Immediately another woman offered to sell hers, and I was then the happy possessor of two dirty brass rings, one of which was ornamented with a blue glass bead, and which after my return home I placed in one of our curiosity cases.
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The island of Philae contains much in the way of ruined temples, rather better preserved than a good deal that we had seen, but dating, as our guide books informed us, from a period of decline. many years after the period of genuine Egyptian civilization, when the country was ruled by the Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies, or when under a Roman governor. What we saw, although occupying considerable space, lacked the grandeur of the temples lower down on the river, due evidently to want of size, although the quality of the work and of the designs seemed to be about the same.
The engineer of our steamer was an Englishman who proved to be quite a companionable person. Hayes first became on pleasant terms with him, and afterwards I did too. He spoke Arabic and was therefore very useful when he could get off at night, as well as in the day at times, for some short excursion into a village or to some trifling distance from the river bank. Several of us were taking a walk soon after tying up at the bank near Philae and we met a little negro girl about twelve years of age. The only wearing apparel she had on was a sort of belt around her loins made of dressed skin, well blackened by constant use and no efforts to remove the dirt. We stopped her as she was passing and the engineer asked her whether she would sell her garment, to which she immediately indicated assent by taking it off and handing it to him. The poor little savage wench seemed utterly unconscious of any indecent exposure, and to gratify her desire for “bakshish”, the arabic name for money, we gave her some trifle and returned her the belt. The latter was too filthy for any of us to wish for it. Soon after our arrival several black Nubians came near to the steamer with wooden clubs for sale. They were of some hard and heavy wood well suited to the breaking of the human skull in mortal combat, but quite simple in workmanship and with no attempt at ornamentation. The prices asked were absurdly high and I don’t remember that any were bought on the steamer.
After our two days were up we began our return down the river. As we had the current in our favor our progress was very rapid, and in a short time we were again at old Thebes, so as to explore the eastern side of the ruined capital. We tied up at Luxor where the ruins of a temple are quite near the bank, and from which came the obelisk which is in the Place de la Corncorde Paris. All that remains of the temple is a row of columns and the other obelisk, but the whole are half buried in the sand and mud.
The ruins of the great temple of Karnak are a short distance from Luxor and to this all the passengers proceeded in a way with donkeys for the journey. Murray’s guide book will satisfy the curiosity of anyone wishing to know all about this magnificent specimen of Egyptian architecture. I will only say of it that some of the detached columns of the interior are lighter and more graceful than the typical ones of the average temples, and that there still stands an obelisk within which is considerably larger than any of the numerous ones in Rome, or those of Paris, London or New York. It appeared to be of the same size as the one still lying in the quarry near Philae. While still at Luxor and on the morning of our departure the distin-
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guished author of the then latest and most authentic and valuable book on ancient Egypt, Sir Gardner Wilkinson, came on board of our steamer from his Nile boat near by. I would have liked to be introduced to him, but there was no one whom I could ask, although he appeared to know a colonel of one of the native Indian armies, a fellow passenger, with whom I was on sociable terms. The Indian mutiny of 1857 had not yet occurred, and when it was quelled the three separate armies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay were disbanded. Officers of those armies were met with in large numbers up to that date, on the highway to India, going to and returning from their duties. Sir Gardner did not stay long on board, and his visit have rize to many observations about him.
While at breakfast the same morning one of the stewards came hurriedly into the cabin and asked for the doctor to attend to the hand of a dragoman or guide attached to a Nile boat near by, who had accidentally shot off a finger with his revolver. There was no regular surgeon board, and as Hayes always called me by the abbreviation Doc, I felt that I must go and attend to the man. I was somewhat disconcerted by the sudden call and there was a hearty laugh at my expense afterwards when the passengers were describing how pale I was when I reluctantly got up to go on deck. It proved on examination to be a simple accident, the last joint of the left thumb having been shot away. I trimmed off the pieces of hanging flesh and sewed up the wound over the smooth surface of the joint - a proceeding that would not have been wise in case of a larger joint having been exposed. The instruments brought me for the work were the tools of the Eastern barber of which one was on board, consisting of a pair of scissors, two or more tooth pullers, a pair of splinter forceps, etc. A piece of silk for the sewing was procured from the blue tassel of the fez of a bystander, a needle having been forthcoming from some other source.
During one of the days of our trip there was a strong wind blowing from the south west which filled the air with fine sand from the neighboring desert. It was most penetrating and managed to get into every stateroom, where it settled upon all clothing and other things which were not enclosed in trunks or valises. Besides the ubiquitous sand there was a feeling of discomfort produced by the wind itself, due to its passage over the equatorial regions of the desert.
