A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia Blanford Edwards

Author:Amelia Blanford Edwards [Edwards, Amelia Blanford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Food; Lodging & Transportation, Cruises, Africa, North, General, History, Expeditions & Discoveries
ISBN: 9781447489078
Google: N-J8CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
Published: 2013-04-16T23:06:56.095566+00:00

PHILÆ TO KOROSKO

SAILING gently southward—the river opening wide before us, Philæ dwindling, in the rear—we feel that we are now fairly over the border; and that if Egypt was strange and far from home, Nubia is stranger and farther still. The Nile here flows deep and broad. The rocky heights that hem it in so close on either side are still black on the one hand, golden on the other. The banks are narrower than ever. The space in some places is little wider than a towing-path. In others, there is barely room for a belt of date-palms and a slip of alluvial soil, every foot of which produces its precious growth of durra or barley. The steep verge below is green with lentils to the water’s edge. As the river recedes, it leaves each day a margin of fresh, wet soil, in which the careful husbandman hastens to scratch a new furrow and sow another line of seeds. He cannot afford to let so much as an inch of that kindly mud lie idle.

Gliding along with half-filled sail, we observe how entirely the population seems to be regulated by the extent of arable soil. Where the inundation has room to spread, villages come thicker; more dusky figures are seen moving to and fro in the shade of the palms; more children race along the banks, shrieking for backshîsh. When the shelf of soil is narrowed. on the contrary, to a mere fringe of luminous green dividing the rock from the river, there is a startling absence of everything like life. Mile after mile drags its slow length along, uncheered by any sign of human habitation. When now and then a solitary native, armed with gun or spear, is seen striding along the edge of the desert, he only seems to make the general solitude more apparent.

Meanwhile, it is not only men and women whom we miss—men laboring by the river side; women with babies astride on their shoulders, or water-jars balanced on their heads—but birds, beasts, boats; everything that we have been used to see along the river. The buffaloes dozing at midday in the shallows, the camels stalking home in single file toward sunset, the water-fowl haunting the sand-banks, seem suddenly to have vanished. Even donkeys are now rare; and as for horses, I do not remember to have seen one during the seven weeks we spent in Nubia. All night, too, instead of the usual chorus of dogs barking furiously from village to village, we hear only the long-drawn wail of an occasional jackal. It is not wonderful, however, that animal life should be scarce in a district where the scant soil yields barely food enough for those who till it. To realize how very scant it is, one needs only to remember that about Derr, where it is at its widest, the annual deposit nowhere exceeds half a mile in breadth; while for the most part of the way between Philæ and Wady Halfeh—a distance of two hundred and ten miles—it averages from six to sixty yards.

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