After Luxor and Karnak our steamer made a rapid passage back to Boulak, the river port of Cairo. On the morning of our last day we got out in the neighborhood of old Memphis, on the west bank, to visit the Serapeum, an underground excavation, consisting of several galleries forming a square, in which were a large number of granite sarcophagi placed there for receiving the mummied bodies of the sacred bull Apis. The digging out by hand of a large block of hard granite must have been attended with infinite labor, and after the pyramids nothing better illustrates the toil that was exacted of the servile classes of the kingdom than these excavated monoliths.
Burrowing under the ground for purposes of burial was practised to an amazing extent among the ancient Egyptians, and since the then (1856)
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An incident occurred while on the return trip of the steamer which has frequently been recalled to my mind and always with amusement, as an instance of what the French would call “disillusionnement.” The steamer had stopped on the eastern bank where there was some unimportant ruin to be seen between Thebes and Memphis, and, when I was returning to the river, one of the passengers who was going in the contrary direction announced as he passed by that the Duke of Vallambrosa was on the steamer, having come from his sail boat near by, to mail some letters. He added too that the Duke and his friend had in their yawl a tame leopard
The two new sights to be seen, a live Duke and a tame leopard, caused me to hasten my steps, as, although the titled man hailed only from the insignificant little kingdom of Sardinia, there was something in his title that interested me as connected with some poetry that I had read, and to have the opportunity of witnessing the then holder of the beautiful name of Vallombrosa with a superb leopard accompanying him wherever he went, and permitting himself to be petted and caressed by his master, was worth the journey to Egypt.
The steamer was therefore soon reached and my first inquiry was for the yawl with the leopard on board, when, to my astonishment, I was directed to a dingy little flat-bottomed boat tied to the steamer’s side, in the interior of which I at first saw no animal whatever. This was on account of the creature having been forced into the bow of the boat, where he was already secured by a chain, by means of two or more seats which had been detached from their positions, and being only one third grown, with his outer color a dingy brown resembling in that respect the hue of old unpainted wood such as the seats were made of. After a few moments I detected his outlines, and to my disillusion I realised that instead of being the noble beast that I had expected to see, he was nothing more than a young animal, evidently recently bought, and by no means yet tamed. The danger too of being near him in the boat was the cause of his being barricaded in the bow, and when the two gentlemen were entering their little craft again on leaving it was amusing to see how they took additional precautions to be well beyond the reach of his paws.
The Duke was in the cabin below when I arrived, and when he and his friend came on deck they could be seen at a glance to be elegant gentlemen. The former was a man between 25 and 30, of large frame and pleasant manners. He was at the Cairo hotel before I left for Alexandria and those who knew him spoke well of his accessibility
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recent discovery of the Serapeum, many other excavations have been discovered in other parts of the country, principally near Thebes, where valuable mummies of kings and queens have been exhumed. These are always in the soil of the desert, above the reach of the annual inundations, and never in land subject to overflow. (During this excursion we met Mr Prime of New York who was doing) Egypt and Palestine and writing accounts of his experiences for Harper’s monthly.
X Upon arriving at the Cairo hotel I met two of my cousins Walter and Blake Heyward who had been there a few days in charge of their tutor who was an English clergyman named Stewart. They had left Southhampton in the P&O steamer, coming by way of Gibraltar, and they returned to Alexandria when Hayes and I left on our way to Jaffa by steamer. These youths were the sons of Mr Arthur Heyward my mother’s brother, and their mother was a Miss Blake. Their education had been much neglected and their uncle Mr Daniel Blake had done the best thing possible under the circumstances in order to make up for lost time, by placing them in charge of Mr Stewart with funds at his disposal for them to see the world by travelling when it was convenient. They both inherited large fortunes consisting of plantations (rice) in Georgia and So Ca with valuable investments in railroad and other bonds as well as bank stocks in Savannah and Charleston, but as men they were both complete failures, and when they returned to Charleston they soon became the laughing stock of the town. The tutor was an excellent gentlemen with whom I had several interesting conversations. His descriptions of the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge the methods of instruction practised there and the then limited curriculum of each one interested me very much, and for the first time I began to understand the principles that are at the foundation of College and University education in Old England. These are that the mental discipline to which a youth is subjected is a process by which his mind is trained, so that afterwards, if there is any subject either trifling or important, which he may desire to master, he is able to do so more easily in consequence of his four years of college study. The branches of learning taught at these Universities were for centuries nothing more than the classics and mathematics, and it is only in recent years that modern languages and other subjects have been introduced. The results however have been satisfactory, for the great English statesmen, philosophers and writers of those centuries have been well equipped for their life work, and it is not surprising when the past is surveyed, that there should be so little willingness on the part of those who govern those institutions to make any radical changes. I very much question, after having given this subject some little thought, whether the American University system, which consists in offering to a student the facilities for cramming himself with any special instruction which he may desire, will in the end produce such good results as have been reached by the system which is distinctly understood to be a thorough training of the mental faculties. Mr Stewart like the other university men of his day was entirely ignorant of all modern languages except his own.